A moment of clarity - how I finally turned my back to AT

Why am I doing this? I don’t enjoy it the slightest anymore!

The insight hit me like a rock as I was slowing down to land in the middle of a bunch of scourge, assembled on an ice field, waiting for their daily execution.

Yeah, by killing those creatures I could make some easy gold and make another faction admire Larísa a little bit more than they did before. I would get currency to get one more pet to forget to display. Looking at it briefly it seemed efficient enough – I’d get two quests done at the same time, since killing one scourge counted for both. The amount of gold and vanity loot I could make per hour was decent, not to say amazing.

It was just one thing. One little thing, but nevertheless important. The very thought of doing those quests another time was revolting. I was totally done with it.

Why had I even bothered to pick it up? Had I completely lost my mind?

From theory to action
I’ve been writing a few posts touching on this issue lately. Some readers have pointed out that I seemed to be on the verge of burnout from daily questing, suggesting that I’d look for a change. And after some therapeutic ranting at PPI, I’ve finally agreed with them. What is more important: I won’t let it stay as a thought experiment. Just as Gevlon preaches, I’m actually doing something about it.

I landed my bird on a safe spot. I felt that this was one of those blessed moments of clarity. There would be no more jousting. No more flying all over the world to kiss a frog and get a sword. No more scourge massacre. At least not for a long time, though I won’t say “never again”, since the itch may come back at some point. But for now being I refuse to spend another single minute on a grind I don’t enjoy. The decision was taken and it was such a relief.

I decided to immediately put Larísa to bed – it was not a raiding night and I just couldn’t come up with anything fun to keep her occupied. Now what? Suddenly I remembered something. Didn’t I roll a little druid a month ago? A blue-faced creature, with tattoos all over her face, currently sitting in Darnassus, collecting dust, waiting for her mistress to finish this tournament business?

The awakening
A few minutes later I found myself bravely attacking level 12 mobs in the deep forests of Darkshore. The loot was about as far from epic as you can come. I got copper instead of gold. I cheered at an offhand giving me +1 intellect, which I hoped would make my mana pool increase slightly. But what mattered more was that I needed to be on my toes all the time, as I was trying to figure out when to be a bear and when not to, when to root and when to heal myself, how I would make best use out of my mana or rage

Trust me; facing a rabid bear is far scarier than taking out defenceless scourge, if you’re not overpowered by higher level or better gear.

I became aware of things that had faded away from me during all those months spent in endgame. Like the huge aggro range of low level characters and what it’s like to make corpse runs when you’re questing and the graveyard is in the other end of the zone.

How had it happened that I had forgotten how fun this game can be – outside of the raids? This was an awakening. Admittedly the zone wasn’t as polished and artistically interesting as Northrend is and the quests were pretty simple, not sophisticated at all. No phasing, no movies, no vehicles. I was back to killing 20 boar, sorry, bears. But at least it was 20 bears I had never seen before and the spells and attacks were all brand new.

Once again I was a noob, slowly learning how to druid. To my astonishment I also looked at Darnassus with completely new eyes. It wasn’t just the deserted city where the lack of NPC:s to ask makes it annoyingly hard to find your way around. It had turned into my home town, a peaceful spot in the world, which I wanted to defend against the threat from the evil forces of the world.

It was a complete change of perspective, a brave new world to inhale, more than can just be explained by my change of height, from gnome size to nightelf.

The Deadmines project
Does this mean that Larísa has turned in to an altoholic, giving up raiding, giving up her struggles to reach worthy, and challenging end-game goals? No, absolutely no! My mage and her ability to raid will always be my main priority. But as the game has evolved in WotLK there isn’t the same need even for a dedicated raider to grind between the raid nights as there once was. It isn’t hard to get the gold you need to finance repairs and consumables. And the only rep grind that is required for maximising your gear is the Son of Hodir, which I’m done and over with since long. When I did this AT grind was rather done out of habit (“grinding is what you do when you don’t raid”) than out of desire.

So what’s next? What are my aims for my druid? Actually there aren’t many. I haven’t made any progression plan. I picked skinning and leatherworking as professions for now, not because I’ve made any deep analysis how it will fit into the team of my other characters, but because they’re new to me and seemed to be OK for a druid.

I don’t rush anything. For the first time in a long time I can honestly say that I’m not in any hurry whatsoever. I’m levelling alone, so there isn’t any “I should keep-up-with-the-others stress”. I don’t know if I’ll even reach 80. The only clear goal I have is to make an old dream of mine come true: to clear Deadmines properly, without any boosting, at the right level.

I don’t expect it to be all easy to find a willing party to join me in this mission once I’m in the DM level range. Who wants to spend hours wiping in an instance the proper way, when you can get boosted and get the loot and xp you want in just 10 minutes? Who wants to put up with a newbie druid, who never has tanked or healed anything in her life before and probably needs some direction? It’s as far from a free lunch as you can come.

But maybe there are a few likeminded people out there. People who have been hit with a moment of clarity and want to slip out from the burden of the daily grind. I hope so.

Was it good to you too? – about shifting perspectives

The raid night was just about to end. The last piece of loot had been handed out; a portal to Dalaran was trembling in the air. We were staying in the raid just another minute, so that the dkp addon handlers could finish their work. Then we would disassemble, some of us eager to gem and enchant their new shiny loot, others itching to cool down in a battleground or just completing the last few “must-do” dailies. A few just waited for clearance to log off so they could head towards the bed as soon as possible.

Our raid leader gave his short conclusion speech about the night, as he always does: “It was kind of messy, but we oneshotted the bosses and got the job done. Good effort of everyone”. He sounded pretty pleased, using his “pink voice”, not to be mixed up with his darker and displeased voice. That doesn’t happen too often. He’s quite picky and can be a little bit harsh when we deserve it, which is one of the reasons why we love him so much.

Indeed it was an enjoyable night. I had once again gone fire, giving it a new chance. I still felt slightly unused to it, struggling to keep up the living bomb, messing around with new key combinations. At least it wasn’t such a disaster as the previous time. I felt hopeful.

The post-raid analysis
Then a question occurred to me: was it as enjoyable to everyone else in the raid? Actually I wouldn’t take it for granted. It’s a bit like the classic bedroom question: “was it good to you too?” You never really know, do you?

To make a post-raid analysis and evaluation, describing what has just passed on a scale from “fail” to “success” is a very personal matter. I’ve more and more come to realize that even if you look at something that appears to be an objective, undisputable fact, such as a wws chart, you can’t be sure that everyone will agree about how to interpret it. What is fine with one player – “we didn’t wipe once!” – can at the same time be a disaster for another: “there were several deaths and people had to cover for others mistakes, we’ll never be able to do this on hard mode if we don’t shape up!” It all depends on from where you’re coming and what expectations you have.

There have been moments in my raiding life in WoW when I’ve been completely taken by surprise by the discussion following a raid. I remember once (a long time ago, in another guild), when I had enjoyed what I thought was a very good, successful, efficient night in Karazhan. We had been focused and the bosses had fallen like bowling pins. I expressed how pleased I was to another raider, and got a response: “do you really think so? It was one of the worst raids I’ve ever been in. The atmosphere at TS was poisoning. No one said a word, it was absolutely horrible. I’ve lost my lust for raiding altogether!” Listening to him you could hardly believe that we had experienced the same raid. And in one sense I guess we hadn’t, even though we technically were wearing the same raid ID.

Seeing it from the other side
So what am I trying to say? It isn’t exactly any revolutionary insight I’m presenting in this post. Anyone who has attended school has probably been presented this picture, which can be seen in two alternative ways, as an old lady or as a young girl. People see things differently, yeah, we know.

But thinking about all the guild drama you hear and read about it seems to me as if some players haven’t grasped it yet. Many, many of the conflicts I hear and read about come as an effect of lack of communication and a refusal to try to see things from “the other side”.

So what can you do about it? Unfortunately there isn’t yet any way that I can enter the mind of someone else and see the world through their eyes, as they did in the excellent movie Being John Malcovich, if someone remembers it. But you can use your curiosity and imagination. And you can talk to your guildmates. Ask them what they thought about the raid. If they discuss their experiences in a class forum on your guild website – follow it, even though it’s not about your class. It can be quite an eye-opener.

Another idea if you want to see the raid from a different perspective is to ask if someone could record it. One of your tanks recently finished a movie from one of our Sarth+3d kills. It’s nothing spectacular, there are no comments or instructions and his UI looks even messier than mine, which says a lot. But to me it was still refreshing and interesting to see the fight from this new angle; somehow the additional perspective also adds depth in my perception and gives me a better general understanding of what’s going on.

Don’t forget that when the raid is finished there are 25 mental recordings of what happened. They’re unique. Sometimes they’re contradictive. Yet they’re all true in their own way. Share it, put the pieces together and learn from it.

And maybe you won’t even have to ask the “was-it-good-to-you-too question” next time. Because you already know the answer.

The Good People of Azeroth

Life sometimes hands us odd coincidences that upon reflection turn out to be telling. In my case, I completed the Amber Ledge quests in the Borean Tundra the same day Obama released the previously secret torture memos from the Bush administration. For those of you who have short memories, the Amber Ledge quest chain includes the quest The Art of Persuasion where the character is required to repeatedly jab a captive enemy prisoner with a “Neural Needler,” with each jab producing increasing amounts of psychic pressure until he confesses to the secret location of a captive ally. For those of you with really short memories, Bush was the President of the United States before Obama.

I actually didn’t realize this coincidence had happened until a day later, my mind too absorbed by the game to pay attention to the news. But even at the time the parallel was too obvious for me to ignore. My initial reaction was to abandon the quest chain because there was no way I could condone this type of behavior from my character. But I was only a few quests short of the Nothing Boring About Borean achievement and I didn’t want to waste the time to track down new quests. So I tortured the captive and went on with the game, a little bile in my throat.

An amoral universe

One aspect of the World of Warcraft that has always left a vague distaste in my mouth is that Azeroth is essentially an amoral universe. There is no real moral conflict. By this I do not mean that the world does not present the character with moral situations. Rather, it’s the fact that those situations are all biased towards whatever gets the character loot, experience, achievements. The real problem with the Art of Persuasion quest isn’t that the player is asked to torture a human mob; that’s a genuine moral situation. The real problem is that the reward structure is entirely biased towards torture. Torturing the captive grants the character experience, gold, and a quest completion that counts towards a variety of in-game achievements. Refusing to torture grants the character absolutely nothing.

Another example of this amorality is the quest chain in Zul’drak called Betrayal. Here the player is required to infiltrate a Scourge bastion and through a series of heinous acts earn the leaders trust, find out his plans, and eventually slay him. From a game play perspective that sequence of quests and their scripting was amusing and fun; in fact it is one the better quest chains in the game along with Saving Sharpbeak and the Swift Flight Form quest for Druids. But I remained troubled throughout the quests by the implication that it’s acceptable for the good guys to lie and to deceive to get what they want. Lost in such design is the question that if our actions don’t separate the good from the bad, what does.

Morality versus Reputation

On the surface it would be easy to jab Blizzard with condoning or promoting torture but it’s actually a result of a fundamental choice in game design. Many games at least have meters where the cumulative total of a player’s actions slide the bar closer to good or evil. The original Dungeons and Dragons paper game had the concept of alignment with the dual poles of good/evil and law/chaos. While in some games the character’s alignment is merely cosmetic (has no affect on game play) and there is the occasional annoyance of disagreeing with the developers idea of what constitutes a good or evil action, those games at least gave a nod to the fact that actions had moral consequences. It’s a fundamental truth that what gets measured gets managed and in the World of Warcraft there is no way to manage your character’s morality because it simply isn’t measured. Morality as a meaningful aspect of game play is completely absent.

But that doesn’t mean their aren’t choices to be made; players need to perceive that their actions make a difference somehow. Instead of changing alignment characters gain Reputation with the various game factions. Gaining high reputation with one faction often comes with various rewards including unique gear and titles. Indeed, one of the most difficult achievements in the game is gaining the title “The Exalted”, which is awarded for gaining exalted reputation with 40 of the 44 factions in the game. It’s a telling point that a major game achievement is awarded not to the character who behaves closest to an ideal good but simply to the person who serves the greatest number of powerful interest groups. To be as plain as possible: in WoW kissing the right ass, going along to get along, is what works; morality is irrelevant.

Playing for Good

A similar debate ensued over at Wow.com regarding this issue a few days after I completed The Art of Persuasion quest. Alex Ziebart argues that the best way to envision characters in WoW is as mercenaries. On the other hand, Daniel Whitcomb believes that Varian Wrynn is in the moral right. It’s possible that both views are correct; the non-player characters of Azeroth live in a moral universe while the player characters live in a reputational one. But it leads to some decidedly awkward questions. Alex says that “saving the freaking world is reward enough” for us mercenaries but it’s difficult to imagine why we would care: which achievement is that again, who is that rep grind for. We’re not really Jesus and we’re not really Pontius Pilot; we’re just the guards that stick god with a spear and then cast lots for his garments.

The tragedy of a moral player in an amoral world is that there is no way to play for good. The lone alternative to evil is to simply not play. If you think torturing is wrong and you want your character to reflect that, your only choice is to walk away. One is then left with the awful choice between not playing or not doing good. It’s an uncomfortable dilemma.

Playing WoW with chop sticks

Have you ever watched dogs having dinner? You put down the bowl on the floor and before you know it it’s empty. Over and done in a few seconds.

Embarrassingly enough that’s pretty much how I behave at a dinner table. I’ve got so much manner that I won’t start eating until everyone is served (given that there are <8 people in the party), but at that point… Oh dear. I just start eating and I won’t stop until the plate is empty and I’m finished. While the other family members still have at least half of their meal left to enjoy, I’m beginning to tap my toes, impatiently, wondering if it would be very rude of me to start clearing the table. They surely couldn’t mind if I at least put my own plate in the dishing machine?

I know this habit is far from healthy and whenever I’ve got the opportunity I try to put some restrictions on myself to slow me up. So if we’re eating china food and there are chop sticks available I’ll always pick those, hoping that the difficulties in handling the tools will keep me occupied a bit longer. (Unfortunately my skills in chop stick eating have improved too much lately, so the method doesn’t work as well as it used to.)

The Klepsacovic suggestion
Anyway. Klepsacovic made me think about the chop stick approach when I read a comment he did to my post yesterday:

You're rushing, there's your problem. Take your time. Relax […] Don't focus on the goal and end up with an unfun process, the goal ends up being a relief rather than a reward.

I think he’s absolutely right. I really need to slow down a bit. Mind you, not in the raids. Never. I really don’t like to raid at a slow pace. You know when there are several breaks without any clear time limit, when there are too much of discussions and random waiting for nothing particular. When marking and assigning people take ages. It makes my skin itch and my focus shatter. Besides, there is a good reason for raids to hurry up – after all there IS the weekly reset and a set amount of raiding hours available (in our guild about 10) before we’re starting it all over again. If we ever want to kill Yogg-Saron we have to keep it up, just as Spinksville suggested the other day.

No, let’s keep the speed in the raids. But what I’m talking about are the other activities, the things I do in between. What is the hurry, really? What exactly do I think I’ll reach by always trying to do things as quickly as possible, in an “efficient manner”? Am I not fooling myself, playing WoW as if it was a job? Will reaching the goal be more of a relief from an un-fun activity, as Klepsacovic puts it, than a real reward?

The thought worries me. It really does.

The need of variation
I could blame that it’s how I am naturally. I walk quickly too, in spite of my short real life appearance. I talk quite quickly – and a lot when I’m in the mood for it. Not to talk about my writing. I actually write faster than I think. So why shouldn’t I be rational and quick in my questing? Why force myself to a slower pace?

Well, the thing is that I imagine that constantly running your engine at warp speed eventually will wear it out. What we need to work at our best is variation. We need periods of recovery between the intense rushes. Moments of tranquillity and relaxation.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m looking for it in the wrong place, wanting to spend some slow time in Azeroth. Maybe the best thing between raids would be to minimize the online time, to just get the little gold I need for repairs and consumables in the quickest possible way. I should shut down the PC, open the door to the little garden on my backyard and lose myself in the May concert of the blackbird. (Have you heard it? It will break your heart if you just bother to listen. There’s no game sound that can compete with it, believe me. And above all - it's random, unscripted and absolutely unique, a one-time-only happening.)

Still there are reasons why you should be online not just on raid time, not the least if you want to have some kind of social life and be a part of the guild. And I can’t rid myself from the thought that it should be possible to play WoW in a different manner. I should be able to enjoy the quests and the incredible details in the artwork, instead of mindlessly chasing the next reward.

I wish I could slow myself somehow, making it possible to actually feel every flavour of the game. I want to silence the competitive side of myself, the one that is constantly striving for “accomplishments”, which in fact mean nothing at all. I want to eat WoW with chop sticks. Not always, but sometimes.

I only wish I knew how.

Wanted: better incentives for endgame questing

There I was, once again trying to catch the monsterbelly to get the lost arm of a fisherman and bring it back to Dalaran. The Frozen sea looked exactly the same is it did yesterday. I caught it at the fifth try. Not too shabby.

Then I mounted up and continued to the lake in the Howling Fjord, where the poor maiden in the iceblock was to be released once again. I knew it was a lost cause. Every time I’ve melted the ice, she has instantly refrozen before I’ve even left the place. She’s doomed to never leave the spot.

Finally I discussed with myself if I should go to Brunnhildar village once again and beat up the poor reluctant prisoners in the cave. The thought was revolting, but still, I couldn’t quite erase the bear mount from my wish list.

It was another night in Azeroth and I suddenly realized that I was doing what I’m doing most of the time when I’m not in a raid. I was doing dailies, meaning that I was doing the same, easy, silly quests over and over again. I was exactly as scripted as the NPCs. And I was in the danger zone of growing really bored.

Reasons for repetition
It was quite incomprehensible when I thought about it. Here I was, in the middle of a huge game, where I still had unexplored areas, where there still were tons of quests that I had never done. And still I chose to stick to just a few quests. How come?

Reason 1: out of laziness. It’s like water pouring down a mountain: it takes the shortest way down, following the already existing ravine. If I make a new, unknown quest I may have to think a little bit and make an effort, however small, to find out what to do. Even if I use a quest support addon as Lightheaded I’ll have to at least read a few lines. Doing dailies requires less effort than doing real quests. It’s relaxing in its own peculiar way, just like picking herbs.

Reason 2: because of the rewards. Doing normal quests in Icecrown generally will give me less in exchange than doing dailies. The possible gear rewards are useless to me and I’m not an enchanter, so I’ll just get a few gold from vendoring the items. I’m exalted with all the connected factions since long from grinding instances, so that’s not a motivator either. And the daily quests at Argent Tournament will award me currency that can be traded for vanity rewards such as mounts and cute pets – useless things, but still attractive to a childish player like me. Ordinary non-daily questing wouldn’t offer me anything like that. Just gold and a Loremaster title, which I don’t care much about.

Why it’s bad
I’m probably not alone in my behaviour. I think there are many other players who still haven’t done half of the offered quests in game, but have slipped into the habit of doing dailies. And while we obviously find reasons to do it, we also grumble and whine a bit about being bored from it. “Oh-my-god-I’m-sick-of-this!” Yet we do it. Kind of weird, isn’t it?

I think this is harmful to the game experience in the long run. A lot of displeased, whining players will create a negative climate, feeding the feeling that we’re playing a game that has passed zenith and now is declining, heading for it’s inevitable future death. It will also make players cluster all at one spot, at the Argent Tournament ground or the fishing spot of the day, rather than populating all of Northrend, which at least makes me a sad panda. To me a big part of the fun in playing an MMO is that I actually meet other players in the virtual world, not only friendly and unfriendly NPC:s.

My suggestion
So here comes my suggestion: why couldn’t they make the rewards from doing ordinary quests once you’ve reached endgame slightly more attractive? I doesn’t necessary have to be huge gold rewards. I think just a RNG feature, such as the items you can find in the fishing reward bag would be enough.

What if there was a chance, every so small, but still a chance, that you could get a special mount, pet or an epic gem such as you can get from the fishing quest, every time you completed an ordinary quest in Northrend. You wouldn’t know exactly what your reward would be; there would always be a moment of lottery in it. I think that would be inspiring enough to bring more people to finish off the zones, in this way using more of the content, meaning that less developer effort would be wasted. Everyone’s a winner.

Stop repeating myself
Well, I don’t expect suggestions from Larísa of Stormrage to be implemented in the game. So I’ve decided to try to be strong. When I have some time over, outside of raids and the obligations that come with it, I’m going to turn my back towards the monsterbelly, the frozen maiden and the blue people village. If not always, at least sometimes. I’ll stop just repeating myself and open my eyes to the one-time-only quests I’ve yet to do.

And I won’t do them for any other reward than the pleasure of seeing the quest designs and the stories.

After all: the amount of entertainment you get from an activity beats everything else in the end. It’s just sad that I have to remind myself about it.

Different approaches to gold farming

Do you ever read the blog by the Ensidia leader Kungen? I do, because it gives me some giggles and an insight into the somewhat bizarre life he leads in Azeroth. The other week he had a post about a, let’s call it different, way of making your living in game.

Here’s the story: Normally Kungen doesn’t visit Ogrimmar for longer than 5-10 minutes a week to get the consumables he needs for raiding. One night however, he did an experiment and decided to hang around for an hour. Immediately people started to give him gold, without any special reason. Not huge sums, more like 10-50 gold. But all in all it gave him 1000 gold in an hour and a bunch of consumables to go with it. He got all this for doing absolutely nothing except for just being there.

Gevlon’s thoughts
I couldn’t help wondering what the Gold collector number 1, Gevlon, would have thought about it. Actually I don’t think he’d disapprove, at least not entirely.

On one hand you could suspect that the people who gave those gifts to Kungen were true “Moron&Slacker” material, stupid people who thought that they could somehow buy the friendship and respect from the Nihilum guild leader for a few gold coins. They were part of a mindless crowd, not thinking for themselves, not striving for any goal or improvement on their own. The kind of people that give the goblins a good profit.

On the other hand you could also see them as fellow businessmen. Theoretically they could have the same good intention as Gevlon has declared on several occasions; they may want to spend their hard earned gold on a worthy cause. They’d rather sponsor a hard working, successfully progressing guild, than just burn it.

It’s a beautiful thought. But to be honest I don’t think it’s the case. The sums are just too small to be considered as real donations.

A good profit
Reading a blog post by Gevlon I realized that the Kungen method of gold farming wouldn’t get any goblin approval anyway. Why? It’s simply not profitable enough.

“I consider 2-3000G/hour (active playing time without AFK listings) an unlucky session.”

Cheers! That is what I’d call a challenging benchmark!

Dear Gevlon, there have been many occasions when I couldn’t agree with you, especially not when you’re into political socio-economic and moral discussions about real world matters. But nevertheless, I like you a lot, as you know, for being so cocky, so full of self confidence and so annoyingly good at what you’re doing.

Being a successful businessman in isn’t about showing up in Ogrimmar waiting for miracles to happen. It’s about devoting a little bit of effort into planning, monitoring the market, finding the opportunities and then exploring them, heading for volume rather than for occasional one-time-only bargains. It’s an entirely different approach to gold farming than the Kungen way.

Larísa’s gold farming
So how about Larísa? Do I ever farm gold in the game? No. Not really. My current fortune is about 5 k gold, spread over my characters, and if you would believe Gevlon I’m on the verge of poverty, even though I don’t see it quite that way myself. I’ve got the economy I need to pay my repairs, even after nasty wipe nights. I’m never low on consumables and I can easily enchant and gem the gear I obtain. My needs aren’t exactly overwhelming. Who would want a mega big mammoth blocking the whole screen anyway? Not me.

The truth is that I still haven’t been able to see the fun in hanging around scanning the Auction House for business opportunities. I farm in my own, slow way. I think the white wastes of Stormpeak give a more beautiful setting, where I can relax and let my mind drift away, than staring at the big screen of Auctioneer.

Maybe I’ll change my mind one day and give the Gevlon methods a shot. If I’d just be efficient and good enough at it, it may not be the boring time sink that I fear. After all, there are a couple of new tailoring recipes that drop in Ulduar now and I can’t deny that the shiny new belt is attractive. If I somehow could make 3 000 g per hour I would no doubt be able to get that upgrade a lot quicker.

Gold farming according to Kungen on the other hand isn’t an option to more than a handful of players in the world, and I’m really not one of them. Actually I’m not sure I’d want to either. I can’t say that I’d fancy having a cloud of people surrounding me, whispering me, opening trade windows to me whenever I visited a capital. Not even if they paid me 1000 g an hour.

And when you think about it... isn’t it dangerously close to begging?

The Greatness of the Game

Games infuse our world. People infuse our would. Thus it is no surprise to encounter people who think they are bigger than the game itself: sport players using drugs, politicians taking bribes, priests molesting children, starlets breaking the law. Karatechop.

Karatechop deserved his ban. Regardless of Blizzard’s predicate acts, regardless of the innocence of his motivation, the fundamental truth is that the actual results of Karatechop’s behavior violated the core integrity of the game. If he had killed fourteen boars rather than fourteen bosses no would have noticed. It is true that comparatively speaking boars are challenging to lower level characters and using Martin Fury to kill them would have been as insulting to such low level characters as killing bosses are to raiders. But the effect of Karatechop’s actions on his fellow players is not the correct metric; the best metric is the effect of his actions on the game itself. The truth is that bosses are more important than boars; the game is designed that way. Imagine the world without boars. Now imagine it without bosses. From loot, to achievements, to quests; a core element to Warcraft is killing bosses. Boars are a minor sideshow. When Karatechop went around one-shotting bosses he didn’t just hit the game, he critted it.

Moreover, Karatechop’s account is not essential to the game. I realize that this is a pill some players don’t want to swallow. They have invested much time, energy, and passion into their characters and the idea that their account can be cut off in a flash without recourse is disconcerting. There seems to be an unspoken agreement that banning is a severe punishment. It’s not. It’s not if the metric is the impact on the game itself. The harsh truth is that the loss of Karatechop will have a negligible impact upon the game as a whole.

The Alternative

Before I played Warcraft I played several games based upon a micro-transaction business model. Nominally, such games are free; there is no cost to log-in to kill a few monsters and do a few quests. However, to progress in the game and experience all the content, you must buy in-game items (pets, gear, mounts, etc.) with real money. The more money you spend the more of the game that is accessible to you and thus the stronger you grow.

One consequences of the micro-transaction business model is that the people who are best at the game are those who are willing to spend the most real life money. It is common for the top players in popular games to spend $5000 a year. I once spent more money in three months than I did in an entire year playing the World of Warcraft.

Believe it or not the sheer amount of money I spent on micro-transaction games was not what caused me to quit them. The bigger problem with the micro-transaction business model is the way it warps developer’s priorities. In your average micro-transaction game, only about 5%-10% of the people actually pay. Most players are free loaders. When it comes to customer service, bug fixes, game design, and anything else you can think of, money talks. Wait, it’s more like screaming.

Playing favorites

The skewing of competition based upon the possession of real life monetary resources is the inevitable consequence of the pure micro-transaction model because such disparity is precisely the source of profit. If the real life disparity in monetary resources didn’t exist, the developers couldn’t afford to support the 95% of the population that is free loading. Imagine Blizzard trying to support the game if only 5% of the people paid $13 a month and everyone else played free; they’d shut down within the week. The only way a micro-transaction game can afford to carry the freeloaders is because a minority is funding it. And when that minority cries, you bet your ass the developers are going to listen; that’s their income talking.

In a micro-transaction model the marginal loss of a player is binary. If the player is a freeloader, the marginal loss is almost non-existent; if the player is a payer, the marginal loss can be significant. In plain language, the developers play favorites. But in a subscription model every player is equally dispensable; the lose is unitary. The loss of any one player has a negligible impact on the game as a whole. Each marginal loss is the same loss since everyone is paying the same monthly fee. A subscription model offers no incentive to the developer to play favorites; the micro-transaction model requires it. The net result is that developers funded by a subscription model are driven, consciously or not, to put the needs of the game first. Consistently catering to a minority can only hurt and never help. On the other hand, the management and expansion of a micro-transaction game is molded to suit the needs of the paying customers.

When you get right down to it all people who pay to play on-line games are engaged in “rent a developer;” what the developers see as good for the game bears a direct correlation to who is paying for it. In this sense the only difference between a subscription game and a micro-transaction game is the diversity of the income stream. Yet that diversity matters, it matters enormously. Because the greater the diversity of income streams the more dispensable each income stream becomes; the less one is beholden to any single interest group; the more one is inclined to do what is best for the game as a whole. It is for this reason that a game where each player individually is dispensable but where the game itself is indispensable is a better game to be playing than one where the game itself is dispensable but a few individual players are not.

The greatness of the game

When the whole Martin Fury debacle came about my reaction was to thank god, once again, that I was not back playing my former games. Because I know what would have happened if Karatechop had been one of those players spending thousands of dollars a year in a micro-transaction game. Absolutely nothing. The developers wouldn’t have dared. The impact on the integrity of the game be damned; the impact on the bottom line is what would have mattered.

For all the incantations of fun, Karatechop committed the sin of hubris. He put his needs above the needs of the game itself. That was intolerable. Just as it was intolerable when Paris Hilton thought she could drive around drunk without consequence or when baseball players thought they could take banned drugs without fear of the consequences. It's the developer's job to play god, not mine or yours.

If all you want is selfish greatness, go play a micro-transaction game that for $5000 a year allows you to play god to the developers. If you want to be playing a great game, however, you need a different perspective. For a being of greatness stands on top and looks down upon the masses, lets go with a Martin Fury, one shots the bosses. The greatness of being is standing on the bottom looking up, conscious of the miracle of creation towering above you, perceiving how disposable you truly are. That’s when you see the greatness of the game.