Lol

Talking about gaming:

I would speculate they make one less productive person ( for example you clearly intelligent guy, going as far as maintaining blog, imagine all that was directed to something like day trading !)

Or maybe it was intentionally ironic.

More on this next week!

But in the meantime, how many hobbies do you have with something to show for them? Now think again, is it the hobby itself or the way you interact with it? I believe WoW could be useful for mental development if a person engaged it in a useful manner. Similarly, chess can develop the mind, unless you never consider strategy or tactics and just sort of shove pawns around the board. That would be utterly useless, but it's not the fault of chess that you play stupidly.

Lowbies don't do Molten Core enough

I've decided to accept Blizzard's offer as Lead Leveling Experience Designer and as my last act as an independent blogger, I'm giving you a sneak preview. Okay yes, there is such a job; they made it in response to my endless whining about the marginalization of the leveling experience and progressive trivialization of content.

So here we go: All raids will be unlocked by the raid before and all expansions are unlocked by the last raid of the previous box. In other words, progression starts with level 60 MC, goes up to AQ40, then moves on to leveling in Outland, before again going Kara...BT, then Northrend. You get the idea. The general concept is the title: Lowbies don't do Molten Core enough. This is something on which all teams have agreed: Molten Core was the pinnacle of raiding. If players hadn't liked it, why did they spend so much time in there, make songs about it, and even another game recreation?

I wish.

More seriously, lowbies don't do Molten Core, or any raid, enough. There's a whole lot of content that they will likely never see because it doesn't fit neatly into the "race to 80 and then race to get gear for whatever the top raid is" method. Iapetes and I were talking about this recently, batting around ideas from raiding to mini-heirlooms. We settled on the most logical solution: Molten Core.

Expecting 40 sub-80 players to get together for a raid isn't reasonable. Even if it gave 50x the XP of normal questing and grinding, it will be such a hassle and take so long to form that it wouldn't be worth it. So let's cut that down to 10. And then let's add our most favoritist bestest friends ever: Garrosh and Varian.

Picture this: You run BRD and along the way pick up some bits of lore. Or not. Maybe you get some loot, which will last a little bit in Outland since there's no more gear reset from Azeroth to Outland (there still is, I mean in this picture that I am typing; hang in there, I have a few hundred words to go). There's this big bad down there, in the Molten Core, and he is mean to puppies. So while questing in BRD and saving a princess, you discover this and so with your respective best friend and a few dozen random NPC soldiers, you go running down to MC. Varian and company do tons of damage against trash, but won't trivialize bosses, so you still get some challenge. Yes, you can actually wipe. No corpse run though, the NPC priests will cover for you. It is meant to be challenging but not irritating.

The goal is to give some of the good parts of the MC experience, while making fun of the bad ones. As you kill bosses the NPCs will gain the respective piece of tier 1, building up until they are fully geared for the fight with Majordomo Executus. Then they switch to FR-based clown suits for Rag. Meanwhile you get absolutely no gear off any boss. However core hounds drop hundreds of gold each, so loot them!

In the end you defeat Ragnaros and are awarded some awesome prize. Maybe a weapon that will last a few levels, perhaps a piece or two of gear (great time to fill itemization gaps in the early BC blues), and of course more than enough XP to make the raid worth it.

These would be phased events, somewhat like Battle for the Undercity, so completing them won't mean you can't come back and farm it normally (if you want to for some reason). There could be other raids, with similar mechanics. I think AQ40 would be a great candidate as well.

The goal is to make leveling seem more epic, as if it were a true struggle (for the characters, not for us), rather than just a long grind before the real game starts. It would give a small taste of raiding without too much pressure.

Would WoW have a better community if it wasn't a MMO?

I really have to hand it to Blizzard, they know the long haul and they are in for it.

Single-player games are not inhabited by raging sociopaths, loot whores, and idiots. Or if they are I haven't played with them yet. Clearly single-players games have better communities, as seen here in this graph, which you should note is entirely blank.


Could WoW tap into this? Yes, and it's a work in progress. You see, there's actually an inflection point in the graph of the community; there it becomes so degraded that it actually becomes better. We saw this strategy executed in EverQuest in which a whole lot of anti-social nerds managed to work together in huge groups and even manage to think of it as a fun experience, as opposed to their usual reaction to other people: running in screaming terror.

As you can see, the graph shows that losers who play EQ will normally form a really awful community, getting worse as there are more, until eventually there is a critical mass of nerds in which social reactions can begin, resulting in a rapid increase in community.


Blizzard has a long tradition of taking what everyone else does well and doing it better. So they've added tools and ideas to utterly destroy all sense of being a multi-player game, eventually resulting in peace and harmony among the community. Sure, in the short term we might not like the extreme alienation caused by facerolling randoms with random people who we will never see again. But in the long term we'll stop caring and just think of them as NPCs. Some people already do. Those are the previously mentioned sociopaths. They're ahead of the game, literally.

But Blizzard doesn't go halfway. They go all the way, and then halfway further. Never try to go on a trip with them in the direction of water, desert, mountains, or really just about any vertical and/or horizontal object, because they will smash right into it at very high speed. Which is of course their plan. So they've added such incredible gear inflation that simply having good gear isn't good enough, now you need [arbitrary number], plus 500. This combined with easily trivialized mechanics to make instances so easy that all you ever need to ask anyone is is why they are so retarded to spec fury with that hit rating. Or whatever it is that a fury warrior should have.

So as you can see here, the changes are quickly destroying the WoW community. But at the point where it becomes a single-player game, it actually gets better.


So do your part to form a better community: Solo as much as possible and avoid thinking of other players as people but instead as poorly-written AI. If you insist on dynamic interaction or the 'players' try to talk to you, be rude, offensive, degrading, inflammatory. They might think you're a total asshole, but in reality you're just saving the community from itself. It's how we won Vietnam: by destroying the village to save the village, since as we all know "better dead than Red" is best applied to other people without their consent, since they might dissent.

Thank you, America. Europe, uh... bon jor we we?

Why DPS are so incredibly stupid

Note: This post takes place in a magical land before heirlooms, trivialized leveling, and faceroll AoE heroics. Imagine it as sometime in BC, when tank/healer leveling isn't trivial, but it's not the absolutely awful task of vanilla.

If you're smart like me, you rolled a tank. Or maybe a healer. We take the hard roles so the DPS can go off and frolic in fields until they get allergies and sneeze and laugh and go into shock and die. But it's okay, because they're just DPS.

Right?

I mean, it's a well-known fact that people generally have equal interest in all classes and roles, but that when DPS roll tanks or healers they are too stupid to handle it so they go back to DPS. If you were to watch the starting zones you'd see all these tanks and healers being created and if you track the names you'll see them get to around level 20 and suddenly blink out, only to reappear as a DPS.

Right?

Of course. It's simply a fact that most non-tanks/non-healers are too stupid to be tanks or healers. This is why DPS seem so stupid.

Right?

Or I wonder if possibly there's something else at play. Could it be that people are not born, or at least do not subscribe, as idiots? Maybe players are generally of around the same intellect. This doesn't fit my ego-boosting elitism, but let's play with this silly idea for a moment.

Let's take someone of equal motivation and intellect and split their fates into tank, healer, and DPS. Two strands go with the 'hard' roles while the other weaves its way through the 'easy' one.

Let's start with the healer. The first thing we should notice is that everything is the healer's fault. Short of someone jumping off a cliff, the healer could have healed better and saved them, and even with the cliff a priest could have use levitate and a paladin could have given hand of protection. Even if the group says nothing, the healer will know on some level that he could have done better, and it will gnaw at him. The only protection is either cynicism, not caring, or the careful balance of knowing exactly the limits of healing and when to blame others. This is why our normal person quit healing.

But let's say he keeps healing. Why is he so much smarter than DPS? Because he matters in the beginning and the end. He has to be on his game or that's it, game over, done. Being failure-adverse just like anyone else, the healer will learn to heal better, to watch better, to know more. He's not actually any smarter, but he is better educated.

Now for the tank. Given well-behaved DPS, he's going to be the puller. If he cannot pull properly, he will be first in line to die. Or maybe second after the healer. But his life is right on the line. He's up front. A DPS can run or feign, but not the tank. So he must watch and be careful at times. He must know where the patrols are, where to pull to, and possibly what abilities to watch out for. Failure-adverse just like the healer, he will learn and become better educated.

The DPS strand won't live the same way. He doesn't pull and he doesn't heal. His failures are slow and not always obvious. He has someone else to keep him alive. What is there to learn in this sanctuary? Very little. Sure, there is much to learn: kiting and interrupts and all manner of little tricks that one can use, but why? It would be as learning calculus in middle school. Sure, you can do it and it might even help, but all the tests are on long division and basic algebra. The normal person, not for lack of intellect, will not become well-educated as a DPS.

For an extreme example, imagine leveling a warrior vs. a hunter. The warrior takes all the hits and cannot heal. His escape options are limited, with all his mobility being focused on getting to enemies, not away. Short of intercepting a nearby critter, he's going to be dying where he fights. So he must learn to pull somewhat carefully. He fails, he dies. So he learns. Meanwhile the hunter is a melee class until level 10. At that point he gets a pet and with growl, autoshot, and feign death (admittedly not at level 10) he is set for the next 70 levels. Failure costs a piece of meat to feed an unhappy pet, not death. Failure is so trivial that it ceases to be a motivation to learn.

The hunter isn't stupid. The warrior isn't unusually smart either. Instead they are both players adapting to their situation. If the hunter had been harder to level, with risk of significant failure, then he would have learned more.

Notice how none of this requires any players to be innately stupid. It doesn't require that players flee from hard classes or roles. All it requires is that some classes or roles challenge the player or not. We know for certain that that condition is met. We have no measurement of player intelligence except biased, selective memory of incidents which may or may not be in any way related to intelligence. Given that we know that the education in WoW varies and that we cannot measure intelligence, wouldn't it be pretty damn stupid to assume that some players are stupid and ignore the teaching aspects of leveling?

Negativity in the Blogosphere

I'm really sick of the negativity. It's out of control and entirely unjustified. Also useless.

No I don't mean the bashing of this or that MMO or the usual sky is falling negativity. I'm referring instead to those who somehow got the absurd idea that performance in a video game is anything close to a useful measure of worth as a human being. Let's have a sanity check here. Let's all slow down a bit and think this over. There are people who think less of others because of how they play a game. And I don't mean less of others in terms like "what a noob" or "he is so full of fail", I mean people pulling out stupid, idiot, moron, lazy, and so on. Labels which they use with no moderating bits such as "stupid at games" or "lazy at grinding rep". No, just plain, unqualified stupid, lazy, worthless, and so on.

WoW is very important to me. I hate it when people disparage WoW or gaming in general with "it's just a game" or fail to respect it, or at least tolerate it, as would any mainstream hobby such as watching football or going to bars to talk to drunk bimbos and assholes. I suppose I was a bit hypocritical right there. My point is this: I think highly of WoW and gaming, so keep that in mind when I say this: World of Warcraft is a game.

It is not a career, a job, or even a weekend chore. It is not an intelligence test; it's not even one of those quizzes on Facebook. It's a game.

It's also a world or toy or epeen competition, but the central theme of it is play and entertainment. A game. Imagine it as a ball. One person sits on it, another bounces it off a wall, another plays catch with a friend, another uses it for physics experiments. None of them are doing it wrong.

I'm guilty of it too. I've thought, even said, that someone was stupid based on what I saw in the narrow context of a random, trivial location in a game. I try to avoid broadcasting that to the world and pretending that it is somehow useful data. I try to avoid claims such as "60% of all players are stupid" or "95% of all players suck at their class". The second one wouldn't even be so bad, since while entirely made up, it's at least not a blanket generalization of a person.

The other day I ran into an incredibly bad hunter. His gems were bad, he was bad at pulling, he was bad at controlling his pet, he was bad at picking targets. Was he stupid? Maybe, maybe not. The most negative label I could reasonably apply given the information I had was that he didn't care much about his performance as a hunter. That's all.

All the elitism doesn't even help. It just makes terrible players see a bandwagon to jump on. They can grab their cookie cutters and out of context spreadsheets and go to town, certain that they are in the elite group, because they're acting just like the elitists. They are in a cozy bubble of elitism. That bubble prevents introspection, since once you're elitist, you're at the top and don't need to get any better (at least that's how an elitist sees it). To reinforce the bubble they get whatever they can: gearscore, DPS meters, gold, spelling, anything to make it clear that they are in the elite us while the other is in the worthless them. They create their imaginary enemies.

I'd call the elitists stupid for all their negativity, but all I have to go off is their constant stream of elitism.

P.S. This post is so late because I screwed up the scheduling and had it going up tomorrow. Oops.

Someone else also read my mind and conveniently provided an example of saying stupid shit

It's sad the way they have 'dumbed down' raids to the point where all you have to do to be COMPLETELY AWESOME is show up and stay out of fires and run away from baddies.

I wish they would make it more complicated than it is currently, but sure as (*&& there's going to be an army of spoiled raiders coming in here to rate me down just because I want to make it harder for them.

Getting epics used to mean you were good. Now all it means is that you played enough hours to get there.

That being said, this actually wasn't a bad item to have. I wish I could get the pattern on my Blood elf.

If anyone on any server gets this, Please contact Nomiconn on Turalyon-US Horde. I will see about buying it from you, and then transferring that toon to Turalyon.

This was a comment about the pattern for Flarecore Wraps.
Farming FR gear or mats for crafted FR gear required no skill. Getting epics frequently did not mean you were good, but just that the raid needed some more bodies and the RNG had blessed the raid with more class X gear than it actually needed, meaning you were good enough to be worth more than a shard.

I actually like the concept of resist gear. But let's not trick ourselves into thinking that removing resist fights dumbed down WoW, single quotes or not.

Someone else read my mind and said it better

But there's a larger, more philosophical question here. If we could just depend on everyone to do what was prudent and sensible at all times, why would we need any laws at all? People act against their own and society's interest all the time. You couldn't ask for a better demonstration of this than the frenzy of chicanery that suffused every level of the residential housing market, from subprime loan to synthetic CDO. Ideally, we'd rather avoid scenarios in which the financial system collapses, costing trillions of dollars to resuscitate and resulting in the loss of millions of jobs. If that means protecting consumers from their own "stupid" decisions -- and, much more important, preventing financial institutions from taking advantage of those consumers -- then so be it. That's a good deal!

-Andrew Leonard, staff writer at Salon

Full article

Is it time to retire?

The trend is obvious. I mean, at least to me, as I watch the posts I've been doing. Maybe retirement is the best option.

Oh no, not my blogging or playing. I meant characters!

Why do we make alts?

I see two most common reasons:
1) To play another class.
2) To have another class at 80.

This are different if you think about them some more. The first reason will not cause a person to enjoy leveling, after all, the first few levels are often not much fun due to extremely limited mechanics. But around 30-40 when a class has filled out a bit, at that point a "to play" alt will start to be fun. The second reason, well for that leveling itself is nothing more than an obstacle, a grind, a mindless act with no clear purpose but very obvious irritation.

Let's not worry about the first reason, at least not today. What's wrong with the second reason? Well objectively speaking I see nothing wrong with it. Let's brea it up and look more carefully. Why do they want another class at 80?
1) Profession
2) Variety
3) Reroll

The first reason doesn't have leveling as as big of an obstacle, since maxed professions don't require 80. Also such a reason is independent of class, meaning that a DK alt can be used for a significant head start.

The second may not be adverse to leveling, since the experience itself is much different than level 80, and the class difference gives variety, regardless of power. Still, being level 1 may not be much fun, and therefore leveling is still an obstacle, though the level at which it ceases to be depends on the class. For example, a hunter is pretty much shit until 10 when they get pets, while paladins are amazingly boring until crusader strike which is a level 40 talent.

The third reason is why I wrote this. Yes it did just take that much time to even begin to get to my point.

I play a paladin, but my guild really needs a druid. So what do I do? Slowly level a druid and then slowly gear it up? Even with easy badges, that's still a huge amount of time to invest. Retirement could give a better option than just making a new alt. This idea is more or less taken from Torchlight, which is a great game that you should try.

A retired character would be destroyed, but it could grant an inheritance to a new characters. This would grant a substantial amount of experience, though not quite max level, since I believe there should still be some time spent learning the mechanics. All soulbound token (badges, emblems, stonekeeper's shards, etc) gear or weapons, excluding heirlooms, would be converted to some percentage of the cost, less than 100% but more than 50%, in order to allow for quick, but not instant gearing. Reputations would go to halfway into the current tier, with the tier above exalted rolled into exalted. Gold (minus a flat retirement tax), non-soulbound items, and bags (even if they are soulbound) would carry over 100% since you'd just mail them to an alt anyway. The retirement tax would go to a trust fund to provide healthcare, housing, food, and entertainment (succubi/incubi as desired) for your retired character. You never actually benefit from the retirement tax. Optionally, you can opt for the "death panel" in which there is no tax, but any character above level 65 has a .5% chance per day to be deleted. Being diseased, poisoned, or in any way debuffed, including being sated after bloodlust, at the end of the day increases the chance to 5%.