To ???, pt 3

If people used this idea, people with high incomes would work less, which means smart people would work less. People might say, "there's always more you can do to help other people". This is me not helping other people. I'm not looking up the progress of the war between Israel and Iran, or whether any of Iran's conventional submarines have been destroyed.

Two observations from the video that I finally finished: the scene with boats moving through canals. It wasn't clear if the player was steering the boats, but it would be nice if they were. Second, someone commented on the original video,

"I'm a noob too" he answers to his group mate - by writing in General Chat, thus proving he is indeed a noob too @50:28

I'm sure there are people who have had this experience: playing for a long time without knowing how to properly communicate with other people. When I first played WoW, I didn't know how to move — I was expecting it to be like Warcraft III, in which you first selected a unit and then right-clicked a location to move to, even in a custom scenario where you could only control one unit — and I didn't know how to reply to Mei after she messaged me, so I was just jumping up and down in place using space bar until she told me how to reply. If not for her, who knows how long I might have played the game before I learned that?

(Actually, I wonder what percent of people whom I messaged for dungeons might not have replied because they didn't know how to)

Communication is very important for people to find the answers to problems that they have. In school, classrooms where students never ask questions probably have worse learning than other classrooms. (It's unlikely that all students fully understand the material.) If someone doesn't know how to communicate in a multiplayer game, or doesn't feel confident enough to ask questions, they might run into a bunch of problems which the game's designers didn't anticipate.

Then I watched a video about players avoiding flying. I wouldn't have said anything about it, but halfway through another video about quests in WoW, at 15:54, I got the vp9 dropped segment bug.

It would have been nice if I didn't make this post and the previous, because the one before that made a good point: that limitations on a character make them more interesting. Like with the point I made in a forum post that I won't link about AoE2, that a challenge for games that undergo continuous development is to help new players without harming long-time players. A lot of the issues discussed in the first video were the result of catering to long-time players, like with getting a mount at lvl 10 and a flying mount at lvl 20, or just the fact of the game not being challenging.

These videos I'm watching have all been 'react' videos by one streamer, so I want to mention a gameplay video, The Last Player on a Dead Server – And Why I Bought Him a PC, with 5m views.

So now I have two reasons to link my 2010 post about WoW. I occasionally think about the post I did in 2008, which I think is in one of the jpg-zip archives but maybe not even on a post that's still visible. Just the bit where I briefly said how the solution to the hardcore vs casual player tension was to keep differences between players but make it so those differences didn't matter, and that "you must study this", which was a reference to the Book of Five Rings. I did not expect anyone who read it to understand (I expected it to fail just like my earlier writings had failed). I think of the translator's note in that translation, "Who can understand Musashi's methods?"

Anyway, the first paragraph, that ended with,

the hopes and dreams of people provide a guiding force, which is not always apparent in the direction it will take the game.

The creator of the video about flying mentioned the 'trenches of 2014'. The great debates on the forums, second possibly only to the debates at some other point about whether the forums should switch to using real player names, about whether flying was good or bad for the game. The people who supported flying might not have been a clear majority, but they were numerous enough to change Blizzard's plans, showing that at least in the World of Warcraft, the future does, indeed, lie in the hands of the people.

And now, many years later, people who kept playing after the 'pro-flying' side got what they wanted are talking about how the game might be more fun if one avoids flying.

And the end of the post, where under "Other PvP issues" I suggested increasingly outlandish fixes to flying.

It never seemed realistic to remove flying, once it had been added. It made the game worse, but major content areas would literally become inaccessible if flying was removed, and there was just too much dissonance from trying to restrict flying in new areas, when it was still available in old areas (especially after Cataclysm, which added flying to the original world). No story justification, and from what players could see, no gameplay justification. Maybe if they had fixed world PvP, people would have seen benefits from keeping flying banned, but unsurprisingly, since they didn't implement my suggestions about PvP, world PvP was never fixed.

So all that could be done was make flying less convenient. I didn't mention Aion, but it is one of the links on my weblog, and the suggestion to use a flight timer was pulled directly from Aion. Aion's flight did have problems, which was basically that run speed boosts made gliding in non-flight zones useless in PvP, and flight potions that restored flight time eventually made the flight timer irrelevant. I might have also had suggestions about improving combat in flight zones, where the cool inertial aspect of gliding played no role. Aion had or has a system where traveling forward for a few seconds gives a 10% damage boost. Maybe my suggestion was to allow spellcasting while gliding?

WoW didn't make flying less convenient. It added inertia to flying, but also made flying extremely fast, so players are even more penalized in terms of time if they don't use it, with no gameplay penalty if they do choose to use it.

People in comments suggest an 'Iron Man'-type buff if one chooses not to fly, and that's kind of interesting to think about: if one could choose at character creation to make a 'heroic' character who would eventually have access to flying mounts, or a 'non-heroic' character who could not use flying mounts, how many would choose the latter?

If time spent walking on a low-level character has the opportunity cost of riding on a high-level character at a later (or even just different, if someone with a high-level main levels an alt) time, then the efficiency of economic activity is a concern, as I've probably said before. New players might enjoy walking, but if gathering iron ore on a max-level character with a flying mount is 5x faster than a low-level character who walks, then an experienced player will not enjoy the portion of leveling where they have no mount.

So mount speed is a problem, even without flying. When I leveled in TBC zones on the public test realm, the first thing I did was run through all of Outland at lvl 60, and with a +100% speed epic mount nothing really felt dangerous. There was a large aggro range, but nothing except a lvl 70 mob would have displayed as 'skull' level, which is the traditional indication of a zone being too high-level for a player in Classic WoW. And so while watching this video about flying, I had a few thoughts about how when everyone has a +100% speed mount, it shouldn't make the world feel so much less dangerous. The daze mechanic does knock a player off a mount, but that's only for melee attacks, and if every mob has to be fast enough to catch a player on a +100% mount, it makes normal combat less interesting. For example, a 50% snare like Hamstring would not make a mob slower than a player, so it would not have utility in allowing a player to gain distance from a mob.

It's basically a neglected problem because in the same expansion where everyone was able to afford an epic ground mount, they were also able to afford flying mounts which made avoiding mobs trivial.

(This was supposed to be a link to the 2010 post and maybe one or two sentences.)

So: the title for the third video is, "The Design Idea That Made WoW Massive", referring to quests. But now people don't read or care about the quests in retail WoW. Should new MMOs bother to make enough quests for players to level with?

I already knew the story of how Blizzard was surprised at how popular quests were in the early testing. I used it as an example of how Blizzard did not plan the things that made WoW popular, and people (or specifically Wolfshead Online) should not expect that Blizzard would be able to create a 'WoW killer' with Project Titan (back when it was just job openings and rumors). I didn't know that a lack of quests might have been one of the reasons for the failure of Ashes of Creation, since I still haven't watched any videos or read anything about its failure.

In the minute before I got the vp9 bug (and if the bug is from deliberate interference, segments are pre-loaded so any content-related decision to cause it would be delayed before I knew of it), the streamer is talking about the ability for people to WoW solo. Maybe a little ironic, when he played Runescape, which came before WoW, and the first video talked about the ability to experience all of the story in Runescape solo, unlike WoW. But at least players can reach the level cap solo in WoW. So: the faction split, solo leveling, and quests were all important features that led to WoW's success. PvP was probably also important, but that might fall under the faction split. But I assume that quests are what the video title refers to.

Almost every major raiding guild in original WoW was on a PvP server. Well: better without Javascript:

https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Gates_of_Ahn'Qiraj

https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Server:Medivh_US

PvE server. But,

In an effort to gain an advantage for their home server, players from Medivh and Mannoroth created alts on the opposing server to increase lag and queue times. Players also trolled the realm forums of the opposing server, trading insults like "carebear" and "Mannorofl".

Though Medivh emerged victorious, some Mannoroth players still claim they were the first "legitimate" server to complete the event, as Medivh's PvE mechanics prevented cross-faction interference and made organization between Horde and Alliance a natural course of action. By contrast, Mannoroth's war effort was hindered throughout the event by fierce competition between Horde and Alliance Scepter quest raids. Ganking in Silithus ignited a no-holds-barred war between the factions, causing constant server crashes due to zone overpopulation and ending in a battle at the Scarab Gong.

I was going with the argument, 'players who wanted to do hard achievements in PvE preferred to be on PvP servers.' An editor here made a good point that achieving anything on PvP servers was more difficult, including doing things related to raid progression or even getting inside a raid instance.

In Gegon's The Last Ovski, the players he attacks at 12:47 are gathered together to try to get the Songflower Serenade buff, quite possibly in preparation for a raid. Players on a PvE server could get the buff safely. So the achievements of guilds on PvE servers like Medivh might oversell their competence, compared to guilds on PvP servers.

And if more competent players did prefer PvP servers, it not only suggests that world PvP was an important part of WoW's overall success, but also that there is something about the interactions or dependencies that world PvP led to that competent players found appealing. To put it another way, players who were bad at PvP because they were bad at the game would not want to be on a server where they could be killed by other players.

I think that this is a bad post, but if it says anything useful, it might be a brief explanation of why the 9GAG post I did was titled, "War is Obsolete". Chess does not lead to any physical thrill. Perhaps physical sports do, but like, one thing I was thinking about regarding retail WoW is that for activities to be interesting, they not only have to be inherently relevant, they also have to convince enough people that they're relevant to be popular. What one lvl 10 character does in retail WoW is just as relevant to another lvl 10 character in retail, as a lvl 10 character in Classic is to another lvl 10 character in Classic. In fact, outside of hardcore, interest in leveling in Classic is low, so I'll just stick with hardcore. More people care about the lvl 10 hardcore character because players whose characters are lvl 10 are a larger percentage of the population.

So, almost everyone can safely do physical sports and benefit from a little bit of exercise. But interest is concentrated in professional athletes, aside from parents watching their children. And most people can't be professional athletes.

Whereas most people could be soldiers; it's why the US military sometimes describes people as "military-aged males", because anyone of a certain age is viewed as having the ability to participate in combat.

As I was saying, chess does not replace war, though in Chinese and Korean costume dramas the ability to play chess is often seen as a critical skill for a military commander. Normal work is often also not challenging, when people are forced to stay at work even when there is nothing to do. But computer games, and the option of working more efficiently and leaving work earlier (while getting paid slightly less), could replace war for competitively-minded people, who seek to challenge themselves.