I expected some responses, after all, politics is serious business. It really is, and emotions related to politics run very deep.

I’m certainly not going to be surprised about getting some kind of flaming arrow of indignation fired my way.

Good lord, the country I live in is damn near split down the middle, politically, so why would I think the readers of my blog all think like I do on anything?

Hell, I’d be SCARED if all of you shared my opinions on everything, because I’m freaking insane. You’re my therapy, so if you’ve got MY back, who the hell has YOURS?!?

I get this email, and I was bored this afternoon over my lunch hour, so what the heck. It’s apparently that time again, it’s been a few years since I did one of these posts, so I guess we’ll do it up right.

From: E=Mc

I don’t appreciate political bashing in with my wow fun.

Take care and have fun.

That’s it. That’s the email I got, in reply to the feedreader emailed “Return of AnnCoulter” post.

Simple, right? No swearing, no offensive language at all, spelling and grammar are correct. On the surface, it appears to be a nice, simple, intelligent email. These are usually considered telling points in an email, lending greater weight to someone’s opinion.

Unfortunately, where it fails is in maturity and sense.

Let’s say you are reading things on the internet, you’re browsing, surfing the web. Following links, reading blog posts in various places, WoW.com articles, whatever.

Along the way, you may encounter something you really like, and think that it would be nice to subscribe to their mailing list or to their blog feed, in the hopes that you’ll get to see similarly enjoyable writing delivered conveniently right into your mailbox in the future.

Suddenly, you do get another post by the same author delivered into your email box or in your feedreader, and this one shocks you. The author didn’t write another article on a topic similar to the last one. This time, he wrote about a subject you take very seriously, and in addition, you don’t like his attitude about it. You’re offended by this idiot. Hey, he may write the funny okay once in a while, but what the heck makes him think you care what he actually thinks about anything else? You thought you were signing up for one thing, and here you are getting something else entirely. This will not do.

So, what do you do then?

A mature individual may do many things, depending on how strong he or she feels about it. They may unsubscribe from that writer entirely, wanting to make sure they are never bothered by that kind of thing again. A total flush to prevent being further offended.

Or, the person may decide that, as irritating as that article was, the other posts were good enough, enjoyable enough, that they don’t want to miss out on any more in the future. They were irritated, but not so much that it outweighs the positives of the funny posts. So, they’ll simply “mark as read” or delete the offensive posts, and scan future posts quickly to weed them out and continue on, only reading the ones that sound interesting.

Those both seem like reasonable responses to me. People change, writing changes, and you never know when someone like me might just go off the deep end.

Why should you put up with it? With a ’subscribe by choice’ blog, like mine, it couldn’t be easier to flush the bad articles from your life, or the blog itself. You just unsubscribe and delete any links to the website, and don’t follow any links from anyone else, and you’ll never see that blog writer again for the rest of your life.

So, all that being said, where in all that do you fit in a situation where a person decides to email the writer with a brief two sentence message like that? What end does that serve? 

I’ve given it a little thought, and while I can’t pretend to know what goes on in the mind of anyone else, I can speculate, and will.

What I would speculate is that such a person, when faced with an article that irritated them or made them unhappy, they could not simply take action of their own to protect themselves and leave it at that. No, they felt the need to take action to share their unhappiness, to spread it around.

The “If I’m not happy, why should anyone else be” mindset.

That’s just not an attitude I can respect.

I know that over time, misunderstandings can happen. Especially when people read posts about WoW and Bear tanking, and are directed here or linked here from WoW-only websites, and accordingly develop an expectation as to what the point of the blog is, what it is I do here, and what they are likely to see.

I’m going to do my best to clear the misunderstandings up.

My blog exists as a place for me to write what I want to write about, when I want to write about it, on any given day. I write whatever I may be inspired about at the moment. I write about my enthusiasms. I especially write about things that bother me. I frequently write what I think of are entertaining posts to cheer both myself up, and hopefully other people.

I do not limit myself to any particular topic. On the “About” page of my website, it says “BigBearButt offers his cranky opinions of a long time World of Warcraft casual feral druid about druid life, the WoW world, and everything.”

That last bit, where I say “everything”? That early bit, where I say “cranky”? Both of those are keywords for the content of this blog.

It’s my own personal website used as a means for my personal expression.

See, I don’t want to mislead you. If you think the blog posts wandering from topic to topic is a temporary situation, please don’t. When I do write about WoW, most often it’s from a Feral Druid Tank mindset. But I don’t limit myself to that, and if that’s the only reason why you’re here, well, you’re facing a lot of disappointment.

So, that’s the blog. That’s what you can expect in the future. Basically, the same old, same old that I’ve been doing here for years.

Now, I don’t want to be unkind. I might tend to think it’s simply an immature desire to lash out at someone that irritated them, but maybe there is an alternate reason why someone would mail me like that.

I know that there is a tendency for people to think that in any situation where they receive a service, they are a customer, and the opinions of a customer are always right and should be respected.

I know that, because of this philospohy, a lot of people feel that if they are not happy, it’s important for them to make their unhappiness known to the ‘management’. Sometimes it’s not for personal benefit, but to try and guide the management service towards better efforts in the future, or just a desire to nudge people to do what you want in the way you think they should, to mentor them when you feel they’ve gone off track.

Whatever the case, it doesn’t apply here. You are not my customers. You do not pay me money. 

Our contract, such as it is, is that I will continue to write what I want to write, and I will continue to post it publicly for anyone who wants to spend some of their time reading it.

I pledge to myself that I will do my best to stay true to myself, and to write my honest thoughts and opinions and research. 

Your end of the contract is that you read it whenever you feel like it or not, as you choose. Whether you walk away amused or irritated or bored, it’s all your decision. But if you do choose to comment, you do so in a mature way, sharing your honest thoughts and opinions, being considerate of others, and if it’s within your power, helpful in your suggestions. 

Further, and I do think this is something that is implied but may not be readily apparent, if you have really strong feelings you want to share in great detail, especially ones that are in direct contradiction of everything I ever say, then you go make your own blog and write your own posts there. You don’t just try and hijack mine every time I write anything.

You may be my friends, you may be people that have been visiting only once or have been here for years commenting frequently and becoming folks near and dear to my heart, like Dechion, Katt and Tesh, but you”re not my customers.

I pay for the website hosting, and to the best of my knowledge I’ve never asked any of you to rush out and fund my purchase of anything. I certainly don’t recall trying to push for people to buy items from the blog store so I can get some cash.

I don’t even host ads, despite a lot of emails wanting me to, so I don’t receive money from passive pagehits. I’ve always felt ads would have been unsightly.

See, I don’t do this for money, If I wanted money, hell, I’d still write for WoW.com and I’d have closed this blog a long time ago. Life isn’t all about making money. There’s nothing wrong with making money, and there’s nothing wrong about websites having banner ads.

But not being a money making enterprise leaves me ethically and morally free to say what I’m saying right now, which is that I don’t owe anyone a damn thing in what I write or how I write it. 

I write for fun, I write for myself, and I write for the amusement and enjoyment of you, my friends. I also continue to try to provide a place to share ideas and suggestions and tips for people starting out tanking, to help get their feet wet and feel confident.

When people do spend money on the blog store, I don’t even keep that. So far, it’s all gone right back into buying shirts or buttons I’ve given away to readers, either at local Meet the Bear events or through website contests.

I’ll never be a Penny Arcade making money with this stuff; it’s not what I aspire to.

I’m always happy to discuss what part of my opinion may have upset you in private, as long as you’re interested in talking about it via email, and not just in lecturing me. If you want a reasoned discussion, hey, I’m your Bear. Close your mind, and I close MY browser.

Where I simply shake my head in laughter is if you read something I wrote that you didn’t like because I wrote about a topic you don’t want to have to see on a “WoW blog”, and then you email me to tell me so.

I don’t care. Click “unsubscribe” and move on with your life, don’t bother me with your sillyness.

Am I supposed to go, “Oh my, I stepped over the bounds of a WoW blog and delved fleetingly in the deep waters of the political spectrum, and my readers have made their wishes known; henceforth, I shall restrict myself to good, wholesome WoW related blog posts so as not to offend.”

No, it doesn’t do that.

I write what I write that I really think and feel. You may love me, hate me, or say ‘meh’, but at least you know it’s me.

If I am really thinking about something a lot and being bothered by it, I’m not going to censor myself, when talking about it and getting it off my chest really does make me feel better. That’s one of the best things about having a blog; to write what I really think and get it off my chest.

I may hold myself to a personal standard in my writing, and I may do my best to hold to that standard, but I do not OWE any reader anything. I don’t answer to you, I answer to my own conscience.

In return, you do not owe ME anything. :) Ain’t I nice? This is finally one thing in your life where you know that no bill will come due.

If you don’t like what I say or how I say it, you don’t have to just endure it. Heck no. You always, ALWAYS have the power to exercise your freedom of choice and remove me from your feedreader and from your life. I’m just one more idiot in a world full of them, writing BS on a blog.

Where we have the divide, is that your freedom of choice does not include a right to attempt to inhibit or discourage my exercising of my freedom of speech and freedom of personal expression on the blog I pay to maintain.

If and when you don’t like what I say on any given day, you have the power. Just unsubscribe, and never come back. Don’t subject yourself to what you find offensive. Be a mature individual, and just close the browser to me.

Just, whatever you do, please don’t bother taking that further step to email me just to tell me you didn’t like my going off WoW topics, or talking politics or whatever. I’m not going to censure myself to make you happy, or apologize for speaking my mind here in my house.

It’s just not going to happen.

Let’s find out together!

Since my Rogue dinged 80 last week, I’ve run quite a few Heroic instances to get geared up.

Why am I getting geared up? Honestly, I have no idea. It’s one of those unexplainable urges, perhaps related to the drive to collect. Even though I have no intention if ever raiding with the Rogue, I still feel an urge to study gear upgrades, plan acquisitions, and do runs to improve my stats. I don’t know where the urge comes from, but there it is.

As I ran all of these Heroics as a low gearscore Rogue climbing the DPS ladder, I ran into what I’m hoping is just a really, really bad run of idiot tanks. Just, “holy crap you morons have no business tanking” kind of tanks.

Interestingly enough, I didn’t have any problems with the behavior of any of the DPS in the runs. Nobody I’ve run with has behaved poorly, or even talked except for saying hi. When things get really bad, it seems like the modern response that has evolved is to just drop group without warning if you’re not happy. No bitching, no recriminations, just ‘poof!’ gone.

On the other hand, and yes I stick with the runs no matter how bad they get out of some kind of sick fascination with these train wrecks, I’ve seen some of the worst tanking I could imagine.

In one case, and I’m not lying, I told a 5450 Gearscore Paladin tank in Heroic Pit of Saron that if he wanted to learn how to tank for the very first time ever, he needed to pick a non-Heroic. Then I joined the other three people that had already dropped group without warning after the third time the healer died from mobs that were never grabbed by the tank… before we ever reached the first boss. That last Dragon trash mob pull was just too much for the group, they all dropped while I stayed long enough to be rude. I’m sorry, if you’ve played long enough to get that kind of gear for your tanking set, and you’re THAT bad, you’ve got issues. Run a normal, for the love of pete. There is a limit to how many mobs a Priest can solo while you go running ahead ignoring everything behind you pull after pull.

As an aside, I am maximizing my “Tricks of the Trade + get on the Healer’s mobs” technique. I find myself using it SO often.

In some ways, I suspect I’m reaping instance karma earned from my “…then you might be a bad tank” post.

Okay, in the interests of fairness, I did have a run with one healer asshat… he didn’t actually say anything bad, but we were doing Heroic Halls of Stone, and everything was going very smoothly, even though we had a very low gearscore Warrior tank. The tank was doing a great job, holding aggro, managing mobs, etc. His gear was just starting out so he was squishier than, say, an ICC tank. But he was doing a great job. I was shocked. Healer was never run ragged out of mana, never too hard to heal, just a little squishier than an ICC tank.

Perhaps it was this squishiness that annoyed the healer, the need for him to actually do something for a change, because when Brann was triggered for the fight against waves of mobs, the Healer dropped group the millisecond Brann was activated, dropped without a word, I guess in the hopes that without a healer the waves would steamroll us.

Fortunately, we got another healer before we even saw the first wave, and we finished the entire run smooth as silk. So, the healer succeeded in doing nothing more than costing himself some Emblems and a deserter debuff, but, oh well. The things some people do, right?

On the other hand, I was in a Heroic Pit of Saron run with a group, and everyone but me was really well geared, run went smooth as silk, and when the crossbow dropped from Krick and Ick, I randomed because there was a Hunter in the group. Hunter ended up winning it on a random, and I whispered him that if he wasn’t going to actually use it, I’d buy it off him for 30 gold.

He gave me the crossbow, refused the gold, and ended up he’s on my server, and has a Rogue raiding in ICC himself, offered some spec advice, gear advice, and has a Leatherworker with leather ICC patterns that he lined to me offering to craft them if I wanted them someday.

Go figure, right? One day you can get runs with people that actively try to drop group at the worst possible moment to screw the other strangers for no reason I can see, and the next you run into someone that just goes out of their way to be nice and helpful, says “Put me on your friends list, if you’ve ever got any questions or could use a tank to run you into HHoR for the offhand Rogue sword, just let me know. My alt is a tank, geared well enough to handle HHoR. I might be able to get some friends of mine to go in with us, too.”

It’s thinking about all this, the core issue of player behavior, the good, the bad and what can be done about it, that brought me to the next train of thought.

I’m always suspicious of comparisons and metaphors and similies, and basically anything that tries to make a point by comparing two different things. Whenever you start out thinking of one thing, when you switch to the other you bring along your own baggage. You’ve got preconceived ideas of what the first thing is, and you apply some of those to imagining the second one.

Still, we do it all the time. Someone tells us they ate in a Hardees, and we ask what that is, if they tell us it’s like a McDonalds, that gives us some vague frame of reference. We’ll picture the typical McDonalds layout, food, speed, cleanliness, price point etc, and figure a Hardees is somewhat like all of those.

Maybe some time later you actually see a Hardees, step inside and order a meal. When it comes, maybe you’re surprised because the food is more expensive than you expected, or slower than you expected, or fresher or more upscale, whatever. The point is, after you make those initial comparisons in your head, you’re going to be ramming up against your preconceived ideas when you encounter the actual thing.

You start off with a frame of reference, and that informs your thought to some extent ever after.

So, the behavior of players in WoW, and what to do about it? What can be done about it?

When I think of World of Warcraft, I think of it using the same frame of reference as I did when I started planning to purchase it; a video game set in a fantasy world similar to other first person perspective video games, with the addition of a multiplayer aspect.

That perspective works up to a point, right? It’s a video game, ostensibly for fun, and you can play it as one, and there are also other people in it you can choose to hang out with.

I think it breaks down in the fine details. I further think there’s a frame of reference that does work better.

One of the most consistent long term problems players have are related to the behavior of others. Our unhappiness when other players’ actions and behavior and attitude affect our own gameplay experience in a negative way.

Who do we ultimately hold responsible for doing something about player behavior?

The other player? No, we acknowledge the existence of asshats, and we frequently note the stark truth of the John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. We pretty much just say to each other, “yep, Asshats are asshats. Would they pull that shit in person? Nope. Chickenshit little pricks. They’ve finally found a home.”

But we don’t hold them responsible. We don’t expect them to modify their own behavior. In fact, I think most of us have given up on them, and just wonder when the freight train of life is going to run their asses down. Sooner or later, bills come due.

No, we don’t hold the asshats responsible, we hold Blizzard responsible, and we petition Blizzard to return stolen loot, to report offensive behavior expecting them to take action against the other player, and we further expect Blizzard to find ways of blocking player behaviors from being able to affect our game experience in negative ways.

I think some folks even expect Blizzard to come up with ways, through game code and design, to force players to either play their characters well in a group, or be blocked from joining groups at all.

Blizzard, for their part, has their ToS and ToC, and they’ve also been experimenting with programmed methods of adding consequences to behavior.

Vote kicking, deserter debuff durations, streamlined spam reporting, reporting offensive behavior through trouble tickets, blocking players from being vote kicked from groups once a boss fight is engaged, etc.

Blizzard is actively developing and implementing methods of controlling player behavior using rewards and punishments.

What do we expect? We, as players of WoW that pay Blizzard our monthly fee, expect Blizzard to act in good faith to provide us with a safe, friendly environment to have fun. And damn, do people get loud and pissy if they think there’s more Blizzard could be doing.

We expect that when another player succeeds in affecting our gameplay in a really negative way, such as by stealing in-game goods from a guild bank, or by hacking an account, or by using language or behavior intended to offend, we can turn to Blizzard for some kind of resolution.

What we’ve all done together is fulfilled the prophecies of Neal Stephenson and William Gibson and scores of others, and made a reality of the concept of a virtual cybernetic government.

Wherever our meat body may reside, we have these new worlds to live in online. They are here, now, and there are several to choose from.

We pick and choose among them, what features they provide to their citizens, how much the taxes cost us if we choose to live there, what laws and customs we will have to abide by… what behaviors will or will not be tolerated, and how such behaviors will be policed.

Make no mistake, that’s what has happened. Those of us that play a persistant MMO are making choices as to where we live our virtual lives… and companies like Blizzard know this, and are studying methods of keeping their citizens happy.

Blizzard is the government of World of Warcraft. You can decide for yourself how to classify it, but they hold the power over their country, and they can decide what rules or laws they will put into place… and to what extent they will choose to enforce them, if at all.

What I find interesting when thinking of the game as a virtual world, is considering the steps Blizzard has already taken to try and control behavior, and how ably players find ways of bypassing them so as to still hurt others.

Blizzard doesn’t have jail, but they can cancel your account. In the middle ground, there are temporary bans, and there are forced name changes for reported offensive names. Those have been around for years.

But really, how recently did the drive to control behavior through in-game incentives and punishments begin?

Creating the LFG interface tool was an excellent step towards streamlining the matchmaking capabilities of the game… but was it also one of the first steps in trying to build in behavior controls?

I know that in Burning Crusade, people could choose to leave group, and I think you could boot someone from your group, but you couldn’t force them to leave the instance… and the instance wouldn’t let more than the predetermined max number of characters in at one time.

I recall one epic tale of a player in Shattered Halls that was treated offensively by the rest of his group, was somehow made to leave group so they could bring in a friend of theirs as a fifth right at the end, and he refused to leave the instance. He camped the instance refusing to leave for a long, long time… long enough that all of the trash he helped to kill respawned, so that the group would have to rekill everything if they wanted to do it with their buddy instead of him.

Somewhere after that Blizzard changed the game so that if you were in another group’s instance, it would boot you out automatically to the nearest graveyard; no more camping to prevent others from playing. No, they weren’t related, what was remarkable about that particular story was that for a change it was the rest of the group that abused the system, and the ability to camp the instance and prevent the fifth from zoning in that upheld justice, or something like that.

Was that Blizzards’ first real act of trying to program in morality, to paraphrase the old “you can’t legislate morality” saying?

Some players would ninja loot items, and then say that it was a mistake, and you could petition Blizzard if you wanted the item back, but they can’t trade it, sorry. Blizzard changed the game so you CAN trade items with other players that were in the instance with you.

Now vote kicking… modifications to the length ot the deserter debuff. Tracking of how often you initiate a vote kick, and adjustments programmed in to limit your ability to vote kick if you ‘overuse’ it. Overuse it? By who’s definition?

Why, Blizzard’s.

While we talk about video games and playing and stats and gear, Blizzard has been patiently assuming the responsibility of creating a system of laws and punishments (and rewards) for a virtual world, and they’re doing it with the pressure of keeping the majority of their taxpaying citizens as happy as possible, so that folks don’t emigrate to another virtual country.

They have other tools to keep people around as active and happy citizens, expanding the boundaries of the game world, new frontiers to explore, new horizons to discover, new opportunities of advancement and excitement.

Are the new Guild leveling rewards an attempt to get us to more effectively police ourselves, by giving lone wolves a tacit reward for playing well with others? Once you are enticed into joining a large guild in the hopes of gaining access to the best rewards, you then become subject to that guild’s rules, and face the consequences if you violate those rules and they find out.

How about the recent Real ID forum foofarah?

We keep talking about WoW as a game, but let’s call it what it really is; a virtual country that we have chosen to become citizens of, with Blizzard holding the reins of government.

I know it’s not a new idea, it’s decades old. But I do think that it’s interesting how different some of Blizzard’s decisions and game designs can look when you change your point of reference away from a video game, and look at WoW as a persistent virtual country that we can all choose to join or not.

This is what we are, my friends. We are all potential citizens of the virtual, with our passports held tightly in our hands. We have the freedom of touring all the worlds of the nether, seeing what each is like, what laws of physics rule these realms, how pretty they may be, what there is to do while we vacation there.

We may even find some that we really like, and may think about making our home there.

Why are the various virtual countries so eager to extend us a warm welcome, all smiles at the immigration offices?

Why, in the hopes that we’ll become tax paying citizens, of course.

As a potential citizen, when we make our decision, part of that decision should be asking ourselves, what are the laws like here? How well are they enforced, if at all? If the other citizens are violent or antisocial, if someone in the game targets me hoping to ruin my virtual life or steal my property, what recourse do I have? How hard is it in this country for others to infringe on my own gameplay, my freedom, my right to property?

I know that I loved reading Neuromancer, and Snow Crash, and so many other books in the cyberpunk genre, but when I thought of those ideas of virtual worlds, I always expected it to come some time in the future.

Many of those worlds painted the future cyberspace as a place where what race, sex, color or age you are would be immaterial; the future cyberspace would be built on a foundation of enlightened utopia, where the quality of your ideas would be all that mattered, and by definition, if you could GET into cyberspace, you would somehow be too intelligent, enlightened and sophisticated to be an ignorant bigot or irritating little prick.

Well, the future is now.

Today, I am a proud and happy citizen of World of Warcraft, and I log in each time, passport in hand, taxes all paid up.

And I encounter the reality of my fellow citizens… ah, well. So much for enlightened intellectualism and the abolition of bigotry and hatred.

Anyone for some [anal] trade chat? /sigh.

When I log into WoW, I’m also eagerly reading about other countries that are being founded even as we speak, countries whose borders are due to open in the months and years ahead.

I look forward to learnig more about those worlds, and perhaps touring them myself.

Are the developers that design those worlds realise that they are the architects, each in their own way, of their own constitutions? Do they plan carefully what laws they will have in place, what measures they will take to enforce them, and what the consequences of those decisions can mean for their long term future?

Star Wars: The Old Republic is coming soon… I was fascinated with the design of the graphics, the announcements of races and classes, and gameplay videos. Now I find myself wondering what the interaction between players will be like, and what limits, if any, will be placed between them?

We’ve long moved past the time when having a profanity filter or a character name approval process is enough for a game to claim to be responsible.

Am I the only one that wishes Massively.com would add a regular column looking into the actual mechanics of controlling character interaction in MMOs, of programming in morality or of policing behavior, and start comparing what is implemented in games due to come out soon? I know that I for one would be fascinated to read it.

I honestly want to know, in looking at this trailer, in looking at the Starcraft II trailer from the last post, dear lord why can’t that insane level of quality actually make it into a real movie?

Why do we keep getting TV show mass produced cartoon crap released as actual movies? Why, lord?

I see that trailer above for DC Universe, and I think about the crap animation in the most recent DC animated movie I saw, Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, and it makes me want to scream in frustration.

If you’re going to leave the half hour TV show episode realm and venture into the bright lights of movie making, for crap’s sake, BRING YOUR “A” GAME!!

Iron Man: Armored Adventures was a style I really, really enjoyed. I thought I could live with that as my new standard for enjoyable, smooth animation.

No. Hell no. If they want to make a movie costing millions that we’re going to pay our hard earned money to see (I know our family drops $35+ on a single movie going experience) how about stepping up and making something somewhere remotely close to the level of quality in the game trailer above?

Am I crazy? Did that 6 minutes of footage above really cost them so many millions that another 124 minutes would cripple the world’s economy?

Gaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!!!

He frequently has wonderful posts, he is pure go’ld, I’m just mentioning that one because it’s relevant to what I’m going to be talking about.

Oh, and Gnomer, you been threatening me with a rant against one of my PvP related posts for months now. Wassup? Bring it, shorty!

Ahem.

So yeah, Gnomer was very impressed with Blizzard’s communication skills during the recent downtime.

Since he was nice and considerate, that must mean I gotta be contrary and cranky, right?

Sure, Blizzard had some great communication. Well played.

But how about that communication the week before?

You know, the Twitter Developer Chat communication?

Yeah, THAT communication.

I’m very happy whenever Blizzard passes on information to us concerning their plans, and the intent behind them. Most companies restrict themselves to lawyer-approved press releases that are so sanitized you can’t see controversy in them unless you really twist your inner lens ALL out of focus.

Blizzard doesn’t do that. They talk to us. The developers as well as the community moderators. So please, keep in mind that when I do bitch, it’s with a healthy appreciation that at least we have some idea of what they’ve got going on.

I’d rather be told something I don’t like, and have it be the truth, than to be told nothing at all.

Moving on to the Twitter Developer Chat, the subject of class specific quests was brought up. Will Cataclysm have them?

The bare bones answer is, yes. There will be class quests at 20, and another at 50. Or something like that. This is good news, correct? There will be something for each class.

However, the value-added answer was that there will not be, and by implication never be, extensive class-specific quests because it is too expensive for the developers to program into the game.

Why is it considered too expensive? Let’s think about it for a moment.

The amount of time spent on quests for that one class could be better spent on quests that all classes could complete. The decision has to be made, create content all classes will see, or content only one class will see, using a certain finite amount of resources.

Or, to try and clarify Blizzard’s position for us, plucking numbers from thin air, if a programmer costs $30 an hour, it takes 1 hour to design a quest and implement the programming, and 100 hours of programming time ($3000) is budgeted for new quest content, then which is a more valuable use of that $3000? 100 quests for everyone, or 10 quests for each class?

That’s the position Blizzard holds. That it is too expensive in terms of allocated resources to program content exclusively for one class that nobody else will see.

In terms of project management and budget resource allocation, it’s very convincing logic. Especially when budgeting the resources required to completely revamp the existing Azerothian world experience.

In terms of the game design of an MMO, however, especially for an MMO with an extremely aging demographic, I don’t think it’s solid foreward planning.

In fact, I think it’s damn shortsighted.

My biggest objection to that logic? The concept, at this stage in the game, that content designed for only one character class will only be seen by a small segment of the players.

Are there still any players of over two years experience in this game that have created one character, and stuck to it, never experiencing anything else?

No. Most players play one main character, and then they start a new one for a new experience in the same game.

Having made that point, let’s back up a little. 

As a developer, you have a decision to make.

Allocate resources to either attract new customers, or allocate them to retain existing customers.

Or both.

I think Cataclysm is a brilliant plan for accomplishing both.

Existing customers get brand new leveling experiences within a familiar setting. I personally think that there is a lot of evidence that people LOVE being surrounded by familiar settings with a fresh new little tweak.

Anyone else love long series of books, TV shows or movies, where the scenery may change, and the plot may be different, but the major characters and genre stay the same?

No, I didn’t think so. Oh no, once an episode or book comes out, there’s never a demand for a sequal.

For existing customers, Cataclysm lets us continue to play in a world with familiar rules, settings, and structure… but the rules are just a little different now, and the places are a little changed now, and the quests are a little different now, and even the locations where Herbs and Ore spawn will be a little different now. And you can fly!

Small adjustments, but overall a comfortable feeling of being at home. It’s just like having a new couch and loveseat, and a 44″ HDTV added to the experience.

For brand new customers, the advertising will entice them by saying, “You never tried WoW before, because you were worried that everyone else already knew everything, and you’d be the noob. But now’s your chance to get in at the beginning, and learn the World of Warcraft alongside everyone else. The rules are new, the world is fresh, and there are brand new races and starting areas to try. There has never been a better opportunity to explore World of Warcraft all over again… for the very first time.”

Okay, so Cataclysm brings something for both existing and new customers.

For the existing customers, though… we’ve all been here before. I for one feel like I can predict the future based on past experiences.

Right now I have every character slot filled. I have had for months.

If I want to experience the new leveling world, there are three possibilities for me;

1. I delete existing characters I love.
2. I start up fresh on a new server.
3. Blizzard lets us have more character slots per server.

What if all my friends are on my server? Then if Blizzard doesn’t open up more character slots, somebody has to get the axe.

If the game was only a year old, or even two years old, that wouldn’t be such an unreasonable expectation. Right?

But as a long term customer of over four years, I don’t think I’m unusual in having almost every slot filled with a character I like, and in which I have invested my time to develop, train and bond with. .

Does that sound super geeky? Bonding with a character in a video game? Of course it does. Anyone that doesn’t share certain geeky video game role playing characteristics with me is even now firing up the comment page to scream “It’s just a video game, get a grip!”

That’s fine, you don’t get it, and perhaps that means you represent the sane point of view.

I can only say that when I look at my level 73 Shadow Priest with maxed Jewelcrafting and Tailoring, I know that I may not feel like playing the character because I don’t currently enjoy her playstyle, but I have too many memories tied up in playing that character with friends. Great times with Legatum Ignavis in Karazhan, uber time spent PvPing in Alterac Valley with my wife to get the awesome PvP epic gavel (which she still carries), even time spent training Jewelcrafting that I just don’t want to lose by deleting her, even though I don’t intend playing her any time soon.

To paraphrase Roy Batty, “All those moments would be lost in time… like tears in the rain.”

Cut down to it,  if I want to hang with all my friends, and they don’t feel like server changing, then I have to kill a long time friend. Digital or not, it’s not cool. I’d much prefer to allow the character to remain, perhaps not logged in by me, but I can imagine at the loading screen that my Priest is out there in Azeroth, somewhere, sipping ale at the Pink Pigtail Inn and sharing stories of Mind Flaying some poor Rogue in Alterac Valley back in the day. Just waiting in pleasant retirement until the day her old friend wants to melt faces once again.

So, technically, limited replay value in the leveling experience, yes? Us oldtimers don’t have tons of empty slots to fill up.

But that’s okay, let’s move past that and assume that most people will eventually fire up a character on another server to experience the changed world. Or delete people. OR, perhaps they’ll take their max level characters and go questing the old world from scratch. Hopefully, all quests will be reset so you can do it all over again from the beginning.

So you do that on one character. Leveling or questing content from 1 to 60.

And then you do it a second time.

What have we learned from 5 years of playing?

Doing the same quests on different characters year after year gets damn old.

We play multiple characters in the hopes of experiencing something new.

And you tell us that content for one class is too expensive because it wouldn’t be seen by enough people? REALLY?

Sure, if all you’re looking at is the next three months, you might be right. Are we really planning on the game only lasting three more months?

Inevitably you want to see the experience from the other faction. Why? Is it because they’ve got better classes? Not anymore. Is it because they’ve got races you like better than the ones you first picked? Probably not, what races you went with first are the ones you liked best. Except for folks that like the brand new races, and none of the others on that faction.

So why?

It’s to see new quests. To take part in new storylines. To experience something new and fresh.

Well, if there are no class specific quests or content, I mean real class content different from the rest, then what you have is playing a different class through the same old thing you’ve already seen five, ten, fifteen times.

If each class had it’s own rich content at some point, or a little thread that wound it’s way through all the levels that had some good story to it, that would to me add something special for the long term player. Something new that playing that class brought besides a new way to trigger a ranged or melee attack.

I’m not thinking of the next year. I’m not even thinking of the next two years. I’m thinking of where we are now, and how short sighted it feels to hear a developer say that class specific content is too expensive for the return on investment.

When World of Warcraft was originally being developed, going headfirst against Everquest II, they invested in their plan. They couldn’t know how it would turn out, so they brought their ‘A’ game and did the best they could to anticipate what would really attract and retain customers long term.

None of the magazines or news agencies at the time considered WoW to be the big thing that would dominate the world. Everquest II was regularly reported to be the stronger contender for next gen MMO, simply because of the experience and popularity of EQ1.

During that initial development, clearly somebody over at Blizzard thought about differentiating the class gameplay experience in ways other than just stats and playstyle.

Somebody clearly thought that investing resources into making each class leveling experience have something special, something new. Some reason to draw you into the 1 to 60 game all over again, and extend your subscription that bit longer.

They invested at that time in class specific content. Special quest chains to unlock class defining abilities. Rogue quest areas and Ravenholdt. Warrior chains for kick ass weapons. Level 50 class quests for items out of Sunken Temple.

It really does feel like one person had that vision, but spent more time with one class than another. Different classes have content implemented at different levels. In some cases, all the class chains consist of are “go here and do this” to get an item that would have been a decent upgrade. Others have big epic feeling chains that bring special mounts. Even the Hunter class had the raiding gear chain that brought the bow and quiver of awesomeness.

It doesn’t feel like the attention to the classes was balanced, but more like one person had a vision… and then in mid stream had their attention shifted, or their resources pulled, and nobody left shares that same vision going forward.

It’s too bad. I know that, having done it already, I don’t personally look forward to questing through everything for the third time and saying, “What now?”, knowing that the plan is for all classes to get the same basic experience.

When it comes to investing resources in improving the replay value of World of Warcraft, a game meant to be a subscription based long-term gaming experience… I just don’t agree with the idea that class specific content is “too expensive”.

Really, when it comes right down to it, I’d rather they had the opposite opinion; that investing in long term replayability at all levels of content be something they make a high priority.

I know that Blizzard has done a fantastic job on the Cataclysm content. I’ve seen the screenshots, I’ve read a few of the beta reports, and by all indications, one thing you cannot accuse Blizzard of is being cheap on developing new content or redesigning the game.

I guess what it boils down to is my objection to the game design philosophy lurking behind such statements. If you’re going to be a subscription based game, you’ve got to be keeping your eye on things that will improve replayability, and keep your customers in it for the long term.

Saying class specific content is “too expensive” feels, to me, to be back-asswards to that concept.

First, the news, for those that hadn’t seen it yet. Blizzard made an announcement that the Official WoW Forums would NOT, in fact, display real first and last names when their changes go live. Instead, there will be a persistant handle or nickname of some kind. The message was signed as coming directly from Mike Morhaime.

So.

I’ll admit to being a little stunned.

I’m not speechless, nor dumbfounded, or even amazed.

But I am stunned. With a little disappointment thrown in as well.

This is what I, personally, wanted, and it was all I wanted.

No bullshit rhetoric, no torches waved in the air, no pitchforks brandished with glee, no screaming “Burn the witch! Burn her!”

I just wanted what was, to me, a very poor decision modified to remove the requirement of publicly displaying your real legal first and last name in order to participate in an online gaming community. 

Well, they did that.

Thanks!

See, that was me there. Thanking Blizzard.

Look, I’ll do it again.

Thanks!

I’m thanking Blizzard, because they had made a decision, publicly announced their decision, and then had to face the hard choice of choosing to stick to their decision come hell or high water and being accused of refusing to listen to the concerns of their subscribers, or changing their decision and inevitably getting accused of being wishy washy and lacking the courage to stick to their principles.

They chose to bend in the wind of subscriber discontent. They modified their stance. We will not be required to bring our real life into our escapist fantasy.

And, of course, they are now being ripped a new one for it.

Well, I knew that was coming, no matter what. Truly, no surprises there.

What disappoints me is how many people were willing, SO FAST, to take Blizzard’s final reaction to the public outcry, an outcry that saw over 1700 pages of “Hell No”, and actually turn it into a consiracy theory.

“They meant to do that the whole time. They just got a week of free Buzz. Look, they came out with crazy talk they never intended to carry through on, and then when they backed down they get what they always wanted in the first place, AND get to seem like they listen to customer complaints! This is what they intended from the beginning!”

I thought I was cynical, and I thought I was pretty clear on the “Corporations are in the business of making a profit for their shareholders” understanding of financial decisions.

And yet, I am still not so far gone that I can see the color of the sky of the planet upon which these people are standing. I can’t tell what the weather’s like there.

I wonder if there are rainbows. Rainbows are pretty. I like rainbows.

Blizzard made a partnership with Facebook. They planned on, and moved towards, social networking integration. And in pursueing that goal, they made an announcement that caused a backlash with an intensity the WoW community has never seen before. This was almost, not quite, but almost Star Wars Galaxies NGE level backlash. And it’s possible it could have built to that level if left unanswered.

Did you see that main Official WoW Forums thread? Did you see the WoW Ladies forum thread? Did you notice the number of comments on the MMO Champions thread about it, or on WoW.com, or the many blog posts in the blogging community about it?

There has been outrage before, and drama, and stupidity, but never in my experience in WoW did so many come out with such a clearly negative reaction in so short a time to anything else.

There was a solid minority of players happy with the change, and there were of course those that were delighted to see Blizzard do it, JUST for the sheer joy of expecting to see an internet disaster of biblical proportions rain locusts and fire down upon everyone involved, for their amusement. Those folks, of course, I noticed expected it to be a nightmare for all involved… they were just in favor of it for the drama watching enjoyment.

Alongside the conspiracy theorists, there are those lambasting Blizzard for having ”caved”.

“Caved”?

This is not a dad letting his grounded teen out of punishment early because he was tired of hearing the whining, “But daaaaad! my friends are all seeing Eclipse tonight, and I wannnna go toooooooo! Oh, and can I have $80 for a shirt at Hollisters first?”.

That’s what “caved” is. It’s giving in to the selfish, petty or inappropriate requests of the undeserving, out of a selfish desire to stop dealing with the bitching and complaints.

Do you really feel thats what Blizzard did? That they acted merely to shut us up because they were tired of the whining, and it was easier to give in than to stick to their principles?

Or even better, are you in the first group and really think that Blizzard WANTED to cause all this drama and controversy, for whatever reason, as some kind of plot, and this was all planned in advance?

I just…. wow.

If you do, if you really look inside yourself, and after trying to be objective about all this, you really feel in your heart that it was anything other than responding to thousands of players’ concerns expressed over three days, then please. I have a request.

Just leave me alone. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t.

If thats your stance, and that’s really the first reaction you’ve got instead of a simple “Hey Blizzard, thanks for paying attention to our concerns, I for one really appreciate such a clear, fast and unequivocal response”, if you’re really that negative, then just drop me from your feedreader.

I may get pissed on occasion and go off on a rant, but in my heart, I’m just not that negative.

I like playing WoW, I’m willing to pay a monthly fee for the game I’m getting, I’m willing to pay for the extra work that they put into the expansions, I’m very willing to buy an in-game pet if they give me a cute stuffed animal Horde batwing mount to go with it, and I’m happy to talk about the game and share stories and squee with glee over whatever comes down the road.

Sure, I get pissed at times. Sure I rant. I vent. I go off on great roaring tears. But I do so because I am so passionate in my love for the wonderful game of WoW, it’s depth, it’s vibrant vitality, the insane number of hours of pleasure it has brought me over the years.

I do it for the Internet Dragons. They deserve to get what’s coming to ‘em, and I’m just the one to bring it.

Sure, on this blog that picture up there has my real name on it. But this is a blog about my life in a video game, among other things, and here, as there, I do not like being called John. John is what they call me at work. John is what I hear being paged over the loudspeaker when, inevitably, there is yet another damn emergency that needs tending to.

Here, I’m the Big Bear Butt. I’m B^3. BBB. Triple B. And whatever other cute, funny, goofy variations you awesome folks come up with.  And I am the BBB here, because this is not work. This is not my “serious” life. This is me having fun with other people I hope are as passionate about the game as I am, and who start out with that passion in their hearts as well.

Not negativity, and not piss-poor bitterness.

I’m glad I won’t have to be ‘John’ on the forums, if and when they change them. For me, I like keeping it unreal. No big deal otherwise, but thats just me. Far more than that, I am truly happy that so many people who wanted the choice of keeping their identity private, for personal as well as safety reasons, will no longer have that worry. Not at all.

I see that as nothing but positive. I don’t see shadows circling, getting ever closer. It’s just positive. We wanted to have the option of remaining unreal. We get it. Got it? Good!

I shouldn’t be disappointed. Nobody owes me a damn thing, and everyone has a perfect right to whatever opinion they’ve got. I have no reason, nor right, to have expected anything different.

But I am. And I did. Shame on me.

Yesterday was, of course, Tuesday.

Server maintenance day.

For the second week, most servers were scheduled for regular maintenance, while a handful were singled out for 24 hour expansion upgrades.

I know many players are on varied shifts and playtimes, and get screwed by this to a greater or lesser extent. For those that do, you have my sympathies.

For myself, if maintenance is done during the day, well, so long as it’s all over and done with by about 5 PM, I’d never even know it happened.

Having the server be scheduled down for 24 hours was pretty interesting, though.

You see, if it had been up as usual, I’d probably have done a little on my Rogue, trained Inscription, mined some Ore, and then logged off. I’m getting into a rut.

On Tuesdays we’ve also been watching Hell’s Kitchen on Tivo, and there’s a Top Gear to watch for dinner (again, thanks to Tivo, the greatest thing since sliced lunch meat).

Same old, same old.

With our server down, but other servers up and running, and an hour of time to mess around, we could have sat there bitching and moaning, but instead, we saw it as an opportunity for new fun.

“Hows about we randomly pick a different server, make some level 1’s we’ve never tried before, and level together for a bit just for kicks?”

So, we did that for a little bit.

We got on Skype to voice chat, picked a server, and made a pair of undead. Cassie chose a Warrior, and I picked a Priest. Off we went, and had fun bouncing around unfamiliar territory together.

It was a great time. We had a blast together. 

Somewhere in there, Cassie tabbed out, and remarked, “Wow, they released the Ruby Sanctum tonight, according to WoW.com. People on servers down for 24 hours must be pissed they lost their chance at being ‘firsties’.”

We both paused for a moment to visualize the folks we meant. The people who play this video game, pay a monthly fee the same as the rest of us, and who will go on the official forums demanding a refund of something like fifty cents to their accounts because they lost a day out of the month. People who scream if things are denied them that they feel entitled to.

After a moment of such quiet contemplation, I had to reply, “Well, I guess if you’re obsessed with getting to content in a video game before other people do, and you’re going to get angry about not getting to go “I was there first noob”, then I suppose you’ve got plenty of personal problems already. What’s one more thing to get angry about? That ulcer ain’t coming any faster.”

And then we continued on, playing level 5 characters, and you know, actually having fun while our server was down.

Which, from the scope of some comments I’ve seen out there, means we just don’t ‘get’ video gaming. Apparently, it’s not supposed to be about having fun, that shows a carebear attitude, a casual attitude, a ‘childish, irresponsible‘ attitude to the seriousness that proper WoW players feel towards content progression.

It’s about finding something in this virtual life to be better at than other people, and having a title or digital achievement ranking to prove it. Which, and now I’m just reading the subtext here… is necessary because a lot of people feel they have something to prove. In a video game? Really? Well, okay.

Ah well, I guess we’ll just continue to fail at video games by doing stuff that’s fun at the time, and not worrying about any of it anymore.

If my attitude about this, my flippant tone, my judgmental assumptions and stereotyping seem too harsh, or if in this post you find a characterization you take personally and choose to be offended about… please keep in mind, I really mean it. I’m not joking. I really do think WoW is a game, admittedly a great game, and games are meant for casual fun, not as a replacement life for people who find the real world to be too scary to handle, or too difficult to find success or happiness in. 

If you’re offended I feel that way… that’s okay. I’m good with that. Everyone has their own perspective on things, and it’d be a sad, boring world if everyone agreed with mine all the time.

I hope that, however your evening went, in game or out, you found your own way to have a nice, fun, enjoyable evening. Especially with family or friends.

I tend to focus on group play rather than soloing, and tanking rather than DPS or Healing. It’s what I mostly think my WoW related rantings on this blog are all about.

It’s what I do. Well, it’s what I do when I’m not doing something else.

I think it’s time to touch on first principles briefly.

I talk about group play in general because when you play solo, no matter how crazed or off the wall you may play, no matter how little you may know about your class spells, Talents, gear or playstyle, the only person’s time you affect is you.

If you want to try to level from 1 to 80 as a pacifist, never harming any other living digital creature… more power to you. Have fun! Send screenshots.

In group play, there are other people present who depend on you to act a certain way, play a certain way, and work towards a common goal together. You’re no longer just handicapping yourself; you’re bringing other people down with you.

So I talk about group play more, because in my mind playing well in groups in a multiplayer game is a higher priority that fine tuning solo performance. 

I talk about tanking because it was the single most challenging aspect of the game for me, personally, to learn when I started. I leveled as DPS Cat/Bear, and I raided as Healing at level 60 end game, but it wasn’t until I hit true Bear tanking in BC that I felt challenged… and rewarded for skillful play. It’s that feeling of satisfaction with Tanking as part of a group, and the enjoyment of doing something difficult very well, that led me to write guides and offer suggestions about it, to help others get started in a little seen aspect of the game and share the fun.

So, I talk about group play because I want to help people be the best member of their group that they can for everyone’e benefit, and I talk about tanking because that was the role of a group I personally found the most challenging to learn.

A statement of my tanking belief.

I feel that, as a member of the team in the role of the tank, it is my primary responsibility to do the best I can to be a team player, and work towards the success of the group. Everything else is built on the foundation of being a team player.

Building on the foundations of being a good team player, I feel that as a tank, it is my job to;

• Keep all aggro from mobs on me instead of the team.
• Regain lost aggro as quickly as possible to keep mobs from interfering with other members of the team.
• Be as difficult to hurt as possible to ease the strain on the Healer to keep me alive through a fight.
• Be as difficult to hurt as possible to ease the strain on the DPS to kill all mobs before I and the Healer are overwhelmed. 

Those are the core duties of the role. All are focused on being a good team player.

There are other aspects of playing a tank that may not be readily apparent, but when you think in terms of being a good team player, there are lots of things you can see to help.

Remember, my point is to approach the game with the attitude of being the best team player you can; to do what is within your power to ensure the group’s success, and to help everyone towards victory.

Examples of other things you can do as a tank to be a good team player;

• Hold mobs physically stationary whenever possible so that melee DPS have an easier time of getting behind them. Melee DPS have to properly position themselves to achieve their most effective DPS.
• Keep the style of your pull as consistent as possible to help your healer and DPS players anticipate what you are about to do (run in and turn around to face mobs away from the rest of the group, or turn to the side, or mark first and second kill targets, etc). This helps everyone else learn to anticipate what you will do, and be prepared for the best time to unleash their skills without pulling.
• Move mobs and the party out of AoE effects as quickly as possible; don’t just get yourself out, reposition the mob so the DPS behind him are also free from pools/slime/kabooms.
• Watch mana levels in the group and pause for clearly announced “mana breaks” when really necessary, so that Healers do not feel overly rushed from pull to pull. Encourage the Healer or other players to announce when they want a mana break, and do not listen to people who want to ignore the requests of other team members for a mana break. Only the player who is low on mana can decide for themselves when or if they need a mana break.
• Pause before the very first instance pull to allow everyone time to buff.
• Communicate clearly with the group, both with what you intend to do, and also what you would like others to do. Communication also includes asking if anyone is new to an instance, and providing tips before tricky pulls where appropriate.

These things are not written in stone as what a tank must do, but every single suggestion, if followed, can help contribute to a smoother run for the team.

If you are consistent, calm and clear, it helps to cut down on chaos in the party, and players that learn to know what to expect of your pulls will be that much faster in target selection and destruction.

Bringing the same principles to the other roles of a group.

What I listed above applies to tanks. Things to think about, things to watch as opportunities to help as a member of a team. There are many other things that tanks can do to help, as well. That’s why I’ve got a blog, to chat about them.

I’d like to take this opportunity to refresh the idea of good team work and group play in the minds of my readers.

It’s not just tanks that are responsible for being good team players. Every member of the team has a responsibility to do the best they can to contribute to the success of the entire run.

Talking about Threat

One of my first rants on this blog was about Damage Meters. The reason I ranted was because of the effect on a team. I believe that the obsession with reaching the top of Damage Meters indicates that the player is more concerned with scoring a high DPS number than he or she is with being a great team player, and that irritates me.

Let me be more specific. A lot of classes have threat reducing abilities. Paladins have Hand of Salvation, Kitties have Cower, Rogues have Feint and Vanish, Hunters have Feign Death and Misdirect, Mages have Ice Block, etc. Sure, not all classes do, but a lot do. There is no satisfactory reason to ignore the threat reducing tools of a class, because it is not the tank’s job to generate threat that exceeds every player’s maximum possible potential DPS. It’s not, and if you think it is, well, you’re wrong.

There is an excellent addon called Omen, which is a Threat Meter. If you install it, by default it will show you what your threat level is on your targeted mob, in comparison to other players, including the tank.

Even if you do not use Omen, WoW now has an option to enable a flashing red warning on the screen when you are pulling aggro on your target.

Even if you don’t use addons, there is still a way to get an indication when you are exceeding threat.

The most fundamental responsibility of DPS and Healer players as part of a team is to not pull aggro off of the tank. Period.

You can easily do this by using Omen, waiting for the tank to get at least one attack off on your targeted mob, and then opening with auto-attack or a low damage attack. Then you glance at Omen to see where you stand on threat. You do as much damage as you can, up to and not exceeding the threat the tank has on the mob.

If you are capable of doing 7500 DPS, but the tank is not capable of matching and exceeding your threat, then it is your responsibility to throttle back your DPS to the point where you can attack without pulling.

If you, as a DPS player, are not capable of throttling back your threat to match the tank, then you, not the tank, SUCK as a team player.

Why?

Because yes, while the tank has taunting abilities, those abilities are better used as emergency pulls when adds run in, or when someone gets a surprise critical strike that pushes them over the top,NOT as something to be used on every single cooldown just for you, personally.

If every DPS player in a group is pulling aggro off the tank, and the tank only has one taunt, then there are two other players that are eating their mobs, and while we can say we don’t care, you pull it you tank it, the fact is, this is creating chaos. It is stressing the Healer. It is stressing the Tank. It is causing the run to be a big, crappy mess.

This is the fault of the player that regularly pulls aggro. None other. And apologizing in advance that you’re going to be pulling off the tank regularly because you’re “lol so leet”, just says to me, “Hi, I don’t actually know how to play my class, but look at all the neat loot my friends got for me!”

Do you think I respect you because of your gear score, when you don’t have any idea how to manage your threat ina  group? Or, even better, don’t care? I have far more respect for any player that tries their best to be a good team player no matter what their gear. Far more. 

Every player in a group should be starting with the idea, “What can I be doing to help the group succeed?” If you’re not, why are you grouping? Chances are high it’s because of selfish motives. And I have no respect for that, either.

For DPS, here are some tips.

Watch your threat, and take care to not regularly exceed the threat output of the tank. You can use Omen, or again with the addon plug, you can use a Nameplate addon like Tidy Plates with Threat Plates. It works great for DPS as well. If you see you are about to pull aggro, use a threat dump like Feign Death, switch to auto-attacking for a bit, or switch your attentions to a different target.

Be prepared to protect the healer. Try to watch for adds that run after the Healer. Yes, DPS players can and should try to intercept mobs that escape the Tank to head for the Healer. That can easily happen if there are adds that are pulled, but have no threat done to them. Such adds are loose, and will go after the Healer as soon as the Healer creates healing threat.

Some specific suggestions that you used to see all the time; Hunters hanging out near the Healer, and dropping Ice Trap in front of the Healer to automatically grab the first add that runs after him. Warlocks that have their blueberry taunt mobs off the Healer (if it’s out) when they run in. Priests can Shackle if it’s Undead. Paladins can either bubble the Healer, or cast Hand of Salvation on them (or on other, super high threat generating DPS). And on and on.

Be prepared with your own bandages and consumables like Healing Potions. Yes, there is a group healer, and I’m sure they’re doing their best. But every Healer has priorities, and if the Healer is overtasked keeping the Tank or themself alive, you might not get a Heal when you want, and you should be prepared to spot heal yourself.

Don’t run ahead of everyone else to push the pace. It’s a team effort. If you’re in that much of a hurry to lead, then make a tank and find someone to heal you. If you are not the tank, then it is not your job to pull unless specifically expected to do so by friends or asked to by the tank.  It is not funny, it’s not cute, and it’s not helpful. It’s being an asshat in the minds of every team player I know. If you don’t like the pace of the random you got, then only run with friends. If you don’t have any friends willing to run with you, then maybe you need to think about why that is.

There are so many things that DPS players can do to help make a run smoother, it boggles the mind. Heck, I didn’t even mention using CC on loose mobs that the Tank hasn’t grabbed yet, or using other class abilities like Tremor Totem for Shamans when fighting mobs that Fear regularly, (or Priests likewise using Fear Ward on the tank when fighting a mob that Fears), or Druids Innervating Paladin tanks or Healers that are low on mana mid-fight, or…

Well, you get the point, don’t you? If you’re trynig to be a good player, browse your spellbook. You might find something there neat to try.

Priests using Mind Control to have mobs buff the team? Ever try it?

There is more to being a good team player for DPS than going all out on their attack rotation the second the tank pulls, and maxing the DPS Meters.

A few suggestions for Healers;

Watch your threat. Healers DO create threat. You gain threat for the healing that is actually done on your targets, divided amongst all the mobs currently aware of the target you are Healing.

If the Tank is running forward at the group of mobs, and is at max health, then if you cast a HoT, the HoT does zero healing on the first tick, and does zero threat. The threat does not start until there is actually damage to be healed, and only does threat per point healed, not based on the maximum potential healing the spell could have done.

If the Tank is below max health before the pull, you cast a HoT, and the Tank runs forward within the awareness range of the mobs, then if the first tick hits before the Tank has done ANY damage, every mob just aggroed on the Healer, and start running for, or begins casting attacks AT the Healer.

You can prevent this by waiting until a target or the Tank has done some threat before you heal them. Tanks in particular should be allowed to attack once or twice before you unload heals and HoTs on them.

Watch your mana level. Use mana regeneration abilities to top up on the fly, or be prepared to drink between pulls quickly. Others should try to give you time to regain mana, but be proactive in looking for opportunities to keep yourself topped up.

If you queued as a Healer, make healing the entire group your priority, and NOT dealing DPS. If you are so eager to top the DPS meters, queue as a DPS. The group needs to be able to count on your heals being there in an emergency. If you can drop some DPS into the mix, that’s fine, but never let it get in the way of performing your prime duty; keeping the team alive.

A few general suggestions for EVERYONE.

Be repaired, be armed with your proper Reagents, and BUFF PEOPLE. Few things say “lazy selfish bugger” to me quite as clearly as someone that just can’t be bothered to buff anyone else on the run. I don’t care if you think it’s necessary or not, the point is that as a team player, you have a way to contribute to the overall success of the group. So buff people.

Don’t queue up for a run unless you intend to stay for the entire length of the run. Within reasonable limits, of course. If the group is just completely fail, and you try and try to pull things together and people just aren’t willing to listen or work together, then no, I’m not saying stick it out for four hours. I am specifically saying, don’t queue for a group, get a group, start the run, and ten minutes later announce “Whoops, raid time, gotta go, bye!” and drop group.  That’s bullshit. If you don’t have ten minutes, then you don’t have time. Don’t queue.

I have never said all this stuff before, at least in so many words, because in my heart I thought everyone that wanted to group, wanted to do their best to be a team player.

I’m writing this in the hopes that people really DO want to be a good team player, but don’t understand how.

What I’m afraid of is that most people that act like selfish asshats in teams do so intentionally, because they really don’t give a damn about anyone else. Nothing will help that situation, except an ever-expanding ignore list.

I’ll end this with one very serious statement.

Having a high gear score does not make you a good player. Putting out 15k DPS, having 100K Health, or being able to heal a Squirrel through a Hurricane does not make you a good player. I will not kiss your ass. Those stats are loot based. Static. They say nothing of how good a player you are, they only indicate what kind of content you’ve run successfully in the past with other people. 

What they really tell us is that you’ve run in a group that had some good players in it. It tells us nothing about YOU.

What makes you a good player is how you behave as part of a team, in every team you join. You have to prove yourself fresh every single time you join a group.

In WoW, just as in real life, nobody cares how you played on your other character, on your main, in your raid group, or with your friends last week. All we care about is, how are you playing right now?

I invite all other bloggers to think about what their favorite class can do in terms of being a strong supportive team player, and write a post to help guide folks along those lines.

I know it seems, well, obvious, but seriously, based on the runs I go on it’s past time to be clear about this stuff, and bring team play back to the front of people’s awareness.

Okay, a lot of consumer level Customer Service people are pretty wonky, but when you step up into commerical purchasing, it’s a whole new ball game.

In the comsumer market, you might think that when you’re buying a $120 DVD player, sure you deserve some reasonable customer service help if the thing doesn’t work, but you don’t expect someone to hop in a lear jet and fly out from corporate headquarters to hold your hand, right?

You’ve got certain expectations. You figure someone should really try to help you, but you know that, in the end, it’s a $120 DVD player, the person you’re talking to on the phone didn’t actually break it personally when it went out the door, they’ve got rules they’ve got to follow, they’re not being paid all that well in the first place unless customer service is only one facet of the responsibilities of their position, and if you’re being a tool to them in the first place, well…

What about consumer Customer Service for things other than goods? What about monthly services, like, oh, let’s just say for example cable internet?

That’s where you start getting into interesting territory in the consumer side of things, right?

Because I know NONE of you have ever been trying to log into WoW 30 minutes before raid time, only to find out your internet was dead, had no way of letting anyone, you know, online know what was wrong with you, and had to frantically call customer support for your internet service provider, desperate to get it fixed.

On the line is your current irritation at a momentary interruption in service, weighted against your inherent laziness when it comes to changing service providers. They know they don’t have to be good enough to win your business, they just have to not suck so much that they piss you off enough to throw off your laziness and switch.

God help you if they’re the only high speed game in town. Sucker.

Someone should actually do an audio montage of those phone conversations. That’s got to be one hell of a sub-cultural bubble, right there.

Protip: If you’re afraid it’ll be a problem in the future, have a “swim buddy” in your guild that you share cell phone numbers with, so if your internet goes out, you’ve got someone to get in touch with and let ‘em know.

Okay, fine, so everyone has their customer service horror story.

When you step up into the commercial arena, you’d expect things might be a touch different, wouldn’t you? Sure, a $120 DVD player is one thing, but drop a few hundred thousand on some gear, you’d expect just a teensy bit more, right?

The first change is, in most cases, you don’t ever go to a store to make your selection or final purchase.

Instead, you start with a specific need, you identify companies that make products that fit those needs, you contact their sales offices, make appointments to meet with them, sales people fly out to meet with you and do the hard sell, you read their brochures, check schematics and characteristic data, and in some cases actually visit other customers already using the equipment, to see how they like it, see how they’re using it, and observe it in action.

When you’re contemplating buying a $250,000 to $1 million+ machine made in another country that will be designed and built from scratch based on your requirements, and that will have a several month lead time, preceeded by preparing a place in your production facility with appropriate power, water, pneumatic and exhaust capacity, it’s a whole other experience than walking into Best Buy or Sears.

If YOU were preparing to drop a cool million in another companies’ pockets, you might think that they’d treat you a nice, right?

And the sales people do.

But once the sale is made, what about when you need something later on? Like the machine ain’t working right and you need help figuring it out? Or a part broke and you need a new one?

Do you think when you call in to customer support on that big ticket machine, you get treated the same way the sales guy treated your company president?

Oh, hell no.

The majority of us in this position don’t expect or want trips to Cancun or other kickbacks when we call in with a problem, either.

We just want someone to do the bare minimum. Help us get going again.

What you don’t see the upper management types who will make the final decision considering is what happens AFTER the sale.

What is their support like?

What happens when you need parts to fix it when it breaks down?

See, when you buy a custom high-cost machine like this, you’re chaining yourself to their repair parts system. It doesn’t matter if you like it or not. They built it, and they intend to make money off of you. BIG TIME.

You’ve got two choices when something breaks down. Buy it directly through them, or try to find it somewhere else on your own.

If you buy it directly from them, then if you’re lucky, they have some in stock, or know where to get it already, so you know it won’t take that long to get it. Maybe. BUT, they are buying it somewhere else, or having it made by a fabrication shop somewhere else to their specs, and then adding a fee on top of it before selling it to you.

If you find it direct from the manufacturer, it may be a lot cheaper, but it will often have a long lead time… like weeks or even months before you’ll get it.

Especially if you just bought a piece of equipment designed and manufactured in another country. Guess what? Japanese engineers seling machines to the American market aren’t known for looking for American solutions to engineering problems. The parts they choose to build from are sold, guess where? Japan!

So when you call in looking for parts, where do you think they’re coming from? That’s right!

Another fun issue is, companies don’t want you to go around ‘em for cheaper parts. A lot of companies work deals with the manufacturer to use custom part numbers on their labels, and only sell those part numbers to the guy who makes the machines. You call, say, Koganei in Japan looking for a new air cylinder, and tell them the part number, and Koganei sees in their system that part number is for something they only sell to Toshiba… and they tell you to talk to Toshiba, ’cause they won’t sell ‘em to you. You want one to fix your machine. Toshiba buys them by the hundred. Guess who they’d rather piss off.

And lots of manufacturers don’t want to deal directly with the end user. They’d prefer dealing with a middleman willing to put up with your bullshit. So they don’t sell to end users at all. They only sell to people that are set up as regional or local distributors. So, you have to find a distributor in your area… and hope that person is willing to help your one time purchase.

And if they are, you tell the distributor you want an air cylinder, they say sure, they email the manufacturer in Japan, the manufacturer in Japan sends the email to a translation department, a few days later they get it back, they get some info on your part, send their reply to the translator, then get it back, then send it to the distributor, who calls you, if they even remember you since a week and a half has passed since you asked for a quote on price, availability and lead time.

Now you can place an order.

Nice, huh?

But okay, you deal with what you got.

What blows my fragile little mind is how hard it is, even if everything works according to plan, in GETTING THE DAMN PARTS.

Every day, every single day, about half my time is spent calling people and asking where the stuff I ordered is, days, weeks or even months after I was promised I’d receive it.

That’s exactly right. This is not time spent ordering items.

No, this is time spent asking where the (%^ the shit you promised me is, damnit!

You won’t let me order it from somewhere else? Well, damnit, then you’d better sell it to me when I need it!

Grrr.

“Hello, yes, I do have a question. I’m trying to find out what the status is on the part I ordered on PO# P349087. Yes, yes I did order it. No, I’m afraid you’re wrong, I did place the order. Oh, you have no record of that on file?  I must have faxed it to the wrong location, or the fax didn’t go through, so it’s my fault you don’t have it? Well, what would you say if I told you that thanks to the last three times you’ve pulled this same exact shit, Amanda, I now document all phone conversations, take down all names of people from your company that I talk to, and that I email AND fax in all orders I place, and then call back to verify your companies’ receipt of said order before I consider it ordered? Do you remember the order now? Would you like me to fax all of that documentation in to you now to helpfully remind you?”

“Still don’t have any record on your end that I ordered that $5000 servoamp, huh? Must’ve been one of those famous computer glitches in the database, right? Dog ate the homework? ”

“Oh, is it a ten week lead time on getting one from Japan? Really? And now that it’s really ordered I should wait for ten more weeks before I call back if I don’t see it?”

“Yeah… that’s what you told me ten weeks ago. Thanks!”

Bitch.

You think I’m joking. I bet you do.

Here’s another example.

I am sitting here, telling this person on the phone, ”My company has one of your machines, and cash. Your company made the machine, and presumably wants cash. Tell you what. Your machine broke. I need the part. You buy the part from someone else, and keep the part in stock. You actually charge us $150.36 for a part that the manufacturer charges us $36.54 each (real freaking example from 5 minutes ago), but I’m willing to pay you that extra $115 bucks right now because you have one in stock, right now, and the manufacturer wants a two week lead time to ship from Japan. So here’s what we’ll do. I’ll order the part, you’ll put the part in a box, toss it at your UPS guy for overnight express, and we’ll pay you. Okay? We get the part tomorrow, the machine will be back up and running after one day of downtime, and you’ll get money at a truly bullshit markup. Okay?”

You give me goods. I give you cash. You’ve made stupid profit because your design engineer used a substandard part for a high stress application in the first place, so the parts wear out frequently.

Sounds good, right?

And yet… AND YET… a week later, I’ll have made 10 phone calls asking WHERE THE HELL THE PART IS. I base this knowledge off of past history with this company.

Third example. This one is still going on.

We’ve got three machines made by a German-based manufacturing company. They’ve been in the plant about ten years, they cost a ton of money, and none of them have ever worked quite right. A lot of money has been sunk into these machines over the years, trying to get them to work reliably.

In particular, one machine has a Rube Goldberg invention for an outfeed carriage. I’ve been trying to get it working properly. 

About 5 months ago, I decided to start from scratch with perfect components, to make sure everything was set at zero per the manufacturers’ design, and then if things weren’t quite right we’d redesign things ourselves to increase reliability.

I ordered all the parts from Germany. I had to. They have all of the build drawings for fabrication. They are the manufacturer themselves, nobody else. They hold the keys to the kingdom.

We get the parts, we install them after the two month lead time, it still doesn’t work with a damn.

WTF?

So I’m going over schematics, I’m reading exploded parts diagrams and design drawings, and I come across a mention, in a faxed memo in one manual’s folder pocket, about an engineer visit from Germany to install some modifications in 2007.

A what to the who?

I gather up all the manuals and documentation, and sure enough, in one manual out of the entire set, there is a note that the parts list shown is obsolete due to modifications designed and installed by the manufacturer to correct the very issue we’ve been dealing with.

But those parts as described ain’t in the machine, and haven’t been since I’ve been here. They do not exist on site. But now I do have their new parts list with a description of what they did.

The manual showing the changes was in our engineering library, not the maintenance OR production libraries. Nobody in the maintenance department back then, apparently, was involved in this project, and none of those people work here anymore now, anyway.

So, I’ve been fighting these problems for a year now, and I’ve spent thousands of dollars ordering things to repair this machine from the manufacturer, things that wear out too bloody fast, and here I find out that the very person in Germany that I have been talking to, and ordering from, is the person that according to this memo I found designed and installed an upgrade to permanently fix their machines’ original bad design.

I’ve been reinventing the wheel. And this guy has been letting me. “Oh no, no idea what could possibly be wrong, are you sure you set it up right?”

We even, and I’m not freaking kidding, we even flew this guy out from Germany to look at the machine and provide us with suggestions on making improvements. After all, he’s the expert, right?

When he came here, he acted as though it was the first time he’d ever heard of such a problem with this machine.

And he got away with it, because none of us were here when it happened. BUT, he also never volunteered any information about the modifications he had designed, the parts they had installed, nothing. He let us sit and spin.

So here I am. I need this thing fixed. So I tell him two months ago I need to order a full set of the parts from the modification, the CORRECT parts, so we can implement it. Again.

We’ll worry about how this all fell apart some other time. Fix the damn problem.

It’s been two months since I ordered the parts. Two months. I have followed up on this every week. Hell, several times a week.

I still… STILL do not have an estimated SHIP DATE, let alone the parts in my hand.

A month ago, I started telling them that if they are THAT busy, give me the design drawings, we’ll fab ‘em ourselves. They refuse to give design drawings to customers, because then… hold onto your hats, folks… then the customer would not buy their parts from their company anymore! Their company would lose revenue!

Never mind that there is no way in hell we’re ever buying a machine from them ever again. I’ve made sure of that.

At the moment, I’ve actually cut away that section of the machine, and modified it to use a belt driven conveyor with a variable speed drive I designed and installed so we can run. It works. It ain’t pretty, but it works.

It blows my mind. It really does.

And now that I’ve ranted about this… I am going to pick up my phone and give them ANOTHER call, to see if and when I will ever get my parts.

Bastards.

I just don’t understand these people. I’m literally giving them enough money for some bloody-be-damned milled plates and a rail that, for the same amount of money, I could use to buy a car, drive it to the East Coast, buy a plane ticket, fly to Germany, rent a car, drive to their factory, and BEAT THEIR ASS IN THEIR OWN F’ING LOBBY. And then come home again afterwards, tired but satisfied.

Don’t think I haven’t considered it.

Oh, and yes, in case you’re wondering, my unit of value when making commercial value comparisons is based on car equivalents. “I could buy your air cylinder… or I could buy a new Hyundai. I think, just possibly, your air cylinder might be a bit overpriced. It’s 6 steel plates, a spring, a bronze bushing and two threaded holes for quick disconnect air fittings. And you don’t even provide the fittings. And you think this is worth the price of a Hyundai?”

Holy shit.

Look, if you’re going to put yourself intentionally in the position of being the only possible source for repair parts, PROVIDE THE DAMN PARTS!!!

Oh, as an FYI… this is why a proper maintenance management program involves analyzing machines for expected wear items and critical parts based on expected lead times, parts costs, and downtime. You figure out what is important, what you can’t live without if it breaks, how long it’d take to get the parts if they were ordered, how important machine downtime is, and then you build an on-site parts inventory to hold the most important stuff. And you also try to find alternate sources of supply for EVERYTHING.

Grrr.

PvE + (PvP + Achievement) = Drama

Okay, so it’s a silly formula. But I want to use it to illustrate a point.

At the moment there is a lot of unhappiness going around within the game because there are players that love PvP resentful of PvE players, and there are players that love PvE resentful of PvP players.

All of it is coming from friction between the two cultures over Achievements.

At it’s heart, this does come from a core design of World of Warcraft.

WoW consists of two seperate, distinct cultures; PvE and PvP. 

WoW seems to be two seperate games in one.

Players of the game may truly love both aspects of WoW equally, but within the rules of the game, they are handled and managed seperately.

You often hear about transforming behavior and motivating people through leading by example. In this case, the example we all follow is how PvE and PvP are set up, and the ways they are intentionally kept seperate (but where possible, equal).

What do I mean about seperate cultures by design? My point of view on this is directly relevant to my final point, so I’d like to explain.

In PvE, Player vs Environment, what is the goal?

The goal of PvE is to overcome challenges against AI controlled NPCs by working cooperatively with other players as part of a coordinated team.

In PvE raid design, no single person is of greater importance than another, because victory is not complete until the entire team successfully defeats the challenge. 

The player with the highest healing or damage on meters does not get bonus Emblems, gold or items. There is no MVP recognized by the game. Group wipe? Then group fail.

In PvE, the only true measure of success that makes world first headlines is “Boss downed”. When that boss is downed, it is the team that gets the well-deserved credit. All else is chest beating irrelevance.

Focused fire on a single target, coordinated movement out of AoE effects while maintaining unit seperation, synchronized tanking/taunting/kiting to handle adds and spawns or stacking debuffs, heals with multiple cleansing/CCing/debuffing duties, etc. Teamwork and prior proper planning to prevent piss poor performance.

What about PvP (Player vs Player)? How is it any different?

In PvP, it’s all about personal excellence against other living, thinking, reacting and planning opponents.

Real people, fighting against each other and using every trick they can think of, all in a fluid combat environment that requires various Battlefield objectives be met for faction victory.

But whether or not your faction reigns supreme, the focus is entirely on personal accomplishments, on excellence in playing your own character as an individual.

The line may seem to get blurred a bit, because overall success or failure within the Battleground hinges on how many players to a side both kicked individual ass AND were able to work together towards these Battlefield objectives.

At the end of the battle, however, it’s not just win or lose for a side. No, in a PvP Battleground, there is a Leaderboard that pops up which breaks the results of the entire battle down into individual accomplishments.

The leaderboard does show information that relates to team play. Who captured or assaulted flags or towers, etc. But all of the information, including numbers of honorable kills, is clearly presented, by intentional design, to single out and recognize excellence in individual effort. To put things in a ”MVP” perspective.

Contrasting the two.

Those are the core differences between PvP and PvE. The difference in emphasis on teamwork recognition versus individual excellence.

Hey, sounds pretty good, right? Having the ability to play what is, in effect, two completely different game styles, each with very deep and exciting gameplay, using the same characters, and having the same games and relaxing opportunities for soloing and exploration and questing outside of these exciting challenges.

Oh, is it time for the guild to do the ICC raid? That’s fine, just let me finish this Wintergrasp battle and I’ll switch specs and gear and be right there!

Pretty cool. Pretty awesome. Brings a lot of replay value to the table.

So, that being established, on what points are the two cultures being brought into conflict?

There have always been, to some extent, conflict between avid fans of each of the two cultures. It’s the inevitable result of HAVING two seperate cultures with such a distinct difference in direction within the same game.

What’s brought things into heightened drama this time are the existence of Achievements in game that require active participation in both PvP and PvE content, Achievements that reward participation with highly desirable items (310% Speed Flying Mounts).

In a perfect World (of Warcraft)

Right now, the way it breaks down is that there are two Meta-Achievements that reward players with Proto-Drakes;

• What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been (From completing all World Event Achievements such as Children’s Week, Hallow’s End, Love Fool, etc for a 310% speed Violet Proto-Drake)
• Glory of the Hero (from completing all Heroic Dungeon Achievements such as Less-Rabi, Girl Loves to Skadi All The Time, etc for a 280% speed Red Proto-Drake)

As has been pointed out in the comments, there are also two raiding-based 310% flight speed mount achievements that are not part of this discussion.

Perception is very important to this topic. 

The current perception of these two Achievements is that the Glory of the Hero Meta-Achievement is a teamwork based PvE reward, and What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been is considered a mostly solo effort PvE reward that has some PvP uncomfortably shoehorned in.

Take a step back and distance yourself from the emotion of the situation. What does “What A long Strange Trip” really do? It consistently takes you not only to various places in the traditional PvE game world, but also into Battlegrounds to complete different PvP based objectives.

“What A Long, Strange Trip” has the feel of a Meta-Achievement designed to be an all-inclusive grab bag of a little bit of everything WoW has to offer. A little solo work, a little fed-ex questing, a little searching for a lucky drop, a little PvP, a little dungeon questing, a little world exploring.

Still standing back and looking at things dispassionately?

What I’d like to see is the acknowledgement of a THIRD culture within WoW.

We have talked about PvE, and PvP, but there is now, and has always been, a third culture within the game.

The World Explorer.

They are not particularly vocal, and rarely get attention, but you either are one, or know someone who is.

World Explorers do not particularly enjoy playing in small or large groups, which is pretty much 95% of end game content.

World Explorers do not particularly enjoy intense personal combat against other real players, which is PvP.

What World Explorers DO love is playing their characters and doing their own thing in World of Warcraft itself, adventuring, questing, exploring, leveling, learning, trying new things, and often once they get to max level, they lose interest in that character and switch to a new one, simply because they do not feel drawn to end game group activities.

Three cultures, not two.

I think the Meta-Achievements, again in a perfect world, should be changed to reflect the existence of three playstyles, and to benefit players that pursue their own chosen playstyle to the ultimate limit.

Keep Glory of the Hero the same. It is an excellent example of a teamwork/PvE based Meta-Achievement. But increase the reward to being 310% flight speed. The dedication needed to accomplish this Achievement is pretty impressive.

Modify What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been to remove both dungeon and PvP aspects of the Meta-Achievement. Make it the Achievement for people that love and follow the playstyle of the World Explorer. Perhaps even tie in Loremaster and exporing all zone areas into it. Again, it should not be easy, it should represent the ultimate expression of following that cultures’ preferred playstyle. Keep it a 310% speed mount.

And then, show the PvP culture the respect they deserve by adding a brand new, completely PvP based Meta-Achievement that would reward them their own 310% speed mount. Perhaps the Ebony Proto-Drake.

Perhaps that is something Blizzard is already contemplating. I have no idea.

What I do know is that having three distinct Meta-Achievements tailored to each of three playstyle cultures makes a lot of sense to me, in direct response to the current game design, and the distinct preferences of the players involved.

So. That’s my dream for a perfect World. 

Dealing with Harsh Reality.

Now that I’m done wishing in one hand, let’s move on to dealing with reality as it is (if you can call Achievements in a virtual world “reality”).

There is a lot of stress, a lot of unhappiness and a lot of drama in the game right now. Two cultures are in direct conflict.

For the purposes of the rest of this conversation, I am going to use the accepted “PvE” and “PvP” terms for two cultures, including World Explorers in the PvE group. It is the most commonly accepted and understood framework for the game. But you know what I mean. :)

For people that play PvP as their preferred playstyle, a playstyle that is equally valid and should be equally as respected as the others, this week SUCKS.

There you are playing the way you like, and the game design itself is sending people into your Battlegrounds that do not want to be there, and while they don’t want to get in your way, they really want that damn proto-drake.

So, an influx of the innocent, the ignorant, the confused and above all else the hopeful, just looking to duck in and get it done and get the hell out of the way of the people that belong there.

The people within your own faction will hate to see these people on their team, and will get pissed at them for the havok they cause. But PvP players have a term for PvE players when they’re on the opposing force.

I believe they’re called “farmable kills”.

For those of us among the World Exploring and PvE crowd, the first lesson to learn is, it’s all about individual achievement in PvP. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you will get steamrolled and die.

If you decide you want revenge, then just remember everyone had to start somewhere, and everyone gets pwned at some point. Get your fire up, reach deep down and find your intestinal fortitude, and devote yourself to learning how to fight back. 

If you decide you just want to get your Achievements and be done with it though, please remember you are a visitor in someone else’s house. 

Don’t be the player that zones in, get’s what you want for yourself and then bails on the run. Whether you do get your Achievement or not, please stick it out, do your best, and along the way why not try to learn to kick ass? Or at least support the ones that do.

Think about how it feels when it happens to you. You KNOW you see people do that in raids and dungeons all the time.

As an example, you go into a VoA pug, the group does the newest boss first, and as soon as he’s down and Frost/Drops are passed out, a bunch of people instantly drop group. After all, there’s nothing for THEM in the rest of the raid instance, so why should they stay? What, to help YOU out? Get real.

Selfish? Yes. After all, they needed you there to get them their shot at what they wanted. The difference is they aren’t willing to do the same thing for you. Selfish.

You see the same thing on a smaller scale during group runs like Love is in the Air, when people needed to get Roses as a boss drop. How many times during that week did you see or hear of groups forming, the first boss in Utgardt Keep killed, Roses needed and players instantly bail on the rest of the party. 

It’s all the same thing. You don’t like people acting selfish when you are in a group to see it to the end and win, and neither do PvP focused players. They’re in there to win over the opposite faction, not sit there and swap capping Towers for 20 minutes.

I think it’s a fine testament to how polite and nice most players are, that when an Achievement week brings the ignorant flooding the Battlegrounds, a lot of PvP folks WILL drop what they’re normally doing and help.

What you need to really keep close to your heart is, you are the intruder in their turf. It’s their house. This is the part of the game THEY like.

When you visit someone else’s house, be polite, wipe your feet, don’t take a dump in their living room, and when you come for the party, even if all you wanted was free food and an open tap, you stay until it would be a polite time to leave, as in, after you get the Achievement, you stay and help KILL THE OTHER BASTARDS and win the match.

That being said, if you are a member of the PvP culture, please, I ask of you to make a few allowances this week for the clumsy and clueless that stumble into your house, drunk and dazed, looking for the bathroom, but who are perfectly willing to piss on the rug in the corner if they can’t find what they’re looking for.

I know it’s trying, and I know it’s annoying, but this is your opportunity to sucker people into thinking Battlegrounds are filled with fun people just looking for a good time, instead of the evil, malicious little bastards looking to gut yers in a dark alley like we all know you are.

Remember… “farmable kills”.

Just try and sympathize. These are people who have been working on their Meta-Achievement all year, and are already feeling stressed out at doing something totally unfamiliar. If they want to get the very, very nice reward at the end of this rainbow, they don’t have any choice but to try and complete the challenge Blizzard set. 

In conclusion… until the day when the Achievements reflect our actual interests, all we can do is try and be civil and respectful to each other, remember that we want to treat other players how we’d like to be treated, make allowances to some extent, and above all else keep in mind…

It’s only for one week, and then we can all get on with our lives.

For myself… I tried for two days to do Alterac Valley. I looked at the stress everyone felt, the anger and frustration on both sides, and I made my decision for myself.

I am no longer going to pursue “What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been”.

I’m going to mentally assign it the lable “PvP Meta-Achievement”, and I’m moving on.

I will instead set for myself the goal of completing, someday, “Glory of the Hero”, and work towards improving my teamwork and knowledge for that purely PvE related goal. Yes, even though it doesn’t reward you with a 310% speed mount as the game currently sits.

I hope that, even if you don’t agree with what I’ve said in this post, you’ll take the time to be a little more understanding during this chaos, on both sides.

None of us are out to intentionally screw up the others. It’s not personal. Give folks a chance, and they’ll be only too glad to get out of your hair.

My thanks for those folks who pointed out the inaccuracy concerning Red Proto Drake speed. It didn’t change my point at all, but leaving the mistake would have confused a whole lot of people, and I honestly did not know that.

I had a nice reader, Trystalia, send in an email that got me thinking once again about roads left untraveled.

She reminded me that I’d meant to do something… and then let myself get distracted.

Oooh, shiny!

What she did was mention an old post I wrote, once upon a time, about Azjul-Nerub, talking about tanking the first mobs and boss.

Particularly, addressing the Skirmisher game mechanic. 

I’ll direct you to the post if you’d like to see it for old times’ sake, but in essence, I was simply talking about the way the Skirmisher mobs respond normally as melee mobs at first, but after a set time delay they abrubtly drop aggro, become untauntable, and dash straight for the player furthest away from them, there to whack them on the head, hey diddle fol-le-roll. 

If left alive long enough, the Skirmishers bear down on clothies like a steam locomotive driving down on a tied-up, helpess maiden lying on the tracks. It’s quite frightening, when it’s you they come after. Briefly frightening, anyway.

These days, with the rapid rise in potential DPS, they are almost extinct as a problem. Most groups I see don’t even seem to realize there is anything different about them at all.

It was nice to be reminded of the post, mostly because Trystalia said knowing what the heck was going on with those idiots really helped her get her tank on in AN. The groups she tanked wasn’t focusing on them, so they’d have some wipes. I love hearing that something I wrote actually helped someone. 

The other thing it really did, as I said, was remind me that I had always meant to write more… about game mechanics and learning to be a tank.

Here’s the thing. And here’s where it might get ugly.

Being a tank has a lot in common with being a raid leader.

For good or bad, with the rise of PUGs, more and more the tank is expected to be the leader, set the pace, make the decisions and lead the group.

When you zone into a Heroic PUG (or PUG Raid) as the tank, you really need to understand what is going to happen in the upcoming fights. If you haven’t seen the fights before, or only seen them in another role with a tank that maintained his silence, then you’re going to need to do some research on your own to prepare.

It’s your responsibility, now. You signed up as tank, and yes, that does mean you are saying you know what you’re doing, not just with your class abilities, but in leading the group as a whole.

If you are not confident, in your own mind, that you know what to expect, then you’re not prepared enough to do the best you can.

You need to understand the mechanics of each encounter, and you also need to understand the basics of all the abilities all the other classes have to draw on. You cannot expect everyone else to know what you expect them to do, and just do it.

Yes, you should be able to trust other players to know how to play their own class, but as the tank, it is up to you to specify that you want the Priest to keep the target you marked with a Moon shackled during the entire pull, and leave him for last. Or that you want the Hunter to use Freezing Arrow to ice trap the Hunter or Mage on each successive wave during Halls of Reflection, to keep the overall ranged damage down during the fights. The other players know they can do it, but in most cases they expect to be told if you want them to or not.

You need to know not only who to pull and how, but also know what the mobs will do that other classes can counter-act, nullify, cleanse and overcome with their abilities. You need to know that a boss or mob can and will Fear the group, and if there is a Shaman in the group, make a point to ask for Tremor Totem to cut down on silly running around.

Did you know Priests used to actually be asked to Fear Ward? No, really.

Above all, you need to be able to communicate, to direct those other players in what is coming so that they are prepared. They need to know exactly what to expect, and you as the tank need to provide clear directions on what you want them to do in special circumstances.

There is one last thing you must do, that is the hardest thing of all, especially with strangers. You really have to be brave enough to ask other people to do something other than mindlessly following along doing DPS or Heals. Expect some to be pissed at slowing down even for a second, but you have to be able to do it. And once you specify what you want someone to do, you have to trust them to do it on their own. You need to lead from the front as the tank, focus on doing your own job to the best of your ability, and trust that everyone will work together as a team and do the things that will make the run work.

That is the ideal. That should be every player’s ultimate goal in group play. To play with knowledge, with skill, and as a fine-tuned team, making every encounter you face seem smooth and effortless. To make the game look easy to any outsider. 

To be a master of the game.

Does that description characterize the runs you go on?

Do you try your best, study the encounters from afar, and stand prepared to Ice Trap or Shackle or Feign Death or Misdirect or use Tricks of the Trade and Fan of Knives? Do you watch your aggro, Misdirect incoming mobs to the tank, know to kill the Skirmishers first and foremost, know what happens when King Dred raises his claws in a threatening manner?

Or do you resent anything that requires you to hit any button that does not directly apply to a DPS rotation? Do you resent it when a healer doesn’t keep you alive while you stand in the green slime, so you are forced to move away, losing precious seconds of your DPS rotation? Do you resent it when you have to Feign Death for a millisecond because you were overtaking the Tank on aggro?

If you intend to play the game in a group environment, you should not be satisfied by ’phoning it in’ and just mindlessly following a rotation no matter what. That’s fine in solo play, where no one suffers for your lack of skill or poor performance but yourself.

If you have no interest in actually trying to be the best you can be at what you do, why are you even doing it? Go play Hello Kitty Island Adventure and pick out a pretty sparkly wand with a hair bow and leave the rest of us alone, okay? 

What you’ll see in PUG after PUG is a lack of communication, a tendency to brute force everything, and at the first sign of trouble or a wipe, somebody will blame a bad tank for not holding aggro, or a bad healer for not keeping everyone alive, and drop group.

Do you buy into it? Is that really your view on how the game works when you play properly?

One prevalent attitude I’ve noticed is that raids are considered important enough to study, practise and learn about. To prepare for.

Heroic instances? Those are the places you go on your own to get your Emblems, lowering yourself to do content that is beneath your gear score, but what the heck, you’ll demean yourself to get your daily two Emblems of Frost if you have to.

There is no respect for the content, or the players around you. If people stop for two seconds to say something, to communicate, to do anything other than chain pull through a brute force approach, then the pissyness comes out fast.

I’ll be blunt. If you think that having 5500 DPS in Drak’theron Keep makes you shit hot, and that’s all that matters, then I’ve got news for you, sunshine; it doesn’t mean jack shit. It just means you’ve got good gear, not that you know how to play.

Any moron can stand there looking cute and repeat a chain of attack moves as instructed by Elitist Jerks. ANY moron. That many people do not visit Elitist Jerks to aid them in optimizing a DPS rotation just makes those that do think they are truly teh aw3some.

That does not make you a good player. A good player is not someone that can stand still and mash buttons in the right order to pump out DPS up to the potential permitted by gear and spec, while standing still and ignoring Mana or Threat levels.

Sorry, it doesn’t. The good players are the ones that are doing all the little things to keep the group alive and stable while you are playing Lone Ranger for the sake of your DPS meter e-peen. 

A good player is one that knows all those OTHER abilities of their class, and will use them when the situation calls for it, in their best judgment, or when called upon by their teammates, even if that means their DPS drops by a couple hundred on that pull.

A good player is one that knows the mechanics of the encouters they are going up against, is mentally prepared for the fight, and is ready to MOVE THEIR ASS and use class abilities other than DPS when necessary to ensure the success of the team.

That Skirmisher situation mentioned above?

Trystalia was glad to know about the Skirmisher mechanic, because she had problems with most runs, experiencing at least a wipe or two each time as the healer went down, and she was hurt for consistently being blamed for losing aggro.

She was blamed by pissy little snots for losing aggro on the Skirmishers.

Guess what, a good player of a DPS class knows that the Skirmisher needs to go down firstest and fastest, because in a few seconds it’s going to drop aggro from the tank and charge the person furthest away, and whomp them good.

You know, when the Skirmisher runs free, it’s not a failure on the part of the tank, it’s a failure on the part of the DPS. The death of the Skirmisher is a DPS race, pure and simple. If the Skirmisher nails a non-tank, then the DPS failed. Period. Bitch at yourself, not the tank, because you failed.

A smart Healer on those pulls will make sure they’re not the most distant from the tank, so that if/when the Skirmisher runs free, the Healer isn’t the one to go down, and they can heal someone through getting pounded.

Let’s use another example I see all the time, of mindless brute force in an inappropriate situation.

Heroic Halls of Stone, on the last boss, Sjonnir the Ironshaper. Sjonnir has a Lightning Shield, a Lightning Ring, applies Static Charge to a target, and taken all together they do hellacious group AoE damage to people close to him if those people all dogpile on top of him and hang out as a brute force approach.

He also does a Chain Lightning for up to 3 jumps, and stacks a debuff on players that causes you to take even more damage from Nature attacks (like all that Lightning), which stacks up to 20 times.  TWENTY TIMES.

God, I feel like shouting OVER 9 THOUSAND.

There are also adds that come rolling in from each side, and when ignored, inevitably they gain Healer aggro and start interrupting/slowing the Healer’s cast times just when everyone needs heals the most from the Ring of Fire… the Ring of Fire. Er, Lightning. Sorry, flashback.

What do I see? I see people literally all piling on top of Sjonnir, EVEN THE HEALER, getting as close as possible so that everyone can ignore the adds, trusting the tank’s AoE threat to grab them, and try to brute force him down fast. Inevitably, that leaves everyone within melee range and chain bouncing range of every single high damage ability that Sjonnir can do. AND also puts them all within range of the stacking debuff.

This is Halls of Stone, people. This is not a Halls of Reflection run, it’s not even Trial of the Champions.

And still, time after time, I see 5200+ gear score groups die by droves and even wipe on Sjonnir. 

After all, it’s just a Heroic, right? It’s easy mode, noob tank, noob healer, you all suck, /leave group in a huff.

Smart groups take the extra 3 seconds to decide that the tank will hold the boss in the center, the ranged will all spread out to prevent chain hopping lightning, a melee DPS or two (if present) will take the adds and keep them off the healer, and guess what?

The Healer is left to focus on the few players still in melee range of Sjonnir, the adds are never an issue, the Chain Lightning doesn’t jump 3 times, most people don’t get affected by the melee range AoE, and even the Static Charge is only a momentary nuisance on 1 or at most 2 people.

Almost as though the instance was designed to favor the mentally prepared, and those that take 3 seconds to formulate and share a plan.

I cannot count the number of Halls of Stone runs I’ve seen, across all my characters, where everyone just piled on in, even the ranged and healer, and then it’s a race to see if the entire group wipes before the boss dies. 

It’s disgusting, and people who play that way should be bloody well ashamed of themselves. If you’re not going to take the time to learn how to manage game mechanics and play your class in Halls of Stone, when the heck were you intending to start? Ulduar?

ICC?

I am, finally, getting to my point, and my point is this;

If you intend to tank, study the game mechanics of the mobs and bosses in advance, so you know what to expect. You will gain confidence and feel better prepared.

Give the encounters and your teammates the same amount of respect you would in a raid. A group activity is still a group activity, even if it’s with strangers, and it’s fewer people. Every instance is an opportunity to hone your skills and practise for the real serious shit.

Prepare properly. Take notes on what special problems there can be, find out who has abilities that can counter those problems, and use your judgment and experience to decide which game mechanics can be ignored and bulled on through, and which ones deserve your time and attention to nullify.

If you want to tank, even if you’ve seen all the fights as DPS, study them from the point of view of the leader. The organizer. The dungeon guide. You will have to explain them to other people, and that means you need to be able to articulate fast, with minimal typing. The better you understand the problem, the better you will be able to share your ideas and plans.

If you know what to expect, then you will feel much more confident in doing your job. I promise you.

At the very least, you will begin to learn that sometimes, when you might have thought you simply lost aggro from over eager DPS, you actually lost aggro due to built-in game mechanics. Or that the group wiped not because you failed to have aggro, but because the wrong mob was targeted for death first, and he had abilities that hit like a brick shithouse.

It may look from the outside like every pull and every boss in a Heroic is just “grab ‘em and go”, but that’s not the recipe for success.

Tanks, knowledge really is power.

On the first boss in Old Kingdoms, know that the boss becomes invulnerable when the add spawns, and make sure you grab that add. After all, everyone that is DPS should be trying to kill it fast so you can all get back on the boss, right?

On the Etherial boss in Violet Hold, know that standing there and getting nailed by the summoned orbs is a sure prescription for pain, even in Tier 9. Don’t be afraid to move your ass a little.

If you prepare yourself, yes, you will find that a lot of things can be forced, game mechanics can be ignored.

With gear level availability the way it is, though, there is no excuse for you to be found dead in Halls of Stone because you were in Brann’s chamber fighting wave after wave, and you stood in the big golden beams of death and died during Phase 3. When the golden beam hits your ass, MOVE!

Yes, even the Tank.

It’s disheartening, it really is.

Not that people are getting used to using brute force to solve all their problems, no. No, that’s expected and, given the current state of affairs, inevitable.

No, it’s disheartening how often people try and brute force things because they don’t know any better, and then when they fail in a Heroic, they lash out at the tank or healer, dump their anger out on the rest of the party, and then abandon group.

Don’t be like that. Take pride in what you do, even if other people around you don’t.

If you take the time to upgrade your gear, gem it, enchant it, plan your DPS rotations or set up your healing macros, or study how to generate and hold threat, then take it that next step further. Do what you can to learn the fights, the encounters and mechanics, and when you see yourself in that instance, know what mob will do what, and how you can deal with it.

One last thing.

Don’t be shy about communicating.

If you know what’s about to happen, you go ahead and try and offer some suggestions for a smooth encounter. If you’re rebuffed, or ignored, or even ridiculed for it, don’t take it as a sign that you are in the wrong. No, take it as a sign that those people who reacted in that way are poor players, or that they don’t respect you or the game itself. That makes them prime candidates for your ignore list so you don’t see them again in the future. 

When you do meet someone that plays well, knows what they’re doing, and is open to a plan, add them to your friends list. Build a network of people that actually give a shit.

In time, maybe you’ll forget that the other kind of player ever existed.