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.
