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

When I logged in to my server for the first time after patch 4.0.3 dropped, I was struck by many things, not the least of which was just how much the world had changed. Though I was excited to see those changes, I decided to wait on giving them a really good look until I could fly around old-world Azeroth, since that would be much more efficient and freeing than walking around on foot. So plopped myself in Stormwind, waiting in the main city until Cataclysm came an unlocked that very basic amenity. From there? Who knows. Maybe I'll focus on Archeology, maybe I'll try to level my fishing and cooking skills, maybe I'll go right for the quests in the new zones, or maybe I'll just fly around a lot and see just how much our world has changed. But as I walked into Stormwind, I knew there would be no time for these considerations; there's a dragon on the loose! And he has torn our world asunder! We must rush to assess the damage, to rescue the innocents, to... wait, why is everything so quiet?

Yes, as I walked in to Stormwind for the first time after the Shattering, what struck me the most was not the damage to the city or the upgraded design of the city or the newly unlocked areas; what struck me the most was just how quiet everything was. The world had just been ravaged by the aspect of death, and everyone's walking around as if it is just old news. The guards aren't rushing to help anyone, the citizens aren't running for safety; people are just going about their daily lives. Were I in this world myself, I wouldn't be able to help but say to these people, "Look, I know it takes a lot of courage to see the world destroyed and not even bat a lash, but this is kind of a big deal. Why aren't you panicking? Don't you know there's a Shattering on?"

The answer as to why they were not panicking came to me while I was in the middle of catching some supposedly hard-to-catch fish for Catherine Leland just to prove I was up to the challenge. ("Really, Catherine? The world has just been torn apart by a dragon who could end all of our lives if he wanted to. I should be going out and helping people recover from this calamity, and you want me to go catch you some fish... for the sake of catching you some fish?") The answer as to why these seemingly brave citizens were not panicking lay in the fact that this World of Warcraft we inhabit now is not an immediately post-Shattering WoW; it is a WoW that we will experience now, that our alts will experience a year from now, and that future players will experience a few years from now, unless Blizzard decides to change the old-world again. All of these theoretical players will experience the same WoW I am experiencing now, because though the time when I logged in was immediately after the Shattering in real-world time, it was not immediately after the Shattering in in-game time.

As I have said before, WoW is really a very static game, and the lack of panic I saw in the citizens of Stormwind that day proves it. We are not playing a game whose timeline is moving as time itself moves in the real world; we are playing a game shown to us as a snapshot of one moment of its universe's timeline. By playing, we advance that moment a little bit, but if we roll a new character, we start from the beginning. The fact is that what those citizens are doing now, they are going to keep doing for a very long time, until Blizzard sees fit to change the old-world again. So suppose they were panicking; because that snapshot would continue to define the world of WoW for the next few years, players years from now would run in to Stormwind and see citizens running around, shouting that it's the end of the world, when that end came and went eons ago. It would seem silly, really.

What this means for us and the seeming bravery that these citizens show in the face of the end of the world is that we can explain their seeming stoic-ness with the simple fact that we are not experiencing an immediately post-Shattering WoW. We are playing in a world where some time has passed between the Shattering and the present time. Though the recovery process is by no means complete, things have started to settle down. Those who need to go out to help have done so, and will soon call upon the heroes of Northrend (us) to assist them in their tasks. Everyone else who isn't in immediate danger has gone back to trying to make the best of what has happened and live out their lives as best they can. And for some of them, that means inviting daring adventurers to try their hands at fishing in a nearby lake, to see if they can catch a rare elusive fish.

So yes, Catherine, I am up to the challenge of catching some Hardened Walleye, and I shall prove it to you. Sure, Robby Flay, I'll swim in the Stormwind canal and pick up some crabs so the King can have is crab legs. It's good to see that you both have found a way to keep on keeping on, ever since that... well, you probably don't want to talk about it, do you? I understand. The past is the past, and we have to move on.

What I am thankful for

Just like last year, I missed posting last Friday due to Thanksgiving taking up most of my time and thoughts. I was going to write a post about the things I'm thankful for, but visiting with family and friends just took too much of my time. As such, in a bit of late celebration of the holiday, that is the post I will write today.

WoW-related things I am thankful for:

I'm thankful for the automatic conversion of base weapon DPS to feral attack power. There was once a time when the only weapons feral druids could use were the ones that were specifically designed for us, which had feral attack power as one of their stats (with lowered base DPS to make up for it; we didn't need that base DPS, after all). This lead to us having one or two (if we were lucky) weapons available to us in every tier of content, weapons which were useless to everyone else. Now that base-DPS automatically converts to feral attack power, a whole new world of weapons has been opened up to us: staves, two-hand maces, polearms (which were added to our repertoire the day the automatic feral attack power conversion was added); we can use any of them that we like, and for that, I am thankful.

I'm thankful for the ability to track multiple things at once. Sure, I might not be as thankful as my hunter breathren, but as someone who once had a well-worn macro which, when activated, would cause me to switch between Find Fish and Find Herbs, so that I could go out and fish in pools while still collecting herbs, I still appreciate this change. My combined efforts made the activity quite profitable, but needing to use the macro to switch between my two tracking abilities was quite tedious. Now, it is no longer necessary, and for that, I am thankful.

I'm thankful for Leader of the Pack, specifically the self-healing aspect of the talent. The feral druid has always been a great soloing class due to the fact that it can heal itself and that its healing spells depend upon a different resource (mana) than the resource it uses to attack (rage/energy). We became even better, however, when Burning Crusade came around we got some passive self-healing in the form of Improved Lead of the Pack, an effect now baked into the main talent itself. The passive self-healing afforded by this talent makes solo-ing as a druid even better because it reduces the frequency with which we need to switch out of our forms and heal ourselves. In fact, I often find that when fighting enemies that don't pose much of a challenge to me, I don't need to shift out to heal at all; Leader of the Pack does it for me, and for that, I am thankful.

I'm thankful for Netherwing. That faction gave me some of my best memories of WoW: some of the best daily quests in the entire game, an island that was beautifully designed, the ability to walk around as a fel orc, and a mount which continues to be my favorite to this very day. That content was a great reward for buying epic flying (as if epic flying itself weren't its own reward), back when 5000 gold was serious money and having epic flying was a real accomplishment. Netherwing is part of the reason the Burning Crusade was my favorite expansion pack to experience, and for that, I am thankful.

I'm thankful for this blog (hey, without WoW, it couldn't have happened). It has helped me discover my love for typing, it has gotten me involved in a great community (the WoW blogging community), it has encouraged me to think about the game in ways I might not have considered before, and by writing these posts, I can continually create something I can be proud of.

I'm thankful for the Shattering. Because old-world Azeroth needed the reboot.

Non-WoW-related things I am thankful for:

I'll spare you the usual things like my family, my friends, my health, etc., and skip right to the things I am thankful for that might be somewhat unique to me.

I am thankful for music. It helps to quiet my ever-active mind, it keeps me focused when I need to do mindless tasks, it helps me work through my emotions from time to time, and it is generally amazing in every way. Listening to music has been one of the few things that has consistently helped me throughout my entire life. Through all of the bad spots, whatever their nature, music could either pull me through or, at the very least, speak to me in a way that validated what I was going through. And through the good times, music has been there to make them even better. Music rocks; that's all there is too it.

I am thankful for the internet. Neo-Luddite that I am, I still can't deny the great things this technology has done for me. The internet puts a wide array of information at my fingertips, information I can access with but a few clicks and empower myself in the way that only information allows me. The internet is a great melting-pot of ideas, which has opened my mind to possibilities that might have never been revealed to me otherwise. The internet makes accessing the music that I love so much even easier by making more of it available to me and giving me more means to listen to it. The internet allows me to stay connected with friends I never get to see face-to-face anymore thanks to social networking sites. The internet made this blog possible. Though it may waste more of my time than I wish it did, the internet has doubtlessly improved my life in many ways, ways far too numerous for me to list here.

I am thankful for the people in my life who put up no façade about who they really are, the people who really do act like themselves in all parts of their life, and the example they serve for me. They inspire me to do the same thing myself, and while it isn't always easy, I'm getting much better at it, with them serving as my inspiration to keep up at it.

I am thankful that this blog is as successful as it is. When I got into blogging, I didn't have big aspirations to become the next big thing in the blogosphere; I just wanted a place where I could write a lot, and perhaps someone would read it. Sometimes I go to the stats tab in Blogger's editor and am amazed at just how many hits my blog gets in a day. The most amazing thing to me is that I got this far on my own merit. I never asked other bloggers to link to me, I never shamelessly advertised myself, and I never asked my friends to read what I wrote. I just started writing without any fanfare, and over the years (year and a half, specifically), people started reading me. Not because I asked them to, not because I tried any devious schemes to draw them in, but because they liked what they saw.

Which brings me to the final thing I am thankful for: you. I am thankful that my blog has readers and that my posts get comments with a fair amount of frequency. Knowing that people read my posts has caused me to be more mindful of their quality, and practicing writing with quality in mind has made my writing better in all parts of my life. But most of all, it makes me happy to know that people enjoy what I write (or else they wouldn't read it, would they?), so to all those people who deemed my posts worth their time, thank you.

The things we carry with us

Picture, if you will, some times in the future, far enough into the future that World of Warcraft's last server has been shut down long ago, the epics and the mounts now nothing more than a memory. Other games have taken hold of our collective conscious, and all we have left are whatever screenshots we took; whatever merchandise we purchased, merchandise we probably keep just for nostalgia's sake; and the various archives of websites and blogs dedicated to the game. The Wikipedia page about WoW, the tvtropes page about WoW, all of them have stopped being updated as frequently as they once were. Our collective awareness of WoW has moved firmly into the domain of memory.

Now imagine a time even farther into the future. Not much farther, for it probably won't take as long as you may think to reach this point, but at this time in the future, our memories of WoW have started to become fuzzy. We may remember certain instances that made a big impression on us, or certain raid nights that were particularly unique for some reason or other, but the finer details of the game elude us. If someone asked, you couldn't tell them what stat was best for your class or what the best strategy for beating raid boss X was. You couldn't tell them what piece of gear you were most proud of, or what boss was your favorite to fight.

Or could you? I ask that question because of my own experiences with nostalgia related to a favorite game; specifically, Metal Gear Solid 3. I was lucky enough to procure the soundtrack to this amazing game, and though all of the music was enjoyable, I was particularly taken back by one song. It's the song that plays during the ending cinematic of the game, during which the big reveal that makes the game the tear-jerker that it is comes out. I wouldn't dare spoil it for you, but suffice it to say that the Metal Gear Solid series as a whole is one of the few series that has ever made me cry, and the third installment was no exception, thanks to the ending. Listening to the music that plays during the ending, I got chills like I hadn't felt in a long time. I was reminded of just how powerful that ending was, and I even got a bit teary-eyed as I listened. Naturally, this made me want to look up the ending on YouTube and watch it again, which I did. But a funny thing happened: I wasn't nearly as affected by seeing the ending itself as I had been by the music. Thinking that listening to the music had just ruined me for whatever nostalgic experiences I might have otherwise had, I tried listening to the song again, and I had more of those nostalgic chills than I did while watching the ending cinematic. It was this that made me realize that the music had stayed with me more than the actual plot itself, that the music was what I had carried with me.

Now, great as it was, the music was hardly the best part of Metal Gear Solid 3. The story, the gameplay, the boss fights, the sheer depth of the game--everything about it was impressive and worth remembering. So why, of all things, is it the music that takes me back the most? Your guess is as good as mine, but it was a lesson for me. I learned that we can never be sure what will what will make us fondly remember the things we are nostalgic about. What does this have to do with WoW? If nothing else, it made me realize that the things that make me nostalgic for WoW once I stop playing might be the things I least expect. It might, of course, be the music; after all, music from WoW has made me nostalgic before. But music isn't the only thing that has made me unexpectedly nostalgic for something; in conversing with a friend of mine, I once became nostalgic for the original Spyro the Dragon trilogy by remembering this one glitch in the second game that allowed you to swim in the air in one of the levels. It was my first video game glitch that I exploited knowingly, and remembering it brought back fond memories of that time.

I suppose the only useful conclusion I can come to from these ramblings is that developers should do their best to make sure that every aspect of their game (the visuals, the sound effects, the music, the writing, etc.) is superb, because different things make different people nostalgic. Sure, they should also focus on making the game fun to play, but we're going to be living with our memories long after we stop playing this game, and those memories will be the true payoff for our experiences. They will be the lasting trophies of our triumphs, but what good are they if we don't actually remember them? That's where these nostalgic triggers come in, for they are what help us remember those good times, and those triggers will work best if they are well done. Would the music that played during Metal Gear Solid 3's finale have brought me back if it weren't as well done as it is? Probably not. That's why game designers owe it to players to make sure every part of the game is very well designed, so that players can be better served by their memories.

Some miscellaneous advice for Pilgrim's Bounty

A year ago, I posted an advice post with various miscellaneous advice for completing the meta for Pilgrim's Bounty, the holiday we are currently celebrating in WoW. Well, considering it has come around again and hasn't seemed to have changed that much, I would like to post that advice again, for the sake of everyone still going for their Plump Turkey.

-Finish the questline that involves you turning in five of each food to various people outside of the capital cities. It ends with you getting a turkey caller, which you can use every two minutes to summon a turkey which you can kill for a wild turkey. Do this every two minutes while you are out doing other things and you won't need to compete with the people going for The Turkinator when you farm turkeys for Can't Get Enough Turkey, making everyone happier.

-I don't know about your server, but on mine, there are fewer people going for The Turkenator in Trisfall Glades than there are in Elwynn Forest, so try doing a route going around the lake there.

-If you are level 80, you can probably solo Talon King Ikiss for Terokkar Turkey Time as long as you run behind the pillars when he used Arcane Explosion (if you can heal yourself, even this step may not be necessary).

-When searching for rogues for Turkey Lurkey, try going into Dalaran and moving your mouse quickly back and forth over a crowd of people, scanning them. Look at the tool-tip that comes up and you should be able to find your rogues. If all else fails, try going to the starting areas of whatever race you are missing, since there is no level requirement for the achievement.

Where does our pride come from?

This post discusses some experiences I had with a real-life friend of mine who I know reads this blog and whom I make some conjecture about that could be patently wrong. You'll know who you are once you start reading, and if what I say is wrong or portrays you in the wrong light, you have my sincerest apologies. But think about it this way; no one else will know it's you I'm writing about.

I have been playing WoW for more than five years now. I don't say that to show off at all, just to provide background information for the story I'm about to tell. I have a friend who has been playing WoW since the beginning of Wrath of the Lich King (about two years now) and has spent most of that time raiding. As such, he has procured some pretty impressive epics, including the Ring of Rapid Ascent, the Amulet of the Silent Eulogy, and the Gunship Captain's Mittens. Now, he and I have the kind of friendship where we occasionally show off to each other, but never in a legitimate attempt to make the other person jealous; just friendly boasting. As such, one day he logged in to show me his gear. Now, as someone who has no motivation to raid and who is rarely impressed by numbers alone, I wasn't as impressed as he expected me to be, so he asked me to show him what I had accomplished. He should have known better, for he knows I have been playing for more than five years.

You see, when you play for that long, you tend to accumulate various rewards here and there that really add up over time. My friend got the first hint that asking me to show off might be a bad idea when he saw my 4605 achievement points, more than double his 2200 (give or take). We were looking at my armory profile, mind you, so he decided to compare achievements, and his dread became a bit more apparent when he saw that he had many times more raid achievements than I (that was where most of his achievement points came from). Then we logged in to look at my character, and he was greeted by my 85 pets (including my Magical Crawdad, my Kirin Tor Familiar, and my Argent Squire with bridle), my 25 exalted reputations (including Netherwing, Ogri'la, and the Kalu'ak) my Onyx Netherwing Drake, my Chef title, my Traveler's Tundra Mammoth, and my Violet Proto-Drake. See, I'm a big solo player, and when you are a solo player who has been playing for five years, you tend to accrue these kinds of things without giving it too much thought, and at this point, most of these things were just trophies of past exploits, things I hardly even thought about now.

My friend, however, was extremely envious of my acquisitions, and vocally so. I made a point of telling him that everything I had acquired was not difficult to get, just time consuming; of course, having played the game for five years, I had a lot of time to put in to getting those things, but I left that part out. See, this friend of mine is a Kingslayer, something he put a considerable amount of time and effort into achieving, and he is also a raid leader, so he spends more time on raiding than the average Kingslayer. My thought was, if he could put forth that much time (to raid management, the multiple attempts, etc.) to getting Kingslayer, why couldn't he put forth the same amount of time it would take to get any of the things I had gotten? His claim was that he just didn't have the patience to go for something as time-consuming as the Violet Proto-Drake or the Traveler's Tundra Mammoth, so I let it rest at that.

But there was a disconnect about the whole thing that piqued my interest. Here he was, with his epics and his raid achievements, quite proud of them, and here I was, with my pets, mounts, and solo-ing achievements, and I had never given most of them a second thought. They were just trophies of parts of the game I enjoyed playing, many of which I probably would have played even if there was no reward (getting exalted with Netherwing certainly falls in that category), so I had no particular pride in most of them, and yet my friend was quite jealous of them. Why this difference between us?

My first guess was that it was just a matter of his inability to obtain what I had that made him jealous, but I realized that I myself had similarly accepted that I would probably never raid and never get epics and achievements like him. If it were that "forbidden fruit" effect that had caused him to be jealous of my acquisitions, then I would be similarly jealous of his epics and achievements. Yet here I was, sitting back as he showed me the things he had achieved, beaming with pride, and I just sat back and nodded, not at all jealous of what he had experienced and obtained that I hadn't. Of course, I thought, maybe I've just had longer to accept that I won't get these things, so I'm more at peace with it than he is about never obtaining the Traveler's Tundra Mammoth or Violet Proto-Drake.

But I found my potential answer in a comment he made as he was showing me his gear and achievements. When he had sufficiently impressed upon me just how much time he has spent raiding, how much time he has put in to get to the point he's at now, he said only half sarcastically, "I hate this game." It was just a joke at the time, but upon reflection, I realize there may be more to read into in his words than I initially thought. My friend may not be the most honest of people (he's not dishonest by any stretch of the imagination, but as someone who legitimately has difficulty with lying, I can say he's more liable to stretch the truth than I am), but perhaps he was being honest when he claimed he disliked that game at this point. I can't help but ask myself, if he really grew to dislike this game, then why did he keep playing? Perhaps he was one of those players who played for the achievements, the loot, the bragging rights; perhaps he had become the type who plays for the objective rewards.

I, on the other hand, am not the type to play for objective rewards, at least I'm not anymore; I may have been that type back in the day, but no longer. I'm definitively in the subjectively-driven camp now, in that I play for the experience more than the end result. Don't get me wrong, the end result is important to me in some respects, but it's the earning of the end result that is most important to me. Perhaps the difference between how my friend and I view the spoils of our exploits lies in this difference in motivation; perhaps he was prouder of his gear and achievements and jealous of my pets and mounts because he was focusing of the rewards, not the process of obtaining them. I, on the other hand, am not at all jealous that he got to experience raiding--which is how he got his achievements and loot, after all--since I don't enjoy raiding. When I saw those purples, I saw the frustration, the time commitments, the needing to deal with other people and depend on them for your success; I saw all of the inconveniences associated with earning that loot, not the loot itself. When you look it that way, is it any wonder I wasn't jealous?

The limitations of our measurement of success

I have not yet had time to log in to see phase four of the elemental invasion, but something else has captured my attention lately; namely, a comment on MMO-Champion's post about phase four of the elemental invasion starting. 'Tis but a simple comment, but the implications it had for my reflections were many:

any FoS for killing them, tabard, etc? if not what the point?

Larisa of Pink Pigtail Inn wasn't pleased upon reading such a comment, for she saw it as a sign that WoW has become nothing more than a game where we play just for the stimuli, for the objective rewards. I have talked about the differences between playing for objective rewards and playing for subjective rewards before, but in that post, I didn't realize the implications of said differences. This comment, though, has made me realize just what those implications are: which rewards we play for changes how we measure our success, and how we measure our success changes how we play.

Success might not be the best word to describe what I am writing about; productivity might describe it better, for I am talking about the general sensation that our play has been fruitful, that some good came out of it. For someone focused on objective rewards, successful play might be defined by the gear he gets or the rank he achieves in arenas or the pets he collects. For someone focused on the more subjective aspects of play, successful play might be defined by whether he had fun or how deeply he was able to immerse himself in his playing or how much of the story of WoW he was able to experience. For someone like our MMO-Champion commenter above, it appears that fruitful play is defined by some sort of tangible reminder of his actions; it seems he cannot be satisfied with his experiences in-game if there is not some visible indicator of what he has done, and thus those objective rewards are his measure of success.

As tempting as it might be to claim that it is somehow better to play for those subjective rewards than to play for objective rewards, both motivators have their drawbacks. Someone who plays for objective rewards will miss out on content that they might otherwise enjoy if that content doesn't give them some sort of tangible reward, and they might continue to play content they don't enjoy for the sake of those tangible rewards. Still, even in that latter case, at least they find the acquisition of those rewards fun, even if they don't find the process enjoyable, and considering how many parts of this game do give some sort of objective reward, it's rare that someone motivated by objective rewards won't find something in an experience to convince them to play. Phase 4 of the elemental invasion just happens to be one of those rare cases.

But what drawbacks could there be to playing for subjective rewards? Self-limitation. Someone who plays the game to have fun, for example, might avoid parts of the game he doesn't think he'll find fun. He might avoid PvP because he enjoys the relaxed pace of questing, potentially missing out on something that he'd find quite enjoyable if he just gave it a try. Someone who plays for deep immersion might not go back and do old quests because he feels that killing enemies easily kills the immersion for him, when he might enjoy the lore he discovers by doing those quests he skipped while leveling. Someone who plays for the lore might skip out on raiding because he doesn't find it to be very story-heavy compared to other parts of the game, which prevents him from seeing the evolving lore to be found in raids and from experiencing a part of the game he might enjoy if he gave it a shot. In all those cases, it is the player himself that is responsible for his measure of success limiting how much he can enjoy the game, and it is the assumptions he makes that hold him back.

From this perspective, whether playing for one kind of reward is better than playing for the other kind depends on whether you think it is better to be limited by the game's design or by your own inhibitions. Now, if players didn't have hesitation about getting into a part of the game they haven't tried yet, then playing for subjective rewards would be the best way to go, without a doubt. But players are human, and one of the many flaws some people have is an unwillingness to go outside of their comfort zone, to try new things that they don't know for a fact will give them satisfaction. For someone like this, it could be better to be motivated by the objective rewards of the game. Sure, it means they can't overcome the limitations on what they play by willpower alone, as someone limited by their own assumptions might be able to, but there are enough objective rewards within the game to motivate someone to try something they might not try otherwise. So, though our intrepid commenter up there might not have wanted to partake in phase four of the elemental invasion because it didn't give him any objective rewards like feats of strength or a tabard, perhaps those rewards have motivated him to try other parts of the game he might not have tried otherwise. Is that so bad?

Now, again, in an ideal world, players would be willing to try all parts of the game, regardless of the objective rewards they receive for doing so and regardless of their own reservations about trying something that they don't think will be fun for them. But again, we don't live in an ideal world, and humans are flawed, and though the two situations I have presented here (avoiding parts of the game without objective rewards and avoid parts of the game that won't reward you with the subjective reward you seek) represent only two possibilities in a sea of ways to WoW, all I mean to say is that given the choice between the two of them, playing for objective rewards doesn't seem as bad as people make it out to be, for it might motivate you to try more parts of the game that playing for subjective rewards might. Whether playing for subjective rewards will allow you to have more fun, though... well, the jury is out on that one.

The consequences of axioms

Philosophy can turn up in some unexpected places. Last week, for example, I was discussing with a friend the implications of a certain plot device in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, one I can't discuss here without potentially spoiling the plot for those of you haven't read it yet but want to. What I can say, though, is that in the discussion of this specific plot device, the issue of fate vs. free will came up, as did the issue of whether our actions are predetermined or not. I voiced a few theories about this plot device that I had either heard or come up with myself, and this particular friend I was discussing the book with said that, though my theories were logically/biologically sound, depending on which one he was talking about, he couldn't accept them on a philosophical level, because they destroyed free will. After some prodding, I eventually got him to reveal why he was so against any idea that precluded the existence free will: to him, life isn't worth living if we don't have autonomy, for his free will and the ability to make his own decisions, decisions which actually mean something, is one of the most important things to him. When I go into a discussion with someone I disagree with, I often do so with the intention of trying to either convince them they are wrong or to understand why they believe what they believe to the extent that I can agree to disagree. In this case, the latter happened, for he and I just didn't see eye to eye on the importance of free will, so I left the issue alone.

Reflecting on this discussion, I was reminded of something the philosophy teacher of a friend of mine once said. Philosophy, when it is done rigorously, is a series of "if, then" statements geared towards coming to a conclusion about life, existence, or just about anything. At best, you'll get a series of statements that are logically sound but based on a premise that either can't be proven or is subjective; at worst, you won't even get the first part of that result. Because of this, the most practical use of philosophy for the common man is to determine whether an action or belief is compatible with one's own personal morals. These morals are called axioms, and they form the basis of our person ethics. An axiom, for those who don't know, is a statement that is not proven, or maybe not even provable, but is used as a premise in proving some other statement. In mathematics, for example, one of the basic axioms is that any number multiplied by zero will result in an answer of zero. It's not something we can prove, but it's something we accept as self-evident, and thus it forms the basis for many other rules.

For my friend, the necessity of free choice was one of his axioms, and thus, in order for him to accept a philosophical idea, it had to be compatible with that axiom. I have my own axioms, as well, which form the basis of how I view philosophical issues. One of my axioms is that, as long as people aren't obnoxious about their preferences, no preference, be it a preference in movies, music, television shows, books, or anything, is superior to another. Based on this axiom, I do not judge people for the music they listen to, no matter how much I may dislike it. Now, this doesn't apply to the media itself. I will openly talk about how unlistenable bands like BrokenCYDE are, but if I met someone who liked them, I'd be happy that they found a band that caters to their... unique tastes in music. One of my other axioms is that no action is morally objectionable if it does not impede the freedom of others to do what makes them happy, with the possible (but not universal) exception of impeding the freedom of someone to impede on the freedom of others. Thus, anything my friends may do behind closed doors, as long as it does not cause harm to anyone against their will, is acceptable in my book, as long as they are willing to accept the consequences.

But I'm rambling, for what I really wanted to talk about is the fact that much of rigorous philosophy (potentially all of it, but I'm no one to say whether or not that is true) is based on these kinds of subjective, unprovable axioms. Many of the posts in my own blog are based on certain axioms that I have never really examined, that I have always just accepted as true. These include ideas like maximizing player enjoyment is a good thing, and that Blizzard should act primarily to please their players. Now, I don't apply these axioms universally to every case. Sometimes having something in the game that players claim they don't enjoy will increase the overall enjoyment and satisfaction they get out of the game, and sometimes Blizzard needs to act against what the players want in order to do what is really in the players' best interests. But my point is, ideas like this form the basis for many of the conclusions I come to when I think about WoW, and though I could try to examine them, any justification I try to write for them will inevitably fall back on more axioms, for that is just the nature of logic.

What does this mean for you, reader? This is nothing special I have outlined here; just a basic write-up on the inexact nature of philosophy. With that said, there is something I would like you to take away from it: if you ever disagree with me concerning a point I make in this blog, or you disagree with anyone else in any situation, it might not be a matter of one person being misinformed, or one person having a bogus opinion; it could just be that you and the other person have different axioms, different assumptions on which you base your opinions. If that's the case, then resolving your disagreements might require deeper discussion than you initially expected.

So what are my axioms about World of Warcraft? They're worth listing, for if you have ever found yourself frequently disagreeing with my points, the cause could just be us not seeing eye to eye on some basic tenet of our opinions.

-One of Blizzard's main goals in designing WoW should be to maximize player enjoyment of the game.
-Players don't always know what will make them enjoy the game the most, and Blizzard should keep this in mind as they design the game.
-A change to the game which can increase the enjoyment of the game by some players while not affecting the enjoyment of the game by other players is superior to one which increases the enjoyment of the game of some players at the expense of the enjoyment of the game by other players.
-Homogeneity should be avoided whenever possible, though it isn't always possible to avoid it.
-Blizzard owes nothing to WoW players who have been playing for a long time, no more than they owe to the newer players.