To Imane, pt 55

https://nitter.net/EllieAsksWhy/status/2037906341067710505

Remember in 2016 or 2017 when Joe Biden, then the former US Vice President, suggested that the two main political parties of the US should not fight each other?

Remember WWII, which was the last time Germany and France fought each other?

Sometimes attempts to get groups to stop fighting succeed. But it rarely happens without a bigger threat to force people to unite, or at least something interesting to do that isn't fighting.

(Like fighting in games, instead of in real life, or like football teams.)

(I'm sure one of the Thirty-Six Strategems would be relevant, something about a distraction, ....

Why is it that https://www.chinastrategies.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/The-Thirty-Six-Strategies.pdf, which I have downloaded, is titled Strategies, when https://ia601605.us.archive.org/30/items/the-direction-of-war-contemporary-strategy-in-historical-perspective-pdfdrive/The Thirty-Six Stratagems - A Modern Interpretation Of A Strategy Classic ( PDFDrive ).pdf says,

The use of the word ‘stratagem’ needs to be understood, this is not a ‘strategy’ (being a long-term plan or outline of activity over a period of time) but something that can be considered a plan, scheme, or trick for surprising or deceiving an enemy or in fact any ruse, or trick devised or used to attain a goal or to gain an advantage over an adversary or competitor. A strategy can comprise of a number of stratagems: a series of manoeuvres or stratagems for obtaining a specific goal or result: a strategy for getting ahead in the world.

Much shorter than either, with no extra notes: https://imperialcombatarts.com/thirty-six-stratagems.html 

Anyway, since I don't know them, the only one I could think of was Clamor in the East, Attack in the West, I think mentioned in a drama like The Prisoner of Beauty or A Dream Within a Dream, and it doesn't really fit.)

Greta posted two more stories about displaced people, with one specifically mentioning of children who have been displaced or otherwise affected by war.

What are people more concerned with: helping children affected by war, or ending war?

I had forgotten something with my previous message to you. The point in the video where I stopped was about divergent realities. In WoW, Mei had experimented with a tool that let her change what her character looked like, without it affecting what other people saw. Rather than more words, this is the screenshot she sent me:

That was just an example of what was possible; I think she might have used something like the 'armor on one shoulder' of Herod's Shoulder; a screenshot she sent me a few days later shows different shoulders.

One extra image:

I didn't like the idea of using such a tool. (It was an early version of tools like Tmorph, and against the ToS; I tried it without success and it only worked by accident after a game update incorporated model files that I had left lying around in a directory.)

People can reach different conclusions based on available information; like, is a certain item of clothing stylish or not? But they should all start with the same information.

Or as Miyamoto Musashi put it, as I referenced before, "Do not think dishonestly."

But Mei used that tool because she didn't like how the gear she had looked.

One more image:

I was focused on gear; the fragment of my post visible at the top. The other player, Stabbitysue, mentions "The return of the Raid or Die mentality", but she was not as focused on this single issue as my posts suggest I was.

The consequences of other players having better gear? Dying and being seen as less skilled than one actually is. Dying in PvP is possible not only from having worse gear, but also from being outnumbered, which better game design can never completely fix. That is the lesson: people quitting a game because the outcomes within the game suggested a level of skill that was lower than what players actually possessed. (A person is less likely to quit if a game is instead suggesting greater skill for that player than what they actually possess, but they might still do so, if they understand that there must be balance: for some players to have more, others must have less.) So: games don't work well if they treat everyone the same ("everyone is a winner!"), because in real life people are not the same. And games don't work well if they exaggerate the differences in skill by letting the best players win more than how often people think such players should win (should 1v7 be winnable or not?), or if they measure too much of the wrong characteristics, like willingness to do unfun things for an in-game advantage.

There's that quote near the end of the drama Cang Lan Jue: "I now know what to take with me, and what to leave behind."

The option I chose, to use bad gear because it looked better, was available to everyone else. (For example, me using cloth gear as a cleric in Aion, instead of chain armor: not as bad as in WoW because cloth gear did have higher magic resist, but the magic resist was cancelled out completely when fighting higher-level characters, so chain would have provided slightly higher benefit. And my shaman on the arena tournament realm wore a cloth dress, rather than mail armor, purely for looks.) The only penalty of using bad gear was having worse combat outcomes, though in practice this could result in the larger penalty of not being allowed to see content at all, or a guild disbanding due to lack of raid progress, etc.

So transmogrification was, like any other game feature, trying to give players what they wanted. Good looks without any penalties for good looks, other than the slight time cost of a gold sink.

A thread I found when looking up the origins of the word transmogrification says that,

I get that it must come from WOW but that game in particular had a restrictive and unappealing implementation.

WoW's recent change to the transmog system is closer to what this person wanted.

And the system I suggested, of 'leveling up' gear like a hunter pet, would be more restrictive even than WoW's original system. I think WoW went from a system where you needed the physical item to copy its appearance (with extra 'Void storage' to accommodate a larger number of items), to letting players collect item appearances, to now letting people apply visual outfits that don't change when swapping.

With 'leveled up' items, it would be difficult to have more than one or two outfits that could be used in combat.

I'm just saying that this is fine. It's like how in a lot of fiction, a character only has a few appearances. In Cang Lan Jue, Orchid had a different hairstyle for each of the three realms she was in, not changing it until she got to a new realm. In other series, a character might only ever have one hairstyle.

Some people wouldn't like it. But, for example, in the wowclassic.plus survey, people voted against transmog, with all its convenience and freedom to look however you like.

I wasn't sure whether to say this: the 'one reality' applies not just to how characters look in games, but also to whether problems exist in real life. Ethical Standard Guaranteed to Fix the Economy: did it? People did not act like it did.

To Imane, pt 54

Watching MMOs have Changed (and why that's bad) | Xaryu Reacts, at 21:34 out of the hour-long video (original is 36m). Mainly I want to comment on the argument about visual appearance, but before that TheoryWise touched on PvP.

The video noted that getting ganked by higher-level players is not fun. In Aion, it was also getting ganked by same-level players, who could access more rifts and get more Abyss Points for killing low-level players. I think physical damage classes also had some ability to kill higher-level players. Basically, some games will reward players for bullying because of bad game mechanics (in Aion, it was the way that rank would immediately decrease from spending points), while others will simply fail to sufficiently deter bullying that has no extrinsic reward.

(TheoryWise pronounces 'facsimile' and 'scarcity' in ways that differ from what Wiktionary suggests, and at 15:05 seems to be using 'retroactively' wrong.)

Anyway, visual appearances. The argument up to this point in the video is that visual appearance is a form of achievement, and that if visual appearance is meaningless, then players have less to strive for.

An old idea that I had, in 2007 or 2008, on my Guildcafe blog. Basically, level up items the way that hunters in Classic WoW level up their pets. (I have never played a hunter in WoW, maybe because of Mei playing a hunter in the WoW beta in 2004.) There are more details to make the idea make some sense beyond that point: a way for hard-to-obtain items to still feel special, and how to deal with items that are beyond the normal 'level cap'. There was also something about having 'styles' of clothing, and you would sort of level up proficiency in a style, not unlike how weapon skills work in Classic WoW.

But the basic idea: it's like transmogrification, but with more work and not being alt-friendly. (Also, a lot of people seem to think WoW got the word Transmogrification from Calvin and Hobbes, which Gbay99 referenced re 'building character'.)

I do remember when I saw a night elf druid in WoW in the dungeon set, aka Tier 0, Wildheart Raiment. Somewhere in the vicinity of the officer's hall in Stormwind. But I've never really regarded items as something worth going out of my way for, even for appearances. I remember, for example, wanting the Carapace of Tuten'kash on my paladin, making a group to go to a dungeon that Alliance players often didn't go to, and I think being lucky enough to get it, but if I hadn't gotten it on the run that I did for quests, I would not have gone back for it. Just as, after I lost the roll for a Triune Amulet from Whitemane (featured in the 'zip file jpg' on 25 Jan 2013 as Prosecutor Futemaien, and in this event in Old Hillsbrad:

— I'm not trying to change displayed image, but if it doesn't show 1680x1050, can change the image url to use like s2000 —

which nearly mirrors the dialogue that can occur if a player visits the Cathedral wing of the Scarlet Monastery, seven years later, meaning that Renault is 19 years old and Sally is 21), I was sad because I didn't expect to return to that location as I had already completed the quests. (And that experience is one reason that I think gold bid is good for dungeons, as then I could have bid more than a rogue for whom one of the stats was useless, even if it was an upgrade from the rogue's existing necklace.)

So over the years I have focused and talked more about gameplay changes, than this idea that's about visual appearances.

My counter-argument to what TheoryWise has said up to this point would be that with a system like the one I suggested, getting a good-looking set of gear would not be easy. Before transmog, it was always a bit of a joke in WoW how players would look like clowns when wearing the best available gear they obtained while leveling. I unfortunately cannot remember all the details of the system I described, and am too lazy to find open the file that has all my posts from that time, ok here it is:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VvOoU7NlwL-X9dmjLV8MJW_3Xx68JxYP/view

Actually a little more readable as HTML, since things like list items don't display properly. Well, this is what I wrote, with the paragraphs somehow deleted during the export process (I did not write a 2369-word wall of text for the 'Soloed Chess
Event in Karazhan, 70 Rogue' entry):

I wanted to explain the more important stuff about how this fits into instance design and endgame.. Most significant is the flat raiding endgame. (and note that this is all from an attempt to try to figure out how to present the quality of endgame raid gear so it fit into gear-scaling, if you didn't use WoW-like color-based rarity/absolute power indicators, lol /sigh..) Any and all raid content would be accessible without any kind of tier system! zomg seriously, if I wrote more concisely this blog would be about half as wordy as it is, and I'm not helping by saying this either >.< Anywayyy so people would be able to run whatever instances they wanted (given a skilled group), and they would want to run those instances because the encounter designers would be focusing all of the energy around making CHALLENGING AND FUN ENCOUNTERS instead of having to make bosses that dropped good loot!! >.< So that's when you get to do all the fun stuff. :P Being able to PUG raid slots follows directly from the flat endgame, the story-based progression (mostly noncompetitive) instead of gear progression (ok and gems too, which can tie into the economy), the modular encounter design as a result of the advanced threat mechanics and proper combat system, and all the other things such as good short- and long-term LFG tools to support the whole PUG concept. And what is even better, is that with downleveling of players in old instances and the scaling of gear and story-based emphasis, old instances will not be made obsolete with future content expansions!! This is what happens when you take the spotlight off of gear! WoW focuses all attention at the peak of character progression and what can be achieved at that point... everything else is, and will be, left to rot once newer and better comes out with WotLK and other expansions. It is the way that game is, and the way that game will always be, because the devs are too stubborn or too retarded to change (EQ junkies). But it isn't the only way to make a game.

So I did not actually make it work with a WoW-type tier system, with jumps in power with each tier.

But my point: suppose this system did not, in fact, work with a tier system, only up to 'basic gear at the level cap'. And let's say that, due to mismatched sets or just sets like Ahn'Qiraj that differed substantially in style which some players might not like, the 'best' gear that a player can get would often look bad. They can either get good gear, which looks bad, or they can wear good-looking gear, which has worse stats.

If the best-looking item that matches an outfit is a lvl 20 green item (for a lvl 60 player), it's a big penalty to use that item: it might literally provide 1/10 of the stats of the best item. But if it can be 'leveled up' in a reasonable timeframe to be similar to a lvl 60 green, and then slowly improve beyond that to be equal to a lvl 58 or 60 blue, the gap is smaller. Or just say there is no performance gap, the 'flat endgame' that I talked about in that post. Then there are four possibilities:

1) a player is wearing gear that drops from difficult content and immediately has good stats, but might be ugly.

2) a player is wearing lower-level gear chosen for its looks, which does not yet have good stats.

3) a player is wearing lower-level gear which, through much work (I think I suggested at some point that higher gear levels could only be reached by defeating difficult bosses, like how killing gray mobs in WoW doesn't give XP), has become as powerful as the ugly gear.

4) a player is wearing lower-level gear which is still ugly, despite all the options they have to choose from when wearing lower-level gear.

Options 1 and 3, a player is impressive because they progressed through difficult content. Option 2, a player could be seen as impressive because finding good-looking gear is not always easy. Option 4 would not impress anyone.

Anyway, I will found out whether the arguments that TheoryWise uses in this video after 21:34 are effective against this. Basically, he is saying that a game is better if players can impress others based on one metric: how they look, or possession of the items that grant a particular appearance. I am saying that it can work using additional metrics. A player who chooses Option 2 listed above, for example, could be impressive if they have not been kicked from a raid for using non-optimal gear.

This is sort of like a PvP system with skill-based ranks. A player with terrible gear who has a medium rank is impressive, but a player with incredibly good gear who has the same medium rank is probably bad at PvP. The theory that motivated me to write the second part of the first pastebin is that people avoid designing systems that require complex evaluation like this, and so useful solutions to problems go unnoticed and unused.

In a long-running game like retail WoW, where there are many impressive items: that post excerpt was me saying in 2008 that players should not be able to easily complete old content (after the stat squishes in WoW, old mobs take up to 500x damage, note different content older versions of the article). The problem that TheoryWise is sort of sidestepping here is that every raid tier is designed to have items that look impressive, but none are hard to obtain except for the most recent raid tier. I wouldn't be surprised if typical players are not even really sure what the most recent raid gear looks like. They might see it when they loot it, but that's just the appearance of one class's armor out of many classes.

If artists try 30 times to design a cool-looking set of armor for each class, then unless they are deliberately withholding cool designs, the set that a new player would find most impressive will probably not be the final one. If a player is actually playing the game, then because of things like the mere-exposure effect (which I mentioned to Autumn on Chirp Club in a message which she didn't reply to, of course), it's even more likely that a player will prefer a set that isn't the last one.

I made a comparison to hunter pets and I think it's a good one. It seemed to me that the worst thing about hunter pets is that they often shrink after taming, to a standardized size. But if you accept that, as all hunters in WoW presumably do, then there are many players who use one pet for their entire leveling experience. I was going to mention Rav as an example of raiding with non-optimal gear, when he told his chat to be serious as he was going to try hard to 'parse' on his second kill of Ragnaros and then switched his ranged weapon to throwing knives as a hunter, and he only used one pet for the entire game on his first character.

To Imane, pt 53

The title says you, but it doesn't really feel like this is to you.

Greta posted a video showing some people from Lebanon who had to leave their homes.

There was an article I read in maybe 2011~2014. It was two 'black' females talking to each other, and one of them mentioned her young son, and made a comment that referenced something like 'the age at which they're no longer cute'. Reaction from the other female, a shudder or something.

Many people view adult 'black' males as dangerous. Unnecessary personal anecdote, in Dec 2010, after I tried and failed to meet Mei, I went to Hotel Seattle (the hotel right next to the library was twice as expensive) and signed in to their Wifi in the lobby after getting a room, and while I was there I heard some noise outside, so I went to investigate, leaving my computer. It was a large group of 'black' males, probably young teenagers, moving through the alley next to the hotel, and when I saw this I immediately turned to avoid them.

So if Obama did know of this idea, I'm disappointed he did not do something to reduce the rate of crime in the US, which would lead to fewer people avoiding places where 'black' males can be found. (Some 'black' people don't want to be associated with poorness and violence, compare this comedy skit by CalebCity that has nothing to do with 'blackness'.)

So I did a search for 'tv tropes kids' to see if anything relevant would come up, and the first page of Google results has both Children Are Innocent and Kids Are Cruel.

Also, how many people don't know that kid is the word for a young goat?

Anyone who wants young people to be treated better than they currently are should share this idea. (Anyone who wants older people to be treated better than they currently are should share this idea.)

 

Do I want Greta to share the idea right now? If I don't talk about this, I might be letting people assume that I have an attitude that would seem morally correct, even if I don't have that attitude.

I don't want her to share it if you like me, because it seemed possible that you weren't talking to me because of the possibility that other people liked me, which made me think of the plan 'what if no one liked me'. If I want Greta to share it and she doesn't share it, then I need to convince myself that she doesn't like me, but I can't do that if I haven't yet convinced myself that you don't like me. Since I haven't concluded that you don't like me, I don't want Greta to share the idea right now.

To Imane, pt 52

I was going to write this and then schedule it to be published in a month, but I will just publish it as normal. One thing I sometimes think about: if the people that were on MH370 are still alive, maybe the Chinese government gives them information about what I do. This might seem like a dumb post. Remember that question: "If information is obscured or hidden, is the result the same?" Someone might think that me publishing this post immediately is a sign that I don't want anyone to share this idea, and that even if I reference this possibility, it's just me trying to look good, while I secretly don't want people to share it. Even if people can mostly agree on things like whether the moon exists (I noticed I linked to a satire page on this topic in an old post), there is no agreement about people's intentions, and so when people treat intentions (and not just actions) as important, people's realities diverge.

So, for example, I acted as though Sherine cared about this idea, and that she wouldn't mind that I tried to get you to share it, but this might a bad reality. Just as I have acted like it's fine for me to write to you, but this might be inconsistent with information that I don't yet possess.

Anyway, retail WoW.

Reaction videos: on them being easy to make, My honest opinion about the state of content by joshstrifehayes

It's really like any other form of content. If people could get away with 'first time watching' videos on YouTube that show the entire movie with no edits, they would. They can't because of copyright claims. There's that video,

[unwatched]YouTube's copyright system isn't broken. The world's is. - YouTube 

A certain type of content based around showing a particular person's image. It basically conveys, 'this person is poor. They are like everyone else'. So people who make content don't want to give copyright strikes to people who make reaction videos, because those people are 'poor', even if they are not (the biggest streamers who publish many reaction videos).

So anyway, the solution is for people to demand a cut of the ad revenue from reaction videos.

The League of Legends to WoW Pipeline by Gbay99

Points: keyboard games vs mouse games. LoL and WoW are both keyboards games. But WoW has a 'sense of place', instead of menus. And he filmed a lot of his videos over the years in places surrounded by nature, to give him a better sense of perspective and to refresh him, even though people who passed by would look at him weird when he was talking to a camera about a game.

Xaryu's reaction videos to Rav's latest videos about retail WoW:

You Can’t Play Both Retail and Classic, A/B tested as The WoW Community is wrong about this… | Xaryu Reacts

The Endgame Retail Experience | Xaryu Reacts (the editor forgot to link the original video in the description)

Xaryu doesn't skip the sponsored segments when he watches videos; it's basically a way of paying a tax to the creator. These reaction videos are useful because Xaryu has a relevant perspective as an experienced player, which differs from Rav's perspective as a newer player.

Rav's videos are presented as comedy. But they are also criticism. After he first tried retail WoW, he was criticized for not trying hard enough, or for treating leveling as important when most people who play retail WoW consider only activities at the level cap to be important. So Rav tried that. And he encountered a bugged cinematic, which Blizzard doesn't treat as important because players don't treat it as important; PvP that can be easily escaped, which means that players won't bother to try; and the actual experience of doing content at the level cap.

"Items are not content. Items are the reward for completing content." Someone who wasn't me said this, but I was thinking about it when I wrote my 2008 post for the WoW forums about how to fix WoW. And yet, it seems that all the suggestions that Rav got about what to do after hitting the level cap were about different ways to collect items. It really seemed like people considered items to be the reason to do anything in retail WoW, and not that the content itself was inherently interesting. So that's why Rav showed himself upgrading an item repeatedly, even after being told that it wasn't a good item.

Also, the fact that he mentioned his baby daughter and the consequences she had on a moment of gameplay.

Rav's video shows that players fight against the character Alleria Windrunner. In a way it isn't surprising that players would fight another famous lore character, but I looked up why players were fighting her, and so found this:

https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Crown_of_the_Cosmos

Over 30 unique abilities in the encounter.

I also learned that there is a flying mount that people refer to as Onyxia, even though it's supposed to be one of her daughters. A sad contrast to the figure shown in the 'Craft of War: BLIND' fan-made video.

Also, I watched Xaryu's video about the human face in the Silverleaf bush, where he visited the same location on three different versions of WoW. First on a ground mount, then on an epic flying mount, and then on a super-fast zooming flying mount.

Point: Blizzard tried to get rid of flying, in ~2014. But it never tried to get rid of teleporting to instances. Those might be even worse than flying in terms of their effect on a sense of world. Maybe one reason people didn't care about flying making the world less immersive was because it already wasn't immersive, due to teleporting.

In one of his recent videos, maybe 'The True TBC Experience', Rav experienced layering away from the NPCs of an escort quest after being invited to a party. The game not being immersive (in Classic WoW), and this not getting fixed six years after layering was introduced to WoW. Not sure if it also affects retail WoW, if layering is just a certain type of sharding, and retail WoW has sharding.

If TBC Classic had more to do (he shows a character that is nearly 'best in slot' at lvl 70), maybe Rav wouldn't have tried retail WoW. So even if retail is 'bad', the fact that Rav even learned this is a criticism of TBC.

All of this: collecting items is unimportant. The large number of abilities to learn and react to in encounters, including the solo instance that Rav showed where the player is expected to move to the side of the path of an ability (unlike all other abilities experienced in WoW up to that point, where moving behind a mob that is casting doesn't provide any benefits), makes the game more challenging for players. But it feels like meaningless challenge. The hidden criticism: Rav showed that he wanted to defeat the 'final boss', and he did so, even though it was on the easiest difficulty and he died due to not knowing mechanics. So will he bother to make any more videos about retail WoW? Maybe it depends on what people say in response to the latest one. There were some comments like "finally someone makes content for retail WoW!" so he might continue playing it for monetary reasons, even if he doesn't enjoy it. Or maybe people will tell him something to do that's fun that he didn't know about. He briefly shows the 'suggested activities' thing (which I didn't know existed), that mentions pet battles and some other things.

From 16 Jan, my notes to myself: 

What do pet battles even look like?

[...]

Random thoughts: extra game modes. For other games, could be a way to introduce raid bosses? Onyxia is important in Classic because she does not just stay in her lair, but influences politics in a negative way. Like, having pet battles as a separate game mode, that doesn't involve traveling in the main environment, but still uses a game character who has done so.

I have showed screenshots of me playing in battlegrounds on the public test realm, and I also did them on my paladin on live realms after the release of TBC. But on my mage, my first character to 60, I only did one game of Alterac Valley, to complete the quest for it, which was just a race to the end bosses that was over in a few minutes without any PvP (this quest gives a weapon to lvl 51 characters that is equivalent to the Arcanite Reaper that was once desired by lvl 60 characters and featured in Illegal Danish Super Snacks or a similar video: bad game design). I did, I think, play in WSG shortly after it launched in 2005, and probably on the PTR for this battleground as well if it was on the PTR, but I wasn't high enough level to play in Alterac Valley at that time. And I played a lot in Alterac Valley on the PTR in Nov or Dec 2006, taking a bunch of screenshots that I failed to move from the PTR folder before the PTR ended and the folder was automatically deleted.

Because PvP in battlegrounds didn't affect other characters. One of the reasons to play WoW was to help other people, and people in battlegrounds didn't need any help. They could avoid being killed simply by not queuing up and doing other activities. This attitude, that battlegrounds PvP was unimportant and less interesting, can be seen in PvP videos, which as far as I am concerned are no longer being made so I don't need to qualify it with "from that time period", but probably no longer exists in WoW, even in Classic which still has mechanics (no flying) that allow for world PvP.

So: what activities in retail WoW can you do that help other characters? Probably nothing. Call it 'quality of life', but when a player experiences nothing difficult when playing a game, there is not really any reason for players to interact with each other.

I spent a lot of time learning the song that Bakeneko performed ~15 years ago, from the Mountain of Faith Touhou game. I still can't play it as well as her, always making mistakes. But I consider the time I took to learn and practice it to be better spent than learning raid encounters in WoW. Some people even learn things that earn them money, like new programming languages.

Still: people spend time on their hobbies. Some people collect cards, or even stamps, though perhaps stamp collecting is more interesting than it sounds.

The basis for criticism is when time spent on a hobby results in outcomes that someone doesn't want. For most hobbies, this means real-world outcomes, like people ignoring changes like the depletion of phosphate resources on Nauru and the effects of mining on its environment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_mining_in_Nauru

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauru

Nauru is a phosphate-rock island with rich deposits near the surface, which allowed easy strip mining operations for over a century. However, this has seriously harmed the country's environment, causing it to suffer from what is often referred to as the "resource curse". The phosphate was exhausted in the 1990s, and the remaining reserves are not economically viable for extraction. A trust established to manage the island's accumulated mining wealth, set up for the day the reserves would be exhausted, has diminished in value. To earn income, Nauru briefly became a tax haven and illegal money laundering centre.

 "island country that invested in a broadway play"

Corruption, incompetence and a musical: Nauru's cursed history
www.theguardian.com › world › sep › corruption-incompetence-and-a-mu...
Sep 3, 2018 · The story of tiny Nauru, once one of the wealthiest states per capita in the world, is a tale of rapacious colonialism, epic mismanagement, and ...

Boy bands and musicals: The secret history of Nauru and its lost ...
www.abc.net.au › listen › programs › earshot › the-secret-history-of-nauru...
Jun 12, 2016 · Nauru, once one of the richest countries in the world, is now considered by many to be a failed state. How did it get to this point?

TIL Nauru, a tiny Polynesian nation, was once among the richest ...
www.reddit.com › todayilearned › comments › til_nauru_a_tiny_polynesia...
Feb 1, 2018 · TIL Nauru, a tiny Polynesian nation, was once among the richest nations per capita in the world. They are currently among the poorest after ...

(I am a little confused as I thought the phosphate deposits came from guano, and one search result says "Having made millions from global exports of guano", but the Wikipedia article only mentions it once)

For a game like WoW, the unintended effects can also happen to the hobby itself. People by now expect stat squishes, and I could not say myself what might happen in the future for retail WoW that players won't like, but maybe things will happen or have happened that players won't like.

One thing I thought about a few times in the last few weeks: "Would you play a game if in the sky, it said in big letters 'Everyone playing this game is an idiot'?"

Like, you could imagine a random experiment: hackers cause this message to appear in half of the games in the world, selected at random. Do people stop playing those games?

Rav's video helped me understand what retail WoW's 'endgame' (i.e. the pause before the next expansion that invalidates all progress) is about: what people are doing when they play.

Point: complexity of encounters. What if WoW had used, or were to use the threat model I suggested, where aggro changes have a random component, completely avoiding these changes is only possible when players do almost no dps, and so optimal play is doing a level of dps where pulling aggro happens regularly? One of the benefits from doing so, of fixing the tanking specialization problem, has apparently been fixed in retail WoW by removing the option to specialize in tanking, by choosing mitigation stats over damage stats. https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Dodge says, "Warlords of Draenor Patch 6.0.2 (2014-10-14): Dodge rating is no longer found on items."

So in my view, the way to make encounters harder is basically just to tune the numbers to be higher, rather than have a bunch of mechanics to memorize. A game where players have to react to the boss changing targets provides a baseline level of complexity without so many unique mechanics for each encounter.

If many players don't know the mechanics, it doesn't seem like removing them would hurt their enjoyment of content.

I also think it looks terrible visually. But even in original WoW: some video had a brief clip from Naxxramas, and someone commented that it looked great, while I thought it looked terrible. The lighting on characters did not match the lighting on terrain; the floor did not have deep shadows in what were supposed to be cracks, even though character models did have darker colors in shadow. There are some places in Classic WoW, like Blackrock Mountain, that look great. And others that just don't look very well-done.

And I think my perception of whether retail WoW looks good is affected by often watching at 480p, with all the visual artifacts from trying to encode complex video at the bitrate YouTube gives to that resolution (lossless 480p would look a lot better). But despite knowing this might be the case, I still think it looks terrible.

About collecting pixels, or gear: raid-logging in Classic WoW is the same thing. Mei was collecting pixels. She did say that the sword she got from Ahn'Qiraj, in late 2006, looked like a dead fish, and she disliked the look of the warrior gear set from AQ. If a player doesn't even have the task of 'raid log to collect pixels', they might stop playing a game altogether.

If a game has PvP, players might still have something to do. Some players like battlegrounds; again, I spent a lot of time in BGs on the PTR, getting over 30k honorable kills on my premade shaman that was deleted when the PTR ended. But even if a game doesn't have PvP, like because the developers are convinced that world PvP is unimportant or mainly consists of bullying (Polzie's segment about players with low HP, like the 2.5k HP priest, with Requiem for a Dream playing over it), I think it's fine if the lack of content simply makes players stop playing. These are players with hundreds, or even thousands of hours of gameplay.

And I think one reason that it was hard for WoW's developers to accept this was that they played with people who spent a lot of time playing the game, and valued the opinions of those people more. And so they buffed the drops in Molten Core in 2005 for some mysterious reason that I still can't say I understand. They buffed the items in TBC, after people complained that some items with non-optimal stats were not as good as items at a lower item level with optimized stats.

(I noted for myself a few days ago, on 23 Mar,

wowclassic.plus, Raids survey, GDKP (Q19) has hidden option, check reaction/review videos to see if people noticed

Q17, "how long should current gear remain relevant": only 11% chose the model that corresponds to retail WoW, or TBC onwards. And Q8, majority chose one difficulty for raids. And Q4, nerfs.)

So I don't think there's anything wrong with a design that causes players to stop playing after they've played for 500 hours. It's better to get 50 million people to play for 100~500 hours, than to get 1 million people to play for 5000 hours, especially if it's a subscription game and people only play for 1 hour per day while paying the same monthly fee (whereas China has always used a pay-per-hour model). But I don't know what anyone else I know who has played WoW thinks of this.

If people always expect to get power increases for playing more, and won't play unless they get these power increases, then it leads to retail WoW and stat squishes. But the evidence seems to be that a lot of people don't care about this, at least in games other than retail WoW.

Well, since this is about retail WoW, I'll also paste what I wrote about leveling, so I can delay checking whether the person I responded to on Reddit replied to me:

22 Mar 2026
high-level players being visible https://youtu.be/WhORAKdRPe4?t=629

If power difference is too high, seeing high-level players doesn't matter. Better to see low-level players. Enemy high levels might gank, friendly high levels can only trivialize content. Different with some or full level scaling, but still no reason to interact with friendly high levels unless content is hard to solo.

"if Imane streams without having shared the idea, I am posting "The problem with leveling in retail WoW" (~150 words) on Reddit, where it will get downvoted or ignored or won't even be visible due to auto-mod"

"I'm indefinitely postponing the post 'The problem with leveling in retail WoW', which also has a 270-word comment"

 

The problem with leveling in retail WoW, 22 Mar 2026:

The problem with leveling in retail WoW

It isn't that mobs scale and you feel weaker as you level.

It isn't that leveling is too easy, with a much lower chance of dying than in Classic.

It isn't even that the world is empty of other players, and the players you do encounter through the random dungeon finder are often hostile towards you.

People have gotten used to measuring the worth of a character, or the skill of a player who controls the character, through what the game records about that character. And there is nothing that distinguishes a character who levels by doing difficult things from one who levels by doing easy things, or one who just skips leveling altogether with a boost.

Unless this is fixed, people will be resistant to anything that makes leveling harder or slower, because they do not see any reason why they should think that leveling matters.


Comment:
Fix all the easy ways to level, so that leveling does mean doing something difficult.

Make level boosts just take you to the level cap. But show an indication to other players that a character was boosted. Allow characters to eventually remove this indication. Treat boosted levels as XP debt. Play enough, earning XP in the normal way despite being at the level cap, and all the XP debt is removed.

Don't allow level boosts for the first X weeks of an expansion. This means not bundling a free boost into certain versions of an expansion. If people want to boost a new character so they can level through a new expansion, they can buy a boost before the expansion launches. During the systems pre-patch period, make the current expansion free, so a new player doesn't need to buy it to boost to max level.

For the WoW Token, establish a link between the players getting gold by selling the token, and the players who are buying the token for gold, by putting restrictions on who can use the token. Since leveling currently isn't difficult, it can't be used as a measure of skill. Use some other measure of skill, maybe something to do with Mythic dungeons. It means fewer people would be interested in buying tokens, which means the price of tokens would drop. People would be warned that this will happen so that they can use tokens they currently possess before the restrictions kick in.

Result: players getting gold from tokens are helping skilled players to afford to play the game, not bots.

To Imane, pt 51

I am talking about the two stories that Greta posted. I am checking her account because I felt you would be happier if I started doing that, and this is a consequence. I have no reason to think that you don't want me to check her Instagram account.

Any time that a sad thing happens to a group of people: "what if they were all very rich?"

What if Satoshi Nakamoto, who once controlled wallets that have 1.1m Bitcoins, were to give 0.5 Bitcoins to each person living in the Gaza Strip? At current prices, that would be $35k, which is 70% of the wealth of the average 'black' family in the US. A quick search says that a middle-class person in Nigeria earns around ₦280k per month. This is around US$200 (site quotes similar rates from central bank as from black market); the article quotes an exchange rate that would convert it to $155, even though the currency site shows minimal changes in exchange rates ($193 in early Dec 2025 when the article was written, $202 now).

Anyway, $35k per person would not make someone rich by US standards, but someone with that much would be rich in a lot of other countries.

But let's say that not only Satoshi Nakamoto, but other people gave cryptocurrency to people in Gaza, enough that all of them were rich (note that there are over three times as many 5-year-olds in Gaza as there are 50-year-olds, so that would be a lot of rich babies).

Would the way that people talk about Gaza change?

One of Greta's Stories is about people getting deported from Germany Sweden. I note that immigrants in Sweden are much more likely than native males to commit r***, and I feel like this is one of those cases where prejudice is good. Do immigrants who think that it's possible that someone they know might try to r*** someone do anything to prevent it? Is the importance of following laws, and not committing crimes, a topic that is frequently brought up in social interactions that immigrants experience? Or do immigrants just ignore the crimes caused by other immigrants, even when it leads to immigrants who didn't commit any crimes being deported?

But anyway, what if the immigrants who are being deported were rich, and possessed 10 Bitcoin each (worth US$700k)? Would it still be a story that's worth paying attention to?

Greta's other story is about Israel's torture of Palestinians.

I don't know if Israel does anything worse than what the US did, like in the Abu Ghraib prison. It probably is worse. But it's really just a consequence of war. US soldiers would joke about Iraqis, and use words like "ragheads" to depersonalize their enemies. This is really the kind of thing I don't want to say, and I'm only talking about it because Greta posted the story, which she wouldn't have needed to if you had shared the idea (doesn't mean I'm trying to get you to share it), but someone from my military unit mentioned how on the unit's first deployment, several years earlier, they had see through a night-vision device an Iraqi male doing illegal things with a donkey.

So I did a search for "has israel used conscripts to fight in gaza" and it showed this:

'We're Not the Same People Anymore': IDF Soldiers Reveal What No Israeli Wants to Hear About Months of Fighting in Gaza

It's a premium article, but it leads with this, which seems to answer the question:

Sent into Gaza straight from high school, five young Israeli conscripts describe the brutal, exhausting reality of the war with Hamas – a world of despair, rage and crippling fear, with no end in sight

I still have open the NieR: Automata video that I linked in the previous post — I would have watched it if Greta hadn't posted any stories — and this reminds me of it. I didn't want to link an English version of the opening quote because the voice acting is worse (apologies to the English voice actor, it's just hard to convey some emotions in English when people's expectations are guided by beliefs that Japanese people would consider stupid, without being so rude or confident enough to actually say so), and the translation is also bad. The expression used, "yumi wo hiku":

2. To nock an arrow to a bow and shoot it; to shoot a bow.
3. To rebel, disobey, or defy. "We cannot afford to defy our parent company."

Consider it in the context of my previous post: people fighting. Rebelling, in this context, can mean not fighting, as 2B in the story of NieR: Automata encounters other entities doing, like in the forest. The English translation was just "kill".

Anyway: Russia is not sending conscripts to fight against Ukraine. It is of course mostly or entirely males who are doing the fighting (remember the female Ukrainian helicopter pilot who was captured, and held captive in Russia for a while?). Males also don't want to die, but when they do die, their comrades won't develop grudges as when a younger person, or females die.

A search for "how many female israeli soldiers killed in gaza" turns up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_Gaza_war#Women_in_the_Israel_Defense_Forces:

In the October 7 attacks, 14 field observers from Battalion 414 at Nahal Oz base were killed, an unprecedented number of female field soldiers killed in battle. Seven field observers were taken hostage.

It does not seem likely that many females were involved in the subsequent 2-year war, but from the Haaretz article, it seems male conscripts, at least, were fighting. So unlike with Russia, where a lot of the males who joined for the fighting sort of considered themselves 'expendable' and were older, Israel seems to have more soldiers who are of an age where they haven't lived a normal life yet.

So, even if Israel's civilian casualties have been low, people still get upset. If what the US did in Abu Ghraib, or at prisons in other locations, was not as bad, it's just because the personnel there (not always military) hadn't experienced the same losses.

The US did have its drone strikes, that killed many civilians in Pakistan.

Anyway: remember when Lea Schlosberg said on Chirp Club, "no forgiveness for terrorists"? (Or something similar.) She said it like a statement, but let's treat it as a question. Both Israel and Palestine have been home to people who acted like terrorists. Israel's actions are public; other countries could do stuff to stop it, but don't. Some people might consider the rockets fired by Palestine towards Israel to be terrorist actions, even though they almost never cause casualties, but even if those don't count, Palestine does pay money to the families of 'martyrs': not planning and sponsoring terrorist attacks, but implicitly condoning and rewarding people who do.

So can the terrorists be forgiven? I want to say "forgive each other", but that would imply that they are all terrorists, and it's a controversial label.

Or is it time to finally try to end the blockade of Gaza, without first sharing the idea?

(I was going to say something about how the UN released a report that said THIS IS NOT A LEGAL OPINION and then everyone was like THE UN JUST RELEASED A LEGAL OPINION)

To Imane, pt 50

Because of the occasional slight pain in my abdomen that makes me think I could have cancer and could die, and because of science, I was asking myself if I would change anything if there was a penalty for not sharing the idea within a certain time limit. "If I don't get people to use the idea within a month, or within three days, I will be tortured horribly until I die."

The answer that suggests that I am acting morally is that my behavior would not change, and that's the answer that I felt was true.

Then while waking up, and realizing that the reason songs with repetition often don't make me wake up is that I have to listen to the songs to wake up, and if I think they won't make me want to wake up then I just go back to sleep instead of paying attention to a song, so it's basically that I wake up if I think I'm going to wake up: this was songs like, 挂念-爽子 (from Stars world first achievement Alone in the Darkness), Jang Yoon Jung (장윤정) - Oh My (어머나) [ftRXG0qRqW0] (from Alexis priest PvP), Shaolin Soccer theme 少林足球主題曲 [ckgF2dNK1fc] (from Shaolin Soccer but used by Lamigo as a crowd song, like smPti8e7T6I 0QA4cvMyY80 1YwA-s72UW8 Z2tRcp2rshk zWySKQ49n74 FVNHIqYW5Do yXun7XvBsEY 6QXC26JmXog fpn0CzK3UH4 RIYmm420WYM), 残酷な天使のテーゼ Cruel Angel's Thesis - Takahashi Youko [xyVatKhd4s4], Bunny Style Panoma Dance Crew edit 183s, 126 BPM higher pitch[lq audio] [oHFOYLJwqYY]_ss331.142, and Eastern Car Audio Motor Show with Coyote Dancers File 04[2012.01.10 DJ Teen Pattaya - Coturo by Lika~Danza Kuduro] [uiXB4OcayDs].

People listen to songs to make themselves happy (usually). Unfortunately, this is not about a happy topic. While waking up, I asked myself, "well what if it was other people being affected, instead of me?"

It made me think of when a drug lord kidnapped the people on a bus, made some of them fight each other, and made the bus driver run over some people to kill them. He probably also shot someone who refused to fight other people.

Some people immediately understand why he did this. Maybe you do. I always try to explain people's behavior in terms of helping people, but this was a behavior that people would naturally describe as 'evil': it might even be worse than pretending to crucify a cat, as some Islamic State fighters made out that they had done, on social media. "It's hard to know how to help the world, so a lot of people end up helping parts of it they know." The drug lord could have just killed the people he kidnapped. Instead he made them kill each other. This showed, to the survivors if there were any, or to the drug organization members (his henchmen), that this was how people (in a certain culture) are: if threatened with being hurt or killed if they don't hurt someone else, they will hurt the other person.

People who believe that other people would not do this are more likely to be 'nice', operating according to disputed and unclear rules of 'morality', which might, for example, include deciding to work with the police, or thinking that the police are not corrupt and that because being a drug lord is illegal while being a police officer is not, that one more person choosing to be a police officer who fights against drug organizations is better for society than one more person choosing to work for a drug organization.

Or to put it less controversially, in terms of prisoner's dilemmas: people defecting by accident, and how much importance to put on 'justice' to punish defectors and how much they forgive due to the possibility of accidental defection. The people who fought each other to the death for the drug lord were publicly showing a 'defection' choice (not an accidental defection) in a prisoner's dilemma.

Maybe people would have used the idea if I tried to hurt Sherine. I called her stupid, but I didn't really completely stop paying attention to her. If she stopped liking me, I think that would have been a good outcome, because no one who is of an age where they have started liking other people wants to go 13 years without being in a relationship, but I didn't do anything that, if Sherine was smart, she would have interpreted as me trying to make her not like me.

But I was thinking, the situation is different if an intelligent entity did not cause the situation of, 'would you hurt another person to benefit either yourself or someone else?'

In a minor way, this can be seen every time someone drives a car. This is an action that hurts other people, but unless you're religious, you don't think that any intelligent entity set up the situation where hurting other people gives a benefit to you or someone else.

To Imane, pt 49

"Play on Hardcore with your PvP flag up." I had said in an email that there was some change that would be important to enjoy playing Classic WoW. It might have been something about layers, but I'm not sure what I said this change was, or whether I was correct.

The idea is that even if there are things that are unpleasant about doing this, you would have enough influence to get those things fixed. Just like how after DDOS attacks wiped an OnlyFangs raid in Blackwing Lair, Blizzard announced they were changing their policy of never reviving dead characters on Hardcore.

But it really depends on your ability to identify the problem and guide people to a solution, if it isn't obvious. And it rather seems like to most people, solutions are not obvious.

On wowclassic.plus, an example: retribution paladins were identified in the community survey as the talent spec that needs a rework the most. (The language here is biased: implying that characters should, or can, be associated with a single talent tree. People select the ret tree because they think, "ret tree is the dps tree, and paladins can't dps in raids." Characters in retail WoW start out by selecting a single talent tree, I think, but in original WoW when PvP was more popular and there was no dual-spec, it was common to pick talents from a mix of trees. Like a lot of rogues in PvP had a spec that was something like 22/7/21, and the paladin video Zalgradis 3 featured a spec that was oriented towards fighting rogues, as he explained.)

I happened to select paladin as one of my main classes, which meant I took the paladin survey. Otherwise I wouldn't have seen these questions, as I didn't review the answers to the survey. One of the questions for paladin mains was about whether it was better for paladins to just focus on strength, instead of trying to get both strength and spellpower.

It is a distraction, but I searched for a screenshot of my paladin.

I chose the pretty face for my mage:

My paladin, not topping healing meters because I was a lvl 61 in a battleground with 70s (on the PTR) with a lot of dps gear (I show my talents as mostly retribution, but Repentance was very useful in PvP, so this was the spec I chose as the most effective in my situation), but I was still 4th out of 80 players:

On the PTR, first of a series of three, but the other two aren't as good:

So in this folder, with just 90 screenshots, I have both the paladin I fought in TBC's first zone, and the warlock in Warsong Gulch. It isn't really worth it, but here are all eight featuring the paladin:

The warlock. Player on the wall, center of screen in first screenshot? I apparently did not think the combat log for my own death was important. But I can say that I had about 10k health, my 1.5 sec heal restored about 1500 health, and the warlock's Shadow Bolt took 2.5 sec to cast. I was used to a game where 1.5 sec Flash Heal restored 900 health and a 2.5 sec damage spell did 500 damage.

When I had the same gear and level as everyone else, I wasn't terrible. Not the best (my unused cooldowns are definitely a point of criticism), but I was healing a lot and doing objectives; I probably linked this exact screenshot before in early 2013:

That's nearly the end. On an earlier PTR, with no premades (despite a player named Premademage?), so I'm on my mage that I leveled from 60 to 63 on that PTR, where all of 16 Alliance players were online on the entire server and Ironforge was being raided by at least nine lvl 70 Horde:

I somehow managed to get a kill on a PTR where warlocks had access to a spell (Seed of Corruption detonation) in their spellbooks that did high damage with no cooldown, not even a global cooldown:

A warlock killing everything with the same ability. Note the WorldDefense messages. I think I actually have never seen such a message from WoW streams or videos in the past seven years, since Classic launched, and I don't know if they just took it out (I don't think it's in retail anymore, maybe because of sharding) or if no one ever attacks towns or NPCs anymore:

The original screenshots have timestamps in the filename. These don't (and are resized from 1680x1050 yuv444 to 1280x800 yuv420, making red names hard to read), but the food and drinks on the right show that it was a different occasion than the first of these three. Obviously I died just after this screenshot. What was I thinking!

So yeah, WoW became a game with no world PvP, where people just spend all their time in instances.

Oh, well, my point, which wasn't well-conveyed here: I played my paladin on live realms in early 2007, around the same time as these screenshots from the PTRs. This was before a talent was added, due to hybrid problem, that converted attack power (which comes from strength) to spellpower: the solution that the paladin survey polled people about.

My paladin had a mix of gear. I wanted not only attack power (from strength), and spell power, but also healing and mana. But anyway: a spellpower to attack power conversion would make paladins overpowered before gear, but they would not scale well. The conversion didn't give sufficient healing, which needed to be about 1.8x the amount of spelldamage to match what was on gear, and even with that much most heals would be scaling poorly. Just with the level 60 balance: in the screenshot of my paladin, I have 540 attack power. With a buff like Blessing of Might, it might be 700. Spellpower conversion was 30% of attack power, which would have given 200 spellpower.

This is about 170 item points of extra stats. With the stamina costs in TBC onwards, this would be 2500 health or mana. My character had 5k health and 4.3k mana in this screenshot (at lvl 61). It's a big boost, and why? Because later on, when most power increases came from gear, the gear did not adequately scale all parts of a character.

Before that point, basically during the 1 to 60 leveling process, things were already as balanced as the developers had been able to make it.

So, the creators of the survey had been thinking about a bad solution. They did not correctly identify the problem, which was scaling. Their survey questions all suggested that the way to fix the game, if retribution paladins were doing low dps in raids, was to modify talent trees, which would buff ret paladins in ALL areas of the game, including the leveling process, before they encountered the scaling problems which made them perform poorly.

And people submitting their own suggestions about what should be done in Classic Plus did not identify this problem either.

Bringing this back to you: if you encountered problems as a result of doing something most people think should not be done (playing Hardcore WoW with PvP flag), I would like to think that you would understand what those problems were and how to fix them. But here we have a large project, with high visibility, and people were not suggesting solutions to the fundamental problems. And, of course, other streamers who played WoW were not able to suggest good solutions to many problems. Over the past week, I submitted dozens of suggestions for the wowclassic.plus site, because it seemed that no one else was going to make those suggestions, but I haven't submitted a detailed suggestion on the site about how to fix PvP. All of the suggestions that I made could be implemented, and I still might not think WoW was a game that's worth playing, if the PvP remains bad.

It's a very high-visibility problem. All of the screenshots from the PTRs that I included above are about PvP. But in the survey question about what to do with the honor system, the option of 'throw the whole system out' didn't even get the most votes. More people prefer a grindy system where the only point of the system is to reward player with gear once they put enough effort. No one is looking at the potential for the system to encourage people to fight difficult opponents — to influence players' actions, not just the stats on their characters.

That includes streamers, who have more incentive than most people to want the game to be fun, even if they also struggle to identify with the perspective of new players. Admittedly, six years ago they would have struggled against the "#NoChanges" purists; Classic Plus is all about what changes should be done.

Would you do better?

Started 02:51, saved as draft without publishing at 05:15, 24 Mar 2026.