Response to Spinks on Gamer Misogyny

This is a response to Spinks' That 'women in gaming' post. I posted a comment to that post in haste, and didn't really convey what I wanted to convey. So this is my second stab at it.

Proposition 1: A significant portion of gamer culture is virulently misogynistic.

I completely and utterly agree with this proposition. It's pretty much self-evident.

Proposition 2: A significant portion of gamer culture is virulently misogynistic, because of the way games are designed.

I completely disagree with this proposition.

Aside from the few companies who are stupid and/or deliberately provocative (*cough*Rockstar*cough*), modern Western games--not gamers, but games--are extremely respectful to women. They feature strong, competent female characters. Off the top of my head consider Jaina, Sylvannas, Jaheria, Bastila, Annah, Fall-From-Grace, Leilana, Morrigan, Wynne, April Ryan. Western game rulebases do not differentiate between male and female. Female characters are just as likely to be successful as male characters.

Female villains are just as daunting as male villains, without resorting to offensive caricatures. Quite frankly, this is something the game industry does better than any other media out there. Consider Onyxia, Queen Anora, Kerrigan, SHODAN, GLaDOS, Carmen Sandiego. There aren't that many female villains, but the ones that are tend to be drawn quite well.

Most game companies also go out of their way to be welcoming to women. A decade ago, when Wizards of the Coast released Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, they wrote the rulebooks using female pronouns (she, her instead of he, his), to basically hammer home on every single page the point that women were welcome. I don't really know how successful that method was, but I thought it particularly stylish, so I copied it for my own writing.

In my experience, the modern game industry is more respectful of women than most modern movies, music, television, fiction, and even media aimed mainly at women like romance novels¹. In my opinion, the only genre that routinely treats women better than modern games is young adult fiction, and even young adult fiction rarely has good female villains.

So then, how do we square the fact that many gamers are misogynistic, when most games are not, and in fact do make significant efforts to be respectful to women?

I think it is a combination of three factors.

The first factor is that gamers, especially teenage gamers, are treated badly by female culture. Male culture has mostly absorbed gaming to the point where almost every young male games casually. But female culture still looks down on gaming. Exactly how many guys would tell a girl that they gamed on first acquaintance? Versus pretty much any other hobby? What other moderately mainstream hobby carries such social stigma as gaming?

So is it any surprise that some gamers, especially teenage males, lash back defensively? It completely fails to excuse that behavior. Misogyny is inexcusable. But if the misogyny stems from this cause, then there is really nothing that game makers can really do. They've been trying to make games more popular and more main-stream for years now.

The second factor is that it is much easier for like-minded gamers to find each other and group together, reinforcing their negative tendencies. This is because gaming communities are heavily internet-based. In a smaller or geographic-based community, the community leaders could police these behaviors, and bring deviants in-line with the rest of the community norms. But in a very large community, such as the internet, the deviants just slink off and form their own sub-community and impose their behavior on others.

Again, I am not really sure what game makers can do about this. Would you really accept limitations on your right of association? Imagine if you could not choose your guild, but were randomly assigned to one. And you could not easily switch guilds. What would the social structure look like? What norms would prevail? I think it would prevent the reinforcement of an individual's misogyny, but it would also prevent reinforcement of some positive norms. Not to mention that most people want to play with their friends.

As well, so much of association is carried out on Vent and external message boards that the game maker cannot control.

The third and final factor is anonymity. Anonymity dehumanizes people. You don't see other people in the game, you start to see just characters running around. These gamers do not see how many women actually play the game, do not see that real people control the characters that they are insulting. Anonymity also reduces fear of reprisal. People act badly just because they can. They pay no social price for their vitriol.

Consider the game of chess. In many ways, chess maps to gaming in that very few women play, and it has a low social cachet. Yet, chess culture is not nearly as misogynistic as game culture can be. Now, maybe it's because chess is more staid, but I think it is because chess lacks that culture of anonymity. Everyone uses their real name and are ranked with that. And as a result, chess culture is far more respectful to everyone than gaming is, even if almost no women play.

But then again, none of you agree with me about anonymity and real names. Everyone is too concerned with "privacy" in video games². And so we reap the consequences of that decision.

That's where I stand on this issue. I agree that a significant portion of gamer culture is virulently misogynistic. However, I think the games themselves have done a really good job of driving out disrespect to women in the actual game and rulebase. I'm not sure that there is too much more that they could do. They can't force female culture to not stigmatize gaming. I think gamers would fuss if they made a solid attempt to break the right to choose your associations. We've already seen that gamers howl if their precious "privacy" is in any way threatened.

So what's left? Fiddling with crafting and pet collecting in a futile effort to entice more women to play? (Does anyone really believe that women don't game because there's not enough pet collecting?) And this will reduce the misogyny how exactly? More women in the game won't matter because you cannot force the misogynists to associate with them. Social shame is pretty much the only option to control them, and that path is blocked.

Games cannot be held responsible for factors out of their control. Modern games have done, in my opinion, a superb job of creating strong, competent female characters and generally being friendly to women. If I had daughters, I would much rather them take Sylvannas as a role model than most other characters in non-gaming media (though maybe with less emphasis on the whole "raising the dead" thing).

1. I read Regencies, and kind of frankly, sometimes I wonder that women accept the way women are treated in a significant minority of those novels, let alone how men are treated. If women were treated that way in a male-dominated medium, there would be Senate hearings. Also, what's the deal with red hair?
2. Meanwhile, your local government is probably putting your house plans and property taxes up on the internet. Not joking, by the way.

Namespace

One of the good things about WoW is that Blizzard never deletes old characters, and Blizzard allows to have up to 10 or so characters on each server. However, each character's name is unique per server.

I wonder if this combination of factors will reach a boiling point as Cataclysm approaches. It is getting harder and harder to find a name for a new character. Instead it's a continuous round of "That name is not available" until you finally hit some acceptable combination. I think this factor has contributed to the large amounts of odd names and non-standard characters used these days.

Over 5 years worth of names have been locked away. And that might present a problem when Cataclysm hits. With two new races and a large overhaul of level 1-60, people are going to be making lots of new characters which will require new names.

Maybe it's time that Blizzard starts looking into ways to free up some of the names that are gathering dust. Deleting characters is excessive. But maybe Blizzard could unlock the name of any character under level 40 and that has not been logged in for 4 months. Anyone could take the name, and if the old character logs on, she will have to choose a new name.

I was skeptical at first, but I really like the way Cryptic handles names. They use "characterName@accountName". In-game and on nameplates only the Character Name is displayed, while the full name is shown in the chatbox. Though, the character name is emphasized and the account name dulled. To friend someone or send tells, you use the account name.

It's really nice to be able to just create a new character with the exact name you want, and not have to play "That name is not available" roulette.

Female NPCs

So there was some chatter in the blogosphere over the last couple weeks about women or feminism in WoW. No real comment on that issue, but on reading some of the posts, I had a random thought:

What if Garrosh was female?

Would Garrosha still be presented in the same fashion that Garrosh is, as a hot-headed warmonger? What would the player-base's reaction to a female character who displayed the same traits as Garrosh does?

I actually started thinking about this while playing the Starcraft II storyline. There is only one female character¹: Dr. Ariel Hanson. The thing is that there is nothing wrong with Dr. Hanson. She's smart, educated, kind, a leader for her colonists. She is entirely unobjectionable. She is also completely uninteresting. For all of Tychus Findlay's flaws, he was a far more intriguing character.

You kind of see the same thing with female Warcraft NPCs. The only interesting (non-villain) female character is Sylvannas Windrunner. The other ones, Jaina, Tyrande, Liadrin etc., all tend to fall into this unobjectionable category. They're all competent, powerful, smart, non-sterotypical² characters.

The female villains are interesting. Lady Prestor had style, and I really liked the portrayal of High General Abbendis of the Scarlet Onslaught, as revealed through her diaries³. But this doesn't seem to extend to female heroes.

Varian and Garrosh are at least unique characters, even if they are--or perhaps because they are--terribly flawed. They generate debate and passion. But it seems very unlikely that Blizzard would make a female NPC like those two.

I wonder if that's a defensive reaction. To keep people from objecting to their portrayal of female characters, they make those female characters unobjectional. It's just too bad that this process seems to make them uninteresting as well.

1. Discounting Kerrigan/Queen of Blades as she is a villain.
2. At least, they don't match the sterotypes of previous generations. Whether this in itself is a stereotype of our current generation, I leave as an exercise for the reader.
3. [The Path of Redemption], [The Diary of High General Abbendis]

Advice From a Loyal Reader

I was surprised the other day when I logged in and found that I had advice in the mail from a long-time, though anonymous, reader:

I thought I'd go through this faithful reader's concerns, and talk about my choices about my current gear. (Points slightly rearranged for ease of response.)

Your armory makes me cringe. Drop the MP5 and SP gems and the MP5 enchants. Utter garbage. Gem pure int with 1 Nightmare Tear in the helm.

This is the major point where I differ with what I see as established Holy paladin theorycraft. Most high-end paladins gem, and even enchant, pure intellect. Personally, I like getting socket bonuses, so I use SP/Int, Int, and Int/MP5 gems. So far I haven't had any issues with mana. But if I was to change anything, this would be it.

I'm not really sure what MP5 enchants are being discussed. The only MP5 enchants I have are the faction head/shoulder SP/MP5 ones. As far as I know, MP5 is considered better than crit, so these enchants are the ones to use.

Get the 245 libram from Triumph Emblems. It's BiS.

I use [Libram of Renewal]. My loyal reader suggests using [Libram of Veracity] instead. I am somewhat puzzled by this. The point of gemming full Intellect is to spam Holy Light. Holy Light spam costs a lot of mana, and reducing the cost of HL by 10% is very powerful. Plus HL spam tends to have high overheal, so extra spellpower often just increases your overheal.

Pick up another 400 Haste. Stop wearing MP5 gear. Crafted legs are BiS. 60 Frost gloves are BiS. Crafted boots are BiS

These are pretty good suggestions. To be honest, I kind of just take gear as it drops. I don't do 10-mans, though, so I'm relatively behind on badges.

Consider a 51/5/15 spec for better HPS and efficiency.

I use a 51/20/0 spec for Divine Guardian. I think Divine Guardian is a really powerful cooldown that is extremely useful.

Drop Glyph of BoL, it's garbage. HS or FoL is the way to go.

I disagree here, Glyph of Beacon of Light is a better choice. It saves a bit of mana, saves a GCD every so often, and most importantly, staggers your BoL and SS refreshes. Taking two GCDs in a row to refresh buffs is a long time between heals. As for the other two, HL is the spell of choice, so buffing the other two is less valuable. Better to buff the spells you use most often, and Beacon is always up.

Drop enchanting for JC.

My second profession is already Jewelcrafting. Seems kind of silly to drop Enchanting at this point.

Seriously, after you got denied from Reclaimed I thought you would at least try to fix your !@#$. It just bothers my soul that you have a blog and give people advice when your own character is such a wreck. I feel bad for your guild. You at least owe it to them to research your class and play correctly.

Heh, Reclaimed was two years ago. I'm somewhat surprised that someone would remember and consider it important enough to reference. Or take time to look up my armor, make notes, create a character on my server and send me an anonymous mail with advice.

Still, the "bothers my soul" line is a tad over-wrought.

It's always useful to see what better players are doing. Let's take a look at Diamondtear of Paragon.

The immediate difference I see is that Diamondtear gems and enchants pure intellect, and does gear for haste (though she uses the same legs that I do). Otherwise, we use the same faction enchants, use the same libram, and have similar specs and glyphs.

The Copyright Bargain

The Original Bargain

THQ and Penny Arcade kicked off a debate last week on used games. Tycho compared used games to straight-out piracy, and got a lot of heat for that view. Here is my perspective on the issue.

Our society created a bargain called copyright between creators and consumers. Creators got certain rights, such as the sole ability to make and distribute copies and derivate works for a set period of time. Consumers got certain rights, such as the right to sell or lend their copy to another person, and to quote snippets of the work in other works, such as essays.

By and large, this bargain worked pretty decently up until the end of the last century. Creators got enough rights that they could make a living selling their work. Consumers did not get penalized for using works in a normal manner. Aside from maybe Disney's efforts to extend the term of copyright for far longer than originally set, the copyright bargain was fair to both sides.

But this bargain was forged when all creative works were physical media. Digital media, on the other hand, differs from physical media in subtle ways. That difference may be enough that the old bargain is no longer fair to one of the sides.

Differences Between Physical and Digital Media

There are two major differences between physical media and digital media.

First, physical media can degrade. Why buy a new book instead of a used book? Well, for one thing, the new copy is pristine. A used book might have water stains, or torn or dog-eared pages. Some barbarous philistine may have underlined or highlighted sections.

That concept of pristine doesn't really apply to digital media. Pardon the pun, but digital media is rather binary: it either works or it doesn't. Your game either installs and runs, or it doesn't.

Second, copying physical media is expensive. Copying a paper book is an arduous process for an individual consumer. There's no concept of making a backup copy of a book, or a transformative copy to a different format.

Copying and manipulating digital media, in contrast, is trivial. That's pretty much the whole purpose of computers: to copy and manipulate data.

Because copying physical media is so expensive, copyright's restrictions on copying really only affected the corporations and not the end consumer. But digital media changed all that.

Conclusions

These two differences have put more pressure on the creator side of the bargain. It is important that the bargain is fair to both sides. The harder it is for creators to make money, the fewer works that will be created. There is such a thing as "killing the goose which laid the golden eggs." At the same time though, making end consumers jump through hoops is just going to annoy everyone.

I think that the differences between physical and digital media are strong enough that the copyright bargain may need to be adjusted. For example, maybe we could ban resale and lending, but cut the copyright term to 5 or 10 years. So the creators can make more money, but only for a shorter time.

If we had a political class worth a damn, maybe they would look at this issue and hammer out a reasonable compromise. But we don't, so we'll just muddle along, trying to force the old bargain to apply in a world that it is not suited to.

On Crafting

There are four aspects involved in crafting:

1. Gathering knowledge - This is learning how to craft items. It can be finding recipes, or trial and error, or even random chance.


2. Gathering raw materials - This is getting the ingredients necessary to make the final item.


3. Transmutation - this is the specific process of converting the raw materials to the finished product.


4. Using the created item - Using the item for it's intended (and maybe unintended) function.

Different games emphasise different aspects. For example, in A Tale in the Desert, Transmutation is a complicated process, essentially a mini-game within the game. In contrast, WoW abstracts Transmutation to a single press of a button. In WoW, the game associated with crafting is primarily focused on the first two aspects of acquiring knowledge and raw materials.

A lot of people dislike this choice, and feel that Transmutation should be more involved. I am not so sure that this is the case. An interesting mini-game is fun the first time you make the item, but it what about the tenth or hundredth time? Not to mention that it is inconvenient for potential customers. If I get some new gear and need 5 gems cut, I don't really want to wait for my jewelcrafter guildie to struggle through 5 games of a Bejeweled clone, maybe even failing some of them. I much prefer getting the raw materials, giving them to her, and getting cut gems almost immediately.

I think where WoW's crafting really falls down is actually Aspect 4: Using the Item.

Initially, WoW is character progression through level. But at the level cap, it switches to character progression through gear. But that progression is controlled through the Bind-on-Pickup mechanism. Bind-on-Pickup ensures that a player needs to actually complete content to have their character improve. While there is a smattering of items you can buy, or alternate ways to earn gear like daily heroics, the vast majority of good gear can only be gained by going out and defeating content.

The problem is that currently crafting cannot partake of the bind-on-pickup mechanism. As I've mentioned before, WoW crafting is missing an action: a crafter cannot create a Bind-on-Pickup item for another character using Bind-On-Pickup raw materials that the other character has acquired.

Crucially, an NPC can do this. That's why crafting is sidelined in end-game, and NPCs hand out emblem gear. Crafting is missing that crucial verb that would allow it to be used in the endgame content.

If a crafter could make Bind-On-Pickup items for another player, that would open the door to a lot of possibilities. For example, Tier armor could be crafted entirely, given that it is already tokenized. Raid bosses could drop recipes, and players would gather raw materials along with special boss drops and take them to a crafter to get their tier gear. You could even restrict recipes to specific classes. Imagine if you had to find a paladin blacksmith to forge Lightsworn Battlegear.

Such a scheme would make crafting armor--not just consumables--an integral part of endgame once again. I think it would also feel better. To see what I mean, compare turning tokens to a vendor to gathering raw materials (could have a field day with what you need to collect) and getting armor forged by a blacksmith who learned the forgotten recipes deep inside the epic dungeon. On one level, both methods are really the same thing, but on another level, the latter would be so much more stylish.

Much better than getting to play a random Tetris-clone every time you want to cut a gem.

Roleplaying and MMOs

Hopefully, roleplayers won't feel too insulted by this post.

Kill Ten Rats has an article up asking why there isn't more role-playing in Dungeons and Dragons Online? We can extend the question to ask why--since MMOs stem from pen-and-paper (PnP) roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons--relatively few people roleplay in MMOs?

I'm going to say that it is because roleplaying in an MMO is fundamentally different than roleplaying in a PnP game. And the difference is significant enough that the majority playerbase sees MMO roleplaying as mere affectation, irrelevant window dressing that kind of misses the point of the underlying game.

The thing is that the point of pen-and-paper roleplaying is "conflict resolution in character". You play a character, you are presented with conflicts, and you resolve them in character. It's sometimes hard to see this in D&D because so much of the rulesbase concerns itself with combat. But if you look at indie PnP games such as Dogs in the Vineyard, where conflict resolution is more abstract, it becomes really obvious.

But in an MMO, you can be in-character all you want, but you cannot resolve conflicts in character. You are limited to the options provided to you and the need to share the same world with other players. You can try and spin "extra" conflicts between other players, but those do not have same weight as the conflicts the game itself provides. It's not "roleplaying" per se, it's just amateur theatrics.

(As normal, we pause to insert the standard EvE Online disclaimer. This is mostly because EvE Online gives players the tools to resolve said conflicts: ship-to-ship missiles.)

So I think that role-playing is not really relevant to MMOs, and isn't really something that should be expected from the players, regardless of the lineage of the genre. If players want to indulge in RP, there's nothing wrong with that, but I don't think it is something that game developers need to spend time worrying about. And I don't think that the presence or absence of a roleplaying community has any bearing whatsoever on the quality of an MMO.

Recruiting

My guild, Ad Infinitum, is trying to make a last push for Heroic Lich King before Cataclysm comes. We're looking for some people to fill out our raid.

Specifically, we're looking for priests and mages, but we're always willing to talk to good players of any class.

We're 11/12 Heroic ICC. We're a Pacific Standard Time guild on US-Lethon, which is a low-pop PvP realm. We raid 25-mans 3 days a week (Wednesday, Sunday, Monday) from 7pm - 11pm PST.

There's also several 10-mans throughout the week and an alt 25-man on Fridays.

If you're at all interested, please take a look at our website and apply. If you have any questions, feel free to email me or comment on this post.

Virtual Passports

John Patricelli wrote an exceptionally good post on MMOs as a virtual government. It's extremely thought-provoking.

I do have a couple of quibbles. For example, sometimes changes are made for reasons other than controlling player behavior. For example, John cites the tremporary window where you can trade BoP items with other people in party as a reaction to ninja looters. It's far more likely that this was done so that people could correct genuine mistakes, where someone accidentally rolled need, or the item was master-looted to the wrong person.

That's a general weakness of attempts to legislate good behavior through programming. It's often hard to distinguish between someone actively griefing, versus a genuine mistake, or someone who doesn't know what the "right" thing to do is. The classic example is a newbie hunter joining a group with his pet on aggressive. Very annoying, but it's hard to tell if it is a griefer or a new player.

(Though, 99% of the annoyance could be removed if Aggressive was disabled in instances. The new Defensive is more than good enough for group play, even for a hunter who doesn't micro-manage their pet. To be honest, I don't really see why Aggressive pets are a good idea to start with. The new Defensive could be Aggressive and bring back the old Defensive. I'm not sure it's good gameplay for the Hunter to ever lose control of her pet the way Aggressive does.)

I would like to point out the very first example of Blizzard attempting to promote good behavior via game rules: the language barrier between Horde and Alliance. It was done in order to remove trash talking from the PvP game, or at least move it to the forums.

Warrior Tanking is Fun

You know, I really like the way the warrior tank plays in Wrath. At least at level 66, which is where my lowbie tank has gotten to.

There are two major things I like about warrior tanking. First is Charge. Warbringer is one of the best talents in the game. Charging into combat is fun. Charging around during combat is fun. Charging into the next pack when the current pack is almost dead is extremely fun.

The second thing is Thunderclap and Shockwave. The thing about these skills that I like is that they very much reward you for timing things well. There's a satisfaction from Thunderclapping at the exact right time to get every mob in the group. Or lining up the perfect Shockwave and stunning everything just right.

It's not like Thunderclap and Shockwave are hard to use. But you can make mistakes with them. And that makes using them correctly valuable.

All in all, I really like the way the warrior tank plays in Wrath. I hope it doesn't change too much in Cataclysm.

Gearscore and FICO scores

I came across a couple of interesting articles by Megan McArdle of The Atlantic where she talks about a new trend of employers using FICO (credit) scores to weed out job candidates.

This situation immediately reminded me of Gearscore, and the way the WoW PuG community often uses Gearscore to determine who gets into raids.

(For those who don't know, Gearscore is a mod which examines a character's gear and gives a single value score that represents the quality of the gear. The higher ilevel, the higher your Gearscore.

FICO is a credit score that represents your credit-worthiness. It's the main score used in the United State. It is generally used when people are deciding if they should lend you money. Low scores generally mean that you have trouble paying back loans, or have declared bankruptcy, and are likely to be a bigger risk for a loan.)

In the articles, employers are using these credit scores as a general proxy for your overall trustworthiness, just like raid leaders use Gearscore as a general proxy for your skill as a raider.

In both situations, the measurement is a weak proxy for what the evaluators really want. It's easy to imagine that someone with a poor credit score might still be a good employee, or someone with a lower Gearscore might still know how to play.

But there are reasons that these scores are used. It's too easy to say that using Gearscore or FICO score is wrong, and so raid leaders or employers should be forbidden from using it.

First, it's fast and obvious. A FICO score of 300 is worse than one of 800. GS 4k is worse than GS 5k.

Second, the best method to determine competence is unfeasible. The best method is by giving the potential employee or raider a trial. But this is just not possible due to logistical constraints. Even the second or third-best methods are not viable. For raiding, high end raid guilds often require proof in the form of logs, or will ask the candidate questions in an interview process. You just don't have time to do this when making a PuG.

Third, you cannot trust the potential employee or raider. People lie on their resumes all the time, and due to litigation concerns, most previous employers won't do much more than confirm employment dates. Similarly, all raiders say they know the fights and will do top DPS.

Finally, it is better to be wrong in one direction than to be wrong in the other. For example, when picking up a PuG raider, there are two different ways a raid leader can be wrong. He can turn down a good player, or he can pick up a bad players. The consequences for picking up a bad raider are much higher, and so the raider leader will pick a method that minimizes the chances of that outcome, even if it increases the chances of the other wrong outcome.

The same thing happens with employment. It is generally considered better to turn down a good employee than hire a poor one.

I find the two parallel situations to be very intriguing. It's always interesting when a real world issue comes up independently in a controlled game world.

Note that I don't actually use Gearscore. It's a chatty mod, and I dislike taking a chance of being disconnected in raids. But I still understand why people do use Gearscore.

If I had to make a Gearscore-like mod, what I would actually do is evaluate gems/enchants against spec. The more optimal your gems/enchants for your spec, the higher your score. In my experience, people who care enough to keep their gear in good condition, regardless of the underlying ilevel, are more likely to be successful raiders.

Cataclysm Talent Tree Awkwardness

I figured out what was bothering me about Cataclysm tree design.

If you look at the first row of talents, Blizzard usually has 2x 3pt talents and a 2pt talent. That means that if you want to only spend 5 points in the first row to get to the second, you get the 2pt and one of the 3pts.

However, in a lot of cases, the 2pt talent is "more optional" than the 3pt talents. If you look at the current paladin trees, Ret has Eye for an Eye at 2pts, and Prot has Imp Hammer of Justice. Both of those are more PvP talents, and somewhat less attractive to other specs.

Because of this, you tend to be pushed towards taking both 3pts in the first row, leaving you with only 4 points for the second row. So you can take a 3 or 2pt talent, and then you're left with 1 or 2 points and very few options to cap out. No matter what, if you are subspeccing, you cannot take 2 3pt talents in the second row.

I think talent trees would flow a little better if the 2pt talent was "less optional" than the 3pt talents. That way, you'd grab the 2pt and choose which 3pt you liked, making the next tier easier to finish. And you'd less likely to have 1 point left dangling in a standard 31/10 build.

For example, in Retribution, I think that tree would flow better if Crusade was 2pts and Eye for an Eye was 3pts. Then PvP/Prot would take Eye for an Eye and Crusade, and Holy and Ret would take Rule of Law and Crusade, and that would give everyone 5 points for the second row of Ret or for the first row in Prot.

Holy Power

The Dev chat on Friday revealed the new paladin mechanic for Cataclysm, Holy Power:

All of the paladin specializations will make use of a new resource called Holy Power. Holy Power accumulates from using Crusader Strike, Holy Shock, and some other talents. Holy Power can be consumed to augment a variety of abilities, including:
An instant mana-free heal: Word of Glory
A buff to increase holy damage done: Inquisition
A massive physical melee attack for Retribution paladins: Templar’s Verdict
Holy Shield’s duration is now extended by Holy Power
Divine Storm’s damage is now increased by Holy Power

Templar’s Verdict: An instant weapon attack that causes a percentage of weapon damage. Consumes all applications of Holy Power to increase damage dealt:
1 Holy Power: 55% Weapon Damage
2 Holy Power: 125% Weapon Damage
3 Holy Power: 225% Weapon Damage

Word of Glory: Consumes all Holy Power to heal a friendly target for a specific amount per application of Holy Power (0 mana cost, 0 cooldown, instant cast).

It looks like the closest mechanic to this is rogue combo points. Certain of our abilities generate Holy Power, and other abilities will consume all of it, and have an effect proportional to the number of points consumed.

However, where the rogue is focused on combo points, and most GCDs are used either generating or consuming combo points, Holy Power looks to be layered over top of our regular abilities. Paladins look to generate a point of Holy Power every 4-6 seconds using our normal rotation, and use a Holy Power finisher roughly every 12-18 seconds.

I guess that this is intended to make paladin gameplay a little more dynamic, and we weave in Holy Power finishers every so often, or maybe even save them for times when we need burst.

On paper, this seems pretty good. We'll have to see how this plays out. There is always the possibility that tactics getting a 3-stack of Holy Power, then running to a new PVP target and unloading a full-power Templar's Verdict will be deemed overpowered. (And naturally, hotfixed 24 hours after Cataclysm's release.)

The other thing I like are the new paladin ability names. Word of Glory, Inquistion, Templar's Verdict, and Light of Dawn (new cone healing spell mentioned in the Dev chat) are very nice paladin names that avoid resorting to the words Holy, Judgment, Light, Righteousness, and Divine.

On the other hand, "Holy Power" is a rather bland name, and could stand to be spiced up. I suggest using a name that paladins have been waiting to see in WoW since Diablo 2: Zeal.

Beta Talent Trees

There are beta talent trees up at WoWTal.

Honestly, the trees are still a great state of flux, so it's really too early to comment on them. In general, I like the paladin trees so far.

The only comment I have is that I keep making builds for many different classes and specs, and I always seem to have 1 talent point left over, and 2/3-point talents to use it in. So I have to partially fill a talent, which I've never really liked doing.

Maybe it's just a general problem with the numbers used to make the talent trees, but it seems kind of odd to be happening so often.

Talent Tree Changes

Extensive talent tree changes coming in Cataclysm.

I'm not really sure what to think of these changes. In general, I like the smaller trees. I'm just not sure about the forced specialization.

It means that there is much less potential builds out there. No 30/11, or 21/20 builds will be possible. But on the other hand, such builds tend to be rare anyways. Sometimes choice is an illusion, and in reality there are only a handful of viable builds. So the end result might be the same now and in Cataclysm, but it will just be more obvious.

As well, right now the 11 and 21 point talents tend to be a little weak, just to keep other-spec builds in check. This is especially true when leveling. Take paladin trees for example. Aura Mastery, Divine Favor, Divine Sacrifice, Blessing of Sacrifice, and Sanctified Retribution are good abilities, but they are a little boring.

Compare them to the 31 point talents of Holy Shock, Holy Shield, and Repentance. Those talents are "fun" talents, but they come so late, and you get them at a much higher level, just to prevent off-talent builds from picking them up. Wouldn't Protection leveling be much more fun if you could get Holy Shield at level 20?

The one "fun" early ability, Seal of Command, is perfect to get at level 20. Unfortunately, it's quite arguable that Seal of Command has made Protection overpowered at producing AoE threat. Because it is available so early, Protection can pick up Seal of Command, forcing a choice between leaving Protection slightly overpowered, or weakening Retribution.

The enforced specialization does away with those concerns. You could move more interesting abilities earlier in the tree, confident that you won't accidentally overpower one of the other two trees.

The current trees are a little top-heavy. Sometimes it's hard to be enthusiastic about pushing through those rather boring mid-tier talents, and then you want to get all the juicy, game-changing top-tier talents.

It probably will be easier to balance PvP as well. PvP builds often forwent the deep damage increasing talents in favor of mid-tier utility and survival talents.

So on the whole it's probably a good change that strengthens the game mechanically. I guess I mourn the illusion of a potential vast amount of builds. An mirage of possibilities. But that was just a dream, and high-end group play rudely awakens you to the fact that only a few builds are ever truly viable.

Death Penalties

Recently there has been some commentary about death penalties. There are some people who feel that the current penalties are too low.

My question is:

Why is it so important to punish failure?

I mean, you shouldn't reward failure, but I don't really see the need to punish failure either.

No one really wants to fail. And failure is often obvious. Your character is dead on the ground and you have a corpse run. You can't really miss the fact that you failed.

Do high death penalties really make players better, or do they just make players more cautious? It's arguable that one of flaws of lower tier raid guilds is that they don't fail enough. They'll wipe 5 times and then call it, or move on to something easier. While a high end guild might wipe 200+ times when learning a really hard fight. I don't think that an even greater death penalty would help these guilds, and it might actively hurt them.

What you do want to keep in check is the ability to fail with partial success, so that several failures add up to a success. The ability to zerg something needs to be carefully watched. But that can be done without harsh death penalties. Quest timers, group respawns, instances that prevent you from zoning in while a fight is in progress, requirements that you do X without dying, etc.

Of course, you do have to be careful with this. If quest progress was wiped on death, and you had a quest to kill 100 boars, it would really, really suck if you died on the 99th boar.

Of course, some people insist that punishing failure in raid groups is the appropriate way to go, like docking DKP for making mistakes. But is the punishment the key driver of improvement, or is it the fact that the mistake was specifically identified and called out, giving the player the feedback necessary to improve?

I don't think that actively punishing failure works when the player wants to succeed. So I don't think that death penalties need to be harsher, and if anything, they could stand to be easier.

RealId and Forums

Most of us have heard of John Gabriel's Greater Internet F******d Theory (link slightly NSFW). I would wager that the majority of gamers even believe it to be true.

But it has never truly been proven, or conclusively demonstrated. So for that alone, I am looking forward to Blizzard's plan to integrate RealId with the WoW forums. Maybe it will turn out to be a good idea, maybe it will turn out to be a bad idea. But at least we'll know. There's something to be said for actual experimentation, rather than just armchair theorycrafting.

Heck, maybe the *real* problems with RealId on the forums will turn out to be completely different than anything that has been thought of.

Sometimes I think our society spends too much time worrying over potential outcomes, and not enough time actually doing things. Not to say that we shouldn't think ahead, but there is a balance, and right now I think we've swung too far to the worrying side.

I think that, on the whole, RealId integration with the forums will work out well. I think the official forums will become much more usable. Many people, both good and bad, will migrate to other forums like Tankspot, and that might pump up some of the non-official sites. But I could be wrong. Maybe there will be many negative consequences.

In some ways, this is probably a tipping point for gaming companies and the internet. If the forums calm down and Blizzard does not lose customers, every gaming company that can will follow their lead. If Blizzard does end up losing money, then we'll probably never hear these schemes again.

Though, kind of honestly, it's going to be weird seeing Greg Street post instead of Ghostcrawler.

Pods: A Raid Force Management System

Managing a raid force is a very complex task. You have to recruit enough people so that you have redundancy, that you can still raid when some members are missing. You have to have enough redundancy to cover the essential roles. Yet you also have to ensure that everyone gets enough raiding time. Sometimes a player can get left on the sidelines more than you expect, and they end up leaving the guild because they feel they aren't getting into raids enough. You have to constantly recruit and people are constantly leaving, creating new holes in the raid force that have to be filled.

Yet, for such a complex task, most guild leaders operate in an ad hoc fashion. They react to events a lot of the time and things slip through the cracks. This is my attempt at creating a system, a set of rules and heuristics, to help a guild leader manage her entire raiding force in an efficient manner.

The system is called Pods, because the central element of the system is a pod.

A pod is a group of three players who share a similar raid role. The basic pod types are:

1. Main Tank - players who always tank
2. Off Tank - players who switch between tanking and DPS
3. Melee DPS - melee DPS players
4. Ranged DPS - ranged DPS players
5. Main Healer - players who always heal
6. Off Healer - players who switch between healing and DPS

Each pod owns two slots in the raid. So a 10 man raid is made up of:

• 1x Main Tank pod
• 1x Melee DPS pod
• 1x Ranged DPS pod
• 1x Off Healer pod
• 1x Main Healer pod

A 25-man raid would be:

• 1x Main Tank pod
• 1x Off Tank pod
• 3x Melee DPS pod
• 3x Ranged DPS pod
• 1x Off Healer pod
• 3x Main Healer pod
• 1 free slot

Now, since each pod has three players, but two raid slots, one person in each pod sits out each night. Anna sits out first, the Betty, then Charity, then Anna's turn comes around again. Of course, the players can trade nights with each other but only within the pod. Since there are only three players in a pod, scheduling that pod becomes a much simpler problem than scheduling the entire raid force all at once.

For the Off Tank and Off Healer pods, one slot will act as the extra tank or healer on necessary fights, while the other slot will be pure DPS. (Or both slots can go tank/healer if the fight is really demanding). Which player gets which job can rotate just like sitting out.

If only one or zero people from a pod show up, then people from the other pods who are sitting out can be drafted to fill out the raid. If the problem is known in advance, as two of the three players say they can't make a specific night, that fact can be brought to the attention of the officers.

For 25s, the third slot can be given to a DPS player who alway shows up, or just reserved for any missing significant buffs.

With three people for every two slots, each raider is guaranteed a minimum of raiding 66% of the time. Some people may raid more than that, but no one will raid less. As well, each position has significant redundancy, which should ensure that you never call a raid because you don't have enough healers, but enough DPS and tanks.

In addition, the guild can use the pods to guide recruiting efforts. The pods with unfilled spots are the positions you need to recruit for. You don't need to consider the entire guild as a whole, you can just go pod by pod and recruit for each position.

Of course, there are potential issues with this system. For example, since sitting out is determined in advance, people might decide to not show up on nights when they are scheduled to sit. This can cause problems if there are unexpected absences. There would need to be some understanding that everyone in guild who can show up does.

In general, the idea is to have each pod run itself to a certain degree, without needing the officers to get involved all the time. The officers' main job is to make sure that the pod is filled with players, and to intervene in unusual situations.

But on the whole, I think that this system would reduce the effort involved in managing a raid force. It provides redundancy for all positions, while guaranteeing a minimum amount of raiding for each individual.

Age of Conan: Group Play

Group play in Age of Conan is an interesting experience. In many ways it is very different than WoW, even though they are both games based on the trinity of tank-healer-dps.

The nature of AoC groups stems from how healing in AoC is designed. All three healer classes have the same type of spells. There are three healing spells: green, blue, and yellow.¹ The green spell is a group HoT. The blue spell is a stronger HoT that affects people in a cone in front of you. The yellow spell is a direct group AoE spell, but a player can only be affected by a yellow spell once a minute.

So healing is essentially HoT-based. You put up your green and blue HoTs and then do damage until you need to refresh them.

The first consequence of this design is that one healer can heal multiple tanks just as easily as one tank, so long as the tanks are positioned correctly.

The next element in AoC group play is that mobs hit like trucks. The standard pull in AoC (so far) is two mobs. Each tank grabs a mob and tanks them next to each other. If you get more than two, the tanks try and hold them and the group uses knockdowns as much as possible. When a mob is knocked down, it doesn't do damage while it gets back up, giving the HoTs time to tick.

In WoW, this is the sort of situation in which crowd control would be used. But AoC is a PvP game, so all crowd control is short duration, on the order of a few seconds. As well, you don't deal damage to targets exactly, you deal damage to the area in front of your character. This means that there is a lot of splash damage, which would mean that crowd control would need to ignore damage.

With two tanks, boss mobs are often handled by the tanks swapping aggro. Since both of them are getting healed at the same time, one tank's health is dropping, while the other tank goes back to full. Of course, tanks don't have a threat meter or even a baseline taunt, so this can be pretty hard. A tank swap is often accomplished when the lead tank dies.

The long and short of this is that in AoC the normal group size is 6 people, and consists of 2 tanks, 2 dps, and 2 healers. Yes, that's a worse tank/healer/dps ratio than WoW. This is despite the fact that there are 3 tank classes, 3 healing classes and 6 dps classes.

Oddly enough, even though healing in AoC is fairly easy² and tanking rather difficult, it's not that hard to find tanks. It's still hard to find healers. I think that's an interesting difference between WoW and AoC. Healers are scarce in both games, but tanks are more common in AoC than WoW.

Of course, maybe part of the reason is because I am starting late, and everyone else who rolled a DPS character rolled a tank to get into groups.

All in all, group play in AoC is different enough from WoW to be interesting, yet similar enough to be easily understandable. Now, if only forming a group didn't take several hours.

1. The spells put a colored circle around the feet of your teammates, so you can see who is affected by each spell.
2. At least healing is easy in theory. I seem to have a hard time finding healers who understand the idea of keeping the two HoTs up at all times.

Single-Colour Gems

It occurs to me that gemming has become very boring these days. It's pretty much choose the best stat for your class and stack it.

When jewelcrafting was first released, it seemed much more exciting. There were all these colors of gems, with different colours of sockets, different socket bonuses, and meta-gems with interesting requirements.

Pretty much all of that has been bled from the system. Socket colours are pretty much ignored. The different types of socket bonuses have disappeared, replaced for most classes by a single stat. For example, on plate DPS armor, the socket bonus is always strength. It's the only stat that can possibly tempt someone away from mono-coloured gems. Meta-gem requirements have been reduced to the bare minimum. And even that is not enough. The meta-gems which require 1 of each color are considered much better than the meta-gems which require 2 blues, because you can use only 1 Nightmare Tear and meet the meta-gem requirements.

As well, I'm not sure being able to focus so much of your item budget on your single-best state is good for the game. It allows for an extremely wide range of that one ability. For example, the health difference between a tank stacking all stamina gems and one matching socket colors is very noticeable.

Is there a way to make gemming interesting once again, and maybe also rein it in a bit?

My suggestion would be to remove single-color gems. If all gems are dual-colors, then it might be easier to hit the socket bonuses. You can't focus so much in the same way. The choice becomes not so much between best stat and second-best stat, it's between second-best stat and third-best stat. Oftentimes, that's enough wiggle room to make decision-making interesting again.

In my opinion, sometimes offering the best possible choice as an option is not the best way to go. Making a decision between two flawed choices can be more interesting.