Going walkabout

I recently finished running some gamers through a one shot scenario in my roleplaying game Heroes By Trade.  Overall they seemed to have a great time, and the experience gave me some insight into one particular rule in DnD that I did not include in Heroes By Trade.  Naked Man gave me a lot of flak for not having it, but now that I have seen people's reactions I am sure I made the right decision.

That rule is attacks of opportunity.  The basic idea is that if you do something that leaves you open your opponents can take advantage and bash you.  That outline looks fine, but the way DnD implements it is disastrous.  The key problem is that 'leaving yourself open' includes simply walking away from the enemy.

This means that once a melee character closes in, you are stuck next to them.  This is especially true if the melee character has a single huge attack, because often you lose half of your HP if you move away, so you are trapped next to them for the duration of the battle.  

I can see where this comes from.  Old DnD fighter design was that fighters walked up to people and bashed them.  They had no options, no choices.  If a ranged character was a bit faster they could simply walk away and keep on shooting and the poor fighter was absolutely wrecked.  It seems kind of silly that a ranged character who is slightly faster can so trivially defeat a melee type, so the designers decided to make it punishing for anyone to walk away from a melee combatant.  Walk away, you get smashed.

They solved the problem wrong.

The problem is that melee types have no options.  You don't solve that by locking down ranged people so that *nobody* has any options!  You solve it by giving melee characters meaningful ways to keep people in range.  Unfortunately the solution they went with is to keep fighters mind numbingly boring and make it extremely hard to maneuver around a battlefield.  Once people lock swords, everyone stands in a pile fighting.  

The players in my test game were DnD veterans.  When a monster walked next to them they wanted to move away, and then looked at me with big, sad eyes, asking if they were going to take an attack of opportunity.  I said no, because my game doesn't have such a thing.  Their faces lit up with glee, and they moved around the battlefield to find a better vantage point.  The players clearly wanted to wander, and in Heroes By Trade you can.

Of course you do have to solve the problem of melee being trivially defeated by ranged folks who keep on running away.  My solution is to give melee options.  They can knock a ranged person down, preventing them from running and making them easy to bash.  They can grab a slippery caster, keeping them within reach.  They can dash madly across the battlefield to get in position to thump.  They can't always do all of these things of course, compromises must be made, but they have ways to keep a ranged enemy pinned down, just as the ranged enemy has ways to escape.

I am extremely pleased with my choices, particularly after seeing the results in this game.  Players have a lot more fun when they are actively involved.  It is more exciting to choose to use Immobilizing Shot to pin an enemy in place that to simply walk next to them and have attacks of opportunity keep them close.

People want to make choices, to have control over their fate.  They also like to be able to run around in a fight and do exciting things.  Attacks of opportunity prevent both of these things.  Good riddance.

Bad Blizzard

For many months now Blizzard, the game company behind behemoths like Hearthstone, World of Warcraft, Diablo, Overwatch, and other iconic games has been mired in controversy and legal trouble.  The state of California is suing them for a variety of things including sexist hiring, promotion, and pay practices, failure to resolve sexual abuse complaints properly, and destroying documents  to cover up their problems.

After reading the court filing and hearing many of the complaints brought forward it is clear that Blizzard has enormous problems with entrenched sexism at the company.  There was one senior executive in particular who was widley known to grope many women at Blizzcon in particular and people regularly had to pull him off of women when he was drunkenly grabbing them.  Nothing was ever done about this, it was simply accepted as the way things are.  There are no end of other horrendous stories though, like women being sexually assaulted and then moved to other teams to spare their attacker from facing any consequences, as well as regular events where male employees would go on drunken 'cube crawls' to harass the women working there.

It is a neverending parade of awful.

Blizzard's initial response was to deny all allegations and blame overzealous regulators in California for overreacting.  The media, player, and employee response to that was *extremely* negative thankfully and the people in charge quickly decided that heads had to roll.  You know you have to do something when the people playing your game are killing an NPC named after one of your executives over and over again just for spite.  They fired Blizzard's CEO and the head of HR and began terminating all kinds of other employees caught up in the scandal.

That is all well and good.  I want those people fired, and prosecuted where appropriate.  This sort of thing is never going to be quickly or easily resolved though.  Entrenched cultural norms take a long time to change, and a rapid leadership swap just isn't going to fix everything.

The question is, what should I do about it?

Complaining on the internet is my first response of course, but should I delete all Blizzard games?  Should I refuse to ever give them money again?  I thought about it a lot and came to the conclusion that other game companies are often bad in similar ways.  Decamping to one of their games isn't really helping anything.  Awful treatment of women is extremely common in that industry.  Most likely what I would be doing is supporting a game company that just hasn't been caught yet.

I think the thing I should focus on is not trying to punish Blizzard, but rather to create a community in WOW that has the values I support.  I should speak up about sexism wherever I see it.  I should refuse to accept it from the people around me.  I should do this both in person and on forums that I frequent.  This is something I have always done to an extent, but I should push it harder now that I know just how bad things are.

There are a lot of people whose response was 'Burn Blizzard to the ground'.  I am not going that far.  I want the leadership purged, and I want to see huge numbers of abusive people get fired.  I am totally willing to accept slower content updates and worse response time as Blizzard sorts itself out and restructures.  I want the games I love to be built by a company whose values I can get behind.  That isn't true right now, but I have hopes that this will be the catalyst for it to be true in the future.

A great mistake

The newest content patch for World of Warcraft is coming in 11 days, and I am looking forward to it a great deal.  Partly this is because we desperately need new stuff, but part is that Blizzard is adding a broken new legendary item in for my class and spec, and they don't seem to realize how absurd it is.  The community at large hasn't seemed to grasp it either, as most people seem to think it is decent but no big deal.

They are so wrong.  This new item is called Divine Resonance (DR) and it is going to break things for paladins of the Kyrian covenant.

Here are the basics.  A normal legendary item should be adding roughly 5% to your overall output.  On single target that amounts to something like 300 damage per second.  Healing per second is much more complicated, but it is reasonable to think of them as having similar value.  My current legendaries add about 300 dps on single target, and as much as 500 dps on fights with many targets.

DR interacts with a 1 minute cooldown that I already have.  After that 1 min cooldown is used, it casts a spell every 5 seconds for 30 seconds, so I get 6 casts.  That spell does damage, generates holy power, and has an additional effect.  First I will do the calculations for my damage spec, Retribution.

First, single target.  For Retribution the spell that is cast is Judgement.  That does 3325 damage directly.  It also makes the target take 25% more damage from my big finisher.  Sometimes that will overlap with other things, so it is probably only worth about 20% on my finisher, which is 1347 damage.  It also provides 1 holy power to cast more finishers, which is worth about 20% of a finisher, which is another 1347 damage.  That means on average each one of those hits is worth 6020 damage.  I get 6 of those hits each minute for a total of 602 damage per second.

So on single target this legendary is worth double what other legendaries are.   That is nuts.  However, is it any good on multi target fights?  I will assume 5 targets for now.  The initial hit is still 3325, but the finisher bonus is significantly worse at 930.  The holy power is better though, clocking in at 4140 damage.  Thus DR is worth 840 dps on five targets.  It isn't as much better on multi target, but it is still absolutely my best option by a huge margin.

Retribution

                    1 target    5 target

Current        300           500

DR              602            840

Now to examine how this legendary works for tanking when I am Protection spec.  This mechanic is quite a bit more challenging to model because Holy Power has multiple uses while tanking.  I will go with my worst case estimates though, to be cautious.  The spell that is cast by DR when I am Protection is Avenger's Shield (see Captain America) which hits up to 5 targets so as we add more targets the ability gains dramatically in efficacy.  Also I heal for every damage dealt by it, so I get both offence and defence.

First, single target.  Avenger's Shield does 1744 damage.  It heals me for 1744.  Also it gives me a holy power, which is worth 237 damage and 2576 healing.  As such, it gives me a combined total of 630 dps, counting healing as dps.  This doesn't even describe its full power though, as this also grants me significant defensive benefits that are extremely hard to quantify.  I won't have to quantify them though, as DR is so busted that side benefits aren't even needed.

On five targets things get out of control.  The base healing and damage increase by five times, as does the holy power damage.  The holy power healing is unchanged.  The total here is 2120 dps.  This is off the charts.  To put it in perspective, I have another legendary that I use most of the time that is purely relevant in AOE.  It does 2370 dps on five targets and is nigh worthless on single target, plus all of its benefit is in damage with no defensive ability at all.  Realistically I only use that because I have no other good options.  If I was using a good all around choice I would be getting roughly 300 dps overall, similar to what I would get for my other spec.

Protection

                    1 target    5 target

Current        250            350

DR              630            2120

That 2120 number is a huge, monstrous outlier.  Now it should be noted that 5 targets is the optimal number for DR.  If I chose any larger number of targets it wouldn't get much better, and if I chose less targets it falls off mostly linearly.  Still, at any number of targets this is a ludicrous ability.  My total output is roughly 6000 dps (again, counting healing and damage both), so 2120 is inappropriate.  It is quite reasonable to model this as averaging 1000 dps over a whole dungeon, making it vastly more powerful than any legendary for any class.

What is funny is that these calculations above haven't even captured the whole problem.  There is a new power for the Mikanikos soulbind that reduces the cooldown of the ability that does this, by as much as 33% on 5 targets.  I will almost for sure be using that, which raises the 5 target effectiveness over 3000 dps, making it a 50% increase in throughput.

So here is the question:  Should it be nerfed?  There are two approaches to answering this.  First, yes, it is silly overpowered, and should be brought into line.  Second, Retribution and Protection paladins aren't used in *any* high end optimal raids or dungeon groups.  None.  They are trash tier.  Clearly this will help, but I don't think it will actually result in them being overpowered overall.  I suspect it will raise them from trash tier to respectable.

If you are a game designer and you make a huge mistake like this but the people who benefit from your mistake are still totally in line with other groups, should you fix it?  Ideally of course you nerf this legendary but buff the specs that aren't working well, but Blizzard seems set on leaving my two specs as weak, so they aren't going that route.

I don't get to decide that they should buff me and nerf this absurd legendary.  They should, but Blizzard isn't likely to listen to my plan.  As such, I will use the thing and be totally busted and hope that they conclude that overall I am still fair, so it should sit as is.

Race and species

I got an email from the creator of Gloomhaven about his new game Frosthaven.  The email addressed a bunch of changes he is making in the new game that centre around cultural sensitivity, character choice, and race.  He brought a consultant on board to teach him about how to write cultures well and avoid dumping on cultures not his own.

I like this idea.  Gloomhaven was a tremendously fun game but it had some issues when it came to the way the players made choices.  You had to side with the religious colonizers in the big cities against the native populations, for example, if you wanted to play the game.  You also got stuck massacreing children in scenario 3, which a lot of people weren't on board with.

Naturally many people were extremely angry about this and demanded refunds.  The idea of treating native groups as people rather than obstacles or resources to be exploited is not a comfortable one for a lot of people.  It would make them question the righteousness of their ancestors, after all.

I am glad to see a creator take a stand though.  I am sure it cost him many sales of Frosthaven, but taking a public stance against colonialism and racism is a good thing.

One thing in his email of particular interest to me was talk about the way that we reference different groups in fantasy settings.  The standard method is to call dwarves, humans, elves, etc. races instead of species or some other word.  This is odd though, since clearly dwarves and humans are not simply races - their differences are not just minor and cosmetic.  They can't interbreed and have wildly varying abilities.  Species is clearly a much more accurate descriptor, and yet it is not the one we use typically.  One potential issue with using the word race in this way is that it reinforces the idea that races of humans are drastically different in temperament, ability, and potential from one another.  Human races are not different in these ways, and throughout history when people try to make the argument that they are this different it is to justify atrocities and position some races as subhuman.

In DnD and many other settings some different species can produce offspring together, such as elves and humans producing half elves.  This is similar to the real world though, where ligers (lion / tiger mixes) actually do exist.  Lions and tigers are still different species though.

This brings me to the way I wrote my own fantasy setting.  I used the word race when I wrote it without thinking about it too much - it was just the standard way of talking.  In my world the different species come from totally different sources as each was created by a god like entity with a particular purpose in mind.  Clearly species is a more accurate way of referring to them.  Interbreeding is possible in a limited way - humans can interbreed with any other species, but the children are always human.  (Humans were created to embody Growth, which is why this is the case.)

The most obvious problem with calling fantasy groups races instead of species is when one race is the BAD PEOPLE and they happen to have dark skin while the group with light skin is GOOD PEOPLE.  Orcs and elves are like this in DnD, and the recent version has moved away from it, for good reason.  I stayed away from that trope, and gave each group different priorities and tendencies that arise from their origin, none of which is just 'This one is evil, so you can kill them without worry.'

When I look at the species in my world the ones I love to hate the most are dwarves.  They are from Tradition and they value conformity, continuity, obedience, deference to authority, and sanctity.  I want them to die in a fire.  However, lots of people in the real world wouldn't see this as evil at all, and in fact they love those ideals.  Dwarves are the group I personally identify with the least, but they definitely aren't a stand in for evil.

On the other hand, gnomes in my world are hippie free love anarchist vegetarians.  I think they are great, but they would certainly be the villains for some folks, especially the MAGA types.

Overall I am happy with my design for the species in my world.  They are varied and none is simply branded as Team Bad.  However, species is a better word for these groups because it is both more accurate and also avoids the problems spilling over from the way we talk about race in the real world.

I guess I have some editing to do.

Hot dates with gamers

My WOW guild is recruiting.  We need a bunch of bodies to fill the roster for when new content arrives, and it is going to be tricky to make that happen.  Primarily this is a problem because we stopped raiding, and getting new applicants when you aren't raiding is .... rough.

But this won't be a problem because the guild tapped me to help out with recruiting.  Surely I can beat the odds, right?

This seems to be the way it goes.  Every guild I get into lets me into raids to do damage because they need a body, they realize I am good and I become a regular, and then eventually I end up being a main tank because some other tank quits and there I am, ready to step in.

Once I become a main tank I eventually end up being asked to be an officer.  The guild / raider relationship escalator seems inescapable for me.

The first thing I noticed when I started doing work on the recruitment problem is how recruiting for a WOW guild is just like a dating website and people all make exactly the same mistakes in both situations.  Awhile ago I wrote a blog post about how people's dating profiles were garbage because they tried to be too generic and inoffensive.  Sure, you can get a lot of first dates by being nice and friendly and asking for a partner who is kind and smart and funny, but those first dates are going to be trash because you haven't weeded out all the people you hate.  You have to put in tons of dealbreakers like religion, politics, and bad habits.  This will make sure that when you do end up on first dates you have a much better chance to actually like your date.

WOW guilds are the same.  They all talk about their friendly atmosphere, how they want everyone to feel at home, and request people who are knowledgeable and prompt.

Useless.  Nobody recruits by saying "We won't make you feel at home, we are a bunch of assholes, and we want to recruit idiots who never show up."  If nobody would ever say the opposite of what you are saying, then what you are saying is pointless.  It is exactly the same as "I like travel and good food." on a dating profile in that it rules nobody out and accomplishes nothing in terms of telling people what you actually want.

The raiders are no better.  They are all hardworking, efficient, easygoing people, according to their advertisements.  BOOOOORRRRRRIIIIINGGG.

The one thing the two groups can use to sort each other is raid times.  It works out exactly like dating sites use location - you have to match that, or nothing happens.  If you are in Hong Kong it doesn't matter how great you are, we aren't dating.  If you raid while I am asleep, we aren't a raiding team.

I want to make our advertisement actually good.  We are on a huge server with hundreds of raiding guilds, so there is no shortage of applicants.  The trick is figuring out how to stand out from the crowd, and you don't do that by putting down a bunch of generically 'nice' statements and raid times and hoping.  However, at this point my guild leader made it clear that she doesn't want me going off and being aggressive in our guild advertisements.  I am sure that I could get great people doing it my way, but I am not the one in charge, so for the moment I have to do it her way.

The trick, I think, is that I need to be good at recruiting, make it clear I can get the job done, and then push to get let off the leash.  When you first get handed responsibility you often have to put in that time to make it clear you can follow instructions and do it the normal way so that you can earn the trust to do something more imaginative.  For now I will write a mostly normal recruiting post, but in the back of my head I will be creating the real one, the one I want to use when I finally get to do it my way.

Also, if you happen to want to raid mythic in WOW, hit me up!

Temporarily dead

Sometimes being right sucks.

A couple of times over the past six months I made the prediction that my guild in WOW would not make it to the end of the current raid, Castle Nathria.  We are a middle of the road guild and only raid six hours a week, the combination of which limits our ability to kill stuff.  In previous tiers there were gradual power gain systems that kept the guild on an upward track, but this expansion those systems didn't exist.  As such we ended up killing 7 of 10 bosses on the highest difficulty level and then packing it in until the next tier of content arrives.

I was pretty sure exactly this thing would happen.  I think a lot of the folks in the guild are disappointed, but you can tell when things are going downhill and you have to accept that it is coming.  We had been dying to boss #7 for several weeks and we were pulling in random people from the group finder or lower tier people in the guild just to get enough bodies to raid.  Combine that with a lot of the core people feeling burnt out and anyone could see that we couldn't continue.  The guild leader told us we had one more week of attempts and then we would quit, but just before our time ran out we finally killed it.

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief that we didn't have to give up in despair after 170 wipes, and mostly everyone logged off and isn't coming back until new stuff is out.

I am entirely okay with this.  For me raiding is about community and striving against a challenge, not so much about killing any particular boss.

Still, this outlines a real challenge in game design for Blizzard.  People complain a lot about gradual power gain systems that rely on players constantly doing activities in game to keep up with them.  They don't like the idea that they *have* to keep doing stuff to maintain maximum player power.  Plus many of the top players complain that Blizzard lets the casuals (like me) kill stuff by handing out power increases instead of just saying 'git gud nub'.

On the other hand, players love gradually improving their results.  Let the players beat everything on day 1 and the players will be upset and leave - make it so they can't beat anything and they will quit that game too.  Set it up so that they slowly improve enough to defeat things that formerly were impossible, and you have an experience that people will stick with forever.

It does seem kind of odd that people would feel so good about challenges becoming consistently easier to surmount so that they can get past them without any self improvement, but that does seem to be the way it works.

As far as I can tell the next tier of content is going to be the same as this one.  There will be many challenges, and we will get better gear to help us overcome them, but there will not be any big, important gradual power increases outside of that.  It seems likely to me that my guild will be in the same place six months from now - most of the way through the new content, but burnout, frustration, and lack of skill will prevent us from finishing it up.

I don't care much if we kill the final boss or not.  No big deal to me.

What is a big deal is culture.  I like these people, both socially and as people to play a game with.  Each guild has different ways of talking, different jokes that are okay, and different levels of dedication.  Finding a place that matches you in these regards is far more important than any boss kill, to me.  After all, nobody ever got happy by killing one more boss.  They do get happy by finding a peer group that brings them joy though, and this is what I found with this group.

And heck, maybe they will surprise me with greater skill and success than before.

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.