Author: Milady

Kiting a rare spawn.

While everybody is busy commending GW2 for its social breakthrough, I went back to vanilla WoW and marvelled at the tools that we have relinquished over the years. I scoured specifically for community-regulating tools, as it was the concern of my previous post, but also paid attention to the quality-of-life improvements that are not so beneficial as they may seem. I will comment on those latter first and analyse what we can learn from 2006+ MMOs.

For starters, I had been missing the longer casting bars when mining, skinning, etc. Preposterous!, you may say. Still, if you have played LOTRO, you may have realized how differently that game plays from other AAA titles. LOTRO is more concerned with the journey than with the endgame: professions take a longer time to skill-up, its recipes are much more complex, and the resource nodes are more spaced out and take longer to harvest, which is key. Vanilla WoW was like that as well. One of the instruments that the developers employed to quench our endgame anxiety was this deceleration of gathering. Gathering in vanilla WoW is less frantic. Everything is less frantic.

The actual journey to level 60 takes as much time or even more than the path to 85, and is indubitably more rewarding. The joy of the first green after that infested pit of furbolgs that is Ban'ethil Barrow Den. It was soloable, but a very dangerous venture due to the high respawn rate. In retail WoW, I cannot bring myself to level up any alts. My characters are insultingly overpowered in relation to the mobs, and the quests are a mockery. Then, I need to check my heart rate before I queue for any instances, because I know that there is a huge chance that I might end up spitting fire for great justice.

In the beginning of Wrath I took up the job of managing and leading a raiding guild, and I used to feel very pessimistic about the new recruits that we were receiving. These people had not gone through the learning process that vanilla and TBC WoW forced upon new players, and had no idea how to play their classes since the game had waived the responsibility of teaching them. Vanilla WoW has so far (at level 12) taught me that kiting with Hamstring may be a wiser strategy than face-tanking; that pulling three mobs is inadvisable when your priest is catching butterflies far away; that aggro is a vital mechanic that saves my heroic clothie. My priest learnt very quickly the 5-second rule of mana regen, because he had to make use of it. But not only does harder content work to show you your class' toolkit, it is also a goal in itself. Quest rewards feel like rewards. Every level is a conquest, not a bureaucratic procedure to be filled to reach endgame.

Another quality-of-life improvement gone awry was the addition of flying mounts that reduce Azeroth from a world to a province with huge terrain dissonances. The process of travelling added to the slow pace of the game, although it was at times a bit too much. The journey from the night elven area to Stormwind involved a ship trip, a walk through a crocodile-infested zone, a pass below the mountains guarded by 20ish-level orcs, a pleasant road walk through Loch Modan up to Ironforge, its awe-inspiring gates and melody, and the gnomish tram.

Remember the degradation of epic loot? When something is handed to us effortless, we develop a sense of entitlement, and regard the object without the admiration that a hardship produces in us. Same with world locations. That trip was wondrous because it was not a mere vista splurged on our screens. For our two night elves, it was a wonder we had pursued with effort. A dwarf greeted us at the entrance, asking what were two elves doing in his lands. Spontaneous rp ensued, in a normal, non-rp server.

PD: Actually, I am currently playing TBC, Vanilla and retail WoW, Argent Dawn, at the same time. Emerald Dream is a server run by the same team that developed the TBC server (Archangel), and has just released ED to start progression from scratch. It is the stablest server I have experienced yet, and mostly bug-free. Absolutely recommended, specially now that they have just started, so you can hop on the bandwagon of raid progression. I have edited the Contact Page if you want to reach me in-game.

PD2: For more vanilla-based blogging, you should check out this blog, whose writer records his renewed experience of vanilla in a different emulator to the one I'm subscribed to.

PD3: Vanilla WoW, how much of my enjoyment do you think is related to nostalgia?

One of the novelties of GW2 is the way this game handles potentially irritating activities that are related to the competition aspect in MMOs, the result being a minimisation of conflictive points, and perhaps a masking of human nature. In a comment with Azuriel on a previous post, we delved on the surface of philosophical thought for a moment, he stating that the repetition of an action creates a habit (“We become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.” -Aristotle), whereas I remain skeptic: Should not a positive, mature attitude come from ourselves, not incentivised by the system? Well, if that does work as Azuriel and our old buddy Aristotle state, perhaps we will see a new breed of more social-conscious players educated by the MMO genre. And that is something we really need right now.

Grumpy Granny Milady: "Back in the old days, people behaved because they had no other option if they wanted to engage in high-end content. The community could regulate itself by ostrasizing harmful elements such as ninjas, slackers and jerks. And what do we have now? A system that eliminates any rough areas so that we can ignore that we are actually playing side by side with a bunch of jerks! I dissent! People should learn that bad behaviour is not tolerated, not that there is no possibility of behaving bad! Etc, etc."

Perhaps it is too late for that, given the trend MMOs are following. WoW is implementing a looting system in Pandaria that completely eliminates the need-greed dichotomy when playing with strangers. The players saw that nobody could be trusted in an anonymous lawless situation and played the same game the ninjas did, rolling for everything as a self-defence. That system was aberrant and a solution had to be tailored for it. Instead, they removed the system completely. One more social aspect gone down the drain, and the Massive Multiplayer is dismantled little by little until we have dispensed with every social aspect that fostered that community which used to be generally good, spiced up by one or two jerks, gankers, etc. These patches into the Multiplayer areas of the genre strike me as a blindfold, so that we can play alongside jerks and their like without actually engaging with them, challenging them.

Some time ago, there was a post by Stubborn in which he told one particularly obnoxious LFD experience. That is the usual way of things these days, the anecdote was nothing new, but the way he reacted to the situation was. He stood up for what he believed instead of resigning to play under the conditions the jerks had established. Check it out, it is a good read and the comments are also diverse and insightful.

This post led me to reinforce my belief that each one of us can, and should, challenge the system. We have been overrun by jerks, not just in MMOs but all over the internet. Trolling is the expected response to almost anything said on the public sphere, specially when a sound discussion is attempted. On the internet, it falls on moderation and a combination of engaging and ignoring those trolls depending on the issue. I am more concerned with the trolls and jerks that populate our MMO space.

It falls on both the developer and the player to ensure that the MMO community is healthy. The former must at least provide the latter with tools to fight undesirable behaviour, and make sure that the system works properly and is not exploited. We could consider GW2 and Pandaria's approaches as an attempt to fight the jerkish community, but I actually see them as a way of rose-tinting the community. Perhaps social and good behaviour will breed good behaviour, so I will not complain too loud about GW2. Although I suspect that the intended result of this is that players do not have to deal with human-internet nature, and thus will not have to challenge its failings.

I prefer tools that encourage us players to deal with the trolls with some effectiveness, such as LoL's tribunal. But since we do not have such tools available to us in our MMOs, we will have to make do with what we have been given: reports, tickets, and being loud about respect and rights. Setting an example. Trade channel, or whatever its iteration is called in other games, has always brimmed with trolls, jerks and spammers, who have taken over a channel that is supposed to be the agora of commerce and grouping (and sometimes Hellenistic debate). Three or four trolls will sour a common spot for the whole server. The other day I read a very ill-intentioned joke along the lines of "The difference between football and rape is that women do not like football." Not only did I report that, but I also wrote a ticket to make sure that it would be looked into by a human being (this is the GM response if you're curious), and then I stated on that same trade chat that I had done so, for other players to know that it is in their hands to do something, and for the perpetrator to know that it is not an accepted behaviour.

Some people will say that I place too much importance on things most people do not care about. Well, I bet that that joke was read by a rape victim, and that it must have hurt her/him. I am also certain that most people, that silent majority, are sickened by the troll/jerk behaviour, and that they only need a little push to begin working against it themselves. Players should try to foster a healthy game environment and stop heeding the trolls who will tell them that "this is the internet." No, the internet is you, me, our neighbour. We are part of the problem if we do not engage with it. Silence sadly equals to agreement. I assure you, confronting the trolls on the public spaces does very often yield results in the manner of public support and troll-silencing, but someone has to step up for her beliefs.

I would rather work with other tools than the ones we were and will be given. I would like to see a player tribunal, some sort of reputation system that was carefully tailored to avoid exploiting, and more power to the game masters. It is needed more than ever because the community can no longer enforce respectful behaviour since players are more individualistic than ever.

An essential read on the topic of trollhood: "Racism, Harassment, Griefing, Bullying, Trolling…whatever you call it… just stop."

PD: I will be abroad for three weeks and might not be able to check the internet so much. I hope I can still post and comment around, but do not think I have been murdered by a furious troll if I don't.

This post is in direct response to Syl's "[GW2] Tired of Trinity Whining. Or: As if!", and a counter at that. Not very common, since I tend to agree with Syl on many topics. In this case, I believe some of the misgivings on the subject of roles are valid. The problem might be as well one of concept. Syl (as well as the proponents of the Trinity) talk about the three roles of healer-tank-dps, instead of the notion of "role" itself, which is what I found lacking in GW2. Mind you, not from direct experience, since I decided upon not buying a beta, but from footage and the report of other bloggers.

The topics that Syl's post covers are too broad to have received such a diminutive treatment in one post, but I will do my best to answer them. The issues of cooperation and communication are tackled, and mixed up, but they actually encompass many more issues than that of the roles, such as the server-wide "groups" and the incentivising of social actions such as cooperating for a quest or ressing. I will refer to my previous post on the topic because I do not think I can add anything else to it, I still feel the same way about this issue. TL;DR: Automating or incentivising what was a social act of yesteryear does indeed avoid some unpleasant events, but eliminates a choice of acting manifestly socially, and a way to distinguish the more social-oriented players. I expand upon this topic much more on the post, please check it out if there is a conversation to be had on that particular subject.

That part cleared, the Trinity itself has to be analysed for what it does or does not in the game. The arguments of the proponents of the Trinity as listed by Syl are the following:

a) No holy trinity means there is no cooperation anymore! *GASP* b) No holy trinity means people do not coordinate / communicate in groups! c) No holy trinity means zerg-mode and needing no strategy! d) No holy trinity means there can't be difficult combat!

A) Is wrong. The Trinity is not the issue with cooperation, as I discussed above. What the Trinity is, is a system that subscribes a class to a specific function in a party, making it more clear for all the participants the way to tackle the challenges. A "crutch", as Syl herself called it. The problem is not with a Trinity-less system, but with a role-less one. The Trinity is just one possible arrangement of roles, and the one we have learnt to expect, and translate into many other games which are not MMOs. I'll expand upon that later.

B) Coordinating and communicating are different acts, and thus have to be considered on their own. There is some sort of coordination in WoW's PvE content, even in randoms, although it is automated by the Trinity itself. The tank pulls first (or if a dps does, I let them eat the mob and go on my merry way), the healer keeps them all topped, and the dps do their thing and once in a blue moon CC some mob. This type of coordination is so ingrained in our gaming habits that we no longer see it as a coordination, which is why 5-man randoms work so well. The Trinity does the coordination for us, selecting the role we will be filling. The problem is, Guild Wars 2 has not created an alternative to the Trinity that involves any more complex cooperation than the one that we have automated.

C) That would depend on how the developers tackle the issue. We do not know yet if high-end combat will require more cooperation than the ascertained easy content that dynamic events are. In the end, we might be seeing fights like Aran in Karazhan, a favourite of some friend of mine, and that model will succeed. The concern that many people have is that high-end PvE will involve the same zerging that dynamic events are. You die, you get ressed or run back, and people pew-pew away; strength in numbers, no penalisation to chain-ressing, etc.

D) Same as above. It depends on how the encounters are designed. Zerging is the lowest-resistance path, but the qualms against zerging are only partially related to the difficulty of the encounters. In a zerg-rush, nobody stands out. You are the lowest common denominator, an expendable DPS helping the bar get lower a bit quicker. That is why zergs are not interesting.

When people deplore the loss of the Trinity, what they really miss having is a particular role in the combat, a role which may enable them to outshine through their performance. People do not miss the Trinity, they miss fulfilling a role. That role could be aligned with the Trinity (I felt proud of one-man healing Karazhan), or be something particular assigned to the individual at a given moment (Mage-tanking Maulgar, Warlock-tanking one of the Twin Emperors; Hunter-kiting in Maulgar again). If ANet is cunning enough, they will be able to pull these off in high-end PvE, and the lack of role-based performance will be diminished by an individual-based performance, but I am skeptical about it, given that there has been no instance of that in low-end PvE.

It is extremely difficult to replace the Trinity model with something completely original. No matter where you look at, people will be arranging their groups into roles similar to that of a meatshield, plus healer, plus damage dealer or control. Diablo 3: The multiplayer is so inefficient and unbalanced because classes are not designed to complement each other. A workaround in the vanilla game (before many nerf patches) which allowed one of the top WoW guilds to defeat Diablo in Inferno was to create a pseudo-Trinity with a Barbarian tanking, two Monks healing, and a Wizard dpsing. In Diablo 2 it was possible to play with friends without feeling hindered because the game was much more forgiving, and thus there was no need for a Trinity, or any role-based system. Team Fortress 2: One of the basic strategies to advance the line was to shield a Heavy or a Soldier and bring down the enemy's turrets while healed and invulnerable. Healers were key to the survival of the team, but there also existed other roles which are not easily translatable into the MMO environment unless there is a major paradigm change in the way encounters are designed. These roles were that of the Spy or the Engineer, the former to take out key targets and the latter to defend a position. Conclusion: There ought to be a major change in the way encounters are designed for other role-model to become viable in the MMO setting. Either that, or have a role-less system, which in turn does have those negative effects the Trinity-supporters claimed: loss of the individual performance, zerging and zerging-designed encounters, chaos.

Sorry for the hiatus! I am finally free of exams and the like and will come back to the blogosphere. I have missed you all :).

I've been following the discussion on attunements for a while now and, surprisingly, I have seen my initial stance on the topic bouncing from one extreme to the other. For some time I considered that, perhaps, it is wrong to prevent people from accessing content they way they want (singleplayer MMOs with LFR, for instance), since we can raid as well without attunements. Then I did away with my "empathy". Attunements had a reason to exist which benefited us all, despite their inconveniences. But it is clear that they are not coming back in any way we might conceive, according to Blizzard.

I can relate to Doone's sentiment about the magic behind attunements, although I have not experienced that golden first period of discovery and secrecy in which only a few chosen participated. Once they were common knowledge (at the same time as encounters and quests were available on thottbot and relatives), that initial magic vanished and they became tools for other purposes: as a barrier of entry arousing a due sense of anticipation, a concealed path to gearing up, a lore dispenser also. For Blizzard, as well as for some fellow bloggers, all of these can be achieved separately through different, potentially less frustrating means. I believe they are right, but they do not take into account one aspect of the MMO genre that we bloggers cling to, and which has been progressively diluted over the years, as the genre intersected with the mainstream culture: elitism.

I do believe most of the bloggers that have written on the subject of attunements were part of a successful guild, and participated actively in the community: they were elitists. In a good sense, do not pick up your pitchfork just yet! It is a truism often mentioned that bloggers (as well as forum posters) are a meagre segment of the population that does not really represent the average player. In fact, had it not been said multiple times that raiding, that activity which used to be barred by attunements, was undertaken by a minority? It was the advent of the LFR which finally introduced most of the high-level population into raiding. As a hardcore player (hardcore in the sense of time-investing and dedicated), I have always wondered what these people did in the game. Probably questing, alting and collecting pets - Blizzard acknowledged this "underground" population by giving them access to the same content as everybody else through an "epic" singleplayer experience, LFR, and now Pokemon. Disclaimer: I would love a Pokemon MMO, but Pandaria is not it.

Attunements are closely tied to the now-vanishing social strata that constituted the original MMOs: the elite raiders on the top, then the medium raiders and nest-guilds which formed and geared the players, and then the rest of the population which played the game their own way. You would have in-between the PvPers who also raided for gear, the RPers, and pet collectors who had intuited the advent of Pandaria. These strata have gave way to labels, informing what the player likes doing (PvE or PvP player), but not establishing any difference in quality beyond 'hardcore' or 'casual', which nowadays have little meaning beyond "I did this on HC and my item level is 10 points higher than yours." The strata were interdependent, with elite guilds depending on the low-level ones for viable recruits who had done their attunements and geared from starting raids. Attunements had the same function as the raids themselves, which had to be done in a particular order so that progress could be made: it ensured that only those worthy had access to the promised land of Sunwell. They also, as it has been discussed, ensured that the community had to work together and behave like a community instead of a pack of trolls.

All of this was related to the idea that raiders were an elite who had access to the most epic portion of the game, that which gave them the rightful label of heroes and associated them with the pantheon of lore figures. There was also the loot. For us, attunement-utopists, this elicited a sense of elitism, or earned reward, that we have seen stripped from the games due to the much-maligned accessibility. Elitism is a cringeworthy concept for us real-world working classes, since the elitism of offline society is barred by attunements which are well-beyond our possibilities. The MMO landscape resembles the American Dream of sustainable capitalism in that everything, with pertinent effort, can be achieved. This fictional elitism is not bad, merely naïve if we are not aware of its ingenuity. In the MMO Dream of Vanilla and TBC, everybody had the opportunity to become a hero, if she did her homework in the way of attunements, gear and consumables.

Why, then, had that healthy elitism had to be wiped out from the game? For a late newcomer or an aspiring guild, it was a difficult path to tread, perhaps too steep for some. But the same reason why wiping is an integral part of the raiding experience, the difficulty of acquiring the gear and attunements to be admitted into a raiding guild, or the difficulty of assembling a reliable group, are inseparable from the sense of achievement. Yes, it was rough for a guild which did not succeed keeping a rooster of geared players to compete with the elite guilds... but this was not coincidental: they did not strive for top-level raiding the same way other guilds did. In this elitist society of old MMOs, if you worked at it enough, you could be a top guild as well, with much less effort than any similar enterprise in the real world would take.

Now remove those attunements, and remove the natural barrier that was the difficulty of the encounters themselves - everybody can come in, but it is not fun for anybody. And I do not consider doing an encounter in heroic mode a solution: raiding would no longer be the key to the epic portion of the game. Only by questing you are already the Hero (no matter the devices they give you to cheat your "singleplayerness" and two-hit elites). Naxxramas in Wrath was the most unexciting raid I have ever done, even in heroic. Exceedingly easy, but not because we were that awesome: anybody could do it. Sunwell: I never stepped on it at the appropriate level, and I cherish its aloofness. It gave something to look forward to. What does an heroic mode provide, which the normal did not? What is more: if anybody, attunementless, gearless, can raid, what happened to the sense of accomplishment?

Current MMOs can no longer bar the path to "epicness", which unsurprisingly deems the whole concept of epic rather shallow. I acknowledge that attunements, as most of the artificial barriers that had been set to separate elite raiders from budding raiders or casual players, have their issues, like having to farm content for guildmates over and over again; but they were part of the reason why raiding felt epic. You had to be part of the elite, yes, but unlike in the real world, you only had to work at it and you were in. There was no need to make it any more accessible.

First of all, excuse my inactivity over the past few days; I'm in the middle of my exams and I have essays to deliver, so I haven't been as active around the blogosphere as I would have liked, especially since very interesting discussions sparked. One which caught my attention was the opinion of a few bloggers expressing their concern on soullessness of some games. Implicitly stands the idea that, in ye olde days, MMOs used to be pregnant with brushes of something not entirely definite, which made them more life-like, or world-like if you wish. These might be related to the concept of Easter eggs, but not entirely. What exactly is the "soul" of a game, and where is it located, if games have one? In the lore tidbits scattered around the world? Inside the Maelstrom (when it was not a game location but a symbol)? Correct, and for the following reason:

The soul of a game lies where its players cannot reach, it lies beyond what is the "game" and into what becomes the simulation of a world.

MMOs are more prone to be deemed soulless than other games because of the expectation that MMOs need to fulfill in order to be deemed worthy of their title - MMOs need to render a world for the players to inhabit, whereas your average RPG needs only to deliver an experience (which is why a cinematic experience such as the Mass Effect series is considered a good game, while SW:TOR attempt at the same thing detracts it from constituting a world). The Elder Scrolls titles are also required to deliver a world, since their main appeal is that same sense of bigger-than-you space which an MMO ought to convey in order to attract us. That which we can easily master, like the storyline in most RPGs, will not haunt us afterwards with promises of more secrets to unveil, with the infinite possibilities of a world to grasp.

In order to create a life-like world, developers have to stuff it with elements unrelated to the game itself. Take for instance the signature books of The Elder Scrolls series: they do not hold a direct relation to the game but to the world, not being part of any quest, although clarifying certain game events in the light of the world's history. They confer TES a background which adds another layer of meaning to the players' own experiences, but also convey the idea of a world which is independent of the individual player's input.

But the soul of a game must not be contained exclusively in the books, or other lore sources one may come across. It can also be imprinted in the locations and NPCs, when those exist in its own sake and not to deliver a game-experience (such as a quest). In Morrowind, the player would come across many dwarven (Dwemer) contraptions and artifacts, ruins and chambers, which were there to convey the idea of a sudden vanish of an entire race, which undoubtedly would produce awe in the player's mind, since the Dwemer were out of her reach inside the game. No quest to bring them back, not even a goal for most of those ruins scattered across Morrowind; their purpose was to produce a world. They were the soul of the game.

The soul of the game lies in the sense of a world produced by events, locations, characters, objects which are not made for the purpose of providing content for the player. They must be independent of the game activities (such as questing, raiding, etc). They could even be part of a quest, provided that it is a) full of non-game content such as lore; b) not immediately accessible to everybody, like class quests, or quests belonging to a chain. They could also be locations: the soul of Karazhan was Medivh's chambers, accessed through the staircase to Prince Malchezaar. It makes sense that there would be a room where the proprietor of the tower lived, doesn't it? Yet that is missing from many game locations these days, even in TBC WoW (Karazhan was actually developed during vanilla). The soul of Skyrim was those locations in the game world which told a story on its own, without being linked to major player-controlled events (an abandoned mage tower, a cellar infested by demons, each and every NPC which had a unique dialogue but no quest to account for it).

The idea for this post originated from an Easter egg I found in old Dire Maul in this private TBC server. I had gone there with a guildmate for the sake of exploring that old and lore-sated instance which was one of my favourites. We searched for the library and for the Highborn prince (whose background always fascinated me), and came across a named skeleton on the floor of the library: "Skeletal Remains of Kariel Winthalus" Who was this man? Apparently, he was the author of some of the librams which you may turn in for the head enchants, and in his librams you may learn that he supported Kael'thas and Illidan, and sought knowledge from the Highborne in Dire Maul to aid their cause. Not only that, the character is also a reference to a legendary individual who came to be a WoW developer.

World of Warcraft is (was?) full of references like that. That constituted its soul. It is not merely the impression of a newbie MMO player from their first game, although that might have an impact for sure.

A game with a soul remains bigger than any one player, since it is not completely devoted to tell her story, but that of the world itself. I am concerned that the upcoming games might be forgetting about that world aspect and place too much importance in the game, gamifying the entirety of a world which ought to stand on its own. Azeroth achieved this, becoming bigger than the game -WoW- itself. I wonder if Telara will accomplish this as well. It requires a development team who will cherish their game enough to care about bringing life to it, not only new and shiny features. This might clash with the F2P business model, though. We shall see. I am eager to explore a new world which does not respond to me personally, but to my expectations of a place to inhabit.

You may have probably heard about the misogynistic display of the gaming community on the work of Anita Sarkeesian, sparked from her project "Tropes vs Women: Video Games", a video series aiming for criticising harmful genre conventions and making the issue of sexist depiction of women in video games more visible. I've always enjoyed her videos, being accessible to people of various degrees of knowledge on gender matters, and encompassing so many angles that, in a few phrases, she summarises each of the problems that arise from uncritical popular culture. Certainly, the project she is going to embark on will be a useful addition to feminist discussion.

Despite her credentials as a successful vlogger and the apparently inocuous nature of her work, she has been receiving an inordinate amount of smears, attacks and threats all across the web, on all of the platforms she uses, in an attempt to silence her. Some people would say that that's the nature of youtube, that trolls abound, etc, but that should never be an argument to dismiss the gravity of this assault. She even compiled one hundred comments from her video to show the degree and amount of sexism that she has had to deal with. I wouldn't have believed it had I not read it. To think that these anonymous internet trolls are real people you might pass by in the streets is appalling.

That this behaviour is intolerable has been discussed multiple times in the past few weeks. Except for those inhuman enough to participate in the vilification of a fellow human being, everybody agrees that the attack is contemptible and unjustified. But some of the participants in the discussion (most of them males, I assume, for the content of their message and the "entitlement signals" they make) argue that Anita's project is worthless.

These are several quotes from the youtube comment section and from the Escapist forums:

"There's a baby in Africa starving, because you chose to waste the money on the most jaw grinding display of sensationalism, I have ever seen. And you clearly have the loosest grasp of how to use sensationalism." (I love this argument. Whatever you say is unimportant since there are people with bigger problems than you. Let's go back to the cave and never discuss anything. Usually he who wields this argument doesn't care a bit about those starving kids himself.)

"mirror's edge. just sain. problem solved" (Thank you for giving us women one game that doesn't take part in sexism.)

"If you don't know who are bad female characters are in games, you have not played games. It is an issue, and everyone who is not misogynist knows it's an issue. But this idea is just a massive waste of money because the documentary is pointless - it's going to be, to use your words, some asshole making ridicule of obviously bad characters as an argument. This isn't going to sway anyone, this isn't going to inform anyone, this is just people pointing out obvious stuff that's been said 100s of times before." (Has it? Has anybody done something about it, since it's been discussed so much? Are we only allowed to criticised for a set amount of words, in case it would grow too big a complaint? As shown in the comments section, there isn't enough awareness of the issue, nor enough respect for women in the field of games.)

"Although asking for $6000 to discuss woman in videogames which others have already discussed by many people e.g. Extra Credits is a bit much." (Same as above.)

"I haven't watched a lot of this "feminist frequency", but from what I can gather it's another one of those that are overcalling "Sexism" if a woman dresses like a slut. Not that I believe that the view of women in games are top-notch, but these people (and oh, have I met them) seem to believe that horrible writing and power-fantasy = active discrimination based on your sex." (Sadly, people tend to think they can contribute to a discussion without knowing a thing about the subject, and they can't be bothered with reading up a bit before embarrassing themselves. Well, I'm going to break it to you, anonymous commenter, a power-fantasy in which a woman is objectified is discriminatory.)

Now take a look at these ones:

"I'd say it's more a problem with her one-sided approach that rails against video-game women conforming to stereotypes, while completely ignoring that video-game men conform to stereotypes just as much. And the fact that she's crowdsourcing videos, videos just like the one she made to advertise her solicitations, videos she'll make even more money on the ad revenue and traffic they'll generate." (She shouldn't make money from her work, how heinous! Women should be volunteering for nurses in the Great War.)

"If that is sexist then males are at risk too. All guys in video games are the super grizzled hero or the smart, weak, and fearful guy. Stereotyping is done to EVERYBODY not just women. It's not a big deal at all. Fucking grow up and deal with it."

This argument is one of the most insidious, and I would like to talk about this more extensively.

Apparently, many uneducated men are insecure about people who are not men/white/straight/whatever other privileged title they have, talking about their own concerns, which may or may not be related to them. They will always lead the discussion into the ambit that affects them, invalidating it when it doesn't. Even the most "good-hearted" men can be blamed on this, because it doesn't take a kind nature but a conscious, educated mind, to see that other people have experiences that differ from ours, and which are as valid as our own. Not only men, but since women are more conscious of oppression by having experienced it, they are more prone to empathize with the Other. But for the privileged, since the entire culture revolves around them (How many female heroes do we have in movies (not being sexualized)? Yes, that's a link to one of Anita's videos ;)), they believe they are at the centre, and the matters that do not affect them are useless to everybody. These are entitlement issues. The youtube comments and Escapist forums reek of them, and most people are not aware.

Actually, feminism does not only concern women, since many of the claims that feminists make affect men positively too. Except for those men who believe that they are the superior sex, of course. But I am talking about educated people (I am not entirely convinced of Socrates' theory that only the ignorant are iniquitous, because we see too many wicked but educated persons, but let's assume that Socrates was not wishful thinking there). If you are a man, and have at least one woman important to you (mother, sister, friend, whatever), you should wish that she received an equal and fair treatment, and not be deemed inferior. But not only the women around you would be happier if they were treated equally, but you would have more opportunities in fields that used to be restricted to women. Feminism also wants men to be able to child-rear on equal terms to women, for instance. And yet it is called feminism for a reason: since the male genre is the one that has the upper hand, feminism is mostly concerned with women's problems; problems which men seldom, or never, face (slut-shaming, age-shaming, objectification, discrimination at the workplace, rape, etc).

Some men are not comfortable with having feminism not be about them. They feel entitled to an equal degree of interest from feminists because "it's about equality, right?" It is, but certainly there would be no equality in talking about both men and women's issues in the same degree since women have it much worse, and although men face their particular problems, women's problems are more insidious and common, systematic and pervasive.

Regarding the discussion of male tropes (read this amazing piece by Doone on masculine power fantasies, please), the disparity between what concerns a woman and what concerns a man is made obvious. Whereas men are represented in a "good light" (the characters showcase an exemplary model for men to follow, although everybody should question the validity of said model), women are portrayed as objects to be obtained after a long quest (Mario rescuing Peach), as sexualised mannequins with one-dimensional personalities (so many examples and so few names that stick in our mind), or as strong but fragile heroines which need saving/directing from men (seriously, WTF).

We certainly need to call attention to these insidious tropes, since our culture is what constitutes our reading of society, unless we're critical enough about it. And even in that case, we are being unconsciously directed by what we have learnt without reflecting upon it. The discussion that Anita proposes can only be beneficial for the industry, seeing that so many people need educating on the subject. I cannot wait to frame further feminist topics with one of her videos.

The Elder Scrolls Online never ceases to amaze me with its ridiculous development decisions to cater who knows whom. No matter how preposterous they might seem, what makes me most uncomfortable is that TESO is not alone in this, and that it is merely following a particular trend that I will never be able to make sense of.

MMOs were -and should be, if you ask me- a world bigger than any one particular hero. The sentiment of bigger-than-you is better achieved when you actually cannot overcome everything on your own, when the world resists your individual influence, just as the real world does. That is why for me the world of Warcraft is more real than Tamriel or the Mass Effect universe, because I participate in it as an individual, and I am at no point the demiurge of it all. In Skyrim you could be at some point both the hero of the world and the cruellest assassin, while hoarding such a big pile of money that the next reasonable step would be to open a bank. Yes, it can be fun and engaging; but those stories are singleplayer for a reason.

Whereas in MMOs we are sometimes involved in quests that require our suspension of disbelief to work (how many times does The Missing Diplomat need rescue?), in general terms, none of the world-shaping events fall on the hands of one player. At least it wasn't that way prior to Cataclysm, after which you were fighting along with Malfurion, shoulder to shoulder. That would be to the detriment of the integrity of the world as something bigger than one hero. That would also harm the mystique of the major lore figures. Nevertheless, I don't mind being in someone else's story, so long as I can shape my own.

The last part is essential: I need to be able to shape my own story. For RPers, it'd be a more straightforward process, as they usually consider the career of their characters in narrative terms. For non-RPers, the story that surrounds their characters tells about their accomplishments, events they participated in, PvE content they downed on that character, PvP rank they obtained, the professions they took, the recipes they found, pets and cosmetic items, etc. Even the zone you quested in establishes a connection between that virtual entity and the image you have of her. The more you cull from a character's resumé, the more homogenised they become, the more blurred her individual story.

So what does this have to do with TESO and singleplayer content? For starters, the quest of the lonely hero does not make sense in a multiplayer environment, no matter how much phasing you shove into it. Even if said quest is brought forward, the developers need to understand that the career of a hero is not the very rigid quests they experienced, but rather the way in which they interacted with the world, and which distinguished them from another players/another characters they have played. The hero quest is fun the first time you undertake it, on the second playthrough you will notice how little of a special snowflake you really were (Bioware's latest innovation, the choose-your-path story, does not stand against the test of a second playthrough, as the choices were merely cosmetic). My father, who is an altoholic, enjoyed very much questing until Cataclysm, when he was forced to play through the exact same questline with all of his characters. There was no choice, no possibility of shaping his own story ("I did Nagrand on this character, skipped Blade's Edge, and went to Shadowmoon").

Then we have the example of GW2 and its personal stories. I am not entirely sure how these work, but I hope that they will not tell me who my character is, or develop my character's personality for me. If they are a development of the traditional class quests, I'm fine with it. If they on the other hand provide a very narrow path for me to necessarily walk, I might shun them. As I am not sure of what they exactly are, I will hypothesize: a) if they constitute a very personal narrative, through which your character will grow (Bildungsspiel?), I will not like it unless plenty of choices are provided. b) If they are just a questline which is freely available but does not shape your character, all is fine.

I want to define my character based on what she did in that giant bigger-than-her playground, not on what the developers write about her. If I wanted that, I would play a regular RPG, a singleplayer hero's quest.

Bethesda, please respect your world and your players. The persistent world of an MMO should not be plundered by any one lone hero, but shaped by the community. I want to see more elites roaming the world, more Fel Reavers that step on you while you humbly quest. Do not let me kill the Daedric Princes, the evil gods of Tamriel, on my own; that would make a very poor story. By all means, give me solo quests and epic storylines that my hero can tackle on his own, just do not lie to me about being the unique hero that will save us all, since I prefer to savour victory with my friends (and strangers-potential friends).

I'm having a blast at the TBC private server. Some people attribute our delightful remembrance of the past to nostalgia, and our desire to relive those moments as an ultimately futile one. For most people it might be the case, I won't deny that, but what does it tell you, the fact that I feel completely realized in, literally, the past? I would think that it means that the past was rightfully better than the present in the case of the MMO genre.

The MMO genre has evolved into an "alone together" singleplayer theme park from which there seems to be no turning back. Bethesda's latest endeavour is a horrifying mess that bespeaks of the little idea the developers have of what appeals to MMO player and Bethesda's own fans. They are aiming for a WoW-clone, not even from the time WoW was successful; similarly to SW:TOR, they will draw from the current design of WoW, lacking its polish and long career, adding some uninformed features that innovate very little and in the wrong direction.

In this hopeless climate, what can MMO gamers turn to? Perhaps GW2, although I remain sceptic. On the other hand, we've got projects like Psychochild's, who could have been a great contribution to the genre, but that haven't gotten as much attention as they deserve. All other AAA-MMOs are drone-like following a trend that I will never understand, and that has proved to be a failure.

And yet there seems to be some appeal about the solo part of MMOs, as Azuriel and Bernard argue. Nevertheless, I think that catering to that huge demographic that visits an MMO for its singleplayer content will neither give the company as much money as fostering social ties, nor be healthy for the genre itself, which would turn into a three-monther as SWTOR did. I remember the time where solo play was a choice which did not hurt the multiplayer aspects of the game. Having singleplayer (leveling, farming), multiplayer (dungeons, raids, arenas) and alone-together activities (battlegrounds) meant that people who wanted to play alone could do so, as well as those who are more social but need some time for themselves. What we cannot do is espouse the current design which polarises casuals and hardcores and forces most of the playerbase into alone-together activities (LFD, LFR).

The problem is that, although I can think as alone-together MMOs as a valid choice, especially for that demographic that can't participate in the social part of them, there is no such choice when all are designed this way. I wouldn't count EVE, it makes me very uneasy. There are no multiplayer MMOs anymore (some years ago, the epithet would have been redundant, now it is a necessity).

What about old-content servers? Officially supported vanilla, TBC, even Wrath servers. This has been discussed multiple times, and Blizzard would never agree to it because it would mean implicitly admitting that their game has been led astray. Nevertheless, 2.4.3 is their game too, why not offer it along with Cataclysm and everything else? I am certain that it would attract a lot of veterans back into the game. Some of them might give it a try and discard it altogether, as time passes and nothing leaves untarnished, but many others would, like me, enjoy their second ride (as we're talking about MMOs as theme parks). Most of my guildmates at Feenix agree that they would definitely pay a subscription to Blizzard if they would open "nostalgia servers." After all, nothing beats Blizzard's server stability (at least that's what I thought before error 37) and customer support.

What could they win from this deal? There seems to be a much larger number of people who have played WoW but not any more, than people who are currently playing. Some of them are people who have tried the game/genre and didn't find it appealing enough, but many others are veterans who are dissatisfied with the current course of the game. Most of the newest additions to the MMO market are either PvP-centric (GW2), or repeating the model of 3.0+ WoW. I don't know yet what to think of the oddity of The Secret World, but the emphasis placed on the quests makes me suspect of a one-time ride kind of MMO, much like SW:ToR. Another big win for Blizzard would be that these servers could be self-sustained. They wouldn't need to add any content, and shouldn't force any patches in either, to keep the experience the most genuine. The players would have to admit some inconveniences for the sake of not disrupting the experience. For instance, although the double specialization is much cherished, I would not allow it into TBC, just for the sake of immersion. These servers could provide a huge amount of money too if Blizzard implemented paid migrations from older content into newer. Imagine a player who starts in vanilla and, one year later, has finished all the content. She might want to keep advancing with the same character, and could do so paying for a migration into a TBC server. How can Blizzard not hear the ka-ching! of this idea!?

There has to be something that prevents them from carrying out this project. What could be the potential losses? Well, I am not sure about financial losses, but there would be some major consequences to this undertaking. Blizzard would be admitting that their game was more appealing in its earlier versions, and that could finish off the moral of the company. For WoW to keep going, they have to maintain the illusion follow the idea that what they are doing is the best course for their game. There would be certain difficulties at the pacing of the patches in the nostalgia servers. Nothing that a good brainstorm couldn't solve, nonetheless. Shall they open the servers with all the content, pace it, keep opening new servers for those who missed the first wave? It might be somewhat costly, but I am fairly certain that they would recover their inversion on the first week.

Would you want to see something like this happening? Or do you think that perhaps there will be a messiah-MMO around the corner soon enough?

I intended to have a sirius blog, but I just had to share this with you.

PD: Thanks for the link, dad.

The AH, that feature that is to guarantee the maintenance of the servers (and Blizzard's entire crew retirement plan, once they finally release the RMAH) has harmed many player's enjoyment on many levels. Also literally: in Normal/Nightmare it makes the game trivial; in Hell it removes all the need for grinding; in Inferno... In Inferno Diablo 3 becomes AH 3.

You might be one of those players who decides not to use the AH at all, so that the game remains somewhat challenging (from Nightmare onwards, and if you're playing with just one hand - seriously, did they balance the early levels for 12 year-olds? I was 12 once, and farmed Mephisto and Cows in Hell. Why do they underestimate their players so much?). I am guilty of wanting to be at the endgame as fast as possible, so I bought the equipment off the AH and proceeded until the end of Hell and the beginning of Inferno, only to find out that Diablo 3 turns into a completely different game at Inferno. Not because of the difficulty (I have been doing the same kiting procedure that Azuriel loathes since Act I Normal), but because I am supposed to turn from a happy-go-lucky adventurer into a successful entrepreneur in order to advance in the story.

As many other bloggers have noted, the game is balanced around using the AH at the highest difficulty setting, and before that it might be detrimental to your enjoyment if you gear up using it. I didn't mind much, as I wanted to get to the "real deal" already, knowing how Blizzard spoonfeeds us these days with the challenge levels. I used (abused?) the AH joyfully. That was until it became a serious business.

One of my friends has managed to become that successful entrepreneur that I could never be. In part because, as I explained to him, I cannot find it in my heart to sell an item for a price that I would never buy it for. Apparently other people can afford those items and dispense with their hard-earned money gleefully. My friend has advised me to farm Butcher and put the items that could be useful at 500-750k, but I end up putting them at 150k and see it as a victory when they get bought. I am a business failure, but that is beyond the point. My point is: Why should I be doing finances in a mindless hack&slash lootfest?

You may say that I could ignore the AH completely, but let me tell you one thing - the loot is so infuriatingly random, and the difficulty step between the acts is so steep, that unless you thrive on running Butcher 10 times a day for 1 month, you will never get further than act I. Blizzard has acknowledged that the balance is somewhat off when in Act I you can tank 3-4 hits with a (decently geared) ranged, while in act II you get those snakes that go invisible, pounce on you and kill you in one shot. For the sake of the discussion, I'm going to disclose my stats: I am a Demon Hunter running at 31k life and 35k dps with a survival build and lots of crits and crit-damage. None of this helps as I still get killed with one single shot from many enemies in Act 2. It's not that much of a problem in most cases, as I enjoy the challenge of avoiding ALL damage. Nevertheless, you cannot count on avoiding it all. I cannot kill Belial because his snakes in phase 1 and 2 pounce on me when I'm out of cds and one-shot me. It is also important to note that Act I has become trivial for me in my current gear. I don't find it fun to farm an area that has ceased to be a challenge.

My only way to defeat Belial seems to be farming early act 2 or Butcher to find items that could be sold at the AH, to amass money to buy even more +vitality gear. I would need to carefully plan my expenses (don't craft, it's overpriced and useless) and my auctions to be able to progress.

And if that wasn't enough, Blizzard put a limit on the number of auctions we can have. I guess they did it so the market could not be dominated by the AH moguls that have honed their skills in WoW. I wish that limit would only apply to the real money AH, because I usually end up selling my stuff at a reduced price so that I can make sure that it will be bought, so I don't have to wait 2 days for my auctions to end to attempt a new sell. The gold AH as it was devised for WoW worked just fine, why couldn't they implement it without these exasperating tweaks? A fellow player has told me that they ought to have done it for the reason above, to control the market-controllers, and to prevent prices from dropping too low by an oversupply. Prices are rock-bottom already; in a week, a crossbow that I had bought for 500k I had to resell it for 145k. The economy is absolutely ridiculous. People want to sell rather than having their auctions sit there for 2 days, so they cannot risk putting it at the price they would want to sell it at, but at the price that should get it bought.

The AH is madness. If you're undergeared, wait a week and you'll be able to buy all of my gear at 10k per piece. Very good gear, at that. You won't still be able to kill Belial, though, you might want to farm for that 1.1k dps weapon at 2m gold.

I think that this post has turned out quite passionate in tone. I had been enjoying the challenge so far, actually. I agree that, from the perspective of a veteran MMO player, it is a baby WoW. I had months before the release been talking about how inappropriate this type of game is for the current times; it is just an old game design without longevity nor incentive beyond the most primal greedy urges. Nevertheless, it is fast-paced, and I like its contrast with more cerebral gameplays (such as TBC WoW, with its mana management and tactical healing). It is a challenge for my reflexes and an easy, fast gratification. I don't know why Blizzard thinks every "hardcore" player has to be an AH player though.