How Much of Raiding is Psychology?

The lions sing and the hills take flight
The moon by day, and the sun by night
Blind woman, deaf man, jackdaw fool
Let the Lord of Chaos rule!
--From Lord of Chaos by Robert Jordan

My Questing Buddy broached the topic again the other day.

She asked me if I was interested in raiding.

"Somehow I don't think your guild is at a loss for raiders," I replied. Her guild may not be at the top of the pyramid, but for the time they raid (evening Pacific Time, so their 8 PM start is 11 PM here) they're likely one of the top guilds on our Anniversary server. In my experience, top guilds have no problems getting recruits.

Well, my Questing Buddy informed me they have three open slots right now: Shaman, Mage, and Paladin. And, ironically enough, all of whom I had gotten to max level. 

"Even if I wanted to, it would take a lot to get even one of my toons geared enough to not be a carry, and I absolutely refuse to be carried," I replied to the feeler. "And by the time I got geared enough, you'd be on to the Sunwell."*

"Can you blame me for trying?" she responded.

"No, that's fine. It's also that my toons aren't even close to geared for Karazhan let alone any other raids, and I'd have to get pre-raid gear just to not be a carry in that place."

***

I decided to change the topic, and I at least thought it polite to ask how the new raids went with her guild. Those were the first raids that back in 2022 I'd never participated in, because I had to quit progression raiding a week before those raids were unlocked. 

"We're stuck on the same part we were back then," my Questing Buddy replied.

Huh. I wasn't expecting that. "Are you being caught by the same problem that you don't have enough Shamans [in the raid]?"**

"Yes," she replied. She also informed me that people didn't know where to stand and it was becoming impossible for her to heal the tank while everybody else was close by. "We got detailed instructions with [the guild we raided with in 2022] but here it was 'everybody spread out' and people still clumped together."

Oof. Yeah, that hurts. "I figured that since you'd blasted through everything else up to now that this wasn't going to be a problem."

The conversation continued quite a bit, with me hearing some of the same complaints she had back in 2022, and I decided that some things about certain raids never change. Good thing I'm not involved, or it would likely drive me nuts.

***

On reflection, that does bring up an interesting thought about the psychology behind MMO raids and other associated group content: do we all end up falling for the same traps on our first instincts that we then have to overcome by explicit training?

If the idea is to spread out, why do people end up clumping together anyway? Do they all run to the same places? 

Do people always have the same initial reaction to specific raid mechanics, and do MMO design teams make use of those psychological tendencies when designing that content?

I have to think that devs do make use of those psychological tendencies, whether explicitly or not, simply because forcing a player to go against their initial reaction is a more powerful mechanic than just about any other actual mechanic you can throw at a person. Sure, add-ons such as Deadly Boss Mods can give you a warning as to an incoming mechanic, which smooths out the initial reaction, but if you're not using DBM (or aren't allowed to, given your specific MMO) you're pretty much on your own to wrestle with your psychological tendencies. 

The thing is, you can eventually overcome your tendencies if you work hard at it, in as much the same way you can overcome your biases in other areas. Yeah, it's not easy, and I know I have a hard time overcoming my own biases that I grew up with, but I've found in the end that it's worth it to make the effort. As in real life, overcoming your raiding tendencies makes the victory sweeter.

***

There's still one thing that does make me wonder: if everything in group content is readily available on YouTube or TikTok, how does an encounter designer compensate?

Chaos, that's how.

If a boss gets to a special mechanic portion of the fight, they shouldn't telegraph what mechanic they're going to execute. The boss perform should instead perform the exact the exact same way every time ("Let me show you a taste of my power!" or some other thing) but then randomly pick one of, oh, 12 to 15 mechanics to utilize. If the boss does the same thing every time, the initial reaction can be easily overcome to create new psychological tendencies. If, however, you simply don't know what's coming that wreaks havoc with people who like steady, predictable mechanics. Sure, you can just weather the storm, but you pretty much have to at that point. 

Another possibility is to do what's always done, lead with an intro that goes into a specific mechanic as is defined in most boss fights, but have a 30% chance that you get a completely different mechanic instead. "What, you thought you knew me? Guess again!" would make a good tagline to go with that.

These are just starting points, because I doubt that the average player on the Anniversary servers really wants any extra challenges than what's there already. Sure, there are those who push the envelope and there are the speedrunners, but between where my Questing Buddy is and where I am lies the average player, and they really don't need any extra challenges right now.

So, maybe we don't tell my Questing Buddy about these suggestions, okay?

*Sunwell Plateau is the last raid in The Burning Crusade. The second last progression raid tier, with the Battle for Mount Hyjal and Black Temple raids, dropped just the other day.

**Apparently there's a mechanic in a boss fight in the Mount Hyjal raid that pretty much requires you to have a Shaman per 5 person group within the overall raid of 25. For those not in the know, an entire raid is broken down internally into 5 person groups, so a 25 person raid has 5 groups of 5 people each. A 10 person raid has 2 groups of 5 people each. So... a Shaman's totems only work within the group they're part of, not raid-wide. That means that because a shaman's totem is used to counter the boss mechanic, you have to have a shaman per group, so in a 25 person raid you need 5 Shamans.

#Blaugust2026

Me and My Big Mouth

Thursday night I thought the monitor was "back to normal", and so I wrote as much and set it to post on Friday at 6 AM EST.

Then Friday dawned, and after I took care of my overnight work emails, I turned on my PC to play some music and got up to go make coffee. When I came back, the screen was blank.

Again.

Okay, I've seen this one before. I unplugged the monitor, plugged in the old one, and sure enough there was a picture there. I then waited while I took care of some more work (including a few meetings), and tried plugging the power cord and HDMI back into the monitor and turning it back on.

Unlike last time, no dice.

Well, crap.

It was at that point I saw the coax budget for my outside antenna sprout wings and fly away. I took a short break from work, punched up the Microcenter website, and quickly scanned monitors that fit the size I needed. I found a couple of potential options but really struck out on monitor reviews online. When most of the so-called "reviews" looked like they were generated by a couple of prompts from an LLM, I kind of gave up and went to Microcenter over lunch to talk to the staff. 

An hour later and a very nice chat with one of the staff later and I was home with a new Samsung monitor. Yes, it's a "gaming monitor", but it's not one of these $1000 4K gaming monitors.* I just wanted something that is an equivalent of what I had bought 5 years ago, and that was merely entry level gaming stuff, just a bit larger than the monitors I've used in the past. 

So, here's hoping that this thing lasts at least 5 years. It's not like I'm pushing it to the limit or anything, since my hand-eye coordination isn't what it once was, so games with a high dexterity requirement (which also tend to be the ones with the most advanced graphics) are pretty much off the table for me. That makes my gaming requirements modest enough to keep my costs low. Thank goodness.

Now, I have to get used to more vibrant colors than what I've had before, because these newer monitors have better HDR than what I had on my old monitor.

*Far from it, to be honest. Oh, those $1000 monitors looked pretty, but I have neither the money nor the space for one of those. 

#Blaugust2026

A Brief Moment of Panic

Ever have that sudden nightmare that you wake up from and go "Whew!"

Yeah, I had one of those while I was awake.

Last night I took a break from puttering around on the PC and got up for a bio break. I came back, and... the monitor didn't.

Restarted the monitor, and no dice.

"Okay," I thought, "the PC is in a hung state. No big deal. I'll reboot it."

After rebooting, I heard the telltale Windows startup tones, but... still nothing on the screen.

So I shut down everything and waited a minute, then tried again.

Still nothing.

I was beginning to panic, because I've seen what graphics cards cost these days, and if it was the graphics card that was gonna hurt. A LOT.

Stepping back, I decided to go ahead and lug up an old monitor that doesn't even do 1080i (it does 1024x768) but does have an HDMI port, turned it on, and then plugged in the HDMI output from the PC.

Voila! A screen!

Okay, so it was the monitor, not the graphics card. Before I began going down the rabbit hole of pricing out 32" curved monitors as a direct replacement for my current one, I decided to unplug it and let it be for a good 15 minutes. In the meantime I began perusing prices at Microcenter, and for my needs the monitor was going to cost between $200 - $300. It was doable, but obviously something in my monthly budget would have to be pushed out until October.

But first, let's try the monitor once more.

I plugged in the HDMI cable, then the power brick, and...

Whew. At least I don't have to go running to the store tomorrow at lunch.

#Blaugust2026

If You Can't Beat 'Em

I have been going through AI training the past few days. While it's also going on at work, I've been doing some stuff on the side for the better part of a week in addition to whatever I have to take for my employer. 

For the record, I'm not going to comment on anything that goes on at work, as that's neither the point of the blog nor is it appropriate for discussion in a social context. Therefore, I'm going to stick with what I've discovered during my personal explorations and learning while on my home PC, typically late in the evening.

For starters, here's the first thing I asked of OpenAI's ChatGPT when I got the chance:

This is OpenAI's ChatGPT's response to my prompt:
"what is the parallel context blog about". Interesting that
TTRPGs got top billing, but not bad. Definitely
better than an average Google search for PC.

(You knew that was coming, right? I mean, if Google can't find PC, what does ChatGPT say? Just as long as "What does the ChatGPT say?" doesn't end in "The ChatGPT says 'Moooo....'", I suppose.)

The first thing I realized is that you have to approach LLMs such as Chat GPT and Claude like a logic puzzle, or maybe a better approach is that of a programmer. You have to be specific enough and yet frame the query in such a way that the LLM knows how to proceed. 

This is Anthropic's Claude response to my prompt: "what
is the parallel context blog about". Note that Claude asked
a clarifying question that ChatGPT did not ask. And before
you yourself ask, I performed both queries on the two LLMs
within a 1/2 hour of each other.

This is Claude's response after I selected the proper
answer, which was Option #2.

***

The second thing, and to be honest it's the one that bothers me the most, is that when writing queries you have to explicitly tell an LLM that it's okay to say "I don't know". Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but I'd expect any LLM to state that up front if it didn't know something, not have to explicitly TELL the thing that it's fine to say "I don't know". To me, that seems to be such a fundamental flaw that I really have to wonder what the devs were thinking when they didn't build pure honesty into these LLMs from the beginning. 

If anything, it should be Law Zero before the rest of Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics come into play:

A robot must always speak accurately, and if a robot does not know the answer to a query posed of it a robot should respond with "I don't know the answer given the data provided."

For reference, here's the actual Three Laws that Isaac came up with back in the 1940s*: 

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

***

The third thing is a corollary to the first two, and that's the old adage "Trust But Verify." 

It's pretty much a given whenever someone --especially a salesperson, an executive, or a politician-- opens their mouth to assert something you go and check it, but the way LLMs are designed lend a certain amount of authority to their statements that humans can instantly warm up to, no matter if the statements are wildly inaccurate. 

That feeling of trust that you build out of an LLM is an emotional response, and that is a problem. When you start to trust the LLM, you make mistakes and stop verifying results. That's a pretty bad headspace to be in, because you will get burned. And if you're using that for work or to manage relationships, far more people will get burned too. 

And that's not even counting the potential to have a romantic emotive response to an LLM. This isn't the movie Her or even one of Asimov's robot stories, but real life. But even a short conversation with an LLM can easily show how seductive that is. 

Here's a snippet from a conversation I had with Claude about inspiration. 

NOTE: the "Ha" in my prompt was caused by Claude acknowledging my starting up the app by stating "You're up late tonight." Obviously Claude doesn't know my sleeping habits...

As you can see, Claude not only provided information in a bullet point style, it also presented things in a conversational way; this is the sort of conversation you'd expect at a coffee house or a bookstore in the evening. While the conversation itself is pleasant, it's also friendly in a sort of way that lets your guard down when you ought to have it up for verification purposes. 

It was in that moment I instantly realized the seductive appeal of becoming emotionally attached to an LLM.

"Holy Shit!" I blurted out. Thankfully this was late at night when my wife had gone to bed or I'd have to explain myself. 

***

In the end, I intend to keep moving forward, but I have to remain vigilant to the potential pitfalls here. LLMs can be useful tools, but we shouldn't assign more to them than what they already are. This might be self-evident, but you'd be surprised at what might happen if you're not paying attention.

*Yes, I know, I Robot came out in 1950, but it was comprised of short stories that Isaac wrote in the years prior to that. In the case of the Three Laws, Isaac created them for the story Runaround, which originally was published in 1942. I perused a recent printing of I, Robot at a bookstore and discovered that the references to the original short stories had been removed in the information. Bad move on the publisher's part, if you ask me.

Here's my copy from the 80s.
I originally read a copy from the library,
so that's why my copy is still in great shape.

#Blaugust2026

The Girl from Sevier County

Everyone I know goes away in the end.

--from Hurt by Nine Inch Nails (and Johnny Cash)

I knew this day would come, but it still was a bit of a shock.

Dolly Parton died yesterday at the age of 80.

Here's a message from the family:

I will not say I'm a fan of Country Music; to the contrary, if there's one music I tend to dislike in general, it's Country. Of course there are exceptions, such as some Kenny Rogers songs, but by and large the biggest exception was for Dolly Parton. 

She was something else. I'd call her a force of nature, but when people typically think of that they think of people who went through life like a tornado, wreaking chaos and destruction in their wake. Dolly was most definitely not that. Born into poverty, she rose up to be the person she became, and yet she never forgot where she came from. 

People born outside the US may have absolutely no idea of the impact Dolly had on reading. Through her Dolly Parton's Imagination Library* that she founded in 1995, she put books in the hands of millions of children. The Imagination Library was a book gifting program that mailed a book per month to children from birth through age 5 completely free of charge. Dolly initially focused on her home of Sevier County, Tennessee, but the program quickly expanded beyond that nationally, and then later internationally to include Canada, the UK, Ireland, and Australia. 

The thing that made this endeavor work was that the gifting was completely unconditional: it was open to all children regardless of family income. Dolly just wanted children to read, to have the chance to succeed in life. 

***

I grew up in the late 70s to early 80s, which coincided with Dolly Parton's rise to superstardom on the pop charts. So yes, I was quite familiar with Dolly. And yes, hitting puberty in the early 80s meant that of course I knew all about Dolly's most famous assets. If you were a boy of that age at that time, there was no way to not know about them.

From Know Your Meme.

Dolly, of course, played up on that quite a bit. 

From The Chive.

Still, she had undeniable talent beyond her physical assets. She was a great songwriter and singer, and on one fateful day back in 1972, she wrote both Jolene and I Will Always Love You. The former is always tied to Dolly, and the latter was re-recorded by Whitney Houston and became a complete smash in 1992.

From iFunny.co.

And that's not even counting Nine to Five or her duet with Kenny Rogers, Islands in the Stream.

***

Dolly was one of those people who was beloved by everybody. I don't think I've ever heard someone say a bad thing about Dolly Parton, and that's saying something. 

Farewell, Dolly. You had a much greater impact than you may have ever realized.

*The website is understandably swamped right now, so don't be surprised if you have issues accessing it.

#Blaugust2026

The Bastards Won

I never really thought I'd ever get to the point when playing an MMO that I would simply not care about the story. Back in 2010, I was shocked when some of the guildies I knew said that once Arthas was dead they didn't really care what happened next. We were on the cusp of Cataclysm, and I'd bought so completely into the narrative of the story that I was leveling two toons --one for each faction-- with the express intention of exploring the story from both sides. 

How did I go from that level of dedication to now, where I really don't care about the story in any of the MMOs I've played over the past 6 years?

There. I finally admitted it. 

I'd been dancing around this realization since at least 2019 when I explored Vanilla WoW Classic and discovered there was no overarching story to Vanilla. Sure, there were some questlines that were pretty epic in scope, but beyond that there wasn't a Main Story that everybody had to follow. No Shadows of Angmar for LOTRO, no OG three faction story in ESO, no vanilla SWTOR story (and class story), no nothing.

And I discovered I liked that lack of story more than I ever thought I would. 

That's not to say that I didn't think the original SWTOR stories were bad --they were awesome-- or that Shadows of Angmar was epic --it was-- but as time has gone on and I've seen expansion after expansion presented to the player base, I've become incredibly jaded. 

It reminds me of how a band pays their dues by playing in clubs, working out songs through endless rehearsals, and finally gets signed to an album deal and releases their first album. That's great, but then they have to turn around and put out another album that doesn't have the years of polish that the first album did, and frequently that second album turns out to be a bit of a dud. If the band is lucky, they land on their feet and figure out a way to write songs and keep the grind going, but otherwise they're destined for the bargain bin by the third album. 

Nothing that the development team has put out after the initial release seems to meet the quality, story-wise, of that original Vanilla release. Sometimes they come close, which is me throwing a bone to the World of Warcraft Legion fans out there who assure me that the expansion was great, but almost every other MMO out there doesn't reach that initial high point. 

"I don't care what they're yapping about," one player once told me in a dungeon in SWTOR, "I'm here to kill things."

"And get the loot," another player added.

That made me more than a bit sad, because I thought they were missing the point of the dungeon. But I decided that you can't please everybody, so just focus on those who do enjoy what the devs created. 

And here I am now, 15 years later, so jaded with modern MMO stories that I've discovered at this point it's better to simply not care. 

***

Before someone says that the stories have all "gone woke" and that's the problem, that ain't it. That's akin to arguing that the OG Star Trek didn't have a social and political angle to it.* What I complain about is twofold: the feeling that the stories were written by committee, and the belief that for an MMO story to work, it has to consistently be bigger, badder, and the stakes more earth shattering that what came before. 

While I don't have any proof that a lot of the more recent MMO stories were written by committee, I've been involved with enough committees at work and at college that I know how they operate. They try to smooth off the rough edges, build consensus, and remove problematic content. All of these are good endeavors to strive for, but the problem is that what each of those means to the individuals in a committee is quite different. Arriving at a consensus, therefore, means less taking a scalpel to a proposal and more akin to taking a hatchet instead. That doesn't mean I want edgier stuff, I just want stuff that has a singular point of view and a single voice presented as the narrative. 

But you know what committees also don't do? They frequently don't present a case where you have something --or someone in the case of a story-- that you can identify with and root for.

Have you ever done a side quest chain that is really satisfying and has someone you can cheer for and identify with? That's because that side quest was likely written by a single person in charge of a questline or three for a specific zone. The NPCs in the quest chain were people you could empathize with and share a common bond with because they were written with that in mind. There is no main storyline about the "Fate of the World" weighing them down, so their admittedly smaller concerns are more important to them. I know that I have absolutely nothing in common with people who occupy the C-Suite or the places of power in government, so there's absolutely nothing relatable to me with their story. But the guy who cuts my hair, or the Dad I talk to while standing in line at the creamy whip** down the street? That guy I can relate to. I'm not going to be able to relate to a Prince, or a King, or The Head of the Conclave of Wizards, or any other sort of Grand Poobah, because I am not them, and their troubles are not mine.

The other problem, the constant need to go bigger than the previous expansion, is one I've harped on before. I was actually thinking the other day that at least Blizzard tried to not top "Defeating The Afterlife" of Shadowlands when Dragonflight was released, and I do applaud them for that, but then I stopped and went "Huh... When is it that the most powerful beings on Azeroth are considered a downgrade for a storyline?" That is the reality we're talking about with the Dragon Aspects as the central point of the expansion, that their expansion is not quite so over-the-top world ending as just about every other expansion with the exception of, uh... maybe Mists and Warlords?

***

Okay, I've gotten that out of my system. Can I still enjoy an MMO and ignore the story? Yes, I can. I mean, I do fish a bit...

But seriously, I can do it. I can hold my nose in the same way when I accept a quest I personally loathe and then go and do whatever needs doing. 

If I can skip a cutscene, so much the better. If I can't, I'll simply get up and walk away until the cutscene is over. 

I can't even say "Don't let the bastards win" because in reality the bastards already won. I have become like them.

*Free Hint: The original Star Trek did have a LOT to say about society and the politics of our time. If you can't see it, then you're not watching the same show I did.

**It's a Midwestern thing. Although in Wisconsin you get Frozen Custard, in the Cincinnati area you have "Creamy Whip" or "Soft Serve" places. They operate during the Spring, Summer, and the Early Fall months, and they sell various forms of soft serve ice cream. Payment is typically cash only. Some sell burgers and hot dogs in addition to ice cream, but ice cream is the main draw. For the record, one of our favorites is Putz' Creamy Whip:

From Yelp on August 10, 2026.

#Blaugust2026

Meme Monday: Travelling Memes

This past week I found myself on the road a bit. One day I travelled up to Lafayette, Indiana* to me my oldest. Lafayette is right about the halfway point between Milwaukee and Cincinnati, so meeting there for an afternoon is kind of feasible. This past Saturday, of course, I was down in Louisville with my in-laws and my youngest.

And a Mooch.

So, in honor of that travelling, I figured I'd create a Meme Monday out of it.

Uh, no. Traffic says otherwise.
And nice misspelling too. From Pinterest.

It's all relative. I mean, I went through
Indiana on I-74 and I-65, so yeah.
But if I head east from Cincinnati on
US-32, you hit the Appalachian Mountains
before you know it. From Reddit.

I've honestly wondered if Blizz wanted to sell
you on purchasing flying because the automated
flightpaths were so bad. From Facebook.

Then again, just remember that travelling in an
MMO is where the devs want you to go. Not where
you actually WANT to go. From Reddit.

Okay, I laughed. From Pinterest.

And sometimes the journey is almost mandatory.
From Instagram.

*Yes, Purdue University is right next door in West Lafayette.

#Blaugust2026