I Like Pancakes

Ascension of Female Characters in WoW

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 07:06:42 -0400

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.

Gaming Conference Welcomes Women With Hilaaaarious Rape Joke

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 11:33:24 -0400

Gaming Conference Welcomes Women With Hilaaaarious Rape Joke:

failefayce:

i-like-pancakes:

See also: Twitter vs. Female Protagonists In Video Games

Rather than restate what both of those authors have stated more convincingly and with more authority than I ever could, I thought I’d share a few observations based on over a quarter century of online gaming. I cannot say any of this for certain, but it is my strong and fervent belief that:

There are a lot of women who like games. Maybe not as many as men, but a lot. I’d estimate the ratio to be 2:3.

The women who like games like them for the same reasons that men like games.

Both men and women like games that have strong female characters, including protagonists.

A lot of women choose not to reveal their gender online because of behavior exemplified by the first link in this post. (Not to mention, it pisses off quite a few men, too.)

A lot of the “men” (let’s be honest: boys) who are exemplified by those tweets complain that they can’t find a girl who likes them and has interests similar to them.

The market for games that respect women and feature strong female leads is much larger than the market for games that are defined by rape jokes and general misogyny.

Just sayin’.

I agree with all these points, and I want to add a few of my own experiences with online gaming to expand.

I know more women than men who play WoW. I use WoW because it’s what I play most. Just so you know, the ratio is 5:1, and the one guy I know who played no longer does. This includes both me and my mom. Ofc, this in no way represents the whole community. But there are a lot of girls who play WoW, and you need to get over it.

The number of women I know who play other video games is far, far larger than the number of women I know who play WoW, and some of them play some pretty hardcore games.

In WoW, I’ve known someone get basically kicked out of a raiding group not because she was incompetent (she consistently had the best DPS, and this was near the end of TBC), but because the guild got vent and found out she was female. They refused to admit from then on that she’d always had the best DPS and instead made a bunch of jokes about how women can’t play video games. They would replace her whenever they could, even if it meant they didn’t progress. She eventually quit the guild.

Despite having good enough gear and reading up on fights, my guild refuses to let me raid because they know I am female and insist I will mess everything up.

The same has happened to my mother.

When someone finds out I am female in the game, they almost always ask for ERP. Even if I’m not on an RP server.

That attitude is spread across the entire gaming community, but I see it a hell of a lot more in WoW.

We are out there. We play every game you do. Some of us are less capable than you. Some of us are more capable.

I felt like I should reblog this response because I know and believe these things also but I don’t have the kind of authority to say.

Gaming Conference Welcomes Women With Hilaaaarious Rape Joke

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 00:15:16 -0400

Gaming Conference Welcomes Women With Hilaaaarious Rape Joke:

Rather than restate what both of those authors have stated more convincingly and with more authority than I ever could, I thought I’d share a few observations based on over a quarter century of online gaming. I cannot say any of this for certain, but it is my strong and fervent belief that:

There are a lot of women who like games. Maybe not as many as men, but a lot. I’d estimate the ratio to be 2:3.
The women who like games like them for the same reasons that men like games.
Both men and women like games that have strong female characters, including protagonists.
A lot of women choose not to reveal their gender online because of behavior exemplified by the first link in this post. (Not to mention, it pisses off quite a few men, too.)
A lot of the “men” (let’s be honest: boys) who are exemplified by those tweets complain that they can’t find a girl who likes them and has interests similar to them.
The market for games that respect women and feature strong female leads is much larger than the market for games that are defined by rape jokes and general misogyny.

Just sayin’.

WotLK to MoP: A Trend Analysis of Raiding Difficulty.

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 12:00:15 -0400

WotLK to MoP: A Trend Analysis of Raiding Difficulty.:

This is a marvelous post about the raiding trends from WotLK to MoP. You should read it because there’s a fair chance I will be making a longer comment about it soon.

Looking For Trouble

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 11:14:59 -0400

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

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 16:51:00 -0400

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.

MMO-Champion - Patch 5.4 - Flexible Raid Preview

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 23:26:53 -0400

MMO-Champion - Patch 5.4 - Flexible Raid Preview:

So here’s the first big bit of 5.4 news. We will have another raid option, the “Flex” raid. You can read the link as well as I can, but here’s the quick summary as I understand it. A Flex Raid:

Can be formed from between 10 and 25 people;
Can be formed from RealID or Battletag friends cross-realm;
Has no item level restrictions;
Drops loot as LFR does;
Drops loot that’s midway between LFR and Normal difficulty.

Now, there are some obvious benefits to this thing, but there are some obvious detriments too. As dwarven battle medic (@fannon451) said on Twitter:

So let me get this straight: They thought 2 lockouts were too much after WotLK, so now in MoP they want to give us 3? LFR, Flex & Normal?

This is the risk of the system. When 5.4 comes out, any progression raider is going to want to run LFR, Flex raid, and Normal to upgrade gear as much as possible, assuming (as in 5.2) LFR loot would be slightly better than the previous normal level ToT raid gear. This will be on top of the likely new set of dailies to unlock rep rewards and/or get lesser charms and so forth. It will make for a very busy schedule if everything is rolled out together.

How things work two months into it will likely be very different than they would be at the start of the patch, however. After two months, people in normal progression raids will likely not need to run LFR at all; they would instead could run Flex raids for valor in addition to their normal raids. People who are not geared would be able to get their gear through Flex raids without having to bother with an LFR minimum gear requirement, and they could also run LFR as well to maximize gear upgrade chances. I think over time it will prove to be a fun thing to add but certainly it will present a crush at the beginning of the raid cycle as people need to run three lockouts instead of two.

But now for a bit of irresponsible speculation.

LFR sucks. I don’t know anyone on the planet who thinks LFR is any fun at all. LFR is simply the pinnacle of the LFD system’s primary flaw of throwing strangers together for the purpose of selfishly seeking loot. I have been lamenting the stupidity of strangers in LFD almost since its inception. A lot of people at the time wrote about how the LFD system was at its heart anti-social. You had fights about rolls. If a tank was less than perfect there would be a shitstorm. If a healer was less than perfect there would be a shitstorm. If a dps put someone on follow and did nothing for the entire instance, the system wouldn’t let you kick him and he would inevitably win all the loot.

The biggest problem with LFD was its defined strength: it let you run an instance without having to look for four other friends to go with you. What that meant was often, if you had two people to run an instance with, you just queued without spending much effort looking for another two to fill the group. LFD became a default; a full group became a rarity. The social aspect of the dungeon run had its legs cut out from under it. (Further encouraging LFD at the expense of full groups were buffs you would receive if you queued on your own and special rewards for tanks or healers who queued on their own.)

LFR built off of LFD and made things even worse. I’d estimate that about half the dps in any LFR run are basically auto-attacking. LFR seems to be tuned for three active healers, because invariably there are a few healers who don’t heal hardly at all. Instance chat is frequently dominated by assholes. In a few occasions my raid leader has been kicked from LFR for daring to give people instructions on how to do a particular fight.

What LFD first started and LFR exacerbated was to take the implied social contract out of those activities. No longer could you count on people to be competent and giving an honest effort. It simply didn’t matter, because often people could get the same rewards for spending their time brushing their cat instead of dpsing the boss. Nor did you have any incentive to be nice to people; you likely would never see anyone again. And while it might be theoretically possible to get to normal level raiding without ever touching LFR or LFD, for practical purposes one had to spend a significant amount of time doing these things to get enough gear for raiding.

It was perhaps unfortunate that Cataclysm hit just after LFD, because the leveling system in Cataclysm seemed to signify a new approach to the game taken by designers. Gone were group quests. Gone was the need to group for instances. You could level from 1 to 85 without working with any other character in the game, and in all likelihood waiting around for a friend to level with you would just slow you down. The social aspect of WoW had been removed as a necessity; with the exception of end game raiding, you could do it all by yourself.

If I were to point a finger at a cause for WoW’s declining subscription numbers, that’s where I’d aim it. The biggest draw to Warcraft for me has always been the wonderful people I’ve met and played with over the years, far far too many to list here. In Vanilla, BC and Wrath I needed to make these friends to get where I was going. In Cata and MoP it wasn’t necessary (although for RP it was).

I think Blizzard has recognized the loss of the social aspect of the game and I think the Flex raid is a welcome addition to it. At the beginning of MoP, Challenge Modes were offered as an incentive for making friendships, but as far as I can tell that wasn’t terribly successful because of the high end nature of the activity. In 5.3 we got Heroic scenarios, which by requiring a premade group encouraged more social activity. And in 5.4 Flex raids might have the same effect, giving friends an activity with a lower difficulty level than normal raiding.

Flex raiding will also allow for real cross realm raiding of endgame lore content, which fills a hole and helps solve the empty server problem (although the recent server transfer sale might do far more to solve that problem).

Ultimately, my guess is that in the next expansion, as long as there are no technical difficulties with the Flex Raid system, is that it will replace LFR completely. I sure hope it does. LFR is a stone around WoW’s neck and needs to be killed as quickly as possible. For this reason I welcome the Flex raid system with open arms, and hope that it succeeds.

When to Cast Inferno Blast, Revisited

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 15:22:00 -0400

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.)

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

Thu, 30 May 2013 22:27:12 -0400

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.

The WoW Bitch — By request.

Thu, 30 May 2013 22:13:00 -0400

The WoW Bitch — By request. :

So this post made me think a bit. There are some things I agree with, and some things I don’t agree with, but I think it’s a useful place to start a discussion about quality RP and lore.

First: I disagree with the questioner intensely. There are definitely right ways to RP and wrong ways to RP. To take an absurd example, let’s suppose that one person, in single emote without any previous OOC contact, burns a rune onto a person’s neck that will kill the person so afflicted unless he or she remains loyal to the person who placed the rune. There are so many things wrong with that: it’s god modding, it’s god moding, it’s impolite, and so forth. It’s bad RP, and I hope that practically every single RPer of any skill would agree.

There are lesser degrees of bad RPing. Let’s suppose you type so badly that often messages are misconstrued. Let’s suppose you use the word “you” in public channels in a way that is ambiguous as to whom you are referring. Let’s suppose in a private RP you take thirteen minutes to respond. This is bad RP, and I hope everyone would agree.

But then you get into grey areas. Is it bad to RP a female night elf who is nine feet tall and hails from Un’Goro Crater? (Some people would say yes.) Is it bad to RP a red dragon who always remains in human form and hangs out by the Cathedral doing nothing that the red dragonflight would possibly take an interest in? (Some people would say yes.) Is it bad to RP a fire mage with red hair because that’s so cliche? Is it bad to play a human woman who is 5’2” and 110 pounds because everyone else does it? Now we’re getting into grey areas.

When I talk about good MRPs and bad MRPs or good RP or bad RP I am necessarily couching these things in my own experience. Good RP is fun. Bad RP is not fun. These are not entirely subjective things - as I’ve illustrated above I think there are some principles which, if violated, make for RP that no one would have fun with. But there are some things which are indeed subjective. To take an example, consider a pregnancy RP. I hate that. Absolutely hate that. It’s awful RP for me. But two other people might be quite content to talk about their upcoming baby and how it will be one of only two hundred cross breed Draenei/Dwarves in Azeroth or whatever.

That’s where I think RPers have to have a little humility. Yes, some MRPs scare the hell out of me, not because they contradict themselves or make copious references to the player behind the character, but because the character itself is terrifyingly odd. That doesn’t make that person a bad RPer. It makes her a bad RPer for me. And mine is but one opinion.

So let’s take the one example that seems to catch The WoW Bitch’s ire: a demon in Stormwind. I’ll assume for the moment that the example is of a player being an undisguised demon in Stormwind. Here’s the chain of logic here:

“[Demons] tend to cause destruction, death and chaos so it seems fairly logical to ask that they aren’t allowed in cities.”
“If someone wants to bring a demon into Stormwind, that’s fine because it doesn’t meet lore. Right?” (undoubtedly this is said sarcastically).
“The rest of us, who are following the actual guidelines of the world given to us, are standing here confused. Why was this demon allowed in when there are laws against that? Why does this person think they’re special enough to pass through every law the rest of us are halted by?”
“Is nobody going to stop them?” (I imagine this voice is like a right-wing Christian lamenting the destruction of marriage as we know it.)

This, I think, is misguided, and it all boils down to the assumption in the first sentence. It may well seem “fairly logical” to ask that demons aren’t allowed in cities, but guess what. It ain’t the case. There is not a single warlock in all of Azeroth who was even looked at oddly for bringing out a demon in Stormwind. Blizzard could have done this. They could have done this fairly easily. Arguably, they have indicated that public shows of warlockyness are discouraged because warlock trainers are placed in damp basements. But if there is a law that says demons are not allowed in Stormwind, I haven’t heard about it in all my years of playing the game, and it’s certainly never been enforced.

Here’s the problem with people who try to enforce lore in RP: they try to enforce “their lore”. (Invariably their lore allows for copious numbers of half-Quel’dorei whose only distinguishing feature from humans is pointy ears, but I digress.) People get into their heads that Death Knights aren’t allowed in the Cathedral or something like that, and then butt in to someone else’s RP, making a nuisance out of themselves to people who were having fun.

And that - wait for it - is bad RP.

I don’t want to pretend that I don’t have lore disagreements with people. There are some people who think Traxy’s lore is completely wrong because she’s not a stereotypically bitter Death Knight. I think their lore is completely wrong for not having had Light’s Hope Chapel change their character in any way. I have also run into people who, while playing a Lordaeron-revival themed guild, think they can settle in Forsaken-controlled land just fine with a private security force. I, on the other hand, think they’d get eaten alive by the plague.

The nice thing is that, unlike some things, Blizzard has given us an option for dealing with people whose RP one disagrees with on a fundamental level. It’s called “/ignore”. Just don’t RP with the person. If breaking lore is really so abhorrent that it is objectively bad RP rather than subjectively bad RP, that person will have trouble finding RP and hopefully will learn the error of his ways. If, however, he finds a few people to have fun with, of what concern is it of yours. And if most people seem to be okay with it, perhaps it’s you who needs to reevaluate whether what the person does is really damaging.

Another example: vampires. I can’t count how many times in Vanilla someone was lambasted for daring to be a vampire, because “WoW doesn’t have vampires.” Period. End of discussion. Not worth RPing with. And then all of a sudden 3.3 comes out and we’ve got one of the five sexiest raid bosses ever in Blood Queen Lana’thiel and all of her San’layn minions and hey… vampires are in WoW after all!

It’s for this reason that I believe lore should guide but never restrict. Figuring out the Lore behind Saxsy’s character was tremendously fun. If it were inconsistent with lore, though, it could still be good RP. Just because Blizzard hasn’t created something yet doesn’t mean they won’t someday. If it really bothers you, then don’t RP with the person.

To sum up: as a role-player, we should be humble about our own abilities. If someone has a lore question, by all means point to resources that will help her. But if someone is playing a character who you think breaks lore, don’t stick your nose in it and ruin their fun. It could be that you’re the one who is mistaken.

Contradictory MRPs

Thu, 30 May 2013 14:29:02 -0400

I read a lot of character descriptions. As you can probably tell from my previous posts, I find that reading the descriptions helps me figure out what makes for a really good description.

But for this post I’m not going to talk about that. Instead, I’m going to talk about what makes for a bad MRP. There are some MRPs that seem to be deliberately bad: the ones that leave descriptions blank or worse, talk more about the person outside of the game than the character. But I’m not going to talk about those.

Other bad MRPs are ones that reflect character faults. For instance, one could claim that an MRP saying a character is half-Quel’dorei half-Gnome or is a red dragon in human form or the like is bad, just because you think it conflicts with lore, or unduly calls attention to oneself. The 12 foot tall draenei and the 5’6” tall night elves would fall in this category as well.

That sort of stuff doesn’t bug me as much, just because I think people can play whatever character they want. What bugs me is when the MRP demonstrates that they don’t know what the character actually is. For instance, I once saw an MRP description where the character claimed to be slender, lithe, muscular and voluptuous. This sort of contradiction within the MRP makes it difficult for me to form an image of the character, and also makes it difficult to RP consistently.

But it also makes me laugh. In the interest of comedy, here are some actual quotes from MRP descriptions:

Living in the heat has left her skin rugged and tough, yet sleek and silky from the beating sun.

I’m not sure what heat and beating sun do to skin, but it’s not both.

B has a petite figure with long slender legs.

I’ve never seen a petite woman with long slender legs.

Walking like a gift from Elune herself, A has an almost divine aura. She comes off though as being very humble…

Anyone who walks like a gift from Elune herself does not, by definition, come across as being humble.

She has…an innocent look to her face. Her eyes seem somewhat calculating…

Which is it, innocent or calculating?

She has long, bright crimson hair that loosely frames a thin face, with matching large blue eyes.

What are the large blue eyes matching? Each other? (Okay, maybe that makes sense but it seems odd to me.)

Her build is quite slender, slender shoulders exposed from under a small, tight fitting dark leather tunic. The tunic does little to hide her body, the leather tight to her body, cut low and exposing a great deal of chest. Large, round pale breasts are quite visible beneath it for any who look down slightly. Her flat stomach and wide hips are shown quite blatantly beneath the short tunic, her hips wide, very visible, showing more of her smooth, pale skin.

I don’t think that’s what “slender” means.

Long, flowing auburn hair sits upon this pretty young mage’s head, generally up in a bun to keep it from interfering with her spell-weaving.

Hair put up in a bun does not flow. It’s more like a still puddle.

(Paragraph 1:) “Will not harm anything or anyone.”
(Paragraph 4:) “Piss her off enough you will get either slapped or killed.”

I pity the fool who stopped reading at paragraph one.

Her eyes held a distant, dreamy look within them, yet seemed to scan her surroundings with purpose.

Unless that purpose is to seem dreamy and distant, these don’t seem to jive.

I do want to point out that a lot of these contradictions are in MRPs that are otherwise rather creative and indicative of someone who can hold her own in RP. If you see your own sentence or something similar in this list, figure out which your character is and try to make it consistent.

MMO-Champion - Titan project "reset", delayed until 2016

Wed, 29 May 2013 00:12:07 -0400

MMO-Champion - Titan project "reset", delayed until 2016:

Undoubtedly you’ve heard of this by now. (I really, sincerely pity the person who gets news from I Like Pancakes.) In light of what I talked about a little while ago concerning Blizzard’s financials, I thought I’d revise a few things I said about Titan and Activision Blizzard’s plans for Warcraft.

First, it’s now clear to me that whatever Titan was, it wasn’t something that used the Warcraft IP. The statements I had seen of it were rather cagey, and it made a lot of sense for me for Titan to use the Warcraft IP, that I figured there was a good chance. But if the thing is being “reset” in the sense that practically everything facing the player was scrapped at this late date, then it seems that they’re throwing out whatever IP it was using. If it were using the Warcraft IP I really don’t think that direction would have been scrapped; it’s more likely that in fact it was a completely new IP that just didn’t catch on with management or game testers. In theory this also means that the new direction Titan will take (if it takes any direction at all) could theoretically be Warcraft related, but I wouldn’t count on it.

Secondly, and more importantly, is what this decision means for Warcraft. With Titan set for a release date in late 2014, it seemed very likely to me that WoW would wind down and be replaced by Titan as Blizzard’s MMO. This seems highly unlikely now; Blizzard as a division will have very little appreciable ongoing revenue outside of WoW. (My impression - and it could be wrong - is that neither Diablo nor Starcraft are “sticking” as significant long-term franchises, at least not absent entirely new games.) Without Titan to replace that revenue, it seems like Blizzard will instead need to push forward with Warcraft expansions, which since the launch of Cataclysm have been the only thing that has worked to get new subscribers back. It would not surprise me to see information leaked about a new expansion fairly soon, just to keep people invested in the game.

This announcement also has implications for what sort of expansion the next one will be. I believe that if Blizzard hasn’t decided a theme yet, they will need to pick one very soon. A friend of mine in guild said that the problem with MoP was that it was and is a very weak lore-based expansion. BC had Illidan, Wrath had the Lich King, and Cata had Deathwing. MoP had… Garrosh? The Sha? Lei Shen? None of these foes capture the imagination nearly as well as the prior three, and at least as far as Garrosh goes, the lead up has made a complete joke out of Alliance lore. He thinks that Blizzard is going to go back to its roots and pull an expansion with an Old God and Azshara as the primary foes, Whether this works to capture the imagination of WoW players or whether they just want to bonk each other with sticks in some new arena is up for debate, but I’d certainly find it more interesting.

The other thing to look for is what happens as populations diminish. Our guild did a check on a few servers last night and we found a few who - at around 11:30 EDT on a Monday night (8:30 PDT) had less than fifty people alliance side. There are serious problems there that CRZ, LFD and LFR cannot resolve. The auction houses on those servers are basically defunct. Major cities are ghost towns. Raids are completely out of the question, except through cross-realm services. The social aspect of the game is completely gone. I understand that Blizzard doesn’t want to deal with the hassle of merging servers, but most likely anyone who is remaining on those servers is going to quit soon. My feeling is that instead of making a publicly embarrassing choice to merge servers, Blizzard will soon contact people with active accounts on lower population servers and offer some incentive for them to move servers (or, at a minimum, allow people to do so for free). I also think that cross-realm raiding at the highest level raid is inevitable.

Whatever happens, I’m confident that Blizzard will now try to push Warcraft onwards, hoping to at least maintain subscriber count on average until there is something to replace it with, whether that’s Titan or something completely different. And I’m happy about that.

An Implicit Guarantee

Sun, 26 May 2013 22:25:28 -0400

I remember long ago one of the biggest insults you could throw at someone was that he or she was an Ebayer. I don’t know if it’s still true now, but back in the days of Vanilla and Burning Crusade there was an active market on Ebay for accounts. An account with a fully progressed toon could fetch hundreds of dollars, and even more if there were more than one toon on a given account. The high prices were a reflection of the game back then: it was a lot more difficult to level, and end-game content was far less accessible. You had attunements and a raid tier ladder that made it nearly impossible to jump into current content without having done prior content.

In any case, tagging someone as an Ebayer meant that he had no idea how to play his character, because he hadn’t gone through the rigorous process of leveling the character from scratch. It implies an incompetence that goes well beyond the ordinary; the sort of incompetence of the legendary melee hunter. You didn’t see it that much.

Now, there’s a few things I would like to make clear before I go on. First, I am especially glad there are many ways to enjoy the game. I am thankful for the xp bonuses heirlooms and guild perks provide. I like that I can get into dungeon runs or even LFR if I so choose. If you were to ask me about all of these things individually I would agree without hesitation that they are good.

But I thought about a few things lately, and it had to do with a post I wrote long ago about LFD etiquette. The context was in encouraging people to learn how to tank, and I noted that LFD wasn’t the place to learn how to tank. My feeling was that when you queued for LFD under a given role, you implicitly promised anyone who would join your group that you were competent at the job for the hardest level dungeon you could receive. LFD was a tool that allowed people to run dungeons quickly, with the expectations that came out of being with random people: everyone else would be competent and no one would have any investment in showing you how to play.

In many ways World of Warcraft itself provided the basis for that implicit assumption of competence. The process of leveling and questing was in many ways Skinnerian in how it taught a player to play her class. Killing ten thousand bad guys with a fire mage practically ensured that I would be minimally competent as a fire mage, even if I never read any of the sites providing theorycraft or the like.

I worry now, though, with the expansion of different areas of the game that the implicit assumption is no longer justified. It may take a while, but you can get yourself to maximum level through mining, herbing, archaeology or pet battles, or any combination of them. You can do this without regard for your class or your gear. Yes, it might be a little bit more time consuming, but I would wager that a person could level from 1 to 90 using these methods only more quickly than one could level from 1 to 60 in Vanilla.

I think a huge frustration with the game is that there is no longer a safe assumption of competency. Ask yourself: when you go into LFR how many DPS are doing more than just their class’s equivalent of auto-attacking? When you run a heroic, isn’t there always one dps who does almost nothing? I’m not saying these people didn’t level their characters through traditional means or that they bought their characters on Ebay. It’s more that I think that the game has, ever since Vanilla, required less and less demonstrable competence to get to end level content. Some of that is almost certainly good - it was great that Traxy could jump her way into ICC having not progressed through Naxx and Ulduar, and is was great that Jana could get into Dragon Soul without any Cata raid experience.

This is another thing where I think they got it mostly right in Wrath. There was no cheating your way to 80. You actually had to learn your character through leveling, and if you wanted to raid you had to convince someone that you knew how to do it.

But now you could get a character, level him through mining and herbing, sell the results, buy gear at 90 with the earnings, pop into LFR and let other people carry you to loot. I’m not saying many people do that. Rather, because you can there is less of a pressure on a person to be competent.

I think that’s a big source of the malaise I see within the game now. I wish I knew of a way to fix it.

Some Things That Are Obvious To Me

Tue, 21 May 2013 17:34:00 -0400

Just a list of a few things that should be obvious but apparently are not.

One: if you have some sort of issue with my RP, my RP style, or how any of my characters are presented to the world, tell me. Don’t blab about it to someone else and certainly don’t blab about it in public to the extent that a friend of mine (who has better taste) can hear about it and report it back to me.

Two: my characters have relationships with NPCs, my other characters, and other people that are not represented by avatars. Jana has a father and had a mother and a sister. Jana fell in love with a guy named Jeremiah. Saxsy and Traxy are sisters and have family. Traxy saved Jana’s life. And now Jana has a relationship with someone named Bronlissa for the purpose of a story. (I created a character named Bronlissa because I thought it might be fun to RP her individually. We’ll see how that goes.) That my characters have relationships with each other is a part of my ongoing stories and I don’t see how anyone should reasonably object to that. (To be very snarky: yes, Bronlissa is Jana’s love interest right now. No, that’s not because I am incapable of getting Jana a love interest represented by a player. It’s because that is what is necessary for the story I am telling.)

Three: I don’t know what will happen with the story with Bronlissa. It is experimental. I am experimenting with it and seeing how well it works to control two characters within a story, two characters who I think have an interesting and complex relationship. I have some ideas for where it would go but a lot of it has depended on the people with whom I have RPed. (For instance: that Bronlissa and Jana are a “couple” now came about entirely because of the urging of two people I was RPing with. It was certainly something I thought possible, but it wasn’t exactly foretold.)

Four: I don’t know if the story with Bronlissa will become part of Jana’s “canon”. Again, it is experimental. Half the RP I do now does not involve Bronlissa at all because I don’t think either the RP is suited for it or the person is right for that sort of character. And by that I don’t just mean she stands on the outskirts and does nothing - I mean that she does not actually exist. I think parts of my story will go one way and parts another and I’m not sure how it will eventually work out. One possibility that will certainly not become canon is that Jana becomes a demon to be with Bronlissa. (In that incarnation, Jana would never again be seen by the rest of Azeroth).

That I should have to say these things to anyone boggles my mind. That it would be someone within my guild who needs to be told these things further irritates me. This is the sort of thing that causes someone to leave guilds.

Update: after a little bit of thinking about it and a retraction by the person who had informed of these things, I’m pretty sure that the person who prompted this post - someone who had disparaged my RP publicly - was not someone within my guild, but rather someone with whom I RPed briefly, using the scenario with Bronlissa, and who did not work out for reasons I won’t go into here. Still, it was pretty agitating to think it would be someone in my guild.

Various Updates

Thu, 16 May 2013 23:12:09 -0400

It’s been a while since I’ve said how things have been going for me in game. I’ve been meaning to write about it, but I just haven’t.

Right now, Jana’s the only toon I do any actual PvE content with. If everything works right, I raid Throne of Thunder with her on Sunday and Monday nights for a total of about 5-6 hours. We’ve gotten 6/12 down, but in the past week (and probably the next week as well) we’ve hit roadblocks because people have been unavailable. This is the downside of not having so many people in the guild willing to raid, but it’s one I’ve learned to live with.

Throne of Thunder has been a frustrating raid experience. A big part of it is the boss fights themselves. We have yet to run across a boss that we could figure out how to down with less than, say, ten separate attempts; progression has been at best one boss a week (Jin’rokh _may_ have been an exception to this, as it might have just been a gear issue at first). Some of the bosses seem to be complicated for the sake of complications. Horridon, for instance, has four different add phases, each with different adds that do different things and require different treatment. The top kill priority changes from position to position and the reason I don’t repeat it here is because I’m not at all certain I remember it correctly. This is on top of all of the normal boss mechanics that everyone has to deal with.

The problem with the boss fights, as I see them, are that they are complicated but not interesting. Once one knows what to do and how to execute it, the fight becomes relatively easy. It’s the process of learning the complicated mechanics and priorities, not on skillful execution of basic principles. Consider the Lich King normal fight in Wrath, one of the most complicated fights in that expansion. That fight could be reduced to five stages, with each stage having a couple different things (e.g., defile, val’kyr) that required reaction and execution. My experience with that fight was that, both as a tank and a dps, you had to go beyond understanding the principles of the fight and actually figure out how to do your best at executing those principles. The principles were generally easier to get but the execution harder. Fights in MoP seem to be the opposite; the principles seem to be very difficult to pick up, but once you do, execution is a breeze.

The real problem with Throne of Thunder, though, is the trash. There is just too damned much of it, a lot of it serving no real purpose at all. For some reason Blizzard has decided to give trash mobs zillions of health, so each fight instead of taking maybe fifteen seconds as it did in Wrath, now takes minutes. There are now mini-bosses that don’t drop any loot of any sort, provide mechanics along the lines of a typical dungeon boss, and take a long time to kill. None of it is terribly interesting, but it takes up far too much raid time to do. I don’t mind trash if it is interesting, illustrates a boss mechanic or is relatively slight in number (hopefully all three). But the trash in Throne of Thunder reminds me of those “fun loops” those people, who were trying to argue that Blizzard was being unethical in Warcraft, were using as the basis for their argument. They’re not fun, they’re just pains in the asses and it’s the sort of thing that makes me nod when I hear about subscriber loss.

Note: I’m not saying that any significant amount of WoW subscriber loss is because of raid trash. Rather, I look at the raid trash and I wonder if Blizzard has forgotten how to make something fun, which probably extends to a lot of other elements of the game.

So PvE is frustrating. I have a few specific frustrations (one, for instance, is that the best weapon for me in ToT has spirit on it. Why?) I feel like I’m playing very badly of late, in that I can’t execute things, lag is getting to me, and I can never get a crit when I need one. If PvE were all I was doing, I may well have quit by now.

But I don’t. I RP also, and here’s some updates on that. Note that some of these stories contain more mature topics, so if you’re not interested in RP or that sort of thing, stop reading now.

My RP of late has also focused on Jana. She’s easily my most developed character and the one with the best description, so it’s fun to play off that with new people. One of the minor frustrations I’ve had is that a lot of her RP tends to be of the revolving door variety. I can have a lot of fun with one RP with one person but then we never RP again for whatever reason. I can’t quite pick it out and I’m sure it has more to do with me than with them. There just didn’t seem to be much reason to return to the RP and it was more interesting to see how Jana works with a new person than to develop any specific RP.

I’m trying to break that cycle though, in part because I do actually want to get further than one day’s RP and in part because I want to develop Jana as a character. So one thing I’ve been experimenting with lately is what I think of as “storyteller RP”. That’s where I, as Jana, control a couple of different characters that form the basis of the story and other people play parts within that story. I generally control the development of the story.

The RP involves a former love of Jana’s named Bronlissa. If you follow my deviantart page, you have some idea of who Bronlissa is. She is an extraordinarily powerful Sayaad. The story behind their relationship is one that I’ve always thought to be interesting.

About five and a half years ago, Jana encountered a warlock named Illadra that took an interest to her. Jana was not at all interested in him: he was at best a two-bit warlock who thought too much of himself, was otherwise socially awkward and wasn’t that handsome either. Unfortunately for Jana, Illadra became fascinated with Jana and had the extreme luck of getting Bronlissa for a succubus when he summoned one. Bronlissa was much more powerful than Illadra (and more powerful than Jana, even then), but was forced by the warlock spell into serving him. Illadra ordered Bronlissa to seduce Jana and she did, very effectively, by warping her mind when Jana was sleeping and becoming able to control her memories, pain and pleasure centers.

Illadra had fun with this for a month, often forcing Bronlissa to force Jana into embarrassing situations, or just watching Bronlissa perform. The problem for Illadra was that Bronlissa was chafing about being under the control of someone so petty minded, and that while Illadra controlled Bronlissa and Bronlissa controlled Jana, Illadra did not control Jana directly. This allowed Bronlissa to hatch a plan, one in which she would control Jana in order to kill Illadra. A month after her introduction to Jana, Jana and Bronlissa succeeded in killing Illadra. This freed Bronlissa, but she maintained her control over Jana.

For the next four months, Bronlissa went on a spree against warlocks, using Jana both as bait and to ensure that she could not be ensnared by a warlock’s power. Thus her power grew and grew, while Jana’s spirit began to fade. While Illadra was alive, Bronlissa and Jana had formed a bond as partners against a common enemy, and this bond continued even as Bronlissa maintained Jana under her thrall. At the end of the four months, Jana was desperate and hatched a plan designed to gain her freedom back.

Jana told Bronlissa that she loved her, and she wanted to be with her for the rest of their lives. This had the virtue of being true; perhaps Jana was suffering from Stockholm syndrome, or perhaps she just admired Bronlissa’s admitted beauty, strength, intelligence and persistence. Either way, Jana told Bronlissa that she wanted to be her partner and wanted to love her as an equal, which would mean freeing Jana from Bronlissa’s mechanisms of control. Bronlissa was skeptical at first, but then revealed that she too was in love with Jana, something rarely experienced by a Sayaad. She freed Jana from her control, promising to love her as an equal.

Jana then killed Bronlissa with a vicious fireball, reducing Bronlissa to ashes. Jana would justify this bit to herself and others by claiming that she could never trust Bronlissa not to retake control and that it was the only way to ensure her independence.

Fast forward five years. Jana has not had any relationship success in all that time. She has been successful in other endeavors but hasn’t found a partner. She thinks about Bronlissa a lot and has come to believe that she made a mistake when she killed her; living under her control would have been better than not having her at all.

Bronlissa, meanwhile, has done what many denizens of the Warcraft universe do when they get killed: she razzed and bided her time, bruised by Jana’s rejection and considering her next move.

The RP I’m currently working on is one in which Bronlissa makes her next move, reappearing in Jana’s life. As you might imagine, Bronlissa’s a bit peeved at Jana. In order for the RP to work, though, Bronlissa can’t just simply want to kill Jana. I am wavering between having her really care deep down for Jana and want some sort of reconciliation on her terms, or just wanting to torture her into a very painful submission and death.

Jana is similarly conflicted. On the one hand, her fears were very real when she made that decision to kill Bronlissa. But as the years have gone by, Jana’s gotten lonely and no one has really measured up. She’s come to feel a great deal of regret for what she did, and even if it were justified she recognizes that it was a pretty wicked thing to do to someone you loved. Jana’s very conflicted and will feel that she’s about to get the punishment that is due her.

So this is where I began with this scenario, and I’ve tried it out with a few people to varying degrees of success. One problem that I have noted is that a few people just can’t abide an RP where someone else is more powerful than they are. This is true despite the RP never getting adversarial to any extent, and the person never being put at risk of anything. For a few people, the focus of the RP became about how to defeat Bronlissa, something I never really intended at all. The RP is about the relationship between Bronlissa and Jana and how that develops. At one point I thought part of the fun would be for Bronlissa to use other people to turn against Jana, but that requires a bit of depth or a bit of humility on the part of the other person, because people are naturally more sympathetic to Jana than they are to Bronlissa the demon. (This is true despite the fact that Jana is very clearly, IMO, in the wrong in this relationship.)

Fortunately there have been a few people that have a more progressive outlook on the RP and I’ve managed to bring it along with them. I think it’s been quite fun for me, and quite different in parts where I’m essentially telling a story rather than having an interaction with another person out there (during the times in which Jana and Bronlissa are acting and reacting to each other. And I do have some direction where I think I can take it, though I’m not sure how far I could get with just one person and whether I can meaningfully include other people along the ride. I hope I can.

Anyway, that’s what has been going on. I’m looking forward to the continuation of the Bronlissa RP, because it’s been a lot of fun and I feel it will help Jana develop as a character. As for the raiding stuff, I really hope it gets better. Right now I have the sense that we’re one bad week away from our raid team breaking up, and that’s a bad feeling.

The Further Decline of Azeroth

Fri, 10 May 2013 16:17:04 -0400

After reading through a lot of my last post I realized that there was more I could do, both in response to a few comments I got and to refine some thoughts on Warcraft’s financial situation. The following post contains a lot of irresponsible speculation and irresponsible financial wonkery so if you’re not into that sort of thing you might as well stop reading now.

The most interesting piece of financial data to me is on the fifth page of the tables accompanying this press release. About halfway down the page is a table setting forth the “Non-GAAP Net Revenues by Segment/Platform Mix.” If I understand this correctly, this shows the actual revenue that Blizzard received from January 1 to March 31, 2013 (as opposed revenue that was received earlier but could not be recognized until this quarter under generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP).

That table has a listing for “Online subscriptions”, which might be sort of a misnomer given how it is defined in a footnote: “Revenue from online subscriptions consists of revenue from all World of Warcraft products, including subscriptions, boxed products, expansion packs, licensing royalties and value-added services. It also includes revenues from Call of Duty: Elite membershios.”

Let’s get that last part out of the way first. Call of Duty: Elite is the online service for the Call of Duty franchise. It was launched in November 2011. Premium memberships sold for $49.99 a year. As of August 2012, they sold 2.3 million premium subscriptions. Apparently that wasn’t enough to sustain it, though, as in October 2012 Activision announced that the service would become free.

If those numbers are accurate, there’s a total of about $115 million spread throughout the 4Q 2011 through 4Q 2012 non-GAAP figures, and the amount will likely trickle out in the GAAP figures through 3Q2013. For the non-GAAP figures it’s likely that most of this revenue would be recorded in 4Q 2011 and 1Q 2012, when most of the accounts were probably activated.

The upshot? 1Q 2013 “Online subscription” revenue is all Warcraft, but it’s not directly comparable to 1Q 2012, which may have had around $50 million in Call of Duty: Elite memberships.

With that out of the way, let’s get to the numbers. Warcraft brought in $228 million in the first three months of 2013.

Let’s get a few things out of the way quickly. $228 million is a lot of money. It represents 28% of the revenue Activision Blizzard received over the three month period. It’s only $20 million less than Activision’s entire console business (which is a damned long list). There’s no question in my mind that World of Warcraft and its customers are one of the top priorities at Activision Blizzard.

In my last post I made the prediction that there would be no further expansions for World of Warcraft. This was based on the following assumptions:

The earliest Blizzard could have an expansion ready would be June or July 2014 (which follows the pattern since BC of an expansion every 22 months or so);
The subscriber base would continue to decline at a rate of about 433,000 per month, leaving 1.8 million subscribers as of the end of June 2014.
My hunch that World of Warcraft as it exists now could not be supported with about 2 million subscribers.

My understanding is that, in this part of the development cycle, the next expansion is being planned, but I highly doubt there would be anything even remotely close to playable. Going forward with it would represent a significant expense, and a decision whether to go forward with significant development or not would likely need to be made soon. They can’t say “Wait a year to see if things turn around”, because if they did they wouldn’t be able to make a June 2014 release.

The question posed is: does it make financial sense to green light a new World of Warcraft expansion.

Let’s get one thing clear: World of Warcraft is tremendously profitable. It is Activision Blizzard’s cash cow and likely has been since Burning Crusade was announced (and probably earlier). On the first page of the tables in Activision’s press release, there’s an entry for “Cost of sales - online subscriptions”, which shows a cost of $57 million. If this category corresponds to the revenue category of the same name (and I have no idea why it wouldn’t), Activision Blizzard’s gross profit from “online subscriptions” (i.e., World of Warcraft) was a cool $171 million. This is a gross margin of 75% - for every quarter Blizzard spent on World of Warcraft maintenance, they got a dollar back. It was also enough to cover Activision Blizzard’s entire product development cost with $46 million to spare for a pizza party for the programmers.

World of Warcraft, as it exists right now even with the reduced amount of subscribers, is the envy of practically every other gaming software maker in the world. $684 million in gross profit is nothing to sneeze at.

The problem is not where World of Warcraft is now. It’s where it’s going. And for this part I have to make a few guesses, ones that I think are reasonable but also could very well be wrong.

Activision Blizzard spent $125 million on product development last quarter. How much of it was related to World of Warcraft? Well, here’s the first assumption: the amount spent on WoW development as a portion of total development cost was the same as the revenue received from World of Warcraft as a portion of Activision Blizzard’s total revenue (not including “Distribution”). As of 1Q 2013 that would be 30% of $125 million, or $37.5 million. (Over the past year, that figure has varied from a low of 11% during major console game spikes to 50%, which makes me think 30% as a general figure is reasonable.)

With that assumption, Warcraft’s total gross cost goes to $94.5 million as compared to gross revenue of $228 million. That’s a gross margin of 58.5%, which looks good until you compare it to Activision Blizzard as a whole. As a whole (this time using GAAP because it’s likely to provide a more accurate gross margin for the entire company), Activision Blizzard had gross revenue of $1,324 million versus gross costs (net costs minus Sales and marketing and General and administrative expenses) of $541 million, for a gross margin of 59.1%. Thus, even though World of Warcraft earns a tremendous amount of money, right now it doesn’t earn the same return as an average Activision Blizzard game.

That, to me, is the rub. Absent a strategic incentive to do otherwise, business folk allocate assets to things that offer the greatest return. Right now, if you had a dollar, you’d be better off investing it in Activision Blizzard’s other properties than in World of Warcraft (although, to be fair, it’s really too close to call). In the future, World of Warcraft is likely to become a worse investment as it continues to lose subscribers. I think the heads of Activision Blizzard can see the same thing and - again, absent some strategic incentive - would invest in something other than Warcraft.

This presents the question as to whether Activision Blizzard would have a strategic incentive to invest in World of Warcraft. This is actually a strong possibility, I think. Blizzard’s new MMO is, from what I can tell from the slides, scheduled for late 2014. Under the laws of shipping date slippage, that means it might actually see the light of day as of mid-2015 (although releasing it on WoW’s 10th anniversary would be a neat thing to do). Can World of Warcraft be maintained through then, to the point where there is still a significant userbase ready to be transitioned to the MMO. Likely not without news of an expansion. If there is an expansion announced or released, I bet it’s for that reason rather than for finances. It’s more of a long term bet than a short term bet.

—

Now, for some further speculation as to the new MMO. I believe very strongly, no matter what the execs and devs said about not making a WoW sequel, that it is based on the Warcraft IP. At the time of the release, World of Warcraft is likely going to be on its last legs. Further, I don’t think Blizzard expects or could expect the average gamer to pay for two MMO subscriptions to Blizzard. A lot of the potential market for the new MMO will be World of Warcraft players, both present and past. It makes too much sense to say that the new MMO should be designed to appeal to Warcraft players and what would be more appealing than something related to Warcraft?

There is also the IP issue. Let’s suppose the new MMO uses a completely new universe, with new mythology and new lore. If that’s the case, Blizzard would no longer have a significant investment in the Warcraft lore, which is the very thing that made Blizzard rich in the first place. If there were some other Warcraft game planned (even not an MMO), then this might make sense. Blizzard without Warcraft is a company without its soul. I just can’t picture it happening.

I could be wrong, but it really just makes too much sense for a new Blizzard MMO set to replace Warcraft to use the Warcraft IP in some way.

The Decline of Azeroth

Wed, 08 May 2013 20:29:00 -0400

There’s been a bit of a buzz in my Twitter feed (and rightfully so) about MMO-Champion’s recent rundown of Activision-Blizzard’s latest announcement that (among other things) World of Warcraft is down to 8.3 million subscribers. 8.3 million subs is a decline of 1.3 million from the end of 2012. That’s roughly fourteen thousand cancelled subscriptions a day. Extrapolating from the operative date of the press release (March 31, 2013), Warcraft is probably down to around 7.75 million subscriptions. At that rate, no one will be subscribing to World of Warcraft as of the first week of October 2014.

That’s a scary thought.

To put it in a slightly different perspective, Warcraft was launched in November 2004. In January 2007, it had reached 8 million subscribers. 5 days later, Burning Crusade was released. Warcraft got its 9 millionth subscriber in July 2007. We are now down to pre-BC levels of subscribers.

For me, the interesting bits are in the details.

Activision Blizzard has released a 12-Quarter Financial Model in the form of an Excel Spreadsheet and if you’re at all curious as to where it gets its money, that’s a good thing to check out. (It’s available at their Quarterly Results page.)

The closest thing to revealing the revenues from World of Warcraft is on the “Rev Mix by Platform” tab. That tab shows the revenue attributed to “Online subscriptions” for the past three years. ”Online subscriptions” is defined as everything related to Warcraft, including some not-so-online-subscriptiony things such as expansion packs (i.e., the box you’d buy at Game Stop), licensing royalties (e.g., payments made to Activision by figurine makers) and value-added services (e.g., paid server transfers). It also includes “Call of Duty Elite memberships”, whatever those are, thus preventing someone from simply renaming “Online subscriptions” to “World of Warcraft”.

In any case, the GAAP revenue for this “platform” for the first three months of the year was $275 million, and the non-GAAP revenue was $228 million.

What’s the difference between GAAP revenue and non-GAAP revenue? With the caveat that I am not an accountant, here is an example that I understand to illustrate the difference. Suppose you pay $120 on January 1 for a yearly subscription to WoW. Since that payment was for services that were delivered over the whole of the year, the entirety of that revenue could not be recognized under GAAP in the first quarter; instead, $30 would be allocated to each quarter. Under non-GAAP, the $120 would be recorded under the first quarter revenue because that’s when it was received.

This covers a number of different situations. If you bought MoP, under GAAP the entire purchase price had to be split over a 12 month period because the game was sold with a promise of continuing online support. Under non-GAAP the revenue could be recognized immediately.

We now bring you back to the land of the living.

In this case, the difference between GAAP and non-GAAP is actually interesting; $275 million in GAAP revenue is nothing to sneeze at and is the second highest quarterly total since Q2 2011. But non-GAAP tells the problem; $228 million is barely above the low of $199 million in Q2 2012, and is in fact the second lowest in the three year period. It seems to me that the Q1 CY2013 GAAP revenues are boosted by sales of Mists of Pandaria in September 2012, and that the non-GAAP revenues are closer to the actual revenue from the subscriber base would be.

$228 million over 8.3 million subscribers is about $27.47 per subscriber, or $9.16 per month.

What should be concerning to Blizzard and the rest of us is how far down that number is year to year. It’s 9% lower than the year ago quarter, which isn’t entirely representative because the quarter a year ago was one year into Cataclysm. A more appropriate comparison would be two years ago, just after Cataclysm was released. 1Q CY2013 revenue from Online subscriptions was $339 million. Over two years that’s about a 33% decrease.

What’s the point of all this?

Well, I have been asked a few times lately what the next expansion for Warcraft would be. (Why me? No idea, I have no better idea than anyone else.) My understanding was that Blizzard had planned two further expansions in order to get players to level 100.

After reviewing the financials, I don’t see that happening anymore. Whatever one thinks of Mists of Pandaria artistically, the financials show the grim truth that it failed to spark significant revenue increases. As a comparison, non-GAAP Q4 2010 revenue, when Cataclysm was released, was $544 million. For MoP in Q3 2012, it was only $345 million. It’s hard to justify another expansion when the current one failed to grow interest in the franchise. I think that Mists of Pandaria is the end of the road.

So what happens now? Well, to some extent we’ve already seen it. There’s an increasing reliance on cross-server mechanics, including the dreaded CRZ “feature” ensuring greater competition for mining nodes and extra-saucy off realm trolling with the added bonus of dismounting anyone you are carrying as a Sandstone Drake every time you switch zones. It would not surprise me to see some low population realms be consolidated as well, but I think Blizzard is highly reluctant to do such a thing because it will be interpreted (rightly) as a death knell. Most of the cross-realm features will allow players to play the game as intended even if a realm’s population won’t support it.

One thing I wouldn’t look for is subscription price cuts. I don’t think the majority of people are unsubscribing from Warcraft because it’s too expensive. Rather, I think the level of new subscribers has fallen to an insubstantial number because the game seems “old” and inaccessible (consider how many separate things you have to buy to get Pandaria content), and other people are leaving because of dissatisfaction with the game itself. Even if this were not true, though, it still doesn’t make financial sense (and at this point it would be a purely financial move). Suppose dropping the subscription rate to $5/month would net you 2 million more subscribers. That would cost Blizzard $22 million a month without any ancillary benefit.

In short, I expect to see more cross-realm features added, perhaps even allowing cross-realm raiding of current content. Perhaps cross-realm auction houses will appear. There might be other steps that I can’t anticipate that have the effect of merging servers without the death knell implications of actually merging servers.

The slides accompanying the press release mention a new MMO in development, one which has the code name “Titan” bandied about. My bet is that once Garrosh bites the dust, practically all game development will be shifted to that MMO, which I think is very likely to be World of Warcraft 2 (with “Titan” as a reference to the Titans of lore).

edit: Fritokal made two helpful comments that I think deserve some sort of response to illustrate where my beliefs are coming from.

First, she said (forgive me if I have the gender wrong): “[T]he development cycle suggests that they’re already likely working on another expansion.” This is true, but I think that unless the subscriber loss is unexpectedly stemmed, whatever is in development will be canceled. Expansions happen once every 22 months or so, putting the projected date for the next expansion in July 2014. Will Activision give the go on such an expansion if they expect that there will be less than 2 million subscribers left at that point? I don’t think so - I think it’s highly likely that sometime soon, if they haven’t already done so, that significant WoW development is throwing good money after bad.

Second, she says that “devs and GMs have said there will be no WoW 2.” I have heard this, but I think there’s enough wiggle room in what I’ve read the developers to say for it to be something set within the Warcraft Universe. For instance, in this article Mike Morhaime says, “We’re not trying to make a WoW sequel.” There’s a lot of wiggle room there - something within the WoW universe set, say, 100 years into the future wouldn’t necessarily qualify as a WoW sequel. My bet is that there is so much IP associated with Warcraft that Blizzard would have to try to leverage that somehow - and without WoW, there would be nothing along that line. (As one person noted, it doesn’t preclude the MMO being a WoW prequel.)

My money is on it being Warcraft related somehow. But I could very well be wrong.

Enjoy Azeroth while it lasts.

WoW Insider: Know Your Lore

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 11:46:03 -0400

WoW Insider: Know Your Lore:

This article by Anne Stickney caught my eye last night, mostly because I’ve been thinking of doing a lore post about my experiences in Mists of Pandaria anyway. So here’s a good place to add my two cents.

Stickney notes that “Alliance players [are] worked up in a near frenzy on realm and story forums, bitter and angry about the direction the Alliance storyline has been taking and repeatedly demanding more.” She describes in wonderful detail the history of the alliance and how we got to Wrath of the Lich King, specifically the return of Varian Wrynn.

But then the article veers off in a direction that seems very foreign to me. Now, an important caveat: I don’t know what Alliance players are saying on realm and story forums. Even if I did, I can’t speak for them. I can only speak for myself. From my point of view, Stickney gets it very wrong.

(Note: none of the following should be interpreted as a personal attack on Stickney, who I quite like. If it seems that way, I apologize, as it’s not my intention to talk about her, but rather the ideas she puts forth.)

As I understand her argument, Stickney claims that with the return of Varian Wrynn, he displaces the alliance player in the role of “Hero of the Alliance”. ”That feeling of being a hero.… was taken away with the arrival of Varian Wrynn…”

This has never been my experience, not in Wrath, not in Cataclysm and not in Pandaria. It wasn’t Wrynn who performed the heroic deeds. Jana was the one who helped Bolvar defeat Thel’zan the Duskbringer underneath Wintergarde. Jana was the one who survived the cowardly Forsaken attack at the Wrathgate and went on to attack the Undercity. Traxy was the one who killed the Lich King. Saxsy was the one who defeated Ragnaros and pushed the Fire Lord back from Hyjal. Jana was the one who defeated Deathwing and ensured Azeroth’s survival. Saxsy was the one who saved the Valley of Four Winds by launching herself into the stomach of a giant bug. Jana was the one who saved Kun-Lai by rolling barrels of ale down a hill. Jana was the one who defeated the Sha of Fear.

Varian Wrynn had practically nothing to do with any of these things. Jana, Traxy and Saxsy were the heroes, were undoubtedly treated by the game as such and got the just rewards from their heroic deeds.

I don’t feel like my characters are not heroes. But I think Stickney is very close to getting what I feel the problem is with the Alliance when she says “Alliance players don’t really have a reason to be fighting right now.” I think that’s hogwash—there are and continue to be existential threats to the Alliance and Azeroth that demand a response. The problem for me is that the Alliance itself does not (and has not) provided the demand for this response.

Let’s review some of the events within the World of Warcraft game since the glorious defeat of the Lich King:

1. The Dragonflight discovered a breach in the Ruby Sanctum, fortelling of a dire attack on Azeroth. The Alliance did nothing.

2. Deathwing arrived and, among other things, destroyed the Park in Stormwind, destroyed the Stonewrought Dam, and destroyed Auberdine. The Alliance’s response to this was to send its forces to fight the Horde over an abandoned Kul Tiran prison.

3. The Forsaken marched on Hillsbrad Foothills, and destroyed Southshore by covering it with the plague. It also marched on Gilneas and carpet bombed that city with the plague, forcing the Gilneans to retreat to Darnassus. The Alliance had no response to this.

4. Orcs pushed deeper into Ashenvale, destroyed the town of Astranaar, and established strongholds in western Ashenvale from which they could launch attacks on Kaldorei settlements, and even Darnassus itself. The Alliance had no significant response to this.

5. A group of Goblins declared its allegiance to the horde and desecrated the historical capital of the Kaldorei empire by building a go-kart track over its ruins and terraforming it to look like a horde symbol. The Alliance had no response to this.

6. Ragnaros returned in Hyjal to threaten all of Azeroth. The Alliance left the response to this to druids.

7. Deathwing launched an attack on Wyrmrest Temple as part of his end plan to destroy all of Azeroth. The Alliance sent the Skybreaker and a few marines to assist Thrall and the Dragon Aspects.

8. Theramore was destroyed by the Horde using a powerful mana bomb. The Alliance’s response to this was to hand out fireworks and chant “Remember Theramore!”

9. The Horde sought a relic that would infuse its warriors with the powers of the sha. The Alliance found the relic first and hid it in Darnassus. The Horde invaded Darnassus and stole the relic. The Alliance’s response was to send a fifteen year old boy to find a Monkey King to learn how to destroy the relic. (Note: the Kirin Tor responded much more dramatically, with the express disapproval of King Wrynn.)

Note a pattern here?

My problem with the Alliance lore after WotLK has nothing to do with Wrynn himself or the thought of being a hero. My problem with Alliance lore is that it seems like the Alliance’s response to significant attacks and even existential threats is to yawn and say “Someone else will take care of it.”

I feel that this is a frustration shared by many roleplayers on Moon Guard. There are guilds dedicated to taking back Southshore, to taking back Gilneas, and even to taking back Zin-Ashari. None of them will ever succeed because Blizzard doesn’t even seem to acknowledge that anyone would actually want to do this.

5.3 doesn’t seem like it’s going to be much of an improvement on these parts. From what I can tell—and I hope I’m wrong—Alliance players will address Garrosh’s madness not through assignments from SI:7 or directives by Wrynn, but through following directives from former Horde NPCs who split off from Garrosh. I fear that the ultimate story ending for the expansion will be one of the Alliance players offering assistance to the rebels in a Horde civil war, rather than seeking retribution for the crimes committed by the Horde—many of which were not initiated by Garrosh! Will the alliance really ally with Sylvanas and forget Southshore and Gilneas? Will the alliance really forgive the attack on Theramore which involved coordination among ALL the horde factions?

This is what irritates me as an Alliance player. It’s not that Jana isn’t a hero—she definitely is. It’s that she’s not a hero of the Alliance.

How Not To Sell Gems

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 12:49:55 -0400

This morning I ran into another seller of gems. We spoke for some time, talking about the gem market and how things worked. I knew his name from looking at the gem sale list (when people undercut you, you tend to recognize their names), but he wasn’t the sort of seller who really upset me. I mean, I get a little upset when someone undercuts me and I have to list my gem, but that’s the nature of the business. If you can’t stand that, you may as well not sell gems, because I do that to someone else every time I list a gem.

There are some things that do make me mad, however. Most of the time these things make me mad because I just think they’re stupid. A lot of the time these things make me mad because they cost me gold. And a lot of these things make me mad because they are stupid, cost me gold, and cost the gem seller gold as well.

1. Listing gems for 48 hours.

This is just stupid. Most gems, if they sell, will sell within two to three hours of being listed, or sooner. Otherwise they will be undercut. This is stupid because it quadruples the listing fee for the seller, and many sellers will cancel the auction and relist anyway. What happens with the 48 hour listing, though, is it effectively sets a cap for the price for that two day period unless it sells quickly. It prevents the market from clearing, and thus costs me gold.

2. Undercutting by more than a token amount.

This is just stupid. (Admittedly, I was stupid once.) Gems are a highly inelastic market; below some cap that I don’t really know the value, people will pay whatever the lowest price is, whether it’s 30 gold or 300 gold. If the current market price is 200 gold, listing a gem for 100 gold won’t make it sell faster, but it will deny you the gold you could have gotten for listing it for 199 gold. This also destroys the market for the gem because of the next tactic.

One exception for this is when the price of the gem is so high that it really is beyond the cap at which you think people will seek alternatives. In my opinion, I can’t fathom people spending more than 400 gold on a gem. On the other hand, I used to not be able to fathom people spending more than 300 gold on a gem, and I’ve since learned otherwise. If the current gem price is well over 400 gold I will often list my gem for 400 gold. I don’t think anyone has a right to complain that a gem priced at 400 gold is too low.

3. Mindlessly undercutting low priced gems.

I used to love it when people did this in Cata, because it gave me a cheap source for red gems, which I knew would sell well. With the variety of gems desired in MoP, however, I haven’t tried this strategy, as I fear I might get a stockpile of gems I can’t sell.

What happens here is that a volume gem seller, someone who really should know better, lists ten or so gems at a token amount lower than a gem listed by someone who undercut the market by fifty percent or more. This effectively establishes the new price as absurdly low until all of those gems sell, effectively preventing everyone from making a profit off of that gem.

The combination of two and three above leads to a tactic of mine that I might take up again, especially now that there seems to be an aggressive volume undercutter who I’ll call R. I would bait that person by listing a gem at an absurdly low amount (e.g., 40 gold), and then when that person undercuts me robotically, buy all their gems out and list for a new price. Since I have a whole bank tab ready for storage, I might try this as an alternative to ghost iron ore to restock my gems. But it’s a risky strategy.

4. Failing to clear the market when the opportunity arises.

Over the past few days, I’ve noticed several gems where one person had listed several gems for a token amount below one other gem, and that those were the only gems on the market. These gems were listed for a low but reasonable price (e.g., 90g). At that point, I don’t think there’s any excuse for a volume seller (who probably has scads of these gems lying around) to not simply buy the one gem other than theirs and reset the price to something ridiculously profitable. I do this myself most of the time - and I sell one gem at a time.

5. Selling a gem for less than its vendor price.

This actually amuses me more than it bugs me because it really only happens with gems that I don’t sell because there’s no market for them. But it boggles my mind that people would list Subtle Sun’s Radiances for 3g90 when they could go to the vendor and sell them without a listing fee for 4g. (In fact, any price below 4g60 doesn’t make much sense to me because of the listing fee, although really any price below 20g doesn’t make much sense to me either.) Of course, why anyone would cut a Subtle Sun’s Radiance boggles my mind as well, but that’s because I know from research that nobody wants them.

There may be more. But those are the things that anger and befuddle me. They cost me gold, and also cost the person doing them gold as well. The latter is really the thing that makes me shake my head; I don’t know why some people - who are obviously experienced with gem selling - throw away as much gold as they do.

Jana Goes Wtfpwn.

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 14:07:55 -0400

Monday night our raid team went into Throne of Thunder with the intention of finally beating the Council of Elders fight, the third fight in the instance.

Council of Elders is an interesting fight with lots of different things to keep track of. It has four “bosses”, one from each of the major tribes. I’m not going to run down the fight here other than to say that the mechanics of the fight require you to switch targets from time to time, generally when they become “empowered”. As of the start of the raid we did not have all too much luck with this boss, although we had started to progress.

I was looking forward to this raid week because I had gotten some new equipment. I had gotten my 2 piece tier 15 bonus out of LFR, and I had gotten a new trinket (Wushoolay’s Final Choice) that was supposedly much better than the trinket I had before, despite losing 2 item levels.

The first part of the raid on Sunday passed without incident. I did well, I suppose, but not extraordinarily so. My dps was still topped by our fury warrior, who I like to think of myself as competing with.

But the Council of Elders fight changed things a bit. At the time I didn’t think much of it as far as a fire mage fight - there is some passive splash damage available when all of the bosses are alive and in a group, but between empowers and Loas there’s so much target switching I thought the plusses and minuses would cancel out. Our first attempt seemed to bear this out, as a 1:45 wipe had me second but still behind our fury warrior.

It was in the second attempt Jana started to shine. There, in a 2:30 wipe, Jana did 178k dps, a full 60k dps more than the first fight. What was the difference? I’m not really sure. But I was happy with the attempt and was hopeful that I could sustain it.

Then came the third attempt.

Now, I remember long ago when living bomb would spread to eight targets that there were certain trash packs where I (and, I would hope, other fire mages) could do ridiculous damage. Things like 140k in Firelands or the like. These were always short fights that took advantage of Combustion hitting several targets and living bomb exploding and hitting multiple targets without its now imposed limitations. They were fun, but they weren’t really meaningful.

Council of Elders is meaningful. And on the third attempt, Jana did 277k dps. Here’s the World of Logs parse.

Yes, the attempt only lasted eighty seconds. Yes, we had heroism up for half of that. No, I wouldn’t have been able to sustain that over the rest of the fight.

But still. It was a boss fight. It lasted for longer than a minute.

One of the frustrating or lovable things about fire mages, depending on your view of things, is that their performance can be remarkably erratic. Run through a long series of non-crits just after combustion comes off cooldown? No way you’re doing good dps then.

But when everything lines up… well. Something like this happens. It’s the sort of thing that makes me happy to play a fire mage. It’s also the sort of thing that boosts my confidence and helps me on the subsequent fights.

We downed the boss ten tries later. My dps then was a much more pedestrian 137k, spread over 6:45. I didn’t have another attempt quite like the third attempt. But that was okay. You have to appreciate those moments when they come.