Author: Zubon

There has been much MMO blog chatter lately on optimization, “I just want to have fun,” what you owe your team/raid, exploring mechanics, etc. I wish to add 2.5 small postulates, upon which I hope we can agree.

If one option is better than another by a non-negligible margin in all cases or nearly so, it is a poor decision to choose the inferior option, and it is fair to criticize someone for doing so. This is true even if there are role-playing or decorative reasons for the choice. As an extreme example, it is perfectly valid to refuse to group with someone who is role-playing an ascetic mendicant who refuses to use equipment or someone who wants to raid in level 10 equipment because it looks nice.

A corollary is that if one option is clearly superior in the circumstance in question, one that is readily available and has no meaningful drawbacks, you are welcome to criticize someone for choosing the inferior option. Don’t be a jerk about it, but this guy is being a jerk by playing his class with only two buttons and not even the right two buttons.

The second postulate is that it is usually poor game design to have stochastically dominant options over non-idiotic ranges of comparison. If 1 2 1 3 1 4 really is the best damage rotation in 90+% of fights, you have reduced most of the game’s complexity to eight characters. If there is no point at which a Warrior should trade off Strength for Dexterity, even at a 10-to-1 ratio, your attribute system is not terribly interesting. These problems are doubly so if some aspect keeps the stochastic dominance from being apparent, such that someone might not notice the tiny DoT icons which tell you that you should never add numbers other than 1-4 to that rotation.

: Zubon

I have a friend who is a stochastic dominatrix.

My latest reading on “what is wrong with the human brain” is Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. The titular theme is that human beings are really bad at predicting what will make us happy. We imagine future events but leave out important details. You have the essence of the experience in mind but forget all the details that could mitigate it, leading us to over-estimate how good the good will be and how bad the bad will be.

The author’s recommended solution, which he does not expect most to take, is to use surrogates. On average, you will better predict how much you will enjoy X if I tell you how much some random person enjoyed X than if I tell you what X is. The odds are better that your brain will miss something important than that this random person is much different from you on an important variable. It is also known that the average person thinks he is different from average for most important variables, so this means you.

Apply this for a moment. You have been following that MMO’s development for years, listening to developers, getting all the details, and on that basis you will probably have a worse estimate of how much you will enjoy it than if you just tried to get a sense of how the playerbase feels as it launches, worse than if you just asked a random player/tester how much fun s/he had. If you consider the pre-game anticipation part of the fun, go to, but consider it a separate form of entertainment rather than useful information-gathering.

Of course, as an MMO player, you are in a niche market. You can improve your enjoyment estimates by narrowing the range of potential players over whom you are seeking a random or average estimate. But remember to stick to that principle or at least keep track of how often you get burned when you veer from it: if you usually like what Ravious likes, and Ravious says he likes/hates X, you can rationally make a buying decision based solely on that. I am happy to take movie recommendations from a few reviewers who I know to have similar tastes, and Roger Ebert will usually know before I do whether I will enjoy a film.

: Zubon

I grant that Bhagpuss is a unique snowflake whose preferences will differ on the important variables.

In 2009 and earlier, I blogged a few times about the Lori Drew case, in which a woman was prosecuted under federal hacking laws for violating MySpace’s terms of service. I drafted but never posted a follow-up of the US government’s continuing to pursue that legal interpretation in an even stronger form: “exceeding authorized access” (federal hacking felony) includes violating your access privileges in any way. That includes checking the news/weather at work when the office policy says, “no personal internet use.” That includes swearing in World of Warcraft or violating the ToS in any game. And that argument is winning. Granted, Ninth Circuit; granted, divided; but this is one of the most powerful enablings of selective prosecution you are likely to see this month.

A legal interpretation holding that checking the weather is a federal felony is clearly insane, but it is not clearly wrong. It is not even necessarily an unfair reading of the plain wording of the statute.

: Zubon

Spinks comments, inspired by Pete:

I’m firmly in this camp where feeling overly threatened by a game just makes me turn it off. When I see a hard mode, I automatically think, “Oh it’ll be too hard for me,” and switch it to normal (or easier) even though I’m a fairly experienced gamer.

Pete suggests that he is old and the reflexes are failing, but I submit another explanation: anyone in that age bracket grew up with Nintendo hard games that featured a lot of fake difficulty, and since everything has “RPG elements” now, fake longevity. We have seen “hard” done badly hundreds of times, versus some smaller number of good challenges.

If you tell me that this next mission is really hard, it could be because the developers have an interesting encounter that will force me to re-examine my usual tactics, react quickly, and understand complex patterns. It could also be that this next mission expects me to grind levels/gear for hours, memorize a Battletoads-like series of arbitrary dance moves, escort fast and suicidal NPCs, deal with a drunken camera, and/or guess the one trick someone thought would be a “clever puzzle.” Unless a trusted source tells me otherwise, I am likely to assume that “hard” means “unfair.” Someone has already consumed the benefit of that doubt a dozen times over.

: Zubon