Malinvestment in Women

The productive economy is not a zero-sum game: one man working alone can build a shelter; two men working together can build two, each better than they would have been managed on their own. The essence of the market is cooperation. Competition is incidental: it serves more of a motivational purpose than a strictly productive one. As leftists everywhere like to point out as justification for their harebrained central-planning schemes, competition can be considered a sort of inefficiency. From a strictly academic standpoint, scarce resources are better spent learning from and helping each other than by trying to win a contest for its own sake.

So it is with sexual competition. As anyone remotely familiar with the theory of natural selection knows, reproduction is the ultimate goal of any living thing, and so it’s natural that we direct a lot of resources towards getting the best possible sexual deal.

But like any competition, it’s a game unto itself, a tautology. The fight for the best mate yields nothing more than an improving capacity, over the generations, of finding an even better mate (and even that being subject to the whims of that infamous bitch, Fate). It says little about the ability of a species to survive and thrive in other ways. Mankind is a lot better off having made an effort towards taming nature than it would have been by simply beating each other to death over the best mate.

So there is a point of diminishing returns in resources invested into direct sexual competition, and that point isn’t just some theoretical curiosity – it is one of the crucial behaviors that separate us from other individual animals (as opposed to hive animals) who do a bare minimum to survive and then spend the rest of their time lounging about or fighting over mates. Humans, and human males in particular, have found a different way of increasing their attractiveness, a way that has incredibly positive externalities: increasing their command over scarce resources by being productive. Being industrious as bees, adventurous as cats, and smarter than either of them is how mankind became as dominant as it is today.

So my contention is that there is such a thing as malinvestment in sexual competition. Sure it’s healthy to spend time and money trying to woo the best girl you have a chance to get, but one has to keep the ROI in mind. As in the “conventional” economy, building ten thousand homes when you can only sell one thousand profitably may be impressive – look at all those shiny new buildings! – but it’s also pointless. Worse, it bid up the price of resources that would have been better used elsewhere.

So it is in the sexual marketplace. Resources that could have been spent on other things – certainly a portion of it would have been used to build capital – are spent trying to grab and keep the best woman. And much worse, it tells women that they are special snowflakes; that they don’t need to work on being faithful or industrious or good mothers: just look pretty and they’ll come.

I haven’t doubled down on reading Sex and Culture yet, but it seems to me that this reasoning is in accordance with the findings in the book. Of course, being an apparent ignoramus on economic matters and focusing instead on psychoanalytical masturbation, J.D. Unwin came up with the most amusing excuses for why societies where women were sexually freer tended to be less prosperous and/or expansive. It’s the economy, stupid!

It certainly fits with what I see in Brazil versus what I sense to be the reality in developed societies. Brazilian men are like gluttonous donkeys running after carrots on sticks when it comes to women. I’ve literally been told that “I can’t be like that” when I said that chasing after women is too costly, while the rewards are uncertain and likely ephemeral. Of course I damn well can be like that, and if other men were like that as well, Brazilian women just might be a bit humbler and less bitchy – plus the men might start getting their shit together instead of goofing around trying to look badass.

Characters are what characters do (and what they go through)

One thing that interests me a lot is what makes a story interesting, and I’ve found that a large part of the answer involves interesting characters. Of course, all that does is invite the question “what makes a character interesting?” Fortunately, I think there’s a more useful answer to that one.

To put it simply, it seems that bootstrapping characters simply doesn’t work. Dreaming up some dude, giving him a name, a look and a background isn’t enough, no matter how deep or complex or tragic or “badass” those are (whatever tickles your fancy).

In order to make the... story-absorber (let’s call him a “player”) care about the characters, they have to identify with them, and the only way of doing that is accompanying said characters through their share of gut-wrenching situations. Therein lies that mysterious leap between “this feels plastic” and “this feels real”. The actual situations don’t even have to be extremely believable or interesting: cook up enough cheesy situations to put your character through and he has a chance of earning a place in someone’s heart... somewhere. Want a demonstration? Go watch a soap opera. If people can become attached to those characters, then they can get attached to anyone if you can only get their attention long enough.

Also, there’s probably a limit to how many characters a player can genuinely relate to. The specific values probably resemble those that govern human relationships (a handful of close friends, a few tens of people on speaking terms, several tens of acquaintances, with variations between individuals, of course). It’s a relatively thin line to walk, because the divide between a “main” character and a “filler” one tends to be blurry, and the player’s attention budget is fairly limited (no, I’m not mocking anybody).

But the lesson I take from all this is that trying to brute-force a character into “main cast status” doesn’t tend to yield good results. Stories have a way of telling themselves, as anyone who ever tried to put one down knows.

Inevitably, of course, some characters are going to be more important than others right from the start (you do need some semblance of a main thread to get the thing going) but the specifics of how they develop, which are going to come out as pivotal, and which will become tragic fodder* is something best left to be digested for a while in the writer’s brain, along with the story itself.

In other, shorter words, characters need to be cultivated.

Which is why I’m cautiously optimistic of a BlizzCon interview where the devs kinda sorta implied that they were peppering the game with candidates for the post of “important character”. That’s good. Here’s hoping there will be no more Deathwings (probably the most arbitrary villain in the fictional universe to date, and that’s saying something) and Varians (a valiant attempt but one that feels a wee bit plastic, but then I didn’t read the comic).

The whole “time-travel-but-not-really” aspect is... euuhhrm... well, you know. Weird. But like I wrote above, it doesn’t really matter if the character’s adventures and misadventures are cheesy, so long as they keep coming in a relatively consistent thread. Let’s be honest here, Arthas’s development had plenty of “wait, what?” moments, and he was still quite probably the most well-loved character in Warcraft, ever**.

So, who knows... maybe Garrosh can become what Thrall in my opinion failed to be (and not from lack of trying, Lord knows): an orc with a personality, and a story to back it, so that we players (and, more importantly, Metzen) can have a backlog of his choices and actions, good and bad, that can be reasonably extrapolated from to create a verisimilar story – or as much as can be expected from Warcraft.

They mentioned Anduin and Wrathion. If that’s about it (one per race?), I still think that Blizzard are putting their eggs in too few baskets. Surely in a game this size there are other characters that can be kept around for tentative promotion. Say, for example, whatshisnameagain, Saurfang the Elder; or Brann Bronzebeard. Those have been around plenty long to make for interesting main characters. And there are lots of others, of course.

Unfortunately, some other characters that were meant to be mains like Thrall and Jaina will probably need some kind of special treatment after years of being bland guys who went around doing random good deeds without any apparent goal. Maybe they could go in the Tragic Deaths bucket?

Jaina, specifically, looks like she’s being honed for becoming a villain, after all the “tolerance” crap she was made to repeat over the years. That’s unfortunate, since villains in WoW tend to become raid bosses sooner rather than later – and then either corpses or the fodder of “it was only a setback!” jokes. It would be much more interesting if she could follow in her father’s footsteps and become a harsh voice of remembrance of the evils that glory-lusting orcs can perpetrate. For two reasons:

First, it might redeem the whole simplistic crap in the Frozen Throne about Daelin being a “prejudiced, intolerant human” (the notion that Warcraft humans are pompous versions of pea-brained Southern rednecks being fairly pervasive at the time***). Maybe Jaina’s father was being shortsighted, but you have to admit that after the First and Second Wars, he had a compelling point. As Jaina found out.

Orcs are “savage but honorable”, they say – but the latter doesn’t excuse the former, nor does it hide its ugliness. I’m all for people who try to cultivate their virtues and fight their vices, but the idea that orcs under Thrall are goody-goodies who simply enjoy some playful axe-swinging every now and then is laughable.

Second, anything has to be better than the “she went crazy and had to be put down” excuse that “explains” a large portion of Warcraft’s bad guys.

Well, that’s enough blabbing for one night. Thanks for reading!

*GRRM for one likes to put the former and the latter in the same bucket, which some may call “ballsy”. I think he’s just a frustrated liberal who likes to portray humanity in the worst possible light.

** Like the joke goes: “tell them only that the Lich King is dead... and that World of Warcraft... died with him.”

*** I’ll take the company of a trailer park redneck over a collective-guilt liberal’s any day of the week, too. Both have thick skulls and intractable tempers, but at least the former is a more honest idiot.

Big Pointless Ideas!

It’s been a PITA week and now that Friday’s finally here, I feel like I have a whole month of vacation ahead. Time for some more WoW rambling! And this time I’m really going to let my imagination fly. We can start with: OK, so everyone says WoW is dying because it’s old. Fair point.

Dying from old age, or chronic sameness?

But what exactly is old, the mechanics or the world? The devs make a point of implementing relatively radical changes to gameplay on a regular basis, presumably to prevent everyone from getting so used to their characters that they doze off on the job, Euro Truck Simulator style.

People don’t always like the changes (I know I don’t), they don’t always like where their class or faction ended up, but I don’t think many people actually quit over that (and the devs apparently agree, if their disdain towards “I’m quitting because my class is broken” is any indication).

I think the net effect of regular changes in mechanics is positive. People generally like learning new things, so long as it doesn’t overwhelm them.

So if the button mashing itself isn’t a major inducer of sleepiness, what about that same old quest design – “kill 10 rats and bring me 3 of their tails”? This is one nail that keeps getting hammered on, but unfairly, I believe. Some age-old, repetitive things make up a necessary part of everyone’s day, such as going to work and sleeping with one’s spouse. (Not that I would know about that last one.)

Humans will be humans, always prone to thinking that someone is out to unfairly get them. So there are always going to be accusations of quests being an unnecessary time sink imposed by the greedy company just to make more money off the players, just like there will always be those incomparable talents unfairly kept down by The Man (i.e. mediocre, lazy people who keep telling themselves they’ll work harder... if they get a raise).

Okay, I’ll try to stay focused. What I’m trying to say is that questing is the bread and butter of any story-driven game, including MMOs. They’re the boring stuff that make the cool parts worth it. The darkness that reminds us of the light’s beauty.

You say: “dude, there’s more than enough darkness in my life. I just want some LCD panel sunshine at the end of the day.” Well, there will always be the question of how much darkness you can take before being shown a little light, true. But I trust the devs to figure out the specifics of each demographic. The point is, saying that

“WoW could do better if it got rid of questing”

is akin to saying that

“Modeling would be more interesting if the kits came already assembled and painted.”

I think that, if players just wanted most of the thrill with none of the work, they wouldn’t be players, but TV couch potatoes.

My contention, then, is that the issue with WoW’s growing rheumatism isn’t the method, but the substance.

Story, verisimilitude matter

Yes, even for those players who purportedly just want to log on and kill stuff. The human brain works in terms of stories, on various levels. There’s a reason why the biggest questions of all are “How did we get here”, “Where are we going” and “Why”. Continuity.

That is what’s sorely missing in WoW today. When a fictional universe’s fabric is young, supple and taut, it can take all kinds of hits without falling apart. Any story in development is constantly bombarded by inevitable inconsistencies and arbitrariness. In the case of a game, that is compounded by practical frustrations such as bugs and balance issues. In the beginning, those things are largely overlooked in the exhilaration of discovering all the traits of a new world. That’s the single biggest driver of nostalgia.

Inevitably, though, like a canvas roof exposed to sun and rain, the fiction becomes dry and cracked and eventually full of holes, until it ceases to provide any shelter from reality and becomes just another ugly reminder of the arrow of time.

Let’s try again without all the bullshit: WoW’s fiction is no longer gripping, it no longer invites suspension of disbelief. You’re not a rising hero fighting through unlikely odds to gain new powers and discover new mysteries. You’re just a guy trying to get the damn boss to drop the shoulders token so you can complete the armor set. That invites the awkward question, why do you want the armor set? Any kind of internally consistent answer to that question will involve the fiction. Belief matters, even for the most “professional” of players.

WoW’s fictional fabric has been particularly frayed by Blizzard’s increasingly desperate appeal to the “heroicness” of everything that players do. When every other NPC has a desperate issue that needs resolving, when existence itself is endangered fifty times every patch, it gets harder to keep a serious face.

“But,” you may say, “Pandaria tried to do exactly that: get back to a more down-to-earth story. Instead of some cosmic menace, we get a war between factions as the main driver of the story. We even got farming, for goodness sake.”

Yes, true, and I applaud Blizzard for that!

“And Pandaria sucked for Blizzard. They haven’t bled so many subscribers in... well, forever.”

Also true. But I don’t think the dive in subscriptions happened because of a lack of heroic stuff to do. On the contrary, Pandaria feels like an acceleration of the “excessive heroism” problem. It’s supposed to be a mysterious new land, yet the player, a complete foreigner, can just walk in like he’s always been around and save the land from a number of ancestral threats that are somehow all rising up at once!

Replacing the Canvas

I think by this point I’ve meandered about enough to make my main point. WoW needs a reboot. A sincere, head-to-toes, bone-deep refresh, especially of the story. Wait! By that, I don’t mean a sweeping retcon. No, no, no. I mean a change in temporal perspective.

You needn’t look further than Warcraft itself for an example. A mere 20-year interval in the fictional world between Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness and Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos allowed for dramatic changes in the layout of things.

Take Lordaeron, for example. In WC2 Lordaeron was a newfangled, ill-explained kingdom that served mainly to justify why the humans hadn’t been wiped out after their defeat in the first game. In WC3, thanks to nothing more than WC2, Lordaeron appears as a storied, familiar nation, whose sudden fall was all the more shocking and gripping thanks to this appearance.

There’s nothing new about this effect. Tolkien used it very effectively, leveraging his previously written mythology to create an awesome perception of depth in a newer, fresher age of the fictional world in which his most successful works took place.

Even Blizzard showed they could bootstrap some ancientness with things like the Dark Iron Dwarves of Blackrock Mountain, and the Night Elves, who didn’t exist prior to WC3 and suddenly became one of the most interesting races of the world afterwards.

An interesting occurrence of this effect, but backwards, is the shift from the original Star Wars timeline to that of Knights of the Old Republic. The original timeline is old and worn (read any of the novels following up to the movies if you don’t believe me). Enter SW:KOTOR, and wham! You have three thousand years of “anything could have happened” before the movies take place, and you get to take part in the pivotal events that helped to shape the world of the movies. That is quite possibly the most amazing reboot ever.

I’m not suggesting that Blizzard make their next big title “World of Warcraft: the Troll Wars.” (Actually that would be pretty cool, but I digress.) But I do think that it’s high time for a Warcraft 3-style reboot with a fast forward of 2 or 3 decades.

New, interesting characters of Arthas’s caliber could be introduced. The balance of power could be changed; old locations could have very different denizens from what you remember. New cities, forts could be built. Forests could be grown and leveled. Heck, mountains could change places – there is such a thing as magic in the world, after all.

Ancient ruins could be uncovered at a more believable pace. Factions that were previously just another rep grind can be incorporated into the social, economic and political structures proper. There would be a more reasonable explanation for the sudden reset of item levels, the arrival of new abilities, new mechanics.

And, last but not least... a new strategy game could take place in-between. Something to remind the peons (players) that the real world-changing events take place with true heroes in the front row, not a band of nameless loot-crazed mercenaries. And to inspire said peons to try their best to make their own dent in the world.

But... Cataclysm...

Cataclysm is not the same as what I’m proposing. Yes, it would similarly require a massive reworking of the world, something that Blizzard doesn’t seem all that keen on (GC is on record as saying that he’s “not sure the bang for the buck was there”). I can appreciate the sentiment, but I disagree. The game’s longevity is no longer a given, so it might be worthwhile to start considering measures that may not seem “investment-grade” at first sight but could help to steady the boat in the long run.

Besides, considering that they charge the price of a full AAA game for each x-pac, I think it’s not so unreasonable to expect them to provide one.

Another benefit of a remake of the world would be that leveling could be kept realistic and interesting. One of the main complaints from older players is that they can’t stand going through that same crap all over again in their alts. Well, there would no longer be “that same crap” if the leveling process was revamped more often. Thus leveling could go back to being an integral part of the game, not just an awkward time sink to prevent people from just rolling maximum-level characters.

I don’t know about everybody else, but I find the idea of re-encountering a seemingly unimportant NPC from a previous expansion as a grizzled veteran, or a tired old hermit, or the usurper of a kingdom very appealing. Untold stories – just waiting to be dug into. Much more appealing than “uhh... Brann? Didn’t I see you in Northrend a week ago? I see... you found a major Titan complex. Again. Riight.”

Microtransactions

I’ve always been a pay-for-what-you-need-not-for-the-whole-package person, but for some reason I’ve yet to determine, the idea of paying for an advantage in a game turns me off. In games, I want to prove myself with raw determination and skill. Must be the same thing that makes those crazy people climb mountains on foot instead of taking a helicopter.

Anyhow, I recognize that the free-to-play model is lucrative and effective, yadda yadda yadda. Anyway, I have a thought. Mostly unrelated to the reboot idea. What if there were microtransactions that appeal to people who dislike your typical microtransactions? “Elitists”, so to speak?

The specific idea I had was to sell a more palpable (as far as bits go) sort of “bragging rights”. You’ve killed Grug the Belcher, have you? Well good for you! You can tell all your friends! Now, how about you buy this here “Head of Grug” that still belches even without a stomach attached?

You get the idea. Tabards, mounts, titles, your name or your guild’s as the official slayer of Grug on the server (or the world!)... the possibilities are many. Just attach the product being purchased to the actual game, making it an extension of gameplay, not a substitute. And for sanity’s sake, stop selling actual advantages in gameplay mechanics. RAF, I’m looking at you.

Do I realize that none of this is ever going to be considered, let alone implemented? What, do you think I write this hoping that it will? It's called a "ramble" for a reason.

Thanks for reading.

The Elder Scrolls: Wild Hunt?

As excited as I want to be at the prospect of another Witcher game, the first two having been masterpieces each in their own way, some of the data flowing out of CD Projekt Red has me worried. In their interviews following the announcement of the game there were a few hints of “making the game more accessible than its predecessors” and “more like an open-world sandbox, in the likes of Skyrim”.

Well, the “accessible” part speaks for itself, I think. One of the great things of the first two Witcher games in my humble opinion was the limited amount of hand-holding. Apparently the devs think that ended up hurting their bottom line (read: “easy stuff sells more”).

I won’t bash them for that belief because recently I’ve gotten anecdotal evidence that it might indeed be true. Some people (with fairly decent purchasing power) are turned off by what they heard is a “hard” game. One guy in particular was scared of Witcher 2 because he’d heard that “once you die, it’s over” (which is true only in Insane difficulty, and even then you can always start over).

Oh well. Still, that can be gotten over. If the tutorial can be skipped, and if there’s an engaging difficulty level, and if the mechanics aren’t too dumbed down, it’s quite possible that a “more accessible” Witcher will still scratch that itch for a game that you must pay attention to in order to get through.

That’s a lot of “ifs”, and a lot can go wrong. The changes from the first to the second Witcher game point in the direction of a lot more hand-holding. But it’s the least of my worries. What gets me wringing my hands is the reference to Skyrim.

Let me say that I never really got it with Bethesda games. They seem awfully soulless. There’s plenty of ego stroking, of the cheapest variety, without even a Fable-like hint of good-natured mockery. The characters seem mass-produced from Ye Olde Fantasy Factory molds. The plot reeks of cliché from a mile away. It’s also looser than pajama shorts, and it has to be, to make way for the bloated array of side quests than have next to nothing to do with the main story. I’m also no fan of the bajillion races – so many that none really stand out, except for being each uglier than the last.

And to top it off... the combat system. Powers that rule this world, what have we ever done to deserve Bethesda’s craptastic FPS-RPG hybrid? And why, why did it have to infect Fallout? That’s as close to a cosmic gaming tragedy as it gets. I’m still reeling at the thought of what New Vegas could have been if it had a proper, Fallout-ish game engine.

Anyway... The Witcher 3. The first two Witcher games had at least one strong point in common: verisimilitude, the feeling of context. Fitting the player into that context wasn’t done so well, but there’s no denying that it felt as though you were playing in a believable world with believable characters, one that could conceivably go on without the player. That feeling is much harder to accomplish in a sandbox-style game.

If the player is limited to a certain area, as he was in both Witcher games up to now, then auxiliary plots can be kept tied in a relatively tight manner to the main plot. The fact that the plots weren’t “world-shattering epics” (especially true of the first game) helped to achieve verisimilitude. “I’m going to kill some drowners to make a buck. It’s not like the world needs saving or something.”

In a wide-world game – particularly one where the world is on the brink of radical change, which seems to be the case in The Witcher 3 – the only practical way of keeping the weave of the fictional universe together, and reducing inconsistencies, is by assuming that each location is largely isolated from the others (Fallouts 1 and 2). Otherwise, making the NPCs in one location aware of what’s going on elsewhere becomes harder by a factorial rate based on the number of locations.

Or, alternatively, you can just make the weave of the world incredibly loose and elastic... which is Bethesda’s favorite solution.

I think that has a lot to do with their games being “seamless” sandbox experiences. When you try to create a whole world with a limited team of developers and put it in a machine with limited resources, that world invariably ends up seeming rather small. It’s hard to pretend that two cities are far off and isolated when there are only a handful of miles between them, and the inhabitants of one are well aware of what's going on in the other.

Paradoxically, limiting actual gameplay to relatively small areas and putting a world map of sorts between them is the way to go in creating a feeling of scale. That’s what the original Fallouts did, and it worked wonderfully. Between world map travel taking several weeks, and the positively dangerous random encounters, there was a very real feeling that the cities were isolated.

Bethesda tries to make up for this by filling the landscape between interesting locations with ludicrous numbers of randomly-spawning enemies. It succeeds to some degree – you think twice before venturing out into the world, which does create a feeling of isolation. But it’s rather gimmicky (and thus annoying). And instant travel, another Bethesda staple, instantly defeats it.

So there you go. This one-map ‘seamless’ approach, and its implications for plot development and side quests, is what worries me the most about the upcoming Witcher 3. New Vegas proved to me that it’s possible to create a relatively believable world within a sandbox, but I fear that The Witcher 3 will inevitably sacrifice much of the cohesion and purpose of the previous games and move towards an approach like that of MMOs: the quest giver just stands there waiting for a Hero to appear and move things along.

Signs of hope?

I barely dare to entertain the possibility, but a few things in MMO-champ today made my dying WoW spirit flicker. First, Rob Pardo hinted that he would be getting "deeply involving [sic] with WOW again."

Now, I'm pretty sure that at some point I read an interview with Rob Pardo, after his appearance in Time Magazine as "one of the 100 most influential people in the world." In said interview, he spelled out Blizzard's design philosophy - first make the game deep and compelling, then worry about accessibility. He identified that (rightly, in my opinion) as one of the big reasons, possibly the biggest reason, for the company's success.

Unfortunately I can't find the interview to save my life. I'd like to, because it displays something that I think Blizzard's been getting sloppy on... it was a pretty simple page, with yellow or orange background, a picture of Pardo in front of a PC, and in the interview he talked about his daughter playing a warlock or some such.

It's probably a far shot, seeing as Pardo was already lead designer for the previous expansions that damaged the game for me. But who the hell knows, maybe his coming back would signal the return of some measure of "elitism" to the game, to counteract the sickening trend of using the lowest common denominator as a benchmark.

**DISCLAIMER** Let me state very clearly that I don't want to "ruin everybody's fun." However, I do believe that there must be real differentiation between players and characters in order for the game to be compelling. One of the best ways to do that is for there to be a large potential difference between them, in each of WoW's many dimensions. That way more people can dedicate themselves to something that might make them feel a sense of accomplishment. Of course, it also means that you'll feel a nagging sense of jealousy, because you can't be equal to everyone at everything. But I think that state of affairs, far from "ruining the game," is a fair price to pay. ** END OF DISCLAIMER **

Another thing that made me look up in disbelief is this tweet:

"It's often easy to make players happy in the short term but not the long term, even though the latter is more important."

This was in response to someone complaining that no longer having increased run speed in ghost form was annoying. Wait... wha? Blizzard is cutting back on "quality of life" and putting their foot down? I'll be goddamned!

Then there's this tweet:

"People keep saying there was a blue post confirming the periods of time in which Galleon can spawn? T or F? I can't find any." - Player

"I dont't [sic] know if we posted that, but it doesn't seem like the kind of think we'd want to spell out. Game needs more discovery IMO." - Ghostcrawler

You mean you want to encourage people to stick their necks out and experiment? What happened to Blizzard "We don't want players to think too hard, it might fry their brains" Entertainment? Not that I care, not at all. It can go die in a corner and lay there, its dark deeds remembered only as mistakes not to be repeated.

And just to make sure I'm not wistfully cherry-picking the facts, let me just go and pick a random tweet to see what design philosophy is implicit in it.

Well, darn. Got a PvP conversation about Pummel/Heroic Throw silence effects. Since I know so little of PvP, it's hard to bootstrap any insight on overall game design from that... still, let's try.

"Silence on pummel was just as skillless as h-throw silence + cc spam and also having two spell reflects." -Player

"We don't think HT silence is "skillless." It was just too much with all the other tools and we didn't want to hurt e.g. mobility." -Ghostcrawler

That's kinda technical. Still, it says something that he's parrying the accusation of silence being "skill-less." One of the rallying cries of the bads is: "X doesn't take 'skill.' " Here GC is thinly implying that "skill" consists of using the available tools to solve the problems at hand. Saying that an aspect of the game is "cheap" and needs to be nerfed/removed is a lame excuse. In other words, L2P.

But this is GC, and he has a habit of taking a "L2P" stand on design issues, even if sometimes he's irritatingly ambiguous, trying to lead people to obvious conclusions without spelling them outright (that might be the work of the evil PR department). GC took a stand on dungeon difficulty in early Cataclysm, making a very polite post that nevertheless screamed "stop complaining and L2P." I still go back and read it sometimes, and I always applaud. But in the end it didn't do any good. The "gimme my weekly valor!" crowd ultimately had their way.

So yeah, in spite of this alarming urge to go and install WoW again, I think I'll stay skeptical a bit more. I hope I'm wrong and things really are looking up, but as I pointed out, many of the things on which I place much of the blame for WoW's current underwhelming state are still in place with no sign of being mitigated or removed. Namely: easy leveling and the dungeon/raid finders. Actually, I'll add to that list the complete obsolescence of old content as soon as a new patch comes out.

Plus, this is the beginning of an expansion. WoW is naturally at its best at such times. Things are new, and there are relatively few bored people clamoring for "quality of life improvements" so they can go back to piling up alts and buying valor gear. This kind of thing typically picks up after the middle of the expansion pack. Then the nerfs start.

If, against all odds, things are still improving several months from now, I might just come back. A good proxy indicator would be their stance on flying in Pandaria at 85. If they're still holding their ground on that issue by, say, February, it might be worth reconsidering my stance. We'll see.

The social aspect of WoW, from a nerd's standpoint

In my journey through WoW and social games in general, mostly I tried to play solo whenever possible, and only grudgingly joined a group when there was something I wanted badly and couldn't be done by myself. Sometimes such behavior led to a good deal of wasted time, but it was also gratifying when successful. For example, killing the keepers in the Altar of Zul. Good times...

Eventually I realized that killing undead by the hundreds in Andorhal and hoping for a world drop wasn't really the right way to play the game. Aiming at greater achievements, I mustered enough willpower to leave my little shell and search for a raiding guild. And even though I never really managed to reach the loftier heights of WoW endgame, it was still pretty rewarding to meet people and learn to work with them.

By contrast, it's implicit in WoW's modern design that players are supposed to play with their friends from outside the game, if they want to play with friends at all. Other gameplay options have been steadily transformed into an anonymous, streamlined experience - first dungeons, then raiding, and now even group quests.

Like I pointed out before, Blizzard likes to say that such things actually improve the social aspect of the game by making it easier for more people to meet and play together. I don't know if they actually believe it, or if it's just the CM party line, but a bit of digging shows that's really not how it works.

At least part of what drove players to meet each other was necessity - there were obviously many things in-game that couldn't be accomplished without teaming up. Because there were transaction costs involved in such teaming up, people tended to band together with guilds and friends lists. And even those people who were not in your close-contact group wouldn't always be complete strangers. You'd cross them leveling up, in the city, in trade chat. This generated the elusive "feeling of community".

To nobody's very great surprise, except apparently Blizzard's CMs, reducing the need for interaction didn't have much of a positive effect on WoW's community. People can play without the hassle of having to deal with other people, and so they don't. In that respect, the only recent counter trends are real-ID friends lists and Challenge Modes, which actually require teaming up. That and normal/heroic raiding are the only remaining bastions of voluntary interaction amongst players. And again, as Blizzard likes to point out, relatively few people do these things.

In my view, whatever socializing still exists is nowhere near enough to make up for the lost server communities. Those were an integral part of the "sense of belonging", which is now in shambles. The game no longer feels like a self-contained parallel world, which was, for me at least, a major reason for sticking around. Nowadays WoW is more like Diablo: get in, find a random group, kill things, get loot, brag, get out. All very efficient. And boring.

Once upon a time, the game won me over as a "prosthesis" of sorts for my sorely deficient social life. Now it's just another game. An old one at that.

Why MoP Doesn't Cut It

In a few days - a week, if I'm not mistaken - Mists of Pandaria, the fourth WoW expansion, is launching. Its self-imposed mission is reversing the dreary boredom that (most everybody pretty much agrees) drove away a lot of players in Cataclysm. For that, the standard leveling->dungeons->raids scheme is being complemented by things like challenge modes, pet battles, scenarios, dailies and maybe something else I've forgotten.

I still care about WoW more that I should, but the way I see it, there are two major things right now preventing me from jumping back in. Unfortunately, neither is being addressed in MoP. If anything, they're being made worse.

First is the utter joke that leveling has become. I used to enjoy making a new character, with the prospect of a long journey ahead. Reaching the end of that journey, max level, was a worthy deed in itself. Having a full stable of max-level alts wasn't something everyone and their mommy could accomplish. Personally, I never had more than one active max-level character before Wrath of the Lich King.

Paradoxically, too, even though you needed a lot more experience to level up, exploring all the zones thoroughly was significantly harder. No mounts until 40 and no flying mounts until 70 - or no flying mounts period, even! Mobs would actually give you a tough time if you pulled too many or if your gear wasn't up to par. Quests were grindier.

Leveling-up dungeons weren't a joke, and they weren't meant to be ran over and over again - they felt like an adventure. And even though they weren't trivial, there was good reason to do them at least once. Getting a blue item from them was a significant boost to your character power, helping burn through quests faster. And dungeon quests were a good way to earn precious XP. There were even some flavor epics to be had in those places... imagine that.

Thus an alt had more replay value - you could, say, skip Terokkar if you'd already done it on your main, and instead go to Blade's Edge Mountains. Or, if you had skipped Maraudon on your first run to 60, because it was too remote and you'd only ever heard of it in passing, you could do it the second time.

I really miss this feeling of not being able to see everything the world has to offer, this perception of depth. It dares the player to clench his jaw and march through the leveling process again, in order to make a bigger dent in the game world. Yes, I know, it's a deception... but what are you doing playing a fantasy game, if you don't like being deceived in such a way, at least a little?

If they un-nerfed the leveling process, forced me to take my time making my way through the world, I'd be back in a jiffy. It's probably what I miss the most. Sadly, the chances of that happening are next to none.

The second point is dungeon difficulty, and raid difficulty too, to a lesser extent (though I was never much of a raider). Now hold your horses, I know Challenge Modes are hard. The problem is... that's about all they offer.

They're different versions of the same dungeons you ran before - much like heroic raids. Nothing new story-wise, and even though I'm no big fan of Metzen's work for the most part, story helps to keep things in focus.

Another thing that bugs me immensely about them is that they're competitive and repetitive. Now, racing against the clock is a nice twist, and even a good-natured loner like me enjoys a bit of friendly competition. However, sometimes I like to approach dungeons as if they were a puzzle to be tackled carefully - something whose reward is reaching the end, not seeing how fast you can get there. Think of Dire Maul, BRS and BRD.

Sadly, dungeons these days are designed specifically with the goal of being ran over and over again - for the sake of weekly valor points. That's something I can't abide. In trying to make the whole game more streamlined and friendly, they've turned dungeons - something I once faced as a challenge - into a chore.

Storytelling suffers immensely as well: there's no mob chatter, no NPC dialogue, no intricate quest descriptions, no books lying around waiting to be read. Just kill this guy. He's bad. The over-the-top, vainglorious, and unimaginative yelling from bosses is basically what passes for story these days. "I grow tired of these games! Witness the true power of Boogiezax, servant of Nasalgtha!"

Moreover, another feature of Challenge Modes that falls way short of my expectations is the concept of it being gear-neutral, and rewarding "bragging rights" instead. I've went over this before - the "special snowflake" thing and all that. My view hasn't changed. Gear is the one thing that matters in the game, as far as performance is concerned, and trying to normalize it across the board stinks of socialism, which is to say, the politics of envy.

Achievements and clothing simply don't do it for me. I'm not the sort who buys an expensive car so I can park it in the driveway and make my neighbors green with envy. An expensive car should make other drivers green with envy - especially the obnoxious ones who think they own the road. Or, in WoW terms, the mediocre kiddies who think they're the coolest thing ever.

Something tells me that these two things - making leveling and dungeons meaningful again - are connected. Unfortunately there's not even a whiff of either of them happening in the foreseeable future. So WoW is bye-bye for now.