Altitis

Are any of these familiar?

• Some of your players simply never seem to read strategies posted to the website?
• Some others, no matter how, will always forget about vital buffs or die to ground fire at least once?
• When you explain tactics over vent, some people may be heard sighing after a while, grow restless and want to just go on with it?
• After a wipe (or an arena defeat), part of the team wants to jump straight back into the fray while others want to analyze what just happened, seemingly to death?
• Do some people seem to have a hard time remembering when to blow their trinket cooldowns in the heat of battle, finding themselves short at crucial times?
• Do you find that your arena team is split between those who want to immediately queue up for the next match and the guys who want to discuss what just happened?

If it does, the above symptoms are just a reminder that people learn things in different ways.

Two Psychologists, Peter Honey and Alfred Mumford, expanding upon the earlier works of one David Kolb, have identified four major ways by which people acquire new knowledge:

• Activists are people who respond best to Scout Movement founder Lord Baden-Powell‘s credo of “Learning by doing”. These players will learn a new encounter or a new arena tactic best by simply experiencing it. They are the people most likely to interrupt a strategy session with “let’s just do it”, they want to be in the thick of things and will learn best through practice.
• Theorists are on the opposite side of things. Half of what we’d call our Theorycrafters stem from this group, they have to model something in their head to grasp it completely. The better the model they build, the better their practical execution later on. These players will usually respond best to long and detailed boss strategies, the more the information you provide them with beforehand matches the reality of a fight, the better they will respond.
• Reflectors mainly gain their understanding from analyzing and reviewing their experiences. The second half of the Theorycrafters belong in this group, as they will tend to collect as much data as they can to support their analysis. Players in this group, more than any other, will be ready to spend hours on training dummies running large sequences of tests and changing tiny elements just to find out the single most optimal cookie-cutter approach to whatever they are reviewing. Where the theorist will be content to calculate the best possible output with maths only, a reflector will thrive on maths derived from hard data.
• Pragmatists will learn best from information which is directly tied to practical use. Contingency planning, adapting to the situation in the thick of battle is something they love, endless strategy sessions and what-if-scenarios tend however to quickly bore them unless you can tie every aspect of it to direct and concrete use. A pragmatist would be quite likely to ask “can we do it with one less?” and willing to go through with it.

Learning styles aren’t mutually exclusive. In general, people will respond strongly to one learning style and a bit less to the others in various degrees. Studies in the past tend to demonstrate that the best learning effect is achieved when many or even all learning styles are being catered to.

That’s All Fine But How Does That Help My Groups?

A fine type of pragmatist question, raid leaders and battlegroup tacticians may want to make their briefings appeal to a wider type of learning styles to maximize their progression speed:

• Theorists will continue to thrive on strategies posted on the guild website. Keep it up, you’re most likely already catering to them
• Activists can greatly benefit from videos implementing the strategy (if available). To help their learning, post them in a thread separate from your strategy post
• Reflectors can be brought up to speed by linking to existing parses and combat logs.
• For the Pragmatists, building a checklist with a direct link to in-game effects can work well. Eg: “Keep your trinkets up for phase 2 because we need to produce XXX dps in 30 seconds otherwise we wipe”.
• After a wipe, instead of running straight back into the fray the moment everyone is rezzed and rebuffed, leave some time for the reflectors to review their combat logs, they might not only improve their own performance but also find out exactly what went wrong on the last attempt
• Make sure you foster a climate where Activists and Reflectors in particular aren’t being singled out: both of these more than the other two will really need to experience things in order to truly understand them. Yelling at an activist because he hasn’t read your 10’000 words of strategy explanation won’t help him get better but rather discouraged, but after two or three attempts, he will probably understand the flow of the fight better than anyone else.
• Theorists and pragmatists are the most likely to come up with intellectual leaps of faith going against the official strategy – if yours just doesn’t work, try it out their way. They might just have thought of a way to get around whatever roadblock your team is encountering.
• Keep your pre-encounter briefing short and to the point. The theorists and reflectors will have done their preliminary research, the pragmatists only want the telegraphic style short overview and the activists want to rush straight into battle. Long explanations will just waste everyone’s time for little concrete benefits.

These, and more, can all help speed up the time your group needs to adapt to a new strategy and put it to successful use. Being mindful of the four different learning styles, and trying to cater to all of them, can speed up your preparation time and help you conquer new content faster.

On Similar Matters

• Closing the 2007 Welfare Epics Debate with a Look at PvE (8)
• Why Nerf Calling is Wrong (9)
• The Sky is falling, the Sky is falling! Oh wait, it’s not (5)
• The Hardcore Raider’s Alien Mindset (8)
• Of Welfare Epics and Loot Envy (13)

And here we are, on the brink of 2009, and as usual, it’s time to look back at what changes the year brought.

One year ago, the hot topic in the WoW blogosphere was still the PvE / PvP opposition centered around the notion of Welfare epics. When I wrote my closing post on the matter, I didn’t yet measure how different 2008 was going to be – not only has the topic practically vanished, but as Megan astutely points out, the notion of Welfare epics nowadays could, if used at all, be applied very readily to raiding, whereas PvP gear is currently a lot harder and longer to aquire.

The one thing which hasn’t changed though is that the term is still being used by certain people to demean the achievements of those who are following a different path from theirs, one they deem inferior. 

2008 was largely dominated by the long Wait for the Lich King, and like the end of 2006, the controversies have centered around the hardcore / casual divide and the raiding scene. One thing which has changed drastically though is the reputation of the few dominating figures. In 2006, even me (then still raiding) was following the race to the Naxx world first with interest. Death and Taxes and Nihilum were in a neck-to-neck race and most people were cheering them on. Even if we weren’t directly affected, we could sympathise with all uberguild’s dismay at the reduction from 40-men to the 25-men raiding format.

Two years later, Death and Taxes has suffered from problems but has at least exited the immediate consciousness of the average player rather gracefully. Their opponent, though, through countless name changes, ugly drama, questionable sponsorships but foremost through a series of graceless and classless public tantrums about the difficulty of the game, haven’t just tarnished their name but in the end effect massively diminished the interest of the community in the life and adventures of the überguilds. In my mind they have become like the spoiled, rotten elites living lavishly and criticizing the taste of this year’s caviar and champagne when the unwashed masses are having sausage and beer. In the most ironic development, while they were wallowing in their pride and spitting at the rest of the gamers (with their dwindling cohorts of me-tooers), the world first for the currently most difficult raid achievement in the game, killing Sartharion on 10-men with 3 drakes up, was snatched up by Method.

In the meantime, titles and mounts for PvE feats have become a lot more commonplace, and the introduction of the achievement system has brought an entirely new dimension to certain aspects of the game. Whether by a bit of an accident or clear design, achievements don’t just give raiders more elements to compare and measure up against each other but also allow for different grades of challenges for farmed content. A bit like all those RPGs with several party members where players have developped additional challenges (single character, low level, gametime etc…) but formalized in a quite addictive structure.

I can’t help but wonder how my old 2007 antagonist Stop the Warrior views today’s game. Might give way to an interesting argument.

So here we are, on the brink of the new year. Last night, Steptoe remarked that this was the most hardcore evening he’d ever seen me play: we ran 5 instances in a row together. Which is indeed more than I have ever done in this game. That being said, it was 2 times Violet Hold, Drak’Tharon followed by another pair of Violet Hold runs (Steptoe wanted the plate pantaloons off the voidwalker boss), and Violet Hold isn’t exactly a long isntance – according to my Blessings timers, it takes slightly less than 24 minutes from buffing to exit. It was quite a profitable evening for my paladin, too, with a couple of nice drops.

Steptoe has taken to taking with his Death Knight and is doing well. Let’s also immediatly put one notion to rest: on leveling instances, you do not need to be crit immune as a Death Knight, far from it. Steptoe was level 75 and his gear was around 435ish defense after he got the legplates, with a combined avoidance of about 40%. The healer was a level 74 priest, who didn’t really have too much of a hard time apparently (and since we ran UK the night before when Steptoe was only around 410 defense and the guy came back, that speaks for itself), and throughout the evening the amount of free FoLs I was tossing the tank’s way have decreased quite a bit.

We had two wipes throughout the 5 runs, one early in Drak’Tharon because sometimes a lifetime of experience in not standing in stuff isn’t enough to recognize the stuff you shouldn’t stand in, the second one in VH on the netherstalker boss because of an unfortunate conjunction of me getting hit by an energy sphere about a half second before critting with judgement of blood. Wipe by Bloodicide. Had to happen once.

Regarding Ret performance, I’m a bit peeved about where I was sitting on damage meters. Oh, I came out on top in Drak’Tharon Keep, that one being an undead-heavy instance, no contest. The first two Violet Hold runs, though, I was only third (not by a large measure but still), behind a mage and Steptoe, and in the last two runs, I really had to work my arse off to keep on top against a level 75 boomkin, including eating AP food.

In the end, some gear upgrades, and I dinged Coldweather Flying in the middle of the last run. 3 more levels to 80. Still with about 20 quests in Dragonblight to go, that’s just three zones I’ve seen and used so far. Glad to have my epic fyling back though.

And this concludes my last 2008 post. Whether you level, raid, PvP, and do it casually, softcore or hardcore, I wish you all a very merry evening and a happy new year. To 2009, and may your chosen activities in game and in Real Life bring you joy and merryment.

On Similar Matters

• Catering to the Casuals Indeed (26)
• Raiding and the Patrouille des Glaciers (0)
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• Closing the 2007 Welfare Epics Debate with a Look at PvE (8)
• And thus TBC Ends, both in a Bang and in a Whimper (4)

Says the designer crab:

“A couple more points about Naxx: many of the guilds who cleared it quickly already knew the encounters from 40-player days, AND were allowed to practice extensively on beta. By contrast we gave players very little exposure to Kil’jaeden on the PTR.

But really, trying to slow down worldwide progression by making encounters insanely difficult is a losing proposition. We’re in the world now of professional guilds with corporate sponsors and players willing to put in enormous numbers of hours and attempts. We can certainly (and will) make very challenging encounters for which guilds can take pride in server firsts. However, I would not expect to see encounters that are so difficult that the entire WoW community wipes on them for months before achieving success. I just don’t know if that game exists anymore.”

That pretty much sums up everything there is to say. As much as Nihilum Curse SK Gaming 25th November Ensidia Whatever-They’re-Called-This-Week and the other handful of überguilds hate it, the C’Thun days appear to be gone for good.

There’s another piece of wisdom hidden in that statement. When the world’s biggest überguild has fully beta access, sees the content, remains absolutely silent about the difficulty then race through the content on release in order to bitch about the lack of challenge, it isn’t just faux outrage and manufactured controvery. It isn’t just a clear demonstration that whatever firsts they achieve in the future is no longer properly legit and completely meaningless (as opposed to the merits of every single guild who was NOT in beta, clears the content and remains out of the limelights monopolized by what has in the meantime devolved into WoW’s biggest collection of attention whores and drama queens). It also shows that they are a total failure as beta testers and haven’t understood the purpose of all these shiny passes they have recieved.

The game too easy for you? Sod off. You should have said so in beta. Now get off the headlines.

On Similar Matters

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• As the Year Turns (2)

So Nihilum and SK Gaming merged, rushed to level 80, and then proceeded to clear all raid instances weeks or even months before the unwashed masses. Good for them.

When you pay a monthly subscription to burn to content which is meant to last other people a couple of months within 2 days, that’s your business.

Then something interesting happened in the PR statement released below (emphasis is mine):

“We are proud to declare that all WOTLK PVE raid content has now been cleared. This is both a moment of triumph and a cause for concern. The question in all our minds right now is if we could do this, how soon until the rest of the top guilds in the world clear all the raid content that WOTLK has to offer? Did Blizzard miscalculate in the tuning of these encounters? Or is this Blizzard folding under the weight of a large casual player base that demands to be on equal footing with end-game raiders?“

By that statement combined with the timing of the whole thing, Twentyfithnovember (that’s the new name of the merged operation) made one thing clear. They no longer represent anyone in this game but themselves. Not even what you would qualify as a hardcore guild.

Mind you, it’s not the fact that they rushed through content and cleared it all within two days, it’s the fact that they take this and act as if they were any reasonable measure of anything.

By their own words, Twentyfithnovember have just rendered themselves completely irrelevant. They aren’t even a role model for the other gamers, they’re just a cadre of people sponsored to raid and churn out world first.

The one thing which they have made crystal clear is that Blizzard should in no way listen to anything they could say in regards to content tuning or balance, in the best case they could be treated as an extended QA team to spot and test out bugs on the PTR. For anything else, their point of view is so far removed from the reality of the playerbase that they could just as well be playing a different game altogether.

And that’s actually what they are doing.

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Cambios is a game dev who may just have started his blog recently, yet posts interesting stuff from day one. Taking on some of the more visible flaws in raiding in current MMOs, he writes:

So 10, 25, 40, 50, or 100 people work together to mindlessly clear trash, follow their little script of brain disconnected button pushes to beat the boss, and now he drops 2 or 3 pieces of loot. This loot will often be useful/needed by multiple players present, so someone loses out. The same item might drop many times in a row, resulting in certain classes feasting while others enjoy famine. Or sometimes loot will drop that nobody can use, and it just gets blown up or sold to an NPC Vendor. NEVER is the entire group happy with the loot that drops or the way the loot gets distributed.

Indeed. One of the major issues at heart of the old Welfare Epics feud of 2007 lies with the difference in loot distribution between PvE and PvP. I think Blizzard recognized the issue when they started expanding the badge system, but I also think they need to make it really pervasive. All instance drops should be token-based in some form, and there has to be in-game rewards for participation for every raid member (as opposed to out-of-game only systems like DKP).

So may elements of boss encounter design are absurdly arbitrary. I have fought bosses who did incredibly ridiculous things that were clearly designed solely with the idea of nullifying a specific class, tactic, or ability for no logical reason other than the devs thought it would be funny. I have fought raid bosses that were immune to all sorts of standard abilities for no apparent reason other than to make you feel impotent. I have participated in raid encounters where mages had to tank a boss… just because. People don’t make mages because they like tanking, folks. They make mages because they like to make things go boom. I have fought bosses where they you have to interrupt some of their spells, but not all of them, because being too good at interrupting their spells triggers some kind of Uber Spell. If the boss possessed the ability to perform this Uber Spell, why isn’t he just doing it all the time? Why punish people for being GOOD at a core mechanic (interrupting spell casting) with this arbitrary result?

In their currently stated best intentions, Blizzard claims to be trying to design designing new encounters more for roles and less for specific classes:

We are adding a new class to Lich King, as well as improving the raid viability of specs such as Arcane mage, Survival hunter and Balance druid. That means you have 30 available specs for 25 slots. There are two ways to design around this problem. One is that there are 25 mandatory specs and 5 that shouldn’t be raiding. Boo. A more fun, interesting and ultimately fair direction is that you actually have some choices in who to bring. Imagine running a raid with no warrior tanks at all.

These are good intentions, though. Designing encounters in a way that any combination of these 30 specs can successfully fill the roster in broad categories like tanking, healing, dps, CC and decursing will probably require quite a lot more overlap between classes than we see in TBC. And the first raid to put that theory to the test will be the new Naxxramas. Because unless memory fails me, frost and shadow-heavy builds for mages and warlocks respectively didn’t exactly fare well in there.

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So after a significant slowdown to my posting activities, this is my 300th post on Altitis. Incidentally, the blog is also 1 year (and 10 days) old now.

Before moving on towards 400, let’s take the opportunity to review some facts both interesting and trivial about this place:

• Collectively, my Damage Meter benchmarking series are what interested most readers, attracting slightly over 10’000 pageviews over time. While I can’t make any promises, I intend to get back to these “soon” to check where we stand now that the landscape has stabilized and the new combat log feature is almost ironed out.
• My Parrot review remains the most popular post not part of a series, followed quite closely by my CowTip review.

Interestingly enough, as the wow blogosphere always makes a point of mentioning this kind of things, none of the above have ever been mentioned by wowinsider, and for that matter, haven’t been linked to from other blogs. The readers all come in through search engines, 98% from Google.

A quick review of phpbb3 combined with a mention of wowdb comes next in popularity, although I suspect most visitors to that page leave disappointed. From the search terms used, visitors were mainly interested in phpbb3 wow themes, not my short review & ramblings. Well, for wow-themed phpbb3 styles, here’s a short list:

• MaevahEmpire for phpbb3 (former MoonClaw style)
• WoW Wrath Style
• PBWoW (wrath themed)
• WoW: World of Warcraft Based Skins (comes in several colour variants, may need some tweaking)

There’s likely to be more out there if you want to google around but the above sampling should give you a good starting point.

My two most popular rants are tied to the Ghostwolf nerf, and I have mainly Mania to thank for that, as most viewers to these pages come from her blog.

One of my oldest theory posts still attracts a decent amount of viewers every day, the second one in the Defense Theory series which explains how PvE defense works, in particular for tanks.

Now for some other interesting or odd stats:

• Last week, Altitis ranked second in Google for clicked queries on wrath talent trees (in fact I’m still second as I write this). There’s definitely a hunger for information on the matter out there. Unfortunately for visitors looking for this kind of information, what they get here is my post on how I believe it is too early to engage in in-depth discussions about wrath talents.
• Some people are apparently still interested in my clumsy attempts to write my own armory crawler in php.
• To the three people looking for Stop the Warrior: although we both are frequently commenting on each other’s posts and sometimes shouting out (or at) each other, his blog is over there. And while we’re at it, his GM, who holds a (probably deserved) bad opinion of me, has her own blog as well, and if you’re interested in insights into how guild management works in a serious raiding environment, you should have her on your blogroll. No excuses, go subscribe now.
• What gives honor in AV? Killing other people of course, but also burning towers, holding onto towers until the end of the match, killing the opposing Captain (that’s either Galvander or Balinda depending on your faction), protecting your own captain until the end of the game, killing the enemy general.
• Armchair from treehugger: dunno what you were looking for, but it sounds hurtful.
• Casserole FFXI: sounds tasty
• Cheese Conspiracy Theory: Yes, the good old mystery about the Darnassian Bleu still hasn’t been solved.

While there’s a lot of additional sassy keywords in here, this is probably enough of self-congratulation for a single post. As always, allow me to thank everyone of you for reading and commenting on Altitis, it’s your silent or outspoken presence which gives this blog a reason to be.

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One of the gripes most often heard during Arena Season 2 and Season 3 from part of the hardcore raiding crowd was about the fact that Arena gear was recoloured tier gear, so that an Illidan-killing hero wouldn’t really appear remarkable when walking in areas where arena dancers gathered.

In Blizzcast 3, Tigole announced that this part of the disagreement between arena players and dedicated raiders will be a thing of the past in Wrath of the Lich King:

PvP armor will be different from the PvE armor entirely in looks and colors this time.

Of course, to some people this might be a trivial issue, but for all the people to whom recognition is also part of the values driving their gameplay, this is a welcome change.

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But Death, Taxes and an infernal dropping at the wrong moment.

My casual-as-dirt guild has started doing Kara for fun. Don’t worry guys, the Random Number God doesn’t hate you personally. You’ll get him next time.

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From the other end of the gamer spectrum, Lume the Mad offers his perspective on reaching the end of the Burning Crusade, and the meta-game represented by the world first race.

A few choice words, on the matter of quality vs. the time it took to produce:

I think the fact of the matter remains that raiders are going to defeat content faster than Blizzard can simply produce it. And faster production lowers the quality. It would be similar to asking Nintendo to put out a new Zelda game every six months, because players beat each in the first week or two. It’s just simply not going to happen. And I’d rather have a quality experience every nine months than a terrible experience every few. I know some people will disagree, but it’s funny considering people complained how BT was relatively easy and called for something more difficult. And now that something more difficult and higher in quality has been produced, people are complaining about the time it took to produce it. It’s a huge cliché, but: “You can’t please everyone.”

About Blizzard destroying the high-end raiding scene:

I don’t think there’s anything they [Blizzard] can do to destroy it [the high-end raiding scene] other than to make every single instance as easy and boring as, say, Molten Core. As long as the content is at least somewhat decent in quality and there’s a guild willing to go the distance to be number one, it will never die. People might note their surprise and disappointment about how quickly the content was defeated, but the fact of the matter is that people will still follow whoever the top guild is through that content.

Ah, heck, just go ahead and read it all here at the source.

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As most of you will have seen already, Kil’Jaeden is down, and the PvE content of the Burning Crusade is now complete.

Two things strike me, first, it was SK Gaming who got the world first, putting an end to 25 months of Nihilum dominance. Congratulations.

The second thing is that KJ fell (again) in less than one week. Thanks to the gate system, Blizzard basically ensured that Sunwell Plateau would artificially remain unvanquished for 10 weeks, but in practice, the instance would probably have been cleared within 4 weeks without gates.

Now a couple of years ago, I would probably have jumped to the conclusion that spending all that development time on the top content to see it eaten up in a month was overkill, catering to 0.1% of the playerbase for very little additional content. But in reality, this kind of discourse is almost always tied to the notion that the casual content comes up short (something I may have been guilty of myself in the past), a notion which is only true in the eye of the beholder. In practice, lots of content has been added for casual players as well, and while old Azeroth isn’t really being given much love these days, little touches here and there still happen.

In SK Gaming’s own assessment, despite falling in 5 days, Kil’Jaeden is the hardest boss in the game, and perfectly tuned to demand the best a player can give. Contrast this with Naxxramas, which took a couple of months to clear, how do you reconcile that difference?

Well, I do believe the relatively short time between a boss’ gate opening and its first kill is actually speaking less about blizzard’s devs and more about top raiding. Let me venture an educated guess here, but to me the 10-20 guilds forming the world first contenders have mostly reached the game engine’s limits itself, a point where no matter what combination of methods are being coded, they can recognize the pattern, relate to a previous boss fight, and devise the appropriate counter almost naturally (if I liken this to the Treck borg, I’m gonna sound like the ultimate geek). There’s probably a point where stuff like not standing in burning vortexes, clicking on spawned thingies, dealing with nasty adds, handling aggro resets, positioning the raid properly, not staying around your guildies when you’re about to explode, managing fear, composing with an  enrage timer, decursing, healing and dpsing according to whatever situation becomes natural.

In a similar vein, one thing about having Altitis is that the newbie zones is probably what you will have visited more often than anything else – I sure did. The draenei and blood elf starter zones are something I’d qualify as both very well done and faster to finish even on the first run-through than the original ones. And that isn’t just because the zones were done with a lot more polish than their predecessors, but also because there’s only so much you can do in terms of newbie quests before the player recognizes and reacts to patterns. Let’s face it, there’s only one single questline in the draenei and belf zones which provides original components, the Stillpine Furblog chain in Azuremist Isle, and even that one, in the end, amounts to little more than fedex and kill.

I think (but feel free to tell me just how much I’m talking out of my arse) it’s pretty much the same with boss fights. The limits nowadays are the game engine proper, but also the imagination of the devs – there might still be some mechanisms to be devised to innovate on boss fights, but in the end, it probably becomes harder and harder to find new stuff which can be countered with more than one specific raid composition, allows for more than just one set of cookie-cutter approaches, and is more than “chug enough of the right type of consumables to beat”.

The bottom line is that this relatively short time to clear the hardest bosses in the game demonstrates, in practice even more than in marketing speak, that we have indeed reached the end of TBC, in the sense that only the new skills and talents WotLK will ship with could provide room for new mechansism and types of boss fights.

Even then, I’m not sure there will be enough novelty and variety available to dispel a feeling of “more of the same”, a complaint I’ll go on record predicting will become much more pervasive in the top raiding circles once Wrath is live. Something which, unfortunately, will probably not be fixable within WoW, independently of the quality and challenge Wrath could provide. Should any of the competitors in the MMO market provide a decent endgame, I expect a good portion of the top raiders to leave for pastures providing a different shade of green.

Makes me pretty glad to have Altitis, actually. I’m nowhere near the point where I could reach the limit of what the game has to offer.

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