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Stochastically Dominant

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.

Surrogating on Happiness

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.

Spiral Situation: Wizard101 Test Realm: The good, the bad, and the ugly

The first thing that must be said about the April (now May) Test Realm for Wizard101 is that there is not a single ugly thing about it. There’s not even a single bad thing about it. It’s all good.

First and foremost, Wintertusk is breathtaking. The music of Wintertusk has received adulation from players of all ages – it’s the one feature that players have praised the most. The Wintertusk graphics and the battles also reach new levels of amazing.

There are new school (i.e., class) spell quests for toons level 35 and 58. As always, there is debate among players as to the usefulness of the spells that have been awarded. For example, Ice School players seem fond of the spell they can cast to reduced damage from the next spell of any class. However, they aren’t big fans of the so-called “upgraded ice armor” spell.

Players of each school will receive an additional school pet at level 58. As with the new spells, players debate over the choice of spell for each school. Many Storm school players wish their pet was a Leviathan instead of a Kraken (or a “stupid sneezing Kraken” as one of my Diviner friends calls it). However, they soon swarmed Doctor Purreau’s Hatchery to mix and match pets and see what neat-o hybrids might be obtained. A Death Phoenix? Yes please!

New gardening features have been added, primarily the addition of new seeds. New seeds are fun, because they present new challenges in terms of needs and likes, and drop new loot upon harvesting. The loot dropped from gardening might be low-level reagents which can be sold at the Bazaar, or it might be Mega-Snacks which otherwise can only be obtained through the cash shop.

The Test Realm also rolls out not one but two things that players have dearly wished for yet didn’t believe they would ever live to see. First off, wand stitching. This will enable players to take the stats from one wand (or sword, which is the other casting implement in Wizard101) to the appearance of another. So if you have a wand that looks kickin’ with your favorite battle duds, but it casts strikes that waste all of your best-laid class traps, you can have the best of both worlds once the Test Realm goes live by stitching it to an implement with wand strikes of a different school.

The second /swoon! addition currently being tested is the ability to set unequipped mounts free in your house or dorm room. The player community has been longing for this ever since mounts came out – we’ve wanted to see them float around our homes alongside our pets. Truthfully, I don’t think any of us thought KingsIsle would give in to this whimsical desire. But they have in spades. Bravo KingsIsle!

I haven’t covered every last feature currently in the Test Realm. There are new mounts, and the new spells for each school deserve careful review and dissection. When the Test Realm goes live, I’ll be sure to at least hit the highlights.

Wrath Reminiscences

A friend was telling me about playing WoW with her son. He did perfectly fine except for the reading parts, since he is only now 7 and English is not his first language. He was, however, capable of learning how to raid as a DPS character. When she needed to go to the bathroom during a raid, she would have him sit in for her. Nothing helps the guild leader reinforce that you are not doing a good job like having a 5-year-old on Ventrilo telling people to stop standing in the fire and not to shoot the sheeped mobs.

: Zubon

[GW2] Fan Interviews

ArenaNet, like any business, has their own marketing agenda where they have to figure out how to use their finite resources to get the biggest results. Obviously, PCGamer and Rock Paper Shotgun are among two media outlets that are going to hit a very large audience. Yet, it shows a lot on their part that they still take time to talk with smaller fansites like GuildMag, Variance, and our humble home. There is one thing about smaller fansites. They usually take as much time and care, if not more, into preparing for the interview as any true journalist site. Two recent interviews from our friends at Tap Repeatedly and Guild-Hall.cz definitely raise the bar for all future professional and fan interviews.

Continue reading [GW2] Fan Interviews

[GW2] WvW – There Are Four Maps

In a nice interview over at Variance, ArenaNet starts dropping some pretty big information World vs. World (WvW)  combat.  WvW is actually three servers or shards pitted against each other for a set amount of time. Instead of arena-style PvP, WvW involves a big combat zone with multiple, linked objectives. For example, a supply caravan might be re-stocking a fortification. Players can either attack the fortification directly or cut off the supply chain. Winning sides garner benefits for their entire server. All this information has been known for some time. The interview brings to light an interesting twist: there are four maps.

Continue reading [GW2] WvW – There Are Four Maps

Unauthorized Access

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

Contrasting Review Philosophies

Gamespot 2007: fire reviewer for trashing a game that was advertising heavily on the site. (Side note: 6/10 theoretically looks like “somewhat above average,” but that is really a 6 on a scale from 7 to 9. To get a 2, the game would need to physically damage your console with harmonic resonance, and even then a small ad buy could get you at least a 5.)

The Onion 2011: Dylan Dog gets a D+ rating while basically paying for the site for the month. As I type this, the main Onion AV Club page is running 4 ads for Dylan Dog at once. I don’t know what that does for their advertising revenue, but that sounds like buying a chunk of credibility. (Sadly, I rarely find the AV Club reviews helpful. A post on using reviews productively is coming up.)

: Zubon

[GW] Happy 6th Anniversary!

Six years of Guild Wars, and it is still going strong even with the last box release being over three years. Most of its perseverance is owed to the Guild Wars Live Team. The Live Team has put out another great update, which follows on the heels of the Embark Beach update last month. There’s a smattering of prodigious items like high-resolution textures in town, hard mode versions of favorite quests, and the much requested Friends location feature. Plus the weight of the birthday presents feels a little different this year, and madness has bled into PvP.

Continue reading [GW] Happy 6th Anniversary!