There was an interesting interview titled “The Hero Factory” on Eurogamer last week with Chris Metzen, otherwise known as the voice of countless Blizzard characters and the grand Loremaster of Blizzard’s fantasy worlds.  It was illuminating stuff.  Chief among its observations is that Metzen’s heroes are unambiguous, uncomplicated, chiselled ‘ideals’ embodied in the form of strong white men, exercising their virtuous power through application of force.  What especially sprang out at me was this quote of his: “as a dumbass kid from California, I certainly am not cosmopolitan enough to know what all these paradigms are.”  Paradigms, eh!

Because of my background, my context, as I’ve grown up I’ve had to confront and struggle with all sorts of issues relating to stuff like race, gender, social class, wealth, ability, sexuality and so on.  And because of my field of study, I’ve had the opportunity to explore many such issues in some depth.  Not everyone has these kinds of experiences, and not everyone who is offered the opportunities they represent acts on those opportunities.  Maybe guys like Chris Metzen have never had to encounter or wrestle with these sorts of issues in a personal context.  Maybe they have, and the childishly* simple representations of games like Warcraft are their way of dealing with them.  There’s a certain appeal, in a confusingly complicated world, in creating an uncomplicated fantasy in which to escape.

Plus, I have to admit, even though I’ve had to wrestle with the issues described above, I’d seriously doubt my ability to create authentic, empowering or even helpfully escapist narratives involving those kind of themes.  Even on issues where I have direct personal experience, any potential universality in that experience is mitigated by my circumstances of privilege and comfort.  Including – even just mentioning or alluding to – these kinds of issues in one’s fiction can easily come off as clumsy or offensive, not least because of the incredibly wide diversity of experiences such labels represent, so I can quite understand why it may seem easier to simply ignore them in one’s fantasy.

Unfortunately, erasing something from a heavily idealised, escapist fantasy world heavily implies you’d rather it was erased in the real world too.  It says “this reality is a problem, a problem I’d rather make go away”.  Maybe that’s a fallacious implication, but it sits there awkwardly between the lines, uncomfortably meeting your gaze every time you look too close.  Meanwhile, those of us whose life experience involves these erased categories find virtual worlds where their very form of existence or self-identity is unsettlingly absent, a sort of terrifying post-genocide fantasy where they’re not just a minority, but they don’t exist at all.

We tend to seek validation for our experiences by sharing them with others, and virtual worlds are an exciting way to do that – just look at all the geeky references which are packed into World of Warcraft to make geeky people feel at home and understood.  More explicitly, check out Metzen’s “Geek Is” address from last year’s BlizzCon – it’s all about solidarity, understanding, and hilariously, identification with a group that has experience of being the picked-upon, disempowered minority**.  Blizzard’s creative directors clearly understand this on some level***.  But it’s also clear that these ‘geeky’ experiences are all they’re prepared to share, and that their worldview is so ignorant of the struggles faced by other marginalised groups that they don’t even realise that something like the ‘Corpsegrinder‘ video is likely to be massively hurtful to a large number of players and observers.

I think it’s always been pretty clear that Blizzard’s worlds are overtly sterilised and simplistic and that their creators think they’re like, really seriously cool, dudes.  I don’t know to what extent that is A Problem, given Metzen’s self-confessed “dumbassery” and the fact that it’s a game sold to make money – there are far wider, far harder issues in there which the game industry as a whole is going to have to wrestle with pretty hard in the coming decades.  But PR fiascos as diverse as last year’s Real ID furore, always-online Diablo 3 single-player and this business with Corpsegrinder provide a deeper insight into a company which simply doesn’t know or, I suppose, doesn’t care about the wider concerns and experiences of its own community.  Somehow Blizzard’s games have attracted a very wide and diverse audience.  Maybe the simplicity of their worlds contributes to that.  But it seems increasingly clear to me that Blizzard themselves simply do not represent this audience – and just what that means for us is unclear.

Well, I say ‘us’, but I’m not really included; I’m done with Blizzard for a while, and stuff like this makes me glad that I am.  That’s a less constructive contribution than I’d like, but I’m afraid it’s all I’ve got – a slightly abstract ramble peppered with cynicism and the sort of easy distaste which guys like me can indulge in from safe and comfy armchairs.

* I don’t use “childish” in a pejorative sense – maybe it’s a word I shouldn’t use at all given the risk of misunderstanding, but I hope it connotes neutral ideas like innocence and a lack of malice.

** Hilariously, nothing has made me feel more alienated from Blizzard than watching that address.  I’ve never identified as a ‘geek’, and while I don’t have a problem with people who do, watching that address communicated to me one message: “this game is not for you”.

*** I’m assuming that “Geek Is” was actually effective at connecting with at least some self-confessed ‘geeks’.  I have no idea if that was the case.

Do do do do do.  Sometimes it’s like I’m humming a little diddy up here.

Cases in point: some high profile Cataclysm intentions as stated in various sources, and actual recent developments.

Announcement: Several smaller raids per tier instead of one big raid

Outcome: Tier 11 – three raids, one fairly lengthy but still shorter than anything since ToC.  So that’s a check.  Tier 12 – one raid, only seven bosses but with lots of delicious trash to fill in the edges.  Tier 13 – assumed to be a single raid on Deathwing.

Announcement: Firelands in 4.1

Outcome: Firelands put back until 4.2

Announcement: Abyssal Maw & War of the Ancients raids

Outcome: Abyssal Maw cut, WotA turned into a 5-man

I could go on to litanise variously minor deviations from what players were led to expect, but hopefully you get what I mean already.  The few examples listed, as many have pointed out, potentially paint a picture of a company whose intentions outstrip their capacity.  I approved of Blizzard’s stated reasons for delaying Firelands, but a delay is a delay is a delay.  Do do do do do.  I considered putting “faster patch release schedule” up there too, actually, but that’s something that they seem to be achieving compared with the same period two years ago – albeit by releasing 4.1 without new raid content, then releasing the intended 4.1 content as patch 4.2 a couple of months later.

On the failure of Cataclysm or lack thereof

So Firelands was delayed, and was released as a single raid instance instead of the previously intended two or three.  About which I wouldn’t give two figs if that content was well paced and worth waiting for, and many folks feel that 4.2 was exactly that.  But in some ways, Firelands and the Molten Front are the reason that I’ve finally stopped playing WoW.  Not because it’s bad content, but – somewhat pathetically- because I hate the aesthetic of the Firelands, and the entire patch is suffused with that single aesthetic.  The quests, the raid, the gear, the bosses, the trash, the abilities, everything.  Everything is basically either browny-black or orangey-orange.  Orange bosses fire off orange abilities that you need to dodge in orange gear.  I’m a fickle, shallow person who likes pretty things.  And getting Firelands with only Molten Front to accompany it was a deathknell for someone already burning out on the game.  Had we had a beautiful, sumptuous, watery, Throne-of-the-Tides-esque Abyssal Maw raid to complement Firelands, perhaps I’d have been able to tolerate raiding longer.  Perhaps I’d even have been able to force myself to do daily quests.  Perhaps not – perhaps those are just excuses.

I’ve seen a lot of commentary recently, in response to Cataclysm’s failure to meet Blizzard’s hopes for reinvigorating the game and reversing WoW’s gradual loss of subscribers, suggesting that the “failure” is because too much time was spent on pre-80 levelling content instead of 80-85 content.  Which I think is stuff and nonsense.  Is having more zones to grind through in order to reach the endgame really what most of us enjoy most about a new expansion?  I mean maybe at first, but it gets pretty tedious pretty fast, no?  I mean, surely if anything, Cataclysm’s only failure in this regard was its inattention to the 60-80 content creating a gap in the levelling experience.  Rather, if Cataclysm falls short, surely it’d be in its bondage to mechanics – especially questing mechanics – which were innovative 5 years ago but are now dated and saturated?  And even then, I only stopped doing the new dailies after I opened the Molten Front, because not only am I pretty fed up with daily quests and grindyness in general, but having to do them in that environment and with scores of other players was the pits for me.

So we’re clear, I’m talking about the bad kind of pits.  With the fire and the torment and stuff.  And Molten Front is all about the fire and the torment and the stuff.

Cataclysm also shipped with a good amount of 5-man and raiding content, which can’t be blamed in any way for its lower-than-hoped-for success, except in that once again it was all just a bit too familiar for some parts of a community that’s been doing the same thing for 5 years.  And I enjoyed the addition of the two Zuls as revamped heroic 5-mans, the quality of which is pretty hard to criticise.

On the sacredness of cows and the sacrifice thereof

What’s far more interesting than this “failure” – which seems a remarkably disingenuous term for a game which still boasts millions of subscribers and must be making staggering amounts of money – is this trend towards Blizzard doing something other than what they said they’d do.  Why is that?  Is it because their proverbial eyes are larger than their proverbial mouths?  Or, to use a less consumptive metaphor, are their ideas just grander than what their development team can actually pull off?  No, you’re right – that’s not a metaphor.  It is, however, one possible explanation.

Another is more cynical, and strenuously denied by Blizzard themselves: that all their resources are being poured into Diablo, Starcraft, Titan and that other game they’re doing which I can’t remember.  I’m in no position to comment on this.  Blizzard say that WoW is not suffering for their efforts on other games, that their WoW team is bigger than ever (or something to that effect), and so forth.  We either believe them or we don’t.  Perhaps, to direct our hypothetical cynicism elsewhere, Blizzard is not wearing the proverbial trousers when it comes to allocating resources and planning content for their now rather elderly and somewhat less sparkly flagship MMO.  Activision conspiracy theories are ten a penny on the WoW forumsphere.

Or what if we factor in the steady march of sacred cows which have been sacrificed on the altar of – well, I’m not sure what the altar would be, or where this metaphor is going.  Maybe I should stop using metaphors.  The point is, Blizzard have expressed considerable displeasure with a number of ideas over the years which they’ve then changed their mind about.  Transmogrification is the most recent example, with its effects on the holy silhouette cow being perhaps the most remarkable.  The speculated introduction of Pandaran as a playable race either neutral or available to both factions would be another if it turns out to have any substance.  Allowing transfers from PvE to PvP realms is a famous historical example.  Faction transfers, character recustomisations, the entire in-game mount/pet store – Blizzard is not shy of doing something it said it wouldn’t do if circumstances change.  Whether that’s good or bad depends on whether the individual decision is justified, and I reckon most of their “reversals” (if it’s even fair to call them that) have been very well received by players.

I wonder, is there any relation between this willingness to change their mind about sacred cows and the sometimes dramatic divide between previously stated intentions (like multiple raids in 4.1) and eventual delivery?  Are Blizzard playing it fast and loose, watching what’s going on and changing their plans on-the-fly to accommodate new data?  Is it all part of an overall plan for quality of gameplay über alles?

On ditties and the humming thereof

I’d like to believe that!  I just, well, I don’t know, though.  As a layman with no insight on Blizzard or its industry, I can’t know.  I don’t like all of the stuff that Blizzard does.  It’d be weird if I did, because just shy of 12 million people apparently play the game and it’s ridiculous to hope that even one of them would be completely satisfied with the entire product.  Recently, I’ve liked less and less of what WoW has provided, or failed to provide, but a lot of that could just be explained by a combination of burnout and saturation – for a game to hold my attention non-stop for 6 years with no serious complaints transcends impressive and verges on farcical.

So I’m torn between a bias towards wanting to believe the best of Blizzard and hope that they come up with stuff I’ll love to bits, and a contrary bias of wanting to believe the worst because I’ve burned out on WoW and started to notice more and more of the stuff I dislike about it.  But ultimately, it makes no difference which direction I’m pulled in, because I don’t know and can’t know what’s going on with them.  Only time will offer any sort of a clue as to why they do what they do.

Do do do do do.

Maybe it doesn’t ultimately matter.  When all the arguments of artistic merit, talent and intent are worn out, I suppose even the humblest little tune really just comes down to what you make of it.

Sometimes I wonder if there’s a point to it all.

There’s a certain drudgery to it that inevitably sets in after a while, that you can’t just escape. Week after week, visiting the same places. Going through the same movements. Surrounded by the same group of friends. When this kind of routine sets in you have to step back and ask yourself: why am I doing all of this in the first place? Because of some mistaken idealism? Because it’s all I know? Because I can’t imagine spending my days any other way?

It’s difficult to step back and question sometimes. Question not just your environment, but what you yourself are doing. If it’s the right thing, the thing you SHOULD be doing. I used to be sure it was, once. But lately doubts have crept into my mind. I wish there was a way to escape them, to go back to that perfect place I once occupied, to relive those wonderful moments. But they’re gone and all that’s left is me desperately trying to relive the same dream, to no avail.

I do feel like part of me still NEEDS to do this. That there’s some deeper desire I can’t really explain, maybe because of all of the good memories it’s created. Maybe because at the end of the day, I don’t want to think about the alternatives. If I weren’t doing this, weren’t stuck in this particular routine, I’d probably be stuck in another one. And I hardly dare think what that one might be.

But it’s not just that. There’s more to it.

What always drags me back in the end, no matter my personal feelings, is my responsibility to my comrades. I just can’t forsake them, they’ve meant too much to me over the years. We’ve fought so many good fights together, spent so much time just building connections and friendships over the years. You can’t just forget that. They wouldn’t appreciate me leaving, after all this time, not now. Just like I don’t appreciate it whenever one of them says he or she’s had enough. I understand why they do it, but I also feel like they’re abandoning us. Surely this time we’ve spent together is more meaningful than that? Meaningful enough that you can’t just sever a connection built over YEARS in the blink of an eye. At least that’s what I’d like to think. Maybe the reality is different.

I also fear what might happen if I left. This group is stable, thanks to years of building it together. But any one of ours departing leaves a mark. It’s bound to. We don’t have the numbers to render anyone insignificant. And the part I’ve played definitely hasn’t been insignificant. Or is that me overestimating my importance again? Maybe they don’t need me at all. Maybe I just want to be needed.

The thing is, despite all my talk of being needed and not wanting to abandon the group, I’m not just getting sick of this whole situation, this whole routine. I feel like I’m getting sick of THEM as well. Quirks that I hadn’t noticed before are starting to show, and all I can respond with is annoyance. I’ve just lost the patience I once had. And even THAT is just getting on my nerves. I don’t want to be the one who sours up the atmosphere, lowers morale – being the weakest link is my greatest fear. And I definitely don’t want to destroy my ties with my brothers and sisters, simply because *I* don’t want be a part of this anymore.

***

They’re coming. Maybe my decision of getting out or not will soon be made for me. They’ve been getting closer every week. More and more of my brothers and sisters are falling in combat every time. They’re savages. They can’t possibly understand, nor have they ever tried to. Idealism is completely foreign to them, they’re just intent on killing. Indiscriminately and without hesitation. They wouldn’t understand even if I explained it to them.

My loyalty to my master, my sense of duty, my responsibility to my comrades, they’re all meaningless to them. They just loot and plunder with no regard for anything but themselves. They don’t consider that we have doubts too. Maybe that’s my problem. That the alternative – getting out, escaping this particular routine – will either kill me or make me end up with them. An option seemingly worse than death.

Going through the same movements week after week, patrolling the same roads over and over, desperately defending our territory against their attacks, is a fate I’d vastly prefer over anything which would separate me from my kin.

No, despite my annoyances, with my brothers and sisters, with THIS, despite my reservations in unquestionably following our master, this is too important. This period of my life has been too significant to just forget and abandon, the friends I’ve made too valuable. Leaving is not an option. I will stand and fight.

Leaving would condemn me to forever being an outsider. No matter if I joined those brutes or not. The bonds I’ve forged over the years are too strong to consider that option now.

Belonging is too important.

They’re coming.

My name was Flamewaker Pathfinder. Remember me.

I’ve wanted to do a retrospective on tier 11 before Firelands comes out, but the more I’ve thought about it the more I’ve realised that actually, for me, tier 11 hasn’t been defined so much by Blizzard as by the folks I’ve raided with, and by how we’ve chosen to conduct ourselves through the content.  ‘course, that’s always true to an extent – that the game is at least partially what we make it – but I’ve noticed it a lot more this tier.  I think as an ex-theorycrafter I’m more aware than I was of that interplay between how the game works and how you make it work for you personally.

Treadmill

So it’s not so much the game itself I want to mulch over, but rather how it works when a lot of the folks I raid with, myself included, are simply getting tired.  Not so much tired of WoW itself, but tired of the endless treadmill of content that constitutes the endgame.  For me personally, tired also of having led raids, raid groups and guilds for six long years.  Despite all the changes to my raid group over the years which have made that role easier in some ways – we’re more a group of extended friends than a raid group now, and the leadership chores are shared among four of us – in other ways that just heightens the responsibility of keeping raids going and progress coming while making sure everyone’s enjoying themselves and feeling socially included.

I still enjoy a lot of what the game has to offer, even to an extent including all the multiplex components of that intricate content-treadmill of rep and gear and enchants and gems and consumables and points and tokens and achievements and all the other stuff that ties together the endgame as a coherent entity.  Cataclysm has taken familiar concepts developed over three incarnations of the game and assembled them into a confident, directed experience based on accumulating the stuff your character needs or wants through various means.  It’s the same stuff we’re well used to by now, but further refined, tweaked and with a bit of a challenge increment since WotLK too.

Now that should be pretty great – take something which has worked well, and make it work better.  But the context has changed.  For me, something of the sparkle, the unquantifiable, subjective allure of the game as a whole, has diminished.  Cynicism is setting in and I’m seeing less of the positive aspects of something like, say, a daily quest and more of the negative aspects.  Not because I was blind to the latter in days past, but because the former has less ability to distract me from it now.  The mechanics are starting to overshadow the game.  The work is less fun, the rewards less appealing, the deficiencies in the systems more glaring and harder to ignore.

Challenge

Into this exaggerated and depressing picture I want to introduce the increase in what you might call challenge that Cataclysm brought.  Succinctly, stuff got harder.  And that’s a really tough thing to put a qualitative label on.  If I was to try and break it down simply, I’d say that the opportunity for increased personal performance is tempered by the general decrease in capability of the WoW population as a whole.  For every person who relishes the extra opportunity to excel at something difficult, there’s a person who feels excluded from content they were previously welcomed in.  Which is of course dramatically oversimplifying something I could ramble on about for hours, but it’s only peripheral to my thought here – which is that the increase in challenge has not only made WoW more potentially fun, it’s also made it more unavoidably tiring.

The increase in difficulty changes where the margins lie between a kill and a wipe, between competence and incompetence, between what’s acceptable and what’s not.  Success requires a higher standard of play from everyone involved.  Mistakes are easier to make and more costly.  That can be invigorating, energising, thrilling – I remember how pleased my group was to be actually wiping again on normal mode content – but it can just as easily tip the other way into draining, stressful, frustrating.  Especially if you have folks who were previously at an acceptable standard now struggling to make the grade while simultaneously relearning their class or role.

Change

It’s class and mechanic changes that are the second factor I want to introduce.  Most specs are now more complex to play, some considerably so, in the sense of juggling timers, procs, situational requirements, spell interactions and so forth.  Healers got a double whammy in the form of a fundamental change away from twitch whackamole to mana management and spell selection.  I really really like that change, but by way of example, it was really hard for a few people to adjust to when we started raiding, and combined with the rather more challenging normal modes put an extra barrier for entry in front of someone who was trying to learn to heal for the first time.  Other folks who were more than passable at their class/spec previously have ended up struggling to make it work with the heightened complexity which, while not usually raid-breaking in normal modes, is at least distressing for the players who feel they’re not pulling their weight in raw numbers.

The elemental AoE change is another example – it went from a simple task anyone could perform without having to think about, to something really complex and challenging and intricate which requires you to really know what you’re doing and why and be spot on with timings and targets.  That was a massive leap up in difficulty (with no attendant increase in reward) and a considerable increase in the gap between cans and cannots.

It’s not you, it’s me

I’m not saying the game’s getting too hard  I’m also not saying it’s getting too complex.  I’m not even saying that the old mechanics and accepted ways of implementing work/reward are losing their lustre, because that depends on the person and perspective.  All I’m saying is that when you’re tired, when you’re a little burned out, when the game is starting to lose its shine… all these little molehills become daunting mountains of weariness, little Everests in your own personal Himalayas of “why am I still playing, again?”.

WoW is more tiring than ever, but only because I’m more tired of it than ever.  Objectively (inasmuch as that word is appropriate), the game is better than it’s ever been.  Subjectively, there are only a few things which keep me playing: the people in my guild, some other friends, the shiny pretty gear I can festoon my avatars with and the fact that I’m still a bloody good player at everything I do, thanks very much.

Which brings me lengthily back to touch again on that thought I started with: for Fancy Hats, the game is increasingly defined not by itself, but by the ways we choose to play it.

Retrospect

And I think because WoW is better than ever, tier 11 has probably been better than ever at supporting different ways of approaching play.  The main deficiency that comes to mind is that it’s lacked an accessible, rewarding, easy raid tier to train up newcomers and provide something for alts to do on offdays.  And that’s precisely what tier 11 could become in 4.2, provided it doesn’t get so hideously faceroll easy that it’s of no value whatsoever.

As for Hats, we’ve been able to progress steadily and without much pain despite a late start, a very relaxed schedule, many cancelled raids, a huge reliance on offspecs and a lot of general roster-related headaches.

Replenishment has been a huge annoyance for the leaders – it makes fights so much less taxing as a healer, but our Survival Hunter can no longer provide it for us.  When our Warlock was busy with work (which was often), we had to perform alt and offspec gymnastics to get it because – bearing in mind what I said above about challenge and change – it was still preferable to not having it.  Raid composition in general still tends to be a minor headache for 10-player raiding, but thankfully not one which affected us too much.

It’s nice that several encounters give one or two players a specific responsibility without foisting it on the whole raid.  It adds to an encounter’s complexity without punishing players who simply can’t fulfil an unusual role, and gives those who need a bit of extra interest something to keep them busy.  Way preferable to something like Ghosts on Gorefiend where anyone who made it to level 70 and tier 6 without being able to play a frost mage would suddenly find themselves wiping your raid for no apparent reason.

There has also been an impressive amount of variety for all the roles I’ve tried – healing, tanking and ranged DPS – with the healing variation especially noticeable given the new mana management game – as well as some nice opportunities to use class abilities to help the raid.

Aesthetically, none of tier 11′s raids really pleased me.  I know, I know, evil lairs are meant to be dark and sinister and stuff, but I really like raiding through pretty places.  Blackwing Descent was a lot more tolerable than I thought it’d be – I really hate that rocks-n-lava thing in general – but none of the instances really stood out as special or beautiful.  The gear, on the other hand, was generally fairly nice looking.

Introspect

All these mundane and abstract observations are really just my way of saying it was an OK tier.  It kept us playing together, it kept us having something to do, it kept us interested.  It didn’t blow us away or inspire us to new heights or reinvigorate our interest in the game.  It had its frustrations, its problems and its obstructions.  It simply functioned; it did what we needed it to.  Far more memorable are the conversations, the dirty tricks, the hilarious exploits, the dramatic saves, the hard-earned first kills, the players lost and the players still with us.  Not what we play but how we play it: WoW is less and less a game we play and more and more a context we play in.  Tier 11 supported that, mostly.

So where does that leave us, approaching 4.2?  In an odd place, not placing too many requirements on the content but just hoping it’s good enough to keep us together a little longer, and that in doing so it isn’t going to punish us for playing the way we do or force us to do stuff we don’t want.  Grudgingly prepared to give the new dailies (sigh, dailies) a try and step back on that relentless gear treadmill for the sake of a few more months with old friends, a few more nights at the top of the DPS meter, a few more over-zealous DPS getting 60k greater healing waves at 1% health, a few more core hounds figuring out how to operate machinery.

Beyond that, who knows?

As for me and Razz, well, I’ve finished my dissertation but have still got another year to go on my (part-time) (I initially mistyped that as party-time!) degree, and he’s had stupendously heavy exam-related workload for the last couple of months which thankfully ends this week.  So we’ll be venturing into the Firelands with everyone else to seek our fortunes and explore tier 12, no doubt generating melancholy and rambling blog posts to punctuate the experience.  As always.

Good luck in the Firelands folks – see you in 4.2.

What was supposed to be light entertainment inexplicably triggered the philosophical center of my wee developing brain, and I found myself immensely intrigued and fascinated by the idea of a time-stopping watch. Not because it would allow me to perform criminal acts involving my math teacher’s underwear (that sentence is bound to be misinterpreted), but for a different reason entirely. I think I found it so appealing because such a watch would give me the ability to escape in a rather harmless way. Wouldn’t it be great if, on a whim, we could just push a button when everything around us was moving slightly too fast? When we needed a break? To just wander about in  a world which, just this once, followed OUR pace, OUR rules.

I think we all need to escape from time to time. That it’s an inherently human need, something that partly makes us into who we are. I can’t tell you why that is. I haven’t exactly widely studied humanity’s escapist tendencies. I do know they’re very real, and that *I* certainly can’t always stay here. Perhaps it’s due to how society is structured, due to the roles we play and to a certain extent are forced to play.

Maybe it’s because life, almost per definition in this entirely futuristic year of 2011, is so involved, so complex, so damn BUSY, that we need to take a breather sometimes. But no, I don’t even think it’s down to the context, down to the times. People have been escaping for centuries. Their means were different, sure, but the goal was the same: to get out, become detached from everyday concerns and problems, and go somewhere else. Somewhere better. Somewhere more in line with whatever ideals they defended, or perhaps the opposite: a place where they could forget all about them, where their ideals, truths and beliefs lost their significance.

Is escapism the privilege (or sad, inevitable fate) of a certain economic class though? Is it, in that sense, part of entertainment? It’s certainly true that, if our primary concerns of survival weren’t put to rest, our most basic needs like a roof above our heads not satisfied, we probably wouldn’t be playing World of Warcraft. Purely practically it seems like an insurmountable barrier. But then, escapism is far broader than that. I think what defines it is a sense of getting lost, of however briefly forgetting, of moving away from our everyday realities. I suppose in that sense getting drunk is also escapism. Which isn’t exactly a privilege for the wealthiest of people.

Becoming a space astronaut

The beauty of the kind of escapism games like World of Warcraft provide though, is that they allow us to not just detach ourselves from THIS world, but also very effectively and tangibly (a total misnomer in this case but it gets my point across) move into ANOTHER world. Of not just ceasing to inhabit this place, but also coming to inhabit another. That’s a fantastic thing. Books and movies and poetry and whatever else floats your boat allow us to do that as well, of course. Any sort of cultural experience which manages to craft a world entirely its own and present it to us, alive and real, gives us the possibility to escape in ways which are as intellectually stimulating as they are emotionally engaging.

But games take it one step further. And I’d like to argue games like WoW take it one step further still.

By virtue of games’ inherent interactivity, we suddenly gain the ability to not just “inhabit” a world in our imagination, through the feeling of being immersed in a book or film, but to ACTUALLY (virtually – this is so confusing) inhabit it. Become a part of it, run around in it, “do” “stuff” in it, “meet” characters which would otherwise be confined to paper and ink or would always be just out of our personal reach on a television screen. This has some massive repercussions.

No longer are we just fleeing from our everyday lives in the literal sense of escaping them and the problems that they bring along with them, we’re escaping into another life. Or more correctly, a complement of our everyday lives as it’s almost necessarily intertwined with our “real” lives. It allows us to LIVE out our wildest fantasies and dreams in a safe zone, without having to worry about the consequences. Live them out, instead of just reading about them or seeing them happen before us on a screen  and letting our imagination do the rest (making clear here for a moment that I am a big movie geek and can very much enjoy reading a good book – I just think games have some amazing strengths of their own which often seem to be neglected). I can BE a SPACE ASTRONAUT or a military commander or a guy who kills Greek gods in his free time or a racecar driver or Razzmatazz, the night elf hunter whose heroic deeds have saved the world about two dozen times so far.

Aside from tickling that wonderful childhood pleasure center of our brains, this escape into a virtual life serves another important function. Where our real life problems often seem to slip from our fingers, grow over our heads or are simply too big for one person to get a grip on from the start, games offer us problems we CAN deal with. I get a huge amount of satisfaction out of that as I’m a terrible control freak, and everyday life tends to frustrate me with the number of things that I simply cannot control. It’s just such a wonderful change of pace to, just for a while, reside in a world where every problem has a solution, everything is in my hands.

In that sense you could call it productive escapism (even though I don’t like the word productive as it seems to imply economics): we’re actually doing things within this world we escape to. The problem-solving as a fundamental feature for games means they’re intellectually engaging, and the interACTIVITY means they’re more active than passively absorbing a movie, for example. Less productive forms of escapism would also include getting very drunk, although to be fair that probably has benefits of its own games can’t begin to replicate.

There’s more to this, but going into it all would lead me into a million different directions. The worlds games present us with have easily discernible rules which, given enough investment on our parts, we can figure out and often manipulate – much moreso than the “real” world’s. There’s only as much complexity as the designers decided to put in there – if only our actual Creator had been this gentle. Then there’s another feature of games I’ve already alluded to: where the real world moves incredibly fast, we can set our own pace in games, slow things down if we’re so inclined.

On wedgies (cont.)

World of Warcraft, being a game (it’s true), builds on all of these. Where it goes further in my view is in firstly, providing us with a world which is probably more fleshed out, more prone to exploration and freedom of movement (more real?) than the worlds normally found in games. Secondly, the fact that WoW enables us to create our own characters, customize them and make them our own, also has some pretty big implications. I won’t explore those here as that’d be beyond the scope of this post, suffice it to say the consequences for how we perceive our bodies and craft our identities are huge.

Getting back to the main question of escapism, what’s incredibly interesting with a game like WoW is that it actually presents us with this bizarre mix of the actual and virtual world. We’re never REALLY escaping as we’re always having to deal with other people. I guess in that sense the most pure, ULTIMATE (yes) form of productive escapism would be RPing. As in RP we truly transcend our own actual bodies, worlds, and ultimately identities, and come to take on other bodies, identities, and inhabit other worlds. For all of us who don’t RP I don’t think we can ever truly sever the connection with the real world in a game like WoW due to the omnipresence of other human beings, but I don’t think anyone’ll argue that the potential for escapism isn’t incredibly strong.

Personally, I appreciate that we’re given this potential, the realisation of which pleases me enormously. The child in me is happy that he’s able to live out all his wildest fantasties. The control freak’s happy he can finally solve every problem. The stressed student who’s grown weary of the current pace of society is happy he can slow things down a bit. And the escapist is happy he can push the button on that watch.

THAT’s what WoW is missing. Virtual wedgies.

It seems a pity to break my blog-fast by gorging on a large lump of sugary complaining, but – well, there is no but; it’s a pity, to be sure.  Especially as patch 4.1 has continued the trend of making important, timely and welcome quality of life changes to a game which otherwise should really be shuffling off to sip herbal tea and play chequers in the park by now.

Yes, Blizzard continue to do a good job by keeping WoW updated and moving forward.  No, I don’t always appreciate all their changes – I’ve not had a lot of time to play recently and I felt a bit foolishly and self-consciously resentful to have to log in just to catch up on all the changed mechanics and inevitable addon updates.  But Blizzard also seem to be using content patches to experiment with stuff lately, and elemental AoE has apparently become the test subject for 4.1.

In one of his recent Watercooler posts, Ghostcrawler talked about complexity in area-of-effect damage rotations:

On the topic of AE, some specs have some fairly interesting AE rotations, such as Fire mages (Flame Orb, Flamestrike, Combustion, Living Bomb) and Survival hunters (Serpent Spread, Explosive Trap and Multi-Shot). Other specs have really simple rotations, such as channeling a targeted spell over and over. Boring. Going forward, we’re going to make more of an effort to make sure everyone has a reasonable AE rotation that at least involves more than one button.

Elemental’s been singled out as not complex enough ever since the Wrath of the Lich King beta, to the point where two expansions later we’ve got a DPS “rotation” which manages to look just a wee bit complicated on paper but is rambunctiously complex to pull off in an actual fight.  At least a little bit of the complexity is caused by what can best be described as bugs, like searing totem’s exhausting inability to care about attacking anything or the fire elementals who manage to impressively and consistently suicide ten seconds after being summoned.  gg no re.  And at least a little bit more of that complexity is caused by class design choices made five or six years ago which don’t really seem relevant anymore yet interact in frustrating ways with new design directions – thinking especially of the linked shock cooldown here.

When elemental was given a channelled AoE as our iconic 31-point talent for Cataclysm, I wasn’t really too bothered.  It was a cool spell in Warcraft 3 and elemental AoE has always been weak, complicated and frustrating.  Now we could finally just spam the shaman version of blizzard and do decent, reliable area damage with a neat animation to boot.  Despite being “boring” it was a huge quality of life change and helped offset the growing complexity and finickitiness (that’s a word) of our single target damage.

Test bed

Rahana knows how to cope with change.

4.1 hit Earthquake hard.  It does half the damage it used to (it never did all that much in the first place) and has a new ten second cooldown; it also has a 2.5 second cast time instead of being channelled, and now functions basically like Flame Strike instead of Blizzard while still costing a daunting amount of mana.  The combination of this long cast time, long cooldown, high mana cost, low damage and static location make it almost a liability as a 31-point talent – ridiculously hard to place (and if you get it wrong, wait ten seconds then try again), hilariously unlikely to affect any mobs for its full duration, and so expensive it’s tempting just to not bother trying.

The reason EQ was hit so hard is because Fire Nova has been quite cleverly revamped: instead of spurting from your fire totem, it now explodes off of anything that’s affected by Flame Shock.  Because it’s instant cast and tied to the shock DoT, we can use it while we’re moving, and even while the mobs to be AoEed are moving – both otherwise still major weak points with normal elemental damage.  And Flame Shock is a spell we cast in our single target rotation anyway, so that’s good, right?

Well, yes, it’s a neat idea.  But FN now suffers the same problem that Mind Sear suffered until being changed recently – it doesn’t affect the target you cast it from.  Also, often the most important things to AoE die quickly, and Flame Shock is a spell which does damage slowly over time – casting it on something which is going to be dead in 10 seconds isn’t very useful.  And to top it all off, the damage of Fire Nova is so low that you need to have several flame shocks up to explode all at once before it’s competitive – and Flame Shock still has a 6 second cooldown, shared with our other shocks.

These things can be tweaked as simple balance changes, and I expect them to be.  But it’s really exposed and put even more pressure on the already frustrating single-target linked shock cooldown situation, as well as reminding us elementals of the concerns we voiced during the Cataclysm beta about the design direction of the elemental talent tree which were never really satisfactorily addressed.  Getting a complicated new AoE system which, for now, requires a huge amount of effort for a pathetic amount of reward, isn’t very inspiring in that context.

More than most specs, Elemental has always been about more than just doing damage – totems have to be managed in terms of position, duration and type; we are frequently on interrupt, purging, offhealing or kiting duty; we have a number of Big Important Fragile Cooldowns to take care of and we don’t have any quick movement or survival abilities to let us relax our guard during a boss fight.  None of this has changed, at least not in ten-man raiding – but we now have to do all this while managing an increasingly complicated and frustrating damage rotation.  We just have so many abilities now which do such similar things in such different ways and the game keeps demanding that we use all of them at once – so many cooldowns, durations, positions and targets to juggle all together and all at the same time – there’s just no let up for us in a fight, no moment of calm where we can catch our breath and take in what’s going on.

No let up

If AoE is called for – well, let’s take Maloriak as an example.  I have to keep him focused so I can interrupt Arcane Storm and purge his heal-over-time effect, while tracking where he is and when so I know when to Fire Nova, while tab-Flame Shocking as many adds as I can every five seconds, while watching my Fire Nova cooldown, while watching my Chain Lightning cooldown, while trying to predict where the mobs will be in three seconds so I can place Earthquake and maybe a Magma Totem.  On top of that I have to look at my mana and decide how much AoE I can even afford.  Then when it all ends – far too quickly for me to have built up enough Flame Shocks to explode – I have to rearrange my brain to deal with switching back to our complicated single target DPS rotation.  Right now it’s all five times harder what with being new and all, and I guess not playing much for the last couple of months doesn’t help either.

Elemental’s taken a lot of flak as being too simple in the past, criticism which I never really agreed with even though I understood it.  I always saw it as a spec which was easy to grasp at a basic level but very hard to really eke the very best out of.  I appreciated that it had enough simplicity in spell usage to allow for greater concentration on the peripheral stuff I talked about above.  But I think Elemental ended up in the developers’ minds as being a prime target for complicatification (also a word), and once the single target stuff was nicely complicatified, they saw the huge opportunity that shaman design history allowed for a nice big complicification of AoE too.

So we’re the guinea pigs for non-boring AoE, or the glorious recipients of an entirely new and fun way of approaching multi-mob fights – depends which way you look at it, really.  I’m not against the idea, but I am against the implementation.  Perhaps mostly I’m tired of new fangled complexity being hung on rusty old hooks, which at this point, is something WoW simply cannot avoid no matter how hard it tries.

4.1 brought many welcome changes, and I feel I should welcome this one as well.  But I’m not enjoying it.  I resent it.  I want our totems to work properly at last, I want to not feel like I’m fighting geriatric design choices made 6 years ago whenever I do DPS, and I don’t want to have to shut down all other brain functions just to cope with a brief period of AoE.  Most of all I want to stop bitching about it and find something positive to say, but instead?  Well, I also play a frost mage, and she can just happily spam Blizzard.

A couple weeks ago I talked about my dislike for trash, and the strong phrasing of that post along with a call to arms to all trash-loving readers prompted some reaction here and there. Which was great! I’d like to elaborate a bit on the subject now by moving off into a related tangent. Instead of having another big whinge about what raids do wrong I’ll take a more positive stance this time, more specifically to what raids do very RIGHT from my point of view (not that this is the only thing they do right): boss design. I’ll go into how Blizzard is overcoming all odds and delivering boss encounters which are really more entertaining than you’d expect them to be, all things considered.

Full disclosure: as a WoW player, I consider myself a raider first and foremost. I love a lot of things about the game and have spent ages questing, exploring, grinding reputations, running dungeons, etc. But when it comes down to it, the primary reason I keep playing WoW and have played it for so long is the raids. I often find myself losing interest in alts because I know that at the end of the day they won’t be my main raiding character anyway, which to me is as good as feeling entirely useless. I want my character to be there when the content is still challenging, when it still feels like I’m making a difference. Not when everything is on farm and I’m just there to hoard loot.

A big reason for that is just how much I love the boss design. I consider it probably the pinnacle of cooperative gaming. Considering I’m not much of a PvPer (not just in WoW, I always seem to enjoy playing with others far more than playing against them), few cooperative gaming experiences are more satisfying for me than raiding. Few things require as much high-level strategising, coordination, cooperation, while still making each individual feel like he’s playing an important role, and making sure he or she doesn’t feel bored because everything is happening in the ether somewhere.

Blizzard does have the benefit of a playerbase that’s accepted this particular school of boss design (I mean accepted in the broadest sense, as obviously there’s still quite a bit of protesting going on about things like difficulty). It’s largely based on trial and error, which is quite contrary to both much of the rest of the game and gaming’s current trends in general. I’m assuming my raid group’s not alone in having to attempt most new bosses – generally speaking, not just in this tier – at least five or so times on average (and often much more) before getting them down. Compare this to standard questing, or even heroic dungeons at their most extreme with a decent group, and there’s just a huge gap noteable. Which is fine by me, I’m just saying we, the playerbase, have afforded Blizzard quite some freedom in terms of challenge and mechanical complexity by accepting this school of boss design.

Regardless, the mere fact that Blizzard still manages to surprise and challenge us with new encounters after all these years is quite a remarkable thing, I’d say. Consider for a moment the challenges they needs to overcome when designing a boss fight. First there’s the inherent difficulty of designing encounters for a number of people this great.

I’ve already pointed out how incredibly difficult it must be to come up with mechanics (and a basic combat system, but much of that’s in place) which challenge players both at a meta/raid-wide level, and on an individual level. Everyone needs to have enough buttons to press to not get bored, while fitting into an overarching strategy which far exceeds the personal level. That in itself seems hard enough to do for 10 or 25 people (I’m going to disregard 40 here, but there’s an interesting related discussion in that as well: personally I don’t think Blizzard would have been able to design bosses of increasing complexity as they have if they stuck with the 40-player model). Hell, singleplayer RPG designers seem to have a lot more trouble coming up with interesting mechanics for THEIR boss fights, so that’s saying something.

But there are other things to keep in mind. There’s a humongous number of boss encounters, both in-and outside of raids, most of those in several different difficulty “modes”, implemented in the game already. Coming up with fresh mechanics at this stage of the game seems like a cause for tremendous headaches. Couple that with some pretty rough technological constraints: WoW is old. By technology and gaming standards, it’s prehistoric. The engine is massively dated despite continuous tweaking, the combat system imposes some arbitrary constraints the devs simply can’t get rid of at this point. And on top of that there’s standard MMO technology issues to consider, such as lag. There’s only so much any designer’s able to do within a framework with boundaries that tight.

And in addition to all of that, they’ve worked themselves into another corner by giving us players the freedom to develop and use tools of our own. Teamspeak, Deadly Boss Mods, countless websites sharing strategies – really handy stuff for us, more things to consider when designing boss fights for them. So yeah, in the end it frankly sort of baffles me that somehow, considering all of the above, we’re still challenged and surprised by boss fights. So kudos to Blizzard on that one.

Of course, it’d be TOTALLY unfair of me to not criticise them at all. Blizzard gets a lot of flak about their boss design, both from the more hardcore end of the playerbase and the more casual one (sorry for perpetuating false dichotomies here). Bosses are often derivative, reuse earlier mechanics, new mechanics are just gimmicks like the meter extravaganza in this tier or the vehicles back in WotLK. Or it’s all just too easy/hard, take your pick. But honestly, keeping in mind everything they need to take into account, I think they’re doing a pretty fine job keeping us entertained in raids. Let’s just hope they won’t run out of ideas soon. I’m honestly surprised they haven’t yet.

The other day my esteemed co-tenant Razzmatazz posted about how he dislikes raid trash, generating a variety of comments both here and elsewhere in defense of the humble trash mob and its ilk.  Amongst the many excellent counter-arguments was my own pathetic “me too”, because by and large I’m actually very fond of trash, at least as a concept, despite being extremely aware of how badly wrong it can go in execution.  I was actually mildly surprised that Razz held up Karazhan an example of a great raid instance considering how utterly jam-packed it was with dangerous, difficult and sometimes downright obnoxious trash, and also a little surprised that he only mentioned Trial of the Crusader (ToC) in passing.  Because of course, what most people remember ToC as is “the great trashless raid”.

Thinking back, though, I don’t actually think that absence of trash was the primary distinguishing characteristic of that raid.  I don’t even think it was what caused it to leave such a sour taste in so many raiders’ mouths.  Oh sure it probably didn’t help, but the placement of trash is something of a fine art: for every example of it being horribly annoying (hello, Sindragosa spider event thing, you horrible scrap of rank filth you) there’s a counter example of it being pedagogical and fun (such as the skeletal giants before Marrowgar – trap roulette included!).  Similarly it’s easy to think of examples where different amounts of trash are used for different effect. Though I know Razz was arguing the case for a different pacing mechanism to the now-familiar trash pack, I think ye olde trash packe still has a fair bit of mileage left in it.  And of course the absence of trash between bosses is a pacing design in itself.

Trial of the Crusader, though, was unique in a whole bunch of respects, to the extent where it could be considered the great counter-experiment to the Great Experiment of Ulduar, and one I’ve wanted to ruminate on in text for a very long time.  Unlike Ulduar though, most of the lessons learned from ToC were probably of the “let’s not do this again” sort.

Architecture

The thing ToC is most infamous for other than its lack of trash is its setting: “room of the crusader”, as Tam referred to it.  While I’ve heard plenty of complaints recently about the deficiency of winged raids, ToC didn’t have any wings, or legs, or fingers or toes or any other metaphorically tenuous example of anatomy.  It just was.  And what it was was just a big boring room.

Not that there’s anything wrong with big boring rooms.  Heck, the thing was set up as a sort of coliseum in the best traditions of epic gladiatorial showdowns.  Exactly why this concept didn’t translate that well to WoW could make for an interesting discussion.  Perhaps because gladiatorial arenas are principally designed for the spectators rather than the participants, who were at risk of being fed to large hungry felines even if they won.  Perhaps because such a design focuses so intensely on the quality of the combat taking place in the arena – but then, ToC had its fair share of interesting fight mechanics.  For whatever reason though, the Big Dumb Room just didn’t work.  Even at the end when it collapsed and you fell and fell and FELL you ended up in… another big dumb room.  (Or dead thanks to hilarious water walking antics, which I would NEVER do to a fellow raider, of course.)

Aesthetics

One possible contributor to the failure of the Big Dumb Room was its setting, which was basically colourless, gloomy and miserable.  Again, these are not necessarily bad things, but they can be done poorly. I am one of those despicable people who never liked the Icecrown zone in the first place; I didn’t like MC, I didn’t like BWL, I didn’t like ICC – all way too gloomy and harsh on the eyes.  Strange as it is to say, I like my evil megalomaniac lairs of doom to be, well, pretty.  Or at least interesting.  I have no idea how to do that with a place like Icecrown, but there have to be some ways of alleviating the depressing and oppressive effects of a gloomy surrounding.  There’s a fine line to walk between “impressively evil looking” and “depressingly forlorn” – or perhaps an even finer line between creating an effective atmosphere to engage players, and creating an atmosphere that’s too overwhelming.

Either way, ToC was dull, dull, dull.  It failed to inspire visually on any level, even on the outside where it was kinda cool to be able to see the whole structure take shape.  That’s still the thing I dislike most about it.  Heck, I even hated the armor sets added with ToC.  I resented having to swap my pretty tier 8 for the ugly tier 9.

Narrative support

ToC’s place in the narrative should’ve been simple and well defined: the leader of the upcoming siege on Icecrown sets up an event to recruit the world’s best champions and whittle them and hone them into an effective fighting force.  You’re there to prove your worth and to earn the rewards which will equip you for the final assault – there should be a sense of importance and anticipation.  Somehow those were missing.  Somehow it all felt a bit farcical.  Yes Tirion, we understand you want us to be big strong goats and gnomes but how is being killed by these giant worms going to help.

Added to that was the uncomfortable nature of some of the in-instance narrative.  I always felt the faction champions fight in particular was very poorly introduced, though I can’t honestly think of how they could possibly have done it any better.  Wilfred Fizzlebang’s antics are now legendary, but when the Lich King showed up at the end to taunt us and like totally ruin the laminate flooring they just had put in, for cryin’ out loud, and oh I didn’t know we had a basement I guess that’s cool but what do you mean there’s already a tenant? – um, as I was saying – the Lich King appearances by that point just felt cheap and pointless because we knew he was just going to taunt us and run away.  It was only in the last, last moments of the last, last fight of the entire expansion that we finally found out WHY Arthas had been showing up to taunt us into killing all his servants, and by then it was too late to salvage all those earlier appearances.  Rather than the LK’s appearance helping to make the instance seem more important, the instance’s perceived triviality tainted the LK’s appearance and degraded his image even further in the eyes of at least some of us who experienced it.

Ultimately I think the daily quests, while brilliant in many respects, really harmed the overall narrative as they contributed to the feeling of “silly” rather than “important”.  Or maybe that’s just me.  The whole package – along with the jousting and the 5-man instance – should have made for a narrative bonanza.  Instead the jousting felt silly and the 5-man just hastened the process of us getting sick of that Big Dumb Room.

Timing

Blizzard ‘fessed up to this themselves – they released ToC too soon (insert Executus joke here).  A lot of folks were still getting plenty of mileage out of Ulduar, and suddenly the entirety of its rewards were rendered irrelevant in one fell swoop.  The only reason to keep raiding Ulduar was to finish off achievements, which were effectively nerfed anyway by the influx of new gear from ToC.  I’m sure plenty of raiders from the more hardcore end of the spectrum were through with Ulduar, but were they really ready for another massive grind yet themselves?  Because ToC forced raiders into doing exactly that – grinding and grinding and oh boy, grinding.

The main mechanism governing this grindfest was the emblem loot system, whereby the only way to get the new tier of gear was through Emblems.  Lots of emblems.  And ToC was the main source of these emblems.  Even upgrading to the next sub-tier required yet more emblems.  It was meant to be a pacing mechanism for gear which was (arguably) introduced too soon, but what that meant was players who cared about upgrading their gear just wanted to get as many emblems as possible as fast as possible.

Normal, Heroic, 10, 25…

And this is how they did that, because ToC was the raid which pioneered the normal/heroic distinction.  Remember that?  Ulduar had hardmodes which built on the Sarth+drakes idea, but ToC was the first time we had that toggle between “normal mode” and “hard mode”.  It was also unique in that the toggle switched between unique instance IDs which didn’t share lockouts, which meant that you could do normal and hard modes in the same lockout.  And, as with all Wrath of the Lich King raids, the 10 and 25-player versions were also on separate lockouts.

The upshot of this combination of lockout mechanics was that a hardcore 25s raider could feel obliged to do ToC a mind-shattering four times a week, and that’s if they only had one character they raided on.  I know of many less progressed 25-player guilds would do the 25 normal, 10 normal and at least part of the 10 hard versions every week.  And even the few 10-player “strict” guilds out there who avoided 25-player normal because of gear pollution (which was itself at its most serious during ToC) had to do both normal and hard modes each week to maximise their emblem gain.  It was a truly brutal regime.

Coming so soon after the difficult and lengthy (though considerably more entertaining) Ulduar grind and combined with the Big Dumb Room with its many attractive shades of grey and the (in my opinion) unattractive armor pieces themselves, this was a total disaster and I’m pretty sure the main reason so many folk got so utterly sick of ToC so fast.

RNG and gear walls and other minor inconveniences

The proverbial icing on the cake, at least in 10-player, was the RNG of faction champions (in this metaphor, cake is bad) which could really screw with your raid if you had the wrong “comp”, combined with the stringent class/spec requirements of heroic Anub’arak and the gear brick wall that he presented.  When my raid group finished clearing ToC heroic, we had a few shots at Anub’arak.  We tweaked our strategy, we practiced, and we practiced some more… and eventually realised the only way to get that final 7% off his health bar was to gear up the entire raid a whole lot more.  It was over a month of solid grinding before we came back, but the plus side is we spent remarkably few tries on him before getting that first kill.

I also remember, fresh out of 10-player Ulduar, how utterly punishing Northrend Beasts was on our tanks and healers and how easy the rest of the instance was by comparison.  The same was true in heroic, with Beasts being The Gear Check™ and nothing else posing a serious challenge until heroic Anub himself.  I’m not going to flat out call that bad design, but I did think it a bit odd at the time.  I do also wonder if putting the (second) hardest fight first kinda spoiled the flow of the instance, especially given its lack of trash mobs for pacing.

Trash

Which brings me to, yes, it possibly went wrong with trash.  Trash can give a great sense of space, place  and pace to an instance.  But ToC already lacked those in its raw architecture and setting , as well as in its surprisingly weak narrative context.  Would trash have helped?  I don’t think that lacking trash is inherently bad, because in many ways the absence of trash can be as useful in building a convincing environment as its presence.  Ultimately, though, I don’t think ToC had what it took to do that with or without trash.

Ulduar

The real problem with ToC, though, was probably just that it came after Ulduar, an instance many of us fell in love with very quickly and which itself came after a tier of content most people felt decidedly ambivalent about.  Ulduar was truly special and would’ve been hard to follow up by anything, so it’s no wonder ToC felt poor by comparison.  Nobody who’s just assaulted the vast Siege area, travelled on Mimiron’s tram or witnessed the celestial pyrotechnics of Algalon’s pull is going to be impressed by a big grey room.  Nobody who’s fought through 14 unique encounters, many of which had several unique variations through hard/harder/achievement modes, is going to feel much excitement at the prospect of a mere 5 new bosses who are basically the same on every raid size and difficulty setting.  And it’s worth remembering that Ulduar even had a cinematic trailer to generate hype.

Success

The sad thing is that ToC did a lot of really creative things, not just with its experiments in setting and trash and whatnot, but in terms of interesting and unique boss fights and mechanics.  Arguably the most boring fight in the place was Jaraxxus, and even he involved interrupting, tanking and DPSing adds, DPSing portals, kiting fires and all sorts.  Twins used a totally unique and hilariously arcade-esque variation on the traditional “two bosses, two damage schools” idea.  Beasts made us fight three totally unique bosses in a row with no break in between, each of which would’ve made an interesting encounter in and of themselves.  Faction Champions was possibly the most frustrating encounter ever designed for anyone who’d avoided PvP, and even for PvPers was frustrating precisely because it was so different from PvP.  And Anub’arak is I think the first time healers ever had to keep the raid at as low health as possible.

I still have plenty of fond memories of ToC to go alongside my general loathing of the place, and honestly I’m glad it didn’t have any trash because it would’ve been pointless and unhelpful.  Despite that it’s easy to see why it was received so poorly and remembered so harshly, and why it’s become essentially a byword for bad raid design.  As an experiment, though, it was presumably a complete success – it’s helped Blizzard understand how to make their future raids better, even while admitting that they can’t go back to some of the stuff I liked most about a place like Ulduar.

Personal update!!!

Before I go, just a word about my posting or lack thereof. I’ve got several drafts I’m still sitting on because I’ve not had the energy to finish them off, and I don’t feel I have the expertise or authority at the moment to be comfortable commenting on matters of theorycraft or strategy. My order of priorities is roughly University > Guild > TotemSpot > Planet of the Hats, and only the first two of those are getting even remotely the sort of level of attention I’d like at the moment.  So I’ve not, and will not, disappear, but it’s likely I won’t be posting a huge amount in the near future either.  Plus I’m doing less blog reading at the moment than I’d like and I always feel a bit uncomfortable posting without a bit of blogosphere-perspective!

(Also sorry Razz for posting right after you like some kind of attention usurping usurper, but… you gotta play it where it lands, and stuff.)

I’m sick of trash. More specifically, raid trash. Entering that room in Bastion of Twilight right after Halfus and thinking “hurray, we’ll reach the next boss in half an hour” is getting on my nerves. Trash isn’t fun. It’s usually of the “you don’t really have to pay attention” variety, which basically means you’re playing on auto-pilot for half a raid, lazily pressing roughly the right buttons, occasionally having someone die because everyone’s convinced the trash doesn’t really pose a real threat to the raid anyway. It feels like having to wade through large amounts of boring stuff in a raid to occasionally get the privilege to do the actually fun fights. It’s bad game design. Let me try to argue why, and propose some possible solutions.

This is hardly a new issue. WoW players have been moaning about trash since basically the DAWN OF TIME, also known as vanilla. In fact, the issue’s older than that still. But WoW’s specific brand of raid design really brought it to the forefront. Anyone who raided Molten Core back in vanilla will be able to tell you that, son, you’ve got nuthin’ to complain about. And they wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Things used to be much worse. MUCH worse. Millions of trash mobs in a single instance, with about three different kinds of mobs in total, with zero abilities each. Only to fight a boss which wasn’t much more than a glorified trash mob in terms of spells and fight strategy. In an environment blander than Bland Street in Blandville, in the country of Bland. But I digress.

We’ve come a long way since then. Is what I’d like to say, but we actually haven’t. Sure, things are better these days. Blackwing Descent has pleasingly small numbers of trash which can quite quickly be disposed of, and the little there is often has some interesting ability to keep you on your toes. I’d name trash epics as a positive evolution as well, but those aren’t exactly new. They’ve been around since Molten Core, they just occasionally went away for a while. The thing is that Blizzard seems to have a sort of schizophrenic stance on trash. I’m not really sure where they want to go with it. Blackwing Descent, as mentioned, is almost empty aside from the bosses. Trial of the Crusader WAS empty aside from the bosses. Some bosses have two trash mobs guarding them, others have entire ARMIES. Some mobs are interesting and require you to pay attention, most are basically harmless and lazily designed. That’s not variety, to me it shows Blizzard’s just a tiny bit confused. And I can’t really blame them.

They’ve made it terribly clear in the past what exactly their intentions are with trash mobs in raids. They’re a pacing mechanism, and little else. Blizzard’s not exactly ashamed about that. They just don’t want you to clear a raid in an hour, hopping from boss fight to boss fight instantly (but what about Trial of the Crusader? I’M SO CONFUSED). Which I guess is understandable. Is it though? Why CAN’T doing raids just be about the bosses? It’s not like you generally run out of stuff to do all that quickly, unless you’re in a very hardcore raid group. We spend most of our raids wiping on bosses we haven’t killed before, or wiping on bosses which aren’t “on farm” yet. That wouldn’t change without the trash pacing mechanism.

To me the whole idea of trash as a pacing mechanism seems to stem from an old school of design which we’re basically past now. “Stuff” in WoW used to take time. This was true for practically everything. Obviously, most things still DO take time. But not nearly as much as they once did. Blizzard has taken great efforts over the past few years to get rid of the grind from just about every aspect of the game. And by extension, to make sure it doesn’t take a player several hours to finally start having fun. Reputation through running dungeons. LFD. Daily quests (granted, those could be seen as a different kind of grind, but I think few people would argue they’re not superior to the good old “collect 1500 timbermaw feathers” model). The examples are many and varied. I’d argue a great deal of the fundamental design changes over the past few years have at least been partially caused by that motivation to – in most cases literally- “speed things up”.

Trash isn’t fun. Does anyone think trash is fun? If you do, please tell me in the comments, because I’d like to have a word with you (a friendly one, I swear). It’s never been fun. It’s always been a way to slow us down. Why does trash still need to slow us down while everything else in the game these days seems to be designed with the specific goal of NOT slowing us down, of doing everything to make us have fun as quickly as possible? I don’t understand. We wouldn’t blaze through the raid content, we promise. The difficulty of the bosses right now will make sure of that. The problem’s only augmented by that ‘other’ raid design element in WoW: the fact that farming is basically required to make any progress, an inherent part of endgame as we all want those shiny purples to optimise our characters. So when trash might be vaguely entertaining the first time through a raid, it’s practically vomit-inducing the tenth time through. Get rid of it Blizzard, please.

What do you mean you don’t want to? Can’t really blame them. The problem is: do WE really want to get rid of trash entirely? I honestly don’t think so. Was TotC as dull as it was because we were forced to hop from boss to boss, with no interruptions in between to help us get a breather? Maybe partially. I’m sure things’d be aided by more interesting boss design (were you the guy who loved Faction Champions? get out, we don’t want your kind over here), and the fact that raids usually aren’t made up of a single room probably helps too. Regardless, maybe there’s some use for in-between-boss interruptions. So, I’ll try and come up with a couple of other solutions.

Perhaps other games can form a source of inspiration in this regard. Let’s look at the recently released Dragon Age 2, for example. Oh wait. Moving on.

I think anything that adds “flavour” helps, really. Epics is one thing, at least they provide some form of reward for wading through all of those mobs. Same with reputation, seeing a bar very slowly increase to get a nice ring at the end of it is an extremely simple mechanic that WORKS to make things ever so slightly more engaging. It doesn’t impact the fundamental problem at heart here though, which is that actually killing trash isn’t fun. Fortunately Blizzard’s made some steps in the right direction. I think moving more towards the mini-boss school of design (as seen in Blackwing Descent or even Icecrown Citadel’s dogs) is definitely a good thing as well – at least to me it seems far more interesting to be fighting one or two big angry mobs with a couple of abilities that actually matter than a pack of five which don’t do much but generic “damage”. Maybe add some daily or weekly quests not involved with bosses, but with trash.

Or if you really want to get interesting, add some different kind of pacing mechanic. Something we’ve also seen in the past, but not nearly enough. The chess event wasn’t really a boss fight, I’d say, just a more interesting way of breaking up the dungeon (God, Karazhan did SO MUCH right – a story for another time, I suppose). A vehicle related section à la Ulduar might get boring after the fifteenth time as well, but at least it mixes things up a bit. Timed runs in a Zul’Aman sense also manage to make even the most mundane trash mob an intense EVENT. Looking at other games more than WoW itself, two elements I really tend to appreciate as well are some form of environmental obstacles or some basic puzzles. Although fitting those into WoW’s obviously quite unique (in comparison with singleplayer games) 10/25-person multiplayer environment, especially considering they need to be easily repeatable without getting boring (hardly the case with a lot of singleplayer puzzles), might be quite a stretch. Just ANYTHING that’s not more generic trash, please.

The problem with all of these is simple: they all require far more design work to implement than just putting five packs of generic trash mobs between us and the next boss. I can scarcely imagine how much design and programming went into the chess event, at least compared to “generic trash”, and the result – while entertaining – wasn’t exactly the greatest thing ever. Regardless, I think trash in its current, primarily Bastion of Twilight-format, has run its course. It’s time for a change. I could make a bin-related joke here, but that would be gratuitous so I will leave it at that. What do you guys think?

Any World of Warcraft player who regularly browses the less.. “sophisticated” forums will probably have noticed them: droves of players arguing that everything was so wonderful and fantastic and magical in vanilla, in those first couple of years of play, as everything was uncharted territory and we were all just winging it. I don’t entirely disagree with this, but I also think the argument’s never really been properly developed because the whole thing relies so deeply on FEELINGS, on our own personal experience. It’s not something that’s necessarily a consequence of game design, something that Blizzard can fix by changing something about the game. Or something that’s been lost by a move they made in the previous expansions, as some players seem determined to argue.

You know, that magical feeling you got when you were first playing, when everything was still fresh and new and awesome. When you weren’t obsessed with the stats yet or killing that next raid boss, but were just having fun without obligations. You know! When the world seemed so big you’d never explore all of it, a dungeon lasted 5 hours to get through half of it, and a battleground lasted days. You know? That kind of thing. It was magic, man. That’s what it was. And then the magic started slowly fading away when you became more familiar with the game mechanics, and everything was reduced to a mess of numbers and time frames, and the world lost its mystery, every nook and cranny explored a million times by those willing, and laid bare in Youtube videos watched by those unwilling. And the magic was lost. You know?

The feelings expressed in that argument are also not, as opponents might assume, just a consequence of rose-tinted glasses and nostalgia. That’s part of it, of course. Because I’d say (and I’m certainly not the only one in that) that the game’s only gotten better over the years, and that there have been so many improvements in game mechanics and general entertainment value that I can scarcely say the old design was superior. But again: this isn’t a matter of purely game design. It’s a matter of everything still being new and fresh and unknown, of experiencing something completely wonderful for the first time.

Expressing why a certain gaming (or cultural, to look a bit broader) experience is unique or special is no easy thing. Finding the words to do so can be incredibly hard, because there are two seperate things to consider, which often get mixed up together: on the one hand there’s the actual game design, the stuff that make the game tick, the purely structural mechanics that can be very clearly explained and defined, simply because they form the “outline” and framework of our experience. Our experience of WoW is in large part shaped by whatever structure Blizzard wishes to place us in. The examples are all around and range from minor things to rather extreme things – you only need to look at how an entirely mechanical change like LFD alters the way we interact and behave in the game to realise that the game-structural aspects simply can’t be ignored when talking about our experience of the game.

Now, those aspects can be described, they can be criticised and taken apart. Most game critics and journalists, when reviewing a game, still focus on exactly that: they go through a purely structural account of how the game works (these are the different systems in place, this is how you level up, these are the different kinds of weapons, this is what the graphics look like) and base their judgement on that. But the experience we gamers – or in this case WoW players – have goes far beyond that. There are a lot of intangible and very personal aspects to our game experience which can’t be that easily captured in words. And just like a film critic doesn’t focus on the purely film-structural aspects when trying to get across what makes a certain film so special, I don’t think we can ever rationalise everything we’re doing in games by always focusing on the mechanics. This is where the problem of language comes in though.

In an ideal world we as gamers, but also we as the blogging community or we as WoW players, would be able to develop a language to express both sides of the game experience I’ve just explained: both the mechanical framework on the hand and the personal experience that builds on that framework on the other. Right now, I think we’re faced with the problem that most of the language, and most of the communication from professional writers, has focused on the first side of the game experience: the mechanical, game-structural one. Which means a vocabulary has been developed to allow them (and us) to talk about that side. It’s a vocabulary that’s not always as clear as it could be, with words like “gameplay” or “immersion” clouding the debates because they’re so vague and quite meaningless. The consequence is that, even in casual conversations about games, people tend to go back to that game-structural, mechanical side, because it’s the easy one to focus on: not only is it less nebulous and personal than the OTHER side of the experience, the language is also developed enough to debate it.

So, returning to the WoW argument I started this post with, I think there are two intertwined issues here, both related with language. The first  issue is that the language used in those complaints is almost inherently vague because it focuses on the second side of the game experience I’ve tried to describe: the personal one, not the game-structural one. It’s talking about the player’s feelings about the game more than any factors of game design at the base of the issue. Which means it’s already difficult to capture in words to begin with.

The second issue is that, in presenting a “counterargument” to this, a lot of players seem to fall into the trap of attacking it based on game-structural aspects: “you are wrong, because this and this and this improvement has been made to the game since vanilla, so you can’t possibly argue the game was better in vanilla”. Which is not what the argument is about in the first place, and which as I’ve tried to show in this post is partially a consequence of the game-structural language already being developed.

The question is what to do about all this. Do we just stop talking about our personal game experiences because we’re doomed to being vague for all eternity? That seems like a silly idea. Do we somehow try to develop a language, a specific jargon to talk about it and transcend the usual game-structural arguments? In an ideal world, that’d happen. Perhaps it’s also a consequence of this medium being very young still, and a language organically being established over time as a medium grows. I hope so.

In the meantime, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to adapt an openness to other players’ feelings about a game on the one hand (however vaguely expressed), and not always trying to reduce a personal account of a game experience to game-structural grounds on the other. Being open-minded is certainly a good thing in general, and it’d help us along while we’re still stuck in the dark, feeling our way around trying to find the words and explain the inexplicable.