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.