Climb on my back

In the past couple weeks I have been doing a lot of carries in WOW.  The ways it works is I am in a bunch of discord channels and an advertiser posts a run.  Boosters like me reply if the post suits them, and then we gather into a group in game and carry someone through a dungeon.  The ad will tell us how much we get paid, how difficult the dungeon will be, and who they need.

This pays extremely well.  I make 4 to 10 times as much gold carrying people as I would doing anything else in the game.  It isn't trivial to get that gold though, as you need to have a high level of skill to do dungeons with one or two people in your group who are incompetent or even afk.  The value of the gold I earn means I am being paid between 4 and 10 dollars an hour depending on the run, which isn't a great hourly rate, but I am being paid to play WOW, so I can't complain that much.  In the end though it isn't like I convert this gold to dollars, I use it to pay for all the potions and food and other junk I need to play as well as my monthly subscription.

The booster community is an interesting place.  People seem to think that I mostly get paid to carry totally incompetent people to rewards they don't deserve, but that hasn't been my experience so far.  Mostly it is people starting off a brand new character who want some good gear but who don't want to spend months trying to work their way up.  They pay some money to get carried to a bunch of good gear so they can get into the content they actually want.  The others are people who are able to do the content but who struggle to find groups.  They don't want to spend hours trying to find people to run with and then have the group fall apart.  

Instead they pay 15 bucks so that a group of friendly, highly skilled people show up and efficiently beat the dungeon with them... and at the end, the buyer gets all the loot!  I can see people looking at it like a movie ticket, where they pay a modest sum and get the experience they want.

I am not interested in buying a boost at all, ever, but I can understand people who do.

There are downsides to boosting though.  The main one is that you need advertisers who sit in trade chat and group finder and constantly spam advertise their services.  I could apply to be one of those advertisers, but I would be miserable.  Even if the gold per hour is better, and I am sure it is, I am not interested.  However, the constant spam does annoy and frustrate players who want to find groups the normal way, without paying for the service.

That spam doesn't affect me.  Trade chat is useless, and is just there for people to post memes, chuck norris jokes, and political diatribes.  I have it turned off.  I have a simple mod that blocks all of the advertisers in group finder when I am looking, so I don't even see that.  For me boosting is all upside.  I don't care if other people buy boosts in general, and I like it a lot when they pay me stacks of gold to do fun activities.  I play the game to do challenging stuff with my buddies, and I don't care if somebody else buys an achievement I worked for by opening their wallet.  The important part is the striving and the improvement, which a buyer misses entirely.

Mostly the people I run into while boosting are a lot like the people I run into anywhere else.  Generally we get along and things are fine, but occasionally I run into a jackass who annoys me.  

One thing about boosting that I often see is people complaining that boosters are giving Blizzard money, and that any new and difficult content is just Blizzard cooperating with boosters do make tons of money.  The idea is that if something is hard, buyers will purchase tons of subscription tokens for real money, sell them for gold, and use that gold to pay me to boost them.  

This makes zero sense.  If there are 1 million players who never buy boosts, Blizzard makes 20 million dollars a month.  If most of those players are buying or selling boosts, Blizzard makes 20 million dollars per month.  No amount of boosting can change that - everybody buys exactly 1 subscription per month.  All that happens if lots of boosting is occurring is that the best players don't pay for their subscriptions because they get subsidized by the buyers.

Boosting is here to stay, and I think we all ought to just get over it.  Focus on playing the game your way, and don't worry about what everyone else is up to.  If you don't boost, then nothing the boosting community does affects you.  Those top skilled players were not going to show up for your run anyway... if they weren't getting paid, they would just be doing something else entirely.

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.

Let them play

In game communities there is a lot of judgement about how other people choose to play games.  The casuals deride the hardcore players as sweaty neckbeards with no life, and the hardcore players mock the filthy casuals and their lack of skills and dedication.

I got hit with a wave of this over the past few weeks as I have been carrying people through the Torghast dungeon in WOW.  Torghast drops important resources for crafting legendary gear and people want their shiny loot, so off to Torghast they go.  Even though most people seem to enjoy it, they often don't enjoy how challenging it can be.  They could practice harder and git gud, but many of them choose instead to pay me large sums of gold to beat the dungeon for them instead.

I have no problem with this.  

Partly this is because it is making me rich, naturally, but also I just don't see the issue.  It doesn't matter to me if they could get better by themselves or if they just can't do it.  It doesn't matter to me if they are doing easy content where they don't 'need' the legendary anyway.  They like playing the game, they want to get more powerful, and this content is being a struggle.  They would rather pay so that the experience they can have is one where some tough dwarf paladin tanks all the monsters while they shoot at them.  I would rather have the experience of having 50,000 more gold, and I don't mind being a tough dwarf paladin tanking all the monsters.

Everybody wins!

But people get really upset.  When they see my advertisements I get lots of hateful whispers with people yelling at me to get out of Looking For Group chat, or making unwarranted assumptions about my hygiene, age, marital status, and general attractiveness.

When I advertise in Torghast chat I get people yelling about how anyone who can't do the content themselves is garbage, and how they should never ever pay for a carry.  One conversation went something like this:

Me:  Selling Torghast carries for 50k gold.

Random person:  Anyone who can't do this themselves is awful.  They should quit WOW.  How can they be this bad?  If they need a carry, they should join my group, I will do it for free.  It is trivial!

I found it kind of funny.  Even if a weak player heard it, would they really want to join a group with an entitled asshat who is busy telling them how wretched they are?  Much better to pay 50,000 gold to run with someone who is helpful and non judgemental, I think.

I don't understand that desperate desire to trash talk people who play differently.  Their progress isn't affecting your progress, and if they can't do Torghast themselves they aren't going to be a high ranked player in any format.  All they are is just one more random person trying to make numbers go up and hopefully enjoying the process.  Just accept that one person's fun is not another person's fun and move on.

There is nothing to be gained by trying to push other people down to make yourself feel higher.  If you want to feel good, find a serious challenge, work hard, and overcome it.  Other people not required.

Except when those people are carrying you through dungeons for large sums of cash, I guess.  Those people you do need.

Rough calls

I am back from the world boardgaming championships, towing a 2nd place plaque and many good stories.  One of the best stories involves a complicated semi final table where we had to make tough choices about who to send on to the finals. 

The setup:  We are playing Vegas Showdown with 5 players.  I am player 1.  We finish the final turn of the game, with me buying an overpriced Lounge, hoping to hit Lounge Lizard and lock up a victory with my many Lounges.  Players 2, 3, and 5 just Publicity, and Player 4 buys a Five Star Steakhouse with only 1 dollar remaining.

The card flip ends the game, giving 3 points per Restaurant, which is a disaster for me because I only have one Restaurant.  I score up the game giving putting Player 2 at 46, myself and Player 5 at 47, Player 3 at 49, and Player 4 at 62.  Crushing victory for P4, and we start to pack up.

Partway through packing up I realize that P4 has a Space Age Sportsbook on his board, and he does not have the prerequisite, so it is an illegal play.  When I point out this he is genuinely shocked - he certainly didn't intend to cheat, but he played illegally and this has to be fixed somehow.  We call the GM over and he stares at the boards trying to figure out what to do.

Clearly the SASB has to be removed from P4's board.  This isn't hard to calculate, and leaves P4 still on top.  However, the SASB got P4 two dollars worth of income, and without that he couldn't have bought the Five Star Steakhouse.  If he didn't buy the Steakhouse, then the game wouldn't necessarily have ended!

The GM is clearly completely unsure what to do.  P4 is obviously unhappy about his own mistake, and insists that he shouldn't move on, no matter what the result of the recount.  But who does move on then?  P3 is in second if we don't recalculate any final turn scoring, so sending him onto the finals is a reasonable choice.  But if we remove both of the problematic tiles from P4's board, then I get two more points on endgame scoring and end up at 49 points with a superior tiebreaker, so I would be up for advancement.  On the other hand if we roll back to when the SASB was bought and cancel that purchase, then P5 would have scooped it up and then she jumps into the advancement seat instead.

Compounding the struggle is the fact that the GM's son is one of the people at the table!  He was P2, and had no reasonable argument for his own advancement, but this sort of personal connection just makes sorting out these thorny issues even more difficult.

So what do you do as a GM when you have plausible arguments for four different players advancing from a table?

First thing you do of course is tell all the players that they are damn fools for not checking other people's boards and making sure people play legally.  Then glare at them for putting you in such a challenging situation.  (At least, this would be my first response.)

Thankfully the GM didn't have to make a concrete call to decide who won the game.  The 5 players all agreed that P4 cheated (accidentally) and so he couldn't advance.  Then we talked about how the game would have gone if he hadn't done that and generally agreed that P5 would have won it.  All four of us voted to send her onward, and the GM seemed seriously relieved that he hadn't had to cope with picking a winner himself.  That is the sort of thing that usually leads to hurt feelings and bitterness, and I know I wouldn't want to have to do that.  He was a little surprised that we all approached it this way I think, but he was happy to take our vote as a final answer and P5 moved on to the final table.

I am so happy to report this.  I wanted to move on myself certainly but I am quite confident that if the only change in the game is that I say 'yo dude, you can't even place that tile' then P5 beats all the rest of us handily.  So I am comfortable with the result, and extremely pleased that everyone was able to get past this sort of situation without yelling or fussing or any sort of unpleasant behaviour.  We had a fun game and everyone tried hard to win but didn't make anyone else's life difficult in order to get there - an ideal circumstance.

This is the best kind of experience.  I got plenty of tough tables and enjoyed the opposition, but combining a tough table with people who believe that you first make sure everyone has fun and second try to win is the shining moment of the con for me.

More blood, and more bowling

I finished my 7 games on the open ladder to get ready for my new Blood Bowl league.  I previously wrote about my first 3 games in which I was conceded to twice and then tied with an unpleasant jackass who spent the last three turns of the game whining at and insulting me.  The open ladder seemed pretty bleak.

I logged 4 more games since then and things picked up considerably.  I got another 1-1 draw against a Chaos team and was pretty happy with that result.  Then I played a game against a Human team that I beat 2-0, and won a super tight game against a Chaos Dwarf team 1-0.  All three of those teams were 200-300 Team Value ahead of me, which made me feel really good about my skill.  Being able to collect a number of wins and a couple of draws against teams consistently much more powerful than myself says I know what I am doing.

Just as importantly all of these opponents were pleasant.  At worst they said hi at the beginning and gg at the end, and nobody fussed about anything with more than a /sigh.  A great change from my earlier rounds, for sure.  I don't mind being sociable or being silent, either is fine, but it is irritating to put up with abuse and complaining.

My last game was in the middle between my toxic first 3 games and my happy next 3 games.  I was playing my Dwarves vs. Undead and got lucky off the bat by injuring my opponent's Mummy, their best unit.  I quickly took control of the game, injuring another one of their players and setting up my touchdown.  My opponent grumbled about the unfairness of the dice and I can't argue that; I got luckier.  However, my opponent definitely tilted some after losing their Mummy and made some poor plays that set me up to continue my dominance.  I injured another player of theirs, got a TD, and they conceded.  It was a perfectly reasonable concession - they were only fielding 8 players to my 10, and I was up 1-0.  Their chances were not good.

Part of Blood Bowl, like many dice games, is keeping yourself regulated when things go badly.  My opponent in the last game basically gave up after having their best player taken out and while they were certainly not favoured to win it doesn't make sense to pack it in that early.  In my game prior to that I led off by rolling 1,1,1,1 and my attacker fell down.  Then my opponent immediately injured my best player.  It was a disastrous start but I held it together, got lucky on two specific attempts by my opponent to knock over my ball carrier, and won 1-0.

The lesson is that you lose all the games you give up on, and only most of the games where you are at a disadvantage.

Much like the rest of humanity the open ladder has some people who are impulsive and rude as well as some people that are perfectly pleasant.  It also is largely comprised of people that aren't that great at board games.

I am ready to fight some people who are really good at board games though, and also people who hopefully won't pack it in when they seem at a disadvantage.  Dwarf smash!

Anger Management

Last time I wrote about getting conceded to on the Blood Bowl ladder.  It happened twice in a row and I was wondering what was going on.  It turns out I was in the casual league where there are a LOT of concessions.  I built a new team for the real league where concessions are limited and started again.  This time I will get some real games!

In my first outing I was in some dwarf on dwarf action.  Normally dwarf games involve a seething mass of hairy balls rolling around in the middle of the field, and this was no exception.  My opponent took a bunch of really risky, aggressive plays and they paid off by taking out 3 of my dwarves.  Then they walked the ball right to my goal line and sat around beating up my team until the end of the half.  On my opponent's last turn, on their last opportunity to score with their dominant position, they decided to take some time first to bash my dudes.  Each bash had a 2.8% chance of ending their turn and costing them the touchdown they had worked so hard for.  On the fifth bash they rolled badly, fell down, and ended their turn.

Before I could click anything my opponent had conceded in a fit of rage.  It was kind of hilarious because they were still in a dominant position with me down multiple players but they were apparently so angry they couldn't stay to beat me up for awhile and win the game.

I queued up again and ran into a Chaos team so I was due for another round of bashing.  This time luck swung my way and I KOd some Beastmen and scored a touchdown, so we started the second half with me winning 1-0 and up 3 players.

And my opponent immediately conceded.

I am finding this a bit ridiculous.  So far my team hasn't even managed to injure an opponent, I have scored 1 touchdown, and I have 2 victories to my name.

I queued up a third time and got another slow bashy opponent - Nurgle.  We bashed each other around a lot and ended up in a 1-1 draw.  When I stopped my opponent's final drive they decided to spend 3 turns telling me how horrible I was and bemoaning how all of their opponents get so lucky.  They told me that people like me should be banned from the competitive ladder.  They also said that they were going to immediately delete and restart their team after the game because starting off with a tie is completely unacceptable, and then complained about me wasting both of our time.

I tried to explain that my team got some experience and I had fun, but they told me that the point of the competitive ladder is not for fun and I should go away and play in the fun ladder.  I guess the point of the competitive ladder is suffering and whinging?  Also restarting teams over and over until you get a bunch of wins in a row.

Blargh.

I am glad I will be done with all of these sore losers soon.  After my 7 starting games here I can join my friends in a private league and play against people who won't spend all their time quitting and complaining.

Cultural Divide

Recently I watched a video by Brian Kibler about the differences in culture between Magic: The Gathering and Hearthstone.  He correctly notes that Hearthstone has a culture focused around the idea that the game is all luck and skill doesn't matter, while MTG has a culture that supports the idea of skill being paramount.

These aren't all or nothing ideas!  Obviously there are plenty of MTG players who whine about getting mana screwed and Hearthstone players who correctly acknowledge that the game has a pretty large skill ceiling.  That said, the trend of Hearthstone players talking about RNG and MTG players talking about skill is real.

Kibler thinks that this is in part because of explicit randomness in a lot of good Hearthstone cards - cards that summon a random minion or make a random spell, for example.  MTG has less of that.  Also the average MTG player plays in tournaments, whether they be small scale Friday Night Magic kind of tournaments or Pro Tour Qualifiers.  Hearthstone players play on ladder and only a tiny percentage take part in tournaments of any sort.

He also thinks that MTG content creators tend to write serious strategy articles while Hearthstone creators make silly decks to play on twitch and youtube and this changes how they are perceived.  While Firebat may bring really tight decks to tournaments he still makes stupid Blood Bloom / Doom decks to play on his stream because those bring more viewers in, so people see top Hearthstone players doing stupid crap all the time and don't see the skill that goes into perfecting and practising a deck.


Kibler's points are right on, but there is more to it, I think.

I remember when I was playing MTG a lot back in Thunder Bay when I was a teenager and it was easy to see that skill was a defining factor.  I won about 25% of the tournaments I entered, and one of my close friends won another 25%.  Mostly anyone else who won was also somebody I knew because generally we were all in the top 8 in nearly every tournament.  When much of your life in a hobby involves tournaments and you see the same people winning every time you really get the impression that skill is the dominant factor.

When I played against good players in top 8 situations I played tight and quiet but it was entirely different in the early rounds against newbies.  If I rolled over someone whose deck really needed some tuning I would often sit after the match and go over their deck to give them pointers.  We would talk about cards they needed, land ratios, what decks other people were playing, etc.  Usually those people would leave some new ideas and also with the definitive impression that I beat them because I was better, not because I got lucky.

In Hearthstone you never get that experience.  When you get beat you just lose and queue up again.  Nobody who crushes you on their way up the ladder sits down with you to say "Hey, you know, your deck could probably use a couple more 1 drops and cut a few expensive dragons."  You don't get people saying "You would have beaten me if you had just Fireballed me in the face on your second last turn."  Lacking those cues it is easy for the player to just rail about getting unlucky and move on.

Hearthstone players also consistently play people of a similar skill level.  The ladder pairs you against people who have won about as much as you, and tournaments are full of top tier players.  You just don't have the newest scrub going into a big tournament, meeting a pro, and getting beat because the pro plays better, at least not nearly as often as it happens in MTG.

When you play against people who are equally skilled, *of course* the victory comes down to RNG.  There is room for individual skillful plays, but on average against a similarly skilled player you would expect somebody's luck to break better and take the victory on that basis.

So while there is an advantage to pitting all the noobs against one another, it does make them think that the game is just RNG based, and the pros end up in the same boat.  Hearthstone pros don't have as much experience at grinding through noobs as the MTG people do, so their games often come down to a single instance of good or bad luck because skill is already controlled for.

This isn't something that needs fixing.  It is just an emergent, accidental property of the way the games are played, marketed, sold, and viewed.  Both companies are doing it right, considering those considerations, but those choices really do affect the way players think about the games they play.

Moving on

A few years ago I joined a WOW raiding guild run by strangers.  It had been a long time since I raided with people who aren't my RL friends so I was a little bit unsure but it ended up being a good time.  I got along with the people pretty well and the game was fun.  It let me play WOW again in a way that worked for me.

During the current expansion I have been raiding with those same people but I think the end of that has come.  The real problem is timing because the guild raids from 8:30 to 11:30.  I need a bit of wind down time after a raid and that means I just can't get a reasonable night's sleep before my alarm goes at 7:30.  I have been doing a lot of napping during the day and was tired a lot for the past four months and that just isn't sustainable long run.

It is hard pulling the plug and running out on people.  I am one of the people who does the most damage in the guild so it feels like I am letting them down.  Even if that weren't true, there is a strong sense of loyalty that comes from playing with people for a long time.  At some point though loyalty must give way to logistics, and now is the time.

Timing isn't the only reason though.  This expansion is different from previous ones in that there is a huge amount of progress that you can get from running things outside of raids.  World quests, dungeons, even PVP reward really useful stuff.  People like me that can play during the day a lot are a *lot* more powerful than those that just log on for raids.  In previous expansions you could sometimes just raid and do little else and have that work - today that isn't true.  I mean, you CAN just raid, but your gear and artifact powers will be so much lower that your performance will be seriously compromised in comparison.

The guild I am in is a friends and family guild.  There are some people that aren't part of a RL web, but most are all linked outside the game.  This means you have a mix of people who play a lot and people who hardly play at all and everyone gets to raid.  In this expansion that means that some people are drastically behind and you can't do much to help them out.  Funnelling gear to them will only help a bit.

Those things together mean that performance in the guild varies wildly.  We are trying content that requires roughly 300k dps from each person, and we have only a handful of people who can make that benchmark.  Some are below 150k.  That isn't something we can make up, because the top end people can't do 500k to make up for those who are lower.

Of course that doesn't mean people are doing it wrong.  Everyone should play the way they want and have the fun they want!  But when the differences in performance are that stark it takes away from the fun for me.  I want to raid content that really pushes me, but in the current situation I massively outgear anything I am raiding by the time we beat it and I barely even need the gear from the bosses we down.  It just doesn't feel right.  Looking at our progression kills and realizing that their drop list doesn't matter to me is disheartening.

If the timing of raids was perfect I would be fine with the disparity in performance.  But that struggle with feeling like I am on the wrong content adds to the difficulty I have with times and together it means it is time for me to move on to find a guild that raids a bit earlier and a bit more aggressively.  I have a good candidate so far, so here's hoping it works out.

Moving time.  No regrets about the past, but I need a new place to live.

No one wants to see that

There was an interesting letter to Blizzard and WOW players in general written recently by a top raiding guild called Exorsus.  They have been banned because they used an exploit to beat Mythic Helya and they wanted to explain the exploit and make some complaints about the game otherwise.  This is one of those exploits that you can totally understand a top guild using, because they had a strat that was reasonable and not an exploit in phase 1, but when they tried to do it in phase 3 of the fight it broke the fight.  Programming error, for sure, but they used it to get a kill and Blizzard punished them for it.

I am not here to argue about that exploit today though.  What I wanted to address was some of the other stuff in the letter, particularly the bits where the author asked for more support for the PVE dragonslaying part of WOW, namely big cash prizes for beating bosses first.  Along with that they want Blizzard to actually show off those races and make it more of a prestige thing.

This is an example of a person who has no clue about how entertainment works.

Imagine a tennis program on TV.  Roger Federer hits the ball, and gets an ace.  Then he hits it again, and gets an ace.  Then he hits it a third time, and does not get an ace.  But there is no opponent, just a computer and a camera checking to see if it is an ace.  When Federer misses he starts again, and he keeps restarting until he hits 20 aces in a row.  So hour after hour Federer hits the ball, checks to see if it is an ace, and his count gets higher and higher, but doesn't quite hit 20 for the victory.

Eventually Federer goes off to sleep, and then eight hours later he is back at it.  At some point within a three day span he will hit his 20 aces, celebrate like mad, and walk off the court.  Compelling TV, right?

That is what some PVE WOW players think people should want to watch.  It is fun to practice and get better at raid encounters but it is absolute shit as entertainment for the masses.  We want to watch Federer play against Nadal because we know someone will win within a few hours and the activity is varied and unpredictable, in as far as tennis can be such a thing.  Federer hitting aces and the computer verifying them is awful.  In just the same way watching a guild die to an encounter making incremental progress for 14 hours a day until they win is not entertainment.  PVP WOW actually has some followers, though not a great number by any means, because it is a far better viewer experience.

Which is why nobody is going to put up big prize money for it.  Nobody wants to see it.  What possible reason could Blizzard have for throwing enormous wads of cash at hardcore players?

They have a great reason not to though, and I don't mean "We want to keep all the money".

If you think players cheating, exploiting, and doing outrageous things to try to get world first kills is bad now, imagine how it would be if they were playing for a million dollars.  The pressure to break the rules becomes absurd when someone's rent depends on killing the boss, and the problem is that with a lot of these exploits you actually have no idea if pursuing them will get you banned or get you victory and accolades.  Sometimes people know they are cheating, but it would end up being a constant issue where players would get a kill and then Blizzard employees would have to decide if a thing was legal or not and who to give the million dollars to.

That can't end well.

In most sports they get the rules down pat pretty well because they do the same thing over and over again.  In WOW things constantly change.  Raids are new, classes shift, and the preparation part of the game is ever changing.  Coming up with a really robust set of rules under those circumstances isn't practical.

Thing is, WOW makes money off of casual players.  Blizzard wants some hardcore players out there so the casuals have something to check out on websites and addons to put into the game but trying to keep every hardcore player working their asses off has no payoff at all.  You play WOW PVE hardcore for the love of the game or you don't play.  I am not saying that is how it *ought* to be, just saying that this is how it is, like it or not.

Nobody wants to watch you slay dragons.

So slay the dragons, or not.  Cheat, or not.  But let us not fool ourselves into thinking that us doing this is entertainment for the masses, or that we are going to make big money doing it.

To infinity

I saw an interesting discussion today about the way Mythic+ dungeons have worked out in WOW's latest expansion.  Basically the way it works is each week you get a key, which can be used to do a specific dungeon at a specific difficulty.  If you complete it in time, you get a key for a harder dungeon, and you can do that until you fail the timer.

In theory this means that players doing 5 person content can do it for a little while until they hit their difficulty cap and then they stop.  Just like raiding, there is a finite amount of stuff you can do in a week.  In theory.

In practice once people get done with their own keys they just split off into 4 person groups and advertise for noobs with keys that still work.  The noob gets hauled through the dungeon and everybody gets loot.  The supply of noobs with keys who are willing to be hauled through dungeons by geared players is huge, so people can effectively run Mythic+ dungeons all day every day if they feel like it.

If you happen to be a tank or healer with good gear you don't even need a group to do this, as your services will always be in demand and you can just run whatever dungeon you like forever using other people's keys.

Some people really don't like this, and I can see why.  If you are in the position where you can always be doing something to advance your character and you are a competitive person you will often feel obligated to do those things.  People feel guilty about not being as good as they could be, and mad at people who play 24/7 and are further advanced.

I am the type who isn't bothered by other people playing all day and being better.  I am old and my arms hurt if I play too much.  I have responsibilities that are more important to me than tiny marginal increases to my WOW character.  If someone else doesn't have those things, then they are welcome to be better than me.  I won't be that far behind, in any case, and I am not doing anything where being a tiny bit better is necessary.

It does sometimes get difficult to know when enough is enough though.  How do I decide when I have done all I should do for the day?  In older times in WOW I could just be done raiding and it was over.  Nothing productive to do.  I remember back in Burning Crusade when my best gear came from PVP so I 'had' to PVP all day, and raid all night, rarely getting gear from raids because it wasn't good for me.  That sucked.  Now it is similar because I can run Mythic+ all day if I want to and there isn't a good, clear boundary for when I am done.

I don't like entrepreneurship at least in part because I like having clear boundaries.  I like being able to walk away from my job at the end of the day and be done with it.  WOW is similar in that I like to be able to log off from the raid and know that I have enough gold to buy my potions and I have done the other maintenance required and the rest is just about fun.  With the current design that never happens.  I can always be hunting for better gear and more artifact power without any end in sight.

I like Legion a lot.  There are so many things to do!  But there are challenges with establishing boundaries on play for the good of the players, and you can't please everyone no matter how you do it.

All about you

A magnificent new legendary minion has been revealed for the new Hearthstone expansion:  Yogg-Saron, Hope's End.  I remember fighting Yogg for many hours in WOW so it is a great pleasure to finally make its acquaintance here.  The Hearthstone version of Yogg doesn't quite capture the feeling of fighting it in WOW but I can't imagine any way to do that and since this is a wonderful card I will forgive this most slight of transgressions.

Lots of people hate this card.  They shout that Blizzard has introduced too much RNG, that this will ruin the format, that Blizzard doesn't understand that people want a skill game, not an RNG game.  All of these people have the same issue - they are under the mistaken impression that Yogg is for them.  It isn't.

Look at this card!  It is random on random!  Spells everywhere!  Just so you know, it isn't as though Yogg is completely 50/50.  Many spells draw you cards, or nuke enemy minions only, or otherwise do things that are good without requiring a target.  Yogg is super random but most of the stuff he does will help you, and over many iterations you will see a large positive trend in his effects.

You know who wants super random explosions and random and KABOOM?  People playing casual decks.  People playing in Tavern Brawl just for fun.  People who are streaming their ridiculous Yogg decks that are designed to just survive until they can slam Yogg down and watch the fireworks.  Yogg will dominate all the highlights reels of the most outrageous things that happened on any given day.

Yogg will not be in tournaments.  It will not be in good decks.  While it can help you, it will often just cast a bunch of spells that barely do anything, counteract each other, or kill you.  Yogg is not for players who want balance, and it is not for players who want competition.  It is for players who want YOLO hilarity, and there are *tons* of those.

I think people get caught up in reading strategy articles and receive the mistaken impression that most players are hardcore munchkins chasing tournament wins.  They aren't.  Most players log on, build a deck that will do some fun stuff, win some games, lose some games, and log off.  They read about stuff on the internet and such, but they just aren't that worried about winning.  Just like in WOW where all kinds of content and balancing was aimed at raiders, people sometimes forgot that most players don't ever raid.

If you hate the RNG in Yogg, then please just calm down.  Yogg isn't for you, and you probably won't see much of it at all, and when you do you will probably win.  You aren't going to have to worry about Yogg being good or not.

Blizzard knows that this kind of ridiculousness isn't good for tournaments, so they ran a bazillion Yogg simulations to make sure that overall it does useful things, it consistently delivers hilarity, and top players will not be running it when they try to beat people for serious.

That is what the card is for.  The people who this card is for are already salivating at the thought.

If you aren't salivating at the sight of Yogg, don't worry.  This one isn't about you.

The things I can say

In Hearthstone player communication is strictly controlled.  The six things you can emote at your opponent are:  Greetings, Thank You, Ooops, Threaten, Well Played, and Sorry.  At first I was surprised that people couldn't talk to each other directly but after a few moment's thought I realized that allowing opponents to talk directly would be a disaster.  While there are definitely some conversations that would be fine, there would be far too much "You suck you lucky ass noob go kill yourself for playing that mindless deck" and far too little of "Hey, do you run 2 Brawls in that deck, or 1?  I can't seem to decide which is best."

The funny thing is that these basic emotes end up being used to mean all kinds of other things that might not be intuitive at first glance.  Greetings usually is used at the start of a match as a polite hello, but it also can be something like "Hey, check out that gigantic threat." from either side.

Thank You either means "Well, you sure did play into my trap there." or occasionally "My face got wrecked, so I might as well say thanks....?"

Oooops is a simple one since it just seems to mean Oooops.

Threaten I rarely see used, I suspect largely because the threaten emotes are pretty laughable.  Mostly it seems just to be there to pass the time.

Well Played though, now that has two extremely polarized meanings.  It is either used as a term of respect to mean "You played that match well, and deserve respect" or even a simpler "Good game."  However, just as often it means "You lucky bastard, you did NOT deserve that."

Sorry rarely means sorry.  It seems to be used to say "Well, I sure did have the right answer, so this is where you get blown out."  Occasionally it seems more like "I drew like a lucksack, so you lose.  That is how it works!"  or "Hah hah, RNJesus hates you."

It is odd how people seem to have consistently settled on both these alternate meanings and how often emoting is acceptable.  In all my games I have only met one person who emoted constantly and in an annoying fashion so I squelched them, but the great majority of people either don't emote or do so in a fashion that seems very appropriate.

Somehow even though these channels are very different from normal human communication we establish multiple meanings for things and social norms that percolate through the group very effectively.

It strikes me as a great solution, since Hearthstone really doesn't have a problem with people being gigantic assholes to each other and so many online games are absolutely plagued with that problem.

Culture shock

I spent a chunk of yesterday reading old roleplaying manuals. Partly this is a search for ideas for Heroes By Trade and partly it is just to stroke my ego when I look at the terrible design decisions made by the game designers of yore.

One of the things that really struck me when I was reading Heroes Unlimited (A Palladium RPG) was that they focused so heavily on lists rather than systems.  They have dozens of different guns in the book, pages and pages of rifles, shotguns, pistols, military grade machineguns, etc. and yet when I tried to figure out the mechanics of actually using one of those guns I came up empty.  You would think that if a book is going to devote several pages to listing all of the handguns in the world (keeping in mind that they mostly have identical stats except for the price tag) you would find space to tell me how to shoot one... or at least you would, in the modern day of gaming.

My theory is this:  Back in the seventies and eighties you didn't find out about RPGs and learn them from nowhere, you learned them from friends.  You didn't need much in the way of examples because the games were largely taught through a network and so it was reasonable to assume that players would simply ask the veteran how something worked.  This is especially true in a system like Palladium where somebody had probably played that same system in a different setting.  But you know what you do need?  Lists of handguns!  You can't just hop on the internet and type in 'list of handguns' and get 100 cool guns you can have your hero use.  That sort of information is tough to come by.

Fast forward to now, and having lists of guns in a roleplaying manual is kind of silly.  If they are all mechanically identical then I can simply Google handgun, pick something out, and go with it.  What I do need is really good examples of play so that if I just pick up the game from an online store or a recommendation on a website I can figure out how to play.  I certainly might learn the game from a friend, but there is a much greater chance that I stumble upon it randomly and don't have anyone to walk me through the basics.

So while I think it is pretty silly that old games so often had such problems with incomplete or unclear rules and such devotion to lists of gadgets I think that a big part of that really can be explained by cultural context instead of incompetence.  I know that in HBT I rarely bother with lists of things because I see little point in taking up valuable book real estate with such trivialities.  However, I make it a point to fill the book with examples after every rule so that people can easily see them in action.  If done right it can be both a way to establish clarity of the rules and also build in a bit of lore at the same time.

It is a bit like looking at a cylinder.  Look at it from the end and it seems like a circle.  Look at it from the side and it appears as a rectangle.  To my mind examples and rules are like looking at a cylinder from two different viewpoints so that you can fully understand the thing you are considering.  It is important to have *both* the clear statement of the rule to resolve cases in future that the example might not cover as well as the example so the obvious cases don't get misinterpreted.

Or, if you are Gary Gygax, you just put a Glaive-Guisarme into the rules, spend a good chunk of a page describing the history of it, and stick numbers on it so that it is never, ever used.  Either way.

Reduced loyalty

In recent times WOW has made some changes to the way raid lockouts work.  It used to be that each instance of a raid had a unique ID and once you joined that instance you ended up saved to it.  This was a powerful force in raiding because it prevented people from playing through a raid multiple times for loot, practice, or just entertainment.  It was a big reason that guilds were so powerful and guild loyalty was such a force.  If your guild raids SSC then you cannot go to SSC with another group because you will end up locked out of the guild raid, which means if your guild needs you later in the week they are out of luck.  Raiding a zone with outside people was treated as something of a betrayal, practically the same thing as quitting raiding with your guild.

These days the mechanic is both different and better.  Each player can only loot a given boss once per week but they can fight wherever and whenever they like.  I can go through a raid with some friends on a lark and then when my guild raid happens I can go through again, though I won't be eligible to loot the same boss the second time around.  The effects of this change have become obvious as time goes by.  I often see people running mostly cleared raids in PUGs in the hope that they can get another boss down.  Back in the day it was a big deal to sell guild raid IDs and guilds would end up purchasing them from one another occasionally to do something specific.  Selling your guild's ID to another group was a betrayal of the highest order!  Now that those IDs are a thing of the past you can join up with a PUG to try to kill a particular boss and the worst case is that you kill it again with your guild and only get loot once.  Not so bad!

It seems to have changed the way guild loyalty works.  People constantly raid outside their guild with alternate groups because there is no penalty to doing so aside from the time investment.  It is almost like there is a palpable decline in tribalism, as though the attachment guilds and members feel to each other is lessened.  I can see how some people might view that as a penalty but I think it is a good thing.  The sense of betrayal and bitterness that showed up when someone left a guild was terrible to behold and now there is less need for that.  You can more easily raid with your friends and are less constrained by the artificial construct of a single guild membership.

Flexible raid sizes surely contribute to this too.  When you must bring seven healers to a zone and one of them quits WOW or raids with someone else you are all in a bad way.  Unless you are raiding mythic difficulty though you can just run with less people and be fine.  If you find a new recruit who seems promising you don't have to bench them until you have space... just bring them along.

Guilds these days feel more like a way of creating social spaces rather than organisms savagely competing for scarce resources, jealously guarding their hoards.  My sense is that it is a lot more comfortable to run things this way, to have players feel more free to go where they will and fight what they want instead of being locked into groups that feel extremely possessive of them.  The sense of loyalty to a guild feels like it is lessened, but so is the sense of obligation.  It is a tradeoff that is very much worth making, I think.

Stop ignoring each other, dammit

Patch 6.1 has landed for WOW.  Unlike in the past it isn't a patch to put in another big raid but rather a big batch of random stuff.  I actually really prefer it that raids are added between patches rather than rushing to fight new bosses at the same time as trying to sort out new mechanics and content.  One thing that stands out is that Blizzard is determined to get us to play together while making it possible to totally ignore everybody else if we want to.  They want us to see that we *can* play solo, but to group up anyway.  I think this is a great idea from a marketing perspective because people stay in the game for their friends but they don't want to be "forced" to group up to do stuff.

One example of this is the addition of new ways to get heirloom gear.  You can get tokens to upgrade heirloom gear by doing daily heroic dungeons and this is a good way to leverage people back into the heroic grind.  The game is much smoother when the queue is jammed full of bodies so Blizzard needs to keep finding ways to make that happen.  I don't have proper stats yet, but by my guesstimates the new tokens you get for upgrading are worth 300g per run in a heroic.  That is a massive incentive for people to do a quick run even if they aren't getting relevant gear and for hardcore players who have a ton of heirloom gear for their alts it is an incentive that will last for months.  Also the new heirloom vendor must have been a ridiculous gold sink in the first day he was active... I spent maybe 40k gold immediately and I could easily have dropped another 100k to finish upgrading all of my heirloom gear.  I probably will spend that money over the course of this expansion and that is an enormous gold sink the likes of which has never been seen before.

The other thing that is an obvious kludge to get people to talk to other people is the rotating vendors.  Each day there are five random vendors that are chosen and each garrison gets one of the five.  You can visit friends' garrisons though so it is easy to get access to all five as long as you talk to some people.  What this means is that people are going to be looking at each other's homes, seeing the monuments, looking at the great stuff other people have, and wanting it.  It is a combination of building social bonds and giving people something they can work towards (or be envious about, if you are being cynical).  It is a bit silly to have this set up instead of just having all five random vendors appear in each person's garrison but it will get people connected to some extent and that means cash in Blizzard's pocket.

It *works*.  I talked to some random folks to give them the quest giver I had and got their stuff and had perfectly pleasant interactions.  I am currently sitting in a pretty much dead guild so making a few connections and getting me into someone else's guild where I can collect some friends and start doing things with people is definitely going to extend my subscription.  Blizzard's obvious tactics to keep me engaged are working.  Which I don't mind, really, because the game is being a lot of fun.  The semi casual experience where I grind up gear over a variety of low commitment techniques like cash, professions, Looking For Raid, dailies, and followers has tons to keep me occupied at all times and I don't even have to do progression raiding to fill my days.

Have I mentioned how much I love being a general who organizes missions for my followers, sets up their gear, and manages resources and priorities for an army?  I love it.  Instead of killing ten rats, I send my dorks out to kill ten rats.  They level up, find cool stuff, get gear, and I feel like a commander instead of a peon.  Well done Blizzard, well done.

Also I am looking for a guild that wants a middle aged former hardcore raider who probably wants to do some raiding again but who totally isn't in for four nights a week of committed hardcore raiding.  More like I will show up sometimes and not stand in fire and hopefully my guild mates won't stand in fire either and we can beat up some enemies and gear up and have a good time.  Also flexible raiding means that nobody has to be there all the time to make it work.  Anyone on Vek'nilash server think that sounds like a good deal?  If so, email me or reply to my recruiting post on the forums.  Please be the sort of guild that isn't full of teenagers, religious fundamentalists, or drama between guild leaders.  I would say been there, done that, but I haven't been there because I never want to do that.

No integrity

Gamergate is continuing to be a thing that sucks up all the air in the gamer blogosphere.  There are endless examples of people arguing back and forth about what did or did not happen to specific people, accusations of fraud, intimidation, and fabrication and there is no end in sight.  The details of all the things that have happened to the people involved in this mess are far beyond my knowledge, but I don't need to know those details to know what is going on.

It isn't about journalistic ethics.  It isn't about the reliability of game reporting.  It is about a giant internet battle with feminists and social justice warriors on one side and misogynists on the other.  There are plenty of people who don't identify as one or the other out there blasting away but realistically these are the battle lines that have been drawn.  Supporting one side or the other is going to get you lumped in with that group, like it or not.

Game reporting is not some kind of responsible, trustworthy industry, nor could it ever be.  Game articles are based on guesswork, false hopes, and most importantly are entirely subjective.  If you think that game articles could somehow be all about objective truth you are deluding yourself.  The money from game developers certainly does affect game articles, but so what?  Even if the money wasn't there the articles would still be random shots in the dark subject to the whims and deep seated prejudices of the writer.  Game reporting isn't objective and it never will be.

All the people out there making serious faces and talking about cleaning up the corruption of the video game reporting sector are kidding themselves.  If you want gamers to have a better reputation, if you want games to have a more broad appeal, and if you want to make the world a better place for gamers then the way to do that is to support women in game development, to push for more variety and diversity in games, and to tell the assholes to shape up.  Objective reporting about games is an unrealistic and ultimately unimportant goal compared to changing gamer culture to be more inclusive.

If you really do want to talk about corruption in game reporting then take the time to do it right.  Make sure people know that you aren't talking about the minutiae of gamergate but are specifically referring to big game companies buying reviews.  Be clear that you support the people standing up for diversity in game production and game worlds and that you don't support the harassment campaigns against Quinn, Sarkeesian, etc.  I won't care much about your opinions on the matter quite frankly, but at least you will be on the right side of history.

Do not believe

I have been having an entertaining time reading about review scores for games lately and comparing them to what actually came out the other end.  Tobold recently complained that previews are pretty much useless as they are just marketing from the game companies and that there are far more of them then there are reviews.  It is definitely true that the hype surrounding a game is an important predictor of sales but that promises contained in previews are pretty near worthless in terms of figuring out whether or not a game is worth buying.  I am reminded of the Bears, Bears, Bears speech promoting Warhammer Online that people got so excited about but which turned out to be complete rubbish (though I called it out as such at the time, go me!)

Certainly Tobold is right that previews are worthless in terms of promises, though you can likely glean some information from watching actual gameplay footage.  You just have to completely ignore anything anyone says and only look at what you see when someone is doing things in the game itself and you just can't get much out of that.  Sadly I don't think that reviews after the game is out are actually much better.  Unfortunately there is way too much of people who played a game for 100 hours in the first two weeks complaining that the game is the worst thing they have ever played and not worth the $50 they paid for it.  These are the same sorts of people who sit on forums for a game they have logged thousands of hours in and whine endlessly about how the game is garbage.

The real problem here is expectations.  When an indie game comes out with no expectations and little fanfare people who don't like it stop playing but they rarely go ballistic and post 1 star reviews.  Just another mediocre game, right?  But when it is a much anticipated big title things are very different and people invest huge amounts of their persona in being fans of that particular game.  Any disappointment in how the game turns out becomes a very personal attack against them and their judgement and they lash out.  It is much like interpersonal interactions in that if a stranger utters some nasty slur it is going to irritate me but it isn't going to wreck my day.  A friend who I have spent months telling my friends is a super sort of person who does the same thing is going to be a much bigger deal and my reaction will be much more vitriolic.

The only way to get useful reviews about a game is to only accept information from people who you trust to have similar tastes and judgement to your own.  Any sort of large scale system is going to be completely corrupted by marketing, whining from bittervets, and false hope.  Even if game quality were some sort of objectively measureable quality (Hint:  It isn't) then actually finding that information would still be a mess.  It seems like with the giant information collection device that the internet is that we could actually figure this stuff out but the systems that are in place right now are pretty lame at doing so.

Are gamers really that bad?

Gamer culture on the internet gets a pretty bad rap.  Ziggyny talked about his own personal experience with it recently and concludes that the crap he had to deal with was brutal so it must be truly a mess for women in similar situations.  I definitely agree that there are a lot of crappy places out there but I know for sure that there are also some really decent places but that maintaining that decency requires a ton of time and effort.  I was always impressed with how decent Elitist Jerks was because they have punitive moderation policies in place and the discussions are quite reasonable as the trolls get banhammered very quickly.  I even got a few infractions there for things like quoting multiple people in a single post - the worst of the internet sure doesn't survive under those conditions.  The great majority of the internet is a pit of despair though and we can't clean it all.

The thing I have been considering is the question of whether or not gamers are actually worse than other people when it comes to hurling abuse on one another.  After thinking about the many places and social situations I have been in my life I concluded that gamers truly aren't worse, but they do tend to exist in a place that enables bad behaviour.  When I worked at a gas station as a teenager the difference between how things were when a woman was in the shop and when they were not was staggering.  As soon as it was just the boys the abuse that was heaped on pretty much everyone was dialled up to eleven.

The same story holds true pretty much everywhere I have been.  Bad behaviour has little to do with the hobbies of people and everything to do with anonymity.  As soon as people think nobody who can hear them will call them on their shit they suddenly turn into ravening monsters.  The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory was developed after watching gamers misbehave but it rightly doesn't specifically distinguish them as the problem.  Targetting gamers as the source of online harassment problems is like saying that camouflage clothes are the primary source of violent atrocities.  The problem is that people in camo clothes spend a lot of time in foreign countries while holding weapons; dressing them in fluorescent spandex would not prevent soldiers killing people.  The problem is the guns / anonymity, not the personal details of people involved.

However, given that gamers do end up being really abusive because they are constantly in spaces where they can get away with it all of us have a real opportunity to improve things.  It isn't easy to constantly push back against crappy behaviour as there is a seemingly endless supply of jerks but there is no other way.  No government regulation will step in to save us.  There is no greater ruling authority of gamers that will come to its senses and suddenly fix the internet.  The way things will improve is for people to consistently speak out against anonymous abuse and to support with our voices and our dollars those companies, moderators, and policies that aim to clean up our virtual spaces.