Lol at elitist whiners who can't read

Person A: Copy-pasting optimal talents that someone else has figured out isn' much fun.

Person B: Why do you insist on playing badly? You must be a pedophile.

Person A: That's not at all what I said.

Person B: Then why is your 23rd talent point spent wrong? GO BURN IN HELL, NOOB.

Person A: This is why we can't have nice things.

Person B: BECAUSE YOU'RE A NOOB!

Person A: Maybe the devs could change some things to encourage experimentation...

Person B: Experimenting with children, pedophile!

Optimization of Location

A few months back I noted that the teleportation system, along with other mechanics, have made location meaningless in WoW. I ended with this:

Do you care where your character is? Does it make any difference? These days, probably not. Just pick your main city and take the portals where they go.

What I didn't realize is that I'd contradicted myself.

Location still matters. So do talents, stat choices, and enchants. But we don't make many choices anymore.

I mistakenly thought that WoW was losing a sense of location. Quite the opposite. Location had become more important, and optimized. Just as theorycrafters have found the best stats, the best talents, and the best enchants, so have we also found the best location: capitol cities.

Being 'out in the field' just isn't a very good choice anymore and we know this. Unless you're gathering from resource nodes, you're probably wasting time outside the cities. Just as if you're running a PvP spec outside of PvP, you're probably wasting time.

What has happened is that the devs have followed the players. We seek efficiency. This isn't a bad thing. What can be bad is if the devs follow us. We go to a city and they follow us there, placing portals everywhere, teleports, and making outdoor farming obsolete. And so we never leave because we have found efficiency and it has become the only efficiency.

One might hope that hearth location could be a last bit of player choice, but no.

P.S. The dungeon post is coming soon*. It got a bit sidetracked so I spun off Monday's post. Then it got sidetracked again with recent uh... outpourings of elitism over video games.
* For a given definition of soon.

WoW is not Chess

Or basketball.

Chess and basketball are both very clearly defined games*. The area of play, number of players, legal moves, and winning conditions are all clearly defined. There are definite beginning and end states, endings which cover win, lose, and draw.
* Don't argue about minor house variations, they are not official and are extremely minor compared to the openness of WoW.

WoW has none of these beside a starting point. We start somewhere, but what is the end of the game? What is the victory condition? There is no explicitly defined definition of winning. There are also a wider variety of legal moves.

With no defined win condition, there is also no defined way to win. This means that winning in WoW can only be decided individually. It could be a certain arena score, defeating the last boss, maxing out every rep, getting every pet, or being very (un)popular in trade chat. None of these are defined by the devs, the ones who make the rules, as wins. Nor as losses.

Think about that again: WoW has no defined win or lose in the overall game. A wipe or a lost BG/arena are losses, but neither are losses to the game as a whole. They would better be described as setbacks, the equivalent of the other team scoring, failures which are not actually defeat.

This does not mean that there are no wrong ways to play. There are some rules regarding cheating, abuse, and that sort of thing. But if your goal is to kill a kobold every ten seconds for an hour each day and you do that, you have won, by your own arbitrary definition of winning. Someone else may have a different definition and obviously they will take different actions.

Personal definitions will define action as well. Kobold Guy should not waste time in heroics, due to the lack of kobolds. That is, unless he has goals related to heroics (for simplicity, let us assume he does not). So in this way there are wrong actions or steps, but they are only those actions which do not advance a goal.

Personal definitions are not a free pass for anti-social behavior or an endorsement of nihilism. Kobold Guy should not be in your heroic searching for kobolds to kill, not only because he is wasting his time, but yours as well. Instead he should play either alone or with other kobold killers. Similarly, you should not bother him and his kobolds unless you have kobold-related goals.

Keep in mind that this doesn't mean there are no ways to compare players. If two guilds want to kill the Big Bad first, whoever kills it first is better (in some overall way, perhaps including luck or scheduling, but that's nitpicking). This means that if your goal is ego inflation, Kobold Guy is a valid comparison, if you wish to go kill kobolds faster and therefore think you're better. Go for it, I bet you can beat Kobold Guy's kobold kill record. That doesn't mean his goal is wrong, though it may mean that he's bad at killing kobolds.

A person cannot be bad at WoW, but they can be bad at what they attempt in WoW. Take note of the difference the next time you're looking to tell someone they're doing it wrong.

P.S. This isn't a justification for playing badly or for screwing with other players. When goals and actions do not align, figure out a solution, even if that means going to another place. Elitist whining about how they're doing it wrong fixes nothing.

Testing Twitter

Don't mind me, just seeing if Twitter is now linking my posts.

*crosses fingers*

*begins whacking intertubes with wrench*
WORK!

I think we're taking the pedophilia a bit out of context

My favorite social has gotten a tiny bit of criticism for comparing gamers who don't share his goals with pedophiles.

I call him a moron because of his priorities. Because he finds that fun. With an easily understandable example: if you find a guy jerking off to pictures of children, you don't find him disgusting (and in many countries a felon), because of his action. Actually his action is totally harmless. You resent him because his action revealed his sexual priority: he is a pedophile. If he would never do the action and just told you his priorities, you would still resent him.

We shouldn't assume this is the classic internet idiot tactic of comparing something to the extreme bad. Gevlon clearly isn't stupid, since if he was he'd surely not be so critical of stupidity. Instead I think we're putting our own cultural values on him, which would of course be stupid, since as he knows, cultural values are stupid.

What I'm trying to say is that his comparison is totally okay if we assume that Gevlon doesn't think pedophilia is all that bad. After all, what's so great about kids? They're just short adults with no marketable skills. Any rational (self-interested) individual will have no interest having and especially raising kids, since despite being necessary for the long-term survival of the economy and humanity, they are a drain on any individual.

While you can obviously believe and stand up for the idea that "collecting status symbols is good", but "everyone has different priorities" is nihilism as it claims that every idea is equal and good.

Exactly, we cannot just have everyone running around doing whatever they feel like. Instead we need rules and standards. Only an idiot would ever suggest otherwise.

"Dangerous", "counterproductive" are measurable. "Moral" is not. It's merely a rephrasing of "my mum/teacher/priest thought it's right and told me when I was a kid and I never had the brains or time to question it".

Never mind.

I'm not suggesting that Gevlon is a pedophile. What I am suggesting is that he is a delusional moron. One cannot simultaneously claim that people should do what is best for them, regardless of the harm to others, while also assigning any special value to children. He is in fact the social that he so hates, the slave to ape subroutines that he finds so disgusting.

And finally:

This isn't an argument. Actually it's a total misunderstanding of the post. It is obvious that the guy farming for rare minipet #187 has priorities on minipet collection. However I did not call his action (the farming) moronic. If the most effective (or only available) way to get minipet #187 is to farm them, then farming it is completely rational.

Also, wrong. If the goal itself is irrational, then the process of achieving that goal, even if it is perfectly optimized, will also be irrational. Means do not justify ends (or the reverse). So if you're going to call the goal moronic, then you should call the action moronic as well.

And in case there is any confusion: there is a difference between choices and chaos, between individual priorities and nihilism.

Or we could ask, what makes Gevlon's goals objectively better than those of anyone else?

Rewards are not rewarding by their own

Let's distill current WoW dungeon-running down to its essenence.

The activity consists of pressing buttons in response to more or less arbitrary visual stimuli in which failure may occur despite the correct button-pressing response. Success will cause the incremental increase in the Score, which is a number. Increasing the Score will reduce the random failure rate, but cannot eliminate it entirely. One session of the activity will last between one and three hours, based on the frequency of failure.

Only an idiot would ever play that game. That would possibly be the worst game ever. Incidentally I may have described many arcade games, but let's pretend I didn't because I didn't mean to. So let's just say that beside some quarter-gobbling piece of 80s machinery, no game with this model would ever succeed. Not even WoW.

Skinner boxes will give a reward we like. If we don't care about the reward, it won't work. This still applies in WoW. The rewards we get are not inherently desirable. Let's try this: would you be excited if I gave you a free Titan in EVE? Probably not. Odds are you don't play EVE. You may not even know what a Titan is. It is meaningless. It would not be a reward for you. What if I offered you a full set of whatever tier we're at? That might be of more interest. Why? Because odds are, if you read this blog, you play WoW, so that reward has meaning.

It is all just pixels. Meaningless and worthless except for the meaning and worth that we give to it. This is more than just answering the question, "what is a Titan?" You can probably tell from context that it is something really awesome in EVE. And yet you still don't care about getting a free one. That's because EVE itself carries little meaning to you. Maybe you never played it, maybe you played it and didn't find it to be much fun, maybe you do play it and cannot actually use a Titan yet. In contrast, WoW is a world in which you are probably immersed. You know stories, both personal and lore, and so the world itself has meaning. From this meaning the items in it, the attempted rewards in it, gain meaning.

What this boils down to is this: virtual rewards cannot have any more value than the virtual worlds which give them. This does not mean the rewards must all gain that value the same way. One person might value the appearance. Another might value the memory of how they got them. For a third person they are bragging rights. Note that the second and third person require some aspect beyond the reward itself. The second person needs an experience, perhaps social. The third person needs a challenge, perceived or real (virtually).

In other words, rewards in WoW (or any other game) are weak rewards, but powerful symbols. On their own they are pixels, but they act as symbols of how you got those pixels. As analogy, a medal of honor is what? A few bits of metal and cloth. But it symbolizes something (about the earner) far beyond those physical characteristics.

This raises the important question: What are rewards in WoW symbolizing? If they symbolize challenge overcome, social experiences, or perseverance, then they may retain their value as symbolic rewards. But if they are symbolic of a long time spent failing with strangers without quite being challenged or entertained, that might not be a very effective symbolic reward.

So there I was...

Twitter was starting to get antsy. Looting and raiding jokes were popping up. Some jokes about how Trump was getting bumped again, this time for Obama's announcement. What? WHAT!? Actually I wasn't all that worked up, it just seemed weird to have an announcement late on Sunday. Surely Monday morning isn't so far away for what cannot possibly be anything Americans would care about.

I went back to leading my Buddhist theocracy in world domination. I'd moved on to the stage of fighting other Buddhists because they weren't quite my type of Buddhists (refused to vote for me as world leader). This was after crushing the Jews, most notably those of Isabella's Spain, one of many historical ironies produced by the alternative histories of Civ 4.

Huh, Twitter seems to think Osama bin Laden is dead. That's interesting. Nothing on the news sites yet. Twitter still thinks he's dead. Now the news sites think he's dead. So that's what the announcement is.

I turned on the radio to listen to it. Apparently at this time WBEZ (Chicago NPR station) has some sort of BBC broadcast which is aimed at Africa. That got interrupted. I'm sure there's some symbolic meaning in Britain getting interrupted by America when trying to talk to Africa.

As stupid as it sounds, the whole operation just sounded cool. I was imagining some badass special forces bursting in, shooting all the bad people, and being out 15 seconds later. My imagination was confirmed by reports that they had in fact used a helicopter, which always make an operation cooler. And Obama said something like "no Americans were harmed", which to me translates as "we kicked their asses." I bet that pirate ship they boarded a year or so back was just practice for this: practice in being totally badass.

With the uprisings in the Middle East and places that aren't in the Middle East but geographically challenged/lazy people lump in with it, there were clearly a lot of implications for the US. Who would we pretend to be friends with? Where would we put our navy? Who would sell us cheap oil? But ultimately it wasn't about us. We weren't the ones putting our lives on the line for freedom. But now this, this is us. Now this is an American story with implications for the rest of the world. I like that. Maybe we were feeling ignored.

Sadly, the War on Terror, or overseas contingency operations, is are not over. Soldiers will still die in Afghanistan at the hands of violent extremists (or people who don't like foreigners meddling). Terrorists will still plot. People will still die. But dammit, this is symbolically awesome and that makes me feel pretty good.

I like mindless grinds

There, I said it. I Like Mindless Grinds.

Remember Silithus? Probably not. But those of you who do, you know what I mean. Texts and twilight cultist clothes. You know. I enjoyed that stuff.

Mining? Love it. Though I liked it more on the ground, when we'd mine thorium and terrain mattered.

I think WoW's problem is that it's not mindless enough. Rep grinding from outdoor mobs is mindless. Just relax and kill things. It's trivial. It's mindless, assuming you're not on a PvP server without a truce. By truce I mean how sometimes when there are plenty of mobs for everyone and we're all just there to get our rep, we don't bother each other. Of course such complacent people make easy prey...

How do you get rep now? Put on a shirt (sorry, tabard) and queue for an instance. Then you have to work as a team. Ugh. I'm not opposed to teamwork as a general concept, but as the only thing to do? Yes.

There are dailies of course, which give rep with no teamwork, but those aren't as mindless as I'd like. I have to go places. Multiple places. It's awful. Just give me a Twilight camp and a few hours, thanks. Even worse, they're dailies. Missed today? Well it's not as if you can make up for it. Mindless grinding is accommodating.

Aha, but didn't the old rep system make no sense at all, with weird pyramid structures of fewer mobs able to give rep at each tier but needing more rep each tier, so then you're hoarding scourgestones until revered? Yes. But that's an entirely separate issue. And if we really want to get technical, and grindy, outdoor mobs can drop minion scourgestones which will always give rep on turn-in, though I'd not use outdoor mobs for long. This strange rep structure isn't directly a problem of outdoor vs. indoor, solo vs. group.

Of course there is still the problem that the previously hinted at but not actually mentioned Argent Dawn rep couldn't be reasonably maxed out by outdoor grinding, making false my entire premise that vanilla and BC were better because of outdoor mindless grinds. But there is another element to the indoor grouping: shared goals.

When players at least have the same goal, it makes it easier to deal with needing to pay attention. In the case of the Argent Dawn instances, we often had the same goals. Reputation was one, since of course we're not getting it from running some other instance. When everyone has an interest in rep, or at least enough people currently and enough people remember, we're not quite so afraid of trash. Similarly, when rep is the goal, killing all bosses makes sense. It helped that the instances in question weren't big on optional bosses and had tier items stacked on the last bosses.

Contrast this with current groups where we are likely to have different, and possibly incompatible goals. Tabard guy wants rep. Blue guy wants gear. Overgeared douchebag tank wants badges because he keeps wiping on raids because he's undergeared. Or maybe they're all on the same page: badges. In that case, speed is the only way to go, so fast fast fast but wait, things can still kill them, so if they go too fast they're dead.

Haste, anonymity, and needing to pay attention are a bad combination. Unless the goal is stress. Trying to quickly getting something complex done with total strangers is a great way to induce stress.

So I suggest this: remove badges and replace them with something better (this will be for another day); remove tabards and make instances give reputation for a specific faction and add add outdoor mobs that give reputation. But won't this make people stop running instances once they have the gear? Probably. Is that a bad thing? I don't think so. Is that going to leave new players with no groups? I don't think so. WoW isn't exactly dying and there are always alts, so with cross-server groups I think queues will remain manageable. Assuming the tanks don't all leave when bribery ceases entirely. But that's another problem for another day.