The curse of being genre savvy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did we put up with this for so long?

There are a lot of negative things I could say about patch 4.0.1. I could talk about Warlocks losing the names of pets that they have had since long ago, names they grew attached to, before a bug took them away (but that's going to be fixed, anyways). I could talk about how atrocious I find the new tree of life model, but time and accepting that I'm probably done healing on my druid has turned my abhorrence into utter indifference. I've already talked about the loss of tree of life as a permanent form, so no point in belaboring that point. Of course, the fiasco of post-4.0.1 class balance is a topic rife with discussable points, but I can't be angry about any of these things. I can't be angry about them because of the changes this patch has made to my warrior alt.

You see, I rolled my little warrior (currently residing at level 25; he was level 22 when the patch hit) as a way to enjoy this game before Cataclysm comes out, but leveling him was a very trying process. Heroic strike, the ability we were supposed to use while fighting one-on-one, consumed so much rage that using Thunder Calp, an ability meant for AoE combat, was actually more rage efficient, even against one enemy. Of course, this meant the damage of a low level warrior was incredibly sub-par, for there weren't many other abilities I could use to increase my damage. I could use Rend, a damage over time ability; Overpower, which I could only use after one of my attacks was dodged, i.e. not all that frequently; and Victory rush, which I could only use once per battle, anyways. In short, at low levels, warriors lacked the abilities they needed to be viable in one-on-one combat.

With patch 4.0.1, however, that all changed. My warrior went from level 22 to 25 (granted, I was two bars away from 23 when 4.0.1. hit) probably as quickly as he went from 21 to 22 thanks to the new move set he has. What you might not know if you've only been following the level-cap changes in patch 4.0.1 is that this patch brought with it changes to how and when we learn abilities at low levels. We only need to learn an ability once, after which it scales as we level. Because of this, Blizzard spread out the rate at which we learn new abilities, so that we have more to learn at higher levels than we would if they had kept it the same. In the process, they reevaluated the order in which we learn abilities and shifted it a bit. This was also the patch where they changed the nature of our abilities. What this all adds up to is that, thanks to the new (new for my level, at least) and improved abilities this patch gave my lowly warrior, he is suddenly viable in combat and--dare I say... fun.

Yes, I said it... ok, I really implied it, but I'll say it now: leveling as a warrior was just not fun in the 1 to 22 range before this patch. Having abilities that weren't viable sitting unused on my bar while using abilities that weren't meant for the situation I was in because the abilities that were meant for the situation I was in were practically useless wasn't fun. Now, all of a sudden, leveling as a fury warrior actually feels like playing a berserker. We have a lot more rage now, thanks (I think) to the rage normalization, and we have abilities that we actually want to spend that rage on. Playing as a fury warrior in low levels is now a frenzy of trying to use the abilities available to you as quickly as possible, since you actually have the rage to do so, rather than an exercise in waiting for Thunder Clap to come off its cooldown and hoping you have enough rage to use it when it does.

So why am I gushing about the new playstyle of low-level fury warriors? Well, after playing as my warrior for an hour or two last night; after surviving a battle against seven enemies of my level, all attacking me at once, when four doing the same thing could have easily done me in before the patch; I had to ask myself: why did we put up with the absolutely terribad playstyle of low level warriors for so long? In fact, I'm sure warriors aren't the only class whose low-level play has been vastly improved by this patch, so I have to ask; why did we put up with bad low level playstyles for so long?

Well, part of the answer is that many people didn't. I know quite a few players who hate the leveling process, and the way some classes play at low levels played no small part in their hatred of that part of the game. Of course, alt-aholics like me really had no choice other than putting up with the bad low-level content, hoping it would be worth it with the higher level content. Part of it could be the idea that we are somehow earning our fun, that the bad low-level playstyle is the price we have to pay to get to the more fun playstyle. That idea is reinforced by the idea that any sort of bad experience we go through makes us able to better appreciate the good experiences we go through, a truism I have often heard in real life.

It could also have something to do with a little condition called learned helplessness. The idea of learned helplessness is that if we accept that we have no control over a situation, it causes us to accept the misery that situation brings upon us, even if a way out is presented. There wasn't a lot we could do to improve the playstyle of classes that were not at all fun to play while leveling, other than not leveling those classes, so those of us who wanted to level those classes just had to accept that the early levels were going to be unenjoyable. (And boy were they. Priests? Paladins? Warriors? Druids? I'm looking at you.) So we gritted our way through those early levels, because we had no other choice if we wanted to get to the part where the classes become fun to play (and I can tell you from personal experience that priests and druids got much more fun to play as you approach the later levels).

Could it really be that bad, though? Could us hopeless alt-aholics really be suffering from the same condition that keeps battered spouses and depressed people in their predicaments? As the blog post I linked to mentions, when someone suffering from learned helplessness does get out of their situation, they often have a hard time committing to anything afterward, and tend to continue believing in nihilism and futility, rather than having hope and being optimistic. When I first logged in to my warrior, I had my doubts about whether he would be any more fun to play, but I gave it a try anyways. As you can tell, I was blown away once I did, but the important thing was whether I hesitated at all. Well, I did find it a bit tedious to need to go to the trainer and learn new moves, and viewed rearranging my action bar with the same weary view. In fact, that fact that I started playing again after rearranging my abilities doesn't really do much to disprove the learned helplessness theory, because I still expected playing to not be all that enjoyable; the surprise came from the fact that I enjoyed play my warrior, not from the fact that I did, in fact, play him. Thus I was engaging in old behaviors with the same kind of futile outlook; all that changed was the result.

So perhaps we alt-aholics who braved our way through the early levels of the unfun classes did suffer from learned helplessness, but patch 4.0.1 is here now, here to liberate us from the previous doldrums of the early levels. Along with this forced liberation comes the force relocation (metaphorically speaking) to a much more fun game design; in other words, we are being flat-out prevented from going back to the situation that caused our learned helplessness in the first place. We have been forced into our escape, forced into a more hopeful situation, and though we might not have been cured of that helplessness, at least we have been saved in spite of it. What this means for the future of low-level playing and us alt-aholics, though, remains to be seen.

Higher Learning: Waiting around for fun and profit

That's right, the advice column is back... for one week, at least. Then it'll go back to the retirement home for blog columns, where it will lounge on the beach and complain about how the miscellany and philosophy columns never write anymore ever since they had to start working overtime to make up for his absence. Ah well, c'est la vie.

One of my goals that I want to accomplish before Cataclysm comes out is that I want to earn the achievement Higher Learning. For those who don't know, Higher Learning requires you to read eight books that spawn in predetermined spots in Dalaran. They spawn every three to four hours and last only five minutes (three if someone reads them) before they disappear, and you need to read all eight to finish the achievement. Did I mention that there's a fairly high chance of a dud book spawning in place of the book needed for the achievement? And that if that happens, you have to wait another three to four hours for another chance at the book you need? Yeah, it's annoying.

Why do I want to finish this achievement before Cataclysm? Once Cataclysm hits, I will likely be too busy with all of the new content to consider going back to Dalaran and running around just to look for the books I need to finish that achievement, and thus I will have no chance at the pet or the ability to teleport to the secret room above the Violet Citadel (which, for a loner like myself, is a pretty good reward). Luckily, the pre-expansion slump gives me the perfect opportunity to take the time I need to get this achievement, and in going for it, I have discovered a technique that I would like to share with you all.

If you are going to attempt this achievement, I highly recommend that you read Breanni's guide on Higher Leraning. It covers all of the basics that you need to know to understand how this achievement works, and this post will assume you know the basics about Higher Learning.

Now, as Breanni's guide says, there are two approaches one can take to earn this achievement: pathing, and camping. Pathing involves running around Dalaran past all of the spots where the books you don't have will spawn, and while it might take less time than camping, it's likely to make one go insane (trust me on that one). However, the boredom intrinsic in camping carries the same exact risk, so the question becomes, how to mitigate that risk? I have a few steps that will help you with that, steps that are very reminiscent of the advice I give in my post on how to avoid boredom whilst leveling fishing.

1. Pick a spot to camp.
Simple, really; just pick a book you haven't read yet and go to the spot where it will spawn.

2. Go into windowed mode.
If WoW is in full-screen mode, this strategy won't work: press command-M if you are on a Mac or control-M if you are on a windows computer.

3. Open another window.
Now comes the hard part. You need to pick something you can do for an extended period of time that won't require your total and complete attention. That can be working on something semi-mindless for work or school, chatting it up on your favorite forum, or going on a wiki-walk or archive binge (incidentally, the website that those two links will take you too is a great place to go if you are bored and want to spend a lot of time doing something on the internet). Whatever you chose, it must fit two criteria: you must be able to divert your attention away from it at least every minute or so (only for a split second), and it cannot take up the full screen. You'll see why in a bit.

4. The set-up.
With WoW in windowed mode and your character near the book's spawn point, set up your camera so that you'll be able to see the spot where the book will spawn while your second window is over WoW. Once your camera is set up that way (some picture demonstrating what I mean can be found below), simply engage in whatever activity is in your second window, and when you think of it, take a look at WoW. Eventually, a book will spawn, and when it does, you can click WoW's window and read the book. Simple, really.

Here's a picture of me with my WoW camera set up to employ this method, with a helpful arrow to show where the book will spawn.


Here's what my screen looks like with WoW in windowed mode and Firefox over it.

You can click on the picture to view a larger version with better detail. As you can see, I can see the spot where the book will spawn on the left side of my screen, and I am free to do as I please while I wait for the book to spawn. If you choose to do something similar to what I did, you can re-size the window of your internet browser of choice to give yourself more space to see the book; I just have it set up this way because I always have that little space on the left side of Firefox (it's quite convenient for me).

And in case you are worried about not being able to see the book when it spawns, worry not:


As you can see, the book is clearly visible when it spawns, as long as you set up your camera so that you'll actually be able to see the book. You may need to work your second window around seeing the book if you can't work your WoW camera to make the book visible, but do whatever you have to do.

This strategy is a slow one, but I have already found two books (as well as three duds) after using it for a bit under a week, which is pretty good, considering that it doesn't actually require much time spent in WoW itself, so I can guarantee that it does work. Best of luck, and happy waiting!

Edit: I forgot to add that you are quite likely to get Manabonked by Minigob Manabonk while using this strategy, so if you are trying to get The Mischief Maker as well, you can kill two birds with one stone with this strategy.

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.

Why should the final boss of an expansion drop gear?

One of the things that continues to amaze me is the vast variety of places that I can find inspiration for my posts. For example, I was browsing TV Tropes a few days ago and came across an article entitled "Bragging Rights Reward", which describes any practical reward in a video game that takes immense effort to acquire, such that by the time you acquire it, you have already proved you don't need it. It's a fairly frequently used trope, and it got me thinking: are there any such rewards in WoW? One example immediately popped into my mind: any loot that drops from heroic Lich King (or Kil'jaeden in Burning Crusade, or Kel'thuzad in vanilla WoW). After all, those bosses were/are the last boss in their respective expansion, so once you defeat them, you don't need better gear. This, to me, begs the question: why should these bosses drop gear?

The Lich King in an interested exception to this case, because with the Ruby Sanctum being released in patch 3.3.5, the gear that he drops on heroic mode will give players a better chance at defeating the foes in the Ruby Sanctum, and considering that everything in the Ruby Sanctum will be side-grades, rather than upgrades to the things dropped in Icecrown Citadel, they won't be bragging rights rewards either. After all, players could go for Halion first and heroic Lich King after that, or they could have already defeated heroic Lich King and will now be trying to best the Ruby Sanctum. Either way, the rewards from one fight will make the other easier, making neither a clear case of bragging rights rewards. That is, unless Halion isn't a comparable fight to heroic Lich King, and is a good deal easier. in which case the Lich King's heroic drops will still be bragging rights rewards. After all, if he is, by far, the hardest fight in the expansion so far, so by the time you defeat him, you have proven you don't need better gear.

For now, I'm going to write under the assumption that heroic Lich King will remain the hardest fight in the game, even after 3.3.5 is released, for this will not only make writing about the subject more interesting, but will also allow me to consider whether there was any point in Kil'jaeden and Kel'thuzad dropping gear. Now, I'm sure one of the first justifications for them dropping gear that one would point out is that their gear helps people level more quickly through the new content released with each expansion, but if your gear is good enough that you can beat the final boss of an expansion, it's probably good enough that you won't notice the difference between having gear that drops off of that final boss and not having gear that drops off of that final boss; you'll probably be mowing through enemies too quickly to notice the time you save. One could also argue that the gear they drop would give one an advantage when one starts the new expansion's raid content, but considering the rate at which gear has steadily gotten better, the difference between top-end gear and second-best gear becomes even less significant when you enter a new expansion's raids.

So where does that leave us in terms of uses for gear that drops off of the final boss of an expansion? I once said in one of my other posts that gear really serves two purposes: helping you advance through an expansion's content, and serving as a representation of your achievements. The real question is, if gear isn't serving one of those purposes, is it fair that it exist only to serve the other, less practical one? Making the models for that gear takes time away from the design team, time they could be spending on other things, like the gear for the new content. More importantly, though, it reinforces the idea that the main goal of playing WoW is to get better gear, and though that is often an important step in accomplishing other goals, it isn't the reason most of us play. Most of us play for the experience, whether that experience is downing a raid boss, winning a battleground, or just getting exalted with a faction; gear just happens to be a nice consolation that also makes future experiences go more smoothly.

But, you may ask, are there any alternatives? Plenty, actually: mounts, titles, vanity pets (granted, people would probably only be excited about receiving one of the first two of those three), all of which serve the purpose of representing a person's achievements without existing solely as a bragging right reward (by the definition above). And truth be told, I think that rewarding regular old gear for defeating the final boss of an expansion is a bit... underwhelming. Gear was just a necessity to get to that point, and to reward more gear almost seems like mockery to me. Think about it: by beating heroic Lich King, a raid has beaten Wrath of the Lich King. They have overcome the greatest challenge off the expansion, and the reward is just more gear? Just more of the same? Now, granted, beating the Lich King on heroic mode does also grant special titles, depending on which mode you beat him on, as well as a mount for one member of the raid, but rather than giving some other members of the raid gear as a reward, why not give everyone the mount? It seems to me a more fitting reward for what is, in essence, beating Wrath of the Lich King, at least more fitting than just more gear. Maybe that's just me, though.