Richard's Online Journal

[05/07/08] The Way Of The World (Of Warcraft)

Time Wasted: 10 days, 19 hours, 46 minutes, 23 seconds.

Hurrah! I finally made it all the way through Warcraft. Virtual photos are here. And yes, I say ‘finished’. Wrath of the Licking be damned. I beat this game, and can now hold my head up high as… well… a guy who’s spent three months pretending to be a gnome.

Yes, I’m aware I’m about two years late on this. It’s been an adventure anyway, and quite an interesting research project. I approach RPG design from a very specific direction; the rules of the world and its lore rather than the numbers behind it. I’m more interested in taking out the local Evil Overlord because he’s threatening to destroy the local town than because he’ll drop an awesome hat. In online games, how the players approach the challenges laid out by the designers is hands down more interesting than actually completing them, whether it’s why nobody cares about the PvP areas, or the interaction between different groups. The most obvious are the whole male/female player/character dichotomies, but it extends further than that.

For instance, are players more likely to rely on a hulking Human fighter than a petite Gnome killing machine with pink ponytails, even if both have functionally identical statistics? The sociology… and sometimes plain sociopathy… is a fascinating thing.

This is what we did to the Big Bad Wolf…

My server, Zenedar, is full-on PvP almost everywhere. This can be frustrating as hell when you just get randomly ganked and killed, but it’s odd how quickly you develop an innate sense for danger. Something as simple as an aggressive guild name can tip you off, or the composition of a group. I steer clear of Rogues, but calmly walk past most Warriors and Druids, and generally get away with it. You see body movement in characters that never display any; signs of danger based on which way they’re looking, or how active they are after noticing you.

Admittedly, sometimes it’s easy. A guy with a big sword called ‘Gonnakillyasucker’ probably isn’t someone you want to hang around with, especially if he’s twenty levels higher than you are and surrounded by your friends’ corpses.

All this makes for some fantastic tension when neither player is particularly interested in fighting, but has no way of knowing what’s going on in their potential opponent’s head. The first to attack gets a major tactical advantage, but then they’ve got to watch their back for as long as they’re in the area. Conversely, if they’re killed, they’re at an immediate disadvantage upon returning, making them easy prey for repeated killing until they retreat to the nearest Spirit Healer for ten minutes of twiddling their thumbs and repairing their gear. A polite little /nod could be seen as an invitation to take charge of the situation come play football in the trenches. It could just as easily be seen as a sign of weakness. Or a bluff, as one enemy Warrior found earlier on today. I regret nothing.

Don’t forget the small stuff either. Put people in factions, and they start thinking in very specific ways. If an Alliance player helps an Alliance player against a monster, they’ll usually be thanked. Replace the second Alliance comrade with a member of the Horde, and you’re more likely to get a rude gesture than a /bow.

Why? Because the Horde are assholes and must be purged.

What? It’s true.

“You want some of this too? Huh? Do ya? Eh?”

The other thing that never fails to interest me is players’ reaction to rules. WoW, like most RPGs, is built around fixed rules that rely heavily on random change. A particular monster has a 5% chance of dropping this. You have a 10% chance of making that critical hit. That crate has a 2% chance of holding the item you want. All this ties in with the basic psychology that makes MMOs so addictive - variable ratio reinforcement. In short, if the rat doesn’t know if he’s going to get a pellet, he’s more likely to keep pressing than if it happens every time. It’s what keeps the kills exciting… or at least, compelling… even when you’ve done the same dungeon ten times without any real benefit.

However, random chance isn’t something the brain has much time for. We’re built to look for patterns, whether it’s a face in the clouds, or the gamblers’ much-beloved ‘lucky streak’. MMOs are no different, but unlike reality, there’s objectively nothing more going on. You can’t read supernatural forces into something that’s been hard-coded. The game can’t behave in ways the programmers never gave it leave to, Sword of a Thousand Truths notwithstanding.

Yet browse the knowledge bases for the game, and time and again you’ll see players try and cheat fate in the most ridiculous ways. One quest tip I saw was to remove all buffs (beneficial magic spells) before trying to pick up an exploding egg. Another player swore she improved her drop rate by stripping naked before trying to get some yeti fur or something… although I’m going to hazard a guess that that ‘she’ was very much a ‘he’ and just trying to find a good justification. And of course, you’ll always get people who try to read in far more than the game rules actually do, like the guy on Stranglethorn Vale chat who genuinely seemed to think that if you used fire attacks on monsters, it made the book pages they were carrying burn up before you could retrieve them.

If you want the best drops, and you don’t ask questions, then guildmate, I’m your troll…

By far the best example is a character called Griftah, who runs a stall in Shattrath. He’s hands-down my favourite MMORPG NPC ever, with the possible exception of the ultra-nice Philip “I’m Meant To Be Darth Vader” Ross at the end of the Anarchy Online novel. Like his name suggests, he’s a con-man. He sells trinkets that give you powers like being able to heal by eating food, or being safe from attack by critters, and all kinds of other stuff that the World of Warcraft’s inhabitents can do automatically anyway. Most people get the joke, occasionally buying some of his crap for amusement value.

Others… are a perfect example of why ‘psychics’ and homeopaths and other scam-artists never struggle for a living. These are actual comments about the ‘Talisman of True Treasure Tracking’, with which one can ‘one might find the rarest of items in the most mundane of locales!’. To be clear, this item does nothing. At all.

ok for all of you that think that this item is garbage listen to this..... we were runnin SM Cath earlier today and i had this item on my 37 druid. Well were killin the place and we got to the big double doors. The first mob we encountered dropped the scarlet chest. of course i asked party if i could open all chests and what not to see if this item worked. Coincidence?.. Well we keep on goin and yet again another mob drops the scarlet boots..... Coincidence?.. well then after we killed everyone and start headin back to entrance...spawns appeared. so we start killin again and Burning War Axe appeared. So tell me why all these items have a .02% drop rate and yet all 3 dropped in 1 instance run. Needless to say these ppl will be usin me as a tank in all their instance runs.

From another player:

I bought this in December and in early January, got my first and only epic drop. However, I’ve only had one blue drop until this item, which has now increased to 6, and my green drops (while fighting boulderfist ogres north of Telaar) have increased substantially. Also, I get less gray items and more white ones like netherweave and the samples. It’s not a complete failure but it’s not worth the money you pay.

Yep, it’s the perfect example of why ‘anecdote’ isn’t another word for ‘evidence’. And if random acts of the universe aren’t enough to explain it, you’ll always find someone with a pseudo-science explanation from another world to help out:

My surmising is that it affects the loot table. It doesnt make a mob have loot but each mob is spawned with a specific loot table and it is my theory that this necklace moves the marker up and down for loot that can drop. Before you bash it look at the tables between heroic and normal… mostly they are the same mobs just harder with more/different/better stats loot on their table lists.

Of course, two seconds thought should be enough to expose these joke items for what they are. Ignoring the fact that none of this NPC’s items have anything written where the game always prints the in-game effect of items, this is World of Warcraft. Blizzard gets death threats when it nerfs a mage spell by 1%, never mind messing with loot tables for a joke. Never mind all the visual feedback in the game, or the fact that it’s sold by a character called ‘Con Artist’. Something to think about next time someone tells you about something amazing but true, anyway. And if you’re still a believer, I have a lucky pen to sell you. It’ll make all your friends jealous. Pen is envy, as they say.

I’m sorry, you seem to be confusing me with someone who works for you.

The only problem with things like this in MMOs is that the players are inevitably more into the numbers game than the details, to the extent that no matter how much Blizzard and co worry about, say, the backstory of the Aldors vs. the Scryers, the real question is always ‘who do I get the best gear from’. The only real exception I can think of, to whatever extent, is Weston Phipps from City of Villains, whose astoundingly cruel missions are often brought up as just too damn nasty even for hardened supervillains.

I don’t really see that changing. MMOs have too many players to allow much in the way of subtlety, and ARGs are even worse for it. That offers one benefit though. When we do see glimmers of it, like Griftah, or a polite /nod from a sworn enemy, it means that much more, minute to minute, simply for its beyond purple-hued rarity value. Something to enjoy, if not necessarily to expect. Whatever form it takes.

(BTW, OMG, did I mention I finally made it to Level 70? Well, I need to say it again. I won Warcraft. Gz to me! Thankfully, I don’t feel even slightly tempted to start rolling an alt. Especially not a Rogue, to return so many PvP favours around its quieter areas. Not at all. Nope, no way. Or a Shaman, for their one-hit kills. Or… Or… Damn you, Rob Pardo and the hundreds of other people I don’t know by name! Damn you to whatever the Azeroth equivalent of Hell is! To the Azeroth equivalent of Hell, I say!)