To ???, pt 1

Ellie, who commented on this site a year ago, said something on Chirp Club about the imperial exams.

She is much smarter than an average person. If she would think that Imane doesn't read this, then the average person would think that, as average people tend to dismiss possibilities that no one else expresses belief in that seem statistically unlikely, based on whether similar possibilities are true. No one else has indicated that they have read this site since the mysterious 'B' commented in 2017.

Just as I think the best way to learn a language (after learning its grammar) is to basically memorize movies, because the stories in them are inherently more interesting than, say, news articles and broadcasts in the target language, I find it more interesting to reference fiction on the topic of imperial exams.

But I will say that I think the second-to-last emperor of China, who was like killed by his mother-in-law or something around 1908, was trying to reform the imperial exams. Her resistance to reforms were linked to the Boxer Rebellion, ultimately leading to the end of imperial rule, and this is an example of the like energy accumulation in a system, the bullet vs sunlight thing again. People tried to protect a system that was flawed, leading to violent change.

The Legend of Anle begins with a case of cheating on the imperial exams.

The Double also touches on the topic of the exams. The idea of having males and females combine into teams for the exams is introduced, criticized by certain characters, and then indulged for the purpose of making an interesting story (like with the archery test).

I think that in The Prisoner of Beauty, the grandfather might mention the importance of the exams and selecting good officials in his final message to his granddaughter, but I did not watch the later episodes in which the importance of whatever he said might be revealed.

Ellie mentioned being a National Merit Scholar in the US. I never tried for any exclusive scholarships. I was disappointed that the US did not, in fact, have much of a merit-based system that did not depend on zero-sum competitions. For example, I went to high school in California, and for like one or two years there was a way of getting scholarship money through tests, then the funding for that was cut.

So, the imperial exams: objective being to get the best people possible for important positions. If being, say, in the top 0.573% is highly rewarded, but being in the top 0.574% has a low reward, then people will want to cheat. But, beyond that: if people's competence is measured, what should be done with the people who are measured to be the very worst? What jobs should they have? (Is it important to be able to say it was worth their time to do all that preparation, even if they were measured as the worst?)

China no longer executes people who cheat on the exams. But the issue of the exams covering irrelevant material still exists. Ideally, all exams (not just the ones used for college entrance in China) should be for knowledge which is useful to know, even if it were not being tested for. This is a very general statement which might seem useless in isolation; I am just rolling it all up in signal accuracy. If an exam tests useless knowledge, then people should not care what result someone gets on the exam, but they often do. So, like, the question about the sheep and goats on a boat ([8.8M views, 13 Oct 2025][ship captain's age China problem]The REAL Answer Explained - YouTube), and the official explanation for why the problem was on an exam.

The following has nothing to do with the idea. It just shows how I am restricting my potential to cause change with less important problems, as evidence that I care about this idea and the problems it would fix.

I did a test. I watched an AoE2 video, but I tried to avoid touching any keys while doing so. I got the 'vp9 dropped segments' bug twice shortly after it started, and then twice again after I had to touch a key to stop the screen from blanking from inactivity after an ad.

This behavior was consistent with someone deliberately and intentionally causing this bug by disrupting traffic from the server: if someone was trying to communicate that "they were deliberately causing the bug", this communication would lead to ambiguity and an increase in complexity if it occurred while I was not watching the screen. But I still don't know if it might just be a browser bug with like muxing the segments (combining audio and video), and the server is sending the data just fine.

While I was watching the video, So, I tried Retail WoW (as a new player...) | Xaryu Reacts, the bug happened again. This is my excuse to mention the video and treat the fact that I was watching it as important.

At 34:08, someone says in the stream chat,

Classic andies: this is the whole point of wow. Why would you wanna boost [past] this

I watched up to around this point. This video is probably one of the most favourable presentations of  'retail' WoW: it shows a storyline that the player had a reason to be interested in, and did not demonstrate the incoherence that can result from the mashup of storylines from different expansions, or basically from players missing the stories from most expansions when they level a single time to the level cap.

I think the difficulty tuning is bad. I think that it looks like the story being told might not be possible to experience while playing with someone else, which is bad, but people might not realize it's bad if they don't think about how MMOs are not supposed to be single-player games.

I also think, just like the creator, Gbay, who made the original video, that the story being told is not very good. I had always felt that books are a better medium for telling interesting stories than games; decline of literacy increases the audience for stories told in games, and people suggest that other games do stories better than WoW. But the opposition (Q41) that Classic WoW players have to boosting is not because the stories told within the game are good.

When a newly created gnome character is asked to slaughter eight ragged young wolves for their edible flesh (found via other database site), it's not intended to be a riveting story. The result is predictable. No one will care what the player did, other than the single non-player character (NPC) who benefits from the exchange. The player themselves won't care or remember that they did this particular quest.

It's more about building a world. A world where other characters in the game, whether player characters or NPCs, care about the existence of the player's own character, at least if the player bothers to read the quests that they're doing. Only a few quests in Classic have stories that a typical player cares much about; with Alliance players, it's the Defias questline, with a lot more quests that players won't remember or care about.

Based on this video, retail WoW apparently has stories in which the player's character matters to NPCs, reaching a pinnacle probably with the expansion in which players had artifact weapons (an item quality above legendary, which is above epic), but these stories were fundamentally incompatible with the fact of other players existing within the game, who had the same role in the story.

So the commenter who implied that the experience of playing through the game's story was why Classic players opposed boosting missed an important fact: the video creator did not interact with any other players while doing this in retail WoW.

If Classic WoW was a game where every player was solitary in their own personal shard until they hit the level cap (or solitary outside of dungeons), a lot more players would support a paid boost, if they didn't just quit.

Other players existing in the world is sometimes good, sometimes bad, and sometimes can seem irrelevant. Game streamers often play a game in a way where they interact more with their stream chat. In MMOs, they will often talk about other players within the game world, commenting on or asking questions about that player, without making any attempt to answer their questions by interacting with that player. Even for normal players, if they have a goal like 'leveling as fast as possible', then other players in the game are often nothing but a hindrance to this goal, like with competition for limited-drop items (language warning).

This post honestly took a turn I wasn't expecting. I didn't really think about the creator of the video not interacting with other players, maybe because so much of my own playtime in original WoW was by myself or in lightly populated areas. Like, when the game launched, I played in areas with other people. I still remember PvP involving multiple players of both factions near the shore of Desolace, in late 2004 or early 2005, where I encountered a shaman on my priest and had the experience of all my survival tools being countered by Purge and Earth Shock. There were raids on Astranaar by low-level Horde, and raids on Crossroads by low-level Alliance, with most participating players being unable to damage guards.

But later on, with my first character that reached lvl 60 in late 2006, a lot of areas I leveled through were relatively unpopulated. Players who were creating new characters preferred to play on new servers, which were periodically released, and many people who had been playing since the launch of my server were already at the level cap. When I leveled on the public test realm in TBC so that I could say that my character on live realms never traveled through the Dark Portal (and never even logged in after TBC launched), it was also in empty zones, other than the odd (rare) occasion like when I fought a lvl 70 blood elf paladin with a flying mount for control of the PvP objective in the first zone.

I linked the Russian comment listed below on 10 Mar. Other videos I didn't mention in that post:

Retail WoW vs Classic WoW comments https://www.youtube.com/shorts/e2WO6u8AUkg
Russian comment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdZ0D-L6yBI&lc=Ugz4YTc8W08feFI4Fld4AaABAg
updated models https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kHvb6pNkKhg
WoW Classic vs Retail: Quests (leveling speed) https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lO8iOxW4xng
retail WoW ad, giant mob dying to 'new and returning player' c9B1DlgIZ74

WoW: https://www.twitch.tv/pikabooirl/clip/PreciousPhilanthropicBaguettePJSalt-QtLvqbRHsCqc2PjV and https://youtu.be/M0DbD9TXAPg?t=1022
Classic has challenge that is more relevant.

Within the rules of a game, a long-time player will always be able to do more. From which follows, "it's better to be max level than to still be questing and leveling". I didn't view this to be true; I deleted my first character at lvl 50, partly in order to delay when I reached lvl 60 (possibly because then I might stop playing, and Mei had wanted me to be playing the same game as her). But every player who buys a boost thinks this.

It does not follow that a game is better if every player can quickly reach max level. A max-level character can do more, but what they can do is not necessarily relevant. It often is not relevant to new characters, and it is often not relevant to the much larger population of "real-life humans", who can hear about the game or the exploits of its characters (including fictional characters who don't actually exist in the game, like with comics or The Craft of War : BLIND by Percula) and make judgements as a result of their knowledge.

Low-level characters are able to do less within the game world. But it's the fact that they are restricted in what they can do that makes them interesting.