Media influence in video games

You might have heard, years back, how The Matrix caused the shooting at Columbine. Or one of many other claims. They're really all the same. The general theme is that violence, presented to us in a fictional setting, creates violent patterns which carry into real life. In other words, violent media causes violent behavior.

In a more general sense this is used to make many claims about mirroring media. Children imitate their parents and those around them, playing at what they see. People are influenced by the world, but how much?

I wonder how much the community of WoW is influenced by media, the media produced by the community. Do kill videos inspire us to greater heights in PvE? Can a PvP video make us want to step into a battleground? Perhaps a rogue video makes us want a rogue, to be that rogue that we saw. Or maybe the other way around, we want to beat that rogue.

I noticed I was running out of space on my computer, so I mapped out my hard drive (my apologies to more savvy people for whom this term actually means something) to see what was taking up the most space. I noticed some old PvP videos. One was Drakedog, an old warlock (I'm talking when MC was hardcore stuff) who as far as I can tell, helped to popularize the style of seduce-nuking. It's essentially what it sounds like: seduce the target, nuke them, repeat until dead. Watching a short bit of one make me think: "I really miss my warlock." Then I pulled up a paladin video from BC and watched an arena fight. I got the strangest feeling.

I wanted to do arenas. Not just do ten games, but do 20, 30, 40 games, or more. And then watch some matches and see what I was doing right and wrong and figure out everything. Something in my analytical side clicked and I wanted to play WoW 'wrong', not as a game, but as a theorycrafted, over-analyzed, no longer fun hobby. And then I shook my head a bit and remembered: I have barely any PvP gear, I have no team, I have no one who would be willing to play with like that, finding someone like that now would be nearly impossible. My last thought was to power level my dwarf on another server and play with a friend there.

Finally I came to my senses and went back to looking for ways to free up space, settling on compressing raw Fraps videos, since they are gigantic. 1.5gb down to 11mb. Well done.

Something must be done. This potential threat to decent society must be analyzed, figured out, and dealt with. What does it mean for the future of humanity that a couple minutes of a video can push a person almost to the point of committing such a horrible act as playing in arenas?

Bad word of the day: Hard

What is hard? Or to put it in context, what makes one fight hard and another fight easy?

Overall it tends to come down to relative gear level. That's it. Just about everything in WoW can be beaten through gear, even if the fight is intended to measure something else.

Gear is not hard, gear is a time sink. For example, I think Naxx is too easy. But what would make it harder? The simple answer is to increase boss health and damage by 10%. Boom, harder, right? Wrong. All this does is tell the raid "go do heroics for another couple weeks and come back." It doesn't tell the raid "practice." No, it just says to go get more gear.

Practice and perspective also affect how hard something is. After you've done a fight a dozen times, it's not hard anymore. It's entirely natural and you'll think it's easy. A new player will think it is hard. I'll use this, at least for now, as my standard for hard: something which appears hard at first and gets easier with practice regardless of changes in gear. In essence hard is just a matter of practice.

Ultimately hard is, pardon the word choice, hard to measure. Why? Because we don't just get more practice, we also get more gear. Example time:

Razorgore:
This fight killed guilds. It was the last 40-man raid I ever did on my first shaman. We wiped. Many times. It was hard. In contrast, earlier fights such as MC were easy, or at least easier. Domo, Garr, and Rag are the only fights I see as being actually hard, having mechanics which test skill which I'll call a combination of awareness, multi-tasking, and mobility. The rest tended to revolve around certain gear levels or repetitive tasks such as cleansing or decursing. But back to Razorgore.

This fight involves, or used to involve, a high level of skill from the entire raid. It required individuals to do their parts correctly but also the raid as a whole to work well as a single entity. There were people kiting and tanking and DPSing and healing and controlling the orb and any failure in any of those quickly wrecked the situation and led to a wipe. This was a fight which required a lot of practice.

Now though, gear has destroyed the hard part. Well, gear in the general sense of our characters gaining power. 20 levels and much higher stats have made the fight trivial. Now it requires barely any coordination, no kiting, and overall just not much skill. Now it's a simple matter of two people for the orb (one is enough if you're not unlucky), a healer for Razorgore, and some DPS to keep the adds from going after the healer. It is simple. The encounter which was once hard is not simply overgeared. I'd like to also point out that this is an even easier, simpler method than what I used at 70 when we actually had a tank for the adds because then we didn't totally outgear it. But even then, we clearly were overgeared for the encounter because at 60 you didn't have a single tank holding EVERYTHING.

Let's get back to Naxx. Heigan is a bit hard, right? I mean, you can't exactly overgear dancing can you? Well.. you can. Get enough health and powerful enough healers and you could just stand in the green stuff through the entire channel. We could remove the gear advantage and make the splash do a % of health, so two are a kill. But still, enough healing can overcome it. Make it a one-shot? That makes gear irrelevant, but also makes it very unforgiving to the slightest mistake.

Maybe the fight could be done somehow to not allow overgearing. Maybe every fight could be set up to not allow overgearing. But then what's the incentive for better gear? There are fights which don't test gear: vehicles the the absolute case. They tend to bother people though. They say they leveled their class, not a dragon. But is that the real problem? Maybe the true problem is that you can't overgear a vehicle. You can't farm gear and consumables and get through by brute force. I think that bothers people. It's not that they're bad or lazy, at least not innately so, but that over WoW we've been taught: if you can't do it now, get more gear. We don't learn to practice, we learn to overgear. When fights do require practice, like Razorgore, they often kill guilds.

Can it be any other way? If fights can't be overgeared, what is the incentive for more gear? The next encounter? It's likely that if a fight cannot be overgeared, it also cannot be undergeared; your gear doesn't help or hurt you on a vehicle. Maybe there could be the idea I'd suggested of gear caps: setting it so you cannot use gear from this or that raid while pursuing an achievement.

Maintain the difficulty past Ulduar. Add an iLevel maximum for the achievements and leave the mounts. This way you cannot trivialize them with gear because you can't get past a certain gear level. All Ulduar can give you is more experience with your class rather than a way to bypass the challenge.

Unfortunately this goes against the progression model which effectively amounts to perpetual obsolescence of everything which came before.

To truly test skill, WoW would have to eliminate gear as a major variable. Doing that would destroy the system which drives all progress past the level cap. In other words: WoW will never be truly hard, you'll just not have the gear for it yet. This doesn't mean that WoW is a bad game. It's been very successful and I enjoy it a lot. We just should manage our expectations.

Urgent! Don't be a jerk

So, forum thread.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=16137705489&sid=1
Basic idea: raid is going for undying, someone intentionally commits suicide and wipes them on KT. I stopped watching after the wipe because I hate listening to vent conversations.

A response in the thread really bothered me.
"Kudos to Evilturkey.
Teaching hardcores that, congratulations, the game you play is still just a game, and shouldn't be taken so seriously."
Wrong. It's not about serious or not. It's not about hardcore or not. It's a simple matter of being an ass. This is really not much different than wandering into a pickup basketball game, grabbing the ball, and stabbing it so it deflates.

"Just a game" does not imply "it's okay to ruin it for everyone else."

Here's another terrible post:
"Whoa dude. You take this game way too seriously. You are saying people who find this funny (I am one of them) are horrible human beings who like to see people hurt?

Wow. You are a freaking loon. I find this funny the same way I found LEEEEERROOOY JENKINS funny although this video isnt anywhere near as funny. You are getting so nerd raged over this video, it screams of deep sided psychological issues.

Have you ever stopped to consider why you care so much about this game? You should reevaluate your behavior. And probably seek some help.

I thought this video was funny, and the fact the people in the guild chat got sooo mad made it even funnier. Now if you'll excuse me Im going to go back to eating kittens."
Again, someone that cannot see that game does not imply totally unimportant and trivial. People invest time in this game. They invest emotion. That isn't bad. It's good, it means it's a great game that it can draw people in so well.

To intentionally screw up something in which people have invested so much, is wrong. It's funny in a cruel way, but it's not funny enough and it's not teaching a lesson. It's just being an ass.

Even if the Leeroy video wasn't staged, it's not even comparable. Sure UBRS was serious business back then, but even still, a wipe there wasn't a huge deal compared to screw with an achievement run that takes hours of near-perfect gameplay.

The fact that things like this happen disturbs me. Are people really this immature and cruel? Or are people so unwilling to see the importance of games? I always thought I was on the casual side, the type that mocks hardcores for min/maxing and thinks they're doing it wrong. But this, this goes far over that line. It's one thing to be semi-anonymously judgmental about how someone else chooses to play when it has no effect on my own play* but to actually go ruin their play is terrible.

[bad person] is a terrible person. It is times like this that I wish WoW had a more tight-knit community, the sort that has the internal strength to hold him accountable and at the least force him to get a new account just to escape what he did. It is terrible that someone can be so horrible and still get away with it. But even worse is that people praise him. He is no grand idealist showing the true meaning of life or even a vigilante fighting for justice when the system fails. He's just an ass and to regard him as someone good** indicates something wrong with the mind.

* Actually it does in the sense that hardcores tend to set a trend for how to play, but that's beside the point.
** This is based only on actions in this video. Perhaps he's actually a magical being who feeds only on joy and happiness which he harvests by bringing puppies to orphans and reveling in their delight.

I think I leak luck

I joined a AQ40 PUG. Afterwards I ran outside and then remembered: I need to check my egg! *click* Holy crap, green proto-drake.

Onward.

A guildy wanted to do MC. He's trying to get ingots since he got the eye of sulfuron a few weeks ago. Well... no ingots dropped. But another eye dropped. I was about to cry while looting it to the other paladin who wont he roll. Damn you, master looter, and your tempting ability to ninja legendaries.

We decided that since it was so fast we'd try BWL. It was a fairly smooth run, though with some problems related to repeated failures to follow the rule "don't aggro the patrolling drake." Over the run I picked up 4 elementium ore, which is the most I've ever seen. Unfortunately the raid didn't like my idea of "Kelp ninjas all the ore" so we settled on rolling off the ore. But, one of the winners let me keep one of the ore, so yay.

In related news, the AQ40 combined with turnins (I had a lot of rep items) got me to revered with Brood of Nozdormu. That meant I could really start the gates chain. BWL allowed me to complete the red chain. I've only just started the blue and green chains. Azuregos is a weirdo. Overall the quests are incredibly strange and epic in their own special way.

Rage-like mechanics

They're everywhere. Why?

Let's start with paladins:
SA: Take damage (get healed), gain mana. It's a weird variant of the rage generation from taking damage.
JotW: Deal damage (judge wisdom), gain mana
BoS: Block (dodge, parry), gain mana

Rogues:
Focused attacks: crit, gain energy.
Combat potency: 20% chance for off-hand attacks to generate 15 energy.
Setup: take damage (dodge or resist), gain combo points. This one, as best as I can remember, has been around since pre-BC, at least a year before then. So I suppose it breaks my attempt to create a pattern of new rage-like mechanics. Let's just sweep this under the rug... *sweeps*

Death knights:
Dead damage (use runes), gain runic power.
Anit-magic shell: Take damage (mitigate 75%), gain runic power

Hunters:
Invigoration: gain mana when pet crits
Go for the throat: pet gains focus when you crit
Aspect of the Viper: attacks generate mana

Magi:
Incanter's Absorbtion: increased spell damage from taking (absorbing) damage
Magic Absorbtion: Mana gain from taking (resisting) damage
Frost Warding: The description confuses me, but somehow you gain mana from people trying to kill you.

Shamans:
Shamanistic Rage: Deal damage, gain mana based on AP

I might have missed some. I definitely stretched some of these a bit. But the trend is there: dealing or taking damage is becoming a normal source of regen. Previously there were three types of regen which operated much differently.
Energy was a constant regen, increased damage came from only increased damage per point spent.
Mana had scaling regen and increased damage could come both from greater damage/mana and from just plain having more mana.
Rage was all over the place, directly scaling with damage stats and also increasing damage/rage with greater stats. It was unique in also scaling with damage taken, due to its dual purpose as a resource for both DPS and tanking.

Why the spread of rage-like mechanics? Well first off, they offer a distinct advantage over pure mana: they last longer, potentially forever. Oh sure if you stand around a while you'll regen mana, but except for strange times like now with loads of regen, mana bars have generally been things which move from full to empty during combat, not the other way.

Isn't this an intended weakness of mana? Well sure, but that doesn't work so well when you try to put it in other roles. SA was critical to paladins having any chance of tanking. They somehow needed a lot of regen (tanking is expensive and the armor has poor mana, even when we had int on tier sets) which wouldn't be too powerful for the healing and DPS roles. SA did that. BoS was added because SA was scaling negatively with gear and while there is a balance to be struck between aggro and mitigation, they were in direct conflict.

JotW was a failure in a way. It was a failure to work within existing mechanics (switching between SoW and a damage seal) to create any type of burn-regen cycle, instead just sticking mana into the normal 'rotation' and declaring it solved.

Rogues? No clue why they got the mechanics. Maybe Combat Potency was to make hit and haste more popular. Maybe it was just to catch the attention of the fabled Rogue with One Dagger. Focused Attacks: it's a crit tree and eventually you can't add any more crit increases or crit damage increases and they already had combo points, so they added energy. Any similarity to rage seems unintended (not to say, "not working as intended", just that they weren't trying to give rogues rage) and ultimately these scaling regen sources still end up being less than the static regen, at least at my poor lowbie rogue's gear level.

Death Knights: I realized that DKs don't really use a rage-like system, it's really more like energy and combo points. Runes are the energy: static regen. Runic power is the combo point: a resource generated by spending energy for some other purpose, potentially scaling with talents or gear but ultimately still restrained by the static part.

Hunters: See ret paladin (except done correctly). Also see rogue (the part about running out of mechanics to add).

Magi, well, they're known for their talents which sound cool but frequently have no practical use. Woo, armor from intellect, they are going to be untouchable to melee! Oh. Well at least the absorb -> SP worked well before they fixed the exploits *cough cough* soloing Military Quarter.

Shamans: See ret, but done better.

I am left wondering something: why do shamans and hunters have scaling regen? This makes balancing much more difficult. Now you can't just lay out a rotation and see what damage it does. Now you have to consider whether they are able to sustain that rotation (scaling goes both ways) or if they're actually expanding that rotation to something more expensive which they can still sustain. It's rage-like and as a result that much harder to model.

Why should I feel bad in this situation?

My troll hunter is running into Tarren Mill to turn in some quests when I catch what appeared to be the climax of a flame war, some sort of attack on the target's vocabulary, ironically using many mispelled words, unexceptional except for their offensive combination. The others responded with fewer words, but still, nothing which I want to read.

My first instinct was to point out the crude words of the first person. But, that seemed unproductive. So instead I hit my question mark button and oh look, report an issue. That sounds just right. The report was something like "I rode into Tarren Mill and so and so was saying 'this' and also these two other people were being offensive as well."

So now I feel a bit like a tattle tale. That strikes me as stupid. I'm not the person being immature here, being offensive in /say. When I say offensive, I don't mean "oh the poor children, they shall be corrupted!" I mean that I don't want to hear that sort of stuff when I'm playing, or at least I want to hear it on my terms, talking with friends, not overhearing bits of childish flame wars.

Of course I don't think kids should have to read that either. This isn't to say that I think WoW should be child-safe, since that would cause some serious problems with my ability to use violence as the answer to almost any problem. However WoW does have some young people. Even if it is rated teen, I don't think teens need any more streams of offensive material. But anyway, this is about me and not wanting to have to hear the constant crap spewed by childish people who cannot think of better ways to express their problems, or even better, just not say anything at all.

The very concept of a tattle tale is stupid. It's a bad thing for children to learn, to think "oh well I shouldn't say anything because that's a bad thing to do." Our world needs more whistle blowers, more people pointing out the bad things we all do. Maybe we'd do them less if there wasn't a society structured around not saying anything.

In unrelated news, an 80 hunter game me a crappy green hat which was less crappy than nothing. His tabard looked interesting so I inspected, and was then surprised to see a red sword of courage. I suppose I should have said something, but I wasn't thinking quickly enough to come up with a polite way to say that it's almost useless.

That wasn't funny.

Sorry. :(

Moving on: The Arrchivist was great. The new Terran unit was slightly less great. The forum change make it hard to read, but was a bit funny. The character customization wasn't very funny.

Back to unfunny jokes: it took half a level (granted it was rested and with shoulders) of grinding Sunfury Bowmen to get the Khorium Scope schematic. Just to get me excited and thinking it was a lucky day, the arrow maker nearby which I didn't care much about, that dropped on the second kill.

Oh oh, here's a great joke for you: I have TWO engineers. I'm sorry, that wasn't funny, just crude.

I couldn't get onto the forums all day, it said my account was inactive.

[edit] I logged on to my paladin and saw an unfamiliar mail. It was a letter from someone saying he can't comment, but he's sad to see my blog go. Now I feel terrible. I wish I could go back and not post that. :(

The horrible realiziation

The problem wasn't the title or subtitle or address. The problem was nothing to say. For over a year I've had nothing to say and too much space to say it. In light of this recent discovery, perhaps revelation, I am closing my doors. I don't even have doors to close, just a Firefox window. I guess it makes sense, closing that window means no more posts.

Maybe this is just temporary. Maybe this is just be following a trend again, the latest trend in WoW blogging being not blogging. I'm sure a philosopher would have something to say about that, but I don't. At least it's consistent, right?

I guess, farewell?

I'll let Google take care of the rest.