Why you should watch the Fall of the Lich King cinematic

Well, first of all, you don't have to. It is, obviously, your choice. I'm just here to tell you that you have no reason not to. And no worries, it won't contain spoilers.

So, Rem, do you read the ends of books ahead of time, too? Well, no. But World of Warcraft is not a book. It's not even a film. It's a game. And the purpose of a game is not so much telling you a story, as letting you take part in a story. Yes, I hear you shouting that you care a lot about the game's story. Your claim may be more or less justified by how much or little you actually learned about the background and history of the game so far, but I hear you in either case. That's exactly the point. You should watch the cinematic because you care about the story, not despite. Confused? Let me explain.

Like I said, the purpose of a game is letting you take part in a story. Consequently, the point at which you will be automatically confronted with the cinematic is tied to your in-game actions. To be more precise, to your defeating the Lich King for the first time. This is an event that may never take place. Despite all the ramblings about how "easy" the game is, it's not all that easy in fact. There is no telling at this point in time if you (or me) will actually be good enough to defeat the Lich King. I'm not saying you (or me) won't, I'm only saying the information is not available yet. Unless you've already done it. In which case you've already seen the cinematic. In which case .. uh .. this whole argument is not aimed at you anyway. Right, talk about trolling oneself. Where was I.

Let's assume you are good enough (and me too, yay!), because that's the more interesting thing to assume anyway. Allow me to describe the probable course of events. Allow me to attempt to immerse you into the atmosphere of the moment. The tension of the final sequence of the hardest boss fight in the game. Someone will be shouting "10% ... 5 ... 3", someone else countering "30 seconds to enrage ... 20 ... 10 ... COME ON, GIVE HIM ALL YOU HAVE!", and then, with the last bit of mana, health, energy, rage and pure will, he will fall and Vent will erupt in cheers, cries and yells, while you'll be fist pumping and/or doing a little dance (as well as cheering, crying and yelling). There will also be some cinematic playing in the background. You think you'll care, at that moment?

Besides, it's not really like you're actually jumping in the story arc. The story is technically already told. It's a long story, which started all the way back in WC3 and is rooted in even older events. But now it is at its end. Did you do the Wrathgate questline, the Matthias Lehner questline and the ICC questline? Then you do not need to flip forward to the last page. You are on the last page. That the Lich King will be defeated is not a spoiler, it's a rule of the genre. The story is told. The rest are details. You may, of course, defer reading the last page until you personally reach a certain milestone. Keep in mind though that when you do, you'll go out to party and drink. And when you return and sit down to re-read what you half missed, you may feel it's not quite as spectacular as reaching the milestone itself was.

Of course, this is not quite true. There are still a couple of blank pages between where you are now and the last page (i.e. the cinematic). But those will remain mostly blank. This is the place where, once again "take part" comes into play. This space will be filled with your adventures, with your personal path to the goal. It is a story no one else will write. More importantly, it is a story that is going to be better than what anyone else will write. It will be more exciting and more epic, because it will be yours. If it wasn't, if, instead, a 4 minute cinematic, no matter how atmospheric and well done it is, was better than anything you experience on the way to it, then, frankly, we'd all have wasted our time.

Don't save the cinematic as "the best thing for last", because it is not the best thing. Don't see it as a climax, because it's not. The climax, the best thing will be how you and your peers will carve their way to that ultimate battle and how everyone will do their very best to prevail in it. You should watch the Fall of the Lich King cinematic, because it is merely an appetiser for the hopefully even better things that lie ahead on your path.

Wrong sport, lads and lasses

The recent Ensidiagate prompted me into posting on a subject that's been on my mind for a while now: the morality of competitiveness. Maybe I should have used that as the title of the entry, but, honestly, my titles sound preachy enough as it is. So, what is this all about, anyway? Competition.

Competition is an interesting thing. A two-edged blade. Competition means motivation, determination. It is a reason to try to be better. Competition is the antidote to complacency, and thus a catalyst of progress. Us not living in caves is a direct result of competition.

Curiously, having come so far since the time we left the caves means that competition has changed as well. In fact, outright competing with the next person is societally frowned upon, and usually manifests itself in the less productive forms of constant 1-up'ing and raging envy. Also, mobbing and other sorts of ugliness.

The medium through which we experience modern competition in what is considered a "pure" form is almost exclusively sports. It is easy to argue that sports, as such, arose from the demise of competition as it was known in former ages of mankind, as a mimicry of activities that once constituted the competition for survival (and procreation): hunt, war, elopement, gathering, perseverance. Not that war could be attributed solely to "former ages of mankind", but at least we don't want it to be an open competition anymore.

So, sports. The pitfall here is what kind of sports we grow up with, what sports get the most spotlight and gain the highest prominence. Football/soccer and basketball matches are frequently decided by coaxing the referee into a wrong decision in your favour. Fall down without having been shoved, talk trash to disturb concentration and hope for a rebuttal that may be punished as an additional bonus. Yell at the referee and argue every decision. No-no, my foot wasn't behind the line. Inconceivable.

Then there's athletics, cycling and similar disciplines, which seem to have long evolved into a race of "who can shove more stuff into their body without being caught overstepping an official rule". The phrase "usage of illegal doping" alone is amusing already, when you think about it - it means there is legal doping, so, the question isn't really "if", but only "by how much". The answer may arrive in the form of a life-ending heart attack at age 40.

Speaking of racing - Formula 1, anyone? Turned into a competition for finding the most improbable loophole in the technical regulations. Funnily, the stricter and more complicated the rules get, the more severe those loopholes are. Back when the limits were more relaxed and everyone was shooting for the sky, the differences were more, you know, tangible. Back then, A had a better engine, B had a better chassis and then we watched it unfold. Now it's all "so, turning this screw 57° to the right can be justified with the following paragraphs as not contradicting to those other paragraphs, and it also gives us half a second per lap".

Major sports these days are a cutthroat business where the limits of the "humanly possible" were reached decades ago, and now everything that gives you any sort of advantage that is not in clear and unmistakable contradiction with the rules is considered "fair game". And then you venture into regions that are in contradiction with the rules and simply hope not to get caught. You are supposed to take everything you can get, try to grab some more and then act as you deserve even more yet.

Having grown up with this image of sports and thus competition, we arrive in a place where everything can be justified by pointing out that X is going up against Y. A "competitive situation" is suddenly a sufficient reason to abandon all honour, humanity, grace and dignity. You are supposed to bite and claw, to kick and punch, to blow low and exploit, exploit, exploit. All is fair in love and competition.

I would like to introduce you to another sport - or, rather, remind you of its existence. One that is not as widely popular world wide, which doesn't get much prime time spotlight. I'm talking about Snooker, a billiard variation with an emphasis on high precision and, most importantly, strategic thinking. Is Snooker competitive? Oh, boy, yes. Look at the faces of the players. They want it. They want it badly. So, what's the difference?

The difference is that Snooker is a deeply aristocratic sport by its very nature and origin. You can't play it in school yards, you can't play it in pubs, half drunk. You have to overcome a high entry barrier to play it at all, and thus, it has traditionally been coined by the, dare I say, noble. Therefore, the standards the players are held up to are inherently higher. And I don't mean merely things as the dress code. I mean moral standards. An example.

There is a rule that forbids you to, at any point, touch a ball, any ball, with any part of your body or clothing. This is something that can be very hard to keep track of, because it basically only becomes relevant in those cases where the intended shot is a highly tricky one, so the view will be obscured, and although the referee will try his best to have a line of sight, he'll also do his best to accomplish this without distracting the player (ideally staying out of his field of view). You can't exactly drive a camera in there either. Besides, in the vast majority of cases, the fleeting contact of, say, a sleeve with a ball wouldn't do anything. So, what?

I'll tell you what. It is considered and unexceptionally accepted the duty and obligation of a player to announce an illegal contact when he becomes aware of it. Immediately. Even if nothing has moved even by a dust particle's margin. It's a matter of honour, it's a matter of morality, it's a matter of what defines you as a Snooker player and earns you respect. Just as a pointer, respect is what earns you money through the discreet ad sticker you're wearing on your breast pocket. It is not considered "okay" to run with it, just because no one noticed.

If you touch a ball, you admit it. If you are carefully swinging at the ball and your cue touches it before you execute the actual shot, you announce it. If you get a double contact (white jumps back from first contact with other ball and hits cue again before you pull it away), you say it. Even if no one noticed. Even if it costs you the frame, or the match. You don't try and figure out how much you can get away with. You don't care how much you can get away with. You care about fair and clean competition, and you are not interested in any unfair advantage.

If you get a fluke (i.e. a lucky shot with a much better outcome than initially planned), you apologise. You appreciate its results, of course, and the opponent accepts them gracefully, without any "lol ur lucky nuub" rage. Luck is part of competition, as it is of any process. But you apologise. When your opponent masters a particularly difficult situation successfully, or plans and executes a masterful shot, you congratulate. You don't cry "hax" and rant about how his haircut is overpowered, but show respect for the skills of your opponent. It's tradition. You just do it. Failure to comply with the moral standards of the game is as severe as a violation of its functional rules.

The bottom line is, competition does not have to be that dirty, grey-zone, cutthroat, no-respect-for-anyone dogfight we learned to accept it to be. You can compete, and compete on a very high level, without disregarding respect and morality. And next time you think about competition and what it allows and justifies, don't think about what ESPN is showing right now. Think about Snooker. Otherwise you're just tuning yourself to the wrong ideals.

Analogy of the day

Taken from the WoW tanking forums:

Being a gorgeous 18 year old girl allows you go out with as many guys as you want. But in the end, you're still a bitch.

Being a tank is the same thing. It does allow you to coerce people into doing things they don't want to. But in the end, you're still a bastard.

Oh, and since we're at it, here a very, very nice statement I read (and saved) a few months ago on the MMO-Champion forums:

This is my opinion. There are many like it, but this one is mine. The game does not suck completely just because I've run out of normal modes to farm gear from. The game is neither easy, nor hard, except from my own vantage created by my experience and skill that makes it so in my mind. Naxx does not suck just as Sesame Street does not suck. I won't complain about 6th graders having it easy because their algebra homework doesn't compare to the rocket surgery I perform daily at a 6 figure job. They have to start somewhere just like I did. Even though I am very smart and skilled, I am one person of a 25 man raid who killed a boss. I did not solo him with my skinning knife even though I sometimes talk like I did. Let me live to a 102 and still have a hard mode achieve out there worth getting or strike me down now if I cry about no new shiny new content with so much still left in the game to do.

Adopted unrealistic expectations

Today my favourite druid recalled a funny incident we experienced yesterday in our good-night-PuG, which took us to Drak'Tharon Keep and teamed us up with a DK, a shaman and a mage.

To recap. The mage asked if people wanted a table, to which the DK responded with "nah let's make it a quick run". How is that even a contradiction? How does free food make a run less quick? Oh yes, I see, because you don't have a draining resource, no one else has to consider theirs either. Of course. Consequently, when I stopped before the first boss and called for "regen", seeing the mage and shaman both below 40%, the arduous DK smartly remarked after the fight "just go no time to wait all over". As usual, my response was a simple /slap. After the second boss the DK dropped group, supposedly because things were not going "quick" enough. We got a replacement-hunter within seconds (of course) and finished the dungeon without any further incidents.

The story would hardly warrant retelling, especially not on two blogs, if it wasn't for some ironic details. Like, as pointed out in the linked post, the DK wearing the "Patient" title. Yeah, right. Or, more on the subject of this post, that he was, in a way, correct - the run was going less quick than expected. I noticed that. See, I'm pulling stuff, and then there's the stuff, and ... why isn't the stuff dying? We fumbled around with those stupid spiders until they called in their entire families, pets and their pets' families and families' pets for us to fumble around with. So, I had a look at Recount, fully expecting to see the impatient DK doing something in the 4k ballpark and the other two dragging along in the 1k range (his attitude was implying more something along 5-6k, but that would not have been possible, since if even one person does that sort of damage, stuff dies quicker than it was). What did I actually see, however? Go on, guess. Oh, right, you read Alquiel's post so you know already ... right.

What we had there was a mage and a hunter, both at about 2.2k, and the DK well behind in the 1.5k vicinity. As well as me comfortably leading the way at above 2.5k, because when I pull entire rooms of stuff, those Cleaves, Thunderclaps and Shockwaves pad my numbers as well, but that's beside the point. For the sake of the point, let's make a few observations here.

1. For a heroic 5-man dungeon (excluding ToC and ICC), 1.5k DPS is, speaking in terms of feasibility, more than sufficient. This means, that if all your damage dealers perform at that level, as well as tank and healer providing their role-equivalent of 1.5k DPS, you can clear it without much trouble. You won't clear it in 15 minutes though.
   
2. Doing 2.2k DPS in a heroic 5-man dungeon (again, excluding ToC and ICC) is actually good performance. It is not a particularly good performance as measured by currently available gear, but measured by the approached content, it is good nevertheless. Although again, it won't make you clear the dungeon in 15 minutes.
   
3. Damaging below the tank (especially if your tank is a warrior) is not exactly a badge of honour, but one has to keep in mind, that a tank's DPS is not a universal measure, but a moving target. As Gevlon recently pointed out, an iLevel200-DPSer damaging below the iLevel245-tank isn't slacking, he's doing content appropriate for him, while the tank is doing content he vastly overgears.
   
4. The Dungeon Finder matches groups with a "mentoring" principle in mind. It always attempts to place one or two people who just barely qualify for that specific dungeon into a group that could, give or take, clear it on their own. It's a good way to ensure a smooth transition from levelling into group content.
   
5. If you're lucky, your group will consist of a seriously overgeared tank, a slightly overgeared healer (this is more for the benefit of the healer, since overgeared healing tends to become slightly boring), 1-2 barely geared DPS and 1-2 vastly overgeared DPS. This may enable you to blast through a dungeon in 15 minutes.
   
6. Being regularly matched into groups as described above creates the somewhat skewed perception, that dungeons can always be cleared in 15 minutes, even if you are the underperforming DPS yourself. A case can be made, that the longer you linger at scrub-level, the more often you're matched with T10-DPSers who will AoE the entire dungeon faster than a mage can summon a table.
   
7. Scrubs think a dungeon can be cleared in 15 minutes just by yelling "gogogo" at the tank convincingly enough. Those who actually effect the fast clear may know better.
   
8. In our PuG yesterday, the vastly overgeared people were the tank and the healer, while the DPS were merely "appropriate" or "good". While this setup pretty much guarantees you a smooth and uneventful run, it also means things will take a little more time.
   
9. The dicknight was so used to being carried, that he failed to realise, that the speed of a run is, among other factors, a direct function of his DPS-contribution.
   
10. He further failed to realise that his DPS-contribution sucked.
    

Skill vs. entry barrier

Today I want to talk about tanks being the most awesome beings in the (MMO) world. And by that I mean, I want to explain why they're not.

The astute reader may be aware of the recent "meat in the room" discussion. Are tanking and healing harder than DPSing? Do they require more skill? If they do, how comes members of top-guilds settle for the "lesser" jobs? They are all highly skilled, they should all be playing "high-skill" roles! Maybe they're sacrificing themselves for the sake of the guild by playing the undesired DPS roles - which would put an interesting twist to the commonly spread perception of tank and healer "sacrifice". Or maybe the whole argument is based on a flawed assumption. The secret, you see, is in entry barriers.

First, let's talk about healers, since this is the role I am personally least familiar with, but have been observing it being executed long and close enough to come to the following realisation: healing, above all else, is about having the right mindset. A great healer is not necessarily the person who thrives at polishing rotations and perfecting execution infinitely. A great healer is, first of all, a person who is capable of immersing themselves into looking after others. This is the great challenge in the mastery of healing, the ability to transition from "I do" to "I help". The MMO worlds are full of those who do not possess that ability, the "battle healers", oh don't we know those. They may make for highly competent DPS, if you'd let them, but "forced" into the healer role they'll always have an above average rate of slip-ups, cock-ups, focus-losses and accidental deaths. Those who do possess that ability, they may never rise to the top when DPSing, but when they're healing, you feel safe, in bold letters. They got your back, no matter what. Salutes to my favourite druid as well as a certain priestess who may or may not still read this blog and may or may not be still very angry at me.

However, this is not necessarily an entry barrier. It's the path to mastery, and it's a precondition for feeling comfortable with a healing role in the long run, but not something you absolutely cannot do without. You can. As long as the encounter is not too challenging and/or there's someone to cover up for you, in one way or other, it's possible to just round up those healing buttons and roll along. You'd be surprised how far you can roll this way. Or you wouldn't, because you've probably seen it yourself.

Tanking is somewhat different. Its mental transition is far smaller. While one has to abandon the "I destroy", the point of destination is a very vicinal "I am indestructible". You're still the fighter who wrestles with the monster (to save the princess?), the change is marginal. What changes a lot is the entry barrier you need to overcome to even begin tanking. In WoW it is currently best expressed through the defense skill. If you want to tank heroics and do not bring at least 535 defense (skill, not rating) to the party, you're asking for disaster. They're doing away with it and incorporating it into talents in Cataclysm - which is a good thing. But defense is only one aspect of the barrier, and easiest to judge, because it's measurable.

The thing is that tank failures are very hard to recover from and to compensate for. Not impossible, especially with competent DPS and a dedicated healer, but hard. Case in point: a tank needs to keep mobs in front of himself, while melee DPS needs to attack mobs from behind. It's basically the same thing - positioning. By attacking from behind (or the side, if it's a dragon), the DPS removes the possibility of being parried, improving their damage output by roughly 5% at the same time as not causing additional damage on the tank through parry-haste, plus avoiding cleave attacks themselves. It's a win-win-win. But when you're only starting out in group play, those 5% are negligible, parry-haste is not as common (or feared, due to the effective removal of crushing blows) as it used to be, and beginner-level mobs and bosses won't exactly cleave you to death on the spot. You should learn it, and you should learn it soon, but you're safe starting out without and learning on the job.

The equivalent task of the tank (keeping the mobs in front) on the other hand is not at all optional. Being attacked from behind means that your parry is removed. As well as your block and your dodge, in short, your entire avoidance is stripped, save for the miss chance (inherent 5%, modified by your defense skill - depending on mob level usually 10-15% total). You are going to eat 2 to 3 times as much damage. And since you, as a beginner tank, are likely to be running with a beginner healer (look, being carried doesn't count), they won't be able to compensate. So, those 5 mobs you're about to pull, with a caster and a hunter type? Yeah, have fun dancing around trying to keep them all in front of you. Your ability to do that will make or break your group's ability to progress. Oh, and your melee DPS will hate you for it.

But is that really hard? Is it so heroic and incredibly awesome that everyone needs to be at your feet for doing it? No, not at all. It's not hard. It's basic. Your task of keeping the mobs in front of yourself isn't really that much harder than the damage dealers' task of staying behind them. But the tank has to learn to do it now, while the DPS can learn to do it later. That's all the difference. When I struggled with AoE threat, I spent several restless hours analysing my rotation and spec, pinpointed what I was doing wrong, changed a glyph, and the next time we lined up for heroics the problem was solved. If I was instead struggling with my AoE-DPS, I could have easily afforded to gradually tweak and improve over weeks.

Tanking doesn't require more skill, nor is it that much more stressful - not if you enjoy doing it! What it does require is the ability and dedication to tackle and solve problems the moment they occur. Actually, you're supposed to solve them before they occur, because, see above, tank failures are very hard to recover from. When Rem slept on picking up Herald Volazj after the insanity phases, two people got subsequently one-shotted. I screwed up, I shouldn't have let that happen. It is the tank's job not to let such things happen. It was a learning experience.

Which leads to the next important remark: yes, there is a lot more to learn when it comes to tanking. It is not just "learn the basics and you're set forever". I learn every day, every time I tank, no matter what I tank. Experience is invaluable. But you need the basics.

Last but not least, let's talk about DPS. See, any damage is a contribution. Even 100 DPS, although laughably low, does, mathematically speaking, still contribute to mobs going down. This is why there is virtually no entry barrier for damage dealers. Okay, there is: don't do outright stupid stuff! But other than that, unless there are enrage timers in play, or the realistic chance of running into mana trouble, pretty much everything you bring to the table is more than would have been on the table if you were not there.

Does this mean DPS takes no skill, since it's always useful? Oh, hell no. The flip side of the coin is that more DPS is always more useful (unless there's Mirrored Soul, or Overlord's Brand, but .. come on, work with me here!). Sky's the limit. And while it takes not so incredibly much skill to start contributing some DPS, it takes one helluva lot of skill and dedication to contribute really amazing DPS. And this means that contrary to popular (well, with some) belief, proficient DPS should be valued very, very highly. And I guarantee you that the proficient damage dealers in the top guilds mentioned at the beginning of this post are valued very, very highly. Because they had the determination to go past the "I'm doing okay" stage, transcend the "I'm doing good" phase and banged their head into the "I want to be freakin' amazing" place they're in now.

Have you noticed a common theme in all three roles? Yep. Dedication. Love what you do and do what you love. And stop worrying so much whether your job is the more important than someone else's or not.

Achievement nodes

Today, Gevlon is once again reasoning about node ninjaing. Well, actually he's reasoning about social norms, but he uses node ninjaing as an example. Thus I will tell you a story I wanted to tell you anyway. Makes sense, no? Okay.

Some time last week, when my favourite druid's arrival was delayed by snow (and recovery from having bested it), I used the time for some domestic tasks. Flying down to Azjol-Nerub to hand in the watcher quest, then a few relaxed rounds of ore-mining through Icecrown (yes-yes, I know, only morons farm, but I actually like doing it for a bit now and again, so, sue me!).

On my way through Dragonblight I spotted a cobalt node. Descending upon it, I noticed nearby fighting. An orc rogue, level 73, was busy with a couple of mobs. Now, I do not nurture any particularly warm feelings for the Horde, or orcs in specific, and a case can always be made, that cross-faction meanness is very much in the spirit of the setting. But we're not on a PvP server. What? Oh, no, that's not what I mean. I did not intend to say that on a PvP server it is okay to steal ore, and on a normal server it's not. No-no.

What I meant is that on a PvP server the situation could have been settled with game means. I could have attacked him with all my Prot-OP'ness (not to mention a 7 levels advantage), or simply taken the ore and then stood there in a "don't like it? come take me" pose. Or, assuming I'd be stealing from someone potentially more powerful (there's always a bigger fish), risk being retaliated through force. This is not an option on a non-PvP server. Therefore, my actions would not have been directed against the character, but the player behind it. Players, in most cases, all belong to the human race, and, despite what Gevlon thinks, deserve human treatment. Long story short, I did the usual drill, hovered next to the node on my gryph and waited for the rogue to finish. She then hastily mined the node and /thank'd me. I /salute'd back, continued on my way .. and suddenly felt good inside. I think I even smiled.

Roughly half an hour later I was in Icecrown, flying my usual path. One of the nodes in the "ghoul field" was up - and it was titanium! Now, I shall remark a couple of things. These days, I don't really mind what metal I mine up. I farm mostly because 30-60 minutes flying from node to node, listening to music, can be quite relaxing when not done too often. It does earn me some money (especially when sold as Belt Buckles), but I could be just doing dailies instead - sometimes I do. Saronite is useful for the "everyday business" stuff, titanium for the rarer occasions. I'm always happy to see the blue-ish glow of a titanium node, but not getting all hot and bothered about it.

The other thing to remark is that I particularly enjoy going after those "troubled" nodes. Not those with just one mob or so next to them, but those in seriously tricky places, for the simple reason that I could not have dreamed about fetching many of those 2-3 months ago, even in the company of my favourite druid, so it's a bit of a challenge and a comparison with my past capabilities. So, I get down to the ground and to work with those ghouls. The really nasty part are the casters, because if I charge them, I get too close to the next bunch, and my ranged silence is on a minute cooldown. This particular fight goes a little pear-shaped, it takes me a while to get into "efficient mode" and get full control of the situation. I don't know exactly how many I pulled in total, but I did more than 160k total damage in the process (first fight after Recount reset), so, it must have been something in the 12-15 household. Oh yes, and midway through it, a blood-elf paladin (it's always blood-elf paladins) flew in and grabbed the ore.

So, I mounted my trusty gryphon, ascended into the air, looked down at the pile of corpses (they .. were dead before anyway .. I know) I produced and smiled again. Gaming is all about achievements. Achievements are gaming's vehicles to fun. You rescue princesses (from another castle), you kill dragons, you're having fun in the process. Scoring a /thank from the opposing faction is an achievement. Clearing out a dozen ghouls around an ore node is an achievement. Cunningly grabbing a node someone else was after is .. an achievement as well .. in a way. I guess.

In which we call out bullshit

Not in the mood for a lengthy rant, so I'll just add my voice to the many and point out that this guest post on World of Matticus is complete and utter bullshit, from the first to the last sentence. Shame on you, Matticus, for even allowing it to be posted on your portal. As for the author, he is either an idiot with a very limited and tunnel-visioned grasp of the game (yes, I just publicly called someone an idiot - for calling members of his team "meat in the room", "a dime a dozen" and so on. Deal with it), or cunningly sparking controversy for the sake of clicks to his own blog. For my part, I decided to never again click on a link leading to We Fly Spitfires. Sir, you are blacklisted.

Kind regards,

Rem
a tank

PvP is CvM

This whole Warbringer debate once again reminded me of why I simply cannot enthuse myself over the idea of PvP. In an MMORPG, player-versus-player combat inevitably spawns a casters-versus-melee conflict, and you simply cannot balance it out. There is just no way to do it, since there is no state or situation in which both are happy. When the caster is successful at kiting, the melee dies without being able to touch the opponent most of the time - if the melee manages to stick close, the caster will be interrupted, silenced, stunned, pummeled and ultimately ripped to shreds. Blizzard stated more than a year ago that melee needs to be in range and casters cannot be balanced around kiting. Fair enough, but it's not working. It can't work, because no matter what else you put in place, being at long range is a huge advantage for the caster (they can't be hit), and being in close range a huge advantage for the melee (they can, you know, actually hit). And so PvP turns into one big arms race between snares and gap closers. It's always either the melee complaining about being kited to death, or the clothies complaining about being blown up. Or both.

Truth is, the traditional classes-and-levels MMORPG is unsuited for PvP combat to begin with. Yes, this is a blanket statement. No, I'm not going to qualify it. I am going to justify it. Somewhat. The problem, you see, is in the early design process. Most MMORPGs, strangely sometimes even supposedly PvP-centric ones, such as AoC or Aion, are, at their very core, designed as PvE games. How can I tell? By looking at classes, class roles and skills. The holy trinity is a PvE concept. Whenever you see neatly separated tanks, damage dealers and healers, taunts, detaunts and threat modifiers, you know where the wind blows from. In Warhammer, tanks actually have a role in PvP. In AoC they're the guys with not enough damage output to kill anything and a ton of irrelevant survivability.

WoW? No matter how often Ghostcrawler, whom I respect a lot, says that WoW has two parts, both PvE and PvP, it is, at a design level, a game as deeply grounded in PvE as it gets. They wrote down roles, they wrote down tools, and then distributed them among classes. It is glaringly obvious, that the question never was "how would an encounter between a warlock and a paladin play out?", but always "in which specific ways would a warlock and a paladin contribute to a group's success?". Because the tools were given out to classes assuming their co-working in fighting an outside enemy, how those tools would measure up against each other did not come into focus until much later. Moreover, many of the so called utility skills are designed specifically to neutralize particular mechanics the player, or rather the group they're in, is confronted with. That mechanic may happen to be a fundamental offensive or defensive tool of another class. So, you end up with "counter-classes" and the ever popular rock-paper-scissors principle. Except, RPS is boring, because the outcome is mostly pre-determined.

But PvP isn't balanced around 1v1! Yeah, I'm sorry, but if you do not balance around 1v1, you effectively do not balance around anything. Cleverly, they iterated to claiming they don't balance around 2v2 either, weighted the respective Arena bracket down, and thus moved the problem into 3v3. Is WoW-PvP balanced around 3v3 now? Not really. It's just that at that level complexity gets so high, that you can always wave your hands in the air and say, well, there are so many variables and possibilities, the composition is just one of a plethora of factors. Which is kind of true. But drowning a problem in magnitude is not the same thing as solving it. In the end, no matter the macro-format, on the micro scale, you still have one character and another character beating up on each other, and one of them has to win. Yes, they have teammates, but if A is doing more damage to B than vice versa while at the same time taking less in return, A's teammates find themselves at an advantage.

Don't get me wrong, I am certainly not advocating the case of those who try to argue, that you should be able to grab an arbitrary assembly of classes and have an equal chance of success regardless. I do not support that notion (neither does Blizzard). Composition should matter. Synergies is what MMORPGs are all about. Which is exactly what puts them at odds with fundamentals of competitive eSports. The very idea of any sport is to create an even field, on which the competitors can, well, compete in terms of the discipline in question. However, to even out the field in an MMORPG means to turn it into an FPS where you shoot fireballs instead of lasers. And no one would want to play that, because Quake is simply better at being Quake (and Unreal Tournament at being Unreal Tournament, and Counter-Strike at being Counter-Strike, and so on). I heard there was a PvP-competition MMORPG-style game called Fury, a year or so ago, that had all "serious PvPers" excited .. for about a week, and then they all went back to their games and all the serious FPS players went back to laughing about them.

Why do we have PvP at all? Because games are played by humans, and humans love to match with each other. You have a character, I have a character, just out of curiosity, let's see how they perform against each other - sparring fight! And there, you have a duel function. It's more fun when it's large scale, so we get BGs. It's even more fun when it's rated, so we get Arenas. And people get so excited about it, that they forget it's just an afterthought in a game with a fundamental PvE mindset. As long as the developer teams get together and start their brainstorming with "okay guys, we need tanks, healers and damage dealers - ideas?", we'll have PvE games, which will then contain some sort of PvP interpretation and implementation, and everyone will be bitching for years about PvP balance issues, because no one thought about that sort of balance right from the beginning, but instead about who gets to cast fireball and who gets to cast rain of fire.

Only if the designers sit down right at the start and ask "so we have the ranged guys and the melee guys, the guys who can heal and the guys who can't, the guys who can deal a ton of damage and the guys who can take a ton of damage - how is this going to match up?", only then will the result have a chance at being a balanced PvP game (cf. Darkfall, in some respects). If that'd be still fun or popular, now that's a different question.

This guild's bank is guarded by a corehound

Just had a thought. Assume you're running a guild, and thus you control a guild bank. Whom are you going to give access to it? Obviously, people you trust. However, there is also the possibility of people you trust being hacked. Admittedly, just like Tobold, I believe that in the vast majority of cases "having been hacked" is simply a euphemism for "having done something very stupid". But it happens. Clever people can do stupid things - when they're half awake, when they're distracted and not paying full attention, or whatever. Windows does its share by still using the "hide known file extensions" default, thereby opening something that cannot be legitimately called a backdoor, but rather a user trap. You see, those very intelligent people whom you really trust as much as you trust yourself may happen to just not be geeks. Those who are not geeks may be legitimately unaware of what file extensions are and how they work in Windows. Long story short, account theft happens.

Surely, it is again a matter of trust. In addition to asking whether you can trust a person to treat guild bank access responsibly, you may have to ask whether you can trust that person to treat their own account securely. Enter the Blizzard Authenticator. While not a "slay all" weapon for security problems, it does reduce the risk of "being hacked" significantly (see Tobold's reasoning on how it's a dual-improvement). So, we can simply demand people to make use of an authenticator, if they want access to the guild bank.

How can we verify if they have an authenticator? Corehound pet. I don't know if Blizzard had this in mind when introducing the pet and the way it works, but if they had, compliments. If someone can summon a cosmetic corehound pet, it means an authenticator is linked to their account that very moment.

What if they unlink it later? We can't make them show their corehound every day, after all. Well, at the very least, that would constitute a conscious move towards compromising their own account security. Which would be stupid. We covered clever people doing stupid things, but is unlikely to be one of those. Why a person would unlink their authenticator is beyond me. So, as long as you can verify that you're dealing with sensible people, and maybe hold regular "Banker's Trust" meetings where everyone shows off their corehounds, that's one step against unexpectedly empty guild banks.

Mind you, this has just as much to do with responsibility and credibility. "Yes, the log shows I've emptied it, but I was hacked. Luckily, I got my account back before they sold off my gear and sent off all my gold, but the guild items are all mysteriously gone. Sowwy guys" - just doesn't fly. Either you did it, or you compromised your account in a grossly negligent way (as opposed to the "oops" way) by putting the corehound to sleep.

Want access to the bank? Show your pet. If you can't, you'll have to resort to asking others to retrieve stuff for you. Until they get sick of it and tell you to GTFO and get an authenticator. See, smoking's not the only thing peer pressure can lead to.

Necessitated optional randomness

Ever since 3.3 dropped, pretty much every WoW-related online presence is filled with LFG stories and reasoning. There is one thing I fail to grasp: people complaining about other people in their group insisting on doing optional bosses. I mean, sure, I get it, there is this knee-jerk path of thinking that makes "heroics = good" into "more heroics = better", but what if we slow down (I know, very unpopular thing to do in the WoW community, especially at this time) for a moment and ask ourselves, why we're actually so keen on running as many heroics as possible, shall we?

Last time I checked, the main reason for running heroics were emblems. More specifically, Emblems of Triumph; if one is after Frost, chain-running is pointless, since Frost is awarded only for the first random - and the complaint stems mostly from people who tend to run upward of 5 heroics per day, regularly. Therefore we hereby consider established: heroics are run for Emblems of Triumph. Now, newsflash: those buggers drop from optional bosses as well. Of course I want to do that optional boss. I'm here, he's here, all I need to do is clear these two rooms of trash, then bash my shield into him for a minute or so, et voilà, a highly optional and almost free emblem. Not even included in this consideration is that one might actually be so weird and derive fun from running a dungeon, in which case fighting an additional boss also results in additional fun. But that's really bizarre territory, so let's leave it there.

Instead, let's consider a numeric example, for the sake of which we shall invoke Halls of Stone as our hypothetical dungeon. It's a good choice for two reasons: firstly, it has two optional bosses, and secondly, it seems to be somewhat hated, for reasons I also fail to grasp. Thus it's pretty much the standard case of most "ohmigosh, I was in HoS again [insert whine about how that person hates HoS and how the LFG tool picked HoS for them 5 times in a row on a single day - a problem I am strangely unfamiliar with, because I have yet to happen to run 5 random heroic dungeons on a single day, and, of the 3-4 we usually run, never had the same one twice either] and, can you imagine it, this noob actually insisted on doing the optional bosses" stories.

So, Halls of Stone. You can skip the Maiden of Grief as well as Krystallus and only do Tribunal of Ages and Sjonnir. In other words, you just left out a boss for whom the achievement is "kill her in under a minute", and another one, for whom the tactic boils down to "when he knocks you back, just stay where you are for a couple of seconds". Real roadblocks *sarcasm*. The most difficult thing you bypassed that way is the trash room on the way to the Maiden which has two groups of three dwarves, with casters in both. If that frightens you so much, you are not prepared.

Anyway, you skipped the optional bosses and got 2 emblems from the mandatory ones, as well as 2 more emblems as your random-reward, for a total of 4. In the meantime, the noob who insists on doing everything got 4 emblems from bosses and 2 more as random-reward, for a total of 6. But of course, you saved time! Means you can run more heroics than him! Bad news for you, the RNG only selects HoS today (that's what you write when you complain about it anyway). Let's be generous and say, in the time it takes the noob to run two HoS, you manage three HoS. Application of simple math derives: both of you have earned 12 emblems each. However, you had to do an additional run of your oh-so-beloved dungeon, while he had the luxury of less monotony through more boss-diversity. Of course, you walked away with 26 more gold for an additional completion, plus more reason to write how sick you are of Halls of Stone on whatever online presence it is you're gracing with your contributions. Win-win, I guess.

Rem stands corrected

Huh. There's something I didn't expect, and I'm actually pleasantly surprised to having been wrong. In October, I added a practical example to my September-rant on micro-transactions:

**Edit (20.10.09): There is this infamous practice of guilds who fail to grab server-first kills on their server to transfer to another, slower progressing one, and getting their achievement there. Although it's generally met with disdain by the community, Blizzard is doing nothing to stop it. Neither will they do anything to stop it any time soon. Collecting 25 times $15 for the transfer of a full raid roster, plus maybe some alts that might be required in short term, then getting the same amount a second time when the caravan heads home, is certainly a nice and juicy not-so-micro-transactional bonus they won't turn their back on for the sake of protecting some vague and officially-irrelevant achievement status.

Turns out I was wrong. Recently, Blizzard has done something to stop it. Colour me impressed.

November games

While we're all celebrating WoW's 5th anniversary by letting "many whelps!" out, especially on the "left side, even side!", I feel reminded of a November evening last year, the 17th, to be precise. It was the evening, when we went to kill Thaurlach, the Balrog, one last time at level 50, and then sought out our favourite spots (and companies) for an early logout. It was the evening, when Shadows of Angmar drifted into the past, taking many wonderful things with it. It seemed to get better from there - before it got much, much worse. So, now we're here. And we certainly need more DoTs!

Ding, 80

There it is. Character started on June 14th, dinged 80 in the late hours of October 19th. This road arrived at its destination. Now it's time to pick one of the many paths starting from here and .. find out where they're headed!

*looks around contently*

*proceeds to improve his reputation with the Wyrmrest Accord to purchase a tanking cloak*

Microtransactions

I used to like football (not that it matters, but let's be clear: I'm talking about the game that is called "soccer" in the USA and some local-language version of "football" everywhere else). Very much, in fact. Used to get all excited about my favourite team's games, draw line-ups, rant about coaches and what not. Funnily, however, I never ever went to a live game and even (relatively) rarely watched one live on TV. I was not a fan of the local team, and things like football games would have been by and large considered a waste of money in our family anyway.

But, luckily for me, there was a very good football show on Free-TV. They had the rights of first (post game) broadcast for the German Bundesliga and used it for a great format. Back then, the usual schedule was: two games on Friday, six games on Saturday, one game on Sunday. So, they had three shows a week on those days. Friday was an hour in the late night slot, where they covered the two games and sent you goodnight; Sunday had only one game to cover, which they used to fit in additional commentary, studio guests and such; while Saturday was the main show, two, sometimes two and a half hours.

On average, this meant 30 minutes gross air time per game. Throw in 5 minutes ad block, 5 minutes studio talk, and you'd still arrive at a solid 20 minutes raw game coverage. That's a lot. They used to show you a lot of sequences exemplary of the game flow in the different stages of the game, so you'd really get a feeling of how the teams stood off, and a goal would be replayed, re-replayed, opposite-angle'd, computer-animated, distance-measured, discussed, while, all the time the announcer would play-act as if he'd be broadcasting live, with emotions of surprise, awe, disappointment, anticipation and so on. They did as good a job as possible of just compressing the best of a full game into 20 minutes.

At some point in the late 90s, Germany's first Pay-TV broadcaster came into being. One of their selling points was, that they purchased the rights for live transmissions of Bundesliga games, and were showing them all in a conference transmission, so one was able to freely switch between games at any time. Fancy and costly. That Pay-TV broadcaster belonged to the same corporation as the Free-TV channel with the football show. And at first, it all didn't seem to .. well .. matter. If you felt like shaking the money, you'd get the Pay-TV live experience, otherwise you'd just stick to your time shifted fix. Market segmentation. Kind of. Because that second part of the consumers wasn't actually paying. Not directly, at least, but instead via advertising revenue.

Slowly but surely, the quality of the Free-TV show found itself in a steady decline. The total time was waning, while the ad blocks were growing. They started weaving advertising into everything, from the opening jingle, to line-up screens, to permanent holographic on-field projections (outside the actual field at first, on it later). The actual coverage deteriorated to the point where only the plays leading to goals were shown. You'd often get only one slow-mo, sometimes they'd skip it entirely. The interview part was kept up somewhat, mostly because it naturally contains lots of advertising (background board, jersey, overlay, everything). At some point, you could say that what once was two hours of football finally turned into one hour of ad blocks. It became commonly accepted, that whoever has a real interest in football, was subscribing to the Pay-TV channel. Luckily, at that time (let's say roughly 2002-2003), I did not have a real interest in football any more.

What does this have to do with the title of this entry? A lot. I dislike the idea of microtransactions, or Free2Play as it's now seductively called. And I do not dislike it because I am pissy about developers wanting to be paid for their work, but, exactly opposite, because I fully realize, that developers need to be paid for their work.

I dislike it, because I dislike unclear business deals. Or, to do away with the euphemism, I dislike lies. Free to Play is a lie. The game is not free to play. It cannot be. No game produced/distributed by a professional company can be. Because "professional" means, that they are earning their living with it. Someone at some point needs to pay for the game, be it buyers, subscribers, donors, advertisement contractors or micro purchasers. Otherwise the devs will starve and die. And their children, too. Even if you don't care about the developers and their children, you're still left with the costs of running the servers. Unless you want to kill off the hosting company and their children as well. You monster. Have I been graphic enough now? Okay. Time to span the bridge to the football ramblings.

See, I'm not criticising Free2Play for its exploitation of impulse control, for circumventing your purchase decision making by splitting the payment in such small amounts, that every time it seems like a negligible cost - even every time out of thousand times. I could, but that base was covered before, and, besides, everyone's so clever (especially us bloggers) and so much in control of their own impulses, that it's always some anonymous "they" who are affected by it, and "they" probably deserve it, being lowly M&S or something. I digress.

The point is, again, that someone needs to pay. This means, that the game in question has to offer an incentive, a strong incentive, to pay for it. That incentive can only be in the difference between the paid and the free content. The larger, deeper, higher quality and more professionally ran the game is, the bigger that difference needs to be. Believe anything else, and you're being fooled. Ixobelle (you followed the link above, right?) explains, that he "could park myself at a tin vein, let my subscription run out, and just fire up FR anytime I wanted to play the mining game; that would never cost me another dime" - and it's true, but misses the point. He purchased the "mining game in pirate hat" for .. whatever couple of dollars he paid for it, and, yes, if he never wants to move past that, he, indeed, doesn't need to pay more. He bought one toy, and as long as he's happy playing with just this one toy, he never needs to pay for another.

But what if he does? The sword that costs real money needs to be significantly better than the one you get from slaying the dragon, otherwise too many people will just settle for slaying the dragon. The "premium only" class needs to be more powerful or more fun to play, or no one will bother to pay for it. That is pretty much what Free Realms (FR in the above quote), according to Tobold, does. It's a free world to roam in, but you're gimped in everything you do, unless you send a dollar or two to Sony Online - and get an "I win" button in return.

Admittedly, it does not have to be as blatantly extreme as the officially highly-casual oriented Free Realms. But it shows, that the incentive needs to be there, and what incentive generally looks like. In-game currency on sale? Means your character's regular expenses need to be too high to satisfy them with in-game means. Only cosmetic items in offer? Means the "normal" outfits need to be butt-ugly to drive you into buying pretties. Whatever it is, that you can acquire for real coin, the game needs to constantly prod you with small sticks into purchasing it, by making its free equivalent's quality something between undesirable and insufficient. The media company delivering football coverage forces you into taking its Pay-TV offer by reducing the quality of its Free-TV service to the point where it can be still said, that, yes, free information is being offered, but the incentive to take the paid deal is overwhelming for anyone who actually cares about playing the game following football.

This also moots the "but we already have microtransactions, they are just called premium services" argument. No, we don't. Changing your character's name, gender, server, race or faction is not actively encouraged, because the game doesn't reward you for doing so. It's just your personal preference, to which game mechanics are neutral. Granted, you might want to change servers to join a particular guild or battlegroup, but that is a situation created by the players, not the developers. Blizzard doesn't hold events where every week all characters whose name starts with a particular letter receive 5000 gold. They do not make raid instances accessible only from a limited number of servers per time frame**. That would equal those services to microtransactions, because it would create incentive. (As a matter of fact, Turbine could be credited for motivating LotRO players to stay away from the server transfer by screwing it up royally a couple of times)

It's about development focus. The company developing the subscription game balances it around you spending as much time as possible in it. That's fine with me, since games are, in the end, just a means of spending time. The company developing a Free2Play^(lie) game balances it first and foremost around motivating you to make micro-purchases. The external solution will always be more desirable than the in-game path. I don't want to play such a game.


**Edit (20.10.09): There is this infamous practice of guilds who fail to grab server-first kills on their server to transfer to another, slower progressing one, and getting their achievement there. Although it's generally met with disdain by the community, Blizzard is doing nothing to stop it. Neither will they do anything to stop it any time soon. Collecting 25 times $15 for the transfer of a full raid roster, plus maybe some alts that might be required in short term, then getting the same amount a second time when the caravan heads home, is certainly a nice and juicy not-so-micro-transactional bonus they won't turn their back on for the sake of protecting some vague and officially-irrelevant achievement status. But that's how it works. There's incentive, there's revenue, there's motivation, and you don't need a tinfoil hat to see it. Want such mechanics to infiltrate the core of the game? No? Then don't be too quick to sing praises to Free2Play^{(still a lie)}.

The ArP Soft Drink

Armour Penetration on gear was not desirable enough. Thought Blizzard. So, they went ahead and increased the amount of actual ArP per ArP-rating by 25%. It became more accessible, and players were able to try out extremes. And all of a sudden discovered, that it's a superior stat for some (most?) physical-DPS specs. So, for those specs, stacking ArP up to (conditional) 100% became the widely accepted winning strategy. As Ghostcrawler puts it, people started "tossing aside" gear pieces without ArP no matter what else they provided, as ArP became a stat that "trumps all other stats". A situation GC/Blizz do not like to see.

Thus, the announced change for 3.2.2 is that ArP-from-ArP-rating is going to be reduced back by 15% - slightly lower than the middle between the old and the current value. How did the player base of the affected specs react? Are they intending to take a more balanced approach now? Nope. Word of mouth is "you still need to reach the same ArP numbers, you'll just need more rating to accomplish that". So, non-ArP gear will be tossed aside even more, because people will thirst for even more ArP-rating to reach the soft cap.

What went wrong? Well, ArP still "trumps all other stats". Apparently it always did, players were just not easily able to test it out under real-raid conditions. Now that they were, and found its upside, they're not ready to back off from it again, since it's not actually being changed. That's the point. ArP itself was not changed. It was neither made "more desirable" before, nor is is about to be made "less desirable" now. The product is the same, all Blizzard is tinkering with is the price.

Instead of the intended balancing, what was in fact pulled off is marketing. The ArP Soft Drink wasn't selling well enough, so they gave away a truckload of free cans, and once people got hooked to it, yanked the price up. It's not at all what they wanted to do, but it's what they accomplished. Oops! Next thing to expect: harsh DR and hard caps on ArP. And forum QQ.

The WoW we are supposed to play

Old Azeroth: Here's XP. Here's more XP. You still here? Here, a few free levels, get to the Dark Portal already!

Outlands: Welcome, here's your flying mount. Have some fun, but hurry up, the ship leaves tomorrow at 9am from Stormwind Harbour.

Northrend: Greetings. No, you can't fly here (unless you have a 78+ character already). Now, to the ground, and get working, baby. And none of that "one level per day" crap for you any more!

Nothing surprising here, but still a bit of a shame, that it takes a new player about 3 months to reach the content which is "the game we are supposed to play". A Cataclysm is overdue indeed.

The difference

I loved LotRO. I truly did. But it never made me wish I'd have switched to MMORPGs earlier. WoW does. Call me names, if you wish, but that's the difference.

Why do we raid?

Turmoil has engulfed the Blogosphere. Well, not really. But it's a cool thing to write. Tobold recently finished his epic Why do we play? series, which I still need to find time to fully read, resubscribed to WoW for reasons you might find familiar from my previous musings, but feels like going back to raiding would be problematic, even if he intended to. Gevlon is fighting the myth of the gear as well as other lame excuses, and would get lots of approval from me (not that he's after my approval!), if he wasn't so eager to insult everything he dislikes. Ixo battles stupid customs and bemoans the state of mind on his server.

And if this entry sounds like a blogroll so far, that's because, so far, it is. I am putting you into the right context and the right state of mind. Because now, I am going to deliver the answer. That is, the question. Because we all know, that the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Loot, the Raiding, and Everything is, in fact 42, so there would be little insight if I told you that. No, today I'll tell you the question, which is loosely related to all of the linked above, and which you won't even have to wait ten million years for. In fact, you can read it right now. Here it comes:

Do you raid for the gear?
Or do you gear for the raids?

And that's all. For now. I reserve the right to further elaborate on it at a later point in time. At this point in time, just allow me to claim, that figuring out what 42 means for someone in relation to the above question, should be enough to figure out just how much they should bother with raiding in the first place.

The critical view

After the excited fanboy shout, let's take a critical look at some of the other things announced for the near and far future of World of Warcraft. Source for the quotes is MMO Champion.

Cross Server LFG

• This will let you PUG 5-man instances and search for groups through multiple servers.
  
• It will come with its own reward systems. If you're the leader of a PUG and complete the dungeon succesfully you will be rewarded.
  
• It should be out for patch 3.3.0.

The biggest problem with PuGs, put in very short terms, is that people you don't know are, statistically, prone to jackass behaviour. Let's not pretend you don't know what this is supposed to mean and save us paragraphs of redundant explanations. Teaming up with people you know even less, because they are, eh, on a different server, won't really go a long way to dampen that factor.

The biggest upside with PuGs is the recruitment potential, which is rendered irrelevant in a cross-server group. Except, of course, if we talk cross-server recruitment, i.e. sucking all existing talent to the "elite" servers. Oh, well...

Rated Battlegrounds

• Rated Battlegrounds will be an alternative way to get arena points.
  
• Each week, one of the BG will be the Rated Battleground of the week. Winning in this battleground will improve your rating and give you points. Losing will not lower your rating.
  
• [...]

Remember the first of these quotes? Yeah. I actually should be amused, because this will wreak utter chaos in the entire PvP-/Arena-community and their inherent sense of superiority. I might be wrong, but from what I understand, the very reason for the introduction of Arenas was to discourage people from AFK-ing their way to PvP-rewards (Ettenmoors-style!). Now it's back, with the added bonus, that the entire "we're in it for the competition" PvP community will be screaming and queueing up for that one BG for the week.

Guild Leveling

• Guild experience is earned through multiple ways, players leveling, killing bosses, leveling professions, PvP victories, reputations.
  
• Each guild level rewards you with one talent point, these talents affect the whole guild. The top 20 earners of the guild will contribute to the guild experience for the day.
  
• Some of the guild talents will allow you to remove reagent costs from spell, get increased gold drops, summon your entire raid, rez your entire raid after a wipe, automatically transfer a % of gold dropped by bosses to the guild bank. Guild talents can be reset.
  
• Once your guild reached level 20, the guild experience becomes a currency and let you buy things like mounts, professions plans, banners, potions, rare reagents and guild talent respecs.
  
• Anyone can learn a guild profession recipe, if you leave the guild after learning it you will loose the recipe and it will be transferred back to the guild bank. Guild heirlooms also work the same way and are bound to the guild.

See, in principle, I very much applaud the idea of (active - not just age based) guild levelling. The problem is, and this particular implementation seems as prone to it as anything, that the encouraged course of action becomes "recruit everything with a pulse". Don't even bother trying to bring up a small, tight knit guild. Just join the biggest one you can find, and get awesome abilities!

I wonder how long it will take for people to figure out, that the optimal strategy under these rules is to set up one huge server-wide guild, and then make private sub-channels for what should be the actual guilds. The guild channel becomes global chat, and everyone runs around with the same tag. Math (and computer science) teaches you to always consider the extreme cases. And online gaming teaches you, that people will, sooner or later, go for the most efficient way of playing your game.

That could, of course, be easily solved if "guild progression" would be instead a quotient of total progression and number of members. Which would instantly result in the other extreme of everyone being prodded with sticks all the time and /gkicked as soon as they're offline for two days. So, this is all kind of meh.


There are, of course, many more things announced, and most of them sound pretty exciting. These were just a few of those that seemed rather odd or questionable to me. Enjoy the Sunday!

Grief Online?

Why is it, that nearly every time someone gets all excited about EVE Online, I can't help but feel the game in long term pretty much boils down to "Bullies in Space"? I may be a little harsh here, and I understand there might be much more to EVE, but stuff like this (and it seems to be regarded as the ultimate apex of EVE gameplay) appears to me as the gaming equivalent of getting your buddies together to beat up the unpopular kid, steal his lunch money, screenshot it film it on your cell phone and send it to a gaming site upload it on YouTube. So, your top achievement in the game was to gank some guys, who were trying to establish a foothold of their own without joining your zerg, together with your 500 homies? Uh, grats, I guess.

PS: Yeah, I totally miss the point of the game and just don't understand it. So, sue me.