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

mechanics

04 Feb 2012

(was this recorded anywhere?)
healing—healing someone 'tags' them for a certain time (5 sec?), regardless of how much healing was done. during this time a portion of their damage goes to you for credit in PvP. tagging more people splits your attention among them equally, while other healers joining in could also potentially reduce your share of credit for damage.

no easy way to fix the 'stealthed rogue in BG' problem without affecting either someone who is CC'd, or giving healers an incentive to tag as many people as possible to be in combat with them (as well as for all other damage users to use AoE). Ignoring this second, simply counting everyone on damage list (including credit from healing) at time of death might work, if suboptimal since it still means either tagging as many as possible (AoE) or penalizing people who are CC'd (share within a group proportional to damage/credit). no reason to increase complexity of mechanics unless 'stealthed rogue leeching points' is a problem.


however, can also be extended to PvE! use for threat with local complexity.

skipping back to tanking though, 'boss attacks damage multiple people'. restores positioning as a complex mechanic with both positive and negative possibilities, instead of the purely negative (for the group) of 'frontal AoE cone'. Only being used for certain, flagged mobs (all bosses, maybe other powerful elites as well) helps with both roleplaying and server load.

not sure of justifications for tank mitigation so that 'a dodge doesn't lead to reduced damage on other targets'... separate from [the issue of balancing] other classes' relative mitigation but if a tank is being kept alive by only one healer, then a 1% marginal decrease in incoming damage is only equal to a 1% increase in healing for that single healer..? must be compared to dps as well though, since that's ultimately the concern for raid group composition. would it make sense for parry's damage reduction to be less than 1, but even lower for larger raid sizes..? (same with block) the question becomes do lower dodge rates make roleplaying sense (or would not doing so have gameplay benefit) especially if different raid sizes provide different parry reduction values.

if parry (and block) gave lower overall mitigation as a single target vs a raid boss compared to dodge, but allowed damage splitting when adjacent to the primary target unlike when dodging an attack, would it be balanced..? a rogue using Evasion would want to stand alone to avoid diverting attacks onto anyone else (..usually) and would have no reason to stand next to another class taking damage due to lack of total split damage reduction from dodge, while a class with parry/block/absorb and higher armor would want to.

not mentioned above, higher armor would mean taking a larger portion of damage even though the total pre-mitigation damage would always be higher when split. A divergence in functionality like this would be more acceptable if success was less balanced around maximum output including highest tank avoidance/mitigation, and more about the balance between multiple situations including when the tank does not have aggro. no idea about druid tanks and dodge, maybe they would just be less effective at protecting other raid members due to dodging attacks instead of being hit by them and parry/blocking?

in which cases would a lower overall single-target mitigation rate from parry/block make up for the greater predictability of incoming damage compared to dodge? if healer mana isn't a concern when the tank is taking damage, does this mean healer threat needs to be more difficult compared to a bear tanking, or would this be balanced by damage splitting in the situations where another player took aggro? can it be balanced at all for encounters where threat isn't a problem?

parry mitigation less than 1 means that the amount of parry+block must be more than marginal dodge + absorb, so it's inherently lower variance in incoming damage... if all raid sizes have at least some reduction in effectiveness of parry/block, then average mitigation probably balanced at a certain raid size... larger raids see lower total reduction but less spikyness for parry/block tanks, while smaller raids see greater total reduction as well for parry/block tanks. since incoming damage is fundamentally limited by cast time, RNG and tank health, larger raid sizes necesarily have to shift away from primary target damage anyway... just needs to be more fun and less "everyone must be perfect" (lack of both invisible and visible carrying).

did dodging bears ever make sense. any more than parrying a dragon's attack...

summary: avoiding damage split makes 'sense' for dodge and miss. this would mostly be bad for any tanks that stack dodge (which shouldn't really be that high, ideally, anyway). however it would only be bad if the primary tank loses aggro, which depends on other mechanics. furthermore only against bosses which have damage splitting mechanic for their attacks.

it's possible to balance this by slightly penalizing/balancing for tanks with parry and block to have lower mitigation when tanking... but it means this is only balanced for certain expectations of losing aggro, and a tank which can avoid this might be better off being a dodge-based tank class. damage splitting roles could even be performed by secondary tanks. the risk from higher incoming damage variance on a dodge-based tank is similar to the risk when damage splitting, and in both cases it may not be possible to fully balance this against overall mitigation advantage for all encounters.

also see, positioning for threat and risk of pulling aggro.


back to PvP and healing:
Cataclysm PVP Feedback // aka 'too many healers and Blood DKs' (p39)
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3967948445

splitting healer attention 'credit' in PvP: more is bad compared to just focusing on high-damage players. however in PvE: more is good when aggroing is from exceeding a threshold. tentative: while a mob remembers prior threat, healing threat is only added if it affects someone who damaged the mob in the last few seconds / is the current target..?

if overall healing threat is relatively constant (or capped at an asymptote with damage being similar) this leads to the strategy of sporadic aoe heals to tag for splitting threat. optimal mechanics might depend on server load..

the other possibility was not basing healing threat on the healing done at the moment of heal, but being based on the healer having tagged that player and a share of credit for their subsequent actions. completely different model but how would it work for healing throughput..?

is it cheaper to renew a timer with every attack ('attacked mob in last 5 sec') or to do a divide operation when a heal takes place?

[tangent] getting group threat levels on a tank asymptotic to dps from other players at large group sizes can be done with faster threat decay in larger groups. threat spikes from rng can then lead to single mobs peeling away from the group.


08 Feb 2012

'chained' relationships based on logical distance of an action. Healing would be flagged as 'originating from a threatening entity' when done to a mob's current target, or possibly 'a target in the last 5 sec'. That healer would then be ranked on a second-level list along with sources of incoming damage. Healing anyone on the second-level list would generate threat, but would not lead to being placed on the second-level list.

May be possible for total healing threat to continually increase with number of mobs for which healer is generating threat. This would be a solution to two contrasting situations, one where a player tanking a single mob would occasionally do a small amount of damage to another so that a dedicated healer has their threat split between those two mobs, the other where a player damaging a single mob does enough threat to a second, weak mob to keep it aggroed while attacking the primary mob to (once again) split healing threat. (These show that prioritizing healer threat based on which mob is targeting the healed player is not a workable mechanic.)

Other possibilities for unpredictability in large groups are if 'random component to aggro' is cheap enough to be done for all mobs, and capping total threat of non-damage aoe abilities (are there even any left?) the same way aoe damage is capped.

No conclusions on balancing number of healers in a 'realistic' way... even a system that reduced effectiveness of healing as time went on would not achieve the goal well. The perception of enrage timers delimiting competence and consequences of tank death from RNG are significant; if not for these then periodic events that led to loss of group members and weren't preventable by having more healers could be used more. When balanced off of raid performance (must kill adds with certain HP, or other dps check) must take into consideration range of group performance and use mechanics with which the group can compensate for individual player skill deficits. As with other types of class stacking the tradeoff of time and effort for a greater chance of success may be acceptable if the cost is clearly visible.

A system where capped aoe damage is not done equally, but instead the closest mobs receive full damage might have gameplay benefits that justify a higher server cost (and display complexity)... for example not feeling penalized on single target dps when using an aoe spell that hits multiple. Greater threat variability and increased difficulty tanking would be a 'bonus'. Being able to aim a spell so the most important targets receive the full effect would become a component of skilled play.

One interesting mechanic used in Aion is spell cancellation from taking damage, based on the damage from the attack. A counter-stat ("Concentration") causes a linear reduction in the size of an attack for the purpose of calculating interruption but it's probably broken/imbalanced especially with the game's scaling... but it leads to a very different feeling when a healer takes aggro even without the possibility of being locked out from a spell school. It provides an immediate danger from pulling aggro on a boss (multiple interruptions leading to death) without the vicious cycle caused by a healer healing themself and generating more threat or the long-term penalty of total mana used.

Examples of PvE healing threat and AoE tanking difficulty:
- boss goes crazy (period of high risk of pulling aggro); an injured player steps away and uses a self-heal ability. For the first few seconds they are still on the 'second-level list' and generate threat from self-healing; however since they were not the boss's primary target this healing does not keep them on the second-level list and they drop off of it, and the remainder of their self-healing does not generate threat on the boss.

- a tank/healer hybrid is healing players taking damage from separate mobs when one of those mobs aggros the healer. After taking some amount of damage a specialized tank manages to recover aggro, and the healer begins to heal themself. This does not generate threat on mob A which was doing incidental damage to player A without targeting them, whom the healer did some healing to in the past few seconds; it does generate threat on mob B which is targeting player B whom the healer healed recently; and it also generates threat on mob C which recently attacked the healer. The amount of threat on each of those two mobs is not half of what it would be for a single mob, but instead an intermediate amount somewhere between half and full. After several seconds, heals to self or to the player tanking mob C would no longer generate threat on mob B [see note 1].

This is similar to what would result from "healing threat based on proportion of each mobs' total threat list with threat decay" but would be much cheaper for the server if updating timers is cheaper than several divide operations for each heal.

- a tank is attacked by twice the usual number of mobs that do half normal damage. The tank's aoe attacks (or splash threat from single-target attacks) do more total threat but significantly less than double the total amount of threat due to caps/reductions on aoe threat and damage. AoE damage from other players in the group scale similarly to the tank's threat, but faster threat decay with twice the usual mobs and unequal distribution of AoE damage with some mobs taking full damage (different for tank vs other players due to proximity to ability origin) means they are more likely to pull aggro. The healer is doing the same amount of total healing since the mobs do half normal damage, but the total amount of healing threat is increased. So the tank is doing roughly normal threat to some mobs (the closest for aoe attacks) and significantly reduced threat to other mobs for reduced average threat and higher variance; the healer is doing reduced threat per mob but the same threat to every mob, and no upper bound on the total amount of threat as the number of mobs increases for the same healing done. These curves for average tank threat vs healer threat should use complementing formulas, but the expected values of tank dps and mitigation and mob damage should mean that the healer pulling aggro is assured for large groups.

- tank is attacked by a large group; healer pulls aggro from mob A and takes damage. Tank recovers aggro. Healer continues to heal tank and is healed by hybrid dpser; this generates aggro only on mob A, which has also become more sensitive to aggro (threat decay) due to switching targets, and so hybrid dpser pulls aggro on mob A. ...well this doesn't work, since the healer would be on the 'second-level list' for all mobs, although on first list only for mob A (and hybrid dsper is already on second-level list of mob A due to using aoe attacks)... but say if hybrid dpser had been attacking something else, then they would have generated a small amount of healing threat on mob A and as a result... not pulled aggro. So this is more a 'threat decay' thing, while the purpose of first and second-level 'threatening target' lists (separate from current threat amounts list) would be only to cause mobs to see healers as 'threatening' in some cases without the healer needing to cause damage and without making the healer permanently threatening by self-healing and renewing that threatening status.

Example of that last: player A is tanking mob A away from the boss. Player A periodically damages the boss to maintain some uptime on their second-level list, so when healed the healing threat is split between mob A and the boss (although closer to full than half). This is fine and intended use of mechanics.

However, healer pulls aggro on mob A from healing player A despite the reduction of healing threat from healing mob A's damage. Healer takes some damage from mob A before player A recovers aggro. They need to heal themself at this point, and will generate less threat on mob A if they can get on another mob's list of 'threatening targets'. They can either... 1) cast a quick spell on the boss, or 2) throw a quick heal on the boss's current target, while still healing player A, and then heal themself with some healing threat being split with the boss instead of going to mob A. This reduces the chance of pulling aggro from mob A again. While if simply attacking a mob put you on their first list (instead of being targeted by that mob), then player A would already be on the boss's first list, the healer would be on their second list from healing player A, and healing threat from self heals would be split between mob A and the boss with no action necessary on the part of the healer, lowering their skill cap. It would also mean that either you would be penalized for self-healing just before dropping off the first list (if you could normally avoid going from first to second list), or... hmm.. it would mean that a healer who was trying to act as a threat transfer agent for another healer would need to occasionally attack the boss (which would put them on the first list) instead of just healing other players (second list)... anyway maybe there aren't any reasons it would need to be "being targeted puts you on first list" instead of "healing puts you in a status where being healed doesn't put that healer in the same state"... so troublesome.~ If you were a dragon, would you care about all of this?


Right, so trying that again. The point of giving more total threat as the number of mobs increases is to try to balance it so the total risk remains roughly the same. This is only possible if there's a non-zero amount of risk despite a decrease in threat, so that the lowered risk on the 'primary' mob to which the threat would normally go without unnatural casting patterns is balanced by increased risk on the mobs to which threat is being split. Since such a casting pattern already has a cost in attention and time compared to what would be necessary if threat weren't an issue, the risk on the secondary target doesn't have to be as much as the decrease in risk on the primary target but it does still need to exist for actions in the immediate temporal continuum despite a lack of activity earlier in the encounter (so threat decay).

The purpose of special treatment for heals on a mob's current target, on the other hand, is as a heuristic for the 'importance' of those heals and consequently to denote the attention the mob pays to that healer. This is because a tagging system, while it may simplify the information or choices presented to a player and reduce server resource costs, does not give any other way of distinguishing large healing throughput.

That's almost convincing. Since this additional layer of complexity would only have any effect in the following situation: boss attacks a target. That target is healed by a healer. That healer takes damage, but not because the boss directly attacked them; it's incidental damage or from another mob. Then they heal themself or are healed by someone else (less likely). Result: this healing threat goes to the boss. Almost ask why so much focus on healing but this entire system is about healing so... one consideration is someone might feel it's too risky to do any damage at all to a boss if trying to reduce threat from self-healing, so treating healing on a mob's current target differently causes some healers to be already tagged to generate threat on self heals, while giving other healers a choice between the two distinct situations of either avoiding directly attacking the boss and therefore demonstrating a sort of deference which leads to no threat on the boss when self healing damage from whatever source, or using whatever abilities are efficient to use in that spec to damage the boss and risk pulling aggro when self healing.

In other words, in the rare situation of healing someone who hasn't directly damaged any mob in the past few seconds (which is usually themself or another healer), it would normally be desirable for that heal to either generate threat on no mobs or on as many as possible. Proper mechanics will cause that number to be one or higher in at least some cases, for the reason that a threat mechanic exists at all. When threat is a problem and a healer can't just assume that they've already attracted the attention of all mobs over the course of the fight through their previous actions, then it makes sense to keep casting patterns that maximize that number from feeling necessary by also having the possibility that it could be zero.

Summary: no 'first-level list', only a current target. Healing that player would generate threat on the boss, but it would seem there are gameplay and roleplaying advantages to not requiring players to be on the 'threatening targets' list despite being attacked. A dps player might simply try to escape without attacking or trying to tank, and after losing aggro could be safely healed after less than the usual amount of time has elapsed; the more unusual case is a healer who generates threat from healing players other than the primary target, and after pulling aggro refrains from healing themself at all.

[note 1] — a careful reading of the above text reveals a hidden assumption: that a healer being on a mob's 'second-level list' would cause all healing they do to have its threat split with that mob. In fact, this sentence, "May be possible for total healing threat to continually increase with number of mobs for which healer is generating threat" was originally something like "...number of entities on the second-level list". That seemed to be a mistake since it didn't make sense and was corrected, but it may in fact have resulted from that assumption about threat. This might not be a bad way to do it, if threat is split so the total amount of threat increases when split. It would mean that healing threat depends not only on the recent actions of the target of healing, but also on the recent actions of the healer and it would give a significance to a healer being on the 'second-level list' that otherwise isn't really present. The significance of a mob's current target, then, would be that healing that player would be the only way for a healer to get on the second-level list other than being targeted by that mob... or attacking that mob, I guess...

since right now healers can pretty much assume they're already on every mob's aggro list (at least the boss at all times) I think it was an understandable assumption to make..!~ When talking about it though, it's possible to forget that being on the 'second-level list' would only last for a few seconds and in many cases everyone you healed (other than self heals) would already be on it so your healing threat would already be going to the boss. This tagging system would be meant for more complex situations, for the specific purpose of causing healing threat to go to as few mobs as possible (and keeping it high even in the cases where it's being split). Yes I think it makes sense now.

letters

shape

19 Apr 2011 4:20am

(7)
Shape of mind, adapt, react, chaos, persist, social, predict

3 May 2011
incentive (subset)

accumulation・separation[・enforcement], barriers (linking, effects of diversified experiences and sampling confidence)

vs scope of action..? local resolution at points of contact

※ benefits and dangers of 'level 0' thinking (aka "positive disintegration"); analogy to protein folding and directing vectors with limited information.

fate 12 May 2011

individual vs group ethics

stories for undirected minds to show that something can be done
stories for directed minds to show how it is done, or in some cases the reason it is not achieved

*
speech conveys expectations
possibility of being wrong

question 21 Aug 2011

progress is made by eliminating ideological sources of conflict

or

progress is made by eliminating physical sources of conflict

(bonus)
reflections 07 Dec 2011

. . .
"priorities"

society: fix economic problems, *then* reduce the working week

individual: accomplish personal goals, *then* address society's problems

King

"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"

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

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

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

"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

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

. . . 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

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

"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

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"

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