Give the People What They Want

(If you get a chance, go listen to The Kinks album of the same name as this title. You won't be disappointed.)

MMOs, by necessity, are a limited slice of an invented world.

As much detail a dev team can put into a game world, there are going to be gaps. Some are massive, such as the lack of religion being prominent as a divisive element,* and some are more subtle, such as the lack of music and the arts in people's lives. 

I was thinking of this when I read Bhagpuss' post about how the Guild Wars 2 devs tried to artificially create player hubs when the players had organically established their own hubs. It's a good post and well worth reading, and as you'll see my really short TL;DR doesn't scratch the surface of its detail. I don't play GW2 enough to comment on that specific MMO, but it did give me fuel for thought concerning other MMOs.

The most prominent of MMOs, World of Warcraft, has the recurring theme of conflict between Orcs and Humans at its center. This is artificially propped up by Blizzard, even though the most popular expansions (BC, Legion, Wrath) all center around the two factions joining together against a common threat. Expansions --or portions of them-- that emphasize the conflict tend to not be as well received**. However, Blizz keeps pushing the conflict because.... It's the core of the game. Or something. Although if you asked me what the core of WoW was, it's that "Old Gods are bad and the source of all evil. HP Lovecraft rules."

Still, it also seems that Blizz attempts to do the same thing that GW2 has been guilty of, which is to create a new player hub for each expac. Or, in the case of Cataclysm, an artificial attempt to re-establish the faction capitals as the primary hubs in the game. 

It's not like ArenaNet and Blizzard are the only guilty ones here. Standing Stone has created new hubs with each expac in LOTRO, and Bioware the same in SWTOR. To an extent, I can understand the need to create central hubs in new territories, and they become the hub of activity for each expac. But at the same time there's no reason in a Fantasy or Science Fiction MMO that you can't just have a gamified way of allowing players to simply return to the hub of their choice and bounce back and forth from wherever "the front" is. 

I guess my whole point is that instead of observing what the players are doing and trying to change behavior by artificial means, why not let the players do their own thing? 

***

I do realize that there is a game out there that does just that, and it's called EVE Online, but EVE takes the "give players the latitude to do what they want" and opens up to an "anything goes" environment.

That sort of game isn't for everybody.

EVE is definitely not for the faint of heart.
From giphy.com.

 

And yet, looking over how Blizzard has implemented WoW from expac to expac, I can't help but think that Blizz has lost a lot of what made the original Vanilla (or Classic) implementation of the game so great: you can wander around and make your own way without being railroaded into a specific path. That doesn't mean that people haven't figured out optimal paths for everything --there's a reason why boosting services are so popular in Classic-- but to experience endgame content you aren't limited to a very specfic path. To experience Naxx, you don't have to have gone through AQ40, for example, and vice versa. About the only limitation those two have is that you have to have at least gotten a decent amount of T2 gear from BWL, and even then it's not a strict requirement. I'm living proof of that.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Some games, however, you can't not have various hubs. With the events of the War of the Ring as a backdrop, LOTRO can't avoid having hubs in various locales. And SWTOR has hubs on each planet you visit as a necessity, since traipsing across the galaxy is not a simple thing. But an Azeroth or Tyria? They have no such limitations. It's all up to the devs to observe the players and reinforce their preferences rather than trying to redirect them, because artificial redirection doesn't always go well.

*This is merely an observation, not an indictment. Many of the longest running conflicts over the centuries have been fueled by religion, so the absence of those types of conflicts in MMOs do tend to stand out. And as many conflicts are driven by religion, an equal or greater number use religion as an excuse for something else (such as Albigensian Crusade, which was merely an excuse of the northern French nobles to invade Languedoc in the south of France).

**Battle for Azeroth as the primary example, although the complaints about that expac are much much more than just "artificially creating conflict".

***Besides, you always have your ship to hang out in.

Roll the End Credits

 So, this happened last night....

I am NOT sleepy. Too much adrenaline.
(And my screenshots suck. This one, taken
by a fellow raider, looks much better. Don't know
how you do it, Tany. Seriously.)

I almost missed the raid due to an emergency at work, but I kept the raid lead informed of my situation as raid time approached, and because of that they kept a spot open for me when I finally got off work.

I'm not sure what I expected, but I felt that there should be End Credits scrolling or something. But we were treated to a serenade of Hey There Valhalla by the raid lead.

EtA: replaced the original with a bigger photo.

Say, Wouldn't that Hurt?

To say that gear/clothing found in many video games, particularly those in Fantasy and Science Fiction genres, emphasize form over function is a bit of an understatement. Of course, if you pick up a random pencil and paper RPG splatbook, you're likely to see pictures of PCs/NPCs wearing "impractical" gear/clothing scattered throughout the inside.

For every RPG that has art like this:

I recently acquired this. Makes
for fascinating reading, and it
looks very much like a D&D 3.0/5e lite.

 You have something like this:

A Cyberpunk RPG.

And don't get me started about how some novels depict things:

And this wasn't even the most
obnoxious of the Flandry novels.

And of course if you've ever played video games, there's a lot of fanservice designs too. You know, like the Spider-mage robe.

I'm not here to complain about that, because it is what it is. However, when I saw the artwork for BC Classic, something caught my eye.

From the WoW Classic website.

 I mean, nothing too unusual here: the oversized shoulders for all toons, the hefty bodybuilder look on the male toons, and the bustier look on the female toons...

But for the female Blood Elf, I noticed the pointed end of that bustier settled right. over. the. belly. button.

Even cloth "armor" needs some
form of basic reinforcement
to maintain that form.

It looks nice until said Blood Elf has to lean forward or bend over or something. Then that point goes right into the belly button and the gut. And that's gotta hurt.

By contrast, the female Draenei has a much more practical design (at least what we can tell):

Honestly, they look less like a bustier
and more like American Football
shoulder pads.

I'm not denying that, fashion wise, both look very nice. And comparatively speaking, not so much fan service as just a personal look. But I'd hate to cosplay that Blood Elf look solely for that pointy little reason. Probably rounding the bustier out a bit would work, or just flattening it out like the Draenei version would work too. But Blood Elves gonna Blood Elf, I guess.

Perfection Not Required

A long time ago, several years before this blog came into being, there was a seminar/discussion about writing and publishing at the Downtown library. It was free and open to the public, and hosted by several editors from Writers Digest magazine.* I'd always wanted to write Fantasy and Science Fiction**, but at the same time I didn't want to put myself out on a limb and show up as the clueless noob among a bunch of aspiring --and much younger-- writers.

My wife effectively kicked me out the door, saying that "you might as well show up and listen, because that's what you're passionate about". So I took a short jaunt to the Main Library and sat somewhere in the back while the editors presented and took questions from the audience.

The area the seminar took place in had enough chairs to easily hold 100 people, but I'd say it was about 1/3 full with about 10-20 other library patrons wandering in and out, driven by curiosity to stand in the back and listen for 10 minutes or so. What also immediately stood out was that I was very much a minority, both in gender and age, and most everybody else was more ambitious about writing than I was. Selling to a publisher wasn't my primary goal, although that wouldn't hurt one bit; my desire was to actually write a story I was proud of.

I quickly discovered that I didn't have to talk --or worse, present a writing sample-- so I could just listen and absorb what everybody had to say.

And people certainly weren't shy about the craft of writing.

Several of the women there wanted to write and publish poetry, to which my initial thought was "good luck with that". It's not that I didn't think they weren't good enough to get published, it's that poetry is such a niche market that it'd be harder to break into than publishing in general. I silently wished them luck, because I felt they were certainly going to need it.

Others played it close to the vest, like I did, but they did ask about the publishing process. And still others were interested in finding an agent and how one went about doing that.

The editors were knowledgeable, but some things --like catching lightning in a bottle-- they couldn't answer. I mean, finding the next J.K. Rowling or Stephen King is as much a crap shoot as it is an educated guess.

***

But the reason why I bring this up is that one of the editors present, the Fiction Editor for the Writer's Market annual, has since gone on to have a successful writing career of her own. I was reminded of that when I saw an ad from our local independent bookstore about a Zoom interview of her in promotion of her latest novel. Sure, being in the writing industry gave her a leg up in figuring some things out, she still had to break through on her own. Plus, another local author is always a good thing for the local arts community in general.

One piece of advice she did give out to the aspiring writers that day has continued to stick with me: a writer has to write if they want to improve. You can't expect to show up, pound out a few lines, and expect to be hailed a genius. 

For every Mozart or Prince, there are a ton of aspiring musicians who have to work their collective asses off just to be considered "average". 

Okay, I know it's not historically
accurate, but while I admire Mozart
in Amadeus I appreciate Salieri's POV.
Don't approve of his actions, however.

 

And her words have rung true for me. 

Over the years of PC's existence, I've learned a lot about how to write. Or re-write, to be honest. Taking a post and editing it before release is critical to my writing process, and one I had to accept before I could improve past a certain plateau. When I was in high school and college, I used to compose at the typewriter because I hated rewriting. That meant I'd sit there and plot out a paragraph or more ahead of time, working everything out in my head before I would type anything. Yes, I would agonize over every single word I wrote, because I didn't want to rewrite a single thing. It slowed my output down immensely, but (I thought) I didn't have to edit the result. The thing is, while I could pull that sort of feat off in high school and get good grades, in college that simply wasn't happening. My professors ate me alive until I admitted that I couldn't just create a "good enough" result one time through.

Nowadays, I can't just pound out some words and then hit "Publish". I know better. And even then, I still miss things afterward, which explains the "EtA:" on the bottom of a bunch of posts over the years. 

***

This sort of approach --trying something, revising, and trying again-- is also important in gaming. I've been reminded of that in spades on our run through Naxxramas, where the raid team hits a wall, spends time examining data and revising the approach, and eventually finding something that works. Sure, there's a lot of strategies for raid bosses already published, but you still have to tweak it to match your particular raid team and their strengths/weaknesses. Even then, you're not guaranteed victory, only a shot at it. 

But it's not only the approach, but the humility that this approach requires, is what makes or breaks a raid team. We're one of the few raid teams left on our server that is still pushing deep into Naxxramas that hasn't yet killed K'T, and what keeps us going is that we're mature enough to handle setbacks. That doesn't mean we don't get frustrated --oh boy, do we-- but what's important is to not let those frustrations overwhelm you.

I don't drink Jack Daniels, but I still found this funny.

*It's perhaps a little known item, but Writer's Digest is based out of Cincinnati, even though the parent company is located in New York City. 

**I have a copy of Isaac Asimov's Asimov on Science Fiction, a collection of his essays on writing SF, around the house somewhere. I was also inspired by Stephen King's On Writing, which interweaves a bit of his own history of learning to write along with understanding the craft of writing. Both are interesting books, and I highly recommend taking the time to find and read them.

It is Mine Now

When I discovered there was no such thing as Azeroth After Dark as referenced in yesterday's post, I decided to jump on it. 

I am now the proud (?) owner of azerothafterdark.wordpress.com. 

What I intend to do with it I have absolutely no freaking idea, but at least it won't suffer the fate that internet users in the 90s will remember with whitehouse.com. Or that time when Dick's Sporting Goods didn't own the dicks.com website.

***

Oh, and Happy St. Patrick's Day! Now you can go have a good cry first....

And then cheer yourself up with a few happy jigs and reels....

Close to the Vest My Ass

 I, uh, made an oopsie last night.

No, I didn't pull aggro*, and we were finally able to down Sapphiron. And I landed the T3 robe as well. (Cost me about all my DKP, though.)

But it was after, when a raid friend and I were chatting back and forth and the talk turned to BC that I slipped up. I'd mentioned that I was thinking about cloning Card so that a version of her could remain on a Vanilla Classic server forever, which my friend was thinking of doing too, but then my friend asked me about mains in BC. 

I admitted that I didn't know for sure what I might do, and that I might even end up switching to Horde as a main, which shocked him. I had to explain that my first two toons I leveled [to completion] in Wrath were Blood Elves, and I do know that I'm likely to create a BC Classic version of them. Whether they'll be just an alt or whether I'll make them my mains remains to be seen, however.

Oh well. If word gets around that Card is "going to the dark side", I'll have earned that.

***

Given that I got the Mage T3 robe, my current robe, the one I've dubbed the Spider-mage robe, isn't going to be on me for that much longer. Still, I really love the look and feel of it:

Azshara was empty the night I was
playing around with the look. I'm not one
to do this sort of thing while there's a crowd.

The official name of the robe is the Crystal Webbed Robe that drops off of Maexxna, and according to sixtyupgrades.com it's the second best Mage robe in Classic at the moment. ** However, the personality of this robe is something that you'd think Spider-woman or Spider-Gwen (both from the Marvel Universe) would wear. 

It just has that awesome look like something
that Ashley Eckstein would design.

 

It was while I was screwing around in Azshara with the look of the robe that I discovered that, much like the superheroes I could see wearing it, the Spider-mage robe has a dual identity.

I was wearing an orange shirt underneath the robe, but since orange looks perfect with the aesthetic I never paid it any mind. However, if you look closely at the chest of the first pic you can see where there are a few cross stitching marks where some lacing is. That got me curious, so I took off the orange shirt, and when I did I blurted out "holy shit!"

Uh.... Card?
When did you grow up so fast?

Card turned into a vixen.

Complete with backless look...

...and matching side boob and
spiderweb / fishnet pantyhose
on the arms.

Even in my dreams I wasn't expecting this.

Now, I'll freely admit that Card looks awesome in both looks, but the Spider-vixen look was truly shocking. And I'm not going to say that Blizz shouldn't have designed it this way, but as was pointed out by another friend who I showed this... transformation... to, Blizz does have a history of presenting female gear very differently than male gear. To her (and me), it was the overall lack of choice on a lot of the gear that annoyed her.***

At least with the Crystal Webbed Robe I had the choice to put an orange shirt on and turn Card into a budding superhero, rather than a femme fatale out of Azeroth After Dark.****

And yes, I'm going to keep the Spider-mage robe in my pack, just so I can put it on from time to time to hang around Stormwind or something. Maybe I should make a "vixen" look too, but I don't think I'm ready for that side of Card yet.

*Thanks to an Ignite I got to the top of the aggro stack on Thaddius, even though I'd stopped casting, and the Mage Lead was calling for a drop of Ignite. Luckily the main tank was able to taunt off me, but I didn't touch my cast bar at all until at least one other tank got past me on threat. That was an anxious 10 seconds there, let me tell you, and that was right after we'd been given a lecture about managing threat by the Raid Lead. I wish I could take credit for the aggro, but I had little to do with it. I wasn't even up high until aggro on the MT got shaky and suddenly it was one person, then a second, and then me atop the aggro stack. But we didn't wipe and we only lost one or two people on Thad total.

**The T3 Mage robe is currently best in slot.

***At least this isn't TERA or some other Korean MMO, where this look would be considered tame.

****Knowing Rule 34, Azeroth After Dark is likely a thing. But I'm stating here for the record that I'm not gonna search for it. Nope nope nope.... Okay, whew. It isn't a thing after all. Actually, I'm quite surprised.

EtA: Fixed a clarity mistake and "shirt", not "robe".

More Chum in the Water, Please

As life has gone on in a post-Naxx release world, the more I'm struck by how much the last two raids, Naxxramas and Ahn'Qiraq, shook up guilds.* While some guilds have gone on to complete Naxx and are in semi-hiatus while waiting on Burning Crusade to drop, others have gotten oh so close to finishing Naxx only to come up short. And there are those who are still trying to finish content in AQ40 to just get to the point of being able to start running Naxx.

And then there are guilds that simply don't have the personnel to get a 40-person raid on their own and have to work with other guilds to just get a shot at clearing content. 

Even within the guilds that have been raiding Naxx, all is not roses and cream. If the guild has enough personnel to have multiple 40 person raids, great. If a guild only has enough to put together one 40 person raid, then there are issues with having a bench to work with, and also keeping that bench viable. I've watched guilds have a constant level of churn trying to keep a bench at all, much less keep those last 5 spots in a raid team filled.**

All of this has me watching and waiting for the other shoe to drop.

***

When a raid team is forced to reduce from 40 to 25 (and later, from 25 to 10) there's bound to be some hurt feelings. 

I've mentioned this before, but I know that I'm not going to be part of the 25 selected to raid when our team goes through this process. For starters, Fire Mages*** aren't as dominant in raiding in BG as they are in Vanilla/Classic. Most of the 25 person raid compositions I've heard talked about for BC have mentioned about 3 Mages max, and I've even seen some raid compositions with 2 Mages. Assuming either composition, I'd be left off the 25 person raid team. On a good day, I'm 4th of the 6 Mages. Most raid days bounce around from 4th to 5th; some of it is my reaction time isn't what it once was, some of it is my lack of gear compared to the rest, and some of it is that I don't have the killer attitude to start DPS almost immediately, trusting in the tank to hold boss aggro. (I've died too many times due to pulling aggro to do that.)

So I'd be going onto either the bench or a "second" raid. 

But here's where it gets weird. When I read the TBC channels in Discord****, people are all talking about what they want to level and what spec is best, etc. etc. Nobody wants to disturb the excitement by asking the hard question: who's getting cut?

It was briefly broached in last Thursday's Molten Core run when someone (can't remember who) remarked that it was sad that with BC so close now that there are only a limited number of times left where we are all able to raid together. And then just like that, nobody said a peep about it. Maybe it was that the reality of it meant that 40% of a raid was no longer gonna be there, but perhaps people already knew where their pecking order was.

And what I expect is that raid teams will potentially fracture not along where the needs are, but where the cliques are. 

***

I've noticed that if you have people who you hang with regularly in a guild, you're going to stick around even if you may be on a raid's bench. But if you don't have that clique or general reaching out to include you in things, you're much more likely to split for greener pastures. It's only human nature after all to want to go where you're valued. And if you're in a guild but don't really know anybody, and people don't make extra efforts to reach out to you, then yeah, you're going to feel like you're not really there for any reason than to fill out a spot.

Looking back on my time in the guild I'm in --yes, the guild that has me as the only active Classic player-- I think I could have done more to play a couple of lower level alts, so I could participate with the slowly declining guild lists. Perhaps if I'd done more, the guild could have lasted longer. But then again, maybe I'm just kidding myself as I'm not only the only regular player but the only guild officer who logs in as well. Even the GM doesn't log anymore, and that says a lot.

But still, I've seen the unintentional lack of inclusion have an impact on various friends in various guilds. You join, you're excited to meet people, they're happy to see you, and then everybody goes back to their own subgroups. And then you wonder what's next. You get kind of stuck into this middle area, and it's quite easy to be present and yet not be "there".

***

So you've got a lot of dynamics in play coming into BC:

• Are you actively raiding or on the bench?
• Are you part of a raid team and/or guild subgroup that hangs out together?
• Are you part of a class that is not going to be as dominant in BC? (Or the reverse?)
• Is your guild able to put together a single 40 person raid team? Two? More? None?

All of that feeds into what's going to happen in BC when 25 person raids become the mains, with 10 person raids taking over the old ZG/AQ20 style 20 person raid. 

My belief is that while some raid teams will successfully navigate a reduction from 40 to 25, they're going to lose critical pieces because of the cliques. If your Main Tank also has quite a few friends who are going to be left off the raid team, I could easily see that Main Tank joining their friends in starting up another raid team, and maybe leaving the guild altogether. Suddenly that first raid team is in need of a Main Tank and potentially other people to fill the gaps. Did that original raid team stop raiding Naxx before a player finished Atiesh? How that player handles that disappointment is going to be telling, and could potentially fracture a raid team.

So yeah, this is gonna get crazy real fast, whether people like it or not. 

And me, I'm going to be watching and waiting to see what happens. As much as people want to not talk about it, this is going to definitely affect them, like it or not. 

As for my raid team, well, I think I know how some of this will pan out. I'm not gonna say anything, because I've intentionally kept myself out of the guild, but I've a pretty good idea what's going to happen. The real question I have is whether things will be worked out emotionally or not.

*That's setting aside guild drama the has blown up several previously well known guilds on Myzrael-US, such as Azeroth's Redemption and All Quests Matter (I was told by an ex-guildie that the name is from the Vanilla era, but was unfortunately a casualty of current events). And there are other large guilds that have had some pretty big splintering, even though the main guild has remained viable (such as Indecisive breaking away from Sunrise).

**The Guild Recruiting channel on the Myz Discord is good for watching that sort of thing, as well as the recruitment ads in the in-game LFG channel. I hardly ever --evah!-- see a guild recruitment ad in the actual Guild Recruitment in game channel.

***And Mages in general.

****And boy are there plenty on various guild Discord servers. That's how it goes when you're a pugger; you accumulate guild Discord servers like people collect autographs.

EtA: Fixed a "of" to a "or". Makes a bit more sense now.