Not a quitting post

I didn't quit WoW. I stopped playing, but I didn't quit. Today my sub runs out.

To me quitting is some active decision: "Today I am no longer player" or "When my sub expires I'm done." Quitting results in those long ranting posts about dumbing down and how EQ/AC/SWG/somegamethatcamebeforewow were so much better. I just stopped caring. My bubble burst. After a couple weeks I thought to unsubscribe. Since I'd switched to a three-month sub, this still left a month. I had previously quit, but even when I had only a week or two left I was still back before it ended. This time feels different. I'm not temporarily bored or frustrated, I just don't care. I briefly considered logging on to sort out my mailbox and send some stuff off to friends, but I didn't care enough. So what if I lose whatever materials are floating around? If I return it will probably be for another expansion, at which time those will all be worthless anyway. I'd rather have the empty bags and not waste my time now.

I guess this is a "I stopped caring and playing" post. That seems close enough to a quitting post that it would call for a long ranting list of why I'm not playing. But that seems like a waste of time. There's nothing that I haven't said before, over and over, until people are probably sick of hearing it. Reading it. Beside that, I don't think any specific change is truly the tipping point. Accumulated they may set up discontent, but something in the person's life or mind shifts and that is what actually triggers quitting.

I'm not quitting (sorry, not not quitting (not not not?)) to play another game. I did try Rift and it was fun, but it runs poorly, so I don't think it makes sense to drop $50 and a recurring sub for sub-20 FPS with graphics turned down so far that I might as well play Minecraft. Maybe when I get a new computer. Then again, I've been saying that for a couple years.

I'll keep blogging, but I fear that with not playing a current MMO and not playing current games, I'm going to sooner or later have nothing left to say. I'd use the word irrelevant, but that assumes relevance. It's a silly thing to be afraid of, but I actually fear that. I like this community of bloggers. You're great people, mostly. With no gaming input, what do I say? I still have plenty to say, but about gaming? Perhaps not much. I've never lurked or been a pure commenter. Day one I was making lame jokes and offering useless commentary, a fate which I never escaped, even if from what I can tell, a handful of much better and more popular bloggers pulled me from total obscurity. Not to leave anyone out, but Larisa, Tobold, and Rohan are pretty much the only reasons anyone knows my blog exists. So blame them. Fading away to nothingness just isn't a great way to go. Then again, neither is the bang that some choose with ragequites, deletions, or parting flame wars. Okay maybe that one last could be fun.

As I said, I won't just stop blogging immediately. This isn't my last post. I want to at least tie up loose ends. Maybe develop some coherent statements from this huge volume of inanity.

So uh, I guess that's that.

It's time to end all unions

And I mean all. Not just labor unions. Those are just the tip of the iceberg. Did you know that while only a bit under 12% of workers are unionized, nearly 100% of jobs are? It's true. There are some job unions of hundreds, even thousands, hundreds of thousands!

It's time to end this.

I propose that first, all labor unions be banned, and criminalized. Why should people get to 'collectively bargain', also known as exploit and extort? Similarly, I propose that all job unions be banned and criminalized. One man, one job.

If workers want to 'organize', they can do it on their own. Let market forces dictate their wages and conditions. Similarly, let no person, whether real or corporation, control more than one job, excluding one's own. In other words, anyone can hire one other person and no more than that. To do so would give them a disproportionate and anti-market influence over the job market. Instead, let the market dictate wages, conditions, and employment levels.

At first glance this would seem to go against the first amendment right to assemble. But that's only because of liberal activist judges. Obviously having been written during a time of industrial expansion "right to assemble" refers to the right to assemble products. Far from being a "go ahead" to anti-market unions, it is in fact a right-to-work clause.

Given this new understanding, we can see a clear path ahead. With assemble no longer referring to groups of people, the Wisconsin legislature can be eliminated entirely in favor of the will of the governor. That means unions can be crippled and protesters ignored, perhaps arrested. Of course this could cause problems for his benefactors, the Koch brothers, since they have done quite well with their own job unions, but I'm sure they can pay bail. Since the collapsed right to assemble contradicts the notion of a jury of peers, they can simply be charged a small fine annually for their persistent violation of anti-union laws. That fine can of course be deducted from energy subsidies, so they'll be alright.

My point is this: cooperation is socialism and we must work together to end it.

Ants cannot comprehend the horror which is a boot

Deathwing is lame. Okay? He's lame. More specifically, his "I set the zone on fire" move is lame.

"Things are red. I guess I'm going to have to run to my body soon."

That's it. That is the entire event. Okay there are also the flames, which lose their effect when a mob wanders through one.

It is pretty impressive to fly over and set an entire zone on fire, instantly killing all the otherwise brave and powerful adventurers. But we're ants and he's a boot. We can't quite comprehend it.

Frankly I find it impersonal. Which yes, that makes sense from Deathwing's perspective, since we are ants after all. But maybe the devs could have done it differently.

How about have him personally torch a town and let some minions handle the rest of the zone, so we can all get personally clawed and burned?

One of my professors liked to say "everyone is the hero of their own story", his idea being that everyone thinks they have something worth saying, so it's good for morale to listen (it was a leadership class), but he clearly had not every played WoW. We're not really the heroes. Oh we get cursory applause, but ultimately we know we're just generic unnamed people who cannot even be personally slaughtered by the evil madness of the Black Dragonflight.

Oh God it's the stupid Whiny Post Day again (not today)

Didn't we just do one of these? Ugh. Awful annoying things. I can't stand them! And don't even get me started on...

Sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Whiny Post Day! Mark your calenders! One week from today, that is to say, March 17th if you're using the same calender system as I am, or 40592 long 5923 short if you're using the Quebok calender. Look it up, not to be confused with Quebec, which is much different.

ARE YOU READY TO WHINE!!!!!!!!?
OR ALTERNATIVELY DO YOU ANTICIPATE BEING READY TO WHINE WITHIN A ONE WEEK TIME SPAN, THE IDEA BEING THAT YOU WILL BE READY TO WHINE IN TIME TO WRITE UP SOME WHINING FOR MARCH 17th DESIGNATED WHINY POST DAY!!!!!!!!?

Note to self: It takes fewer representatives to take rights than to work on a budget

http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/03/09/wisconsin.budget/index.html

I guess we should hurry up and fix the first amendment to read something like "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances, so long as they do not expect to accomplish anything whatsoever by assembly or petition."

That sounds about right.

P.S. If you didn't read the link, the WI senate passed the parts that have nothing to do with the budget (which requires a smaller number of senators present), which most notably involved stripping the public unions of the ability to have any point in existing. Even the way they pass the bill contradicts their claim that it is about the budget. More on this on Saturday.

What is Exploration Anyway?

One of the recent comments to Tobold caught my eye: "I do not agree that wow is remotely "exploration-driven". It's linear, it's streamlined it's candy coated."

Is linear the opposite, or at least incompatible, with exploration? To determine this, we need to define exploration. First, what is the actual physical act, how does one explore? Second, what does it cause, rewards, sense of pride, Dora the Explorer title?

What are you doing?
Initial exploration is often non-linear. We don't know where we're going, so we hit dead ends and loops and in general we can't follow some optimized pattern. At least we couldn't until we started flying everywhere. So in this initial phase of exploration, it does seem incompatible with a linear design. If it were linear, then it would be pre-optimized, essentially giving us information about the path, and therefore reducing the amount to find.

But that initial wandering doesn't cover ever single little bit. There's still that one area that we didn't have time to get into, what with being filled with elites, so we'd want a solid bit of time for fighting or sneaking in. At this point it may be semi-linear. We know approximately where we want to go, but we have to decide how we will get there. For example, before the Shattering, Grim Batol wasn't open yet, not even all the gates, but a player could run quite a ways up toward the entrance, dodging dragons along the way. It was literally linear (okay literally slightly curved, but alliteration is more fun). And yet it was also exploration.

What's in it for Me?
Ah that old problem of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. We meet again!

Exploration isn't purely intrinsically rewarding. My proof? Minecraft. It has a whole lot to find, to discover, to dig into and extract, and explore. But it's a terrible place for exploration. Why? It's meaningless. Exploration isn't the simple process of seeing something that you haven't seen before. It has to have some sort of meaning. Finding history, treasure, something. It may not be profitable in the strictest sense, but it has to be something. The next hill over, or the next half-dozen digs through a dozen blocks, will certainly be profitable, but they will be meaningless.

This is the strange strength of WoW has an exploration game. While it sticks us on rails and make everything inevitable, thereby discouraging the process, it also has something at every end of the path. There are no random areas of nothing. It is all crafted, created, meaningful. Oh of course there are little bits of nothing here and there, but the world overall has a whole lot in it.

But I suppose I just evaded the question. Is history an external reward? I'd say so. But I think we can differentiate between learning something and getting something. A scholarshop vs. a winning lotto ticket.

I wonder how much I have contradicted myself in that post. Hey, a challenge for you all. Have fun.

There will be no difficulty slider as long as...

I'm not a very good gamer. There, I said it. I get disoriented easily. I get jumpy, trigger-happy, and my aim goes to shit. Alternatively, I am overly cautious, a sensible habit given my inability to walk into a crowd of enemies and score a dozen headshots in a second. But then if there is a timer of any sort, oh then that's trouble indeed.

I'm the reason games have difficulty sliders.

Why do online games so rarely have difficulty sliders?

There's an obvious case for not having them in PvP: that is, that they make it unbalanced. Skill falls out. That wouldn't be very good at all. It's the same as why no one likes playing against cheaters. Uh... pay no attention to the gear behind the curtain.

But why not raids? If I can't kill Lich King on normal, why not have an option to dial back the growth rate of defile? Lower the health or speed of valkyr? Why not?

Difficulty is only half the story

Tobold asks if Rift proves that Cataclysm is too hard? He eventually comes to this claim: "Most players prefer a game in which they don't have to constantly justify their performance."

That sounds about right. I'd even go so far as to say that most players prefer a game in which they never have to justify their performance. Please don't take this as a "they have lives" argument, but when people have serious jobs full of their own challenges, family and social arenas to navigate, and at this moment, a whole lot of economic uncertainty, who the fuck wants a 'challenge' when they start a game?

Challenge is great and all, but when there's too much of it (a subjective measure) and when it's "not my job", it morphs into frustration. Top it off with an obnoxiously realistic preparation cost, gems, enchants, glyphs, pre-learning fights, and the raiding game in WoW could very quickly resemble a job, except unpaid and without even being able to pretend to contribute to society. Not that I am saying there is anything wrong with raiding, just that it's not a productive activity. Again: recreation is fine, good in fact, essential, but it is not and should not take on too much similarity to work.

But I don't think this is the entire situation. There is another aspect: consistency. Historically, WoW has been on a trend of anonymity and speed, even before LK, though that is when it mushroomed into the awful pile of awful that it is now (I mean the trend, not WoW; I'm not going to be a WoW-basher just because I left). Leveling got faster, grouping got faster, gear got faster, everything got faster, we overgeared faster, we zerged and rushed and zergrushed and merged adjectives into nouns into verbs with some adverbs generously scattered on top to complete the recipe, as if we were making German words.

Raiding went in the exact opposite direction. Fights became more complex. Smaller raids gave less room for error, and for carrying lower-performing players. We went from basic concepts like "stand here and kill that, but watch your aggro, run away if you're the bomb" to "kill the boss but when the slimes come you switch to them and you have to stay close to them unless it's the orange and it's chasing you, then you need to stay away from it, and now that you're back on the boss you need to watch out for the ooze puddles and also there are the orange vials that you cannot stand in, and now we're going to be in phase three where you're moving constantly so I hope you don't have a predisposition toward muscle craps because you're going to be twisting your hand a bit to keep up your rotation since this is a burn phase but keep moving and if you stand i the orange stuff we wipe because that will wreck your DPS and fucking fuck you god damn noob you killed us how hard is it to keep track of A, B, C, D, E, and F while also maintaining your rotation?"

And then we go back to dailies, facerolling a half-dozen mobs at once while we contemplate our next angry forum post about how X fight is too lag-dependent and how my class is so underpowered.

WoW used to be harder or less convenient and fast or some mix of the three. I'm not saying leveling wasn't always easy. It was. That was one of the selling points. But your average world elite wasn't a total joke. Your average instance wasn't going to be rolled over in your sleep. I'm not suggesting it was "hard", if theoretically there was an objective, quantifiable measure of it, but that the average play experience was a little bit more normalized. We waited around more, so when we found ourselves waiting around, that was normal, as opposed to an outrageous outrage. We wiped, so when it happened, well that's what happens.

WoW used to be more consistent. The loss of consistency, I believe, is part of what made hard heroics so undesirable, even if they aren't all that much harder than past hard 5-mans.