On Choice

Dàchéng the mage in Azeroth was discussing morality yesterday. Today it is my turn. Me, her alter ego on Earth.

The boundaries of Dàchéng's world are set by Blizzard. Within those, she must make moral choices. But she can only make choices that are allowed by Blizzard. She can no more choose to attack King Varian Wrynn than I on Earth can choose to cast arcane barrage on a passing cyclist. The physics of these two worlds are different, and so are the moral choices available to the inhabitants of these two worlds. Like Saxsymage's rogue Saiphy, Dàchéng would like to help Vanessa Van Cleef. They cannot. The choice to do this is unavailable to them, just as the choice of taking Lordaeron back from the undead is not available to us, despite the efforts of many RP guilds on many realms. Though the adventurers of Azeroth wield unimaginable power, and can kill gods with the power of their thoughts, they cannot fix the gate in Lordaeron. They can't even chop a nearby tree down to fashion into a door. Those choices simply do not exist in Azeroth.

Sometimes we, the players on Earth, are reminded that some of the choices we can make on Earth are not available in Azeroth. That's when the game reminds us that we are just playing a game. That's one of the ways in which immersion breaks. The art of creating a great virtual world is to minimize these moments, by making it seem as if we have sufficient choice in Azeroth to direct our characters as our Earthly morals would dictate such a character would behave, or as we would behave if we were that character. And when we have the ability to make such choices, this is when we feel flow most, this is when we are most immersed.

Importantly, we bring our earthly morals into the make-believe world of the game, and (when we are fully immersed in the game) imbue the characters of the game with reality. We believe that these coloured dots on the computer screen are people. For of course it is not immoral to press F1 and make some coloured dots disappear. It's only when in the flow of the game that we can suffer moral quandaries by confusing these coloured dots with real people, and by confusing pressing F1 with ripping out their hearts.

A few years ago, Brenda Romero (Brenda Braithwaite as she was then) made a very interesting game called Train. In this game, you load yellow figurines into boxcars of a train, and then move your train along its course to its destination. Impeding your progress are a number of randomly drawn cards that can slow you down or derail you, free some of the figurines, and so on. When you reach your destination, its name is revealed as Auschwitz.

When described baldly like that, it may not evoke the same strong emotions in you as it did in the players. That's because they were immersed into the milieu by the board and its setup and by the gameplay, which were chosen to subconsciously evoke the Nazi era and put the players in the zone. You can read and watch an interview about it on the Wall Street Journal. What is fascinating to me is that, when players discovered what was going on in the game, they reacted as if those yellow figurines were real living, breathing people. They felt guilty about transporting the figurines to Auschwitz, and they tried to use the rules to free them. They were in the flow, immersed.

Of course, nobody dies. They are yellow figurines, not real people. But when you are immersed in the game, in any game, you treat it as real, and its rules as immutable like the laws of physics. Thus is is that people cry when their figurines reach the final destination, and are elated when they can use the rules to free the figurines or redirect the train. Yes. Even when they understand what's going on, they often still stick to the rules, trying to use them to subvert the final solution (rather than simply picking up the boxcars, emptying the figurines out, packing up the game and going home).

It is the same in Azeroth. We players are immersed in the game to the point of imbuing the citizens of Westfall with real lives, and of feeling evil when we kill the innocent. In fact, the point of the game is immersion in the virtual world of Azeroth, it certainly isn't for the exciting game-play.

But how do the inhabitants of this world feel? I know this is rather like asking if the yellow figurines are afraid or not. And yet it's a question that makes sense. If you were, in real life, in the situation that your toon is in, and you had her powers and abilities and history, what would you do? The answer to that is what pushes us to continue to play (rather than moving on to playing Tetris, for instance, whose moment-to-moment game-play is rather more intricate). We want to be immersed, but we can't help being Earthlings.

So when we are faced with a ludic choice that does not include the option we would like have (such as giving free candles to kobolds, and arranging to buy their ore), we players feel frustrated, and sometimes are brought out of our immersive state. But would our characters feel frustrated? Would they feel any more frustrated at not being able to help Vanessa  Van Cleef than we would at not being able to polymorph our neighbours? It just never occurred to me (before now) to want to polymorph my earthly neighbour. Perhaps in a world where the gods (Blizzard in the case of Azeroth) have not made some choices physically possible, our characters would be as unaware of the missing choice as we are about polymorph. That is to say, they might hypothetically amuse themselves imagining how great a world would be that allowed such a choice, but they know that in their world, it's all just fantasy.

Morality

Jana over at I Like Pancakes is worried about the morality of killing 30 people in order to investigate and solve a double murder. I agree. There are many such examples of immoral quests - immoral, or at least disagreeable, to the adventurer who has been asked to undertake them (for instance my own poor friend Paoquan). I remember DEHTA asking me to kill some poor starving people in Northrend, to save the buffalo mammoth from being turned into dinner for their families. To bring the immorality of it into sharp relief, the very next quest in the area is to kill the self-same mammoths to provide hides to cover some gnome's mechanical device.

Jana already mentioned how she felt about Vanessa van Cleef: she wanted to be able to help her, but due to the linear nature of the on-rails world that is Azeroth, she was unable. I sympathize. I felt the same about both her and her father, Edwin. I felt thoroughly ashamed that I helped Thrall escape from prison and killed Alliance guardsmen to do it (I will never do this instance again on any alt), and I was unhappy about killing members of the Scarlet Crusade/Scarlet Onslaught, whose aims I thoroughly agree with (even if their leadership had been infiltrated by our enemies).

We are not allowed to behave differently, though. I cannot join the Scarlet Crusade, much as I would like to. Its members are red to me and attack me on sight (members of the Zandalar tribe also attack me on sight, despite the fact that I am supposedly exalted with them). No doubt many orc adventurers felt troubled by helping Garrosh steal the Divine Bell, while other orcs must feel terrible about betraying him. What can they do about it, though? We are all on rails.

I don't get Alter Time

There is such a terrible downside to Alter Time that I find it hard to use in my rotation. The downside is this: I end up being moved back to where I was a few seconds ago. I can certainly see why it's great for fire and frost mages, who can use it to double-proc, and I can see it has some great uses in PvP (for instance with blink), but as an arcane mage trying to raid, I usually don't want to be moved back to where I was standing a few seconds ago, because the only reason I would have moved in the first place is because there's burning oil or acid or something similarly nasty where I was previously standing. Raiding in this tier has required a fair bit of mobility, something arcane mages are not great at. When we do move it's because we are absolutely forced to by the void zone under us. Here's what happens to me every time I use Alter Time:

"Hey, I've got 4 stacks of Arcane Charge up! My next Arcane Blast will use up a lot of mana. Let's use Alter Time to have my cake and eat it."
- Cast Alter Time
- Start Casting Arcane Blast
Then a void zone opens up under my feet, my robes start to singe! Ouch! Get out of here fast! Run! Don't wait to complete that cast!
- Run away, little girl, run away
- Restart casting Arcane Blast from the comfort of solid fire-free ground
Alter Time resets
Doh! Back in the fire again!
- Run away, little girl, run away

So Alter Time usually ends up costing me time in most raid encounters, especially mobile ones. Arcane raiding mages, how do you benefit from Alter Time?

The Day of the Dead

Halloween is a Celtic Festival, and based on the Celtic calendar. It's the greatest of the four main festivals, marking the start of Winter. I want to tell you why that is the greatest of the festivals, but first, I need to tell you something about the Celtic day. It's simple. It ends at sunset. Not midnight. Sunset. That also means that the day actually begins just after sunset, as well. As the sun dips below the horizon, one day ends and the next begins. The Celtic calendar day begins with the darkness of night.

Now back to why Halloween is the most important of the four festivals. The four festivals fell on the interstices between the seasons. The seasons are based around the solstices and equinoces. Let's start with winter. It lasts for three months, centred around frosty midwinter's day, the shortest day of the year (that's December 21 in the northern hemisphere).

Spring also lasts for three months and is centred around the vernal equinox, the day when it is light for 12 hours and dark for 12 hours, which is March 20th. What is the day that is halfway between those two centres, and marks the interstice between those two? It is February 3 And don't forget, that day actually starts at dusk on February 2. This day was celebrated as the day on which we left the cold winter behind, and marched into spring. . Originally known to the Gael (the Celts of Scotland and Ireland) as Imbolc or Imbolg, it's now conflated with the Christian saint Brighid's day and Candlemas. It is still traditionally the day when spring begins in Ireland.

The other fire festivals were calculated in the same way. The Beltane festival is now celebrated as May Day almost universally (but no longer in Ireland!) halfway between the Vernal Equinox and midsummer's day, the summer solstice. Lughnasa or Lúnasa marks the end of summer and the beginning of the harvest (and at one time the celebrations included the Tailteann Games, the Olympic Games of the Gael), and Samhain marks the end of the harvest time and the beginning of winter. Oíche Shámhna in Irish Gaelic. Samhain's night. Halloween.

I mentioned that these were fire festivals, almost by-the-bye; in passing; but they were fire festivals, all right. They were interstitial celebrations, held in the gap between one time and another, and the light of the fires purified that gap. Imbolc: the festival of candles. Beltane, the festival of fires (it seems to have been translated in Ireland to St John's eve, near midsummer, nowadays), when bonfires are lit on hills and on beaches, and hearth fires would be doused and renewed from the bonfires. Lughnasa, when the first corn is harvested, ground, and baked on the hearth. And Samhain, Halloween. More bonfires.

Especially at Halloween and on St. John's eve, bonfires burn from dusk until dawn. Young men and women still jump through them at the end of the evening, through the flames and over the embers (or occasionally miss their step and end up in Accident & Emergency).

These festivals were held in the gap between times, and the Halloween festival fell on three gaps: the moment between one day and the next; the crack between one season and the next; and the interval between one year and the next. Because just as the Celtic day begins in the darkness of the dusk after the sunset of the previous day, so the Celtic year begins with the darkness of Winter. In these three apertures in time, worlds can open. The souls of the dead might come from their plane of existence to ours. Hence the purifying fires and bonfire leaping and general divilment. It is the start of the day of the dead.

As you might remember, my Pandaren monk has been stuck for a year and a day in the gap between our world and the mists surrounding the great turtle's back on which all Pandaren begin their adventures. Poor Paoquan was faced with having to help the Yaungol (they call themselves Tauren) to progress beyond her level 10 story on the concealed island that is Shen-zin Su's back.

She cannot. Every time I've tried to find an alternative understanding of this story, or an alternative way of advancing Paoquan, I have failed. This Halloween, I hoped she might leap through the flames, through the void between her old dilemma and her new future, might with one bound be free. She did not. She fell into the underworld, into the abyss of lost souls. Never more will I see her. 

Edit: What's this? By the cleansing power of the summer flames, Paoquan returns!

Old-time raiding

My guild has a levelling group, doing Burning Crusade raids. We've been seeing dungeons at the appropriate level, and now we're at level 70, we've finished all the Burning Crusade HC dungeons, and started the BC raids, even though we're struggling to get a full team. We did Karazhan last week. I think we'd all seen that raid already, soloing it on our 90s for transmogrification gear at some time or other. But of course level 90s cut through these bosses like a hot knife through butter, usually totalling the bosses before they get a chance to show all their abilities. So we were excited to be doing it at level 70, to see it as it was originally meant to be seen.

Only trouble was, we couldn't muster more than seven or eight people. Karazhan, as you need not be told, is a ten-man raid. We gave it a go, anyway, and did better than we expected. Sure, we had a few wipes as we figured out tactics, but really, we were never blocked. We managed to get to the end of the instance in two nights (each of which included an awful lot of running about, lost, trying to find where our corpses were, or where the next encounter was). Finally we killed Prince Malchezaar (and his beautiful bow dropped). It seemed a little too easy, since we were seven at the time, but I put it down to our gear, which included some Northrend pieces and some heirloom pieces. Anyway, we had a great time.

To round off the evening, we thought we'd just quickly head over to Magtheridon's Lair, to get a foretaste of the problems we'd have in a 25-man raid. Not too bad, we survived the trash, and managed to get it all down, even though we were still only eight. Then onto the boss. A couple of wipes there, but then we found a strategy that worked, and we managed to kill Magtheridon! Well, that was definitely challenging. But really, it should have been impossible. Eight level 70s managed to get down Magtheridon? That's more than just better gear. What's going on?

My first thought is that Magtheridon has been nerfed horribly since his heyday. But then I noticed an article on the blog I like Pancakes wherein Saxsymage remembered that 400 DPS used to be common for level 70s, and she had 700 DPS in Karazhan back in the day. Our top level 70 damage-dealer had over 3000 DPS last week in Karazhan and Magtheridon's Lair. Sure, Magtheridon may have been nerfed, but the real nerf to content has been the buff to player stats.

This is something I hadn't really paid much attention to, before. Sure, I knew that new players were now complaining about the trivial nature of many quests. I put that down to an XP buff, not a stat buff. People were outlevelling zones before they'd finished all the quests in them; and out of a desire to finish a quest-line once they'd started, they'd find themselves doing trivial grey quests, just to see the story to its end.  In other words, they're doing quests designed for, say, level 70 characters, but by the time they do them, they're level 72 or 73. But that isn't the case with Magtheridon. He was originally designed as a challenge for 25 level 70s, and can be defeated by eight of them now.

Yesterday, though, we tried Gruul's Lair, and had our asses handed to us.

Talking Trash

Keen wants to improve themepark MMO dungeons. Great idea. Just I'm not sure of his tactics to achieve this. He says that the all suffer from the same issues:

• Repeating the same dungeon over and over
• Too many trash pulls and not enough bosses
• Encounter variety and mechanics are always the same

Let's take a look at the first of these issues, just to get it out of the way. Nobody needs to run the same instance over and over again. If you do it, don't blame the virtual world for your repetitive and obsessive behaviour. Look within yourself. Blizzard, in fact, have tried to stop this behaviour in a number of ways at various times: by locking you out of a dungeon once you've run it; or by stopping bosses dropping loot for you once you've looted them once in a particular period. But it shouldn't really be up to the world designers to keep you from your disorder. You need to fix it yourself. If you find yourself chain-running dungeons, perhaps it's time to look at what else you can do.

As for trash, I like trash mobs. They are not there just to provide you with loot and fights. In fact, they aren't even primarily there for that. They are there to provide a real world: to  set the atmosphere of the dungeon, and to provide a setting that makes the dungeon more credible. Take, for example, the instance Keen mentions, Utgarde Keep. And forget how the dungeon finder teleports you in, so that the instance seems to be suspended in space and time, rather than set in an actual keep in the Howling Fjord whose entrance you reached by battling through the Vrykul to the north of Valgarde. You fight your way into the keep. It is full of Vrykul. Of course it is. It's their keep. Should it just have a handful of Vrykul and three bosses? Keen's view seems to be that the sooner he can get through the trash and onto the loot piñata bosses, the better (and sadly, Blizzard seem to be siding with this kind of argument: on the Timeless Isle, you don't even have to kill bosses to get your loot. It showers on you from the heavens). I can't say I'd find such an instance interesting, even the first time through. The trash make the instance come alive, they make it credible. Utgarde Keep is a real keep populated by vrykul soldiers, blacksmiths, guards, and so on. Without them, it would be empty.

But credibility and atmosphere aren't the only benefits of trash mobs. They also provide a cadence and rhythm to instances. A warm up to the boss. A way of building up the tension for the boss fight, and a counterpoint to it. The trash mobs, of course, are easier than the boss fights, but the best trash also provide a challenge of a different nature: the trash in the Lost City of Tol'vir or in the Halls of Origination required teams to plan pulls, to communicate, to practice small pulls, to practice crowd control and to practice focussed fire - something that came as a shock to many adventurers after their previous practice of silently rounding up everything in sight and AoEing it down. It came as such a shock, in fact, that they whined to Blizzard for a nerf. But while those instances still required teamwork, they were great, precisely because of the trash.

Of course, Keen is quite right that 5 pulls that are all the same is dull. Trash needs variation, and the best trash does have it. Meeting the same trash over and over again isn't great design. I'm thinking here of the two bridges between Jin'rohk and Horridon. Perhaps one would have been sufficient! But the best trash adds variation and forces the instance team to respond in ways that boss fights don't. When encounter variety and mechanics are always the same, the fun goes out the window. Part of that is the fault of overgearing. Once we're overgeared for an instance, we can often reduce every trash pack to the aforementioned tactic of round up and AoE down. Part of this is also our fault. We whine when unfamiliar mechanics are introduced that take us out of our comfort zone, and Blizzard is ever ready to nerf whatever we QQ about.

Finally, Keen suggested:

One of the biggest changes I would love to see in Themepark dungeon design would be to add way more bosses.  I think a dungeon full of nothing but boss fights would be fantastic

I hate to say it, but it was tried and found wanting. The Trial of the Crusader was exactly this. Blizzard listened to players like Keen who said they hated trash and only wanted boss fights. So they designed a raid that was only boss fights. And nobody liked it. It felt thin and hollow, and actually boss-fight after boss-fight without end, proved to be as dull as trash after trash with no boss at the end of it. Adding way more bosses simply proved that the highs of a boss-fight need the pause of trash to make them feel epic. And the most innovative fight of the lot there, the faction champions, were the least liked (again, because they moved adventurers out of their tank-and-spank comfort zone). Another instance that was almost (but not quite) trash free was  Blackwing Descent. The boss fights in this instance were fun, but there was no sense of being in a real credible world. Without much trash to provide a context, there seemed to be no reason for any of the bosses to be there. Finally, the most memorable thing about that whole instance is the elevator that killed more adventurers than the trash did.

So where is trash used well?

Kharazan is probably the most memorable. The trash mobs bring the place alive. The same is true of the Lost City of Tol'Vir, where the trash also added great variety to the encounters.

And the worst?

The Throne of Thunder has just far too much trash. But the worst has to be the trash-free Trial of the Crusader.

The Secret life of a Dungeon Boss

By the gods, I'm bored! I've read all the books in here a hundred times. I hope some adventurers come by, so I can have a little fun with them. The more overpowered they are, the stupider they become.

Nobody. Bored, bored, bored, bored, bored! Can't stop thinking about my poor son, Medivh. Please, no more! My son .. he's gone mad. I hope that Khadgar guy looks after him. He always had his back.

Ah, here comes the curator.

"Hey, Curator. Seen any adventurers today?"

"Your request cannot be processed.The Menagerie is for guests only."

Man, he's dull. A golem, of course. The place is full of them. Hey, he wasn't talking to me! There are some guys out there! I can hear them crashing about, blundering from golem to golem. Excellent. Time for a bit of fun! I hope they manage to get as far as me.

"The curator is equipped for gallery protection. You are not a guest". He's funny, that curator! Popping poor adventurers because they touch the displays!

"Get 'em, curator, go for it. Use the flares!"

Silence. Did they all die or did he?

"These shoulders look cool!" Ah, now they're looting him. My turn! Let's see, I'll close the door, but I won't lock it. I'll stand over there, pretending to read a book. No, I'll walk slowly around pretending to be lost in deep thoughts. Yeah, that'll be good. Maybe they'll come rushing straight in hoping to take me by surprise. Ho ho, that'll be great fun! Ah, here they are now, fumbling at the door. Just two of them. I remember when they were scared to come here with less than ten. Here they come, opening the door, and rushing straight in, just as I had hoped! What idiots these guys are! Ow! That hurt! A quick bit of telekinesis now and the door behind them is locked. They're all mine!

"Who are you, what do you want from me?" They just want my loot, but let's string them along, see if we can get a little conversation going. Nothing. By the blood of Aegwynn, these guys are poor conversationalists. Wow, Aegwynn! She was a ride! And she could talk for Lordaeron! I miss her. Hot nights in Tirisfal, romantic evenings in front of the fire, snowy walks discussing the Titans. She knew everything about everything! Concentrate, concentrate, these guys are still hitting you. Let's see. These flame wreaths are always fun. Every time I use them, the idiots walk into them and get blown into the air! Then they fall and land on another flame wreath and up they go again! It was even better when there were ten of them, popping like jack-in-the-boxes!

"Burn, you hellish fiends!" Well, you gotta keep up the image. Let's try the arcane explosion now. that's always fun. Pull them in, then blow them back through the air till they hit the back wall. What a laugh!

"I am not some simple jester, I am Nielas Aran!"  I might even get a part in the movie, if I keep people talking about me. "I'll freeze you all!" That's a good one. After knocking them back, cast blizzard in the outer part of the room! Double whammy. A couple of water elementals now, and a pyroblast should put them in their place. Look at that idiot healer, running into range of my counterspell again, and then wondering why he can't heal! Stupid people. I doubt I'll get any interesting conversation out of them. Oh, I know! I'll turn them into frogs. What? Dammit! Out of mana. I've been having too much fun. Time to lie low, and drop some shinies to distract them. Let's see, they got some shoulderpads from the curator, maybe I'll drop some boots. Let's see: Boots of the Incorrupt. Drop boots, drop to the floor, play dead. Telekinetically open the door before they start looking about the place.

"Dude! Look at these boots! Phat lewt! Let's go!" Out they run. Up I get. That was fun! Till next time!