Firing up for another daily grind

A look at the new shape of Firelands dailies 

Once again I’ve been struggling to find much time to play WOW over the past few weeks, when I’ve managed to get on, even if it’s just been for 10 minutes my first priority has been to carry on with my auction house experiment; my second task, time allowing, has been to work through the new Firelands dailies. I wrote a brief post just before the Firelands patch asking what the casual could expect from the new content, in particular looking at the more ‘personalised’ dailies.

Firstly, the way the new dailies works is a little different to that of other ‘rep’ type dailies, you don’t directly gain rep by doing x, y and z, instead you collect tokens. Mark of the World Tree to be precise; in order to get anything from these dailies you need to collect 150 of the little buggers, at which point an NPC will become available from whom you can buy goodies from. Further NPCs turn up varying number more, according to Wowhead a total of 695 will currently unlock all of the available NPCs.  Now I like this idea, in some respects, and hate it in others, as a casual you are at no more of a disadvantage than raiders (other than perhaps they have more time to play), as you can only get the marks from dailies, you can get a maximum of around 12 per day (it varies according to how many NPCs you’ve unlocked) after the initial introductory quests which give a few extra, so you’re going to be grinding for 33 days completing each quest to unlock everything (again according to Wowhead). There is no tabard so it’s not like you can hit a few instances over the course of a weekend to max your rep out like the others.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, it’s not all about the gear; gear is a means to and ends, my primary goal is enjoyment, so what about the quests? I’m not a big quester if I’m honest, they’ve been a means to getting to the top level over the years, and nothing more, yes there's been the occasional chain to get an item, or that really are fun, like the crucible type chains, and then the horrible Onyxia and molten core type key chains which are occasionally fun at first but a complete pain in the proverbial when you come to run alts. On the main part, I’m not one of the people who’ll just churn through them for the fun of it. I’m not interested in the lore, or the ‘story’ (I know it floats some peoples boats, just not mine.) in fact the second I discovered the macro to speed up quest text in Vanilla it was a permanent resident in my macro book; click the NPC, hammer accept, and jog on, that’s me. I’m not a fan of the cut scene for the same reason, but that’s a different story (pun intended).


On the face of it the Firelands quests are a bit different from the norm; rather than, say, the Jewel crafting dailies, where if you need to inflict stardust on ten different people, every other jewel crafter on the server will be doing the same, the Firelands quests are randomised for you, there are a pool of quests from which you get a random selection to do each day (the numbers vary again depending on how many NPCs you’ve unlocked). One of the reasons I’ve never been so interested in the MMO story element is that they never felt that, well, epic. “you young Troll! Go kill MEGADRAGON the undefeatable beast that’s been stealing our carrots and has slayed every Troll before” only if you don’t mind waiting in line for the seventeen other peeps who got there first to finish killing him it’d be appreciated, ok, thanks, bye…. Not for me thanks. With the randomised aspect, you AND ONLY YOU, are on that particular quest chain. RIGHT! Wrong. Whilst the quests are essentially randomised from a pool of possible quests, there's so many people wading into the new content at the same time, that you’re still competing for the same mobs as everyone else. Yes there’s improvements, all of the big mobs are killable by the same people concurrently; they can’t be tapped, so you only have to hit it once before it dies to get credit, so there’s not as much of the listless hammering of the /target megadragon /cast <instant spell> macro to tap monster before that nasty Paladin gets there first. When it comes to punting bears onto trampolines, or reviving exhausted allies (who look shocked for a few seconds, before stumbling round a bit and then falling over again) you’re still essentially grinding stuff and competing with everyone else on the server.

It’s a step in the right direction, don’t get me wrong, but so much more could be done. I’d like to see more in the ways of phasing being used so that when you kill MEGADRAGON, you and you alone are fighting it, you’re already zoning into Firelands for half the quests, which would suggest it could be on a different instance server, so why not ensure there’s only one character in each ‘instance’ on each particular quest, or at least only a few. I like the combination quests, the ones that aren’t party quests, but several people can kill the same hard mob. I like the ‘different’ quests of punting things into the water, although the stupid bear-up-a-tree quest is already doing my nut. Actually it would probably require far more quests to choose from in the random pool to make it viable, that and enough server power to accommodate the extra phases and instances. All of which means cost, and cost means less profit, so I doubt we’ll see anything like. For the moment I’ll continue grinding coins, at least until I get to 250, just so I can say I gave it a fair crack, doubt I’ll go much further though as chances are I’ll be ready to strangle the developers by then.

Austerity Measures

After penning a begging letter to my competitor who’s been artificially holding the glyph market so low for a while now that there’s no longer any profit to be made in it, as I set out in my last post, more in hope of a reply than expectation; I received a reply!  I’d like to report that my guess as to what he was up to was spot on, and I called it; but as it happens, I was half right.  The glyph market has been dropping on my server a little recently, nothing substantial (since I got involved, but I can’t really comment on the prices before that) but I’ve noticed (now I think about it) that where glyphs would regularly go for around the 100g mark, I quite often see them slipping down to the 75g level, not all, just some.  This when you consider I have around 100 to 150 glyphs listed at any one time, and (used to) sell up to 10 of those per listing session can equate to quite a drop in revenue.

Now in my mail communication with the seller (I explained that I write a blog, and he’s specifically asked not to be named so I’m assuming he’s a ‘he’ and will be referring to him as ‘the seller’ from this point onwards) he set out the reasons why he’s doing what he’s doing.  The full text of the letter is shown to the right, he talks about the glyph market being “hugely profitable for months” until recently when the “new guys” (do you think he means me?) have come along increasing competition and thus lowering the prices and the profit to be had.  By setting the prices low, he’s trying to price the other sellers out of the market, by taking away the profit margins, hoping that he has deeper pockets (and more patience) than they do.
This sort of competition is quite a common occurrence in real world economics; a new market comes along, lets say selling trolls tusks.  Someone has spotted a niche for tusks, makes an investment in the R&D of developing a trolls tusk for the market, setting up a selling infrastructure and taking the tusks to market.  All is fine, there's lots of profit to be made an no real competition to speak of, everything is going swimmingly.  That is until one day someone else spots that you’re doing nicely for yourself with you big house and new car and decides they’d like a bit of that pie too.  This isn’t a problem initially, yes your sales take a hit at first as customers can now chose your tusks or someone else's, in the long run the added competition has actually helped you as there are actually enough customers to go round, and you’ve taken another look at your operation and realised that you can save money by streamlining some of it, thus making more profit per tusk.  Even though you sell less tusks, you make more profit per tusk.  All is great until, over the months, ten more tusk sellers come into the market all wanting a their own slice of the shared troll tusk-pie; and what's more, they didn’t bother doing their own R&D, they just copied yours so saved on the costs, meaning that they can sell at a cheaper level that you to such an extent that there’s no longer any profit in the market for you because everyone is undercutting you. 

At this point, something called consolidation will normally happen, either companies will aggressively buy out their competitors or merge, chose to move into a different market, or go bust.  This isn’t always enough to reduce the competition to a level to achieve a stable, sustainable, profit level for all involved.  So other avenues need to be taken, either by differentiating yourself some way(adding tassels to your tusks for example) so that people will pay more for them even though they’re a higher price.  The only other option is to compete on price alone, this is generally accepted to not be a nice place to be – someone will eventually fail if more than one seller attempts this as there can only ever be one lowest cost seller.  Very occasionally, dirty or extremely aggressive tactics will be employed; smear campaigns, aggressive undercutting and much much more can happen, the aggressive undercutting is just what we’re seeing on the glyph market.  In real world economies, the undercutting seller will generally sell their wares at an unsustainable level, either at a loss or at such an insignificant profit they may as well not bother.  This is a brinkmanship game, hoping that their competitors go bust, go away, or sell up before they do.  Once the competition is gone, the prices can be artificially inflated to far higher levels and more profit can be made than was previously possible as there is no longer any competition.  The way this is normally stopped is through legislation by governments and regulation, the government specifically stops companies doing things which will harm competition unfairly, and  ultimately raise prices or lower service levels for the end consumer.

Winding our example back to the Auction House and my current predicament, there are a few differences between real world economics and the WOW economy; Primarily, you cant go bust, you can’t buy other peoples business, and there’s no regulation, and you can’t compete on anything else but price.  People can go away, but not for the same reasons as you’d see in business; The only reason that others will stop selling, is that there is so little gold to be made, it’s not worth their time to play in that particular market.  For example if I only make 1g per glyph in profit, but each glyph takes 2 minutes to create (picking herbs, milling, inscribing the scroll), I might chose to go and make potions at 10g profit per pot for a similar effort.  Additionally, different people will have different thresholds, a school kid with an abundance of time on his hands might accept a relatively low profit, someone who has a full time job, family and drinking habit to sustain, on the other hand, may only have a few hours a week to play and decide their fun is better had elsewhere in the game.

My friendly sellers strategy is brave, but I fear may be misplaced for the reasons I’ve set out above, we’ll see, and hopefully he’ll be kind enough to tell me how he thinks his endeavours in artificially revitalising his market have gone.  I suspect some of the competition may disappear, but as soon as the market goes up they, or other new entrants, will reappear.  He also may be creating a rod for his own back, glyphs are now at such a cheap level that it’s more profitable to farm something or quest for gold and buy them, instead of going out and picking herbs to make the glyphs yourself, potential customers may just buy up all of the glyphs they’ll ever need for them and their alts, and never need to buy a glyph again (until the next WOW expansion is released) thus decreasing the demand.  I know this is happening, as it’s exactly what what I’ve done – it’s not worth my time grinding herbs and creating the glyphs at this price, so I’ve filled out all of my empty slots for every character over level 70.  He’s also running the risk that the competition will simply buy the glyphs at 25g, wait it out and undercut him at the higher levels in a few weeks time; I know this is happening already, it’s exactly what I’ve done.

As for my glyph selling antics, I’m pretty much waiting it out, as I say, I’ve bought a good few glyphs at the low levels, about 3k worth at 25g, which equates to 10-20k at previous prices (whether the market will ever recover to quite this level I’m not sure).  I’m absolutely fascinated by the effect on the economy, I’ll be monitoring the sales closely, and I wish him every success in inflating the market, if it works, it’ll benefit my sales massively.  I’ll also be monitoring the related item sales.  I’ve noticed inferno ink sales, which previously sold like hot cakes, have been slow.  I’ve also noticed that the price of potions has increased slightly, this may be coincidental, or it may be that he’s bought herbs for ink from the AH, pushing the price up.  I’ll have to write and ask…

Sounding the Death Knell for ‘Old Heroics’

Are the original Cata heroics dead and buried already?

As my regular reader may have noted, I’ve not written much on here recently; this is due mainly to me sunning myself in various parts of Europe.  Hope you all had fun while I was away… Having had a mini-break from WOW of just under 2 weeks (which I think I needed as I was becoming a little jaded anyways) I waded back into ZG and ZA with my priest.  Oh how I was rusty, it’s amazing how you forget the subtleties of playing your class after a bit of a break.  Anyway, after five minutes of flailing about aimlessly, I remembered how to cast Chakra and all was well.  I completed a few runs on the priest, but as I’m pretty much as well geared on my priest as I’m going to be from the new heroics (although the damn 2h caster staff from ZG still eludes me) I thought I’d dust off the DK tank and the druid and do a few ‘old’ heroic runs.  Now I know that they’re not technically that old, more middle aged, but that seems to be the way everyone seems to refer to all of the 5 man instances apart from ZA & ZG; far be it from me to fly in the face of convention.

Firstly I dusted off the tank, now I haven’t actually done much tanking since the release of the 4.1 patch as I’ve been concentrating on the mage and the priest.  My ilvl was 2 below the requirement for the Zanzilar instances so I’m pretty well geared as the old heroics go, but oh how I was rusty.  I actually took some time to read up and refresh my memory on tanking with the DK before venturing into an instance.  First off it was Grim Batol, oh the joy (my regular reader knows how I love this place, if you’re not him, have a read of this).  Not only was it Grim Batol, it was a half complete Grim Batol, their previous tank had deserted them, give them a chance I though, ‘he may have just disconnected’.  Oh how wrong I was.   We were at General Umbriss the penultimate boss in there, it’s really not that difficult as DPS or healer (especially with a reasonably geared tank), its a simple matter of not getting too far away so the breath can be avoided, not standing in shit, and dpsing the adds which spawn.  The healer, it seems, had a death wish, running at spawned adds, standing in the shit, and generally just jumping off cliffs as much as possible, but that’s not the worst of it, of the three DPS, only one of them managed over 5k, and him only just.  Now I know DPS isn’t everything, but we had a druid, hunter and a mage, regardless of how bad their gear was they should be kicking out at least double that; hell on my fire mage I was getting close to 12k on some boss fights before getting a single piece of heroic gear.

After five failed attempts, five failed attempts that weren’t even close and showed no signs of improvements, I decided enough was enough.  Now I hate dumping groups like this, but it was clear this was really going nowhere.  I took the time to apologise and politely (I hope)explained that I didn’t feel this groups DPS was anywhere near what was needed and left, I suppose I could have pointed out that their positioning sucked, and at least two of them didn't have a clue how to play their class, but I decided against it; to be fair, I’m not the greatest tank in the world and it would have felt a touch hypocritical.

So I queued for another random, after a quick food break, back refreshed, we were off to the Lost City of Tol’vir.  The first pull went badly, partly my fault I suppose, but not helped by someone breaking the crowd control at least twice and the groups inability to attack the marked targets.  Before the fight was over, the mage who’s crowd control had been broken had left.  Replacing the departed mage we cracked on, round to the first boss.  Now this boss, lets face it, is pretty easy.  Don’t stand on mines, avoid the charge (which is telegraphed well in advance of it happening), and blast away.  As I was kiting xxx boss xxx round for about the tenth circuit, it struck me that things weren’t going to well, we finally killed it, and I had a cursory glance at the DPS meters; none of the DPS had more than 4k!! what on earth is going on?? ok, there’s a bit of movement which effects the numbers, but not that much.  At this point I had a quick inspect of peoples gear, it was clear that at least one of the party had cheated the ilvl requirements, the rest of the party was in low to average quality gear, but you’d expect them to be able to manage the instance easily.  Not long after the group fell apart.

I ran a few further instances, both on the tank and the druid healing.  I witnessed it all, tanks who don’t know how to tank (no not me, worse than that), healers who had no clue how to manage their mana pool, DPS who refuse to switch to adds on bosses, and my favourite of all, people who were new to instances (which is fine, we all had L plates once up on a time) who were asked directly “do you know what to do here” only to cause a wipe and say, “sorry this is my first heroic, I didn’t know what to do”.

Not the most enjoyable afternoons play I’ve ever experienced, but it made for a new rant post, it got me thinking, why is it so bad in PUGs for old heroics? and it struck me, they’re basically training areas for people aspiring to the Zanzilar instances and 10 man raids.  People are able to power level to 85 from scratch in a few days, either not touching an instance on the way or being so overpowered, their inability to play their class doesn’t matter.  They hit 85, buy the gear they need to meet the ilvl, and then hack straight into the heroics. 
I’ve met a lot more new players also over the last few days in old heroics, either WOW is undergoing a resurgence in new subscriptions, or there are less experienced players doing the older content; I suspect the latter.  It seems people plough through the old heroics, gathering the gear they need and then jump straight into the new content; why wouldn’t you?  There’s very little reward for hanging around after you’ve met the ilvl, you’ll replace most of the gear in a few runs of the new stuff anyway.

So you’re not going to get too many people hanging around with better than average gear, so those players with poor gear stand out far more, they can no longer expect to be carried by the players doing the better DPS.  Those players who are ‘good’ players tend, in my experience of the last few days, to be far less forgiving, I’ve seen people drop out on inspecting other peoples gear before a shot had been fired, I’ve seen far more abuse from players, who weren’t that good themselves, and generally people treating PUGs as their means of getting to better things as quickly as possible, not really caring about who they trample over on the way.  The one thing I haven’t seen (yet) is ninja looting of gear which is better suited to others in the party.
It strikes me that the new ZA & ZG instances are where it’s at at the moment, and as everyone is clamouring to meet the requirements to get into those they expect to be handed the gear on a plate from the lesser instances, it seems to be fostering the kind of abhorrent behaviour which no one particularly likes to see, and also exposes the newer players to the game to an environment where they’re most certainly not going to learn, and more likely going to get turned off the game quickly.

Now I’m not saying that I don’t want new content, I’m already starting to feel that I’ve done the two new heroics to death, but Blizzard need to be wary of releasing new content which walks all over the existing stuff, are we going to get to a stage where the next lot of dungeons are released, which means that ZA & ZG simply become gearing zergs? With patch 4.2 coming along sometime soon, T11 gear is going to be far more attainable, I suspect so.  Blizzard have already proved they are capable of revitalising old content, in the changes they’ve made to the lower level zones, but as I’ve already mentioned in many of my other posts, the lower level instances, that is, the instances that aren’t the top level heroics, are just a joke.  Without a bit of care, Blizzard could be nullifying most of the content they created for Cataclysm only half a year after it was released.

LFD

How do you find yours?

Since the 4.1 Patch hit, and before, there’s been a lot of consternation in the blogging community about LFD.  Has the new reward system made any difference to the queue? has the quality of tanking gone down as a result? are groups failing more?  As it’s been done to death by the rest of the community, I’m not going to even talk about the Call to Arms reward system, instead I’m going to take a look at group makeups a little more generally since ZG and ZA hit.

I’ve got two characters of the required level for the new dungeons, my priest and my mage, I’ve been concentrating on running these two primarily, but I’ve done a couple of the ‘old’ heroics on my DK and druid.  Lets take the new heroics first, the first thing I noticed is that players, on the whole, seem to be far better geared; yes I know the ilvl requirement is higher, but actually a lot of the players I see in the new heroics are wearing primarily 10-man epics, where as your average LFD player pre 4.1 would be somewhere between the basic 328 and being kitted out in blues with the occasional rep and / or valour point item.  I guess this is because the raider types were either bored of the old 5 man heroics, or were running less well geared alts through them; the new instances are new content and they’re there either purely to experience it, or to top the occasional bit of gear up that they haven’t gained from raiding.  Secondly, and probably as a result of seeing more raider types, I’ve noticed the skill level has gone up significantly, players on the whole, and in the face of new unfamiliar content, perform far better than I’ve seen over the past three months in LFD.  Take for example a guild tank who came along to a ZA run with me this week, he’d never even set foot in the instance before, let alone tanked it.  We were able to clear it, almost managing a timed run, just by giving him a quick run down of what each bosses abilities were over vent.  I’ve absolutely no doubt that a lesser skilled player would have had all sorts of trouble tanking ZA in such a scenario.  On the negative side, I’ve noticed people are far less forgiving in the new instances, probably as a result of being used to higher performance in raids, the most pertinent example I’ve seen being “5k DPS in here? REALLY?” kick…. (to be fair the guy was abysmal, but I’d usually expect to see him asked why his DPS was so poor and have suggested he needed to improve it before being kicked).  Chatting to people both from guild and randoms, I’ve seen a few comments along the lines of, “if you don’t know the strategies in here by now, you deserve to be kicked” which is a little elitist for my liking.

The old heroics are a complete different kettle of fish to what they used to be, I’ve been running a couple of specific dungeons on my DK to get the items I need to unlock ZA & ZG, one of which being Stonecore, on the first three trash packs, where a little crowd control and DPS focus is essential for all but the best geared groups, I’ve seen DPS pulling before the tanks ready or in one case before the healer was even in the instance!  The impatience of players that you typically see in the low end instances to level up and get ma gearz is creeping into the heroics where you really can’t afford to be so gung-ho.  Added to this, the queue’s do seem to be shorter, so I’ve seen a lot of people simply leaving the group if the random instance turns out not to be one of their liking, or one pull doesn’t quite go to plan. 

Come on people! do it right first time, take a little bit of time to do stuff, with some consideration for the other four in your group, and you’ll get it done quicker in the long run and you might even have a bit of fun (ya know, the reason you play the game) in the process.

3D gaming, is there a WOW factor?

3D is one of the buzz words around the media industry, lead by the film industry, the big broadcasters are slowly starting to come on board as 3D TV sets become more affordable.  In the UK Sky is regularly showing live sports events in 3D and has recently followed that with movies, entertainment and documentaries all in 3D.  I’ve worked, until recently, leading a research team who’s remit was the ‘connected home’ focussing mainly on media & entertainment provision to the home.  Clearly 3D is one of the topics on the agenda here so I’d like to hope I can claim to know a little about it.

3D works, very basically, by tricking your brain into thinking a projection has got depth to it.  In years gone by this was done through those hideous red and green tinted glasses.  Unsurprisingly these never really took off.  Fast forward a decade or two and you have two prominent types of 3D viewing sets available to consumers, those using passive techniques, using inexpensive ‘passive’ polarised lenses which is the one your probably more familiar with from cinemas, or the active alternative which utilises battery operated  shutters in the lenses which fire faster than the eye can detect (and cost a fortune).  It is possible to get a 3D viewing experience without glasses, I’ve seen and used a TV set which gives you 3D but these give no where near the depth of the alternatives which use glasses and there are a few oddities caused by the technology which mean at certain angles you can’t see a picture.

I firmly believe that 3D has a place in entertainment, but until it’s without glasses, it’ll remain pretty niche, this will happen, but it’ll clearly take time.  I can however see certain specialist areas taking advantage of 3D technology, gaming being one of those areas.  Before I go into gaming specifically, I think it’s help to make a few observations about 3D technology, and point out a few pet hates.

Firstly, I’m sceptical that the ‘customer’ is currently at the heart of the drive behind 3D, think of the one thing which terrifies the movie industry…. have you got it yet?… that's right, piracy.  Now next time you go watch a 3D film, take the glasses off and take a look, blurry isn’t it? So anyone stood there with a conventional camcorder will get the same.  Even if you get a physical disc with a 3D film on, you’d have a hard time copying it (and finding anyone with a 3D TV to watch it); this will become easier over time, but currently it’s a great way of foiling the pirates.

My second complaint is the seemingly mandatory requirement for all films to be in 3D regardless of whether it adds anything to the experience (and the additional 3D ‘tax’ added to the already extortionate price of a cinema ticket).  Yes there are some great 3D films, Avatar and, ahem, Piranha 3D…. ok, so perhaps just Avatar, but there are also some absolutely pointless 3D additions where 3D has been added as an afterthought for the simple reason of adding 20% extra to the entry fee.  Clash of the Titans is one such film, there’s literally one 3D effect, a coin toss, in the whole film, which is completely and utterly pointless.  Similarly with football (soccer to all you American types), I’m lucky enough to have a local boozer (bar to you American types..) which has a 3D TV and regularly shows 3D footy, this TV happens to be situated in between two normal TV’s so, purely by luck, the viewer gets a stark comparison of the ‘normal’ versus the 3D coverage, and I’ve got to say the 2D version is far better!  More often than not, when you’re getting a replay of a crucial piece of gameplay, or some insightful analysis of the game on the 2D broadcast, the 3D TV is showing some non-descript tackle which happened by the corner flag for the sixth time because it ‘looks good’ in 3D; the coverage has lost the whole point of why people watch football or films – the entertainment of the subject matter, not the 3D experience, yes 3D can compliment that experience, but it shouldn’t be the focal point; until the media industry ‘grows up’ and realise this 3D is destined to be niche.  This is really exemplified by the number of punters in my local who ditch the 3D glasses after a game or two and revert to watching the 2D broadcast (and I realise my American reader’s head has probably now exploded with the amount of colloquialisms I’ve used in this last paragraph).


So, “what's this got to do with WOW then?” I hear you say…. well just this; is WOW something which is suited to 3D? on balance, I think it could be, you’re view of the world is centred around a focal point (your character) with players, monsters and all of the other ‘stuff’ spanning spanning out from there.  Giving a depth to instances, for example, could really enhance gameplay.  That is providing its used to enhance gameplay, and not replace it; we’ve already seen ‘uber’ graphics replace most of the actual gameplay time and time again as gaming power has improved over the years.  I’d almost be excited about the prospect of 3D in WOW if the cynic inside me didn’t keep telling me that it would lead to a subscription hike (well 3D is more difficult you know, so cost more! yadda yadda yadda) and that because it’s more difficult to develop would almost certainly lead to less content.

The thing about 3D which, in my experience, has really got the design geeks going isn’t the content at all, it’s the possibilities it exposes in the user interface design.  Any of you who’ve ever seen Top Gun will know what a heads up display or HUD is, imagine the possibilities for your UI if you had multiple layers unfolding before your eyes in the same manor a fighter pilot has with their HUD.  Even better if you’re able to interact with that display on a 3D level (clearly that's a long way off).

Recently I posted about the possibility of truly mobile gaming, one of the barriers to using a mobile for WOW which I identified was the screen space available.  If you suddenly have the ability to layer your UI in 3D it suddenly opens up a whole host of possibilities.

Clearly there's a long way to go before 3D gaming comes to the masses, the Nintendo DS already manages it (kind of) by making use of it’s dual display, so there’s clearly already some development going on in the area.  But how soon before we get a 3D WOW experience? your guess is as good as mine, I’d wager it’ll be later rather than sooner.

Can Warcraft go Nomadic?

38 years ago today (well possibly yesterday, or the day before, depending on when I get round to finishing this post), the first ever public mobile phone call was made.  A guy called Martin Cooper wandered the streets of New York with what is akin to a brick with an antenna sticking out of the top held to his ear.  Unsurprisingly this caused a bit of a stir, people quite literally stopped in their tracks and pointed.  Fast forward 38 years and you’d be hard pushed to find a single person walking the streets of New York, or any other city in the developed world, who isn’t carrying a mobile.  They’re not just mobile phones now either, they’re cameras, GPS, web browsers, email clients, MP3 players, games platforms, RSS readers and much, much more.  Even the plain old SMS, the text message, hadn’t even been conceived back 38 years ago, in 2010 6 trillion were sent globally.

How people use mobiles has changed drastically over the years, those of you who had one of the earlier mobiles may have been lucky enough to have the ability to send texts, if you were like me, you could only store three at any time on the phone, and could only send to other phones on the same operators network.  Mobiles have entered into almost every aspect of modern life.  The advent of the smartphone has only increased this influence, roughly half of the phones sold in the UK is what I’d term a smartphone, this is only going to increase as users demand more and more functionality.

So will you ever be sat on the train playing WOW on your phone?  In a nutshell, I think the answer is ‘yes’ but with some caveats.  Firstly lets have a look at how mobiles are already influence how you play the game.  firstly, logging on to the game, the thing you do at least once every time you play WOW, most people (or at least those with any sense) use an authenticator; these come in two flavours; a specific hardware dongle which you can buy from Blizzard, or a mobile application.  A pretty minimal influence on the face of it, but actually, I don’t want another RSA security dongle, its a to carry around, adding the ability to have the authentication done on my mobile makes me far more likely to use it. 

More recent releases from Blizzard have seen the armoury made available on your mobile, you can view do pretty much everything you can on the web based armoury from viewing your calendar to playing with your talent build.  Going even further, the auction house application allows you to browse the AH, look at your bids, and if you buy the ‘premium’ version you can even create auctions, buy stuff and collect your mail.  It all boils down to what your definition of ‘playing’ the game is, interaction with the auction house is something that you could only previously do in-game, there's no question that this is an integral part of the playing experience.  Going forward there's potential for a similar application for trade skills, and any other ‘windowed’ type interface in your normal WOW UI.

But what about really playing, I don’t mean messing around with the AH, I mean doing things like running around and hitting things, doing quests, and herbing.  This is quite difficult to do on a mobile phone for a number of reasons, firstly raw processing power; mobile chips aren’t the same as your standard desktop machines processor, they are optimised to give a balance between power, battery usage, heat and cost.  They are not generally intended for use in rendering graphics (nor are standard processors, hence why you’ve shelled out a small fortune for your graphics card).   Screen size is an issue, I struggle for space on a 17 inch widescreen, on a 3 inch mobile screen you’re really going to suffer.  The restrictions of the mobile network is also an issue, both bandwidth and latency, we’re already starting to see broadband providers limit gaming traffic, I talked about it here, this happens widely in mobile contracts too, most mobile providers have realised that they’ve previously given away more data capacity than they can supply (if fully used by each customer) so have started limiting mobile contracts to 1Gb of data a month.  Latency is the real killer however, even if you have a bank balance the size of the GDP of a small African country, and can afford the mobile data, with latency figures sometimes in the seconds for mobile data the game play experience will be abysmal when you’re needing something sub 100ms for optimum playing experience.

Wifi could be he answer to this, most, if not all, smart phones have wifi built in, most come with free hotspot wifi access with the contract.  So if you happen to be sat near a wifi hotspot you could be onto a winner.  However, even if you have a super-duper mobile with a massive processor, graphics card and a decent wifi hotspot in your location (is anyone else remembering the brick sized original mobile?).  Even given all of that, you’re still stuck with a 3 inch screen, no keyboard, and no mouse;  I don’t know about you, but I have all my number buttons bound, plus a few other specials, plus movement keys, AND for healing I use a combination of alt, shift, ctrl and mouse clicks to cast particular spells.  On a mobile, this simply isn’t going to happen.  There may be a niche of gaming specific mobile phones, the Sony Xperia already aims to do that with PlayStation games, but for this to be included in mobiles as standard is a long way off.  There’s potential for the use of accelerometers and other innovative control and UI developments to aid this, but the implications for user interaction will always put you at a disadvantage to players sat at a standard desktop.  If you don;t believe me, imagine trying to play something like Counter Strike on an Xbox against someone using a keyboard and mouse; you wouldn’t stand a chance.  There's no possibility of having mobile only realms, this removes the attraction of being able to do stuff with your main characters while on the move.  There’s potential for the development in 3D screen technology to solve some of the UI, I’ve got a post in the pipelines around this, as it’s such a big topic, which will be coming along in due course.

Even assuming someone can solve all of the above, any iPhone or Android user will still point out, that unless you’re less than 1m away from a power socket, you’re still screwed.  This kind of defeats the object; unless you fancy carrying a car battery around on your back, you’re not going to last more than 20 minutes before your phone dies, I barely get 45 minutes of hardcore Angry Birding out of my phone as it is, and that’s relatively non-existent on the graphics load front compared to WOW.

You can actually ‘play’ WOW now if you install a remote desktop app on your desktop which basically screen scrapes the desktop display and punts it to your mobile, but this is very clunky and adds even more latency to the link. I’m convinced gaming, and specifically WOW has a future on mobile, it almost certainly wont be the same experience as playing via your PC, things like pvp, raiding or instances strike me as being very difficult, but why not offer the ability to herb, mine, fish, possibly one or two quest zones aimed at mobile usage (i.e. areas which aren’t going to tax the processing load, or require every spell or ability in your kitbag.  I’d certainly like to spend my train journeys collecting herbs or mining, it’d save you guys having to read this drivel…

Levelling trade skills: pure, pure tedium.

I’m sat here, sad as I am, trying to level blacksmithing from zero.  It’s gash, I mean really gash, I’d derive more enjoyment from continually inserting hot needles into my left eye for three hours than the mindless grind it’s taken to level from zero to 250 in blacksmithing.


Ok, rant over, on a serious note, why? WOW is supposed to be a fun game, the endgame is slanted towards various trade skills to maximise tanking / dps / healing output and the ;best’ trade skill for particular roles or classes tends to change now and then as new releases are a made which forces the more hardcore players to drop one skill and level another.  should this really take the best part of 10 hours to do? (if you ignore the time spent gathering the materials).

EDIT: I wrote this post almost a week ago but have been sitting on it as I published the GM interviews, in the mean time the gits insigtful people over at wow insider posted a similar article here which covers some similar topics, I didn't steal their ideas.... honest, I wrote my blog post first... :-)


Added to the fact that with blacksmithing it takes roughly 8 seconds to create and item, you also need to smelt the ore, AND Blizzard in their wisdom removed the ability for addons such as the Advanced Trade Skill Window to queue multiple items (you now have to manually click ‘process queue’ to move to the next item type), so you cant even go away and make a cup of coffee, or do something slightly more interesting like admire the growth rate of your garden while your toon hammers his head against the anvil repeatedly.  Whether it’s blacksmithing, or any other trade skill, the story is pretty much the same.

Is there not an easier way? I think so. First up, I’d like to state that I don’t think trade skills should be given to players on a plate, there should be some effort involved in levelling a skill, but the top level has gotten so far beyond that of the original level that it’s just another tedious grind.  Levelling to the top level in any profession takes an enormous amount of materials see here for blacksmithing as an example; its fair to say that people levelling trade skills support the WOW economy in a number of ways, in increasing demand from purchasing materials from the auction house, in reducing supply, from not offering those materials they have collected for sale on the auction house (or making the herb and mining nodes more sparse).  Now I’ve levelled two characters recently, both of which have been miners and herbalists, and I’ve banked everything I’ve collected for just such levelling as I’m trying to do with blacksmithing; even with all this banked ore, I still found myself buying stacks of the stuff from the auction house, or heading out to low level zones to collect the stuff.  Now I’m not the type of player who can see a yellow dot on my screen and not go collect it, this would indicate the materials requirement is far over and above the amount a single character would collect in the course of levelling, even with the occasional trip out to grind metal veins or herbs.

This may not necessarily be a bad thing, and may be by design; it keeps the the effort required to level a trade skill, and it keeps the older content useful (although barely in my opinion).  However when you consider trade skills were meant to be levelled in the main part with characters, for those of you who started a character back in vanilla WOW who levelled their trades with their character it was a straight forward task of making stuff as you got the material; your trade level stayed roughly in check with your characters, with a little bit of extra effort here and there, and the final 50 points or so taking the additional effort once you hit 60.  The trouble is, this final 50 points or so existed at the end of each expansion, so platos have developed at the headline skill level from each new release which are a complete pain, rather than just the end game final 20% of levels which should be difficult.  Here are a few suggestions for Blizzard on what I’d like to see to improve things:

Re-evaluate the amount of raw material required to level certain trade skills: blacksmithing seems far more difficult than alchemy for instance.

Reinstate the ability to queue trade skill activities with addons such as the advanced trade skill window, I understand the reasoning for removing it, but it simply doesn’t do what it’s intended to, it just makes the task of levelling more arduous.

Add the ability to queue multiple ‘breaking’ activities; disenchanting, milling and prospecting are even worse than crafting skills, at the very least let me mill by stack rather than per 5, but preferably add the ability to queue multiple stacks of material.  I acknowledge this might be dangerous with disenchanting, so how about only allowing it for greens.

Remove the levelling, platos which exist in the last 20% or so where, in previous releases, they where the top end of the trade skill level.

Add more lower level ‘multiple level’ items; most of the crap which is made is simply vendored anyway, why not add more items which cost 5 times more to make, and add 5 levels.  Or even better, taking into account my suggestion above, just up the level boost of a few items and leave the material requirement the same.

Look at the possibility of buffing players ability to level trades from other tradeskills, how about an enchanted blacksmithing hammer which adds an x% chance to double the level gained, a potion of superior tailoring reducing the amount of cloth required to make a bolt for the next hour, or a scroll of mass disenchant which allows you to disenchant every green item in your inventory. etc. etc.

Add the ability to ‘pay’ for bulk levelling at a trainer; rather than going away and self teaching the first (say) 300 levels in a crafting skill, why not turn up on the doorstep of your profession trainer with a set amount of materials, or a bag full of gold equivalent to the value of those materials which it would have taken you 6 hours to churn through and just exchange it for a level boost.  This would still require the materials, or currency value of those materials, so wouldn’t harm the economy (and done right could be used to boost it).  I’m not suggesting that this replace the whole levelling process, just a percentage of it – perhaps only available to accounts who have one character with a trade skill at it’s maximum level?  This is exactly what happens in real world industry today, you can go to a library, read about stuff and practice yourself, you can learn on the job as an apprentice, or you can get a ‘boost’ by going on an intensive training course – the training course accelerates the learning curve for the easier, apprentice level stuff, but the artisan level skills only come with practice.

Whatever is done, do something to make trade skills less tedious and more desirable, WOW is a game, it’s about entertainment, much of the recent development of WOW has been to make the game more accessible to the mass market, take the same principles and apply them to trade skills!

50 Not Out

Well this is my 50th post, who’d have thought it? After three months of toiling away, I’ve managed 50 (FIFTY) blog posts (and two guides).  In that time, I’ve managed to nearly triple my regular reader, found out a hell of a lot about the WOW blog scene, frittered away countless otherwise dull hours on the train, and thoroughly enjoyed myself in the process.

To celebrate this arbitrary milestone of insignificance, I thought I’d write a few words about the experiences I’ve had so far, what's gone well and not so well, and where I’m planning to go in the future.  I’ve also got a little surprise under my hat about an upcoming article, more of that later.

Lets start, as all good theorycrafters do, with some stats.  As i mentioned, I’ve amassed 50 blog posts in my time as a blogger since the 13th Jan, that’s 50 posts in 69 days, not a bad waffle ratio if you ask me.  I’m not sure what to say about my traffic levels, then again, I’m not sure what I expected.  Its quite variable from day to day but I’m generally averaging in the several 10s of hits per day.  having just scanned through the limited stats that blogger gives it seems my hits have more than doubled week on week since I started, at this rate,every person on the planet will be reading my blog on a weekly basis by the end of the year….  My top read posts have been one of my originals on my first heroic which generated quite a bit of early interest, the idiots guide to simulationcraft, an article on hit caps for shadow priests, and quite surprisingly my blog not so long ago about net neutrality; the latter has been up for the shortest period but seems to have attracted a lot of attention. 

I’ve had a little bit of attention from the blogging community as a whole, not much, but a bit, making it onto the blog roles of one or two other popular sites, and getting the occasional mention in peoples twitter feeds and the like.  I’ve recently featured on the welcome wagon on twisted nether which provided a welcome boost to traffic.  Looking down the referral sites on the stats, twitter features heavily (I advertise pretty much every blog post on there).  Quite surprisingly (actually, not so surprising if you read the guides to blogging) my comments on others blog posts which provide a link back to my post are one of the main referral methods.  Most pleasing is the fact I’m now starting to get random referrals from Google searches so i must be doing something right.

On the critical side, and having wrote a blog about constructive criticism, I don’t think I could get away without this paragraph; I’d obviously like more hits, I’m not disappointed with the traffic levels by any means, but I suspect if you asked any blogger if they’d like more traffic they wouldn’t say no.  My main disappointment is the number of comments I get, or lack there of.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve gotten a few, but I’d love to get more engaged with my regular reader and see what he / she thinks, not sure what I can do to remedy this other than keep on posting and hoping.  I suppose I’d also like to wade into a few more unique posts, the trouble with unique, is it requires a lot of time and generally access to the game to test things; for example, if I was to compare the relative merits of shielding people over direct healing, it’s a pretty easy comparison on the face of it, but unless you can sit in front of the game and collect figures with different talent builds, it’s hard to back your thoughts up with facts.  I don’t get the luxury of this in my normal journalistic pose (Coach C to London Liverpool Street…) and if I do it at home it cuts into my already constrained playing time.

Where do I go from here then? well firstly its the bread and butter of a blogger, posting, I’ll be keeping up the posts.  I’ve got a decent base now, so the regularity might drop slightly in favour of some of the more practical type posts outlined above.  I think I’m going to try and whore myself out, if anyone will have me, and try a guest post on post on someone else's blog.  I wont to do this for two reasons; firstly to engage a bit more with other bloggers who’ve been at it for far longer than me and see how they go about their business of blogging.  Secondly, I’m intent of getting myself a mention on one of the bigger sites, such as wow insider, this is less important than my first objective, and might happen naturally without me doing anything, but a bit of self publicity can’t hurt.

And finally, a mention to that little surprise, and a bit of uniqueness (as I’ve not read another blog on the subject), I’ve been working on an interview with a Game Master the last few days, that's right! a real, live, Game Master.  I’ve asked him a whole host of questions and will be spending the next few days editing them down into something readable, possibly over two posts as there's so much information.  I’ve been genuinely surprised by some of his answers so am hoping it’ll be a good way to mark the blogs big Five-O.  Watch this space.

How I roll

I’ve finally got round to adding a blogroll, to the site (see the right hand menu), something I’ve been meaning to do for ages, but never quite got round to it until I was having a look at my referral stats over the weekend (you know I’m a stats whore..) and had my conscience pricked as I seem to be making it on to the blogrolls of the occasional other blogger (my regular reader need to take note: you’re no longer the only one).

I thought rather than just stick it up unannounced I’d prattle on talk a little about why some of them are on there.  Firstly my main port of call, and probably the initial reason I started reading blogs; WOW Insider, it’s moved about a bit over the years as it’s become bigger and bigger (and possibly a tad more commercial), and is the only blog which I know about which can boast coverage of every class and every spec and a whole host of other regular columns.  Fox Van Allen is the regular Shadow Priest author, Dawn Moore the Holy (and Disc)  and both talk an enormous amount of sense (generally).  Seriously, if you’re regularly reading WOW blogs and haven’t heard of these guys you’re not doing it right.

One of the first blogs I click on when catching up on the rss feed is Divine Aeigis, with two main authors, Lyria and Lilitharien with regular posts focusing on the pro’s and con’s and the use of specific priest abilities, raiding, up and coming developments and patches, its a must read for me.  Next Comes the Stories of O, written by Oestrus,  who until very recently had jumped ships and was authoring for Divine Aegis.  Oestrus is now back on the one blog and covering similar types of topics to Divine Aegis but is often found branching out to druid (branching! geddit?? ), shaman, and paladin healing to take more of a generic look at all things healing.

The Greedy Goblin is a strange sort of blog, Gevlon strikes me as a pretty hardcore player of WOW and his views are often quite extreme, and polarise the blog community; just have a read of some of the comments on his more controversial posts if you don't believe me.  The blog is extremely  ‘elite’ player focussed and Gevlon spends a lot of time ‘helping’ morons and slackers ‘improve’.  I’ve included a commentary on this blog specifically because it stands out as one of the prime reason why people should blog; Whilst his views aren’t always popular, or in line with my own, Gevlon generally makes good, well balanced arguments, comments are (understandably I suppose) pre vetted by Gevlon as I would imagine he gets a fair few abusive comments, but to his enormous credit, he always seem to post critical comments (by critical I mean “I don’t agree, and here’s why…” comments, not “this post is crap…” the latter I would consider abuse).  I’ve seen some excellent debates go on in the comments of the posts here as a result, and I’ve taken inspiration for a number of my own posts as a result of reading posts or comments here.

Moving from the more niche focussed blogs to, well, random, we have Pugnacious Priest, I’m sure some time in the distant past this blog was more focussed around priests, now it’s at best loosely priest focussed, but is still an excellent and entertaining read.  Larissa and her Pink Pigtail Inn is another one of these blogs that I wouldn’t class as having a specific focus, taking a look at wow from the perspective of a raider, gives an enthralling commentary on the thoughts of Larissa on WOW and the Blogsphere.  with the added bonus that Tamarind, who was recently lost to the blogsphere, occasionally stops by with a guest post.

I also couldn’t write a post like this without mentioning two of the blogs and bloggers that have, for whatever reason, stopped blogging.  Misery written by Merlot which was loosely based around his shadow priest but encompassed an excellently articulated commentary on WOW.  And then there was Righteous Orbs, written by Tamarind, an excellent,well thought out, and thoroughly engaging blog.  Both of these guys decided to hang up their pen about the time I stared putting my ramblings down in prose and I do hope both will have a change of heart soon (though as I mentioned above Tam does occasionally pop up else where, but its just not enough).

Well there's a seemingly random sample of the blogs I read, there are loads more, but I think I’ve prattled on for long enough.  My blogroll will contain only  blogs which I genuinely read and wont be an attempt to get more links.  Rather topically I received an email from some random as I was half way through writing this post “I really like your blog ‘pleasefeedthetroll’ would you be willing to exchange blogroll inks….” yada yada yada.  Looking at the ‘blog’ it was clearly nothing to do with WOW, or actually anything in particular and just survived on trading links with other spam blogs.  I almost replied “certainly, if you can tell me one thing about the content of my blog”, but sensibly decided to consign it to the spam trap instead.  Hey ho….

What would you have done?

Another weekend, another job lot of heroics, all pretty non-descript valour points and rep grinds, that is, all but one. I jumped into the queue with a guild tank and another DPS, I was healing, PUGing the final two DPS. The guy tanking normally plays a priest and was undertaking his first tanking exercise since Cata so we were chatting most of the way through, we ended up in Blackrock Caverns, not the best place to have your first experience as a tank. The other two DPS, a mage and a rogue, were kicking out a decent amount of damage, nothing special, but nothing bad, so we decided not to re-queue; all was going relatively well until Karsh Steelbender, Steelbender himself was dispatched with ease, it was the item drop which caused the problem; a spirit neck piece dropped, now I'm at ilvl 346 or above on pretty much everything these days, so it's unusual that I take anything from heroic drops, but my neck was the final piece I needed, I already had a 346 item, but it was a DPS item, so I rolled need. No biggy you might say and I carried on, not noticing that the Fire mage that we'd picked up had also rolled, but had been beaten by mine.

To my surprise I got a whisper: "didn't you already have THAT necklace on?" ( I actually thought this was from my friend the tank as we'd just been talking about gear)

to which I replied

"I don't think so, I hope not"… as I furiously checked I hadn't been thick, realising that it wasn't actually the tank whispering me.

"link your old neck now" came another whisper, which I duly did, explaining that it was a DPS piece and this was a bit of an upgrade for my healing clobber (I kind of which I hadn't bothered trying to justify myself, in hindsight there was clearly no point).

"OMG!! You selfish tard! I've only got [some ilvl 333 piece], give it to me now!" (Actually, I think I'm doing him too much of a service including the punctuation in the correct place…) followed by a tirade of additional abuse before I had chance to reply which were a bit too x-rated to quote here.

Now normally, had this guy asked me politely to give up the item, I wouldn't have thought twice about it, I've actually, on several occasions, given loot that I've won fairly to people in PUGs who would benefit more than I from it; it really doesn't bother me in the slightest, this chap however had managed to rile me a tad. Quite understandably, I feel, I told him to stick it (I'll let your imagination work out where), and put him straight on ignore. I kind of wish I'd had the presence of mind to realise that for a fire mage, this SPIRIT item was actually a downgrade from the item he linked, I also kind of wish I'd given him both barrels and responded in the same manor he'd whispered me, but I think I'd of been annoyed with myself had I let him get to me enough to force me to sink to his level. And part of me wishes I'd taken a step back and tried to explain that, actually, I won it fairly, and actually, it was about as much use to him as it was to the rogue anyway.

Feeling a bit of a crisis of conscience, I whispered the tank to ask if I'd done the right thing, it was actually him who pointed out that it was useless anyway for a fire mage. Feeling a little reassured in my actions were both right in rolling on the piece in the first place, and in refusing to give it up, I promptly forgot about it and got on with enjoying my day. Well, when I say forget about, clearly not forget as I'm writing about it here, but you get the picture. This whole unsavoury incident got me thinking, how often does this kind of thing happen? How do people deal with it? I'm thinking how you as an individual behave can kind of bring it on yourself; I (hope) I'm generally polite and laid back in PUGs, and this is my first experience of any such abuse in 4 months of playing, however, there's a few, shall we say more abrasive characters, who I regular party with, who quite often get themselves into a little war of words with a fellow PUGger.

Did I do the right thing? Should I have reacted differently? Have you experienced anything similar? Was it YOU abusing me? :)

Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality is a topic that's been in the headlines lots over the past year or two, primarily the technology press but occasionally spilling over into the mainstream media, and is likely to be again in the next week as the main ISPs in the UK get together to announce a code of conduct on it. Net Neutrality is something that's close to me, both in what I do for a day job, and as a gamer and internet user so I thought I'd write a post on the subject. A warning to my regular reader: this post has nothing to do directly with priests, but as a gamer, Net Neutrality will have an effect on you. Firstly, what is Net Neutrality? Basically it's the premise that all things internet are equal; an internet user accessing a minuscule blog from an anonymous priest somewhere in the blogsphere will experience the same levels of service as if they accessed a big site such as the BBC. Similarly, my rich neighbour paying £100 a month for his super-duper top end connection (yes I'm making this up) gets the same level of service as me paying £30 a month. In a nutshell, true Net Neutrality means that no matter who the user or what the site, the same level of service would be achieved (I say service rather than speed or bandwidth as this could be bandwidth, latency QoS and a whole bunch of other things) obviously the physical capabilities of your connection will influence this, if you're 5 miles away from your exchange in deepest darkest country side you're unlikely to get as fast a connection as the guy who lives next door to the exchange.

This was all very well and good, in principle, back in the days of HTML only web page days, you may have had the odd JPEG or GIF but in essence each page hit would only account for a few hundred kilobytes of data at most. Any of you who've ever downloaded porn or stolen music used a P2P client, or even tried to access streaming media services such as iPlayer or YouTube at peak time will know that (most) ISPs actively rate the connection speed you can achieve for these services. There are several reasons for this; firstly cost! If everyone is streaming huge amounts of data the backbone (the connections between exchanges) won't be able to cope and will fall on its arse (and thus need upgrading) and fairness; secondly fairness, if one person is consistently hogging the bandwidth available, neighbours will suffer speed losses, this is called contention. Contention is one of the hidden gotcha's of broadband, it's actually a form of Net Neutrality avoidance that's been going on for ages; cheaper ISP's (generally but not always) will generally offer high contention levels, let say your 20Mb (yeah right, who gets that?) has a contention of 1:100, this means that up to 100 users could be sharing (actually more if you consider how many people in each house could be using the internet) at any one time. That's a measly 200kbps per house! The more expensive ISPs tend to have better contention ratios; basically you get what you pay for! Hence the net is already most definitely not neutral. Similar things happen on mobiles, anyone buying a smartphone today in the UK will have a data cap of around 1gb a month (depending on what they pay) this has been introduced because the mobile operators have realised that if everyone used their full allowance, let alone had unlimited data, their networks would be screwed. Similarly, you try using mobile internet at 9am in a busy station in London on a Monday morning, compared to 10pm in the centre Chorley on a Wednesday.

Why do ISPs want to be allowed to not have Net Neutrality then? Basically, in the UK at least, its cost. Huge cost which is driven by a few websites offering streamed media services, which costs the ISPs a fortune, and the companies which are the source of this data absolutely nothing – and this is the problem, any Tom Dick or Harry can stick a server on the internet (yes you'll pay for data hosting etc.) and stream 'stuff' to any location in the world without having to pick up the cost of transporting that data outside of their connection to the internet. i.e. if you pay for an internet connection from poor speed broadband inc. and you send data to people who are customers of Sky, Virgin and BT, those companies pay the cost of transporting that data and Tom Dick and Harry get away scot-free.

So what does this have to do with gaming I hear you ask? Well lots actually, do a little experiment, stick iPlayer on (if you're in the UK) or some other streamed TV service, download a decent sized file from a P2P site or filesharing website, and then stick WOW on and try and do something. Unless you have a fibre connection, and actually even if you have one, you'll probably find the game is unplayable – this is because the routers, the devices like your broadband router (but bigger) on the internet are set up to simply drop data packets (i.e. just ignore them) when they're busy, or at the very least delay them – some packets have higher priority than others – there's not much point getting a packet from a streamed audio file 2 seconds too late, it would just give garbled sound, however if you have to wait 2 additional seconds for a web page to load it's no biggy, hence the prioritisation (and another source of non-neutralness). Gaming is one of these time sensitive services, especially high action first person shooters, those with a 'quick' connection have a distinct advantage over their slower competition, but even with WOW if your latency is above 200ms you're likely to be experiencing degradation of gameplay.

The premise is that ISPs charge the data providers to increase the priority of their traffic over their competition to recover this cost, basically creating a two-tier internet of 'standard rate' free traffic which gets where it's going sometime, and high speed, high priority traffic which leaves the standard traffic standing in its dust. This has huge implications for companies like the BBC whose iPlayer service is one of the main 'hoggers' of bandwidth in the UK (and soon to be the world). I'm not going to get into the rights and wrongs of Net Neutrality, it's a very poignant subject, I can see it from the fairness of apportioning cost side of the argument, and I can also see the need to make the internet available to everyone – I've seen a study recently (sorry I can't remember the link) which refers to internet access as a basic human right, in the same way as water and personal safety are, I'm not sure I agree with this, but it highlights the internet's importance to the modern world.

Who actually pays then? Simple, you do. It may be that Blizzard pays a 'congestion surcharge' direct to the ISPs, let's say £1 per user, the user doesn't on the face of it pay anything extra. Blizzard doesn't simply magic this money from nowhere, they are in the business of making profit, so they either increase their subscription cost, or they reduce cost in other areas to cover it – reduce the amount the pay for development of new dungeons perhaps? Thus the quality of the game you experience. It's not all bad though, as a user, your gaming traffic is now tip top priority so your lag levels reduce and you rarely experience that annoying night of lag which ruins your guilds attempt on a progression boss.

I can see both sides of the argument, as a user I don't want to pay more, but I do want a good quality of service, and I don't want to suffer because my neighbour has decided to download every movie ever filmed to his PC. As a telecommunications (employee) I want my company to be able to make a fair profit, and not have to subsidise other companies' profits unfairly, but I do want to ensure our customers don't have to pay through the nose for it. It's a hard argument no matter which side of the fence you sit on, the fact of the matter is that it's been happening for years with packet prioritisation and contention, life isn't 'fair' and I'm certain it will happen in some guise or other, so long as it's fair and reasonably costed, and doesn't disadvantage lower privileged communities; gaming is most definitely a premium, luxury, service but things like free media or local government services are often becoming a necessity.

Fostering Performance

I read a blog on Bossy Pally earlier in the week about constructive criticism, what it is, why it's a good thing, and specifically why it's not a bad thing. This post was spurred by another great blog post by Rhii on the novel approach her guild deals with criticism (incidentally another blog which mentions llamas and has no supporting pictures whatsoever). I've always been one to actively seek constructive criticism in work and sport – I'd far rather the person I'm asking tell me what I'm doing wrong and how to improve on it than highlight the good stuff, I can't improve if I don't know I'm doing it wrong – if I knew I was doing it wrong I'd be doing something about it. This approach often raises eyebrows in the person I'm asking, and they sometimes feel uncomfortable giving constructive criticism. These two blogs got me thinking about how people 'manage performance' in WOW (that sounds so corporate) and how anyone can aid the performance of themselves and others quite easily.

I'm not going to talk massively about constructive criticism, Ophelie has already covered this, but I'll frame it briefly for the purpose of this post. Constructive Criticism is giving feedback on areas that can be improved (which need not be bad, but could be better) in a manner which indicates what the issues are, and a 'framework' to go about improving them. It is most certainly not "you suck" type comments, that comes under the abuse category. Football fans will probably agree that Lionel Messi is, if not one of the best, the best footballers in the world at the moment; is he perfect? No, could he improve? Most definitely – he's not the best header of the ball, there's one area he might work on in training. At this point, this post is in danger of becoming a whitepaper on how corporate performance management does and doesn't work, I'll try and keep away from that little can of worms, really I will, but there's a lot of similarities between (good) corporate practice and good gaming.

I'll ignore self-improvement for the moment and concentrate on helping other people, as much of the lessons apply when you turn the focus on yourself. Firstly, who can you help? The answer is anyone; I've helped people who I met 5 minutes precious in a PUG, through to experienced raiders who know their class inside out. Giving advice and having it taken on board are two different things, it's all about the relationship you have with the individual and the way you frame your advice. You have a relationship, of sorts, with anyone you've ever interacted with, it may be a very superficial relationship as in my PUG example, but it's still a relationship. If the person has reason to respect what you say, they are more likely to take heed of your words. Imagine for a moment that on the first pull you've shouted in party chat "GOGOGO" and OMG "WTF IS GOING ON WITH YOUR DPS" and then whisper the other shadow priest in the party and say "excuse me, but do you realise that the Mind Spike you're using is removing the three DoTs you've just cast from your target? You'd be better off…." The recipient of this advice is likely to completely ignore it or worse, tell you to stick it. If however you started off with a pleasant "hi guys" or similar you've already framed your words in an (admittedly thin) veil of respect. By starting off with "I hope you don't mind me saying…." Or similar you further open the person up to accepting you're not just trying to call them a noob.

In recent months, I've seen numerous examples of heroics that were heading south being turned around because someone has helped out one or more of the party (quite often be being one of those on the receiving end). So it's clear that something can be done in the very short term to improve performance, I've seen equally as many, if not more instances of members simple leaving or vote-kicking without a word as soon as problems are encountered.

Taking this to the raiding and guild environment, where improvement is more likely to be sought, or even demanded, it's a bit easier, but also a lot harder in some respects. On the relationship front, it's a lot easier, you've had a long time to establish trust, but they recipient has also had a lot more time to observe your actions, if they see that you're not practicing what you preach or lack respect for your words, for whatever reason then you've hit problems. You will also be more likely to encounter the suborn types, you know the ones, the pretty decent players who aren't the best, but are better than average who assume they are the finished article, they're not! See my comments about the certain diminutive football player above.

Once you have established a trusting relationship, how do you go about improvement? Firstly look for the low hanging fruit, pick the easiest things which give the biggest boost first. Take saving money on energy bills for instance, if you want to save money on your electricity bill, what do you do? Spend £10,000 on a solar panel for your roof? No, you pay £100 to replace the insulation in your loft; it's cheaper, easier and quicker, and gives a far better payback on the investment. In the same vein, if someone's DPS is 15k and the best achievable is 18k, but they keep dying, it's probably more profitable to look at why they're dying and focussing on positioning rather than DPS rotation (incidentally DPS may reduce in the short term as a result, but total damage output will drastically improve). On the same token, concentrate on one area at a time, try rubbing your tummy in a circular motion and patting your head at the same time, unless you've practiced for hours (saddo) you almost certainly can't do it – peoples brains best deal with things in a serial nature, tackle one thing, 'fix' it, move on to the next.

If you're a raid leader and you need to help someone improve, you need to make sure your message doesn't come out of the blue – if someone's DPS has been substandard for three months, telling them you've been watching them for some time and they have a week to sort it out or be benched is silly, tackle issues openly and early to avoid drama (llamas?). On the same token, it's not just about negatives, focus on positives, which sounds best "you're DPS is good, but I think we can improve it by…." Or "you're not doing enough DPS, you need to improve by…." Notice also the subtle difference between we and you! We are a team and we are working together to jointly improve our performance. As opposed to you aren't good enough and you need to do something about it.

My final point, is don't forget to look in the mirror; lead by example (even if you're not a GM or a raid leader, you can still lead), actively seek feedback, it's almost impossible to spot your own failings without help; if you've ever tried to proof read an assignment at school or college thinking it was perfect, only to have the teacher hand it back scrawled in red ink you'll know what I mean. Don't shy away from people offering advice, be thick skinned and take it, whether you like what you're hearing or not. Above all, nobody is perfect, everyone can improve in some respect or other, so don't think it doesn't apply to you.



And finally, finally, I've mentioned llama's twice, so I'm going to lead by example, practice what I preach and all that, and include a nice picture!

Pulling it out of the fire

Last night something strange happened to me! I started looking, and feeling, like a proper tank for extended periods of time in a heroic. I was milling around waiting for the footy to start (disgraceful refereeing btw) with nothing to do, a couple of guildies wanted a heroic so I asked what classes they wanted. The answer came back "a tank would be nice" the poor, unsuspecting, fools… Out comes the Death Knight and into the queue we go, only 4 of us so we needed to PUG the healer. Blackrock Caverns, brilliant. For some reason I've not randomly been in the place many times before, to the extent that I only just completed it on mystic for the first time over the weekend, I reckon 4 or 5 times in total on all my characters, I've always skipped Beauty and I've certainly never tanked it.

I explained to the healer and the rest of the group that this was my first time tanking the place, and that they'd have to bear with me, whipped wow wiki up on the laptop and had a quick scan of strategies, fortunately one of the guys there has an alt tank and has done it several times before. My admission also prompted the healer (I think) to say it was his first time too… great… on closer inspection it was his first time healing, he'd got a million alts so knew the instance inside out. We had a load of crowd control with two mages, so the trash was relatively straight forward, a couple of cockups here and there but nothing major. That was until we got to Karsh Steelbender, the basic strategy is to kite him in and out of the flame in the middle of the room, he can't be killed without the having debuff it gives him, but too many stacks of the debuff and the part gets overwhelmed with adds, the trick is to try and get his toe in the fire so he gets one debuff at a time, if he gets to 8 then the tank stands him out until the stack drops and it starts over. You get the picture. It's a pretty daunting task for a tank, or possibly just me as a tank, the onus is on you and only you, if you balls it up, everyone dies. More so than normal. Anyway, I checked up on the strategy and began the pull, all way going smoothly, whilst I wasn't managing one debuff at a time, I was keeping it to two, so not all too bad. We got him down to just below 30% when the healer didn't notice he was stood in crap and died. Now normally a dead healer on a boss fight means wipe, but, amazingly, not this time. The damage is pretty low and smooth in this fight, and I was at about 100% health at the time, with all my cooldowns. Blood DK's have 6 damage mitigation cooldowns (if you include Army of the Dead), or at least 6 that I've found… plus I have a click to increase dodge trinket. So I set off slowly popping cooldowns and healing myself as much as possible with Death Strike and Rune Tap. The DPS was pretty high so it wasn't long before we had him down to sub 5%, I was near death with only Army of the Dead left so out it came. Now this was nearly fatal in itself; as I mentioned earlier the boss needs a debuff from the flames to take damage, the whole point of popping Army of the Dead was to take aggro from me to allow me to heal, but unfortunately I popped it just slightly outside the flames so the boss became immune to damage on 1% health. Bugger. Put fear not, I have taunts! On a massive 20% health myself I utilised the DKs two taunt abilities to move the boss just enough to be in the flames before the ghouls took agro again.

Steelbenders death was greeted with calls for DK's to be nerfed and general mocking of my ability and amazement that I managed to pull it off (don't worry, I gave as much as I got…) Now I've been in situations before as a healer, or shadow priest swapping to heals, which have saved raid or party wipes, it's a great feeling to know something you, and only you, did saved the group. More so with a tank I suppose, as a healer you're expected to heal, as a tank you're expected to tank WITH healing. All in all a great confidence booster, and the satisfaction of actually, for the first time, feeling like I'm a reasonable tank, I've still got a long way to go, but I'm getting there on the tanking front. The run also gave me an appreciation for previous tanks bemoaning the aggro magnet mage, with two of the idiots (one extremely well geared) blasting away controlling aggro was a nightmare, still at least they both knew where the sheep button was.

It’s not easy being a priest

I first realised I might have a little bit of an alotoholicism problem last week when I stepped back and had a look at the number of alts I have. I'm in the position now where I have 3 characters at 85, two of which (Priest and Mage) have been through tens of heroics, one which (the DK) is on his way to being reasonably geared, so I can safely say I know quite well. I've the druid which is late 60's and a Hunter Warrior and Warlock all in their 60's that I must confess I haven't played at all (yet!) since returning to WOW, a Rogue and Paladin in the 30's and the Shaman that I created but haven't played purely to make up the numbers. That's nine out of the ten classes I've spent playing, when you consider the different specs too, I reckon it's about 16 different class / spec combinations I've played, clearly some of those experiences are out of date since Cata hit as the play styles on most classes have changed significantly but you get the picture.

I was running a good few heroics over the weekend on my mage and DK as we had guild healers available, and then swapping to the priest with many of the same group. We were taking it easy and chatting as we went, when it struck me how much more involved the Priest is to play; on the mage I play a fire spec, I can easily kick out 12k DPS on regular occasion, with pretty poor gear, all that's needed is Living Bomb and Fireball till your heart's content, with a quick scorch to begin with, and looking out for Pyroblast and Fireblast procs; there's a little bit of complexity in choosing the correct spells for crowd dps, and the cool downs, but nothing overly challenging. Contrast this to the Priest, as DPS you've got three dots to keep up on the mob, your own buff to refresh, providing you have shadow orbs to be able to, Mind Flay to ensure you don't clip, SW:D to bring into the equation when the mob is at 25%, and that's before you take into account the cool down spells and when's best to use them. Cross over from the dark side and take a look at healing and it's even more complicated! There are a massive 12 healing spells which a holy priest may use in general play, another 4 occasional and "oh shit" type spells, and a further 12 situation specific spells, like Dispel Magic, which may or may not be added into the mix for a given encounter, add to this the different usage profiles of these spells, depending on what Chakra state you're in, the very fact you can now cancel Chakra after 30 seconds and recast to another state; it's a nightmare, a great big, fun filled, nightmare! Now don't get me wrong, I love the complexity the priest offers and the learning curve for playing it, anyone can pick up a priest, either healing or DPSing, but it takes a long time to master it.

Now I'm being a bit unfair to Mages in comparing them to healing Priests, I've always said tanking is harder (to master) than healing, and my experiences on the Death Knight over the last week certainly back that up, and healing is harder than straight forward DPS. But just taking the DPS comparison, looking at my first heroic with both classes, the Priest kicked out about 5k, the Mage was touching on 10k. Even on the healing front, I've been running through the old instances on my Druid, and am now getting to the stage where the instances are becoming difficult to heal (i.e. a Rogue with a few bandages and a bottle of magic spray couldn't do it) and I can't believe how simple the choices are, basically it's a hot, and a small heal (read Renew and Heal equivalents), a big heal for when things go wrong, a PoH equivalent and a reverse Holy Word: Serenity type spell (in that it removes a HoT and adds a big heal, plus an AOE healing circle on the ground, as opposed to making the next heals better with a Priest). Admittedly I'm not at 85 yet, so it might get more complex, but looking at the spell list on wowhead I doubt it's going to be that much different.

Actually the most difficult class I've played to pick up is the Death Knight, Tanking especially, but even on the DPS front; you're instantly presented with a million and one different diseases and abilities, with Runes and Runic Power to bring in, and none of the normal early learning curve as you don't start from level 1, fortunately I had a friendly guild DK, who I'll be eternally grateful to, who explained that it was more about priorities of sorts, than a true DPS (or tanking) rotation. Once you get to grips with the DK's abilities it's a lot more straight forward, it's not the face rolling it used to be by any means, but it's not hugely taxing. Of the other classes I've played, Hunters are pretty straight forward, ahem auto shot ahem, Warlocks are just wannabe Mage's with DoTs and a self-harming problem, Rogues just stab things in a similar vein to Cat Form Druids (but with knives I suppose) Paladins have it a bit harder (from memory) and warriors were a set key mashing order. Clearly if you're Tanking (well) on any of the classes which can, it takes a lot of ability, but as healing or DPS goes, I can't think of a harder (or more fun) class to play than a priest. But perhaps I'm biased? Go on tell me I'm wrong!