Building a Better Community, Part II

I forgot one other strategy for building a better community when I was writing the last post.

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D. Reduce Anonymity

According to John Gabriel's Greater Internet F****** Theory, the combination of anonymity and an audience causes normal people to feel free to act badly. So maybe reducing anonymity is a valid strategy to build a better community.

6. Tie all characters to a single id

Remove the idea of anonymous alts. All alts can be identified as belonging to the same player/account.

7. Tie all accounts to real word name or identity

This takes the previous idea a step further. Your online identity is linked to your real name.

In addition to reducing the anonymity of the would-be bad actor, this also might have the additional effect of "humanizing" the other players. Sometimes when you're playing with a bunch of avatars, it's easy to dehumanize them and treat them as effective NPCs. Perhaps using real names will remind people that they are playing with real people.

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I also want to respond to a couple of specific comments made.

Community Based Policing

SaiyanMan states:

Isn't the central problem: "The Internet is a horrible place to have a community"? The only working solution on a fairly large scale tends to be a strong, user community based policing.

I am not as sure of this as you are. Community based policing enforces the current norms of the community. So if the community is bad, the norms it enforces will be bad as well.

For example, if you picked 5 random WoW players and presented them with one player, Sue, who used the word "gay" as a pejorative, and other player, Jane, who does 2K dps in heroics, who do you think the community is more likely to censure?

(If you say Sue, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that you might be interested in.)

In my experience, community based policing only really works when the power is not given to the community at large, but to a subset of users who have a vision of what the community should be. Often older or original members of the community.

As well, community based policing is vulnerable to hijack by organized "mafias". A small group working together can often intentionally push the community moderation in an unintended direction. Just imagine if Goonswarm gets to be the police in your MMO community.

Moderated Servers and the Best Guilds

Winterpine suggests:

Create specific servers where there is little to no moderation or banning and see where people choose to roll their mains. Five bucks says that many who try out the "freedom of speech" servers will realize society without laws isn't as peachy as they thought, and that a little (self) moderation goes a long way in improving play experience. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see the best guilds thrive on the moderated servers.

This might or might not be a good idea. But personally, I would be shocked if the best guilds were on moderated servers.

The best players tend to come from the young, male, hyper-competitive gaming culture.¹ Killer-Achievers, basically. They are not particularly attracted to moderated servers. The culture is often crass, and contains a lot of bravado. They're not bad, per se. If the lines are laid down, they will stay more or less within them, pushing the edges where they can.

But that culture would see it as a point of pride to be top dogs on the non-moderated servers. A sort of "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen" attitude.

1. I'm not saying that they're all male, or all young, but the core of most high end guilds tend to be males in their 20s.

Building a Better Community

Tongue firmly in cheek, Tobold asks what game companies could do to build a better community.

I'll take the question seriously and give several possibilities. But I'd also like to take a step back, and consider the greater strategy behind each idea. As well, remember that all things have a price, but some prices are worth paying.

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A. Improve the environment

The idea behind the Broken Windows Theory is that "humans constantly monitor other people and their environment in order to determine what the correct norms for the given situation are." An environment in disrepair encourages people to be more anti-social, while a maintained environment prevents further vandalism.

Basically, the theory states that paying attention to small violations of social norms helps prevent larger violations. Accordingly, here are a couple of suggestions following this theory:

1. Have a strict naming policy

Normally, naming rules are very relaxed, save on Role-Playing servers. Enforcing stricter naming rules for characters, guilds, and PvP names would send a signal about what is acceptable and not acceptable. We've all seen the terrible, scatological, rude, and quite frankly stupid names that abound in WoW.

They're kind of like graffiti and petty vandalism. Making sure that names are decent (and also don't use special characters) might improve the general environment.

2. Stricter forum moderation

Hyper-aggressive forum moderation would set a the standard for what is acceptable behavior. Forum bans should also result in in-game bans, further linking the idea that how one behaves on a forum should match how you behave in-game.

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B. Filter your audience

There's an old saying that "one rotten apple spoils the bunch." Here, the idea is that a single malicious player can destroy the community for numerous other players. That player might also influence other players to behave badly as well. Identifying and getting rid of that player might have the greatest impact on the quality of your community.

3. Be more willing to ban players

If it looks like a player is a bad influence, ban them. Even if it is debatable, maybe it is better to lose a good player than keep a bad player.

4. No PvP

If you follow the Bartle archetypes of Killer, Achiever, Socializer, and Explorer, Killers are the ones who enjoy harming the game experience of others. Killers are also greatly attracted to PvP. Getting rid of PvP gets rid of a major attraction for those players and makes it less likely that they will join your game.

There's some circumstantial evidence for this. First, battlegrounds have always been much worse than dungeons. Heck, I've been in BGs that featured vicious insults and trash talk when we were winning!

Second, of the MMOs I've played, the Lord of the Rings Online community (at least prior to going F2P) always had a very good community. I don't think it's a coincidence that it's the one game that featured the least PvP.

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C. Remove sources of conflict

Maybe to improve the community, the best thing to do would be to remove the things players fight over.

5. Make the game easy.

In my experience, players are pretty easy-going as long as they are successful. It's really only when failure happens that the knives come out. If the game was much easier than it is, maybe players would have less to fight about.

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Anyways, those are some ideas to improve the community of an MMO. Remember that they all have drawbacks, which I really haven't discussed at all.

Crowd Control Changes

Big Bear Butt has a good post talking about the changes coming for Crowd Control in 4.2.

Basically, sheeping a mob in a pack will no longer pull the rest of the pack.

I completely agree with BBB that this is a good change. It makes CC much more user-friendly, as it separates the CC phase from the actual pull. Rather than painstakingly marking the entire pack, we will be able to CC first, see that it was done correctly, and then pull the remaining mobs.

The DPS can even CC ahead of time, confident that they won't be pulling before the tank is ready.

As well, it will make tanking easier. The CC'd mobs will stay where they started, while the remaining mobs will be pulled to the tank. This makes it a lot easier for the tank to use AoE abilities without breaking Crowd Control. Essentially, we get some of the Wrath-style AoE capability, while still using Crowd Control.

All in all, this will be a good change for the game.

Optimizing and Fun

Several commenters advance the notion that looking up talent and gear optimizations is not fun.

And there's a lot of truth in that statement. Coming up with your own specs and strategies is a great deal of fun. Personally, if I'm looking at something new, I like to make up what I think the optimal spec will be and then go to Elitist Jerks and see how my spec differs from theirs and why.

But you know what isn't fun? Wiping.

It isn't fun to wipe to bosses you know that you could beat if only that hunter over there went to EJ, looked up a decent spec and rotation and tried it out. It isn't fun to watch your guild die because you stalled out at a boss that you know your team had the skill to beat, and optimal specs, gemming, and rotations would have been enough to push you over the hump.

I've been there and done that. To be honest, I've probably contributed to the problem in past guilds.

I'm in a guild now that takes it for granted that players will use the Internet to help determine optimum specs, rotation, reforging, and gear. That every player will come to raids pretty close to the accepted optimum for all those elements. If you app to us, and you differ from the optimum, you will face extra scrutiny.

And you know what? This is enormously freeing.

It takes so much of the "busywork" off the table. We still struggle with fights, but we're struggling with execution, and mastering the mechanics of the fight, not basic elements of how to play the class.

Talents, gear, and rotation are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to playing. They're the basics. Using community resources like EJ allows you to "shortcut" past those basics and work on more advanced techniques¹ and fight-specific mechanics.

Ironically, taking optimization for granted allows you to focus on playing the game, and not playing the spreadsheet. Someone else has made the spreadsheet for you, has done the math. Leverage their efforts, steal their results, and you get to focus on making the right gameplay decisions for the fight at hand.

1. For some examples of more advanced techniques, see Kripparian's video.

More Thoughts on Optimality

Choices and Futures

Several commenters took exception to my statement that "for a decision to be meaningful, there must be a right choice and a wrong choice."

Kring states:

I couldn't disagree more. You only have a real choice if all choices are valid.

It's like democracy. Just because you're allowed to vote doesn't mean you also have a choice. You only have a choice if there are multiple good and relevant parties.

I don't really think we're that far apart. Perhaps I'll rephrase and extend my thoughts.

For a choice to be real, it must lead to different futures. If you vote Conservative or NDP, it's a choice because the future with a Conservative government is different than the future with an NDP government. However, the desirability of each future matters.

When voting, neither future is obviously desirable. Some people would prefer the Conservative government, others the NDP. Thus neither choice is right or wrong.

However, this is not the case with optimizing. In one future, the boss dies. The other future, the boss doesn't die. The future where the boss dies is 100% more desirable. Thus, barring any side-effects, the choices that shift the probabilities towards first future are "right", and the other choices are "wrong".

For another example, take a Civ-like game. Both going for military victory or cultural victory are valid choices. But if you're pursuing a cultural victory, randomly producing tanks for no real reason when you could have made a cathedral instead is the "wrong" choice.

Now if it's a single player game, then no one else other than you pays the price for your wrong decision. But in a team game, wrong decisions hurt your team's chances of victory.

Shintar phrases this in a different manner:

Situations where there is a clearly right and a clearly wrong solution are calculations, not choices.

Sure, if that's the semantics you want to use. But it is incumbent on you to pick the best calculation in a team game. And the best calculation is determined by the optimizers.

Good Players and Sub-Optimal Choices

Masterlooter states:

If you have the "optimal" setup, and I have a "sub-optimal" one, but I do more damage than you (with equal gear), then I am more valuable to the raid. But since my setup is considered to be "inferior", I may not even get an invite to the group in the first place.

In my view, this is a bit of a strawman. The truth is that this very rarely happens.

High-skill players almost always use the optimal spec or strategy. There are a few exceptions, but they are very rare. The vast majority of the time, someone with a non-optimal spec turns out to be a low-skill player.

Encouraging medium or low skill players to feel that they are a "special snowflake" and don't need to use more optimal builds dooms them and their group to mediocrity and failure. You have enough trouble with lack of skill, why further handicap yourself with a sub-optimal build?

And even the high-skill player with the sub-optimal spec does her group a disservice. If the high-skill player switched to the optimal spec, odds are she would play at an even higher level.

DPS Meters

There's also a lot of antipathy for DPS meters among the non-optimizing crowd. This is probably uncharitable of me, but sometimes it seems like DPS just want the freedom to play badly and not get called out for it.

They'd rather no one be able to tell how terrible they really are. That might mean they have to take the "effort" to improve. Just let the tanks and healers carry the group and do the work, while they sit back and collect the loot.

After all, it's pretty obvious when the tanks and healers are failing. What's so wrong with having an element that makes it just as obvious that the DPS are failing?

Good players don't worry about DPS meters. You know why? Because they post respectable results. They're an asset to the group instead of dead weight.

Optimality

Nils and Tobold are talking about inefficiency and the fear of being sub-optimal. Both of them seem to feel that the drive to optimize is negative.

I disagree.

For a decision to be meaningful, there must be a right choice and a wrong choice. Taking the right choice makes it easier to be successful. Taking the wrong choice makes it harder.

Players optimize because there is a chance of failure, and no one wants to be the guy who is deliberately handicapping the rest of the team. The game is already hard enough. Why make it harder on the rest of your group?

Trying to stop optimization is futile. Removing the ability to inspect or dps meters just means that you don't get any feedback and can't see what's going wrong.

You can remove the decisions entirely. Remove talent points and different stats on armor. No more optimization. But that makes the game less interesting.

You can make the game easier. If there's no chance of failure, there's no point in optimizing.

You could make content less predictable. But this is no guarantee of optimizing. PvP still has optimal builds and, more egregiously, optimal group compositions. It just changes the focus on optimizing to be the most damage for the most situations.

And I don't think that PvE players like unpredictable content as you think they would. Faction Champs in ToC and Prince Malchezzar in Karazhan had unpredictable elements, and there was a lot of grumbling about those.

As well, unpredictable content can still be optimized. Think of Blackjack or Poker. It's unpredictable. Yet there are still strategies and optimizations for those games. Only now you have to take probability into account, which makes the optimizations far harder to execute.

You could rotate content such that the "optimal" build in Fight 1 becomes sub-optimal in Fight 2. Which is promptly followed by the playerbase replacing the players from Fight 1 with different players for Fight 2.

In reality, I think that most people who are against optimizing aren't really against optimizing per se. Rather, they are against other people optimizing for them. If they were the ones to come up with the "optimal" build and reveal it to the world, then they would be happy.

But it just doesn't work that way. My rule of thumb is to assume that there are people who are ten times better at this game than I am. And there are people who are ten times worse. The better people are going to come up with optimizations faster than I will. The worse people will not see what I see, and just perform at a much lower level, making grouping with them destined to failure.

For any meaningful decision in a game, someone will determine the "right" answer sooner or later. The good players in the game will figure it out pretty quickly. The bad players will never figure it out.

The best an MMO company can do is make sure that each "playstyle" is close enough to the optimal so that it is viable. But otherwise, it is impossible to have meaningful decisions in group play, and yet not have optimizations.

Paladin Tier 12

Blizzard recently unveiled the Paladin Tier 12 armor:


I think it looks rather decent. A lot of people deride the "dress" surcoat/cassock, but I rather like them. It makes paladin armor recognizably different than warrior or deathknight armor. It also plays up the "cleric" aspect of the paladin.

The helm is clearly inspired by T2, Judgement armor. In fact, where T2 was Paladin as Dark Inquistor, this set is Paladin as Fiery Inquisitor. Which is a pretty neat interpretation.

What's most interesting to me is that Blizzard did not show off any recolors of the set. And because the T12 theme is fiery armor, I don't see how they can actually do recolors this time around without wrecking the theme. So it will be interesting to see how, or even if, they differentiate the heroic version from the normal version.

My final verdict is that T12 is not in the absolute top Paladin sets (reserved for T2 and T6), but it is certainly above average.

Star Wars: The Old Republic Preview

Ouch. These guys probably aren't going to get any more previews or material from EA. Oddly courageous for the gaming media:

Our opinion of The Old Republic, formed over two solid days of playing, is that it’s one of the most boring titles we’ve ever had to endure. It’s plain and staid and deathly dull.

I don't know how absolutely accurate this will turn out to be, but I admire Bitgamer for being so willing to bite the hand that feeds them.

Public Quests

Let's discuss Public Quests. First, let us start by defining what exactly a Public Quest is.

A Public Quest is:

1. In the game world. It is not instanced content.


2. Requires multiple players to defeat. It's generally group content, not solo content.


3. Repeatable. A player who completes the event once can do it again the next time it starts.


4. Requires a minimal relationship between players participating in it. You don't need to be in the same guild, group, raid, or perhaps even faction to participate.


5. Has some direction from the game. Either a questgiver or UI element directs the event. A random wandering monster, even if it meets the other criteria, is not a Public Quest. A quest to go kill that random wandering monster, on the other hand, is a Public Quest if it meets the other criteria.

So you can see that Public Quests are essentially ad hoc, repeatable group content aimed at the players in the immediate vicinity of the event. The idea is that these players would stop what they are doing, from an impromptu group, complete the Public Quest, and then return to what they are doing.

From this definition, we can immediately see three major issues with Public Quests.

First, the PQ relies on players in the immediate vicinity. If not enough players are around, maybe because it's late at night, or out of the way, then the Public Quest can't be completed successfully.

Second, the PQ also relies on players to stop what they are doing and switch to the PQ. The players might prefer to ignore the PQ. Maybe they don't think the rewards are worthwhile. Maybe they want to work on this quest right now. Maybe they'll do the Public Quest in a few minutes when it restarts. Maybe they've already done it once, and don't want to repeat themselves.

I know that in RIFT, I'd close a rift, then ride by 10 minutes later and see a new rift in the same spot. Rather than wanting to participate again, my thoughts would be more along the lines of, "I've already done this, no need to do it again."

Third, because the content is ad hoc, and the relationship between the participants is tenuous, you can't make the PQ require too much from the players. There might not be a tank, there might not be a healer, there might not be someone who can crowd control. You can't guarantee that the players will be in the same group.

The best implementation of Public Quests I've seen comes from RIFT. But it's not the normal rifts that dot the landscape. Rather it is the Rift Zone Events.

The Zone Events are rare, occurring every two hours or so. That's a lot of incentive to participate in one when it happens, because you might only see that one in your play session. Rather than saying, "I'll finish this quest, I can always do another rift after," it becomes easier to say "I'll do this Event now, there might not be another chance later, and I can always finish the quest when this is done."

The rewards are high, commensurate with the rarity. As well, the "vicinity" of a Zone Event is the entire zone, so the event draws from the widest possible pool of players (for non-instanced content, at least).

If I was designing a Public Quest system, I would model it after Zone Events in RIFT. They would occur infrequently and would be broadcast to the entire zone. Only one event would active at a time, and it would be different than the last event that occurred, to increase the novelty factor. It wouldn't necessarily need to involve the entire zone, just make the entire zone aware of it, and give players enough time to travel to the right spot, with UI support to tell them where the "right spot" is, of course.

Critical Hits, Commenters

Follow Up on Critical Hits

The commenters on my last post have convinced me that having a stat with negative effects is a bad idea.

However, I still believe that in PvP, the presence of resilience means that healing will scale much faster than damage will. Inevitably, healing will have to be reined in, probably through a debuff in arenas and battlegrounds that reduces the overall effectiveness of healing, like in Wrath.

I still think that Blizzard should normalize crits at 200% across the board. Since that debuff will probably come sooner or later, Blizzard may as well bring the debuff in sooner, and maybe at slightly higher values. But a normalized crit would make critical strike more valuable to healers, and simplify the game.

Commenters

Sometimes it seems like Tobold is at war with his commenters.

To be honest, I think he takes commenters too seriously, and doesn't wield the delete button as aggressively as he should. People respond to their environment, and push the edges a little. Prune aggressively and people will respond to that, and live up to expectations.

I mean, take the last post of mine. Two one-line "this idea is stupid" comments. Both promptly got deleted. And the next two comments, by The Crossbowman of Sarcasm and Azuriel, are solid, insightful, and useful. I strongly believe that you don't get comments and insights like those two if you allow the terrible comments to stand and even flourish.

Finally, as advice to aspiring bloggers, I don't think you should second-guess what your audience wants. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that I cannot predict what other people find interesting. Completely random posts get linked. One-off posts that you spend 10 minutes on get multiple Likes on Google Reader, while crafted epics that take you hours go uncommented on.

Just write what you want to write, rather than worrying about what you think people want you to write about. It will sort itself out.

Critical Hits and a PvP Idea

Ghostcrawler had an interesting post on critical hits today.

Back in Vanilla, the rule was that melee criticals did 200% damage, spell criticals did 150% damage, and damage/heal-over-time spells could not crit. But over time most of the DPS casters got talents or abilities that pushed their criticals to 200% damage. Pretty much the only people left at the 150% mark are healers and physical dps who get some damage from spells.

So GC is mulling over simplifying the entire thing with a rule that all crits do 200%.

Personally I think it's a good idea. It simplifies things immensely. Pretty much every DPS already has 200% crits on the majority of their damage.

As for healing, because damage crits do 200%, crit rating is expensive. So when you look at crit rating for healing it seems even more overpriced compared to the throughput it gives you. And then you add to that the fact that healers disdain crit because you can't count on it in the short term. At least bumping healing crits up to 200% would normalize the value of crit rating.

The one area of concern is PvP. A healing crit can be very swingy. Ghostcrawler suggests that the potency of the Mortal Strike debuff be increased to compensate. But then that can make having an MS class absolutely mandatory when fighting a healer.

I have a different solution. The "swingy-ness" of damage in PvP is mitigated by resilience. Perhaps we should use the same mechanic. Have resilience reduce incoming damage and also reduce incoming healing. So if you have a lot of resilience you're taking less damage, but you're also getting less healing. That will shift power away from the healers and make a random critical heal, even at 200%, much less of a game-winner.

Resilience would essentially slow the rate of change of your health bar in both directions. A lot of resilience would mean your health decreases slower, but it also increases slower while being healed.

Leveraging Successful Players in the Dungeon Finder

Here's a random idea I thought of yesterday because of all the recent talk about the Dungeon Finder and the deja vu experience.

My theory is that there exists certain players who are more successful than other players when it comes to random groups. Maybe it's skill, maybe it's gear, maybe it's patience, maybe it's even luck. But these people are more likely to successfully complete random dungeons than the "normal" player.

What if we could identify who these High-Success players are? It would be as simple as looking at their success rate for heroics where they queued solo, and comparing it to the average success rate.

Once you've identified who these players are, then when a heroic group is in trouble and needs a replacement player, instead of taking the first person in the queue, search the queue for High-Success player and toss them into the group. If the heroic group has wiped, and people have left, adding a stronger-than-average replacement would make it more likely that the run would still succeed.

You would make it more likely that runs don't completely dissolve. You refrain from throwing the first player in the queue, who might not be able to handle a weakened group, into a half-finished run that may not be successful, leading to a wasted queue and poor experience.

Plus, this would be entirely invisible to the player base. You can't really tell that something like this is happening. The High-Success player gets a bit shorter queue, but at the price of having to "carry" a weaker group.

Deja Vu

I had a really odd experience running random heroics recently.

In the last two randoms I queued up for, the queue time was about 10 minutes, but the dungeon popped at about 5 minutes in. Both times I zoned in and found myself at the same place: Shadowfang Keep, in front of Baron Silverlaine.

Coincidence? Or a glitch in the Matrix?

Difficulty of Automatic Transient Content

Alright, you guys are probably getting as tired of Tank Time/Call To Arms as me, so hopefully this will be the last post on the subject for a while.

Maybe this Call To Arms issue is showing us the upper limit of difficulty for transient content.

Maybe transient content can only be so difficult before we start seeing problems in the system, such as lack of critical roles. I know I complained that rifts in RIFT are nothing more than zergs, with no skill or strategy involved. But perhaps that's the way it has to be. It's entirely possible that if those pieces of transient content were too difficult, the system would break down. Arguably, that's what happened with Warhammer Online Public Quests, they got too difficult unless you had the numbers.

Perhaps Blizzard would be better off saying: here's easy content, and here's hard content. You get a Dungeon Finder for the easy content, but anything difficult requires you to build your own groups. Maybe difficult content needs to be reserved for extended forms of play, such as raiding, where you are involved with the same group over multiple days.

Or if the 5-mans are hard enough, it might would be better to leave them off the Dungeon Finder, signalling to the playerbase that you need to find your own groups, or that you should be doing them in-guild. But even long Dungeon Finder queues might be preferable to that alternative.

Again, a lot of qualifiers for this idea. It might be completely wrong, and we are still well below the "difficulty ceiling" for transient content. I think the real test of this proposition is coming in 4.1. By all accounts, the new troll instances are harder than the current heroics. So they will stress the automatic group creation system even more.

The Slow Death of 25-man Raiding

Unfortunately, because Blizzard decided to use the same achievements for both 10 and 25-man raiding, it's somewhat hard to disentangle exact statistics. But I believe there are some clear trends in what data we do have.

Take a look at these graphs, from wowtrack.org, which display where guilds are in progression. In particular, mouse-over the 25-man/10-man lines in the legend (upper-left corner) and watch the graph change.

You'll see that there's a clear difference in the shape of the demographics for 10s and 25s. 10s are shifted to the left and have a much larger proportion in the non-heroic area before sloping down. 25s, in contrast, display something close to a binomial distribution with slopes down to zero on both sides of the peak.

What this graph indicates to me is that no new 25-man guilds are forming!

Instead, the 25-man guilds appear to be the same 25-man guilds that existed at the end of the last expansion, and they are moving through the content more or less as a single wave. Note that the median 25-guild has one or two heroic modes already down, making it very likely that they are experienced guilds.

In contrast, 10s have a lot of guilds clustered on the left side of the high point, indicating that there are a lot of newer guilds there. And if you look at the numbers below, you see that there are about ten 10-man guilds for every 25-man guild.

And this makes sense, to a certain degree. Where would new 25-man guilds come from? A guild new to raiding would start raiding with their first 10 raiders. There's no need to move up to 25s. Maybe a large guild with multiple raid teams might merge some, but then you have issues where Team A is several bosses ahead of Team B, or too many raid leaders, or conflicting schedules or loot rules. Why break up three functioning teams to create one team which may or may not be successful?

But if no new 25-man raid teams are created, then the number of existing 25-man teams will slowly fall just through everyday attrition. In the normal scheme of things guilds die, and new guilds are born to replace them. That's what's happened all throughout WoW's past. But now, no new 25s are appearing to refresh the blood.

That's why I think 25-man raiding is doomed. Not because of any inherent negative quality in them, but because I just don't see where the new 25-man guilds are going to come from.

Given the path we're on, I would be surprised if 25-man raiding existed in the next expansion. The number of existing 25-man guilds will probably be less than half of what it is now, just through regular attrition.

Tanking: Power and Responsibility

We all know Uncle Ben's dictum: With great power comes great responsibility.

But what about the converse? Does great responsibility require great power?

In my previous post, I suggested that a Trinity game might be better off by sharing the responsibility of tanking between two people.

But perhaps we should go in the other direction and embrace the responsibility. For example, in the description of tanks, emphasize that they are the leader of the group. In a random, rather than having a separate leadership checkbox, have the tank automatically be the party leader in a random dungeon.

And give the tank's greater control over the group. As Dinaer suggests, give the tanks two votes in the vote-kick, with three votes kicking someone. Make it a little easier than the other roles for tanks to initiate vote-kicks.

Maybe there are other powers we could give the tank to help ensure a smooth run.

Having the responsibility without having the power to carry out that responsibility is a hard thing to bear. If we cannot do anything about the responsibility, maybe we can give them enough power to make it easier to shoulder that responsibility.

Flying Mounts

Sometimes I wonder if flying mounts were a good idea.

The thing about flying mounts is that flying mounts basically obsoleted geography. You fly up, then fly directly to your destination in the air. There's just air around you, a blank emptiness.

Whereas for ground mounts, where you are matters. Sometimes you cut across country, sometimes you follow the road. You're "in" the scenery.

Not to mention that when you see people on the roads, they're much closer to you. They're sharing the road. When flying, it's basically seeing someone pass you at a great distance. Another airplane, or ship on the horizon.

Flying mounts are cool, no doubt. But I think in a lot of ways, they started the trend of separating players from the game world. I wonder if the novelty of those mounts was really worth it.

Vampires

Apropos of nothing, I came across a F2P game today called Forsaken World. Looks like a pretty standard Eastern-ish MMO, but one of the classes available is Vampire. That sounded kind of interesting, so I took a look at it.

Apparently Vampires in this game are healers.

That just blew my mind. Vampire tanks, sure. Vampire DPS, definitely. Vampire healers...uh what?

Also, they seem to shape-shifters, which actually makes a lot of sense given the mythos, and is a pretty cool spin on the class.

And according to Melmoth at Killed in a Smiling Accident, the vampires barely wear clothes and wield giant crucifixes as weapons.

Shape-shifting vampire healers in skimpy outfits who wield giant crucifixes. The mind staggers at the design process which came up with that.

More Thoughts on Call To Arms

After reading comments and assorted blog posts about Call to Arms, here are some more thoughts.

Tanking isn't Quantum Mechanics

Gevlon thinks that tanking is too difficult. Difficult enough that offering an incentive won't improve things.

On the other hand, he's offering 1000 gold to everyone present at a guild-first kill of Nefarian, which seems to imply that you can motivate people to complete difficult tasks with rewards. On the scale of things, killing Nef is much more difficult than tanking.

First off, tanking isn't that hard. It looks hard at first, but practice improves everything. Personally, I think that if more people step up and try to tank, more people will find that it really isn't as bad as they thought it would be.

(Except for Ozruk. You're on your own there.)

Second, the reward is also aimed at experienced tanks who have finished gearing up in heroics. If the reward pushes those tanks to do just two daily heroics instead of one, it's a major win.

Tanking Shortage Is Not Caused By Raid Slots

I used to think that part of the reason tanks are rare is because 25-man raids require fewer than 20% tanks.

But the truth is that 25-man raids are dying (a topic for another time), and the vast majority of raiders are in 10-mans. And 10-mans have the same 20% tank ratio as a 5-man group.

So I'm not really sure this reason is valid anymore, if it ever was.

Social Cohesion

The thing about PvE in WoW is that it tends to be very egalitarian once you're in a group. There's a sense that everyone is part of the group, and everyone is contributing more or less equally, and thus everyone has more or less the same shot at the rewards. This may not be strictly true, but that's how the default loot systems work. Even Need before Greed is strictly based on armor-type, rather than any performance-based quality.

This Call To Arms explicitly breaks that illusion. Now, though the group completes the task together, one member of the group gets singled out for an extra reward. And going against that egalitarian grain often rubs people wrong.

For example, a lot of the high-end guilds give loot priority to their tanks and healers. This is deliberately unfair to the DPS, but the DPS accept it because it helps the group progress faster. The DPS sacrifice for the group, and that can restore the cohesion.

But in Call to Arms, there is no external group for the DPS to invest in. I think this will be the biggest challenge for Call to Arms. Tanks often feel "abused" by the dps and healers. Will it get worse if the game deliberately sets them apart and gives them extra rewards?

Envy is a deadly sin, but it still causes damage.

The Value of Experimentation

I may have mentioned this before, but I think our society is becoming too risk-averse in many ways. What's wrong with running experiments, with trying something new?

Honestly, if Blizzard had floated the idea of the Dungeon Finder before it was available, I think everyone would have enumerated all the things that could possibly go wrong and insisted that the Dungeon Finder would be a failure.

And a lot of those negative effects did happen. But they were greatly outweighed by the benefits, and the most negative behaviors corrected where they could be.

Doing something, seeing what happens, and fixing the problems as they emerge is far more likely to produce advances than trying to theoretically construct the "perfect" system beforehand.

Carrying a Tank

Tobold asks a question: How do you Carry a Tank?

It's pretty rare, but I've seen a group carry a tank before.

I define "carrying" as when a character performs significantly below normal, to such an extent that it requires other characters to perform significantly above normal in order for the group to be successful.

I was once put into a Dungeon Finder group with three DPS and a bear tank, all from the same guild. The bear tank had a 150k health, so I thought all was good.

As we progressed through the instance I noticed two things. First, the DPS was very good, all pushing 10k. Second, the bear was taking a ton of damage. I was having to chain Divine Lights and pop cooldowns to keep him up. I found this amazingly odd, given that the tank came from the same guild as three top-notch DPS.

Mid-way through the run, I inspected the tank. The tank was in full PvP gear. So he had a lot of health, but was missing all the avoidance and mastery that would have significantly reduced his damage taken. He was also missing the talent Natural Reaction.

The tank had enough health so that he wasn't one-shot, but he took damage at a rate that required me to burn mana at a much higher rate than normal. However, the DPS performed at such a high level that they were able to end the fights before I ran out of mana, in addition to requiring the barest minimum of healing themselves.

It's fairly obvious that the group decided to have their druid respec and wear PvP gear, and let the DPS carry him through the instance, rather than face 45 minute queue times. I think the Natural Reaction thing was just a mistake, as the druid spec looked good otherwise.

The point is that because the tank performed at such a low level, the DPS had to perform at a much higher level so that the run was successful. The performance of the DPS effectively carried the performance of the tank in that run.

The moral of the story is that very high DPS forgives a lot of sins.