Cowardice is the Killer of Fun

I'd been avoiding tanking in LFR. I didn't know the fights and didn't quite trust guides to get the ideas across. Obviously this was stupid. LFR is the training ground for raids. It's where people go to learn. Yet it all seemed so complex.

That's only because I'd been in as DPS and DPS are stupid. It's just something that happens when you switch role. Healers are smart. Tanks are smart. DPS are barely literate cave beasts. They run after a crowd hitting things. Sometimes they try to appear smart by quantifying their contribution with damage meters. It never works.

In actuality the fights only seemed complex because I was too stupid to see the basic patterns. Going in as a tank meant that I had to have some understanding of the fights. Stand here, keep aggro on these, interrupt that. Keep the holy power rolling and be ready with a CD in case there is a damage spike. A few mechanics are still over my head, but I don't play a draenei.

It turns out LFR can be rather fun to tank. It's a little more dynamic, a little more engaging, than DPS.

Oddly, people aren't as horrible as I thought. A more experienced tank gave me some pointers on a fight and things went well. A tank of my experience (lol, nub) hoped I could do the same, which I tried, and it worked fairly well. I stood in slightly the wrong spot, someone pointed it out, I moved, and they thanked me. Afterward I thanked them for their patience. I suspect I have a magical power to make people like my tanking, regardless of the quality of it. Perhaps they appreciate a quality transmog. I got a neat 2h sword and some vendor trash along with the opportunity to do more LFR.

During my daily shopping at the PvP vendor I was invited to do some arenas. I haven't done those since sometime in mid-Cata. They didn't go well or last long then. They never were my forte. I accepted, on the condition that they not mind that I am terrible.

Perhaps the matchmaking tool has gotten better. Maybe at this point in the season the arenas are filled with bad players. Whatever the reason, we won a bit more than we lost and I walked out with some conquest points, which I spent on a cloak. That then got me killed because a shaman knocked me off the lumber mill before I'd remembered to add a parachute to it. I don't blame arenas for that. In fact, they turned out to be a good bit of fun. Even losing isn't so bad when it doesn't take long. Lose, think about it, then get ready for the next fight. It's not like a BG where you can clearly see that your team is losing and yet it won't have officially lost for a few more minutes. Then you find yourself wishing the Horde would cap a fourth so you could get to another, less-losing match.

I'm going to find more arenas. I don't expect much winning, but the payout for a win is pretty generous, so I can't complain too much. Coupled with BGs and converted justice points I anticipate that my PvP set will steadily become less awful. In fact, I've even reached the point where my PvP and tanking sets are not identical.

Like an action movie set in Arathi Basin

I have a habit of checking who is defending the less-active spots. Then I keep an eye on health and debuffs in the raid area. That way I can see if there is an attack even if they can't say anything.

I'm at blacksmith farming defender honor off the glorious zerg at farm. I see the priest at mine is getting hurt a lot. Mount up, jump down, and break out the parachute cloak. It looked to me like the priest was about to die. I hit the two Horde with my shield since I expected they'd be capping by then. The priest was not dead. So while still in the air I stuck sacred shield or her.

I landed and started hitting people. She still was not dead, but seemed sufficiently close that I'd expect two melee characters to kill her very soon. Hand of Protection made them laughably ineffective. Next thing she's at full health and casting with the uninterrupted cast bar of someone who can't be hurt by physical damage. That means the Horde are dead.

A second or two later and she'd have died before I got there. That is why you pay keep track of who's where and how they're doing.

It also helps to have a parachute cloak.

What is a PvPer?

The everlasting conflict between PVErs and PVPers is that the second group is quite happy to gank the first but there's no vice versa. - Syl on Twitter

 Pshaw, I say.

PvP and PvE are not separate groups. I usually do PvE. Sometimes I do PvP. The latter has about 95% of my gaming-related profanity. Strangely, in PvP my profanity is usually aimed at developers, while in PvP it is aimed at other players. As they say, "don't hate the player; hate the game developer who created such an unbalanced piece of total bullshit." Maybe that's relevant.

When I am in a PvP mood I do not gank. Just yesterday I was on my way to a mote cloud when I saw a level 80 fly toward it. He'd have beaten me to it, but he flew away. I was sad that I'd scared him off. Granted, I might have stunned him and taken the cloud for myself, but I wasn't going to press the entire extra button needed to kill him. Gear inflation is insane.

I take that back. I have ganked. Once upon a time that was a way to draw out the 60s. Swoop in and kill a quest giver or two, kill a few lowbies, and you've got yourself a battleground. Sadly, that no longer works.

In PvP I am often looking for a reasonably fair fight, or a fight that has a reasonable expectation of being fair. Those aren't the same, as anyone can tell from your average random BG that, despite being based essentially on random draws from both factions, has one failing in an almost impressive manner. I'd even claim that ganking and PvP are different activities, despite falling under the same mechanical umbrella.

Getting back to my pshaw, I suggest that Syl has drawn the lines all wrong. Since PvP and PvE are not separate categories of players, then what is the division? I propose decent human beings and bad people.

PvP has an obvious appeal for the bad people. They can directly inflict harm upon others.

Yet, is PvE immune? Is the loot ninja not a harmful jerk as well? How about the person who wipes the raid? What about the person who abuses the limits of vote-kicking to act as a parasite on a group, contributing nothing yet getting all the rewards for success? And surely the people who make glyphs are a universally awful group.

The problem is not PvPers vs. PvPers, but of horrible people vs. decent people. Maybe PvP has a higher percentage of horrible people. Fine. But do not stereotype an entire group because of that, or else you, Syl, will be in that group.

I'm saying you're a horrible person.

Lose your way to success or do something completely different

It appears that Ner'zhul is not a PvP powerhouse. My sample size is small because I had a hell of a time getting the informed consent forms from everyone in the BG and had to end the experiment early, pending an inquiry by the IRB. While there is a total lack of statistical significance, the magnitude of the difference between a 50-50 win-loss and what I experienced is such that I am confident that we are terrible. This suggests that the way to gear up is through repeatedly losing until I've been given more gear through honor pity points. That's a lot of losing that we'd have to do. I am, of course, part of the problem. And so, I am going to take the advance of Uncle Joe, "no person, no problem," and remove myself from this system.

At a 2-1 ratio, justice points can be exchanged for honor points. At 400-500 justice points per run, this makes random heroics a viable way to gain honor points. I've not calculated the time efficiency, but given the speed of instances these days and the shortness of tank queue times, I believe that heroics are close, if not possibly superior, as a way to farm honor. More important than the time involved, it's more fun to run something that isn't particularly hard and see some measure of success than repeatedly die to people with far better gear than me. Even if it weren't a psychological blow to die, waiting at the graveyard gets repetitive.

In a way, this makes sense. In PvE you can farm up gear from easier content to prepare yourself for harder content. You don't hit 90 and go wipe on Siege of Orgrimmar for a couple months. Instead you run easier content and build your way up. In this case, the easier content is PvE, since PvP has relative difficulty and can only be made easier by finding terrible people to play against. Then they feel bad that they're losing to slightly less terrible people. Before you know it everyone is sad and writing long emo posts about how their gear sucks and they used to fight with fishing poles. Indeed, PvE for PvP is surely the lesser of two sads.

When you get lapped it's hard to see just how far behind you are

Any runners out there? Not particularly good ones? Isn't getting lapped painful? It doesn't matter if it's a tenth of a mile track (my school had a tiny track) or a quarter mile; it just feels bad. But oddly, after the first one, the pain doesn't change much. It's hard to keep track after that. You're definitely losing and counting won't make you not be losing.

The other day I learned that prot paladins have started stacking haste. I'd never heard of this. It's something new to Pandaria. Clearly I've not done much reading on mechanics these days, by which I mean the past year or so, missing all sorts of important information. It's almost ironic. I can just picture myself laughing at a tank who thinks that DPS gear is good for him, and for a long time I'd have the facts on my side. Now I'd be that ignorant tank who thinks he should be stacking avoidance. Well supposedly we were supposed to stack stam anyway, but I always (usually) thought effective health was a load of shit.

I'd been a bit down about my potential prospects in PvP. I've not had anything near a fair fight in a few years. It's been a sort of downward spiral; at some point I stopped doing PvP, fell behind on gear, and never got into the habit again. Yet I had some hope; I could die my way through losing BGs to some gear, eventually. With my mostly altless playing these days I'd have time for it. That hundred thousand difference in health could go away, as could the vast gulf in damage.

I'd just killed Garr the Darkener in the Dread Wastes. He was kind enough to drop the pet this time. I headed for the other guy, a tough fight. There was a warlock there already. He had about 600k more health. That's when I started doing the mental arithmetic and trying to decide if that's closer to double or triple my health. I decided to see how the fight went for him, since it was tricky for me. It took a few seconds. I flew off to where I was going to farm rep for the Black Prince and spotted a rare on the way. I ran into the cave to fight it and a few seconds later the warlock showed up. I bubbled, stunned him, and ran until I was out of combat. That's my world PvP these days, not even bothering to pretend that I stand a change, just running for it and hoping they're too busy taking my kill.

I once had a fishing pole fight outside Everlook. I was on my shaman and had the overpowered Horde-only fishing pole. It was my fight to lose. And lose I did, because seals aren't weapon-based; they were a buff on the player. The paladin hit a lot harder, relatively speaking - it was a fight with fishing poles after all. We stayed far enough out that the guards wouldn't aggro. Just the two of us hitting each other with fishing poles.

I'd fought at Tarren Mill. Even after battlegrounds it still somehow turned into a battle ground. Someone would come to gank us and swarms of lowbies would gang up on them. There weren't so many AoE attacks back then, so we could just keeping biting at their ankles, figuratively-speaking, since we were Horde, not gnomes, and had no goblins yet.

I was in a farming group deep in the hives under Silithus when we ran into an Alliance group. It was no place for a fight, too many elites, too little space. We hastily backed away. I tried to drop another totem; we didn't have totemic recall back then. I was too slow. A single ball of fire went out from my searing totem. We died after putting up a moderately okay fight. The hives weren't properly linked to the zone and we reverted to the default graveyard for the Horde: the Barrens. The smart move was to use the spirit res and take a flight path; the debuff would probably be gone by then. The dumb move was to run, from the Barrens to Thousand Needles, to Tanaris, Un'Goro Crater, and finally into Silithus. I took the... well you guess.

People tended not to cause too much trouble at the cultist areas in Silithus. We all had stuff to do and some of that stuff involved fighting things that could easily kill us. This meant that we didn't want a fight, but if one started, we weren't going to waste time trying to do any more PvE. It instantly escalated into a full-scale war. We didn't need any sand for that, just something we wanted to do and someone getting in the way of us doing it.

We were about to win that arena fight. I had the match in my hand. Blessing of protection on the priest and the warrior would finish off the enemy who was attacking her. She'd heal up and then we'd have a wonderful 3 v some number that is not as big as three. I got it backward. I put blessing of protection on our warrior, preventing him from finishing them off. Our priest died. They healed up. One misclick and the entire match was lost. I'm not sure I ever recovered from that. Maybe from there it was straight downhill. Surely what they did to Alterac Valley did not help.

Before long I was thinking how next expansion I'd try again with PvP, with a nice reset to get me into things again. It never happened. I'd start late and that meant starting at the bottom of a mountain facing enemies who'd walked uphill up a hill, and despite what an old Pandaren would probably claim, they were the stronger for it.

At this point, I'm glad to even know what SoO even stands for.

PvP Should Have Gear Disparity

The notions of balance, fair play, how to advance or now, they are all philosophy. As I said on Twitter, "As long as the eventual goal is to utterly crush your enemies, then use all the philosophy you want." Therefore, it is only logical that PvP should have gearing disparity. What is the point of winning if not to win harder the next time?

One might even argue that the point of war is to be able to win it. Look at how Israel fought, over control of the Golan Heights, an area which is felt was critical to its own defense, or the offense of an enemy. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in an attempt to protect itself from the US navy. Germany made a major push in the south of the USSR for the oil it needed to continue its war efforts. The notion of a preemptive strike is to start a war to prevent a war. When countries win wars they rarely decide to redraw the borders exactly as they were, but instead seek to increase their advantage, in anticipation of the next war.

Let's us consider this in the context of PvP. If I kill someone in WoW I do not do it out of a sense of malice. It is out of a sense of greed. I want a reward. That reward should exceed what I put into the fight, or it will not be worth doing. Simply getting gold might be nice, but would that actually get me anywhere? No. But gear, gear would help me to win the next time. I'd gladly forgo a bit of gold today for a victory tomorrow, and the next day, and forever after. That's called investment and it is the foundation of prosperity. It's also what wins wars. Any Starcraft player can tell you that.

Of course this has some side-effects. New players are in a tough position. Their gear is awful. In an open-world game they could try to compensate with numbers, in the manner of a hundred 0/0 marines taking on a 3/3 colossus. A brave gesture, perhaps even successful, but costly. Oddly, by trying to be fair and balance the numbers on each team, games often remove this possibility. The result is that new players may never join, or quit soon after.

Yet, is that not the point? If your enemy is too afraid to attack you, does that not mean that you have already won? And won forever? A long battleground queue is not a problem for a game; it is a victory. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot not stamping on a human face - forever.

The PvP Paradox of Accessible Gearing

As I looked at the mage I realized something terrible. First, she had a lot more health than me, at least 120k more. Second, that first frostbolt wasn't exactly tickling me. Third, ice lance on a frozen target, such as me, hurts a hell of a lot more than a frostbolt. I ran over and hit her a few times. I didn't have the damage to burn through her ice barrier, let alone her health, and I didn't have the health to soak very much damage.

I did the logical thing and died.

As more gear is available, significantly unbalanced fights become more common. By that I mean fights where gear is the largest determinant of success, as opposed to tactics, reflexes, or class differences, and furthermore, decides the winner regardless of those other factors.

If we imagine a game in which gear is highly exclusive, then surely we'd expect more unbalanced fights. If only one or five percent of a game can get extremely powerful gear, then we'd expect a lot of unbalanced fights; since any interaction between them and the rest of the community will be unbalanced. Yet that is only one or five percent of the interactions. Even if we expect those highly geared players to be more active and therefore run into less geared players at an unusually high rate, we're still going to be dealing with a minority of fights. A newly-leveled player will be weaker than a more experienced one, but the difference in gear will not be particularly vast if they aren't in the minority of high-end raiders.

On the other hand if gear is more accessible, though not a Push Button for Loot, then we'll see more unbalanced fights. Not everyone will take advantage of this increased accessibility, due to still being locked out or not caring enough to get the gear (maybe they prefer pet battles). Since there is a time and luck component, gear will not be evenly distributed, even under conditions of equal motivation. Some will still be poorly geared, while a large number of players will have far better gear than under the exclusive scenario. In effect, unbalanced fights are made available to more players as more players have an opportunity to gear past their peers.

A Mixed Beginning

As I wrote my post that in part lamented the status of my paladin, I realized that my rogue main wasn't in such a great position either. Her guild isn't very active anymore. So why not play my paladin? I have nothing to lose.

So I hopped on over to level up. Eventually I'll finish the Jade Forest and write about my thoughts on the Alliance side of it. Pet battles meant that I hit 90 long before finishing the zone. Glorious 90.

I set off to the Temple of the White Tiger. I fought a legendary pet along the way, failing a couple times before recognizing that my pet selection needed some improving. The tiger let me into the Vale and in I went. Aha, a rare! I'd fought it before, a dangerous melee enemy. I wasn't geared for this. But paladins are not a melee-only class. I knew that with judgement, exorcism, and a lot of patience I could kill it.

I was interrupted in my kiting by a level 90 Horde paladin. A level 90 Horde paladin attacking the rare. I closed in to my now-safe melee range and killed it. The paladin did not kill me. I thanked him and looted the corpse. And then the third attack from the warlock landed and killed me.

PvP servers breed such paranoia.

Since it's the place to be, I went to the Timeless Isle. The shower of loot that my rogue had received was more like a trickle, but enough of a trickle that I was able to get into scenarios and heroics. Gear will come. Despite the slower pace, I might enjoy it more. Wearing plate rather than leather makes so much trouble so much easier to deal with; except those damn snakes. I'm also developing a healthy level of perpetual, comfortable, paranoia.

The giant groups aren't dangerous; those are the people farming rares or elites. They aren't going to cause trouble. Maybe they know that war is never in the best interests of the farmer. They know that a lone pissed-off enemy can be a major problem when fighting elites. It's the lone person who causes trouble, who sees that your health is barely higher than when you were 85, and who makes the economically rational decision to cause suffering to others.

And then there was the druid. I was fighting tigers near an ore node when he attacked me. I killed the tigers, stunned him, and ran away a bit. I bowed. If I could have said it, I'd have told him to take the ore, that he'd won it. I'd be a hypocrite to criticize him. He killed me anyway. I came back to find the node unmined and figured he was just a jerk. But then he started emoting sorry. Then I was just confused.

But that didn't mean I didn't use my cloaking device to get some distance before mounting up. I run with one on my belt, and if it's not on cooldown, another in my trinket slot. They've both come in handy. Damn it feels good to be an engineer.

Convert unbalanced PvP servers to PvE

Are any of you from Alliance side Cho'gall?  Well you're lying, because no one is (Warcraft Census estimates 1:19.7).  That's the problem: when a PvP server becomes seriously unbalanced, it becomes unihabitable for the lower side.  With attrition and transfers it only gets worse.

Thankfully, the PvE problems are reduced thanks to the variety of cross-realm options, though a server-based raiding guild would have problems.  On the other hand, that just makes it easier to get server firsts, so places like that should be attractive to raiding guilds that are competitive but not quite good enough.  However even in an era of dungeon teleports and portals to everywhere, people still need to leave the sanctuaries.  They need to farm materials (though I suppose a cross-realm auction house could do that, but they'd still need gold to buy with).  They'd need to do dailies, both for gold and for reputation.  With the loss of tabards players must do the dailies.

On a highly unbalanced PvP server, going outside is dangerous.  I started on a moderately unbalanced server, Magtheridon (1:3 or 2:3 iirc).  It wasn't so far off that Horde couldn't survive and it did wonders for the battleground queues (they were server-based back then).  Still, it was a problem at times, though I think it made me more aware of my surroundings, or paranoid.  On the other hand, Crimefighter is an asshole who seemingly did nothing but kill my warlock when I was trying to farm abyssals in Silithus.

Closing the server is not an option.  Blizzard won't allow the bad press, even if players would benefit from the merging of the many low population servers.

So why not fix the world problem?  Convert the server to PvE.  Give all Horde characters free transfers to any PvP server and free race changes to Alliance on Cho'gall.

Alliance could safely level up and play out in the world.  Horde could go to another server if they need the PvP so much, though they might miss the lack of balance.  I can't promise it would save the server, but it is a better option than leaving it to stagnate on one side.

No one would play gearless PvP

I offer this question: Would PvP in WoW be more or less active (note that I am specifically not using the words popular or fun) if players used a standardized set of gear?

On one hand, removing gear as a factor would allow players to jump right in at any time, with no grinds to get in their way.

But I suspect this benefit would be outweighed by the costs. For one, gear serves as a scapegoat. How good/bad are you? Who knows! Your gear is a factor, and a convenient excuse, allowing bad players to avoid being discouraged and quitting, since they can get better gear and think that will fix the problem.

WoW on the PvE side is driven heavily by gear. I don't think it's a stretch to say that PvE is the dominant element in WoW. It levels us, it trains us. Note the training part: follow the gear, always, if there is no gear, ignore it. Even if PvP gear was completely useless in PvE, the ability to gain gear attracts players, and keeps them going. The hamster wheel may keep more players on than it keeps off.

When I see a bad idea, I think, "Hey, I should try that!"

While with my awesome nerd friends (the same who gave me this shiny newer computer) we watched a bit of "when cheese fails", a show dedicated to replays of people trying cheap (cheese) strategies, and failing at it. For example, this might be a protoss player using very fast cannons as a "cannon rush" or "cannon contain" in which mass photon cannons are used to bottle in or attack the enemy. The overall concept of cheese is interesting to me, seeing whether people consider it valid or not, what they think is or is not cheese. And why the fuck do they call it cheese?

The particular replay was of a protoss-terran battle, in which the terran attempted to use a few early marines, along with most of his SCVs, to attack the enemy earlier than would be expected, even building a bunker to really hold the line. But he managed to be insufficiently aggressive and generally tactically failful and was defeated, leaving him with a weak economy which was soon overrun.

Then we played a 2v2 match, as terran-zerg matched with random-random who turned out to be terran-protoss. I did something unusual: I scouted. Yea, I'm that guy who doesn't scout and then gets terribly surprised when a horde of enemies arrives to which I have no counters. So there I was, scouting, with my SCV, when I thought "Hey, there's a bad idea; I should try that!"

So I built a barracks. It wasn't planned. Just an impulse. I normally build a barracks about now and this is the SCV I have selected, so why not build it here?

Here's the area I was working in.



1 is where a normal person might build this so-called "proxy barracks". From there it can quickly bring units to the front lines and blocks the enemy from expanding. Also it's not likely to be noticed very quickly. Players would have to either run all the way around, fly over (and flying takes a while unless it's a terran building or an overlord), or blast through the pile of metal there. It's a good location.

Psh.

3 is the protoss base. Sadly, that wasn't much of an option. Though now that I think of it, I might have to try that some time.

I went with 2. This area isn't in sight of the main base. Players will by habit build something there, for the sole purpose of visibility. Supply depots and pylons are popular choices. Zerg may float over an overlord. But not this protoss. And he paid for it.

Watching the replay, my SCV was for a few moments mere inches away from being seen. A wayward twitch, one extra jolt on his hover controls, and it would have been spotted. But no. That little tiny bit of grey-black fog kept him safe.

By the time I left my hiding spot I had a half-dozen marines, two barracks with reactors, and a filled bunker. One does not expect that on their doorstep. Or in this case, their back porch, since their doorstep was fairly well secured.

And so began the harassment. They'd run out and shoot something, running back at the sight of enemies, to the cover of the bunker. All the while four were being produced at a time. Eventually the protoss nexus was destroyed, many probes gone, and the pylons powering his unit-producing structures knocked down. But the day was saved with the arrival of a few siege tanks and more marines from his ally.

Except my barracks fled to live again and his base was still entirely offline. I'd been a highly successful distraction. Turns out the real threat wasn't two and a half barracks (third one got its SCV killed halfway in), but the zerg ally who was expanding and quickly saturating bases with drones, a luxury granted by my cheesy irritation.

Then he made a ton of roaches and blew up the protoss expansion, a nexus that he'd managed to build in time to avoid being revealed. Hilarity ensued as I sent a few reapers for some more obnoxiousness (that's word! AWESOME!), reapers who blew up an attempted terran expansion, and the protoss attempt to reactivate his base, a single probe with a single pylon warping in, both of which died from a single volley each. Then the roaches arrived at the main ramp. Soon later our enemies surrendered.

The game lasted about 18 minutes, which I consider somewhat quick, but obviously not super-fast. In my experience games last either 5 minutes (rush->gg), 25 (major attack->gg) or fifteen hours (anyone have any spare minerals?), so 18 would make it a quick non-rush. It might sound like the other team was bad. Maybe. Maybe not. Of course they made some significant mistakes, as did we, but ultimately I think it was one single tiny mistake which tipped everything.

He did not watch his other ramp. That's all. This isn't some massively stupid thing. Just a little tiny thing that can go terribly, terribly wrong. It's not spamming marines to fight colossi. It's forgetting a stim, once. But that small error, if exploited, can compound into a gigantic problem. Or at least a gigantic irritation.

That's something that fascinates me, whether in games or real life, how a single error can have multiplying effects, causing problems far beyond the actual mistake. I remember an arena match, a close one, but where I'm pretty sure we were on the verge of victory. One enemy was nearly dead and one ally was nearly dead. I cast blessing of protection to save the ally. Alas... I cast it on the wrong player, and rather than saving my ally, who died, it instead stopped my warrior teammate from delivering the killing blow to the nearly-dead enemy, who did not die. It came down to one single mis-click, and yet it cost the entire match.

Going back to my Starcraft strategies, which mostly revolve around being annoying while someone else did all the killing, it makes me wonder why I played a paladin for so long. Wouldn't a CC-heavy class have been better? A rogue perhaps? I actually did have a lot of fun when I played a rogue, relishing the sheer irritation that they can cause. But somehow I never switched to one. I liked tanking. Or maybe I liked short queues. Which makes me wonder if anyone would play Starcraft if it required completing the campaign first and if we needed to complete missions on hard or higher to unlock units, much like a gear grind. Wouldn't that be a pretty stupid system for competitive PvP?

Why did WoW PvP make me swear so much?

I really can't explain it. In PvE I would of course swear constantly, but it was of a frustrated muttering sort. I would get annoyed but rarely truly angry. Somehow PvP always made me mad. Well, unless I won, then it was nice, but even then I'd find something to swear about.

I can't say it's the PvP aspect, since TF2 doesn't make me swear quite so much. Or when I'd play Mt:G against friends, almost no swearing at all.

I can't blame it on people being stupid either, since a stupid PUG can be just as stupid and probably more of a waste of time; at least when BG dummies zerg the farm-BS bridge I can get honor.

Based on analysis of my profanity, finding patterns in it, I can only conclude that most PvP is, quote, "fucking bullshit I mean what the fuck is this shit?" Let's break that down: I claim that it is fucking bullshit but then I question what the shit is. This leads me to conclude that I actually understand PvP perfectly and have nearly unlimited potential in it, but that some sort of mental barrier is holding me back and I am expressing frustration at this limit.

There are only two possible explanations.
1) The CIA knew that I would be dangerously dominant in PvP and used advanced brainwashing techniques to block my skills, but then to cover it up made me a softy leftist liberal, which also provides a convenient cover for them to kidnap and kill me.
2) I'm actually just really bad at PvP.

Obviously the second one is a useless oversimplification, leading to the only logical explanation: I am a chained PvP god.

P.S. Burn this post after reading it and oh my god they're right behind you.

Carebear Highlands

After playing through Twilight Highlands and seeing how often the quests there, especially the faction dailies, would push opposing factions players into the same space, I wonder, could it possibly be any fun at all on a PvE server?

Sure, I suppose the quests can be done faster and with greater convenience. But I sometimes wonder if the focus on faster and more convenient isn't such a great universal principle in MMOs.

How carebears have ruined WoW

This post will contain nothing but facts, so if you disagree, it's because you hate facts and American and are therefore a Communist. Europeans, you can just move along right now, along with anyone not from real America.

Rogues thrive on world PvP. By world PvP I mean people who are either afk or at half health while fighting ten mobs. With the addition of guards and sanctuary cities, rogue PvP became harder, but thanks to vanish could still be done. Then came flying mounts. By the time Blizzard added teleports to instances, rogues were all switching to sword specialization in order to get the highest possible DPS. While commuting seppuku.

This lack of world PvP also hurts everyone else. With a safe, carefree, or should I say, carebear, world, no one has to pay any damn attention. Situational awareness has plummeted. When players fall out of the habit of spinning their camera and character in circles to watch for rogues, or on some days, warlocks who will fear you into even more mobs, it's not a surprise that they also lose track of things like adds, fire, and adds on fire.

But how does world PvP come back? Simple: make it.

The fact is that world PvP cannot be based on any sort of encouragement or positive effect. Small rewards didn't make sand, I mean Silithyst, any more fun. Significant rewards will only work for a short time, until we outgear them and no longer care. There is only one way to cause world PvP: give us no other choice. Put summoning stones in vulnerable locations, such as anywhere, and make it impossible to summon from outside to inside an instance. Remove teleporting to dungeons. While you're at it, put a bunch of instances all in the same area so that inevitably players will run into each other. Or at least so rogues will run into them.

Getting chain-ganked by rogues also hardens players, giving them the strength to deal with wiping continuously for hours on end. After all, I've killed some bosses in less time than it takes to run from Thorium Point to Blackrock Depths while a raid is gathering for Blackwing Lair.

Carebears have also ruined gathering. It used to be that a mineral node was a serious deal. People might fight for days over a regular thorium node, until finally someone won Alterac Valley. Gathering used to be hardcore. Dismounting to mine or pick herbs meant you were vulnerable to someone else coming along to kill you. Now everyone is spread out and not flagged. The greatest happiness came when I switched back to PvP and got into the habit of killing anyone who even dared to glance at my ore.

Carebears encourage bots, leaving them free to bot away at bot activities such as botting. If instead they were killed on sight... Let me put it this way: I started this post talking about hating America and Communism and here's where it ties in: bots. The economic growth in China is not due to stealing jobs. It's due to stealing spawns. That's right, bots and gold sellers in WoW account for over 75% of China's increase in GDP over the past five years. Kill the bots and we'll stop those damn Communists right in their tracks as they attempt to sell us gold at market prices.

Step one: You get a rogue

It's my rogue in a box!

My neglected JC bank alt rogue in half-blues, half 200 epics, and a couple pieces of badge t9... for some reason she went to Wintergrasp. No resilience, no trinket, no PvP gear at all, and as previously stated, not even particularly good PvE gear. If anyone looked at her, she died.

But if by chance no one looked at her... well then she did a lot of very mean stuff. It turns out my sub rogue is pretty capable at being a sneaking, backstabbing, stunning (and not just looks!) annoyance. I even almost beat a warrior. Might have done it if I'd not forgotten that I have evasion.

Yea yea, anyone can do a lot when they blow every cooldown. I get that. But what else is to be expected when my other characters could nearly two-shot me? Actually I wonder... trinket, wings, some sort of damage buff... I wonder if I could instantly kill my rogue with divine storm. Maybe not. But fine, two attacks. If she could survive more than two hits, if she had the slightest health buffer, that would make a huge difference.

Her keybindings need work, being mostly set up for carebearing. Shadow dance would be much more effective if I didn't keep hitting my pickpocket macro.

Step two: I need some gear
This is the part that worries me. I don't even have enough honor for a PvP trinket, let alone armor. I could buy gear with badges, but we all know how DPS queue times are. BGs are also possible, and arenas, but the repetitive loss which will come from my gear state is a turn-off. My paladin couldn't even do this, and she's starting at a much better point.

Then again, my gear is so bad that PvP gear is dual-use, PvP and PvE, so I effectively get double the gear, at half the enchant and gem cost. Even losing, the process could be more fun. On my rogue I feel like I have options and some control over the situation. Stuns and blind and vanish and all sorts of stuff that lets me dictate how the fight will go. My paladin has some control abilities, but too often it feels like I just wade into a fight and unload tons of damage and hope that makes someone die. I couldn't do that if I wasn't at least putting out tons of damage. My rogue has more flexibility, and that might be what gets me through the grind.

It's also a new experience. Before WG a few days ago, she had literally zero kills and a handful of honor from a VoA. I'm still learning how to play sub in PvE, so learning PvP too is quite new for me. I like that. Too often I feel like I've learned most of what I can, all that's left is practice (boring!) and gear (boring!). But my rogue, I know I've got 95% left to learn, and that's possibly the most fun thing in any game.

WTF is my Gearscore says... FAIL!

We will kill the PvE to save the PvE... vP

PvPvEvP, only 10000g!

"What what what?" screams the Goblin alchengineermancer.
"I want to influence the mind of the boss."
"What what what!?"
"I have a lot of gold."
"Time is money, friend!"
"Ten thousand gold."
"Ten minutes."
"Deal."

I handed over 5000 gold and he began tinkering. He eventually handed back a hat which he assured me would grant control, for ten minutes, over Marrowgar. I gave him the other 5000 gold and went on my way.

I launched the next stage of the war, the most logical stage. Rather than put myself in harm's way, I would put my enemies in harm's way. Rather than attack the Alliance or the Scourge, I make them attack each other.

And so I activated my hat and began to mind control the add tanks.


It's the new way of doing hardmodes: with a player in control. For a mere 10,000g, you can control the boss against players who have activated PvPmode encounters. If you win, you get the loot from the boss. If they win, they get the loot from the boss, and 10,000g. They have four attempts before they lose.

Players can burn through content faster than devs can make it. But players can make content just as fast as they can burn it. Bring together PvP and raiding and make it last forever.

Why I hate arenas

It was sarcastically suggested in my Sunday thread that I write about arenas. Well, here we go.

I'm bad at arenas. I get tunnel vision far too easily. I feel as if I'm being attacked from 20 directions at once and cannot escape or survive. My enemies do not die no matter how much I hurt them. If I go after the healer, they still don't die. I cannot out-damage the healing and I cannot out-heal the damage.

This isn't really the worst part.

My first PvP was long before I'd heard of MMOs, play some FPS of some sort or other. I think it was a demo of Medal of Honor. There's no gear. Only reactions, aim, and knowledge of the map so you know how to sneak around or where it is easiest to defend. No achievements, nothing unlocked, just shoot the other side and then disconnect if you want to play something else.

WoW PvP needs gear. You just wont survive without it. Except for extreme skill gaps, there's no way to skill away the gap between no resilience and lots of resilience. Same for damage, health, healing, and so on. So PvP requires a bit of a grind to get started. Get your honor and some arena points and spend some emblems carefully and you can close the gap and start to actually play. But it's not like a PvE grind. In PvE you tend to get a lot of insignificant wins which add up to a result: add up emblems or drop chances or reputation. PvP has this too. Except the enemies are the other players, the ones with better gear, and they will beat you. So the grind isn't one of victory, but of defeat. You will eventually get to a bracket of your gear and skill, but can you imagine if running heroics required you to first wipe a few times in Ulduar?

This isn't the worst part.

The true worst part is that PvP exposes me as an idiot. I keep advocating more dynamic encounters in PvE, claiming they would be more interesting, more fun, less repetitive. That's the sort of thing you can find in PvP, where even the same composition will not play exactly the same. But I suck at PvP. The very dynamic PvE encounters I claim to want are the very same ones that make me fail at PvP.

PvP makes me look dumb, and that is why I hate it.

I want more 'useless' PvP zones

Tol Barad is going to be the new Wintergrasp. Except it's apparently also a quest hub. Us carebears don't like getting ganked while questing, so the current plan is for Tol Barad to only be forced PvP during the battle.

BOOOOOOO!

Wintergrasp isn't just an outdoor BG. It's also an area for higher risk, higher reward farming. I like having a PvP zone on a PvE server. It's somewhere to go for some excitement now and then that isn't the restricted context of a BG. It's a taster for world PvP. I like having that!

So I ask that Blizzard add a zone with no PvE quests, only a few PvP quests and a lot of resources to fight over. Oh and make it a no fly zone.

Can NPCs make us feel better?

For my most recent random BG I got Strand of the Ancients. It's not my favorite, but I enjoyed it more than expected. Except for one thing: The DK who kept whining about heals. Then I want to play Team Fortress 2 and kept hearing people thank the medics no matter how often they died.

Does TF2 have a better community? Are DKs just antisocial fucktards? Maybe.

Or maybe it's that no one ever said anything at all to the medics. I didn't see a single typed word or anything on the voice channel (tough maybe I just wasn't in it). Nor was I hallucinating.

Instead it was the automatic response of the characters. When they get healed up, they thank the medic: "hey thanks, doc", "you're a great doctor!"

Is this an incentive for healers to heal? Certainly it helps that medics are terrible at offensive action, but no one has to pick a medic. Could the simple responses of the characters actually be a reward for those who play medics? They know it's automatic (at least I think they mostly do; I know I didn't for a while), so it's not as if they are thinking "this person was appreciative enough to say something." But people can respond to that which appears human.

Should BGs have a random "X loves your healing!" emote? Would that encourage more healing, and help to reduce the impact of that DK who wouldn't shut the fuck up?

I am leaving out a significant factor: medics heal by continuously firing their healing gun onto a target and get kill assist credit on the players they heal, meaning that they can easily rack up huge assist counts while staying just behind the front lines.

Are you also bad at making friends?

There's my gnome running around and I see it, a friend! So of course I yell "friend!" in party chat and run over to go play with it. Iapetes says they aren't friends and I need to stop doing that. Maybe he's right and I'm just not good at making friends. They always seem to end up getting hurt and then they stop playing.

But I thought red = friend.

Part two: A delicate question about engineering
My gnome was doing some questing in Borean Tundra. I happened to see some mechagnomes and... well... I was attracted. They looked like they had something to offer me. So I explored a bit and found some parts and um...

Is it weird to tinker another male gnome?