heart of injustice

King

2011-12-31T17:00:00.000-08:00

"desire 18 Nov 2011.txt"

it's funny when the world doesn't work as expected, or

it's funny when the world works as expected.

the best way to get close to people is to make yourself seem less than you are, or

the best way to get close to people is to make yourself seem more than you are.

"honoji.txt"

no 'ifs'

what you want can't depend on what other people want without constant reinforcement, it must exist unconditionally until changed

'both'

the general problem caused when a given signal is not recognized, and external feedback disappears... evaluation of risks and overcompensating..? (moon photo)

"hidden value" if known only by multiple metrics means that capability and risk known only to those aware of progress

external metric allows feedback on risk levels, avoids compoundment of errors when risk is tied to progress metric predicting optimal risk

reason for forgetting all this: perceived cost of information and value of simplicity goes up as info increases
"correct vs successful"

"when eliminating small problems at size of comprehension decreases perception of larger problems? local flatness" (being happy & change)

^ 12 June 2011

4 Aug 2011

based on intent
necessity of similar understandings of signalling schemes, depth
communication based on resistance to poking, and result of lack of feedback
nominal and specific benefits as the foundation for understanding of wants, so conflict is more likely to be based on conflicting benefit than wants for the two strategies of resolution priorities

7 Aug 2011

looking for something and expecting to see it, usual assumptions about interacting with the world... in normal circumstances things with a presence in the future also have a detectable influence in the present. when this isn't true, usually a reason that can itself be observed in the present. these expectations of reality do not include situations where an object is hidden, and the reason that it can't be observed is also hidden, when this reason is internal and not recorded in any external aspect of reality.wanting something to happen, based on a presumption of benefit with no observable confirmation, leading to reactions based on the perception of this want and removal of evidence for it, or against it

__________

"forgetful 17 Aug 2011.txt"

awake - activity (note sleep)
shine - counter (metrics)
picture, essence (graph)

^ 17 Aug 2011

19 Aug 2011
attractors, stability

21 Aug 2011
large events are more difficult to handle than smaller events and can be more destructive. when a system does not direct the outcome of smaller events to maintain stability, a large event may occur from interaction with the environment. size and frequency can be seen as related either to resistance to change from small events or weakness to same, depending on whether there is interaction with other objects depending on the result of smaller outcomes.

*

is the purpose of economic innovation to improve the ratio of utility to price, or instead to improve the ratio of price to effort and profit margin?

22 Aug 2011

attitude toward conflict, honesty - not only benefit to society, but also informational aspect for other people. iterated games and lack of reliable system record mean that conflict arises from switching strategies even if any given game is played cooperatively due to unknown value of information in future interactions.

allows control over predictions of future choices based on available information on current strategy, even if strategy is not always openly stated

'i spend too many thought cycles trying to predict what i'll do' but actually, trying to answer the emotion questions based on past events to determine strategy... cost of switching leads to different priorities and timing

prince, formless, essence

27 Aug 2011

expectations as a differential encoding of the understanding of society's values, which is subject to change as a result of interaction within society and life experiences that influence the prediction of the average strategy and values

relationships - 'hidden' value roughly equal, and implications when agreed and personal measurements of value change unexpectedly in separation distance

29 Aug 2011

[morning] The third strategy - effectiveness. avoids stating any preference for conflict, preventing any contradiction from occurring or any requirement for such a preference to be confirmed or validated for third parties. Intended to be a temporary state when entered and lasting until critical information is obtained relating to an open question.

a dangerous state to be in and not often entered willingly, due to what can otherwise and normally be accomplished with a proper understanding of conflict and local quality variation

*

[evening] butterfly - eternity - ?
a pure heart

simple

(and controlling thoughts, topic on strategy.. level at which event occurs)

values, motive, potential - see above
cloned

31 Aug 2011

mind games - ways to justify change of strategy or current goals. primary motive is attitude toward conflict, with regard to signals and deviation from expectations, and complication arises from the attempt to accomplish a goal without conflict. however, the divergence or disagreement in expecations results from the values inherent in a situation, and all complexity can be reduced to the identification of these values, both relative and absolute.

the choice is one of whether to compromise by changing strategy to the one optimal in the local circumstances or to adhere to one's own understanding of absolute potential regardless of any change in apparent success or lack of confirmation of the size gap between agreed and hidden value.

part of topic of risk

*

[evening] benefit means a promise to adhere to the same strategy despite unknown circumstances. void is to prevent phase changes in strategies of others from linked promise by withholding information, not just one's own benefit

__________

"hikari 8 Sep 2011.txt"

8 Sep 2011

capabilities determine adherence to common standards
willingness to handle additional complexity of differing from expectations based on whether limits have been reached or currently being tested, exceeding limits leads to fundamentally different approach than not having discovered limits.

strategy change and social interaction, or cessation of

knowing which patterns to break, and which to adhere to is itself a form of skill that can demonstrate competence

being correct, vs being optimal within a set of constraints that may prevent ideal behavior (verifying a solution, given the quality variation but also the perception of accuracy of standardized quality measurements on that quality variation)

10 Sept 2011
[a.m.]
be very clear what you are bad at, and what the costs are of improving any specific area at a certain point in time. minimizing the overall effect of a weakness is as important as improving one's strengths in pursuit of an objective

origins of lack of confidence..? what defines the recognition of a 'weakness'

12 Sep 2011

congruence
"level 0" = determination to anticipate future events, which allows strategies toward conflict as a distinct element for others to react with

confidence in abilities obtained from practice, meaning self predisposition in conflict is a natural assumption from the gain in capabilities that results

"level 1" = deference to others in conflict, based on observed intentions of other entities and the potentials that result in the local space

conflict results from the search for the optimum global strategy and the attempt to eliminate local factors from the decision-making process without regard to inter-region movement and overall quality level, which might be assumed to be constant. The idea of expected relocation determines the regions to be placed under consideration, due to prior and future agreements on social values and likely results from residence in a certain space

elimination of conflict reduces degrees of freedom as the complexity of the situation increases, meaning that higher initial degrees of freedom or obtaining new capabilities will increase the set of possible outcomes

"reality interpretation" essential for understanding the decision layer above the values layer in the activity process, common pattern of mistakes and omissions from aggregate opinion and relation to goal completion and system design. signal evaluation, but also conflict strategies and correlation with quality variation in a population

part of understanding, anticipating, or preventing future change. ("level 0")

18 Sep 2011

aversion to showing 'nice', torrent creation
but also cost of learning and confidence..?

29 Sep 2011

attraction: 'unaware of signal quality' matches absolute value, 'aware of variation in signal quality' follows different strategy of matching hidden value. implications for sheng nu, ladder theory of attraction, etc.

02 Oct 2011

relationship, able to accept selfish behavior and knowledge cost of transition from selfless to selfish. conflict often manifested between individual benefit and social norms, but is not expected to occur between connected individuals meaning that actions which imply a strategy that welcomes conflict should not be met with resistance

deception/ambiguity as described in art of war is the essence of the adaption to poor signal evaluation in a population, as a way to influence the thoughts of other people to avoid potential conflict between one's self and society. The need for ambiguity is not obvious in any single local context, and so its manifestation can be an indication of knowledge of local variability in signal quality as a result of average incidence of critical evaluation in the general population.

The strategies toward conflict used under the cloak of ambiguity may depend on one's estimation of relative ability and the feasibility of the adoption by the general population of strategies to cope with signal quality variation, as well as other goals and unshared knowledge.

(unshared knowledge is the basis of unpredictability of goals, for all cases where the cost of learning exceeds the expected benefit to society)

3 Oct 2011

signalling: behavior that is consistent with both strategies toward conflict. most difficult pattern to adhere to which consequently demonstrates understanding of the world and future obstacles, more so than simply avoiding conflict in pursuit of goals at cost to self

demonstrates objective "minimum competence" or lack of having reached limits of ability

__________

"mind 27 Oct 2011.txt"

"if everyone you had any obligation to were to, one day, forget everything you had ever said or done, what would you then do"

If everyone you knew were able to convince you that they had forgotten everything you had ever said or done, what would you do

a distinction between goals that are defined in terms of change to the outside world, and goals that exist only in one's thoughts in order to influence one's future behavior in reaction to situations that one might encounter. The value of statements that cannot be verified by the outside world to a degree that everyone can agree upon

_____________________________________

"unknown.txt" last modified 07 May 2011

does having done a thing give more confidence in being able to do it?

__________

"progress 22 May 2011.txt"

22 May 2011
absolute strengths, relative values. objective increase always has greater long-term benefit than progress in personal value. due to memory and complexity, greater personal ability allows more freedom to avoid branches of reinforcement in personal value, bounded by confidence in the extent of one's capabilities.

absolute strength = capabilities, nonlinear growth due to prior dependencies

part of the topic of estimating risk

limit as ability increases, contrast to experience of reaching that limit.

technique: failure of large goal by pursuit of a smaller one, by avoiding knowledge of the larger goal's failure until a decisive point
usable when the knowledge of a goal's feasibility is more important than its outcome
can be useful when a negative outcome may have harmful effects, technique should only be used when willing and prepared to accept those consequences

5 Jun 2011
if conflict between self and others, which takes priority? prior commitment to avoiding such conflict can only be upheld by negating personal goals.

putting priority on self is less risky, but leads to different results and the lower prediction of potential leads to different goals for the self and different perception of value by others. with entropy causing conflict of benefit, arguments for absolute value mean that mixing types benefits neither party.

if conflict is seen as reducing efficiency, the most efficient framework is one which encourages accurate prediction of overall variation of quality by observation of a small part of it. this homogeneity can only result from stability due to awareness of and constant effort to correct drift in an environment where change accelerates and locally spreads.

_____________________________________

random unrelated video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-GP615oIUo

"intelligence"

2011-12-26T12:56:00.001-08:00

from somewhere in dreams, unknown
(something to do with school lunches, selecting someone from a crowd to start off or announce something, buying food to maximize quantity, renewing an item, returning an item from distant past when someone else female was principal or teacher, sister remarking on being late, sister saying that something works better now and can have actual conversations, door, ... )
hiding in blankets to avoid getting sick from cold while sleeping

intelligence:
1) the ability to perceive signals, values, and norms held by people, including those arising from hidden information and complex situations

2) the ability to evaluate signals and perceive the optimal course of action regardless of the opinions of others, including when the complexity of a situation leads to an incorrect conclusion on the best way to accomplish a goal

Revolutions

2011-12-24T01:14:00.000-08:00

A very wise dwarf once said on the WoW forums, "Items are not content. Items are the reward for completing content." This is a very important distinction, because it means that content should be fun but should not be easy to complete, even if it's easy to begin attempting it.

Blizzard's misunderstanding of this basic principle is very evident in a recent post by one of the CMs on the topic of daily quests:

[quote="37908288004"][quote="37893499209"]Given that Blizzard posters have made exceedingly similar statements about every major daily hub from IQD onwards, and that these have all turned out to have the same basic failings, you'll forgive me if I take that note with a pinch of salt.[/quote]
[...]
No one likes being the guy on the assembly line putting the left index finger on the doll 250 times a day, 5 days a week. They might not mind it as much though if they're paid $100k a year. Right?[/quote]
Items are not an excuse for the available options after logging in to be boring or mindless! If it is, that suggests huge problems with the game if people feel they need to do something which isn't fun instead of finding something else to do entirely that doesn't require any character progression at all.

(A real-life analogy, which hopefully won't get this thread deleted, is Foxconn workers in China making iPods. By the standards of factories in China they are paid and treated well, but... "Each employee would sign a 'voluntary overtime affidavit,' in order to waive the 36-hour legal limit on your monthly overtime hours. This isn't a bad thing, though, as many workers think that only factories that offer more overtime are 'good factories,' because 'without overtime, you can hardly make a living.' For the workers desperate for making money, overtime is like 'a pain that can breathe:' without it, the days without money make them 'suffocate'..." —without any choices it lead to a string of suicides from loss of hope or enjoyment with life. Just goes to show that the 'rewards' aren't everything. End of interruption.)

Someone in a previous thread I made suggested that it's pointless to post about problems without also offering a solution. In that case, here is the problem and the solution. Blizzard has been vacillating for the past several expansions between "challenging" and "accessible", without ever having the fortitude to do what's necessary to offer BOTH.

This means different things for PvP and PvE. For PvE, most importantly content should not become obsolete as soon as the next major patch arrives. In Cataclysm this can clearly be seen with Firelands, which many people would still like to see but almost no organized groups are still going to.

This did not happen in, dare I say it, vanilla and early TBC, and the clear difference is JP/VP allowing everyone access to the latest gear with what's basically soloable progression. There are many stories of encountering people in the LFR who are literally afk during much of the instance, and the 4.3 Heroics were basically easier than the troll ones which is part of why the troll Heroics were recently nerfed in hotfixes. The difficulty of early Cataclysm in 5-person content is no where to be found.

This tuning in itself doesn't reflect poorly on Blizzard. The 'casual' content of 4.3 is designed so new players can be carried by the rest of the group, because the alternative with the state of the community is that new players are insulted and kicked for holding back the group and preventing it from completing the instance.

This happens because people want to complete 4.3 content before it becomes obsolete. Blizzard must realize the relationship between the JP/VP gear reset model and community attitudes if it wants to provide challenging content that's still accessible even to the most inexperienced players.

So this is a very long and complicated explanation of the interaction between different parts of the game. That's unfortunate and I should apologize for such a lengthy post.

Free Gear and the Burning Crusade

The current system of buying PvP and PvE gear from vendors with points that take more time than skill to acquire started in TBC, and the justifications for its existence remain the same now as they were then. It went like this:

1) Blizzard wanted to offer a 'skill-based' way for PvPers to obtain gear so they could compete against PvE epics, without the huge time requirement of the vanilla honor system. Getting the best PvP rewards in vanilla could potentially require 18 hours a day of farming BGs in a group for weeks on end; arenas could be done with just 10 games per week.

2) After a while, it became obvious that casual guilds were not having enough success in raiding beyond 10-person Karazhan. People who wanted to see more content were forced to abandon their old guild to join the 'hardcore' raiding scene of 25-person raids, and even the original ZA didn't fix this. This was one of the major failures of design of TBC that Blizzard has tried to address with 10-person raids for every instance since then.

3) To address the simultaneous problems of hardcore guilds feeling forced to run old content that most people in the raid didn't benefit from, casual guilds stuck on the 10/25 transition having their members stolen, and arena weapons being used for PvE, Blizzard removed attunements for raids and introduced new vendor rewards equivalent to BT/Hyjal loot in the first example of the gear reset that's been a standard of every major patch since.

Since this post is about "solutions" and not just "problems", it's necessary to point out what Blizzard could have, and can do differently. Blizzard does not need to give free PvP gear (which people feel they must grind before they can even start PvPing) if PvP is fun even in low-quality gear. If casual guilds can progress beyond the initial raid content of an expansion and there's enough of a healthy and active raid culture on each server so that both small and large raid guilds can fill replacements in their raiding roster and everyone is accustomed to not basing loot on promises to remain in the guild, then it won't hurt a server community for someone to naturally progress to the point of being able to do recent raid content even if it means associating with other guilds and less progressed raid groups along the way. If everyone accepts that a game should be not only rewarding but also fun, then it won't matter if a guild has a disadvantage in a PvE 'race' when some of their members haven't fully upgraded all their gear, because even if they can't complete raid content within an arbitrary time limit they will still feel like they are personally rewarded within the game by doing something they enjoy.

That above paragraph is probably the most important in this post as it sums up everything that's needed to make the game about content, instead of about the in-game rewards for content, even if it's much too short to describe how these several goals can be accomplished. Anyone who thinks items are enough to keep people in the game, ask yourself whether this very vague description of a game without free gear would be something you'd enjoy.

Infinite dynamic content

Switching randomly back to the topic of PvP, the most important difference between world PvP now and in vanilla is that in vanilla, other people wanted to PvP. "But Blizzard can't control what people want to do!" Right... that's why the game has titles, mounts, items, and pets. The danger with offering 'rewards' in PvP is that other players can become no more than a bump on a progress bar, but this is the reason for only giving rewards that no one should feel they need to have. "That doesn't make sense!" you might reply, but talents and other character customization work in a very similar way—the difference in this case is that instead of giving up another ability you aren't sure you'd use when making your choice, you would be giving up a different way of declaring what it means to win.

It may sound complicated, but it really isn't. Right now for the most basic form of PvP, two players encountering each other in 1v1, it's well accepted the winner is the one that's still alive at the end. Now imagine that it's possible to say that the winner is not the player that's still alive, but rather the one who died? This can easily be done by introducing a system that measures performance and can cause positive or negative effects on a character, that doesn't pretend like both players had an equal chance to win.

It's possible that Blizzard is already working on something like this for MoP and if so this post is unnecessary, but still might have some good discussion. Anyway. This would mathematically be different from arenas in that it's meant to make the game more fun so the numbers would be set up in a way to encourage this (for example in arenas rating changes are based only on relative ratings, not absolute), and it avoids the idea of a precise measure of skill from the start because in world PvP and BGs you can always zerg a single powerful player. So to continue on the topic of solutions...

By PvPing, you would gain rank. This is similar to the rank in the old honor system, but since the way of limiting the number of higher ranks would be different, it wouldn't only be calculated at the end of each week (although this still could be done!). The more PvP you did, the more attractive a target you would become as you would be worth more points. Someone who doesn't like PvP could avoid it simply by never doing it, since there's a chance you're actually a very skilled player who just doesn't enjoy that aspect of the game and anyone who attacked you would have a high chance to lose. Furthermore, for someone who does PvP you would also begin to lose points as you become worth more to the opposite faction.

The PvP difficulty of any enemy would be indicated by their rank, just like in the old honor system. The ranks might be different since the old ranks are now used in rated BGs, maybe they would be based on some other attribute like race or class, but you would have a rough idea beforehand of what your chances to win are in a fight, or how disappointed to feel if you just lost. This is very important in establishing an estimate of whether it was reasonable for you to win or lose a fight, so you can feel ecstatic after fighting off someone who should have been able to destroy you and know how to react when you notice several high-ranked names materialize at the limits of your vision while doing a repeatable quest.

Group size can be important, and if it's necessary Blizzard could account for this while calculating point loss and gain. It might not be strictly necessary when the system is done correctly, with no way for an experienced PvPer to 'erase' their history and be treated like a PvP newcomer with no penalty for dying, but if people want it the server could easily calculate this with only a small resource cost. By comparing damage and healing sources between two opposing groups in active combat, the 'attention' being paid by and to each character can be derived and used to calculate a single number for each character of how dangerous their situation is while taking damage. Any given character would be assumed as paying 100% 'attention' to any other at the instantaneous calculation of damage, but the effect this has on the coefficient for the actual level of danger would depend on the interactions between the groups within a specific timeframe to derive relevant actions; so if someone stopped attacking or being attacked for say, 5 seconds, then the server could do a single re-calculation for each character on both sides with which that person had been directly interacting as that person is no longer considered an active part of the fight. The cumulative effect of this means that the number participants in a fight would be important not just at the moment a character dies. But no point in being more specific since probably no one's reading this.

It might help if there's a way to discourage ganking lower levels. If people feel like they're properly rewarded for taking on challenge in PvP this might not be a problem at all, but if it is then the best way is with a "PvP solution" that assists the low-level player by encouraging people on their faction to hunt down whoever's attacking people weaker than them. There are more possibilities for this if items are squished, since then a low-level player can enjoy PvP more when they don't die by being looked at and they might be able to participate in the fight after high-level help arrives, and consequently it would be more acceptable if the 'penalty' for ganking (more PvP) was not purely negative or punitive but instead provided an alternative way of looking at things.

One of the last changes that should be made in PvP is balancing BGs for gear. Not everyone on both teams needs to have the same quality of gear or anything like that. Much more simply, the system should estimate the 'power' of a player based on their items, which is not proportional to the iLevel (even ignoring that iLevel to stats is exponential these days) since an increase isn't just to AP or Spellpower but also to health and combat ratings like crit and resilience. While adding players to each team the gap in power is calculated with each step, and whether to add the next player in the queue is based on if it would increase the gap or decrease it. Team size might even have the possibility of being larger than now, like if the system lets you queue as 10 people all in the best gear then it might match you against as many as 15 people in average gear to balance the teams, or you might have to queue in a smaller group if you want a reasonable wait time if the team sizes have the current restrictions. Coordination and skill can be valid reasons for winning a BG, but having better gear should not be. Dying less than your undergeared teammates should be its own reward. And point losses and gains that affect rank would be halved while in a raid group like a BG so people have a reason to venture out into the world for PvP without the constant action and instant rezzing of BGs.

(None of these suggestions are actually original)

Raiding with friends

Of the reasons for not raiding with friends, "neither I nor my friends enjoy punishing raid mechanics" is one of the most common among people who don't raid. Some others are loot drama, the fact that raid content quickly becomes obsolete and can eventually be soloed, and the difficulty of maintaining a steady group of people who can meet at regular times or are willing to raid at irregular times. All of these problems can be solved, but the challenges facing implementation of the solution in each case are different for each situation.

The first complaint, that raid mechanics are too difficult, may sound extremely subjective. But whether a difficult mechanic is fun is something that can be analyzed by components, which (among others I'm sure) include the timing leading up to an event and its degree of predictability which influence the dramatic tension experienced during the encounter, and the potential for mitigating a mistake by someone in the raid and even completely negating it by turning a downward-trending situation into a positive one.

For this second, a simple example would be if the main tank of a raid lost aggro and the boss aggroed onto a kitty druid. If the druid immediately switches to bear form and uses a defensive cooldown and as a result the healers spend less mana than if the previous tank had maintained aggro for those several seconds, then this turned out to be an awesome way for the kitty druid to show how willing they are to adapt to the situation as their class is meant to.

However, if the kitty druid switches to bear and uses a defensive cooldown and still take twice as much damage as the tank, there's really just no way for the raid to 'win' in that situation and the encounter is much more dull than it could have been. When all answers are the wrong one, it's not very fun so it would help for the mechanics to cause at least one of the available options to players in a raid when things go 'wrong' to be the right one. I won't go into more detail on this as it would be a very significant change to raiding that would deserve its own discussion.

Loot drama is one of the main complaints with this early version of LFR in 4.3, but it's also important for casual raiding. Very frequently the number of people who want to raid in a guild won't match the size of a raid instance, so either people will be left out or the raid will be short on members and this can vary especially if people can't keep a regular schedule from week to week. With the raid lock changes of Cataclysm, the only things preventing many guilds in this situation from raiding is making up the difference to the next marginal raid group size and a way to fairly distribute loot to raid members who aren't part of the guild.

As an example, pretend LFR was actually difficult and a guild with 19 members online decides to fill in the rest of the raid group with PUGers from the same realm. So they clear the first boss with 6 out-of-guild PUGers, and an item drops meant for healing priests. One priest in the guild has a 359 epic in that slot, another has a 378 epic, and one of the PUGers has a 378 epic. (Yes three priests, maybe one of them is shadow or something) The guild member with the 378 epic decides to be nice and pass so the 359 priest can roll on it, without knowing who wants the item outside of the guild.

Then the 378 PUGer outrolls the 359 guild member and wins the item. There were only 6 PUGers in the raid, but the guild had a 50% chance to lose the item which would have significantly helped on future progression. Was this fair? Is the guild likely to continue in the same way, or will they get all upset and feel justified in 'defending' their nice 359 priest by insulting the PUGer and everyone rolling on all future drops in the same instance?

This loot drama can be avoided with a system that fairly rewards everyone in the raid, whether or not they win the item or have any gold to bid. GDKP has a reputation for being used by 'greedy' people and devaluing the meaning of epics if someone can't win an item due to being poor, but these problems can be addressed by only allowing a single bid and letting everyone roll to pay the highest bid, with a bonus for accurately stating the value of an item with a high bid. The entire raid would then be split the proceeds of each item, allowing each player to afford to pay items with what they earn from the raid and rewarding groups in proportion to their contribution to raid slots, not on how many items they end up winning (and paying for). Using the same example as above,

1) Item drops for priests.
2) The 378 guild priest passes after discussing in private with the 359 guild priest.
3) The 359 guild priest makes a hidden bid of 500g.
4) The 378 PUGer makes a hidden bid of 350g.
5) The highest bid of 500g is announced, and the 378 PUGer gets an option to match this bid but has an RNG penalty to winning the roll.
6) Due to the RNG penalty, the 359 guild priest wins the roll and 500g is automatically split with the entire raid, with the 6 puggers receiving a total of 120g (20g each) and the guild receiving the remaining 380g.

This is explained in greater theoretical detail at http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3754955563 .

The remaining reasons for not raiding would be solved if JP/VP were removed (since they discourage seeing older content), if LFR was improved, etc. (post limit)

Nightwish

2011-12-12T21:00:00.000-08:00

Including lower-geared characters in raids, basis for.

clearly lowers chance for group to succeed. Requires philosophical shift away from the idea that "it's fine for wiping to not be fun, because it encourages better play to defeat an encounter". If raiding is fun even when wiping may mean the next attempt will happen an undetermined time in the future due to schedules and life priorities, then it becomes acceptable to bring 'undergeared' characters even on difficult progression fights.

...really just a restatement of 'skill cap' argument.

"that which is not forbidden is required"

since 2.1 with epic buffs
smart players realized this, and either quit or adjusted their expectations, for the game and for the relevance of resulting community ideas of achievement, accordingly.

general problem is lack of tolerance for less 'progressed' characters or less experienced players, solution is change in evaluation standards so goals of being accepted can be accomplished without progression, leading to choice

(http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3566337439)

result of "oh this problem is unavoidable" leading to acceptance of chain of problems that result. definitely not an A+ standard of design, even if most other competitors in the realm of complex (not able to isolate a single element with a 'focus group') systems of competitive evaluation and achievement that appeal to unstated motivations are scoring a D-

Inefficient Use of Time

2011-11-25T22:46:00.000-08:00

"conflict in wow" Sun 18 Feb 2007 01:05:38 PM PST

The basis for conflict in WoW

"The solution to warfare is simple in essence:

When fear is removed from conflict, conflict becomes choice.

Just as when a person's mind is in a state of conflict, it can cause sickness, powerlessness, and depression.

When a person's mind is in a state of choice, it can cause health, clarity, power, and joy.

When a conflict in a person's mind is transmuted into choice, it becomes the basis of self-expression."

What does this mean for the ultimate fate of world PvP in WoW?

========================

On my mage, I don't gank. I never did. I thought maybe this had something to do with the fact that I'm in the military IRL; casually killing people isn't something you want to get into the habit of, even if it "isn't real". I never even went to the battlegrounds, because they were and still are such a cheap and adulterated imitation of true PvP.

I stopped playing my mage on live. On the PTR for 2.0, I finally was able to play in and understand the meanings of the various BGs, and discovered that some of them weren't that bad, as long as you weren't PvPing just to farm gear. As we found out in December, when the only reason people play in BGs is to farm gear, the BGs suck horribly.

But I still had questions about why me and everyone else did what they did in terms of PvP. Why do some people gank, and others don't? Why are half the servers in this game "PvE" servers that avoid world PvP almost entirely? What is the "bloodlust" that causes people to say, Red = dead, and kill anyone and everyone of the opposite faction they encounter without provocation? This is an essential element of world PvP, but why does it exist, and why didn't I feel that way myself?

...

I think I found the answer. Why do we gank? "Because otherwise they'll kill me instead." "Because if I don't prove myself against them, why am I playing this game?" "Because everyone expects me to, and I'll look like a carebear if I don't at least try."

The basis for conflict, both in the world and inside one's mind, is lack of choice, which results from fear. Is it possible for world PvP to exist in WoW without fear? I say it is.

25 Nov 2011

1) increase in society's ability to measure things, simultaneously with decrease in obvious problems that cause a unifying sense of purpose and common goal (historical/cultural)

2) differing ability to perceive remaining problems and 'residual' variation in measurement accuracy lead to separation in priorities and 'countersignalling', or growth of hidden value, by entities with higher intelligence and unusual circumstances

3) encoding hidden value based on understanding of ideal measures of achievement, not on a flawed sample of values existing in a population

4) prediction of low error rate in accomplishing goals means that changes in hidden value have negligible cost, and inaccurate values in population do not need to be corrected immediately without an identifiable negative result

5) timing error: situation where communication does not convey adequate range of information. frequency of occurrence in population is unknown

6) unexpected change in importance of errors in value of a population that seems to indicate misplaced priorities and incorrect evaluation of benefit from countersignalling, due to unexpected conflict with truth value due to situation that results from previous assumptions.

7) search for solution in immediate environment leads to inconclusive results, which causes contradictions with any previous understanding of designed systems working as expected and the feasibility of common goals in society. prediction of importance of goal accomplishment in similar situation has broad significance for both the possible existence of solutions in the non-local scope and also for the accuracy and verifiability of possible local solutions, both for the individual and for the general population

8) promotion of values and strategies that are perceived to lead to avoidance of the problem in the optimal case and goal accomplishment when the problem cannot be avoided. awareness of problem in population is unknown; conclusions on optimal local or global strategies are also unknown, but directly affects understanding and prediction of ideal values in society.

Resulting values can include "It is important to avoid countersignalling", "Dishonesty is acceptable if it does not lead to an identifiable victim", "People cannot be trusted", "The true incidence of 'avoidance of conflict' strategy is low enough to assume any given sample of opinions is not biased based on benefit to society", with the actual rate of occurrence of these values in the general population subject to large deviations from what is predicted due to the complexity of the situations from which predictions of incidence rate are derived.

Method of Distributing Items Between Several Groups

2011-11-19T14:26:00.000-08:00

each group has an 'item fund'. the amount available for each purchase is a set proportion of the total current funds, which can be changed. the history of contributions and deductions can be accessed. payments are made to groups. a group can consist of a single individual.

1) a member of a group (problem, inflation due to lack of defined exit of cash from bidding circulation regardless of whether bids can be lowered or contribution varies on item type)

1) make cost equal to benefit, so net change is zero for everyone, then decide winner

single bid
announce highest, no name
option to match
lower initial bids have smaller chance to win RNG
distribute costs to group?

depends on how groups are viewed, complexity costs, ...

method of determining value of an item. number of bidders, size of bids, all might not be accurate. largest problem is advantage of late response. should be a way for an individual to 'win' regardless of collaboration by a majority of participants on most items. if value is accurately determined for usable items, lack of accurate measure of value for other items is not a problem. standard bidding process does not equally distribute risk to all participants in case of collaboration, since value is not properly measured unless a non-collaborator accepts risk by revealing their own value for an item.

consequently, there is a decrease in benefit from collaboration by including a penalty for underestimating value, in all cases where the top bid is lower than the true value for a collaborating player.

　　2:26~3:43

dragons

2011-11-16T23:11:00.000-08:00

. . . Which leads to the second conclusion:
2) If items are squished, raiding needs to be made more fun and less elitist.

This is not about casual players being unskilled n00bs. A lot of players who COULD perform well in current content do not want to, for reasons that go beyond real-life scheduling priorities. While the content itself may be enjoyable, as seen by the number of players protesting the possible removal of the ability to solo old raids, the social environment often is not. A lot of this has to do with the fact that most raiding guilds are focused on completing content instead of having fun. This sounds completely natural at first glance, but the reality is that raiding is this way because the game does not allow people to agree on what, exactly, is fun other than achieving the end goal of being able to loot the body of a raid boss.

What began as a simple inquiry, of how to squish items without upsetting people who enjoy soloing old raid content, leads to an examination of the very foundation of raiding itself.

This has a lot to do with the overall complexity of an encounter, and whether the actions the group must take can be easily understood and announced by a single entity (the raid leader, or a Deadly Boss Mods 3rd-party addon) or whether a raid group will perform best when most people are willing to take actions on their own initiative without needing directions from higher up. Another very important consideration is what are the consequences of being given the opportunity of a challenging situation but failing to succeed at it: does it wipe the raid group, or does it offer other players a further opportunity to recover from that mistake and even benefit? In real life, it's not always easy to identify what would have been the correct action in a scenario, because the consequences depend on being able to adapt to both good and bad situations and turn them to your advantage. You might normally try to avoid risk, but when the amount of risk you face suddenly increases it is just as important to know how to handle it. Unexpected levels of risk should not by themselves constitute a failure for the raid group.

In general, the connection to an easily recognized, larger group goal is very significant for the community values that will tend to evolve and stabilize. The most healthy situation will always be one where the goals of the group that someone directly interacts with has a clear relation to a larger group, of which the group one works with is a subset. The standards and defined benefit of the larger group form a way of evaluating the progress and goals of the immediate group and provide an outside, stable way of justifying any lack of progress or complications that may arise for the immediate group.

The scale of the larger group is not, itself, particularly important, as long as interaction with members of the larger group by the individual is completely optional in clear contrast with the accepted closer connection to the immediate group. The larger group must be neutral in relation to the smaller group with which the individual is associated, meaning that the smaller group's influence is strictly limited by the legitimate goals of other entities within the larger group at a level where no conflict has a priority high enough to require immediate action by any involved subsets of the larger group.

When benefit to the larger group becomes unclear, motivations have the potential to become distorted within the smaller group. For WoW in particular, faction PvP rivalry once defined a benefit to the faction from the acquisition of PvE rewards by the group, in the absence of any other clear benefit to the faction or other larger groups to which an individual belongs. (guild, roleplaying origin, faction, playerbase, national origin, etc.) In many cases the potential benefit would be of a specific accurate standard of achievement or the discouragement of inaccurate evaluation of achievements in general through the promotion of complex goals, but the actions of much of the playerbase indicate that in their experience, 'hardcore' raiding does not provide either of these two results.

Consequently, there exists a clear benefit from ensuring that raiding goals in WoW are harmonious ("river crab") to the commonly recognized goals of a larger group with which the individual has no direct connection, whether by influencing the goals of the group or by changing the recognition of how that larger group will benefit.

ikebukuro

2011-11-16T13:44:00.001-08:00

higher wages for overtime, lower cutoff point = unambiguous increase of profits for firms from tendency to want to work less, leading to permitting high amounts of overtime due to marginal benefits to supervisory structure and low utility of money for the firm. high variance/skewing of total income encourages production of goods with low utility per cost and further income inequality.

lower wages for higher amounts of work = increase of profits for firm depends on job responsibilities and elimination of inefficient work practices. any tendency to want to work less does not naturally result in higher profits for all firms, leading to resolution of conflict only when firm competitiveness is high enough for profitability prior to work reduction. contrast between worker outcomes based on firm profitability leads to congruence between the firm's goals and benefit to workers and society, compared to overtime system where variation in firm profitability with low overtime cutoff would lead to adverse outcomes for same.

a profitable firm should cause benefit to workers and society. with overtime system, both are harmed instead of benefiting.

no objective

2011-10-22T02:20:00.000-07:00

"complexity 21 Oct 2011.txt"

21 Oct 2011
instructive: changes to Ubuntu UI for 11.10 version.

tablet UI vs mouse input, icons vs sorted list, 'special snowflake'

value of countering expectations, but also usability of a system at minimal initial cost of setup. verifiable benefit from correct design and the misunderstandings of consumer preference which prevent correct design from being adopted or retained. complexity of use and initial learning curve, but also significant consumer pressure for a design which can serve as a signal and interaction with, or compensation for, necessary psychological elements ("progress/competence" and "options") that are missing from other elements of life.

22 Oct 2011 a.m.
(unrelated... >.>)
explain importance of "measuring progress" in the context of respect for enemies and valuing a situation that may lead to defeat.

lack of knowledge of minimum extent of abilities can cause adherence to metrics when the goal was simple and judged to have been obtainable, with the same failure combined with complex goals can lead to separation from metrics and 'hidden' value. however, lack of knowledge of maximum extent of abilities causes completely different pattern of errors for both approaches to conflict; apples and death note

large variations in competence by themselves not seen as harmful. however, the large increase in complexity that arises from psychological anticipation and the local variability as a result of disagreements on goal priorities and attainability lead to a 'singularity' where individual conformance to a conflict-avoiding strategy is not seen as leading to a greater expected contribution to the perceived goals of society than a strategy of winning conflicts despite lack of knowledge of the specific goals of entities involved in a situation.

ultimately the result of unbounded complexity and unresolved system failures in the rest of the world which indicate limits reached by other entities interacting with the system.

...snowflake partly result of pattern of winning conflict strategy incidence & trust in others, conflict between snowflake as stable achievement measure and society's progress only as far as individual effort and mental health can be maintained without snowflake...net gain for society requires being able to achieve economic goals without accumulating reputation capital

battle

2011-10-18T16:31:00.000-07:00

18 Oct 2011

final element: benefit to group, regardless of proper redistribution. Assumption that no one is working more than they wish, and taxation is natural consequence.

[Argument that bureaucratic processes will naturally introduce inefficiency that decreases real value from total time spent working by all persons.]

Assuming optimal efficiency from bureaucracy, the option to work less would still help the group because of reduction of natural inefficiencies during normal work. Cite work efficiency studies when variables were changed, such as reducing total time spent working did not lead to an immediate change in total production, and returning hours to previous lead to an increase in total production due to higher time efficiency from previous step in the experiment.

Unwillingness to point this out but natural consequence of lack of success in previous arguments (distribution failures) and aversion to taxation, leading to further complexity in arguments and deconstruction of assumptions on the lack of need to make distinctions in quality in a population.

自慢 // "flame"

2011-09-14T12:33:00.000-07:00

What's with the frequent name changes!

I just checked the forums, and it looks like quotes are still broken. The last time I tested it, first-level quotes would not correctly link to the previous author's post unless it included a valid, second-level quote in the quoted text. If the first-level quote does make a valid reference to a previous post, the first-level quote will correctly link (with #URL and character name) but the (valid) second-level quote will show up without a #URL or name; this means that if the post is edited, the first-level quote will no longer show up since the forum software returns the formatted post when editing which does not include the second-level reference. On the other hand, if the first-level quote does not include a reference, the second-level quote(s) will show up with #URL and name. This was likely the result of an intended fix to the problem of third-level quotes and clean conversations, but it seems that the problem has somehow still not been identified. It's possible that the double-space bug also exists, where the forum software attempts to match to a post with double spaces (such as many people will enter after a full stop) but a browser will only display, and therefore paste for quoting a highlighted section of text, a single space.

That was just a FYI.

Now, then. I feel sorry for other regions, because while there might be some degree of communication with the developers with the Q&A format, probably only the US-EN blog comments are being read by them. Expect this comment to be complicated.

The most prominent short-term danger to the health of WoW is likely "a lack of challenge". This can be seen, for example, in comments to the news item announcing a reduction in difficulty for normal and Heroic modes of current raid content.

The most prominent long-term danger to the health of WoW has been, and will continue to be, a lack of "broad awareness of the varying reliability of primary signals", in the sense of a quality that communicates information, in the playerbase that prevents WoW's developers from anticipating which changes are likely to lead to a game that people will want to continue to subscribe to. To be more specific, while there are plenty of people who anticipate what they would or would not enjoy in a game, there is substantial correlation between an accurate prediction of what would improve the game and a lack of action to do anything about it.

This is due both to the predominance of inaccurate predictions in the overall subscription base, but also competing goals outside of WoW that prevent people from being able to decisively state that effort spend on improving WoW will lead to positive changes in the world as a whole, due to both the opportunity cost of these efforts and also of the game itself. This manifests as a lack of desire to contradict the expressed wishes of the rest of the playerbase, no matter how inaccurate those predictions of enjoyment might be; meaning that while constructive efforts to improve the game might be made, the particular incidence of doing so drops sharply when it leads to conflict with any part of the playerbase leading to a significant divergence in the aggregate opinion that the developers will find themselves exposed to.

This bias can be understood, allowing the developers to accurately evolve the game in a positive direction, but the underlying causes that contribute to this problem in the game's community have their basis in the rest of society. In other words, there are two situations that will result in WoW's developers obtaining a more accurate signal in the community's feedback. The first is for WoW's developers to improve the overall incidence of accurate judgements in the game's playerbase through game changes that would encourage this critical approach. The second is through the resolution of problems in broader society that prevent higher competence individuals from feeling justified in contributing to improvements to WoW, removing the inherent bias in the accuracy of the community's feedback as a result of conflict.

To provide a bit more explanation on said bias and correlation, more intelligent individuals are more likely to attempt to anticipate future changes in their own situation and direct their own actions and thoughts in an active way. The most common strategy that results is to maintain the capability to anticipate conflicts and cause them to resolve in one's own favour. However, once someone has sufficient confidence in their ability to do this, they may begin to avoid conflicts and allow the ones that do occur to resolve in favour of other entities, due to the significantly different options this leads to in voluntary interactions with other individuals; the ability to complete goals without conflict is in some sense even more difficult than winning a battle, and this is part of the reason for the correlation with accurate judgement even as it leads to increased difficulty in the verification of capabilities and demand for situations which provide this confirmation.

As one of the issues in society that lead to the correlation in feedback incidence and skewing of WoW's developers' perception of player desires (note that the conflict in this case is not actually between an intelligent player and the player that does not accurately predict what changes would be good for the game, but rather between the desires of the intelligent player and the demands society places on them due to their capabilities and their own knowledge of the existence of system failures), the reason global economic problems such as unemployment and economic inequality have not previously been addressed, and what people can do to contribute to a solution, is described here:
http://pastebin.com/Wy8B0hK9

(it may or may not be worth pointing out that the reason prices do not somehow stabilize to reduce unemployment can also be analyzed by looking at the demand curve for a single firm, as distinctly opposed to aggregate demand or demand for a specific product type, as shown here:
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o245/Taemojitsu/theiPodeffect.jpg

Failure to understand this is part of why traditional economics did not correctly identify the problems with previous modeling of recessions and unemployment or the solution.)

The other situation which would lead to more accurate feedback from the game's community, as mentioned above, is to deliberately introduce more ambiguity in the measures of progress used by the community to make judgements, leading to a more critical evaluation both of one's own accomplishments and the capabilities of other participants in the game. Shallow, inaccurate judgements are at the core of the biased player feedback that influences WoW's developers' perceptions of player desires, leading to an inaccurate model of motivation and development work that does not produce the expected reception when it is released.

The basic antagonistic principles which can lead to an improvement of this situation are described at the end of the following text, although it does not pertain directly to WoW:
http://pastebin.com/Q86Zhgs9

Adopting counterbalancing arrangements of achievement measurements in this fashion has a direct influence on their use as estimations of competence or as goals, and can therefore prevent inaccurate feedback on changes to these measurements that leads to inefficient allocation of development resources or the perception by parts of the playerbase of nonconstructive change as described in this blog post.

However, as mentioned previously, the greatest short-term danger to the health of WoW is likely to be the lack of challenge for much of the content available to most players. While this is a sensitive topic in the WoW community, the implications of insufficient challenge at the individual level, and consequently the importance of providing opportunities to test one's capabilities in a constructive direction, are described here:
http://daughterofankh.blogspot.com/2011/02/skill-cap-and-mmos.html

It's worth mentioning that there is a distinct difference between reacting to problems that appear in the game, such as balancing issues in the viability of different character classes in a particular content area, and designing a game such that these problems avoid arising in the first place. I think it would be fair to say that WoW's developers do not have a precise theoretical understanding of how to minimize the number of balance changes that are necessary in character classes; low-level character performance could probably be seen as a great example of this deficiency, with no consistency over time in the difficulty a character is expected to face in leveling up. WoW's developers have mentioned that it was originally estimated during the early design process that combat with an equal-level NPC would take about one minute to complete; it is unlikely that the current developers have any particular goal of what this time frame should be.

[exceeding the 'post this today' length... oh well]

*yes finally remembered after 5 minutes... WoW wasn't originally intended to have lots of quests. They were only added in from feedback from testers who really enjoyed the questing aspect. The reason WoW became popular was not collecting magic items, or the optimization of character performance to complete content before it is reduced in difficulty, and if WoW's developers do not understand why quests made WoW popular they should consider how accurate their understanding is of player motivations in the game's current state. 'Travel' quests, in particular, did not lead to complaints even if they took a large amount of time to complete if done as the sole purpose of a journey, and were often deferred for a significant amount of time if the character had no other reason to visit the area of the quest's destination. The complexity of interacting goals, with reaching the level cap often actually having a low priority, did not lend itself to a single-variable evaluation of a character's progress, and consequently there was no community pressure on development to make a given progression baseline easier to attain. A return to the social environment of early WoW—which some might say was more refined—is possible, but it depends on the ability for WoW's developers to understand the basis for community evaluation of metrics and the reasons that people subscribe to the game.

[it's so fun watching undo history repeat itself... then realizing that the last four minutes since saving were spent on a single sentence]

>On the other extreme, too much change can produce what we often call the “roller coaster effect,” where the game design feels unstable and players, particularly those who play the game more sporadically, can’t keep up.

If the developers make a game change because a certain spec's numbers are not the right size, does this mean players should feel obligated to respec if it will improve their character's numerical performance? If the numbers of one of several possible primary specialties were not important enough to base changes to one's character on, would the game's developers still react to a perceived or theoretical imbalance? The playerbase takes cues from the changes to the game, and this forms one component of the community expectations for character customization. Or as one the above links states,

"[A situation] which involve[s] conflicting goals, where progress in one direction causes a reduction of expected progress in another direction, promotes the self-measurement of a hidden competence metric and is therefore more useful than a single variable measurement for individuals who are not accustomed to attempting to keep track of progress outside of what is measured by the previously developed system, even if a single variable can accurately measure competence within a constrained set of assumptions"

If players feel they need to change specs to justify their participation in group content, perhaps WoW's developers should look at increasing the 'fun' of that group content and the potential to test individual player competence instead of merely treating it as a goal to be completed, as described in another of the above links. I have been told that WoW's raiding has never really been hard at the individual level, only in the difficulty of gathering enough competent players with stable connections that can meet at the same time.

>We call these server changes hotfixes, because often times we are able to deploy them even while you are playing. If we hotfixed Mortal Strike’s damage, you might suddenly do more or less damage in the middle of a fight.

If Mortal Strike's damage were not fixed, most players would not care. The need to change its damage at all is not immediately apparent in the situation leading to an analysis of class imbalance.

>I mention all of that just to explain that one reason you see so many hotfixes these days is because we have the technical ability to do so. That doesn’t mean that the game has more bugs, more boneheaded design decisions, or more class balance problems than previously.

Does a class balance problem that no one notices exist? Time between patch 1.2 and 1.3, 11 weeks. Class balance changes intended to address performance issues in raids: 0.
http://www.wowwiki.com/Patch_1.3.0#Rogue

>If your hunter is topping meters by a small fraction, you might ask: what’s the rush? And many players do. But you have to consider that other players are miffed that their raid leader might sit a warlock in the interest of bringing a third hunter (since their damage is so awesome) or might be really frustrated that they are so likely to lose to your hunter in PvP.

Why does the warlock have no other groups to raid with? Is this not the fault of WoW's developers, regardless of balance issues, for not providing the tools and mechanics necessary to be able to expect the warlock can join another group? What is the timescale over which the hunter has gained this advantage in performance? It is unrealistic to expect that no raid group can gain an advantage by selective substitution based on content unless all classes have the exact same mechanics and identical abilities in their specialization roles. Designing a game that is resilient to adverse effects on player choice from leadership whims or raid group optimization should be seen as superior to the discontent that arises from the endless attempt to improve balance without really accomplishing anything at all.

>We have to balance the goal of providing fixes when we think they are warranted with the whiplash or fatigue that can come from players feeling like they constantly have to relearn how the game works. We debate constantly whether a change needs to be made immediately or whether we can sit on a problem for an extended period of time.

There are many analogies that could apply to this situation. One might be a leaky boat.

>Ideally, we want players who like Fire to be able to play Fire without feeling like they are holding back their friends.

Are their friends having fun?

Oh and is this before or after the content is reduced in difficulty? The reason for this rhetorical question should be obvious...

...but in case it isn't, if content is not fun to do, then it would likely improve WoW's subscription numbers to improve game mechanics to make content more challenging for the individual player instead of making it trivial to complete. The reason there is no coordinated feedback that content should be made more challenging is described in the above links, but also due to the concern that WoW's developers will add mechanics that are challenging but have no social relevance. WoW once had 'login challenge' and 'avoid death from loot lag challenge' but overcoming these personal challenges had no positive effects on other players, and therefore limited relevance once competence in those areas was reached.

>A lot of the fun of World of Warcraft is problem solving.

Then a lot of gameplay in World of Warcraft must not be very fun due to the lack of problems requiring solving.

>It’s time for us to step in when the lines flatten out and no new players are beating the content.

Are the ones who haven't beaten it having fun?

>It’s a bit easier for the five-player dungeons because we want players to prevail almost all the time. Nobody wants to go back to Throne of the Tides week after week until they finally beat Lady Naz’jar.

Has it always been this way..?

Is the desire for players in the most talented guilds to have content that challenges the competence of their guild and competing guilds at odds with the desire of casual players to have fun playing the game? If content is intended to be reduced in difficulty, does it benefit the game to offer it at a higher difficulty at all? At either difficulty for the group, does it challenge the individual player enough for them to enjoy the game?

>Players would typically rather we buff everyone but their spec rather than nerf their spec, even if the outcome is the same.

Are they having fun? This is getting repetitive.

>It’s fun for you to top meters. It’s not fun for when you feel like you have no hope of competing with the guy topping meters.

Is it fun to top meters on an encounter that is not difficult?

> (Remember, that if we buffed everyone up to the DPS of the outlier, that we might very well have to buff creatures as well to keep you from trivializing content, which adds a lot more overhead to the change.)

The content is already destined to be trivialized if it isn't challenging for the individual player. The player feedback that asks for increases in character performance is the same feedback that leads to content nerfs. Instead of conceding defeat when players say content isn't fun, understand why they feel that way and how to change game mechanics to make content more difficult for the individual, not how to make it easier for the group with class buffs and content nerfs.

>We hear from players who say “My dude hasn’t fundamentally changed in years,” and they want something, anything, that makes them look at their character in a new light.

It's been a while since people treated WoW as a roleplaying game..

>Stuff like this is why I say game design is an art and not a science.

Art is a science. Sadly, Aion has not delivered as a good PvP game either... the inability of the playerbase to anticipate their benefit due to poor signal evaluation, and the ignorance of the developers on how to address flawed character interactions based on these signals, are common elements of both games. The changes made to a game and their frequency are not as important as the motivations for and goals of those changes.

WoW's developers should have enough ideas on how to progress the game in a positive direction and improve the community and its quality of feedback. If they do not act to improve the attractiveness of the product for potential users, there would seem to be nothing anyone can do to remedy this situation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM3hF9fUkGs&feature=autoplay&list=PL2E110B829DF1555E&shuffle=683271

temp

2011-09-09T19:28:00.000-07:00

http://goo.gl/j47mR+
http://goo.gl/Ghqiu+

pizza rolls 700 kcal/dollar; turkey frank w/ cheese, pepper, onion, ketchup, pickle relish on 8¢ bun; hotdog w/ cheese, pepper, onion, ketchup, pickle relish on 8¢ bun

(yoghurt)

Paper Tigers and

2011-03-16T22:07:00.000-07:00

"A harder challenge can be relevant to society."

Corollary:

Balance

2011-03-15T18:00:00.000-07:00

"There are times when, due to a previous history of events, one is unable to benefit from the present. In this case, the optimal course of action is not determined purely by the set of potentials and values that make up the current situation, but rather by the conditions at an earlier point in time.

Knowing that someone is happy may lead to benefit, by previously mentioned mechanisms regarding situational complexity"

"Physical exercise and a change in mental focus." There are many ways to influence one's own thoughts, but excess mental activity is as much a problem at the physical level of thought as it is a psychological one.

Skill cap and MMOs

2011-02-28T21:18:00.000-08:00

Specifically grouped content.

When the skill cap is low, one logical conclusion once someone has reached their individual potential is that they would spend their time doing other fun things. However, if the goal is to complete group content, the difficulty of assessing that the skill cap has been reached manifests as effort to contribute to the group's success by progress in areas that do not require skill.

In this sense, offering non-skill increases in effectiveness, either permanent or temporary, are only harmful to enjoyment if goals are set which cannot be accomplished solely by increase of skill. From a competitive standpoint, if every individual player eventually reaches a personal skill cap, then any interaction has the potential to demonstrate incremental improvement without the need for a long-term goal.

By increasing the perceived skill cap and significance of each isolated victory, there can be greater 'depth' of non-skill progress offered (either permanent, or temporary) without the feeling of those elements being required to participate in group content.

This, in turn, requires not only the possibility of discerning whether an increase in skill has taken place, but also that the individual can benefit from this progression, which is not measured by the game. The easiest way to do this is, as mentioned before, congruence of individual goals with group benefit.

The second implication of the skill cap is social patterns of voluntary grouping. A higher skill cap, meaning greater variance in performance, implies easier completion by a group that's better than normal. However, there are two possibilities that may prevent extreme divergence of group performance in the population that would complicate content difficulty tuning: a higher skill cap means less reason to avoid the situation of the previously-mentioned non-skill progression elements feeling required in a group that is not progressing, since instead of "farming more potions" someone can just play better at the moment an encounter takes place, if the reason for playing a game is for challenge instead of in-game rewards; and also when rest of the game has sufficient justification to improve even for those who do not have challenge as the primary goal, decreasing the variation in performance in the population by increasing average competence as time goes on.

Flying

2011-02-17T00:00:00.000-08:00

Systems are designed to have certain modes of interaction. The assumption by the user is that the observable controls will have the intended result. The reason this is possible is the prior analysis of the entire system and removal of variation of performance from actions which are not intended to have an effect. Sometimes it's necessary to question to what extent this planning was done effectively, but in many cases without prior experience with similar situations the available modes of interaction must be taken as presented.

In a 'living' environment characterized by energy input and systematic replication, there are a greater number of ways to produce results and more ways to make mistakes. It helps to have experience with both designed systems, and natural environments.

How2fix Income Disparity in Capitalist Economy

2011-02-12T12:12:00.000-08:00

First X hours gives higher compensation. Rate, and size of X depends on development of economy. Legislative reduction of X also increases salary/wages so that total income from working X hours remains constant, with same multiplier for work done after X hours, so that changes in X have a balanced effect on an economy that can support it.

Explanation/tl;dr: {Those who feel they have 'sufficient' income will not agree to employment under terms that require them to work more than X hours, for high income occupations. Those who do not feel they have sufficient income will work longer than X, and either not accept jobs or will lobby for pay increases in occupations where the marginal compensation for working beyond X hours is not 'fair'. Even when the multiplier is no where near the size of income disparity, the contraction would affect all levels of the economy where choices are made to forgo expensive goods in favor of cheap goods of the same benefit regardless of the income or wealth of the purchaser.

Cannot be done instantly from the inverse of working hour limitations and overtime that addressed the working conditions during the time of the industrial revolution, because spending habits, item price leveling, wage normalization, and creation of new production and employment niches can only happen from market forces that need time to take effect.}

No pressure for this to happen until world resource depletion lowers 'standard of living' in developed countries, since currently survival and comfort is easily possible at less than 1/10th of per-capita income.

***

Protip from Amazon: silk or satin pillowcases prevent 'bed hair' for people with long hair.

Shoes

2011-01-28T03:17:00.000-08:00

"A story begins when something unexpected happens. Sometimes this is a mistake, but it can be other things."

I hate it when I can't fall asleep! 70th post in this weblog, not counting deleted posts.

It's hard to give imaginative titles when...

2011-01-20T22:45:00.000-08:00

. . . you're not being exposed to new stories or anything interesting. 'LFD queues' sounds boring, 'dungeon queues' even worse, 'Waiting' is just vague and boring !

It's difficult to find average expectations for performance in a population, but given enough interactions it will be found. The problem is that when any kind of learning is needed within a group without any expectation of past or future social interactions, benefit depends on a prediction of the amount of effort to reach the goal but obtaining the information to accurately make that prediction takes its own effort, which may turn out to be a lost investment.

Someone may be presented with two possible cases: 'competence', or 'lack of competence'. In the second case due exactly to the factors leading to lack of competence, advice for improving mistakes may not be instantly accepted. At the same time, the system must be designed on the assumption that improvement will happen.

. . .

Meuh, fine, this entry is about WoW now—

It's important to separate players making honest mistakes from lack of experience from those who blame their mistakes on others and are unwilling to improve.

If the playerbase cannot assist those of the first category, Blizzard will nerf the game, making all of the current encounters much easier exactly like you imply you dislike. The second category is not important, but the only way for a group to distinguish between them is iteration; it can't be done instantly the way groups would like.

For accepting risk to become a popular decision, one of the possible results of taking greater risk must actually be seen as rewarding.

That which cannot be seen

2011-01-16T21:34:00.000-08:00

When the system does not provide enough information to preserve justice, it's up to other individuals to ensure fair treatment. Few will admit this as a motive even to themselves when it would be more personally rewarding to let mistakes or ignorance slip by, but it is the basis of many actions.

edit: was trying to preserve an original thought, not restate something else encountered before ._. The loss of information obtained from the current situation (unable to be communicated within the current system in a useful way), and the effect of this potential information loss on decision making due to the uncertainty of future benefit and cost of remembering are the salient points of the thought. This is related to the manipulation of values, and priorities of action, when the source of those values is not known or understood.

Note that it isn't mentioned whose mistakes or ignorance, the definition of rewarding or whether that reward assumes a constancy in factors that might have other influences.

Zero tolerance

2011-01-16T04:35:00.000-08:00

Hackers have a wide interest in many things. This is why I'm trying to make myself read an article about how to make it in prison published in the most famous hacker magazine, /sigh. It went like this, 1) mention security vulnerabilities in software 2) re-read articles about the commercialized fraud industry 3) browse blog discussing security issues including 'jihadist publications' (it's hard to criticize someone for not knowing a language when, well~) 4) skim articles for current magazine issue 5) profit!

Wait missing a step there.

"X is too expensive. Y is missing features. Z just doesn't interest me." At some point, one allows oneself less and less freedom to choose an acceptable option until combined with overlap of uncertainty of multiple factors the size of the range of options that one allows oneself to approve of becomes negative, but I don't remember why this is. Probably something to do with being simple, or some other communication-based concern.

(17 Jan 2011 11:09 pm) oh, I remember: "A feeling of control of the environment", or rather when the amount of control is the amount desired. Ultimately arising from feedback on perceptions of and abilities of the self, due to the lack of real information flow when actions neither affect, nor are affected by the 'outside world' and the mental model of the world's current state and direction of change, in other words disassociation from a perceived reality. Related to population trends after the second world war.

Special snowflake

2011-01-14T21:07:00.000-08:00

If there are multiple options available, is one of them more attractive because it's your idea? Obviously in some aspects of life this isn't true, as people hire interior decorators so they don't have to think about which colours match, or whether a dragon could fit its tail between the couch and a wall. But in other cases, people seem to display a distinct preference for originating any changes to an arrangement instead of adopting them from an outside source.

The logic seems to be that there are a number of potential solutions towards a goal; however, there is no way to distinguish between them. The only way to find the most beneficial solution is by experimentation, meaning that the knowledge about effectiveness is an 'experience good' or 'credence good' in Wikipedia economics terminology. The benefit of a solution therefore has an important reflection on the source of that idea, as it provides the sole means of evaluating the likely correctness of future analysis in related topics.

It's possible there are things for which an analysis of value or correctness cannot be agreed upon, yet specific sources of opinion or creation have high correlation with economic success or popular appeal. This description would probably apply to many of the fine arts. Yet for the same reason, these things are criticized when something seen as having low value becomes popular due to marketing efforts or being promoted by certain economic products associated with an artistic work, due to the emphasis on convenience of purchase by consumers and lack of interest in comparing the quality of a complex product.

Of a game which is mentioned three times on the first page of search results for "$100 million failed MMO", the pages for job recruitment at the developing company are no longer available due to the failure of the company and archive.org doesn't have them either lol, but a discussion that linked to one of them quotes the following from the previous text on that page:

"If you’re looking for your first job in games, it’s worth thinking very carefully about your future employer. Do you want to work on jaded, derivative titles that receive scathing reviews and go straight to the bargain bin? Do you want to work large amounts of unpaid overtime because your project is underfunded and poorly managed? Do you want to work on codebases that are messy and poorly-designed because there’s never time to do things properly? Do you want to live in fear of your company’s financial security?

It’s sad that these and other games industry horror stories are more frequent than they should be, but it’s not like that here."

(quote continued from a different source)

. . . "And while making games is great fun, we take our work seriously. We pride ourselves on our unusually sensible, sustainable and professional development practices, resulting in smoothly-run projects and far less overtime than is normal for many game developers. We’re passionate about engineering and crafting our games to the highest of standards. We cultivate an open working environment where ideas are valued on their own merits, no matter whose they are."

While being 'original' seems to be one element of success, it should be questioned how much of this is due to the motivational aspect of doing something you like to do, without a real increase in quality compared to others with the same level of motivation.

A textbook for Japanese language lists the following as important for making hiring decisions, based on a survey of 501 companies :-

Enthusiasm/desire - 86.7%
Personality/cooperation - 57.3%
Creativity - 40.7%
Specialist knowledge/contents of research - 34.9%
Individuality - 31.0%
Amount of effort put forth during education - 16.7%
Practical knowledge/existing ability for work - 11.3%
Grades from education - 6.5%
School graduated from - 5.0%
Other - 2.8%

Enthusiasm, or perception of personal benefit from a field of work independent of salary is seen as being twice as important to hiring decisions as the propensity for expressing unique ideas.

Is there any point in quoting this? Lol. It doesn't seem efficient to say the same thing in multiple places. But then again, I'm

/lazy

For many people in NA, the approach to a problem such as the ganking that occurs in Aion is to modify just the situations of the particular individuals involved in a specific scenario - there is the casual player who has just been ganked; and there is the ganker. The 'solution' is one that changes the relationship between these two.

This pattern of asking questions ignores interactions outside the immediate - by penalizing the ganker, it is understood that their ability to PvP against players other than the casual player who was ganked will also be affected, and solutions attempt to minimize this effect while accepting it. In other words, the assumption is any modifications of the interaction of the ganker with other players, other than the casual player who was ganked, are due to changes to the situation of the ganker, and that these distant players will not, or even that they should not be directly affected by any 'solution' that resolves the options and emotions of the casual player who was ganked.

Casual player
　　　||
　　　||
　 Ganker - - - (irrelevant) - - - Another well-geared player
　　　|
　　　|
(irrelevant)
　　　|
　　　|
　Another well-geared player

This is why suggestions to fix PvP consistently omit that all players that PvP frequently should award more AP, and lose more AP than casual players who do not PvP. The 'option' of whether someone is interested in PvP can be expressed, and communicated to other players simply by avoiding participation in it.

Turtle and the rabbit

2011-01-12T21:04:00.000-08:00

It's possible that it's often said that it helps a writer to diversify and have experience with many different types of stories. A mystery, then:

There is a mechanism which may result in the death of a cat without any possibility of prediction. However, the cat is not present at the moment. The only way to ascertain whether the cat is living is to examine traces in the environment where the cat has been.

Some of the traces, an incidental result of movement here or a scratched couch there, are not conclusive. The best analysis is unable to conclude they are of recent origin, but even in the case they are several weeks old they only prove the cat existed at the time, and an event to change that may or may not have occurred since then.

But there is also a different kind of evidence, marking unusual behavior for a cat. The question is whether this evidence, left by a cat that seems to be no longer visible, is more likely to have been done by a cat that is currently alive elsewhere, or a cat that is dead..?

Suppose that the motivation for an action is not to prevent someone else from hating something, but to prevent yourself from hating—it, or something else..?

Frozen trees

2011-01-11T22:12:00.000-08:00

Warm light on white snow
Shadows open to the sky
The night does not end

The price of future contracts for commodities with low storage cost is remarkably flat and close to spot price. The possibility of buying the commodity now to sell as a future means that the contract price cannot be too high, but also means that spot price cannot be too low and the predictions of the most risky positions by specialists have already influenced the spot market.

However, for goods with significant storage costs especially this only provides a maximum for future contracts price, which not always be at the contango value predicted by the difference between the short-term cost of money and benefit of lending the commodity. When the cost of carry exceeds the investment benefit of the good, the optimal time to invest will be delayed until the inflection point with the rest of the market realizing the coming rise in price, resulting in decreasing purchase volume as prices rise until the market price stabilizes and begins to fall.

But the current popular gold futures exchange requires $5000 USD on margin for a 100 troy ounce contract (~$140k, yay) to even enter, which by itself would not provide nearly enough safety to cope with artificial fluctuations whether or not working the less competitive supply side of contracts is also possible so meh ._. without $20~30k or so not going to happen

bubbly rice

2011-01-10T16:29:00.000-08:00

Learning how to invest in gold is annoying. As always, the expectation that people will do things in an efficient way is a useless hope.

The preferences of a market expressed by aggregate choices are not homogeneous. Try to understand the correctness of a certain sector, in the form of the average intelligence of people interested in that choice. Often, even telling people that an investment or activity would benefit them will not let them understand that it would, so the people choosing it will tend to be smarter than average and demand, and consequently average price level will be artificially low, or alternatively supply is low and profits are high. Avoid the unwise choices with a low amount of aggregate intelligence. Since price will only change over time due to a change in conditions, the limited capital and risk acceptance of individuals intelligent enough to make that choice means that additional investments do not affect the profit of other investors, only the profit of industries that depend on the consumption demand at a specific price.

However, it seems that most companies that sell gold to private investors are selling gold as a physical object to feel assurance from and profit from the difference between supply and demand for a long-term investment with physical shipping, in the form of a price premium on sales and/or purchases resulting from the uncertainty about the value of the good and the lack of liquidity.

It would be just as 'efficient' in the short term for the gold to never require shipping at all with no increase in uncertainty about the value of the good, and just store the gold as a number in the accounts of the selling company. The gross revenue then being used to further invest in gold coins purchased from other companies. However, since companies can be destroyed and constantly increasing physical storage requirements is not seen as the natural result of a business that sells things, this is not the service that these companies are selling to people interested in long-term investment in gold as a form of assurance against currency inflation. Similarly, while investment for individual retirement accounts is another common goal which is facilitated by a broker, taxes and income are a primary consideration and the liquidity of a smaller short-term investment in gold is not.

So it seems the only way to invest in gold on a short-term scale while retaining liquidity is an exchange traded fund for gold, where the service being sold is knowledge about the expected future changes in the price of gold. Investments are not a purchase, but an expression of agreement about the current market trends and a current profitable choice.

However one has to wonder if it's worth the effort

edit 7 minutes later http://www.bullionvault.com/ can has pretty website??

edit 11:20 pm 10 Jan 2011 . . . normally investment is limited by capital, in derivatives like futures exchange it's only limited by risk one is willing to take and the restriction of the negative consequences that stupidity can have by laws limiting risk. If only one person could invest with margin leveraging their capital, then any expectation of a rise in prices would be cause for a high-risk position if the rest of the market is intelligent. But when specialists in the market have access to the same leverage, the price difference between a futures contract and spot price already reflects the expected maximum profit from a high-risk position.

Since the greatest risks are consistently taken by those with the most confidence of success, futures prices should predict the actual future spot price to some degree after taking into account the depreciation over time with respect to a currency bearing interest※. But when short-term motivations are removed and simply finding the balance between leveraged risk and long-term profit becomes the goal, then there is no reason to expect a futures market to provide substantially greater profit than a normal long investment, without specific understanding of events or trends influencing the short-term market to the contrary. This is why gold exchange-traded funds have such high investment by major players like banks, since it doesn't make sense to depend on specific individuals with 'skill' for risky investments in a futures exchange. Those skilled enough to do so are already able to profit on their own while reaching the same limit with attention span and market opportunities, not investment capital, restricting their gains that they would have making decisions for a bank.

When leverage of risk is selectable, profit requires not only understanding of the proper price but also the proper amount of risk at that price, and many people will guess wrong without realizing why.

※In a stable economy with no change in economic output or the size of the money supply from credit and other promises, this means that gold would not be a profitable investment, because it would not be helping an intelligent person to do something they otherwise couldn't do without loans or outside capital investment, which are themselves a judgement of quality and take effort.

. . . actually I think 'contango' has nothing to do with the cost of borrowing money (the good doesn't even need to exist when the contract is sold) and everything to do with supply-side uncertainty, /sigh. when the cost of a commodity varies by up to 10% per year there's little point in worrying about people not knowing why they lost 0.6% of principle to renew a futures contract anyway. Maybe the sellers of gold futures contracts do have to put up some kind of guarantee that prevents them from earning interest on money they have, it's all quite confusing lol. Right now I can't even remember if short vs long is the same as seller vs buyer. too late? lol. I'm so productive. 2:43 am

Buddha

2011-01-09T21:45:00.000-08:00

Proper social interactions require knowing the values placed in things by others. This includes the significance of the loss of those things, but manipulation of the possible outcomes of a situation is often without an understanding of the reasons for the relative size of the value of each thing.

For an individual or entity to hold the same values for things, is it necessary to understand the reasons for those values? For humans specifically, does lacking the reason make the value harder to remember? In which cases should it decrease confidence in the result?

Minions

2011-01-08T10:41:00.000-08:00

On the other hand, dreams can be quite stereotypical sometimes, almost as if they are a derivative work.

Overanalyzing a dream is when the same scene is replayed multiple times, to see what works. One example is when large or sharp objects are being tossed or moved at high speed, since the natural reaction is to flinch or blink which makes it hard to see what's happening.

As a story progresses, its beginning becomes more and more shrouded in time. However, a conflict; the group of raiding outlaws are persuaded to return on their previous path. Wolves may be prominent. At the same time they do, tracking them without being seen is not an easy task, the dips and turns in the mountain path strangely visible despite the general sense of darkness and steepness on either side that is usually found when mountains are used in stories.

After crossing the magical bridge of stone, the hostile group continues in their retreat but must follow them before the magical bridge of stone disappears. Closer to the opposite end, and closer... time is running up. Preparing to leap as the bridge disappears or falls away. The bridge remains solid and the opposite side is reached next to the shrouded individual standing to one side, turning to look the magical bridge of stone is still solid but after a few seconds does disappear. It is invoked one more time for the individual to cross and depart in the direction of the original objective of the hostile group, and perhaps remains for a second traveler to cross and likewise depart.

Arriving from a distance at the confrontation between the hostile group and their leader. Of course the leader is being challenged; but how to exploit the opportunity? Taking cover behind a metal dumpster (used for a different purpose of course) as large objects of similar size to the dumpster are exchanged between the largest and most aggressive of the marauders, who is unattractive, and the leader at the base camp.

"How not to get squished" obviously requires the proper choreography of large objects being thrown, camera locations, etc. Anyway to skip forward, sort of fighting against the leader. A nearby subordinate is slain, to provide offense and defense against the leader. After a few clashes with the leader who is hovering with an altitude advantage, they are surprised that their weapon has been broken. The next attack is fatal to them.

One of the large metal dumpster-sized objects is nearby, with the weapon of the large marauder who had been fighting embedded in it. The ends are clean and the construction is solid. It is picked up and hefted by the female protagonist, twirling it quietly in the silence to get a measure of its balance.

The next scene presents confusing images, but it turns out to be a sort of knighting or other ceremony (not a hanging). One of the previous marauders, or maybe they are a peasant receives what may be the weapon handled in the previous scene.

___

Is this in opposition to literary works such as A Clockwork Orange? From the most superficial glance, it might appear so.

"wishes"

2011-01-07T17:38:00.000-08:00

An empty plastic yoghurt cup, a white crane made out of a paper towel, and a glass of water.

I dislike being vague~

mm and practical leather ankle booties with a folded topline

"Things to revert"

2011-01-06T14:40:00.000-08:00

I took a semester or two of judo at a local college once, while failing an introductory computer programming course taken at the same time. Other forms of defense may be more effective overall, but there were stories to hear such as the girl who had a knife held to her throat while walking with a friend at a university, and used that arm to throw her attacker to the ground. I was fascinated by the technique of the basic foot sweep while walking, where one becomes airborne before noticing that the foot is not firmly placed on the ground.

And yes, as mentioned the second president and current prime minister of the Russian Federation is a black belt.

. . . I was trying to look this up, but it isn't as clear as I wanted. I'm not sure if my understanding of this was correct so I will just quote

To Hit the Enemy "In One Timing"
"In One Timing" means, when you have closed with the enemy, to hit him as quickly and directly as possible, without moving your body or settling your spirit, while you see that he is still undecided. The timing of hitting before the enemy decides to withdraw, break or hit, is this "In One Timing".

You must train to achieve this timing, to be able to hit in the timing of an instant.

The "Abdomen Timing of Two"
When you attack and the enemy quickly retreats, as you see him tense you must feint a cut. Then, as he relaxes, follow up and hit him. This is the "Abdomen Timing of Two".

It is very difficult to attain this merely by reading this book, but you will soon understand with a little instruction.

No Design, No Conception
In this method, when the enemy attacks and you decide to attack, hit with your body, and hit with your spirit, and hit from the Void with your hands, accelerating strongly. This is the "No Design, No Conception" cut.

This is the most important method of hitting. It is often used. You must train hard to understand it.

Don't be a newb. Anyway. According to Wikipedia, occupatio is "the rhetorical figure of bringing up and responding to a counterpoint before the opponent has the chance to make it." According to the premier experts on all Internets-related matters, occupatio is "a rhetoric technique in a debate or trial whereby the speaker would predict his opponent's behavior/argument before they'd made it. This prevented their opponent from pursuing that line of action. If they do pursue that line of action, then they seem like the mindless puppets of the original speaker."

(Examples omitted)

The difference is the assumption of audience. The expectation is that the action will not be taken. However, for this exact reason the action may be taken anyway. By not mentioning the action, it may be possible to avoid it by avoiding the expectation that the action will not be taken.

Bank

2010-12-20T19:43:00.000-08:00

"No one is asking me to do impossible things, it's so stressful!"

Why do people tell themselves they want to die happy, but never take the opportunity when it presents itself? Does it even make sense to assert that "dying happy is better than dying unhappy, all other things being equal"?

I'm not sure anyone can understand this blog anymore, including me :3 So much for distinguishing between random drivel and things other people would be interested in reading about. And yay for constantly picking titles based on avoiding linguistic repetition from previous titles, I'm sure it makes things so much more clear! ^_^

Found a nice poem a few days ago, here is the translated version because I don't understand the original at all lol. Someone asked me recently to reconcile an apparent contradiction between a certain view of morality and the existence of wars and other disagreements; why do all my conversations with people end with them not talking to me lol ._.

. . .Hatanaka, on a motorcycle, and Shiizaki, on horseback, rode through the streets, tossing leaflets that explained their motives and their actions. Within an hour before the emperor's broadcast, sometime around 11:00, August 15, Hatanaka placed his pistol to his forehead, and shot himself. Shiizaki stabbed himself with a dagger, and then shot himself. In Hatanaka's pocket was found his death poem:

"I have nothing to regret now that the dark clouds have disappeared from the reign of the Emperor."

As well earlier that morning, from Wikipedia:

. . . War Minister Korechika Anami (the army minister and "most powerful figure in Japan besides the Emperor himself"), and asked him to do whatever he could to prevent acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration. . . .

. . . The hours until [02:00] were spent in continued attempts to convince their superiors in the Army to join the coup. At about the same time, General Anami committed seppuku, leaving a message that, "I—with my death—humbly apologize to the Emperor for the great crime." Whether the crime involved losing the war, or the coup, remains unclear.

Dangerous questions

2010-12-15T21:18:00.001-08:00

If someone imagines you to be happy, are you?

If someone imagines you to be unhappy, are you?

Does this entry have a purpose? If it does not, it will be deleted eventually.

Entropy

2010-12-10T12:47:00.000-08:00

Time limits are useful, but not for anything important.

If a situation occurs but information concerning connected events is delayed or ambiguous, is the motive the same? Is the result the same?

It doesn't belong

2010-11-30T19:13:00.000-08:00

Text file excerpt

used to certain amount of simplicity. Fonts, information conveyed vs interpolated
(unrelated: employment, most efficient for employer is full-time, most efficient for society after mass production becomes part-time due to lack of demand in markets and desire to avoid "wasteful" spending, especially with energy/environmental issues. Delegation of complexity and avoiding management problems by consolidating tasks into individual responsibility

however without encouragement of money as a goal by perception of having to reach personal limit "full-time work" to be comfortable, how does the market efficiently communicate immediate demand..? "investors"/stockpiling? money benefit must overcome utility of free time, but for 'non-full time' to be stable the opportunity cost of additional work is already low...)

Historical perspective

2010-11-23T06:54:00.000-08:00

"A unit of consumer price index represents a different amount of effort" < original post title was going to be "unproductive", this is just so the present title isn't confusing // changed title again so the explanation of the title is more clear

Wiki software, reputation system . not usefulness of information, but instead signal-to-noise ratio in making edits. can flag an edit as trolling when reverting, with the lack of good intention. can flag an undo/revert as poor judgement on good intentions of the edit, with no explanation or reasonable attempt to incorporate a useful perspective. this feedback is available for review by a selection of other parties, on the intentions as opposed to specialist knowledge of the information content. presentation of the general trends for an article, as well as users in the edit history. If a reversion is made by someone with a good reputation, it is less likely to be contested or reported. if a bad reputation, more confidence for sympathy in review of a bad faith judgement.

must leverage value of time differential between editors in a wiki

Fragments of a dream

2010-11-21T08:21:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you do wake up when you wanted to.

Remnants of a dance session... joining the rebel faction of a party and being laughed at by them for it. Next week, then, told at the end when everyone is leaving... and once they are gone, being told there won't be a next week because something else is already planned. Why do some people want to know the truth, and others don't..?

Sometimes in a dream, you feel as if you recognize someone even if you don't know who it is.

....yes there was a prurient element, but it was earlier and dreams aren't consistent

edit 11:41 AM pst: mm, snow~

No pr0nz?! :<

2010-11-16T17:57:00.000-08:00

Wikipedia is bad >.> Dictionaries > Firefox quick search methods > (public Wi-Fi safety, or something) > bump keys > Wikipedia > crowbars etc.

Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20080822044708/http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/story/4208695p-4801212c.html

Only hours before Vincent Li allegedly beheaded a passenger on a Greyhound bus travelling across Manitoba, the 40-year-old man was reportedly sitting peacefully on a bench in Erickson, Man., haggling with a local teen over the price of his laptop.

Fifteen-year-old Darren Beatty and his mother Dorothy Beatty said police seized a laptop belonging to the accused killer after Darren bought it from Li Wednesday morning, only hours before the gruesome death of Tim McLean aboard the Greyhound bus.

Dorothy Beatty said her son saw Li several times Tuesday and Wednesday, discussing a severely discounted price for the laptop, then returning twice later to pay the man $60 in cash and getting the laptop's password.

"He seemed like such a nice guy when I talked to him. He was not mean or fidgety or anything," said Darren Beatty, who said he was not threatened by Li's presence on a Main Street park bench in the town of 500.

"He had, like, no emotion to him, but he didn't seem like he was a very nasty guy. He just seemed calm and normal."

Darren Beatty said the computer contained resumés with the name Vince Weiguang Li at the top. There were also photos of fighter jets and female Chinese models, he said.

The laptop contained school schedules, job resumés, e-mails written in Chinese and innocuous nature photos, said Dorothy and Maurice Beatty, after the couple perused the laptop's contents to ensure no X-rated material was on it.

"The pictures were of planes and mountains, and I think pictures of B.C.," said Dorothy Beatty. "I just took a glance at it. I didn't really get right into it, because at the time, we had no idea.

"This was just some guy's laptop, something you or I would have... there was nothing erratic and nothing gruesome. It was just a regular computer."

Dorothy Beatty explained that her son saw Li sitting on the bench Tuesday night while he bicycled by, and then again on Wednesday morning on his way to work as a gas jockey at a local gas station. During Darren's coffee break, Dorothy said her son eyed the computer lying out for sale.

"He saw the laptop sitting on the sidewalk with a sign saying '$600 O.B.O.', so Darren went over and took a look," she said.

Initially, she said the deal her son made struck her as a lucky bargain, with Darren proposing $100 for the laptop, then $50, and Li countering with a $60 price.

Darren told his mother he went to a local bank, withdrew cash and returned to Li to buy the computer.

Her son perceived no threat to his safety from the quiet man, she said, and she later told her son he got a bargain.

"I thought, 'Right on,' " she said. "The only time (Li) came up was when they were negotiating. He got up from the bench and talked to Darren on the sidewalk. And then, while Darren got the money, he took the computer back to the bench and shook Darren's hand and took the money and counted it."

Darren said Li tried to sell him a bag for the laptop for $35, but Darren told him he didn't have any more money. In the end, he said the man gave him the bag for free.

After the teen went home and realized he did not have a password for the laptop, he returned to Li shortly afterward to request it.

"He told Darren if he had any problems with the computer to come on back and talk to him," Dorothy Beatty said. Later that day, Darren said he heard a Greyhound bus pulling away and the man on the bench was gone.

Dorothy Beatty said the family had a foreboding feeling when police called her son at work the next day, only hours after Li allegedly stabbed and beheaded 22-year-old Tim McLean in front of terrified passengers, then was taken into custody after a four-hour standoff with police.

Officers from the RCMP major crime unit contacted Beatty's son at the Erickson gas station where he works Thursday morning about taking the laptop for an unidentified reason, and he later turned to his mother and father for advice. Hearing the dramatic news about the killing on the bus, Darren said he suspected Li was actually the victim of the attack.

Dorothy Beatty said she and her husband initially thought the officers might be impostors after they called her son at his workplace, not at his home.

During another call to the RCMP by Dorothy Beatty later Thursday night to confirm the request to hand over the laptop was legitimate, police told her it had a link to crime. Only Friday, when an officer came to collect the laptop, did the family learn the laptop belonged to the accused killer.

The family recoiled from the computer - where they'd already started deleting files from to create space.

Dorothy Beatty said her son was taken aback at the police's news.

"(My son) was shocked and a little scared," she said.

It's not unusual to see bus passengers hanging around Erickson, said Dorothy Beatty, so Li's lurking didn't strike her or her son as odd.

"It is not uncommon to see people sitting on the benches," she said, referring to tourists who frequent the town due to nearby Riding Mountain National Park.

- with files from The Canadian Press

oh wait

There were photos of a formal Chinese military parade, and others of Chinese models in clothes,

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/article701693.ece

...oh the first article did mention that ._. yay for misleading titles!

Innocence

2010-11-15T13:05:00.000-08:00

Any ranking system, such as a selection of seasonal television shows, creates an expectation of a gradient in quality within the reviewed category. However, this should match with the actual variation.

It is unrealistic to expect to know if a metric is efficient without familiarity with the specific situation, which will continue to change.

Sunlight

2010-10-31T16:15:00.000-07:00

The deception of activity

The deception of stillness

Lazy

2010-10-30T03:03:00.000-07:00

if doing a certain task or spending effort does not result in a significant change in opinions of other people, to what extent will that task be done

who is most aware of the importance of a task or able to understand the quality of its execution (not the same)

Idle thoughts V: "blanket"

2010-10-24T17:10:00.000-07:00

It seems one of the reasons for attacking an email account is manipulation of trust, by masquerading as the original owner in need of urgent financial assistance.

This presents different problems than merely forgetting your password.

A 'slow' password. Infrequent use means difficulty in memorizing, but also less vulnerability to keylogging on public access to the Internet or other attack vectors. Can be recorded on a physical token. Only usable after certain events which are correlated with account compromise: change of account password, recovery methods, or the 'slow' password itself, depending on frequency of use of the account. The effort associated with avoiding compromise is offset by the greater value placed in the account by the individual, compared to the value of the account for the attacker. Recovery using the 'slow' password is not instant, and collisions lead to extension of lockout. The value of the account remains constant for the owner, while for an attacker the value of the account falls sharply as knowledge of the compromise permeates the trust network.

It seems that a network of accounts can avoid compromise by preventing the reading of new or all email messages after the 'slow' password has been used, so linked accounts which have been identified by exploitation of the compromised account can be protected. However, if the 'slow' password has also been compromised, the benefit to the account owner by retrieval of contacts and previous messages might offset the danger of this information being accessible to the attacker, once knowledge of the attack has already been spread.

The value is not the account itself, but rather information that others have about the owner of the account. This entry says the same thing in like four different ways ._.

Paintings

2010-10-16T14:47:00.000-07:00

I had a bag. A canvas bag that said "support the war effort" on a large image of a 1-cent stamp in green, the only colour used to decorate, with a large capacity and a zippable top. It was left outside a store while shopping half a year or so ago, filled with food, and was stolen. (for the second time possibly)

I think it cost about $10 to purchase. Now I can't find a replacement on the retailer it came from, out of 29 categories of bags and 74 brands none of them have a bag I want.

There was also a note of currency, which I used for a bookmark.

Is it more dangerous to lose a useful item which was purchased cheaply, than to lose one with a high cost?

Esquel with peridot

2010-10-02T00:56:00.000-07:00

Five and a half hours after understanding why incandescent lights are only 2% efficient, I now know why traffic lights are blue! (The other four colours being yellow, red, white, and black of course)

Wikipedia is terrible and unreliable and no one should use it since it allows anonymous editing. And apparently, fluorescent lighting is known to give people headaches and much worse but mixing lighting types even more so.

The whole concept of lighting temperatures or matching film type to spectral behavior of lighting is probably unfamiliar to many people using a display medium that does not depend on ambient lighting. Browser history 177 pages, all in the Wikimedia namespace or linked sites ._. Don't feel like talking about it

Names and the isolation of an image

2010-09-14T11:21:00.000-07:00

It is difficult to know what would help the world. So, it's more common to help the parts we like.

The ending of a story does not have to reflect upon its beginning, because the beginning and end are not always fixed.

TK/Get Wild

2010-08-20T11:39:00.000-07:00

A momentary thought can be captured. Must resist urge to paste a single paragraph...

The rebirth of IBM is cited as an often-cited example of successful change.

One of the motivations in evaluating system change is the cost of learning metrics, or losing old ones with no easily quantifiable replacement. Trust depends on social system and structure and cannot be centralized as easily. Low motivation requires high centralization, so losing this requires motivation increase which is not an obvious linked change.

... >.>

cost of learning new metrics, or losing old ones with no easily quantifiable replacement. Affects evaluation, trust depends on social system and structure and cannot be centralized as easily. Low motivation requires high centralization, so losing this requires motivation increase which is not an obvious linked change

Security

2010-08-07T14:02:00.000-07:00

The sound of fighter aircraft practicing manoeuvres overhead. Is the purpose to create this tearing, rumbling sound that fades into ambience?

The light rain does not deter them, and on approach one can be seen underneath the endless roof of clouds.

A certain scientific railgun

2010-07-16T20:52:00.000-07:00

Pasting from text files, yayyy ^_^

Principles of marketplace competition in or out of an MMO, aka
'8 May 2010 competition.txt'

8 May 2010
1) when value of time for other players is low, let them make it instead of yourself.
2) complementary goods, tendency for demand of a final good to be fixed. Increase of one due to outside factors leads to predictable decrease in other.
3) "low wage" often operates under instantaneous profit due to high risk of investment.
4) idea that profit must come from the craft leads to contradiction when faced with no effort competition. Reselling is a risk, ability to use the invested resources mitigates risk when value of effort of competitors is uncertain leading to unpredictable demand for resources.
5) Items with high information about worth, vs items with low information about worth. High profit per item vs high profit from quantity and sell volume/velocity, especially with limited space to show offers. Low quantity of demand may make certain items never efficient to sell, which changes difficulty of acquiring them and alters methods of interaction, with more information not always more fun...

9 May 2010
6) Cost of storage (volume/upkeep not just perishable), and relationship between effort and profit compared to cost of inventory vs profit. Certain types of work give relatively constant profit per time, others tend toward profit as a proportion of investment/inventory. Being able to reach the point where effort is the limiter, not capital or inventory.

24 May 2010
7) A single supplier market does not accurately determine prices. Monopoly will tend to have higher prices with less sales, but more profit per sale. Due to uncertainty in demand and future changes, so assumes that unmet needs will persist and that short-term sales volume does not depend on demand, only on lowest seller in the market. Does not encourage use of little-known products due to high price. "Major recovery potions"
8) If sales velocity is more important than restricted resources of time and materials to create, the only competition is current price and market price over time becomes less important.

6 June 2010
9) Multiple sellers will not achieve a competitive price either if acceptance of risk is low. Sales of both resources and final product will stagnate and resource price will drop creating further profit from oversupply and lack of communication between different layers of production.
10) Key principle "prepare for market changes", achieve fluidity then buy/make deals for materials before instantaneous demand and prices bring material cost up.

18 June 2010
11) Preference for useful methods or services, not just the ones that would make the most profit. Search for new goals and validation during the process of working.

25 June 2010
12) Fluidity has value, so exchange of items can become attractive due to lower number of transactions. (aka "Don't you hate it when you can't even give away a valuable item for free")

'goals 24 May 2010.txt'

24 May 2010
short-term goals vs long-term goals? Length of time to find a solution, effect on other people and other goals.

progress and opportunity costs, the effect of going to a different place. Lost options dependent on short-term goals. Relation of performance with expectation for self, and consistency with perception of concept of self by others, what should be possible. Depends on goals or standards that are defined outside the self, due to inability to predict constancy under change. To forget, or to not be able to forget...

Therefore, change is necessary.

11 Jun 2010

A society can support many different types of people.

'specialization 8 Apr 2010.txt'

8 Apr 2010
a single goal is boring. Two goals that conflict, such as doing damage and not dying becoming more difficult is better. Specialization is a choice between goals. Interesting mechanics have implications for other players, and a negative result in one situation is positive in another. Without interactions no reason to care. Good performance is not reason to care. Risk justifies action by making it able to be respected as a less than selfish decision, whereas example: high dps with no risk has no point and is not interesting or respectable if done for self benefit.

9 Apr 2010
compare: specialization which increases options (situational spells gain further situational use) vs decreases options (ability use is entirely filled with a subset of options).

either 'RP value' of expression, or group benefit from tradeoff in form of increased options for other players and opportunity to benefit with correct play. Survivability specialization that does not increase volatility reduces relative options of other players.

Specialization options that are non-stacking depend on the existing abilities that can be modified.

importance of balance. King of China. (restatement of first paragraph)

knowledge specialization, indiv vs group benefit? doctor, or psychology(games). Seeing things in a different way and benefit to others from this viewpoint

30 May 2010

「委」　leave to; entrust; minute; detailed
「委託売買」　brokerage; agency; transaction

controller? requires knowing capabilities of others...

[...]

30 May 2010
from "building a healthy end game server culture" thread.

A game that attracts leadership?

E-mail

2010-07-10T11:56:00.000-07:00

"Being simple should not reach the point of causing yourself to be unhappy. This requires being able to trust yourself to know the difference between what does, and does not benefit you. I don't know how to express this clearly or how to remember it."

Lame title is lame

2010-03-11T07:44:00.000-08:00

Posted a few days ago on the WoW forums, have yet to see conclusive results! The dragon picture doesn't fit well in the blog style used when this entry was made, and I need to stop worrying about whether to leave the date and time at when the webpage was loaded or to update it before submitting. Generic blog is generic! Sorry, I got bored at the end of writing this one ._.

MMOs change.

—Ghostcrawler

The recently announced update to the stat changes that are coming with the Cataclysm highlight the adherence of Blizzard to the principle of making WoW as fun a game as possible, for as many people as possible. The basis of the changes is to continue to provide a wide diversity of choices in the game, with each option having meaningful results. This design is limited only by the reality of the interaction of different options within the game's mathematical and social framework -- the hopes and dreams of people provide a guiding force, which is not always apparent in the direction it will take the game.

Chief among the failed dreams of WoW is the valuation of past achievements and respect for those who combat the menaces facing this world, although the lack of respect extends to PvP contributions as well. This is posted in the tanking class role forum because the tanking role is essential in establishing order in the realization of PvE goals, but mechanics affecting the success of and respect for the tanking role have implications for all classes.

A recent thread on this forum posed the question, is threat fun? The most basic and correct answer is, threat is fun when it offers a situation where the player can benefit from making the correct decisions and the risk from guessing incorrectly can be mitigated by other players turning a dangerous situation into an advantage when played well, and when the complexity of the situation does not detract from an overall goal that turns anything before it into a grind. In raid situations, threat is not fun when the only conceivable outcome of the tank losing aggro is the raid wiping. In dungeons, threat is not fun when it only increases the time that must be spent farming badges for the day when the gear from those badges is needed for the real objective. The hidden quality of Warcraft, and the basis of its immense popularity is that individual goals have a group benefit that may not be immediately apparent, but these results are disconnected from each other in too much of WoW's current design. This must change.

"Hybrid"

In the Hybrid Tax sticky in the damage dealing class role forum is this contextual definition:

Hybrid = can respec to fulfill a different role (damage, tanking, or healing).
Hybrid != can fill multiple roles at the same time.
Hybrid != has awesome, amazing buffs or utility.
Hybrid != pure. Beyond that, there are no shades of gray among hybrids.

It is not possible for any player to competitively fill multiple roles at once in current WoW, nor has it ever been possible. In the original design for WoW this was simply because the offensive capabilities or mana efficiency of healing classes was reduced to ensure PvP balance. In later expansions, with all classes now viable for raid dps, it is because the mechanics of the game do not allow effectiveness in multiple roles. This has harmful effects: no one except a pure tank can absorb a single hit from a raid boss, so raiding is designed so that no one has to, becoming predictable. There are no choices to be made in gear or talents when there is no increased difficulty from doing more damage and no options that provide an alternative benefit to other players. To provide content to those who do feel these restrictions are not fun, alternative versions of endgame content are created that can be done without single-role specialization that is more effective in the current design of the game.

The announced intention for Cataclysm is to increase the survivability of non-tanks in a raid setting, but two major barriers to this have not been addressed: the effect of diverse stats on item design, and the quantization of raid threat mechanics into predictable performance leading to further increase in specialization.

Stat weights in item design

The current item design mechanics of WoW are that an item with the most stats is one with many different types of stats, all of approximately equal proportion in the item budget. An item with only strength will provide a reasonable amount of dps to a plate user. An item divided into strength and crit rating will provide more. An item divided into strength, crit, and hit will increase damage by even more. An item with strength, crit, hit, armor penetration, haste, attack power, agility, and expertise will provide even more, even if the item budget has been divided into all these different stats, even if a single point of strength would provide more benefit than a single point of any other stat. Even if a class only values agility at one-fourth of the value of strength, a small amount of any given stat on an item is virtually free. Conversely, a single stat when increased takes up a disproportionately large share of the budget as it becomes larger than other stats. With several stats for the class role on every item and only a small portion of the item budget allocated for stamina, this is why dps has inflated so much in WotLK relative to health pools, since not only does stamina have a small share of the budget but dps increases polynomially with multiplicative stat mechanics such as crit, haste, hit, and armor penetration.

The current method of adding stats in an item's budget was fine for original WoW, where the main stats were Strength, Agility, Intellect, Stamina, and Spirit, and each class role benefited from only one or two of those stats. But that design is no longer sufficient in providing interesting gear choices, and must change. Recognizing the importance of roles, each type of stat should be more expensive when paired with other stats from the same role, and the groupings of stats for different specialties should be much cheaper when paired together. Avoidance is a special case as cheaply providing it on all gear would not scale well in PvP without counters, but this fits well with the intention of making the same boss attack challenging and counterable for tanks and non-tanks. Stamina in large amounts would take up a reasonable amount of the item budget when it is only competing against one or two other stat groups, instead of against five discrete dps stat types on the item.

Revising threat mechanics

If it's reasonable considering the possiblity of increased computational load on the server, revising threat and aggro would not only allow the rest of WoW's design to make non-tanks less squishy giving them more choices in gearing and talents, but would also further the respect for raiding achievements in WoW overall by increasing the accessibility to challenging raid content for players with non-skill 'handicaps' like scheduling or social obligations and by making mob behavior more fun.
A proportion of the threat for any offensive ability is shared between all mobs of the same social aggro group that are targeting the same player that the mob is targeting.

Best way might be to take a certain amount (like 30%) of the threat and divide it between said mobs including the mob that is the target of the offensive ability, but to drop the proportion of this splash threat that would go to the original target. (Another way would be to reduce the threat of the original attack by the amount of splash threat.) Examples:

Tanking two mobs and using a 1000 threat ability on mob 1. 30% of threat splashes, resulting in (1000 + 0) = 1000 threat on mob 1, and (300 / 2) = 150 threat on mob 2.

Death knight is tanking five mobs, a warlock uses an aoe that does damage equal to 500 threat on every mob. Threat splashes from each mob, with a total of (500 + [(150 / 5) * 4]) = 620 threat on each mob.

Warlock in above example pulls aggro from aoe, and all of the mobs except the primary dps target head for the warlock. Death knight uses ability that does 3000 threat on one of the mobs heading for warlock, causing (900 / 4) = 225 threat on the other three mobs making them attack death knight again.

When a mob, such as a raid boss loses aggro from the current target because they died or used a threat reduction move while below the top threat on list, instead of heading for the highest threat player on threat list the mob will use the 'effective' or 'apparent' threat which is decreased for players farther away. Implications:

Even if someone who is trying to tank is not at the top of the threat list, they can still gain aggro if they are next to the boss and the highest threat player is far away and running as fast as they can.

If the boss goes crazy and heads for a squishy, others nearby can react by either running away from that player (example: mage), attempting to heal the squishy and keep them alive but risking being the next target (example: holy paladin), or trying to gain aggro themselves if they have more survivability than the boss's current target and the tanks are far away or have had their aggro reduced by the boss (example: boomkin).

This mechanic can be viewed as a temporary restriction on the healing or dps capability of individual players that forces others in the raid to adapt and heal, and also as a temporary imposition of tanking capability on specific players in the raid with frequency proportional to threat generation when combined with unpredictable threat mechanics explained below.

Kiting a mob and being out of range will decrease threat, causing it to switch targets if threat is low enough. Aggro switch from kiting does not occur until threat is significantly below other players. If using the 10/30% rule in current mechanics, then boss will not switch until threat loss on the kiting player causes someone to exceed those thresholds, or effective threat could be used to establish a threshold that varies linearly with range.

Threat for all players on threat list is reduced proportionately more frequently on fights, maybe every time targets are switched. This increases the effect of threat-producing moves which are used in these situations, compared to if they had been used prior to the switch. Simultaneously, dps are forced to interrupt their attacks until a tank has established aggro, unless the dps is attempting to tank by pulling aggro off someone more vulnerable. Could be a reduction by half but the objective is just to keep visibility on recent events and retain volatility in later stages of an encounter, and frequency and reduction might depend on the design of a specific encounter that is intended to be more or less volatile.
Threat-producing events that are below the threshold for pulling aggro still have a chance to cause the mob to switch targets, deliberately reducing the amount of time any specific player is tanking the boss.
Provides smoother curve of risk vs reward for dps, instead of an infinitely sharp transition to 'raid wipes' by causing 100 more threat-per-second to push over the threat cap.

Allows balancing of class abilities so that high threat production and skilled play are required for tanks, instead of being given for free to avoid bad tanks automatically causing wipes when paired with bad dps.

Allows balancing of bosses with attacks that will not always one-shot players who are not tanks, by forcing tanks to combine tanking talents with hybrid tanking/dps gear to achieve optimum mitigation and tanking reliability ratio.

Simplifies boss drop itemization requirements by allowing more generic items and tier sets, with the optimum threat/mitigation balance to contain only a few pieces of specialized tanking gear when using tanking talents.

Each boss tunable with constants that determine how likely they are to unpredictably switch targets. Patchwerk might have no chance to switch targets unless someone somehow managed to exceed the threat cap. Battleguard Sartura might be an example of the type of boss designed to frequently switch targets.
Server load: instead of calculating on every attack, might total threat increase for each player during a certain time period, and periodically check these totals to see if boss switches targets. Special attacks by the boss, and possibly even autoattacks might be good times to check, as would drops in threat in the current target due to threat loss abilities or kiting as described earlier. Also gives some measure of predictability for unpredictable mechanic giving tension in fight. Simplest design for chance to aggro would be [(player's effective threat, based on distance) / (tank threat)] * (amount of threat player incurred since last periodic check) / (time since last periodic check) / (sum of [constant for size of significant physical attack, scaled to raid threat-per-second expected] + [(effective threat/tank threat * tps since last check, summed for all players in threat list including tank) / tank threat]) * (constant specific to boss, determining frequency of unpredictable aggro switch) * (expected frequency constant for the mechanic tuned for entire game). Chart:
                   Dragon
                 /        \
               /          pick from:
  ⌜---------------⌝ ⌜------------------------------------⌝
  |Constant in tps| |      Everyone incl. tank           |  ====>
  ⌞_______________⌟ ⌞____________________________________⌟
          |        [sum of]: (effective threat/tank threat) * tps
          |                     |
          V                     V
     (no switch)   x rate constant for mechanic frequency, boss
This simple (my head hurts) design, with chance to draw aggro below the threat cap proportional to total threat multiplied by current threat-per-second, means that danger is proportional to the square of dps, while flat threat boosts like Misdirection and Tricks of the Trade linearly decrease the chance for a switch to occur. Other designs might give greater chance to draw aggro at low total threat levels such as after feign death, or have different low-fight-intensity behavior. This one will give a certain rate of aggro switch each time the check is made unless the division by time is removed to make it 'threat dealt since last check' instead of 'threat per second'.

When aggro switches to random player below the threat cap, all threat above the new target is flattened to the threat of the current target, as well as threat being halved. This is distinct from aggro switching due to the tank's aggro being reduced by the boss or by the boss's current target dying in that threat leveling does not occur in those situations.

The tank is not expected to be max threat in melee range. Offtanks should be trying to exceed the tank's threat and even reach the melee threat cap to switch aggro, allowing the previous tank to switch from mitigating damage to catching up in threat. If a ranged player draws random aggro or the boss uses a threat reduction move on the current tank, an offtank will probably pick up aggro before the previous tank does.

Threat above the tank for ranged players represents increased risk should the boss go wild, but will be floored and halved if any player unpredictably draws aggro below the threat cap. Healing threat-per-second from spam should exceed tank threat-per-second, so that healers have a reason to care about proximity aggro from high threat if the boss goes wild. A situational threat limit on one healer allows versatility from others in the raid.
Healing threat may benefit from a change if the server load can support it: when a target is healed, threat is distributed in proportion to the share of that target on mobs' threat tables. Intention is for aggro management in chaotic situations to be controllable on a smaller scale. Examples:

A paladin is dpsing a boss when an add appears. The paladin picks up the add and begins to tank. A priest heals the paladin for the equivalent of 4000 threat. Prior to the heal, the add has 10,000 threat on the paladin and no threat on any other players, while the boss has 160,000 threat on the paladin out of a total of 3,200,000 threat on the entire raid. The heal causes (4000 * 100/105) = 3810 threat on the add, and (4000 * 5/105) = 190 threat on the boss.

A shaman is healing a dungeon when the tank loses control of one of the five mobs and it attacks the shaman, who heals herself. Prior to the heal, the shaman's threat on the mob is just slightly above that of the tank, on the current party focus is 30% of the tank's, while on the remaining three mobs the shaman's threat is slightly below that of the tank. Due to social threat splashing described above, the three dps in the party also have threat close to that of the tank on the four unfocused mobs so much of the shaman's healing threat is correctly distributed to the focused target, but with the mob no longer targeting the tank splash threat does not reach it and without intervention the proportion of heal threat going to the mob targeting the shaman will gradually increase until it really, really hates the shaman! (lol) But heals on the tank will lead to less threat going to the mob attacking the shaman due to the lower proportion of threat that mob has towards the tank.
Overall, the lack of viability for a hybrid playstyle in current WoW is due to both the linear dropoff in effectiveness between the extremes of specializations for different roles and raid encounter mechanics that would not support any such hybrids even if they did exist. The ideal raid would neither be composed entirely of players that were geared and specced as hybrids nor one composed entirely of specialists in one role each. It would have a mix of both, with the specialists filling one role for the entire duration of an encounter with greater effectiveness than a hybrid trying to do the same, while the hybrids filled gaps as needed either due to requirements for or impositions on class roles on the raid as a whole or on individual players. Itemization for all classes would be easier too, since standard gear would support all roles for players with the proper spec, with only a small drop in effectiveness compared to wearing gear meant only for that spec which would also mean more risk in a raid.

World First

Moving beyond tanking, there are more things that can be done to increase the fun of and respect for incursions against enemies residing in the instances of WoW. Many of these possibilities support each other in the attitudes they would encourage towards accomplishments, but some of them may sound quite radical compared to what has gone before.

Extend the concept of item scaling beyond Heirloom items. Gear at the level cap causes considerable problems, including but not limited to, the mitigation of plate continuing to increase its advantage over cloth, fixation on weapons as a source of imbalance in both PvE and PvP, and the almost total reliance on gear for casters as the source of scaling above level 60 with almost no increase in the base power of spells. A portion of the scaling for both weapons and armor should be shifted to level, with the effective result that the dps (or spellpower equivalent) of weapons and base armor value of items would increase only slightly with each tier at the level cap, and would only reach the 'expected' values for their iLevel in the next expansion when items of that power have become standard. Moveover, there is no reason not to extend this partial scaling to all items regardless of what their original value was, to extend the usefulness of items that are no longer the best available. If, for example, two-thirds of item scaling from items at the cap was from character level, then...

Thunderfury would have 77 dps at lvl 70, 118 dps at lvl 80, and approximately 189.5 dps at lvl 85.

An ilvl 200 epic 1H weapon would be unchanged at lvl 80 with 143.5 dps, but the dps (not stats) of weapons past it would be reduced, with the base damage of Bloodvenom Blade (Heroic) from Deathbringer Saurfang on 25 Heroic being reduced from 250.6 dps, or 175% of the ilvl 200 weapon, down to 179 dps or 125% of the iLvl 200 weapon. Bloodvenom Blade would not do the 'full' dps of an item with its ilvl and item budget until lvl 85, where presumably a blue weapon will be equivalent and have similar dps and stats. At lvl 85, the dps of the ilvl 200 epic 1H would have increased to 215 dps, still 35 dps less than Bloodvenom Blade (Heroic), but with greatly inferior stats to either that weapon or the lvl 85 blue which would match it.

Armor would be scaling similarly, so a Sunwell tanking item would have had reduced armor at the level it was obtained, and only reached its current armor value at lvl 80, while any less powerful gear that had not been replaced in Northrend would have still been adequate with the armor value that was only slightly below current Northrend blues, although the Outland gear would have had significantly less bonus stats.

In contrast to weapon dps, the bonus spellpower on weapons would not increase from leveling, because spells would improve while leveling from the automatic increase in the base power of spells with the removal of ranks in Cataclysm.

Note that the primary benefit of removing spell ranks is to remove the WotLK paradox of a spell staying the same in power but increasing significantly in mana cost from level while avoiding the TBC situation of spells being downranked to avoid mana costs while still reaching nearly the same effectiveness from scaling. This could be avoided, if Blizzard so desired, by scaling the mana cost slightly upward with levels (to keep spell effectiveness relatively stable while leveling post-60) while increasing the base amount of an ability proportionately with the mana cost, increasing the coefficient proportionately with the mana cost, but decreasing the coefficient proportionately with the 'expected' cost of the spell should the spell rank have been obtained at that level. This has the overall effect of giving all spell ranks a coefficient proportional to their mana cost.

The other situation is scaling player levels, and item levels, down to match the level of an instance. This has great advantages over creating Heroic versions of a dungeon, such as the Deadmines, at the level cap:

A high-level player can do instances in a challenging way with their friends who have just started the game, or even friends who are in mid levels.

The experience of attempting to overcome the boss with the storylines present at the appropriate level is preserved, with the boss always being as hard as the story asserts them to be for anyone seeking to challenge their reign.

Preserves the challenge of older raid content, making any achievements in them understandable even if there are no longer enough players at the appropriate level to do the raid in the way it was intended without overgearing or overleveling it.

The development necessary to remove spell ranks makes it much easier to scale player levels down to match an instance. Each instance would have have the highest level allowed in the dungeon determined, probably not higher than the highest level boss in the dungeon or even one or two levels lower: Deadmines might limit all who entered to lvl 19. However, all abilities and even talents would still be available, just with reduced capabilities to match the player's level. Gear would also be limited to the highest quality available in the instance, with different item colours scaled to match the the selected item level so going to the Deadmines in lvl 60 epics would not be easier than going to the Deadmines in lvl 80 blues. The stats on an item would be scaled as a vector.

Just as significantly, this would also apply to instances at the level cap. Any equipped items would be reduced to a level appropriate for the dungeon, which for many of the lvl 85 dungeons might be the first tier of Cataclysm epics. For a raid instance, it would likely be the tier of that raid or the next tier. Any items of higher power would provide reduced benefit inside that raid.

However, items should not be the main progression mechanic in Cataclysm for the more casual guilds that have traditionally found them necessary. ICC attempt limiting and current attitudes towards the ICC raid buffs has shown conclusively that a new method is needed for raid progression beyond just gear. The fundamental question is how to allow players to assist and fight alongside their 60-year old grandmother who may be very skilled but does not have fast reflexes to overcome the challenges of the game, while also providing the same story to a guild composed entirely of seasoned players at a difficulty that will take more than just a single week to complete?

If an encounter becomes easier over the course of a game to players with the same gear and abilities, whether because the encounter was nerfed to reduce the hitpoints of the boss or by giving a zonewide buff, it becomes impossible for players newly attempting the encounter to understand the achievements of those who defeated the boss previously, and this creates conflict in the playerbase in the sense of value. The individual goals, of defeating an encounter as soon as possible, come to interfere with the social objective of extending the boundary of possibility for the entire playerbase by showing that a certain difficulty can be overcome. This conflict can be removed, without increasing the imbalance and distance between tiers of raid gear, by balancing raid progression on individual character advancement specific to the raid instance.

This comes in the form of powerful buffs that draw on the essence of a particular raid instance or that focus on the weaknesses possessed by enemies in that instance, but these advantages can only come at the cost of a lingering weakness in said instance which will only go away completely after a period of weeks or months. Such is the price of power, but with each passing day the resistance to the malaise permeating the raid location will become stronger, without the loss of the power that caused it. In other words, it is a raid progression mechanic on an individual level where the benefits are not realized immediately. Given the large number of customization options in WoW, it may not be wise to make it too complicated, but here are some useful patterns:

"Increases damage of <ability> against <creature group specific to instance>."

"Reduces damage of <ability type specific to instance>." (see: Shadowflame!)

"Blackwing Lair Sickness - damage, healing, health reduced by 5%." (Up to 30% reduction if every single possible buff is obtained in a single week with no time to decay.)

To be fair, the level of the corruption would not decay while inside the instance, with the value calculated by adding all time spent in the instance for the week but it would have a minimal effect for all but the most hardcore guilds when an instance first becomes available. There are many possibilities about how to obtain such dual buffs/debuffs and how to present it, but it is clear that any benefits should be themed specifically on the raid instance in their description as well as functionality. Overall, as regards to raid progression tiers, it would offer much more of a sense of progression and achievement if raids did not feel the need to impose on everyone to become fully geared in epic equipment before even attempting raid content, as it devalues the sense of achievement in the playerbase. A mechanic like this, as well as quest-based mechanics such as a collection quest that would take weeks for the entire raid to do but only a day for a new guild member later on, offers the necessary slowing of progression without the need for easily obtainable epic upgrades at an expansion's launch.

The main discontent with the raid paradigm of original WoW was the imbalance that raid gear caused in PvP as a result of the dependence on gear as the almost sole progression mechanism, also causing many other problems with guild hopping and leeching between tiers. WotLK has offered its own totally different capacity to remove the ability for gear to provide a sense of achievement. If WoW focuses on new mechanics for raid progression with less reliance on gear to provide this limiting factor, the potential for blue-geared players to earn the respect of raiders and even contribute to raids themselves is much improved, and there becomes absolutely nothing wrong with an endgame where high-end epics are not easily grindable with 15 minutes per day of faceroll aoe. In this case, the only obstacle to the community valuation of raid achievements is the issue which has become a hallmark of WotLK casual discontent: endgame raid size and the disassociation of story from achievement.

Obstacles to the 40 person raid

It is possible to return WoW to the style of requiring 40 people to raid an endgame instance. It does not mean tuning encounters to be easy. It does mean fixing hybrids and threat to allow an understanding of one part of an ongoing fight without simultaneously having to observe every other part of the fight, and giving players and guilds the necessary tools to defeat content even without being able to form the full raid from a single guild.

The majority of guilds in WoW are small, social guilds. People are in these guilds because they like to associate, and adventure with, people they know and are comfortable with. There is no reason these guilds could not participate in endgame content if the players are skilled and are able to complete challenging content on a smaller scale. Scheduling and instance locking are one complication that prevented this from happening frequently in the past, but so were the motives that commonly inspire players to raid at all. Many casual players feel that raiding does not provide sufficient context to be able to feel that the individual motive, of wanting to raid, supports the group objectives of valuing goals that all sufficiently skilled and determined players are able to achieve. This is both due to the lack of game-supported rationale for visiting a raid instance in the form of quests, and also the impositions of scheduling and restrictive specialization requirements in the current functional framework, with the declared objective of many raiders being simply to collect items. There is nothing wrong with this, but with the community attitudes that inevitably emerge, currently gearscore obsession and in the past PvP advantages, many simply do not view gear as a worthy goal and the game provides no other goal for raiding that justifies raiding's requirements and constraints in scheduling, talent spec and gear.

In the context of WoW, benefit to the group and others is provided by the promise of a questgiver that a certain action is worth rewarding, and the description by the questgiver of how the objectives of the quest relate to our own goals and values. The only significant questline related to an instance in WoW was the forming of the scepter to open the gate of Ahn'Qiraj, and most of that took place outside instances. Blizzard in Cataclysm is already seeking to reduce the aforementioned, non-skill restraints on raiding of talent spec and gear by allowing more player choices to be viable for a raid, but there is an overwhelming need for interesting, deep, and relevant quests for the raid instances of Cataclysm as well as better tools to coordinate scheduling so that 40 person raid instances can, once again, be a reality.

Part of the difficulty of coordinating multiple guilds to attempt content is not only knowing what the completion status is of a partially-cleared, shared raid instance, but also on the status of other people bound to that instance and their willingness to continue it at a certain point in time. The tools provided to the community must be just as effective as the highly successful Looking for Dungeon tool in allowing guilds to communicate both short-term and long-term raiding needs and desires to other guilds and players. Just as important for any raid instance, however, is avoiding drama in the distribution of rewards, and while social guilds very rarely have any drama it is important to recognize that the social structures within a raid may need their own loot distribution authority to ensure timely and efficient operation without detracting from the story of the instance. For any 'PUG'ed members of the raid, being able to efficiently implement the 'Gold DKP' loot method within a subset of the raid might help.

Reviving the heart of the World of Warcraft

The congruence of individual goals with group values applies just as much, if not more to PvP, and as with the case of PvE these objectives are often hidden and are only revealed once they have been lost. When was the last time a random roleplayer on your server charged into battle yelling, For the Horde?

Arenas do not have an objective relevant to the interests of the group, except for the minority of the playerbase who do not view the roleplaying aspects of their character as an essential part of their experience in this world. The challenge of seeing how high a rating one can reach in a controlled competitive environment is something that many in WoW only did for one season, since further participation beyond that tends to prove little more than that you are interested in obtaining better gear. The world of Azeroth needs a return to the sense that by defeating a hostile and aggressive member of the opposite faction, you have helped your faction.

A rank system may be the answer. But while the past one was based on measuring PvP activity levels and rewarding the greatest champions with superb equipment, this one must be based almost entirely on creating a standard to measure individual victories against the opposite faction, with rewards only a small bonus for time and effort spent. This is, completely coincidentally, somewhat similar in form to another PvP game developed by a different company... but with key differences!

First, battlegrounds and what can be obtained from them. It is possible to measure skill in a mixed population of skilled and unskilled players by consistency of victory when the population contains a relatively high proportion of skilled players. For BGs in a team-based, premade bracket, a premade of skilled PvPers will have no trouble defeating a PUG premade formed in trade channel, so by ensuring high participation by skilled teams in that bracket, any item rewards that are obtained from it by the average player will be well-earned. But farming kills is not the same thing as completing battlefield objectives, and it may be advantageous in encouraging a competitive spirit both within and outside of BGs if these were separated, to allow players to earn rewards by accomplishing the clearly defined goals of a BG, while contributing to their faction's advancement on an entirely different level with PvP kills. Key points that would encourage wholesome and morally unencumbered slaughter inside and outside of BGs:

gear matching should work on the total number of players on each side, so if a party of five players with the best gear in the game join via the Looking for Battleground tool and are placed in a BG, their faction's team would enjoy a handicap of two or three players as those players already exist in the form of overpowered gear. To prevent unbalancing of the system in a way that isn't an issue with LFD, just prevent anyone from transfering gear from storage to their bags after receiving an invite to a BG.

The existing faction-specific BG rewards purchased with honor might benefit from being updated to a quest system dependent on achieving a certain number of victories from that BG and looting the corpses of the opposite faction, with any epic rewards requiring the premade team bracket for quest credit.

PvP competitiveness and community is built by interaction with other players and teams, not by interaction with a rating system. The existence of a premade bracket and restriction of forming a full successful team prior to entry into the queue validates the group contribution to the PvP conflict. The success of the bracket is formed around this, with any high-quality item rewards only ensuring the validity of the bracket and taking advantage of measurable difficulty in PvP.

May help to merge the mostly dead 'twink' bracket of no-XP with the team premade bracket.

PvP rank

A smaller number of ranks to ease recognition. No one cared about ranks in the old honor system except Ranks 12, 13, and 14, and not only because they had teh epicz.

Rank is based on quality of play, not playtime. Honor loss on death and honor gain when getting kills, but opponents more than a few ranks lower do not reward honor nor do they lose honor on death, similar to the XP cutoff against lower levels.

Significantly flat progression for honor awarded on death for higher ranks, with main determination of skill based on rank being that the lower rank has no risk and low chance of reward, instead of a more extreme situation of the lower rank having normal risk but extremely high reward on a successful kill (encourages zerging).

Rank is understood to be a function of both gear and skill, and victory over a high-ranked opponent is seen as a more significant contribution to one's faction whether that high rank resulted from gear, or from skill.

A small number of rewards might be available of a PvP-oriented nature, but not intended to become necessary for PvP and not designed to be replaced with new rewards as PvE tiers are released. Rewards in a progression-based system should not be required to progress to the point of be able to obtain those rewards, so better if rank rewards are for less visible slots like accessories.

Any PvP gear identity, of visible nature such as weapon or shoulders/chest, would be obtained either from premade or rated BGs, or from arenas if they still exist.

Honor gains from PvP kills should also be seen as benefiting the faction in a concrete and visible way. One way would be to increase the rewards from BGs and world PvP objectives, in proportion to the honor gained compared to the other faction in a 'tipping' system similar to WG. Due to design of ranks, eventually both factions will get the same honor per week, even if it means all Horde have to be of highest possible rank and are awarded no honor for killing any low-ranked Alliance they encounter.

PvP rank as an indication of skill must take into account group size and dynamics in PvP. More logical to modify the honor loss on death, instead of modifying the honor gain which is more visible and goal-oriented.

Dying when heavily outnumbered would cause reduced honor loss.

Dying by being killed by someone who was heavily outnumbered by your allies might cause increased honor loss, considering other factors such as their rank and your rank.

When killed by a mixed group, dishonor is only awarded for the opponents who were close enough in rank to obtain honor, not for the opponents who were much higher rank (implying much better gear or PvP experience).

Best way to calculate odds in PvP is with 'attention', similar in mechanics to distributing threat. The reciprocal amount of attention determines the supposed difficulty in inflicting damage, so if a group of five players are engaged in combat with an equal group of five other players of the opposite faction, there is no modification to group.

Other PvP issues

With the introduction of flying mounts to Azeroth, this mechanic will significantly affect how the world is viewed. Several things could decrease the impact of this escape and afk mechanism on PvP servers, as well as increasing the enjoyability and realism of flying mounts overall:

Inertial physics for flying mounts. Should not be possible to hover, even with the gyrocoptor. Somewhat similar to the Brewfest quest ram, keep going forward, and climbing should be significantly slower than level, gliding flight. Flying should be a cinematic experience.

Might benefit to add a flight timer, with forced gliding and landing or even forced dismounting at the expiration of the timer.

Nets vs flying mounts and druids, that immobilize, force landing, and prevent movement and escape.

'anti-aircraft' stations, possibly portable, where by utilizing a scope similar to an Ornate Spyglass one can view flying targets from a longer distance and immobilize or disable them.

A strict limit on the vertical detection range of gathering abilities to allow lower-level characters a competitive chance at nodes.

Disabling 'click to move' for flying mounts, as a quick Google search reveals that this mechanic is used by gather bots to avoid Warden detection.

Ground mounts should be disabled when diving beneath the surface of a body of water.

Redo spell resist system so the marginal advantage of higher amounts of resist is not so unbalanced.

videos used

World of warcraft alterac valley
So we pwned this funeral by Serenity Now
Teremus by Punchcat
BWL - Drakes in the Shell by Millenium
Yashe's Domination II
25k Ambush lvl 70 by Nition
Ahn'Qiraj The Movie by Jack
Fanaticism by Jamaz
KotS Ganker in the Westfall
2.4.0 PTR bug by Mewlyn
Holy Power Priest PvP by Panda
Vurtne Frost Mage PvP 1
Extreme Solo PvE by Demia
40 shamans vs 40 paladins preview by Ressorius
Feel the Pain vol4 by Niar
The Chosen Ones by Clan Rum
Paladin - World of Warcraft beta
Revenge of the windfury by Creed
Ahn'Qiraj - Eranikus and Maws by betrayal
The Last Ovski by Gegon
Shockadin goes to arena by Avalus and Oscuro
Polzielol : The True Story by Polzie
One Man vs Onyxia by Nabor
5 rogues vs Ironforge by Ludenben
Unbreakable
Wormie hunter PvP
Candystriper 2 Mage PvP
Burn 4 the master of pain
Polzie PvP Part 2
How to get into Mount Hyjal by Shétàn
Spelldmg paladin by Dernos
New Ability by Gegon
Path of Blood by Grim
Shivan Frostmage PvP 2
Kazzak in Lakeshire
Tales of the Past III by Martin Falch
하이잘 성기사 홀리인페르노 (reckoning bomb PvP)
Hole of LoL
Szene Event Pinke Gnome
Maydie grand marshal PvP
WotLK Beta paladin preview by Kamil
Fist of the Heavens by Jamaz
Laughing Skull Horde Ironforge Raid
Lvl 70 warlock dps TBC beta
The Craft of War : Blind by Percula
TBC Mage preview by Gidgey
Melee Hunter by Kardonnis
The Memories of Sun
AFK by Sagacity
Solo BRD Emp by Gaeowyn
Unstoppable by Aelli
Onyxia Solo by Oniji
Awesome WoW Tricks by Chweet
My first wow PvP video by SA
Lorelol by Sykskar
DK Solo Karazhan by Mionelol
속력 frost mage PvP
Zero keeper Yogg-saron by Stars
Reflex is best by Grievous
A Night in Ahn'Qiraj by betrayal
Total Annihilation by Grim
Divinity II by Avengence
Polzie PvP part 1
scharlachrot by Patrizia
Alexis, Priest PvP by Francis
Soloed Chess Event in Karazhan, 70 Rogue
Paladincraft Ultimate by Grievous
Alliance Most Wanted by Death and Taxes & Death Dealers
Baskar the Hero
Run by Niallith
Fight against the Twilight Corrupter by betrayal
Zalgradis Paladin PvP 3
Circles by Shweex
Gwilldom vs AV Queue
Jimmy the World of Warcraft story
Clash of the Ovski by Gegon
Faxmonkey vs Onyxia
Divinity mage PvP by Avengence
Feel the Pain vol 5 by Niar
Vurtne 60-66 Mage PvP
Ovski Strikes Back by Gegon
Learn 2 Play by Myndflame
Further Proof Shamans are Overpowered
Vicious Mage Clazzi
Naxx Heroic Military Winge solo by Pai
Hunter solo Azuregos by Bigfluf
Untouchable 2 : 5-man Gruul by Gaeowyn
Millenium vs Ragnaros
Twin Emperors cinematic by Novakaine
Mantrid the Ninja
Tales of the Past by Martin Falch
Tales of the Past II by Martin Falch

Palmtrees on the shore of a lake

2010-02-21T20:13:00.000-08:00

It is a technique called, "to keep your intentions pure despite the form society feels itself forced into by others, so that you neither weary yourself in the good, nor afflict yourself in evil."

This is adapting to changed conditions of the landscape, dark chasing and being chased by bright. Do not rely too much on image, since there are things no one can fight directly against.

>In your country, are foreigners invited to parties?

Survival

2010-02-08T16:06:00.001-08:00

Liquid pancakes
a type of soup is made, then pancake mix added to thicken.

Delicious!

Burdens

2010-01-23T18:37:00.000-08:00

Isn't it funny how, despite how frequently MMOs are mentioned here, none of the entries have been about playing one..?

The best way to make money is, of course, to find people who have too much of it. Failing that, to provide a useful service or good that is in high demand; failing that, to prevent existing resources in an economy from going to waste.

The relationship between current and future value is not always clear. The information technology sector continues to draw heightened interest as the world's economy progresses and regional conflicts are seen as being less volatile than previous years, with the financial situation of the world emphasizing that a free market does not always result in the most stable or efficient of frameworks. Mitigation of risk in one direction may result in uncontrolled risks that are absorbed by the framework, until a limit is reached and the market's expectations reverse.

Anyway as I was saying... bots with large amounts of cash being banned in MMOs probably has an interesting effect! Do prices in the short term go up, or down? x.X

Anticipating success

2010-01-20T01:01:00.000-08:00

I was trying to figure out why I didn't want to listen to language clips ripped off an audio CD. They were so comforting and helpful before, when I was trying to learn. As I am spoiled, I only do the things I want to do, so I didn't put on my headphones and make myself listen to them.

Anyway, I figured it out but I can't say, and deleted what I had written, but before I did there was a mention of Sun Tzu's 'five dangers' as not actually being important to this post... I've been posting on forums recently so can't think straight lol >.< studyyyy

"if you hold a bird too tightly, it will die, and if you do not hold it tightly enough it will fly away"

Holidays

2010-01-10T19:29:00.000-08:00

http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/community/fanart/#875

edit 11 Feb
3.1.3 CB: Blood Turn Black, Icons Become Boxes?
Continuing Revelry - BOX and All will be Remained

Sleeeepy

2009-11-30T06:54:00.000-08:00

I understand Clannad now~ Isn't it strange when you are thinking when asleep, and come across something so startling that you wake up but can't remember exactly where in your dreams those thoughts came from.

the greatest adventure

2009-11-27T03:08:00.000-08:00

From earlier in this blog: "A lie is justified if it does not benefit you." Of course, most of the time the lies that people tell end up benefiting them because of the actions or prejudices of other people, even if the lie could not reasonably be expected to be believed. Due to the indirect influence of people and situations that surround those that encounter these lies, it becomes more efficient both on an individual level and on the level of the society to believe them. This, of course, is why crime exists, since it will always compete with the administrative and social effort needed to control it.

In some cases, however, whether something is a lie at all depends on other people, and this may mean it is the responsibility of someone else to ensure the above situation with regards to purity, even when the implications of this are an unwanted result.

Zones of Thought

2009-11-20T00:10:00.000-08:00

The fifth book is Void. It's been so long...

관심 개발자 – Problems with solo PvP and PvE in Western Market

2009-11-11T23:10:00.000-08:00

Things that were not mentioned:
- scaling of abilities based on gear and stats
- rank distribution as absolute vs relative values and effects on PvP and reward system
- item budgets and manastone socket cost, variable stat costs
- implications for instanced PvP or PvE raiding, and any current design factors that hinder this
- exploration and story elements that do not involve PvP

Mostly due to lack of knowledge of the above mechanics, or the following changes making it difficult to predict the value of further iterations to a design.

Any change to Aion should be carefully considered. But there are certain factors that cause the game to feel like a grind with the only objective being to reach level 50, and this decreases the number of people willing to play. For players in the Western culture it is not enough to feel pretty or to be part of a Legion, it is also necessary to be able to express ourselves in a unique way and to be able to compete against other players in PvP regardless of whether we have reached the level cap. In addition, when the game is not enjoyable to play, a bad community forms and the social environment becomes hostile to those new to the game as more experienced players are too busy leveling to be helpful. It is vital that these issues be fixed before people lose faith and I ask NCSoft to consider the value of these suggestions and implement them.

Contents
1. Abyss Points and Rank
1.1 Losing Rank from Buying Contribution Rewards
1.2 Combat with Unequal Numbers of Combatants
1.3 Fighting an Opponent of Higher Level
2. Character Statistics and Equipment
2.1 Item Rarity and Crafting
2.2 Offensive and Defensive Stats
3. Other Issues with Leveling, Combat, and XP
3.1 Difficult NPCs that Drop Powerful Equipment
3.2 Social Emotes and Combat Animations
3.3 Soul Healing Costs and XP in Groups
3.4 Preventing Botting and RMT

Abyss Points and Rank

PvP at level 50 is very different from PvP at lower levels. But most people who might consider leaving Aion are doing so without reaching level 50, and many who might do so would make that decision because they are not enjoying lower level PvP. The experience must be improved for Aion to reach its full potential in these markets.

Losing Rank from Buying Contribution Rewards

Higher PvP ranks lose more Abyss Points on death. This is fair when they are fighting opponents of equal rank and equal quality of equipment. It is not fair when fighting opponents of inferior rank that have better equipment, or when outnumbered. To avoid losing Abyss Points, many players spend their points on items and are reduced to a low rank. This results in the situation where Abyss Rank often does not relate to the quality of equipment of the character.

To fix this, spending Abyss Points should not reduce the PvP rank. These spent points go into debt and are shown in the Abyss points display and continue to determine PvP rank. When the player earns Abyss Points, a portion of the earned points are used to pay off the debt. For example, if a player has 25,000 Abyss Points (Rank 5) and spends 15,000 of them on an item, their rank remains the same at Rank 5. If they kill an opposing player and earn 700 Abyss Points, 200 points are used to reduce the debt and the result is 25,500 Abyss points with 14,800 of that being debt. If they are then killed in turn, they will lose the Abyss Points that a Rank 5 soldier loses and award the appropriate amount of Abyss Points to their opponent.

Combat with Unequal Numbers of Combatants

When you are killed by many opponents, currently you lose the full amount of Abyss Points for your rank. See http://na.aiononline.com/forums/suggestion/view?articleID=3271 for data. To increase confidence in the skill of a player with a certain rank and to encourage players to reach the higher ranks and continue to PvP normally at those ranks without restricting themselves to PvPing only in groups, Abyss Points must take into account the size of the groups participating in a battle. If one player is solo and fighting many opponents, the amount of Abyss Points lost for a death must reflect that. This becomes especially important at higher ranks in solo PvP.

The easiest way I can think of without putting too much burden on the server is to use what is already done of tracking damage dealt by different sources, but adding an additional metric of how much attention was paid to the player when that damage was being dealt. With this method the calculations are done over the course of a PvP encounter, instead of being done at the end when a death occurs. The amount of attention involved in inflicting a certain amount of damage is determined by comparing the number and difficulty of opponents who are engaged in combat with the one who is inflicting damage to the number and difficulty of opponents who are engaged in combat with the one who is receiving it. At the moment of inflicting damage, this is simply by counting the number and difficulty of these opponents in the right way without regard to the effectiveness of these other simultaneous combat relationships.

To make the following example more clear, I will describe some of the details for implementation. Each character has several variables or lists:
List 1 (Opponents you are attacking): opponents that you have damaged recently, or that someone you buffed or healed has damaged recently. Each opponent in this list is receiving 'attention' from you according to their difficulty of level and rank, with a total of 100% before being modified by a comparison of their level and rank with yours.
List 2 (Opponents that attack you): opponents that have damaged you recently, or that have healed someone that damaged you recently. 'Recently' might mean the same length of time as other things that do not allow you to be in combat, such as being prevented from changing zone channels. If someone who damages you drops off this list, anyone who healed them also drops off the list and you drop off of their List 1 as described above. Each opponent in this list is giving you 'attention' according to the elements of their List 1 and their own difficulty of level and rank. The amount of attention you are receiving changes only when someone drops off this list because they are no longer attacking you or healing someone who is, or the size of List 1 changes for someone who is attacking you because they stopped attacking someone else.
List 3 (Record of damage dealt to you): Aion already tracks the list of the amount of damage done to you, but in addition this would track the level of danger this damage posed according to the amount of attention they were receiving (their List 2), the amount of attention you were receiving (your List 2), and the inherent difference in difficulty between you and your opponents according to your level and rank, and their level and rank. We do not know what the mechanics are for NPCs attacking a player during PvP, we only know that it decreases Abyss Points earned or lost. So this PvE damage might include its own level of danger according to the attention the NPC paid to you in List 2, or it might only factor into the level of danger that PvP opponents represent by increasing the size of your List 2 and decreasing the attention you are able to give to your PvP opponents when they damage you.

Example:
Player A – Asmodian (cleric)
Player B – Asmodian (gladiator)
Player C – Elyos (templar)
Player D – Asmodian (sorcerer)
Player E – Asmodian (chanter)
Player F – Elyos (spiritmaster)
Player G – Elyos (cleric)

In this example, the characters all have the same level and the same Abyss Rank to simplify the calculations. Sequence of events:

1) Player D casts a spell that damages Players C, F, G. Player D is now seen to be attacking these three players, with 33% of her attention on each of them until they stop taking damage from her. (Player D has 3 opponents on her List 1.)
2) Player E heals player D, and is now seen to be attacking Players C, F, G with 33% attention until she stops healing. (Player E has 3 opponents on her List 1.)
3) Player C attacks player B. For the damaging attack we can assume Player B is paying attention to Player C at the moment of attack (Player B is added to Player C's List 2 for the moment of the attack), and since Player B is not paying attention to anyone else (Player B's List 1 includes only Player C at the moment of attack) Player C is receiving (33% + 33% + 100%) = 166% of normal attention. The weighted amount of attention Player B is receiving for the purpose of calculating danger level for the damage of the attack is [(full attention of attacker according to their level and rank in comparison with target, usually around 100%)/(incoming attention of attacker according to List 2)] = (1/1.66) = 60% of normal attention for this attack. Player B is not paying attention to anyone else (Player B's List 2) so the end result, which calculates the total danger level according to the reciprocal amount of attention Player B is giving Player C at the time of attack, is [(weighted attention of attacker)/(attention of target towards attacker according to the total amount of attention they are receiving in List 2)] = (60% / 100%) = 60% modifier for attention recorded for the damage of this attack.
4) Player A heals Player B. However, since Player B has not yet attacked Player C, Player C is still only receiving (33% + 33%) = 66% of normal attention (Player C's List 2) before determining the calculation of a new attack.
5) Player B attacks Player C. At the moment of attack Player B is seen to be receiving 100% of offensive attention from Player C (Player C's List 1) as Player C has not inflicted damage on anyone else or healed someone who is inflicting damage, and Player C is seen to be receiving 166% of normal attention (Player C's List 2 as Player B has now been added on to this list and Player B has only a single opponent on her List 1), so the weighted amount of attention Player C is receiving for the purpose of calculating danger level for the damage of the attack is [(full attention of attacker according to their level and rank in comparison with target, usually around 100%)/(incoming attention of attacker according to List 2)] = (1/1) = 100% of normal attention for this attack, and the end result for the total danger level according to the reciprocal amount of attention Player B is giving Player C at the time of attack is [(weighted attention of attacker)/(attention of target towards attacker according to List 2)] = [100% / (1/1.66)] = 166% modifier for attention recorded for the damage of this attack.

A large amount of attention corresponds to a high danger level for the damage recorded on List 3 and means you were heavily outnumbered during an encounter, while a small amount of attention means you were taking damage from someone who was fighting multiple opponents. A large amount of attention should result in a decrease in the Abyss Points earned or lost, while a small amount of attention does not need to result in a change. Player level and Abyss Rank may be added during the damage calculations to change the amount of attention received, or it may be included at the time of death depending on the sources of damage on List 3 to decrease or increase Abyss Points earned or lost without influencing the attention received from other attacks.

Calculating the number of opponents you face in a PvP battle like this, compared to the number of your allies that they face, allows a fair assessment of solo PvP proficiency and allows more enjoyment of the game.

Fighting an Opponent of Higher Level

There is no additional damage penalty for physical attacks against opponents of higher level, beyond the reduction from Physical Defense. There is also no reduction in the amount of damage of a successful magical attack, the way we incur in PvE (see source thread for formulas for PvE: http://www.aionsource.com/forum/mechanic-analysis/42597-character-stats-xp-dp-origin-gerbator-team-july-2009-a.html). However, physical attacks will eventually be reduced to dealing 1 damage per attack against opponents of higher level, and spells will suffer a 99% resist rate against someone 10 levels higher even without Magic Resist. To compensate for this, higher level opponents will earn very low Abyss Points when killing you and you will lose very few Abyss Points on death.

It is imperative that these obstacles to PvP be removed. There is a wide spread of level of opponents in a zone such as Morheim and Eltnen, and currently very few of these opponents will give both of you a fair chance to win. The unfair barriers to PvP must be removed and the Abyss Point penalty decreased to compensate to allow more equal PvP at all levels. Higher level players will still have more health, more damage, more armor, more abilities, larger heals, higher defensive stats, and more magic resist, but will not benefit from extra spell resist based on level and damage mitigation mechanics which unbalance PvP.

- The extra resist based on level must be removed, and chance to resist based solely on comparing Magic Accuracy against Magic Resist and other resist attributes such as Stun Resist that certain classes get.

- Magic Resist must be capped at 400 above the opponent's Magic Accuracy, giving a maximum chance to resist of 40%.

- The reduction from physical defense must be capped for players at a certain proportion of damage of the incoming attack, such as 60-70% reduced damage. Attacks should never deal less damage than this amount. This applies to NPCs attack players and also PvP. The amount of reduction is greater than the allowed resist chance for spells, because a certain proportion of physical damage is already intended to be absorbed by physical defense. For example, at level 30 a player may have 200 Attack and be fighting opponents with 700 Physical Defense, so 35% of the attack is already being absorbed by physical defense.

Character Statistics and Equipment

Aion's stat system causes problems. Certain stats are too powerful, while other stats are not powerful enough and there are many situations where they are not useful at all. This causes damage to increase in PvP by a large amount, reduces the choices we have to create an effective build for our characters, and means that much of the advice experienced players have to give to new players is about what to avoid because it is broken, not about how to have more fun playing the game. Seeing options appear and then disappear is one of the things that makes people quit a game.

Item Rarity and Crafting

Manastones are very powerful, and higher quality items of the same level have both higher stats and more manastone sockets than lower quality items. Most Common-quality items have only one manasocket, with the occasional item having two. It is not uncommon for characters to have several Heroic-quality (blue) items by the time they are in their mid-20's, and with three manastone sockets it is difficult to justify upgrading to a Common-quality item with one socket even if the Common-quality item is many levels higher and has better base stats. With Abyss gear from level 30 onwards having between 4 and 6 sockets, Common (white) and Superior (green) items have even less use. However, PvE still provides many Common-quality items and many crafting recipes also produce a Common item, a Noble result of which is then used to craft the higher levels of gear. With the low demand for Common items, most of the usual results of crafting are sold to vendor or extracted for Enchantment stones. As a result, crafting becomes difficult and expensive to use unless selling the high-end results for large amounts that the average player cannot afford, which encourages third-party RMT, gold buying, gold advertisements, spamming, and botting.

To increase the usefulness of items that are not of Fabled quality (orange), the lower quality items should increase in the amount of manastone sockets they have as the level of the item increases. A Common item of level 5 would continue to have just 1 manastone socket. But a Common item of level 25 for example might usually have 2 sockets, and only rarely have one socket. At level 35, Common items might usually have 2 sockets and very rarely have 3 sockets, while Superior (green) items might usually have 3 sockets and very rarely 2 sockets, and Heroic (blue) items might usually have 4 and occasionally 3 sockets. By level 50, Common items would normally have 2 but often have 3 sockets, Superior items would normally have 3 but often have 4 sockets, and Heroic items would normally have 4 but often have 5 sockets.

Offensive and Defensive Stats

Magic Boost and Physical Critical Hit are the main stats most classes aim for because they are effective in all cases of doing damage. Defensive stats are only useful when the stat is higher than your opponent's accuracy. Accuracy is only useful when it is lower than your opponent's defensive stats. All defensive stats are also useful against only one damage type, physical attacks or magical spells. However, the base amounts of abilities that do not benefit from these mechanics are not increased at higher levels to compensate for the increase of these stats, such as the damage of spellbooks or orbs, the strength of healing spells, the amount absorbed by Stone Skin or Rage, or the damage of a Cleric's physical attacks and abilities. It becomes more difficult to use these abilities in PvE and PvP as the power of characters increases from getting better gear and acquiring more manastone sockets from gear quality.

If Aion is not going to increase the power of these other abilities by scaling, it is necessary to slow the rate of damage increase in PvP to reduce burst damage and sustained damage. The most effective way to do this is to transfer the optimal stats towards the ones that have counters: Magic Accuracy is countered by Magic Resist and Accuracy is countered by Evasion/Parry/Block. These stats are normally not used for three reasons. First, half of them are defensive stats and the objective of most classes in PvP and PvE is to deal damage without taking damage. Second, the amount of benefit from using in a manastone socket is usually less than the benefit from using Magic Boost or Physical Crit. Third, they are only useful when the relevant stat on the opponent is lower or higher than the stat on the attacker, and so they all have a lower cap and a higher cap. In the case of Evasion/Parry/Block this cap will often vary based on movement bonuses and buffs or debuffs, and in other situations vs a lower-level or higher-level opponent the cap is already reached without using manastones.

This is somewhat intentional to avoid increasing damage too much against lower-level opponents. However, it is possible to increase the effectiveness of the defensive stats and ensure they are appropriately capped at reasonable levels, while giving a non-damage benefit for exceeding the cap of the opposite stat.

All stats currently have a weight on items when used as a bonus stat, which is different from the relative amount on manastones. This weight should also be adjusted, but manastones are the primary means of directing the increase in power of a character and so I will use them to discuss examples.

- Change Parry and Block so that a difference of 6 parry or 6 block over the opponent's Accuracy results in 1% Parry or Block chance, while keeping the amount on manastones the same. This means that the effective cap is 240 Parry or 300 Block over the opponent's accuracy.
- Change Accuracy so that a level 50 Superior (green) manastone gives 20 Accuracy, down from 25.
- Change Evasion so that a level 50 Superior (green) manastone gives 20 Evasion, up from 15.
- Change Magic Resist so that a level 50 Superior (green) manastone gives 20 Magic Resist, up from 12. Change any lower-level manastones if they still exist to give higher amounts of resist, similar to low-level Block/Parry manastones. Change the cap on Magic Resist to 400 above the opponent's Magic Accuracy, as described in the section “Fighting an Opponent of Higher Level”, so that there is a maximum chance of 40% chance for a character to resist an attack. However an NPC can still get 99% resist chance to continue to discourage the hunting of higher level NPCs.
- Change Magic Accuracy so that a level 50 Superior (green) manastone gives 20 Magic Accuracy, up from 12. Change any lower-level manastones if they still exist to give higher amounts of Magic Accuracy, similar to low-level Accuracy manastones.
- Add additional effect to Magic Accuracy: when Magic Accuracy is greater than the opponent's Magic Resist, there is additional chance to interrupt the opponent's casts when spells do damage, regardless of the damage of the spell. This is a counter to Concentration however the base chance to interrupt based on damage, without the boost from Magic Accuracy, may need to be reduced slightly. Since high Magic Resist already gives more chance to resist interruption because spells are resisted, it might not be necessary to further decrease the chance of interruption when Magic Resist exceeds Magic Accuracy.
- Add an additional effect to Magic Accuracy: effects applied by magic which can be broken by damage have reduced chance to be broken when the Magic Accuracy of the character who applied the effect is higher. Effects which have a variable duration will have a longer duration when used by a character with higher Magic Accuracy than the opponent's Magic Resist. When Magic Resist is high compared to the Magic Accuracy of the opponent who applied a magic effect, damage will have increased chance to break the effect if it can be broken by damage, and if the effect has a variable duration it will have shorter duration.
- Add additional effect to Accuracy: after comparing Accuracy to the Parry, Evasion, and Block of the opponent, there may be additional chance to interrupt the opponent's casts when physical attacks that use Accuracy do damage, regardless of the damage of the attack. This is a counter to Concentration however the base chance to interrupt based on damage, without the boost from Accuracy, may need to be reduced slightly. An equipped shield should always decrease the chance for casts to be interrupted, regardless of how bad the shield is. However, if the shield is very bad (and Block is much lower than Accuracy) the decrease in chance to be interrupted should be small. If Accuracy is higher than some stats (such as Evasion and Block, or if there is no Block) but lower than another stat (such as Parry), whether the chance to interrupt casts is increased may depend on the formulas used. It may be possible to use Block in the formula, regardless of whether a shield is equipped, as everyone has block from their level. It may not be necessary to further decrease the chance of interruption when Accuracy is lower than all defensive stats, if a blocked or parried attack already decreases the chance of interruption.
- Add an additional effect to Accuracy: effects applied by a physical attack which can be broken by damage have reduced chance to be broken when the Accuracy of the character who applied the effect is higher. Effects which have a variable duration will have a longer duration when used by a character with higher Accuracy than the opponent's defensive stats (Evasion/Block/Parry). When the defensive stats are high compared to the Accuracy of the opponent who applied an effect using a physical attack, damage will have increased chance to break the effects if it can be broken by damage, and the effect has a variable duration it will have shorter duration.

It may be possible to increase the effectiveness of defensive manastones by less than described here, but the important points are capping magic resist to prevent it from reaching 80% or higher in PvP against equal level opponents and adding a non-damage benefit to Accuracy and Magic Accuracy to have them as a viable option to the damage stats of Magic Boost and Physical Critical Hit. Certain players will reach the Magic Resist cap whether it takes them 20 manastones or 28, but in every case the existence of a cap reduces the effectiveness of specially socketed gear and they are less effective against attacks their manastones do not protect against. No more Templars getting 1500+ Magic Resist in PvP, or Sorcerers with equally much Magic Boost without being experiencing resists.

Other Issues with Leveling, Combat, and XP

The leveling experience in Aion is mostly enjoyable, due to the wide variety of storytelling techniques used. However, new players will eventually encounter things that may detract from their enjoyment of the game.

Difficult NPCs that Drop Powerful Equipment

The relatively small apparent increase in the stats of items and the automatic increase in the power of abilities makes many who are new to Aion think that upgrading their equipment is less important than it is in other games. This is mostly true, until encountering higher gear qualities with more manastone sockets. However, in the elite areas in the second zone we encounter bosses whose only purpose is to be killed for the items they drop. They are not for any quest since it would be difficult to complete any quest with the competition for bosses, so currently they do not do much to progress the story. Many players will find themselves joining groups with the objective of killing these bosses for loot. To prevent new players from thinking they must do this to have fun, it is necessary to integrate these bosses into the overall story of the daeva's progression and the conflict between Elyos and Asmodian and Balaur, which is lost somewhat when killing these elites.

One way to do this might be to have an Asmodian or Elyos NPC in the main fortress, or at the forward camps, who will discuss the existence of these bosses and their background story. This way, the name “The Peltclaimer” will be known to Asmodians who encounter this Black Claw priestess when they venture to the area and she will integrate with the rest of the story the daeva has encountered. Otherwise, after completing the final Campaign quest which relates to the Balaur, it's too easy for a player to move on to farming bosses with no other objective. There are complaints that Aion feels too much like a grind around this level, and the lack of overall story connecting these bosses to the rest of the game is one reason why. It is also possible that the problems around this level are due to the lack of significant rewards from Campaign quests and disconnection between Campaign quests, especially in different zones. A storyline does not feel important if it is irrelevant to the other, important storylines, but fixing this would take significant development effort and might not be appropriate for Aion at this point.

Social Emotes and Combat Animations

It is frustrating not being able to communicate what you want to, whether it is to allies or enemies. In many cases movement and ability use is a form of expression and communication about what you are capable of, and the game should allow this expression as clearly as possible as long as it does not create imbalance. There are some cases where there is a reason for animations preventing certain actions, and other cases where actions are prevented but should not be prevented. For example, changing gear is not permitted while casting a spell or using an ability and this is how it should be. However, flying or gliding is a form of movement and should be treated as an extension of running or jumping, and in all cases where movement is allowed the start of gliding or flying should also be allowed. You should be able to use one instant ability, unfurl your wings immediately afterward, and then use the next ability in a chain without losing any time, or use an instant and then jump and immediately start gliding. To be realistic, the unfurling of wings animation could continue to prevent normal auto-attacking using the weapon.

There are several issues preventing use of Aion's emotes to express emotions to other players:
- Emotes cannot be used while moving, you will stop to perform the emote.
- There seems to be a bug where you will not use an emote if the server has recorded the wrong location for your position, but instead you will be moved slightly to the new position instead of using the emote. This also affects gathering and will cancel the gathering of a resource upon speaking.
- Emotes cannot be used while attacking, you must stop attacking to use the emote.
- Emotes cannot be used consecutively until the animation has finished.
- Emotes cannot be used while flying.
- Many emotes that we expect to use and attempt to use are not available in Aion.

These issues prevent us from expressing ourselves to other players and lower enjoyment of the game by causing frustration, especially when we are unable to complete an emotion in PvP or against a flying opponent due to circumstances and not being able to stand still.

Soul Healing Costs and XP in Groups

During solo questing it is common for many players not to die at all. When starting to join groups to fight elite NPCs and when beginning to PvP, death is more common but at the same time Soul Healing becomes more necessary to avoid holding up the group in PvE or to survive in PvP, even if PvP was not the source of XP loss that leads to a long duration for Soul Sickness. This is despite that when fighting elites in a group, often the reason for a death is a mistake by another player. It is imperative that we be allowed the choice in this situation to accept the death and pay the soul healer, or to accumulate a large amount of Soul Sickness and lose XP on every death without being required to pay the soul healer. PvP removes this choice when PvE mistakes by other players force you to spend money to avoid being penalized in PvP.

PvE deaths should not affect PvP in this way. Deaths in PvP should result in a small duration for Soul Sickness, no matter what the XP deficit is from prior deaths. It is also necessary to change the way XP reduction works in groups of characters of unequal level. Currently, the decrease in XP is based off the difference in level of the characters, without regard to the level of the NPCs they are fighting. (See same thread as before for XP formula: http://www.aionsource.com/forum/mechanic-analysis/42597-character-stats-xp-dp-origin-gerbator-team-july-2009-a.html) It must change to also take into account the level of the NPCs they are fighting, and whether it would be reasonable for the lower-level characters in the group to defeat these NPCs by themselves. For example, at level 27:

- I could kill a level 31 non-elite NPC by myself for 15,000 EXP.
- I could kill a level 25 elite in the Nashtana Training Camp by myself for 90,000 EXP.
- I could kill a level 26 elite in Taran's Cavern by myself for 40,000 EXP.
Or,

- I could join a group with lvl 28-29 players and kill lvl 30 elites in the Arkanis Sky Temple for 8,000 EXP.
- I could be in a group with just a lvl 35 Gladiator, a lvl 29 Ranger, and myself and kill the same lvl 30 elites for 1,700 EXP.

The existence of a player 8 levels higher than myself does not make the elites easy to kill. The XP reduction formula is balanced off the assumption of powerleveling and that the highest level player in the group is killing NPCs that award the most efficient XP, which is always roughly same-level or slightly higher level NPCs. In this case it would be lvl 35-37 NPCs which would probably give the same XP to a lvl 35 player as the lvl 30 elites, but would be much easier for a lvl 35 player to kill and would justify a lvl 27 player getting greatly reduced XP. But because there are often legitimate groups fighting NPCs that are lower level than the highest player in the group, the formula needs to be adjusted to be based off the level of the NPC that is defeated, not just off the level of the highest player.

Here is a quick, but very usable process that would result in fair XP for fighting NPCs that are lower level than the highest player in a group, copying the appropriate steps from the thread linked above:

Example chart copied from linked thread:

Level Difference Coefficient

0 2000
1 1860
2 1715
3 1429
4 1145
5 859
6 430
7 215
8 107
9 52
10 26
11 20
12 and more 0

1. Determine level difference compared to highest-level member in group.
2. Each member gets a coefficient according to the table of coefficients for groups copied from the linked thread.
3. Determine level difference compared to the NPC that was defeated.
4. Each member gets an NPC-based coefficient according to the table of coefficients for groups in the linked thread. Members of the group higher than the NPC get a coefficient equal to a player of equal level to the NPC (coefficient of 2000 using example chart).
5. Determine level difference between the NPC that was defeated and the highest player in the group, and find the ratio of coefficients for the highest player in the group and the NPC, according to the table in the linked thread. Using those coefficients as an example, fighting an NPC 3 levels higher than the highest player in the group the ratio would be 2000/1429, fighting an NPC 4 levels lower than the highest player in the group the ratio would be 1145/2000.
6. Multiply the ratio in step 5 by the coefficients in step 4 to get a weighted comparison with the level of the NPC.
7. Add the weighted coefficients in step 6 to the coefficients for the same member in step 2.
8. Calculate % proportion each member has compared to sum of all coefficients.
9. Also calculate "XP as for solo" for each member (as described in linked thread for increasing XP against higher level NPCs or decreasing XP against NPCs more than 2 levels lower).
10. Multiply number from step 8 with number from step 9
11. The XP undergoes limiting as in the linked thread for not being able to fill more than 20% of XP bar.

Example calculation:
Group of 27 Cleric, 29 Ranger, 35 Gladiator kills lvl 30 elite

Old formula:
Cleric coefficient of 107
Ranger coefficient of 430
Gladiator coefficient of 2000

Sum of coefficients is 2537, if Cleric is getting 1700 XP per kill with bonus from "XP as for solo" step (15% bonus) then normal XP for NPC is (2537/107 * 1700 / 1.15) = 35000 XP per kill according to the formula. After XP as for solo penalty of 50% for gladiator (described in linked thread), gladiator should be getting 15,500 XP per kill and ranger with 5% XP for solo bonus should be getting 6200 per kill. Data for XP on these 1-dot elites is confirmed by getting around 8000 XP per kill with a total of four players lvl 27-29 in the group.

New formula:
Step 2:
Cleric coefficient of 107
Ranger coefficient of 430
Gladiator coefficient of 2000

Step 4:
Cleric coefficent of 1429
Ranger coefficient of 1860
Gladiator coefficient of 2000

Step 5:
Coefficient of highest player to NPC level: 859/2000 = 0.4295

Step 6, weighted coefficients compared to NPC:
Cleric, weighted of 613.8
Ranger, weighted of 798.9
Gladiator, weighted of 859

Step 7, total coefficients:
Cleric, total of 720.8
Ranger, total of 1228.9
Gladiator, total of 2859

Step 10, XP after calculating solo bonus or penalty:
lvl 27 Cleric gets 6034 EXP after 15% bonus from level
lvl 29 Ranger gets 9391 EXP after 5% bonus from level
lvl 35 Gladiator gets 10403 EXP after 50% penalty from level

This is a much more fair XP distribution. According to the described formula, powerleveling would still be impossible since the coefficient compared to the NPC is reduced when the highest level player is of higher level than the NPC, with this coefficient eventually being multiplied by 0 when the highest level player is more than 12 levels higher than the NPC.

Preventing Botting and RMT

Botting is much more of a problem on our servers because Game Guard is disabled, and this increases the supply for Real-Money Transactions or 'RMT'. However, the primary reason that people choose to become clients of RMT is that they feel there is a problem with the game or its community that will not allow them to enjoy playing without RMT. Therefore, the above solutions are all important to reducing botting and RMT as they increase the PvP and gear customization options available at all levels of the game, without having to resort to RMT or use a botting program to reach a high level. Once they are done, long-term solutions to botting can be implemented to restore balance to the economy.

Reducing botting should focus on attacking the network of bots, distributors, and clients of RMT, instead of trying to identify them with just their own actions. Similar to Google's link weight algorithms and real-world identification of networks, characters that are identified as being bots or gold sellers should also raise flags for the game accounts that they are associated with financially. Many actions could lead to being identified as high chance or high risk for botting or gold selling, but this should only be used as the first step in verifying this prohibited activity. Examples of high-risk behavior:

- associating with any high-risk character by guild, in-game mail, or direct trade of kinah or goods.
- a low-level character sending large amounts of money or trading large amounts of money, as gold sellers are likely to try to use temporary characters to decrease the risk of their main accounts being banned. There are reasons that a high-level player might send their friends money, such as if they are quitting the game, but there is almost no reason for this exchange to be done indirectly through an intermediate, low-level character.
- being the target of many Auto Hunting Reports.
- engaging in certain activities after being the target of Auto Hunting Reports, such as continuing to kill the same type of NPC for a long period of time, or gathering the same resource for a long period of time, or killing the same type of NPC when it's much lower level and gives very little experience.
- completing very few, or no quests. This is a very strong indication of botting, as is not having a standard title.
- broker purchases or private store purchases that are much higher or much lower than a normal range of prices for that item, as this is likely one technique used to transfer kinah between characters to prepare for RMT.

If word verification is added for gathering, it may be less annoying to normal players if word verification is only triggered by Auto Hunting Reports along with high-risk activities such as gathering the same resources or killing the same NPCs, and the chance to ask for word verification should be related to the number of Auto Hunting Reports and historical record of likely botting activity. One very easy, and likely very effective short-term way to reduce the effectiveness of bots operating on Aion's Western servers would be to prevent the '/select' command from being used to select resources. In the current client, you can type '/select Adamantium' and it will select the node as shown with a yellow circle, and then you can Gather or use the Attack hotkey and automatically move to and gather the node, or you can type '/select Big Vortex' while flying and use a hotkey to automatically fly to and gather from the node. The '/select' command has a range which is less than the limit of visibility but there is no reason to allow the automatic selection of a node at all.

I ask NCSoft to consider the issues in the Western market and the solutions described in this post. Allowing players of all levels to contribute to the PvP battles between the factions and giving more freedom of expression in itemization and social interactions is critical to the growth of the game.

Hashi

2009-08-30T21:07:00.000-07:00

With the default touchpad driver in Ubuntu, top-right is middle click and bottom-right is secondary click (right-click for most people).

This isn't mentioned in Gnome because it's supposed to be simple, but I think the package description mentioned this. I've found it quite useful because I couldn't find any way to initiate standard right-click using the keyboard (different sometimes than the 'context menu' key), and you don't need to do the complicated gsynaptics configuration stuff with touchpad memory to get it working, either. :P

"World of Warcraft"

2009-08-24T17:17:00.000-07:00

(very lazy)

lvl 85
specialization, 'talent' variations (circular layout!)
downleveling to play with friends, heirloom items (and updated Onyxia >_> content obsoletion in general including entire zones/expansions)
Story specialization instead of power
ganking and PvP. Biggest option for new competitors, having options while leveling

more on item model
character is 60. Item is 1, but counts as 40 or 45
Effective level increased for low-level items if more proficient in that clothing style from use
Being able to use any item, not the same as being highly effective with any item immediately upon picking it up
Economic quality differ upon 'deterioration' events, avoidable vs unavoidable damage. Optimum differs for each case
Downleveling in instances good for story and social, regardless of power scaling

a friend is having relationship problems

tears

2009-08-11T17:49:00.000-07:00

Haha, found it. What everyone who has a blog should keep in mind . . .

Restless thoughts

2009-07-22T12:32:00.000-07:00

Some days I just can't concentrate . . .

This is going back to the idea of three separate views in an MMO, each of which presents different information and functions. The social view presents conversations and normal user interface information, as well as abilities setup and all other options available. It emphasizes the display of this information thru the 'UI layer', and presents reduced information in the dynamic game world environment such as not displaying player names floating above their heads in most cases.

The second is the battle view, which also presents a subset of information but in this case selects information that helps a single player make quick decisions in combat. This eliminates chat information from the display and even UI elements such as abilities; a player fighting in this mode would have all abilities keybound and memorized. However, unlike the social view, the battle view shows all friendly and unfriendly names in the gameworld. It might or might not include the status of group members as part of the essential information to display. This view is designed to complement, and not replace the social view in both combat and other situations; however, its other use is for those who are 'following' the viewpoint of a player to be able to understand what they are doing, without distractions such as chat and the placement of buttons that do not influence the instantaneous decisions of the followed character. This would include being able to show the dynamics of any staged battles viewed by a mass audience, in-game or out.

The third is camera, or director, or film-making view. As well as setting up graphical and camera settings for screenshots, it would also give video capture options. More settings are being able to move the camera position independent of the character, prerecorded camera movements in all dimensions and variable speeds (think graphs that show position in a dimension over time, and being able to recall relative or absolute locations), letting the camera stay in one place tracking a moving character or freely moving, as well as other previously mentioned things like camera viewing angle and display of names or the interface. It may be possible to change other settings in this interface, or maybe they would just fall under graphical settings for the game as a whole, such as the amount of 'glare' produced by a simulated light source. All this should be designed not to be exploitable in combat for line-of-sight information etc. Probably by removing saved points when switching to a different view, or at the very least by restricting the camera movement speed at initial switch and in certain situations. If it is still used to view nearby, otherwise unviewable, areas as by thinking of the character going into a 'trance', that may not be a bad use of the system.

Anyway the important one in this discussion is social view. It would be nice to do as previously mentioned and display 'important' names without selecting those entities; however some analysis says that this may not be possible. Battle view would fulfill the most necessary situations, as going into a single-minded state of concentrating on awareness and combat instead of other details; there may be too many contradictions by expanding this into social view, as follows . . .

There are different options. Displaying transparent names with a fuzzy glow, to distinguish from the bright main selection; showing on near-mouseover, and then fading again; doing this with certain subsets of all entities. As regards to hostile targets, this would detract from the single selection that is made by the player. Situations are most interesting when they allow for friendly or unfriendly actions to be reciprocated or to deny that reciprocation, which drives emphasis towards the status of individuals when time and the display allow for this. Even this fuzzy-glow display would also cause overreliance on combat mechanisms that cause names to appear which may speed the decision-making process, leading to cases where 'aggro is good' and so on, where actions are chosen solely for names and not for information; this is what really reduces the chance of being able to do this. But I guess names on near-mouseover is still possible in all cases . . .

For friendly entities, the main problem is which subset to make names appear for. Should group members have their names always displayed, or should friends..? How to differentiate between these two? If similar patterns are used, which is better, a friend or a group member? This last question inevitably arises when both group and friend are supposed to be 'better' than average. Is everyone who does not have their name displayed unimportant, since you have to go to extra effort to recognize them? It's easier to ignore everyone you don't know know or aren't working with. Why bother to memorize the physical appearance of those around you, when the important ones already have their names displayed and you can just memorize those..? These last ones are most troublesome, and since passive name display already creates the discomfort of an easy and unrealistic simulation of the real, it may be better not to have passive name display at all, and maybe not even on near-mouseover as these recent questions could mean that making it more difficult to obtain this information makes the game better.

Anyway, back to friends vs group, "display and value conflict". This is where I start copying notes verbatim. Different display mechanisms for each, but if group display is preserved then preferential and denigrate friends. But group display necessary for awareness when joining a group, etc. for social context and guidance/direction. "Follow the mob'.

Since for separation of known friendly [entities] and social dependencies and hard obligations, only important when non-grouped friendlies are present.

not in raids
Not in instanced PvP with controlled sides

"Raid group" besides very evocative does not have to be the same as normal group for other tasks. Goal can be different, obligations different, and display different. Possible: raid group is spears + feathers or banners. [Note: more lengthy setup of raid group, need to design banner and so on, or must derive from a guild. Less trivial for raid group to exist, possibly longer existence too..? Task-based, different purpose than a guild, may not be able to exist for long regardless of setup requirements.] Physical tokens within context of game reality are not comparable to game or player-designated relationships and potentials as displayed by name colour, etc. Group could be different but less obvious; "only feathers". Multi-group could include both of these.

Groups in raid vs party buffs, universal benefit?

. . . and that's as far as I got before I ran out of space and had to start thinking again, lol. The traditional 'raid groups' of current PvE MMOs would not correspond to the raid groups in this thinking. That raiding role in a system like this would fall upon groups of various sizes, with more internal organization to encourage modularity and dynamic social groupings to accomplish a task. This third type of group would be the 'multi-group' as mentioned above and also described in previous writings not present in this space, since 'super-group' sounds too much like American comic books and you can't create a more unique and descriptive term unless you have a place for it in the functional language. Would it help to be able to have raids, and not just the normal small group, join into this 'multi-group'? It might depend on how obvious the raid-group physical token designator is . . . otherwise it might be fine. Raid groups might just work as multiple small groups for combat purposes anyway, similar to existing games.

So another open question, besides 'preventing party buffs from breaking raid modularity' and 'whether raid groups can join raids', might be 'whether to design or alter combat mechanics around large groups with no internal structure or organization'.

Maybe PvP raid group vs PvE raid group might be better short-term descriptions. o_O Anyway that's all I can think of for now, and hopefully soon . . . as in today >_< . . . I can go back to studying.

UPDATE: 23 July, 12:13 a.m.

It may be very sad, but I have lots of pictures and movies from an old game on my hard drive. Due to issues, I know I can't concentrate so I escape to the unseen world. Things I noticed regarding names:
- raid instances look great with no names, at least for someone not actively playing and making decisions. Note: glowy armor looks stupid, properly done non-glowy armor can look totally awesome especially when the scene is properly presented.
- the one named Mantrid had friendly names off at least for one point in his (first?) PvP video
- generally, having names off means that the name display for the selected entity is the concession to gameplay, and no names is actually the 'reality'
- camera angle and height is still essential to taking characters seriously, instead of having them trivialized by distance and smallness

Screenshots, of course, look much better with no names. However in order for the meme 'identity is somewhat hidden' be successful, it must also apply to Player-vs-Environment scenarios, aka aggro and other artificial intelligence concepts. Take a screenshot of an underground university turned into a house of death and horror by undead perversions: the players have been turned into diseased gnomes and skeletons by various potions, and off in the distance are several groups of necromancers chatting. The only name appearing in the screenshot is that of one of the necromancers who was selected at the time. Not displaying friendly names can cause confusion about who is and who is not, but under current systems an artificial opponent would have no such confusion. Extending the assumptions of this scenario, the diseased gnomes and skeletons in this screenshot should be able to walk past the necromancers in a casual way, and not attract their attention.

Approaching too close or otherwise acting unusually might of course trigger a question or other challenge, which may or may not have a suitable response to avoid conflict. This actually is another example of 'group dynamics instead of solo', since a large group of players would not only be more suspicious but would also require uniform behavior from all group members to prevent an escalation.

Other pictures... hum...

Ninjaing a chest with pirates standing scant yards away... taunting guards of a fanatical and militant religious order while disguised as a paladin of said order, in turn disguised as a pirate of the wrong gender too... also one of the opening of a keystone in an archaeological site which is interesting because it's one of the situations I thought you WOULD need names, but it actually works out quite well from the screenshot... one of the movies which I shamefully watched had the character's own name displayed, which mostly works because their identity is relevant so it isn't a distraction. For presentation of situation however, identity is not important and name colour as action-potentials is distracting as usually involves losses and gains that do not concern the viewer. Identity information can be provided in metadata or descriptions accompanying the screenshot, and there would always be the option of selecting oneself as the named entity being emphasized in a screenshot.

Another one of the same corrupted school... this one with interface on, but names still off and it looks great. But I don't think I did the fight that way >_<.. if someone is in trouble, it's hard to tell where they are without being able to examine a situation for friendly entities, and verify that someone who seems to be in trouble is the one that actually is by looking at their name display in the gameworld. On the other hand it's somewhat difficult to tell who may be in trouble even with names on unless you are paying attention.

However, this can can be countered by having predictable damage. The 'assist' hotkey, to find target of target is an essential tool in dynamic situations, and in the confusion of many opponents, 1-vs-many damage mechanics and aggro mechanics will contribute to this relative predictability. Just as essential tho is communication. Even if it's not an important subject, when someone says something in chat and you can't associate their name with a specific nearby entity in the gameworld, this is confusing and distracting, because there are social considerations too and remembering who said what, not just the immediate impact of this communication on the game world.

What about this..? Complicated because not all communication takes place with range of voice, so the analogy is not perfect. If someone speaks in any communication channel and within 'voice range' (which might not be same as visible range), they give physical indications of speaking and a voice bubble shows up that gives an abbreviation of the communication channel and the beginning of what they say. The purpose of this is not to be able to follow a conversation by just looking at the game world, but to allow quick identification of who is saying what. However, 'mousing over' any chat bubble could easily show the full text. Their name could be included, but leaving it out as well as abbreviating the communication channel is to avoid repetition of information and screen clutter. The chat bubble doesn't have to be always over their head; it would be better if it were dynamic and tried to fill screen space that was not already occupied by something interesting like a character.

For example of this, suppose the following dialogue:
[Group][Holymackerel]: pally power!
[Group][Lavicus]: im nervous :P lol
[Group][Jerdren]: lol
[Group][Taemojitsu]: ought to have gone x5 pallies XD
[Group][Holymackerel]: is this a long fight?
...

might show up as something like,
"[G] pally power!"
"[G] im nervous ..."
"[G] lol"
"[G] ought to ..."
"[G] is this ..."

in speech bubbles in the game world.

More screenshots: siiigh, lots of totally iconic imagery of a free-for-all arena in a jungle. For example one partial shot has at least 72 bodies on the floor and entrance to the arena of players who have died and not resurrected; another shows at least 64. Neither of these count all the skeletons that remain after a player has resurrected, nor do they count ongoing player-vs-player engagements with flashy explosions and healing and moonlasers coming down from the sky. If I included images in this blog this post would have too many. Other images include groups from classic opposing factions mustering their courage at the entrance and making preparations to enter the arena floor, with lighting from time of day highlighting the differences between them... interspersed in each case with several players of the wrong faction. A lineup of trolls on raptors with a hulking tauren on same walking down the line, faced by a lone female and the occasional dead body or skeleton on the floor. Four identically-dressed assassins attempting to molest a player by intrusion on their personal space as she sits near a wall. Another screenshot demonstrating the hilarity and social reactions when a many-vs-1 gank fails. None of these with names displayed, the interface displayed only if conversation or health/debuffs are relevant; and it all looks great! siiiigh. ^_^ the memories... sorry!

...

As regards to free-for-all PvP, this highlights how useful the 'physical token' approach to marking groups would be, as this makes groups visible to players who are not in one.

(healers PvP, making it interesting/dynamic and using group heals)

Open questions

2009-07-15T11:11:00.000-07:00

In the course of things, I am distracted by various thoughts. They start from anywhere. As they progress, I wonder about power inflation. Do things scale properly? How does this affect player options? Perhaps inspired by a depiction of a lone caster facing the lord of the molten depths in all his anger and power, I wonder about past stories and a player attempting to solo Maws, the tiny minnow who held part of the key to an ancient mystery. Any game should allow at least as dramatic a depiction as the one by Betrayal, a player, of the battles against Maws and Eranikus. But how is it really, to experience such a thing? How much of it is just presentation and editing? For a single player to attempt the same thing would be unrealistic as seen in a game. Is there any way to show any amount of drama when the minnow is faced by a single opponent? How much of this can be done with the game, and how much would need to be done by camera and editing?

Removing the traditional form of power inflation would make this impossible. Is there any downside to the situation of not being able to do this? Scaling problems are a core issue in a game based around progression of power, and bad mechanics will throw off balance. It is apparent from the design of some games that certain classes were more 'dependent' on their gear than others, especially for damage. Is it possible to have balance... or you might say, "balance-preserving transformations"... when the size of resource pools, and thus the length of fights change?

Obviously, one way of avoiding this is by not having classes for whom upgrades are a necessity, and specifically weapon upgrades. How is the situation tho when classes are dependent in this way, or in some cases as they have become this way? For which classes are options present, and for which do scaling mechanics restrict what they are able to do? Under which scenarios -- such as character level or gear depth -- do these restrictions exist, and how would you create a character to preserve as many options as possible so you could have fun...? But at some point there is a limit to these questions and their relevance.

This somehow, led me to wonder why I consider the possibility of group combat more exciting than solo combat, and why I would choose options that emphasize group support in addition to solo viability in most cases. Why would I not speculate about group offensive viability as well. One way or another this led me back to names; after spending much time thinking about the very simple situation, 'Use an offensive ability that blows up multiple enemies next to you, and everyone's name pops up briefly to let you know whom you damaged', I think it isn't possible. There's too much about ranged aoe attacks, and periodic aoe damage, and single-target aoe damage, and names as letting you know who you have damaged compared to names letting you know what creatures you have accidentally damaged that will now try to attack you, and showing friendly names when you are healed by one out of a large number of playeres compared to showing friendly names when you are healed by a dedicated healer in a small number of players you are working closely with at a certain time. Too difficult to separate times when names would be appropriate vs when they would not.

This asks, when is showing multiple names needed? It would be when you have just caused a significant change, either in their own health or in their perception of you, in several entities and don't have time to select each individually to see their names; but also when you are faced with multiple entities and need to target one of many of them, and your decision is dependent on the identities involved. In this second case, names-on-damage would not help, and not all characters would have access to area-of-effect abilities anyway. These other flaws in implementing make it less likely that this function would work smoothly.

However, many target selection difficulties would be somewhat alleviated by more area-of-effect possibilities by abilities, as well as other ninja law mechanics to help a player attacked by multiple opponents. Knowledge stress is based on the penalty for not using that information, and by lowering the immediate intensity of a conflict where information is hard to quickly obtain the knowledge stress is reduced.

It is important not to forget the stylistic approach, where less information is more helpful when taking all factors into account.

Also, 'tab select' shouldn't go thru walls. And there's lots of stuff you could say about using story ('quests') as incentive instead of power-based items, with story also actually including character expression and differentiation. A 'quest' would change your character's expression, as it is only done once. Defeating a known figure in a story tableau would only change your status within a certain context, those in the world who care about the story as portrayed within the larger story of the game and maybe other players who care about for this specific aspect of your character. However the gear questions that lead to this diversion are not new.

drifting

2009-07-13T20:27:00.000-07:00

Rise of Western civilization, world empires in last few centuries

metalworking, energy, weapons

technology combined with language enabling cheap knowledge transfer. (movable type works well with the Latin alphabet)

In 20th century technology allows knowledge transfer in all languages and cultures.

See also, Pierre Bourdieu. Note reflexivity and link to the 'financial terrorist' Mr Soros, and different kinds of social and cultural capital, I haven't read most of this stuff except maybe the end. This gives an interesting viewpoint: something which can appeal to everyone of the right temperament can act as this bridging social capital to link bonded groups. If communities tend towards isolation (and this is true in leisure as in everything else), elements of culture that bridge these communities have value.

Tatja Grimm

2009-07-12T11:40:00.000-07:00

Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio:

It was the verdict of ancient writers that men afflict themselves in evil and weary themselves in the good, and that the same effects result from both of these passions. For whenever men are not obliged to fight from necessity, they fight from ambition; which is so powerful in human breasts, that it never leaves them no matter to what rank they rise. The reason is that nature has so created men that they are able to desire everything but are not able to attain everything: so that the desire being always greater than the acquisition, there results discontent with the possession and little satisfaction to themselves from it. From this arises the changes in their fortunes; for as men desire, some to have more, some in fear of losing their acquisition, there ensues enmity and war, from which results the ruin of that province and the elevation of another.

It is possible this is no longer the case. I have mentioned before that Unrestricted Warfare by
Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui is an excellent book which I have never finished reading. It argues, or mentions, that the 1991 Iraq war was the first and last of its kind, and that the world is fundamentally different than it was before regarding people's support for wars. Maybe this is because of nuclear weapons.

It brings to mind many things. Is conflict really so unavoidable? If it is, then it is because of selfishness or ambitiousness of those around you. What you allow them to do, or what you seek to achieve is largely defined by the social environment of what you see as possible and what you see as reasonable to have as a goal, whether this is because other people have the same or whether they have a different attitude towards what you or they should be able to achieve. Our reactions toward what other people attempt to do is only because of what we have decided or what other people have decided for us. Conflict is not unavoidable, but occurs because we feel it should. This may be a morally acceptable decision as it relates to the benefit of others around us and even our own benefit; but this may not prevent it from becoming a selfish decision. The only way it is not, to keep being good even as you grow weary with it, is to be the warrior.

Most are not. Some cultures are aware of this requirement more than others. Some cultures present death as hypothetically being a positive thing, and in that way are able to embrace conflict while not denying its nature. This is more of a social stance as this presentation of strength is mostly of a rhetorical nature; whereas viewing the accepting attitude towards death as... what it is... derives from a more individual stance that does not depend, or thrive on the benefit of other people to be expressed.

The second thing it brings to mind is that if nuclear weapons really have softened the aggressive characteristics of society, then the aggressive mindset that is attracted to war might only exist in simpler and less deadly environments. Comparing the warring factions of ages past, they are very different from the current one of global trade and media saturation. A game, then can derive its legitimacy and its reality from the fact that it does not take place in the present.

Signs of the Times

2009-07-09T11:05:00.000-07:00

Background noise is annoying >_< I used to be able to read so well, totally ignoring everything going on around me. Now the exact opposite is usually true. Why?

Release info on a central site days before it is available by any other means. Data-mining and model rendering means that public testing is equivalent to a full release. It is harmful in itself itself to show things in a way which suggests that knowledge of new abilities or mechanics is worth displaying or talking about them in a poor way. Even if this attitude did not exist before, it will create it, and the attitude will be self-reinforcing despite being contrary to the state of a game. So even when dampening the competition-based factors which encourage this knowledge . . . primacy, the improper release and approach to new information can such habits to exist in those interested.

Accumulating information and releasing at the right times means less information at other times. Inconsistency will kill a habit. When a game relies on, tolerates, or even encourages an obsession with new details and the edge of change, it will not reduce the alteration of the spirit of the game by third-party sites and will not benefit those who are trying to enjoy the game in its present form, neither in the social environment it creates nor in the choices it will cause the game's designers to make, consciously or unconsciously, in response to the most insistent of players who do concern themselves with the flux and newness of a game. This mutual or self-delusion by avid fans and the creators of a game can lead to the game's . . . dullness, I suppose for those who are not interested in the grind.

Specific practices.
Model-viewing screenshots tagged with the name of a site. Depends on having the object model in game files released to players.

Describing upcoming changes or newly released information in specific terms, or even copying all official information releases on formal or informal channels to encourage players to use a certain site as their primary source of information.

For example, a new boss is released on a public test realm. A third-party site uses a model viewer to create a screenshot of the boss and tags it with the site name. They data-mine the game files describing the boss's abilities and post all data on their site.

The following would make less people interested in that presentation by the third-party site, for a game developer interested in avoiding the knowledge-obsessive approach to their game. Days before the test patch is released, create a story about the boss with a 'role-playing' attitude, that defines who this boss is, why they do what they do and why they are important. This is accompanied by proper screenshots of the boss in certain points in the story, from someone who is actually good at photography and doing angles and background and so on (in other words not cr*p). In this way, the 'lore' of the game is created as the game is developed, and becomes important because of its realism and the emphasis on story from being the first information released on this boss, and allows the interpretation of a situation in terms beyond the format of an encounter or its rewards, prior to seeing any 'numbers' or encounter specifics. Especially when the story of an instance allows not fighting this boss, this makes knowing these specific numbers in advance unimportant because the player can have already decided that killing the boss is not what they want to do.

Mmm there's other things I thought about, such as being able to make all or at least many factions like you or to make them all hate you, and a 'long-term' reputation contrasting with a 'short-term' one that leads the long-term one such as when you betray a faction and they wait disapprovely for you to redeem yourself, and players being treated as a group with trusted players grudgingly making up for the untrusted players as if vouching for them (group effects or reactions is a theme as mentioned previously) . . . but don't know too much to say. Was something I wanted to talk about a few days ago but I forget. o_o Also was thinking recently about 'how to keep the boss from just killing the healers' as well as well as how to make sure someone CAN be killed by reducing the effects of healing when it is done repeatedly . . . this is not paradoxical if a boss's optimum 'strategy' is to kill someone in less time than it takes for diminishing returns on healing to take effect on a soft, healy target. 0.o

The Trickster God

2009-07-05T13:49:00.000-07:00

Mythology is one source of inspiration for games, and can lead to spirited discussion about these lore elements. What can go wrong, and how to avoid these problems?

No matter how interesting a mythology is, there are several problems with it being used in a game. The game will be benefiting from copying the mythology with no real adherence to it; and the game has certain other goals that dictate how a scenario will play out and what the players' options in it are. Someone you are determined to kill will interest you only so much, and may interest other players even less. No matter how skillfully the story and graphics are presented, the game may contain elements that cause the average person to reject this presentation due to the implicit support of these motives or values. A similar situation may also arise for lore that the game creates itself, as people often believe in a thing only because they feel its base elements benefits themselves or others and no story is real enough to stand without belief.

Things like PvP ranks, and changing power scaling to reduce competitiveness would help. Just a reminder, the Ninja Law of 1 vs many helps to balance lack of power scaling, so the significance of a single low-level opponent does not translate into being destroyed when fighting multiple of them.

However, there are deficiencies in the story-based progression incentives too. When a discussion is oriented around 'strategies' to defeat a character who is significant in lore, it detracts from the story and disrespects the character who may come to be important only because they drop items upon their death. What if you did not feel you had to kill everyone you encountered?

This is a three-part balancing act: if you kill everything, then everything is only for killing. If you have too much choice in not killing, then the world becomes peaceful and the complementary option is still removed. There must be just enough choice to raise this option as a possibility and maintain it, without letting things become too predictable either way.

Stopping ongoing combat could be bad.

Discussion leading to combat may work, if it may also lead to dialogue.

The 'rewards' of a situation must not force either option. Needs of people in a group dictate the group actions, and if someone needs certain 'drops' this could force a situation. Diversity in rewards helps, so both conflict and dialogue can be acceptable options.

Short-term gain and long-term gain must be balanced with inconvenience, for determining these choices. Sneaking past a watcher. . .

Combat may lead to other results other than death, if these results are also beneficial and do not make the situation seem contrived or force themselves on the players unwanted. Specifically thinking of a certain underhanded individual at a tavern near a marsh . . .

Many scenarios become possible when a story has time to evolve. An instanced area in a game centered around story, instead of progression, can provide this time for a group to explore a story, with variations of instance binding providing the continuity. A key concept, and an expansion of the 'instance as fortress' perspective, is multiple factions within an instance. A group that makes the proper decisions may be able to actually ally themselves with one faction, allowing them to complete goals that involve conflict with another faction. When the story is done a different time, the group may come to ally with a different faction, or even go to war with both. The accumulated 'reputations' with factions of individual players may have an effect even if the reputation of a single player does not enable or deny certain options by itself, making it easier or more difficult to accomplish coercive goals. This brings into question the idea of conflict with any specific character, when this conflict may be avoided by the correct actions earlier in this enactment of the story. The right contributions to a leader who is suspicious of you could alleviate their concerns and gain a powerful ally in your fight with your opponents in obtaining your true goal . . .

There are other details in accomplishing this set of options in a game. When there is only a single standard of success and a single linear goal, everything else becomes subordinate to this goal. This is seen in current games. When multiple diverse goals offer many and sometimes conflicting standards of success, the options are not so simple. This is part of having story, and quests, be a way to differentiate and express instead of just a progression in power. Complexity of accomplishing a given task is entirely different from being able to ask whether to accomplish this task at all, while still satisfying other in-game requirements and the player's own standards of achievement and consistency of purpose. Complicated fights do not make up for lack of choice.

This means that, due to the quests they choose to accept (or other methods of differentiating character and their goals), some people may want to ally with one faction, while others will want to ally with another. It is imperative that this does not cause groups that agree ahead of time to choose only one or another path!! There should not be 'LFM ' groups . . . -_-' This type of design gains value, and real-world relevance, only if there is conflict within the group and a choice of which decision to make, that benefits all parties involved ambiguously and must be able to withstand uncertainty prior to the action as well as the addition of uncontrolled elements during the course of the story; this means that quests cannot have linear requirements or results! Either quests should tend to be relatively faction-neutral regarding their completion, or there must sometimes be hidden, unexpected ways to accomplish a goal even when the story is not as expected. This is the result of a design where quests are seen as changing the world for the player after they are accepted, instead of just after they are complete. It may mean a possible to defect in favor of or betray the other side in a conflict, for example. It may also mean that a player with a Wanted poster for a certain leader may get squashed against the wall when encountering that leader in a supposedly friendly format. ^_^ This would then become a thing to avoid in future instances.

It may also be possible to incorporate the 'immunization-type' raid progression enhancements into the faction format . . . but I don't know, it's a separate idea whether or not it might be required for them to work together. For example, maybe you could only win over a certain ally if the player negotiating with them had consistently shown their rapport with them during past gameplay for several weeks . . . somewhat modified version of the faction-insensitive and combat-oriented 'immunization' system for raid progress. Exploring the complexity of story paths could take as long as actually implementing a known plan; for example, you could be required to work to befriend a faction at one point of time, but then later on need to find separate allies to betray your first ones later on in the same instance . . .

In all cases, relations should be sensitive to specific actions. Destroying a random patrol and killing all its constituent entities does not make you look good to the command that sent them out, and the attitudes of different parties in dialogue should reflect that.

Omg, two ideas down ("factions", "gain, split") and only two more to go!!1 ("death", "simple")

When a player dies, it is a very negative thing. Sometimes this is good, such as when that death could have been avoided. Sometimes this is bad, such as when the player came up against a stupidly powerful enemy and their death had no purpose, or when they died due to random uncontrollable factors in an otherwise necessary situation, or when those who were supposed to be helping them ended up being stupid or incompetent or both and there's no way to accomplish their goal and no point in being there at all, or when any of these situations leads to any other like when a stupid decision leads to an uncontrollable death which leads to a wipe due to game mechanics not allowing otherwise. Part of this is bad design that causes slight but critical mistakes to overcome the skill delta that is restrained by the gear/progress delta, but part of it is also just stupid teammates who didn't help you and didn't heal. The critical aspect is that difficulty is enjoyable when it allows you to enjoy a situation and succeed; but it is not enjoyable when deficiencies in those around you cause you to fail again and again with no benefit.

Therefore, it may help to give a slight gain for dying in the right situation.

But not enough to make you do it on purpose.

How does this relate to the other stuffs talked about above? What would be the right consequences for dying? :P I haven't thought up any details.

And finally, 'simple'!! If being with other people is fun and you are able to roleplay and enjoy a story, it does not matter if a fight has new and complicated mechanics that require specific strategies. More complex means more challenge to adapt to and memorize and overcome, but this is bad as well as good because these challenges will usually have no relevance to the real world, and it just becomes a needless complication. The original game that has become so important in this genre never had complicated fights when it started out and did better than ok . . . people look for things they can't always find. That's from a PvP movie by the way, sort of.

Awareness

2009-07-03T14:56:00.001-07:00

The primary reason for a form of entertainment to be insufficient for someone, other than being bad, is when it presents a sphere of interests that does not harmonize with other things in this world that one may encounter. Failure to adjust to, or account for these other attitudes means loss of relevance. As mentioned before, other countries have significantly different priorities than the United States or other developed Western countries. Not accounting this means losing those audiences and anyone connected to them. The Grind is just one example of an unacceptable mechanism that may seem acceptable to a country used in leisure; when in reality most people in this world have economic progress or skills specialization to make in real life. Just to remind that the chance of death on an everyday basis is another significant reality and attitude difference; it is important not to forget these things when thinking of the world.

There must be many ways to increase framerate when many players must be rendered. One of them may be to transition to display of standardized textures for different styles and converging on certain hues when there are large numbers of players in one area; but I don't know if this would really be a computation issue, or just a memory one. However it has the additional benefit of reducing extraneous flashy characteristics and presenting an opposing army as more homogeneous and cohesive, especially if names are not displayed resulting in no 'large red cloud of names' effect so graphics must be simplified when in large numbers so someone can understand a situation faster without being confused or annoyed by distracting details. If polygons is the big issue, then it might be simple to also just have alternate low-polygon models that use the same or the simplified textures, and these models are swapped out when there are large numbers of people, with preference on swapping out those further from the camera.

It may also be possible to use filters, or even weather/lighting effects on the scene as a whole, with the player themself possibly staying unfiltered in this case and maybe nearby friends too, so only 'interesting' people take up normal computer resources. Mostly, large numbers of people nearby whether friendly or enemy should have a graphical effect to promote and reinforce the psychological effect of this environment. This is in line with treating numbers of people differently in other parts of the game too, such as aggro radius and 'sneaking past' something, and it also leads to another function as follows.

Having a conflict extend its effects past line of sight. At a distance, of course the distant sound of arms would be audible, if the game is tracking that large numbers of people are engaged in combat in a vicinity. Also a visual component would be nice (can't help thinking of whenever it must look like in PvP video) such as a flashing red border, or hopefully not something so lame/obvious. Weather effects may change as far out as this too, or anything to give a sense of tension and anticipation. This may manifest in a different way when the outcome of a battle has been decided; for example, someone 200m away may hear or receive some alert only when someone has died, and may not hear the preceding struggle. It might be very faint and only by investigating can they know what happened.

This 'beyond line of sight' idea would enhance the perceived significance especially of conflicts in an instanced area, which otherwise do not individually seem important.

Phase

2009-06-30T07:08:00.000-07:00

It is justified to lie when you do not benefit. It is justified to become evil when you do not benefit. In retrospect, my path during this time was due to a lack of trust in those around me, or rather, a lack of trust in their trust in me. However, mistakes are how we become closer to people, after all . . .

The alternate explanation is that situations may require being in two states at the same time. This is fine as long as outside observations do not cause you to collapse into an unworkable state, which is either of them . . . under this explanation, when you cannot advance to where you need to be because of where you are - such as when the possibility of happiness, causes the opposite - you may be able to continue on. Both explanations seem fine. In the case of the second, I am no longer in this superimposed state.

I really need to separate 'random drivels' from stuff that I think other people would actually be interested in reading. This blog has deviated from its intended purpose.

"Have you seen?"

2009-06-17T16:16:00.000-07:00

Another long entry. This is a copyrighted work and may not be reproduced without permission. I would like to say something first about methods.

A way of thinking about things cannot support itself on its own. As a generalization it is always open to attack and so it weakens things that depend on it. The correct way to use different methods of thought is as a sort of base structure, that lets you predict where things should fit and how they should relate. Once you find the congruence to a situation, those things must be connected in your mind directly, without the benefit of any theories or predictions of how certain connections will allow you to think a certain way.

Tehran -- Islamic Republic of Iran News Network Television (IRINN) in Persian 1058 GMT 14 Jun 09

[News conference given by Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinezhad after presidential elections -- live]

In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. I thank God for once again demonstrating Iran's dignity and might before the eyes of the world. In Iran, elections carry a lot of meaning. First, elections are a genuine process and to be honest, the people rule Iran. The people's choice is a free and genuine selection. The people's vote governs Iran. The most overwhelming election of the contemporary era was held on Friday [12 June] in Iran. In Iran the people decide who to vote for. No one can make the people their followers. The people's vote does not follow a specific current or political leaning. On the contrary, it reflects the determination and will of the nation.

During recent months, the whole of Iran was filled with excitement, enthusiasm and awareness. Every individual not only felt that they owned the vote, but also they viewed participation in the election as a national and social duty. Two issues were of significance to our people. First, an enthusiastic presence on the election scene, the strengthening of the pillars of national power, and more hope in the future, Second, the election of a person who can pursue their wishes and ideals more efficiently.

From another angle, the Iranian election is a new model of democracy based on moral ethics and human and divine values. Liberal democracy is a democracy which has put aside ethics, and deprives society of two essential factors. The first factor is the people and their role. As you can see in countries which follow liberal democracy, a few parties with a specific number of members rule the people. The people have no choice but to vote for them. In fact, it is the people who are placed on the sidelines, and politics becomes a profession and exclusive to a few people.

The second factor which is put aside, are values and morals. Humanity and mankind will die in a place where there are no moral ethics and values and oppression, discrimination, class differences, wars, and aggression will take shape. Global problems are rooted in the fact that moral ethics are omitted from political relations between various liberal democratic systems. In Iran, democracy is based on and promotes ethics. This is why we are witnessing that after 30 years since the establishment of the Islamic Republic, the people's influence is much deeper and prevalent than what it was at the beginning. In comparison to 30 years ago, ethics have flourished and spread further into our society.
You can see that the Iranian nation is a nation with grand ideals and goals. The Iranian nation is committed to and has faith in divine and humane values. The Iranian nation is a noble, independent and knowledgeable nation. The Iranian nation supports righteousness, truth and justice. The Iranian nation despises deceptions, lies, oppression and injustice. Our nation is modest and is content with its right. It has never attacked other countries or yearned for others' rights. At the same time, it has resisted bullying and arrogance powerfully. The Iranian nation is a brave nation. It has never been and will not be intimidated by threats. Our nation is a nation with morals and distances itself from political and economic callousness.

Our nation is a dear and powerful nation. It will not trade its dignity with anything. The Iranian nation wishes progress for itself and for all world nations. Of course, it will resist those who try to block its progress. The Iranian nation believes that the systems which have arisen from the Second World War are worn-out systems which are anti-human rights. They have to go to the archive of history. Today, the world is in need of new systems which are based on human values, justice, friendship, equal rights and respect for the rights of all nations and people. Today, everyone must join hands to set up a humane system in the world. The era in which a few countries could determine the fate of other nations has come to an end. The era in which a few governments could impose their demands and illegitimate interests on a huge part of the world has come to an end. Today, everyone must have an equal and fair share in managing world affairs. It is impossible to run world affairs without the involvement of all world countries. The doors have to be opened so that every country will be able to make a constructive contribution to managing the world affairs. Today, the Iranian nation's method of managing a country is a role model. It is a model of religious democracy based on human values and ethics. This model can be presented to the whole world.

During these elections, our nation was faced with a widespread psychological war and propaganda by some of mass media which have not learned from the past. I remember that four years ago, some Western media affiliated to the hegemonic system and the capitalist system which lacks culture, adopted a stance against our nation and used their false propaganda and psychological warfare to try and divert our nation from its shining and enlightened path. They even tried to undermine the great and historic action taken by our nation for some time after the elections. Today, I can see that in some places there are people who have not learned their lesson from the past. Of course, some governments are making other claims. We don't deny these claims. But these claims are not our only criteria. On the contrary, we have to see what has happened in practice. Some made a grave mistake. They expected our nation to surrender to the propaganda they were carrying out. Today, they are following the same line. They are making a mistake. I advise them to not only understand that the world is in need of change, but also understand the fact that the world cannot be managed in this way. They should also understand that the Iranian nation is vigilant and has realized what they are up to and is moving at a higher level than they are. The Iranian nation is trying to rebuild Iran. The Iranian nation is trying to elevate Iran to the level and position which befits it. The Iranian nation is trying to reform the world's political environment to one which is based on respect and justice. We are pursuing the setting up of sustainable peace and security based on respect, justice and righteousness. It is clear that under such circumstances the Iranian nation will not officially recognize any unilateral relations based on bullying. The Iranian nation's election showed that its idealistic, ideological, and civilization-building movement is very deep-rooted. This election was mainly directed by the third and fourth generations. This means that today the awakening, self-confidence, and self-belief which appeared in the first generation 30 years ago, is much more deep-rooted and widespread in the hearts, thoughts, will, and actions of the third generation. The Iranian nation is a turning point in contemporary history. It is a model of national rule and how people govern their own fate. It is a model of human relations which is based on friendship, love, respect and justice. Iran's election, which was met with the participation of more than 84 per cent of eligible voters, was a great epic and a firm blow to the oppressive foundations of the system which is ruling the world. The Iranian nation showed that today, it is more resolute in, and committed to, following the path outlined by the Imam [Khomeyni], the martyrs, and the grand ideals of the revolution. The Iranian nation has shown that it still interested in logic, constructive interaction, fair talks based on respect. Most definitely it will not allow others to determine its fate. I would like to thank you and I would like to hear your questions. [The correspondents applaud the president]

[Moderator] Thank you. I think it is essential to mention a few points before we start the process of asking the questions. This press conference is simultaneously being broadcast live by press TV, Al-Alam, State nationwide radio and the International News Network [IRINN]. The set deadline for ending our program today is 1700 [1230 GMT] and since the president has another engagement, we beg [each correspondent] to ask only one question because of our time limit. We try to observe the priorities that have been previously set. We ask the [correspondent from the] Islamic Republic News Agency [IRNA] to ask their question. The News Network [IRINN] correspondent should be ready to follow.

[IRNA correspondent]: In the name of God, my greetings and congratulations to you on gaining the second confidence vote of the Iranian nation. In your interview with IRINN, you said that the agenda of the tenth government will be in proportion with the vast participation of people [in the elections] and their votes to the president. If it is possible, please tell us what will be the probable differences between the plans of the tenth and ninth governments?

[Ahmadinezhad] Thank you very much. As I said then, today, we all believe that the potential of Iranians are huge and extensive. Iran's nation has the potential and ability to make big decisions and to take huge steps in a variety of domains. In the first term, [the emphasis was on] the development of infrastructure and it is very obvious that in the second term we move towards the development of various cultural, economic and political aspects. The people of Iran showed that they deserve to have a high status in the world. It is clear that a government derived from the nation has to quite seriously follow the fulfillment of the nation's wish. [We will follow] the construction of the whole of Iran on the basis of justice and the complete removal of obstacles on the way of the progress of the nation, especially those on the way of the young generations. [We will follow] the pursuit of justice in all domains and the unconditional implementation of justice for every individual of any ethnicity and social class. This is our obvious agenda for the future.

[IRNA correspondent] Thank you.

[Moderator] The International News Network. BBC Arabic correspondent, be ready to follow.

[IRINN correspondent] In the name of God. Greetings to you, Dr Ahmadinezhad. My congratulations to you. I ask for your permission to say hello to all the respectful viewers of IRINN, those who are inside the country and those who live abroad, all the viewers who are watching live interviews with the president conducted by the domestic and foreign correspondents. Mr President, foreign media have been watchfully pursuing the elections since months ago and at every juncture, by resorting to certain strategies of their own, they have tried to create an atmosphere of despair and to make people believe that the Islamic Republic system was incompetent. At the same time that the results of the election were released, once more [the foreign media] created an atmosphere against the Islamic Republic by casting doubts on the health of the elections. In your opinion what is the reason for this [negative propaganda] and what answer can be given to them.

[Ahmadinezhad] The answer is obvious. I mentioned before that they did the same thing in the previous election. Of course, they have acted similarly over the last 30 years. They believe in a democracy [democratic election] whose results are in their favor and if people make a decision which is against their wishes, they are naturally upset; and they have no way to express their anger but this [by creating adverse atmosphere.] What do they have to say? It is not known with what justification they cast doubt over the magnificent presence of the Iranian nation [in the election]. Around 40 million people participated in the election. The election system in Iran is very exact and precise. Since the election belongs to people, the process of holding and monitoring it are carried out by people themselves. The members of the polling stations across the whole country are the very members of the public. The observers are the local trustees whom people know and trust. And the hierarchy [of the officials] is the same. The Election HQ has been just in charge of providing the preparations. In other words, it supports the management of holding the election which is conducted by people. This is explicitly stated in the text of our election law. The executive and monitoring bodies consist of people. The election belongs to people. I am surprised to see that an election which belonged to people - was held by them and 40 million individuals participated in it - is questioned. Which part of it are they going to question? We have an election law. Let them come forward and tell us which article [of the law has been violated] and where? I have not yet seen anyone who can present any evidence. They just say that the results were contrary to their expectations. Well, you have to change your expectations. You do not know the Iranian nation. Revise your attitude. What you do in spreading false propaganda is like what [the satirical figure] Molla Nasreddin did: Nasreddin once wanted to get rid of a fellow. He told him people were handing out free soup at the other side of the market. The good news traveled fast and every one hurried to get free soup. While Nasreddin was standing and watching, he saw that people were all running to get free soup. He asked a passer-by: What is going on? The man answered: Haven't you heard that free soup is being handed out at the other side of the market? Nasreddin reflected a bit on the answer and wondered: Maybe it is true. Let's go and see for ourselves.

Now some of the Western media and countries act like Nasreddin. They say something on their own, then they repeat it and start to believe it and finally they act and make judgments on the basis of their belief. The path of our nation is very clear. These statements belong to three and four decades ago. The answer of our people to these statements is very clear. Those forty million who participated in the elections are present now. Those 25 million individuals who voted for me are present now. And at any juncture in the future, they repeat their heroic action. This is the nature of the Iranian nation. Of course I believe that all the forty million individuals who cast their votes, are against the intervention of foreign media in Iran's domestic issues. And all of them will say no to these [foreign media].

[IRINN correspondent] Thank you.

[Moderator] Mr Muhammad Nun from BBC Arabic; the next correspondent will be from Keyhan newspaper, Mr Moqaddm.

[Muhammad Nun] Hello. I express my greetings to you dear Mr President and all the dear participants. My question is about the foreign policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the second round of your presidency. You know that US President Barack Obama admits that Iran has a right to peaceful nuclear energy. You also announced recently that you are ready to have a debate with US President Barack Obama. My question is: May we expect talks between Iran and America in near future? What are the practical measures that you expect America to take to normalize the relations?

[Ahmadinezhad] We have already announced our position. We are however reviewing the positions taken by countries concerning the elections. We are reviewing their behavior towards our people. I announced a month ago that I am ready for a debate.

Concerning the nuclear issue, I think that the nuclear issues belongs to the past We call for a global consensus on nuclear disarmament. Based on our experience, we have announced our readiness to participate in managing this issue."

At the same time, I believe that there are many important issues in the world that need to be settled based on logic, justice and respect. Iran is a powerful country with great influence in world political affairs. We are ready to use all our power to address world challenges and bring about sustainable peace and security based on justice and respect.

[Moderator] Thank you. Mr Moqaddam from Keyhan newspaper, and then Fars News Agency correspondent.

[Moqaddam] I congratulate you on the occasion of the birth anniversary of Zahra [Prophet Muhammad's daughter], the anniversary of the late imam [Khomeyni] and your victory in the elections. We hope that we can carry on with implementing our sacred principle-ist goals in the upcoming four years.

Mr President, I wanted to ask two questions this time. Because whenever I ask my question and leave, I then realize that others have all asked two questions.

I am wearing Ahmadinezhad-type overcoat today, even though it does not have sleeves.

[Ahmadinezhad] So, it is a bit short of Ahmadinezhad's overcoat.

[Moqaddam] My question might be a bit disturbing. We should be happy at this epic moment created by 24.5m people.

Mr Hashemi-Rafsanjani's destructionist letter addressed to the supreme leader of the revolution once again reminded us of Mr Montazeri's insulting adventure and his disloyalty to the imam [Khomeyni]. In the same connection, we see that two of your rival candidates have not yet congratulated the winning candidate. At the same time, by issuing provocative, insulting and destructive statements, they are attempting to create another 18 Tir [9 July] incident [students rebellion at their dormitory]. The only difference is that because of their weak strategy, as well as your shrewdness, the major elements in this plot, who were in the shade until yesterday, are now exposed.

Since you are going to be the president for another term, I wanted to know what measures you are going to adopt to keep the situation under control. At present when I am talking to you, they [supporters of other candidates] are holding hidden meetings to continue the riots of these days.

[Ahmadinezhad] Thank you very much. I should announce that during the Friday [12 June] elections the nation was victorious, i.e. 70m people were victorious, and 40m people were even more victorious.

I am sure that if the rest of the 70m people had the chance to take part in the elections they would have done so. This is an Iranian characteristic. The Iranian nation is among the most sociable, political-minded and committed nations in the world.
It is not really important now that some are objecting and questioning the elections' result. This is natural. Some individuals had had a campaign with the hope of being elected. They may now become a bit disappointed. They may react by writing certain letters and saying certain things.

During the last round of the [presidential] elections, they [rival presidential candidates] were the organizers of the elections. At the same time, they were objecting to the result of the elections. We believe this [their objection] lacks legal basis and our nation believes the same. This time, there will not be much problem either.

This is like a football match. Some 50,000 to 70,000 spectators take part in a football match. They become excited and then they take certain measures. Here we had a competition in which 40m people participated. The people were in the field. I believe that such level of unrest is not important. The government will carry on with its work with tolerance.

The freedom in Iran is close to absolute. You see that people express themselves freely. They even question what they have already done themselves. This is not important.

What is important is that everything should be dealt with through its legal procedure. This is what the Iranian nation will respect. If someone has seen any problems or shortcomings, the law has envisaged how to deal with it. They can submit their objections of any shortcomings to the Guardian Council until to the end of business today. The Guardian Council is an independent body. Experience has also shown that the Guardian Council expresses its views without compromise, and it will not consider anything but the text of the law and justice.

They may refer to the Guardian Council. Otherwise, talking to some media, issuing statements, etc will not solve any problem. Elections in Iran were held with the participation of close to 40m people. The result is quite clear. The gap between the votes is so wide that no-one can question it.

The elections themselves are indicative of the health and legality of the elections.

[Moderator] Fars news agency correspondent now and then Tokyo Shimbun newspaper correspondent.

[Fars correspondent] Thank you Mr President. I congratulate you for the 85 per cent participation of the people. I would also like to congratulate you for getting 24.5m votes.

Continuing the discussion about which you explained, there are reports that indicate that extremists and rioters today have decided to, with the cooperation of the EU , to have certain sit-ins. I want you to explain your views in this respect as well. Could you also tell us what the reaction of the Iranian nation would be in this regard?

[Ahmadinezhad] I doubt it that there is anyone in Iran that would like to follow foreigners to prove anything, because it will be useless.

The Iranian nation has shown that whenever foreigners interfere, the 70m Iranians will stand up to them in a united manner.

There may be various reports anyway. During the elections, there was absolute freedom. You realized that three candidates were competing against one, and they benefited from the national media [TV and radio] three times more than me.

According to the election law, campaigns should be carried out for 20 days, but since three months ago all my rivals' campaign activities were reported by the national media, and even the normal activities of the government were not reported because there was a doubt that they could be regarded as the president's campaign.

During the debates, the time allocated to my rivals was three times that of mine. This led to the enthusiasm of the people. In such an atmosphere, some individuals spread false reports and untrue rumors, and even accused others. The election is now done and gone. It is time for friendship, cooperation and building the country. There is no problem if some people are now interested in continuing the discussion. Such political discussions are always held in Iran. This is what goes on in a free country.

We have had an election in Iran which is considered to be a very important development, so it is natural that there would be such discussions for some time. I do not think that this is really important, or at least it does not cause any concern.

It is clear that our Judiciary will deal legally with those who will try to take any action in Iran based on foreign support.

[Fars correspondent] Some people were even attacked and some public property has been damaged.

[Ahmadinezhad] This is what sometimes happens. Some people are emotional. Like football fans, some think that their team should always win; and when it does not win, they claw at someone or other. One should not be that concerned anyway.

[Moderator] Tokyo Shimbun Newspapar correspondent, and then the Central News Agency reporter.

[Tokyo Shimbun newspaper in English] Thank you very much president and congratulations. My name is Luchida [as heard] from the Japanese Tokyo Shimbun. I want to ask you about the nuclear issue. Some Western media reported that US and Israel keep their military option [open to hit] your nuclear sites.

Have you ever imagined that some countries may attack your country and now do you think that you may face an attack in the next four years of your presidency? Thank you.

[Ahmadinezhad] I would like to ask you, who dares to do such a thing today? Who dares to think about it? This is what some media says. No power can even threaten Iran. The world's situation has changed. It is the nations' era. It is the era of intellect and logic. It is the era of major changes and reforms. This is while the Iranian nation is a powerful one.

It is true that Iran loves peace, justice and brotherhood, but everyone knows that it defends its interests powerfully and it will make those who threaten it regret it.

We believe that there is no possibility for anyone to make such a stupid mistake. So, you should not be worried. The world is moving towards justice and dialogue.

[Moderator] Mr Qorbaninezhad, Central News Unit correspondent and then Al-Alam international TV network.

[Qorbaninezhad] Hello Mr President. I congratulate you on your victory in the election and also the great victory of the Iranian nation for such an outstanding turnout in the elections.

In view of the end of your first presidential term, could you say what, based on your conclusions, special situation will prevail in the second round as compared to the first round.

[Ahmadinezhad] Thank you very much. I think that I have already responded to this question. Four years ago 29m people took part in the elections and this year close to 40m people turned out at the elections. The enthusiasm and the will of our nation are totally different from the previous round of elections. The approach of our nation to regional and international affairs is completely different today.

Iran is having a constructive and forward-looking approach that will add to its dignity. It is quite clear that the will of our nation in developing the country and removing the hurdles will quickly reach fruition.

Economic problems such as housing, employment, and marriage will be solved much faster and the creation of knowledge will gain speed. In four or five years we will not consider them problems in our country anymore. In the international arena, we will also play a constructive role in the interest of justice, peace and fraternity. These are the approaches of the upcoming government.

[Moderator] Thank you. Al-Alam TV channel correspondent and then Mr Robert Frisk from England.

[Al-Alam reporter] Thank you. I first of all congratulate you for your election. I believe that many people in the world are happy of your victory. My question is about your visit to Egypt. I was informed that you were supposed to take a trip to Egypt by the end of this month to take part in the non-aligned movement meeting. This would mean that you would be the first Iranian president visiting Egypt. Would this mean that you are taking a step to establish better relations with Egypt, as well as Arab countries?

[Ahmadinezhad] We have good relations with Arab countries. We have brotherly relations with them. There are however some ups and downs in our relations with some of them which are due to the interference of others. Otherwise, our nations are friends and brothers. Our major policy is to develop friendly and brotherly relations.

An Arab leader will be visiting Iran soon. I have also visited [Arab] countries. They have visited Iran several times. We exchange ministers as well.

I was interested in visiting Egypt. I made great efforts to set up relations with Egypt free from the domination of others. Some developments have now taken place, but we are not at the optimal situation.

I do not intend to take part in the non-aligned movement meeting, unless some new developments take place and I review my decision accordingly.

[Mediator] Mr Robert Fisk, The Independent newspaper, UK and then the Iran newspaper [correspondent] should be ready

[Robert Fisk] Mr Ahmadinezhad, Sir, Robert Fisk of The Independent. I want to ask you about the issue of justice, the issue that you've been talking about a lot. Some weeks ago, you know that a 22-year-old young woman was sentenced to execution in prison. She had allegedly killed someone, although there were doubts about this, and she was executed after two months. She was nevertheless dragged to the gallows screaming, pleading with her mother on the mobile phone to save her. And she was hanged. Can you give us a guarantee that such terrible events will be prevented by the Judiciary of the Iranian justice from ever happening again in the Islamic Republic of Iran?

[Ahmadinezhad] Basically we are against the execution of people. We are against killing people. We are even against killing an ant. But after all, the judiciary system of each country has its own regulations. In Britain, America and many other countries the penalty for execution has been predicted. We feel sad too when someone is executed. If you want the execution punishment to be removed, you have to do something so that no one will violate the law, and that they [people] would not commit crimes, the punishment of which is execution.

The judiciary system in Iran is an independent one, but of course since I am principally against human beings being killed, I try to create a social environment where no crime is committed and also urge the judiciary to act in a more sympathetic way. But as you know the judiciary system is completely independent, I think we should arrange a meeting among lawyers in order to discuss the philosophy of punishments. This can be a very good discussion at the international level. I think that our lawyers are ready to hold meetings with lawyers from the UK, Europe, Africa and Asia to discuss the matter and reach a logical result.

[Moderator] Thank you. Mr Javad Hojjati from Iran newspaper please. Reporter of Lavanguardia of Spain is next.

[Iran newspaper reporter] I congratulate you on the occasion of the birth of Zahra [daughter of Prophet Muhammad] and also the epic created by the nation on 22 Khordad [12 June presidential elections]. Mr Ahmadinezhad, some so-called experts claimed that a silent majority exists in the country which does not support the establishment [Islamic Republic]. However on the 22 Khordad we witnessed that this majority which was referred to as a "threat" entered the scene and voted for the person who was most committed to the establishment and its values. By casting their votes, in addition to sending a clear message to the foreign and domestic enemies of the establishment, people annulled allegations suggesting that the supporters of the establishment and the Principal-ists current had a specific quota for votes. I would like to have your analysis on this please. Thank you.

[Ahmadinezhad] Look, I think those people who sit down and analyze the Iranian nation based on their own understanding are making a mistake. They do not know the Iranian nation, this year we had 46 million people who were eligible to vote based on a report by the National Organization for Civil Registration, and the Statistics Organization. Well, nearly 40 million people participated. Does this mean that the six million and something people belong to the opposition? This is a very wrong thought. In no country in the world do we have 100 per cent participation. Some people are ill, some are working in fields, some are in airplanes, some are traveling, some cannot vote due to other reasons. In no place in the world does anyone invest in a non-existent entity and say that those who did not vote are my supporters. This is the most laughable claim that a politician can make. For example, imagine that in Germany 60 per cent participated in the elections, and a candidate say that the 40 per cent that have not participated are my supporters. Based on what logic? Compare this election with the previous one. In the previous election, about 29 million people participated and in these elections more than 39 million, meaning that we had an increase of about 11 million votes. The ratio of votes which were cast was the same as before. This means that 65-66 per cent of the new voters voted for the current government again. They do not know the nation. Some people, under certain circumstances, might not feel the urgency [to participate in elections] they might think well, elections are taking place, it is not important. But in other circumstances, they might think that it is necessary to participate, as they did this time. People felt the urgency to participate. I saw that some of the media think the 10 million people who usually do not participate will definitely vote for them [the opposition]. This is an over-expectation; I think that it is very spoilt and selfish attitude for people to think that the nation should come and vote for him or his supported candidate. The nation is very alert. The best statistic sample taken was 17.5 million and this time 24.5 million. The statistic sample could not be any higher. They conduct an opinion poll, they take samples from 70 million people, they choose 3,000 people as a sample and they guess what the opinion of the people is. Last time 17.5 million people voted. 17.5 million is a very large and decisive sample. Well, this time it has increased.

[Moderator] Lavanguardia Newspaper of Spain, and then the reporter of Resalat Newspaper please be ready.

[Reporter] Mr President, I know your country from 30 years ago; I know your country well and I was here during the Islamic Revolution. I was in Tehran when Imam Khomeyni returned to the country from abroad. I love your country. My first question for you is whether you are ready to give more freedom to the cinema and national culture? Everyone knows Iranian artists all over the world. Iran's cinema and Iranian films have many fans across the world. You should be proud of this. Do you think you would give more freedom to artists? Thank you Mr President.

[Ahmadinezhad] Thank you very much. Iranian arts and film industry are flourishing in Iran. I can assure you that in this government, in the next term of its work, this will be several fold. You will witness the presence of more Iranian artists on the international scene.

[Moderator] The respected reporter of Resalat Newspaper please.

[Ahmadinezhad] Please translate my response to the Spanish reporter again.

[Moderator] Please translate the response again.

[Ahmadinezhad] Yes, because he did not have his ear peace on before. Please repeat your translation for him.

[Moderator] The British Economist magazine, Mr John Marks [name as heard] and then Jam-e Jam Newspaper please.

[Economist reporter speaking in English, with voice over Farsi translation] Mr President. You spoke about freedom, but what we see is that many newspapers are closed, and many are censored. This morning you talked about ethical values but we can see how your police are behaving towards the protestors. You talk about foreign media and the allegation leveled by foreigners but we can see and hear that these things are happening and that millions of people who participated in the elections do not believe in the statistics you provided and the vote counts were never completely announced. Do you think this harms the legitimacy of the government and don't you think this is against the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic? Thank you very much.

[Ahmadinezhad] In a country where 85 per cent of people participated in the elections and more than 62 per cent vote for a single candidate, and in a country where the people are united in national interests, all the pillars of the country is selected on the vote of the people, talking about legitimacy of the establishment is nonsense. How do you know that the people do not believe in the [results of the] votes? Have you contacted 40 million people? You only see a few people that you like. This is your mistake. You report such news to your countries and governments and mislead them as well.

If you want to see the people of Tehran, come to Vali-Asr square in two hours. You should have come in front of Sharif University [of Technology] three days ago to see [the crowd of people]. These people who are in the streets [referring to the protestors] are not equal to even the number of people at one single polling station. Some 5,000 people have cast their votes in some ballot boxes in Tehran. Some 2,000 or 3,000 people come [to protests] just like audience of a football match. In my opinion you have to change your view. Don't repeat the previous mistakes. The Iranian nation is an aware nation. Forty million people participated [in casting their votes] and the same 40 people will defend the election [results]. If you can be a bit more patient, you can see [people supporting him] in 22 Bahman [11 February, anniversary of the Islamic Revolution]. Don't you worry about us. We have almost absolute freedom here. The reason is that, as you see, they can say whatever they want. And they don't worry about any prosecutions. Hundreds of newspapers are published in Iran. Now, two or three of them go every now and then and come back [referring to newspapers banned temporarily] which is natural in a nation's move. Don't worry.

[Moderator] Thank you very much. If the Jam-e Jam [correspondent] is not here, Radio Iran's correspondent Ms Soltani, please. I'd like to add that this program is broadcast live by Radio Iran as well.

[Radio Iran correspondent] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. Hello Mr President.

[Ahmadinezhad] Hello.

[Radio Iran correspondent] Hello to the dear listeners of Radio Iran who are listening to this press conference live and the dear audience who are with us watching it on TV. I would like to express my wishes on the occasion of the blessed birthday of Hazrat Zahra [Prophet Mohammad's wife] and the blessed birthday of the late Imam [Ayatollah Khomeyni], as well as your re-election with such a high and exceptional number of votes. Mr President, considering the 84 per cent participation of people in the 10th presidential elections, in your opinion what is the people's major expectation and demand from you and how do you evaluate people's specific priorities?

[Ahmadinezhad] Thank you very much. I have to congratulate the Iranian nation on this victory again, especially since this victory happened at the verge of the birthday anniversary of Hazrat Zahra [blessings upon her and her household], which added to the glory and beauty of this victory. I explained last night that the people have three to four demands: Firstly, to resolve problems and being at their service. After all we have economic problems, development problems, unemployment problems, housing, and the inflation issue, which the government has to follow up more seriously and in a wider spectrum and hopefully reach an ideal point. Secondly, to remove obstacles in the way of development, obstacles which usually prevent the people from making progress: selfishness, classifications and certain rules and regulations, and certain administration structures. And thirdly, to execute justice. People want justice to be practiced. They want selfishness and greedy demands and unlawful access to public properties to be confronted. They don't want there to be people who are seeking special advantages, even one person. And the nation demands honor and even-sided development of the country. Naturally, the government has to pursue the nation's demands in the framework of its agendas seriously and hopefully it will do so.

[Radio Iran correspondent] Hopefully! Thank you very much and I wish you and your administration success on behalf of myself and my colleagues in the national media.

[Moderator] Thank you. The correspondent of Jam-e Jam newspaper, Mr Nikpur and then Europe Radio of France, Mr Didier Eric Francois should be ready if he is present.

[Jam-e Jam correspondent] In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. Hello.

[Ahmadinezhad] Hello

[Jam-e Jam correspondent] Mr Ahmadinezhad, some gaps are created during the election process that some of them are normal. Some disagreements happen. Some believe that through various potentials in different parties of the country, some of which were in other candidates' parties, these gaps can be amended quicker. In your opinion are these gaps important at all and do you have any plans with this regard in the 10th government or not?

[Ahmadinezhad] This is true, but such gaps are not among the people. Our people were free to vote for whoever they wanted to and they are all united and friends with each other. In a family, the father has voted for someone and the mother or the son for someone else but the family is united and continues life with love. But there are such issues among political claimers and groups. Last night, I invited everyone to cooperate. I said that the way is open, let's all develop the country hand in hand. At the previous time, immediately after the election, I met four of the candidates and I asked them to let me know if they know anyone or if they have any suggestions or plans. It was a meeting which went on for a few hours and I wrote down the minutes of that meeting. I have those [minutes of the meeting] and I have used some of them. This time as well, I invite everyone to discuss any plans, suggestions or capabilities that can help in the development of the country and progress of the goals and we will welcome them.

[Jam-e Jam correspondent] Thank you very much.

[Moderator] Europe Radio of France, Didier Francois and then the international Jam-e Jam TV

[French correspondent] Do you think that after the election you will be in a new position for international negotiations- sorry if my English is so bad?

[Ahmadinezhad] We have announced this before that we- give him a headphone. Change to the English translation channel. We were ready for discussions even before, based on logic and respect and justice. This is the characteristic of the Iranian nation. It is the same now. I announced this even before the election that if I am elected, I will invite Mr Obama to a debate at the United Nations because we think that points of views should be discussed. The root of international issues should be identified and suitable solutions should be chosen. It is very clear that holding talks is the best way of interacting. Of course, at certain times some people have tried to impose their own demands on our people. It is natural that our nation will not accept such a thing. It is natural that through clear performance, clear slogans, and clear plans this government was extensively welcomed by the people. It is very obvious that now the government is stronger than a month ago. Today, the government's capability is tens of times more than three months ago, an experienced government that was welcomed more extensively by the people after four years. Of course we have a steady logic in encountering international affairs but we will pursue that logic with more strength and capability.

[Moderator] Mr Sadeqi, international Jam-e Jam TV and the next person is Ms Amanpur from the CNN

[Jam-e Jam correspondent] Hello, I congratulate you on the occasion of [interrupted by Ahmadinezhad]

[Ahmadinezhad] He is the correspondent from where?

[Moderator] International Jam-e Jam TV

[Jam-e Jam correspondent] As per the name given to the fourth decade of the Islamic Revolution as the Decade of Progress and Justice, and an increase of more than 300 per cent and 3 times of participation in this election by our countrymen abroad, please tell me how the Iranians living abroad can help your government in fulfilling the slogans?

[Ahmadinezhad] Last night, I invited all the Iranians inside and outside the country to participate in developing the country and achieving the goals of the Iranian nation. I repeat this today as well. The supreme council of the Iranians is a very suitable means of communication by all fellow countrymen with the administration structures of the country. This council has created a very good organization in at least 26 countries of the world, in countries where more Iranians live. And I hope that through this relation that will be wider, we will witness more participation by our dear countrymen living abroad in the development of the dear Iran.

[Moderator] Ms Christian Amanpur, the CNN correspondent, and then Mehr News Agency's correspondent should be ready

[Christian Amanpur] Good afternoon Mr Ahmadinezhad. Last night in your speech, you said that you were the president of all Iranians, no matter who they voted for. I would like to ask you what is the situation with your challenger, Mr Mirhoseyn Musavi and if you guaranty his safety and why have the opposition reform individuals, officials been arrested?

[Ahmadinezhad] The country is in a very good condition, thanks to God. Iran is the world's most stable country. Iran is a lawful country. And everyone is equal in front of the law. The election was a very enthusiastic one. As I said, even in a football match there might be some audience who would get angry and they would be confronted by the Law Enforcement Force. This is natural. When someone leaves a stadium and passes the red traffic light, whoever he would be, he will be given a fine by the police, whether he is be a minister or an ordinary person. These are no problems on the Iranian nation's path. Some 40 million people participated in the election. And these 40 million are the guards of the election.

[Political] Parties do not exist in the Iranian culture like the way they do in the West. People are friends and intimate with one another and will vote for whoever they want. Voting for different candidates does not cause hatred or grudges among people. Go out there in the streets and see that people are friends which each other.

In Iran no one asks you who you voted for. The situation is very good. Iran is about to take huge leaps and certainly, in the next four years, the position of Iran will be a lot higher. Economic, scientific and cultural advancements of Iran will be 10 fold [in the next four years]. Iran, in the coming four years, will turn into one of the world's economic powers in addition to the political power it already is.

[Amanpur in English with Farsi voice-over] Sorry, I may have missed the translation.

[Ahmadinezhad] Under the pretext of translation, you're asking your second question.

[Amanpur] No, this is the first question. Last night you said [interrupted by Ahmadinezhad]

[Ahmadinezhad] Yes, you asked if I am the president of every Iranian and I answered your question. I said that when a football match finishes, some people might be upset [with the result] and may cross the red light. And the police will fine them. That person is a member of the Iranian nation too, but is fined for crossing the red light. This may not have anything to do with your question, but I am the president of every Iranian, just as I was in the past four years.
Everyone is respected and people are equal in front of the law. And I like everyone too. I am not happy to see people crossing the red light and being fined, I wish they don't cross the red light.

[Moderator] From Mehr News Agency, Mr Kho'iniha.

[A journalist from among the crowd] Mr President, the turns are not respected again.

[Ahmadinezhad] Mr Mardukhi please be patient.

[Kho'iniha] Greetings. I would like to congratulate you on the occasion of Hazrat Zahra's birthday and your re-election as the president of Iran on behalf of my colleagues at Mehr News Agency. Mr President today is a festive day and as a gift I would like to be allowed to ask two short questions.

1. Will your economic priority in the next four years be the Economic Reform Plan?

2. Unlike Western media, American officials admitted to the massive turnout of the Iranian people in the 22 Khordad [12 June] election. In addition to that, we have heard that Mr Obama has announced that he is ready to hold direct talks with Iran and Syria, to the point that American ambassadors have invited their Iranian counterparts to take part in the American national day [4 July] celebrations. How do you assess these recent comments by American officials and what is your response to those comments?

[Ahmadinezhad] Look, Iran, its election or its nation are not the sort of things people can ignore easily or play down. They are all about grandeur, dignity and power. Iran is the main pillar of human civilization. In other words, Iran is one of the main pillars of mankind's civilization. Without Iran, civilization and culture are meaningless. Without Iran, running the world is meaningless. It is obvious that Iran's position is very important and without Iran, no one has an exit strategy from the current situation.

Iran's views, approaches and solutions are all cultural, humanitarian, civilized and based on love, justice and kindness. This is what mankind needs today. We have said repeatedly, and I said it too, we will hopefully go [to New York] for the UN General Assembly. I have announced that I am prepared to have a debate [with President Barack Obama]. The reason I am ready to have a debate is because we have no secrets. We should discuss international issues openly so that everyone will know about them and participate in them.

It will be so good if the UN could see a day when a topic is presented and discussed for three days, unlike now when the decisions are made somewhere in a separate room and hundreds of world leaders make a speech and go back home. This is not the United Nations, this is not a discussion. They [UN] should introduce a topic and discuss it as long as they understand what the best solution is and the whole world should listen to those discussions too. This was my suggestion and I will hopefully follow it up.

[Reporter] What about the other question?

[Ahmadinezhad] Allow me to continue with my one-question policy to avoid discrimination.

[Moderator] Mr Ali Akbar Dareyni from the Associated Press and after that the correspondent from the Javan newspaper.

[Dareyni] Hello Mr President, my name is Dareyni and I'm from the AP. Your suggestions have been limited to an offer to debate with Mr Obama at the UN. But is your government prepared to hold direct talks with the American government regarding bilateral issues or not?

[Ahmadinezhad] Thank you. Well, we review [all the] proposals after all. You are not offering a proposal, you are asking a question. If there's a proposal, then OK we will review it.

[Moderator] Mr Takbiri from Javan and then Ms Zabihpur from the Young Journalists Club.

[Takbiri] Hello Mr President, congratulations. Over the past four years and in your campaigns for this election, you insisted that you wanted to fight financial corruption. Last night, too, you insisted on this issue. I want to know what your practical measures will be in this new government to fight financial corruption.

[Ahmadinezhad] Many thanks. In the previous government, we tried to stop corruption through amending bylaws, regulations and processes. Thankfully we achieved numerous achievements. A great deal of the loopholes that could have been misused are now removed. Now we have to address the past and the cases that might be beyond the lawful structure [remit] of the executive power.

[Moderator] Correspondent from the Young Journalists Club, followed by Ms Mary Catherine from Sunday Times.

[Correspondent] Greetings Mr President. You were elected as the 10th president, with 24m votes, yesterday. I'd like to know if you will still use the ministers and the cabinet of the ninth government or will make changes.

[Ahmadinezhad] I set out my plans regarding the choosing my colleagues last night. It [his plan] is in accordance with what the people have asked me to do and it is compatible with our culture and belief. It is very clear that I will invite everyone who thinks they are capable enough; of course I will announce the necessary requirements for each position. I will give an opportunity to people to introduce themselves to me, and will review their performance. Naturally, our friends who served in the ninth government, too, will be re-assessed, although I have completed my assessments regarding them. What I want to say is that the management circle of the next government will not be limited to the current figures.

[Moderator] Mary Catherine from the Sunday Times, followed by Mr Mardukhi from Arman newspaper.

[Correspondent in English with Farsi voice-over] I've been speaking to a lot of women in the past week. Iranian women took part in the election and were very happy to do so. However, they think they do not have equal rights with men. For example, their word is half worth the word of a man in a court, etc. Will you introduce new laws or at least take a look at the current situation of women in Iran?

[Ahmadinezhad] Please pass the headphone to the lady to listen to my answer.

In Iran women have better rights than men do. Please pay attention that if a man dies, his blood money is given to his wife. Similarly, if a woman dies, her blood money is given to her spouse. That means the families of a dead man receive twice as much money as the families of a dead woman. If we want to say that there's discrimination, then the discrimination is against men because the blood money is not given to the dead person, it is given to their living family.

This means that our judicial system cares for the women who live after their dead husbands. They receive more. In any case, please note that legal debates have their own place. Legal systems are very complicated and their mechanisms should be examined in their own right. Despite that, we agreed in the government that insurance companies should pay equal blood money for men and women. We will continue to make similar decisions. Of course, that will be to the benefit of men, although it may look like to be in the interest of women.

Please note that we do not consider men and women as two opposing points, we think they complement each other and are friends.

[Moderator] Arman Newspaper, Mr Mardukhi, and then Mr Martin Rodriguez from the Spanish EFE News Agency.

[Ahmadinezhad] Well, we need to wrap up. Just ask your question please.

[Reporter of Arman Newspaper] In the name of God! [chants a slogan before posing questions] Thanks God that through our efforts and actions we were united with "the friend" [referring to Ahmadinezhad], well done for our manly determination.

As tonight there are celebrations taking place everywhere for the victory of the Iranian nation, I would also read this poem: Tonight is bright daylight for us, the celebrations for being united with "the friend" instead of "the enemy.”

[Ahmadinezhad] Well done.

[Reporter] Dr Ahmadinezhad, thanks God, the Iranian nation was successful in this great test and was victorious. People expect two things from the government: First: to provide the basic necessities of life, and secondly to provide security. Thanks to God, with clever management and the wisdom of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamene'i, Iran is one of the safest countries in the Middle East. I mean there is no other country safer than Iran in the Middle East. Regarding the provision of the necessities of life, hopefully in the second round you will start your second term in office, we hope that you can curb the current high prices so that people will be more satisfied with you. Yesterday a group of rebels created mayhem and insecurity. People expect the government to punish the main perpetrators and other individuals with minor roles seriously. Also, in the previous press conference, I asked you when you will submit "Where did you bring it from" [presumably referring to officials gathering personal] law to the Majles, you said that you submitted it, but that a group of wealthy people created a hue and cry and did not allow the bill to be approved legally. You said that in your second term, you will immediately submit this bill to the Majles; I want to know whether you would do so or not?

[Ahmadinezhad] Thank you very much. I need to answer your second question. You added that part of your comments about the wealthy people [creating hue and cry] based on your own judgment. We submitted the bill, the Majles did not approve it, we will submit the bill in the new government after some amendments.

[Moderator] Thank you. The Spanish EFE News Agency and Mardom Newspaper next please.

[Ahmadinezhad] [Continues speaking about the previous question, addressing the report he says:] Yes, that bill was regarding the [the wealth accumulated by the] officials. Because people can work hard to accumulate wealth, we wish for all Iranians to be wealthy. The bill was regarding the officials to make sure no one, God forbid, misused his responsibilities.

[Moderator] The Spanish EFE News Agency please.

[EFE reporter speaking in English with aid-over Farsi translation] Mr President, before the elections you said that your government is preparing a new pack of proposals for the 5+1. When will this pack be ready? And when will you be submitting it to the 5+1? Have you made any changes in the draft of your proposal after you were elected president?

[Ahmadinezhad] It is natural that the government is going through change; the political situation is constantly changing. Our package of proposals is affected by the current situation in the world, but the principles of the package remain the same. It is based on justice, respect, logic and dialogue and it calls for everyone's effort to resolve the issues of the world. I hope that the package is prepared in the near future for submission.

[Moderator] Thank you. Mr Karim Abbasi from Rah-e Mardom Newspaper and then the Hayat Newpaper from the UK. We are aiming to finish the press conference by 1700 [1230 GMT] with your permission.

[Rah-e Mardom reporter] I would also like to congratulate you. My question is that the people expect you to employ a new team for providing services to the people. Are you planning to make changes in the middle management of the government or not? The people believe that the country should have 25,000 officials, like president Ahmadinezhad, to rule the government so that one can see works speeding up. My question is whether you will make these changes or not?

[Ahmadinezhad] Thanks very much. I think that the Iranian nation is a great nation. We have hundreds of thousands of efficient people, our problem is to find and identify these efficient individuals, otherwise I am a humble member of society and a humble servant. In line with our capabilities, commitments and honesty and the characteristics that I announced last night [in his televised speech 12 June] we hope to be able to employ more knowledgeable people to serve the nation.

[Moderator] Thank you. The UK's Al-Hayat Newspaper please.

[Al-Hayat reporter speaking in Arabic with Farsi voice-over translation] Greetings to you Mr President. [Translator speaking in progress] Regarding the Arab coalition, what are your plans for this and what is your plan regarding cooperation with the Arab world and especially regarding the common problems which exist?

[Ahmadinezhad] We seek brotherly relations with all countries, especially with Muslim and Arab and neighboring countries. We are brothers, we aim to expand relations with all countries and have done our best to meet this end. Of course, under the new circumstances, efforts will take a new form and I think that we will witness more speed in improving and deepening brotherly relations between Iran and other countries in the region.

[Same reporter speaking in Arabic] The ambiguity exists that Mr Ahmadinezhad will be much more moderate in the future, is this true?

[Ahmadinezhad] We are moderate dealing with friends and will be tougher against arrogant powers.

[Moderator] The press conference comes to an end.

[Ahmadinezhad] I can answer one more question.

[Moderator] Arya News Agency reporter please.

[Arya reporter] In the name of God. Greetings to you Mr President, I congratulate you on the birth of the daughter of Prophet Muhammad and your re-election as Iran's president. Regarding criticisms leveled against you and the ninth government by your rivals during the elections, my question is whether in the tenth government you have any plans to correct the criticisms by your rivals - those who you consider valid - and have a specific plan regarding this.

[Ahmadinezhad] In the four years, we did not object to insults and allegations so that people can express their views. We will use any comment which is useful and wise and is useful for the country. Some of the media people have written a lot of analytic reports about various departments, I relayed them and the government used them and even invited authors and I sat down and listened to their comments myself. Also the government's circle of consultants is very big. Despite the fact that the government is in touch with the social body of the people, it is constantly in touch with experts of various fields. I myself have numerous expert meetings with experts, in various fields. However the news are not broadcast, otherwise, nearly all the decisions of the government is based on a series of comprehensive expert work and discussions with the elites, exchanging views and opinions. It is clear that in the next round, these meetings will be expanded and with a new organization we will move forward, speedier than before. I thank you all and wish you success.

[Description of Source: Tehran Islamic Republic of Iran News Network Television (IRINN) in Persian -- State-run 24-hour news channel in Persian, Arabic and English; presenting up to the minute domestic and international news. It offers exclusive interviews on a variety of topics, as well as information on universities, labor, and economic developments from the capital and the provinces.]

Bananas

2009-06-14T17:22:00.000-07:00

Some of the more helpful mental techniques that seem to have worked enough for me to remember them.

(see entry: "The Son of Heaven,The Destroyer") 1. don't be cr*p, 2. become evil 3. someone else..
X would have a positive outcome, so thinking about it now would be selfish. Focus on the present
This is one I don't remember and only thought of recently, but it seemed to work... "It wasn't only your choice"
"Everything is important. Nothing is important. Do you identify with one of these views. Do you identify with both of them"
the real warrior "...is not me"
A positive outlook, and anything to say that present circumstances will not happen again. Finding strength. Birthdays...

None of this contradicts the underlying currents, which are necessary to be able to trust yourself.

Juggling ideologies~ the world turns. And another day has passed.

Late edit: omg, Vladimir Putin has a black belt in judo

"Nothing is important"... sometimes I forget. Should add "summon enemies" to the list, sometimes being ineffective isn't important either. The cruelty of organizations is bounded by consequences of their mistakes. 04 July 2009

Music Video Overload

2009-06-11T08:02:00.000-07:00

I'm so terrible at studying. I always think of other things. Occasionally it leads me to a conclusion, but my inability to concentrate usually results in wasting time.

A third conclusion. The first was a realization about the world, why people give up, and what you can do about it. The second was that in order to account for the inevitable review of a situation and transient emotional imbalances, you must avoid . . . certain thoughts.

The third is that if reasoning extends outside the self, it is acceptable to say that it can be wrong. In other words it may be necessary to disagree with yourself.

Why is income disparity in the United States so high? It doesn't seem to make sense. But it seems there may be no other way of making sure people work hard: suppose a very nice employer decided to pay every employee a high amount, trusting them to work hard. Even those with low ability can do well when they accept suggestions for improvement, instead of fighting against any such suggestion. But some employees would not work hard. The correct answer in this case would be to replace them; however, most people in the United States are selfish and assume the company is in conflict with its employees, instead of trusting them, and as a result there is something called 'job security'. Companies are not required to offer this in contracts, but in a contradictory fashion employees will be less motivated to work well when they perceive a company as not trusting them enough to ensure 'job security'. Consequently, companies cannot guarantee that an employee who is paid well will not be a liability; and are forced to pay well only those employees who have demonstrated that they are committed to the company's interests, because otherwise they would be sued for firing highly paid employees who were not fulfilling their responsibilities, under the public consensus that results in laws and government regulation. It would seem that salary is not seen as a strong reason to fire someone who does not do their job well, and that salary is not very good at motivating people to work.

Making one vs many fights more equal is essential for the combat system of an MMO! This is obvious from watching dramas. :P

"Do, or do not..."

2009-05-20T05:04:00.000-07:00

It finally reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit here. I might have to wear sun screen to avoid getting a tan. :/

Do you know why I write this? I don't know if I will exist, and I am afraid I will forget. In other words, the standard reasons for a blog . . . but also resonating in an interesting way with the financial terrorist's 'reflexivity' or fallibility principle. I do not trust myself.

But I do trust other people. Anyway I think I might be starting to get less sick. It isn't the influenza strain going around, but it does make my tummy hurt.

"Do not think dishonestly." This was one of the recommendations of a famous warrior. The problem is, there are so many lies that people tell themselves that it can be hard to predict whether you can live without any lies.

as long as she is trying to be happy...

This is equal to being happy. I don't really know what the generalization for this is. It's hard to say whether someone could use this; 'trying' in this context means exploring every single possible approach and doing the most extreme things to reach a goal, which is a scary thing. Having someone tell you what to do might mean you aren't trying hard enough. ((Or that they aren't...)) But I think it works.

You can't even tell anyone about this, because it means hurting them... but I can let someone I don't know find it here. /frowns but if that means that I can't tell anyone about this place, then it isn't true. Always keep your options open.

/waves to anyone I know

The Son of Heaven,The Destroyer

2009-05-06T16:44:00.000-07:00

A fire burning strongly, entrancing swirls and flickering brightness... captivating. But it may consume the path it travels on, existing only by continuing to find new places to go. In its wake it may leave ashes.

A culture is complicit in propagating attitudes like this. This culture in turn depends on what is possible, as there are always options in life and those who are not pleased with the options in one endeavor will find another. In a social game, options are dependent on the opinions and values of others. A short story . . .

There was once a country overrun with strife and conflict. This was thru the actions of an external source; but the country needed to cope with this and survive regardless of the cause. Strong social bonds and idealistic positions led to sectarian outrages, and all attempts to stop this could not succeed due to foolish actors on each side, due to extremist stances, criminal ignorance, or just being criminal. (terrorist.) A goon came to democratic power in the midst of political corruption, supported in his reign by other goons and thugs -- however, due to strong action as well as a resurgence from another sector, things became more peaceful . . .

Machiavelli did not consider his advice moral, but he did consider it effective. Under the idealistic position, this effectiveness does not excuse its lack of moral consistency. However, while actions and decisions may determine morality, the intent behind those decisions may be enough to change things... when there was no other way.

There is always the choice. Do YOU have it within yourself to become evil, when doing so would benefit persons other than you?

and don't be cr*p, and... another thing I don't remember, about a certain person, and... forgetting what it means to be happy

Defeating info sites, that may be run by companies with financial interests in exploiting edge of change
static directions, strategies, locations
static = predictable = defeated =
disappointment = boring

Adapting to overall player 'strategies'
item density in population affecting obtainability
How to determine, and adapt to locuses of tactics or information...?

Uncommon and current = good advice...

Locuses continued
Negating the value of 3rd-party sites by providing the same information by the game, and within the context of the story...

'Legendaries' wielded by the correct individuals. stories & screenshot
changing text of dialogue in response to drastic loci jumps (compared to gradual loci drift at most times)

[BTW, clothing styles: graphical change for 'proficient' use of clothing in a style
model changes when possible
saturation or dampening/muddying of hues]

Dialogue change might be delayed. "We don't know, but there are rumors that..." participation of multiple characters, varying based on speaker, etc. Short-term memory of conversations and info given or not given. "I said I don't know!" Encourages knowledge sharing by players as well.

Respawn sensitive to players in area, encouraging grouping while maintaining difficulty afterwards

Possible to use 'community growth' concept for location of population concentrations?! Only works for social entities tho...
same sense of dynamic story. Dialogue cues the location, etc.

Repeating myself: Uncommon and current = good advice

Idle thoughts IV: "example"

2009-05-01T17:13:00.000-07:00

Now that I've read (skimmed) [parts of] the articles for BitTorrent, DHT and a popular torrent implementation I can say a bit more.

Sorry as always for using 'you'. Browsing a torrent website for user-created contents, you find a file that you want to watch. There is a list of torrents or a link to a list of torrents which contain this file, with basic information such seeders, leechers, total downloads and date added. You click on one of these torrents which takes you to its download page.

Part of this page, maybe a tab, shows torrent history or which torrent collections it draws from, dates and authors and size and so on, maybe a quick summary of how many files it draws from each previous torrent and how many it adds that weren't in previous torrents. Might have a more detailed diff but that's not something everyone would care to see on the basic display especially for large torrents.

The other part of the page, other than author and date and so on, shows the files contained within the torrent. Every file that is tracked on this torrent site has its name on the site shown and a link to its page provided; it also includes the name of this file as listed in this particular torrent, as it may be different from the name on the website. It also lists the names, and maybe a hash or key for files which are not tracked on this site, as well as basic information such as their size and so on.

Due to tracker issues, it is not possible to individually track every single file in a torrent in all cases. This applies to DHT too, it seems like it would not be reasonable for every seed to publish hashes for thousands of different files, as DHT nodes have to store this information many times over for many different seeds. Even if uTorrent only shows up as 10MB memory usage in Windows, I'm sure (in the nontechnical sense) that it would be a significant burden to store DHT/tracker info for all files in a torrent, on some systems.

So the compromise in usual cases would be to track folders. Current torrent implementations haven't added a 'file layer' to their extensions because it seems an unnecessary burden on trackers and DHT nodes; not to mention the major benefits to reseeding can only be realized with integration with the file manager which there would seem to be no reason to do. But it's necessary for user-created contents, where the goal is not to mass download low-quality content in bulk such as in most torrent sites like The Pirate Bay; nor to download certain files the user is already aware of prior to looking them up, which all torrent implementations are currently capable of; nor to track a finite quantity of high-quality content, as with D-Addicts.

The goal for user-created contents is to encourage spreading, and keeping high-quality content, instead of feeling the need to collect more low-quality content so you can sort it out yourself to find what interests you. When there is no mechanism to keep and update high-quality collections of content, it encourages this 'race' mentality which not only affects the overall pattern of content sharing, it also affects attitudes towards the content itself which is especially important for socially-derived content like an MMO. (It also affects attitudes towards other types of shared files, which I won't mention. >_>)

I have no idea what any of that had to do with 'tracking folders is a compromise'. anyway!~ =p This would NOT be 'Mainline DHT', at least I don't think so; it would mean tracking keys or hashes that don't associate with specific names, and I don't know if that's how BitTorrent Mainline DHT works. Many things you can add onto a normal client as an extension, which will only work for interacting with other clients with the same functionality but will still be able to function normally in other cases.

Adding a torrent to a website: I've never created a torrent myself or read the FAQs on how to create one, but this is generally how it would work. Standardized hash boundaries and so on... this might get a little BitComet-ty in creating what look like bad torrents for other clients >_< Basically, if you were to create a torrent out of three files on your system, and someone else creates a torrent out of the same three files on their system, the hashes need to be the same. This means restricting whatever options are out there for hashing, at least if they are selected for inclusion in the semantic 'file layer' of this BitTorrent protocol extension.

So prior to adding a torrent to a website; creating a torrent. You have three files and a folder with 70 files that you want to put into a torrent.

File#1 is tracked individually, so it has standardized hash boundaries/piece size and its own, overall hash for inclusion in DHT. I don't know how this relates to Merkle Hash Tree torrents (future reading topic, maybe never...). It is a file that you created yourself and uploaded the standardized hash to the tracking website already, with a description of the file's content and credits.

File#2 is also tracked individually, but was uploaded to the website months ago and was created by you or someone else.

File#3 is a short descriptive file that you are not marking as tracked individually because it's too small to bother with DHT and not relevant to any other torrent collection. (This is the part I'm not sure about... it still needs to be included in any reseeding, so might it be best to compress it in the torrent file itself with regards to file management? Jigdo concept >_< Maybe it could have its own extension and the client could designate a single folder for these files so everything that downloads into the normal folder to be later moved, sorted and renamed as needed by the user would be 'content' like a movie that had its own place, instead of descriptive 'metadata' that just gets lost or deleted...? Sounds good.~ ) uhmm. So in other words, whether the torrents track a file is separate from whether the client, or 'torrent thumbnail' implementation-independent operating system standard, tracks the locations of files that are eligible for inclusion in torrent reseeding. Small files may still need to be tracked in the filesystem by the OS/client even if they are not included on trackers or DHT, including these unique-extension (or magic numbers) 'descriptive' files that go in their own folder.

The folder is selected to be tracked as a unit, which means it has its own DHT and tracker entry (for trackers which allow it) and can have its name changed, but the files inside of it cannot because there'd be no way to reference them in the torrent file (to map files on the seeder's filesystem to pieces that other peers request) if their names were changed. In contrast, files that are individually tracked in a torrent can be identified in the filesystem by their hash and size and other information stored in the torrent. This is appropriate for large numbers of files such as pictures, where the files are neither changed (as in the case with a program, as if anyone should be downloading executables with torrents....) nor renamed (because they're too numerous and there's no reason to do so since they're in their own folder with no namespace intersections). Folders could be combined and the files pooled, as long as there were no namespace intersections that would prevent a torrent from finding files by name. Note that trying to seed a torrent where this had taken place would only mean that certain pieces would not hash correctly so the seed would be just partially complete.

Finally you can upload to the website. This includes information about torrent history. You could start this process from an existing torrent, altho not without creating the torrent yourself to confirm that you can actually seed the torrent once you upload the torrent file; you could also start off fresh and search for known previous torrents to add to your torrent's declared history. After adding a description (POSSIBLY) it would analyze the torrent you uploaded and associate any files in the torrent with ones on the website, providing links as previously mentioned. I think that's it, the tracker would accept it and you could start seeding then.

Now if someone were to add your torrent to their client. They would ping the tracker or whatever stuff a client does when it adds a torrent. Their client would see you as a seed. It would look at the torrent file, and see that files 1 and 2, and the folder, are tracked individually. It would attempt to download file 3 from you as this torrent is the only one with that file, as well as any other similarly unique pieces of the torrent. It would ask the tracker if it knows any other torrents that contain file 1, file 2, or the folder. In this case the tracker is only allowing individual tracking of files uploaded to (might require full upload, not just hash, for authentication purposes..? maybe.) and described to the website, but other trackers and websites might be more expansive; or more restrictive if they do not support this 'file layer' bittorrent protocol extension.

The tracker only lists this torrent as containing file 1, since you only created and uploaded it today; but it does list three other torrents which contain file 2. This new peer, named Nishikado, asks one of the peers on those torrents for the torrent file via Magnet link to obtain information about where in the torrent the file is that he wants.

Right about now his client does something weird with the display, either it shows the torrents he's leeching from or it doesn't show the details by default... I don't know... it might only work for peers that support this protocol extension, and it might be best if it can only connect to such peers to prevent a perception that clients with this protocol extension are 'selfish'. . .

. . . I think that's it. Connect to peers, download file. o_O It does work a bit different depending on whether it supports all peers or just ones with this protocol as described above, but almost everything happens prior to finding a peer to download from. example done.

And then there's all the social implications of a bittorrent extension that allows the community to refine torrent collections, but that's a different story that hopefully will eventually be finished one day. . . .

Oh, and Nishikado's client also checks for the folder on DHT in case someone has it despite the tracker not viewing it as a separate file, since the torrent provides an overall hash, and standardized piece/hash sizes for the folder in case other torrents do contain it. Your own client for its part broadcasts file 1, file 2, the folder, as well as the overall torrent to nearby nodes in the hash space on DHT.

One day

Two different perspectives

2009-04-29T16:53:00.000-07:00

Asad al-Islam at http://majahden.com/vb/

"In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate...

"After Star Wars, Obama Invents New War Terminologies

"Praise be to God, and peace and prayers be upon the messenger of God, his family, and companions.

"Anyone who lived among and interacted with the beastly and arrogant American people will know that their verbal expressions full of cursing and foul words. They are a people who are not good at speaking, regardless of how well they decorate their speeches. What really distinguishes US foreign policy, since it was established by Henry Kissinger, is the manipulation of words serve the greed of their leaders. They killed two million Vietnamese in the name of 'war against Communism,' and did the same thing in Nicaragua in the mid 80's in the name of 'freedom and democracy.' Their successor Obama is following in their footsteps. He is continuing the US war against Islam and Muslims, but lies to them and attempts to trick them by beautifying his words.

"The era of the despicable Bush was known for terminologies resembling the saying 'open sesame' to anyone who wanted to approach the White House, such as 'war on terrorism,' 'Islamo-fascism,' 'Islamic extremism' etc. These terms brought woe upon all the US. The war that was associated with these terms drained their powers, and displaced and starved them. On top of all that, the American is on the top of the wanted list anytime his filthy feet touch Muslim land. What was the result of that drunk's term? Imaginary profits gained by war companies such as Halliburton (the second house of Dick Cheney), and oil companies like Chevron, which honored 'Candy Rice' (former member of its board of directors) by naming one of its petroleum carriers after her. This is just a simple example of the 'conflict of interest' (as they call it in their administrative laws) inside the governing body of the United (but near separated) States. The rich are the decision makers and the executive team of the Federal Government. As for their people (the people of Coca-Cola and McDonald's, the people of adultery and gayness): Those who did not lose their houses to the mortgage crisis eventually lost their savings due to the collapse of banks and the economic crisis. Those who did not lose a son or brother were eventually killed by the mujahidin. Some lost their jobs at General Motors, where the mujahidin contributed to its bankruptcy. The best of them visits a psychiatrist three times a week, and a doctor purchased a weapon yesterday because fighting over bread is on the horizon.

"When the new administration felt the weight of the burden left by Bush, when it realized the signs of the collapse of empires that are surfacing in the US, it sought help from the 'think tanks.' They turned to a report released by the Anti-Terrorism Center on 14 March 2008 entitled Words that Work and Words that Don't: A Guide to Counterterrorism Communication, published by the expert Steven Emerson (who rose to fame when he accused 'Islamic terrorism' of blowing up the FBI headquarters in Oklahoma City on 19 April 1995, which was carried out by extreme rightist Timothy McVeigh). This report included many recommendations related to reconsidering the content of the US President's speech on the war on terrorism in an attempt to eliminate some terminologies (such as "open sesame"), which tarnished the image of the US in the Islamic world. Some of the important recommendations are:

"'Do not invoke Islam: Although Al-Qa'ida exploits religious sentiments and tries to use religion to justify its actions, we should treat it as an illegitimate political organization, both terrorist and criminal.'

"'Do not harp on Muslim identity: Avoid labeling everything 'Muslim.' It reinforces the 'US versus Islam' framework that Al-Qa'ida promotes. Be specific (Egyptian, Pakistani) and descriptive (South Asian youth, Arab opinion leaders), where possible.'

"'Avoid offensive terminology: We are communicating with, not confronting, our audiences. Do not insult or confuse them with pejorative terms such as 'Islamo-fascism,' which are considered offensive by many Muslims.'

"'Avoid the term 'caliphate,' which has positive connotations for Muslims, but is used to describe the goal of Al-Qa'ida and associated groups. The best description of what they really want to create is a global totalitarian state.'

"'Never use the terms 'jihadist' or 'mujahidin' in conversation to describe the terrorists. A mujahid, a holy warrior, is a positive characterization in the context of a just war. In Arabic, jihad means 'striving in the path of God' and is used in many contexts beyond warfare. Calling our enemies jihadists and their movement global jihad unintentionally legitimizes their actions.'

"The report also addressed avoiding phrases such as 'We do not hate Islam,' because the word 'hate' is the only word that will remain in the minds of those listening. Because the US Administration blindly trusts such reports, it began implementing everything in it. Hilary Clinton was the first to play her role in this play, which is aimed at misleading Muslims. This old woman stated that the US will abandon using 'global war against terrorism' in her speech about war on Islam. When asked why this decision is being made, she replied by stating it was the obvious and did not give a convincing answer. Why would she? She is only a button that can be pushed, nothing more. This was followed by Michelle Sison, the US ambassador to Lebanon, who stated to Al-Nahar net [Lebanese newspaper] on 3 April 2009 that: 'The new administration will use the phrase peace in the Middle East instead of peace process.' As for Obama, he announced from Turkey on 6 April 2009 that 'the US is not at war with Islam and will never be in a war with Islam.' Does the change in speech imply a change in policy? No not at all. No one is better at proving this other than their own.

"On 4 April 2009, the Washington Post addressed this subject in a column entitled New Words for War. This is what was mentioned in the article: 'Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton recently confirmed that the Obama administration has dropped the phrase 'global war on terror.' She didn't say why. 'I think that speaks for itself, obviously' was her elaboration. That raised a few obvious questions: Does the new administration believe the fight against Al-Qa'ida and other extreme Islamist groups does not amount to war? Is the threat to the US homeland less, in President Obama's estimation, than that perceived by President George W. Bush? And does the United States still expect its NATO military allies to join in this newly unnamed, speaks-for-itself endeavor?' It added: 'It seems the 'global war on terrorism' will continue, only without the name. There is some logic to that: Mr. Obama is acutely aware of the damage done by the Bush administration to American prestige in Europe and throughout the Muslim world, and he has spoken much this week of a fresh start. As many have pointed out, the old term was awkward- 'terror' describes a means of war, not an enemy. The challenge for the new administration is to describe that enemy and the campaign against it in ways that convey its urgency to both Americans and foreign audiences - and that unites rather than polarizes. In that respect, Mr. Obama made a good start in Strasbourg.'

"Peter Baker wrote in an article entitled The Words Have Changed, but Have the Policies?, published by International Herald Tribune on 2 April 2009. He wrote: 'They may be sending 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan, as much as Mr. Bush did to Iraq, but it is not a 'surge.' They may still be holding people captured on the battlefield at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, but they are no longer 'enemy combatants.' They may be carrying the fight to Al-Qa'ida as their predecessors did, but they are no longer waging a 'war on terror.' He added: 'Indeed, for all the shifting words, Mr. Obama has left the bulk of Mr. Bush's national security architecture intact so far. He has made no move to revise the Patriot Act or the eavesdropping program. He has ordered Guantánamo to be closed in a year, but has not turned loose all the prisoners. The troop buildup in Afghanistan resembles the one Mr. Bush ordered in Iraq two years ago.'

"O brothers in religion, are there any doubts or confusions left after the confessions made by their own people? Republicans and Democrats share the same goal, except Republicans use the stick to achieve it and Democrats use the carrot. The actions of the White House slaves amount to nothing more than throwing ashes into the eyes of the Muslims in an attempt to hypnotize them in order to accomplish their goals. They have been exposed, however, by the will of God. Praise be to Him. The question that comes to mind is: What caused the Obama plan to receive such objections from some Americans who tried to expose it? The ruling entity in the US has caused the entire country to become divided. We have clear evidence to support that, but this is not the place to discuss it. Our last supplication is praise be to God, Lord of all creation."

Markus Ziener: "Moving Coolly Through the Crisis?" from Duesseldorf Handelsblatt at http://www.handelsblatt.com/

In the crisis, Americans appreciate, above all, one thing: leadership. And this is what Obama shows. Regardless of whether you agree or not with all the decisions Obama made in his first 100 days, the 44th President is meeting the challenges. He does not shun decisions.

If Obama wants to know what the people's concerns are, he talks to them directly, even now as President. When he headed for a townhall meeting just a few weeks after he had taken office, the political classes shook their heads -- perhaps he has not noticed that the election campaign is over, they stated sarcastically. Actually, however, the critics did not understand that this President works differently than many of his predecessors. From the beginning, his secret to success was to talk with the people, and not just about them.

A new style will not be enough. At the end of a presidency, success is measured by facts. In a few years from now, the Americans will judge Obama, above all, on whether he succeeded or not in overcoming the crisis. It is still much too early to answer that question.

It is clear that the financial and economic crisis can only be overcome if the President manages to change his country's psychology. It is not by chance that Obama often mentions Ronald Reagan: the republican from California was a symbol of confidence, a confidence that was so contagious that it enabled the United States to get out of the economic doldrums and the trauma from the Vietnam War. Because he achieved this, the Americans forgave him quite a few mistakes.

Obama may hope for a similar outcome. Despite record unemployment and first setbacks in foreign policy, a large majority of Americans believe that the country is on the right path. In fact, the surprising thing about the first three months is that the big difficulties with which the United States is struggling do not seem to affect this President much. Obama seems to be "cool" -- calm and collected.

This is why his "Grand Design" - the strategy to tackle all problems simultaneously - is working. Obama has understood that health care reform, climate change and the economic crisis belong together. The weaknesses of the US social system are a burden on the companies, and so is the lack of adjustment to new global environmental standards. Hence, Obama does not only want to patch potholes. He wants to overlay the streets with a new asphalt surface.

Since his large-scale project for America will tie him to domestic policy for quite some time, Obama needs support from his allies in terms of foreign policy. This is why he extends his hand to partners, admits that the United States has made mistakes, and shows that he is able to listen. This is also part of the overall concept.

Does Obama always strike the right balance? Some goals may sound naïve -- for example, the noble goal of a nuclear weapons free world. Substantial progress in disarmament would already be success enough. But that is not the point. The point is the direction. It is the right one.

Idle thoughts III

2009-04-26T19:14:00.000-07:00

I was reminded of some of the flaws with current paradigms for sharing user-created content when I tried to find some old warrior movies. There weren't any links on a popular direct-download site; and despite this warrior's popularity there wasn't a single mention of them on the largest torrent site >_< I deleted everything I had from them a long time ago, partly because I didn't like paladin abuse but mostly to save space.

The current phenomenon of torrent collections has two interesting features. Torrent seeders rely on being able to describe the torrent contents to accomplish their goals: a sense of ownership of the files included in the torrent, and spreading their popularity as a torrent seeder or other provider of information such as a website. Some torrent sites offer exceptional ability to describe the contents and status of a torrent, such as a well-formatted description space and torrent classification or even forum threads that accompany torrents; when the source of torrent files does not allow this descriptive information, seeders rely on including text files within the torrent to support this sense of ownership of the files.

When you create an additional like semantic (mangle technical meanings) file layer beneath the torrent, the seeder no longer owns the files. Instead they control the connections between, and groupings of files. At the same time the particular collection that a leecher is constructing may not be the one held by the seeds they are leeching from, due to the 'JIGDO' concept from working at the file level. So once again it becomes the responsibility of the torrent site to provide this association between seeds and ownership.

There's no way around having an entirely new bittorrent client implementation, due to the requirements:

Download a torrent for the single file you are interested in, but leech off of collections of many files that include this one file
Create a new collection out of files previously downloaded, that is receptive to requests from other collections and single-file torrents
Seed a new collection by partly using old ones, to avoid dead torrents from losing seeds
Associate files with certain names in one torrent, with the same files in another torrent that are named differently

This last one in particular means you can't just transparently include several torrents in one, that would seed independently but show up as the sum of unique peers in torrent UI; because the current bittorrent protocol has torrent names, as well as file names as unique and part of the way to identify that torrent. Multiple seeders with different file names could not connect to the same torrent unless some or all single-file torrents within torrent collections were corrected to the same filename, but this is contrary to the idea of torrents being independent of any single website to be able to work. Seeders that could not connect to a torrent database would not be able to construct valid collections that linked to other torrents.

Anyway so I was wondering if you couldn't create linked torrents using DHT on a per-file basis because of seeder ownership requirements and you would instead have to just show very well all the torrents that contained a particular file you wanted; but this would prevent you from doing the first item in the above list, downloading the torrent for a single file. If you did want to seed after downloading, you would have to continue to manage single torrents and this leads to torrent clutter.

So that's why change is necessary. You can either keep trackers pretty much the same as they are, and rely on clients to create standardized hash things for pieces and files and then use DHT to find files in torrents on other peers; or you can do that AND also change trackers work on the file level by treating every major file as its own torrent without regard for its name, so peers can find seeders with the file by tracker as well as DHT.

This only works for files you'd want to include in multiple collections... and I still don't know what impact it would have for large numbers of files >_< it's possible that streamlining things would end up reducing the total number of things tracked by the tracker; but some torrents have a lot of files. Maybe best if trackers in this implementation only tracked pre-registered files, for which it had a verified/official hash and so on. It might still be possible to search for other files via DHT, especially if using a smart algorithm which assumes that a seeder with one file from a large torrent may have many other files from it too; and in the case with a non-registered anonymous/generic tracker.

Torrent collection tracking could get complex. Again, the idea is that even when files have their own separate pages and the torrent collection seeder is neither required nor allowed to provide an in-depth description of the torrent contents (or advertisement for their website...), other details about a torrent can have a significant effect on someone's decision whether to use that torrent or another one. It would be possible to have an implementation where users could explore the torrent-space entirely within the torrent application, by showing which torrents you leech from and letting you select for download all files within that torrent, then branching these off into more primary torrents for you to explore or even provide feedback or discussion via a statically-linked website; but this would remove what little remains of seeder ownership under a file-descriptive system and would also lock implementation users to a specific torrent website o.0 So that's why any torrent UI feedback would just be informative, not supposed to lead to new torrents; this exploration would be done on any central site which describes the files themselves, as well as providing this information about torrent collections which I still haven't described. omg.

If I had more experience with open source project development maybe I could describe this better >_< Any particular collection of files may importantly be linked to previous collections. It may be a branch from a main collection by a different seeder than the creator of the original collection, it may also be a compilation of various sources or the evolutionary development of a collection that seeks to include a certain number, quality, or focus of files. This may show prospective leechers how a collection was derived and possibly what it led to, contributing to the feeling of ownership even if a different individual branches off a collection to create a more popular torrent that still leeches off the original seeders using the jigdo method.

The files contained in the torrent should also be referenced, this is possible when standardized hashes lets the files be uniquely identified regardless of whether they were renamed. This lets users see descriptions of the contents of the torrent, regardless of who created the collection or how much detail they used to describe its contents (if a description apart from the name is allowed at all)!

mm will say a bit about games. Could even have multiple worlds to live in. Some of these might not allow unique advancement, such as leveling or gaining experience; some might have different rules, such as 'infamy' for killing weak players of a different faction vs becoming a 'murderer' for killing same-faction players in a weakly free-for-all player vs player ruleset, allowing conflicting attitudes to exist in the same game. Or a world that emphasizes group combat and ambushing, lying in wait for convoys to pass by o_O somewhat mutually exclusive with an emphasis on solo PvP as reinforced by ruleset and the activities and progressions given in a game. This also increases the chance that an open source development model could be leveraged to provide more game content and options, using the OpenID authentication model. However, art style and consistency is a major concern and may be one reason for centralization of certain development resources.

Maybe I did, or didn't have anything interesting to say about items, but I need to go... it's late here.

MY SMILEY FACES MESS WITH HTML PARSER UPON EDIT

Idle thoughts II

2009-04-21T17:53:00.000-07:00

Torrent client that manages files that the user has decided can be shared from local storage. There would probably be several ways to display them, such as chronologically and by folder structure.

Separating torrents from the filesystem and confirming any sharing instance to prevent violations of privacy or security.

Standardizing hash methods and piece size allows quick adding of torrents once a file is located in the list of sharable files. This would be very similar to the thumbnail standard; torrents would be hooked into the file manager such that moving a file would change the location that the reference torrent file pointed to, without having to regenerate the hash. This pre-torrent file would need to include information to verify the file, such as size, file type if magic numbers or other methods are available, and possibly timestamp; the file's current location; and hash information for each piece. The requirements aren't exactly the same as for thumbnails. The actual 'torrent thumbnail' file name would not have to be defined the same way as media thumbnails, unless the torrent program doesn't load the entire directory into memory upon program start. The torrent sharing method might be such that it isn't necessary to do this. Hmm~

If separation is really maintained, then torrents would contain all the information (hash, and maybe name?) to find the right 'torrent thumbnail'. It would mean that you couldn't right-click and immediately start sharing a file (automatically creating a hidden torrent, or downloading one, using a predefined tracker), because the hash would be part of the 'torrent thumbnail' file name, but this is the objective because it reduces privacy accidents. I may be saying things that are totally wrong, I'm hardly an expert on the BitTorrent protocol >_<

Overall goals for this proposed expansion of torrent functionality in order to better support user-created content sharing:
- can download the files you need
- can easily share files that you feel like sharing, matching between torrent and files on the hard drive
- can clearly and simply define the files you share

This last one, as well as privacy, is why not to have a system that lets you 'share every possible file on my hard drive that I have marked for sharing', despite that changing OS support and standardizing hashes would let you accomplish this. The fact that you cannot do this is due, as far as I understand, to the problems mentioned before here of torrent clutter and lack of freedom to manipulate files in the filesystem when sharing; but it is also due to the way torrents work with sharing collections of files. If you change the way torrents approach the download objective, by changing from searching for pieces within the swarm for a single torrent to instead searching for files within the like meta-swarm of all torrents on available trackers, it becomes easier to update and replace old torrent collections with new ones, which accomplishes the goal of reducing torrent clutter and keeping clear definitions of what to share while also allowing the addition of new files into the meta-swarm.

This goal is somewhat similar to that program for debian repositories, that lets you synchronize an iso image with new packages. It's on the Ubuntu distro server but I forget the name.

It somewhat involves treating each individual file as its own torrent. It would mess a little with tracking seeders and leechers for torrents; but since it works both ways it should all work out. As I understand it (aka not very well!) it increases load on the tracker, but I don't know how significant this is and you can always split torrents up on different trackers.

Name should not matter, because it's easy to change and people arbitrarily change the name of a file and include it in a new torrent... maybe less for user-created content where a file has more of an identity that it can be found as, but still~. If you open a torrent, it should automatically populate files you have previously decided to share if the hash file allows it; if there are files that look like they might match but the hash boundaries are wrong (is this how torrents work? I don't know, lol) it will check the hash again; in all other cases it will look for similarly-sized files within your filesystem as you allow it and suggest checking, or automatically check to see if any of them have the right hash. And if a file is still being downloaded, it could still check it if the hash boundaries are standardized.

I think knowing exactly what it is you're sharing has important psychological effects on overall swarm behavior. Some people may seed 300 torrents at once but they are in the minority.

Path of Death

2009-04-20T17:01:00.000-07:00

I don't really want this to be the place I put important things. But at the same time, there are some places you might only be able to go to once.

I don't have control when indulging myself. If I stop eating, it's because I'm not hungry anymore or feel like eating something that isn't available.. not because I feel I've eaten too much. Right now I'm not hungry >_<

A movie said that if you hold a bird too tightly, it will die, and if you do not hold it tightly enough it will fly away... maybe I'm saying too much, but you can't hide forever :P So that's why to know that something could exist is enough.

It isn't mind games.

i'm still afraid.

"To end": thread + winter

I was thinking. First, is there really no way to leverage an open source code base for an MMO? One of the problems of trying to share an MMO across multiple providers is not just trusted vendors, but also authenticating users of content and a particular transaction of that user with content providers. Trusted vendors is closely related to the attitudes that develop within the community towards progression and character identity. If a game allowed transfering a 'character' or other specific information between different vendors of a game, besides the basic technical issues there is also the validity of things that are viewed as achievements, and deciding whether to change any aspect of presentation in-game. Anyway, the point is that an OpenID-style model would let a game that has solved these problems transfer information from one provider to another, while being assured that the same person is in charge of both copies of this account until proven otherwise.

Second, a free alternative would probably change opinions towards banning as seen in current popular MMOs. Being able to switch providers might change it back and make this not a problem, but becoming a 'ghost' might be a different way, for things as simple as illegal account selling or trading. Someone wouldn't be banned, they would just become noticably different. Just a little too predictable, as if they weren't really there. Disturbing in strange ways. A silly smile and a repetitive argument... any normalcy is just evidence of the monstrous perversion that must be lurking behind this facade. A name that fuzzes out once in a while.

Someone could, of course, apply to fix any misinterpretation of evidence, but it importantly allows the retention of the idea that a character in-game is associated with a certain individual assuming that identity, while presenting the reinforcement of that idea entirely within the game's rules and not making reference to outside factors.

Idle thoughts I

2009-04-18T17:56:00.000-07:00

I hate worrying about money. I hate listening to people, who view earning money as their only goal in life and worship those who are successful at it. It makes me feel inadequate :P

An Amazon-type system would be great for torrenting user-created content. Someone's interests can be determined by which content they rate up or down. Even... it could be used with a tag system. Sorry for switching to 'you' here... if 'you' like something, you give it a rating or just a binary tag, and you select which words best describe it from a list. It isn't just a simple voting system >_<>_<

Anyway the goal of that would be to be able to select a label on a user-created content, and be directed to contents that were labeled the same way by people similar to the ones who created the descriptions for the first content, that's what is important. This is because it would be impossible to create a comprehensive system to give 'true' descriptions to contents, such as in its outstanding production qualities or the in-game behavior of its actors or the perceived philosophy or standards of its creator. A well-designed tagging system is better because it will drift to the correct position, as long as the differences between tags are well-defined and easily spaced in the like memepool or the values or outlooks of people in this life; because even if a word doesn't quite mean what you think it means you can tell what other people think it should mean based on the user-created contents that you have viewed and that it applies to.

Returning to determining interests, lol. A one-sentence tangent must always turn into multiple paragraphs.. -_-' It's important to separate how associations are made. Amazon makes pages really long so they can sell stuff, but not everyone is trying to do that. It would probably be best if recommendations for you in particular, based on what you have rated or even what tags you've placed (would probably be harder, both computation and storage space, to use tags because it's so many more variables than a rating and requires comparing many networks, while you can probably simplify ratings comparison a lot more with averaged out network relationships), are on a completely separate page than normal contents, and are not incorporated into the contents page for every signed-in user. Recommendations on any single content page are based on the average network comparisons based on tags and ratings, independent of who is viewing the page. Then the sparse descriptive tags that are assigned to a user-created content, based on the consistency of previous labeling feedback or 'votes', can be used to isolate a particular quality of the content that the viewer likes.

That was another long 'single sentence' >_< I haven't even referenced torrents at all so far... grr. ANYWAY, all this is complemented by emergent features of torrenting: compilations of material are more successful than single items, because of the overhead of searching for and managing torrents. This also might involve the file system and storage.

I don't know whether it would be better to have the torrent as the thing you search for and rate and download, or whether to create (or is it remove??) an additional abstraction layer by having the file as the basic unit? If it's the file then there might be links to and statistics for a torrent for just that file, as well as to a torrent or torrents that compile this file with other, similar or related user-created contents. Both seem to have their drawbacks; if the torrent is the basic unit, then single files are marginalized and someone may download a torrent batch without caring about the details of the files or those who created them. If the file is the basic unit, then I suppose it becomes harder to show information about the torrents that include this file. Maybe searching for, and providing information about contents can be separate from supporting the torrents social architecture, and the 'layers' could compliment each other, instead of intersecting...

But anyway the idea is that if you know that something is worth watching, you can find a collection, which is a recommendation by someone else, that includes the known contents as well as additional other ones which could be worth watching. It also allows you, for example, to download and manage a compilation by a single creator, as well as support it by continuing to seed. Once again -- the expectation of finding future content worth downloading, and being able to support the needs of others without it being a hassle for yourself, are essential for user-created content to be able to seed effectively.

Torrent management is the other half of this. Being able to designate content that you want to be able to 'watch' for when it needs seeding, based on leeching/seeds ratios and historical consistency of that demand. This means diverse ways of tagging your interest in both seeding and being alerted to new user-created content within a particular category or domain of interest, such as an author. (Might be able to use RSS for this? I don't know, I've never used it myself...) It also means more active, or passive ways to search for needed seeds; such as, torrents that most need seeding that have a particular LABEL (as described before); as well as some means of tracking which files you are able to seed from having them on local storage, and this could be difficult...

only two more things :P OpenID, and incorporating torrents into the OS file browser.

It seems.. that some of the problems that reduce seeding when it's needed, are torrent clutter (minor); adding torrents when you are trying to seed; and moving files within the file hierarchy without breaking active or unopened torrents. It is basically the problems: which files are associated with this torrent; and where can I find them. It's possible that the solution to this could be similar to the thumbnail standard used in the standard OS including the Gnome desktop, that allows many different programs to use the same thumbnails for files and provides backup solutions in case of error... it might also be similar to Google Desktop Search or other things I don't know anything about >_< Anyway now that it's been mentioned I'm sure I, or anyone else would be able to figure it out if necessary, lol.

OpenID could be useful for sites associated with an MMO. Being able to use a central login to identify yourself on other sites; I don't know if it would help to have a one-time authentication that would then allow another site to access information associated with characters on your account or otherwise personalize your identity on that site. It would allow you to login to just that site without worrying about the security of your central account, but it also MIGHT mean having to include a way to manage the permanent authentications associated with your MMO's 'OpenID'-concept login method, so you could remove a key, or site, that is misusing information from your authentication... but anyway. It would mean that you could, for example, offer verifiable character-linked identities on a third-party torrent site, to prevent the (of course) company-sponsored torrent site from being the only one that lets you associate your in-game identity. :P As well as forums and so on..