Author Archives: Asmiroth

Cynicism in Trying Times

Posted on by

(More of a diary than a dialogue.)

I am (mostly) conscious of my inherent privilege.  There are doors that open for me that will barely budge for others.  I am allowed to make a serious amount of mistakes before paying a price, while others are not provided that same leniency.  It’s systematic, it’s cultural, it’s tightly woven into some fabrics.  At the global scale, there are places where people will outright kill each other in a lost war of hundreds of years.  No reason other than “it’s always been this way”.

I make no excuses for this.  I have no ability to be articulate on the specific issues at hand as I’m barely impacted.  I won’t even bother to do so.  I’ll take a larger societal lens instead and let the experts dig into this complex issue.

This post is not a global post, it’s focused specifically on my southern relatives.  What’s going on now is the build up of years of events.  It’s built on the foundation that one life is worth more than another’s.  That there are “others” in our midst.  That isolation and division is a better way forward that working together.

There’s no one root cause just like there’s no one solution.  America’s version of capitalism is a warped affair that only benefits the already-rich.  It’s not possible to become “wealthy” in that sense without being an athlete, artists, or getting an insane amount of seed funding / gift (which has it’s own gates).  The simple matter is that you become richer by getting the money from people who have less than you.  The lack of tools for the social masses effectively makes the US remain a state of servitude to survive.  How the “best country on the planet” doesn’t think affordable health care for all is a good thing is amazing to me.  Even more folly when you consider that the US is beaten by Cuba in health scores.

It’s a social dissonance to claim to have ethics and morals, only to not hold your elected officials to the same standards.  The concept of trusting the person representing a group of people is just plain lost.  That gerrymandering is not only allowed, but encouraged is disgusting.  2 party systems don’t work, there are enough historical examples of it.  Pendulum swings cause larger and larger after effects, and there is only 1 outcome – social upheaval.  Sure, you may have a dictator (self-appointed leader) installed in the interim (like say China or Russia) but the end result always ends in the same place.  As long as you think of people as “them”, then there’s no real progress to be had.

Being a first responder is a calling, it is not a job.  They are meant to represent the best of us, a position of trust at our weakest points.  In Canada, all first responders go through a psych assessment prior to deployment.  I won’t say it catches everything, but I do know that it filters out a lot.  When something does happen (it will eventually), there’s an inquiry and they are treated with the same laws as everyone else.  It is not perfect, but it says something that in 2019 7 people have died in Canada to law enforcement, compared to 132 in the US (403! in 2018).  There are deep seated cultures in law enforcement, and it only takes a tiny percentage to exemplify the worst of those qualities to bring out the marches.

Now we get to the cynicism part.  Peaceful protests are ok, but kneeling is not.  Respecting all values and lives is ok, but supporting Hong Kong is not.  Taking no responsibility but claiming all credit.  Abortion is wrong but letting seniors die is ok.  Supporting businesses in need is ok, but first you need to pay your friends.  It’s ok to have white folks with guns charge a government building, but people walking in the streets deserve attack dogs and to be shot.  You can have one or the other, but not both.  Speaking from both sides of the mouth means you can’t actually do anything.

ezxvqb6x0aedkoi

There’s a limit to society’s patience.  It’s like a wave of change, and the dam that people in power put in to try and change the flow, or reduce the impacts.  That dam works for a while, but eventually the flow becomes too much and destroys that dam. Now the cynic in me says that this is a phase, and that a new dam is being built because of a lack of leadership & power in that wave.  The people that could implement meaningful change simply don’t want to because it means less power for them. (I am bitter about electoral reform up here).

The video of the Canadian PM reflects my own ability to digest and respond to these events.  That 20 second pause says more than everything else that follows.

Sometimes, the house just can’t be renovated anymore, and you need to build a new one.  The US hasn’t seen that for 200+ years.  Dozens of countries have undergone it in the last 100 years.  All of them, without exception, were triggered by social unrest.  I would be surprised if that was the case today, but it’s not far off.

Putting the RPG in MMORPG

Posted on by

There’s been a homogenization of MMOs in the last 10 years, where there really isn’t a whole lot to distinguish one game from the other.  In continuum of RPG features, older games were more in the RPG space, with playing a specific role, choices made, and impacts that were felt over time.  Something like an FPS had little RPG to it, so that the start of a game resembled the end of a game (think Halo).

Time goes on and both of those have started to meet in center.  Nearly every game released today has a stats mechanic, often employed as a carrot for retention (bigger stats).  Fornite and League of Legends may have everyone start on “even” footing, by the end of the game there are large power spikes from the RPG mechanic.  Not to dismiss that an “underpowered” player can’t use skill to overcome, but the disadvantage is there.

MMORPGs on the other hand are moving into a more digestible experience, where the gap between a long term player (investment) isn’t so far away that no new players can come into the game.  Say what you will about WoW’s model, but it is much more willing to let new blood in as compared to EvE’s skill point system.  But is the WoW model where a new player can level to max in about a weekend’s effort the right path?  Or where a new 120 can hit near raid level stats in a couple days?

I’m going to posit that it doesn’t matter primarily because the world of RPGs has so many options today.  20 years ago the people using MMOs were the typical geeks (self-included), so the RPG aspect was attractive.  UO hit that button something fierce.  EQ was a glorified chat bot that tested those social structures that made geekdom work.  WoW’s greatest achievement isn’t the size of the playerbase, its that it normalized the playerbase in the eyes of society.  My kids will never know a world where video games were derided, where geek is something that’s ostracised.  The conversation has moved to from “you play games?” to “you play that game?”  I’ll take that shift as a positive one.

Within a game you’re always going to have exclusionary activities.  There’s not a developer on the planet that isn’t running some sort of heatmap of players vs. engagement.  I am not some ultra wise guru that can divine the inner workings of games or gamers.  So if a situation seems ultra obvious to me now, it most certainly was obvious to the developers beforehand.  NGE in SWG was immediately clear.  The Trammel split is not what killed UO, it was how long it took to be implemented vs. the launch of EQ.   Atlantis in DAoC.  EQ2’s grind vs. WoW’s open beta must have made people sweat bullets.  Someone, somewhere, greenlight FF14 v1.0 as being acceptable.

The decisions are not bad except when measured to the stated goals.  You want to increase the player base, you need to make it more accessible, not less.  You want to respect the existing player base, you don’t wipe all their progress and have them start as fresh as a green leaf.  You want to provide a perception of value, you make sure that the rewards are measurable and trend forward (*cough*azerite*cough*).  You want to provide an element of choice, you need to make sure that there are multiple relative options to choose from.  All of this is simple when written down.  All of it is a nightmare to code and balance.  But at the end of the day, that’s what gamers are paying for, and the insane amount of player choice today means that if devs don’t do this, then players will just move on.  There is no single horse in town anymore.

Opportunity Costs Everywhere

Posted on by

This post was drafted a while ago.  This blog is as much about gaming as life, and it would be ignorant of me to not point out the sheer insanity going on around us.  It would be further folly to say that this wasn’t the obvious outcome of a seemingly infinite amount of factors.  I’ll come back to this point in a more fulsome view later.

Opportunity cost is where you lose the opportunity to do something while doing something else.  This is, impressively, one of the pillars of society.  You can’t have workers if you don’t have farmers.  You can’t have artists if you don’t have workers.  You can’t have X without Y.  Games like the Anno series are examples of this system of dependencies and plateaus.

At the micro scale, it can be something as simple as the time you spend prepping food vs. buying pre-made meals.  The former is certainly less expensive if you look at it from an ingredient perspective.  Where it gets more complicated is in labour costs.  Even though you may get paid more per hr, odds are the service costs are higher because that takes into account a bunch of overhead costs.  So for argument’s sake, let’s say making a gourmet burger at home costs 8$, picking it up costs $15, and getting it delivered is $20.

The opportunity costs is the time it takes for you to do this, giving 3 cases.

  • Making it yourself : 40 minutes @ $8
  • Ordering and picking it up: 20 minutes @ $15
  • Ordering and having it delivered: 3 minutes @ $20

Then you look at what you could have been doing during this time.  Learning to play guitar.  Spending time with the kids. Washing the car.

Again at the micro level, people see this come up everyday, multiple times.  In my neighbourhood, over half of the folks pay for someone to plow their driveway during the winter, yet none of them have someone mow their lawn (so time is less of value here than effort & comfort).  I could paint my house and spend a week doing it, or pay professionals who will get it done in 1-2 days.

I tend to classify these choices into two categories, the large and small.  The large ones are where I have a choice to not work and do it, or pay someone to do it.  Those choices are much simpler as my pay/hr is motivating.  When I was working part time as a kid, this was even easier as I could do it for cheaper.

The smaller ones at the individual level are actually the hardest to do because they appear to be convenience but often have much larger impacts.  Using the food example above, the one-off is fine as long as it fits in the budget.  Making a habit of it has health impacts (since 95% of ordered food is not healthy choices) and financial ones (since most people are not offsetting the financial impacts of the choice).  Something as simple as a breakfast sandwhich and a coffee before work is $8.  Do that every day in a month and it’s $160, or close to $2,000 a year.  Prepping it at home is closer to $1 per day.

I like to fish, and that costs money for bait.  Worms are $7/18, and plastic baits (with hooks) come out to around $1.50 each.  I can get through the worms in a weekend with the kids, and 10 plastic baits.  Each weekend can therefore cost me $22 in bait.  Breeding my own worms is $40 of material investment, but reaping is nothing for 6 weeks, then a limit per week (to maintain breeding).  Making my own plastic baits is $120 in material investment (then ~50c in material per item) and an hour of effort, but I can’t make hooks.  My napkin math says I’d need to make ~200 baits to get a return on investment – or 20 weekends of fishing (2 seasons).  If I used more bait on a regular basis it would make sense, but for now the costs are entirely manageable.  Right now, it would cost me more in time than it would in money.

I know this isn’t a common viewpoint.  It doesn’t account for the emotional aspects of an activity, the skill growth, the expertise, or the networking benefits.  But if people take a step back and think about why they make certain choices, they will realize that they likely apply this thinking instinctively.  The entire concept of convenience is based on it.

Cause really, I can always make more money, but I can never truly buy back time.

 

The Joneses

Posted on by

When I bought my house nearly 15 years ago, I was the young buck on the street.  GF, no kids, rather simple life.  Parties most weekends.   Had friends over to reno the majority of the house as it was owned by an 80 year old who kept it like most 80 year olds did.  Neighbours were a mix of older parents, most 15 – 25 years older than me.  Of the 40 or so houses on my dead end street, 4 of them have been resold multiple times, and only 4 others have been sold in 15 years.  It’s getting older around here.

Life goes on, I get married, have kids and the neighbourhood has grown up around me.  A large chunk of the street is now retired folk, very few kids.  And what retired folks have in abundance is time.  And people with time fill it with all sorts of things.

The easiest way to find the retired people is to look at their lawn in the spring or driveways in the winter.  There are fields of yellow dandelions up and down my street, with pockets of pure green.  It’s even funnier when two neighbours share a lawn without a fence – you can see the clean division.  The people with green lawns spend hours meticulously manicuring their lawns.  Whether for their amusement or competition with the others is a good question.

So here I am mowing the lawn (I guess it’s still considered a lawn) the other day and looking out and about.  I’m sweating like crazy in the humidity, amazed that I am even finding time to mow it once a week.  And then trying to napkin math out the effort required to get it pristine, let alone maintain it.

do-not-reuse-wea-alta-tornado-mower-20170603

Here’s a line & here’s another line

Then I come to the realization that the lawn is pretty much the most important thing in their lives, or at least the thing that they spend the most time working on.  My grandfather is an active person, always out and about.  I can’t ever recall his lawn being this shade of green or ever being weed-free.  He never had time for it because he was busy doing other stuff.

This isn’t a judgment on what the people are focusing on, if they value their lawn and never leave the house, that’s up to them.  Just because I don’t share that particular obsession, doesn’t mean it’s bad.  It’s the definition of “their own backyard” after all.

Here I am, mowing the lawn & weeds cause it just needs to be done, as a step to doing the things I really want to do.  Then I’ll pack up some food and drinks, head up to the cottage and enjoy the outdoors.  Do some social distancing with the neighbours.  Plant the garden.  Get in the boat and fish with the family.  Play some boardgames, and have a pint around the campfire.  The weeds will be there when I get back.  And I’ll let the Joneses worry about their own lawn.

 

The Box Syndrome

Posted on by

This is more in line with psychological debate than gaming topics, but it applies across a lot of life.  We generally like to categorize people, and this is a similar attempt.  I call it the Box Syndrome, and it is one of the archtetypes I use to engage with people on terms they understand.

The premise is somewhat simple.  People with this syndrome believe that their world is a finite box.  They are unable to see outside the box, and don’t believe that anything matters but what’s in the box.  They view the source of things entering / exiting the box with mistrust or wonder.  If you’ve ever tried to play a magic trick on a toddler, then you can see what the Box Syndrome looks like.

Everyone starts in this mode, and with time (and willingness) they move on.  There are plenty of people who find comfort in the box, in the familiarity of it.  They are shown that there are things outside the box, but make a choice to ignore them.  They make that choice for a wide set of reasons.

Social media dramatically enables this mindset.  There’s a reason they call it an echo chamber.  Flat-earthers, anti-vaxx, conspiracy nuts are all stuck in their box, and regardless of what happens outside the box, they just don’t care.  They will do whatever they can to paint the walls of the box to reinforce the ideas within that box.  There’s very little you can do to deal with this mindset, aside from creating a new box within their existing one, then moving that new box elsewhere.

There are people where the box isn’t so large a negative, simply a safety blanket.  People who fall into routines and forget why.  Folks who have been doing the exact same job for years and never changing.  They are hyper resistant to anything that questions the existence of the box.  Dealing with them means respecting the safety the box represents, and helping them find a new safety box and a path towards it.

This isn’t to say that the syndrome is all bad.  Everyone needs a box from time to time in order to recharge.  Non-stop change is a rollercoaster that no one can maintain.  It also protects you from un-wanted change.  If you hit a rough patch on the job front, then you need to box your budget to survive and ignore the more frivolous items.   But there’s a time where you’ll need to remove that box.

In the middle of an emergency is the time to start paying attention to the box, or at the very least aware of its existence.  There are more than enough examples of people making, uh, interesting choices because they only see the walls of their box.

I find myself challenging this mindset more and more lately.  I’d say the majority are willing to accept that change is required, and help take part.  There’s a small group that is aware of the box but unable to do something about it.  Then there’s the smallest group who are in their box and unwilling to do anything about it.  The sad part here is that regardless of what they think about the solidity of their box, no matter how much they’ve shored it up, they can’t survive without the people outside the box.  Change is going to happen.

 

 

The Golden Age

Posted on by

The first Age is always the Golden one. Where things are new. Where the impossible seems possible. Where mistakes are made and accepted as part of growth. Where hindsight after many years makes you really question the sanity of that time as the time context is gone.

 

Bhagpuss has a summary series on EQ through the ages. It starts, as they all start, with a Golden Age, a pinnacle, a decline, a resurgence and then… meh. It’s always meh for the current age.

 

You can apply the model to pretty much anything. Sci-fi. Cinema. Music. Food. And when you apply today’s paradigms, you can pull out all sorts of nonsensical items. Fahrenheit 451 has nothing to do with books – it’s a social commentary on technology making people into zombies. But since we’re all zombies beholden to technology, we don’t get that.

 

UO, EQ, WoW at launch were a gift from the higher heavens. Each of them was pure and focused and perfect. Time made them less so. Design decisions brought them to earth. The magic was lost. They are broken today. Hyperbole clearly, yet people still want to defend the idea because they find solace in it.

 

We were all 15-20 years younger. All our lives were simpler. We all had more time. It was new and different. It had other people! People like us! It was a level of social acceptance that really didn’t exist elsewhere. It was geeky before geeky was sexy. It provided shelter to people with different social skills and holy crap did that resonate.

 

Mechanically the games were ok. They were best guesses. UO was a skinner box, where PvP greifing was discovered (and exploited). EQ in particular was a glorified chat tool with the insane downtime in the game. WoW made the meta (resistances and raid checks) more challenging than the gameplay. Without each of those steps, the market would not be what it is today. And in the aggregate, there is no way that geek would be cool without them. Each built on the success of others and pervaded our larger social fabrics. Not everyone knows EQ, but everyone knows WoW – gamer or not.

 

The Silver Age is what follows the Gold. It is a time of trials and tribulations. Of experimentation to see what sticks and what doesn’t. It’s an age of refinement, not of creativity. What down the road will often be seen as catastrophic failures, but those are needed in order to stage a rebirth. And everyone loves a rebirth story. 

We’re in a time where ages are measured in shorter and shorter spans.  The Dark Ages lasted 1000 years!  Renaissance was 300.  Golden Age of sci-fi was less than 10.  Gold + Silver + everything else is just a tad over 20 for MMOs.  2 years for Gold EQ (which I’ll let others debate).

Time is a fickle thing.  Einstein had it right, our concepts change depending on the context.  A game is perfect when it fits your needs perfectly, and is horrible when it doesn’t.  That’s not the game, that’s you.  Viewing it through the Age lens, is just applying the larger social needs vs the game.  UO thought non-stop PvP was what people wanted, it wasn’t.  SWG thought people wanted a combat revamp – woo did they not.  EQ thought doubling down on challenge would keep people around – nope.  Blizz thought people wanted to play Cataclysm and hit walls of difficulty, people didn’t.  There isn’t a single dev that had instructions to follow.  They did what they thought was best… and here we are looking back with so much hindsight it’s like judging a baby that can’t do a backflip.

Games have grown.  We have grown.  It’s a veritable buffet of choice today.  I’m certainly appreciative of it.  Thankful for the people that came before to lay the foundation.  Time to enjoy today.

The Joys of Fishin’

Posted on by

I should build a category for this topic. I keep coming back to it.

I love to fish. I’ve found that most people who love to fish love it for the same reason, and it’s a reason that’s hard to properly explain. Getting fish into the boat is the perk. The act of fishing is the reward.

I’ve been somewhat fascinated by fishing in video games. I mean the real act of fishing, not the Bass Tourney type games. Where fishing is a side thought, a pastime that takes a 180 from the rest of the content.

Ultima Online’s fishing was like this. For the longest time it provided no benefit – just more fish. Boats were used as a method of transport – and once you had runes, then there wasn’t a whole lot of point to boats. Eventually they revamped fishing to be its own world. You’d fish up messages in a bottle, go out to sea to fight serpents and collect maps, then dig up treasure on islands. At the time, I had done most everything the game offered and this was an awesome combination of the best parts. I had 2 character builds that I built up and kept selling those accounts to fund real life things (FWIW, they went for $600USD then or ~$900USD today).

Fishing in MMOs since then has been relatively simple. Rift is the gold standard in terms of it as activity. You only need a pole, but can craft lures to get better, and it’s not a 1-2 click event. Rewards are achievements mostly, with some pets included. FF14 is close, but the leveling system makes it less fun. Its a profession versus a pastime.

WoW takes a weird approach. Pat Nagle is the most famous NPC who has never thrown a punch. For 15 years he’s sent anglers to their death chasing the weirdest of quests. There have been raid bosses that needed fishing. The common part between expansions is that fishing is a core requirement for the best food buffs. So there’s some reward to being a fisher, rather than anything else. But the fishing meta usually involves some super convoluted plot to have you explore the world and get some super rare set of fish and unlock a neat gimmick.

  • Vanilla: Stranglethorn fishing tourney, time-based and you needed to get a special fish first to win.
  • TBC: Daily fishing quests for pets!
  • WotLK: Daily quests, the fountain coins, and a new fishing tournament
  • Cataclysm: Daily quests like TBC.
  • Pandaria: The anglers faction node – with the ultimate reward of a Water Strider (and the Raft).
  • WoD: More daily quests for rare fish, with cosmetic rewards. There’s a water strider here too, but it’s much harder to get than the Pandaria version. Pat Nagle lives in your garrison though, so that’s neat.
  • Legion: A fishing pole artefact that requires fishing ultra rare fish. Can breathe underwater, walk on water, teleport to nodes and avoid combat.
  • BfA: A simple start of catching all fish types in Mechagon, which goes to 11 quickly with special goggles that cause fish bubbles to spawn. Clicking the bubbles in certain zones / time of day / being dead catches different fish. Reward is a personal ocean to fish from.

I’ve never won a fishing tournament. The timing just doesn’t work for me, and the only time I did well (3rd place) I didn’t even realize it was going down. Aside from that, I’ve completed 90% of the fishing activities per expansion. The Angler faction was amazing. The Legion fishing quests were a ton of fun, and the pole artefact is still amazing. BfA feels more like finding a secret to get the ultra rare drops figured out, more tedious than actual fishing (since I need to move to collect bubbles).

It’s still impressive that I keep falling back into the fishing mode. After all these years and all these games. If it has fishing, it automatically gets a play. Now give me my Weather Beaten Hat and give me a cold one.

Design of Meaningful Actions

Posted on by

Sid Meier is often quoted as saying that a game is a series of interesting choices. I think we can all agree with this in the foundational aspects. Slay the Spire is a supremely good example of this. Where I think the good and the great spread out is the design of meaningful actions.

Games are full of actions, some of which stem from choice, some of which are from being forced down a path. In a game of golf, you need to hit the ball with a club – that action is required. The choice is related to which club you select, and the method of the swing. You need to take into consideration the distance, wind, pitch, obstacles, your next shot, and the money you have bet that you’re going to win the hole! If you play golf and at 175yrd you always pull out a 6 iron, then that’s not a choice. You’re not there for the game of golf, you’re there for other reasons.

Video games are similar. There’s the presentation of choice, and then the act of a meaningful decision. Today, failure states are nearly non-existent in game design. Battletoads had a failure state. Fortnite has another match. Even in the MMO space, failure is simply a time factor (take longer to take down a boss). That impacts the choice, in that its either the “better choice” or the “status quo” choice. The value between these two is meaning.

I’ll use WoW as an example here since it covers such a wide swath of MMO design choices, but the concept is found elsewhere. Combat in WoW is mechanically bound to three concepts.

  • The damage/healing ouput
  • The resource cost
  • The time before re-use

The damage output is both simple and complex. Simple in that the numbers displayed can be easily compared between various choices. Complex in that designers throw in synergies that make a specific flow of skills more powerful than if randomly selected, of if there is more of a specific resource to use.

The resource cost is important because it is limited. Otherwise it would simply be “use the strongest ability all the time”. Design choices favor resource exhausting choices vs. resource building choices (e.g. mana > combo points) as there are more choices in that model. If I can pick from 10 skills and have full mana, there’s a choice. If I have no combo points, I only have 2 options, until I get to max points, then reset.

Time before reuse is cooldown related. This slows down the pace of combat. FF14 is a slower game than WoW because of the inherent global cooldowns. Designers often put the most powerful of skills (damage or resource generating) behind long cooldowns. In that sense, the skill has less choice, because it’s often so powerful you want to use it on cooldown. There are exceptions, such as progression raiding and burn phases (You don’t want Bloodlust on the first trash pull.)

Meaningful Actions

My definition here is that the action itself has a meaning that is larger than a single purpose. An action either has significant damage, significant resource impacts, or significant cooldown impacts. It is not possible to design a game with only meaningful actions. You only know they are meaningful because there are slower moments in between – the contrast is important.

So let’s look at a Fire Mage. Almost all their skills are locked behind cooldowns, and the priority is to use the one with the biggest number when available. You then fill in with Fireball (when stable) or Scorch (when moving). Fireball builds Heat Up, which boosts another skill. Critical strikes drive a lot of this build and make other options show up. Same with keeping enemies Ignited. This class is mostly reactive to situations, and the there is a flow of 1-2 actions between meaningful ones. I don’t think it’s possible for them to ever be resource exhausted. There was a time where this happened!

Healer next, and a Mistweaver Monk is up. They are a mix of HoT and direct healing, and also use a priority. You keep the HoTs up on the tank, throw a Vivify if there’s a spike, and keep Soothing Mists active so that you can throw an Enveloping Mists cast quickly. The HoTs are used to conserve mana, since chaining Vivify will drain you super fast. There are some cooldowns, but the majority of choices are about mana efficiency. The most healing, without overhealing, for the least amount of mana.

Rogue now. They are a feast or famine class where your most effective skills are either locked behind cooldowns or require you to be at 80/100% of combo points (resources). In order to build resources there is only 1 skill, which may trigger a reactive skill that can boost it further. The resource consumption skill uses all resources, and you need to rebuild. You end up with 1 meaningful action, followed by 2-5 meaningless actions. The kicker in this is that the meaningful actions are typically the most meaningful over time (Slice and Dice, Poison, Roll the Bones). Your most damaging direct abilities are actually bottom of barrel in comparison to other classes. Oh, and the class is resource restricted with Energy, which actually prevents you from building resources. Feral Druids (who have 4 specs) and Windwalker Monks are similar design choices (WW skills do not drain all combo points). DH and Warriors are also energy building classes, but they only have 1 resource to manage. Warlocks appear to be dual resource, but they never have mana issues.

Simplified View

The meaningful action is gated by 3 main factors. When more than 1 of those gates are present, then it’s not meaningful (e.g. double resource penalty, and low damage). It isn’t a question about being effective, that can be tweaked with numbers. It’s a question of rewarding. Is it fun to play a class that’s slow as molasses, continually restricted in choices, and has “dead time”? I recall a fundamental redesign of DKs as originally all their actions were rune-limited, with slow generation.

I am not saying that Rogues & Feral are broken. I am saying that their fundamental combat design seems archaic compared to every other. For damage classes, Blizzard has removed the mana restrictions almost entirely and replaced it with cooldowns. If the button is there, click it. For resource building classes, the “fun classes” have skills that consume a portion of resources and then are cooldown locked (short periods). The job of that class is not to continually rebuild, it’s simply to maintain (Hunters are mana maintenance).

Again, this isn’t a numbers issue. If they boost the resource consuming skills, then you get massive bursts of damage and periods of nothing – that actually makes it worse. Re-scaling of all skills to raise the filler damage and reducing the consumer doesn’t help either, since it muddles the actions to 2 buttons that do the same thing. Adding a cooldown skill that does similar effects to a resource consuming skill feels like a bonus, but both are already dependent on cooldowns to accelerate resource generation. Removing the energy mechanic completely would get rid of all “dead time”, but require some re-scaling of skill damage. It would still be feast/famine mode, but the duration of famine would be dramatically reduced. The final option is to rebalance the consuming skills to only use a portion of resources, so that you could potentially chain consumers.

I’m sure this is a watercooler conversation in Blizzard. Curious if there’s ever any action on it, as the focus seems to be on the “numbers” rather than the “fun”. And there are plenty of other “fun” things in WoW. It’s just too bad that that Rogues get the short end of that dagger.

The Death of a Rogue

Posted on by

I’ve been using the Asmiroth moniker for over 20 years (that’s painful to write), and my first WoW character was a dwarf rogue on launch day.  I ran a rogue-specific website at the time, wrote guides (that paid for my PCs for a LONG time), and was more than well versed in that class.  I played Rogue as a main character up until Pandaria, where I started to really mess around with alts.  In particular the Monk, which I’ve mained since.

Rogues in just about any RPG setting have been interesting to me.  The idea of hiding in the shadows, coming out with bursts, then hiding again is a rather unique class trait.  There’s an irony here in that the typical rogue mindset is that of a loner, but in practical terms they often require other people to excel – what with the backstabbing and all.  This worked in something like Everquest where group combat was the default.  Less so in WoW where the single player experience has been taking a larger foothold.

As the MMO space has evolved, the multi-role aspect has really become the gold standard for way forward.  FF14 does a spectacular job on this, but doesn’t actually have a rogue class.  This model allows an individual to continue to participate in the game, filling in the role they see fit (heal/tank/damage).  WoW at launch focused on classes filling a single role well.  Those that could do multiple roles, usually did so at a penalty (hybrid tax).  Game moved forward and more and more hybrid classes have come to shore.

Which means in WoW there are only 4 pure damage classes left – Rogue, Hunter, Mage, and Warlock.  Only one of those is melee.  And the game design over the years has been ultra punishing for anyone in melee range.  It’s not that it’s impossible, just that if you want to play a melee DPS role, you need to always be moving, which requires a level of player dexterity and awareness above and beyond those at range.

So, the Rogue is limited to a specific role, and mechanically at a disadvantage.  What benefits do they bring?  Group stealth is one, where this has a niche application in time-based group trials.  They are great at locking down single targets, especially in PvP settings.  It should be relatively high on single target damage but due to the melee range challenges, they actually rank middle of pack, with 4 other melee classes ahead of them.

The above issues reflect tremendously in day to day gameplay.  Single player efforts are at a disadvantage compared to pretty much every other class due to poor defensive options.  In group settings, aside from high tier timed dungeon runs, they provide minimal benefit.  Combined, it makes rogues less fun to play.  Maybe if the game reverted from the AE-trash / Focus-boss structure it would help, and the full skill set could be leveraged.

I will point out that the rogue lore in WoW is second only to Paladins, and crosses both factions.  I absolutely loved the Legion class hall.

For now, if you’re looking for a leather-based, mobile, melee option… you’re better off with a Demon Hunter.  They do nearly everything a Rogue does, but better in nearly every aspect.  Monks are even more versatile, but their DPS spec needs some tuning.  Their tank role is the best in the business, which is a nice offset.  Plus they heal.

End result is that my Rogue sits in the inn, unlocking boxes sent to him in the mail, at expansion max level, waiting for the day he can come out of retirement.

BfA Pathfinder

Posted on by

Naithan had me thinking with a recent post about flying in BfA.  A long time ago I had completed Part 1, which was mostly a rep grind at the start.  At the time, the rep grind had some significant tangible benefits related to gearing and vertical progress.  Really doesn’t mean much today though.

Part 2 is another rep grind, specifically with the 8.2 factions (Nazjatar and Mechagon), and given the large rep boost it turned out to be about 3 days of effort with the reputation boost active.  A Mechagon contract plus all the quests and dailies for each zone gave me the boost.  So maybe a week now that the rep boost isn’t active.

Now we get to cover the actual benefits of flying.  I decided to level my rogue to test it out.  I did a few levels on the ground, a few in the air.  Air was faster, but only when put against negative zone flow design.  Blizz world design has 2 modes – open exploration, and then funnelled experience.  The funnelled experience doesn’t benefit from flying.  You go from A to B, and the path is part of the experience.  The open world design has spread out targets, and then “trash” blocking the ground path.  The western part of Stormsong (Naga area) is a super good example.  Flying allows you to pick your targets, and since the majority of EXP is from quests, this is a major speed boost.  The difference in BfA is large, but not as large as it was in Legion.

World quests also benefit, since they are spread out and the drop in/out aspect is a HUGE timesaver.  Fairly useless for people who have access to flying since they’ve likely got all they need from WQ already (except alts).  Material farming also isn’t that great.  Both 8.2 zones have plenty of trash drops that are worth 100g, which blows any farming route out of the water.  I made 5,000g running those 2 zones in 30 minutes and vendoring everything I found.

8.3

In 7.3 (Argus) you couldn’t fly.  Daily quest hub, plenty of ways to die, lots of interesting bits.  It was relatively good design but felt punishing since you had just unlocked flying.

8.3 is re-makes of existing zones with N’zoth invasions, and they require flying (Uldum in particular).  The zone design itself is limited by Cataclysm/Pandaria structure, where you have pockets of activity and large spaces with nothing.  It’s a heck of a throw back when you look at from afar.  Flying is not punished, only floating and going AFK.  It makes the dailies go by extremely fast, 15 minutes or so per zone.  This is really odd design choice considering the deliberate efforts in the past years to slow down the pace of content consumption.

Overall

Flying has a larger benefit to alts in terms of catch-up options.  Whether there’s a value there or not depends on what you’re trying to achieve.  There are quite a few time gates in terms of vertical progression (WQ/Dailies), but you could try your hand at dungeons I guess to reach max level pretty quick.  I don’t see why that would matter today.  You’re pretty much just setting up alts for the next expansion, right?