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.

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.

Pay attention to something other than your gear, such as yourself

Once I learned anything at all about gear there was never a time that I was not making fun of what people wear. I was provided endless amusement by the rogues in spirit gear, the non-troll warriors in spirit gear (back in the day a troll warrior who stacked spirit literally never needed healing). Sometimes I'd offer very basic advice on what to generally look for. Most of the time I'd just laugh to myself. But I did not insult them about it, unless they had revealed themselves to be worthy of insult, because I don't believe in being a useless jerk.

When it all comes down to it, it's their character.

Of course once they try to join a group with me then it is in my best interests to be sure that they aren't poorly geared, or worse, poorly played. I'll overlook a gem or a clearly outdated reforging, since I sometimes try to not be a hypocrite and those things are minor oversights, not fundamental problems. And what are a few ilevels between complete strangers?

It was a long time before I looked at a character and cared not just how they had geared, but also how much they had geared. I knew about better and worse gear, of course, but I also knew that content was designed for a particular level of gear and that level tended to be lower than what people had, particularly early in progression. I knew that player ability and attentiveness mattered more to the group. I was that person who would yell at people for watching TV while raiding.

In part, this may have been because gear could only go so far. If someone couldn't beat content level X, then they could not gear much higher than tier X. There were always ways to get ahead a little bit, but you couldn't get very far ahead of what your next boss dropped. I knew that gear wasn't the fundamental problem: the player's behavior was. Not the player; I don't like to separate players into good and bad. Of course there is variance in reaction times and visual perception, but I think the game is generally tuned such that those are rarely an issue. It is behavior that matters; checking out a fight ahead of time, paying attention to the fight, being mindful of how everything fits together.

Focusing too much on gear, demanding a particular gear level, runs counter to this. When people fail they blame gear, rather than behavior. One of those can change before the next attempt, the other cannot. In the short term, worrying about gear is pointless. While neither of these commands are diplomatic, surely "Pay attention!" is more useful in the long term than "Gear up!" After all, gear eventually comes just from playing, but paying attention to one's surroundings is a conscious decision. Gear will sort itself out, but only players can fix themselves.

The purpose of badges

When I say badges I am referring to the ongoing system that began with badges of justice in Burning Crusade and now exists as justice and valor points. Honor and conquest points are a similar system, but I do not directly address them here. One could reasonably draw comparisons to the multi-class gear tokens of Ahn'Qiraj as well.

What is the purpose of this mechanic? That's the key question for everything in a game. Presumably a mechanic with no purpose at all would get thrown out. What if the answer isn't clear because it is meant to accomplish many things at once?

Clockwork may be the appropriate analogy here. A part that is used frequently will wear out faster than one that is used rarely. A constantly-spinning gear for a minute hand will wear out sooner than the track along which the cuckoo travels once an hour. Yet a part that is used constantly may also be simple and therefore easy to replace. Swap out the gears and it returns to operation. The clockmaker may have even anticipated this and designed the clock so that those parts that wear out soonest are also the most accessible. A part with multiple roles, that is pulled in many directions, will wear out faster. But with many duties, it is interconnected, and therefore harder to replace.

Consider mounts; they increase player speed and they serve as a conspicuous status symbol. These were once intertwined, when mounts were so expensive that simply having one at all was a status symbol. Blizzard eventually made the riding skill costly and basic mounts inexpensive. Fancier mounts are much more expensive or in some other way hard to acquire. The Mount part had been redesigned into two pieces: a simple Riding piece that just makes us go faster and a simple Show-Off piece that makes us look cool. These can now be easily changed as they wear out; Blizzard can produce an endless stream of expensive and exclusive mounts without needing to remake the entire mounting mechanic.

Then there are badges. What is their purpose?

In BC they started off as a way to fill in for missing gear; they helped insulate players from the cruelty of the RNG. At this, they failed. The badge gear was inferior. Worse, it created a cruel choice. Do you spend your badges to fill in for a missing slot, which may then be filled the very next raid? Which slot? The RNG could not only torment you by withholding loot, it could do the same by giving it and making the badge purchase seem foolish. Badge gear fell behind raid drops, so another tier of badge gear was released, without any restrictions. This meant that players could use it to gear past their raid experience. Were badges meant to be an RNG fixer, an alternative progression path, or a way for players to overgear in order to reach otherwise inaccessible content? Or all three at once? Doing multiple things with a single mechanic is dangerous, as any change creates that many more ripples.

Wrath of the Lich King seemed to carry on this system, until badges became necessary for buying tier tokens. They became a gating mechanism. Or a way to fill up heroic groups, by pushing high-end raiders into trivial content. They were used for five purposes (or more, I may have missed some), doing none of them well, and causing all manner of other social problems.

Now Blizzard has simplified things. Badges can give some early gear for a bit of a boost to get into LFR, because in contrast with Wrath and Cataclysm, running LFD is now apparently a terrifying thing that the developers want players to avoid. This badge-based gear skip is redundant now that the Timeless Isle exists, but that's not causing any problems.

Badges can be used for very expensive and very tiny gear upgrades. I find this terribly unexciting, and yet, brilliant. Your fruitless RNG attempts still yield the badges that can upgrade gear. As long as you have an item that isn't going to be instantly replaced by the RNG (surely you've gotten something) and it isn't maxed out (good thing the upgrades are so expensive), then you can keep getting something from those wasted kills. It isn't the loot you wanted, but it is some advancement, some sense that you're getting somewhere, however slowly.

Badges have been simplified, trimmed down to a nice, compact, extremely slow treadmill. What more could a developer want from an MMO mechanic?

Morning Mystery: Who needs a dozen ghost iron dragonlings?

You've just posted a few auctions and as you're headed to the mail to empty it out, you see that yellow text: a buyer has been found.  And again.  Next thing you're eagerly anticipating the coming hour when you get to be rich.

This morning I checked the ghost iron dragonlings.  They'd been up in price last night but I'd been undercut since yeterday.  I posted a few more.  A few seconds later it came in, a buyer had been found.  They were too close together to be separate buyers.  I'd put up four.  But there were five sales; one was of the previous day's more expensive ones.  The four or five that someone had posted in the middle were gone too.  That only adds up to ten, but a dozen sound better, so I'll stick with that.

Market manipulation is possible, and I'd hoped that was the case.  If someone had tried to push them up to 400g, I could overprice and still undercut with my supply.  Maybe they'd keep buying them to pull up the price.  I have a lot to sell.  But no; the AH was not cleared, nor did they repost them.  They bought them to keep them.

Thus the mystery, who needs a dozen unique-equipped trinkets?

Intellect is not a rogue stat. Did you know that?

Imagine that in your group there is a rogue in full heirlooms buy whose damage is terrible.  Upon inspection, he is in all caster gear.  An intellect robe drops.  He rolls need.
If you respond by kicking the rogue, then you're looking a lot like the person who was yelling at me (in the original intro, someone yelled at me)(omg beyond the scenes of the making of Troll Racials are Overpowered)(Original name: Lucas Starkiller)

Here's my pet peeve: Not explaining problems.

Let's look at that rogue again.  Is he a noob?  It certainly looks like it.  Note that he is a noob, not a ninja, at least it does not appear so.  Based on the gear he had and the gear he tried to get, it appears that he does not know that intellect is worthless for rogues.

Either that or he's obsessed with style.

Whichever it is, the important thing is to talk to him, rather than just shoving him off into a new group of victims.  Explain, politely, that intellect is worthless to rogues, that agility is a much more useful stat.  If that is unconvincing, invite him to mouse over his character sheet where it describes the primary stats, with emphasis on the part that says "Intellect: Provides no benefit to your class".

Alternatively, if he insists that he needs it for style or transmog, then explain the problems with that. Transmog is obvious: you can't transmog leather for cloth appearance.  Style, well that's trickier.  You'll need to carefully explain that rogues go for a leather-based style with dark colors and maybe knives, rather than flowing robes.  If he insists on dressing in robes, avoid using homophobic slurs (seriously, not cool) and instead use tribalistic cultural appeals, similar to why your company insists on a dress code and you don't let your children get their eyelids pierces.  The important thing is to talk it over first.

The wrong thing to do, and I don't just mean "impractical" wrong but "you're a sociopathic menace to society" wrong, is to simply kick them.  That puts the burden on another group without solving the problem.  Instead the rogue is likely to think that you're an asshole.  And maybe that everyone is an asshole, "Why do people keep kicking me?  This game is filled with assholes.  Well fuck them, I'm ninjaing everything!  I bet that druid won't like it when I take his agility gear!"

The Case for More Gear Inflation

Jump off a one-foot drop and you can catch yourself, a few more feet and you can roll.  Jump off a three thousand foot ledge, and with the appropriate training and equipment, you might not break your leg.  But anywhere in the middle you're probably going to die.

I've seen Dragon Soul and Deathwing.  Not just in LFR, but in real raids.  This fits with the current WoW model of bumping players up to the most recent raid.  It accomplishes this with gear inflation, with steadily stronger badge loot, higher LFR-available raids (I'm guessing that's going to be the pattern moving forward), and the late-expansion release of instances with upgraded loot: Zulroics and then Caverns of Time, preceded by Trial of the Crusader and before that, Magister's Terrace.

There is a problem, though: The philosophy is one of players seeing content, but if they're always in the most recent, then they're not in anything lower.  That's fine if they started at the start of the expansion and have stepped up with each gear wave since then.  What if they came in late?  Then they're missing the start, because thanks to the inflation, people don't do those anymore.

People might go back if the earlier raids were easy enough.  Maybe there isn't any greater incentive, since the loot did not improve, but the barrier to backward entry can be made lower.

The solution: even more gear inflation.  Don't make a tier 10% stronger than the one before.  Make it 50%.  100%.

Think of the raids from previous expansions, which originally needed 10, 25, or 40 people.  And then five go in.  Or two.  Or one.  They can do this because the character and the gear has gotten stronger by orders of magnitude.  Similarly, if gear advanced by enough, players could take small groups of interested friends for easy tours through the earlier raids in an expansion.  It won't be the same experience, but it will be something.  It will be seeing content rather than nothing at all.

The Five Levels Problems: Introduction

I kept thinking about how Cataclysm has only five levels.  Was it a good thing?  Bad?  I was leaning towards bad as I kept finding problems and changes that needed to be made to compensate for only having the five levels.  So I decided to really look into it.  I pulled up wowhead and began filtering and running the numbers on the gear between and within expansions to see if I could find something.  I was pretty sure it was there, a problem which would link in to several others.  All of it coming back to the core issue of only having five levels.

Let me assure you, it's a great post.  At least I think so.  I have some good, solid points, some analysis, data to go with it all.

There's one small problem: do absolute changes matter more or less than percentage changes?  50 is more than 25, but 50 more than 200 is less than 25 over 50 (25% vs. 50%).  Absolute terms point in one direction.  Percentage in another.  The argument might be stronger for the percentage, which would seem to go in the opposite direction of my conclusion.  Or does it?

If that made no sense, here's the general idea: there is always inflation between and within expansions: we level up and gear up and before long the gear from the last expansion is obsolete.  Given the goal of the gear reset, Blizzard tries to make it obsolete quickly, so the gear of a previous expansion is pretty much gone by the first new zone.  Then they have to inflate to get rid of that gear too.  The result is that you get some inflation from the start of the expansion to the cap (before instances and raids).  In BC and LK this was 40-50%.  In contrast, in Cataclysm it was around 22%, or roughly half.  Aha!  Half the change for half the levels, a brilliant way to fix inflation and we'd see about the same growth of character power.

However, in absolute terms, Cataclysm was higher, 61 vs. 57, suggesting that Cataclysm was working off the hugely inflated ilevels created by the many tiers and modes of LK.  From this perspective, the half-count of levels weren't any help at all, an accounting trick to paper over the problems created by runaway inflation in LK.  Reducing the leveling gear inflation by reducing the levels would help to reduce the inflation over the expansion as a whole, or give greater room for raid gear inflation.  I've not looked at which of this is the game.

They say there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.  I don't know why someone would lump the science of uncertain results with the art of certain falsehood, but maybe that person was just a liar who didn't like pie charts.

Bring Back Block

Once upon a time a ret paladin could, with varying levels of use, justify wearing the following stats: intellect, spell power, agility, strength, attack power, armor penetration, haste, crit, hit, expertise, and of course stamina because that is on everything. That is ten stats that could increase their DPS. Intellect was needed because they used to have terrible regen, spell power affected much of their damage, agility gives crit, armor penetration increased physical damage by allow their attacks to ignore some enemy armor, and all the rest are understandable melee DPS stats.

This caused some problems. It meant that gear was a strange thing to itemize, warriors and paladins sharing most stats, except that paladins needed intellect and gained little from armor penetration while warriors used ArP a lot but had no benefit at all from intellect. For sets this wasn't an issue, but non-set items were tricky because of it. The simple solution was to just never put any intellect or ArP on non-set plate gear. What about non-armor gear? If you expand to rings, trinkets, and necklaces, now you're bringing in rogues, hunters, and feral druids. Those classes like agility and AP, while warriors and paladins prefered strength to AP due talent multipliers and blessing of kings. To make matters worse, a ring with strength could be worse than a ring with agility and attack power, because of how the cost of stats changes, so that the plate classes could prefer the items intended for other classes, while the reverse was not true, just like with non-set plate with intellect or spell power, which paladins would use but other classes could not. It could get even worse, with non-plate gear being best in slot for plate classes, meaning that leather could go to warriors if DPS was the only consideration, and since the old model of hybridism was dead, it was.

I hope this has been a confusing mess of a post so far, because that should help you to understand the problem.

Blizzard saw that stats were getting too complex, so they eliminated many of them. Gear was rearranged to narrow down what classes had to focus on. Armor mastery pushed everyone to their correct armor type. Everything was good again.

Except for the poor tanks.

Offensive stats were based on the player, while defensive stats were based on the enemy. By that I mean that a DPS will pick a certain stat based on their class and other stats, but the actual enemy they face is irrelevant. It's not as if certain enemies favored ArP over haste, and in cases where they could have, the varying stats weren't available in sufficient quantity to be able to change around much.

Contrast this with tanks, specifically, with block. It used to be that a block blocked a certain amount of damage, based on your block value. Against a boss, you might block a significant percentage of the incoming hit, but dodge and parry would negate it entirely. However, block rating, which changes your chance to block, was much cheaper to get, so a player could get a very high chance to block and a high block value, though against a boss it was still not going to be close to a fully avoided hit. However this changed in some cases. Bosses with faster attack speeds, for a set DPS output, would have smaller individual attacks, making blocked attacks closer to avoidance. Against many mobs, as in the case of trash or add tanking, block can almost, or sometimes entirely, block the attack, making it as effective as avoidance, but at a much lower cost. The overall effect is that tanks could significantly improve their damage mitigation by gearing for the encounter.

Did block cause excessive complexity? No. We knew what it was for and when. It didn't cause terrible itemization problems between paladins and warriors, and in the case of off-set items that a druid might want, that was simply a matter of not putting block stats on those items; since beside that we could share a large number of stats. Of course DKs ruin the plate itemization, but there is an easy solution to that: eliminate DKs in order to bring back the stats of block value and block rating.

Purple Pixel People

On Friday masterlooter suggested

There are players that like to raid (read: defeat difficult encounters with many other players), and there are players that want purple pixels.

I'm sure he didn't mean it as a dichotomy for the overall population, but for the population that raids. In other words, some people raid to raid and some people raid for loot. Even then, it's a bit of a stark divide. I raided because I enjoyed it, but I definitely liked the loot as well. I know that my preferences are not universal, but I think that the particular trait, being able to enjoy both an activity and the reward from it, is universal, or fairly close. People can enjoy raiding and enjoy getting loot and may raid partially for loot and partially for the experience.

In fact, I think these are linked, and that's the root of the problem with easymode raids. Despite my absurd claim that loot has intrinsic value based on the number attached to it, it doesn't. Loot is relative. Relatively relative.

Gear rewards have two parts: the gear (tool) and reward (reward). Higher stats make me better able to play and are a useful tool when attempting to kill internet dragons. But the loot itself, regardless of the stats, has a reward aspect to it, which is derived from the experience. The loot is a symbol of the experience. For example, getting Thunderfury was effectively useless as a tool because by the time I got it it was a couple expansions behind and was more useful to a different class anyway. But as a symbolic reward, it was tied to many experiences. It drew from my early days in MC and the status of such a weapon back then. It symbolized the time I had spent farming MC in BC and LK. It symbolized a social effort to get the raid members I needed and to find the materials as well. Also it just looks awesome.

From that we can see that the gear reward is not a matter of the stats or power of the item, but of the meaning it carries for the player. Certain tier pieces in BC symbolized having struggling and succeeded to kill a tricky boss. These days the stats would be laughable, but the symbolic meaning is still there.

Over time this meaning has become ingrained in the item system. Higher level gear came from higher level raids which required more perseverance, more struggle, more skill (please don't argue this last one, it never gets anywhere). With this pattern firmly established, it would be easy to see how the connection could get reversed. Gear, carrying the symbolic meaning of some achievement, could substitute for the achievement. To a limited degree this can work, with badges giving that tier piece that never dropped or in my case, going back later to get the badass sword that shamans could not use. If an experience gave loot, then it is not unreasonable to think that the loot implies the experience. Loot can become fun.

That connection relies on the loot, the reward, being linked most strongly to the specific experience. There can be side links, such as the badge system, but the reward should primarily invoke the main experience, such as killing a particular boss.

That connection can be distorted or broken if the reward changes sources. If a chest piece started off coming from a very hard raid, we'd link it to that raid. If much easier content began to give that reward, then the link changes. This is not necessarily a bad thing. That easier content could be a lot of fun, in which case the reward switches the link from challenge to fun. For some that is better, for some it is worse, but objectively we can't say that the item is degraded. However, if the easier content is not fun, then the reward switches the link from challenge to drudgery. In that case, the item is degraded.

So to get back to the Purple Pixel People, there may be people who are attracted to purple or big numbers, but they are a minority. Most people are instead attracted to the symbolism of the items and how they evoke an experience, maybe fun, maybe challenging, maybe social. The reward is a means to an end, the end being the experience. This can happen directly, with the reward-as-tool allowing them to confront and overcome the challenge. It can happen indirectly, with the reward giving them the image of one who has overcome the challenge, like putting on a uniform to appear authoritative, or lacy underwear to appear pretty. Not that I am suggesting that I or any other raiders, former or present, do or have done that.

There is also status. Good gear confers, or is hoped by the player to confer, status. "Look at this gear and know that I am a badass." This works as long as the gear is primarily linked to something badass, such as killing something badass. If the gear is instead linked to spending ten hours a day watching My Little Pony (before the remake of it), then even if it could also be gotten from a world-first Sargeras kill, it wouldn't confer much status.

Maybe I haven't quite convinced you, so I'm going to make you an offer. I'm running an MMO and if you want, I can give you a full suit of Awesomeslayer Armor which has +tenbajillion^7 attack damage power. Do you want it? Let me assure you, this armor is way better than anything else out there. Do you want it? Better question: Do you even care? Probably not. The armor has no link to anything, no symbolic meaning and no clear usefulness, given that for all you know my MMO was made up on the spot to prove a point. What if I said that it has a particularly purple shade of purple text? No? Okay.

In conclusion, Purple Pixel People are an irrelevant minority that are not protected under anti-discrimination laws so I can safely say that. If people appear to want epics, it is because they want epic experiences. It is because they want content. That does not mean it is content that showers them with loot. In fact, a loot shower may be counter-productive, as well as dangerous if we were to imagine the literal scenario.

Inverted Sets

Scrusi is unhappy with sets. They are too easily just a pile of math.

I have an easily solution for that: Make them piles of EVIL MATH.

That's right, sets that harm you. Want a collection of armor that looks good together and synergizes for a greater bonus? Great! This does that, except the bonus is a bonus of pain. Let's consider a full set of tier 50, which I assume that will be out within an expansion or two, in this case being the extra-heroic 25-man achievement set awarded when running with 20 people on an odd day of the week, with no higher than 5423 average item level. This set shouldn't grant +672 attack power. Instead, it should grant a 1% reduction in damage output.

You might say "but isn't this still just a pile of math, comparing the a full set with most of a set plus non-set gear?" And I say NO. Because you used the word "just a pile of math."

First off, imagine the theorycraft potential for picking which piece of the set you won't use. Imagine if somehow the entire set is still better; it will be no time at all before you get an upgrade, such as anything other piece in the game.

Second, this set finally has a negative effect. It has been far too long since WoW used negative stat modifiers. Vanilla, being the most sadistic of the flavors of WoW, had them all over the place. There was an awesome sword with -stamina, which also happened to be hard to get in a place that was hard to get to, from a boss event that was hard to beat, needing a class mix that was hard to make, wearing gear that was hard to get. This sword knew evil. It was a crowning achievement and it was NOT GOOD. Other items included a cloth chest, presumably for a caster, which if I remember correctly, had a big chunk of negative spirit on it. That just screams evil. Oh a cloth robe, you think this is for you, a cloth-wearing class? WELL HOW DO YOU LIKE THIS NOW!?

Finally, and possibly most importantly, it punishes people for trying to look cool. Vanity, aka pride, is one of the seven deadly sins, and while those are bad enough in the real world where some people, such as myself, are truly awesome, in a virtual world it just screams "nerd who is going to burn in hell forever; see Dante's Inferno for more information, which of course being a nerd, he probably has somewhere, downloaded illegally to his e-reader which isn't a Kindle because Amazon only sells Kindles to cool people." My point is that games have strayed from a strong moral foundation, with too much emphasis on killing and self-gratification, when they should instead be about humility and causing non-fatal harm to non-believers.

Is armor appearance customization the end of gear, or merely the next step?

If your armor looks like [this]. then it is very powerful and you should be worshiped for having it. It is this need to show off stats that has driven gear design, the need for everything to be 'distinctive', for shoulders to grow ever-larger, and for nothing to ever look like anything else.

That is no longer the case. Blizzard is finally allowing armor to look like something other than the original model. Is this possibly the end of stat-worship?

Under this new system, we can parade, not our latest gear, but our oldest. Stats and appearance have been separated. This could mean that the game does not need to be driven by stats, but by something else. Aesthetics? Personal choice?

I'm not actually optimistic about this. If anything, it can be the opposite. Devs can add stats more easily, adding gear faster and faster, since now new armor doesn't need to look good or distinctive. If we don't need to see it, they don't need to make us want to see it.

This will probably trigger a brief rush into old instances and content, effectively adding content back in, temporarily. But that will end soon and will be unlikely to have any major change on player interaction. The instances could all be soloed. Some of the raid bosses as well. So we'll see some more people flying to instances and making a few more raids, before everyone has the appearance they want or give up on it. Then it's back to the stat grind.

Transmogrification and Void Storage

Short version: Allows you to make armor you have look like other armor you have and gives storage space for old armor.

It makes me laugh that a content patch does not evoke the slightest bit of interest. But this, something so utterly useless, does. I'm almost, ever so slightly tempted, to give WoW another try when this goes live. Collecting pretty dresses was one of my favorite activities. Er. I mean, collecting awesome and impressive suits of powerful armor that did not include and dresses or dress-like elements such as kilts. Never.

Every now and then I'd think "maybe I should play WoW again", but then I'd realize that my nostalgia was for places like BRD and BC heroics, not WoW as I left it. And then I'd get sad.

Morality doesn't all win the same way

They have always connected the two which lead to players having to decide whether they want to roleplay or win the game; an interesting, but completely unfun decision.

- Nils commenting at Procrastination Amplification

Why is winning separate from roleplay? Or if you don't like that term, try choice of play or style of play. It doesn't make much sense. Would a Light character win the same way as a Dark character? Of course not. But beyond that, they'd define winning differently. For Palpatine it was dominance over the galaxy while for Luke it was freedom and protecting his friends.

Perhaps win isn't even the right word. Success. Goal completion. Different people have different goals. President Obama and Speaker Boener have a conflicting goal regarding the 2012 election. They have a shared goal in economic recovery, but their methods will be very different. So even for the same goal, the same winning condition, we see significantly different methods.

The win condition should not be a single absolute in a game with morality or other types of choice, but should instead be based on how the player plays. This could be done in a sandbox way, by allowing greedy players to get rich and murderous players to kill while altruistic players protect everyone. But sometimes people like their credit roll or victory screen. At the least it confirms that they've done what they thought they had, which in the specific case of "kill everyone" can be difficult to determine if the victims move around a lot.

Let's try the example of the Civilization series. There are definite winning conditions, all of which give a win (duh), but in different ways. The key part is that you win by playing well in the way you choose to play. Science victories come from technological progress while cultural victories come from cultural gain. You wouldn't get a conquest victory from either method, but instead from a different way: killing everyone.

Applying this to a gear-centric, or even just gear-using, MMO is not as easy. If you're +3 Light and your decisions tend to keep you there and there is a nice +4 Light cloak, the game would have to somehow not cause you to want the +4 Light cloak. Otherwise there is incentive to play away from the character's personality in return for reward, which is often not much fun.

The different Shades (Light-Dark) of gear could boost stats or behaviors related to actions which cause that Shade. For example, maybe a player does a little too much theft to be +4 Light, so the +3 Light cloak helps with theft, but less than a +2, and much less than a -4 Dark. But this carries many problems. For one, there are multiple reasons for a Shade and not all of them are stats to be boosted. Maybe a player has a murder but no theft, so the +3 Light cloak with added theft is useless.

Light-Dark power costs could be one source, with a Light Side and a Dark Side energy pool, each supplemented by gear. A +4 Light player would have little to gain from a +3 cloak that mixes mostly Light with a little Dark, while the +3 Light player would not want to lose the bit of Dark energy, and the flexibility, from going to a +4 Light cloak. Unfortunately this solution lends itself heavily toward gear/stat-obsession, but even worse, is really damn boring.

P.S. Yes, this is tagged Star Wars Galaxies. That's the tag I have and I'm sticking with it, search engines be damned.

Getting a new computer

I used to be enchanted by technology. I remember the times we've had a new computer at home and the oohing and ahhing and thinking it's all so great. Then we start up Netscape and go back to doing whatever we did anyway. I eventually learned that new computer equipment is quite boring for most people. Oh they might think it's fun, but give them a few days and it's all the same again.

This isn't the case now. If I got a new computer it would be fun for more than a few days. This time there's something different. Specifically, the ability to play newer games. Not being much of a gamer in the past (I was in the closet), the concept that new hardware would allow new software wasn't really relevant. But now I could dust off my unplayed copy of Dragon Age (note the lack of a 2). Or download Portal 2 (there is a 2).

In the past when new equipment was just new equipment, without content to go with it, it was pretty much wasted (I'm discounting the opinions of the people who actually bought and paid for the computers). In my current situation new equipment means new content, so it's more than just a new box with bigger numbers to describe it.

I'm sure there's an MMO analogy in there somewhere.

Simply Inconvenient or Complexly Convenient

A new item drops and you win the roll or bid. It is now yours. Also, you are a developer with mad skills and right now, at this very second, you can rewrite the item enhancement system.

Would you rather have one enchant that is hard to get or an enchant, a few gems, reforging, and possibly the same to a few other items?

You may have noticed that I am presenting a false choice. That is intentional. I'm trying to look at two extremes, without all that messy middle ground and picking and choosing individual features. I can do that in other posts.

You may also have noticed that this is essentially comparing the vanilla enchanting system with the current one. Before LK there were no vellum, so when enchanters wanted to sell their services, they had to interact face to face with the customer. This was inconvenient for everyone involved, plus the trade spammers had to deal with people spamming trade looking for enchants or customers. Add lockboxes, UBRS keys, and portals to the mix and it's no wonder we needed a global LFG channel for our spam chat.

Contrast this with the current system in which we can easily get our gems and enchants off the AH and the reforging trainers aren't so far away. The needed materials are not so rare as to be impossible to find, in the rare case that you need a crafter. Whereas essence of air required a flight from Orgrimmar all the way to Silithus. And then there were the shoulder and leg enchants, which rather than being crafted or from a simple if slow rep grind, instead required raids of one sort or another, excluding a generic resist enchant which merely required a simple if slow rep grind, plus a simple if slow mob grind (unless you planned ahead and combined them).
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If you somehow missed it, Spinks had a recent post on this.

Am I really the only person who would prefer to be able to just grab a cool drop and be ready to go without being asked to do all the legwork for an extra minor bonus? It’s funny, once I used to find these extra complexities so cool. I think that I’m over it now, or at least I’ve done it over again in enough games that I’d rather just cut to the chase.

Note that when the only deficiency on a new item was an enchant, upgrades were upgrades on the spot, so you could use it right away, even if you were going to eventually go get it enchanted. Now the lack of gems and enchant will make fresh off the boss gear usually worse than existing gear. Also thanks to jewelcrafting, and reinforced by reforging, having the proper caps has become more important than it used to be, mostly because back then we didn't have the option to dramatically change our gear.

You might have assumed that I agree that it is annoying to have to regem, reforge, and reenchant before even considering using a new item.

Don’t forget to regem and reforge all your other gear since now you’re above or below a necessary stat cap.

Here’s what is strange to me: back when we only had to get enchants, it was harder to find enchanters. No scrolls on the AH, so we’d end up in major cities looking for them. Half the time we’d have to go farm some special mat like essences of air or crusader orbs. It was an altogether inconvenient system.

Now it is all very conveniently placed on the AH: gems and enchants, or nearby at the reforging elf. And yet it feels more annoying.

Well you'd be right.

Note that I am not using complex to indicate difficulty, just that it adds more steps and stuff to manage.

So given the false choice of liberty or death, I mean no-scroll enchanting-only or easy but complex gems, reforging, and enchants, which would you prefer?

P.S. I noticed that I never quite explicitly stated that one of the assumptions of the no-scroll enchanting is also that gear wouldn't take us near enough to hit/expertise caps for us to worry about being a bit high or low: we'd just always be low.

Lol spell power

With the recent changes to stats, I've been thinking a lot about gear. Again. And vanilla. Of course. For me the most noticeable change has been spell power going away. Suddenly all the caster gear looks like pre-BC blues. Heavy on stats but not a secondary in sight. Intellect reigns supreme.

Klepsacovic and Troll Racials are Overpowered make no claims about the usefulness, either relative or absolute, of intellect. The phrase "intellect reigns supreme" is not to be taken as advice. Please consult with your personal Elitist Jerk before taking intellect supplements or altering your stat weights. The opinions contained in this blog are purely the personal opinions of the blogger Klepsacovic and should be taken as an indication of the overall stance of the blog Troll Racials are Overpowered.

I'm waiting for "of the eagle" gear to start popping up.

The writer Klepsacovic is speaking in a metaphorical sense and is not implying that he is suspending all activities until the "popping up" of "of the eagle" gear.

Lawyers...

As usually happens, my train of thought hit one of those splitter things and cars detached and went all over the place. Some crashed. Another ran through a crossing with no gates, killing several other thoughts which were out for a leisurely drive.

I forgot what I was saying.

Panda? Puppy? Pierogi? Pumice! Oh right, gear. See, I had it all along.

Sets are fascinating to me, and a huge challenge. If the set bonus is too strong then off-set pieces are undesired, causing problems in most loot systems. But if they're too weak, then set pieces also cause problems. But if a set was just as strong altogether as a non-set 'set', then why bother with the set and coordinating? Perhaps non-set loot is just there as filler for slots with no set or to fill in while building the set. But that's obviously not true. Some sets are good, some aren't.

Thinking about vanilla also made me think of not just what gear or stats we went for, but that very idea of going for gear. I can't remember the last drop I used. Okay tanking weapon from ICC10. But before that? I'm covered in badge loot. It's not that the RNG hasn't made offerings, but I have my badge loot already, my sets and bonuses and 264 when the RNG in ICC10 offers me 251 and who wants that? A couple weeks ago my mage was thrilled to get a couple greens off mobs in Borean Tundra.

Speaking of which, would blues be more 'legitimate' if they dropped in raids? ZG and AQ20 both had blue drops in them. They weren't trivial places, so a person could have some pride in their blues. My shaman was glad to get Zulian Scepter of Rites and Gloves of the Tormented. Blues! Can you imagine raiding and being glad to have a blue? Oh sure, he had some epics. He liked his 'welfare epics' of The Unstoppable Force and Don Julio's Band. They were expensive! At least I enjoyed Alterac Valley, since getting exalted was a long process (I've done it on at least a half-dozen characters, I loved that place). Oh but the blues, I used those two! Cloaks and necklaces and even a belt. Who cares if frost resist wasn't a particularly useful stat?

Mage exorcism quest to wear warlock gear

Was that title a good enough word salad?

Tesh thinks low level sets are silly. So of course we all promptly started arguing about loot distribution.

It’s a tricky thing, loot. If it’s random, we lose constantly. If it’s guaranteed, we’re done too soon (from the dev perspective). If it’s a slow guarantee (badges), it’s just another grind.

I decided it was time to dig up my previous post: Gear as an Enemy. Loot often has no story to it, strange for being so powerful. I wished to see quests attached to loot. Which leads me to the current situation.

I'd suggested that the piece for the 'wrong' class could be turned in for the desired class. In my example it was yet another warlock set chest that the mage could turn in for a mage set chest. This has a few problems.

First off, it seems weird that NPCs have all this amazing gear on hand. I don't mean bosses, I mean vendors. The official Horde and Alliance armies are off fighting with plain steel while some unknowns with questionable ties are handed powerful enchanted weapons and armor. It just seems weird that they never use the stuff. Sure, I can see the story to the family heirloom locked or found treasure, but the tier sets appear to just be amazing armor that no one bothers to use. Don't get me started on the masses of unmounted soldiers while we're flying around with 100 different flying or ground mounts, some of which are dragons, eleks, or other creatures which would be weapons all on their own.

There's the player problem too: if warlock tier could be exchanged for mage tier, then effectively the warlock tier is just a cloth set token which happens to be slightly more convenient for a warlock than a mage. That turns problem one: randomness, into problem two: geared up and nothing to do. Also I imagine there would be a split between players who think the drop as gear (warlock first) and those who think of it as a token (anyone can roll).

Hence mage exorcism quest.

If no warlocks want it, the mage takes the warlock tier chest. He can't wear it. But fortunately there is a mage who has experience dealing with demon-tainted magical objects: Tabetha. With her assistance, and of course some reagents that are found who knows where, the mage can remove the demonic magic and infuse it with something cleaner-burning. This could even be split up to allow for fire, frost, or arcane specialization (perhaps that's too far). This makes it so that the chest can reasonably be called a warlock drop rather than a mere token, but poor luck isn't as likely to result in extra shards. On the other side, a warlock might find a mage chest far too boring and would seek a demon to capture and infuse into the armor. Priests might do the exorcism and a blessing with a holy object, or pull an Ashbringer and just spam smite until the warlock set says class: priest.

Tiers would be grouped by armor type, which might give a bias to cloth-wearers, while lowering their ratio would mean they get just as much loot but have to quest more for it. Or just maintain the cloth ratio and have that as the shard source, since there would be less sharding overall.

In entirely unrelated news, if you care much about politics I have another rant about anti-American sociopaths destroying America on my other blog.

Gear as an Enemy

All manner of ideas have been given: finite durability, decay, increasing repairs. All of these were intended to... I forgot why. I think it had something to do with crafting? Yea, that's it, if our gear breaks all the time we'd use crafting more and run older raids more and everyone would be so much happier.

What a stupid idea! No, not because people dislike loss. Instead the problem is that it doesn't go far enough.

Gear should be your enemy.

Let's take the One Ring as an example. The first time Bilbo put it on, not much of a problem. It saved his life. Poof, invisible. But repeated use gave him long life, stretched life, like butter spread over too much bread. He was lucky!

Isildor was attacked by orcs and his attempt to use it to escape was thwarted when it grew too big for his finger and slipped off. He was betrayed by the ring.

Smeagol (Gollum) fared little better. His life was stretched, his mind corrupted, all hobbitity driven from him (or was it?). But at least the ring did not get him killed. No, instead it simply abandoned him in the bottom of a goblin-infested mountain. And drove him to murder and treachery, but the greatest of loyalty, for he could not break his word upon his Precious.

Frodo learned that the Ring does not give universal invisibility, but instead makes him more visible (and able to see), the terrible Ringwraiths: victims of other corrupting rings (I oversimplify their story). Even worse, the Eye of Sauron has no problem finding him in the shadow realm.

Strangely, Gandalf claims that wearing the ring too long will cause the person to fade. A strange claim because he has no actual examples. Sauron, Isildor, Gollum, Bilbo, Frodo. Beside a few people who briefly touched it, these are all the bearers and none had faded away. Gandalf did say it takes a very long time, but how long? He clearly knows more than us to be able to predict such an effect.

Our loot does not betray us. It does not abandon us in hour of need. It does not slip off or render us vulnerable to our worst foes. Perhaps it should!

Of course not all armor, because that would be a huge hassle resulting in us running around mostly naked. Then again, female armor suggests we already are mostly naked. But that's beside the point. Betraying items would be unusual, both in rarity and in slots. Rings, necklaces, trinkets. These would be items of great power, but which would be needed to be controlled or destroyed at the wrong time.

Think of Quel'dalar. At one point during its cleansing and renewal it attacks the player, but by defeating it we become stronger. Why do we not do this more often? Most loot is rather boring.

Imagine a necklace which grants great power, but which will eventually choke you to death, reducing stamina. When I say eventually I mean weeks of game time, so there is no great rush and any player with time to get the neck will have time to save themselves, but it could not be entirely ignored. Maybe the neck would need to be cleansed or maybe destroyed or maybe given away to a greedy enemy as a trap. Perhaps the player can choose a path with significantly different rewards for each.

Gear is mostly non-interactive. We get it and then we have it. We click on a vendor when we get something better. For the most part it is like auto-attack. While that's certainly a solid foundation, I'd hate to have no auto-attack or to spend every other day fighting my latest evil boots, it is boring.

Or maybe we just suck at RP and are incapable of sensing adventure. A random encounter with trolls granted Bilbo's party several powerful and legendary swords. Taunting a dragon, which was then killed by someone else completely out of sight, gave Bilbo his mithril armor and everyone involved ridiculous amounts of gold. The One Ring was found by Bilbo getting lost in a cave and playing riddles. Perhaps by comparison our invasion of Ulduar and Icecrown Citadel is epic and heroic and the boring nature of loot is all in our heads.

Our loot does not betray us. It does not abandon us in hour of need. It does not slip off or render us vulnerable to our worst foes. But it is... our Precious...

Epics are Undergeared

I'm now recruiting epic-geared players for level 80 heroics. My recruitment thread has gone up on the Zu'jin forums as well.

Heroics these days are boring. More importantly, unstylish. It's time to fix that.

I need four level 80 players in pre-BC gear to run heroics with. Pick whichever tier you think looks best.

I'll also be running raids on Fridays at 8pm to help gear people down. We'll do whichever raid best fits our numbers, so if we don't have enough for AQ40, we'll do 20; if we don't have enough for BWL, we'll do MC. These will not be undergeared since we're likely to be undermanned. As a rough estimate, AQ needs 20, BWL 15, MC, AQ20, and ZG just need someone else to show up to give me an excuse to run them.

3k GS maximum. Send a letter to Kelpsacovic to apply.

P.S. DKs are welcome, but will have to scavenge since there are no sets for them.
P.P.S. This is a silly serious project, meaning that it is intended to be silly, but it's serious enough to happen. Let's do this.