Ethics in video games journalism

A new tier of content is coming out in WOW, and with it comes a wave of terrible reporting designed to leverage outrage for clicks.  Outrage journalism has been around forever, but I think the way our media consumption is structured these days amplifies it.

Given that it shouldn't be any surprise that when people talk about new content in video games they try to make things sound EXTREMELY BAD and VERY SERIOUS no matter what the thing actually is.  I should be expecting this, but apparently I am not entirely jaded yet.

Recently I saw a perfect example of this when Preach Gaming was reporting on something on the public test realm for the new patch. 

Characters have legendary equipment.  In the new patch we were all expecting to be able to upgrade that equipment, and that is the case.  The way this will work is when you go to the new zone you will be able to do quests that award tokens, and with enough tokens you can upgrade your gear.  You won't be able to do it all that quickly, because these tokens are limited by how many quests appear each day.  I would expect it would take a couple weeks to upgrade a legendary piece, but we don't know for certain yet.  The tokens can be sold on the auction hall too, if people are so inclined.

This news is not outrageous, or even exciting.  It is precisely what we would expect.  However, the headline was that you will have to be rich to upgrade your gear in the new patch, because wallet warriors will buy all the tokens and leave the poor people to rot.

Outrage!  Anger!  Why would blizzard only let rich people do things!

Which is of course nonsense.  The vast majority of the playerbase won't use the auction hall at all for this, and will just do quests to get their upgrades over the course of a few weeks.  If you are broke and don't want to pay any money for your upgrades.... then don't.  I certainly won't be doing so, and I have a bunch of gold saved up.

Will there be rich people blowing giant wads of cash on day 1 to upgrade gear?  Yeah, I expect so, but so what?  You don't need to beat everyone in the world to the punch, just wait a couple weeks and get your stuff at the same rate everyone else does.  Unless you are one of the elite few pushing for world first, it just doesn't matter to you that someone else is buying a tiny bit of power for a few weeks until the world catches up.

Trouble is, saying "New system in the patch is fine, and pretty much expected.  Everyone will get their stuff by playing the game normally for a little while." generates no outrage, no clicks, no engagement.  It is true and boring.  "Poor people will be cut out of the game and have no fun." gets a lot of people wound up, so creators see an incentive to put out that kind of content.

It is all kinds of sad.  Blizzard does make mistakes, no question.  Calling them out on those mistakes is fine.  But if you are ranting and frothing about every damn little thing, you have to admit that you aren't actually interested in game mechanics - you are interested in villifying someone in a desperate attempt to make yourself seem more relevant and popular.  You are trying to find meaning (and profit) in being part of a mob that is intent on destruction for destruction's sake.  Mobs typically do proclaim that they are trying to save something sacred, but once they get going that is rarely what keeps them moving.

If you really are interested in how rich people oppress the poor, the real world has no end of examples.  You don't have to make things up.  But let's be real here, people who thrive on outrage reporting aren't looking for justice; they are looking for an angle to wind up their audience with lies.

Read my lips: Gradual power gain

I have said for awhile now that the WOW Shadowlands expansion has a problem with its raid.  The issue doesn't spring from the raid itself though, but rather the lack of gradual power scaling in the expansion as a whole.  Previous expansions had you gain power through both gear and other systems, and in Shadowlands people simply aren't gaining power through other systems, so midrange guilds like mine are struggling to kill later bosses.

Blizzard apparently agrees with me.  They have metrics about how many guilds are killing what bosses on what schedule, and they clearly are finding that people are getting brickwalled too much.  Every week they push out another big nerf to a raid encounter to continually make things easier so we can keep on progressing.  Sometimes they just flat out lower boss health, sometimes they tweak damage numbers, and sometimes they outright change mechanics.

I agree that they should do this, given that they put themselves into a bad situation.  There are two outcomes at this point - no changes, and guilds get stuck and quit, or keep on nerfing things so we can keep going.  Clearly the second way is better for subscription numbers, and also for fun.

However, Blizzard put themselves in this stupid situation and they need to stop it from happening in the next tier.

It sucks to constantly feel like your practice doesn't matter, and the best way to progress would simply be to wait for a month till the fights are easier.  It isn't a good feeling at all to know that killing bosses isn't a matter of slowly getting good enough to do it, but rather a waiting game until Blizzard decides it is time to nerf the boss.  All of that is ASS.

In the next tier they need to implement something to stop this nonsense of constant nerfs.  In previous xpacs they had awful grinds holding back this slow power gain, but that has its own problems.  People do not like feeling like they have to play trivial content 14 hours a day to get better in order to not let their guilds down.

The solution is simple.  Give us a weekly quest that takes 15 mins and gives us 1% more damage.  Make sure people who show up late or miss weeks can make those weeks up and catch up to the current cap.  The top tier guilds will be mostly unaffected, and midtier guilds like mine will slowly overpower content.  We will do it at our own pace, and we will know that practice matters a lot because 1% more isn't a huge deal each week.  By the end of the tier we will end up with 30% more damage though, and that will be plenty for us to kill everything.

We need slow power gain.  Blizzard's constant nerfing means they know that we need this.  All that remains is for them to listen to me and implement it.  

Hopefully they do it right.

I am not that good

The World of Warcraft Shadowlands expansion is doing very well.  Blizzard has confirmed that subscriptions are higher now than they have been in many years, and the general reception for the expansion has been positive compared to other expansions.  The numbers bear this out too - Normal and Heroic raiding participation is way up, and vastly more guilds are killing bosses now than were doing so in the last couple expansions.  It isn't just raiding though, as participation in all endgame content has gone way up in terms of raw numbers.

There is one place where the numbers are lower though, and that is the peak of raiding challenge, Mythic difficulty.  Numbers are down compared to last expansion, and I am confident they will get much worse as time goes on.

The reason for this is the lack of a power grind in Shadowlands.  In previous xpacs people got more powerful just by playing a lot and this let them overcome challenges by virtue of slow power inflation.  Shadowlands has little in the way of power inflation compared to earlier times, and this means that guilds are struggling to make the numbers checks in Mythic raiding.  I talked about this earlier when the first guilds were killing Mythic bosses, and now the numbers have borne out my projections.  The top guilds are still able to clear raids in a couple weeks just like before, but middling guilds like mine are struggling.  We are used to slow power inflation letting us beat content eventually, but with no more power inflation on the horizon we are going to have huge problems beating the harder bosses.

Currently we have downed 4 Mythic bosses.  We will get more so long as we keep at it, but the struggle is going to be real.  It is especially difficult because these folks are used to a progression pattern where they beat all the stuff, just not that quickly.  Perfectly fine for people who raid 6 hours a week and are fairly relaxed about it.  A shift into being a guild that doesn't beat all the stuff will be tough to swallow, even if it is due to larger trends that have little to do with how we play.  Just because other guilds are having the same struggles doesn't mean we are going to be happy about this.

I like the raiding I am doing, and I intend to keep blasting away at it.  If we don't kill all the stuff I am totally okay with that.  I like practicing and playing on challenging content and eventually getting some kills, but I am not especially hung up on any particular goal.  This isn't a big problem for me personally.

Still, I don't quite know how to feel about it.  Not having the pressure to constantly grind away to get those incremental benefits is a positive, but I actually love the overall system of gradual improvements in numbers combining with gradual improvements in execution leading to victories.  I am glad to not have that feelings that I have to play all the time doing stuff that is boring... but getting brick walled with no way to progress out of it is not great.

The biggest advantage to gradual power inflation is the social flexibility it grants you.  If you get stopped by a boss you can't quite do enough damage to beat, you can either boot weaker players from your group to get past it, or you can wait until inflation gets you over the hump.  Being able to keep playing with people who are fun to play with but who aren't quite there in terms of numbers is great.  In the scenario where we stop progressing in terms of numbers we may well end up in a spot where we either have to accept that we can no longer accomplish new goals or be super mercenary about who plays with us.  

Both of those options suck.  I don't want to boot good people over 5% performance.  I also don't want to just stop having new things to do.

This isn't some theoretical thing either.  Right now I have item level 222.  I am going to hit a hard cap at 226, and likely won't quite make it there.  That is, I can expect to do 5% more damage from gear eventually.  There is nothing else that will improve my abilities.  If we are 6% off from killing a boss, that boss isn't going to die.  We have finished all the grinds the game has offered us, and I don't think it is enough.

I don't want another infinite grind where I am offered the chance to play 14 hours a day slowly getting a number bigger.  Yuck.  I just want a thing I can do every week to get myself something quite small.  Just 1% more output would be plenty, since that means by the time new content arrives I will be doing 12% more than I am right now, which should be sufficient to beat the entire raid.

People like slowly getting to their goals.  They like seeing new things, and constant, gradual progress.  We are happiest not when we get it all at once, nor when we get nothing, but rather when we get a string of victories over time.  Now it just remains for Blizzard to make that happen.

Giving away loot

In the WOW Shadowlands expansion loot is contentious.  Blizzard decided to dramatically cut back the loot awarded in this xpac, and while I am generally happy with the new pace the changes have not been particularly popular.  The major complaint from where I sit is that by far the best way for me to get better gear was to do pvp.

I don't like pvp much, especially serious pvp.

But I do like being the best I can be for when I am doing raiding and dungeons, so I did some pvp to get gear.  A system where players who want to be optimal absolutely have to play one game mode in order to get loot for other games modes (which do drop loot of their own, just not enough) is flawed.  I think there should be benefits for people who do multiple types of content at a high level, but each content mode needs its own comparable advancement path.

Some numbers.  First, everyone gets loot two ways.  First, you can get loot as you do content during the week.  Second, you can get loot in your vault at the start of each new week.  The vault has many options, but you can only get one item from it no matter how much content you do.  Doing more content just gets you more choice.  

Imagine you are a Heroic raiding type of person.  Your raids drop item level 213 gear, and your weekly vault awards 213 gear.  If you did pvp at a similar level you get 213 gear during the week, and 213 options in your vault.  So far, so good.

However, that same person is probably doing dungeons at level 12, which gives them 203 loot from each dungeon, and 220 loot in their vault.

This leads to some bizarre situations.  If you are doing level 12 dungeons you probably don't need level 203 gear, it is already obsolete.  As such, dungeons don't give you anything except a shot at much superior gear at the end of the week.  This doesn't fit with the other modes, but I do understand where it came from.  Dungeons can be run over and over, and if they awarded 213 gear from every level 12 dungeon, it would be too easy to fully gear up.

This also means that everyone has to do dungeons because it gives the absolute best stuff in the vault.  That is, this happens up to a point.  Gear caps out at 226, but from raids and pvp you can get 226 both in the vault and from doing content.  Dungeon gear caps at 226 from the vault, but the stuff from every dungeon caps at 210.  Once you reach this cap you are stuck, and running dungeons no longer awards loot that matters.  That isn't good, and it meant that people like me ended up doing pvp because no matter how good I am at dungeons, the loot is trash and if I want to be my best self I should go do pvp so I can raid and do dungeons.

I hate being shovelled into content I don't like in order to do content I do like.  I could just ignore it of couse, but the fact is that my gear makes a huge difference to which groups I can get into and what things I can do.  Sitting and waiting for the vault each week when I could be improving myself is not how I want to play.

Blizzard has developed a solution for this.  It is a bit kludgy, but it does address the problem to some extent.  Their idea is that you will be able to get badges in dungeons, and you trade in those badges to upgrade your dungeon loot.  At the top level you will be able to upgrade loot to 220.  This is worse than pvp and raiding, but it is a big improvement over what we had before.

Trouble is, 220 is still less than 226, which means dungeon loot is going to be worse than everything else.  This grants an upgrade path for dungeoneers, which I like, but I don't see a reason for it to stop short.  Dungeons scale infinitely, so at the highest levels they are monstrously difficult.  Raiding at the highest level is hard, but a level 30 dungeon is actually impossible.  You can pick some dungeon level below that which is ludicrously difficult and gate the gear behind that.  There is no worry about giving it away too easily.

There is one catch though.  When you are getting gear from raids, that gear is random.  Most of the time it has fixed stats, but every so often you get a piece that has an extra on it.  These bonus abilities don't increase damage or healing directly, but they help a bit.  However, since all the gear you get from raiding is random, if your Bracers of Beatdown drop, you put them on whether or not they have that extra bonus on them.  However, if you are running dungeons you can run a crapton of them looking for Pauldrons of Smacking that *also* have that extra bonus.  They will start at a low level, but then you can upgrade them to level 220.  This means that people upgrading dungeon gear will consistently have extra bonuses on their gear, so it is a little better than the level 220 it appears.

That extra bonus isn't enough.  To give a proper comparison, if you were in full 220 gear with every piece with a small bonus, and someone else was in full 226 gear with no bonuses, the 226 character does about 9% more damage and has 6% more health.

The 220 character gets to move 20% faster, regain 10% of their damage dealt as healing, and negate 12% of all area of effect damage they take.  The 226 character is better, and realistically they will get some extra bonuses on their gear, just not as many, but those extra things make quite a difference.  Of course an actual character is going to have a mix of those things, but this gives some context for what kind of tradeoff we are making.

Other people mostly scoff at extra bonuses on gear.  They don't care much about regaining health or speed.  I like those extra bonuses a lot!  I love being fast, and a lot of the time I would happily trade 6 levels on my gear for an additional 5% movement speed.  I know I am in the minority in this, but I am confident in my calculation.

People ignore things like speed because it doesn't show up in a simulator.

But in simulators you always live to the end of the fight, and in real game play being slow means you die to stupid stuff sometimes.

In any case, much as I might nitpick this, it is at least a step in the right direction.  Letting everyone play their own form of content and get geared up doing so is a great goal, and I don't mind at all if doing multiple forms gives an edge - I just want that edge to be smaller than it is.

Swords are bad, get a wand

In WOW there is always a struggle to balance melee and ranged damage dealers.  Baseline ranged have a huge advantage that they can attack from all kinds of places while melee are pinned near the enemies.  In theory this is balanced by melee having a better toolkit of survival and disruption abilities, and this works pretty well in 5 person dungeons and pvp.  It doesn't work that well in big raids.

This is being a serious problem right now in the Castle Nathria raid.  My guild, like many other guilds, has realized that we have way too many melee.  There are a lot of fights where you have to run away from the boss for awhile and stand around and this is awful for melee and perfectly fine for ranged.  We aren't melee heavy in theory - our damage is split roughly even melee/ranged - but that split is terrible for the raid we are doing.

It doesn't hurt that most of the top damage dealers in terms of raw numbers are ranged, so a melee has to be exceptional to get a spot even on fights where they aren't unduly punished.

I am playing a melee character.

I am not super worried about being booted from the raid team because I am the top damage dealer for the raid about half the time and always finish top 4.  They are going to keep me around because at our level you still see large variance in performance within a spec, and I consistently deliver.

But the other melee players are probably feeling worried, and their worry is justified.  

I don't have any good answers for them either.  Swapping classes to a ranged class is possible, but catching back up isn't fast and most people don't want to swap.  If we can't win with the composition we have then management is faced with the terrible prospect of recruiting ranged players and booting melee players, including people who have been around awhile.

No easy answers.

This is also going to compound the problem I talked about last time.  This xpac has no infinite grind to increase player power.  That feels good in a way, because we don't feel obligated to grind.  However, it has the issue that guilds like mine are in bad shape.  We have good players, but we will probably need some kind of slow power gain to actually beat the entire raid.  It is made worse by the fact that we have what should be a normal mix of melee and ranged, but is bad right now.  Top guilds just force people to reroll or recruit whoever they need.  We don't do that.

I was looking into some options for how I could fix this by respeccing out of a melee role.  I don't want to play a holy paladin healer, as I haven't done that in most of a decade.  That would have helped us a little.  I investigated playing a prot paladin healer and I think it might actually be pretty good.  Nobody in top guilds is running a tank spec player doing full heals, but I always look for these weird spots to shine and I am a believer that this could be a good strategy.

Protection paladins have good throughput.  My main heal is one I build up by attacking, and then BOOM it drops a huge heal.  I can hit it about every 5 seconds for 21500 healing (if I am targetting someone at half health), which also puts a 4000 point shield on me.  4000 healing/sec is not enough to be a proper healer, especially because I don't bring big raidwide healing cooldowns.  However, being essentially invincible, healing for 4000/sec, and also delivering 2000 damage/sec is a good set of things to do.  I also have the advantage that if a tank ever dies I just step in and start tanking no problem.  I am slightly squishier in my weird healing spec but only slightly, so me stepping in to tank for strategy (or to recover from calamity) is a fine thing.

Mostly people don't want me to try weird stuff like this.  They go with what normal raid groups do.  However, I think in this case it would actually be quite strong in many fights.  Sometimes you need exactly 4 healers to get through a fight, in which case this build of mine is bad, but sometimes you need 4.5 healers and I can be an excellent .5 of a healer.

So far nobody has decided that we need to get rid of melee badly enough to get me to heal as a tank.  I can't decide if I should wish that it would get that bad so I can try my crazy thing, or if I should wish that things just work.

The consequence of no grind

My guild just finished up the current WOW raid on heroic mode.  We are now ready to start working on mythic.  This is slower than the group is used to, but that is explained by the raid being harder than expected.  I like that, and I am perfectly content with slightly slower progression.  In the previous expansion I landed in the middle of a patch and didn't get to experience most progression.  Now I get to see the whole thing start to finish, which is great.

However, we have some problems.  Castle Nathria is a tough raid.  One of the hardest start of xpac raids ever.  The absolute top guilds cleared it in 8 days or so, which isn't unusual, but I am concerned for middling guilds like mine.  In previous expansions there were mechanics to let weaker guilds gradually beat extremely hard content.  Initially Blizzard just put in % bonuses, but those didn't feel good.  Lately they have been adding in slow grinds that let players gradually get more powerful so the weaker players can slowly overpower difficult content without feeling like it was handed to them.  In the previous raid tier we had Corruption, which increased my damage by about 40%.  This allowed me to put out sufficient numbers to do content that the best guilds beat without that bonus.

This expansion we don't have those systems that slowly power us up.  There are a few small things like sockets from Venari, additional conduits, and gradual gear increases, but if the best players in the world beat the content at 220 item level, and my guild gradually gears up until we are fighting the bosses at 226 item level, we are only getting an 8% increase over them.  Even with sockets and conduits we are still only going to be 15% better than them in raw numbers.

That won't be enough.  We have good players, and some middling players, but the absolute best in the world are more than 15% better than us, especially when you consider that they can stack classes to have any composition they want while we simply have to run with the group that we have.  Given their class stacking options we might well only have a 10% advantage by the time we arrive at the final boss.

It seems entirely possible that we will simply be flat out unable to defeat the mythic raid this tier.  It won't be just us, either - any guild that is more than 10% worse than the best in the world isn't going to be able to win.

I get why Blizzard did this.  They wanted to get away from infinite grinds where players felt obligated to play forever for marginal increases to power.  They wanted to just make the game about getting your gear and then being able to log off for the week if you want to.  I get that, and I don't disagree.

But the consequence is that if the raid is extremely hard for the best, then the pretty good cannot win, ever.

If we can't beat the final boss before the next raid tier arrives, that isn't a disaster.  I will just keep on practicing to beat whatever it is we can beat.  Still, I bet there will be a massive outcry about this once other people realize what is happening.  They haven't seen it yet because they are used to beating bosses a couple months after the cutting edge people do.  When they finally realize they cannot do so, then a reckoning will come.

It turns out that even though people complained about the infinite grinds those infinite grinds had a purpose.  Getting rid of them has consequences that we will have to grapple with, whether or not this is a net positive change in general.

The great failure

Shadowlands has been by and large a strong expansion for WOW.  In particular I commend Torghast and the first raid as being especially fun.  There is one thing that stands out as being a horribly designed disaster though:  The new mission table.

I like the idea of recruiting heroes and sending them out on missions.  Ever since this mechanic appeared in Warlords of Draenor I have been a fan.  It made me feel less like an errand boy delivering goods and more like an important leader, which is appropriate considering the lore and history of the world.  Each expansion has brought a new implementation of the mission table, and this new one is the first catastrophic failure.

It looked good at first glance.  Heroes all have unique abilities, and positioning matters since each side has a front row and a back row.  Some units attack in a cone, or attack the furthest away unit, or defend their teammates.  In theory this seemed like it could be a deep tactical subgame for WOW.

In practice it is a pure numbers grind, and the numbers are rubbish.

Attacking targets in the back row *seems* like it is a way to take out casters.  However, because all of your units bash into the front line and the back line has plenty of health, you want every attack to smash into the same enemy in the front.  Attacking back line enemies is useless.  Units have all kinds of special abilities but they can simply be summed up by figuring out their damage per round and ignoring any unique traits.  All you do with most covenants is fill up your ranks with random heroes and make sure your level is high enough to plow through the enemies.  Strategic decisions are nearly irrelevant to the outcome.  It simply doesn't matter that enemies have a cone attack, or a bleed, or a heal.  You deal with every threat the same way.

So the system is a complete failure when it comes to delivering on its obvious promise of strategy.  How does it do otherwise?  Since there isn't any strategy that matters, you would imagine it would be trivial to balance at least.

Unfortunately the balance is completely busted.  The Night Fae have troops that permanently reduce enemy damage done by 20%.  You put four of those in a group with a healer and they can beat any mission.  The rest of your heroes don't matter, you just send out that one comp and it beats everything.  The game has challenging plot missions and as you do them the level of the missions you face rises.  After awhile of smashing everything with your broken comp none of your other heroes can beat anything and they are utterly worthless.  You have level 30 heroes going up against level 50 missions and they are helpless.  

The Night Fae situation is a disaster because of one stupidly overpowered ability.

Kyrian, on the other hand, has troops that are utter garbage.  Instead of 'all enemies do 20% less damage, stacking', the Kyrian troops do 'a few allies take 10% less damage, not stacking'.  The Kyrian don't have any powerful way to do anything, and their heroes are weak.  If I want to beat a level 30 mission as Kyrian, I will need to slowly grind my way up to level 40 to even stand a chance, and I might need be level 50.  Those level 30 missions can be beaten by Night Fae at level 15 without any difficulty.

Simply put, they completely screwed up the numbers.  Many heroes are nigh worthless, and there are some outrageously broken ones.  That would be fine if every covenant had a mix of both, but they don't.  If you are Night Fae you get tons of materials, cash, mounts, pets, and other rewards.  Kyrian get basically nothing.  Both of these situations are wretched.

This basically comes down to the system having some cool ideas at the outset, and the numbers being written in 5 minutes by some intern.  I could easily take the ideas presented in the system and make numbers that would make sense and be enjoyable for players.  What players want is a way to level up heroes, defeat missions that seem appropriately challenging, and eventually earn the big rewards.  They don't want to grind endlessly for seemingly nothing, and they don't want to instantly crush all opposition without thought or creativity.

The mission table is a small part of the game admittedly.  This isn't wrecking it for everyone.  Still, covenant choice is not supposed to work out this way, and it is clear that the subgame was incompetently built.  It is so messed up though that I don't expect any fixes soon.  My guess is they will just write it off entirely until a big update happens in six months and then rebuild it from scratch.  It is a black mark on their record, no doubt, because this isn't some tricky thing that is tough to notice.  Anyone who played it through would have seen how wretched it is, and if they didn't then either there was no testing or the testing was as badly done as the original design.