To Imane, pt 62

There are four posts that I will publish if the most recent post records 20 views. One of them is addressed to you, pt 60. When I wrote it, the most recent post was "To ???, pt 5", published 31 Mar, but I am just following what I said.

Video Feel the pain Vol5 - Niar R14 NE Rogue

There's a different upload of the same video with eight times as many views, in 1080p, but stretched sideways. It seems that a large number of people, enough to boost it in the algorithm, do not realize that a 16/9 aspect ratio does not mean a video's quality is higher. But I'm in a bit of an unusual situation, with a 8/5 aspect ratio, so when I watch 16/9 videos there's black bars on top and bottom, and a 4/3 aspect ratio video is taller than the same video stretched to 16/9. So I have a reason to care.

Like, when I watched The Fellowship of the Ring a month ago with my sister and her daughters, the wrong display aspect ratio made it stretched sideways, but they didn't want to change it. Maybe the fact that they were sitting to one side made the stretched ratio better. But by the end, I had completely stopped noticing that it was stretched; I only noticed it in the beginning and am only assuming that it remained so for the entire viewing, as it stopped registering in my consciousness.

The editing at 2:53, with like a light bloom that makes part of the screen hard to see, is why I watched the video. I watched until 7:33 when the second song ended.

I wonder it would be interesting for someone with very little experience with WoW to watch this video, knowing that it shows a rogue, and then pick a class to play based off of what they see in the video. But all I really know is that I think it's a good video that's enjoyable to watch, and I played WoW enough to understand what's going on; and that one or two Aion PvP videos that I watched did not make the game look fun, and I also played Aion, though not the classes that would have been featured in those PvP videos. (And I considered the +20% runspeed boots in Aion to be a big part of the reason why PvP was broken, and PvP videos would certainly have featured characters with those boots, and they probably had a small character which meant a correspondingly faster running animation which looked bad, i.e. prioritizing combat results over appearance which I obviously disagreed with, etc.)

So it's possible that the reason I like this WoW video is not just because I have played WoW, but I really have no idea whether it makes WoW look interesting, or whether it's even possible for a video showing combat from an MMO to look interesting to someone who hasn't played the game and doesn't know what's going on. (I also don't know whether people who play retail WoW have any understanding of what's going on, like being able to identify every single ability that's being used and why it was used in that situation, when they watch someone else's gameplay, or whether not knowing this detracts from their enjoyment.)

The "i has a shuvel" still made me smile.

I was just listening to the music without watching it until 2:50, but I watched after that, and it made me think about the responses regarding using a PvP system to identify skilled players. Notable: the footage is from a PvE realm. 5:53 shows a duel, with the loser not dying, which isn't possible in that zone on a PvP server. But the fights at 1:51 and 4:21 take place in Horde starting zones, where even on PvP servers, Horde players become unflagged for PvP. The players he fights were already flagged for some reason, and being on a PvP server would not have meant a higher chance to encounter players in those locations who were flagged.

At 4:21: Niar is at 32% health, attacking a player at full health who is wearing the Tier1 robe and the Tier2 helm. (These are epic items that are better than what my lvl 60 mage had, but worse than the PvP epics that Niar was using.) Did it require skill for Niar to win in this situation? An argument that players seem to use is "player X is not skilled, their opponents are just unskilled." The ability use at 7:15: first frame with the first ability, Ambush, highlighted is 436.27 (using Stats for Nerds and ",." to go frame-by-frame). It fails to be used because not behind the target, but before this message appears (due to latency) it cannot be attempted again due to 1-sec global cooldown (1.5 sec for non-rogues) triggering before being cleared by the error message from the server. It starts again at 436.72. Stealth drops at 437.52, and the damage number appears at 437.65 simultaneously with the mage's health dropping. (Note that some of the delay might have been from 400 ms spell batching.)

I was watching some WoW-related thing recently, and an action registered one frame after the button was pressed. If I ping Google, it's just 13 ms; battle.net, associated with Blizzard, is only 4 ms. So one frame, 33 ms, is plenty of time for a packet to reach the server and return, if the server is processing actions immediately.

My latency from my ISP when I was playing WoW in 2006 was about 1 second (I think it was round-trip time). Eventually I was able to use Ethernet from the modem to my computer, which eliminated most disconnections due to bad local Wifi, but I was still playing with high latency.

For a rogue, there was an additional consideration beyond just actions registering later. At the upper-left is an energy tick meter: a rogue would ideally open just before it finished, which would give 20 energy immediately after. He tries to use Backstab immediately after Ambush, but because Ambush happened after the energy tick, he doesn't have the 60 energy required for Backstab, until a packet arrives indicating that Ambush apparently did trigger before the server tick, giving him enough energy.

So: a player could be skilled, and still have bad performance in PvP due to high latency. I remember Mei saying that it was easy for frost mages to kill mages, and the difficulty that I (as a frost mage) had fighting a well-geared Tauren warrior near the furbolg village in eastern Winterspring. I don't think I managed to kill him even once. My reaction time tests as worse than average, but the difficulty I had using Blink to avoid getting hit after an Intercept was mostly due to my connection latency.

Fast-forward 20 years, and latency isn't an issue for most players. So they are more likely to think that "bad performance in PvP means unskilled". Put simply, this leads to more stupid people trying to demonstrate that they are good at PvP, by learning to PvP well. PvP inherently involves affecting other people.

This probably affects the feedback about PvP ranks. It makes sense for a game to let players show that they're skilled, and yet some people believe this would be a bad thing, because (although no one did me the favor of making the following argument, so that I could more easily understand why they had this belief) it would encourage players who seek to show that they're skilled to act in a worse way. When encountering any given opponent, a player might go to greater lengths to defeat that opponent than they otherwise would, which could lead to an arms race in the use of consumables for example, or they might attack a weak player because of a slight reward for doing so.

Or, for example, they might seek to optimize their character to win PvP fights, leading to more imbalance in a typical fight due to their character being stronger, when they otherwise would not bother.

But my point is how the removal of latency, as a reason a skilled player might perform poorly in PvP, makes players view performance to be a more accurate signal of skill, which makes them more afraid to be grouped with 'low performance' players (or to desire more to be grouped with 'high performance' players), even though I just named several non-skill factors that would still affect the measurement, PvP rank, which could be used as an indicator of skill.

To put it another way: my awareness of latency, as one factor among many, made me think "of course there's never going to be a completely accurate measure of skill". Whereas other people saw the proposal and thought, "how would other players act if the developers of a game tried to introduce a completely accurate measure of skill."

There honestly might be some element of how players identify. If they imagine splitting players into two groups, "tries to be seen as skilled" and "does not try to be seen as skilled", they would probably label the first group as 'try-hards' and put themselves in the second group. Retail WoW certainly has goals, like getting a good standing in arenas, raid progress, or mythic dungeons, which only a small percentage of players try to accomplish. So an argument might get more support if it explicitly defines the groups, by forming a larger middle group into which most players would fit, rather than allowing people to implicitly group everyone who isn't at the very top into one large group with the same goals and outcomes.