What will happen if our sub-culture goes mainstream?

We as gamers are a subculture that still has not seen total mainstream acceptance. We may have a wider variety of people under our umbrella than we used to, but as the Real ID scare showed us, not everyone is comfortable associating themselves with the gamer label. Sure, some people wear t-shirts or buttons proclaiming their gamer pride, and I've been known to wear my druid t-shirt out in public (though the fact that non-WoW-players wouldn't understand the meaning of that kind of shirt is part of the reason why I'm so comfortable donning it for a public outing), but the people who I see wearing t-shirts that explicitly state their identity as a gamer tend to be the ones who fit the "gamer stereotype" more than most of us do; after all, there is still a stigma attached to gaming, so if one can get away with not immediately being associated with our subculture, it's generally beneficial to do just that.

In many ways, I find being a member of the gamer community to be a lot like being a member of the gay community, and I can say that because I am a member of both communities. Membership in either community isn't immediately obvious to others if one don't fit the stereotypical image of their respective community. (For the gaming community, it's the overweight, glasses-wearing antisocialite; or the gay community, it's the flamboyant man or the butch woman.) In other words, unlike race or religion, being a member of the gamer community or the gay community has more to do with what you do than who you are, so the only way someone can identify you as a member of either subculture is to see you participate in either subculture's defining activities, see you proclaim that you are a member of either subculture, or see that you fit the stereotypes about the subculture and make an assumption based on that fact. Both communities also have varying levels of acceptance in different circles and different areas, though gay acceptance seems to vary more by geographical location than gamer acceptance does, but both definitely vary by the average age of the members of the circle in question.

Of course, being a member of the gaming community somewhat more of a choice than being a member of the gay community, which could lead to the gaming community being more of an acceptable target than the gay community. However, I would argue that we don't choose which activities appeal to us the most, so though being gamer might not influence our lives as much as being gay influences the lives of members of the gay community, being a part of the gaming community isn't as much of a choice as it is made out to be.

So why do I bring up these similarities? I bring them up because I have recently read an article about the end of gay culture, which proposes that as the gay community becomes more accepted in mainstream culture, the "gay subculture" will fade away, becoming less of a defining aspect of our community. To quote the latter part of the article:

So, too, the majority of gay men and lesbians want nothing more than to raise families behind picket fences. There are other signs of increasing conformity in the gay world. Leather is seen by most younger men as more silly than hot. While they may exercise, younger men mostly don’t strive for Adonis physiques. It goes on. (Lesbians are way ahead of the curve on this. They’ve been mating and nesting for years.)

Is this bad? Probably not. We’ve been fighting for acceptance. Now that we’re getting it, it’s up to us to do what we want with it. If younger gay men and lesbians want the same things as their straight counterparts, so be it.

Have we lost something? Probably. Just as blacks lose their jive and soul when they become middle-class suburbanites, and Jews lose their Yiddishkeite, so we shed the camp, the bitchy humor, the diva worship, and the other facets that defined “gay” for so long. [Emphasis is my own]

Most people, however, would consider it a fair tradeoff.

In other words, as the gay community becomes more accepted as part of the mainstream culture, we could start to shed the trappings once thought typical of gays and lesbians. And this doesn't surprise me at all. It's not uncommon for members of a culture that hasn't been accepted into the mainstream to act as exaggerated versions of their culture, and for that to cease once they have been accepted into the mainstream. After all, the thinking behind it goes, if people aren't going to accept us for who we are, even if why try to earn that acceptance, why try to earn it? Let's instead be as gay (or what have you) as we possibly can; they won't accept us if we try to act like them, so let's act as unlike them as possible for the sake of preserving our sense of identity. However, once the mainstream does accept a sub-culture, members of that sub-culture have a reason to try to fit in with the mainstream culture. After all, for all that we may put individuality on a high pedestal, we humans are social animals, and the desire to fit in is hardwired in our brain for that reason.

I witnessed this phenomenon myself in high school and college. My high school was in a fairly wealthy, very white suburb, so the school was mostly comprised of white students; I could count the number of black students I knew of who lived in that town and went to that school on one hand. As part of a program to try to give inner city children better education, we also had black students from urban areas nearby bussed in to attend school with us. Now, the school wasn't racist by any stretch of the imagination, but these inner city kids didn't fit in, and they knew they didn't fit in and would never fit it, so they would act very "thuggish". I have read that this phenomenon is not isolated to the high school I attended, and it happens for the very reason I outlined above. Contrastly, the college I currently attend has a very racially diverse student body, and though I have met my fair share of thuggish black students, I have also met a lot more subdued, not-so-thuggish black students in my time at college, and I think it might have something to do with the fact that they stand a chance of fitting in if they don't act like exaggerated versions of the stereotypes about their subculture.

In short, we once had the choice between trying to fit in and not being accepted, or acting like exaggerated stereotypes and not being accepted, and since both would lead to the same result, we picked the latter, because it was more fun and didn't force us to sacrifice our identity in vain. Yet now we have the choice between trying to fit in and standing a chance of being accepted, or acting like exaggerated stereotypes and not fitting in. Since we stand a chance of actually being accepted for who we are, the former option is starting to look a lot more attractive.

The question I want to ask is, what will happen to the gaming community if we are accepted into the mainstream? Will we lose the jive and soul, the Yiddishkeite, the camp, the bitchy humor, the diva worship of our community, whatever that may be? And if we do, will that really be a bad thing?

In order to answer those questions, we need to ask what it is that we stand to lose if we become accepted by the mainstream. What, exactly, is our jive and soul, our Yiddishkeite, our camp, bitchy humor, and diva worship? Well, if we look at what these staples of each community have in common, it is that they are the result of members of those communities putting forth time and effort to be a part of something that defines their subculture. Being "camp" in a showy way takes time and effort, time and effort a gay man might not otherwise spend if he stood a chance to fit in if he didn't act camp. Perhaps when a subculture is assimilated into the mainstream, its members start putting forth effort towards fitting in rather than standing out, since the former can actually lead to them being accepted. Are there exceptions? Certainly; long after gays have been assimilated into mainstream culture, I'm sure there will still be members of our community who try to be as campy as possible and who will still spend time worshiping divas and all that, but it will likely be more rare than it is now.

So what is a staple of the gaming community that takes this kind of time and effort? An easy answer would be giant LAN parties, midnight release parties, and gaming conventions, which could very well be what we lose if we go mainstream. After all, if gaming became more mainstream, you would see a lot more gamers who have much bigger lives outside of gaming than the typical LAN-attending, convention-attending, midnight-release-attending gamer does. These would be gamers for who gaming is not as big of a part of their lives as it may be a part of ours, so they won't have the time to go to and arrange LAN parties or conventions or midnight releases. We could also see people who now spend a lot of time gaming start doing other things outside of their gaming hobby as less and less stigma is attached to it. With this disappearance of stigma will come more acceptance of gamers in non-gaming circles, and that acceptance could motivate once-hard-core gamers to start doing things outside of the realm of gaming. After all, we are all social animals, and social experiences brought about through gaming (like the ones brought about by WoW itself) can only do so much for us.

In other words, I think the best conclusion to draw from this logic is that if gaming becomes more accepted by the mainstream, we will see a decline in the number of hard-core gamers. It wouldn't surprise me if the current stigma attached to gaming is what drives hard-core gamers to play as much as they do in the first place; they know they can't fit in with mainstream culture, so rather than trying to fit in, they just do more of what they love: gaming. Once that stigma no longer exists and gamers are more accepted by the mainstream, maybe they will no longer be driven to these isolating levels of dedication to their hobby. Just as the black community lost their soul brothers, just as gay community may lose it's flaming queens, we may lose the most extreme members of our community to mainstream assimilation.

Is that a bad thing? That's a topic for another post, though I wouldn't mind hearing your thoughts on whether it is or not in the comments section.

Don't you know there's a Shattering on? Redux

The last time I asked the question, "Don't you know there's a Shattering on?", it was because I was struck by the nonchalance the citizens of Stormwind seemed to have taken towards the recent destruction of their world, and I was able to formulate a reason as to why they were so calm after a gigantic dragon had just ravaged their city. Now I am forced to ask this question again, this time by the Hero's Call board. Allow me to copy a line from the Hero's Call quest for each Cataclysm zone (the Alliance versions of those quests, that is) that succinctly sums up your purpose going into each zone:

Vashj'ir: "Recent attacks by the Horde on our trade ships must be met with swift and just force!"

Mount Hyjal: "Our brothers in the Cenarion Circle report that Deathwing's minions have launched a destructive offensive against the world tree and threaten to burn it to the ground!"

Deepholm: "The Earthen Ring requires our aid! They report that the elemental plane of Deepholm threatens to overtake our world and destroy all life on Azeroth!"

Twilight Highlands: "King Wrynn requires a trustworthy and proven hero for a mission of the utmost importance."

Uldum: "Be one of the first to enter glorious Uldum and claim its treasures in honor of the Alliance!"

One of these things is not like the other... I mean, what's up with Uldum? The way that your motivation for going into Uldum stands out from your motivation for going into all of the other zones becomes even more clear as you accept the introductory quests for each zone:

Vashj'ir: "As you may have heard, the Horde's attacking just offshore. The fighting's been fierce and relentless. We need every able body out there repelling the enemy!"

Mount Hyjal: "It is good that you've come here just as Azeroth finds itself in a time of great need. Deathwing's minions are attacking Hyjal and seek to bring the destructive Ragnaros back into our world."

Deepholm: "Deathwing's return to our world left a rift open between Azeroth and Deepholm. If we don't mend the breach, this land will be torn asunder."

Twilight Highlands: "Great burdens have been placed on my son's shoulders in his short lifetime, and I fear his responsibilities are only going to grow. He will never learn leadership confined to the keep, but I am loathe to send him forth without escort. [Name], your deeds in the wake of this cataclysm are already legendary. You would be an excellent mentor for young Prince Anduin."

Uldum: "The ancient region of Uldum has been exposed! Treasures beyond your wildest dreams, free for the taking! We just need a bit of an escort, what with the bandits and all..."

Let's look at each zone individually. In Vashj'ir, the Horde has attacked Alliance ships out near an island that has recently surfaced, and we need to go out and defend ourselves, lest we loose even more lives to the conflict. On Mount Hyjal, the mountain threatens to burn if we don't do something about it, and Ragnaros might be brought back, which would be an even greater threat upon the world. In Deepholm, the world threatens to tear apart if the world pillar cannot be reconstructed. For the Twilight Haghlands, though Varian doesn't exactly make it clear what is wrong in that zone, the tone of the quests give the impression that it is important and consequential. In Uldum, there are treasures to be found! Yes, one of these things really isn't like the other.

In other words, it seems as if our actions in every zone in Cataclysm minus Uldum are motivated by the basic need to save the world or ourselves, or at the very least, some grander purpose. We are out there to do things for other people, as is our character's motivation for much of the game. But when we get around to going to Uldum, we suddenly find ourselves motivated purely by the treasures we can find. Sure, the quests may try to gloss over that by saying that we are looking for these treasures "for the glory of the Alliance" or that we are really helping this caravan get into Uldum, but at the end of the day, rather than being there to help, we are there for fame and glory. In every other zone, we are there to make a difference, to help the innocent, to save the world, but in Uldum, we are there for easy treasures... what.

This dichotomy was especially apparent to me because I only quested through Hyjal and Deepholm before starting Uldum, and in both of those zones, we narrowly avert widespread destruction though swift and timely action. In Hyjal, we narrowly avert the destruction of the mountain by fighting back those responsible; in Deepholm, we narrowly avert the destruction of the whole world by resembling the world pillar. Between these two zones, the mood of the expansion is set as one where the world is constantly teetering on the brink of destruction, and only by acting quickly can we save it. That's why it's pretty jarring to spend two zones saving a world that is very close to destruction, then to be lead to a zone where our only reason for being there is to see what treasures we can find. As the people in that caravan asked me to escort them into the desert, I couldn't help but ask myself, don't you know that there's a world out there that could be lost if we don't go help? Don't you know there's a Shattering on?

The one possible reason I could think of for Blizzard to put in a zone with such a different mood is that they wanted to show that our characters are not the spotless paragons of good they might otherwise seem to be. They may be heroes, but perhaps Blizzard wanted to show that they are by no means perfect, and they can get excited about personal gain just like anyone. I can understand why they would want to do this. After all, they are trying to tell a story, and we are simply playing the part of the protagonist of that story. If the protagonist of a story is too perfect, he becomes a Mary Sue, and the story becomes unbelievable. But our characters do have flaws, the most prominent of which might be their gullibility. The way we help Tyrus Blackhorn, Drakaru, Teron Gorefiend regain their power in Mount Hyjal, Grizzly Hills, and Shadowmoon Valley, respectively, show just how easily our characters trust others, a trust which is often taken advantage of. But being that that is the only flaw that comes to mind (for me, at least), perhaps they are a bit too close to being Mary Sues, which is why Blizzard wants to add self-centered greed to the list of their flaws by sending them to Uldum to look for treasure.

Does it work? I suppose this is a matter of opinion, but I'm of the opinion that it doesn't. Our characters spend so long being near-perfect heroes (with gullibility as their only flaws) that for them to show this interest in more selfish motivators so suddenly feels more like character derailment than character development, even if there isn't much character to derail in the first place. Now, maybe I need to level an alt through the old content so I can see that our characters really can be pretty self centered, because the truth is that I haven't leveled a character past level 14 since the start of the expansion. Hell, it probably isn't out of character at all for goblins. But I can say that two large zones' worth of setting our character up as a grand world-saving hero is enough to establish our characters suddenly taking on the role of a treasure hunter as decidedly out of character.

And even if this concept did work, it would completely ignore the fact that the world is teetering on the brink of destruction, as was made clear to us in Hyjal and Deepholm. No amount of character development or any other such justification can mask the fact that Hyjal and Deepholm probably aren't the only areas in need of being saved by our characters, and to be forced to go treasure hunting when the world is teetering on the brink of destruction forces our characters to show an uncomfortable amount of disregard for the world at large.

The sad state of illustrious grand master enchanting

I haven't been very happy with the state of enchanting going into Cataclysm. Yes, archeology may have it bad, and that's an issue that affects more players than are affected by the problems with enchanting (assumedly), but that's why I wrote about it first, and now its time for my primary profession to take the spotlight.

You see, enchanting is in a rough spot right now. For those with no experience with enchanting other than having others enchant their gear, enchanting is both a gathering profession and a crafting profession. We "gather" materials by disenchanting green-quality or better weapons and armor, which destroys the armor and awards us with the materials we need to do our enchantments. The steadiest supply of green-quality or better armor is quests, and thus the best way to level enchanting is to gather materials by disenchanting weapons and armor awarded by the quests we do as we level up. This applies at all levels, from level 10 to the level range we find ourselves in now.

Now, once upon a time, an enchanter could disenchant any piece of gear, regardless of its ilevel, but in Burning Crusade, most gear was given a minimum enchanting skill that would be required to disenchant the gear. Gear awarded by quests in Vashj'ir, Mount Hyjal, and Deeopholm require 425 enchanting to disenchant (except a few of the rares, which require 500 skill), which is good and all, but upon entering Uldum, we are greeted with an ugly surprise. The quest rewards in Uldum, including the simple greens that we so depend on to obtain our basic mats, require 475 skill to disenchant. This is problematic, because there's no guarantee that an enchanter will reach 475 skill by the time he reaches Uldum. I myself just barely made it to 475 with the materials I obtained by disenchanting quest rewards from Hyjal and Deepholm, and I had a ten skill-point head start with my leftover materials from Wrath of the Lich King. In other words, I was only able to level enchanting 15 to 20 skill points with the materials I obtained from questing in Hyjal and Deepholm, and I was lucky enough to have the 25 skill point head start thanks to advanced Wrath of the Lich King recipes (enchanting becomes very costly to level with Wrath of the Lich King recipes around 425). Someone who didn't get that head start would be even more likely found himself unable to disenchant his quest rewards. He'd probably have to go back to whichever 80-82 zone he hasn't already completed so he can obtain more materials, which I found myself doing, so even that might not be enough to push him to the 475 level. In other words, enchanting has the potential to flat out break for someone trying to level it along side a typical leveling pattern. Enchanting has never been an easy profession to level by any stretch of the imagination, but this is just not acceptable.

How to fix this issue? Well, lowering the minimum required skill to disenchant Cataclysm greens would be a start. The lowest skill required to start learning recipes that use Cataclysm-era materials is 425, so it seems a bit of an unreasonable jump for lowly greens to go from requiring 425 skill to 475 skill, since that's fifty skill points the enchanter could potentially need to earn with only two zones' worth of materials. If that number were lowered to 450, this issue could be solved easily and with minimal effort.

That's the main issue I have with illustrious grand master enchanting as it is, but there is a more minor one that has taken up my thoughts, too: currently, all Cataclysm enchantments are restricted to ilevel-300 gear, and I find that just plain unjustified. The highest ilevel of gear anyone can obtain from Wrath of the Lich King content is 284 (from heroic 25-man Lich King and Ruby Sanctum), and while Hyjal and Vashj'ir quest rewards have a lower ilevel than that, Deepholm's quest rewards don't, and is it that unreasonable for players to want to enchant their Cataclysm gear with Cataclysm enchants? It would be just as easy for Blizzard to restrict the Cataclysm enchants to ilevel 285 and above; it would have the same effect of preventing Cataclysm enchants from being used on Wrath gear, and it would allow enchanters to start using their new and exciting toys earlier.

In fact, why not just lower the minimum ilevel for Cataclysm enchants to 270? 272 is the lowest ilevel of Cataclysm gear, so this minimum would allow enchanters to use their new toys as soon as they entered Cataclysms content. Yes, this cutoff would include some Wrath of the Lich King gear, but it would only include gear obtained from the hardest of raid instances. And though I may be wrong, I was always under the impression that these minimum ilevel restrictions were put in to prevent high-level enchants from being put on low-level gear, so you couldn't add 130 agility to the Alarmbringer's Mace. But now that the era of Wrath of the Lich King is over, the only gear over ilevel 270 that anyone can reasonably expect to get is Cataclysm gear, and considering that Wrath of the Lich King raid gear that is over ilevel 270 is better than Cataclysm quest greens of the same ilevel, I don't imagine that allowing Cataclysm enchantments on such gear would create a stat imbalance at all.

Now, one might say that stat imbalances are exactly why these seemingly-unreasonably high minimums are required. Take at look at the Beakless Polearm, for example. It's a quest reward from Vashj'ir, one of the two lowest-level zones in Cataclysm. If one were to enchant it with the Mighty Agility enchantment, the amount of agility it provides would be almost doubled, and that could be considered an imbalance in terms of how much of an effect enchantments are supposed to have. But it all balances out in the end, because as a green-quality quest reward, the Beakless Polearm won't remain the player's weapon of choice for very long. It will soon be replaced, and a player will go through materials very quickly if he tries to keep all of his replacement weapons enchanted. Thus, though the benefit of applying such a powerful enchantment to such a low-level weapon might be high, the amount of time that the player will use that weapon is comparatively low, and thus the total benefit he gets out of that enchantment will be about the same it would be if he had enchanted a higher-level weapon.

You might be wondering, why is this even an issue? After all, no player in their right mind would enchant gear they plan on replacing soon, so who would put an enchantment on a green-quality weapon? No player who isn't an enchanter, that is. We enchanters are the only ones who would have access to a steady enough stream of materials that we'd be comfortable enchanting green-quality gear, so it's not unheard of for us to do just that. If it weren't for the fact that I have materials to spare due to disenchanting all of my quest rewards, I would never have put 50 haste rating on my Bloodcult Handwraps, yet because I have dusts and essences to spare, I did just that. Of course, given the choice, I would have put that enchantment on my Corecrusher Gloves, too, but they were too low level for me to do so.

Since enchanting is the only profession I have any experience with in the illustrious grand master range (other than herbalism, which is doing just fine, thankfully), I now put out this question to my readers: are other professions suffering similarly? Do you find yourself unable to properly level up your primary professions whilst leveling up normally? Or is enchanting the only profession suffering from these kinds of issues?

Failure to adjust: whose fault is it?

Being that I am still level 84, I have not yet had the "pleasure" of stepping into Cataclysm's heroics, but if Allison Robert's look at the unbearable suckhood of pugging is anything to go on, I'm not missing much. I can't say I'm all that surprised that in the wake of Blizzard making some pretty significant changes to heroics in Cataclysm--crowd control is necessary, DPS can't be healed through avoidable damage, triage is more important that fast healing, kill order and interrupts are important again--it seems the playerbase has been less than willing to adapt to these changes. Now, we are still in the first few weeks of the expansion's life time, and given time, players might learn and change their ways (especially when their current ways deny them their epic loot). But if Allison's post and other horror stories I have heard from other players and other bloggers are anything to go on, people really aren't do well in adapting to the changes made to heroics in Cataclysm. But does the fault really lie with those who "refuse" to adapt to the times and the demands of a new era? Or might the fault lie elsewhere?

When heroics were introduced in Burning Crusade, they were difficult, and wiping was common. When Wrath of the Lich King came out, that changed. Heroics were not all that difficult, especially as the expansion wore on, and the fact that we kept running heroics long after we outgeared them lead to players developing some pretty bad habits for running them. It was bad enough when Wrath heroics allowed us to ignore kill orders, not interrupt spells, and AoE down trash at the beginning of the expansion; once the emblem system allowed us to get amazing gear without leaving heroics, it was all downhill from there. Runing heroics took the same amount of skill as doing old-world quests for Loremaster; that is to say, it took none, but people still did it, and as a result, they developed some pretty low expectations for how difficult heroics should be. Players who try to run heroics now using the strategies that they used in latter Lich King era heroics are like level-80 players who try doing Cataclysm quest content using the strategies they use to do low-level quests for Loremaster (which, if you've ever killed low level enemies for any reason, you know would end in disaster). I don't know for a fact that those players exist, but if they did, they'd be comparable to today's heroic runners.

But let's look at Wrath's heroic dungeons more closely. You had heroics, which took almost zero effort and a minimal investment of time and awarded great gear, and raiding, which took a great deal of time and effort and award superb gear. Considering that heroics took infinitely less ability and commitment to run and awarded gear that wasn't much worse than what raids awarded, it's no wonder players flocked to them, even those without the skills that are usually necessary to succeed in group content. And when they went there, they obtained gear that trivialized the very content that awarded it, but they kept playing because they liked these shiny epics they could earn. Because of this design, players associated heroics with zero-effort rewards and started playing under the assumption if their zero-effort approach did not yield victory, it meant someone was playing badly, an assumption which hampers their ability to adapt to today's heroics. The expectation of reward for zero effort also keeps players in heroics who have no business expecting to succeed in a cooperative environment, further hindering our efforts. And whose decision was it to design Wrath's heroics to start out easy, become even easier when the gear they awarded trivialized them, and thus create this mess in the first place? Blizzard.

Now let's fast forward to the development stages of Cataclysm. Wrath of the Lich King is coming to a close, and many non-raiders (a category which includes a startlingly large players, if a poll I ran a while ago on my blog is anything to go by) continue running heroics because that is the only thing they have left to entertain themselves, thus further cementing the bad habits they have developed over the course of the expansion pack. Meanwhile, in all of their interviews and press releases, Blizzard makes clear their intention to make heroics challenging again, to make them require crowd control, kill order, interrupts, strategy, etc. They make this clear at BlizzCon, in miscellaneous interviews, and as a result, us players who keep up with WoW news online are well aware going into Cataclysm that things are going to be different, that the strategies we used for old heroics won't work in this new expansion, and that we're going to have to change the way we do things. We knew this, but the players who don't follow WoW news online didn't.

I don't know exactly when I started following WoW news online, but if I had to put a guess to it, the earliest I would be willing to guess is November of 2008. Now, I started playing WoW in September of 2005. That's sixty three months I have been playing, and I have only been following WoW news online for, at the most, twenty five of them. That's less than half of my time spent playing WoW, and it means it took me more than three years to realize that WoW had an online community. Now, I'm sure the community has grown more robust as the game's popularity has grown, meaning someone who started playing after I did would probably have an easier time discovering WoW's online community than I did. But I bring up the duration of the time during which I was oblivious of WoW's online community to illustrate that not every player is privy to the information we often take for granted. For anyone who did not keep track of news about Cataclysm, the sudden rise of difficulty in heroics is something they had no way of anticipating.

So, we have Blizzard creating a situation that leads to players developing really bad habits in heroics, and then doing nothing to convey to players who don't follow news about WoW online that they are increasing the difficulty of heroics come Cataclysm. It's beginning to look like the fault for these players who didn't adjust to Cataclysm's heroics is resting on Blizzard's shoulders. The question is, was it Blizzard's responsibility to prepare players for this change?

Blizzard hasn't exactly been transparent when it comes to information about their game. When they expanded the armory to include a wowhead-like database of items, it was a big break from convention, to say the least. They have put other detailed information, like boss strategies or walkthroughs, on the official website, the kind of thing you would get on other sites. Sure, they'll release general information about the game, like overall descriptions of the classes and zones, but they've never been one for revealing specifics. This is especially the case in-game, where we go into most situations blind without any of the information we take for granted because we know so much information about the game that we acquire online. We may pick up on general patterns that can help us in entirely new situations (such as, one should generally not stand in the fire), but those assumptions are formed in response to general patterns of game design; they do not influence the game design itself. In other words, we know not to stand in the fire because developers usually make fire harmful; they don't make fire harmful because we usually don't stand in it.

What this means for heroics is that just because we players grow accustomed to certain facts in game (fire is bad, heroics don't require strategy) doesn't mean Blizzard owes it to us to keep those facts consistent or to warn us when they change. They can design the game however they like--within reason, of course, or else they'll lose subscribers--and its our responsibility to adapt. Part of that adaptation process is assembling information in online databases with boss strategies, item statistics, etc., which results in websites like wowhead and WoWWiki, as well as blogs that detail changes to the game, like heroics being made more difficult) This is all part of the process of adapting to changes made to the game, and knowing heroics were going to become more difficult by following Cataclysm news was part of that adaptation process. By taking that knowledge for granted, we took our adaptive abilities for granted, but some players haven't learned the process of adaptation as well as others. Those are the players who struggle in heroics now, and while it might not seem fair that we have to suffer for their inability to adapt, that's just the nature of group content.

Food for thought on remake and genre designation

Just a week ago, I found myself defending WoW from the accusation that it has become too linear of a game, yet as time has gone by and I have consumed more of Cataclysm's content, it has become apparent to me that WoW really has changed in terms of how linear it is. I remember in my last post before Cataclysm came out, I considered whether Cataclysm could really be called WoW 2, as it has frequently been called, since the setting hadn't changed much. If only I had known just how little change was really wrought by patch 4.0.3, and how much awaited me once the switch was flipped on Cataclysm itself.

Suffice it to say that questing in Cataclysm has more linear than it was in expansions past, especially compared to questing in vanilla WoW. It has become so linear that WoW really has become a different game, at least in terms of its questing, so I would say the title of WoW 2 is not undeserved. In fact, it really deserves the title of WoW 2.0, rather than WoW 2, because Cataclysm is really an updated version of the old WoW. See, when I heard everyone calling Cataclysm WoW 2, I assumed they meant that it would be like a sequel to the game, like the way Metroid 2: Return of Samus was a sequel to the original NES Metroid game. It continued the story of Metroid (which Cataclysm does) and provided some updates to the gameplay and the player's arsenal (which Cataclysm also did). However, considering how greatly Cataclysm has changed WoW, it now seems to me to be more analogous to Metroid: Zero Mission, a remake of the original Metroid released almost twenty years after the original. Zero Mission completely updated the original Metroid, adding all of the new features, weapons, and abilities fans had grown accustomed to over the years as new games had come out, while also expanding the game's universe to add new areas to the remade ones. Cataclysm, to me, seems to be more of a remake of WoW than a sequel to it, which is why I say it deserves the title of WoW 2.0 more than that of WoW 2.

Yes, WoW feels like a very different game now. In fact, after doing enough quests to see just how much WoW has changed, I can say that it reminds of another game I spent a lot of time playing: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I never got into the other entries in the series as much as I got into San Andreas, so I don't know whether they all have this same design or not, but in San Andreas, you often had a few missions you could do at any time, and once you finished those, a new segment of the story would open up. Maybe it would involve one mission that would progress the story to its next stage, or maybe you'd have more missions to do, but the story missions were very linear, and the game itself was very story driven. However, that wasn't to say you couldn't do other things. There were a plethora of side missions you could do, items you could collect, and there was always the option to just go out and cause mayhem. A game with linear story-driven missions in addition to side missions you could complete if you wanted to? Sounds a lot like the way I described WoW but a week ago.

Yet San Andreas was not an RPG by any stretch of the imagination; it was a sandbox game, a genre which shares many elements with the RPG genre, including an open world and many things to do, yet it was not nearly as open and non-linear as WoW was in its earlier incarnations. Could this mean that WoW is moving away from its MMORPG categorization and becoming something new? Not likely. Linearity or lack-thereof is not a defining feature of an RPG, though RPGs tend to fall closer to the non-linear side of the spectrum, but this is more by convention than by definition. No, what defines in RPG is really stats, numbers, leveling up, and things of that nature, game aspects that are reminiscent of the table-top RPGs of yore. What this means is that WoW is still definitively an RPG, not a sandbox game; it is simply and RPG with sandbox elements, which could always be said about it to some extent.

But with that said, WoW is most definitely very different from its vanilla days; the newfound linearity of the quests is enough to prove that is true. If anything, this is the culmination of changes to questing that have been made with each expansion pack, for each continent's quests became more and more linear as time went on, until we got to the point where we are now, where questing has become much more linear than is typical of an open-world RPG. Is this a sign that WoW is moving away from the conventions of the open-world RPG genre and taking on aspects of other, more mainstream genres? And if so, what will that mean for MMOs as a whole? It's probably too early to tell at this point in the expansion, but it's something I'll be keeping an eye out for as the saga of World of Warcraft continues.

Potential improvements to archeology

Let me say from the outset that I really enjoy archeology. Having leveled this secondary skill into the master range, I can say with certainty that it is one of my favorite additions made to the game in Cataclysm. I'm something of a text addict--that is to say I eagerly read every little bit of text that developers put into a game (Metroid Prime took me a very long time to complete for that reason)--so I quite enjoy reading the little text blurbs that come along with each artifact. The fact that I don't have to compete with other players for dig sites is also a much-appreciated aspect of the profession, and one of the reasons I have progressed so far with it; flying to and excavating my own dig sites is much less stressful than competing for quest objectives when the realm is full.

With that said, archeology isn't perfect, and there are some things I believe could be done to improve the profession. Some are minor issues I have with it, issues which I by no means assume are universal qualms which everyone has with the profession:

-I find that knowing which artifact I am crafting ahead of time takes away from the sense of discovery one would think would accompany digging up unknown relics from ages past. Sure, all we get is an icon and a name, but that's enough that the less-than-detailed text blurbs become an underwhelming reward for completing the artifact. That sense of solving a mystery could perhaps be recovered if the icon were revealed bit by bit with each fragment recovered, with the name not being known until the artifact is completed.

-Searching through the list of completed artifacts for one you have just completed just to read the text gets tedious fast. If that text could somehow be copied and become yellow flavor-text for the artifact when it is in your inventory, that would be much more convenient.

-Getting artifacts that sell for five silver at level 85 is pretty underwhelming, especially when one has leveled archeology well beyond the initial stages, where it's understandable for the artifacts to not be worth much (we can't let level 20 players get artifacts which sell for dozens of gold, after all). I think it would stand to reason that as we get better at archeology, we get better at putting together artifacts, and thus the artifacts that we put together could become more valuable. Now, it would be no fun if all artifacts sold for the same amount, so perhaps, instead, the value of the vendor trash artifacts could increase as our archeology skill increases (if Blizzard needed to keep it simple, they could make the value scale just with whether we are journeymen, experts, artisans, etc. in archeology). Under this system, an artifact that currently sells for five silver would sell for less than one that currently sells for twenty, no matter what, but it would still be worth something to a level 85 character with Illustrious Grand Master Archeology.

But there is something more fundamental to the profession that just feels off to me, and that something is the way that we find the fragments for our artifacts. I'm talking about the Survey ability. In its current form, finding fragments with survey feels more like running around following signs than actually searching a dig site. It feels more like we are being lead to the artifact than actually finding it. Now, being that I didn't follow archeology in beta, it could be that this was the best way of finding fragments that Blizzard could come up with, and that they went through many iterations before settling on this one. However, I still believe that one simple change could make finding artifact fragments a more satisfying experience.

I propose that Survey be split into two abilities. One would retain the Survey name and would still spawn the telescope mechanism that survey spawns when you aren't right next to an artifact. However, it would not automatically excavate an artifact once you get close enough to it. To do that, you would need to use the "Excavate" ability, which would collect archeological fragments if you are close enough to them to collect them. Excavate would have a five second cast time, to make the choice to use it more consequential, which would also lead to finding those artifacts being more satisfying. Because it would be serving fewer purposes, the cooldown of Survey could be reduced. This would make pinpointing the exact location of the artifact fragments easier and get rid of that annoying wait during the final stage of looking for an artifact, when you are in the green zone and know you don't have to move far to get closer to the artifact fragments, so you spend much of your time just waiting for Survey to come off of its cooldown.

The reason I think this will make archeology more satisfying, and thus more enjoyable, is that it will bring some strategy into the profession. As I mentioned before, finding artifact fragments with archeology now feels like following arrows until we get to our destination, and we don't know with each survey whether we'll just get another arrow, or whether we'll actually find the artifact fragments. With this set-up, we would have to figure out where the fragment is before digging (in order to avoid wasting time casting Excavate), and that would bring some thought into the excavation process. Now, if this ended up making fragments take longer to find, then the numbers could be changed to balance that out; there could be more fragments per find, or fewer finds per dig-site (which each find giving more fragments).

Now, I by no means think that every player would enjoy this kind of change, which is why I'm posting it here and not of the official forums. With that said, do you think that this kind of change would make archeology more fun and/or satisfying? Or do I just have unreasonably high standards for how challenging the solo content should be?

Guild perks and guilds "for guild's sake"

After putting it off for a week or so, I have finally broken down and joined a guild. I didn't join one to raid or anything like that; as you learned in Monday's post, I am a happy solo-er and have no desire to change that fact. So rather than join a raiding guild which would level up quickly and need to live a lie every time I log in, I posted the following message to my realm's trade chat:

Solo-er looking for guild. I'm not looking to raid or PvP, but if you let me into your ranks, I will help your guild level and earn guild achievements. PST, but please don't just send an invite; I want to get to know you before I join.

And so, the serially guild-less player has joined a guild, all because he couldn't resist that 10% mounted speed increase or those items awarded by the guild achievements. What have I done differently since joining this guild? Well, I've killed a lot more critters and had a conversation about archeology... so really, not all that much has changed. As I said in my post on Guild perks and the death of the independent player, I was happily guild-less until Cataclysm came out, so when I joined a guild, I didn't plan on changing much about my playstyle. Still, considering that I have enjoyed the conversations I have had since joining the guild, I suppose this change to my playstyle has been, overall, positive, and also fits my prediction as to why Blizzard seemed to be targeting us solo players with these guild perks.

See, in my post that I mentioned above, I theorized that part of Blizzard's motivation for putting in these guild perks was to get willingly guild-less players like me to join guilds (or, at the very least, it was an unintentional positive side-effect). This would be good for Blizzard because being guilded makes a player less likely to quit should he/she get bored. If it's a raiding guild, the player risks losing his spot or falling behind in the progression if he/she takes a break. If it's just a social guild, that social element could be what keeps the player playing after he/she has stopped finding the game itself interesting. But in my searching for a guild, I found many people who had come up with some ways to obtain these guild perks that didn't really mesh with Blizzard's seeming intentions in putting in these guild perks. I found people who had created guilds comprised of only their characters. I heard tell of people who had created guilds for the sole purpose of avoiding being asked to join guilds, guilds which didn't even have a chat channel, and which would now also serve the purpose of giving members the guild perks, but served absolutely no other purpose.

These guilds seem to me to be a sign that some people would rather work around the encouragement Blizzard is providing to join guilds and would rather just go for the rewards. In other words, Blizzard is encouraging players to play one way and giving them incentives to do so, but players would rather work around the system put in and try to get those incentives without conforming to Blizzard's pro-guild ideals. If these perks were put in to encourage players to join guilds, the fact that these "for guild's sake" guilds exist shows that not all players are willing to play as socially as Blizzard wants them to.

Now, I'm sure that encouraging guild-less players to join guilds wasn't the only purpose of these guild perks. The fact that it takes a long time to level up a guild means that these perks reward guild longevity, as well as discouraging players from reacting to guild drama by breaking off and starting their own guild, instead encouraging them to actually work through their issues. The fact that leveling up a guild actually requires the members to do something (questing, PvP, raiding, etc.) means that the guild perks rewards guilds who seek out members who are active participants, rather than seeking out large numbers of players just to have an impressively sized roster. And if nothing else, the guild perk and guild achievement systems breathe some life into what has long been a very stagnant and simple system. Still, one can't deny that those perks also discourage players from remaining guildless; the fact that these "for guild's sake" guilds are popping up prove that they do. Whether these other benefits to the perks system actually materialize remains to be seen, but if, as I theorized, Blizzard wants players joining guilds because it will discourage them from quitting, than the "for guild's sake" guilds show that they haven't exactly been successful in that goal, because those guilds don't provide any incentive to keep playing after the game has gotten boring.

All this makes me think that the guild perk system has failed in its purpose of bringing guild-less players into guilds, simply because it hasn't meaningfully changed their playstyle or made them more likely to keep playing when they get bored. What does this say about the system as a whole? Well, it's entirely possible that it was never Blizzard's intention to change the playstyle of us serial solo-ers, so perhaps it hasn't failed because it was never trying to do that in the first place. It also says something about us players, something which I don't think will surprise anyone: some of us are quite stubborn. You can see this stubbornness in the refusal of some people to adapt to the new methods of play required by this expansion (crowd control, triage, etc.), but if these guilds for guild's sake have shown us anything, it's that that resistance to change applies outside of combat as well.

But if it was indeed Blizzard's intention to use these perks to make us guild-less players join guilds, then the fact that they have failed shows that some of us aren't going to change that easily. We players who don't look to play WoW socially may be rare, but we do exist, and we don't like being told how to play. It's bad enough when other players and our friends try to "convert" us to a more social playstyle ("Raiding is fun, you just haven't found the right guild yet!"), but when Blizzard does it too, that's especially infuriating. But perhaps that's just Blizzard's way of saying, "This is our game, and we get to tell you how to play it. Now be social!" Fine, Blizzard; you have won this round, because I have indeed joined a guild and started being more social. Just don't think you can push this much farther.

How linear is Cataclysm, really?

Larisa has a post over on her blog in which she remarks on how linear Cataclysm's quest design is. Rather than allowing movement between the various parts of the zones, we are restricted to a set path by which we can progress through the quests. She compares it to "the moving walkway in the room where they keep the royal jewels at The Tower of London. The only way you can see them is by standing on that walkway, and it passes those jewels at set, nonnegotiable pace." And though I have only just completed the quests in Mount Hyjal and am thus ill-equipped to judge the expansion as a whole, I have to agree that the quest design in that zone was indeed very linear. It could have been worse, though; there were sometimes two quest hubs one could choose to go to, and you could choose which order you did the quests in each "round" of quests at each hub. Yes, it could have been a lot more linear, but for an MMO, a genre supposedly defined by an open world, it was indeed pretty straightforward.

Why did it take me so long to get through one zone, you might ask? As I mentioned in Friday's post, questing is not the only thing I have been doing since Cataclysm came out. I have done the fishing and cooking dailies every day, fished in Hyjal's lakes and rivers, searched the world for archeological fragments, and even taken some time just to fly around the old world (oh the flying, oh how I love it) and see the changes wrought by Deathwing's return. After all, questing isn't the only thing that has been changed or added in this expansion, and it would be a pretty poor way to experience it to focus solely on that aspect of this new Azeroth. But what's this? Choice in what I play when I play WoW? But I thought this game was supposed to be linear? (That's not a personal jab at you, Larisa; just a jab at the idea of WoW being linear.)

This is where I take issue with the idea that WoW has become "too linear", an idea I have heard elsewhere, aside from Larisa's blog. Yes, the questing has become more linear, but as the commenters on Larisa's post that I linked to earlier have pointed out, that's a necessity for phasing to be as prevalent as it is, and phasing is a necessity for us to think that our changes are having any effect on the world around us. But questing isn't all there is to World of Warcraft. There's PvP, dungeons, professions, secondary professions, and even just exploring the world to see what can be found. And even if some of these things themselves are pretty linear (professions especially; gone are the days of searching the AH for recipes or the world for vendors who sell them in a limited stock; we get our recipes from a pretty limited selection of sources these days), we are completely free to choose which ones we engage in and when. There's no "negligence punishment" mechanic put in to keep you in one part of the game when you'd rather be doing something else, outside of the fear of falling behind your guild.

Now, this does mean that in order to experience the true non-linearity of WoW, you need to take the initiative to do something other than what the game will direct you to do; the quests won't tell you to take a break and go try out archeology or PvP or fishing. The best you'll get is an occasional quest that will direct you to a dungeon of the appropriate level. I bring up this little detail because, in the past, I talked about the decline of Wrath of the Lich King heroics and the players' reacting to this decline by being more creative about how they ran heroics. In that post, I concluded that the player's running the heroics in unconventional ways was indeed a sign that the heroics had gone into decline, because players were running them in ways they weren't intended to be run. The implication of the conclusions I came to in that post was that if the game doesn't tell you specifically to do something, and you have to do that something to make the game interesting, then the game is a failure. If we apply this logic to Cataclysm's design, then that would mean that the fact that game can only be non-linear if players do something of their own accord to make it so--rather than because the game told them to--then the game fails at being nonlinear.

But the reason I concluded that players doing things in Wrath's heroics to spice up their heroic runs was a sign that heroics had declined was that the heroics weren't designed for that kind of play. Wrath's heroics were designed to be run in particular ways, and that fact that players weren't running them in those ways meant that they had failed. Cataclysm, however, is designed to support players doing things other than questing. If it weren't designed that way, archeology and all of the other things we can do aside from questing wouldn't be in the game. Cataclysm-era WoW is designed so that it can be played in a non-linear way, if the player chooses to do so. And therein lies the crux of the problem: WoW's linearity is inversely proportional to how much initiative you take to seek out other things to do within the game. Someone without that initiative will probably limit themselves to questing and the occasional dungeon run, and in doing so, they'll find WoW to be a very straight-forward game.

But in a way, I don't mind WoW being designed this way. It reminds me of the way that the story was told in the GameCube game Metroid Prime. In that game, you collected bits of the story (similar to the way we collect bits of lore through archeology) with your scan visor, including logs by space pirates and stories told by those who inhabited the planet where the game takes place before they were wiped out. You can also find vanity text aplenty by scanning various things in the environment, which adds even more to the atmosphere of the game. The beauty of this system was that it allowed players to experience exactly as much of the story as they wanted to. If they wanted a straight shoot-em-up, they could eschew the scan visor completely and just go in with gun ablazing. If they just wanted the background story but didn't want to hear all of the little details about the world itself, they could keep an eye out for the red scan nodes which would indicate a lore entry that would reveal the background of the world, while ignoring the other ones that just added to the atmosphere of the present situation. And if they wanted as many details as they could sink their teeth into, they could scan everything, which would tell them a lot about the story and about the world itself.

In a way, the non-linearity of WoW's design is like the depth of the story in Metroid Prime; both are at the control of the player. Just as players of Metroid Prime chose how much of the story they cared to experience, players of WoW choose how linear they want their experience to be. Are you looking for a game with a wide variety of things to do? Go out and find them; they're there for you. Are you just looking for a straightforward quest-based adventure? Fine, just follow the quests and do what they tell you. You'll miss out on a lot, but if that's how you want to play, who are we to say no? And if you don't want a linear experience, but you haven't taken the initiative to check out the other things there are to do in WoW? If that's the case, then who's really to blame?

The roots of my soloist tendencies

A recent shared topic over at Blog Azeroth has asked us about the ways that how we handle our real-life jobs affect how we play WoW. Considering that I am still a student and the ways I handle my part-time jobs don't exactly speak volumes about who I am as a person, I consider it fair to instead look at how I handle school and whether that might say something about my play habits in WoW. And after some reflection, I realized that is does say something about how I play WoW, and could reveal exactly why I'm a solo-er.

Back in high school, group projects were the bane of my existence. I feared any assignment where I would be forced to work with other people and put together something decent, because I simply had higher standards for my work in high school than most of my pears did. I have always been something of an overachiever, and my grades in high school were no exception, so I tried my hardest to get the highest grades I could possibly get in all of my classes. The thing is, the people I was grouped with usually didn't share this attitude, so I would be put in groups with people whose standards of what is acceptable work were lower than mine. I grew to detest needing to put my name on something that wasn't up to my standards, especially because these projects often contributed a significant amount to our final grade. So I often ended up as either the overbearing leader or the person who did the whole project himself (usually the latter), just so I could be sure it would be up to my standards. To this day, I still detest working with people on something where we will be judged as a group, rather than by our individual contributions and efforts, for the very same reason.

This anecdote illustrates something that has long been one of the defining aspects of my personality: I do not like depending on other people. Perhaps I'm jaded because I have many experiences that show just how undependable people can be. I've had dozens of friends not keep their commitments to social plans, sometimes showing up hours later than they said they would with the flimsiest of excuses and without even a hint of repentance for keeping me waiting, twiddling my thumbs (I have learned since then to always have something to do if I'm waiting for a friend to hang out, or to go to their place instead). I took a bus to school all four years of high school, and though the bus was usually dependable, the numerous times when it wasn't has made me hesitant to let a person be the linchpin in my plan to get anywhere. Point it, because of my less-than-solid faith in others to always come through when they say they will or when I need them to, I became a fiercely independent person in many aspects of my life. I took up biking so I wouldn't be dependent on others to give me rides places. I opted for solo-projects whenever they were an option so that other people wouldn't drag the quality of my work down.

WoW has been no exception to the general rule that anything I do that involves other people will invariably show me that people aren't dependable. I've seen people miss raids and provide no explanation afterward. I've seen people ragequit and leave the raid stranded in the middle of an instance, then come back the next day as if they had done nothing wrong and owed no one an apology. I've seen people leave their computer in the middle of a boss fight, then come back after we had managed to just barely kill the boss without their help, and simply say that the phone rang. After some time, I just grew sick of it, and the truth is, I didn't enjoy raiding enough to put up with this nonsense or up my game enough to become worthy of a top-end guild that wouldn't put up with those kinds of shenanigans. So I gave up on this supposedly integral part of the game, and I have never been happier.

The beauty of the solo-er's world is that whether you succeed or fail, whether you rise or fall, is solely dependent on you. In raiding, you can bring your A-game to every raid, but if other people aren't bringing their A-game too, you aren't going to succeed. Effort put in does not always scale with the quality of the results. In the solo part of WoW, however, that is completely different. When I decide to go solo an elite for fun, whether I succeed or die will be determined solely by whether I bring my A-game to the fight. If I decide to go on a long grind for some purpose or other (like getting Guardian of Cenarius), whether I succeed will be determined solely by whether I have the perseverance to see it through. And should I fail, I have no one to blame but myself, which means I can examine my playstyle and potentially find the flaws that lead to my failure, and either fix them or remember them when considering future endeavors. I am dependent on no one else for my own success, and that makes me very happy.

That said, the question I get asked most often when I tell people that I don't raid or PvP in WoW is, why even play a massively multiplayer online game if I'm not going to play with other people? The answer is quite simply that the solo content is good enough to hold my interest. I may be a square peg in a round hole, but that hole is big enough to contain my supposedly incompatibly shaped playstyle. As long as that fact remains true, I see no issue with playing this game the way that I find most fun, and should I stop finding it fun, I'll simply stop playing. See, that's another beauty of solo play: social obligations won't keep you playing if you don't enjoy the game anymore. I know some people who kept playing long after they had lost interest in the game simply because their guild depended on them, and they really grew to hate it. Yet they still spent a lot of time playing WoW, when they could have been doing something they enjoyed, because their guild needed them. No such conundrum faces us soloists, which is one more reason why I like this playstyle.

Why I'll be taking the expansion slowly

At this point in the expansion, I have spread my time out quite a bit between all there is to do. I have quested a bit in Hyjal, played through the Worgen starting experience and gotten my little rogue to level 13, gotten my archeology to 37, leveled cooking about 25 skill points, fished a bit, leveled enchanting to 460 with my leftover Wrath mats, an through it all, gotten my druid half way to level 81. And I have thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. But something captured my attention more than the great new quests, the fragments I find with archeology, and even being able to fly in the old world (which is, in my opinion, the best part of this expansion pack). That something was the goblins and worgen I saw questing along my side in Hyjal. Yes, characters which I thought couldn't have existed for more than a day or two, now above level 80. Seriously?

Now, I quickly realized that these particular players may have simply race changed an old character that was already level 80, and I felt very silly, but my moment of myopia did remind me of a thought that always comes up for me when new content comes out: power-levelers, and how little I understand them. Now, I'm no one to judge other people for how they play and suggest that they play otherwise; as a solo-er, I'm on the receiving end of enough of that to know better than to subject anyone else to it. So let me just say right now that I'm not writing about power-levelers to judge them, or admonish them, or suggest that they change their ways. I am only writing about them because someone choosing to race through the new content that quickly just boggles my mind.

But even with that said, I understand that there are some people who enjoy the challenge of finishing content as quickly as possible, and for them, the content itself comes second to its speedy completion in terms of what they find fun about the game. If that's the way they want to play, I'm happy to see them finish so quickly. I, however, am not that type of player; I play for the content itself. And the thing is, once you finish the content, that's it; it will never be new and exciting again. It is forever in the realm of "seen it", and you can never enjoy it as much as you enjoyed it the first time. And considering that this is my chance to "start over", to break all of the bad, fun-killing habits I formed in Wrath of the Lich King, one of the habits I would like to break is the habit of steamrolling through content and exhausting it quickly.

Now, one might say, as long as you play through the content itself a slow pace when you do play, what does it matter how much time you spend playing? If it takes me fifteen hours spent over the course of ten days to get to level 85, and a friend of mine gets there in the same amount of /played time but spends two days doing it, haven't we both soaked up the content at an equal rate, and shouldn't we have theoretically enjoyed it just as much? It is to this question that I say no, and that is the fundamental reason I am taking the expansion slowly, both in terms of content experienced per hour of play and in terms of real-world time I spend playing. There have been some games that I played through in a short amount of real-world time, and it has been my experience that playing through a game like that can ruin the game for me because I simply get sick of it faster. The rate at which I get sick of a game just seems to increase as I spend a greater fraction of my time playing it.

It is with this knowledge that I have become very deliberate about how much I allow myself to play WoW. WoW is a big part of my life, you see; I spend a lot of time reading about it online, blogging about it here, and, of course playing it. Yet WoW became stale for me quickly because of how much I played during Wrath of the Lich King. With Cataclysm breathing new life into the expansion pack in so many ways, I'm not going to allow that to happen again. I plan to play more casually than I did before (you could say I was a dedicated soloist before), and by doing that, I hope to maximize the amount of /played I can get out of this content before I stop enjoying it. If that means that I can't write about things from first hand experience until long after others have already experienced them, so be it; I'll take that fall for the sake of a game I enjoy this much.

Identity, privacy, and secrecy in WoW and life

As I write this post, it is currently Monday night. Cataclysm is coming out tomorrow, and I know that I'll be spending all of my free time tomorrow playing WoW. I might just forget tomorrow that I even write in a blog about WoW. In anticipation of this sudden urge to play, rather than wait until tomorrow to write this post so I can write about something topical, I have decided to write about a topic whose relevance is not dependent on which expansion pack we are playing. This way, I can play on Tuesday knowing that I have filled my three-post-a-week quota and I won't be leaving my readers high and dry on this, the beginning days of a new era for WoW, and I can give myself until Friday to pull myself away from the game long enough to write something about Cataclysm itself. So here's your nice, timeless, early post for today.

I haven't told very many of my real life friends about this blog; I have told even fewer the actual name and nature of it (for they can probably find it based solely on the latter). The only two friends I have given the URL of this blog to are friends with whom I have very few secrets; were that not the case, they would probably not know this blog exists. I have mentioned blogging in general as an activity that I engage in frequently to a greater number of people, but not many people are privy to that information either, lest they wish to read what I write. You may wonder, why am I so secretive about something I should be proud of, something I should be showing off? The answer has something to do with one of the most basic rules of the internet: don't put anything out there that you'll later regret uploading.

You see this rule all the time in various forms. Adolescents are commonly told to not upload incriminating photos of themselves to social networking sites, lest someone see them. Bloggers are sometimes told to be careful of what they post, lest it be traced back to them. The general vernacular version of this rule goes something along the lines of, "Don't put anything on the internet that you wouldn't want to show to your own mother." It's a good rule to follow, most of the time, but it ignores one of the fundamental concepts of what makes the internet so great: spheres of privacy. I touched the concept of spheres of privacy (a term I did not coin, but I don't know who did, so I can't provide proper credit for it) in my post on Real ID and the necessity of anonymity, which was written during the "posting under real names on the official forums" scare. In that post, I discussed how anonymity is a tool that can be used for good, even though it is quite often used for less-than-good purposes. Anonymity, the state of your identity not being know, is the very thing that brings about these spheres of privacy, which is why they are so prominent on the internet.

But what is a sphere of privacy? Well, allow me to give a practical example. Suppose you had never put anything out on the internet. You had never posted in a forum, commented on a blog post; never has a word you have typed been recorded online for all to see. Now suppose you happen upon a forum; it could be any forum: a forum for fans of a tv show you like, or a forum for people who are members of a specific subculture, what have you. When you join this forum, you have to pick a name to post under, but there's no reason you can't use something other than your own name (and 99.99% of the internet-going populace don't use their own name). So you register with this forum, and in doing so, you pick your new name, your new identity that you will go by. The beauty of this system (or perhaps the ugliness, depending on who you ask) is that this new identity has no connection with your own identity. You have crafted a new identity by registering under this new name, and that opens up a world of possibilities. If you are usually not much of a talker in real life, you can use this new identity to break out of that expectation others have for you and be as wordy as you wish. If you registered with a forum centering around a subculture you belong to that is usually shameful to discuss in real life, you can discuss whatever this subculture is centered around on this forum without fear of ridicule. This latter point is the one I want to discuss today.

Let's take something we all have in common: WoW. If you bring up the fact that you play WoW in real life, depending on who you bring it up with, you could get a wide range of responses. Just today, I told a friend of mine that I was trying to get as much homework done tonight as I could so that I'd have more time for playing the new expansion pack tomorrow, and he flat out told me that he lost a little respect for me, knowing that I play WoW. In the context of our friendship, it wasn't nearly as rude as it must seem to you reading about it now, but it reminded me that WoW and other such video games still haven't been fully accepted by the mainstream culture. That's why I would never bring up WoW at my place of work; I can't risk them potentially thinking less of me for playing, and considering that I am one of the youngest people who work there by about twenty years, that's not an unlikely possibility. More generally, I usually avoid bringing up the fact that I play WoW in most conversations with other people, especially people older than myself, since the probability of them thinking less of me for it is just too high. Yet look at what I'm doing now: I'm writing a blog about the very game I seem ashamed to play.

Why does this happen? It happens because, when I created this blog, when I took up the name of "Ardol", I made sure there was no way to connect my blog to my real-life identity. I do the same thing in all online communities I join, and the blogosphere is no exception, for if it were a widely known fact that I take this game as seriously as I do, it could hurt me in a multitude of ways. Yet because there is no easy way to connect my blogging activities to my real-life identity, I can talk about WoW with no fear of the usual repercussions of being known as a serious gamer. I can even talk about personal issues like my struggle with suicidal thoughts because I know it won't be connected to me. Thus I have created a sphere of privacy around my blog, and within this sphere of privacy, I can be open about my habits as a WoW player.

We see spheres of privacy outside of the internet, as well. When you tell a friend a secret, you do so within a sphere of privacy that encompasses only the two of you. When you are out with a group of friends and you talk about something slightly more person that what you'd divulge to a random stranger, you do so within the sphere of privacy of that certain social group. When you engage in office gossip with the people you work with, you do so within a sphere of privacy that only contains the people who work in that office. And when you go on the internet to discuss a game you play, you do so within the sphere of privacy that contains the WoW-playing internet-going populace. Within each of these spheres of privacy are different expectations and assumptions about what is and isn't appropriate, what is and isn't cool, and what is and isn't acceptable.

Within these spheres of privacy, we are able to alter our identities to fit the expectations and allowances of that particular sphere. Within the sphere of privacy of the WoW blogosphere, I am someone who focuses most of his attention on World of Warcraft and discusses the game seriously. I am also someone who is more eloquent than he is in real life, as typing things out ahead of time allows me to be. But it's the former point that is more important to our discussion. Within the sphere of privacy of the online WoW-playing community, I am completely open about my WoW-play habits (obviously), which can't be said about how I am in certain other spheres of privacy. That particular part of who I am shines through brightly in this particular sphere, while it is something I keep under wraps in other spheres. This is an example of the ways we are able to shape our identity within these spheres, which is one of their greatest strengths. In the sphere of privacy of that hypothetical forum earlier, your membership in that subculture is one of the defining aspects of who you are (it is what brought you there, after all), but in real life, the same is not so.

Now, there's a chance some of you reading this might object to my usage of the word "identity" to describe the various selves we show to our different spheres of privacy. After all, who we are fundamentally as people doesn't change with the crowd we are currently in. That may be true, but the fact is that the idea of identity is meaningless outside of a social setting; a lone man has no identity. It is only when we are around other people that the idea of identity actually means something, since identity is, by its very definition, how other people know and recognize us. As such, our identity is not a solid, unchanging thing; it is something that differs with who we are spending our time around, for no one, save for the most boring person imaginable, acts the same way and is open about the same thing around everyone, no matter how open they are about themselves. I am a different person around my parents from how I am around my friends, and I am a very different person around my coworkers from how I am when I write in this blog. This isn't deceit, it isn't dishonestly; it is a simple, basic fact of socializing that we act differently around different people, and thus our identity does, in fact, change with the sphere of privacy we find ourselves within.

You might also be wondering why I keep using the phrase "sphere of privacy", when something like "crowd" or "social circle" might better describe what I am talking about. My incessant usage of the term relates to why I am so hesitant to tell the people I know in real life about this blog. You see, within the sphere of this blog, I have crafted a certain identity that would be incompatible with most other areas of my life, an identity where I am open about my WoW-playing habits. In other spheres of privacy, I am open about things I wouldn't be open about in any other sphere of privacy, as evidenced by the fact that I am not giving any specific examples. You can probably think of examples of your own of ways that one of your identities might not be compatible with a different sphere of privacy from the one it was conceived in. Maybe you're very cutthroat and efficient at your job, a personality which has helped you get ahead in the workplace but would be off-putting to most people in social situations, thus it is one you don't adopt outside of your 9-to-5. Maybe you are romantic and passionate when you are around your significant other, a personality which would be off-putting to anyone who didn't feel that way about you, and thus one you don't adopt when you are with anyone else. As should be obvious by now, spheres of privacy appear in all parts of our life, inside and outside of the internet.

So what happens when those spheres cross? When happens when your close friend brings up a secret you told him/her in confidence in a work-place discussion? What happens when your significant other tells your own friends about the romantic, if a bit cheesy thing to you said to them last night? What happens when your friends and coworkers find out that you play WoW and discuss the game seriously on a blog? You feel embarrassed, because the spheres of privacy have merged in a way they were not supposed to, and thus one of your identities has entered into a sphere it was never meant for. These spheres only work when what is said and done within them is done in privacy, with the understanding that it will stay within the sphere. That is why I keep referring to them as spheres of privacy, because it is that privacy that allows us to change who we are within them.

Which brings me back to my original point: the reason I don't tell most people about this blog is that, when I made the decision to write about WoW and join the WoW blogosphere, I was setting this blog up as a sphere of privacy where it was ok for me to be open about my WoW-playing habits. By doing that, however, I was crafting an identity which wouldn't be compatible with most of the other spheres of privacy of my life, so I ran with it. I talk about people I know in real life (I'm usually not one to talk about other people behind their backs) and things I wouldn't bring up with most people in face to face conversation, because this identity I have constructed isn't compatible with most of my other spheres of privacy, especially the spheres in the real world, so there's no need for me to take real-world considerations of what is socially right and wrong into consideration when writing; the considerations of the blogosphere are all that matter. Sure, both spheres share many of those considerations of what is right and wrong, but they differ on some key ones, which is why I have crafted this identity with no regard for keeping it compatible with my other spheres of privacy.

What this leaves me with is a blog which I can't show to most people I know because the identity I have taken on in writing it isn't compatible with the spheres of privacy through which I know those people. Now, if I were perhaps a bit more discerning in what I put up here, I could show it to my WoW playing friends, but because I use the anonymity of this blog to great advantage while writing in it, the identity I have crafted is incompatible with just about any sphere other than the blogosphere. That's why I have only shared this blog with friends with whom I have very few secrets; the fact that there is so much openness in the spheres of privacy of our friendship means that they are the few spheres where the identity I take upon when I write in this blog is acceptable. With my other friends, that's identity just isn't compatible with our sphere of privacy.

So there's your timeless, non-expansion dependent post for the middle of the week. Happy Cataclysm, everyone; we shall talk again on Friday, when I will hopefully have something to say about the expansion itself.

Scattered thoughts on Cataclysm's coming

It finally hit me this weekend that this is the last post I will write during the age of Wrath of the Lich King. Come Wednesday, when my next post will go up, we will official be in the era of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, and the era of Wrath of the Lich King will finally be over. There are probably some who, in response to this realization, would write a nostalgic post about their memories from Wrath and what they will miss, but I can't count myself among them. In fact, before the Shattering came, I took no screenshots of the old world, did no final tours or looks around of Azeroth before it was changed forever, did no rushed leveling of any new alts to see the world one last time, because it has simply become stale. Wrath is also something I have put behind me, as evidenced by the fact that at this point, all I do in WoW is the Stormwind cooking and fishing dailies. The cookies dailies I do to earn recipies in preparation for Cataclysm, and the fishing dailies... well, I might not need any of the loot from those bags, but I like fishing, and the quests are new, so that's good enough for me. The point is, I could not be happier to be getting new content, for I lost interest in Wrath's content long ago.

You see, I'm a soloist. I play the game for the solo endeavors, and the last time WoW received an injection of good solo content was two years ago, when Wrath of the Lich King was released. Patch 3.3 brought no new solo content, and patch 3.1 and 3.2 brought with them the Argent Tournament in various stages, which I felt did not live up to the first round of solo content brought about by Wrath of the Lich King. Two years is a long time to play the same content, so I grew bored and started leveling alts, but that too soon turned stale as I realized just how far behind the old world had fallen in terms of quest design. It just wasn't as fluid or fun as Northrend or Outland, and the classes themselves evolved in very strange ways at lower levels. patch 4.0.1. did much to address the latter point, but the fact is that we alt-aholics have been playing the same content for a very long time. Given all of these facts, is it any wonder I'm ready to embrace WoW 2.0? Is it at all surprising that I have no nostalgia for the old world and no wistful longings for the glory days of Wrath? I'm ready for the new content, both in the lower levels and the higher ones.

You'll notice I referred to Cataclysm as "WoW 2.0" in that last paragraph. It's a nickname the expansion has picked-up due to just how much it is changing the game. Come Cataclysm, many claim, the game will have changed enough that it will practically be a brand new WoW, not just an expanded version of an old one. And the nice thing about it is that we don't have to lose all of our progress we have made on our current characters. If Blizzard were to release a proper World of Warcraft 2, a different game from the current one, I'd be hesitant to leave my pets, my mounts, my achievements, my trophies from conquests past, and start from scratch in a new universe. With the way things are, everything we have already earned carries over into this new WoW and can remain with us a few more years, while we still get to experience an almost brand new game.

But does Cataclysm really deserve the title of WoW 2.0? I hit upon this question as I was walking through Stormwind the other day and realized that, though the world has changed, it is not a new world. All of the old zones remain, even if they have returned in new forms, and though there are new zones and new content being added, they are simply par for the course in an expansion pack. The fact is that we are still playing on Azeroth, just Azeroth realized in a different light. We are still playing the same 10 classes; yes, those classes have evolved in some significant ways, but those evolutions are, again, par for the course in an expansion pack. Any significant change to class design I can think of that has come with Cataclysm is just a response to the necessity of adding a new expansion pack or a logical evolution of the class as the game and the expectations of its players continue to evolve. Not to marginalize Blizzard's efforts--far from it, I imagine it must have taken them a lot of effort to get to this point--but might Cataclysm be WoW 1.5 moreso than WoW 2.0?

If it is, then I'm ok with that, because WoW is a great game. We don't need a completely new game to entertain us, because WoW has a lot of longevity. As long as it can keep evolving to continue to satisfy the players and let us have fun, I'm ok with not getting a completely new WoW. Why demand something new if the old is still just as good?

So on this, the eve of Wrath of the Lich King, I say goodbye and good riddance to WoW 1.0 and and welcome in WoW 1.5, or WoW 2.0, whatever you want to call it. Tonight, I can go to bed with the knowledge that when I wake up, a game I have been looking forward to for a very long time will be waiting for me (I preordered the expansion digitally), and though I can see us players needing to wait for some sort of server maintenance or emergency patches before we can actually play, it's good to know that Cataclysm is almost here, and I'm willing to wait that time if we need to. After all, Cataclysm was officially announced more than a year ago; what's one more day to wait? Either way, I shall see you all on the other side.

The curse of being genre savvy

This post contains spoilers revealed during the Lich King fight in Icecrown Citadel. At this point, I consider said spoilers to be fair game, but if you are trying to avoid them for some reason, you have been warned.

On my recent post about the seeming lack of panic in our post-Shattering world, Tesh of Tish Tosh Tesh left a comment which gave me quite a bit of food for thought:

"What strikes me as odd in the whole thing is that yes, it's later, but instead of prioritizing defeating the dragon, Varian and Garrosh are playing the whole "Orcs vs. Humans" game again.

I want a third, neutral faction for playable characters. The Horde and Alliance are both being led by dimwits."

Preach, brother! As I have said before, we can't influence our leaders in WoW the same way we can influence them in the real world, which leads to some very frustrating results as we see Azeroth suffer for their incompetence. In the face of these disappointments, it is tempting to wish we could strike out on our own, ignore this destructive faction conflict, and actually do some good for the world. It's tempting to wish such a thing, because we players are cursed with being genre savvy.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, genre savvy usually describes a character in a fictional universe who, if not knowing outright that they are in a work of fiction, at least know enough about the rules of that fictional universe to avoid some of the most common pratfalls characters in that universe would otherwise make. Scott from the Austin Powers series is a good example of a genre savvy character, endlessly mocking his father's overly elaborate plans, constantly asking why he doesn't take the simple routes that would guarantee him success. The Lich King is the closest thing World of Warcraft has to a genre savvy character (aside from the players, of course), in that he knows that if he lets "Azeroth's greatest champions" get stronger and more powerful by facing his best minions, they'll simply become even more powerful minions when he eventually kills them and enslaves them, making them even more useful. You can find more examples on the page linked to above if you still are a bit iffy on the concept.

So how does the idea of genre savvy play in to our frustration when we see the leaders of the Alliance and the Horde ignore the significant threats in favor of old conflicts that serve no purpose? As I mentioned briefly just now, we players are extremely genre savvy, pretty much by definition. After all, the definition of a genre savvy character is one who does all of the things the viewers know are the intelligent things to do in a given fictional situation, so you can't get much more genre savvy than the viewers themselves. As such, we knew that the conflict between the two factions is largely pointless and serves only to distract us from the more important threats, like Deathwing's return. We know this, and thus we are genre savvy, but our avatars do not, and thus they are not.

As I said in my post about the doomsday cultists who showed up before the Shattering, what we players know and what the characters we control know are two entirely different sets of knowledge, and this includes our knowledge about faction conflict. We know that the there is no reason to fight the Alliance or the Horde (depending on what side you play), because we know players on the other faction and know that they are good people too. Our avatars, however, are not privy to this knowledge, and their only experiences with the other faction are in battlegrounds, hardly the place for building camaraderie and friendship. It is this disconnect between our knowledge and the knowledge of our characters that creates the frustration we feel due to being genre savvy. Though we know what we know, we cannot impart our knowledge to our characters and make them act in a way that would be more conducive to a beneficial outcome. In other words, we cannot make our avatars genre savvy.

Now, this is typical of 99% of media. Most media simply doesn't contain particularly genre savvy characters, because those characters would know how to circumvent much of what creates tension and conflict in those universes, and the same can be said for WoW. And yet, as we control our characters going through this evolving world, we wish we could make our characters genre savvy. We wish we could do things like break off in to our own faction and make the world right again by disregarding faction conflict entirely. Yet this is not something I see as often in the communities surrounding other games. There are plenty of other video games that are story driven, with equally dedicated communities surrounding them, following their story lines with bated breath. Why don't they have the players of those games have the same reaction to genre-blind characters as we WoW players do to our game?

In my eyes, the biggest reason for this difference lies in the way that story is presented to us. Most games don't constantly evolve the way WoW does, with constant updates to the game and the story. In most games, the story is written, put together, and shipped complete to the customer, climax and all. All console games are like this; players simply experience a story that has already been written, and if they don't like it, tough, it's already been determined. In WoW, however, the story is constantly evolving right in front of us, and with as big of a community as WoW has, we often find out about changes to the story long before their consequences have been fully realized. If Cataclysm were a console game, we would boot it up, find out that Garrosh and Varian are acting really stupid, then experience the consequences of that as we play. As it is now, however, we see them being genre blind, and it pains us because it is happening now, and we know the consequences are going to be bad, but we can't do anything about it. Playing a console game with a plot determined long before the player starts playing is like watching a news story about an event that has just happened; we may not like what happens, but there's nothing we can do to change it. Watching the evolving story of WoW, however, is like watching live coverage of a tragedy half way across the world; we want to do something about it, and we think we can, because it is happening right now, but we are really powerless to change the course of events.

So not only are we cursed with genre savvy while our characters are not, but we are cursed to watch the story take place right before our very eyes and be unable to do anything about it. That is the true tragedy of being a WoW player who is invested in this game's storyline; we can only watch as the world goes to hell right before our very eyes, for we are powerless to do anything about it.