Is that still the same Gevlon?

People on the internet love nothing more than a good conspiracy theory, a subject on which my blog is notoriously short of. So to fill that gap, here is a thought: Is the person currently writing the Greedy Goblin blog under the name of Gevlon still the same Gevlon who started that blog? What if, like the Dread Pirate Roberts, the original Gevlon handed his blog over to somebody else, the only requirement being that the new author, in the words of Hobbes, must be nasty, brutish, and short?

The evidence for that theory is found in the very much changed writing on Gevlon's blog. Less than a year ago the original Gevlon wrote a very insightful post on when dps is Good Enough. In that article he calculated how much damage per second a dps player needed to produce to kill Patchwerk, and that doing that number would be "good enough". Quote: "If everyone else makes 5K DPS, they are still not carrying you, as you still put in enough effort. The fact that they do much more effort does not change the outcome of the fight, just the time spent."

Now compare that to his post of yesterday, where he argues the exact opposite point. He is in a random pickup group, finds that some dps are lower than the tank on the damage meter, and tries to force the pickup group to vote kick those dps, ending with him being vote kicked himself. Because, as the other players realize, the "bad dps" are in fact good enough (and funnily enough one of the guys Gevlon wants to kick does MORE dps than the "good enough" number he calculated in last years post). Kicking bad dps would just slow the pickup group more than "carrying" them.

Other evidence for "Gevlon" not being Gevlon any more are the relative lack of WoW economy posts, other than posting reader screenshots from economic "morons". The current Gevlon obviously doesn't share the old Gevlon's interest in virtual economics, but is more interested in group content and raiding. Which are inherently social activities, and thus not at all aligned with the interests of the original Gevlon.

And if you believed all that, next up my theory how Syncaine is in reality Tasos Flambouras.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:44 AM Permanent Link  (23) comments

 
Does Blizzard support goldsellers?

Gevlon posted an article in which he argues that Blizzard secretly supports goldselling, "proof" being that they haven't eliminated the practice yet. People who disagree have their comments deleted, so Azzur asked me to post his reply on my blog. While I can hear you snickering in the back about Tobold the defender of free speech, I think you'll find that my comment section is full of people who disagree with my point of view, and I never censor them as long as they do it politely. Thus here is Azzur's letter:

Hi Tobold

I tried to respond to Gevlon's blog directly but looks like his comments moderation has silenced all of his critics. I come to you because I believe that your blog is a neutral place to post arguments. I am hoping that you can post this on your blog.

This is my response to Gevlon's post: http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2010/02/why-blizz-supports-goldselling.html

A short summary: Gevlon claims that Blizzard supports gold-selling because they have not done 'all they could' to stop it. This is all despite Blizzard banning accounts, having detection measures (e.g. Warden), etc. But Gevlon ignores all of these evidence and are instead claims Blizzard are lying. Several commentators (including myself), question his theory and propose that gold-selling exists because stopping it completely is impossible - for it would lead to unacceptable server performance.

The problem with so many Gevlon posts is that he frequently makes a wrong assumption (in this case, Blizzard supports gold-selling and that it is possible to stop it). Even with this wrong premise, he continues adamantly claim that he is right. The commentators who question his base assumption are all silenced (in his view, we are 'trolls')! In this case, how is there recourse for sensible argument?

In fact, in the comments section of his post is this from Gevlon himself:
"The debate is about WHY Blizzard tolerates goldselling and you are welcome to come up with answers conflicting mine.

Denying the obvious fact that they do it is either trolling or being retarded."

When some commentators question his logic, Gevlon responds with: "Server load: come on! The server can handle 2*120 players spamming spells in WG, but can't handle text chat? Are you computer illiterates or trolls?"

If you read all the comments, there are computer programmers (me included, but I was silenced!) who question him on this statement. Gevlon is wrong, for text filters will impose an unacceptable server load. Of course Gevlon is too stubborn to see this. And note his use of 'strong language' of 'computer illiterates or trolls'. Many people will be swayed simple because of this. But don't be fooled: If you know better, real-time filter of text will lead to unacceptable server performance.

Of course, rather than admit wrong, he goes on with this one about licensing from Google: "@Drew: that's why LICENSING exists. They don't have to develop tools. They can license tools, for example from google. Or from the guys who made the "free speach filter" for the Chinese.".

This is all nonsense. Firstly, it's no guarantee that Google will even licence their technology. Secondly, Google queries and performs string matching on an existing database. World of Warcraft relies on real-time input from other people. They are totally different things! The latency that will result from string matching will result in unacceptable performance.

Gevlon also comes up with ridiculous suggestions like capchas for killing 'non-quest monsters' (so that bot farming can be identified), banning low-level ppl from trade, etc. I suppose he doesn't understand that gold-sellers and bots can easily circumvent this and measures like this will harm innocents instead. He doesn't even understand the basic tenets of freedom (lucky Blizzard does!). He thinks that it's alright to have the majority constrained due to the actions of a minority. Bank alts? Low-level newbies? They're all acceptable collateral damage!

An article (http://www.wow.com/2010/02/15/trial-account-restrictions-and-the-30-percent-problem/) shows that Blizzard already puts restrictions on trial accounts to stop goldselling spam. Why would they do so if they tolerated gold-selling?

Gevlon is living in a fantasy land where he imagines all these bizzare conspiracy theories. His imagination is so vivid that "Blizzard tolerating gold-selling is an obvious fact" (slightly paraphrased from Gevlon). Obvious to himself only, despite having no evidence whatsoever. Perhaps he'll like to live in a land where people are guilty until proven otherwise!

Cheers,
Azzur

I do believe that goldseller cause economic harm to Blizzard. Not because they wreck the economy, because for WoW goldselling the same is true what some people used at defense for legal RMT in EVE: Goldselling does not create additional gold for the economy, it only transfers gold from one player to another. But goldsellers cause harm because they are often unscrupulous in how they acquire the gold they sell, and their illegal activities of botting and hacking result in customer service cost for Blizzard. A single call to customer service because of some bot or hacker costs Blizzard more money than what they earn from that customer in several months. Thus I'm pretty certain that Blizzard would like to eliminate goldselling.

But when I say "Blizzard would like to eliminate goldselling" that is like saying "The WHO would like to eliminate Malaria": The goal is clear and laudable, but the way to reach it isn't all that obvious, and you wouldn't want to do it at any cost. As I stated in the past, it is actually extremely easy from a game design point of view to eliminate goldselling: You just make all items bind-on-pickup. That is easy to prove: For any WoW player it is obvious that alternative currencies like lets say Emblems of Frost are *far* more valuable than gold. But there are no "emblem of frost sellers", because the emblems and most of the items you can buy with them are bind-on-pickup. Problem solved! But of course if you do the same to gold in World of Warcraft, you just eliminated the player-to-player economy, plus some ways of players to help other players. Thus making gold bind-on-pickup would work, but it would have a serious cost. A cost that Blizzard thinks is too high.

And the same cost-benefit analysis could be done for any possible way to block goldselling: Would it work? And if yes, what would the cost be? Gevlon for example has a point in that removing the ability for goldsellers to advertise websites by forming words with level 1 corpses in cities would work, and wouldn't inconvenience other players too much. On the technical point of how much lag an anti-gold spam filter would produce, I have not enough knowledge to offer an opinion. But any filter is a cost per se; for example I sometimes talk German with German friends on an English-language server, and some completely harmless words of the German language like "weniger" (less) are blocked by the chat filter as potential racial slurs. And software to catch goldselling behavior, like sending money from one player to another, will always have a "false positive" rate, e.g. I once sent several thousand gold to the account of my wife, for her to buy an epic mount.

So I think we can't make a blanket statement whether Blizzard is too weak or lenient to eliminate goldselling. We would have to examine every single proposed way to do so, and carefully consider the possible up- and downsides, as well as how the goldsellers would circumvent it. If Gevlon were right and it was just Blizzard who was deliberately inactive against goldsellers, then how come every other major MMORPG has exactly the same problems? Do you know any MMORPG with over 100k subscribers in which you can't buy gold?
- posted by Tobold @ 5:05 PM Permanent Link  (34) comments

 
Contentious writing

Of course the previous post wasn't true, I'm not Gevlon. Of the various commenters, Rem came closest to the truth, by saying "I think (sure, I can be wrong) most of you (including Gevlon) didn't fully understand this post. It's not the truth. Nor is it a prank. It's just Tobold's subtle and verbose way of showing us, what "contentious" writing style actually looks like, and why he's not in the business of producing flame bait, even if such always generates more feedback."

I basically started the day with two subjects in my head, both of which I wasn't totally sure whether I should write about. One was a request from one of my readers, who asked me to reply to Gevlon's "proof" that gear doesn't matter in raiding. That reply would have said something along the lines that I think (and Gevlon confirmed that with a post of his) that Gevlon knows perfectly well that raid success is a combination of gear and skill. And it would have said that I suspect that Gevlon deliberately chooses the most contentious way possible to get his point across, with the goal of getting maximum uproar and feedback, in a way which would be called trolling on a message board. I wasn't sure whether I should write this, because such a post would have basically been "feeding the trolls", being exactly the sort of response that such contentious writing tries to evoke.

The other subject in my head I wasn't sure about was a reply to some of the comments of yesterday's post, who advised me to write more outrageous stuff instead of balanced analysis if I wanted feedback. I started thinking about what to say about that, but that post would have been a balanced analysis on the advantages and disadvantages of contentious writing. When writing about a subject, do you want to blast out your favorite one-sided argument, to get the other side of the coin in the comment section? Or do you want to demonstrate that you have thought about the pros and cons, and risk nobody replying because you already said everything there is to be said? But of course if I had written it that way, the style of the post would have given away my obvious preference, however balanced I try to present it.

Neither post would have been especially interesting, nor thought-provoking. Gear vs. skill has been discussed a hundred times, and a long post about how I write my blog would just have diluted the excellent input I got yesterday. By stating so many completely different opinions my readers already made it perfectly clear that there is not one optimal writing style. It is unlikely that I'd even be able to completely change the way I write, nor would that change be universally welcomed.

But while thinking about the two posts, I noticed the obvious overlap of the two subjects, my writing style being diametrically opposed to what I suspect is Gevlon's deliberate tactic. And I observed that apart from the style, and more often than not being on opposite sides of the discussion, we were rather close in our subject area: World of Warcraft, economics, social interactions. Which led to the thought that Gevlon could be regarded as something of an "evil twin" of mine. And then I realized that writing all this together in that "hoax" of me claiming to be Gevlon made much better, more thought-provoking blogging.

That wasn't about the number of comments and feedback posts I'd get, but about the more fundamental question of how you get your readers to think about the things you are currently thinking about. The "hoax" touches a lot of very interesting subjects, like identity on the internet, trust, the value of flame bait to get inherently passive readers to respond, and whether straying from a well-known "brand" style from time to time can liven up a blog. However you want to call that post, I am pretty sure it did make you think. And the posts that make you think are the good ones. And in the end, like Rem said, I got my point across: The inevitable flames provoked by the flame bait made my argument about the disadvantages of contentious writing.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:00 PM Permanent Link  (38) comments

 
I got Gevlon worried

I must admit that I always thought that Gevlon, like the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz, had no heart. When last year I pulled the stunt of claiming to be somebody else (to make a point about identity on the internet), I choose Gevlon for the simple reason that he was the least likely to get upset about somebody stealing his identity. I thought Gevlon was intelligent, but was completely lacking what is called "Emotional Intelligence". I thought he simply doesn't understand people, what makes them tick, and is thus stuck in an endless rant about why the emotional things people do aren't rational. So it was touching to read Gevlon blogging that he is worried about me. Gee, thanks Gevlon, that is awfully nice of you! I didn't realize you cared so much!

But don't worry, Gevlon, you and the other people worrying about me are just operating under a completely false premise. You think that a "normal" blogger does not show any emotions, and that showing any emotions is a sign of the blogger being close to emotional breakdown. I assume that train of thought is a projection of what you'd expect from a professional publication; if an editor of the Wall Street Journal started going all emotional on the front page, people would justifiably be worried, and the editor out of a job.

But a blog is not the Wall Street Journal. A blog is closer to let's say Twitter, where somebody writing "Dammit, my cornflakes were soggy this morning" is a completely normal (and boring) outbreak of emotion. Me posting "Dammit, somebody called me an asshole on his blog" is equally normal, and I'd even say equally boring, although some other blogs apparently operate like tabloids and like to report on which blogger said what about which other blogger.

I'd contest your idea that words can't hurt anyone. If that was the case, why can you sue somebody for emotional damage, or harassment, even if that was only done by words? If the law considers that people can be hurt by words, enough to award them compensation, the hurt must be real enough.

But how much somebody is hurt by words varies a lot from person to person. And so does his reaction to those hurt feelings. Some people are easily hurt, but bottle all that emotional damage up until they explode. Me, being called names annoys me a bit, comparably in annoyance to those soggy cornflakes, or the guy who took the last coffee from the office coffee machine without brewing a new pot. Only I am unusually chatty, as over 3,000 blog posts should be ample proof of, and so I'm likely to post about such minor annoyances. Other people, when finding that you can't change the country field on your Playstation Network registration just grumble a bit into their beard, me I write a full page of rant about it. That doesn't mean that minor annoyances hurt me more than anyone else, it only means that I'm posting every little thought that goes through my head. And I'd even claim that in the end I am *more* mentally stable than somebody who eats up all those little annoyances, because by airing mine, I deal with them, and then can forget them without losing any sleep.

So, Gevlon, thank you again for being so worried about me, but it is really not necessary. I'm fine. The only thing I'm suffering from is verbosity. ;)
- posted by Tobold @ 8:38 AM Permanent Link  (15) comments

 
Virtual identity theft

How many of you are going to make a goblin character in World of Warcraft and name him "Gevlon"? I'm pretty sure that if I make an armory search a month after Cataclysm releases, I'll find dozens of goblins named Gevlon. And that'll be just one of many forms of virtual identity theft the blogger Gevlon is suffering from. There is even somebody who calls himself "Gevion", but with a capital "i", because then in many fonts GevIon looks a lot like Gevlon, who leaves comments on Gevlon's and other blogs, trying to fool people. And of course if there is ever a large trend towards impersonating Gevlon, I might even have a claim to have started it.

Stealing somebody's virtual identity is easy. Many blogs and forums have no identity verification at all, thus posting as Dr. Richard Bartle, Raph Koster, Lum the Mad, Tobold, Gevlon, or whoever else is extremely easy. Writing an at least marginally believable parody of somebody is a bit harder, but in most cases a crude parody will suffice, especially if the target is known for specific strong opinions. If you wrote "WoW is shit, play Darkfall instead!" on a dozen WoW blogs, sign it with Syncaine, and add the hyperlink that gives the real Syncaine a share of Darkfall's profits, many people would believe that it was really him who posted that. Or the other way round, you could post a "Darkfall is dreck, play WoW instead!" post on the Aventurine forums, with a link to my blog which would be likely to result in lots of angry trolls trying to post here (that is what comment moderation is for).

Given that this is impossible to prevent, the question is whether it really matters. I find virtual identities a fascinating subject, because I think that people tend to trust them too much. Which then leads to things like the Ferarro debacle. Personally I think that it is sad if your interest in what I write depends on your beliefs of who I am, because I'd love for my opinions and writings to talk for themselves. But I'm well aware that this can't be helped, because our brains apparently aren't wired like that. They can't process an opinion without taking into account who said it. Thus the interest in virtual identity theft, because you can either enforce or ridicule a point of view by ascribing it to somebody else.

My advice to Gevlon: Turn on comment moderation, which will completely shut out fake Gevion from your comment section. It also makes your overzealous deletion of comments that disagree with you or point out your mistakes less obvious. You can't prevent fake Gevion from posting elsewhere, but do you really care? I'd advise my readers to not automatically believe anything supposedly written by me that doesn't appear on my own blog.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (14) comments

 
Goblin raiding

While I don't like his philosophy, I do have to admit that the Greedy Goblin is often entertaining, bringing new ideas to an old game. His latest adventure is goblin raiding, buying a raid spot for 4k gold from a hardcore guild, plus paying 1k each for the 7 epics that farm run netted him. So one evening and 11k gold later Gevlon now has better gear than my priest, who is raiding for months now. Of course the lessons him and me draw from that are radically different.

Gevlon thinks he has found the most efficient way to play WoW, or as he says "the fastest and most cost effective way of reaching content". Well, he thinks that "anyone" can make the "pitiful" amount of 2k gold per hour, which obviously isn't true. Gevlon is making money by what is called arbitration, and the profits of that depend on how many people do it. The more good businessmen are on a server, the less the amount of money you can make simply by using the auction house. But even if you make only 300 gold an hour with farming or doing dailies, paying 11K for a 7 Naxx25 bop epics is probably still faster than raiding for months until your less-than-hardcore guild starts getting Naxx25 loot.

But that assumes that "reaching content" and getting the best epics is the ultimate goal of World of Warcraft. So how about the following, completely hypothetical, offer from Blizzard: For just $200 you can make a special account with a single character of your choice, in God mode, for a single day. As you are invincible, you will be able to solo all the raid dungeons you want during that day, and come out with all the best epics in the game. At the end of the day you get a nice screenshot of your character, and a .pdf file listing all your epics, but the character itself is deleted and the account cancelled. So for the cost of just about 1 year of WoW, you'll reach the highest level of content and epics in a day that some other people have spent 4 years and on average $800 on. Good deal, or isn't it?

No, it isn't. I don't think many people would take that deal and pay those $200. Because reaching content and getting epics by itself is worth nothing. We play for various reasons, but one reason is simply to spend time having fun. Pressing the "I win" button and bypassing all the game means you'd lose out on thousands of hours of entertainment, which are far more valuable than some purple pixels. And where the value of the purple pixels comes in is them being the reward for a challenge you have overcome. Even Gevlon was proud that he didn't place that badly on the healing meter in spite of having had bad gear at the start, being just 0.4% of total healing behind the other healing druid, and ahead of the best healing priest. But fact is that there was no challenge, and if Gevlon had done absolutely nothing, the raid would still have succeeded, and he would still have gotten the same epics. The only challenge he had to overcome was finding a bored hardcore guild willing to sell raid slots and epics. And, although Gevlon doesn't believe in it, there is also value in social contacts. Finally beating that boss in a group of guild mates and friends is a lot more satisfying for most of us than beating that boss with the help of 24 strangers you paid for the service. Even strutting around in those epics in front of the bank trying to impress lesser geared players is a social function. Ultimately those epics are useless to Gevlon, because the only game function of those epics is to allow you access to harder raid content. By using the "goblin raiding" method he can probably get into Ulduar dressed in greens, as long as he is paying enough.

Being entertained, playing with friends, overcoming challenges, and through the rewards opening up avenues to new challenges, that is what raiding is about for most people. "Goblin raiding" is an interesting parody of that, but it wouldn't fulfill most of our needs. In economic speak, goblin raiding doesn't maximize utility. Or at least it wouldn't for people who aren't sociopaths.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:16 PM Permanent Link  (40) comments

 
Gevlon says PvP can't be fun

I find Gevlon, and especially his various projects with which he proves World of Warcraft to be a sandbox game by veering of the ordained themepark path, to be interesting, even if I find many of his opinions abhorrent. So on the one side I'm sad he cancelled his ganking project in what looks very much like a hissy fit, but on the other side he has some interesting arguments on PvP, if you arrive to sort them out from the rest of his rant. Gevlon says:

I think I figured out why there are no successful PvP MMOs. I mean I can prove that such game not only have not been made, but theoretically cannot be made. PvP MMOs will always be a small niche.
...
Flow is the "proper" way of fun. It is "the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity."
...
The flow needs, among other factors:

• Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
• Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
• A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.

And then explains why it is easier to give adequate feedback for PvE than for PvP, and concludes that because you can't have adequate feedback for PvP, you can't get into the "flow", and can't have fun. That leaves, in Gevlon's opinion, only three "small minorities" of types of players who enjoy PvP: Casuals who just want to batter the wall of Wintergrasp with a catapult from time to time (that would be me), Killers who enjoy ganking others, and a tiny "elite" who play PvP for the challenge they can't get from AI opponents.

As I said, some interesting arguments in there, although I found parts of them being contradictory. For example if the key to mass market success is the fun from "flow", and flow requires "balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult)", then why would the number of people seeking challenge in PvP be "a very small group by definition"? Why would only the tiny elite enjoy it? That is like saying the only people having fun playing football (soccer) are the teams currently involved the world cup, while everybody who is kicking a ball around in a local league on the weekend doesn't enjoy the challenge of it.

So I find myself in the unusual position of being *more* positive on PvP than another blogger. Now that must be a first. I think that Gevlon has a point on PvP remaining niche *only* for the case of free-for-all unbalanced hardcore PvP. I do think PvP games could be more successful if they would do a better job of pairing people with similar skills and abilities against each other. Gevlon's "balance between ability level and challenge" can work in PvP, as centuries of football leagues and chess clubs and ladder systems in other games people play against each other clearly show. So while I do agree that games in which lets say one side is allowed to capture a barely defended keep at 3 am in the morning, or a larger number of stronger players is allowed to beat up a smaller number of less strong players, can't create the "flow" Gevlon is talking of, I do think that it isn't "theoretically impossible" to create this flow in a PvP game. You just need to put up some restrictions and advancement systems which encourage players to play against equal numbers of players of similar strength.

Think of that when you watch the world cup, which apparently works quite well. You might argue that lets say North Korea doesn't have much of a chance against Brazil, but as they only lost 2:1 their "PvP" was still close enough to being balanced. Most current MMORPGs more resemble a system in which Manchester United is allowed with 11 players to play against a 5-man local Futsal junior team. It isn't "theoretically impossible" for PvP to have "flow", it only is impossible inside the game design most MMORPGs have now.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:47 AM Permanent Link  (26) comments

 
Do not buy gold guides!

Earlier this year a fellow blogger named Markco asked me to have a look at his WoW economics blog, and whether I would allow him to do a guest post on this blog. I had a look at his blog, which looked interesting enough, and allowed his guest post, which created a lot of traffic on his blog. Once he was well established and got lots of visitors, Markco transformed his blog: It was now not only offering WoW economics advice, but was also selling Markco's gold guide. Markco then repeatedly pestered me to promote his gold guide, promising I would make a lot of money. I refused. I do consider gold guides to be the very worst deal you can make on the internet, as you are basically paying for information which you can easily get for free at many places. Buying a gold guide is actually more stupid than buying gold. I am not promoting gold guides, and I considered Markco's bait-and-switch blog to be a clever, but shady and underhand way to quickly attract lots of visitors.

Now you would never again have heard of Markco on this blog, if it wasn't for Gevlon. Markco approached Gevlon with several shady offers designed to promote Markco's gold guide. And Gevlon, while probably not considered the most upstanding citizen of the MMO blogosphere, is intelligent enough to see through scams like that. Actually being anti-social makes scam detection easier, as they are based on social engineering, which is something which simply doesn't work on Gevlon. Gevlon posted his experience with Markco here, and called me as a witness, after Markco mentioned my refusal to cooperate in a mail to Gevlon. I am happy to comply. Selling gold guides is bad enough by itself, but using various underhand ways to promote them, and promising affiliates unrealistic sums they'll never receive is downright repugnant.

Do not buy gold guides! There are dozens of WoW economics blogs which are considerably more up to date, and give better information for free than you are likely to find in any gold guide you had to pay $20 for.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:11 PM Permanent Link  (68) comments

 
What audience do I write for?

Gevlon blogs about me not being harsh enough to comment trolls. His policy is that when on his blog a commenter points out a mistake, the comment gets deleted, and the mistake fixed without any record of the edit. Like the party fixing historical records in 1984, that makes Gevlon look omniscient and always correct, because he leaves no trace of ever having been wrong. And he has an interesting justification for it. Gevlon says:

My most disliked action is "sneak editing", aka fixing an error in the post and delete the referring comment. I'm writing it for the readers. See it from this perspective. He is not interested in old incorrect versions and their incremental fixation, nor the comments that pointed out the errors. He wants to read an error-free post.

Exactly like Blizzard I won't make content for only 1-10% of my subscriber base. While I personally like intelligent commenters more than a random guy who spends 2:15 on the site, my personal feelings does not matter. Business is business, cost effectiveness above all!

Now statistically speaking, Gevlon has a point. There are 3,000 people visiting my blog every day, plus another 3,000 reading the RSS feed, which is a lot compared to the 25 comments the average post gets. But the comparison with Blizzard is dead wrong: Outside Asia, Blizzard is dealing with customers who are all paying about the same monthly fee, thus they have a good reason to try to make content for all of them, and not just some 1-10% subgroup. But what if WoW was Free2Play, and only that 1-10% subgroup was paying, while the other 90-99% were playing for free? It would still make sense to not totally neglect the majority, as they could always decide to move into the paying subgroup. But you'd want to favor the payers over the non-payers, to make paying more attractive. In such a model, not everyone in your audience is equal.

My blog isn't much different. Not everyone in my audience is of equal importance to me. Google Analytics tells me that over the last 30 days I got 68 visitors who found me by typing the search words "Age of Conan sex" into Google. Most of my visitors only stay between 1 and 2 minutes on my site. So why should I value those visitors as much as I value the readers who come here regularly, especially those who leave feedback?

I consider those of my readers who leave comments to be "paying" customers, while the others are Free2Read customers. :) And as my commenters are important to me, I take their feelings into account in my comment moderation policy. I do agree with Gevlon that I should have deleted the troll comments which derailed my "transferring a character is cheaper than buying gold" thread earlier. But even when I finally deleted those comments, I still left a note of why I did that. And whenever somebody points out a mistake I made, I do *not* delete the comment pointing out the mistake, and I *do* leave either a comment or a note in the post that I edited it to fix the mistake.

That is not to say that I allow every comment on my blog. I regularly reject comments (and with the new system you actually never see them), either because they are comment spam, or because they add nothing to the discussion, or because they contain personal attacks. Unfortunately we live in a world where you can't mention the possibility that some game might possibly have some flaw without somebody shooting off a "you are just a WoW fanboi" (or "you are just a WoW hater" in case I'm talking about WoW) one-liner comment. Also I get those stupid "you shouldn't write about this subject" comments Gevlons mentions and delete them. Comments which don't use the word "you" are usually of higher quality. But I think I sufficiently explained my comment moderation rules and reader rights in my Terms of Service.

The point is that I am not afraid to admit that I'm just human. I make mistakes, I get hurt, I get angry, I react, just like everybody else does. And I do have a social relationship with my "community", however you want to define it. There are rules, but there is also respect, and mutual appreciation. My blog is not "business", it is far more personal than that. And the funny thing is that if Gevlon would be honest to himself, he'd realize that writing a not-for-profit blog is an extremely social act, as the only rewards for it are of the social kind.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:24 AM Permanent Link  (42) comments

 
The nuclear option

Gevlon has made it his personal goal to be less nice and more outrageous than anyone else in the MMO blogosphere. Not an easy task, that. Especially if you already have people like Syncaine shouting and cursing invectives at anyone they don't agree with. So to beat Syncaine's "WoW tourist" insult, Gevlon claims that anyone leaving WoW for a while is the ghetto scum of the WoW population, because players who are either nice or good would stay with their friends in WoW.

And if that wasn't outrageous enough, Gevlon has a theory why Age of Conan failed: Blizzard deliberately banned half a million botters on AoC's release date, sending all that ghetto scum to AoC to destroy the competition. Gevlon says WoW has a million customers that are so bad that they would destroy any game community, except WoW's (where there is no community and they are diluted by 10 million other players). And whenever a competitor launches a game, Blizzard simply chooses the nuclear option and sends that ghetto scum to the competitor's game, trampling it into the ground.

Now that is the funniest theory I've read in a while. Syncaine's paranoia and desire to blame somebody else for the failure of his favorite game style is understandable, but such angst is never very entertaining, no matter how many swear words he uses. But if you go completely over the top with that theory, as Gevlon does, it starts to become amusing. I can't wait to read that in EA's annual financial report: "Warhammer Online failed to reach the 500k subscribers we announced as criteria for success because Blizzard used the nuclear option and sent their worst players our way to destroy our game. Not our fault, honest!"
- posted by Tobold @ 5:48 PM Permanent Link  (21) comments

 
Why I can live without other players in my games


- posted by Tobold @ 9:27 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments

 
My secret evil twin identity

After several people in yesterday's mega-comment thread advised me to write in a more contentious style, because that attracts far more comments than a long and balanced post, it is time to come clean. About a year ago I had pretty much the same idea, wondering whether if I wrote about basically the same WoW, economics, and game design stuff in a more outrageous, preferably unpleasant way, I would get a lot more visitors and heated discussion. But as I didn't want to change the style of this blog, and the "Tobold" brand and identity, I simply created a second artifical blogger identity. Opened up a second blog on blogspot, and started posting in a deliberate anti-style to Tobold. The result was a success beyond my wildest dreams. You guessed it: My other identity is Gevlon, the Greedy Goblin.

I always thought that somebody would sooner or later guess that behind Tobold and Gevlon in reality there is the same writer. Two bloggers, both which exist only as their avatar icons, with no real name or photograph behind it, no information about their private lives, both on Blogger (too much hassle to master a different system), and writing diametrically opposed views on exactly the same themes, that should have raised suspicions. Guess I underestimated the power of brands, where when people see the exact same item sold under two different brands, they believe the two are actually different. I even got away with frequently cross-linking and cross-quoting the two blogs.

While I couldn't really hide my naturally verbose writing style, and tended to produce walls of text as both Tobold and Gevlon, I simply used a book about Ayn Rand and objectivism as philosophical background for the Gevlon persona, to create the deliberately objectionable and controversial "evil sociopath" persona. Based on the knowledge that the hardcore are a known vocal minority, and the majority of players are social, casual players, I deliberately baited this otherwise silent majority by making fun of them as "socials", or my famous M&S, morons & slackers.

And it worked so well! My Greedy Goblin blog after one year has as many readers as my Tobold blog after over 5! And I got away with the most outrageous stunts, without anyone noticing! Nobody ever asked why somebody who is so obstensibly anti-social than proceeds to take somebody he would call a moron and slacker under his wings to teach him how to make 5k gold per week. Nobody ever questioned what somebody who pretended to not feel any social bonds was doing in a raiding guild (although that might say more about raiding guilds in WoW than about my ability to fake a personality). Pretending to have bought my way into that guild was a stroke of genius, and people believed it even after I posted screenshots demonstrating that I was doing a good job as healer in raids.

But now it's time to end the charade, post a final big announcement as Gevlon on my Greedy Goblin blog, and go back to be simply one virtual blogging character, Tobold. Getting lots of visitors, and lots of feedback, isn't everything, and isn't actually all that pleasant when most of that feedback is predictably negative. Running two blogs in the end was too much work, even if I posted a lot less as Greedy Goblin. My apologies for the ruse, but I thought it was a rather interesting experiment on the nature of blogging and reader reactions. Just shows you can't believe everything you read on the internet.

[EDIT: You might want to read the next post before commenting.]
- posted by Tobold @ 8:03 AM Permanent Link  (81) comments

 
Running a guild without social skills

Science has tried with mixed success to measure the mental capabilities of people. From that research we got the IQ, intelligence quotient, as unit of measure of logical, analytical, and numerical mental capabilities. Lesser known is the EQ, the emotional quotient, defined as measuring your capability "to identify, assess, and manage the emotions of one's self, of others, and of groups." The two are not correlated, in fact cases of people with high IQ and low EQ are quite common. Being more intelligent than others makes you "different", and being different is a handicap in social situations. That rejection can evoke a response of the intelligent person isolating himself socially ("I don't need the help of these morons, I'm better than them."), and over time withering the social skills.

Now obviously it is hard, if not impossible, to judge a person over the internet, as you only see a small part of him. Nevertheless, if you read enough of what a person writes on the internet, and assume that he is writing from the heart (and brain), and not faking a personality, you can make an educated guess of that persons IQ and EQ.

Based on his writings, I believe that Gevlon has a high IQ and low EQ. Thus I couldn't help but wonder about Gevlon's latest scheme, in which he wants to become the guild leader of a new raiding guild for raiding in blue gear. It is not that I don't believe that a guild consisting of 25 Gevlons in blue gear couldn't raid Naxxramas. Rather the problem is that running any guild requires quite some social skills. Cold, hard logic only gets you so far. Ayn Rand would pretty much suck as a guild leader. Thus, even if Gevlon manages to get the guild together by leveraging the advertising power of his blog (which is a good plan in itself), I do expect the whole thing to spectacularly explode after a short while.

I'd nearly be tempted to join his guild just to see that, but I haven't got the time. But if you are playing on European servers and are interested in Gevlon's concept of a blue gear raiding guild, you are invited to see for yourself. What do you think about Gevlon's plan to become a guild leader?
- posted by Tobold @ 9:43 AM Permanent Link  (33) comments

 
Lum gets mad

Scott Jennings perfected the art of rant blogging at a point in time where the word "blog" wasn't even invented yet. And while I don't always agree with his opinions, I certainly respect the man, and in expressing my disagreement try to remain as factual as possible, and not attack him personally. Greedy Goblin Gevlon obviously had no idea who Scott is, and anyway isn't the type of person who'd express himself carefully to not be insulting. So he basically called Scott a crybaby, and of course Scott replied in his usual masterful style. The discussion is already at the Godwin stage, and makes for an interesting read.

I'll try to stay neutral, because both sides have their good points. Gevlon calling any form of social mechanism an "ape sub-routine" doesn't especially come over as a nice person. But then Gevlon is looking at the issue from a cold capitalist point of view, which doesn't justify, but explain, how layoffs happen. Scott is talking about business ethics and how things *should* be, and the problems of regular people caught up in that cold capitalist system. No wonder the two don't find much common ground.

In a way, both of them are right. Recessions have a way to bring out the nastier sides of the capitalist system. I know the inside of game companies only from various videos, but it always struck me how young the people working there are on average. Ever see any people over 50 in these places? You can't expect lifelong employment in a company that obviously has no use for older people. On the other hand few people really consider their long-term future when applying for a job somewhere, especially if its the first job. A game company certainly sounds like a cool place to work at, and if the salary is right and the atmosphere is great, I can understand that people want to work there. Whoever you talk to at such a company probably tells you how great their prospects are, and one would have to be exceptionally cool-headed to realize that many game studios depend on the success of one or two games. The developers at Vanguard who are said to have been fired collectively on the companies parking lot lost their job two years ago, without any recession or financial crisis involved. Getting fired is nearly always a personal tragedy, however much those layoffs appear inevitable in hindsight. And even if a wiser person might have chosen to work for something offering safer employment, lets say an investment bank for example, he could still end up in the same unemployment line. Economic theory is macroscopic, it might be able to explain the percentage of unemployment, but is completely unable to deal with individual suffering from the consequences. So while Gevlon's explanation of the capitalist system aren't wrong, Scott certainly is right in saying that these explanations aren't helpful. At least not to the people involved and their friends.

I'd also like to offer my apologies to anyone who felt offended by my earlier post on how layoffs aren't a betrayal. I tried to keep it respectful, but of course the same logic applies: Even if an explanation is correct, it isn't necessarily a good justification, and often doesn't help at all.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:52 PM Permanent Link  (15) comments

 
Gevlon has a point

Sometimes I ask myself why I keep Gevlon's anti-social drivel blog on my newsreader. And then he writes something to remind me why, usually a highly intelligent analysis of something, followed by a completely disgusting interpretation and rant about morons and slackers. So if you manage to just ignore the sociopathic nonsense, you'll find that Gevlon has a point in his analysis that Cataclysm dungeons can be trivialized by simply taking two healers.

Of course if you look at it closely, the same analysis is true for Wrath of the Lich King heroics: Bosses don't have an enrage timer, so if you come with 2 healers and a tank sufficiently competent enough to keep aggro from the healers, a group can't possibly lose a fight, and thus will by definition eventually win. Only that in WotLK of course the group would also most probably win with just one healer, and bringing one more dps makes the dungeon go faster.

In Cataclysm wipes in dungeons are more common. I even wiped several times with guild groups in the new dungeons, because we were all of the mindset that it would be better to just try stuff out instead of getting a ready-made video guide from YouTube. So we fell in all the traps, like killing the fourth puppy at Beauty in Blackrock Caverns. We laughed, it made for a great story in guild chat, and we moved on. In a pickup group a wipe is likely to lead to the break up of the group, and not necessarily to players learning something and doing better next time. Thus with dungeons being a lot harder, a strategy to never make a pickup group wipe is definitely a possibility to consider.

Of course the analysis of the social consequences by Gevlon is completely wrong. The two-healer method is not going to become the standard for pickup groups, because it requires the tank and the first healer to queue together, with the healer "disguised" as dps, in order to get a second healer assigned by the Dungeon Finder. For that to work we need tanks having special relationships with one healer, but not with anyone else. That will happen rarely enough to not make any difference on the queue time for DPS.

What is more likely is that certain classes realize that they can benefit from being hybrids, and heal a bit in tight situations in dungeons. For example Tranquility is a great spell to heal everybody when things are starting to go south, even if the person casting it is currently a Moonkin. It is *because* everybody tends to blame the healer that even pickup groups might feel that some added healing would allow them to overcome their problems, and they might ask hybrids to help out with healing a bit.

Furthermore the discussion on how to make heroics easier is one which will only pose itself for a few month. Of course now, with people just reaching 85, heroics are very hard. But they will most probably stay at exactly this level of challenge for the next two years, while players on the other hand will continue to improve their stats through gear. Cataclysm didn't fundamentally change the emblem system of Wrath of the Lich King. Doing heroics long enough will still end you up with a set of gear that outgears the heroics. And if I understood the new system correctly, there is even a built-in progression, where heroics rewards get better over time, while people reach new raid dungeons. In a year nobody will consider bringing a second healer to a heroic a good idea. Right now it is a neat trick.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:33 PM Permanent Link  (22) comments

 
Wolves and sheep

Gevlon started playing EVE, promptly got ganked, and is loving it. Now here is a good fit between the character of a game and the character of the player. I do think Gevlon will do very well in EVE. Although I also believe that there are a lot of people who are a lot better at what Gevlon does in EVE. I wonder if he'll still be reporting so honestly once he makes a REAL mistake in this game, like trusting the wrong people. Or when he will get stuck and unable to progress because he trusts no-one.

I do agree with his premise that whether you like EVE or not depends on whether you like games where "good" players can hurt "bad" players. Where he is completely wrong, of course, is making the connection between that preference and real-life intelligence. In many ways EVE is a lot closer to real life than a game like World of Warcraft or Star Wars: The Old Republic is. WoW and SWTOR are full of guaranteed wins, and protection for the weaker players. It is a lot harder to ruin another player's day in WoW or SWTOR than it is in EVE. Not impossible, but much harder. And I can understand the attraction of a game like EVE to a person like Gevlon, who already thinks of the world as a place of wolves and sheep, and enjoys the opportunity to demonstrate that he is on the wolves side of things.

But do we really want games that work like real life? You don't have to be a sheep to think that it would be nicer if people wouldn't constantly try to hurt each other. In fact the very concept of civilization is based on the premise that we get further if we cooperate instead of bashing each other's head in with a stone club. And the benefits of civilization accrue to the wolves as well as the sheep. And even if you live your life as a wolf, having a day job that constantly puts you in cut-throat competition with others, do you want to continue the same activity in a virtual world in the evening?

On this blog I have repeatedly gotten into trouble with my commenters when I stated that I would prefer to be a winner in real life and a loser in games rather than the other way around. I am not saying that these are the only two possibilities, but I'm pretty certain that there is no correlation between success in games and success in real life. A solid majority of people in the society at large tend to concentrate their efforts on doing well in real life. That is due to Maslow's hierarchy of needs which says that we need to get our basic needs fulfilled before we start worrying about stuff like feeling good about ourselves. If your washing machine breaking down counts as a major financial disaster to you, your success in a video game can at best be escapism.

Once you are doing good in real life, virtual life is full of options. And trying to do well there, to "win", is just one of these options. Playing is about exploring alternatives with consequences that are significantly less serious than in real life. A game is attractive *because* it is not real life, *because* you can try out being a different person, having different goals than in real life. Playing a game differently than you "play" real life broadens your horizon, and is more relaxing than reproducing the same patterns of behavior you already follow in real life. After a long day full of various challenges, I don't blame people for preferring games that are full of easy wins, or where you don't constantly have too look over your shoulder to guard against the wolves. Not everybody who plays a sheep is one in real life too.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:53 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments

 
Identity is relative on the internet

We tend to think of ourselves as "real". But once you question that notion, you'll find that you *were* real when you woke up that morning, but once you got online you probably assumed a different identity. And while your real identity might be reasonable well documented, your online identity is far for secure.

For example there are several Tobolds on the internet. The Tobold on Twitter isn't me (my fault, I had that name and stupidly deleted my Twitter account because I don't like Twitter). There is a Tobold posting stuff on the Boardgamegeeks forums, who isn't me. As I "borrowed" my name from Tolkien, there are references on the internet to Tolkien's Tobold Hornblower, who introduced pipeweed into the Shire. And apparently in the real world there was a doctor named Tobold, who invented a tongue depressor. Tobold the Hamburger King is a main character in the book Portrait of the Writer as a Domesticated Animal. And so on, and so on. By the way, that wouldn't change if I used my real name, somebody else has the same real name as I do, and has it registered as a domain.

So yesterday I kicked a troll who called himself AndruX from the blog, and then somebody else who also called himself AndruX turned up and complained. Well, sorry, I only banned the *troll* AndruX, not everybody else calling himself AndruX. Who am I to say who of the two is "real" and who is "fake"? Apparently faking other people is all the rage now in blog comments, we had fake Gevlon, fake Nils, fake AndruX, and for all I know there is a fake Tobold out there somewhere trolling syncaine's blog. It isn't really a problem for blog moderation, as comments are deleted one by one, and I can't really "ban" a specific name or IP address from commenting.

I find the subject of identity on the internet fascinating, and once stole Gevlon's identity as a joke to make a point. I really loved the people argueing that if I was also the author of Gevlon's blog, then they would stop reading what I wrote on this blog. That clearly demonstrated the unhealthy fascination people have with identity. Apparently many people are unable to read a text and form an opinion about it *just based on what is written*. They need to "know" the "identity" of the author, and would judge the exactly same text differently when it was written by me, than they would judge it when it was written by Gevlon. So when Paladin Schmaladin "Ferarro" turned out to be several persons using fake photographs and invented details of fake real lives, many readers went bonkers, as if the identity of Ferarro had any effect on the validity of the texts written under that name about paladins.

Basically the problem is that many people are too lazy to think, and take a shortcut called "trust". Hey, I trust that guy, so what he says must be right, and I don't have to engage my own little grey cells to ponder the question. That approach is already not great in the real world, and on the internet it is downright foolish. Why on earth should you trust a guy who calls himself after a hobbit from Tolkien, and who you never even met in real life? I deliberately post fake news sometimes, to get people to think, but there are always readers whose trust in me overcomes the unlikelyhood of the posted fake news, so they end up believing it. And even if I don't do it deliberately, I'm wrong often enough, e.g. I missed several details on RealID yesterday because I hadn't read the FAQ, and even misspelled RealID in the title (fixed now).

Trust is actually a problem for me. What I am trying to do in this blog is keeping up an intelligent discussion, and that requires all participants to think. It doesn't require everybody to be right all the time, or everybody agreeing, but it requires people to read what I (or other commenters) wrote, think about it, and post their own thoughts and opinions on the subject. If my readers have a completely false vision of me as infallible pope Tobold pontificating from his blogging throne on some subject, the intelligent discussion doesn't take place. And then I get nasty comments from people who had that vision, and got disappointed because they realized at some point that I'm only human, and make mistakes as often as the next guy. If you expect a blog to have the same resources for research and editorial staff as a professional newspaper or magazine, you're bound to get disappointed.

So I would ask all of you to mistrust me. I make mistakes, I sometimes deliberately post fake news as a means of making a point, and I mostly post opinions, not deeply researched facts. Engage your brain, think for yourself, and form your own opinions. Putting your trust into strangers you only know by their fake identity isn't safe. And if you disagree with that, well, you can use the donate button up there to the right to start bidding on that Golden Gate Bridge I have for sale.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:08 AM Permanent Link  (27) comments

 
Making 500 gold per hour in WoW

I always suspected that some of the claims of Gevlon on how easily he was making thousands of gold were exaggerated. But being a man of science, I set out to test it. I followed his instructions on how to get filthy rich in WoW by selling glyphs for several weeks now, and here are the results:

On the positive side I made a lot of gold, my total wealth is up from 30k before to 70k after, and in addition to that plus of 40k gold wealth, I also spent about 10k on various things, like tradeskills for alts. So I'm counting 50k gold made with glyphs.

On the negative side, making those 50k gold took longer than you'd have expected from Gevlon's description. For example my glyph selling alt alone, who does nothing but empty his mailbox, scans the AH, and then posts the glyphs using Gevlon's undercutting strategy, has already 70 hours of /played time, and is still level 1. I don't have an exact count of how many hours my inscription toon spent, but I'd say it was at least another 30 hours.

So that is it, I made 50k gold in about 100 hours, a rate of 500 gold per hour. That isn't counting the time and money I needed to get the inscription skill to maximum and learn every single glyph recipe in the game. Now many of the hours spent lets say scanning the AH or posting hundreds of glyphs were semi-afk. But doing that still prevented me from using those hours for other activities, like leveling alts, or doing heroics and raids.

Now 500 gold per hour is not a bad wage in WoW. But inscription isn't the only activity that nets you that much. For example farming mats, that is either gathering herbs or ore, in Northrend can easily also make you 500 gold per hour. You might have some bad days, where you find very little frost lotus or titanium ore, but on average 500 gold per hour from farming is quite doable.

Now Gevlon despises farming, but I'd say it has its charms. Flying around and gathering materials is somewhat more active than standing in front of the AH or mailbox. And it is more sustainable: You will make less if other players are gathering at exactly the same time as you, but demand is high enough to support a large number of farmers gathering materials at different times. The glyph market is far more sensitive to competition, it only takes 2 or 3 greedy goblins to drive down the prices. MMO-Champion having published a glyph-selling guide while my experiment was running certainly didn't help my profits.

I am currently winding down my ink and glyph inventory. I found the experiment fun, but only as long I was figuring out all the details and tricks of the inscription business and AH "PvP". But I'm not really motivated to spend another 100 hours making another 50k gold the same way. What would I want that gold for? There is nothing I could spend it on. Ultimately I gain more if I spend those 100 hours on lets say leveling one of my alts to level 80. If I see glyph prices going up a lot, I might just jump back into the market again. But right now, with 5,000 out of 15,000 auctions on my server being glyphs, there is too much supply and too little demand.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (30) comments

 
Skill-less WoW

Joel feels he missed something, and didn't understand my remark in the class vs. skill post that outlined the importance of PLAYER skill (not avatar skill) in most non-MMORPGs. Gevlon hates social players. And Green Armadillo reports on Blizzard making transport easier in WoW, with easier teleports to Outlands, and mounts starting from level 20. What has all this to do with each other?

If you have a thick skin and can withstand Gevlon's sociopathic ranting, most of his analysis is correct and shows where the problem is. Blizzard is nerfing WoW, because easier is more popular. Quote: "I feel hate now. Not towards Blizzard, they did the goblin thing, defending their $15. If I were a Blizzard executive, I would do the same. I had warned the raiders in 2 weeks advance so they could focus on FL+4, to have it before the nerf. But I'd nerf it too. I hate the socials now, who are paying for this nerf." Of course the hate part is irrational. If you don't blame Blizzard for making WoW skill-free, because that is where the market is, you can't possibly blame the market. Blaming the market never works, as every economist should know.

But he is right that there are apparently more people wanting World of Warcraft to be even easier than it already is, so every nerf results in 10 skill-free players subscribing and staying, for every 1 player who is leaving because the game is now too easy for them. As I said in my Sims post, auto-questing isn't far ahead. In fact the WoW-clone Runes of Magic already has auto-running back to the quest NPC. The easier transport is just part of that. You'll now be able to buy a flying mount at level 60, thus you can do all of Outlands flying. On the one side there is a certain logic to that, because previously once you hit level 70 and could buy your flying mount, you immediately moved to Northrend, where it didn't work any more. On the other side the quests in Outlands were designed with ground transport in mind, and a flying mount at 60 makes many of them much easier.

And yes, while I defended Blizzard for making the STARTING raid dungeon easier, and still think that this is a good idea, I never wanted them to nerf hard mode for the more advanced raid dungeons. And I repeatedly said so, but nobody listened, because everybody makes the same mistake as Gevlon: They all think that 100% of the game should be designed to be exactly at the difficulty level they enjoy most. So the hardcore want everything hard, and the skill-less want everything skill-free, while the casual raiders want everything at medium difficulty. Not only is it obviously impossible to please everyone, it also is rather bad game design.

What happened to the idea of the game getting more complicated the higher you level up? Somehow it got lost in the process. Any player who is able to do the very first quest to kill 6 wolves is nowadays also able to do any level 80 daily quest. And if you ask a developer to design something hard, the only idea he can come up with is making it faster and more twitchy. A "hard boss fight" is one where you constantly have to be moving in unison with your raid, a giant game of Simon says on high-speed.

I blame the combat system. At level 80 you have more possible buttons than at level 1, but they don't do anything different. The little added complexity more buttons bring (small heal fast for little mana or large heal slow for lots?) is concentrated in the first 30 levels. From there on you just get the same abilities over and over, in different colors and textures. Ultimately it doesn't matter at all whether you hit a monster that has 100 health for 10 damage, or whether you hit a monster that has 10,000 health for 1,000 damage. Forcing a large group of players to run around to avoid fire or all press a button at the same time increases the chance that the group fails, but doesn't make the game much more complex for the individual player. Its simple math, if you have a 90% success chance, but all 25 players in a raid need to succeed, your overall chance of success goes down to 7%. Wow, a hard boss, you fail to beat him 93% of the time. Still doesn't change the fact that every single player just has to perform a trivially simple action with 90% success chance, it just changes who to shout at after the wipe.

Might as well play Luminary, where combat only uses one button. I recently fought a monster there at my level, and got killed in a moment of distraction, not drinking my healing potion fast enough. And noticed that in the presumably much more complex WoW my chance as a warrior to die when fighting a single monster of my level just because I didn't watch the screen for 5 seconds was much lower, near zero, even at the level cap.

What I would like to see in a MMORPG is combat being easy at the start, but getting more complex when leveling up. Not simply by adding more buttons that do the same thing, but by adding more interactivity and decision-making. Not simply twitchy "hit that button in the next 0.1 seconds or die", but more like tactical combat games, where you get a bit more time to think about what to do, but have to take an non-obvious decision.

But just like Gevlon I realize that I'm a niche gamer in wanting tactical challenge, and the more mainstream a game is, the less likely it is to cater to my needs. World of Warcraft will get easier with every patch, with every expansion adding 10 more levels, and a new level cap which takes even less skill to reach than the previous one. Star Wars The Old Republic will copy that model and garnish it with great storytelling, but still getting you all the way to the top without having to think much. I blame neither those who prefer twitching to thinking, nor those who prefer not having to do anything at all to get their virtual rewards, nor the game companies that are willing to sell you those feelings of "achievement" for nothing much. Hate is not a solution. The only reasonable thing to do is to look for niche games catering to my niche gamer needs, and supporting those games with my money, so they don't die out. Thus my opposition to flat fees, which end up favoring the bigger, mainstream games to the detriment of the niche games. If you don't like Disney movies, neither blaming Disney nor blaming those who make Disney movies a multi-million dollar business is going to get you anywhere. Targeted spending on indie movies you like will, because it allows the producers to make the next movie. Games are just the same.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:12 AM Permanent Link  (46) comments

 
Gearing up oneself or one's guild?

Gevlon, the Greedy Goblin, is the most selfish blogger I know. And I mean that in a completely non-judgemental way. His unique philosophical outlook makes his blog posts interesting, especially when they clash with somebody else's blog. So while Matticus is complaining about a paladin who stopped raiding because he had enough gear for himself, instead of helping the rest of the guild gear up, Gevlon defends the point of view of that paladin. The underlying question is whether we raid to gear up just ourselves, or whether we raid to gear up our guild.

While I'd normally lean towards seeing raids as a guild activity, and thus loot being best distributed for the maximum good of the guild, last night something happened which made me rethink that position. We did Naxxramas in heroic 25-man mode for the first time, and cleared the plague wing, which isn't half bad for a first night. And some epic dropped which lots of players wanted (not including me). And suddenly our officers decided on a new loot distribution rule, and let only those players roll for the item for who it would replace a blue item. People already wearing epics weren't eligible. That caused some consternation with some players, including me, who had invested heavily in crafted or boe epics from the auction house. I have a crafted epic robe, gloves, and ring, and bought epic cloak, plus a trinket I bought with emblems of heroism. So all other things being equal, a hypothetical other priest who didn't spend that much gold and emblems on epics has a significantly higher chance of getting an epic loot assigned to than I do, while at the same time contributing less healing, due to lower stats. That not only doesn't seem very fair, but it also creates a bad incentive structure. If the least prepared reap the most rewards, then nobody will want to take the time to farm the money or materials for crafted epics. Having a guild policy which basically punishes people for acquiring epics on their own doesn't seem very wise to me.

Distributing loot without checking for whom it is the biggest upgrade leads to the most active players being "full" with epics faster, simply because getting epics then just becomes a matter of statistic probability. The more often you are in a raid, the more likely you are to be present when some loot you could use drops, and thus the more epics you get if loot is distributed with random rolls, or nobody else wants that particular item. On the one side that is good, because it rewards the player for showing up often to raids. On the other side that is bad, because sooner or later the player will have all the epics he can possibly get from that raid dungeon, but the guild can't move on to the next place, because the less active raiders are still missing too much gear. The situation Matticus describes, the paladin taking a break until Blizzard releases Ulduar is only the latest possible effect of that. In earlier times the player with full epic gear would instead have been likely to quit his current guild and join one further advanced.

So we end up with a conundrum: Either we reward people with epics in proportion to the effort they put into raiding, and risk losing them. Or we distribute epics there where they do the most good, which ends up rewarding those players the most who prepare and raid least. While I'm far from celebrating selfishness in the way Gevlon does, I nevertheless am not so naive as to believe that we could arrive at having guilds in which all members are completely unselfish. Epics (and legendaries) remain the biggest reward World of Warcraft hands out, and thus the way in which they are distributed creates strong incentives for behavior. Having to decide how to distribute epics is not easy, if you realize that either you reward doing less, or you push those doing more towards taking leave or just plain leaving. The only other alternative is to assume that people with a full set of epics will want to run the same raid dungeon over and over, just to equip the other players in their guild. That amount of selflessness is unfortunately quite rare, as experience shows.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (31) comments