To Imane, pt 47

I don't understand sound.

I don't understand why, when a medium like a gas has a distribution of velocities, or maybe regardless of the shape of the distribution, energy (such as from a very fast-moving object) can travel in a certain direction through collisions between particles, and does so at a certain speed.

It's a simple macroscopic behavior — the speed of sound — resulting from a extremely complex, but disordered system. Anyway.

What should males do who want to be in a relationship but are not currently in one?

For many males, the default behavior is 'try to earn more money'. They are often rewarded for this, by females who seek to be in a relationship with someone who has a lot of money. (The saying in China, that a male needs to have a house before he can get married.)

This behavior is what I am trying to change. What should we think of this behavior?

Most people don't realize the macroeconomic consequences of their actions, of course. But this is like people releasing chemicals into the air which are later found to be harmful because they destroy ozone. If people want a behavior to stop, they can tell other people not to do.

Do males deserve criticism for acting in a way which they believe could lead them to a relationship?

Do females deserve criticism for rewarding males for doing a harmful thing?

Neither of these are true. Suppose that people used this idea. Males could still earn more money by working more, and in the long term, the relationship between 'working more' and 'earning more' would be mostly unchanged. (Inequality would be lower, and so rich people would have less money with which to pay skilled people or to buy from monopolies, but people would still accumulate skills aka human capital from working more and these would still lead to higher pay than someone without these skills.)

But in the short term, it would often seem like working more is not worth it. And a lot of people think in the short term.

So suppose that a male cannot be in a relationship for 10 years. It's hard to think of a realistic situation where this is true, and the male knows that it's true; let's say that he was in a relationship that ended badly, sort of like the Black Mirror episode Eulogy (S7E5). He doesn't expect to be in another relationship until he learns the person he was previously in a relationship with has married.

He might think that he should simply try to earn money for 10 years, and so he would work long hours even with this idea.

But most males are not in that situation. They would prefer to be in a relationship in the present, even if the actions that have a chance of resulting in a relationship will be wasted if none occurs. For example: going on dates takes time and money, which may seem wasted if none leads to a relationship, and yet people still go on dates.

People are simply trying to act optimally within the options that they have, even though, unknown to them, their actions are making things worse for each other.

To put it another way, if females should not be attracted to males who have worked enough to own a house, then we should make make working enough to own a house illegal.

No one is suggesting to do that. But I am suggesting that working a lot should be made less attractive than it is currently. Less attractive financially, for people who feel that their main motive for working an extra is financial, and less attractive morally, for people who feel that their employer just pays them so well (despite also making billions in profits) that it would be immoral for them to work less than they are, while being paid the same amount. Or that them working less could harm their co-workers.

I had watched to the middle of the League of Legends content creator Rav's video, The Burning Crusade Experience (and reaction), up to where he says "At this point rather than looking at it as a skill issue I just figured warlock was the weakest class in TBC and knew exactly what I would have to do."

It's interesting to compare to this video by Josh Strife Hayes, set on a PvE server. I only watched maybe a minute and a half before I got the vp9 bug and stopped watching; I think the video is him explaining why he's on a PvE server.

I don't think being on a PvP server would make the game more fun now. It did in 2005, but I think that people who really enjoy challenges have stopped playing WoW, because they seek challenging things in real life which, if accomplished, bring more benefit to themselves and other people than killing a boss in World of Warcraft. I think this leaves a higher-than-normal concentration of bullies in WoW, who are likely to gank low-level players. This is sort of how Aion died as well: the devs not knowing how to design to stop bullying, while still allowing fair PvP. (And maybe the North American community managers being unwilling to forward my suggestions on how to fix it to Korea, or the Korean developers being unwilling to listen to outside ideas, like with the fictional Japanese company portrayed in Haken no Hinkaku.)

So the decision to play on PvE servers is fair and I don't think I view the creator worse for having made that choice. But in these two videos, we have one creator who apparently does not enjoy PvP, and one who does.

I have to comment about warlocks, though. I remember in 2007 or 2008, when I was playing with a premade lvl 70 shaman on the PTR. You could pick any class and get good gear, ostensibly for testing something. As a shaman, my spells did around 1500 damage, and I expected every other class to do about the same, like mages.

Then, to my surprise, I got hit by 3k shadowbolts (around double that if crit), when I and everyone else had about 10k health. Like, I still remember it was in a Warsong Gulch flag room, the warlock was on the top level, and I could probably find the screenshots of it with a little effort.

The orc warlock who did that had sacrificed his succubus for 10% shadow damage, but usually succubus is probably better for PvP. So it's kind of funny that Rav was using imp in these clips; maybe it gave some bonus to fire damage, but it seems the only reason to use Soulfire at all would be for a big crit. I'm unsure if he actually expected to be able to get the first cast off, when he had full world buffs.

In 2020, I took a bunch of screenshots of the Alterac Valley end screen for the Chinese (Taiwanese) streamer SupremeQAQ, who was playing a warlock. (I also have a few of my CPU and GPU around 105°C, the critical temperature which makes it automatically slow down to prevent damage, from trying to watch Twitch.)

First screenshot: Alliance wins in 8 minutes.

Second, etc.:

(Same battleground 7 minutes later: Horde wins, Supremacy 19 KB, 4 deaths)

Double the KBs of second-highest Horde player:

An hour later:

Everyone zerging to the end:

His character, with a pet with a Korean name (from first summoning the pet while using Korean language game client):

3 KBs, 4 HKs (upper right is timestamp displayed with ffplay, a mistake to have had visible in this screenshot):

11 KBs and 33 HKs, meaning that out of the 33 Alliance that a large group of Horde fought, Supremacy finished off 1/3 of them:

A hamstringed warrior managed to kill Supremacy with a crit execute for 4.2k (players have 3~5k health):

Cross-faction communication, "Y O u LO SE":

A screenshot of text from an article, which ends with a description (not a photo) of a setting sun, that I thought about a few years ago and couldn't find:

The PUG vs premade experience, with most Alliance players having 0 HKs. Note the five Rank 13 players in Supremacy's premade. A blurrier screenshot from 10 days earlier appears to show six players at or above Rank 12, many of them the same as shown here:

I was posting in 2006 about fixing the honor system and making battlegrounds more balanced, before I eventually moved on to trying to get people to use this idea, with a similar lack of success. This unbalanced matchup in 2020, in Classic WoW, happened because I failed in 2006 to convince Blizzard, and probably failed to even reach the people who were responsible for design decisions at that level.

15 minutes later: a similar result, 22 HKs for the Horde team, 0 HKs for the PUG Alliance team, 7 minute victory, camping the Alliance graveyard.

11 minutes after the conclusion of that match, a premade vs premade:

Either team could have scouted with one player entering the battleground and dodged the match when they saw a premade, but both joined and they fought it out. The match still ended in 8 minutes, with the team that lost the initial clash not attempting to hinder the flag carrier, to maximize honor per hour:

15 minutes later, another premade, from Benediction, though also with two random players from other servers:

Premade with nine players at Rank 12 or 13, from Bigglesworth:

18 minutes later, premade with eight players at Rank 12 or 13, from Herod:

From Earthfury:

A player from Benediction, not from the previous premade, scouting the battleground:

15 minutes later, doing Alterac Valley with several of the players from the WSG premade. Just died, but 8 minutes in, Horde have 53 KBs in the top 20 players, Alliance have 17 KBs, with only 4 Horde players dead in the raid frames. I think rezzing in starting cave means Horde controls zero graveyards:

17 minutes later in the same match, killing Alliance in their starting cave, while zero Horde players in the entire battleground are dead:

140 HKs in a 31 minute match isn't unusual, but Supremacy got 31 of those killing blows, in a 40v40 battleground.

Much clearer screenshot of the win vs the Herod premade, from the 1080p source. A premade with POV of female gnome warrior Maitoz, seven Rank 12+, winning against a Horde premade from Mograine with eight Rank 12+, 19 HKs to 1 HK. Russian streamer @cauthontv, winning against an Alliance premade from Mograine with two R12s, in a 36 minute game with 17 flag returns. Horde apparently wiping on the Alliance general and respawning in cave, due to not controlling any graveyards, while Alliance has just taken the Coldtooth Mine in the south of the map. The end screen for the same, 32 min game, four minutes later, which really deserves a screenshot since it means the map state with zero bunkers destroyed and Horde respawning in cave is 28 minutes into the game (compare to all the 8 minute zerg games):

A one-hour game between Korean players, 140~190 total deaths per side, with 46 flag returns.

I never really got a chance to use this but might have shared this screenshot before:

Who is right?

But according to the school of philosophy that led to the revolution in Western society on the basis of self-governance and free markets which has marked the past several hundred years, there is one thing that no one has knowledge of more than any other individual: our own goals, values and ideals. [...] The lack of expression of opinion by every one of us, as experts on our own desires, on unusual or unanticipated policy suggestions with limited precedent in political thought limits the progress our policymakers can make to resolve social conflict.

First public argument. (I had to close the page and reopen with Javascript off to prevent my 17-year-old computer with 4 GB memory from lagging.)

More screenshots of Supremacy topping KBs in Alterac Valley as a warrior on Taiwanese servers. So maybe it wasn't the class (Rav's joke about warlocks being weak in PvP), but the player. I might have shared these screenshots before but I'm doing so again:

 

The point is not "hospitals charge so much, and that is terrible." It's that people don't care about the high prices, because they don't pay. People who do know, and have some responsibility somewhere in the system, don't care because it's giving hospitals money, and hospitals employ health care workers (as well as administrators, who have families too). As long as "well if we eliminated this systemic inefficiency, people would lose their jobs and that would be bad" is seen as valid reasoning by a significant number of people, systems will be inefficient and people who see it will have a hard time understanding, because they don't see the bigger picture, which is the lack of jobs.

These are just some random screenshots, though. Two PvP videos that feature the same song:

Shivan Frostmage PVP pt 2

Laintime Korean PvP (uploaded Mar 7, 2006)

"This isn't me, this isn't you. This is everything but true. Till we come to realize it's what we put each other through."

To Imane, pt 46

Look, if I can say that US President Barack Obama should have dropped whatever he was doing in 2011 and shared this idea, I can say that you should too.

I'm sure that the three letters I mailed to the US White House, and the messages I might have sent on the online contact form, never reached anyone important. I'm uncertain if Obama might have learned of it later, as a result of me contacting US Vice President Joe Biden's economic advisor and the Federal Bureau of Investigation etc., but Obama has acted happy since leaving office and that makes me think he's stupid, and the fact that he's acting in a way that makes me think he's stupid is evidence that he doesn't know of this idea.

I'll think you're stupid too if you don't share it. You're streaming with GIRLSET, whom I don't think I've ever heard of and who have only 33k followers on Chirp Club, and I'm sure they'll benefit from the exposure.

But they would also benefit if you just gave them a million USD.

Silent Fang

Near the end of his first video about classic WoW, Gbay99 said,

It's possible that some features might drive me away eventually. I have heard that best-in-slot items exist in this game, which is kind of sad.

Funny because it shows a group of people being wrong, and it isn't too important.

It seemed that Xaryu and his chat did not understand why this would be sad, and skipped over it to focus on the subsequent criticism of vertical progression.

Gbay99 used to play League of Legends. I haven't played it, but I know (or at least I think I know, without bothering to confirm with a search) that there are no 'best-in-slot' items. There are items which are especially good for one character, but there are always alternatives, and the build path to reach an item is also important.

So in a sense, the fact that WoW does have 'best-in-slot' items is not bad, or sad, because player choice can potentially come from other aspects of character customization. If an item doesn't change how a character plays, and the path to reach it is unimportant, then one item will be at least slightly better than any other item. But people focusing on acquiring 'best-in-slot' items is a little bit sad, and yet not so sad that it's important that many players don't realize it's sad.

(When I played WoW, I used Silent Fang as a mage, which provided zero benefit while casting spells. Definitely not best in slot.)

Someone in Lebanon who wanted to play Classic WoW might have difficulty doing so due to the fighting with Israel.

1. Sun Tzu said: The art of war is of vital importance to the State.

2. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.

I said that if Sherine didn't do something, which was probably to share the idea, then it meant she didn't care about Lebanon. But she had said that one of the one or two things she cared about was the country she was from. Which of the following was true?

1) Sherine lied

2) I lied

3) I was wrong, without intending to lie

4) Sherine is not from Lebanon

My general intention is to convince people that I don't lie, and that I'm not wrong. But I said that if Greta posted Stories on Instagram, it meant Imane didn't like me, then said that I had lied or was wrong.

I felt like it was possible that the outcome of Greta posting Stories was my 'fault'. I did not feel like the outcome that led to the conclusion that Sherine doesn't care about Lebanon was my 'fault'.

Emotionally, I don't really care if people suggest or think that I was wrong or lied about Sherine not caring about Lebanon. It just makes logical sense for me to act like what I said was true, until people use this idea, at which point it won't matter if I make mistakes.

I would say that I care about the country where half of my ancestors came from, as well as the country that 1/8 of my ancestors came from (I don't know the remaining 3/8). I don't know if I can say that I care a lot, like I almost never think about those countries, but I do care. Just as I would say that I care about every other country, including Lebanon. It's a little sad if someone says they don't care about other countries, or their own country, whatever it might be.

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.

To ???, pt 2

I have watched up to around 46:00 in the video I linked in the previous post, before I stopped again.

I thought about various things. Quests as puzzles, and how this is invalidated by the 'arrow' of the questing addon that is popular in Classic (other than with like the rogue quest with the parrot where not reading the quest text gets you killed). My suggestion to make only a subset of quests available to any particular player would not fix this; a guide could not tell the order in which to do quests, but it could give the answer to any 'puzzle' in a particular quest.

Mei talking about how she had done almost everything it was possible to do in World of Warcraft, in the context of her switching servers to play with a more casual guild (Death and Taxes) and like maybe trying to dissuade me from trying to follow her. The question of whether, at that point in time, she would have liked WoW to be a game that had more stuff for her to do, or if she was fine the way it was, considering it was affecting her school grades.

The MMO that Ghostcrawler is apparently working on; a lot of the things I've said should apply to any MMO, and it might be better if I tried to help that project than a Classic Plus version of WoW.

The way that I stopped at this point in the video because fundamentally, I saw a problem and looked for a solution or how to describe the solution, when I am really just trying to fill time and act in a boring way until someone shares the idea. When I quit WoW, i.e. cancelled my subscription that I might have (not sure) been paying for continuously since the game launched, despite not logging in to the game or even having a computer for over a year, it was in large part so I would not spend more of my life on something that was going to decline in quality, to the point that I could not recommend people play it. So that, at this moment in time 19 years later, I would not devote a lot of this post to talking about WoW.

The way that I probably spent a lot less time than Mei playing WoW (I might have played more at first, since after a short break around the time I met her she was supposed to start college soon), and took an opportunity to make her think that I might have quit playing a few months after WoW launched (partly so she wouldn't feel she would have to keep playing it), but she graduated from college despite the time she spent playing WoW while I did not.

The broader questions; beyond 'how to make WoW better', and 'whether it's good if WoW is better than other games if it only increases the parent company's profits', and 'what are the consequences if games are more enjoyable to play'.

The thing with 'the attitude of Jewish people is that it's better to be seen as smart, than to be seen as moral, while Muslim people would say the opposite'. So, if Israel's leaders know of this idea, and the war with Iran is related, then it was the attitude: 'being seen as dumb is undesirable'.

If this site is important, I didn't want to label Islam as dumb. I have tried to act in a way that extends the 'now' in my post. I have not done web searches for my current weight or my diet, because that was something I was trying to do every day. I have not had any multivitamin tablets since then, as it was something I was trying to do every 2~4 days, and to take one would be acknowledging the passing of time.

I am supposed to say something at this point that exploits the desire not to be seen as immoral, as contrasted with the desire not to be seen as dumb.

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.

The mountain

Most people want to be seen as attractive, at least to someone. That someone does not necessarily even exist; it might be, "the version of you who is smart enough to understand what I'm doing and why". It might be, "someone who will know what I did, which is no one".

I could unpublish the last two posts. I had already thought I might unpublish the one titled 'Sand'. Really the title was about waves erasing things drawn in the sand, though it also became an allusion to the sorites paradox, because it uses sand (honestly until I just looked it up, I assumed sorites meant sand). I think I look bad, and unattractive, whether I leave them up or hide them.

I might have acted differently if I had fallen asleep two hours ago. But I remained awake, and I wanted to give an explanation for my actions, which might be unimportant, but if important may seem unusual.

I just thought of an event with my national guard unit, in mid-2008, before leaving to go to Iraq. I'm not even completely sure this event occurred, which is part of the reason it put me in a bad mood to think of it. It was at a place, maybe not a park, but an outdoors place away from the city. Since I have never had a car (I was the only member of my unit who took a bus to reach the training armory each month), someone else had to pick me up to drive me there, probably the NCO in charge of my section.

It was more for people with families to socialize. There was a sort of hill or tiny mountain next to where the people were, and I spent a lot of the event walking on the trails of the mountain, surrounded by trees. I had thoughts which I no longer remember, but I think some of those thoughts might have been about how no one else would know the thoughts I was having at that time. If I had that thought, then because I have forgotten what kinds of thoughts I had, that thought would have been true.

It just shows the passing of time.

Sort of like with me never having had the opportunity to watch fireworks with anyone, only by myself, and then forgetting the experience.

I think there was a sort of canal and path for walking and biking, next to the event area. If looking from the event area towards the canal, the mountain was to the left.

Maybe I didn't have cell phone coverage, and I thought, "what if Mei tried to call me then?" Even though she had never called me before.