I think we're at our most honest after waking up. One of my sleeping-waking-dream thoughts was that I don't even want you to share the idea. But I said I wouldn't watch any more dramas if you didn't, and I would like to be able to do that. It's hard to want something to happen if you don't think it will happen. With relationships, this is called moving on after a breakup.
The reason for this post is just WoW. I just wrote this to myself, after waking up:
WoW: role of layers in driving micro-faction imbalance. Layer away when ratio is unfavourable, positive feedback. Even if server is balanced, it makes layers unbalanced. Even if layer is balanced overall, it makes specific locations unbalanced.
Game gives players a reason to be in a specific area, like quests. Layers allow them to be in the area without being outnumbered.
Solution has to involve taking away the easy escape. Some players will enjoy challenge, but who enjoys 10v1? Could call for help, but not justified when layering away is always possible.
Can't remember all details of previous layering solutions, but shouldn't always go to party leader's layer.
(Thoughts about the lack of low-level players raiding towns, compared to first few months of WoW in 2004.)
One thing I said on the WoW forums, sometime between 2010 and 2012, was that the biggest threat to WoW was players zooming out really far with their cameras in raids. I didn't explain why it was a threat. It made players take the game less seriously, and at the very least not taking the game seriously implies they might not care to play it anymore. A few years later, WoW limited the ability for players to zoom out so far, comparing the size of the player's character to the size on the screen of a Marine in Starcraft. Of course, players who were used to doing this complained.
I never like to say that I was wrong, or even that I might have been wrong. Looking at the WoW of today, one might question whether camera distance was really WoW's biggest threat.
There was a game cinematic that I can't find, from a game whose name I can't remember; the notable part was when it had giant, 20m+ humanoid monsters, who moved very slowly. I contrasted it with WoW, thought of how bad the (extremely tall, like 40m+ mob with Thaddius model in WotLK, who was soloed by a paladin in a WotLK beta paladin PvP video that was pretty cool but which I deleted, by someone with a name like Sabrina who might have been involved in a controversy involving TBC arenas, which opened with a PvP scene and nearly one-shotting a priest due to a bug with PWS that existed at the time) looked, both the shading and the way that the mob moved. My thought was that, even if WoW's artists don't understand that larger beings move slower, there are still people who know this and are able to create good cinematics and games.
Then I watched a trailer for a film that featured King Kong, in which he was moving very fast despite being very large, and I reflected on how there are many people who don't understand that larger = slower and it makes an unrealistic representation still profitable.
But, camera distances are tied to this. If the player's character seems tiny, and raid 20m tall bosses are 'normal', then the player will accept those bosses moving quickly, like swinging an arm across their body in 0.2 seconds. (~50 m/s, or ~100 mph, or much faster than the speed that requires a lengthy stopping distance to avoid injury in a car crash.)
And representations that only make sense if people are stupid drive away smart players. It's the health insurance death spiral all over again, except that games can be profitable when only stupid people play them; they're just not fun for other people to play, which would include the people making the games since software and art does take some intelligence.
So this is all context. I'm pasting more of what I wrote about games being fun at low levels, but in the past I pointed to camera distance as the biggest threat to WoW.
Based on another bookmark, it seems that I watched the game cinematic from the game I forgot around 03 Feb, and the following is from 03 Feb. It's not really useful to you, but I'm afraid that I might never have a reason to look at what I wrote again, in this 'online tasks2, 16 Sep 2022.txt' document that is now 355 KB:
Poll: Is there a widely-known method that developing countries can use to prevent wealth from accumulating to a small number of people, without heavy taxes on capitalists or making capitalism illegal?
show relatives: don't fall for Alpha Male
WoW discussion topic: What would Classic Plus be like if it committed to a design where questing greens at lvl 63 were the same quality as lvl 58 blues, just like lvl 53 greens are the same as lvl 48 blues?
observation: almost all popular videos, especially PvP videos, in original WoW were at the level cap. Maybe didn't need to be lvl 60 to have fun, but needed to be lvl 60 to impress others, which for many people is part of having fun.
And at the level cap, most PvP videos were from people in good gear.
(sub-60 PvP: Alexis priest PvP, not the best gear: Vurtne)
Several reasons. Videos from a single player are usually to showcase the player's skill. For many people, skill is whether fights are won. Winning is easier with better gear, or when opponents have bad gear or are unskilled. Low-level players are more likely both to have bad gear and to be unskilled, and hard for viewers to know whether this is the case. PvP videos at low levels also risk encouraging bad behavior: bullying weaker players, fighting players who have zero interest in PvP and just want to level (including players with lots of spirit gear), and sending money and items from a high-level 'main' to a low-level player which makes good BoE items less accessible for other players.
So it's a bit circular: many low-level players don't want to PvP because they know that other low-level players don't want to PvP.
With max-level PvP, gear is easier to recognize on both the player who makes a video and their opponents. The fact of an opponent being an appropriate level to present a challenge is also evident from the location of fights. Tier sets in Classic are iconic, and a shorthand for player power. With low-level items, too many to recognize, as well as items that look the same. Also harder to know the appropriate level of players in a leveling zone; a zone like Ashenvale looks the same in many places, but quests in an area differ by 10+ levels. Lvl 21 player fighting lvl 21 is totally different from lvl 21 vs lvl 31. Level difference is in addition to gear difference: a player in Ashenvale could be a lvl 20 with whites and greens, or a lvl 33 with superb (i.e. blue, or even epic) gear.
So it seems like lack of information about difficulty of fights would be solved by a performance-based rank system.
But it's not the only potential problem. Gathering professions: easier to farm ores or herbs at a high level, both to avoid mobs (or PvP) and due to having a mount. If financial incentives to reach max level are too high, it deters activities like PvP at low levels that may be fun, but slow leveling.
And bullying: if max-level players are immune to low-level players, due to 'resists' or just raw stats from level cap power inflation, then trying to enjoy low-level PvP is asking for bullies to come and ruin the fun. So, disincentives to bully, like 'most wanted' board and aggression-based PvP flagging penalty.
What percentage of people would recognize a reference to Mandelbrot fractal or curve? (poll) (re: map being procedurally-generated, but predictably, not randomly)
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