“There are places I’ll remember
All my life, though some have changed
Some forever, not for better
Some have gone and some remain”
~ John & Paul

Salome’s Ode To Gaming Friendships and Virtual Places – Take 1

Having decided to give up on WOW and been through the detox phase with very little pang, it occurs to me that the only thing I’m really going to miss is a handful of friends — two in particular (it would be three, but I’m disqualifying one because she’s been stuck with me since high school and her friendship is not WOW-centered). My memories of these two people are heavily tinted in WOW-filtered colors. I’ll explore one later in a small rant on why I’m anti-guild. For now, I’ll focus on my “WOW best friend.”

People who do not spend a lot of time in virtuality tend to roll their eyes at the notion of friendships that develop based on a format, gaming or otherwise. The idea of a forum friend or gaming friend is less legitimate in their eyes. But, it’s really no different than a friendship that develops over shared work or living spaces. The chemistry of such friendships is always the same, physical or virtual. And, even the strongest of those friendships strain when the format is taken out of the equation. When leaving a job, for example, there are always promises to keep in touch, and often we do, but generally, we don’t. Even under the best circumstances, with effort on both sides, the relationship moves into an at-fingertips arrangement where lunches and meetings have to be scheduled and maintained; that casual familiarity of the everyday joke or encounter is removed. This is true with friends in virtual environments as well.

The randomness of how such people come into our lives, and the places that mark the important events in those relationships are just 1′s and 0′s lurking on a server somewhere. On some level we know that. But then randomness of how your dorm or cubicle mates get assigned are no less random. And a “home” is more than just stucco and cinder blocks with tar paper on top; the materials of construction do not equal “home.” Some would argue that houses and office buildings are more “real” because they are permanent, while virtual places can be destroyed in a few minutes. But anyone who has been through a natural disaster understands the foolishness of attaching permanency to physical objects as a measure of their value. Most things in life can be gone in the blink of an eye under certain circumstances. The concept that they could be lost, worn out, destroyed is what makes them all the more precious. A house can be set ablaze or foreclosed; a server can be wiped. Experience and memory are the real currency of how we assign value to the places that take up real estate in our emotional ether.

Everything beyond that is just paperwork and security measures.

The First Time I Saw Dun Modr

So, I was working up my first WOW character (human priest, of course) and even though I was in a guild, I was generally off by myself (later entry on guilds, I promise). As was my wont, I was leveling in an area about 2-5 levels higher than I should have been — my best guess is that I was between 25-27. WOW was new and shiny, I was coasting on newbie immersion and eager to see as much content as possible. I have no idea how I got to Menethil Harbor. Truthfully, everything from Fargodeep Mine to the Wetlands is a blur.

Dun Modr (Wait, Where Am I?)

At any rate, while dodging bluegill murlocs, black ooze, and mosshide gnoll-thingies I turned north up a road, entered Dun Modr and accepted The Dark Iron War quest which innocently ordered me to kill some evil dwarves. Sure, no problem.

Dark Iron War - How Hard Can This Be?

An hour (and multiple corpse runs later) I was making frequent use of four-letter words and considering giving up. The innocuous looking encampment is (or, at least, was) a devil of a place for level-appropriate characters. It’s packed tight, aggro ranges are wide and most of the mobs are linked in pulls of 2 or 3 so you can’t patiently single-kill your way through (the mid-to-low-level priest’s bread and butter method). I was getting my priest ass splattered all over the place. And I was getting grumpy in that “why am I paying money to bash my head into make believe walls” way.

I was about to die — again — when, from out of nowhere, there was a dwarf warrior beside me, tossing a group invite, which I hastily accepted. Sure, the stumpy little guy was a level below me and named after a Forgotten Realms sword, but he was warrior DPS and he killed the bad, bad dwarves that were chewing me up like it was free.

For those of you that don’t play WOW, a warrior-priest leveling team is (or, at least, was) better than peanut butter and jelly sammiches. Warriors wear a lot of armor, suck damage down like water and hold aggro (the algorithms that are used to determine which player a “monster” attacks) so a robe-wearing priest like moi can stand back and toss out heals at my leisure. With Aegis, we had 80% of the quest done in minutes. All we needed were the pesky Dark Iron Demolitionists. As it turned out, the five demolitionists were, however, a particular flavor of bitch. They were entrenched inside the tight-packed barracks buildings and there were only a scattering of them amid all the other mobs. To make matters more frustrating, they stood back and lobbed high-damage explosives while letting their little army of friends hack at you. It didn’t help that Aegis and I were under-leveled for the quest.

More four-letter words and corpse runs, only this time with a stumpy little dwarf in mail armor ghosting beside me.

Refusing to be defeated, we found a demolitionist in one of the barracks that was less populated and opted to wait out respawns and kill him over and over. We cleared all the mobs down to the bottom level where we found a handy little alcove to sit and wait for respawn so we could kill them one at a time as they reappeared. I don’t remember how long it took. Long enough for us to rattle off conversation tidbits with enough sarcasm and personal exchange to realize we enjoyed the company. We’d also exhausted all the /flirt and /joke options for our races. One of them for the human female was (I kid you not) “I need a hero” and one of which for the dwarf male was “I like my beer like I like my women: stout and bitter.” These sound bites would later become in-jokes between us.

By the time we finished The Dark Iron War and a handful of other nearby quests, we’d made friends, added one another to friends’ lists, yadda yadda. I sent him some potions. We suffered the abject horror that was completing Stranglethorn Vale (the WOW camaraderie equal of doing a tour in ‘Nam together). He left his crappy guild for my crappy guild and we alienated the other members together. Years of friendship followed and continue.

Whenever one of us would work up an alt, we’d always call or IM the other when it was time to do Dun Modr. “I need a hero” and “hey, short and bitter, get over here” were used in tells from server to server and faction to faction. Just so we could stand in the aforementioned alcove and jump up and down a few times while tossing /joke and /flirt emotes back and forth.

I cannot tell you how the poor fellow suffered. He leveled with me possessed of a patience that would make saints stand there and say “How the fuck does he do that?” He had to deal with things like:

1. I am a compulsive harvester and I will aggro an entire zone of mobs just to get that flower over there which I don’t even really need. He still has nightmares about killing packs of bats in Eastern Plaguelands because I saw a Plaguebloom node or two.
2. I cannot make two targeted jumps in succession with the WOW interface. (A fact that became painfully clear when we ran Blackfathom Deeps a few days later. He waited patiently while I fell, swam back, fell, swam back, fell… all the while ignoring the bitching and moaning of the other people we were grouped with.) You remember that early part of Tomb Raider 1 where you have to do the running jumps from pillar to pillar over the gator-infested water, timing it to miss the flames that shoot up? That took me DAYS.
3. He had to double back to get me when I inevitably got lost in anything remotely resembling a cave (actually, he learned to never run out of my sight so he didn’t have to waste time doubling back).
4. When we were using the “avoid Mazthoril cave” exploit to turn in for our Drakefire Amulets and he made it on the first try, he sat there and waited and waited and waited while I fell and retried and fell and retried and fell and healed and then remounted and retried.
5. Every time we had to run UBRS or LBRS, he went to get a drink while I missed the jump onto the frakkin’ balcony twenty times and ran back up the stupid rock into the alcove and…fell (I still maintain it’s just too damn dark in there to see the jump).

He never raised his voice. He never got all condescending and hissed and talked to me like an idiot. He knew that just because I couldn’t judge a jump didn’t mean I was stupid and it didn’t mean I couldn’t play my class. It just meant I sucked at jumping. Although on the screen it makes you look and feel like an idiot. A really, really lot.

In all fairness, he did get to mow down every mob without ever having to pause. And he knew that if I lost every other member of a party or died myself, he was likely going to be standing when the smoke cleared (my rule: when things get ugly, the tank lives, everyone else can wait for rez, corpse run, and/or suck it). This was back when priests were useful and hadn’t been busted down to second-class healers. Plus, while we were leveling he was fury. So we pretty much owned anything that looked at us funny, even when they were a few levels above us.

Aegis is one of those people who’s just instinctively good at gaming. He doesn’t have to learn it or work it like I do. He sees something once and knows how to do it forever. He knows where to go, what order to kill, where to stand, and what to ignore. He’s also evil and speaks my brand of sarcasm. When people would ask me why I so “shy” and didn’t get involved in guild events, I’d answer “I’m not shy, I just hate most people.” He was the only one in vent that knew I wasn’t kidding. He wasn’t a whiny little kid who thought his name was tattooed on my ass just because we gamed together and when someone was a dick about something he didn’t play the old boy’s club “let me take care of this” card. He just sat back quietly and let me demo the jerk if I wanted to. Occasionally he might toss out a “Dude, I really wouldn’t say that to her…” warning, but that was more for the protection of the noob trying to flex nuts at me.

I can honestly say that the biggest thing I’m going to miss about WOW, without question, is the realization that I’ll never again get a random tell that says “hey – short and bitter – get over here and help me with Dun Modr.” I even had to apply my lame video capture skills before I canceled my account so that I could go and nab a shot of the infamous alcove (after helping a random noob complete their quest).

When I cleaned out my bank vaults, one of the handful of things that I couldn’t bring myself to vendor was a stack of six Crimson Lotus — items that would show up randomly in my mail whenever he had a quest in Alterac Mountains or Desolace and one dropped. Why? Because no one thought much about them, you couldn’t buy them, and other than the token gesture between us they were worthless to the naked eye. Just like the places and experiences that people in virtual environments trade every day.

Crimson Lotus

And when you find a friend who gets that and knows how to express it, that’s the kind of thing you’re gonna miss. Just like a badly textured alcove made up of 1s and 0s.

“I hate Thunder Bluff! You can’t find a good burger anywhere.” ~ Blood Elf Female, World of Warcraft

I’m leaving WOW.

This may sound like a frivolous statement because people say these things all the time (and because it’s a game, so who cares, right?). They announce grand departures on forums. They rage and quit guilds on the spot. They declare the things they’re giving up in moments of empowerment and then go slinking back when the buzz wears off.

I’m not one of those people. For one thing, generally, when I leave any sort of environment of which I am merely a member without authority, I do it without comment. Being “done” for me is generally an act of personal choice, not a gesture to discern who will try and woo me back. I can count on one hand the number of times I have openly declared I was leaving something, and I haven’t ever returned to any of them. I either knew I was done, or that my personal ethics would make it impossible to return. When I have felt the need to announce a departure, it’s generally been to make a statement about something I felt needed expressing or simply to let familiar denizens of a communal space know how to reach me outside the format without sending a gazillion private messages, or to explain why I was surrendering the responsibility of a role tethered to the format I was departing. IRL, when leaving a consulting job I’d have a brief gathering with my people before departing; there is merit in rituals like exit meetings that I consider separate from drama tactics, but that may be my open personal justification system in play.

I’ve spent years in the WOW format (I tried it in early 2005, but quit soon after, rejoining “for real” in May, 2006) — so there is history, and it feels wrong to leave without saying something somewhere. Or maybe I’m just feeling a fondness of memory. Either way, don’t follow the jump if you’re likely to be bored with such humdrummery.

(more…)

“There is a powerful tension in our relationship to technology. We are excited by egalitarianism and anonymity, but we constantly fight for our identity.” ~ David Owens

This is a rambling train-of-thought post. Proofreading it was a nightmare; I can’t imagine why you’d want to read it, but if you do, know that persons attempting to find a plot within it will be shot.

It’s strange to me that the Blizzard / Battle.net controversy only hit stride yesterday. I got my first “Real ID” email on the 13th of last month and knew there was darkness on the horizon. True, it didn’t contain the official forums tidbit, and was worded in such a way to highlight how everything is (at this point) optional. So maybe that explains why the enormity of the consequences didn’t set in until now. Or maybe privacy is already so on the ropes that it takes a fortnight for people to connect dots these days.

From a purely cynical point of view, it’s brilliantly timed. Those users who might be pissed and cancel in protest are likely to be lured back soon after by Cataclysm (…or StarCraft, or Diablo III…).

The official line and a lot of the conversation seems to believe the Battle.net requirement is merely a smirking corporate tactic they’re hoping will silence a lot of negativity on the public forums (which, in theory, will reduce the energy that is expended on moderation). Blizzard’s own babble backs this.

The official forums have always been a great place to discuss the latest info on our games, offer ideas and suggestions, and share experiences with other players — however, the forums have also earned a reputation as a place where flame wars, trolling, and other unpleasantness run wild. Removing the veil of anonymity typical to online dialogue will contribute to a more positive forum environment, promote constructive conversations, and connect the Blizzard community in ways they haven’t been connected before. With this change, you’ll see blue posters (i.e. Blizzard employees) posting by their real first and last names on our forums as well.

Most of these assumptions are demonstrably untrue, and ignore the troubling implications.

* Forum administrators will be vulnerable and serve at a disadvantage while their real-life information becomes fodder all over the internet.
* Vile people will be just as vile under their own names as they will under a handle. Talk shows, Reality TV and Girls Gone Wild videos are the majority rule and those people don’t wear Guy Fawkes masks to act like morons or say disgusting things. Social and criminal deterrents only work when there are consequences that deter people from their own natures.
* It’s easier to impose stricter rules and employ technology solutions than it is to police a user base. Trying to impose a false sense of positive by bulling away negative criticism is ultimately self-defeating.
* Devaluing your own forums and driving people to third party formats in search of free speech makes you a second-class delivery system in your own market. When people stop visiting the official forums, Blizzard will have to work harder to monitor third-party forum sites to find out what their customers are saying/thinking and will have to spend more on promotion efforts to get their messages out. This is bad juju.
* Blizzard actively recruits and markets to children; the first time a kid’s real name gets used for something sinister, it’s crying moms and abused children vs. Big Bad Blizzard’s greedy corporate policy. Throw in an ambitious lawyer and you’ll end up with a class-action lawsuit just for putting kids at risk.
* God help them if they try and make this retroactive, or there’s a tech glitch and information from past posts are revealed without user consent.

Blizzard is usually nothing if not self-serving and hyper-protective of their legal liabilities. So why the dumb move? What’s the advantage? Do they think being able to provide users with the ability to network inside their own system is more important than focusing on gameplay/immersion, developing the relationships between users and their avatars, or updating content faster? It looks like it. They’re misreading their role as that of a communication provider, instead of being an entertainment provider with outlets to communication-based venues.

With the launch of the new Battle.net, it’s important to us to create a new and different kind of online gaming environment — one that’s highly social, and which provides an ideal place for gamers to form long-lasting, meaningful relationships. All of our design decisions surrounding Real ID — including these forum changes — have been made with this goal in mind.

You can almost see some out of touch suit sitting around spouting things like “we gotta be more like that Facebooky stuff — why aren’t we doing Facebook things? Farmville is killing us!” while his R&D department head tries not to commit seppuku in the middle of the boardroom.

It looks like they’re trying for the Disney World model, where once you show up, you never have to leave for anything. Except that sort of thing only works at Disney World because WDW provides for every guest need. Food, clothing, transportation, emergency services, entertainment, etc, are all catered to. It’s stupid to attempt this sort of this thing when you only offer one product (entertainment/activity) and that product is, let’s face it, waning. Improving the flow of communication between users and their social networking is certainly crucial. Trying to establish themselves as a closed-circuit hub (and doing so while imposing constraints) is unfathomably dumb.

I could support (and would defend) Battle.net trying to hook up their users with outside social networking as a means to keep people inside the format, and requiring authentication for such. That’s basic, but it doesn’t require the public brandishing of user information. If I’m Jane Smith on Facebook and Jane Strangelove on Twitter and KillzYouHard on WOW, my voluntary desire to link those accounts doesn’t require my IDs being splashed all over the forums just because I hate the fact that Blizzard techs can’t ever meet their announced deadlines, or because my fishing hat lure doesn’t work after the latest patch.

Being able to monitor and interact with my social networking should be a positive thing, not a sacrificial endeavor. Blizzard could easily allow authentication and interaction without stomping all over user privacy. So why don’t they value user privacy, or believe that users value it enough to make it worth the trouble?

Well, that’s a longer post and requires a bit of personal disclosure to understand where my beliefs on the subject come from. I’ll bump it behind a jump so you can leave it here if you’d like. (more…)

“So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?” ~ Ayn Rand

Recently, a friend sent me this little gem:

It reminded me of the “Fair Game” machinma that uses WOW to explain fair trade:

Together, the set form an interesting lesson that combines both world and personal finance. And they say games can’t teach you anything useful ;-P

“Ugh I hate Thunder Bluff! You can’t find a good burger anywhere.” ~ Blood Elf Female

My chronic boredom with WOW and the bitter disappointment that was Aion has led me to ponder exactly what *I* want from an MMORPG and how that measures up against what the market can offer.

(Disclaimer: Much of this is WOW-centric. It’s not my fault they currently define the market.)

What I want:
1. RP. First and foremost, I want to RP. Although many MMORPGS claim to offer RP, I’ve never realized it in the same way online as I did in my teens sitting around a table with a bunch of friends fondling geometrical dice, calculating ThAC0s and arguing over how much the light of the torches in the tunnels would affect my drow fighter/priest’s vision. In theory, online play should get rid of all the stupid calculation stuff and just let us RP, but RP is little and far between.
2. Pee Vee Pee. I want to pew pew against other *thinking* beings in a way that isn’t held hostage by who has the better gear, who can hack macros better or who has the OP class this week. I don’t mind a little bit of luck, but it shouldn’t be the deciding factor. Real PVP should be mentally challenging as well as battle strategic. I want Warsong Gulch meets Risk meets Stratego. I want to stand the same chance going up against the worst player in the game as I do going up against the best. I want a pvp system that doesn’t reward losers who sit in BGs all day or OP classes with one-two-three-dead macros more than players with actual gaming skills. I don’t want to have to respec for 1-on-1 and group pvp. I want anyone that afks in a BG to get a 2 hour no-more-bg-for-you debuff. I want a pvp system in the same game as the rest of the content I want to play everything else in (Sorry, Warhammer you just suck so much for EVERYTHING else).
3. PvE on My Own Terms. If I’m in the mood to pve I don’t want to spend all my time getting griefed and annoyed by every thirteen year old asshat that just jerked off to the latest 4chan uploads. I want to have the freedom to play the game I’m paying for the way I want to play it without being shuffled off to the Hello Kitty Island Adventure servers. I want a fuck-off mode that tells campers to go find something else to do with their time. I want non-combat NPCs to be alive when I need them to be alive. I don’t mind competing for mobs, but I don’t want to be at the mercy of stupid farmers when I need mobs for mats and quests. I want any character that kills a character 10 levels below theirs to get a “stupid chicken” buff that turns them into a level 1 critter and doesn’t wear off for an hour. I don’t care if you’re on a pvp server, killing lowbies is lame.
4. No. Fucking. Grinding. Yes, I know that technically questing is grinding, but I need that illusion to maintain my false sense of achievement. So I’d rather have quests disguised as grinding rather than just mindless “kill 100 boars” grinding.
5. Original Approaches to Questing. While I’m at it, I want quests that aren’t always the same variations on the same things or thinly veiled grinding in the guise of lore.
6. Minimize Mini-Games. I picked my character and class for a reason, stop taking away all my skills and abilities in favor of a new set of stupid buttons that don’t interest me. I’m glad you got that Atari emulator running and all, but that doesn’t mean you need to inflict your retrofix onto my gameplay.
7. Interesting Crafting. Skill up, farm mats. Skill up, farm mats. Skill up, farm mats, wait for cooldowns. There has got to be a better way to build this mousetrap. I actually *like* crafting when the game isn’t making me hate it.
8. Privacy. I don’t want that creepy guy from that last pug to know when I’m signing on, but I also don’t want to ignore him because he’s in that guild with those other people I sometimes group with and that leads to uncomfortable situations. I want to control my own privacy in any social format; appear offline when I want. How is this not basic?
9. To See Content. Your designers just spent a year and a half on the latest dungeon so that 1% of the game population can see it. Does that sound logical to you? Allow passive modes for dungeons and high-end content so that guilds can bring non-combat observers to educate the newbies, or even just so I can go in and have a look without 40 other screaming idiots.
10. Non-Guild Progression Options. Would it kill you to have non-dungeon progression that would allow us to get access to high-level gear without guilds, banging our heads in the same BGs over and over and over, or farming until our eyes bleed? Make it challenging. Make it something we have to work for. Just don’t make it boring and stupid. Oh, and if you’re worried that gear is the only reason anyone will run dungeons…well maybe you should THINK ABOUT THAT.
11. Avatar Customization. Aion got this right. I want dozes of sliders and vanity options. I want to dye my robes to match my shoes.
12. Priests That Don’t Scream “Please Rape Me.” Okay, I’m going to be specific. This is about the priest class in WOW more than anything else. I want a healing class that isn’t useless in 1-on-1 pvp. I don’t want to choose between being a target or being effective. I don’t want to be a watered down warlock or a very pretty corpse. Let me heal effectively and by all means make it challenging, but then give me tools to protect my ass and don’t take them away a week later. Make it so that coming after the priest is at least KIND OF a challenge. Druids shapeshift. Pallys stun IN PLATE. One fear every 30 seconds and shields that disappear after 1 high-level hit aren’t cutting it. I don’t want to have to rely on other people for my dps or my defense — especially when other healing classes are just as healing effective with better dps/defense tools. Have you TRIED to kill a restro druid? WTF.

Realistically:
1. This is likely something game developers cannot influence, although they could put some effort into creating formats that encourage and/or allow this for those of us who want it. Navigating through strangers who are too creepy or too mental or too bad at RP is an individual issue that no amount of game filters can help with. I can also see the challenges this presents for communities that mingle adults and teen populations.
2. This just shouldn’t be that hard. Do this already.
3. See above.
4. Skill up ur cre8iviT dudz.
5. See above.
6. Just cut this crap out entirely.
7. I don’t see why this isn’t a reasonable expectation.
8 – 11. See above.
12. See above, only louder. WHY is this a dream that never comes true?