Now that seems fair!

[Sarcasm alert!]

Conclusions from yesterday's comments on the new Call to Arms system bribing people to play the less popular roles, aka tanks (or healers to a lesser degree):

1) DPS players are incompetent and anti-social.

2) Bribing people to play tanks (or healers) will cause incompetent and anti-social players to play tanks (or healers) instead of DPS.

1)+2) = The Call to Arms system will result in groups in which incompetent DPS players are grouped with incompetent tanks and healers.

Sounds fair to me! What's not to like about this?

How do you "carry" a tank?

Great discussion today, really showing how different people think about the various group roles. I'd like to point out another comment for discussion: "However with this new bribe I am thinking, where is our reward for "carrying" new/bad/inexperienced tanks?", by rulez. I find that comment fascinating because obviously rulez believes that there are situations where the dps "carry" the tank, while I have doubts that this is even theoretically possible.

How would "carrying" a tank by dps work? How would a dps with a bad tank play differently to "carry" the tank, instead of playing "normally"?

A comment to discuss

In the previous thread Numtini said: "anti-social behavior is concentrated among DPS classes". Do you believe this is true, and if yes, why would damage dealers be less social (or less competent, as others suggested) than tanks or healers?

Woot! Bribery!

In case you haven't noticed it yet, one of the fundamental credos of this blog is that social engineering is the answer to many of the problems of MMORPGs. If you don't like the term social engineering, you can also call it bribery. Like Blizzard does:

The long queue times are, of course, caused by a very simple lack of representation in the Dungeon Finder by tanks, and to some extent healers. We don't feel the tanking and healing roles have any inherent issues that are causing the representation disparity, except that fulfilling them carries more responsibility. Understandably, players prefer to take on that responsibility in more organized situations than what the Dungeon Finder offers, but perhaps we can bribe them a little.

So in future people queueing up for the most under-represented role in the Dungeon Finder (meaning tanks in 80% of cases, healers in 20% of cases, and dps in 0% of cases) will get an additional bribe reward in the form of a goody bag containing "some gold, a chance at a rare gem, a chance at a flask/elixir (determined by spec), a good chance of receiving a non-combat pet (including cross faction pets), and a very rare chance at receiving a mount".

If you consider role representation the responsability of the developers alone, this is the absolutely best possible solution. I like it. Personally I would have liked it even more if players would consider role representation at least partially to be also the responsability of the players, and would have queued up as tanks without a bribe; but that obviously was an utopian pipe dream. So, woot to bribery!

Learning from video games

Researchers from the University of Krems, Austria, recently performed a study in which they tried to seriously teach children things via video games. They found out that this doesn't work. Playing a lot of video games, surprise, surprise, makes you good at playing video games, but at nothing else. There was no significant "skill transfer" from game to real life, even with educational games. Even children are perfectly able to completely separate virtual life from real life. Apart from learning social skills by interacting with real other people via a multiplayer game platform, games don't teach you anything. On the positive side that also means that playing GTA doesn't turn you into a car thief and murderer.

So while direct teaching through games seems to be a lost cause, researchers from the MIT are trying the indirect approach: What if your desire to play can motivate you to learn something outside the game which is useful for the game? Thus they developed a Curriculum: Teaching Computer Science through WoW Scripts in which high-school students learn computer science and programming by creating LUA scripts for World of Warcraft.

Given how people usually use such mods and addons to make games easier for themselves, I find it somewhat ironic that science thus proves that cheating at computer games is more likely to teach you something than playing them.

Player-created content

A reader directed my attention to an article in Massively about the new Star Trek Online Foundry, specifically the part where players used the Foundry to create missions that practice their jumping skills, needed for one of the game's raids. Sure, that would be one of the valid uses of such an editor for player-created content: Create training missions for developer-created content.

Unfortunately mission editors and MMORPGs based on player advancement don't go well together. Either the players are given very little freedom on how to create new content, or they tend to use any freedom given to create missions that give the maximum amount of reward for the minimum amount of effort. Paragon had to threaten players who used the mission Architect of City of Heroes / Villains with being banned for exploiting.

That is the curse of games in which character advancement and rewards have become more important than any notions of "fun". Add an editor and players maximize rewards instead of maximizing fun, because they can't even tell the difference any more. Given the possibility, they would create the big red button which advances any character to maximum level with best in slot gear in all item slots, in spite of that button being a thinly disguised "game over" function.

Remember me?

I was discussing Dr. Richard Bartle's opinion of Rift as a WoW expansion with somebody on chat, and the person I was talking with said something along the lines of "Oh, Bartle, that's the guy with the Bartle Test, isn't it?". Not "the co-creator of the first MUD", or "the writer of Designing Virtual Worlds", no, most people only remember that one article about achievers, explorers, socializers, and killers in online games. Or not even the article itself, but some bastardized multiple choice test that wasn't even created by Dr. Bartle himself.

In a similar vein, when Paul Barnett’s involvement in a possible remake of Ultima IV in online form was mentioned on this blog, one commenter immediately remembered Paul for his "bears, bears, bears" video. Now that was a great video, and one could say that the enthusiastic hyping of a feature which then ultimately didn't make it in that form into the game neatly summarizes people's disappointment with WAR. But I seriously doubt that Paul Barnett views that video as the defining point of his career, and the one thing he wants to be remembered for.

That makes me wonder what people remember me for. Probably not for any of my real life achievements, because I hardly ever even mention them. But even of my blog posts I doubt that the ones I think are my best work are actually the ones that stuck in people's memory, if they remember me at all. What do you remember me for?