Atlas shrugged. For real

In 1957, the visionary Ayn Rand published her book describes a strike of top professionals refusing to be exploited by the society. The title refers to the people who hold the society like Atlas holds the World in the Greek mythology. The strike of the experts remained a myth, a wish held by many. I wrote several times that it is the only way to end the oppression of the inactives.

Somehow even I did not notice that this miracle just happened: Czech doctors started submitting resignation notices to their trade union. With almost half of the doctors practicing in hospitals signed these, the trade union could force the government (the oppressing arm of the inactives) to give them a stellar 60% rise.

They did not protest, burn dustbins like the occupy Wall Street idiots. They weren't even rude. Their campaign slogan could be translated into "Thanks for all, we are leaving now". Simply they wrote legal notices that they don't want to work here anymore. They were considered evil and selfish by the media and the common people. They had no political, financial or media support, nothing. Yet they won simply because the society can't operate without them and there is no legal way to force them to keep working. The loophole of the democratic oppression system is that everyone has the right to join the oppressors: the inactives, by simply quitting his job. That's what they did. And won.

Now Slovak and Hungarian doctors are doing the same. But not only doctors are capable of this. Most highly qualified experts are irreplacable. The strike of the dustmen can be broken by recruiting random unemployed guys. Good luck using this against IT programmers. There are about 2-3 guys in the country who could do my job if I'd quit and even they would need months to pick up the ongoing projects. I think I'll do what no pro-capitalist did before: join the trade union of my field and try to convince them to prepare mass resignations as the doctors. Our sectors provide almost 10% of the GDP of the country, employing less than 0.5% of the population. We do 20x more than the average guy but we definitely don't get 20x more money. Not even close. It's time to shrug.

You know what would be the real Atlas shrugged? If business owners would start writing termination notices: lower the tax to its half by the end of the year or we simply terminate our companies. End them with bankrupcy. That would shake the World, end this disgusting system where every useless idiot has the same power as the people who provide food, heat, homes, health care to everyone.

Why there is tanking shortage?

Countless posts analyze this question, including some from me. They are all wrong as they try to give some sort of social explanation like "responsibility" (or the non-reason "itz no fun lol"). It is wrong, especially in the dancy raids of today. The flyer on Alysrazor or the driver of Rhyolith is no less wipes the raid with fail. Actually everyone can wipe the raid with fail.

The "25-man raids only need 2-3 tanks, not 5" is also a bad example. At first most people don't raid 25. Secondly, if it would be the problem, Blizzard would already fixed it by forcing 25-raids to have 5 tanks by a 20 second cast, 80 seconds duration "you must not tank" debuff.

The problem is completely in game-design, and can be easily fixed. The first design problem is indeed the "you must not tank" debuff. It's a well-known mechanic forcing using more than one tank. One tank can't tank Occu'thar because he get searing shadows debuff that increases shadow damage taken, rendering him one-shottable. This is a terrible design because it does not create tank spots. It creates a spot for a rage-starved damage dealer in tank spec and gear. Because that's what the tanks do half in their time. Would you like bosses throw -50% damage done stacking debuffs to damage dealers forcing them to spend half of the fight off-healing (with bandages for rogues)?!

To make people like tanking, we must allow them to tank instead of doing pitiful damage half time. There is a mechanic for it, used by Marrowgar, Patchwerk, Gruul and others: multiple tanks are needed front of the boss and his damage is distributed between them. However it alone wouldn't fix the problem or would be introduced already. With this system, the second (third, fourth, fifth) tank are merely used to avoid the first tank to be one-shotted and to allow healers use economic group-heals instead of single-target heals. The tanks themselves are not needed to do anything better, they are merely needed to exist. You can offtank Marrowgar while AFK-autofollow on the main tank.

Let's see why there are no tanking meters at all? What do the tanks do? Mitigate damage. One could easily create a "mitigate meter" that calculate how much less damage the tank got compared to a plate DD. The more they mitigate, the less healers have to heal. So this value can be considered healing, could be merged to healing meters. This case adding a new tank would allow the group to have less healers. Until the optimum point (5 tanks, 5 healers in 25-men), adding one more tank would give more healing/mitigation than adding a healer. Also, tanks could compete on the meters if the bosses would attack them evenly. The 500% threat mechanic made aggro irrelevant anyway, could be completely removed from the game, replaced with a spec-given "tank aura": the single-target attacks hit randomly one of those with tank aura (with some Magmaw-like mechanics against kiting), the cleaves hit every tank (or everyone in frontal cone) equally. Since all tanks would get the same incoming damage, they would be differentiated by mitigation. A better tank would mitigate more, climbing higher on the meters.

The problem with this is that mitigation is percentage-based and the incoming damage is much higher than player DPS/HPS. That's why there are multiple healers on a tank. A 10% undergeared/underperforming tank need all healers to do 10% more, while a 10% underperforming DD need just one DD to do 10% more (or all other 4/15 DDs to do 2.5/0.7% more) to carry him. This would be very unwelcoming to new tanks and trivializing to overgearing ones. A single overgeared tank could carry a whole raid. They handled this with diminishing returns. A seriously undergeared tank mitigates only a little less than the normal, and the overgearing mitigate only a little more, making gear and skill progress invisible and irrelevant to tanks.

The solution would be a fix-value mitigation system. I mean avoidance would be talent-given and equal to all tanks, a naked tank would avoid the same as the top geared. No gear or skill gives more avoidance. Armor value would take X fix value from every physical hits (so 10K from both a 20K and a 100K attack), and using skills would create absorb shields modified by stats that also absorbs all damage until a fixed value. This absorption-mitigation model could be normalized with heal and damage, so his "mitigation per second" would be half of the HPS of an equally geared and skilled healer while also doing 50% of the DPS of an equally geared and skilled DD. This would prevent both tank stacking and understacking: Until mitigation optimum it's preferred to bring one more tank than 1/2 healer + 1/2 DD as he does the same damage and healing, while can be healed with group and smart heals increasing the efficiency of healers. After the optimum a new tank would mean that all tanks receive sub-optimal part of the damage, so they start going rage-starved and their damage drops. Seriously over the optimum they would start to "overmitigate", their shields would expire unused.

With this model tanks could tank all the fight, they would show up on the meters and could compete with the other roles, being able to be proud of their performance.

Smart Chinese, stupid Greeks

Greece keep getting insane amount of money from the EU, mostly from Germany. They are demanded to perform budget cuts and they do so. Yet the Greek budget looks worse and worse, now the analysts now say that there is more than 50% chance that they will go default on their loan (practically bankrupt) in 2012Q1. In the same time, despite negative expectations, the Chinese economy does near 10% growth and so good export-import balance that the USA wants to introduce some toll against them claiming that the Chinese money is artificially undervalued.

What is the difference between these countries? Surely not the quality of the government. In China there is still one-party dictatorship, even if the key members seem to be enlightened. This system failed terribly in Eastern Europe. Also the Chinese bureaucrats are infamous for their corruption, which definitely doesn't help their country. While Greek politicians are corrupted too, they are not much worse than the ones polluting the EU and USA. The Greek people are not undereducated and I'm absolutely sure that there is no "genetic laziness". The problem is not even in the tax rates, the holy grail of Libertarians and neo-cons, as the Chinese taxes aren't low at all.

The difference is in social transfers. In China, there is no pension system at all, while Greece has one of the most supportive. In China the welfare system is pretty low, practically only prevent famine, while the Greek system is large even compared to Europe.

The Chinese keep the money within the circles of productive people. The taxes are spent on infrastructural advancements (high speed railways, highways) and the army, which create at least jobs. In Europe, especially in the countries in trouble the taxes are mostly given to various inactives.

Funnily the actions made on the demands of the EU are making the economy worse, despite they make the government spending smaller. They fire government employees and sell government property, while the social transfers are not touched. This way the relative size of the social transfers just grow. The fired teachers, firefighters, policemen and even the bureaucrats did some productive work, while as unemployed they do nothing and still get money (even if less than their old salary).

The solution to save Greece is obvious: drastically cut welfare, pensions, free health care, while keeping up or even increasing the Government sector (especially the police to counter riots).

Why don't they do it? Why don't the EU demand it? Because they are all under the control of the inactives. Funnily, the corrupted Chinese communist dictators provide less of a dictatorship than the European democracies, simply because the mentioned bureaucrats are more similar to us, working people than the inactives who dominate the Western elections.

Greece will go bankrupt because the holders of the true power, the inactives will not give up an inch from their loot and want to solve the crisis by forcing their "slaves", the taxpayers to work more for less. They won't. The highly skilled will flee, the unskilled but hard-working simply can't.

"We're not douchebags"

I read the transcript of the press conference on Blizzcon. In this, Jay Wilson from the Diablo III team stated: "We're not really concerned about making 1-60 some ridiculously long grind. We're not douchebags".


What? Making players playing being a douchebag? This tells much about the attitude of developers towards gamers. But they are not evil per se. There is at least a loud minority or even a majority to blame for this. This developer believes that players hate playing and only do it to get pixel rewards to feel good about themselves. Or alternatively, Diablo III will be a terrible game, which wouldn't be surprising considering it's free to play. I bet on the first option.


The "boring grind" attitude is surprising even in WoW, where the endgame seriously differ from the trivialized leveling. It's completely possible that someone enjoys PvP or raiding while hate to level up. That's bad design on its own, but here it's not the point. Diablo III "endgame" won't be any different from the leveling. We will be wandering in the same scenarios, killing the same monsters, with the same group size. Obviously the Inferno monster will be harder than the first imp in normal act 1, but this is definitely the same game. If someone enjoys doing it, he will enjoy doing it.


However the Hell Baal runs of Diablo II tell otherwise. Hell Baal was the endboss of the game. If you killed him, you won Diablo II. You even got a nice cutscene. But people kept bashing Hell Baal again and again to gain more levels and especially to gain more gear. They duped in large to get even more gear. Why? Only for pure vanity. After you killed Hell Baal there was nothing more to do in the game. Yet people wanted more gear and levels, just for itself, to show it off to derive a twisted sense of "l33tness" from it.


This attitude explains and predicts lot of gaming design features. Developers don't want to be douchebags, so they won't make the players do anything hard or long to get the shinies. It of course affects us too as we can't play anything immersive or challenging, unless it's under the radar, not providing new shinies, therefore uninteresting to the target audience.


But who are they? No, not the kids. Kids like pandas and sparkling ponies, but don't really care about numerical improvements of their characters. Otherwise they wouldn't be ungemmed, unenchanted and mis-specced. The target audience are the socials who want nothing but being respected and liked by peers. They consider everything status symbol and collect it, in the hope that it will make them special, or at least "not worse" than the "community". Funnily the people actually think of them as no-lifers, since anyone who has something they don't must be playing 40 hours a week.


Remember that the "i got an uber sword lololol" guy is a person in real life. We have to handle these creatures both in game (any game) and in real life. No point fighting them, they are a mindless swarm of zombies. It's much better to abuse their primitive mind. There is a slogan used to this: "I have a Bridge in Brooklyn for sale to them". I have better one: "I have a bunch of pixels for sale in the Diablo III RMAH"!


PS: remember fellow goblins, we are not game developers. When we are dealing with them, we can and shall be douchebags!

Mists of Pandaria: a new hope

The recent changes turn WoW upside down on several ways, but the largest is not the talent system (that's just handy), nor the pandarens and monks (we seen blood elves, goblins, death knights before), but the idea that the new territory raid bosses won't be world-threatening monsters, rather just local villains. We are now officially not heroes, just busy bees in Azeroth. Very elegant solution to the problem that arthasdklol wants to be a hero too, despite he is obviously unable to. If no one is a hero, no one whines to be one.


While Tobold and others welcome 5.0 as the glory of "casual" playing (read: morons and slackers who expect rewards for showing up), I see the opposite: a hope for good, challenging and well-designed raiding.


Arena is extremely competitive and "casual players" are rated to 900. Zero sum PvP, with rating loss for losing. The nightmare of "accessibility" and "having fun" people. Yet no one whines, because the feature itself is irrelevant in the mainstream WoW culture. If you are gladiator, the people may tell "Yeah it's great I guess, but hey, check out my new mount!". Arena can be competitive because there are no negative social consequences for sucking. The "community" doesn't look down on you for being at 900 MMR.


By removing epicness from raiding, they can make it competitive and great without offending the "Kung fu panda woot!" crowd. Good raiders doing good raids will be just as ignored as gladiators. The average players will be (as always was) unable to raid, but they will no longer care!


Placing the endgame below the radar would be a masterful choice. Remember, the problem always was that the M&S wants to be on the "top". With WotLK and Cataclysm Blizzard tried to let them, but failed for obvious reasons. Now they might redefine "top" into pet combat and panda dance and cutest mount, therefore pulling away the lolkid attention from serious features.


Am I staying? Why? Because it's the largest game existing and for better or worse, it's a huge social experiment in which I'm deeply interested in.

Permanent RBG page and RBG progress

We successfully made the turn from raiding focus to RBG. It wasn't easy as in the first times we simply did not have enough people online (now we RBG every day from 19:00 up to 21-22, from 16:00 on weekends) and had to pick up trade people. Most of them are plain crap of course so we lost rating bigtime. However from the /trade we finally collected those who were useful and could do guild RBGs again, reaching the 1000 guild RBG win achievement, that got us more PvP-ers. Since then we have a winning streak as we climb back on rating.

The largest problem is that lolkids are keep spawning PvP-guilds that collect new people who could be useful. Hopefully the new achievement and the upcoming rating ones will help us prove clearly where the PvP-ers of Agamaggan-EU should go. Of course we are still recruiting new rerolls and transferers. I expect to be able to run 2 RBGs at the same time, letting even blue PvP geared people get experience, max conquest and good honor/hour. Remember, that you win 50% of your games, so the second team will win too, just on low rating. Players will be selected to the first team based on rating (and class balance of course).

Here you can find the strategy page that is expected to be known by the guild members and hopefully useful for others too.

I hope Blizzard will fix raiding, till then, we'll PvP hard.

Do we need hard modes at all?

After addressing the dance problem, we can also ask "do we need hard modes at all?" in a good high-end "hard working" raiding? I mean can we make one difficulty that is challenging to the very best but also accessible to casuals (not morons and slackers, but people with little play time).

The answer is clearly: "no, we just need the gear upgrades be meaningful". Let me outline how gearing would look in the raiding scheme I'd design:

• Every tier is equally stronger than the previous. So full T₁ is 10% above full T₀, T₅ is 50% stronger than full T₀. It provides a form of diminishing returns as full T₁ is 10% above full T₀ but full T₁₁ is just 5% above full T₁₀.
• Raids drop about 1 piece/person for full clear (8 bosses, 40 people, 5 loot/boss)
• Dungeons only give starter (T₀) gear, except for one slot, for example necklace. T₁ necklaces are given by the endboss of the dungeons published with the game, and with every new tier, new dungeon(s) are released too, giving current tier necklaces. New tier dungeons are "harder" in term of output demand but not harder assuming gear progress, so the T₅ dungeon in T₃ gear is just as hard as the T₃ dungeon in T₁ gear. These dungeons are doable in gear 2 tiers below them.
• Another slot, for example back is available from badges that are rewarded by both dungeons and previous tier raid. So you can get T₅ back by running T₅ dungeon or the T₄ raid, while T₄ back is rewarded by T₄ dungeon or the T₃ raid. The highest tier raid provides badges that has no vendor yet, it can be used when the next tier arrives.
• The rings (2 slots) are raiding BoE. Every tier of raid drops various rings of its own tier and you can pick them up on the AH.
• Belts are provided at exalted at the faction that is involved in the story of the tier, and gives the daily quests. They give lower tier waists at lower rep (so T₅ faction gives T₅ waist on exalted, T₄ on revered, T₃ on honored, T₂ on friendly. The daily quests are soloable in gear 3 tiers below them and reputation is rewarded by doing the dungeon or the raid itself (allowing top raiders to fully skip dailies).
• Boots are crafted BoE, recipes are dropped in the raid and provided by the faction on exalted. Besides common materials (like leathers for leather boots), one would have to get orbs provided by the current tier raid, dungeon and badge vendor.
• Finally one more slot, wrists are available by the seasonal boss, like Headless horseman or Coren Direbrew who aren't too challenging, you just have to wait for their holyday (simple way to reward subscribing every month)..
• The rest of the slots (head, shoulder, chest, hands, legs, trinkets, weapon, offhand, ranged) are raid BoPs.

In this scheme, you can get 7/17 top tier gear without ever stepping into the current raid. Of course you can't be 7/17 instantly, as reputation needs time to be built up, dungeons drop only 1 necklace for 5 people, badges have to be collected and BoEs are initially very expensive. However just by playing casually, you can get 7/17 of current tier. Since these are mostly accessory slots with no weapons, they cover about 30% of the stats.

Let's see how it affects various player groups, when the current tier is 10:

• New, alone player just reached top level: he can do the original dungeons with LFD, buy T₈ BoEs which are dirt cheap, so he can bypass T₀ power in a few hours. At this point he can start doing T₂ dungeons. By the time T₂ necklace drops, the other bosses will give him T₀ in every slots, while he has T₂ necklace, T₃ back (from emblems), T₈ rings and back, giving him T_1.2 in a few days. With this he can already LFR T₁ and T₂ raids while running T₃ dungeons for necklace and emblems. He can also start running T₄ faction for rep and gold. Doing so for only 2 lockouts, would net him a revered T₃ waist, T₄ back, T₃ neck, enough money to upgrade the BoEs to T₉ which still cost 1-2K gold, 2 T₁ and 2T₂ raid drops, and he is already over T₂ gear. The next 2 lockouts therefore he can do T₄ dungeons, T₅ faction, T₂ - T₃ raids, and on average he will encounter the seasonal holiday, so he'll finish these weeks at T₃. Practically he can gain a tier every 2 weeks, while one tier last 3 months (12 weeks) for the early player, so the new one experiences the full content 6x faster.
• New player who has T₈ geared casual friends just doing T₉ content or new alt of such people: He wants to play with his friends and they are ready to carry him. They give him T₉ BoEs, carry him in T₉ dungeons, T₁₀ faction dailies in group, T₇ - T₈ raids where they pass on most loot. While playing with them for a month, he get T₉ neck, T₁₀ back, T₉ BoEs, T₁₀ waist and wrist, 4x T₈ + 5xT₇ raid items, pushing him to T_7.5, nearly where his friends are, who can now carry him to their current content.
• Casual player one tier behind: He is average T₈ geared and the introduction of new tier pushed the prices of T₉ BoEs down. He can also adventure into the current tier dungeons and do the current tier faction. Without stepping into current tier raid he can get a current tier back, neck, waist, improving his gear enough to safely be within the margin of the T₉ raids (which is designed for T₈), getting him some drops. Since he doesn't do anything too hard, his gearing will be slow, but by the end of T₁₀ he can surely push his gear to T₉, maybe even doing the early bosses of T₁₀
• Non-HC raider. He has T_8.7 geared when the patch hits as he could not farm full T₉ gear previous season. He instantly jumps on the current dungeons and faction, while keep running T₉ raids for the remaining drops. After a month he finishes rep and the BoE prices have dropped enough to buy T₁₀. Even without the seasonal holiday, he elevates his gear to T_9.1, allowing him to finally step into T₁₀ raid. While he will first have to leave after the first boss, the few drops allow him to slowly upgrade his gear and hit the performance demand for later bosses. After several weeks, but still before the next patch hits he will kill the endboss, finishing the content.
• HC raider. He has full T₉ at start, but his performance is still not enough for bleeding edge raiding as his performance is "just" 99% and his class/spec is "just average". While he surely do tries on the first new boss, his focus is the new dungeon and faction. He instantly goes to the back vendor with his raid badges, He also eagerly watch the AH for the first 50K BoE to arrive. After the first week he'll get the neck and back item, pushing him to T_9.09 which make him good for the first boss who is tuned for 100% performance (9.09/9*0.99 > 1). He gets 1/8 drop (someone in his guild will get if not him so the raid power grows anyway). Next week, his busy dungeoning and questing gives him exalted rep to the current faction and the bleeding edge raiders finally get the recipe dropped for his boots. He has orbs from dungeon and farmed enough gold to pay the shamelessly high crafter fee. With new boots, waist and the drop from the first week, he gets to T_9.18 allowing him to kill the second boss, who is tuned for 101% T₉. From there they can kill a new boss every second week killing the endboss around week 7-8.
• Bleeding edge raider. Full T₉, flavor of the month spec (101%), 99.9% performance, new back at start, allowing him to kill the first boss (100% tuned) instantly, and with the 1/8 drop from the 101% tuned second. After they hit the brick wall, they jump on the dungeon to get the necklace, making the third boss just killable, assuming that everyone in the raid has flavor of the month. Next week he'll get the rep and the recipe for boots, making them ready to get 4 bosses. From there they can get a new boss every week, allowing killing the last one in a month.

The main point is that only by playing you can increase your power to go beyond the current brick wall, however most power still comes from raiding itself, rewarding it. And this would be the one thing motivating to every players. By working on their character, they will be able to defeat the same challenges as the very best players.


PS: while, for simplicity I talk about series of Patchwerks, it doesn't have to be so monotonous. Adds, duo bosses, enrage phases, various resistances, unavoidable raid damage and such could easily give unique characteristics to the bosses.

Does dance have place in hard modes?

People keep commenting that there are output demands in hard modes, despite I have serious doubts that it's really that high. I still remember Maloriak HC that we did with 4 healers, 2 tanks and still pushed it to P2 too early. But let's accept their statement that hard modes need output and dance, while normals need only dance.

I doubt that anyone says it's a good design, considering that leveling needs absolutely no dance, while it needs a little but still non-zero output. You can't level up with zero DPS but you can level up not moving at all while in combat. So demanding high output in normals and introducing dance in hard modes would make more sense.

But it's not the question today. The question is: do hard modes need any dance? Can meaningful hard modes be created without dance? The problem to be addressed is that in the world top 1000 guilds people are above 99% of their theoretical output concerning rotation and specs. We can also assume that they gear up completely in the previous tier. So when a new tier opens with no dance to learn, all these guilds kill the first N bosses and no one can kill the N+1th boss. Next week with their gear from the first boss they all can kill him or none can. This would clearly be a bad design as being #1 would be meaningless, it would only mean your server came up first after patch. It would kill all top competition which is clearly bad.

To prove that a "hard working" game needs no dexterity element, I have to create a raiding design that allows the best people to meaningfully compete and win only by their "hard working" skill.

We know one answer for that, the one in Vanilla: you must get various consumables and Felwood stuff for raiding. However it is grindy, meaning easy and boring. Farming is limited by travel speed and not skill or even gear. This is a bad answer. It is also bad because every top guild would have them all, so the bosses would still die together.

My idea is class/spec balance. While the game must be balanced, it cannot be perfectly balanced anyway. There will always be a "spec of the month" that beats all other specs and classes. This natural imbalance offers itself as the perfect high-end challenge. If the buff/nerf criteria is that every damage dealer specs must be within 1% of their average, it means that there are specs that is 1% above the average and there are specs that are 1% below. The bosses therefore can be tuned up to 101% of perfect performance with BiS gear from last tier, and they are still doable on the first week by a guild that stacks the best specs.

This means that to be successful on the bleeding edge, you need alts with gear from last tier and good experience playing them. This has huge diminishing returns, as on average a randomly chosen spec is average. If you have the best spec of the patch, you get only 1% power increase, and the cost is leveling up and gearing up an alt to teeth. This therefore doesn't affect anyone below the bleeding edge, as until you play your class perfectly and have BiS from last tier, playing your main gives you more power than playing an alt. However to be in World top 10, you must have alts, geared to full current tier gear giving enough work for even the most obsessed no-lifer.

The purpose of raiding

I continue seeking the deeper reasons why raiding is so messed up in WoW. I guess one of them is that Blizzard totally misunderstood the reason why people raid. No, it's not about "finishing the game/story". If people would be motivated by that, they would not accept the fact that you cannot finish it. C'thun is still happily sitting in AQ40, you can go and check him out, despite he was "defeated" 4 years and 3 expansions ago. If people would care about the story, they would demand the old content changed to reflect storyline changes.

It also cannot be a "fun rewarding activity" itself, as people would not accept the weekly lockout if raiding would be fun. Just think that Starcraft or HL-CS would have a weekly lockout on maps. I have seen no uproar about Blizzard limiting our access to "fun content". When they decided that the lockouts for 10, 25, normal and HC would be merged, so you can kill a boss once instead of 4 times (limiting your access to 1/4), all we heard was relief: "finally we don't have to kill them so many times".

The purpose of raiding is to test the players, to separate the winners from the "noobs" and to provide proof of their goodness. The raider go raid to come out and be displayed as winner. For primitive ones, it manifests in gear, that's why they worship and ninja it. For mature players it is the progress, the kill itself, knowing (as opposed to showing off) that "I did what others did not". Even for me it was the test and proof of the goodness of my ideas. Raiding in blues wasn't fun. Posting about it, reading the theorycraft that this or that boss is unkillable and then throw the killshot into their face was fun.

The reason of raiding is definitely not social. The popularity of the totally asocial mega-perk-guilds, the popularity of the often openly anti-social LFD proves that people would not go out of their way to play with friends. They rather pick an available stranger than wait 10 mins for a "friend" to show up.

The current raiding is unpopular because it cannot serve this "test, prove and display skills":

• The dance is binary: you survive it, or you do not. There is not good, better, best; just OK and not OK.
• The dance is random: you can stand in one spot being totally oblivious about anything and still survive Ragnaros, if you are lucky enough to not get a single bomb, smash and such. You can on the other hand get a Rageface+Immo combo on the easiest boss and you are down unless other players save you.
• There is no glory in defeat: If Brutallus wiped you at 3% and you were damage first, you could go home proud or use the log to get in a higher guild. If some guy messed up the little spiders and Beth healed to full P2 start, you just go away angry and frustrated.
• There is no place for personal excellence: 10 OK player fare better at Rhyolith than 9 Method members + 1 clueless newbie. That one guy alone can make the good Lord drink some magma. You will not save the day. You will not provide a narrow win by doing more damage/healing/20 sec tanking without heal. No matter how good you are, there is nothing you can do about others failing the dance.
• There is no need for personal excellence: if the others don't fail, the boss will drop. If you do OK-ish DPS or you just beaten the DPS record of your spec, it doesn't matter. You just gained 10-20 seconds, while the enrage was several minutes away. A good DPS or healer is nice to have, speeds things up, but doesn't really matter.
• Gear rewards are worthless: You killed Ragnaros HC and got his loot? Wonderful, you are better geared than anyone in the server for 1 more month, when valor points coming from facerolling LFD buys arthasdklol equal or better ones.
• Gear rewards are not even needed: since your DPS doesn't matter, your gear doesn't matter.

If you keep the purpose in mind, you'll see why the constant progression Patchwerk (+adds) fight is the best. No, it's not fun, but it doesn't have to be. No one expects fun there. It tests and proves individual skill (damage/healing meter shows personal worth), it's reliable (bad RNG can't make you damage below the tank), your performance depends on only you, gear rewards increase your performance and last long.

Also, the success of LFD makes the biggest TBC issue invalid: if there are 6 consecutive tiers, but there is LFR, you can find a group for T3 progress on Monday 10 AM as there are more than a million other players out there, so even if just 0.01% is interested in T3, there is a 10K playerbase to find you groupmates.

Gold stealing addon

It's a random idea that came to my mind. I of course don't go steal gold, but for goldsellers it would be a masterful scam.

The idea came to me when I was using the gold bid helping addon. One of its features is that I can mail the pot to everyone with one click. No need to open trades with 9 people, typing the number, press trade. Great feature. However this one click mailing allows an addon to send my gold to anyone.

So here comes the scam: the goldseller hacks into the account of the writer of an addon that uses the mailbox, picks up an abandonned addon or writes a good one from scratch. This addon functions normally, until the goldseller doesn't write a coded message on some channel the addon watches. This message tells the addon who shall get the gold. Next time you go to the mailbox, the addon sends some of your gold to the goldseller. If it's not a large sum, (like never bigger than 2% of total or 1K in any day), it can run for long before anyone start to get suspicious that some of his gold is missing. Or he can go all out and send lot of gold, and the recipient sells the gold quickly before any GM reads the first victims complain and parse trough the logs.

The addon could also steal materials, BoEs (kitten) from your backpack and send it to the goldseller.

Blizzard should quickly close this vulnerablity. Until then: watch out for what addons you use and keep your deposits on an alt, keeping only daily liquid on your often used characters.

The dance is inaccessible

Everything Blizzard did since TBC was under the flag of accessibility and casual friendliness. Here I'm not telling my opinion about accessibility and casual friendliness or talk about the people who really benefit from it. I just point out that the dance-based boss mechanics are the worst thing for accessibility. Brutallus was more casual friendly than Alysrazor.

The old raiding was output-centered. The boss died if the DDs did enough damage to kill the boss before enrage and the healers could keep the raid alive until it happened. The output was determined by gear, enchantments, consumables knowing the proper rotation. It was called "inaccessible" since players had to farm to get gear and read up on rotations. If the raid did not farm BT clear, they had little chance at Brutallus.

The new model is dance centered, the boss dies if the people did not die before him in the various forms of mechanics. While "fire on the ground" existed since Vanilla, it was straightforward and non-obtrusive. Practically it was a visually obvious fire on the ground that people had to run away from. Only "morons standing in the fire" failed on that. Compare it with even Shannox: there are several kind of traps while there is a grid of little fires everywhere, covered by the various healer AoE textures.

The dance model is called "accessible" because anyone can jump on it. A new lvl 85 in some 353-JP-PvP mixture doesn't do significantly worse than the same player in full 391. Consumables are coming from guild cauldrons, potions can be used once every battle, so you can come raiding without preparation.

Except that you'll die in the first mechanic. I've yet to see a player who finishes Shannox alive in the first few times he sees it. I've yet to see a new tank who doesn't do atrocious movement on Shannox wiping the raid. And it's just damn Shannox, the first boss available in Firelands.

Gear, consumables, enchantments and rotation reading can be done outside of raid. One can be prepared for Patchwerk without ever seeing him. You cannot be prepared for Alysrazor outside of fighting her. Learning Alysrazor can only be done wiping on her. And by doing so, wiping the raid. A new player on the boss means several wipes, unless it's so undertoned that it's 9-mannable. Bringing a new player, I mean someone who did not kill that particular boss, not a new 85 is a curse. I saw raids of individually weak or outright terrible players killing bosses that we couldn't. Why? Because they had a fixed roster, the same 10 people tried and tried again, until they learned the dance. It did not matter that in mixed BH PuGs our average players did 50-60% more damage, as we always had 2-3 new people who kept wiping us. That's why Rhyolith became the prime monster, receiving multiple nerfs. We first killed him #7000 after 4 tries pre-nerfs. We wiped almost 100 times in the following weeks because of people not being the same group, failing in lava, not knowing how to drive, switching too late and so on.

A guy in Karazhan gear could do 70% of the DPS of a full BT guy. So he worth 70% of him. After the rest of the raid got some SWP gear, doing 102% of BT performance, they could accept a new guy on Brutallus.

A guy who did not kill Alysrazor yet, worth exactly 0. He will die in P2, if he did not die in the fire of the rotating lava worms in P1. The problem is not that 0 is a smaller number than 70. The problem is that it is zero. The Kara guy worth something at Brutallus. No sane raid leader would try to 24 man Brutallus if they had a Kara geared applicant online. Maybe the raid did only 101% BT-DPS, so his 70% wasn't enough. But maybe it was. Definitely worth a shot. The new guy at Alysrazor is worthless. Actually less than worthless. He wastes feathers, a combat res (if someone is dumb enough to combat res him) and rolls on loot / receives DKP. It's better to leave a spot empty on a dance raid than taking a new person. Tell me, how many times you 9-8 manned Baradin Hold rather than giving a chance to someone?! Why? Because 9-man means 8 eyes, a newbie means an eye away from the raid.

And it's not just the numbers. It's also the personal experience. Imagine that Brutallus dies with the Kara guy. 6 seconds into enrage, but dead. If anyone, including the Kara guy would do just 1% less, they would wipe. The Kara guy knew that without him it couldn't be possible. He killed Brutallus agains all the odds. He proved himself to that guild and to anyone who knew that he did it. The others, who carried him also had to outdo themselves and could be proud of their damage meter position.

What about the same with Alysrazor? The new guy died in first tornado phase. His damage is below healer. He was dead weight, literally as he spent 90% of the time dead. The others also did nothing spectacular. They did the same as normally, just the fight last one more cycle longer. Which raid had more fun?

Raids that demand out-of raid preparation can be done by casual players, just after longer preparation time. Raids that demand learning inside the raid need veterans. Cataclysm was the most inaccessible raid since the existence of WoW, despite it was designed that way exactly to make it accessible.

But fear not, LFR-salvation is coming!

Misunderstandings regarding kittens

People celebrate or curse the "kitten", the new $10 pet. It is new because it can be traded on the AH. Blogposts are all over the place. They are all wrong. You don't even have to read them to know they are wrong. Writing about the kitten is itself wrong.

I did not want to write about the irrelevant kitten. I have to write about the people who believe the World (of Warcraft) will be turned upside down by the kitten. It won't. Some wannabe Warren Buffets will be poorer by $10 and richer with some experience. Here I can give you the experience for free.

You can't buy anything for kitten. Nothing. There isn't any NPC that accepts kitten. No player needs kitten. Kitten has near zero liquidity. To get gold for the kitten you must sell it to another player. Who will buy the kitten? A player who

• has gold
• want a completely useless vanity item
• rather spend gold than $10

This is an extremely small group already. To make it worse, the kitten will deflate in price without doubt as the production is infinite, but the demand is declining as those who got it won't get another. So every buyer with some clue will either wait or buy one in the Blizzard store. Those who have no clue has no gold at hand so they have to wait until they farm enough.

On the seller side there will be the swarms of Warren Buffet wannabes, undercutting each other on the kitten by 1c and yelling on each other for undercutting on them.

Blizzard is obviously good at marketing. It's not goldselling, it's a cute pet with the promise of goldselling. Lot of players will say "hey I'll make a fortune and if not, I'll have a cute pet, let's go for it!".

My prediction: 99% of the Warren Buffet wannabes will finally use the pet and keep telling themselves that "it's so cute, totally worth the $10", as it sounds much better than "I'm a moron in economics and spent $10 on a piece of crap hoping to get lot of gold".

PS: the goldseller creates X gold for $10. He sells this gold for $10*profit_rate. So if kittens sell for more than X on the AH, the gold sellers are better off buying kittens in the Blizzard store, sell it on the AH, then sell the gold. Gold sellers sell gold for around $1 for 1000G. They have harsh competition so they can't have stellar profits, I'd guess their production cost is $0.8/1000G. So gold sellers will sell kittens for 10/0.8*1000 = 12500G. This is a hard cap on kitten price even if there are legions of players who have lot of gold and can't live without a kitten. (of course if they produce gold for $0.5/1000G they will sell for 20K, but you get the point).

The curse of the no-lifer

When you disagree with someone you see his statements as lies or excuses. Maybe he is wrong. But it doesn't mean that he is not seeing something that is true. Maybe not in the way he think, but it is.

We all agree that Vanilla and TBC were much better model than the current. Blizzard deviated from that path in the name of "accessibility" and "allowing casual playing". We took their statement as "letting morons and slackers have everything".

However the more I think about the "hard working" game concept, the more I see that Blizzard was facing a true problem and something had to be done. Vanilla, or the game rules I listed could not last long. Maybe would last even shorter than their fix: the constant gear resets, welfare gear and faceroll+dance content.

The problem is indeed what they mentioned: the Vanilla concept rewards lot of playing, the infamous "no lifer" attitude. We dismissed it with "every game rewards more playing". Our statement is true: if I play HL Counterstrike 30 hours a week, I will be better than vast majority of those who play just 10 hours a week. We are right, Blizzard is wrong, case closed, the rest are lies for catering morons and slackers.

What we did not notice is the fundamental difference between playing and MMO and an FPS. We are not just playing the game more. We play the same match more. In an FPS there is gear and position reset every 10-30 mins, when the match ends. We carry over our skill and nothing else. In an MMO our gear, gold, consumables, keys, achievements are all carried over from last hours game. So if you play more, you are more powerful than the other guy even if your skill is equal.

This is fundamentally unfair and a game must be fair to persist. In the game only actions done in the game matter. Playing schedule is outside the game. Again: its obvious that playing more allows you to improve skill. However in an FPS or RTS match the skill matters only. Doesn't matter how did you get it, grinded it over 10K matches, watched videos of the best or you just a natural born gamer.

In the MMOs this problem is "fixed" by gear resets or allowing RMT. The first destroys the whole "hard working"-progression concept, the second replaces "IRL time" with "IRL money".

The solution is defining time constraints: you can play on a server for X hours a week and you cannot transfer a char to a server where you are already playing. This way every player would have an even field.

X could be several different numbers for different server types. I'd suggest 10, 20, 30 hours/week. Each server type would have its own ladder, toplist and battlegroup (they can BG, RBG, LFD, LFR only with the same timeframe servers). This way casual players would compete fellow casuals and could win. There wouldn't be direct competition between those who play differently and character strength would only display skill and not play time. Of course one could choose to play on several 10 hours servers to hone his skills and have an edge over the others. However he would only bring skill to his competitively played server and not time.

Bonus tip for Blizzard: since the playerbase wouldn't be bigger, the existing servers should be randomly assigned to 10, 20, 30 every server linked to another two and players allowed to freely transfer to these two realms. The trick is that one of the 3 time frames will be less popular than the others, so servers assigned to this timeframe will be seriously underpopulated. Then Blizzard could merge these servers without any kind of bad press, since people are not leaving the game, just that time-frame, while the favorite time frame of the people will be on full load or even queues on some servers that can be widely publicized.

LFR: salvation

People keep asking why do I stay play the game if I clearly don't like the endgame philosophy. The answer is simple: because I really believe that WoW will be changed soon, in a way I told it should be. How? Via LFR.

People use LFD despite the amount of atrocious failures wandering there. The reason for it is skipping the group organizing what need social skills. (remember social skills =/= being social). They rather take the chance of damaging 45% of the group (another 25% coming from the tank), then taking the long and frustrating route of hand-picking people, rejecting the applying failures manually. LFD revitalized dungeons, especially low-level ones.

It was a no-brainer to copy this to the raiding that got a huge blow in Cataclysm. They also remember the success of Karazhan which was largely attributed to the 10-man format that was easier to organize for players.

However we know well the LFD crowd. They are completely unable to perform anything more than tank&spank and even in that they are below the tank. So in the LFR version of the raid practically all boss abilities must be switched off or toned down to be outhealable (by LFD healers). If it is outhealable, people will expect it to be outhealed efficiently changing the feature to be an "unavoidable raid damage source". So we get exactly what I proposed.

Of course the LFR will not only be tank&spank but also seriously undertoned, allowing the raid to carry below-tank people, so it won't be an ideal thing, but it's definitely a start. Its success will prove that the players don't want to learn some scripted dance.

Of course we have to wait some months while they gather and evaluate the data, but if the participation in raids increases the same magnitude like with Karazhan, we'll see some serious changes soon.We can play rated BG while waiting.

What players REALLY want and reject

This is the Holy Grail of game development without doubt. Create features that players want and don't create what they reject. You do this one thing and you're a billionaire.

Of course it's practically impossible to know what people want and reject. The forums and blogs are always a voice of a small minority. Even large scale opinion surveys have limited usage as people use to answer something that hits their expressed persona and not their true self. For example they say they want challenge because they don't want to look like a weak loser. But they won't enjoy challenging content. Seeing what content is used and which is avoided is also terribly misleading: make an NPC that gives a random top level epic for 100 clicks, and you'll see that people will click him like crazy. Yet the feature won't increase the longevity of the game for sure.

I believe I found a method to figure out if players really want or reject a feature: How do they judge people who bypass/trivialize/cheat it? By demanding others to follow them, by accepting/ignoring them, or by rejecting them as cheaters? This answer will be their true answer about the feature itself.

Leveling needs time. Many people claim it's boring. Yet those who bypass the leveling by using bots or power leveling services are considered cheaters and widely rejected. If you ask anyone "would you like bots and power levelers disappear?", they say yes. Botters/leveling buyers hide what they are and loudly shun the botters too. The fact that the community reject botters mean that they consider leveling necessary and the feature should stay.

How about vanity, like pets and mounts? Many people claim that they are no-skill, no-brain features. Others say they are great fun. But I saw no one who wanted to ban or gkick players with no pets, nor I saw anyone who demanded players to have no pets. The amount of pets others have is largely ignored and neither lot, nor few pets draw rejection from the majority. So it is optional content, the community doesn't want it, nor they reject it.

How about boss dance? You can bypass it to some extent by reading up, watching videos and using boss mod addons. Using these things is considered absolutely necessary and anyone not using them is considered a lazy idiot who has no place in a raiding guild. This means that the community (whatever they say) reject the dance. While those who can do it might claim it is "fun" or "great challenge" to boost their own ego, but the fact that they cheated it as much as they could show that they actually hate it.

Let's compare this with the FPS community: there are similar mods in FPS games like the WoW boss mods, they help you recognize what the enemy does, giving more obvious visual or audio clues. There are mods that highlight enemy players with big arrows just like DBM places a skull on the guy you must run away from. Using such mods in FPS games is considered cheating and the FPS community goes great extent to weed it out: if the punkbuster screenshot finds someone using such mod, he will be kicked from the server, banned and blacklisted. The FPS community truly enjoys dexterity based challenge and reject those who cheat it.

To not only list things where I'm right, let's see the "ninja" concept. While I think that anyone participating has equal right for the loot, the community clearly consider taking loot for selling as a violation and kicks such ninjas from raid, showing that they really want loot going to those who use it as an upgrade, preferably in their main spec. Also, while most people claim that "ipwnu" names are stupid, they accept such named players to their guilds, showing that they consider it an optional thing that depends on personal taste, like pets.

The point is that someone who make demands or rejections vote with his money. I mean if I say "I won't play with people who has stupid  names", I lose the chance of playing with good players who have a stupid name. I make a sacrifice, so I surely want (as opposed to wish) stupid names banned.

Fix the ship on the sea!

Tobold doesn't approve that CCP apologized for their messups. He doesn't believe that WoW can be fixed and only expect Blizzard to learn from the WotLK-Cataclysm disaster and make Titan better.

This is the worst advice one can give. To abandon something that is broken completely and build something new from zero. A "fresh start". It sounds great. It's fresh. It's new. It must be good.

It can be. But it's extremely costy. WoW is broken, but not worthless. On the one hand it still has several million subscribers, paying $15/months. Abandoning ship would be losing this revenue. Also, 99% of the work done by Blizzard employees have nothing to do with the mess. The mob skins, the landscapes, the fight engine, the updater, the Warden, the servers, the game master support team are in perfect shape and could be used for a good game. Yes, the game mechanics and the design philosophy are a complete failure for the reasons Tobold said: trivial leveling and huge gap between the two. But is it the right move to leave everything behind and model new monsters, landscapes, train new GMs for Titan?

Yes, they shouldn't have messed it up in the first place. But it's not beyond repair. What would I do if I'd be the Blizzard CEO?

I wouldn't touch current WoW at all content wise. I'd use it to hold players while I develop the fix. It would have a new .exe, new installer, installed in a new directory. Of course it would copy most of the artwork and engine from the old WoW. When someone starts this new .exe, he sees an empty character screen, as the characters from old WoW can't be transferred. They start a new one and find the same Azeroth, but with impacting but technically small modifications: monsters fight back, dungeons need an able team. When they reach the level cap they could join the endgame dungeons and raids that would use the same graphics but no dancy mechanics, but gear and rotation demanding unavoidable damage and enrage timers. (just as I outlined on Friday).  The first raids would be purposefully easy.

I would promise to the playeres, in the legally bonding EULA that:

• The level cap will never be elevated, no more "first murloc give better green than last expansion legendary".
• That every new dungeon and raid will be harder than the previous tier ones in terms of output demand
• That they will never design any dance elements to bosses
• That later content patches and expansions will not give better gear outside of the mentioned harder dungeons, except for a few slots (for example ring, back, bracer, belt, feet) where reputation, BoE and valor point versions are available. If you got a chest from a raid, no one can get better without killing a harder boss.

I would make a marketing campaign, offer a free re-trial to people who left the game, and start opening servers for the new WoW, while slowly merging old WoW servers as people abandon it. In a year or two, the last old server will be down and I would have a fixed, thriving WoW.

Of course not all players would like the new WoW. But then they wouldn't hand on hopes anymore. They would see that the game is not for them and leave. Those who would see it's for them, would stay or come back. They would see that this game is for them and it will stay that way.

The fundamental failure was the attempt to create a game that appeal to anyone. They created a game that is perfect for no one. Every game must have a target audience and you must be clear what this audience is, so those who belong there see you and those who don't won't be fooled. It's tempting to sell a box to people who will hate the game (hey if you trick 1M people, you get $50M!), but in turn you get bad press, and bad word of mouth. It's OK if you just sell the box and run away. It's not if you want to stay for years.


The  main point however is that we can't just throw away things that are not complete rubbish and can't hope for a fresh start. We must fix what we have using the information we learned while seeing it breaking down.

The pure "hard working" MMO raiding

In the previous posts I described that only those games can last long that challenge and hone one of the skills of the player. These skills are strength, dexterity, thinking and "hard working". I also pointed out that for the MMO model where you play the same match for years (opposed to thousands of short matches), only "hard working" skill fits. All the other skills are better honed and challenged by short matches with new opponents who fits your current skill. Also the "hard working" skill contains usage of previously gained resources, so you have to carry them over, while no such item is carried in dexterity-related games.

Yesterday I pointed out that WoW deviated far from this model, changing the endgame a totally dexterity one. The project undergeared proved that working on your gear is near worthless to do the endgame and you must work on your "skill". Unfortunately I did not realize that the "skill" is dexterity based, because the WotLK level of dexterity was trivial to me.

At first we have to answer why we need raiding at all? Why can't the game just be an endless leveling? I mean it's just rewriting a number to make WoW leveling 10000 hours long. The answer is not that leveling is boring (if it is, it's a design failure, it could be easily fixed by giving bonus for doing orange mobs/quests). The answer is that it's a solo activity. To evaluate your skills you must compare it to other people. This is the edge MMOs have over solo games.

Now let's see what raiding should not be: it should be not challenging in terms of dexterity or thinking. It should be testing your skill in hard working, the theme the whole game have. It should test your gear (your ability to get it) and your rotation (your ability to do your homework). Also, it should not challenge your social skills. The raids were downsized in WoW because of the organizational nightmare.

To create a such raiding the task should be obvious and the performance should be perfectly monitored. The job of the DD is to deal damage, the job of the healer is to heal, the job of the tank is to mitigate damage. Their performance can be evaluated by a single number: DPS, HPS and mitigation % over a successful bossfight.

Dance have no place in a "hard working" themed game raiding, mobs must only do damage to the tank (Marrowgar-cleave is adviced to allow more than 1 tank in a raid), and unavoidable raid damage. They can have adds that must be tanked, burned, or CC-ed but no jumping, LoSing, interrupting, using vehicles and anything like that. The boss is just a strong mob, but not fundamentally different from the kobolds in Elwyn, besides his hard or soft enrage mechanism. This way the performance can be evaluated by a single number.

Since performance is a single number, raids can be epic 40 men again without any organization or guilding. It can be simple LFR. You queue up selecting the target raid and "progress" or "farm". Each of the raids have pre-set performance values. For example "T1 progress" raid needs 860 DPS, 750 HPS, 45% mitigation. "T1 farm" needs 1000 DPS, 900 HPS, 50% mitigation. To queue up, you must have this value. The value is coming from your previous raids, for example the average value of the last 10 bosskills, excluding the best and the worst 2. For newbies it can be calculated from 5-mans, scaled up with raid buffs. The game obviously has built-in damage, healing and mitigation meter, and after a try (successful or not), the raid can replace those who don't hit the pre-set limit with a simple majority vote of thouse who hit the mark, no cooldown. This prevents the 5500 GS for Naxx nonsense, the values are developer-set. There is no need to know each other as your job is simply hit your performance limit. If you are doing 861 DPS, you are good enough for "T1 progress". If everyone else sucks, you simply vote them out until you get a good team. If you suck, you will be kicked. If you are kicked from two different raids in the same day, you are done for that day.

To allow friends to play together this performance demand can be tricked: you can queue up to be linked in performance. So if you do 1200 DPS and your friend does 800, the official damage meter gives 1000 DPS for both of you, so if you can carry your friend, he is immune to kicks.

Obviously there would be no gear resets in this game, the level cap is never elevated either. Every raid is gradually harder. For example T1 raid is doable if you do 50% of perfect rotation in full dungeon gear, so you can start a bit undergeared a few missing enchants and unpolished rotation. T2 needs 70% of the perfect rotation in T1 gear, and so on. Higher tiers need higher and higher perfection and gear.

How can newbies catch up? There are slots where gear comes from crafting, BoE, valor points, so someone who start playing when T5 is out can get T5 level gear into these slots, so his average gear is better than the gear of those who started early. Of course it applies only to a few slots and for most slots you can only get gear from raids.

Loot rolls shall also be modified by performance. If you do exactly 100% of the performance limit, your roll is unchanged. For every % you outperform the limit, you get +1 for a roll, for every % you are below the limit, you get -1. So if you do 120% of the limit, and roll 45, the guy who did 80% of the limit must roll 86 to win the loot. Of course you can only roll on items that belongs to your armor type and the spec you performed in the raid.

This kind of raiding would reward the "hard working" skill and also provide epic encounters where 40 people defeat some baddie and some of them get loot.

Diablo III vs WoW

There is a new post on my blog every workday for 3 years, excluding maybe holidays. No one pays me for blogging. I do it because of internal motivation. I guess it proves pretty well that I take pride of my work and consider effective working internally rewarding (you can use the term "fun" if you want to, I don't really like it). Such motivation makes me a perfect customer for the MMO market. Yet I'm considering leaving WoW. I won't leave  yet and will definitely wait for the next expansion. However staying is based on my hopes and not my experience. If Ghostcrawler would say "we are pretty satisfied with Cataclysm and the next expansion will be new content played the same way", I'd unsubscribe today. WoW endgame is a dexterity game and I don't like them.

Actually current WoW is a bad game because it starts with boring grind and continues with a dexterity endgame. The dexterity players (who could be the target audience) quit before 85, most "hard working" player quit at 85. 

I have high expectation to Diablo III. I played Diablo II a lot, despite it's called "grinding" game. "Grinding" is not the same as "hard working". Grinding is a series of trivially easy steps continuing forever. In WoW leveling my effectivity is capped by external factors like mob distance and disengage distance. I could kill more mobs if I could pull more, but I can't, so I'm forced to kill them one by one slowly despite they provide no challenge. I could go to attack orange mobs (who are challenging), but such activity is not rewarded by the game, I get less XP/hour fighting them.

Diablo II (and according to the beta videos Diablo III) is a "hard working" game. I can effectively pull more monsters increasing both my challenge and my XP and loot/hour ratio. From the first fallen to Hell Baal trash I felt that my skill is challenged, as I dictated the pace, and via that the difficulty, just like in a work. A more skilled worker finishes the same job faster while doing good effort. In a good "hard working" game, the more skilled player finishes the level faster while doing his best, while a less skilled finishes it slower, doing his best. They both have fun. In a bad grinding game (that is tuned to newbies), the more skilled player finishes the level in the same time as the newbie while being terribly bored.

What Diablo II lacked is the endgame. Hell Baal dies, game over. Of course there are players who keep on killing him for more gear, but what the gear is good for? I seriously hope that Inferno difficulty Diablo III won't be "for everyone" and will be very hard, giving me lot of time of entertainment beating it. I would love to spend 1000+ hours finishing Diablo III.

Diablo III (assuming that it can't be facerolled on Inferno) will be a perfect "hard working" game as progress depends on the quantity and quality of your play, everyone finds the perfect difficulty automatically by breezing trough the easy content to the point when it's not easy anymore. A newbie may have to slow down and pull carefully at the end of Act 1, I might have to do it at Nightmare difficulty or even later, but after a short period (which is masked by exploring the new world),  everyone will battle challenging monsters. Everyone will progress on the same content, no one will feel that latecomers or losers get all the rewards for free. Yet late newbies can catch up in a way that rewards the veterans: by buying gear from them in the AH.

If Diablo turns out to be a long-standing game, I will change the blog focus to it, giving gold (and therefore $) making tips once again.

"The skill" and games

Yesterday's point was that permanent games must derive their fun value from challenging and honing "the skill". One time games can exploration based. Of course all games can be spice up with other sources of fun, but the main source must be honing a skill. We expect the players to play thousands of hours with their game and exploring won't last that long, other sources are simply beaten by competing non-games (like Facebook for social fun).

Now let's list the skills and see what kind of games can focus them. All skills can be sources of good games, but of different types:

• Physical strength and endurace: these skills were obviously useful for our prehistoric ancestors and for a lesser extent to us too. The genes that rewarded challenging these skills obviously increased survival chance, therefore spread. Animal cubs, long before the humans played wrestling to prepare for the hunt that will get them food as adults. Playing games challenging strength and endurace are obviously fun, that's why the countless sports exist. Unfortunately computer games have little place here with the current hardware.
• Dexterity, reaction time, hand-eye coordination: the usefulness of these skills are also straightforward, and genes that rewarded these activities with fun spread. There are countless computer games with limited content that exist for decades and still considered fun, pac-man is the most ancient example. Starcraft, HL Counterstrike are much more "recent" games, but still decades old. Yet they show no sign of "burning out".
• Thinking: I wouldn't separate intelligence from knowledge here, since we use while thinking about a problem. The fun from figuring something out, the "Euréka!" feeling, is well known. Chess, majong, go and similar games with very limited content are played for centuries because they reward using and honing the thinking skill.
• Social skills: the ability to get information from others and get them to cooperate with you, help you (and don't harm you). Obviously useful and gives the good feeling of power. Don't mix it with being social, the fun coming from friendship. EVE online, which is mostly about politics, spying, manipulation and such is running constantly, despite the computer games limit the social skills greatly by allowing only text or voice at best.
• "Work ethic", "hamstering", "completionalism": I don't have a good name for this skill, but I'm completely sure it exists. The lack of it provides the lazy bum, and we all know the good feeling of  "Well done!". The ancient hunter who went out hunting when he wasn't hungry had better chance of survival than the guy who started hunting when he was starving. The guy who felt fun from watching his pot filling up with beans had much better chances during winter than the guy who foraged just for today. We are descendants of hard working people and we inherited the genes that give the fun feeling when we see our stockpiles filling. The traditional MMO use this form of fun.
• "children skills": these skills are developed by children and every healthy adult has capped them. Hide and seek practices spatial awareness. Figuring out that Johnny can be behind a tree, but can't be behind a brick (as the brick is smaller than him) is a challenge for a small kid, but not for an adult. Obviously mainstream games can't aim on children skills.

You can design a game to any of these. However you shall focus on one. On the one hand people have different priorities on the forms and any kind of mixture would now and then force people to do a different form of activity. This is the infamous "I won't play a bad game until max level just to have fun later" problem. The game that focus on one form of skill will always provide fun to the player who want to experience the fun of honing his skill. If he gets tired or want to focus on another skill, he will not play for some time. But he is never ever annoyed by the game. The game that mixes two skills will fail because it's too X for one player and too Y for another. You can never hear a chess player whining that chess is too "thinky". He want to play on a thinking game or he wouldn't play chess at all.

The other problem with mixture is difficulty: the game must be just in the right difficulty for every player. If it's too easy, it's boring, if it's too hard, you learn nothing. You experience flow when the task is on your limits, but still doable. You might noticed that most long-living games are PvP. It's simply because in ladder PvP the difficulty is auto-adjusting. Every time you win, you get higher and face stronger opponents, every time you lose you get weaker opponents, you always oscillate around your limits. A PvE game with one flat difficulty is good for very few players. It's too hard or too easy for the vast majority. The solution is either multiple difficulty settings or gradually harder levels. In Tetris, which is a dexterity game (you have to recognize shapes in 3D and move fast accordingly), players are "stuck" on one level (someone on #5, other on #15) and have to practice on that level to improve.

You can easily see that MMOs, where you play the same match for years can only work with the "hard working" skill. You gather more and more resources, progress. In a dexterity game there is nothing you carry over, besides the skill itself. Series of short matches serves that much better.

Now let's analyze the glorious rise and then the shameful stagnation and fall of WoW. Vanilla WoW was a pure "hard working" game. Your progress depended on how much and how effectively you worked. There were action in the game, but due to the GCD and cast times, it demanded dexterity that vast majority of people easily had. Of course you had to understand the game, but for non-retards it wasn't a challenge. So you could concentrate on one form of skill: "hard working".

People completely wrongfully assume that WoW beaten EverQuest because it was "less grindy" or because it had smaller death penalty. No. It won because EverQuest had forced grouping, making the game mixed "hard working"-"social skills". WoW was pure "hard working" until the endgame, where raid organization needed social skills which did not belong to the game. No wonder everyone referred it as "the organizational nightmare".

To reach "more casual" players WoW allowed new players to "catch up", devaluing the previous work of the players. Remember "working" skill is not mindless slaving. It's about effective creation of value. If the most effective way to get an item is to not log in for 2 months and then get it for free, players will not log in. Casual players existed and were happy in Vanilla: they did the same as the hardcores, just on a lower level: gathered resources, progressed. They did not mind about their less progressed state more than the local team soccer player for not reaching World Championship. The gear resets took away the "hamstering fun" of the casual just as much as the HC. He was happy with and proud of his dungeon set and it was devalued too.

To make it worse, to make raiding accessible, but avoid total faceroll, the dance was introduced, making the game a dexterity one. Most of the current raiders are dexterity skilled, and they openly hate the leveling (which is still "hard working"). Raiding should exists as the test and trophy provider for the game. The better "hard worker" got better gear, and was rewarded by bosskills and boss trophies.

The good MMO raiding fits into the "hard working" scheme of MMOs: the performance both depend on the previous "hard work", and the raid itself needs accuracy, carefulness and concentration (but not intelligence or dexterity).

"The skill" and fun

Yesterday I wrote about a game that hasn't received new content for 150 years yet hundreds of millions play it. There are lot of games with similar characteristics. Below I try to pinpoint the reason why such games exists.

Evolution has developed a simple system to motivate mindless beings to do what is bad and good for the survival of their genes: pain and pleasure. The dog doesn't know that standing on a hot plate is harmful for him, therefore decreases his chance of having offspring. Yet the dog jumps off the hot plate because it hurts him. The neural pattern that recognize hot as painful appeared randomly long time ago. Since it increased the survival chance of its owner, it multiplied. Alike the act of being with other dogs is "fun" for the dogs, they are clearly happy be with each other. This pattern rewards forming a pack that increased their survival chance greatly in the times when they were wolves.

Humans are creations of evolution, so their pain and fun concept is the same. Feeling pain has a positive correlation with being harmed, while feeling fun has a positive correlation with increasing our chance to multiply. Of course correlation doesn't mean equality, my countless posts about "ape subroutines" were focusing to the exceptions. It's easy to find such exceptions: dentist is painful, yet helps the person, drinking alcohol is fun, yet harmful.

However today I focus on the rule, not the exceptions. It's clear that the correlation exists, most painful things do harm and most fun things are doing good to the person. I'd like to categorize the fun things into groups and there discuss where games can use it to provide fun:

• Sex. The sex itself and all actions that usually leads to it (like nudity). It's usefulness is obvious, it rewards making offspring. Games have little place here, since pornography does better.
• Social: being with people who are friendly with us. It rewarded staying with the clan and sharing with them. The clans were our close relatives, sharing our genes. It was clearly beneficial in the prehistoric age, much less nowadays, most of my blog is about how harmful it it to pursue social fun. However here I just note that games have little chance with the social fun seekers, as Facebook, chat rooms, forums and other social media does better. Facebook doesn't have to spend resources of designing a murloc. While games were serious social fun source, they were simply beaten by the purely social social media.
• Exploring: finding  new things that we haven't seen yet. This fun rewards finding new resources or early warning for dangers. The cavemen who explored their surroundings found food when they needed easier than those who started searching only when they were starving. Most games rely on this kind of fun. Such games can and will succeed, as "sell the box once" games. They are fun once, but has little replaying or endgame value. You saw the content once, explored it, had the fun, game over. Unless developers can create content faster than players consume it (they can't), exploring games won't last.
• Honing skills: the soccer, the chess, the basketball, the poker all demand "skill" from the players and playing it improves "the skill" (whatever it is). This activity is fun because it rewards preparation for upcoming challenges. The tribe that spent its time with wrestling and running competition was more likely to be successful hunters than those who spent their time idling.  The psychological name of the "fun coming from improving skill" is flow. I'm absolutely sure that this is the only kind of fun that permanent games can provide. Tomorrow I'll list the different skills and explain why Vanilla WoW was such a huge success, despite being grindy. I will also explain why there are no FPS MMOs and why don't adults play hide and seek.

Can you imagine playing the same game for 50 years?

People talk about burn-out. They consider it obvious and necessary. They explain the downfall of games with "people got bored of doing the same game". Tobold expresses his disbelief that a game where people never get bored can exist.

Let me introduce soccer. The "content" was published in 1848, more than 150 years ago. Since then, the game received no content patch, just bug fixes, balancing issues. It is played by more than 250 million players. The highest level championship is followed by over a billion spectators. There are no signs that the game would start to lose players.

My father started playing this game in his childhood. Was playing competitively in a semi-professional team associated to his workplace in his late twenties. He still plays with the "old boys". He is playing the same game for 50 years, with varying effort, but never-ending enthusiasm. Also, he is an avid spectator of high level matches.

How come that this simple game can live so long, despite limited content and no further development? Because the basic activity is fun to the players!
A good game is defined as playing it is fun indefinitely (in terms of years, not playing 24/7). Most games are not good. They are absolutely not fun to play. WoW leveling is a perfect example: you press any random button and the monster dies, giving rewards. Terrible. None of your abilities (thinking, reflexes, concentration, body control, body strength) are challenged and honed. The good question is not "why people get burned out on such games?". The good question is "why do players play such games at all?". The reasons:

• Exploring: the game world (where the terrible activity takes place) is interesting, beautiful, original, nice. It can be breathtaking graphics or immersive storyline. Exploring is naturally one-time activity.
• Playing with friends: the player has real life friends or "gaming friends" in the game, and being with friends is fun, despite the game itself is not. While it can keep a social person in the game for long time, the competition from Facebook is strong. Why bother subscribing if we just hang out and chat anyway? Also, most gaming friendship is shallow and meaningless, providing less and less fun.
• Being l33t: the player assumes that the items or achievements he gets draw respect and envy from fellow players. He keep grinding (as opposed to "playing") for more rewards, as leaving the game and starting a new one would put him to the "n00b" status again. Such player start to burn out either by the amount of grind he "must" do to "keep competitive" or when he sees "noobs" getting things "too easy", devaluing his "effort".
• Boredom: the player just want to waste time. He will play until the game becomes more boring than the alternatives.

Most of the games available are bad and designed only for one time consumption. Of course that one time can be entertaining. But this doesn't mean that games can't be good. Just have to look at the games that are here for 100+ years and learn from them. Surprise: they all have fixed ruleset, they all challenge and hone one skill, and moste of them are zero-sum PvP.