Ascension of Female Characters in WoW

This is a short post, and just reflects an idea I had on my long drive back home last night.

In light of the recent comments about the lack of female protagonists, it occurred to me that in the next expansion, Blizzard is primed to take advantage of this opening.  I’ve commented on female characters before, and almost lamented their status. Let’s consider this possibility, though:

Alliance side Jaina Proudmoore is already shaping up to be Varian Wrynn’s primary foil.  In addition, Moira Thaurissan seems to be ascendant as the de facto leader of the dwarven coalition, and of course Tyrande still leads what is likely the second most powerful force within the alliance.  Female characters - and powerful ones - abound within the alliance.  There’s a good case to be made that the alliance has achieved gender parity in its leaders.

Horde side is trickier to predict, perhaps because I don’t play horde, but I’m hoping someone who does can at least confirm this as a reasonable possibility.  The game seems to be setting up Vol’jin as the new Warchief. Like Wrynn, Vol’jin needs a foil among the horde and who better to provide it than Sylvanas?  Like Tyrande she is the leader of what I see to be the second most powerful faction.  There has been established a built-in conflict between her and the other Horde leaders. While I am less confident in this, I believe Blizzard could very easily elevate Sylvanas’s stature to be equal to Vol’jin.

And finally there is the question of the villain of the expansion.  Three of the four expansions have been defined by the villains - Illidan, Arthas and Deathwing - so in many ways the role and choice of the villain is more important than the status of the leaders of the alliance. The great thing, in terms of gender parity with characters, is that there is one villain out there who is female who is the one lore figure that would seem to make sense as a villain.

That is, of course, Azshara.

I would love to have an expansion with Azshara as the villain.  I think she could be a tremendously interesting character and I also think that she already has the sort of power that would threaten both the alliance and the horde.  In fact, I am having trouble thinking of any lore character on Azeroth that would fit that description, although admittedly it is morning and I am kind of sleepy.

To sum up: there’s a possibility that several prominent leaders of the alliance will be female, that the primary foil for the horde leader will be female, and that the person or being defining the expansion itself will be female.

I think that would be great.

Looking For Trouble

One of the tangents that has split off in my thinking about the Flex raiding system are the LFD and LFR systems and the effect they have had on the Warcraft experience.

First, LFD, which might be the trickier bit of the two.  LFD was released with patch 3.3, in December 2009. It would be remiss of me to not admit that at the time I felt it to be tremendously useful.  Running dungeons no longer required a party of five!  You could just queue and get matched up. Yes, some people I ran into were idiots, but most of the time (I’d estimate about 80%), people were good and it was a good experience. Some people lamented at the time that LFD might destroy the social aspect of WoW (alas, I couldn’t find any links in the ten minutes I looked for them), but the general response to that was either: 1) You’re nuts, or 2) Maybe, but this is so darned useful that we should give it a shot.

At the time, WoW had 11.5 million subscribers (a PDF, skip to the page on Blizzard Highlights).  It was without question an enormously successful game.  Over the next year that figure rose slightly, peaking at 12.0 million in December 2010 concurrently with the release of the Cataclysm expansion.  Since then subscription numbers have more or less fallen steadily (with the exception of a slight uptick for the MoP release) to the latest announced figure of 8.3 million in March 2013.

Why do I bring the subscriber numbers up?  Because they are, IMO, the one statistic that truly matters in so far as judging the effect of a feature on players.  The subscriber totals are consistent with the notion that LFD provided a great deal of short term benefits but at the long term cost of taking social aspects away from the game.  You could claim otherwise, that LFD had a positive effect and everything would be even worse without it, but such an argument would be without evidence. Subscriber totals have slipped since Cataclysm and, as I noted before, a lot of Cataclysms changes were to de-emphasize groups in general for the purpose of making single-player play easier.

There is a cost to LFD.  With LFD, there is the option to simply jump into queue and find a dungeon group.  Even if you were inclined to try to form a full group, those efforts would be hindered because everyone else had the same option to jump into LFD and may have done so already before you had the opportunity to ask. Moreover, Blizzard provided incentives to use LFD above and beyond what you could get with a full group - your stats were higher if you queued alone, and if you could play as a tank or a healer, you often were rewarded with a goodie bag at the end of the run containing items that were fun and a lot of people valued.

There is no question to my mind that these incentives hurt the game in two ways.  First, because one had less incentive to form a full group and because it was more difficult to do so, people were less likely to form the social bonds that led to friendships within the game and further social opportunities.  Secondly, because there was no reason to care about the character development of the random people in LFD you would never see again, the game fostered a selfish attitude where getting loot for yourself was the only concern.

LFD served to dehumanize the people in the groups one ran dungeons with.  Think about it for a moment: what proportion of people in your LFD experience passed the Turing Test? My sense is that only a minority did (and a significant portion of that minority did because no one would develop a machine that would act that stupidly).

It’s my opinion that LFD has been a net detriment to the game. The articles that warned that LFD would destroy the social aspect of WoW were prescient - although admittedly they might have been hyperbolic. I don’t think the social aspect of WoW has been destroyed. I do think it’s been damaged.

LFD is obviously not going anywhere and a call for it to be removed is generally an extreme position taken for the purpose of presenting an argument. I think that it can be tweaked in many ways to better encourage people to actually find other people to run with. The bonuses for running LFD rather than getting a full group could be removed. Blizzard could offer better rewards for full groups, whether that’s better gear or more valor points or goodie bags.

The upshot is that I think LFD would be fine if there were enough incentives not to use it such that when a person had time to do so, he or she would try to put together a full group.  Right now that isn’t the case and the network effects of that change have made getting a full group far too difficult.

And now onto LFR.

I will make no secret of my disdain for LFR. Unlike LFD, the encounters in LFR have been dumbed down so much as to not provide meaningful interesting challenges to minimally functional groups. (Durumu necessitates the qualifier “interesting”; it certainly provides a challenge but it’s one that is far more frustrating than interesting.)  The presence of twenty-four other people encourages loafing and the lack of interest in seeing so many of them advance encourages being a jerk in LFR.  The great majority of people who I run LFR with do so in order to get tier gear or legendary quest items and would never touch it otherwise.  (I did have one person tell me that she liked LFR except for the assholes, which is kind of like saying you like pancakes except for the carbohydrates.)

Unlike LFD, I really do want LFR to go away.  This is not an extreme position taken for the purpose of presenting an argument. This is really how I feel.

I think there are a lot of people who do LFR because they want to see the content of raids but for some reason aren’t able to actually raid. I think one of the best changes in Wrath was how Blizzard made raiding accessible by eliminating attunement requirements and providing raid ready gear at each tier through valor rewards that could be earned in dungeons. I

think that LFR is an extremely poor substitute for actual raiding. LFR is representative of actual raiding experience in the same way that driving a piece of junk car is representative of driving a luxury sedan. There are technical similarities but the experience is so different as to make the comparison silly. I fear that there are a lot of people who try LFR and are so put off by it that they don’t try actual raiding. I fear that there are a lot of people who think LFR is good enough and despite being able to form the social relationships necessary to get into a normal raid, don’t because they view LFR as an acceptable substitute.

That’s why I want LFR to go away. I think if it went away the pool of people who would want to raid normals would increase significantly. I also think having those people around would make the game more fun.

It’s my hope that Blizzard provides enough incentive to run the Flex Raiding system that an overwhelming number of people will choose it - even if they have to form groups with people they don’t already know - over the current version of LFR.

It is also my hope that there could be something like Flex that would do the same thing for LFD - not to eliminate LFD entirely, but to decrease its use to the point where it doesn’t hinder the building of social relationships.

/flex

Almost a day has passed and there has been a lot of talk about the newly announced “Flex” raid system in 5.4.  If you’ve for some reason been away from the internet for the last 20 hours or so and have no idea what I’m talking about, you can read my last post and the link it contains. Alternatively, you can toss a brick at the internet and read the blog post that it hits.

I don’t want to run down the specifics, but now that I’ve had time to think about it and have had time to read some of the comments of the people I follow on Twitter, I’d like to update my thoughts and perhaps offer my reasoning as to why it is a bad thing and a good thing and so on.

The bad: a third set of raid lockouts increases the load on hard-core raiders and the chance of burnout.

“Hard-core” here is loosely defined as an almost pejorative term meaning anyone who consistently raids.  Yes, all sorts of people have made this complaint.  And it’s not always obvious why this is so.  For instance, earlier today my friend Rox tweeted:

I really do not understand why “hard core raiders” claim Flex, and LFR, is not a choice.Not at all.Would love blog posts to read on it.

— Rox (@valkyrierisen)

June 7, 2013

I’ll try to do my best to explain why I feel it’s forced. Other people may have different views. I am in a stable raiding group and I feel I owe a responsibility to come to raid as prepared as I can be. (Indeed, one of the joys of raiding in a stable group is that other people feel that responsibility to you).  I do not want to be the reason why we don’t progress.  Thus, I feel a responsibility to come to raid with the best gear that I can get.  To the extent LFR and Flex (and, for that matter, dailies, scenarios and dungeon groups) offer me such gear, I have a responsibility to run those things.

I’m fortunate that even if I don’t run everything I can, I’ll still be in my raid group.  My spot is safe. For people in a more competitive environment the sense that Flex would be mandatory is even stronger.  Not running Flex and LFR and not getting gear from it would endanger that person’s raid spot. In this sense it really becomes mandatory if one doesn’t want to lose a raid spot.

The upshot of this is that gear helps raids progress.  If you are forgoing a chance to get better gear you’re harming your raid’s chance to succeed.

One key aspect to this argument that’s easy to overlook is that it assumes gear in LFR and Flex are indeed upgrades.  This is not necessarily the case.  LFR ToT gear right now is item level 502.  With the valor upgrades, gear from Heart of Fear or Terrace of Endless Springs had at item level of 504.  Thus, a fully geared normal level raider should not need gear from LFR ToT - theoretically it could be upgraded to 510 but by the time one earned enough valor to buy the valor rewards one would likely have 522 gear from normal ToT anyway.  Thus, with one exception, it doesn’t seem like this problem should apply.

That one exception is identified in a tweet from Velidra:

Oh hey, back to 3 raids a week for 4pc? No thanks.

— Velidra (@Velidra)

June 7, 2013

Indeed, this is the reason why many of us regular raiders with item levels of 515 and higher continue to run LFR even though it is a pain in the ass.  LFR drops tier gear, which includes such useful bonuses that 502 level gear is much better than 522 level gear if it gives you a two piece or four piece bonus.  (Jana, for instance, wears two pieces of LFR tier gear for that very reason.  I have 522 gear that I could use but the tier bonus makes up for the loss in item levels.)  A progression raider runs LFR and will run Flex also to maximize the chances of getting those tier set bonuses.

This argument as applied to the Flex raiding system assumes that tier gear will be awarded in the same manner as it is now: dropping from certain bosses. The last time there was more than two raid lockouts, however, tier was distributed in a different way.  That was back in 3.2, when there were four lockouts theoretically available for the ToC raid run: 10 normal, 25 normal, 10 heroic and 25 heroic. Back then, tier didn’t drop from bosses at all.  You bought it with valor, and could upgrade it with tokens from the 25 man raids.

A similar system would certainly reduce the pressure a raider felt to run LFR and Flex.  If neither of those raids had tier gear, normal raiders generally wouldn’t feel the need to run them (except perhaps to learn content).  I hope that Blizzard recognizes this and comes up with a way to distribute tier outside of LFR, because as Velidra noted, the pressure to run LFR is really about tier.

The good: Flex brings back the MM in MMORPG.

A while ago I took a little break from World of Warcraft to play Dragon Age 2.  Compared to World of Warcraft, Dragon Age 2 had:

• Far better graphics;
• More responsive combat;
• Far better character customization options;
• Far more interesting NPCs;
• A far better set of stories and quests.

So why is it that I’m playing Warcraft now over a game that put Warcraft to shame in so many ways?  The reason is obvious: the other people in the game.  Dragon Age 2’s “weakness” was that I could only play by myself, and as charming as Isabella was, she wasn’t a real person. Meanwhile, back in Warcraft there were tons of people to meet, to play with, and enjoy the company of. That’s what gives MMORPGs a compelling advantage over single player games.

For a while, though, I think Blizzard forgot that, and tried to turn Warcraft into a game that had, in essence, a “single player” mode.  Quests in Cataclysm were designed to be completed by one person.  Dungeons no longer required you to meet anyone.  It was only at the highest levels of the game, raids and arena PvP, where knowing someone else was a prerequisite.  And then LFR came out and you didn’t even need to know another person to kill Deathwing.

This approach was a boon to a person who was interested in playing the game by himself, but in my opinion this boon backfired seriously on Blizzard.  Players taught that other people didn’t matter wove their way into LFD and LFR and poisoned the atmosphere with selfish attitudes.  I remember very clearly one Dragon Soul LFR run where a warlock had the strategy of jumping off the boat or the spine or the island or platform at the beginning of the fight, a blatant sign that he wanted to be carried to victory.  I remember it well because he won three items in the raid.  That Blizzard has fixed the loot system to prevent this does not solve the basic problem that many, many people in LFD and LFR do not try.

The basic problem with LFD and especially LFR is that there is no social contract between the players running it.  If I am in your LFR group I will never see you again and I have no desire to help you and no reason to even be nice to you.  The difference between a person who does her best in LFR and one who lets other people carry her is pride, and a lot of people don’t have it.

The single-player approach also infected the rest of the game. Because you could run LFD by yourself, there was no need to go out and establish friendships or reputations.  The indirect effect of that is that you didn’t have to give a shit what anyone else thought of you; you could still play the game.

It’s my belief that LFD started and LFR greatly accelerated a trend that led to dissatisfaction with the game and a spiraling reduction in subscriptions.  Subscription data is at a minimum consistent with this theory.

Let’s get back to the Flex system.  The part of the Flex system that makes me say “Yay!” is that it requires a pre-made group.  It will encourage people to go out and meet people to form these groups.  In that way it’s similar to Heroic Scenarios.  Heroic scenarios require a premade group of three and are, at the moment, by far the most efficient method of earning valor points.  I see it as a recognition that having a social contract with another person, if only briefly, is an important part of the game, and I see Flex raids continuing that.

It is my hope that Flex raids offer a credible alternative to LFR, and eventually replace LFR.  LFR is a horrible system and I don’t know anyone who runs it for any reason other than to get gear (or valor or legendary quest rewards).  But I see people running Flex raids for the same reason people run Normal raids, with practical advantages thrown in as a bonus.

I am encouraged because this represents another step away from the single-player approach used in Cataclysm.  I hope Blizzard keeps making such steps.

When to Cast Inferno Blast, Revisited

This week Jana got quite lucky with gear.  She got four new pieces of gear.  One was a weapon, which was a huge upgrade. Two were side grades, the same item level as she had before but with better stats.  The fourth was one that made me jump up and down excitedly: Cha-Ye’s Essence of Brilliance.  Yes, the Thunderforged version.

The commonality of Jana’s upgrades was that they all had critical strike on them (in the case of the trinket, a bucket load of crit).  This made me think of a post I did long ago on the optimal use of Inferno Blast and I figured I’d revisit it.

It is now a commonly accepted fact that Inferno Blast should be cast when Heating Up is active in order to trigger a Pyroblast! buff.  Back when Mists of Pandaria was in beta, though, it wasn’t clear to me that this would be the case. Inferno Blast offered, as far as I could tell, better DPS than fireball did generally, and I wondered if the dps gain of casting it on cooldown would be more beneficial than using it as a trigger. Then Inferno Blast was nerfed to do less DPS than fireball, but I went through with the calculations because I like to see. The end result was that the differing values of the strategies depended on one’s crit rate, and that at effective crit rates of about 62% or higher, it became better to cast Inferno Blast on cooldown. This, I felt, was unlikely to be achieved in the low-crit post-Wrath era so I really didn’t think too much of it.

Right now, though, self-buffed Jana has a listed crit rate of 40.8%.  With the Critical Mass buff, this is an effective crit rate of 53%.  But with temporary buffs from trinket and enchanting prods, I’ve seen Jana’s crit rate climb to 53.3%, an effective crit rate of 69.3%.  And with Primordius’s 20% crit buff, Jana’s effective crit rate without trinket procs is 79%.

Thus, I think there’s a real possibility that in certain situations, it would be better to cast Inferno Blast on cooldown rather than have it be triggered by a heating up buff. The theory behind this is that when crit rates get so high, the likelihood of a fireball crit after the Inferno Blast cast is such that getting the Pyroblast buff sooner results in enough dps to offset the times when you don’t get that buff.

(Warning: lots of theory craft wonkery ahead.  TL;DR: Don’t cast Inferno Blast on Primordius.)

My earlier calculations used numbers as of level 85.  I’m going to update them for level 90, but first here’s some definitions:

• F: The DPS value of casting fireball over and over.
• P: The DPS value added by casting pyroblast with a Pyroblast! buff.
• I: The DPS value added by casting Inferno Blast without consideration of any buffs. (This is actually negative.)
• C: The effective crit rate.
• IB(h): The DPS value added by casting Inferno Blast when heating up is active, incorporating the triggering of the Pyroblast! buff and its benefit.
• IB(n): The DPS value added by casting Inferno Blast when heating up is not active, incorporating the triggering of the heating up buff and its benefit.
• L: The length of a fight in seconds.
• S: The cast time of a fireball.
• V(n): The overall value of the strategy of casting Inferno Blast every time it is available.
• V(h): The overal value of the strategy of casting Inferno Blast only when it is available and the heating up buff is active.

If you’ve gotten this far, congratulations.  In my prior blog post I calculated the formula for V(n) and V(h) as follows.

• V(n) = (C*((1-C)P + I) + (1-C)*(C*P + I - P*C*C)) * L/8
• V(h) = ((1-C)P+I) * L/(8+S/C-S)

Now let’s get some values for C, P, I, S and L and see how those two values compare.  All of these values were taken from Jana’s current gear, self-buffed only.  (I may redo this with raid buffed numbers at some point).

A standard fireball hits for about 45.2k, and crits for twice that.  Its cast time is 2 seconds.  Thus, F is equal to (C*90.4 + (1-C)*45.2)/2, or (90.4C + 45.2 - 45.2C)/2 or (45.2C + 45.2)/2 or 45.2(C+1)/2 or 22.6(C+1).

An inferno blast crits for about 36.1k. (It always crits).  It has an effective cast time of 1.34 seconds. Its value over a fireball (I) is equal to 36.1/1.34 - 22.6(C+1) or 27 - 22.6(C+1) or 4.4 - 22.6C.

A pyroblast hits for about 59.6k and will crit for twice that.  When buffed, its damage will be increased by 25% to approximately 74.5k on hits and 149k on crits.  They will do, on average, 74.5(1+C) damage.  It has an effective cast time of 1.34 seconds, so its value is 55.6(1+C), and its value over a fireball is 33(1+C).

Before I go on, there are a few things I am ignoring because I think it would overcomplicate things without adding any visible value.  I am ignoring ignite, which as a percentage of all damage should not change the analysis.  I am ignoring the DoT portion of the pyroblast.  While this is actually quite a bit of damage, because one pyroblast will overwrite and older pyroblast DoT, and the DoT lasts for 18.7 seconds (with Jana’s stats), I assume that the DoT will always be present.  At very low values of C this might be a factor but I don’t think it will be with current values.

S is 2 seconds.

L is assumed to be 300 seconds, which represents a 5 minute fight.

Jana’s crit rate is 40.76%.  With critical mass’s current 1.3 multiplier, C is 52.99%.

Now we can compute some numbers.

V(n) works out to equal approximately 527.2k.  V(h) works out to be equal to approximately 600k.

That’s with Jana’s current crit rate of 40.8.  What about other crit rates?  Is there a point where V(n) gives us a higher number than V(h)?

Alas, no.  This is where the futility of the exercise hits home, as the results I got show that as long as C is below 100%, V(h) will always be greater than V(n).  The difference is not terribly large; V(h) has an advantage of between 10-20% over relevant crit ranges, and is smaller as the crit rate gets higher.  It is a real advantage, though, and I would be loathe to suggest that an ease of casting Inferno Blast on cooldown could make up for that.

But there was one other thing that I found interesting.  At a raw crit rate of 63%, but V(h) and V(n) became negative.  This suggests that it’s not worth casting Inferno Blast at all, and that one should just cast fireball and take the Pyroblast crits you get.  This makes intuitive sense; when your crit rate gets high enough the value added by the guaranteed crit of Inferno Blast is offset by the reduced damage from the spell itself.  And with Jana’s current crit rate of 40.8%, that’s a level which could be achieved during the Primordius fight.

Now, it’s a bit unfair to just assume everything would be equal for Primordius.  For one, the fireball cast time is far faster while mutated, and I think one needs to take that into account.  Jana’s base haste while mutated is 38%, leading to a fireball cast time of 1.63 seconds.  What does this do to V(n) and V(h)?

The results are as suspected: haste does not materially alter the relative values of V(h) or V(n).  At a raw crit rate of 63% both V(h) and V(n) are negative.  With buffs, Jana is very close to this number, and with enchanting, tailoring or trinket procs, Jana would be over this number.  Further, ignoring Inferno Blast during the transformed phase of Primordius makes the rotation far easier to handle.  Thus, I think it makes sense at a raw crit rate of 60% with the Primordius buff to ignore Inferno Blast altogether and take what Pyroblast procs you can get.

It wasn’t the finding I expected or even anticipated when I started working on this, but it seems like an interesting and sensible result.  I’m going to follow it next time I face Primordius.

(note: it is of course a different matter to consider whether one should use Inferno Blast to spread DoTs from Primordius onto the oozes that are crawling toward him.  My feeling is that because it risks giving your melee unhappy buffs, it’s a very bad thing anyway, but now you shouldn’t feel like having to do it to get your pyroblast buffs.)

failefayce asked: So I saw your very recent post on RPing (and if there are right and wrong things), and I wanted your opinion on something, I guess. A friend and I transplanted a couple of characters into the WoW universe, but one ended up human and one ended up a blood elf. To be able to play together, we decided the human would be "disguised" as an elf. I really only want to RP with her, but the idea of RPing in game makes me nervous when people would probably consider it bad RP. But we're invested in their

story, and we love how it all unfolds. I’m just so afraid that someone will see us RPing, or ask us about our RP, and laugh. I’ve never RP’d in WoW before, and this one thing keeps holding me back from it. We have other characters, with other stories, but I’m so afraid people will decide we’re bad RPers that I don’t do anything.

First, my opinion: there is absolutely nothing wrong with one person RPing as being disguised. My feeling is that you should think about the intricacies of the disguise and the implications as to how the pair would act, but really if you’re just RPing with one another it shouldn’t matter. I have RPed with many, many people who were disguised and a lot of it has been quite enjoyable.  There is no lore reason why a human couldn’t put on an elf disguise, and indeed no reason why a blood elf and human couldn’t get along.  (Explain the Scryer’s Tier to me if you disagree).  That’s not necessarily saying you couldn’t botch things in the implementation, but there’s absolutely no reason why you should feel uncomfortable RPing them as a couple.  Only the most pedantic RPer would object, and frankly, fuck them.