Kitty Cat Survival Tactics

I don’t normally follow Blog Azeroth but I happened to pop over there looking for a link to something else and I found that a topic up for this week was how to survive as a melee DPS. I actually believe that surviving as a melee DPS is very simple.

RUN!

No. I’m serious. I leveled as a Boomkin. When one is playing caster DPS one basically stands around tossing spells at the boss. Occasionally one has to pick up an addie or chase after the boss if the tank kites him somewhere. But as caster DPS you don’t have to pay a lot of attention to the nitty gritty of the fight. You toss up Hurricane or Blizzard and let it channel on the trash.

As a consequence when I switched my spec to feral at level 80 to play cat I had a difficult time in instances. I would die. Often. My instincts were to just hang in there, mangling and shredding everything. Although I didn’t know it at the time I actually had the perfect attitude for a tank. Only I wasn’t geared as a tank. The results were predictable.

What I had to learn through harsh experience is the cardinal rule of feral. A dead cat does no damage. You lay there on the ground pushing up the daisies, pining for the fjords, and your dps is exactly zero. You are a deceased cat.

My first reaction to this mystifying problem of dying was to wonder where the hell the healer was because wasn’t it the healers job to heal me through all the damage. But even I had to concede that the healers main reasonability was to the tank, not me. So the next thing I started to do was to use various tools at my disposal such as Lifeblood from my herbalism profession and Barkskin whenever it was off CD. This helped.

But I still was dying more than I liked. Then a funny thing happened while I was in the forum. I was playing with a bad tank who couldn’t hold arrgo. The result was that I was chasing the mobs and the bosses every which way. But I noticed something odd. I wasn’t dying. I wasn’t doing as much damage because I couldn’t land my power moves but I wasn’t dying. And when I considered the issue in a break between bosses I realized that yes, there was a reason why I was living on the run.

I wasn’t standing in the colored goop.

And this dear readers is when I learned the secret to melee dps survival:

run the instance with a bad tank.

Here is the long and the short of it. As melee dps you should only be taking killing damage in two situations. (1) You got arrgo from the boss or the tank failed to pick up adds. (2) You stood in the goop/got caught in the aoe. I have yet to be in an encounter where the melee dps took damage—damage that a proper healer can’t heal through—unless one of these two conditions are true.

In situation number one the best solution is to run…with your toon right out of the instance. Because either your tank doesn’t know what the heck he or she is doing or you significantly out gear them.

In situation number two running is your best option as well. Almost all aoe can be ran away from if you know it’s coming and it’s your responsibility as melee to know it’s coming. Second, running away from the fight is a very obvious signal to the healer that you are hurt. Healers can get tunnel vision too and forget about the dps. More times than I can count I have fled the fight with less than 10% health and within seconds got zapped by a heal. The healer may have even had me on their radar and those precious seconds were the difference between a failed heal on their part and me living.

I understand that in some people’s minds running is a cowardly thing to do. Let’s be honest here. What the worst that could happen if you run away? You don’t do any more damage. Well, if you are dead you are not going to do any damage either. So if you run away you are no worse off than you would have been if you had hung in there a second or two and died.

Like all rules this has an exception. If you are at 1% on the boss hang in there and sacrifice you body. One or two seconds more of damage might prevent a wipe. If not, you gave it your best show and can hold you head up.

There is an old saying that “discretion is the better part of valor”. That’s the code of the melee dps. You first priority is to live. Dead cats do no damage. Although, based upon experience in party chat, they tend to tell a lot of tales.

The Porn Star and the PUG

The following post contains mature themes and language that may be offensive.

Even now I feel slightly awkward publicly admitting that a porn star changed my life. It was one of those boring evenings surfing the web where one news article led to another news article that caused me to eventually land on the web site of AIM, the adult industry medical health foundation. The web site of Sharon Mitchell. Five years ago I did not know anything about Sharon Mitchell, the porn industry, or an important truth about myself.

The Woman of a Thousand Fucks

In the porn industry Sharon Mitchell is legendary. She appeared in more than 2000 sex movies and has won every major adult industry award that exists. What makes her interesting compared to other adult entertainers is that after a twenty year career in the business she left to advocate for the health and well being of the performers. What makes her interesting to me is the reason why she left.

Stumbling around on the site I discovered an interview that she gave shortly after she left the business. An interview no longer available on-line but which I still have saved to my disk drive. Reminiscing about her career she said, “Looking back I think I fell for attention. I was performing acts of intimacy without the intimacy and that kept me from love for a long time.”

Having a Zen moment is no trite phrase. Those words crashed upon my consciousness; a tidal wave of truth exposing the foundation of my existence; laid bare the bedrock of my love life. In a flash my whole life cleared and I realized that what was true in the deepest heart of a whore was true for me too. That I too had been guilty of falling for attention and confusing it with intimacy. In my case that attention wasn’t sexual; it was about intelligence, competency, success in my career. A different brand of poison. Attention is not attraction which is not intimacy which is not love.

The Pornography Business

In what is coming to be a pattern Spinks is arriving at insights one step ahead of me. In regards to the new Looking for Group tool she writes, “Unshackling the social side of guilds from the group game may be one of the most long sighted advances any MMO of this generation has accomplished.” A statement that is about as close as one can get to a feisty defense of the pornography business.

Because unshackling sex from intimacy is the core of the porn industry. That’s it’s purpose, that’s it goal, that it’s aim. Some will argue that this has always been true for the consumers of porn; Sharon’s key insight is that this divorce is equally true for the performers. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that she named her organization AIM as a subtle reminder to all adult entertainers to question what their aims are for being in the business.

Because the entire thrust of Sharon’s insight and her subsequent work is that it’s the lack of love, not the sex, that is the underlying problem in the porn industry. The problem with the porn industry isn’t that people are fucking; it’s not even that they are fucking for dollars; the problem is that they are fucking strangers. They are performing acts of physical intimacy without psychological intimacy.

The Ugly Side of the New LFG Tool

The ugly side of the new Looking for Group tool is exactly as Spinks describes it: it allows us to grind groups in the same way we grind mobs. The efficiency of the new tool removes the need for any knowledge about one’s fellow players. Since most cross server groups don’t know each other and will never play with each other again, what Larisa has called the “quick silent run” becomes if not the norm the ideal. Get in, get it done, move on. With strangers.

The easy defense of the new tool is that no one has to use it. That the new LFG tool along with the new guild system arriving with Cataclysm presents the best of both worlds. For those who only want a quick silent run during their lunch break to get some loot the new tool makes that easy. As easy as a sites like Redtube or Pornhub makes it easy to have a quick silent handjob during the lunch break for a thrill. Meanwhile, those who are seeking deeper relationships can find those bonds in the new guild system.

But what is the best of both worlds for some is the worst of all worlds for others; people like Sharon and I. People who are gullible and easily confused. People who are after the attention the loot gives them and want the quick and easy way to get there. People like the teens to whom this game is marketed and rated. For teens the distinction between intimacy and attention that is clearer to adults is not so obvious to them.

The easy defense of the porn industry is that no one has to look at it. But the reality is that people do look at it, are influenced by it, and it has consequences for everyone concerned. The critical question is why is there a tool that emphases the unshackling of sociability from grouping when, as I pointed out last summer, the teen age years are the most social times of one’s life. Do we really want our children to learn that the ideal group is a group without intimacy? For the precise real world analogue to the new grouping tool is the website Adult Friend Finder, where people go to create PUGs for sex. With strangers.

A Thousand Fucking PUGs

The new LFG tool is the gaming instantiation of the pornography mindset. A quick easy thrill with no string attached. So it’s no surprise that it’s popular; pornography is popular. As Tobold correctly notes popularity normally means profits.

Because of profit I don’t have any illusions that either the new LFG tool or pornography is going away. What is mystifying to me is that despite the inroads pornography has made in Western society there still is a cultural sense that being a sexual whore is bad yet being a social whore— having casual and temporary emotional and psychological relationships with others—is harmless. It’s just a game, dude.

I have a deep respect for Sharon Mitchell because after her epiphany it would have been easy to walk out the door feeling betrayed and disgusted with herself and with the world. Instead, every day she gets to look those young men and women in the eyes and subtly ask them what their AIM is. Do they really think the risk for AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases is worth it for a few thousand dollars and the chance to see oneself in a movie. Do you think fellow Warcraft players that having a silent run, without communication, without intimacy—your little noontime quickie—is really worth it for a shot at some loot? Is grinding out one superficial relationship after another—networking—really worth it for success in the business world? It’s not my place to tell you yes or no; many of Sharon’s charges will get treated for their sexual diseases and go back on the movie set. Yet she and I are alike in another way: we have come to the place in our lives where must ask the questions.

A Million Little Doorways

In America there is a minor tradition of making “New Year's Resolutions.” These resolutions seem mostly to involve losing weight by not eating chocolate. I don’t participate in this tradition because to be honest anything anti-chocolate is anti-me. Sometime the resolutions involve improving one's love life or financial condition but whereas I think being alone and poor is a noble endeavor that doesn’t apply to me either. So I resolved one year to give up making resolutions; have keep at it with tenacity.

A New Life

That doesn’t mean that the turning of an arbitrary date doesn’t give rise to reflection. January is named for Janus the Roman god of doorways, of entrances and exits. He’s a two-faced god in that regard because he’s always looking to the past or the future but never one for the present. And that reminds me of our own sort of Janus god, the spirit healer. Because death in Warcraft is a Janus moment. We look back and think about where we goofed that caused us to die and we look forward to raising our corpse so we can get on with playing the game. Death isn’t a state of permanence but a simply doorway.

Which gives rise to my thought for the new year: how would you live your life differently if what we call death in real life were exactly like it was in Warcraft. Not heaven nor hell, no oblivion, no reincarnation as a cow. Just a few minutes delay and there you are. Not quite as good as new but back among the living. How would that reality shape your decision making process? Would you be more adventurous or daring or would you be more conservative, more relaxed.

Different Deaths

I’m one of these people that has fun randomly inspecting characters. I’m curious about how other people are playing the game. One thing that has always fascinated me is the number of times a character in the game has died.

The lowest number of deaths I have seen on a level 80 toon is the lowest possible: zero. I remember sending an astounded whisper to the person asking how in Azeroth they managed that feat. He claimed that he’d leveled with four other members of his guild doing nothing but instances. When I asked why he said that dying was a waste of time.

Then there was the woman raider who had died more than 3000 times. I still shudder at the thought of that. Even if the time spent being dead was only one minute (a lowball figure) that means at least 50 hours or two full days of one’s life spent being dead in a game.

What these extremes tell me is that not all people respond to death in the same way. Even though the penalty for death isn’t large in each individual case the time spent as a ghost can add up; enough so that some people will go to lengths to avoid it. On the other hand, there seems to be some people who don’t mind dying. It’s just a doorway to them.

My Reaction

When I first started thinking about the question my initial reaction was that I would be more adventurous. What would it feel like to jump off a 1000 foot cliff, just for a rush, knowing I could pick up and move on again. Then I switched gears and thought it would make me more relaxed. If I could die an unlimited amount of times then death would cease to be a cause of worry. I wouldn’t worry about making it home ahead of the bad blizzard or drifting off to sleep while driving. Hakuna Matata.

The more I thought about it the more I came to the conclusion that in the long run it would make me more conservative. There would be the initial rush of daring as I explored the world but I would quickly get bored with that. I found myself thinking more along the lines of the player with zero deaths at level 80. Why waste the time; it’s not any fun being a ghost.

Don’t misunderstand. I think it would be cool to live in a world where there are biological second chances. Yet I kind of like the idea of a death penalty. It sharpens the sense; it focuses the mind. It helps you to figure out what you value, what you care about.

Or maybe it’s just that I don’t care too much for the idea of January. I’ve never been a person that has much love for transitions. I love to visit other countries but I hate the actual traveling part, getting from point A to Point B. Planes, trains, automobiles; I dislike them all. Get me though the doorway as quickly as possible. “Can someone Rez me, please.”

The Feast of Winter’s Veil

In the northern hemisphere Christmas is our counterpunctual holiday. It is an isle of birth amidst a sea of dead tundra. The long night compacts the darkness into an ooze of gloom seeping under the doorway where it is greeted by a festival of lights. It is a holiday of gift giving during a time when fecund nature bestows no gifts. In the rhythm of our culture Christmas is syncopation.

Winter

I breathe to stop time. Not death, but the endless compress of decay. Each breath a surge of air pushing against the inevitable. Delaying, denying, demoting, yet never destroying. A diastolic rhythm taking in oxygen and pushing away time. Almost always unnoticed unless exercising, or in the moment of flight, or battle, or when the rain beats a lonesome tattoo on the grotto and there is no one to hear you except you; only the sound of your breathing lets you know you’re alive, fending time.

Not dung, or death, but decay leaves a field in winter barren, snow covered, without crops. The increasing prominence of gray in the hair, the bifocals sliding down the nose, the fading libido; all this and more leads to a failing sense of exemption from the panting cold breath on the nape that prickles the hair. A time, a time older than that of watches or scratches on the cave wall. A rhythm, a rhythm beyond that of one life only, beyond one species only; a rhythm born of lightening in a fetid pool or in a manger in some backwater village; a rhythm of birth and youth and maturity and age and decay.

There is a course a time for the children to leave home. A time to remember with the photograph album, or the home movie, or the newspaper clippings about the award in the spelling contest or taking first place in the foot race. A time to remember the toothaches, the fevers, and a broken bone while leaning towards the dim lamp on a dingy sofa. Then an owl hoots and the widow draws her sweater tight for warmth; an expulsion of breath sweeping through the decades kicking up dust and rattling tin cans in a deserted lot.

Veil

In plastic hutches incandescence flickers green blue white. There is music and the sound of childish laughter hidden behind the furniture. The angel nestled in the top of the plastic tree twitters “go go go” while adults seek to unweave, unwind, unravel the future; imagining a voyage without wreckage.

My eyes are strong brown gods. At first a commanding presence, then a sexual attractor, and finally a problem for the ophthalmologist. “Quick” said the children, “find him, find him.” Quickening footsteps, quickening voices cut to the quick. “Find him, find him” whisper the unseen voices, excitedly. Jolly old Saint Nick. The sharp grind of ripping wrapping paper. Mankind cannot bear much reality.

Not particle, wave. Two brown gods sailing on an ocean of light. Dust in the air suspended marks the place where voyage ended. Dust in the air suspended marks the attic where the children pretended. Dust inbreathed was the cross, a crown of thorns, the epic boss. “Quick,” said the children, “find him, find him.” Down the damp road to the junction, past halls of living stone, past the formation grounds and the aerie, into the scrapyard. “Quick,” said the children, “find him.” Pushing through the spark of imagination, breezing through the conservatory of life, with a clash of thunder into the halls of winter. “Quick,” said the children, “find him!” Jolly old Saint Nick. Mankind cannot bear much reality.

In that moment between the intake of breath and its expulsion the agony abides. In the moment between the entering and the passing the agony abides. In the moment between the taking and the giving, the agony abides. There is of course a time for the children to leave home. We call it death.

Feast

I recall once hiking on a mountain. At an overlook I paused and seemed to me as if reality ripped, like a movie caught in the machine. Behind that, behind the curtain in the theater, no angels ascending or descending the narrow steps to the stage, but a blank screen, an empty room filled with the faint scent of mascara and rouge.

What then is the cause of this drama, this agony of life. Love. What force is veiling this vale between two eternities. Love. What is this pulse still quickening the pulse, growing closer and stronger. Love. Between a dry September and a windy May, when the boat is in dockage and the seams need caulking. When the rigging is worn and there is too much slack in the tiller. Love.

What fills our halls of reflection. Love. What is the forge of souls. Love. A rose encased in a crown of ice. Love. When lady death whispers in your ear as you sit at the foot of the frozen throne, when what you know is what you do not know and you do not know if it is citadel or cathedral. “Quick,” said the children, “find him!”

Love is the intolerable womb of pain which human flesh can not endure. Of course there is a time for the children to come home. We call this cataclysm birth.

Near the Wild Heart

During thanksgiving killing turkeys learned the meaning of player vs. player. Mistaken, I. Mistook the meaning of achievement as achievement. Misunderstood the meaning of process as the struggle to triumph. Kill 40 turkeys. Misfelt victory as triumph over pain.

Standing on the road in Elwynn Forest I came to understand. Feeling sadness in my heart, frustration, disappointment; a frown upon the face. Reflected in my monitor a frown upon the face. 12 turkeys and I lose, 21 turkeys and I lose, 30 turkeys, 39 turkeys, 39 turkeys and I lose lose lose; I realize and it dawns and I see that this sadness and disappointment is how I’m supposed to feel; this sad frustrated look upon my face is your victory.

Turkey Domination

Victory is you feel bad. Yes, you and you, and you mr. human mage and you ms. gnome warrior. Why do you think I’m following you. Why. Yes, you know why. It’s to kill the turkeys. Kill the turkeys. Kill. Kill. Kill. I no longer have any desire to win. Rather, my winning means you losing. The more you lose the more I win. Waiting and counting. Stalking and prowling. Running ahead and wiping out all the turkeys. Killing. Killing turkeys. I want that sad frustrated look upon your face. That’s the real achievement.

Pain is food. Your pain; my food. Your grief and sorrow flow though me like an electric shock. Hungry. Starving. Greedily I race around the woods killing turkeys. Kill the turkeys before you. Before you.

I look up at the mini map. My Tracker Snacks shows friendly life as little yellow blobs. How quaint. Yellow. Happy. Like a smiley face… a smile that I trash smartly off your face. I switch to my healing spec and put on my mana regen gear and I smile because I understand now that mana causes pain and pain is the source of life; source of my life.

And now it’s time to kill. To wipe off the map every little blob of happy yellow smiley face. It’s time for you to suffer and for me to live. That time. That time.

Turkey Slaughter

I run and leap and ride and the moonfire rains from the sky and the moonfire rains from the sky and I am killing every living thing moonfire raining from the sky. I kill the turkeys and the lambs and the cows and pigs; everything that is a little yellow smiley blob on the map that I can target, I kill. To make you sad.

I am rushing down the road between Goldshire and the logging camp to make you sad. I am running down along the river past one farm and another farm and another farm and killing everything with that yellow circle of joy around it to make you sad. You stand there night elf looking around for all the turkeys and there are no turkeys and I know behind your monitor you have a sad frustrated look upon you face. Victory.

I feel good. I feel alive. I suck upon your pain and it feeds me. And it dawns on me that there is no end to these turkeys and there is no end to pain and there is no end to life because so long as I feed upon your pain I live. Immortal.

Turkey Triumph

The text scrolling across the screen tells me Wintergrasp in five minutes and my cheeks turn red and I grin. The grin gets bigger and bigger and threatens to eat my face. All turkeys; all on two legs. Two legs good, so good. Battlegrounds filled with turkeys. An all-you-can eat buffet of pain, a smorgasbord of sorrow. Pixel death but human suffering. Because you care.

I think of myself wallowing in your sorrow, bathing in it, washing myself with tears from your eyes. So good.

Misunderstood, I. Not pixel vs. pixel nor toon vs. toon; player vs. player. Human against human, human mind against human mind seeking one goal: that look upon the face. That sad frustrated angry bitter defeated look upon the face.

My palms sweat; my heart thumps in my chest. No, not thumping….jumping. Jumping for joy! The joy of prowling, the puma jumping from limb to limb inside of me, inside of me this jungle, this wilderness. So near to me this wild heart. Kill the turkeys; feed on suffering; dine on pain.

My fingers are claws on the keyboard.

I feel so alive.

Reply to Adam

Adam Holisky’s editorial at WoW.com regarding what he sees as an out of control negativity about Warcraft reminds me of this post from Broken Toys last February. Both Adam and Scott share the attitude that when someone says something you don’t want to hear, the proper response is to tell them to shut up. Adam’s confident post is the living illustration of the definition of positive: mistaken at the top of one’s voice.

The Benefit of a Vocal Minority

Adam starts his piece with a claim that a loud and obnoxious minority is harming the game. In particular, that it’s drowning out the sober voices of reason. Adam specifically states that even he agrees with some of the underlying complaints. It’s that he thinks the way those concerns are expressed is counterproductive.

Attacking means and not ends is almost always error. Lets consider some realities that we take as ordinary that once started out as the complaints by a vocal minority.

• The American Revolution
• The Abolition of Slavery in America
• Women’s Right to Vote
• Civil Rights

The list could go on and on. Almost every major change in American society occurred because someone complained loud, long, and frequently in an obnoxious tone of voice. In writing that I am not comparing the substance of the forum posters complaints to those noble causes. I'm saying that the best question is not whether the people on the forums are being jackasses. The best question is: are they right?

If the complaints are correct then they deserve a vigorous airing. In fact, I’d go one step further. I’d say that only where there is a free trade in ideas, only when there is an opportunity for all voices to be heard, can we possibly know if the answer is correct. Every human being is fallible. No single human being has all the correct answers all the time. It takes input from the entire group. The trolls of today are often the heroes of tomorrow.

Silence is the Wrong Answer

If Blizzard were to take Ghostcrawler off the forums or even shut them down entirely the real loser would be Blizzard itself. First, Blizzard would be a loser because it would lose an essential tool of positive feedback. Ghostcrawler himself has mentioned on several occasions the valuable feedback the developers have gained from the forums. Even if there are only 10,000 regular users of the forum, that doesn’t mean that having that resource isn’t important to irregular users like me. You don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. If the vocal minority is wrong, shutting down the forums only makes Blizzard look weak and hurts the silent majority. If the vocal minority is right, then silencing those voices only makes Blizzard look arrogant and unable to admit its mistakes.

The second problem is that people won’t be silenced whatever Blizzard does anyway. If people have legitimate complaints (and Adam concedes they do) then telling them to shut up only results in them taking those complaints to other forums. 10,000 angry people with a genuine beef can do real damage to Blizzard’s brand name. It’s just not a smart strategy to have them wandering around the internet crying to potential customers. Better to have the vocal minority vent at the developers who know nonsense when they see it than have the vocal minority vent at the gullible public who get easily scared of anything new. As the old saying goes, keep your friends close and your enemies even closer.

So I would implore Blizzard not to press the self-destruct button on the forums. The results are not likely to be what they want.

Where Adam is Correct

I think that Adam’s attacks on Warcraft’s vocal minority are inapposite. Yet I also think there is one aspect on which he is correct. A few months ago I stated that I thought the biggest problem with the forums as a means of public relations was that Blizzard had allowed it to become too much about a single personality at the expense of the brand. Because of Ghostcrawler’s significant presence on the forums the trolls often flock to his threads because they treat his comments as a form of PvP. So I am pleased to see that Adam also recognizes this as a real problem which Blizzard has failed to address.

In fact, I think that this is the real heart of the problem on the forums. Often people with something useful or important to say get drowned out by those who have come online to play “let’s outwit the developer” making the helpful people shout even louder in an attempt to be heard above the din. Adam’s post reminded me of the school teacher shouting at a rambunctious group of eight year olds to behave themselves. Of course that strategy is going to fail because as far as eight year olds are concerned being rambunctious is behaving themselves. If the teacher wants to get control he has to direct their energy into positive and constructive channels. The vocal minority, as far as I can see, don’t have any real interest in “running the game” anymore than students want to be the teacher. What they do want is to be engaged in constructive manner which has proven beyond the capabilities of one man, even a man as capable as Ghostcrawler.

Blizzard is the Vocal Minority

Sometimes in life in order to take two steps forward you need to take a step back. Adam's follow up post claims that players' freedom of speech ends where Blizzard's property rights begin. That's true as far as it goes but it doesn't go very far. Game developers don’t live in a vacuum; they are part of larger social and economic groups in which they participate and in which they are the vocal minority. All the recent trials of Blizzard in China are concrete proof. The recent issue with alcohol during Brewfest in the European Union indicates that this reality is not just for communist countries. There are no scared cows.There is no constitutional right to property in America. In fact, all the Fifth Amendment guarantees is that you will receive "just compensation" should the government decide to take your property. Anger enough of your customers and they won’t simply cancel their game subscription; they will complain to their electoral representative. Engaging your customers, all of them, even the trolls and the crybabies, creates an enormous reservoir of good will that may save the game development community someday.

In 1850 only a fool would have predicted a civil war that would lead to freeing the slaves. A vocal minority made it happen. In 1910 only a fool would have predicted that women’s suffrage would be universal in America within twenty years. A vocal minority made it happen. In a democratic society Blizzard has the power to run their business as they see fit by the leave of the community. Don’t trifle with it. One day that vocal minority that’s driving you nuts and wasting your time might be the same vocal minority that picks up the phone and tells their representative to keep their hands off MMOs. Maybe not. But there are no guarantees that the game of life will turn out the way the game development community wants. There are vocal minorities that exist right now that claim that video games should be banned because they are too violent or because they promote irresponsible behavior. When Congress comes along and shuts down the cash cow because of the agitation of the vocal minority that is anti-video game, game developers can’t wonder why no one spoke up on their behalf. They were the ones who told their own customers to shut up.

Those Binds That Tie

Charles S. Pierce has been called “America’s greatest thinker.” You’ve probably never heard of him. Prodded by commentary at Spinksville, today I explore the implications of some of his theories for MMO design.

Identity

Pierce claimed that the key characteristic of an identity is the fundamental inability to change it. Pierce believed that there was a limited range of possible behaviors for any object in the universe and that this range of possible behaviors defined that object’s identity. Once an object acquired an identity it maintained that identity until the end of time.

In Pierce’s cosmology an object takes an identity through external action. Identity is a descriptive word in the sense that it refers to a habit—a pattern of behavior—which is historical in nature. There is, for example, nothing innate or intuitive about being an “American” or a “Swede”. “Swedishness” is simply the range of all possible things people from Sweden have done. In the same way there is nothing innate about a “comet,” the word “comet” only refers to the range of possible behavior of a specific body in space. The reason we distinguish between a Swede and an American or between a comet and a planet is simply because these things have different ranges of possible behaviors.

In an earlier post I talked about a marriage being valid because of the witness of the community. In Pierce’s view this is superstition. What makes a person a wife is not witness but action. We can’t say a person is a wife until they have been a wife. The old joke that a man never truly knows his wife until he has been through the divorce is a literal truth as far as Pierce is concerned. “Wifeishness” is just the full range of behavior a wife does. There is no pre-existing social script that wives have to abide by; rather it is through the actions of a woman in a particular relation to a man we find out what being a wife means to that woman. When we examine the full range of responses of all married woman we have the range of behaviors that identifies the concept called wife.

Raiding as an Identity

In this insightful post, Spinks makes an essentially Pierceian claim. Namely, that what makes a person a “raider” is not the fact that a person desires to be a raider but the fact that a person engages in a particular range of behavior. Spinks critical insight is that by programming a game Blizzard (intentionally or not) programmed players to behave a certain way. Further, she argues that this programmed behavior created a set of expectations in the players about the game. I’d go further and say that it not only created expectations it created a full-fledged identity for those players. The only reason “hard core” raiders exist in Warcraft is because Blizzard programmed them to exist.

In this interview Blizzard now admits that they defined the original range of possible behaviors that make up raiding too narrowly. The problem with this casual admission is that it totally ignores the human element. As the psychologist William James put it, the sense impressions left on neural pathways “do not easily disappear.” It’s easy to change pixels; it’s difficult to change minds. And as anyone who has ever redone all their key bindings in the game can tell you, it’s even harder to change behavior patterns. When Tobold accuses players of having a “sense of entitlement” he’s accusing them of having minds that work normally.

Identity as a Sunk Cost

A concept often used in economics is that of sunk costs. A sunk cost is a cost that has been incurred and cannot be recovered. For example, the three hours raiding spent last night are gone forever. One cannot have those hours back. One can relive those hours in memory but only at the expense of more time.

What’s interesting about sunk costs is that people value sunk costs more than they do present costs or future costs. This is sometimes called the ‘endowment effect’ and it’s perfectly summed up in the cliché that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. The future is perceived as risky and people expect to be compensated for that risk.

If identity is a function of action then the more time a person spends performing that action the more that person will identify with it and the larger their sunk costs become. The larger those sunk costs become the more incentive will be needed to overcome it. If the time spent is long enough then there never will be enough force to overcome it and the truth becomes clear that the definition of identity is the fundamental inability to change it.

Implications for MMOs

Tobold has said that Warcraft doesn't care too much about identity. If that’s true then it’s another way of saying that MMOs don’t care too much about people. MMOs by definition provide for only a limited range of behaviors. The subscription model provides ample opportunity to spend lots of time. Spending a lot of time on a limited range of behaviors just is the definition of identity in Pierceian terms. The point is that MMOs by definition create identities in players; it simply can’t be avoided.

But that doesn’t mean the developers are helpless because there is still the question of what identity it is that player will form. It’s quite clear that Blizzard is trying to change player identity in all sorts of ways. For example, just as I predicted, Blizzard is seeking to change player’s identity away from their in-game characters to their account. Battle.net is obviously an attempt to get players to identify with the Blizzard brand (write large) and not just any one game. Handing out what critics call “welfare epics” is simply an attempt to expand the range of possible behaviors that falls under “raiding” and thus change the identity of raiding.

MMO developers should think carefully about what identities they encourage players to form. Because while it is all nice and cool that Blizzard developers want to classify their changes as the result of “learning” and “becoming mellow” it must come as no surprise that some players see this as a “betrayal”. Because for them it is. Anytime you change the range of possible behaviors for an object you have changed its identity and anytime you change an objects identity you impose risk upon those who have sunk costs into that identification. In making the game more casual friendly, Blizzard isn’t simply reprogramming code; it’s reprogramming people. And people aren’t so easily reprogrammed as computer code.

This reality goes as deep as the intimacy of the computer keyboard. For every possible action of a player can be bound to a key. As you sit and repeatedly press your key binding for your frostbolt or shadowbolt you not just doing damage to pixel mobs; you’re spamming out your identity as a player. Those key presses—the action they represent—are those binds that tie.

Pilgrims' Progress

For hundreds of years science fiction has predicted future technological developments. Leonardo de Vinci envisioned the submarine and the helicopter 400 years before scientific advancement made them a reality. Writers in the 1940s predicted cloning and sixty years later it too became a reality. The truth is that many things once thought impossible have become real. It seems that if some person dreams it someone else makes it real.

Is it possible to genetically engineer the Druid Tree of Life form; is it possible to create a human plant. While it hasn’t actually been done, the theoretical process necessary to create a human plant is well understood.

Three Steps to a Human Tree

The major difference between plants and animals is that plants contain chloroplasts and animals do not. Chloroplasts allow a plant to conduct photosynthesis—change light into food. So the first major step is injecting a chloroplast into an embryo and coaxing it to divide as the cell divides. This would give a human ability to generate energy from the sun.

The next task is creating a means to turn the energy created by photosynthesis into a form usable by the human cell. Plants produce the enzyme rubisco which converts carbon dioxide into sugar. Because animals and plants diverged so long ago human DNA does not have the gene necessary for this conversion to take place. The second step to creating a human plant is to splice the necessary chromosomes into human DNA.

The final hurdle is caused by the diffuse nature of light. Plants have a large surface area relative to their volume because they need a lot of light for photosynthesis to take place. Plants, such as cacti, which have a relatively small proportion of surface area to volume live in direct sunlight and even then grow very slowly. In order to create enough energy for basic life functions (like walking) human DNA would need to be engineered to grow long chloroplast filled hair, essentially fur.

A human plant would actually look much like a yeti.

Space Seed

In the well-known Star-Trek episode genetically modified human beings were cryogenically frozen and launched into space. Much coy sexual innuendo, heated violence, and hundreds of millions of dollars in profit later this resulted in the death of Spock.

Human plants offer several advantages for interstellar space travel. First, with a minimum of food plants can live an extraordinarily long time. The oldest living plant in the world is a Bristlecone pine tree in Nevada nearing its 5000 birthday. If genetically engineering humans slows the aging process in the same way the need for inter-generational space travel disappears.

Second, the hardiest species we know on earth are plants. They are called extremophiles and they live in conditions inconceivable to human flesh. NASA is already investigating how to genetically modify earth plants to survive on Mars. If we can modify plants to survive on Mars and we can modify humans to be plants its logical we can genetically engineer humans to survive on Mars.

But the biggest advantage of human plants for space travel lies in embryonic or seed dormancy. A dormant seed requires almost no life support whatsoever. The oldest living seed that has been successfully germinated is 1300 years old. Forget menstruation and pregnancy; in the future human babies might simply sprout from the ground on some alien planet.

Flesh: The Final Frontier

The major long-term implication of the Copernican Revolution was to remove earth (and hence it’s inhabitants) from the center of the cosmos. The major long-term implication of the Darwinian revolution is that human beings are not even the center of the evolutionary process of life on earth. People often justify pleas for biodiversity on the benefits that this diversity brings or can bring to human beings. Evolution could care less such about anthropomorphism. It’s not the case that we need life so much as it is that life needs us if it ever intends to expand past this planet.

The tagline of the Star Trek series is that space is the final frontier. Yet interestingly there is very little focus on either stars or space in Star Trek; its focus is mostly on the life forms that inhabit the stars. Kirk and crew represent one vision of pilgrims' progress; a vision where genetic advancements are shockingly taboo.

Spiritual leaders often tell us that our human form is just one temporary step in an infinite or eternal pilgrim’s progress; heaven or hell or nirvana or Jannah awaits us. So why shouldn’t this be true in physical evolution too. One vision of that physical future is on display at Fizzcrank Airstrip in the gnome robots saved from with the Curse of the Flesh. Another vision of that future is in the Druid Tree of Life form where the very plasticity of flesh is not a curse but the ultimate salve.

In one of my favorite poems the poet T.S Eliot calls incarnation “the gift half understood”. For what is the point of having flesh anyway; what is the progress we are making as pilgrims. Where are we going to? Back to dust from which we have arisen? To a future of metal and stone? To plant life on some unimaginable planet some inconceivable distance away?

Where is humanity boldly going?

Rent Seeking in Warcraft

Economists define money as a medium of exchange and a store of value. One logical consequence of this is that there must be an actual mechanism to exchange value. This mechanism by which stores of value are exchanged is called a market. As markets exchange value they distribute that value among market participants. In our modern industrialized world money markets are the main market. However, markets are not the only system for distributing value. Another means of distributing value is brute force (such as a war); another means of distributing value is democracy.

At least in theory, modern capitalist democracies are democracies first and capitalistic second. Democracies deploy markets to achieve specific social ends in the same way they deploy armies to achieve specific social ends. One difficulty with this social arrangement is that markets work most efficiently when they are free from outside intervention. We take it as a democratic given that people have a right to petition the government for a redress of their grievances. But the people’s grievance is often that capitalistic markets produce results which harm them. Thus governments are pressured into a market intervention that erodes efficiency and undermines the reason that a market was deployed in the first place.

When social groups petition their governments for market interventions that favor them economists call this behavior “rent seeking”. The “rent” in rent seeking is merely a historical term and doesn’t have anything to do with renting a flat or car. Another name for rent seeking is “privilege seeking”.

Evidence of Absence

The most interesting aspect of rent seeking in Warcraft is its almost total absence. Let me be clear here. Players are always complaining about nerfs and demanding buffs to their class. This is indeed privilege seeking. But there is extremely little movement by players to prod the developers into giving them an advantage in the in-game market for good and services.

One example of rent seeking that springs to mind is the recent reaction of players regarding the new disenchanting option in dungeons and raids. Many players with toons with the enchanting profession claimed that it would seriously impact their ability to charge for disenchanting and thus impact their ability to make money. After a significant amount of complaining Blizzard announced that they would restrict the disenchant option to parties that already had an enchanter in order to “protect the importance” of the enchanting profession.

This example of successful rent seeking is a rare occurrence. There are certainly a great many interventions by Blizzard in the in-game market: the establishing of the Inscription profession, dual specs, and even the prospecting of epic gems which caused titanium prices to skyrocket. Yet none of these market interventions were done because players demanded them. The Greedy Goblin discusses all sorts of types of anti-competitive practices that players attempt to engage in from monopolies to cartels; behavior that would be illegal in our non-game world. Sometimes these anti-competitive practices work and sometimes they fail but I have yet to see any serious effort from players to get Blizzard to intervene to stop it.

Capitalism and Democracy

For those who think that game markets offer useful insight into real world markets this situation begs for an explanation. Given the power and ease by which developers could dole out market favors it’s shocking that there is so little pressure by players to do so.

The obvious answer is that players don’t advocate for market interventions to the extent they do for class interventions because they value class changes more than market changes. Players don’t advocate for market interventions because markets in Warcraft operate successfully without those interventions. There is no need to demand intervention because the markets successfully address their in-game needs, as opposed to class mechanics which don’t.

What’s interesting about this answer is what it implies about rent seeking in capitalist democracies. Economic theory argues that rent seeking imposes net social costs on society. Yet the lesson from Warcraft is that rent seeking actually creates net social benefits. When markets work effectively to address social needs people don’t seek market interventions; the demand for government interventions is a signal of market failure. There is nothing instinctive about rent seeking any more than there is something instinctive about citizens petitioning government for a redress for their grievances.

Seeing rent seeking and subsequent government interventions in markets as an economic positive allows us to grasp that the reason government interventions take place is not because capitalistic monetary markets are weak but precisely because they are too strong. Weaker monetary markets reduce rent seeking and allow those markets to operate efficiently and effectively to meet social needs. That’s what’s happening in Warcraft. The interesting economic lesson from Warcraft is that less capitalism produces better capitalism.

Shop Smart, RMT Pet Shop…Smart?

Aghast. That’s the precise word to describe my reaction to Blizzard’s introduction of real money transactions to the game. Aghast.

Old timers will know why I am aghast but if you are new or just don’t recall go back and read this post wherein I stated my belief that the foundation for Warcraft greatness was the fact that it did not have real money transactions in the game.

Pets as Status Symbols

One of the major issues I have with real money transactions is that they are classist. They create a distinction between the haves and the have nots that is based upon a person’s out-of-game rather than in-game accomplishments. The fact that this distinction is merely visual (a pet) as opposed to functional (an epic) is of cold comfort. If anything, the visual distinction is much more “in your face” as opposed to an exp potion that no one sees you use.

Chris thinks the new pet store is just a logical extension of Blizzard revamping of account services but I don’t agree. If I am standing on the auction house bridge in Ironforge and your character that just had a faction change walks by I am clueless about any RMT activity unless I know you personally. If you have a RMT pet I know. I know because it is staring me in the face (my bank alt is a gnome.) With account services what is essentially out of sight can easily stay out of mind. Precisely because RMT pets are going to be always in sight the classist distinction will always be in mind.

This is also why I disagree that this move is just one tiny step in a history of selling pets by other means. There's a difference between a pet which is bought as part of another transaction and a pet that is bought directly. Taking off one’s underwear and hopping into bed is just one tiny step in a romance; most people would also acknowledge it’s a significant step. The first step on the moon was also one tiny step; it was also a giant leap for mankind. The size of the step doesn’t always correlate with what it portends. Little moves can signal big intentions.

An Accountants’ Game

Whether we see a full fledged RMT store will depend on the success of this pet foray. If the net profit margins meet expectations it will be full steam ahead. Don’t delude yourself into thinking Blizzard cares anymore about the fantasy world of Azeroth. This RMT development signals that in the future it is going to be the accountant, not the players or the developers, which is going to determine what is “detrimental to the game.” What the game boils down to now is profit maximization; that’s the greatness of the accountant’s game.

There is an old saying in politics that “elections have consequences.” Yet it never ceases to amaze me that people can talk about voting with their dollars and at the same time pretend those money elections have no consequences. When you buy a pet from the pet store you are not only buying a cute panda monk, you are electing to support with your dollars a specific business model. The consequence is that when you buy a pet from the pet store you are voting with your dollars for the sale of epics. It’s that simple.

An Issue of Trust

Most fundamentally I see RMTs a betrayal of trust by Blizzard. I began my hunt for a new MMO more than a year and a half ago by specifically eliminating any game that featured RMT or micro-transaction of any type. I joined Warcraft and invested my time in the game predicated upon the expectation that Warcraft was a subscription game and would continue to be so. The game had been a subscription game for the last three years; there was no indication in would not stay that way.

At the bottom of the Pet Store FAQ there is this question: “Will you be introducing the ability to buy epic weapons/etc. in the future, for example?” The relevant part of the response is “the Pet Store service is entirely optional and intended to provide players another means to enjoy World of Warcraft in a way that isn't detrimental to the game and that doesn't detract from the gameplay experience for players who choose not to use the service.” Notice the artful wording in that response. They avoid a direct answer to a simple question and that is never a good sign. Of course, even if they did directly say “no” I doubt I would believe them anymore. They also said they would never do faction changes or races either and well…you know what…they did. People keep insisting that the pet store is not on a slippy slope when all the evidence points to the fact it actually is on a slippery slope. Epics for sale. Wake up and smell the coffee.

Smart?

What I want is for the bullshit to stop. Don’t tell me that these are just pets and they don’t make any difference to the way one experiences the game because unless one is blind they do. Don’t tell me that these pets are just $10 items and Blizzard will never sell epics because Blizzard has refused to commit to that when asked directly; everything they are doing says if they can sell epics they will. Don’t tell me that I can trust Blizzard because I won’t accept a blind faith that totally ignores a pattern of past behavior. Actions have consequences. This action by Blizzard has consequences. So don’t tell me that this action by Blizzard is not a game changer; it is. Whether it is a smart game changer is going to depend on how players respond to it. Because our actions have consequences too.

Tell and Show

God spoke and it came to be. This reality is at the heart of Catholic self-identity. As a people of God we are first and foremost a people of the word.

The Story of the Design

The order of events in the introductory sentence is worth highlighting. The first thing we learn in Genesis is that speaking; talking…vocalization…is contemporaneous with creation. The Lord said let there be light and there was light. He then looked upon the light and saw that it was good. God does not engage in an act of show and tell; he tells and shows.

The concept that creation springs from the voice runs throughout the whole course of the Bible from Genesis, to Moses hearing God and then writing down the Ten Commandments, to the Sermon on the Mount by Jesus. It is for this reason that Catholics place special importance on the disciples’ description of Jesus as the word made flesh. We think primarily of John in this context yet Mark’s emphasis on Jesus as the fulfillment of the prophetic prediction, that he is the one foretold, is critical. The Greek concept of Logos shares with the Hebrew concept of creation ex-nihilo the belief that speaking is the original creative act.

This Biblical story of creation is predicated on an understanding of the senses as passive receivers of stimuli; our senses perceive reality but they don’t create it. This understanding is also the basis for many Warcraft class abilities. For example, the warrior ability is called Commanding Shout and the priest ability is Shadow Word: Pain. There are no class abilities entitled “Commanding Hearing” or of “Shadow Smell: Pain” because in the literal meaning of the word those don’t just make any sense; they wouldn’t reflect the way our biological senses actually work.

The Design of the Story

It is for this reason that I was astounded to read that the lead creative designer of Warcraft believes that the future of MMOs lies in, “Show, don’t tell.” It’s true that video is a visual medium but as a passive sense sight can never tell us what to do.

Let’s be explicit about how sight actually works. Human beings have two eyes that are physically spaced apart to create slightly different views of the same event. This parallax creates a contrast affect which the brain interprets as depth. What the brain perceives as movement is simply a changing ratio of depth affects. Sight tells us what’s happening but it can never tell us what to do about it. There is an exclamation point over the quest givers head but it has meaning only because someone somewhere told us it did.

I think the thing that confuses designers is that they forget that text is a visual representation of an oral fact. Written words have no power outside of the oral context; they’re random lines, gibberish. Human babies are born with the ability to make noises and their hearing is fully developed within a month. Sight is not formed until six months and reading happens much later. God spoke. Then he saw.

Depressingly, there is even an element of self-hate in Alex’s statements. He was speaking, to a journalist who was writing his words down, to be displayed on a video card and his statement was that video cards are more important than speaking or writing. OK. That makes a great deal of sense. (No, it’s stupid.)

Creation Stories

The most mind boggling thing about Alex’s interview is that doesn’t actually represent the way World of Warcraft is designed. After you create a new character (are born) you are given a cut scene which zooms into your starting area (home town) while a voice, yes an actual human voice, tells you what the story is all about. Then once the narration is over you are deposited in front of another being and (here’s a shocker) that being tells you what to do.

Why does that ring a bell? Maybe it’s because after God created the world and after placing man in it the first thing he did was start ordering Adam and Eve around. And of course they ignored him. Exactly like what most people do with quest text.

But that doesn’t mean that the best answer is to get rid of the story. One reason the Biblical story is still around 4000 years later is because it accurately reflects in a crude way the basic development of human consciousness. It resonates. While developers may get their egos (and career ambitions) tied up in hot properties like phasing the truth is that for the new players the redesign of the tutorial system in Patch 3.3 will have a much bigger impact on customer retention. Clue to the clueless: there is a reason that God names things the moment he creates them.

I’ve mentioned before how I hate flaccid clichés and “show, don’t tell” is now officially on my hit list. Normally I wouldn’t bother about it too much except for the fact it’s annoying that someone who presents themselves as a creative designer evidences such a complete lack of understanding of even the most basic creative design. Life itself. Perhaps before he starts spouting off to the press Alex might wish to think a little more before opening his mouth. Although, now that I think about it, the Bible doesn’t say anywhere that God actually thought before he spoke either. Which would explain a lot.

Questing for Immersiveness in MMOs

Sometimes when the light dawns it hits you like a ton of bricks.

Mike Schramm at Wow.com wrote two posts recently (here and here) noting with approval the trend in MMOs to de-emphasize text, particularly quest text, in favor of a more visual model. The ultimate source of inspiration for these posts appears to be an interview with Warcraft creative lead designer Alex Afrasiabi where he repeatedly denigrates the importance of the "the story" to Warcraft. While I have a more fundamental disagreement with Alex that I'll save for another time, I want to focus today on the implication in Mike's post that the purpose of questing is to immerse players into the story.

Damn, that hurt.

Seeking Immersiveness

It never occurred to me before that the purpose of questing in a video game is to immersive players into a story. It's strange to me that anyone would ever think that having the text scroll across the sc r e an l i ke th is c o ul d create an immersive experience. Presumably some developer made it the default in an attempt to give quests that "olde" aura. Yet the reality is that slow speed text is irritating. The first time I ever used the escape key was to find a way (I hoped) to speed up the scrolling. It's a good thing the instant quest text feature was there because otherwise I might not have made it past the trial account.

If Warcraft designers think that quests should create an immersive story they have bigger problems on their hands than just slow scrolling text. The word immerse means to plunge into, to dunk, or figuratively to be absorbed by. There is nothing in the game play design of Warcraft that makes the story absorbing. There's nothing that makes it flow. Warcraft seems designed to break up flow, to force us to experience the story in bits and chucks, in pulses. Go out at night and stand in front of your car and have your partner repeatedly flick the headlight on and off. That's not immersive; it's irritating. Sometimes irritating can be another word for attention getting but attention getting is not absorbing. Attention has to be held continuously for absorption to occur.

If we define immersion as the state of flow, the state of absorbed attention, then it should be obvious that the enemy of this desired state is interruption. Yet the game play design constantly interrupts one's attention on the story. The failure of questing to absorb me into the story has nothing to do with the way "the story" is written or the fact that it's text based.

Breaking up is easy to do

First, the nature of questing itself is disruptive to the story. When you take a story and chop it into a 4500 bits, throw those bits to the four winds where they are picked up by it hundreds of different NPCs, and then ask your average person to recreate that story in their own head over the course of months or even years you are simply asking too much. I can't do it; I'm confused; I don't get it. It's no wonder that people want the quest text out of the way as fast as possible. You have given the average user an impossible task and so they brush on by it. And I'm only speaking about intellectual comprehension. If the story is so disjointed and chopped up that people can't understand it, why would anyone expect people to be absorbed by it.

Here is a challenge for Alex and Mike. Take the novel War and Peace and rip every single page out. Throw those pages off the roof of the Blizzard headquarters. Collect them all and read one page every day in the order they were collected. If you find the story (notice I did not say the task) immersive after one week, you too can be a Warcraft game play designer.

Second, consider all the interruptions to the story from a purely mechanical point of view. One of the biggest disruptions to game play is inventory management. I'm supposed to kill ten rats to help save Stormwind from the plague yet five minutes later I'm not back in Stormwind to report to the quest giver that the rats are dead; I'm back in town because I need to dump all the garbage that I collected because my bags are full. Then there is the whole issue of leveling professions, trading on the auction house and dealing with a character's talents and abilities. Yes, I grasp the technological reasons for limited bag space. I get the fact that much of the trash that we pick up is designed to heighten the realism of the game world and give us a monetary start in life. But with all these distractions and interruptions it's no wonder that some people get their story by reading the paperback novels.

Third, if game designers are seeking player absorption in the story I can't think of anything less immersive than daily quests. Third, if game designers are seeking player absorption in the story I can't think of anything less immersive than daily quests. Third, if game designers are seeking player absorption in the story I can't think of anything less immersive than daily quests. Third, if game designers are seeking player absorption in the story I can't think of anything less immersive than daily quests. Third, if game designers are seeking player absorption in the story I can't think of anything less immersive than daily quests. [ACHIEVEMENT]

Seriously, how many people curl up by the fireside with their favorite book and read the same scene over and over again for hours at a time. Yet that is what we do with dailies; that's what we do with heroics. Such behavior might absorb us into the game but it's the antithesis of what it takes to make a gripping story.

The Point of this Story

The point I want to get at here is that it bewilders me why anyone would think that the point of quests is to immerse players in the story. I've always seen questing--as I've seen killing mobs, playing the auction house, running instances--as tools to absorb me into a fantasy, an alternative world. It's the game itself that holds my attention. I think that placing the burden for story cohesion and player absorption is asking too much from the questing mechanic as a function of game play design. Questing is a lousy way to tell a story.

In saying that I don't mean to suggest that the story, the lore that serves the basis for the game, doesn't matter. I think the story matters a great deal. I think the written story matters most; that's my fundamental disagreement with Alex that I hope to get to in another post. But when the creative talent makes the lore inaccessible in the game it's two faced to claim that the players don't care about the story. The game design itself discourages us from caring. When Alex tells his new talent "nobody cares about the story" it's a vivid example of blaming the victim.

Cataclysm Release Date: February 1st, 2010

I have been an advocate since before Blizzcon that Cataclysm will release before March 1st, 2010. The purpose of this post is to share my reasoning with you.

(1) Given that Blizzard has already announced Cataclysm at Blizzcon 2009 it makes no sense that that they will wait for yet another Blizzcon to go by before the release. In fact, it makes no sense for them to announce the new release and then wait an entire year before the product comes out. Whatever suspense they build up with the end of Wrath will be dissipated if there is a six month gap between the end of Warth and beginning of the next expansion. Further, the summer is the slowest season for playing the game and it makes no sense to release a game at a time when people have no desire to play it. In short, it's inconceivable to me they would release after May 1st, 2010.

(2) There is precedence for releasing a game in mid-winter (Northern Hemisphere). The Burning Crusade was released January 16th, 2007. In fact, with Wrath being released in November 2009 both expansions have been released in wintertime. So another winter-to-early spring release is in keeping with that pattern.

(3) After Wrath came out Blizzard publicly stated that their goal was to make expansions on a yearly basis. While it is true that Blizzard does not always keep its word in such matters, there doesn't seem to be any particular reason to think they can't keep that pace. Furthermore, Blizzard stated at Blizzcon 2009 that they had already started working on Cataclysm before Wrath was even launched. Anything in summer of 2010 would mean that the company was not merely off target; it would mean that the third expansion took just as long as the 22 months it took to complete as Wrath. That's unlikely.

(4) Patch 3.1 dropped in mid-April 2009. Slightly less than four months later patch 3.2 dropped in early August. Patch 3.3 is on the PTR and a four month gap means it would drop no later than December 1st. A release day after March 1st, 2010 would create a yawing gap of content. In fact, all three patches have been essentially raid patches with no new solo content to the game. The idea that Blizzard will go six to eight months with no major updates (either raid or solo) to the game is inconsistent with recent practice.

(5) A release date after March 1st misses a landmark sales opportunity: Christmas. Christmas is the busiest shopping period in North America. With Patch 3.3 coming out no later than the beginning of holiday season it's inconceivable to me from a business point of view that any company, let alone Blizzard, would fail to have some major Warcraft product for sale during that time period. A release date of the first three months of 2010 allows them to market and sell pre-orders during the holiday shopping period.

I could go on but for me that's enough. There is a constellation of reasons why it's highly improbable that Blizzard will release the next expansion after March 1st, 2010. Given the release status of Patch 3.3 I expect it to drop mid-November, a public announcement of the release date of the next expansion during the holiday season, and the next expansion to release February 1st, 2010.

Defining 'Fair' in Loot Distrubution

For the first time playing Warcraft, doing hundreds of PUGs, I was involved in my first real piece of loot drama.

It was a true pick up group with none of the players knowing each other before hand. We were doing the Coren Direbrew daily. What happened is that both the Brewfast Ram and the Direbrew remote dropped. We all agreed to roll 'need' on these two items, except two of us. I passed on the remote because I already had it; our party leader passed on both items because she already had them.

As you can see below, the same person won them both with an identical roll of 93! Some luck, huh.





This luck did not sit well with our group leader who insisted that it wasn't 'fair'. She told the person who won the two items to give the remote to the second highest roller. A discussion ensued, which I did not take part in, over whether this was fair or not. In the end, the person who won both the loot drops gave the remote to the second highest roller, which happened to be our tank. I didn't say anything because the result didn't effect me.

But even as the discussion was going on I was bothered by the idea that giving the remote to the second highest roller was 'fair'. It bugs me still.

Typically my response to loot dramas is that the party members should decide on the loot rules before hand. But the loot from Coren Direbrew is unique in the sense that both the remote and the ram are vanity items. It's not gear. The Direbrew event is also unusual because it is the one time in game where the members group up to increase the party's chance of seeing the loot. Everyone can summon him once a day so there are five chances for the party to see the loot.

Further, both of the ram and the remote are rare drops. Wowhead estimates the remote dropping 4% of the time and the ram dropping 1.6% of the time. A fight where both of them drop is extremely rare. To have a fight where both of them drop and the same person wins both is extraordinarily rare. And the odds of the same person winning with the exact same roll are out of sight.

So I can forgive our party for not discussing the loot rules before hand because frankly it would have never occurred to me that that this situation would come up.

To me, the person who won both the items just got lucky. Extremely lucky. I don't think it was fair to ask him to give them up. On the other hand, we all pitched in our summons to to make the party work. There is a sense in which it was fairer for that loot to be distributed among all the party; one person didn't 'hog' all the good stuff.

I do wonder though what would have been the reaction of our team if our lucky fellow had won both items on two separate fights. Certainly no one would have complained if it had happened on two separate days (with two different groups). After all, if our dear leader didn't win her mount and her remote in the same fight then it must have been under one of the other scenarios. Why does the fact that the drop happened in the same fight make it any different than if it were two separate fights or two separate groups.

Our lucky fellow still has his ram; I'm sure he's happy about that. But I can't help but think that it was he who got the raw deal. He won both rolls fair and square. If I had been in his position I don't think I would have given up the remote.

MBTI and WoW

Kae at Dreambound with the help of Nertok has been running a survey of the personality types of Warcraft players. The instrument they are using to measure personality type is the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). This attracted the Innkeeper's eye because she happens to know that her Bartender, when not spilling mead all over the customers, has a great deal of professional experience with MBTI and Jungian psychology. As all employees know, when your boss e-mails you and says, "it might be a good idea" this means "do it now or you're fired." But I don't mind the task because it will keep her distracted and not notice that the barkeep is into the goods (if you follow my (hic!) drift) and that this is the real reason yours truly spells tips as "tits".

Since it's tradition in the MBTI community to always reveal your type when talking about type, I'm an INTJ. This post assumes you know what those letters mean as it's beyond the limited space here to introduce the whole theory of the MBTI.

The first note I want to sound is a note of caution. The MBTI is an instrument and like all instruments it's only as useful as the competency of the person who wields it. A person's MBTI result is frequently an inaccurate description of their true personality type because responses to the questions are subject to cultural, social, and age-related influences. The MBTI should always be used as a starting point; not treated as a final answer. The single biggest confounding factor in any web based survey using the MBTI is the reality that there is no way to tell if the person is recording their genuine personality type; professional assistance is required.

Despite this caution about the accuracy of type identification, the results recorded by Kae and Nertok are for the most part what Jungian theory would predict. If you had asked me prior to reading the results who most role-playing gamers are I would have said the dominant type would be an INTJ. Certainly IN. Everything about on-line gaming screams INTJ for the same reason that this type dominates in research, academia, and the law. It's a quiet activity where individuals can use their analytical skills to create systems that push the boundaries of the possible. The concept of an ordered progression (gear levels, class levels) is what we mean by judging (J). That data is taken in and manipulated analytically (think Elitist Jerks) is what we mean by thinking (T). That this activity takes place in an imagined space is part of what we mean by intuition (N). That this activity takes place in a space of limited extroverted interaction is part of what is meant by introversion (I). The common remark that INTJs are the unusual combination of imagination (N) and reliability (J) is well illustrated by reputation grinds, dailies, dps rotations. Once they find something that strikes their imagination they just want to do it over and over again, sometimes well past the time that is healthy. Alexander the Great (ENTJ) raided Persia; Napoleon Bonaparte (ENTJ) raided Russia; INTJs raid Ulduar.

As this table shows, the overwhelming majority of the respondents are introverted or intuitive and of the top five types three are introverted intuitives. Interestingly, the top two introverted personality types are the INTP and the ISTP. Both of these types are actually dominant thinkers and secondarily intuitives. The two dominant intuitives are the INFJ and the INTJ. The poor representation of the INFJ and the middling representation of the INTJs suggest that Warcraft is less of a game for people with imagination than it is for people who think. With the lone exception of the INFP, all the top introverted types use thinking as their dominant or secondary function. This makes perfect sense if you consider that most of the community around the game is based upon sites that emphasizes the usefulness of data (Wowhead, Thottbot) or thinking through the possibilities in data. Elitist Jerks is a beautiful example of the INTP personality writ large.

To those who don't know much about how Jungian personality types work the popularity of the ENFJ might seem a real outlier. But ENFJ is the description of the extroverted type that is most interested in exploring the values of others in the world. They are the prototypical socials that Gevlon likes to deplore; the ones who want everyone to win; the ones who will sell their Runed Orb for 10g to help out the guy around the corner. I would also guess the type most likely to be casual players as Warcraft would be only one of the many activities they do. For reasons to complex to get into here, I would also suspect that they are almost entirely under age 30. ENFJ are also a very popular type in fields like career counseling and I suspect that their dominance in the results also comes from seeing the MBTI advertised. They are one of the extroverted types most interested in personality, although almost always another's personality and never their own.

One aspect of the data I found puzzling is the Feelers. Role playing gaming is intrinsically structured imagination; it's not a feeling activity at all. So while the absence of the ENFP is to be expected, the presence of a large number of INFP respondents is remarkable. The American cultural female stereotype is INFP. It's possible that many of these players are women brought into the game by their boyfriends to do the traditional female role of healing. There's some support for this in the fact the data shows that most of the feelers are in classes that have a healing role (Druid, Paladin, Shaman) and that feelers shy away from the classes known for tanking (Warriors, Death Knight). In other words, the feelers are not into the game as an end in itself but as a way to support their feelings about others. This theory is further buttressed by the almost complete lack of any sensing feelers in the game. It would be most illuminating to know where those INFPs came from and their sex. If they were American women then boyfriends is reasonable answer. If they are not, it's an interesting development warranting further research.

Kae's and Nertok results are right in line with what Jungian type theory would predict about who plays role-playing computer games: introverted intuitives and introverted thinkers. The top four types (baring the ENJF) are the INTP, INFP, ISTP, and INTJ all of which are either primary/secondary thinkers or primary/secondary intuitives. The results so far suggest that thinking types are dominate but a surprising large numbers of intuitive feelers, most likely drawn to the game in support of their feelings about others. In particular, the involvement of the INFP in Warcraft is an area warranting future investigation.