Blizzard, won't you sell me a Honda Accord?

The auto business has been on my mind lately as I recently purchased a late model used car. As I buy a car once every ten years, I do a lot of research and prep work. Meanwhile, the news has been inundated with the latest gyration in GM and Chrysler’s decades long death throes, this time ensnaring US taxpayers. At first glance there doesn’t seem anything similar about making games and making cars; a look under the hood tells a different story.

Detroit

One way to categorize personalities is to use the product life-cycle. There are individuals who have a preference for creation, those who prefer to maintain, and those who prefer to repair. US Secretary of Defense Roberts Gates recently articulated this approach when he said that President Obama didn’t keep him on from the Bush Administration to maintain the status quo but to continue fixing what Rumsfeld had broken. As he bluntly stated, “I don’t do maintenance.”

For 50 years the American auto industry has been based on a league between people who like to create (design autos) and people who like to repair (auto mechanics). This agreement between creators and repairers has a name in economics; it’s called planned obsolescence. If a car wears out and begins breaking down after three years/60000 miles (whichever comes first) it effectively amounts to a periodic redistribution of wealth from those who buy a car to those who produce it or repair it.

Since the fundamental purpose of a car is to get one from point A to point B, worn out or broken cars become nothing but expensive lawn ornaments. For most of the 20th century the average consumer in America’s interstate highway culture had the option to either pay a mechanic to fix the car or buy a new one once the warranty ran out. This was a great-set up if you had to have the latest hot wheel or if you enjoyed tinkering with the tappets, but it stunk for everyone else.

Tokyo

Japan killed Detroit by breaking up this conspiracy between creators and repairers. Producing reliable cars at competitive prices that lasted for 300,000 miles did exactly what Tokyo hoped: maintainers fell deeply in love. Truth is most Americans prefer never to see a mechanic and have no interest in buying a car every three years. They want to put oil and petrol in their car and the drive down the road safely. As soon as they were given a choice, these sad pandas abandoned American made cars and never looked back.

Japanese cars were derided as boring econoboxes by Detroit. Yet those cars sold and sold profitably. For both the 1980s and the 1990s Japanese cars accounted for every single car on the top ten lists of those decades most reliable vehicles. Apparently hassle free is something people want to buy. It’s a testament to the reputation that Japan has built that a Toyota or a Honda compact car sells on average for $2000 more per car than the exact same American model with the exact same features. In fact, there is this hilarious story from Russia where an eastern province is threatening to secede from the Federation because Putin banned the import of their beloved Japanese cars.

Irvine

The MMO world inherited the business model of planned obsolescence from the single-player game. A publisher would create a game and then post a few patches to fix it on a bulletin board. As a technological fact there was no practical way to maintain a persistent game. Occasionally a publisher attempted to maintain a particular game franchise (e.g, Baldur’s Gate) but there was little that was persistent from game to game. This model of produce and patch is analogous to the effort between creators and repairers that ran the American auto industry for 50 years. The only significant difference is that with games the creators and repairers are one and the same group.

The explosion of the internet and the development of the MMO changed gaming in ways that have yet to be fully grasped. For the first time it became possible to create a persistent world. The key attribute of a persistent world is that it is a world that doesn’t needed to be expanded or fixed, only maintained. Most of the server down time in Warcraft comes not from expansions or from hotfixes but from Tuesday’s regularly scheduled maintenance. The same way that a Honda Fit will spend more time out of commission getting its oil changed and its tires rotated than it will because its broken down by the side of the road.

The sad part is that while Blizzard understands the technical need for maintenance it still doesn’t understand that maintainers are a market it can sell too. It’s still caught up in maintaining the Warcraft franchise instead of the Warcraft world. Biobreak hits the nail on the head when it says, “Blizzard has all but come out and told everyone that the 1-60 content — classic or “Vanilla” WoW — is an obsolete abomination to them, and they simply don’t want you to experience it…Now, as an ex-player, why should I care? It’s because nobody likes it when a cherished memory is cheapened, especially by the creator.” (emphasis added). In other words, Blizzard’s planned obsolescence is running straight into Biobreak’s desire to maintain his experiences and he don’t like it. Shocking. Now he knows how GM owners felt in 1980.

The Next Detroit?

Needless to say, the arguments against the maintainers are the same as they always were. Green Armadillo writes, “In a very real sense, constant progression for everyone - not merely players who got into the raiding circuit years ago - is the price we pay for the ability to experience the game worlds we get to play with.” In other words, if Detroit doesn’t make its cars obsolete every three years how on earth is it going to fund the creation of new cars that are necessary to develop new features and new styles. That logic was untrue in the 1980s and it’s untrue now.

The argument that planned obsolescence is necessary for continued progress is fallacious because it assumes that there is a never ending desire for novelty. My computer screen can only get so big and then it begins to hurt my neck. I do not want or need constant progression. I do not need it in my car and I don’t want it in my MMO. I have never even played a single Horde character, which is half the content of the game, because I can’t even keep up with the expansion cycle on Alliance. The early adaptors, the hard core players, may love each expansion or major patch because just like Pontiac it builds excitement. Pontiac is also defunct.

Produce then patch is a business model that failed Detroit and it is going to fail MMOs. Planned obsolescence is not the price I choose to pay, it’s the price I have to pay to be in a persistent game. Give me an MMO Honda and I will gladly take it. Give me a game where the effort I put in to get Ambassador is not flushed down the toilet six months later and I’ll buy it. If Honda can figure out how to make a car… and make a car profitably… that can persist for 20 years and 300,000 miles with only basic maintenance then game developers can do the same. There are no valid excuses.

I want to make clear that I am not predicting the death of Warcaft today, next year, five years from now. I believe those concerns are over-hyped. But the clear lesson from Detroit is that when given a realistic alternative, consumers reject the constant progression used to justify planned obsolescence. They did it with cars and they are going to do it with MMOs. If I were a young computer geek in college I wouldn’t bank on the planned obsolescence model funding my retirement, not unless I expected the government to bailout MMOs thirty years from now. Instead, I’d be busy building the gaming version of the Honda Accord.

Heaven and Hell

The raid bosses may be scripted, but the players aren’t, that’s for sure.

For a while our guild has been doing a sort of pendulum movement between failure and success, it’s been like Heaven and Hell, with a bit too much emphasis on the hell part to be honest.

This frustrating experience has shattered our self image quite a bit. We’ve always seen ourselves as a very good guild. We can’t compete for the top five positions on the server, but considering we’re just raiding three nights a week, with modest attendance requirements, we’ve been doing really, really well and we’ve always taken pride in our serious, at least half-pro approach to raiding.

Going backwards
This was until a couple of weeks ago, when our progress didn’t just halt, but even started to go backwards. The worst moment of humiliation was probably one night when we wiped several times on Kologarn, in a mess that looked worse than my work desk (and that is bad, trust me.). Our poor raid leader was so frustrated that he didn’t even come around to give a harsh speech. And I think that silence on vent was even worse than anything he could have said. The air was dense with frustration and disappointment.

Then our guild anniversary came, a blast for everyone. Maybe the break from the routine would help up a bit and make people get back on track? Disappointingly enough it didn’t. Last week we had some really bad wiping on General Vezax, far below our normal standard, which ended up in a prematurely ended raid night.

What was the problem? This was the same players who had killed him without too much effort a few weeks earlier, so it couldn’t really be about lack of knowledge of tactics or skill. It was rather an issue connected to mentality and focus, and the question was how to deal with it.

An intense discussion on our forums followed where we honestly and straightforwardly vented the situation and what to do about it. Not only the officers, but everyone participated. The question was: what’s up? What’s our problem? Do we really want to do this or have we for some reason lost a bit of our focus and interest in the game? Would we be better off taking a break from our 25 man raiding, reloading our batteries, getting our energy and focus back again? Were people getting burned out from running Ulduar 10 man in the offnights as well? Maybe we should take it a bit cooler with those optional offnight activities, making sure we’re in top shape for our 25-man raids?

The discussion ended up in the conclusion that we really did want to go on. And if people got a bit fed up with Ulduar, they should be mature and responsible enough to recognize the signs of burnout, sticking to our 25 man raids, which is the focus of our guild.

Raid resets
So came the new week and the raid instance reset.

The resets always make me think about the wonderful movie Groundhog Day, where the main character has gotten into some kind of time loop, living through the same day over and over again. After experiencing it enough many times he’s slowly starting to learn from it, seeing that the outcome and experience of the day will be quite different, depending on his decisions. The day may be scripted, but he isn’t.

Sometimes the raid resets feel like a nuisance. You’ve been working so hard the whole week to get to the end boss, and if you only could have gotten a couple of hours more, you’re sure you would have gotten him. Now it’s all in vain and you’re starting the long uphill struggle again.

But sometimes it’s the opposite, a blessing. It’s a fresh start. The disaster from the raid the week before is forgotten. It’s a new situation – yet another opportunity to get it right from the beginning.

And this week was one of those blessed moments. As we approached our vehicles to start the long climb, I could hear the Sonny & Cher's "I Got You Babe", which wakes up Bill Murray every day in that movie. “Here we go again” I thought. “I wonder how it will go”.

Back on track
And soon I knew. It was the same bosses, but it was all different. There were no silly mistakes. We were once again transformed into a raiding machine, efficiently making its way through Ulduar, oneshotting more or less every boss we encountered. We grabbed the chance to prove to ourselves that we deserve to be where we are progression wise. We came back from Hell and went straight to Heaven.

And this trend continued the next raid. The very same guild that wiped for hours on Vezax last week oneshotted him now without any problem whatsoever, with several minutes to spare on the enrage timer, which means that we’ll have an entire night at our hands dedicated for Yogg the next raid.

How come? I have no idea. The discussions on our forums following the defeats last week didn’t offer any rocket science solution, any new strategy or shortcut. We hadn’t kicked or benched any players due to poor performance.

But suddenly the focus was there that wasn’t before. If you ask me I think it’s all about what’s happening in our heads. To succeed in raiding you need to know basics about the gameplay, about your class, the strategies in encounter, raid mechanics and so on. But it can only take you so far. Without the right mentality and mindset you can still lose it all.

And that, my friends, is what makes raiding so fascinating to me. It’s not about “seeing the bosses”. They’re all there at YouTube to be seen for anyone who’s curious. It’s not about the epic drops. That’s just pixels and will be exchanged at next content patch anyway.

No, it’s about the never-ending learning of how to make a group perform at its full potential. Every raid reset gives us another chance to deal with it better than the one before.

And who knows, when we’ve done it perfectly maybe the raid won’t reset, but something else will come? At least in my imagination. A brand new day would dawn, just like in Groundhog Day. I wonder what it would bring to us.

A happy blogging tête-à-tête

A guild meeting must be an amazing experience. I’ve never been to a huge one myself, but I’ve met a few guildies on a couple of occasions during my WoW career, and even in the small format it was a blast.

It didn’t take many minutes for the initial nervousness to wear off and the friendship to take over. The bodies and faces didn’t exactly fit with the avatars I had grown accustomed to, but the voices were all familiar after all those late nights we had spent together online. I was among friends.

This week I experienced something that somehow resembled to this, even though it wasn’t a real life eye-to-eye meeting. This week I saw another blogger online. I chatted to him, I sent emote-hugs to him, I jumped around enthusiastically and was actually taken by surprise how happy I was, wagging my tail like a dog greeting his master.

A whisper in the night
It was just an ordinary night and I was poking around in Dalaran, pondering upon the issue if I should change my offspec to something less mana consuming to optimize it for General Vezax, when I suddenly got a whisper out from the blue. It came from a character called Ixobelle. Yes, THE Ixobelle - one of the icons of the mmo-blogging community, probably not as wellknown as BRK, Tobold or Phaelia, but just as brilliant. A blogger who combines creativity, passion, and excellent writing skills with deep knowledge about WoW and overall mmo-gaming. A blogger I and many with me look up to.

Since Ixobelle lives in Japan, soon moving back to the US, I had never imagined that I would communicate with him in any other way than through our slow exchange of thoughts in writing and commenting on each others blog posts. There is an ocean of physical distance and time difference between us, so I didn’t see it happening any more than I expect to ever see the green beard of Gnomeaggedon in any other manner than as a screenshot.

But little did I know. Suddenly Ixobelle was there – cheerful, chatty and full of energy and before I knew it he had thrown himself into a VoA pug, sending me humorous reports about his progress (or lack of progress, if you read his blog post about it).

It felt just as weird and fun as seeing guildies in real life. Even though bloggers evolve bonds of friendship over time, we’re generally spread over countless of realms all over the world. We’re like lighthouses blinking out messages to each other from a very far distance – over the Internet, but not in game. (Admittedly, I have two guildies who have blogs of their own, Kromus and Lerbic, but since I knew both of them as players before they became bloggers, it’s not the same thing).

Future adventures
I have no idea when I’ll see Ixobelle next. As a matter of fact I don’t expect it to happen too often, since the time certainly isn’t in our favour. When I’m raiding I’m usually coming online around 2.30 am his time, and when I’m not raiding, two or three hours later. It’s rather inconvenient, to say the least. Besides, he’s got characters to tend to on other servers as well.

But who knows, maybe we’ll be able join our forces in some pug during an offnight and then write about it? I think it could be quite interesting to see the same event described from different points of view, through the temperament and sunglasses of two different bloggers. And in one way we’ve already done it, haven’t we? This was the Larísa version of what happened during our first meeting and here's Ixobelle's take on it (including a screenshot which proves that it did happen.)

To be continued at some point!

Taking the mystery away from the game

Today I read the patch notes about the upcoming change of the world maps and something in me died a little.

Once upon a time WoW was a game that offered mysteries to be solved, adventures to be experienced. The world was there for us to explore and it was endless. Not so anymore. It’s like if the whole concept of questing is turned into something that requires as much brain activity as fishing.

I’ll quote the notes in case you haven’t seen it already:

Quest creatures and objects will now show on the player’s world map.

• A skull graphic will be placed on the map in the general area where players can find creatures they must kill for a quest.
• A skull graphic with red eyes will be placed on the map in the general area where creatures can be found that must be killed in order to collect quest objects.
• A gear/cogwheel graphic will be placed on the map in the general area where players must loot quest objects found in the world.
• A chat bubble graphic will be placed on the map in the general area where players must interact with a specific NPC for a quest.
• A yellow question mark graphic will show on the map to provide the location of a NPC whose quest the player has completed.
  

The benefits
Now, before I’ll throw myself into my doubts about the change, I must admit that I’m a bit torn in my opinion. I can see why they do it. It’s a part of the ongoing mission to make levelling up a bit easier. Completely new players can more easily work their way through the more or less dead zones and reach the +70 zones where most players hang around. They don’t have to wander around for ages, annoyed and frustrated at quests that sometimes are pretty cryptic and poorly written.

And to players who have been around for a while it doesn’t change anything. They’re using Questhelper or Lightheaded anyway, which do about the same thing. Now those features are built into the game, which means they have an addon less to update and to put strain on their system.

So, OK, I too see the reason for it. And probably I deserve to be called a hypocrite, since I too use Lightheaded and TomTom to give me the coordinates and directions when I level my druid alt.

All this said I still want to vent a bit of the sadness I feel seeing this happening.

My sadness
What bothers me is that somehow the “being efficient and do things as quick as possible, ticking off things from your list” concept has completely overtaken the “experience, explore and lose yourself into a different world” idea.

I think back to my own first levelling experience, two and a half years ago. I started in TBC, at a point where there was already tons of information available to facilitate your questing at institutions such as Thottbot. But I was all new to gaming, I didn’t know anyone and I had no idea those tools existed. I played the game vanilla, the way it was presented to me, fumbling for quest objectives in complete darkness for my first levels. And how I enjoyed it!

A typical example of this was when I completed the quest Retrieval for Mauren, which is handed out by a guy standing close to the mage tower in Stormwind. There was something in the quest description that really kicked off my curiosity and imagination:

Travelers keep asking me about the Stonetalon Mountains. It seems to be a popular place for adventure--it doesn't matter if you're seeking wyvern, elementals, or you have business with the Venture Co.Within the Charred Vale, deep in Stonetalon, there used to be a species of basilisks whose scales, when ground to dust, made a wonderful reagent for some spells I've created.

If those basilisks still live, I would love to have a few of their scales.

Take your time, it is no rush, but I can pay well.

Off I went on a journey that seemed endless. Completing this single quest took me three nights – at least. I didn’t have flight points anywhere, I didn’t have any mount. I don’t remember how I finally got there, but I can vividly imagine that I didn’t find the shortest route. And my corpse runs were countless. All this for just a crappy wand as quest reward. I remember teleporting back to SW, turning in the quest and then wondering: was this all? And then I went back to questing in whatever area of Easter Kindom I was working on.

This was of course a waste of time and effort, measured in xp/hour efficiency, and I’d never ever consider doing it again on any on my alts. But was it fun? Absolutely! The world was endless and almost everything on the map was dimmed. I didn’t know where I was heading, I didn’t know where to go, what to do, and this gave a sort of immersion that I think is hard to obtain if there are skulls and crosses all over the map.

What’s next?
Probably I’m just a sad old lady, longing back for an era of youth and innocence that WoW lost long ago. I guess I want to protect the new clueless “Larisas” coming to the game today from getting too much information. I want to let them enjoy their first steps in the game the way I enjoyed them. But it’s a lost cause, since those players were quite rare when I started and hardly exist at all anymore.

WoW is aging quickly and there’s nothing we can do about it. We can walk down the memory lanes and mourn what’s lost and gone, but the development isn’t in our hands. If we want adventure and exploring we would probably be better off trying a new game.

Still I come to think of the brilliant prediction of the patchnotes 5.2 that Gevlon made a while ago:

• "an "adventure guide" NPC was added to all starter zone who provide quest "kill 3 boars" for XP to level to 100

  streamlining classes: the complicated rotation of the 2 spells/class introduced in 5.0 has been revised. Now every class have one spell "Ipawn" doing 50000 damage to all hostile cratures in 20 yards and heals 60000 damage for all friendlies in 20 yards up to 10 targets.

  Reputation requirements for "awesome screenblocking flying whale" mount has been reduced to Whale Tamers friendly

  New Whale Tamers daily quest introduced, providing 500 Rep for bringing a letter from Whale Tamer Jack to Whale Tamer Joe, both standing in the largest building.

  Material requirements for ilvl 400 legendaries have been reduced to 10 dream cloth/dream skin/dream bar and 1 ultimate earth/fire/shadow/life"

I’m afraid that this isn’t just sarcasm. It’s exactly what’s going to happen. Changing the maps in 3.2 is just another brick in the wall.

Sparkles don’t come with tier gear

Sometimes I wonder if Blizzard has made a mistake putting the sparkles on the quest items. Probably many players would be better off if it was the characters that twinkled rather than the objects.

For some reason we seem to need it. We want to feel like stars. If not every single second, at least once in a while.

The urge to be special
This urge to be special, to be recognized, and identified, to be a name and not just someone in a faceless crowd seems to be an overall trend in society. Have you ever heard of a youngster who wants to become a system administrator or work at a grocery store when they grow up? Probably not. If you believe what they say, we’ll soon live in a land populated by pop stars and models.

But the longing for stardom and attention it’s not just childish dreams, something we’ll grow away from as time passes. I think you see it with adults as well. Take the act of blogging for instance. When you think about it, don’t we all step up on a soapbox, publicly displaying our thoughts and personalities, sticking out from the crowd? How come else that we upload our posts instead of letting them stay on our private hard disks?

We all want to sparkle. We all want to be Somebody rather than Nobody. And sometimes I can’t help thinking that this tendency is even stronger in Azeroth than in real life. If we fail to reach the Star status in real life, we can somehow compensate for it in the game.

Some people will immediately argue that it’s an illusion, that any kind of notion of being “special” in WoW is completely false and just pathetic, pulling out the “it’s just a game” argument. Yeah, I know. You’re sort of right. But if you achieve the same state of mind and somehow experience a boost of your self confidence, what’s the big harm in it?

So I don’t really condemn the need many players have to become noticed and feel special. However I keep coming back to the question: where do we get the sparkles from? How do we become stars in WoW? Who decides what is a star and on what criteria?

Star status from gear
There is a quite widespread idea in the community that Star status comes from rare shiny gear, at least if you’re reading the discussions about the upcoming changes to the badge system.

Mind you, some players are just fine with the changes, seeing it as a great opportunity to gear up alts and get good raiders who for some reason (like a temporary break) are behind the gear curve a chance to catch up smoothly.

But quite a few of the raiders, if not the majority, are displaying signs of frustration. They fear that their Ulduar gear will become trivialized in the same moment as the badge gear is released. Everyone will be wearing t8.5 pieces and there’s no way to tell how it was earned – by through hard work and effort taking out the keepers or by mindless farming of 5-man heroics.

They fear that they won’t sparkle as they used to. Will they be noticed and admired anymore? Or will they become as faceless and impersonal as any ST borg?

And now we have come to the point when I have to tell you the sad truth.

You weren’t very much noticed in the first place. At least not by me. You were faceless before the next patch and you’ll stay faceless after the next one, unless you do something about it.

Showing off in Dalaran
I can’t help laughing a bit when I read about how you enjoy walking around in Dalaran, showing off your shiny Ulduar gear and I shake my head in disbelief. Honestly, when I’m in the mage capital, I don’t pay much attention to you or to any other player whatsoever around me. I’m totally focused on doing the errands that need to be done, be it delivering a dailiy fishing quest or taking the portal to Wintergrasp, and then get out of the lag feast as soon as possible.

I definitely couldn’t be bothered to stop inspect anyone, neither for gear, nor for comparing achievements. I may notice a title above your head, if it’s one of the most exclusive and hard-to-obtain ones. But that’s about it.

What about your good looks then? Isn’t there any way to catch the attention of Larísa, at least if you move your butt to the less laggy Ironforge?

Well, if you think I’ll go “oohh” as I see your tier 8.5 outfit, you’re dead wrong. Most of the Northrend gear looks pretty much the same to me. I can’t tell one thing from the other.

To make me notice you, you would have to wear something that really sticks out, such a The Twin Blades of Azzinoth.

Once again I come think about our realm clown Cacknoob. He is quite a familiar sight to most Alliance EU Stormrage players, always standing on the bridge of IF in his X-52 Rocket helm. I don’t claim he’s a star (even though his guild is running a campaign for him to become president). But at least he has managed to build himself a trademark.

If you want to be remembered for your looks I suggest that you rather go for elegance or originality than for gear stats.

How to sparkle
To all of you who are desperate to sparkle and stand out from the crowd, no matter how, I send the following messages: forget abut the ordinary epics. You’ll never sparkle in it, no matter in what manner you have attained it.

There are other ways to shine.

• You can shine by doing things for the community on your server, arranging guild pugs old world raids to get achievements, which you announce on your realm forums.
• You can make yourself a name by making innovative and awesome guild events, such as the officers in our guild did. (We even got a post about our guild at http://www.wow.com/, isn’t that quite a bit more epic than showing off your 8.5 tier set?)
• You can specialize deeply into some aspect of the game. Become The Autority of Lore and share your knowledge with anyone who’s interested. Take up the competition with the goblins of your realm and become The Master of AH. Find up some different way to play the game, such as those who have levelled to 80 without dying or without killing any creature or without wearing any gear and then tell the world about it.
• You can start an awesome blog that will give Gevlon some competition for the subscribers.
  

But the best way to sparkle is probably the least spectacular and the one that takes most effort.

You can just work silently on becoming a reliable, easygoing and skilled player who is an asset to any guild and a dream member of any PUG arranged on your server. You can make your way into as many friends lists as possible.

It won’t happen over night, but trust me, slowly the word will spread and there will be sparkles around you, you’ll get whispers and greetings and invites.

And best of all: those sparkles are magic. They don’t get outdated at the next patch.

The post where Larísa goes nuts

I’m not known to be the kind of blogger who explodes into angry rants about the state of the game. I tend to take things pretty calmly, focusing on cultivating my garden, to quote Voltaire.

I generally see WoW from a bright side – trying to understand and accept the motives Blizzard have for their decisions in how to develop the game and run the show. Sometimes I’ve been blamed for being a fan boy. So be it. I’m a happy player who loves Azeroth, the community and almost everything around it.

But the other day I read a blog post which really brought me out of balance. I went nuts. I suppose I’m not as enraged as Ixobelle can get from time to time, but it’s not far from it.

The post that made me so angry is very well written in itself, but it was published on a blog that doesn’t get much attention, so I thought I should give it some link love and make a contribution to bring it out to the light.

The Rage of Larísa

It’s Jormundgard at Yggdrasil, who in the post “Don’t be tactical, you might get banned” tells the story about some guys who found a way how to kill Flame Leviathan on just four people and got banned for doing it. According to Blizzard this is an exploit.

I suggest now that you go and read the original post, where you’ll also get links to the full story including screenshots of dialogues with Blizzard representatives.

Have you read it? Fine. Now listen to the rage of Larísa: This is freaking unbelievable and I agree entirely with Jormundgard (even though I don’t quite see the parallel to the Martin Fury incident, which is a different story imo).

These guys haven’t made any exploit. They haven’t cheated; they haven’t used non-allowed addons or done anything illegal as far as I can see. All they have done is using their brains, solving the boss encounter riddle in a different way than the developers expected them to.

Their crime was that they didn’t do like 99 percent of the players who are too lazy or dumb to try to find out a solution of their own, instead of mindlessly doing exactly the same thing as everyone else does. They turned their back to the Tankspot mantra. They did it their own way. And for this they should be punished? Hey, no! If anything they should be praised! Why not award them with an achievement:

“You’ve got brains!” - Defeat a raid boss without using a strategy suggested by Wowwiki, Tankspot or Bosskiller. And why not an "Einstein" title to go with it?

The alternative

But let’s say that Blizzard has right in one aspect. Let’s say that strategy makes the boss encounter too easy and it not be the experience Blizzard had intended it to be. I can understand that they don’t want FL to be 4-man-farmed in the future by people who didn’t come up with this strategy for themselves, but just picked up the idea as it was spread on the Internet. They have reasons to stop the followers.

Even so, this isn't how they should deal with the problem. I know Blizzard has every right in the world to do whatever they want (as stated in the terms that we accept every time they apply a new patch). It’s their game, they are the gods. But still: I think they’re lazy and doing it all wrong in this case.

They didn’t need to ban those players. They could have made adjustments in the encounter making it impossible to do it this way. No one could argue about that. They guys who did a cleaver thing would have had their fun and got screenshots and public recognition for being so smart. There would be no further easy-mode downing. No harm would be done. Everyone happy, possibly with the exception for some lazy developers at Blizzard who didn’t want to be bothered with putting in some extra work in that encounter.

Blizzard chose to ban the smart guys. They don’t want us to think. They want us to click on the buttons that DBM and Tankspot tell us we should click. They want us to spend hours and hours travelling to cities all over the world, over and over again, to eat candy, see elders or as now honour fires. They want us to collect tier 8.5 gear by doing 5-man instances that we outgeared months ago. What does this say about how they look on the players? How stupid do they want us to be? Are they in conspiracy with the Cable TV distributors, thinking we're spending too much of our attention on WoW when we could watch TV at the same time if the game just didn't requite any kind of brain activity?

This is “just a game” (sorry Elnia :)). But I’m afraid the story also tells us something about the world. Where are we heading?

I’m seriously concerned.

And mad.

My pink pigtails are glowing. Can you see it?

Technical issues

If you can read this post you’re not the one I’m trying to reach. Does this sound cryptic?

The thing is that it seems as if my old domain address http://pinkpigtailinn.blogspot.com doesn’t work. It used to redirect visitors to www.pinkpigtailinn.com, but not so any longer. I don’t know if this is a temporary issue or a permanent change of things. And no matter what it is – I have no idea what to do about it. So I just want to get out the word: please change your bookmarks and links to PPI to the new domain address, or my voice will be lost in the eternal sea of Internet.

But how could I get in touch with the ones who need to know it and tell them that their virtual pub hasn't closed, just moved? I have no idea.

Proper posts are incoming later this week. Don’t lose hope!

Cheers from your innkeeper