Feels like I don't have a reason to write unless it's a solution.
Greta posted a Story on Instagram of this ajplus post:
It's sad that three people died. It's also sad that probably over a hundred Russian males were killed in fighting yesterday. I don't want to suggest I'm sad about the three deaths, but not the hundred deaths that took place elsewhere.
Search "how many journalists were killed from syrian war" gives
https://snhr.org/blog/2024/05/03/on-world-press-freedom-day-717-journalists-and-media-workers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_during_the_Syrian_civil_war
This was, of course, a war that can be blamed on Syrian people who disliked the leader of Syria, who had kept Syria peaceful during all of the fighting in Iraq.
I remember the reporter named Yara, because she shared the same name as Yara. (Whose last name I'm not sure of.) I don't know if other people are like me and don't like to be reminded of other people with the same name.
It seems like most people in the Wikipedia article don't have the specific circumstances of death listed. Syria's military had much less funding than Israel's; Syria was dropping improvised barrel bombs out of helicopters, not using expensive precision-guided missiles to hit individual cars.
So the deaths of these three journalists is viewed as more notable, because someone made a conscious decision to target the vehicle. I was thinking, and it led to this question: "If you were targeted and killed as a journalist during a war, would you want other people to think that the people who killed you were stupid or evil?"
People who would answer "stupid" to this question might care about the following. It isn't meant to be a joke; people dying is not a joke. But it happens, and such a death might be worth considering as a possibility, by doing something that might only have an effect after one's death.
They were traveling in a "clearly marked press car". Lots of ambulances in Gaza were also hit, despite having a distinct appearance. What if, instead of "a clearly marked press car", the vehicle had other characteristics, that would be visible to a high-tech opponent using a camera to look at a vehicle?
Like, a QR code. Or the Chirp Club usernames of a vehicle's occupants. This would require some work, like modifying a vehicle to allow the display of such text; maybe it would be possible to just have like a banner or flag on a pole, that can show text, rather than trying to conform it to the roof or side of a vehicle.
Most journalists do not get killed. Some journalists who used this would still get killed; it might even increase the risk of death. But it would be something which is used with the intention of communicating with the people who are considering targeting a vehicle with a missile, in areas where the risks of this happening are considerable. (It would have made less sense in Pakistan, where vehicles being hit by US missiles was more surprising, and the US never deliberately targeted journalists.)
As I've said, I think that given the choice, Jewish people would prefer to be seen as evil rather than stupid. This Al Jazeera post does imply that the strike was 'evil': "a clearly marked press car". If a journalist acted in a way that would cause the public's interpretation of such a strike to be that Israel's military was stupid, rather than evil, people might say that because such a journalist caused an outcome that Israel did not want, then that journalist was themselves 'evil'. And so this might be a reason that a journalist might not want to do this. But really, if you get killed, why do you care if people think you did something that might be seen after your death as evil?
Now, if journalists tried doing this, and it led to them being specifically targeted, then I could see them choosing not to do it. But no one has tried it.
Have watched half of the video, We Ruined MMOs Without Realizing It.
I think the reason that MMOs fail is that the people making them are dumb. I might have already pasted this, from 15 Feb 2026:
Example of issue: killing bots. "you have the potential of losing your gear. Your combat efficacy decreases based on the amount of corruption you accrue." And if higher level means more powerful, then high level players can still interfere in fights between low-level players with no consequences.
contact: "Intrepid are investigating a potential bidding system, which allows players to bid on items instead of rolling for them." https://web.archive.org/web/20230107192424/https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Hunting_certificates
In an ideal game, there are no bots. But every MMO has bots. Bots become more important when a game is successful, with players wanting to play a long time; one of the big motivations for someone to use bots is to farm gold to sell, and one of the big reasons people buy gold in games (with RMT) is to 'catch up' to other players, and if everyone quits a game soon after they try it, there is no one to catch up to. So bots were probably not the reason Ashes of Creation failed so soon. But the design of this particular system, which had the intention of reducing ganking, did not take into account the possibility of encountering bots.
In Aion, it was sometimes hard to encounter other players to fight in PvP. After I finish writing this, I will find some screenshots of bots that I killed, which I had great difficulty killing because they were higher level, and so even if the bot acted in the dumbest possible way and I attacked them while they were fighting one or two mobs, it was hard for me to out-dps their heals. Of course I also reported the bots, but there were many obvious bots that did not get banned. (One of my successes was in reporting a much simpler exploit, where someone just stood in place to collect from a single node every time it respawned, where my screenshots of the interactions apparently proved to be more convincing. This was an actual player and I felt a little bad getting them banned, but sometimes I am ruthless.)
<insert screenshots>
So, penalizing players for killing bots is bad design. The reason for the design of that system in Ashes of Creation was that the designers did not think about bots: they were dumb.
I had said, in my last posts on the WoW forums in Jan 2012 or at some earlier point, that feedback about changes was biased because good, smart people avoid giving feedback, which lets the feedback that developers receive be dominated by stupid or selfish people (people who want a game to have a design that's good for themselves, even if it harms other people). This was a bit of hopeful thinking. Like, no one I know ever posted on any forum threads I made about game suggestions. When I posted on the WoW forums in 2008, ...
<H3><IMG class=inlineimg alt="" src=""> <SMALL>[Jan 28, 2008]</SMALL> reach</H3>So maybe I didn't ruin it when cleaning a poorly-ventilated bathroom in Jan 2012?
<P>A brief moment of noise and brightness, and then echoes and sparkles as
things fade to calm... was there ever anything there? But it did
exist..<BR>[indent]...<A
href="http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=4311146828&sid=1">here</A>.[/indent]</P>
<P>a lingering presence, whispering echoes and perhaps the memory of a scent...
I don't know, my sense of smell has always been terrible ;P </P>
Some of the links from my Guildcafe blog might actually work with the Internet Archive, though the forums had a lot of different URLs for each thread that made threads hard to archive (a thread might be archived with different URL parameters and you would never know). Anyway, that seems like the right date:
'desktop litter 17 June 2008':
-rw-r--r-- 1 14 Jun 4 2008 4 Jun 2008
-rw-r--r-- 1 26691 May 21 2008 temp15.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 4799 May 9 2008 temp14.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 13448 May 4 2008 temp13.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 680 Apr 4 2008 math problem.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 840 Mar 30 2008 temp12.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 3668 Mar 24 2008 temp11.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 28716 Mar 18 2008 temp10.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 616 Mar 15 2008 thoughts.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 1750 Mar 15 2008 temp8.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 581 Mar 14 2008 bridge.tmp
-rw-r--r-- 1 9968 Mar 12 2008 temp6.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 160 Mar 7 2008 trial.temp
-rw-r--r-- 1 7098 Feb 23 2008 temp5.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 12999 Feb 23 2008 temp4.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 2986 Feb 20 2008 temp3.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 3972 Feb 20 2008 temp2.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 4295 Feb 17 2008 temp.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 426 Feb 13 2008 20080212 MMOs.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 28548 Feb 3 2008 20080126 - shape of WoW.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 19990 Jan 26 2008 20080126 - ranks updated.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 6335 Jan 26 2008 20080126 - plight of the shaman updated.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 76 Jan 2 2008 sscc.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 72 Nov 6 2007 open.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 294 Aug 19 2007 backwards.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 208 Jan 16 2007 World of Warcraft.desktop
I have zero idea what's in the 'temp' files, but it confirms that this post on Jan 28, 2008, was a link to a post I wrote. But based on the context, I only linked it after my trial account had already expired or something.
I just remember Laura commenting that she thought it was possible that the change about a week later, to prevent trial accounts from posting on the main forums, could have been related to my activity. Suggesting that she read the post. She might actually have commented on something I wrote, I don't remember; maybe I even replied to her comment.
But, as an example, the player Chronosius (Rank 14 paladin from Lightbringer) shown in this screenshot, who might have had a high opinion of me, probably did not ever post on the threads that I created about fixing PvP:
Were players dumb? Some may have thought, "Blizzard will fix things, and anyone who disagrees with the design is a vocal minority who wants to selfishly change the game for their own benefit." But I try to give players the benefit of the doubt: that players allowed the game to become worse because they didn't really think they deserved to have a game that would cause them to spend lots of time on it, when the real world had problems like the US's occupation of Iraq and other things that as a US-centric person do not immediately come to the top of my mind, like the 2006 Lebanon War that I probably did not know about, or the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami which I could not recall at all when Kate asked me about it for a school assignment. (It occurred a month after WoW launched, and killed 228k people.) WoW's existence as a fun game was like the start of Orangemarmalade's first PvP video, where he is frozen in time before an inevitable fall into lava. Lyrics relevant, of course.
As a Korean male, Orangemarmalade probably did military service after he played WoW. A search for 'orangemarmalade military service wow' says that Laintime, the famous warrior that I linked a few posts back, did this:
That same Laintime was away from WoW for many years because he went to army in Korea. He came back shortly (I dont remember if it was at the end of WotLK or Cataclysm) on a season that warriors were at the very botton of representation in arena (thanks Ghostcrawler and his crazy changes that would make classes goes from top to botton or bottom to top in one patch). Then he achieved RANK 1 GLADIATOR in this very season. The guy was a beast. You can’t deny it.
To spell out the obvious, doing military service and adult things like finding a good way to earn money were like falling into lava.
I think the way games work is like this: either you try to attract the best players, or you settle for having a stupid audience and trying not to let them realize that good players aren't interested in the game and would have a low opinion of the game's players, if they knew anything about the game. In the second case, you might be able to get away with some degree of "everyone is a winner!!".
For the players: people who are playing a 'stupid game' don't want to be told it's a stupid game. They get defensive, and it just leads to name-calling.
The creator of the first video I linked talks, at 11:26, about players who don't optimize getting excluded from content: "no invite to raids if you don't have world buffs."
Gevlon, creator of the Greedy Goblin blog I linked before, sometimes talked poorly about players with nonoptimal gear or talents. Basically, he saw examples of people not trying hard to better themselves in real life, saw that a certain type of person could be motivated by insults, and decided that it would be best for him to try to influence such people to change. His pages "Play to win" vs "Play for ego", About M&S, and From M&S to rational explain more. Excerpt from the second:
why "M&S", why do I address them together, despite moron and slacker are pretty different in motivation, beliefs and values? Because unless I spend lot of time analyzing a specimen, I can't tell which one is him. Is he ungemmed because he doesn't know the importance of gems or because he doesn't want to grind gold for gems?
I guess fundamentally, the assumption behind his arguments is, "playing optimally is consistent with having fun, because if that were not true, it would be important for the game developer to change this so that it is true." He wants this to be true, even if his playstyle suggests points where he did not play 'optimally'. Maybe in one of his early posts, he described how after he died in Zul'Farrak, a lvl 45 dungeon that requires hundreds of hours of playtime to reach, he wanted to or did delete his character, because he felt that if if you leveled while allowing yourself to die, the game was too easy. (Now there are official Hardcore servers which enforce this rule.) And he created a guild to raid in WotLK with blue gear, which accomplished the goal of showing that doing so (and killing the Lich King in Icecrown Citadel) was possible, but it took longer than it would have if people had used the epic gear that dropped during the process.
Notably, Gevlon did not exclude people from his raids or his guilds. They used GDKP, I think with an addon that a reader of the blog developed for the guild, which encourages bringing new players.
So anyway, the exclusionary attitude exists. It's logical, when there is no GDKP or token DKP (negative comments: in classicwow, wowclassic, and MMORPG). Why take a player without worldbuffs, when you don't have any information about that player to suggest they would do more dps than a different player who does have worldbuffs? If information about a player is important, that's exactly why guilds exist. So it makes sense to exclude such players from PUG raids, when they might still find success in a raiding guild that has learned they are skilled player.
I think games need to have identifiable ways, that are concrete enough for players to point to them, in which being low level is being better than high level.
I pointed out one way, in Aion: low-level players could access more rifts leading to enemy territory. Other possible ways: a low-level player can find ways to 'win' in PvP that a higher-level player couldn't. Examples of 'winning': not losing points when dying. Opponent not getting points for killing you. You getting points for killing opponent, when you wouldn't if you were high level. High-level opponent being penalized for killing you, like other players on your faction seeking them and killing them for bullying a weaker player. But none of these ways might apply if a high-level bully doesn't get points, but they don't care about the points because they already have enough points and wouldn't benefit from more, and they don't get any other penalty.
Another way in which it used to be better to be a low-level character in WoW was that faction reputation was not gained for completing quests much lower-level than the player. This eventually changed, but I think XP still not granted for lower-level, 'gray' quests, and a player who finds challenge to be fun will find doing content at its appropriate level more fun than doing it at a higher level. But players who optimize for power gains are deliberately avoiding gameplay that would be more fun, removing this reason to be at a lower level.
(Aion also removed loot if any player in a group was too high-level; this was nearly the case in a raid that I did, where a tank was close to being too high-level.)
But generally, people are reluctant to think about this, because they think being high-level should be better. If being high level was worse, they reason, why would people want to play at all? Why do quests, when gaining levels from completing those quests removes options from the game or makes your experience worse in some way?
And yet this is what games need to do, to prevent people from 'optimizing the fun out of the game'. Or more precisely: whether or not there are disadvantages to being a high level, all lvl 60 players in WoW would have the same disadvantage. It would not directly affect whether they exclude players without world buffs from raids. What does do, is discourage players with simplistic thinking from playing the game, or encourage players who start with such a simplistic goal, of "become more powerful", to acknowledge other goals, like "have fun and overcome challenges", even if those challenges only exist because they took a new player to a raid who is not optimal and does not know the encounters.
Accepting players with no world buffs is inconsistent with playing in the most efficient way, unless it's a small server and a raid cannot be filled without taking such players. (I.e., the situation of most raid guilds in original WoW.) But it is consistent with playing for challenge and to help other people.
One of the dangers is actually that it's too good. Chinese WoW was doing GDKPs in 2006, and because they did not exclude people, there were lots of PUG raids, lots of people got to raid (up to and including the final raid, Naxxramas, which barely anyone saw in the US and Europe), and lots of people had good gear. But it's hard to get people to talk about this as a potentially bad result, when they can't believe it could happen at all.
(One consequence of everyone having good gear, with WoW's current mechanics: a lot of content becomes trivial. I watched a Chinese streamer playing an overgeared warrior in Stratholme Live, doing very high damage with no effort. If instances limited the level and gear of players who entered them, as I have suggested, this removal of challenge from players getting good gear would be not exist to this degree, though the typical group would still be better-geared with the scaling than a group of new players would be.
And, again with WoW's current mechanics: a lot of classes break when everyone has good gear, because the scaling of different abilities, and the item budget calculations etc., were not designed around extreme values.)
Anyway, harmful attitudes. If one person out of 100 thinks that the best way to play is to rush to max level and collect good gear, it doesn't matter much. Those players will be strong in PvP, but they can be zerged down. But if 90 out of 100 think that way, it completely changes the game and the play experience for everyone.
A few weeks or months ago I was thinking about 'black' females in the US not marrying much. There is a financial incentive, in the form of welfare. And so it's possible to contemplate it being an outcome that some people prefer. But it takes the form of many females deciding that it's not necessary for them to get married before they have children, which means interacting differently with males, and if most females act in this way, it's hard for one female to act differently.
Looks like a bot, but one from my own faction, with combat log not revealing anything more:
This confused me, until I remembered that I opened trade because it caused the bot to switch directions (running towards me), and so I had caused it to run off the cliff and die:
Successfully locating a gather bot that I identified via the auction house aka broker:
Acting like I am sneaking around the bot, or maybe they had changed channels (like layers, I guess; I had forgotten that PvE-only zones in Aion had this feature) and I was trying not to alert them of my presence so they wouldn't do it again; presumably I was spamming 'assist' hotkey to see if they were targeting me:
I have 4000 screenshots and can't look through them all, I just want to find one with combat.
Still not combat with bots; I remember fights with a higher-level Chanter bot in a particular place, and how when I managed to kill it, I would get low abyss points because the damage inflicted by all the mobs the bot had been killing had not been cleared. I should probably stop after this series. I will just post a bunch without any explanation, just the file timestamps in the image titles. There was a forum post that I remember; someone commented on the setting from the perspective of the NPC faction. "A flock of white birds and a flock of black birds were fighting. We tried to separate them and they attacked us."
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