Trust

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_Thunderbirds_Indian_Springs_Diamond_Crash

Smart people can make conclusions from limited information.

While waiting

Time elapsed: 3 hours

"never leave" - not talking must not count
Kate: "not let leave"
email: implies relationship. if ended, cannot assume silence means further emails wanted.
footsteps
50% higher chance to die

being nice to people -> not talking. due to thinking someone might be happy.
step 1: earn money. step 2?
(school cost: focal point, nonmonetary value. also brand tho)
life maybe harder without a car! more planning required.
"I don't mind dying" — best way to convince others is to believe it yourself. [later:] but when true~.
thesis: "meet and then die" is not an acceptable option
"legs numb"
not knowing what relationships are like : Fauna
(grapefruit juice)

Results

http://jobcreationplan.blogspot.com/

Knowledge

situations not intended to have a harmful effect:
1) making someone think you are using 'conflict avoidance' strategy
2) the self perception that one has high abilities (solution: conflict by omission, deniable; requirements)
3) ? forgot... so much for trying to write this down!

isn't saved

[quote="Hippeaux"]There is no problem with wanting to accomplish more that other players or advance further or whatever. There is a problem when someone feels like they're "better" than someone else because of these accomplishments.

Special Snowflake Syndrome happens when someone feels like their Deathwing kill was somehow more important/valuable/significant than someone else's, therefore only they should be entitled to rewards from it.

Examples include: Wanting Ashes removed from the game because TK can be solo'd rather than 3-manned like it was when the OP got hers, asking for loot table adjustments to raids after they've been nerfed, asking that older tier armor not be available to new players, and so forth.

Given how easy it is to get certain achievements, titles, and ranks from being carried, I'd argue that being there when the content was relevant doesn't mean you're any "better" than someone who starts a new character and completes it some time later. Some players just don't want to see anyone else get what they have even 3-, 6-, or 9 months later. Nerfs don't negate the fact thet the player defeated the content and sometimes people need to be reminded of this.[/quote]
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/4044744834#17

Pass/fail mechanics lead to nerf, which causes content to fall into a region of not requiring skill, only non-skill factors. This loss of relevance as an accurate metric leads to subsequent debate on further nerfs to difficulty.

Reason for pass/fail is prevalence of invisible carrying and its implications for group progress or identifying the reasons for lack thereof. Highly visible failure with a given content tuning means that group success is 'validated' by the high-performance players in the group who choose to carry the poorly performing members.

The idea of 'becoming more difficult for a group with higher performance' is therefore essential to avoiding nerfs so that a group where no carrying is necessary is still challenged. Since 'going slower' is not an inherently more difficult choice (only takes longer), it must come in the form of complexity and pace of activity with subsequent implications for the accuracy of decisions. Idea of a threshold of 'safe amount of risk for the entire group' seems to still be useful.

Arguments about 'special snowflake' are based (around the exaggerated caricature of a derived measure of achievement that uniquely identifies a single individual's accomplishments, but also) on the assumption that a game's most difficult content will ideally be balanced upon release such that the in-game competence of all players in a group is required to be at a high level to complete that content. In other words that no 'carrying' will be allowed even if poor performance results from factors like latency. This establishes an idea of 'player skill' within a game's population; anyone who does not complete content at its original difficulty is seen as having a lower or unverifiable skill level and automatically ineligible for a special in-game status from things like better gear.

Countering this assumption as it manifests in a discussion can only be done by the players who are seen to benefit from the current arrangement: those who complete a game's most difficult content at its original difficulty. The required statement would have to be that greater relevance to a wider audience is worth the loss of accuracy from the removal of pass/fail mechanics that test every player in a group. Such a conclusion could only reached through a discussion of the various ways that carrying happens and how it could be made more visible.

title goes here

unimportant 13 Dec 2011
not actually used for anything, in the end.

prove to self, not show to others. discarding goal of raid completion time as an accurate measure of ability, legacy of EQ

(separate issue from depth of progression)

"If Blizz made an LFR that was normal mode would be in heaven. Even if all they did was tweak it so guilds can easily fill slots cross realm with pugs and individuals just put their toon on a list with a short bio, I would love that." http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3710773060?page=29#575


"Now everyone you run stuff with is either a friend or a faceless nobody that means nothing to you and you'll never see again.

This. Right here. This is why I'm leaving. I can play solo games if I want to play solo. WoW was "supposed" to be a group game, something you worked at with a guild. Since it's not anymore, I'm not interested." http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3710773060?page=30#582


if not succeeding is fun, then having succeeded and still playing should also be fun. complete opposite of the idea that the purpose of playing is to gather 'achievements' with a specific date to make them relevant

overall goal: deep evaluation, not shallow evaluation


easy > oh, everyone has it > must have it > easier > ... not actually any more choice, just change in length of time to completion. should still be fun without being at maximum progression

most fun things: wall-jumping, and playing with camera with names turned off. both avoid traditional notions of 'progress' and require deep evaluation


quintissential example: people enjoyed equal-level world PvP in original WoW, raiding Crossroads etc. dying meant a long corpse run, and was still fun. by definition 50% win ratio, and losing did not prevent from being fun (contrast PvE difficulty settings)

(extra rewards for random dungeon finder would become unnecessary, which dungeon it is can be important again) ... without extra rewards, teleporting isn't necessary either

"the unravelling"

(gear: single bid system, also implications for cross-realm item trading)

to all the people i don't talk to

deep evaluation means singular points of failure aren't important. nothing has to be absolutely perfect, such as RMT that manages to avoid ban and affects other players in a raid and meaning of 'having gear'

hero factory, challenge to Blizzard

obvious flaw of raids as measure of ability, groups. rarely pointed out

LFR as predictable endpoint of compromise between EQ philosophy of raids as signal and the practical reality of a majority casual playerbase

RNG drops: community idea of "it's easy" and simplification of standards leads to frustration and unrealistic goals, fixed by deep evaluation

unrealistic goals at [one] center of problems

barriers to grouping another center, PvE unable to fill certain group size, PvP unstable standards for competition and desire to avoid unfair advantage (evaluation standards and ideas of a fair advantage, lack of friends not seen as something that should affect available options for success)

main problem with 'option for free gear' is community expectations of being required and Blizzard's assumption of reasonable attainment affecting future content (gear squish). option of experiencing content is only a problem if community, overall, decides that completion is a signal of ability that is more beneficial as it becomes more accurate, cannot reach a conclusion that is not based on overall community attitudes and actual goals (statement of which depends on signal evaluation competence)

more challenge/longer justification with regard to casuals: "cannot complete content" is not valid argument. however, "someone in my position is looked down on by community" or "cannot complete same-level goals due to ganking" are valid arguments as they have implications outside of the game


"Why would I want social interaction? With you?

Seriously the argument about social interaction is written with rose coloured glasses about the past. Social interaction in the past was trolling trade and black balling people.This, too. Back then you had to know the right people to even get into raids in the first place. Which meant things like politics. Which often led to drama somewhere down the road."

wanted vs unwanted social interaction. bonus (coordination, time cost does not necessarily prevent goal completion) to having a group without being required

a game which is not too easy and does not give options for arbitrary levels of effortless progress can be better because it avoids community standard feedback loop of expectations. enabled by item squish

overall: many players would like raid completion to be more difficult and represent a higher quality signal than what LFR offers. this conflicts with desire of casual players to see content at all. overlap of goals is in allowing goal completion despite higher levels of content difficulty, both PvE goals of content completion and PvP goals of acceptance regardless of performance

loss: EQ idea of "best players are in the best guilds which are the ones that complete content first". gain: deep evaluation so EQ idea is not necessary, and more accurate but unpredictable measures of achievement

basis for statement of "decline" is inaccuracy of specific signals. advantage of complex goals is understated due to inability to conclusively state benefit from such, due to tradeoff between complexity and more accurate evaluation competence when existing frequency of assumptions that lead to competence is difficult to determine

significance of LFR: "casuals don't care about gear"? raiders' attitudes toward it are what?

multilayered systems: deep evaluation prevents singular issues from becoming problems in the "signalling layer" of the game. single bid for gear prevents offspec/etc from becoming a problem during rewards distribution in a raid

another reason for content difficulty is an excuse to play with friends, by denying goal completion or making it more difficult. goals in the community might or might not intersect with this social motivation space. However, an excuse to play with friends is secondary to not being forced to associate with strangers to be able to experience content. (no loss of the option LFR currently provides)

changes can be isolated
1) making content more challenging, but increasing options for participating in groups smaller than the maximum allowed in a zone *also the type of challenge is very important
2) removing the 'progression floor' of cheap gear for every new raid tier, so old content is still appealing from a character progression standpoint
3) discouraging the idea that only the latest content is interesting as an indicator of player ability, by offering alternate goals and deliberately introducing changes that contradict this idea but increase the enjoyment of content even if it's very difficult or very easy for the raid group to complete (instead of basing all changes on the idea that completion order is an indicator of skill).

Less predictable, more large-scale RNG decreases usability as signal, which combined with the change in common understanding of goals and lack of gear homogeneity all contribute to deeper evaluation of metrics.

4) removal of 'random dungeon' rewards to change priorities for group and eliminate teleporting
5) PvP evaluation change enables elimination of free gear and feel of needing to acquire gear (or levels) before having fun
6) BGs equal in gear weight to eliminate non-skill factors from team victory
7) squish



(11:30pm)
It's a little envious following these forums over the last few days to see people care so much about the game, even if the volume of posting on the main feedback thread for this topic is still less than 10% of what it was for RealID... so after a nice little nap with a dream about a young Siberian tiger who was surely there to indicate I should write this post, I have decided to write this post. I fully expect no replies or interest in this thread.

[...]

(6am)
"That's a ridiculous argument. For one the automative process of looking for raid is what bypasses people who "snub" you for what gear you're wearing, not the difficulty of the raid. Also, I've done looking for raid and frankly the environment is just as volatile as it was before.

Basically: anyone who is claiming that the looking for raid difficulty setting is for people on a budgeted schedule is downplaying their own ability to play the game. The tool to organize raids is what makes raiding more accessible, not the difficulty of the raid itself. For the most part, the difficulty only determines how quickly you will experience the content."
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3709661639?page=7#123

since lower difficulty is due to wiping and disbanding not being fun, which is partly due to planned obsolescence, removing the LFR difficulty tier depends on the spectrum of implications related to loss of completion order as supposedly accurate metric of ability


"I'm curious. What all would need to change in, for example, Icecrown Citadel before it's LFR-capable?

Not a whole lot I suppose as far as the raid mechanics go, but it's long enough we'd want to chop it in half because we expect the time investment in the Raid Finder to be much shorter than ICC in its entirety was. Chopping it in half isn't a small task." http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3657613297?page=35#694
prefer queued characters with completion similar to raid group's current completion, or even require it to prevent griefing of any kind. if groups become more popular, then filling a slot from friends would become higher priority (assuming invites become possible by eliminating possibilities for griefing). how much of griefing is due to loot disagreements? if loot is fixed invites may be possible

14 Dec 4:23pm

LFR is to be able to do content while 'current'. if all content is current then difficulty is not an issue if it's fun

resource model for damage has changed leading to increased variance of damage with experience. previously most abilities had relatively equal damage per resource, but now much more 'free' damage with low resource cost that is wasted if not used correctly and at the right time. must be recognized as a significant reason for difference in group performance and affecting content tuning

should groups with high concentrations of skilled players quit if they can complete all available content within a few weeks of release? see TBC

"an end to teleporting"? pvp, free gear (reward for randoms), fun pve = aggro (and healers cannot carry group since threat causes problems before going oom)... lack of free gear = fair loot method becomes important (and gearing for offspecs too), implied difficulty means more reasons to be social as long as group size can vary

LFR and free gear is result of Blizzard trying to be 'perfect' but this depends on assumptions of goals. If hardcore goal = complete content quickly and gear up new members quickly (heroic completion order as "accurate signal"), free gear accomplishes this; if casual goal = see content then LFR also accomplishes this, but only thing preventing casual goal on harder difficulty is specific mechanics that make it not fun (not impossible) while assumption of hardcore goal may be incorrect, since flat gear environment would accomplish this better than current

"would game be better if all items had same iLvl"? serious question. gear quality should not negatively impact either choices in game (including to delay completion), or availability of accurate signals. teleporting is result of the idea of current content.

"barriers to casuals seeing content at higher difficulties"

...however, no pressing reason for casual players to want an increase in difficulty for LFR unless problems emerge in the future, so any campaign for change would have to come from the hardcore playerbase segment who are probably more concerned with planned obsolescence than difficulty. item squish is central question, difficult to act if items are still seen as a measure of achievement under the current system due to reactionary attitudes by casual players


"You are not a special snowflake. Let people have LFR, it doesn't affect you. Unless you get special tinglies by being the only person to think they see content. Or maybe you feel like you "work" for your gear, and others don't?

Hint: your gear will be replaced in 3-5 months.
Hint: your achievements will be worthless in 3-5 months as people go back and pug normal modes (that you "worked" for). Many people still don't have H. Lich King done." http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3657613297?page=175#3485
if planned obsolescence does not cause hardcore players to quit, no reason for change now that LFR has satisfied casual players. also LFR has removed 'see current content' as a justification for gear quality as an accurate signal, meaning expending effort for non-LFR raiding does not lead to a result that seems to benefit the larger group (RP origin, playerbase, etc)

in other words currently "signal accuracy shift" period, people are learning the obvious and will not take action yet

chess deception

invisible chess— pawns move forward if a diagonal capture is requested but the location is empty, an illegal move is reported as such and prevented, a long-distance move can end in an early capture, game pieces that are captured are displayed during removal