They're not business "plans". They're more like "guidelines".

I recently got into a discussion with someone who was lamenting the annual decent of Brasilian tour groups on Disney World in Orlando, wondering - and not without reason - why Disney allows that.

For anyone who hasn't crashed headlong into these (charitably) people... Well, you all have Google, I don't need to help you find the world of stories about hundreds of chanting teenagers linking elbows to line jump or in one of those funny-but-not-really moments, abducting a Mickey Mouse in the middle of a character greet. It's almost exactly like what happens to the Goldshire on any RP server either between battlegrounds or when the arena season hits a lull - a staggering number of assholes without parental supervision for the first time who've keyed to the fact that if there's enough of them, and they fake poor comprehension, they can do whatever they want and can't be touched for it.

(Those of you quicker on the uptake can see where I'm headed already. The rest of you keep your hands and arms inside the ride. We'll get there.)

To paraphrase his conclusion, "Does Disney really only care about money and not the satisfaction of their guests?"

Well, duh.

Disney cares about the satisfaction of the plurality of their guests, or to put it in simple terms, they care about satisfying the largest market segment that requires the minimum amount of effort and maintenance for maximum return. The Disney parks are a place of whimsey and fantasy...

...to you. But Disney is a business and has to turn a profit by any means necessary. Those "means" often determined by people who don't visit the parks, don't even *like* theme parks, will never meet a customer themselves, are unaffected by the conditions their policies create, and who - should the parks tank - will just get another similar job in another industry.

The result is the annual locust-like descent of the Brasilian tour groups, who get a free pass because they're low-maintenance from a customer service standpoint. And even with the deep, deep discounts they receive leave behind just a stupid amount of money.

It's the same reason you'd cover up crimes to, say, protect a football program: you've done the cost-benefit analysis, and decided your priority is to do what it takes to make sure nothing withers the money tree, even if that means some bad things go on. As long as they're not happening to anyone you know. Or you can't marginalize the "whiners".

A a Watchman, I am asked with disturbing frequency by people just picking up Warcraft as a hobby or fleeing a sinking server why Actiblizzion(tm) is so blase about or encourages certain behaviors. Usually Before, during, or after taking a face full of thrusing loincloth from a bored nuisance alt/guild recruiter/Susan Express robot.

Thank God they're nothing like Disney, huh?

That is a *staggering* number of assholes.

The other night I'm sitting on-post in Elwynn Forest when it starts to rain nuisance alts.


A little background for those of you who aren't coppers. A nuisance alt is a level 1 (usually human, almost always a human paladin) throwaway character that someone who's a complete dick bored between battlegrounds or arenas rolls up on an rp server, gives the most racist or sexist name they can think of (that's not already taken!), and takes it out for a spin to spam all the swears they've heard the bigger kids use in school. Because they're awesome. Or something.

Anyway. So after the eleventeenth "Sosexiiixoxox" and "Rpgayfagslol" cruises by like someone left the faucet running on the moron tank I actually start paying attention to General and see Justicarr and Gerodox leading this special olympics march into our Goldshire to camp and be as nasty as they can.

Or as crass, racist, and vulgar as you can get when so many people have driven that road ahead of you that the closest you can come to the shock-value racist name you want is "Neauger", because all the good phonetic spellings have been taken.

They're here because Total Gaming Network's video production arm has decided that Moon Guard needs to die. Specifically, that anyone who's being - let me go back to the source material for this - an "rp fag" needs to go. It's nothing really more than Blizzard's own change in target demographic taken to its logical conclusion. Uh...except...

To that end, they got a truly mind-boggling number of other complete dicks people bored between battlegrounds and arenas and got them all to roll up level 1s on Moon Guard and steer them all to the same place.

Technical trivia: Modern multi-player games work through the magic of multithreading, which is a trick whereby they pretend to do many things at the same time by doing one thing quickly in an awfully clever way. One of the "clever ways" Blizzard came up with when they designed the game engine for WoW is the concept of a load zone. Just like a monster's aggro radius, the "signals" your icon sends out have a local boundary range limit. This keeps the game engine from having to process all signals from all icons all the time. I f you and I come into proximity and I turn your way, my client is handed the data about your icon - what are you wearing, are you waling or running, your heading, and position, for example. Icon signal increases geometrically based on the number of icons in each others' ranges - this makes sense as you think about it, they're all processing all of the others' signals: If there are two of us in a "room", my client has to process data for both of us, and our interactions with each other. If there are three of us, it has to process for my effect on player 2, my effect on player 3, player 2's effects on me... This example is simple, easy to understand, and almost completely wrong in the details, but does serve to very graphically explain why, when you put too many players in one small area (*coughDalarancough*) the game slows down dramatically.

Now pack hundreds into an area about the size of a basketball court and the server will make a noise that's the digital equivalent of "oh dear CHRIST", and go somewhere quiet and stare at its hands.

Like a juggler with too many balls in the air, the server will screw up in that multithreading shell game I alluded to earlier and some pointers in the database will...slip. So for instance it will tell people your hair colour is "Stormwind Brie" instead of "red" as that pointer bumps into the wrong memory area. Like a phonograph needle skipping.

The longer this cascade failure goes on, the more deranged the server gets. Almost always the first sign is that NPCs stop respawning. Then it gets "weird."

The technical trivia is over. You can wake up now. ;)

That's what happened to Moon Guard. So the native Moon Guardians decided to pack up and come over to Wyrmrest Accord and kick over the bins until their own server came back on-line. Or it stopped being fun. You can guess which.

Because it wasn't fair that some bullies kicked over theirs, you see. A certain kind of person - a weak man - always needs to find a victim to vent himself on.

The irony is lost on them.

Lellex from Moon Guard wonders, in a thread that Blizzard deleted...

So that other warrior guy from YouTube got account banned for organizing an event that (intentionally or otherwise) crashed some servers, but you can have jerk offs like this organizing -intentional- griefing and disruption without any sort of punishment?

"Yes." You'll love why.

The parent of TGN.TV owns Stratics now. And Blizzard/Activision sort of "needs" Stratics in much the same way that Square-Enix "needed" Bradygames; continuing market exposure. They're a valuable business partner, which makes you the role-playing community the actual problem. I mean, you were considered the problem already (you and explorers may have been the target audience to begin with, but that design philosophy is so 2007!) it's just that no one has the heart to tell your subscription fees you that you're not really welcome on their swingset anymore.

Well, TGN is allowed to.

Hmmm. Now that I give that some thought, I'm not sure I like the implications of that.

De Rerum Natura

Getting ready for work this morning I heard this story on talk radio about a boy in Michigan who, for kicks, took the Hummer his dad bought him and ran it back and forth over some nesting ducklings a few times. The presenter, in quite understandable disbelief, wondered "Who who do such a thing on purpose?"


This presenter has obviously not met a lot of teenagers. I live mildly close to a whole building full of kids who would do something like, and with no hesitation, just for the cheering of their mates. A lot of adults make a logical mistake like this that we in the "service sector" call false consensus, assuming a logical underpinning to behavior and a moral compass that quite simply isn't there, because there is no cause and effect relationship between what one does, and what will happen to you .

Activision operates under a kind of a broken model of what their player base actually is. Since the merger with Blizzard, the audience shift has been to a crowd that could be called, charitably, "tribal", and probably more accurately "feral" - completely attracted to and kept in the game model by how much they can victimize other players, or how instantly their needs are gratified. But the legacy of the original design - more lent towards the Exploration and Socialization types - is still somewhere stuck in the gears of the process.*

The upshot? You get game mechanics centered around keeping people happy beating the crap out of each other, in a tableau that's not designed for that at all.

One good example, from when I used to test things: When doing load testing for the Hallow's End event, a whackload of us discovered that the Alliance's version of the quest giver had two very serious problems.

1. She was not flagged as PVP-enabled.
2. She was well out and away from any of the Goldshire guard patrol routes. I.e., their detection radii would never include her.

It went live this way, despite months of argument because, quote, "We don't feel that this will become a significant problem." When pressed, nobody doing the design could conceive of someone spending their whole day killing the quest giver over and over again just to deny the other faction the event.

That's exactly what happened, of course. but anyone who's met a WoW player of a certain stripe nowadays knew that before they got to the end of the sentence. The ability to wreck peoples' day in perfect safety? A kid - or someone who never stopped being a kid - with "social issues" is as likely to turn that down as free cake.

So if some of us sound to your ears "jaded", it's not because we're miserable sons of bitches who hate all people everywhere and so on. We've just met the game's new "target audience" and, yes, they're easily addicted. And that part is "working as intended." But as I used to have to drill into new game designers in the days before these games had pretty pictures, keep in mind that they'll show up to play, but not to play the game that came in the box.





*A contemporary of mine codified the types of players you'll find in this dissertation, which is useful if you're not already familiar with the sociological theory of games.

Cycnicism: It's like experience, but when you pay attention the first time

I wonder if it's a bad sign that the April Fool's Patch Notes for this year are things that, on any other day, I could actually see the development team doing?

For the last time, you were not recruited by the Star Leauge for any purpose whatsoever

Once upon a time, when MAX_LEVEL was a lot lower and most of the areas still had that fresh-from-the-factory smell, World of Warcraft was designed in a completely different way.

Those of you joining the WoW party late may be surprised-cum-horrified to learn that furiously headbutting each other and being in an instance (AND ONLY IN INSTANCES OR YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME!!!1!) all day wasn't the original design intent.

If you'd put down your $49.99 for the box at CompUSA, you already knew that from the back copy:

"A World Awaits... Embark on Epic Quests... Engage an Ever-Changing World... Indulge in Seamless Beauty..." "Play solo or enlist fellow heroes to join forces with you as you negotiate the vast, battle-scarred landscape of a world at war."

And that's what it was like. A giant world and if you wanted, as an option, you could get together with people you knew and form a guild for the fun of it, or find 40(!) people and go die in funny ways under a mountain somewhere.  But it was optional.

Take an archive stroll through the patch logs and you can actually draw a physical line at the point where the management shift occurred and the design philosophy became, The point of the game is to acquire the stuff we say is cool. That's it. And you will damned well belong to a guild huge guild full of strangers to do it, too.

Ergo: guilds are only cool if they contain massive numbers of members, all contributing to the vault they will never have access to and the perks they'll be /gkicked before they can utilize effectively. So they're hoovering up every single person they can find to contribute to the guild experience total.

I bet that never comes back to bite them in the ass. Nosiree. Never.

Which brings me to guild recruiting. A Watch Constable sees a lot of it. And believe me, it's hard to keep the bile and/or laughter to ourselves.

Blizzard has provided two channels and soon an entire UI for folks either looking for or trying to trick people into find people to join a guild. These methods are roundly ignored in favor of going to the starting areas in their most ridiculous tier gear and using /shout or a macro that spams /general every few minutes to attract people who're starting new characters into their endgame raiding guild.

Let me draw a line under that. They are skipping the places people of the right level would be, and the channels which have people on them looking for guilds, in favor of going to the starting areas to try and look impressive as possible in a place where 85% of them are already in a guild.

A bigger guild.

At least, a smarter guild.

And they're probably not doing that dance.

That's the other thing. Even the (few) guilds worth being in I am pretty sure have absolutely no idea what their recruiters actually do. Realistically, if you just installed the game, your first chance meeting when you rock up on Wyrmrest Accord is probably going to be someone named something like "Sykokilla" in a loincloth attempting to hump your face and asking if you want to "join mi gild".

His guild is inevitably named "Paragons of Pure Virtue."

I bet that never comes back to bite them in the ass. Nosiree. Never.


So your recruiters are spending the majority of their time doing one of two things:

• Humping people in the face who already live here.
• Spamming their guild recruiting macro on a taxi while en route between Lakeshire and Westfall.

Just in case there was a question, that's why we just can't take you seriously.

Coming Out of the Closet...With An Arm Full of Linen Cloth

The Watch runs on the "goodwill of the community", which is a lot of words for "all that stuff we give away? Yeah, that doesn't belong to us." I may be in a unique position in that nothing in the guild bank (we call it "The Donation Bin") belongs to any of us, with a few exceptions; almost all of it is seconded from guilds and individuals on the servers we operate on. That includes the operating funds.

Some nice soul on WRA donated enough heavy leather that some very small people can have some 10-slot bags when they show up. My problem is where to put it all.


See, here's how the Donation Bin works.


In theory, each Ward has a vault with 3 tabs, divvied up into matterials & misc, armor, weapons, and our own miscellaneous stuff (uniform shirts for example). And it generally works that way until someone who's been with us for a while takes off. Then it fills up with whatever they were carrying around.

This happened recently - we lost a long-serving corporal to the allure of Cataclysm raiding - and now there's about 16 stacks of ammunition I need to clean out, low-level leather armour, and all sorts of things I suppose I could throw into rotating storage if I was on the ball enough to remember it was there. It's like that one drawer in your kitchen. The Donation Bin kind of...accumulates...stuff....and then one day you open it up and wonder When the hell did we start storing thousands of rubber bands?

It wouldn't be so bad if there were either more boots on the ground or more actual new players. Of the five I attended last night, one was a multibox bot, one was a leveling alt who immediately put me on ignore (which is pretty common) , and the rest were guild re-rolls or other natives taking small mages out for a test drive.

Try that, by the way. It's cathartic. You absolutely can not run out of mana. Seriously. Set fire to level-appropriate monsters to your heart's content until level 15 or so. And then...well, reality sets in. :/

So. Anyone got a use for about 8,000 crafted light shot?

Mops

"Members of the Public", a term of dread for anyone who's ever had to actually deal with the public. For us, this can mean anything from yesterday's level 5 hunter doing a guild re-roll to (more often) the guy on the largest mount he owns trying to strategically park himself in such a way that the new kids can't get at their questgivers.


This line of thought pops into my head every time I sneak a look at the official Blizzard forums during a break at my real job.

In theory, the forums represent lively discussion and debate between the players of the game about game issues, and represent a cross-section of what each server community is like and what you can expect if you park there.

Of course, in practice, most World of Warcraft players - despite the recent change in target audience - are people like me. That is, grown-ups with jobs who don't have infinite time to sit around and flood the forums with cries for attention. Pretty quickly, in the absence of any real moderation, the forums are overrun by Mother's Little Darlings who do and say whatever they please; a vocal, quasi-illiterate and nasty bunch who make the servers look like the West Bank on Free Gun Day. The upshot of this is that the tone of the forums bears little or no relation to the actual tone of the server it represents.

Oh, some communities try to "take back" their forums, but they run quickly up against the limitation of time: while the rest of us can only check in once or twice a day, they can be on almost continuously. They learn fast you can't win a battle under those conditions, and are snowed under.

Most servers that have not turned into Thunderdome have created their own, moderated, sites for conversation. This works out better in the long run.

Happily, today I only see the usual suspects on the two realms I now follow: guilds begging for new members, one girl who's skipped across three servers in the last 6 months (making the same posts each time, trying to "get something started"), and one girl who is really, really trying to get attention for being part of the LBGT community.

On the internet. Which is kind of like trying to get attention for being ginger in Ireland.

One girl on the test realm form suggests the /ignoreguild command, which would make my life soooo much easier some days. or at least quieter. But I know due to current policy it'll never happen.

I can dream.