What other games could learn from WoW

I sometimes see posts on other blogs by people who have spent significant time playing other games, talking about what WoW could learn from those other games and how taking up those aspects of those games could make WoW better. While they often make good points, I think we need to take some time to consider the opposite; the things WoW does well that other games would do well to imitate. After all, Blizzard did many things right in their design of WoW, things other developers would do well to take note of.

-Streamlining pre-playing processes
Games can throw a lot of obstacles in your way to prevent you from reaching your objective: enemies, puzzles, bosses, or even the level you are playing on, but the game itself should not be an obstacle. WoW has done a great job streamlining the things we need to do before we can play the game so we can spend more time actually playing the game. The dungeon finder is a great example of this. Say what you will about how it promotes trollish behavior and reduces the feeling of companionship among group members, but it definitely streamlined the process of getting a group for an instance run and made it much more convenient.

-Not denying content to less skilled players
Let's get one thing straight before we continue; I am not in favor of not rewarding skilled players for overcoming difficult challenges. What I am in favor of is giving the majority of players access to the fun rewards, and at least a good number of players access to the practical rewards. However, the big thing I am talking about here is content, the meat of the game itself: the sights to see, the things to do, the bosses to fight, etc. Raiding in WoW was once confined to the great minority because of the effort it took, and Blizzard has done a great job of making raiding easier for the more casual players to jump into, allowing more of their playerbase to see the content they make. Normal modes, 10-man raiding, the new emblem system--all of them made it easier for players to see the content, while the inclusion of 25-mans and the addition of hard modes ensured that the more dedicated players wouldn't lack for a challenge to overcome.

Most games do something similar in this regard in the form of difficulties, such as easy, medium, hard, etc., that scale the challenge of the game to the desires of the player, and that's a good thing in my eyes. However, what isn't a good thing in my eyes is when a game saves the best and most fun rewards for the people who beat the game on the highest difficulties, be it a special weapon, an extra level, etc. WoW is good about this in that, though the best gear is only available to the hard-core raiders, gear itself is not difficult to get, and the important things (basic mounts and the like) aren't denied to all but the most dedicated players. The only things that are denied to the less skilled players are better gear (which they don't need, after all) and cool-looking mounts, which are cosmetic, anyways.

-The ability to undo mistakes or misinformed decisions
I'm a bit of a perfectionist, and for that reason, I don't like it when a misinformed decision or flat-out mistake plagues me for the rest of the game. Because of this, when I play expansive and complex RPGs like Oblivion and Fallout 3, I often find myself replaying the first hour or two of the game multiple times because I don't like the way it played out or because I looked up a guide on the game and found out a way to make a certain decision much more intelligently. Perhaps I found out that making a certain choice during a certain quest would have been a better decision in the long run, or perhaps I chose a sub-optimal way to design my character. Either way, I often find myself restarting the game simply because I don't want one bad choice to hinder my future chances of success.

One of the great things about WoW is that that problem is not present. Make a bad talent choice? Pay gold to reset your talent points. Didn't like the pet you trained? Train another. Pick the wrong quest reward? You'll replace it soon anyways. Pick the Oracles but like the Frenzyheart more now? Do the quest to switch over. Pick the DPS Ashen Verdict ring but want the tank one now? Do the quest to switch it. Don't like the race you picked? Pay to change it. Don't like the faction you picked? Pay to change that. There are very few decisions in this game that will permanently hinder you for the rest of your time with that character, and the few there are can usually be undone with a ticket to a GM. I wish other games would take WoW's example on this, because it's one of the things I love the most about WoW.

So what about you, dear readers? What aspects of WoW do you like that you wish other games would adopt? Failing that, what mistakes has Blizzard made that you hope other developers can avoid?

Not at the computer currently

I'm putting this post up in case I don't get back in time to write anything else. I'll be going on a three-day trip this weekend to visit my sister from Friday to Sunday, so I won't be near a computer long enough to type an entry of reasonable length. Don't worry, though; by Wednesday, I'll be back with your regularly scheduled lengthy ramblings and oddly coherent stream-of-thought writing.

Comparing the three WoW's, Part 2: Raiding and Leveling

I have already compared the parallel structures of cooperative PvE and PvP, so today I shall compare the parallel structures of leveling and cooperative PvE and see what conclusions can be drawn from them. If you haven't read part one of this post, please do, for I will be writing with the assumption that you already have, so I don't have to repeat myself.

One thing that makes the two parts of leveling different from the two parts of cooperative PvE and PvP is that there is no objective line between pre-level-cap content and level-cap content. Sure, by the time you reach the Storm Peaks, you'll probably be level 80, or at least very close, so that zone and Icecrown could perhaps be objectively considered level-cap content, but even that is a difficult call to make. After all, you are eligible for all of the quests in Storm Peaks at level 77, and ditto for the vast majority of quests in Icecrown (excluding the Quel'Delar quest chain and a few Argent Tournament quests, exactly three to be exact). And even though you are very likely to be level 80 by the time you enter Icecrown, the fact that nothing in either of those zones requires you to be level 80 means the distinction is blurred, to say the least.

Another interesting point of note is that, aside from the chestpieces awarded by the Icecrown quest Battle at Valhalas: Final Challenge, the best gear you will get from quests that don't require you to enter an instance is ilevel 174 (and the quest above only rewards gear that is ilevel 183). For comparison, gear dropped by the normal version of the original level 80 5-mans (Culling of Stratholme, The Oculus, Halls of Lightning, and Utgarde Pinnacle) is ilevel 187, while the rare-quality gear that drops from the original heroics is ilevel 200. That's 13 ilevels of difference between those three areas of the game, a steady increase. Thus we can see these three areas of the game as pre-raiding tiers, with out-of-instance quests being tier 1, normal mode 5-mans being tier 2, and heroics being tier 3.

Of course, with the inclusion of craftable epic gear and reputation rewards, it is possible to skip normal mode dungeons, and even heroics if you know what you were doing, and go right into Naxxramas. I suppose those craftable epics and reputation rewards could be seen as similar to the current system by which heroics drop the second best emblem in the game, while the daily heroic awards the first; they allow you to skip to the interesting stuff, the stuff that everyone else is doing, without needing to go through old content to get there. They allow you to get to the cutting edge without people needing to drag you through old content to gear you up.

But wait! This is the start of the expansion pack that we are talking about. This is when nothing was "old content", not the normals, the heroics, nor the raids. And yet, these measures (craftable epics and reputation rewards) were put in place from the beginning to allow people to skip normal modes and go right into heroics or into raids, just like how the current emblem system allows people to skip all of the previous tiers of raiding and go right into the most current tier of content. Something isn't right here; similar measures were implemented in both cases, yet the circumstances that necessitated them in the second case didn't exist in the first case. What I mean by that is that the new emblem system was implemented so that people could enter the raiding scene if they got in a bit late and missed the chance to gear up while everyone else was running the lower-tier content, but craftable epics and reputation rewards allowed people to skip new content that everyone would have been running if Blizzard hadn't implemented those epics or those reputation rewards. What gives?

I suppose one explanation is that Blizzard didn't want to force people to run 5-mans if they really didn't want to, but even this explanation is difficult to accept. After all, the amount of time it would take to fully gear a character up for Naxxramas without entering any 5-mans would probably be similar to the amount of time it would take to gear up that character using normal modes and eventually heroic modes. The only difference is that the player could move at their own pace and play at their own convenience while using the former method, while gearing up in five mans would force the player to play not only for themselves but also for those they group up with, and they wouldn't be able to just drop out whenever they feel like it, like they could when they are out solo-ing. But the thing is, those differences are also exactly what differentiate raiding from solo-ing, and those differences only get more pronounced in the raiding scene. 5-mans are like a mini preparation for the demands of raiding, so to want to skip them to get into raiding is like skipping learning how to walk because you want to start running. As such, a player who would chose to gear up for Naxx through solo ventures rather than 5-mans would likely be doing so for reasons that would show that he, as a player, isn't ready for raiding, no matter how good his gear may be.

So who were these craftable epics and reputation reward made for? It looks like they were made for the mysterious brand of player that enjoys solo-ing more than 5-mans but still ultimately enjoys raiding more than either. Or perhaps they were made for those players who have the necessary grouping skills to raid and want to get into raids without bothering with that 5-man nonsense. This is certainly a feasible possibility, but heroics in those days weren't like heroics now. In the days before the Dungeon Finder, it was common for guild members to run heroics together for gear and badges, which would negate the one aspect of heroics that could make them less enjoyable than raids: the fact that they were usually PUG'ed. I suppose these craftable epics and reputation rewards could also provide a source of back-up gear, like that provided by emblems, gear that you could use to gear up if the RNG gods decided to deny you a certain drop over and over again.

But could these craftable epics and reputation rewards also have been made for us, the soloists? We players may say that gear is just a nice consolation prize for the grander experience of playing the game, and we may look down upon those who openly admit to playing for the gear, but gear is still an important factor in all parts of this game. As I have said before, gear doesn't only serve as a gatekeeper to keep us from steamrolling through content; it also serves as a representation of our achievements, of the effort we put in to obtain that gear. Crafted gear represents the time we put in to farm the mats and/or earn the money to buy them off of the auction house, while reputation gear represents the time we put in to reach exalted with the faction that rewards it. So is this gear for us?

Honestly, I doubt it. Crafted gear and reputation rewards were integral to entering heroics and raiding back when Wrath first came out, meaning that obtaining them was simply another step on the path to raiding. After all, raiders had to obtain this gear first, then move on to raiding to obtain better gear, so I really couldn't see Blizzard putting this gear in the game to give us soloists something to work for. To say that those rewards were put in for soloists would be like saying that the first few levels in a single-player game were put in for the people who aren't skilled enough to beat the latter levels. It doesn't work that way; those first few levels (and the craftable epics and reputation rewards) are the stepping stones through which a player moves on to more difficult and more rewarding content, not something put in to stand on its own.

It's the fact that this gear serves as a stepping stone into cooperative PvE that convinces me that Blizzard didn't want Wrath's solo content to be viable, to be able to stand on its own as a unique part of the game; they only want it to facilitate players' entry into raids. Astute readers will notice that I have come to this conclusion before through very similar reasoning, but hey, at least I'm consistent, right? In the previously linked post, I concluded that in the same way PvP (and the entire game, really) was balanced around class performance in arenas, PvE has been balanced around raiding to make getting into raids easier. This fact, coupled with everything I have said up to now, leads me to only one conclusion: the three WoW's aren't solo-ing, cooperative PvE, and PvP, with content done before the level cap and content done at the level cap, heroics and raiding, and battlegrounds and arenas as their respective sub-areas. The three WoW's are, instead, leveling, level-cap PvE, and PvP, with level-cap PvE split into three areas: soloing, heroics, and raids.

So what does this mean in the grand scheme of things? It means I can take the conclusion of my previously linked post a step further: WoW's level-cap solo content isn't just a stepping stone into cooperative PvE content; it exists only to facilitate the transition from leveling to heroics and raiding. Wrath's solo content was, quite simply, not designed to be viable, to stand on its own, which explains all of the points I brought up in On the homogenization of Wrath of the Lich King solo content. And yes, I think that the lack of viability of WoW's solo content is a bad thing. So I wait for Cataclysm with bated breath, to see if the game will go further in this direction, or if it will reverse it. Only time will tell.

What could replace Path of the Titans?

Where are your glyphs that made us run
To WoW.com for information
Indeed your development days are done
Oh Path of the Titans, I hardly knew ye.
-Inspired by the tradition Irish anti-war song "Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye"

With Path of the Titans officially scrapped, I have been thinking about whether something should be implemented to replace it. I was excited for Path of the Titans because it promised to add a new dimension of character progression to the game, one that would make solo-ing at the level cap more interesting. With that gone, it seems that when we reach the level cap, all we'll have to await us is the same old same old of dailies, dailies, dailies. And in case you weren't aware, I am sick and tired of the same old dailies, dailies, dailies. I want something more, and I was hoping that Path of the Titans would be that something more. Now it won't be, but we can still hope that Blizzard will implement something to keep us soloists occupied. (You know, something other than the massive overhaul of the old world. What can I say? I got my druid to the level cap, now I want to do something with him... something other than raiding or PvP.)

But what could that something be? Well, as much as we soloists may want something that will reward us with unique items that raiders won't be able to get without spending twice as much time on the game (such as the ancient glyphs that Path of the Titans would have provided), that would be unfair to WoW's raiding community, for they would need to spend an ungodly amount of time on the game to stay as competitive as possible. Since Blizzard is making 10-man and 25-man raids share a lockout in Cataclysm to prevent raiders from needing to spend an ungodly amount of time on the game to stay competitive, we can bet they wouldn't want raiders to need to spend twice as much time on two parts of the game just to stay competitive. While Blizzard could always implement some mechanic to allow raiders to progress along this solo progression as they raid, preventing them from needing to spend extra time to stay competitive, this would rob the solo community of the sense that their progression is special to them, and it would almost invalidate any efforts they make towards that progression; after all, why spend time doing the solo ventures if raiding gets you good gear and helps you progress along those solo ventures just as quickly?

So we are left with the conclusion that whatever solo venture Blizzard could put in to replace Path of the Titans, it would need to reward similar rewards to raiding. This kind of precedent already exists in game in the fact that both PvP and raiding award gear, but the stats on that gear make it specifically geared for the content that rewards it, so it never feels like you need to engage in one to be competitive at the other (at least, these days I doesn't feel that way). Perhaps if Blizzard added a solo venture to replace Path of the Titans, it could also reward gear, but the gear rewarded would have stats on it (and set bonuses?) geared specifically for solo-ing. At this point, you may be asking why we should even have solo content that rewards gear the same way raiding rewards gear, but as I have already said, since Blizzard draws us in with WoW's solo content and some of us are quite content with that solo content, they do owe it to us to keep us as occupied as they do raiders and PvP'ers.

But how to reward that gear? Why not have it start with something that everyone will be going for: faction reputation. I assume that Cataclysm's endgame content will still have factions who reward raid-worthy gear at exalted, so perhaps the path to the end-game solo content could start there. Perhaps the factions could give people who reach exalted with them special quests that they can only trust to their "closest allies", such as infiltration missions or quests to search for some secret artifact. Though those quests would take a long time, they would reward better gear than most solo ventures. They could also be a good way to add a bit more lore to the game.

Of course, all things being fair, the gear these solo ventures initially reward would have to be worse than the gear dropped by heroics, so that people who like heroics wouldn't feel pressured to pursue these solo ventures. To borrow numbers from this current expansion, perhaps these solo ventures could reward rare-quality ilevel 200 gear, which would still not be as good as the epics one can gain from heroics, but better than the items gained from normal 5-man dungeons (which are like an extension of the solo content, anyways). As new 5-man dungeons are released, the solo ventures could be updated as well to reward items better than the normal mode loot of the new dungeons, but not as good as the heroic mode loot. That would mean, if this kind of system were implemented with Wrath of the Lich King, once Trial of the Champion was released (200 on normal, 219 on heroic), new quests would be added that would reward 213 epics. When The Frozen Halls was released (219 on normal, 232 on heroic), new quests would be added that would reward 226 epics.

But how exactly would these quests play out? I envision something like the Swift Flight Form questline, minus needing to run a dungeon to finish it. I envision questlines that would take you all over the world to perform a wide variety of tasks. They could begin with simple killing, collecting, and exploration quests, and end with quests that involve vehicles, flying mounts, and perhaps even phased quests where you and you alone go through some sort of gauntlet assisted by members of the associated faction. Or perhaps a quest like The Drakkensryd, which, to this day, is one of my favorite quests that I have ever done. Hell, I wouldn't mind if these questlines required temporary dailies (like the ones that award Aspirant's Seals), as long as there is a good in-quest reason for them.

There are some of my ideas. I know we'll probably never see anything like this in-game, but it's always nice to dream.

New poll for profit and pleasure

In addition to the poll I have had on the side of my blog for some time now, I am adding a new one to hopefully gain a deeper understanding of my readership. I use the original poll to get an idea of what my readership spends most of its time doing, which is fine for when I talk about WoW in the past and the present, but what about the future? Since WoW is an ever-changing game, the way we play now may change as the game changes, and since the game could change in any number of conceivable ways, the percentage of players who play a certain part of the game can change easily. In discussing these kinds of changes, I think it's important to consider not just what the players currently do, but also what they like to do. That's where this poll comes in.

My new poll is going to be very similar to my old poll, and for good reason; I want to get an idea of how the answers to my new question compare to the answers to my old question. My new question is this: If all parts of WoW received equal development time and were equally fleshed out, interesting, and rewarding, what would you spend most of your time doing? Would you stop leveling alts and focus on your main now that the level cap actually had interesting solo content? Would you leave the raiding scene for the less stressful scene of heroics now that they weren't the same stale heroics you are used to? Would you abandon arenas for battlegrounds? What would you do? If you would like to say why your answers on the two polls are the same or are different, please do so in the comments section of this post.

And since I'm sure someone is curious to know, I haven't voted in these polls myself because I want them to provide a snapshot of my readership, and I don't want my votes to sway that snapshot one way or another. However, if you are curious, I'll answer them now: I spend most of time leveling alts when I play WoW, but if all content were equal, I would spend most of my time doing solo content at the level cap on my druid.

Comparing the three WoW's, Part 1: Raiding and PvP

One could say that there are three worlds (of warcraft?) in this amazing game we play: solo-ing, group PvE, and PvP. These three areas have an interesting parallel between them: they each have two categories of content, one of which is a gateway of sorts for the other, the other of which provides better loot. For group PvE, those two categories are heroics and raiding. For PvP, they're battlegrounds and arenas (though battlegrounds will provide gear as good as that provided in arenas once Cataclysm hits). For solo-ing, they're, quite simply, content done before the level cap and content done at the level cap. Considering the parallel structure between these three areas of the game, I think it's worth it to look at each area, examine their similarities and differences, and see what that says about the game itself.

It seems that my readership is comprised more of solo-ers than of raiders or PvP-ers, but I'll look at the group PvE scene first--I want to save soloing for last, for I suspect that is where the most interesting conclusions will come from. From the beginning of Burning Crusade, when heroics were first implemented, they were designed to be an entryway into the raiding scene: they gave loot that allowed one to enter the first tier of raiding, and they provided a challenge to those who had just reached the level cap, while still being less of a challenge than raids (and thus rewarding comparably worse loot).

It seems, however, that Blizzard has acknowledged the popularity of heroics (a full 14% of my readership seems to spend most of their time in heroics), for they have added four since Wrath was released, all of which were designed to be harder than regular heroics and to be comparable to raids in terms of their difficulty, and thus reward better gear. All heroics received another upgrade when Blizzard changed the emblem system so that the daily heroic would reward the best emblem in the game, while the bosses themselves would drop the second best emblems. While this meant that heroics did allow players to get better gear, they were still firmly in the position of a stepping stone into raids; if anything, the new heroics themselves were just added to give people who can't raid but can run heroics a place to use that new gear, and to give those looking to get into the newest tier of content another avenue to get raid-worthy gear. Thus heroics still seem to exist as little more than the step before raids; the change in the emblem system only improved that functionality, since people likely don't want to run old raids to help alts and new players gear up, so the emblem system makes it so they don't have to.

And as for battlegrounds and arena? Well, they share a similar structure; battlegrounds are available to players before arenas are, and they allow players to gear up in second-rate (compared to arenas) gear, gear which can allow them to move into arenas, where they will get the best gear. Thus the best gear is only available to those who participate in arena, while gear that was once exclusive to arena players becomes easier to get for players who only participate in battlegroung PvP.

The way gear is obtained in battlegrounds and arenas shows an interesting parallel to the way gear is obtained in heroics and raids: the latter provides better gear than the former, but gear that was once exclusive to players who participate in the latter becomes available to those who participate in the former as the expansion wears on. This can allow us to conclude that Blizzard wants players who decided to enter the arena scene a bit later than others to have a chance at getting geared up for it with relative ease. It certainly takes longer than it may have at the beginning of the expansion, but it is still easier for them to do so than if they had to use the same starter gear as people had to use during the first season of the expansion.

More disturbing, though, is the implication of this parallel that Blizzard sees arena as the PvP counterpart to raiding, and thus they see battlegrounds as the PvP counterpart to heroics, i.e., inferior content. Now, Blizzard has said that they want as many people who PvE to raid as possible, and they have certainly designed the game to make that happen. Can we thus conclude that Blizzard sees arena as the end-goal of all PvP, just as raiding is the end-goal of all PvE? It's an interesting prospect, but it might not be the case. After all, Rob Pardo, Blizzard's VP of game design, has gone on record as saying that arenas were the biggest mistake in WoW's history, and I doubt Blizzard would want to encourage players to participate in something they saw as a mistake. One could see rated battlegrounds as Blizzard's way of admitting that arena should not be the end-goal of PvP, since rated battlegrounds will allow people who play only in battlegrounds to get the same gear as people who play only in arenas. This means that battlegrounds and arenas will no longer relate to each other the way they do now, with the latter being awarding superior gear and thus being implied as being superior to the former.

Still, if Blizzard was so unhappy with the way arenas were implemented, why did they try so hard to promote them over battlegrounds? And why did they still try to do this when arena participation dropped dramatically after rating requirements were added to gear, showing that many players simply weren't interesting in arena for the experience of it? And most importantly, why did they stick with this dying part of the game in spite of the balancing nightmare it created for them? The best guess I have is that they simply didn't know what a nightmare arenas would create; Pardo himself said that if they did know what a nightmare it would be to balance the classes in arenas and PvE, they probably wouldn't have implemented the arena system. I guess their best excuse is the classic excuse: it seemed like a good idea at the time.

I wanted to make sure I had enough time to explore this topic as much as needed, so I will have to postpone looking at the parallels between leveling and cooperative PvE for my next philosophy post, which may or may not be posted next Wednesday (considering the sporadic nature with which the ideas for these blog posts come to me, I can't make any promises). Stay tuned!

Edit: As I suspected might happen, the follow-up to this post will be posted on Friday.

Anonymity is no excuse for trollish behavior

Before I begin, let me just say this post contains no revolutionary ideas, no grand revelations that will make you think about WoW in a new way; it is really a form of catharsis for me, and thus may not fit the standards I hold my other philosophy posts to. It will probably not lead to any deep discussion in the comments section, and it probably won't inspire any new ideas in you, but that's the way it goes.

Still reading? Glad to see it. First of all, I am going to assume, at the risk of being horribly wrong, that you, the reader, are not a sociopath. I am going to assume that if I were to say that you should be generally courteous to the people you see in your daily life, that it is wrong to go out of your way to make their lives miserable, and that even if you can't see them as friends, you should try to see them as people, then you would simply read through without a speck of thought to the contrary. If, however, you are one of those people who thinks that we need a reason to be good to others, rather than one of those people who thinks we need a reason to not be good to others, then you may as well stop reading now, because this post is based on assumptions that we do not share.

Still reading? Thank goodness. I apologize for all of these warnings and all this seeming self-doubt, but I tend to get a bit nervous about defending a position when I don't justify the premises beforehand, and that's exactly what I am going to do now. What are those premises? I could go into a long list of them, but I shall stick with one that summarize the rest rather well: the Golden Rule. If you aren't familiar with this golden rule, then I'll give you my own version (I often find the other versions I read to be too schmaltzy, trite, or particular): If you like it when people do something for/to you, then do that thing for/to other people; if you don't like it when people do something for/to you, don't do that thing for/to other people. To paraphrase the Rabbi* Hillel, that is the whole of morality; everything else "is just commentary."

Now, even if you don't follow the Golden Rule in your everyday life, I'm sure you follow some basic sense of morality that prescribes that you treat others with respect and that you generally don't be a jerk. How frequently you follow that sense of morality is a different matter, but even if you break the rules, at least you are aware of them. It's simple ethics that if someone is human, they are worthy of some sort of respect (in most cases, at least). So, when you start playing WoW, surrounded by other players, it follows that since they are people too, they are worthy of this same respect. Simple, right?

I wish. If it were that simple, we wouldn't have WoW.com breakfast topics like the one that inspired this post. No, when you boot up WoW, rather than people acting like civil human beings, we get trade chat, ganking, and griefing. We get gear score/achievement checking and people yelling at new 80's for not having ICC epics in heroics. We get impatient DPS shouting "Gogogo" (no, really? I thought we got our emblems of frost by standing around doing nothing), healers refusing to heal DPS through forgivable mistakes because of the number who take avoidable damage and expect to be healed through it, and tanks chain-pulling faster than their healer might be able to keep up. Quite simply, we get jerks.

It has always frustrated me that the WoW community has degraded into what it has become. If anything, encountering someone else while playing WoW should make you want to be nicer to them. See, there's this thing called the Monkeysphere. The monkeysphere is an informal name for "the group of people who each of us, using our monkeyish brains, are able to conceptualize as people." Scientists studying our brains have determined that our monkeysphere is limited to 150 people. That means that we are only capable of seeing 150 people as real people at any given time. Our brains simply aren't capable of seeing every single person we see on a daily basis as a real person; unless they are important to us, we just see them as "one-dimensional bit characters."

What does this have to do with what we are discussing? The monkeysphere is the reason we are more comfortable being rude to strangers than to people we know; those strangers simply aren't people to us. How does someone enter your monkeysphere? Simply having something in common can be enough, though our monkeysphere is usually comprised solely of people we see on a regular basis. However, commonality can be enough if you are willing to expand your monkeysphere beyond a few dozen people. And guess what! Those people you play WoW with? You do have something in common with them; you both play WoW. Oftentimes, you'll have even more in common; you both want to finish a certain quest, you all want to finish a heroic, but failing that, you still have your common identity as a WoW player to help you see those you encounter in-game as people. Still, I suppose the fact that WoW has gotten as big as it has, as well as the spontaneous and temporary nature of most group activities, means that at some point, the number of people we encounter in-game had to exceed our monkeysphere.

Still, I have encountered twenty trolls in WoW for every a-hole I have encountered in the real world; where does this imbalance come from? Aside from the G.I.F.T, there are two elements that can be reasonably blamed for this increase in antisocial behavior in the WoW population: anonymity and lack of repercussions. We aren't as rude to people in the real world as we are in WoW because those people in the real world can see our faces and recognize us again, and we don't want to face the potential consequences for our prospective antisocial behavior. Both of those elements are severely reduced in WoW, hence what we see on a daily basis. I know I'm not hitting on anything new by claiming that anonymity and lack of repercussions lead to the behavior we see in WoW, but that's not the main point I'm trying to make. The main point I want to make is this: anonymity and lack of repercussions are piss-poor excuses for trollish behavior.

Neither of these excuses should need to be debunked if you simply believe in the Golden Rule, but I highly doubt most trolls follow the Golden Rule, so so much for that. Let's start with anonymity. The anonymity that WoW provides comes from the fact that people won't recognize you as the perpetrator of the trollish behavior in question. It's similar to how people can be rude to people they don't see frequently in real life: people who we see frequently are within our monkeysphere, so because we are more comfortable being rude to people outside of our monkeysphere, we are more comfortable being rude to people we don't know. In other words, somewhere along the line, we got this idea in our head that it's ok to be rude to someone if you won't see them again. From a practical standpoint, that may be true, but it's a very perverse sentiment, regardless. The idea that strangers aren't worth our respect really denies them a bit of their humanity; this may be the monkeysphere itself at work, but it is our responsibility as human beings who live in as large of a community as we do to overcome the monkeysphere, to surpass it. If we cannot do that, then our only choice is to regress technologically and sociologically until we never have to encounter more than 150 people in a day.

As for the lack of repercussions? Well, by reading this, you agreed that being courteous to people is a good thing, and that rule applies whether there are consequences or not. If being courteous is its own reward (and I can say from personal experience that it is), then that alone should be enough to make you courteous towards other players, regardless of whether there are negative consequences for doing otherwise.

Still, both of these excuses are just that; excuses. When I say excuses, I mean that in the sense of pretenses. I think the real reason trolling exists is because the people behind those trolling avatars simply don't respect other people. In real life, they hide their lack of respect out of fear of the repercussions that that will follow it, but when you take the possibility of those repercussions away, that's when you get trade chat. The issue isn't anonymity and lack of repercussions, then; the issue is onymity (the opposite of anonymity) and the presence of repercussions in the real world, for some people only subdue their trollish tendencies in real life because of these discouragements.

Now, don't think I haven't forgotten the very blog post I wrote a few weeks ago. Most of you are probably sitting there in agreement as you read this, and I doubt I will change the mind of the odd troll who may happen upon this page. So why do I write this? If anything, it can prepare you, the considerate reader, for the day you may argue with a troll, for the day you may have the opportunity to change his mind, the day he listens to reason, if only you can provide that reason. Maybe that day will never come, but if it does, you might just be a bit more prepared now.

*Though I may be quoting a Jewish commentator, the Golden Rule can be found in almost every religion world-wide, and even if you don't follow any religion, it's a very nice cliffnotes version of ethics that is simple to follow (though rarely easy).

Illogical quest drops and the Ironforge moat need to die in a fire

Spinks of Spinksville has asked us what we think needs to die in a fire in Cataclysm. Though he asked us about towns, quests, NPCs, and zones, I have other things on my mind. Specifically, I have my eyes on two things that need to go away with Cataclysm (even though they likely won't).

I'll start with the more obvious one. It's something that has been the butt of many a joke or webcomic since WoW began. That something is the illogical nature of body parts collected for quests. You know what I'm talking about: the fact that you can see that every enemy you kill has an ear/hoof/eye/whatever it is you are looking for to complete the quest, yet only one in every few drops that quest item. The fact that this has been allowed to go on for so long has boggled my mind since I first started doing these kinds of quests, and since Blizzard has the opportunity to redo everything in Azeroth, I say it's time they addressed this farce.

But how to address it? Blizzard could address this issue by taking an example from one quests in particular: The Zoram Strand. The Zoram Strand asks you to collect the heads of the naga you kill as proof that you killed them, and wouldn't you know it? When you do the quest, every single naga you kill drops a head. I suppose Blizzard realized that to kill a naga and find out that he doesn't have a head would be too ridiculous, even by their standards. What makes this quest different from other quests is that you need to collect 20 heads, which is more than most collection quests, and thus you end up killing a comparable amount of enemies. I think every quest where the basic structure is "Go kill X and bring me Y as proof that you killed X" should resemble The Zoram Strand in this regard, since these kinds of quests are more about the number of enemies you kill than the items they drop, anyways.

But what if Blizzard wants to keep some element of randomness in their quests? In that case, they can design quests similarly to the quest Are We There, Yeti?. Are We There, Yeti? is similar to many collection quests in the game in that the quest item has a fairly low chance to drop from the enemies you kill for it, but with one key difference. Nestled away in the quest text is this little blurb: "Remember, I only want the best looking ones -- no beat up or broken horns, please!" There you go. There's the justification for the fact that you can't take a horn off of just any yeti. You ruined most of them by killing the yeti, so you have to keep trying until you can kill one without damaging its horn. If Blizzard wants to keep some element of randomness in their quests, they can justify doing so by adding little blurbs like that to the quest text of any quest where the basic structure is "Go kill X and collect Y so I can do something with it."

So that covers quests, but I did say I had two things in mind that need to die in a fire in Cataclysm, didn't I? Well, folks, the second one may surprise you, but it's one that was the bane of my existence when I first started play WoW on my old, sub-par computer with 256 MB of RAM: the moat-like depression in the front of Ironforge. You probably don't even notice it when you walk across the bridge over it, but it is there, and woe to you if you lag near it.

You see, when I started playing WoW on my very old computer, I would lag pretty badly in some places, but nowhere near as badly as I would in Ironforge. Remember how it used to be called Lagforge? There's a reason for that. It got so bad that if, for some reason, I decided to enter the city, my frame-rate dropped down to--are you read for this?--one frame per a minute. You read that correctly; my game would slow down to the extent that after I rounded that corner, the screen would stay as it was for a whole minute. A minute later, I'd be closer to that moat, and I'd have to look at that for another minute. I'd then be in the moat, and with the lag against me, I'd have to make my way out. On my first visit to Ironforge, I did this dance five times before giving up and hearthing out, fuming with frustration.

That was years ago, though. Today, I play on a computer with with 4 GB of RAM, and Ironforge is so abandoned that I could probably enter it without much difficulty on a machine with only 256 MB. Thing is, Ironforge is coming back. Blizzard has gone on the record to say that the old capital cities will serve as the central cities of Cataclysm, similar to Shattrath in Burning Crusade and Dalaran in Wrath of the Lich King. That means Lagforge will likely re-earn it's nickname, and people with sub-par machines will have to go in there again. Now, I don't imagine that a large number of players will experience the crippling lag I described above, but your lag doesn't need to be that bad to fall into the moat. And so, I ask--rather selfishly, most likely--that that moat die in a fire when Cataclysm comes. I ask that the rubble from the earthquakes caused by Deathwing's return fill it in, and that rather than trying the clear it out, the Dwarves simply cover it up and leave it as is. It may do little more than placate the anger that still simmers in my former newbie self, but for all those who still play on old machines, it should be done.

Where is the line where If you don't like something, WoW is not for you?

I think it's reasonable to claim that Blizzard has tried to make their game appeal to a wide audience, and their massive number of subscribers attests to their success in that department. One of the things that I would argue made Wrath of the Lich King a successful expansion pack was that it opened raiding to a wider swath of WoW's playerbase, and though that did have potentially negative repercussions for the solo content, considering that WoW's primary focus is on raiding, I'd say that it was a good change in the grand scheme of things. Of course, WoW cannot be everything for everyone, so a line must be drawn somewhere between trying to increase the game's appeal and simply saying, "If you don't like X, then WoW is not for you."

But where is that line to be drawn? I ask because four days ago on WoW.com's Q&A column The Queue, Alex Ziebart answered a commenter's question about the complex and bombastic nature of the design of high end gear by saying this: "The Warcraft aesthetic is all about those huge shoulders, the random spikes, the intricate little decorations on each pauldron. In Azeroth, bigger is better. Bigger is much better. Having that massive gear is prestigious. The stripped-down gear is for nameless schmucks that haven't fought a proper battle in their lives. If you're looking for a simpler aesthetic, you're really better off looking at a different game. I don't mean that in a rude or smug way in the slightest. It just isn't Blizzard's style. It definitely isn't Warcraft's style."

While I agree with Alex's claim that WoW's style is one where bigger is better, something about the answer just doesn't sit right with me. Is WoW really the kind of game where something like the look of gear can be a game breaker? Where if someone doesn't like something as simple as aesthetics, that means they shouldn't play the game? I won't spend much time considering the spiky-ness of gear as I look at this issue, for I am the kind of person who never paid much attention to aesthetic considerations like that (though I suppose it helped that the old Night Elf Cat Form model had a certain timeless beauty to its design). I'll just say that this issue could perhaps be solved by Blizzard adding armor skins to the online store, if only to change the way your armor looks to you, while not changing the way it looks to everyone else.

With that issue out of the way, we must look at two conflicting facts and how they affect the issue of where the line should be drawn where if you don't like a part of WoW, then WoW isn't for you. One, video game design is an art-form. Two, Blizzard is a for-profit company. As I said in my post on whether Blizzard should be more loyal to their fan-base or the lore, video games are a form of art, and thus they have all of the responsibilities of an art-form: they should "challenge our perceptions, our beliefs, and make us ask questions about ourselves." While I was referring to the storyline when I first made that statement, the same rule applies once we stop reading the lore and pick up the keyboard. Unfortunately, games like WoW are only possible because they are big business, and it's the profits WoW generates that allow it to continue to exist. It's because money makes the world go round (sadly) that most contemporary art (at least, most successful contemporary art) sacrifices artistic merit for popular appeal.

Why do I bring up these issues? I bring them up because widening the game's appeal is a good move commercially and increases WoW's popular appeal, but may not be a good move artistically. After all, widening the game's appeal is usually done by loosening the standards that players need to fit before they can see certain content, and that means less challenge for the players. Now, if the lore of WoW is supposed to challenge our perceptions, then the gameplay must, by reasonable extension, challenge us. However, most of the things that Blizzard has done to widen WoW's appeal has taken some of the challenge out of the game: shrinking raid sizes, reducing the number of consumables by removing sharpening stones and oils, allowing the use of heroics to gear up so plays can skip entire tiers of raiding, etc.

Of course, what some would call taking challenge out of the game, others would call removing needless barriers. Though my experience with raiding is pretty scant, what I do know is that raiding is still a challenge; that has not changed since the days of Molten Core. What has changed is that the challenge is now mostly in movement and strategy, not in the logistics of organizing and buffing forty people. When you think about it that way, you could say that WoW has struck a balance between the two aforementioned issues (art vs. profit). Blizzard has managed to increase WoW's commercial appeal without sacrificing the things that make it a truly great game. They have increased its allure without sacrificing its character. It might not be a very impressive conclusion to come to, but I think we can conclude that any change that increases WoW's appeal without alienating those who already play by sacrificing the game's merit is a good change.

Should better gear look more unique?

As I said in my post on the Celestial Steed, aesthetics can be serious business in WoW. It's for this reason that something as simple as the look of the gear that drops off of bosses can create as strong a reaction as it does. As someone who doesn't raid frequently and is just happy to get his hands on whatever gear he can, I never thought about this much until WoW.com did a breakfast topic on the subject of the lack of unique models in the Lich King's loot tables. It's easy to understand where the author comes from; the Lich King is, after all, the final boss of the expansion pack, so it seems ludicrous for him to not drop unique-looking items. But is it really?

As I have said before, loot serves two purposes: it acts as a gatekeeper to determine how quickly we can move through content, and it represents the challenges we overcame to obtain it. Whether the loot has a unique model is only relevant to the latter purpose, so we'll focus on how the loot's appearance relates to its representation of our achievements. (Still, imagine what WoW would be like if how cool gear looked were relevant to both of its purposes: "Look, man, I am proud to be a part of this guild, but our tabard just looks so... plain. It really is in our best interests that I wear the Tabard of the Shattered Sun instead; we've been banging our head on the wall on this boss for the past week, and it may give me the advantage I need to help us kill this guy." "Fine, but once we get him on grind, do you think you could wear our tabard instead?" "Alright; I guess it will help keep him interesting once he's no longer a real challenge for us.")

So, if the look of gear is supposed to be reflective of the challenges we overcame to get it, then the more difficult and significant a challenge is, the more impressive the gear should look. That's why the coolest mounts drop off of the hardest bosses, and that's why people were so indignant about a mount as impressive as the Celestial Steed being available to every Tom, Dick, and Harry who shelled out the money for it. Well, the Lich King is certainly the ultimate challenge of Wrath of the Lich King, so it certainly follows that he should drop the coolest loot in the game. "Cool" may be subjective, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that unique models are the coolest models of all.

Granted, we can't expect Blizzard's artists to be able to come up with twenty of their best models on the spot, but they certainly could have saved their best ideas for the Lich King. As they were going through making models for loot from quests, normal dungeons, heroics, and the first tier or raiding, and even as they were making models for Ulduar and Trial of the Crusader, they could have taken one of two of their ideas and said, "That's one of our best. Save that one and flesh it out for the loot that drops off of the final boss." If they didn't do that this time around, then it's too late to change anything about that, but at least it can be a lesson for the future.

So, the Lich King should drop unique weapons because he is the final boss of the expansion, as well as the greatest challenge of the expansion, and the gear he drops should reflect that visually. Case closed, right? Perhaps, but that's not all there is to it. We must remember that the models of the items in-game take time and creativity to develop. Some artist at Blizzard had to first come up with the idea of a unique model for a weapon or piece of armor, then spend the time it takes to actually develop that model so that we can see it. I imagine that process takes a very long time, and I don't think any one piece made me realize that more than the Conqueror's Nightsong Raiments, which I used to wear on my druid. Just go ahead and go look at the screen shots of that piece. I'll wait.

Back? Did you see just how intricate the design of that piece was? How many details there were? And that's just one model for one piece of armor. The art team has to churn out hundreds of those in the duration of any given expansion, not to mention models for enemies, bosses, the raids themselves, etc. And with every piece that's made, that's one good idea they likely won't be able to use again, limiting their reserve of creative ideas for future models. What I am trying to say is, every single thing in the game was the result of some artist's long work and effort, be it a weapon dropping off of the Lich King, a blue-quality drop from a heroic, a level 68 baddie in Borean Tundra, or just a small plant used to add scenery. I think we sometimes get too caught up on the look of one thing to appreciate all of the amazing artwork in this game.

So the next time you log in, as a favor to me, the design team, and yourself, just look. I don't care what you look at; it could be your character, the raid you are in, the heroic you run, the world itself, or even just an herb you pick or a node you mine. Just take a look, and appreciate all of the effort the art team puts into this game. And whatever you look at, think to yourself, "An artist worked hard to make this, just so I could see it." Gratitude and appreciation, my friends; that's all I ask.

How am I conquering the pre-expansion slump?

A shared topic on Blog Azeroth proposed by Jaedia of The Lazy Sniper asks us how we are conquering the pre-expansion slump, a slump I am definitely feeling. Sadly, I started feeling this slump long ago with the disappointment I felt with the Argent Tournament. Having gone through all of the other solo content in Wrath of the Lich King, I put high hopes in the Argent Tournament to revitalize my interest in game, but with the lackadaisical design of the daily quests, I quickly grew bored and resolved to do it only long enough to acquire enough Champion's Seals to get the Argent Pony Bridle and the five pets. Once I had those, I quit the tournament forever, and have not returned. The dungeon finder briefly reignited my interest in the game with the way it made it easy to chain run heroics, but it had the unintended effect of making me burn out even faster, to the point where I realized that there were no heroics that I liked anymore; just those I didn't hate as much as others (and I had something to hate about each one). Thus the things that were probably implemented specifically to keep people like me (non-raiders) interested in the game failed to capture my attention.

So what's a soloist to do? Why, what we soloists have always done; roll an alt! Problem is, with the remake of Azeroth coming soon, there's less motivation to go through the process of leveling a character again, when we can only assume that it will be more fun when the expansion comes out. This is made worse by the fact that all of the content begins to feel a bit stale when you have leveled multiple characters, even though you may be going through it with a new class. As such, we need to find a reason to want to level that character, other than just experiencing that content again. With that said, though, experiencing the content again isn't that bad of a reason to level an alt, since it means that the old content will be fresh in our mind after the Cataclysm happens, allowing us to appreciate the new content that much more.

But if experiencing the content to be able to appreciate the new content isn't reason enough for you to level an alt, then why should you? What has worked for me so far is the goal of having an alt that is a "pet craftsman". I leveled my shaman with the goal of having a pet jewelcrafter, and I leveled my priest with the goal of having a pet alchemist, and those are the only two alts of mine (beside my Death Knight, who had an unfair start) that made it past level 25 (they have both made it past 60 at this point). I know I said in my post reflections on leveling a shadow priest that leveling an alt is more fun with two gathering professions, but if you usually level your alts that way and are looking for a change of pace, perhaps leveling them while also working on a crafting profession is the change of pace you need.

Overarching motivation, in-universe and out

One of the things I'm sure most of us love about the world of World of Warcraft is just how open of a world is it. There's so much to do with so many classes and races to do it with, and it's this scope that has kept me playing the game for what will soon be five years. But with this kind of open world comes the risk that it may be too open. A game like WoW runs the risk of becoming a quicksand box (a play on the term "sandbox game", which describes a game like WoW where there are tons of things you do and you can choose what you do), in which a sandbox game becomes so open that the player has no motivation to play, usually due to a lack of goals to accomplish. I know many of you will probably say that WoW's extensive array of quests prevent it from becoming a quicksand box, and as much as I may agree with you, quite of a few of my friend has tried WoW and stopped playing because of an overall lack of general motivation. There are quests, but for what purpose do we complete these quests? How does me helping a drunken gnome with his buzzboxes relate to defending Darnassus? Most of us probably get too caught up in these little intermediary goals to really think about our characters' lack of overall motivation (art reflects life, indeed), which is why we are able to overlook it.

But as with life, for some of us, our lack of an overall motivation can only last so long before we begin to ask, what for? Our characters get to explore this huge world, fight impressive and intimidating monsters, earn great rewards, but why? After all, there are a finite number of quests in the game, so those intermediary motivators will eventually run out, and then we will be forced to face the question again, what for? Though the introductory cinematics that play when we make a new character do give us an abstract motivation for our avatar, we have almost no way to follow up on that motivation for any extended period of time. Take the Night Elves as an example. Our motivation is to "defend Darnassus and the wild children of nature against the Legion's encroaching corruption." Ok then, so I do the quests in Teldrassil to help protect our tree from any sort of corruption it may be suffering from, but when those run out (as they do around level 12), what then? I'm apparently supposed to protect it from the Legion's corruption, but where is this Legion? How are they corrupting our tree? What am I supposed to do to stop them? Sadly, the game gives us no answers until higher levels, when we are no longer concerned with the motivation the cinematic gave us.

While WoW may not have very practicable main motivators for our characters, it does have quests that send us to new zones once we have outgrown the quests within an old zone, such as What's Wrong at Cenarion Thicket?, which sends players in Outland from Zangermarsh to Terokkar Forest. WoW abounds with these kinds of quests, and they allow us to make sure there are always quests for us to do, people for us to help, etc., so our character is never lacking in motivation Problem is, they still don't give our characters any overall motivation. They help give our characters overall motivation about as much as adding more quests to our starting zone would; they simply delay the realization that our characters don't have a larger purpose or goal.

As you can probably tell by now, I am mostly considering this issue from a lore/in-universe standpoint. We players have plenty of overarching motivators to keep us playing: leveling up, getting loot, experiencing content, overcoming long and difficult challenges, etc. How much story matters to us is something that varies from player to player, but you can't deny that the story of Warcraft truly is an amazing story, and it's a shame for a player to play without any thought for the lore whatsoever. After all, a player who plays with no thought for the story is really playing only for the numbers (be they gold, experience, stats, or whatever), and I would think that most of us would like to think of ourselves as more than people pushing buttons to make numbers bigger.

But though we would like to think that we have larger goals in mind when we play WoW, I think the current state of overall motivation in the WoW universe mirrors our own motivation for playing. Sure, we may have goals like getting more money, more levels, better gear, etc., but when you think about it, those motivators are a lot like our characters' seeming motivation (doing more quests): they give the illusion of a larger, overall purpose, but are really comprised of a series of smaller, nearly identical goals. In-universe, our characters really just do task after task for other people in exchange for money, experience, and occasionally gear. Expanded into the real world, this model still holds. Those of us who play the game to level up are really just chasing a series of milestones that result in a number increasing by one (as well as our characters evolving to become more powerful). Those of us who try to get better gear are really just chasing a series of small upgrades that have the larger effect of increasing some numbers on our character panel. I could go on, but I think you get my point.

But we players do have an overarching motivator that keeps us playing, something grander and deeper than increasing numbers: fun. We play this game because we enjoy it, plain and simple. Everyone has different definitions of fun, so I won't write a long expository paragraph of examples of ways that WoW is fun, and I don't think I have to. With rare exception, I'm sure most of you who read this won't need to be convinced that you play WoW because it is fun.

So if we players have an overarching motivator that isn't explicitly shown in the game, can our characters have one, too? I think so. It's a motivating factor that can't be found in our quests, our introductory cinematic, or maybe even our lore. It's something that may not even be able to be summarized in one word, but I shall try regardless. That motivating factor is what I would call honor (not that kind). You can call it whatever you like--dignity, valor, integrity--they are all words to describe the same thing: that sense of doing what is right. We help those in trouble because it's the right thing to do. We accomplish to intermediary goals because, by doing so, we are helping other people and making their lives better. Obviously I am talking about our avatars, though the same priciples apply in real life, as well. Considering how ephemeral our accomplishment in Azeroth are (different people can help the same NPC multiple times, and they'll still need our help when we roll a new character; gear upgrades never last forever; level gains are only as impressive as they are close to the level cap, and we can always do away with those gains by rolling an alt), something intangible like honor may be closest thing our characters have to a practicable, overarching goal.

Kantian ethics and group quests

One of the things I have noticed about group quests is that many times when I have done them, I was helped by at least one person who had already completed the quest and was just helping me out of the goodness of his/her heart. When you think about it, this kind of charity is necessary for people to complete group quests, especially as the expansion wears on and most people have completed those quests. If no one helped others with quests they had already done, people who started leveling later than other people or who leveled an alt would probably never be able to complete group quests. I always got the sense for this kind of charity to work, we must be on the giving end of it as much as we are on the receiving end, but I never knew how to consider it further. Luckily, there exists a philosophical system perfectly set up to examine this kind of issue: deontology.

Specifically, I want to look at Kantian deontology and what it may have to say about group quests. Immanual Kant was a philosopher who came up with the idea of the categorical imperative, which is a way to evaluate the motivation for a person's actions as either moral or amoral. Among other things, Kant said that when we chose how we act, we must always "act only according to that maxim by which you can also will that it would become a universal law." What this means in regular English is that when we decide how we act, we should ask ourselves, "Would the world work if everyone acted like this?" Kantian deontology would say, for example, that music piracy is immoral because if everyone pirated music, musicians would have no motivation to make music, and there would be no music to pirate.

So what would Kantian deontology say about group quests? Well, if everyone only helped people with quests they themselves needed to complete, it would be difficult to find people to help you with your quests, especially as the number of people who hadn't completed those quests grew smaller, and it would be impossible once the number of people who hadn't completed that quest but have it in their quest log reached a number below the number of players required to complete the quest itself. Thus it is necessary that those of us who have already completed a group quest help others with that group quest after we have completed it so that they may complete it as well.

But how frequently should we help others with quests we have already done? (What follows is semi-stream-of-consciousness writing about how I derived the system for determining how frequently we should help others, so if you want to skip right to the system I came up with, scroll down to the second-to-last paragraph, the one that begins with "Here's the short version." Of course, if you do that, you'll probably think, "My God, why is this so complex?", since you skipped that parts that showed why it needed to be so complex, and dismiss it outright. Do what you will; there's a simpler less at the end, anyways.) We can't always be the recipients of charity without helping others in return, for if everyone refused to help other players with quests they themselves weren't on but expected other players to help them, no one would ever help each other, and we have already determined that we can't have that. So a balance must be found; when others help you, you must help someone else.

It's tempting to make a simple statement like, for every person that helps you with a quest without being on that quest, you should help someone else with a quest that you aren't on. This works fine when group quests are done in pairs, but not when they are done in groups of three. Here's why: suppose one person in a group of three wasn't on the quest involved. If we accept the statement I made before, then both of the members in that group who were on that quest would need to go out and help someone. If all group quests were three-man quests and all people went out and helped someone with a quest they had already done for every person who helped them with a quest that they had already done, this would create an imbalance of givers and recipients of charity, with the balance skewed toward the givers side.

Allow me to explain what I mean. Suppose Alice helps Bob and Carl with a group quest. At this point, neither Alice nor Bob nor Carl has helped a group with a quest they weren't on, nor have they been the recipient of this kind of charity. However, Alice has already completed this group quest with a different group, but Bob and Carl have not. So Alice helps them complete the quest, and by the assumption made before, Bob and Carl must now go out and help another group with a quest that they aren't on. As you can see, though one act of charity, Alice has necessitated that two acts of charities be performed. This will continue in an endless cycle as Bob and Carl go out and help people, creating an even greater imbalance between the need for this kind of charity and the availability of it. And it's only going to happen faster when 5-man group quests enter the equation (though I have yet to encounter a "5 players recommended" quest in Wrath of the Lich King that couldn't be done by a competent tank (yours truly), a competent healer, and a DPS for good measure).

You may not see a surplus of people wanting to do good for other people as a bad thing, and practically applied, it probably wouldn't be, but this system would still not work from a deontological perspective because we would run out of opportunities for people to "pay off" their "debt" of charity. As such, those who were late to the game and didn't have the opportunity to pay off their debt would get the long end of the stick (metaphorically), while those who go there first and had the first opportunities to pay off their debts will have done more work that those who got there late. A system like this would result in a scenario where there is more debt than ways to pay it off, and that can't be a good thing.

So then, for all this to remain balanced, there must be a system whereby for every time one person helps a group with a quest that they themselves aren't on, one other person will do the same thing. This means that when Alice helps Bob and Carl with a quest she herself isn't on, either Bob or Carl must do the same for another group, and that will allow things to work out. In more general terms, when a group gets together to do a quest, for every person in that group who isn't on that quest, one person in the group who is on that quest needs to help another group with a quest he/she isn't on.

But even that system is too simple to be applied universally. Suppose both Alice and Bob have completed a group quest that Carl has yet to do, and they help him with that quest. By the logic above, he must now twice help a group with a quest he hasn't done. But suppose our group of three are the only players on a realm (work with me here). If Carl helps Alice and Bob with one quest (rather than two) that he has already done but they haven't, surely he has repaid his debt to them. After all, if he had to help them twice, then he would have had to help a group with two quests he had already done, while Alice and Bob would only have to do that once. As such, Carl would have done more work than Alice or Bob.

So we must revise our previous claim. When a group quest is done, for every person in that group who isn't on that quest, someone in that group who was on that quest must help one person with a quest that they themselves aren't on. If we take the situation above and Carl goes out and helps a group of two with a quest that he isn't on and both of them are, he has fulfilled his debt. If one person in that group isn't on the quest, and one person is, Carl has fulfilled half of his debt, while the other person in the group who isn't on the quest has also fulfilled part of his own debt, whatever it may be, and the person who was on the quest has incurred his own debt. Because the other person in the group used the group to pay off some of his own debt, Carl can't claim that he has paid off all of his debt by helping that group. With a system like this, the number of people who help people with quests they themselves aren't on and the number of people who receive that kind of help will remain balanced. Thus it is deontologically sound.

But how to put it into practice? I suppose that since I have already used the word "debt" to describe this phenomenon, a currency system of sorts isn't out of the question. For now, we'll call this currency someone's "charity value". Obviously, when a group does a quest that everyone in the group needs to do, no one's charity value would change. A person's charity value would go up when they do a group quest that they aren't on and help someone who is on that quest, while a person's charity value would go down when they are the recipient of such help. In order to keep things balanced, a person would need to work to keep their charity value as close to zero as possible. This doesn't mean trying all the time to keep it at zero; it just means not letting it fall too far in either direction.

Working out the exact values by which someone's charity value would go up and down is a bit more difficult, but it can be done. Let's look at our final conclusion again: "When a group quest is done, for every person in that group who isn't on that quest, someone in that group who was on that quest must help one person with a quest that they themselves aren't on." Here are some formulas we can start with: when a person helps a group with a quest that they aren't on, their charity value would increase by an amount equal 1 divided by the number of people in the group who aren't on the quest. When a person in a group is helped by someone who isn't on the quest is question, their charity value would decrease by an amount equal to 1 divided by the number of people in the group who are on the quest. This means that the total debt and credit in the system would always be equal to zero, and it would not incur any sort of inflation or deflation.

To give you an example of this system in action, suppose five people are grouping together for a quest: Alice, Bob, Carl, Daniel, and Ethan. Alice is the only one in the group who isn't on the quest, so her charity value would go up by 1, i.e. 1 divided by 1. Bob's, Carl's, Daniel's, and Ethan's charity value would decrease because they received Alice's help, but because most of the people in the group were on the quest, their charity values wouldn't decrease by that much. There were four of them in the group who were on the quest, so their charity values would decrease by 1/4, or 1 divided by 4. So the charity values are as such: Alice: 1. Bob: -1/4. Carl: -1/4. Daniel: -1/4. Ethan: -1/4. The sum of the system is zero, showing that it is balanced.

Now suppose the next day, Bob helps Alice with a quest he has already done. Her charity value decreases by 1, and his increases by one, so the values are as such: Alice: 0. Bob: 3/4. Carl: -1/4. Daniel: -1/4. Ethan: -1/4. Again, the system is still balanced. Now suppose Carl, Daniel, and Ethan help Alice with a quest they all have already done. He charity value goes down by one again, while theirs go up by 1/3. The values would now be as such: Alice: -1. Bob: 3/4. Carl: 1/12. Daniel: 1/12. Ethan: 1/12. The system is still balanced, and reflects the general amount of charity given by each person: Alice has received help twice and given it once, so she is in the negatives. Carl, Daniel, and Ethan have been on the receiving end of charity towards a group and the giving end of group charity, so they are close to zero. Bob, however, is an anomaly; he was on the receiving end of charity towards a group but helped Alice alone, so he is in the higher end of the positive spectrum.

Bob's charity value illustrates a potential problem with this system: under this system, if you give or receive charity as a group, your general debt towards or credit in the system won't change as much. What I mean by that is, if you and some of your friends help one person with a quest, your charity value won't increase as much as it would have if you had helped that person alone. And if you receive help in a group with other people receiving help, your individual charity values won't decrease as much as they would have if you had each received help on your own.

This issue can be addressed by changing the formulas slightly to reward more credit or incur more debt based on the size of a group. We can change the formulas thusly: when a person helps a group with a quest that they aren't on, their charity value would increase by an amount equal the total number of people in the group divided by the number of people in the group who aren't on the quest. When a person in a group is helped by someone who isn't on the quest is question, their charity value would decrease by an amount equal to the total number of people in the group divided by the number of people in the group who are on the quest. Under this new system, your debt towards the system would be much greater if four people help you than if one person helped you, and your credit would be much greater if you help four people than if you help one person. Since it would also keep all things balanced (the sum of everyone's charity value would always be zero), we can conclude that this is the superior system out of all of the ones we have derived here.

Here's the short version. Everyone who engages in group quests would have what is known as a charity value. That value would increase when a person helps a group with a quest they themselves are not on or have already completed and would decrease when a person is helped by someone who isn't on the quest or has already completed it. Because of these parameters, a person's charity value would not change if everyone in the group is on the quest in question. The exactly values by which it increases or decreases would be as follows: When a person helps a group with a quest that they aren't on, their charity value would increase by an amount equal the total number of people in the group divided by the number of people in the group who aren't on the quest, including themselves. When a person in a group is helped by someone who isn't on the quest is question, their charity value would decrease by an amount equal to the total number of people in the group divided by the number of people in the group who are on the quest, including themselves. It will be everyone's responsibility to try to keep their individual number as close to zero as possible.

Whew, well that was a doozy. If you understood what I wrote, then great; if not, just take this much away from it: when someone helps you with a group quest that they have already done, try some time to help someone else with a group quest that you have already done. It's only fair.