Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft
Folding Ideas
0:12 [Dan] What you’re looking at is a story.
0:14 It’s a story about numbers, it’s a story about people,
0:16 and it’s a story about how numbers and people interact.
0:20 It’s a story about World of Warcraft, in specific,
0:23 but it’s also a story about every video game,
0:27 in a way a story about video games themselves.
0:30 It’s a story about why it’s rude to be bad at World of Warcraft.
0:35 It’s December 2004.
0:37 Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game World of Warcraft
0:40 is taking the world by storm and Wallace,
0:43 the Gnome Rogue walks barefoot through Molten Core.
0:45 Wallace, a proper hobbit of a gnome, doesn’t wear shoes,
0:48 and he’s not in a hurry to get anywhere.
0:51 His guild thinks this is a little embarrassing,
0:53 but it mostly just makes for a story about
0:55 a quirky weirdo they met in this new video game.
0:58 Ultimately they enjoy having Wallace around because he makes the game fun.
1:02 Six months later they’re screaming at Wallace
1:04 and demanding that he equip some boots.
1:06 Ultimatums are dropped, tempers are elevated, and no one’s having a good time.
1:11 Someone calls Wallace a bad player.
1:13 No one disagrees.
1:16 [Gentle music] [Choice] ‘Instrumental play’
1:24 was first described by literary theorist
1:30 Wolfgang Iser in his 1993 essay “The Fictive and the Imaginary.” Iser,
1:35 a highly influential theorist,
1:36 saw play as being divided cleanly into the categories of free
1:40 and instrumental based on how the act of playing related to goals.
1:44 On one hand is play unburdened by systematized
1:46 goals and on the other hand, play with goals.
1:49 In Iser’s framework play becomes instrumental
1:51 the moment it has some intended outcome,
1:53 something resembling rules and structure.
1:56 However in Iser’s work this was largely
1:58 to distinguish between children chasing each other
2:00 around a field for no reason other than because it felt fun in the moment,
2:03 and children chasing each other in a game
2:05 of football with concrete winners and losers.
2:08 Its discussion in relation to video games is credited
2:10 to sociologist T.L Taylor in her 2006 book Play Between Worlds.
2:15 ‘Instrumental play is a goal-oriented approach that values efficiency,
2:18 expertise and optimizing strategies as part of play.
2:21 In instrumental play, the point of playing is not to reach the end,
2:24 but to find the best way of getting there.’ This is, for the record,
2:28 not a discussion of good players as opposed to bad players,
2:32 we are talking about the ways you play
2:34 the game in which ‘being good’ is considered desirable.
2:37 This is a critical distinction, and perhaps if there’s going to be one
2:40 takeaway from all this it is this confrontation:
2:42 the idea that ‘being good at a game is a good thing’,
2:46 that the correct way of playing a game is one in which you are good at the game,
2:50 isn’t some natural force of reality, but an imposed value.
2:54 If you’ve ever gotten destroyed in a video game and felt awful about it,
2:57 just ashamed of how hard you got thumped,
3:00 that feeling isn’t objective or natural,
3:01 it is an instrumental value that you are imposing on yourself.
3:05 [Dan] It's common for instrumental play to be framed in opposition to fun,
3:10 that they are ends of a spectrum.
3:13 This is understandable in no small
3:15 part because instrumental play tends towards optimization,
3:17 which can often result in deeply un-fun player behaviors.
3:22 This gets extended out to the extreme
3:24 where play framed around challenge or investment
3:26 is treated as irrational or somehow
3:28 less genuine than some hypothetically more “pure”,
3:31 “innocent”, “unadulterated” version of play unconcerned with doing well.
3:37 It’s important in this conversation to establish,
3:40 firmly, that this is a false dichotomy.
3:42 We are going to spend a lot of time
3:44 talking about how fun gets optimized out of games,
3:47 which is why I want to stress that they are not antithetical concepts.
3:51 Rather than being in conflict with one another they are instead in tension:
3:55 there is not an opposed relationship, but there is a complex one.
4:00 Because if you back up and think about it,
4:02 it’s easy to appreciate how someone can find
4:04 a deep enjoyment in improving at a skill,
4:07 or achieving goals, or discovering solutions to complex problems.
4:11 Rather, instrumental play, play focused on goals,
4:14 can be juxtaposed with free play, the form of play that is without ending.
4:19 Neither free or instrumental play can exist in their purest form,
4:23 but René Glas in his book Battlefields of Negotiation describes play
4:27 in World of Warcraft as movement between instrumental and free play.
4:33 For every arena match or dungeon, there is a time before and afterward when
4:38 you’re waiting in town and just stand there, aimless.
4:43 This moment, this is free play approaching its pure form.
4:47 An important consideration here is that game design
4:50 can rarely compel the player to take action.
4:54 A game can attempt to prescribe an action,
4:56 such as the famous ‘press F to pay respects’,
4:59 but players tend to chafe against moments
5:01 like this, as in clumsy hands they tend
5:03 to come off as naive or insincere or, in the language of the youth, cringe.
5:10 If you refuse to pay your respects then that’s it,
5:13 the game doesn’t even end so much as it just bricks,
5:16 a standoff between you and a choice that doesn’t exist.
5:20 Whether or not you close the application,
5:22 if you refuse to pay your respects you functionally stop playing the game.
5:29 World of Warcraft offers players a tremendous amount of agency.
5:32 It is, after all, an entire virtual world.
5:34 You are, indeed, broadly free to not pay
5:37 your respects and the game is generally cool with that.
5:41 You can shun levels, talent trees,
5:43 and even weapons and still play the game for a very,
5:46 very long time in a way that’s still identifiably play.
5:51 Why shouldn’t you stand facing a wall on the far side
5:54 of Bloodmyst Isle and contemplate the nature of the Draenei… forever?
5:59 Roleplaying is a genuine example of the value of free play,
6:04 and the fuzzy edges of instrumental play.
6:07 Roleplayers engage with World of Warcraft in a fundamentally different
6:10 way than how you or I might engage with it.
6:13 They are often less concerned with the explicit objectives of World of Warcraft,
6:18 and instead prefer emergent activities.
6:21 By shunning the game’s progression system,
6:23 there’s a clear embrace of free play here.
6:26 but when roleplayers self-direct, say,
6:28 by holding an annual festival that raises tens
6:31 of thousand dollars of charity year after year,
6:33 they are creating their own goals
6:35 and that morphs into a form of instrumental play.
6:39 In this sense, you cannot have free and instrumental play in their purest forms.
6:45 You might be surprised just how much
6:47 of the study of WoW is concerned with roleplaying,
6:50 because it reflects a fascinating alternative,
6:52 and socially-driven, means of engaging with a game.
6:56 And that nuance, that question of how you
6:58 can enable a form of play that, by definition,
7:01 doesn’t concern itself with, like,
7:03 the numbers, the spreadsheets, the statistics,
7:06 all the stuff that the game is fundamentally made of, that is awesome.
7:12 Blizzard can’t force you to stop staring at the wall,
7:15 but they can encourage and discourage certain play
7:18 practices and very rarely abolish them in their entirety.
7:23 In Battlefields of Negotiation, Glas’s core insight is that Blizzard is not
7:27 an omnipotent god in the World of Warcraft, the developers are not the Arbiter.
7:32 Yes, they have immense influence and a form of final say,
7:35 but they are ultimately a stakeholder who push their vision of the game,
7:41 which either aligns or resists against the playerbase.
7:45 Writing on Lineage II,
7:46 Professor of Informatics Constance Steinkuhler described MMOs
7:49 as defined by a “mangle of play”,
7:53 the push and pull relationship between game developers and their players.
7:58 Blizzard has access to certain tools and means
8:00 of creating the “legitimate” World of Warcraft experience,
8:03 they have control over the servers and decide
8:06 what bespoke content gets made and implemented,
8:09 but they are not the sole hand attempting
8:11 to sculpt the game MMOs are “interactively stabilized” systems, coevolutionary,
8:16 the emergent result of the intersection of designers,
8:21 armed with their technology, and players, armed with their own practices.
8:26 Blizzard has code, the players have codes of practices.
8:30 Social codes of practice are ‘the tenets laid down
8:33 by individuals within the game who have no design power
8:37 or automatically conferred authority.’ These social codes are often linked
8:41 with perceptions of ‘foul play’ and the ‘spirit of the game’.
8:45 But they go far beyond that, and can shape
8:48 what is considered legitimate play in World of Warcraft.
8:51 In Leet Noobs, Mark Chen sees success
8:54 in World of Warcraft as dynamically defined.
8:57 To be good at World of Warcraft is defined by consensus.
9:01 Put another way, you are good if you do enough
9:04 of the things that we collectively decided that good players do.
9:09 Success is relative and socially defined.
9:13 For a simple example, arena rating was very inflated in Season 2 of Shadowlands.
9:17 While a typical season tends to have a median rating around 1600,
9:22 season one was severely deflated with a median rating of 1426.
9:28 Some behind the scenes tweaking leading into season
9:31 2 resulted in a median of roughly 1750.
9:35 In the abstract both of these are fine,
9:37 the actual underlying mechanics of matchmaking are all relative,
9:41 the numbers are arbitrary.
9:43 If you are a high level competitor the experience on a match-to-match
9:46 basis is generally the same regardless of what the median rating is,
9:50 the shape of the curve remains the same, it’s just shifted upwards.
9:55 The hitch is that certain rewards, like titles,
9:58 achievements, and armor, are hard coded to specific ratings.
10:03 So the inflation resulted in the prestige
10:05 rewards being available to more players than usual,
10:09 many of whom would never have qualified for it under different circumstances.
10:14 This led to a rather vocal belief that these rewards were illegitimate,
10:18 they ‘didn’t count’.
10:20 Despite the game layer presenting these dragons as equivalent,
10:24 there is a significant difference in their social value.
10:28 For Glas, World of Warcraft is composed of various ‘idocultures’,
10:31 groups of players linked together by particular systems of knowledge,
10:35 beliefs, behaviors and customs.
10:37 Big boy raiders and roleplayers have totally
10:39 different ways of engaging with the world,
10:41 there is no single objective way to approach WoW.
10:45 These idiocultures exist in layers.
10:47 You’ve got WoW players categorically, PvP versus PvE,
10:52 Battlegrounds versus Arenas, Keystones versus Raids, Guilds, individual guilds,
10:56 and of course cliques within those guilds,
10:59 and players can move seamlessly between all of these different modes,
11:03 all of these different ideocultures.
11:06 These different idiocultures may subscribe to different social practices,
11:09 and it is the interaction between these groups and the constant negotiation
11:13 on proper codes of practice that Glas argues shapes World of Warcraft.
11:18 It is the interaction between different groups of people
11:21 that set the boundaries and fundamental meaning of play.
11:25 Instrumental play has entrenched itself as the dominant
11:28 mode of engagement with World of Warcraft.
11:31 Through social codes of practice,
11:33 players are subject to expectations that they may be completely unaware of.
11:38 It is taken as value neutral, and objectively true,
11:42 that expertise and success are the natural objectives of play,
11:46 and thus the default mode of play that players owe to those around them.
11:50 In other words: It’s bad manners to be bad at Warcraft.
11:57 [Choice] We’re going to talk for a moment about the Great Vault.
12:02 If you play World of Warcraft then you probably already know how it functions,
12:05 and if you don’t then all you need to know is this; at the end of every week
12:08 you get to pick one reward from a grid
12:10 that fills up as you do specific group activities.
12:13 Options are dictated by difficulty and volume.
12:15 Do more stuff, get more picks.
12:17 Do higher difficulty stuff, get stronger picks.
12:20 Case study A: during the Shadowlands Season 3 race-to-world-first,
12:23 in the US 2nd guild BDGG, our players were required to fill all 9
12:28 slots to their maximum potency on multiple ‘mirror’ mains.
12:31 Since there is an element of luck to gearing up,
12:33 the top players will prepare multiple copies of the same class in order to have
12:36 a few pulls at the slot machine and maximize the chances of a favorable outcome.
12:40 For this particular raid tier,
12:42 our Moonkin player prepared three separate Druids,
12:45 our Death Knight raider prepared four Death Knights,
12:47 each of these characters had the same odds of being the main character,
12:51 based hugely on the outcome of their Vault rewards.
12:54 These are players who are paid, in dollars,
12:56 for their time as part of a pseudo-professional eSports event.
13:00 Achieving the absolute optimum performance in a raid
13:02 environment is part of their literal job description.
13:04 This expectation was only maintained until the progression period was over,
13:07 at which point no one cared, job’s done, do what you want.
13:11 Case study B: Venture, US rank 180th.
13:16 They are a 2 night a week guild that has some very different ideas.
13:21 If you’ll allow us this one indulgence,
13:22 let’s just take a moment to dunk on an incredibly stupid opinion.
13:26 If some of this goes over your head, don’t worry about it.
13:28 I promise you will pick up the important parts.
13:30 So it’s Season 3 of Shadowlands, almost 3 months into a 4 month season.
13:34 Our good friend and contributor to the show, Crystal,
13:36 has just come back to the game after a lengthy break,
13:38 so we spin up a group and spend a few hours hanging out and doing dungeons.
13:42 In terms of gear, Crystal is wearing old junk
13:44 and so the rest of us have elected to bring alts.
13:47 But a member of our group,
13:48 the tastefully named Moistrainbow, opts to bring his main character,
13:51 in part to make it easy but also to fill out slots in his aforementioned vault.
13:55 Moistrainbow is doing this for a chance at one specific item,
13:59 the coveted Unbound Changeling.
14:00 This is one of the best trinkets in the game
14:02 for healers and casters at this point in time.
14:04 We end up doing over eight keys, but only about four of them at level 15.
14:08 Moistrainbow does not do any other keys for the week.
14:10 So, at the end of the week, this is what his vault looks like.
14:13 He has 3 chances at the Unbound Changeling,
14:16 two will be at the maximum possible level.
14:18 The Changeling is 1 of 91 potential items.
14:23 Huh.
14:24 That’s good right?
14:28 That’s good.
14:30 Having consulted the team, a player getting their Best-in-Slot trinket is good.
14:46 But Venture felt differently.
14:48 They came down on Moist hard for not maxing out that final slot.
14:51 There was explicit shaming, snarky remarks,
14:54 even cowardly announcements from leadership about players
14:56 needing to do their part for the team.
14:59 And perhaps on the face of it, you’re empathetic to all that.
15:02 But we have been pissed off about this incident for almost six months,
15:05 so just give us a minute.
15:07 Remember, this was a piece of gear generated solely for Moistrainbow,
15:10 this is not typical loot drama, there was no alternate home for this trinket.
15:14 The issue was entirely in the missed opportunity at a stronger version.
15:18 Gear in Warcraft is comprised of stats that are
15:21 assigned based on the individual item’s overall budget,
15:23 dictated by its slot and by its level.
15:26 These stats all do and mean a lot of different things.
15:28 So the ultimate unit of measurement we use to value a piece
15:31 of gear is to calculate its contribution to the player’s damage.
15:34 How do we do that?
15:35 Easy, we build a robot to play our character perfectly while wearing both items,
15:38 ideally a couple of thousand times, and then compare the results.
15:41 Typically, a higher item level should translate to a better item.
15:46 However, trinkets are not like other pieces of gear,
15:49 their item level can be deceptive.
15:51 A trinket lives or dies on its effect.
15:54 So this Unbound Changeling was the best
15:56 possible trinket with an item level of 272, down 6 item level from the max.
16:00 If we compare simulation results from a Destruction Warlock at the time,
16:03 we can see the difference is barely perceptible on the graph.
16:06 This particular simulation values the overall impact at 0.6%.
16:10 Here are some more details on that if you are interested.
16:13 But we’ve buried the lead on this, because Moistrainbow isn’t a Warlock,
16:16 he’s a god damn healer.
16:18 And healers are a whole different deal.
16:20 Healers don’t have the same simple,
16:22 tangible benefit from gear as damage-dealers receive.
16:24 For well over a decade,
16:25 it has been standard practice for guilds to starve their healers of gear,
16:29 on the basis that they don’t really need it.
16:32 We don’t have any real way to even quantify this difference for a healer.
16:36 While this would not be accurate at all,
16:38 let’s be generous and assume it would match this point-six percent figure.
16:42 This was in the context of a guild
16:44 that was 9 weeks behind the progression curve,
16:45 working on bosses that had been hit with the nerf bat several times.
16:49 And just for those in the know,
16:51 these people were six healing Mythic Lords of Dread
16:53 in early June- like… I don’t even have the words.
16:57 Gear was not their problem.
16:59 So a close friend of mine was bullied
17:00 and excluded from this group for not spending a few
17:02 more hours running dungeons to load the bases
17:04 for a one-percent chance at a maybe half-percent increase in performance,
17:08 where that improvement was entirely disconnected
17:11 from the problems the group was encountering.
17:13 The reason we wanted to talk about this is that I sincerely could not
17:16 imagine a more petty reason to give someone a hard time in World of Warcraft.
17:20 Frankly, It's pathetic.
17:23 This was not an instrumental practice, this was a social one.
17:26 Here, the social value of the item level
17:29 was wildly disproportionate to any tangible, mathematical value.
17:33 The process of completing the necessary 8 keystones
17:38 was a ritualistic reaffirmation of commitment to the group.
17:42 The fact that the trinket was worth something
17:48 was just a pretense to enforce the practice.
17:54 [Dan] Early attempts at anthropological studies of virtual worlds were fraught.
18:03 Some might look back on them as hopelessly naive,
18:05 but I prefer to categorize them as bad.
18:08 Many of them sought to reify online spaces, to rope them off from reality
18:11 and paint them as a separate self-sustaining world,
18:14 an actual destination as disconnected from the rest
18:17 of reality as the moon or perhaps Australia.
18:21 In Coming of Age in Second Life,
18:23 Tom Boellstorff conducted a study of user experiences in Second Life,
18:26 but critically did not involve the user’s real lives
18:29 or any other websites or software in his analysis.
18:33 The work drew criticism from Alex Golub,
18:36 who identified this as a dramatic oversight.
18:38 The virtual worlds of MMOs are not enclosed worlds.
18:43 [Choice] My experience with World of Warcraft is
18:45 not limited to the executable file on my harddrive.
18:49 Discord, Twitch, Twitter, Google Docs, they are all ‘places’ where I can engage
18:52 with World of Warcraft without ‘inhabiting’ World of Warcraft.
18:55 I work as a contributor to Skill Capped,
18:57 an analyst for BDGG and produce my own YouTube content.
19:00 I might be at the point where I spend more
19:02 time doing WoW outside of WoW than I spend inside it.
19:05 So we have MMO-Champion, WoWhead or whatever,
19:07 the term we will be using for this material is “paratext”.
19:11 If you’re into a certain, lame, type of youtube video,
19:13 “paratext” is a word you’ll have heard before.
19:15 It’s one of those words that gets thrown around quite a bit,
19:17 but is rarely given a clean definition.
19:19 The concept of paratext was originally
19:20 conceived by French literary theorist Gérard Genette.
19:23 Genette saw a book as containing the text of the book, the primary work,
19:27 but also containing other components that were necessary for the book
19:29 to be complete but that were not an element of the primary text.
19:34 You have the actual story of Warcraft: Durotan,
19:35 but then you also have a cover, the title, a foreword and so on.
19:39 Things that aren’t the ‘text’, but still influence the meaning.
19:42 The title gives you some idea of what the book is going to be about,
19:45 the illustration might tell you what a certain character looks like.
19:48 For Genette, all of that additional text
19:52 required to make the work complete, was paratext.
19:57 But let’s be real, while this is all interesting, it’s a bit of a niche.
20:03 It’s an acquired taste.
20:04 The field of literary academia focusing solely on physical
20:07 books is not a growth industry in 2022.
20:11 There have been attempts to apply Genette’s framework to the internet.
20:14 For instance, it could be said
20:14 that this video’s title and thumbnail represent paratext.
20:15 You saw the video recommended by YouTube
20:15 and formed some expectation based on what you saw.
20:17 If you’ve encountered the term paratext in the wild,
20:18 it likely wasn’t Genette’s definition,
20:19 but rather the definition attributed to Mia Consalvo.
20:22 Consalvo is a Comms professor who tastefully
20:25 and delicately but firmly expanded upon Genette’s formulation.
20:29 [Dan] For Consalvo, paratext was any text
20:31 that “may alter the meanings of a text, further enhance meanings,
20:35 or provide challenges to sedimented meanings.” So paratext are texts
20:40 that exist to influence what we think of a separate, primary text.
20:45 This is reviews, walkthroughs, pre-release trailers and so on.
20:49 The material that “surround, shape,
20:51 support and provide context for texts.” There
20:55 is a legitimate criticism to be made
20:57 that this ever broadening definition is quickly
20:59 becoming so vague as to lose all meaning.
21:02 But for our purposes, this is a blessing.
21:06 WoWhead and Warcraftlogs are paratext for World of Warcraft.
21:10 Developer interviews are paratext.
21:12 Forum boards and twitter threads have been called paratext.
21:15 Podcasts, fan art, and machinima straddle the blurry
21:18 line of being both texts and paratexts,
21:21 converting the original text into a paratext
21:23 that provides context and meaning to the derivatives.
21:26 AddOns have been called paratext.
21:29 Whatever this is, Paratext.
21:31 [Crusader] 2 v 3 biiiiiiitch!
21:35 Do do do do do do!
21:40 Do do do do do do!
21:45 Do do do do do do!
21:50 Trash players!
21:52 Trash players!
21:54 Traaaaaaaash!
21:55 In most media, a movie or painting is produced,
21:58 and then paratext is produced which can then act on the dominant text,
22:03 a particularly incisive review can persuade you
22:06 into a given reading of the story and themes,
22:09 or fan fiction can emphasize the prominence of romantic tension
22:13 that would otherwise appear subtle or even non-existent, that kind of thing.
22:18 Maybe if a movie gets a sequel,
22:20 the filmmakers will respond to what people liked or disliked
22:23 and thus the paratext has influence over subsequent texts.
22:27 It is common for paratext to alter the way that people talk about something,
22:31 but for the most part that’s where it stops;
22:33 it is very rare for paratext to go beyond that and actually alter a text.
22:39 World of Warcraft, like many online games,
22:42 has a bit of a different relationship.
22:44 World of Warcraft is constantly being updated and altered,
22:47 there is no static final product that can sit
22:50 on shelves and be dusted off by critics decades later,
22:53 and since Wow is constantly being updated so is a lot of the talk about WoW.
22:59 The paratext is in a constant state of churn in lock-step with the game.
23:04 At a basic level, paratext is a form of feedback for the developers.
23:08 YouTube videos critical of certain changes,
23:10 bad reviews of an expansion launch in major outlets,
23:13 explosive forum threads or viral Tweets,
23:15 the developers and writers are in an inevitable dialogue with these paratexts,
23:20 as subsequent updates to the game will inevitably be read
23:25 as either integration or rejection of the vision presented by those outlets.
23:30 But beyond that, paratext interacts with social practices.
23:35 Paratext emerge from, create and disseminate social practices.
23:39 And what then tends to be prescribed are ideals of instrumental play.
23:46 When a new strategy or idea is discussed,
23:48 people make guides or posts discussing it and push it out in the world.
23:53 That then influences how the game is played
23:56 and what practices are considered correct and legitimate.
23:59 The expressions of this can be
24:02 surprisingly pervasive in really unexpected places such
24:04 as which of two perfectly symmetrical hallways is the correct path to take.
24:10 There is a shocking amount of social friction
24:12 that can be generated by looking at two identical choices,
24:15 and picking the one other players weren’t expecting.
24:20 In The Sepulcher Of the First Ones these two paths at the entrance are the same.
24:25 They’re literally identical.
24:27 There is absolutely nothing to distinguish going left from going right.
24:32 But for whatever arbitrary reason,
24:34 Looking for Raid groups have established an entirely unspoken assumption,
24:38 a rut-like convention, that you go to the right.
24:43 If you get dropped into a randomly assembled LFR
24:45 group and you lead the group down the left path?
24:49 People will yell at you.
24:51 These are the foundation of all the small rituals players engage
24:54 in as they wordlessly navigate a dungeon for the fiftieth time.
24:59 These are the rituals that allow players
25:01 to just know what their expected role is, why they are the one expected to stand
25:09 somewhere or do something without anyone saying anything.
25:13 Many of these silent ruts are just that: ruts of habit with no consequence,
25:18 but the reactions get even more intense if there are consequences,
25:22 even trivial ones, that can be mathematically quantified
25:25 in some way or another as less efficient practice.
25:29 [Choice] In the Plaguefall dungeon,
25:31 the first boss, the delightfully named Globgorg,
25:34 will summon sets of slime creatures that will make their way toward him.
25:37 If any reach Globgorg, he will be healed for a portion of his health.
25:40 Low-difficulty or uncoordinated groups usually just turn and kill the slimes.
25:44 But at the highest difficulties,
25:45 the standard practice is to focus damage on the boss
25:47 and prevent the larger slimes from reaching the boss with ‘Crowd Control’.
25:51 If executed correctly, this positioning and strategy trivializes the fight.
25:55 And it’s not difficult, but the risk is enormous.
25:57 Any breakdown in the management of the slimes
26:00 can immediately brick an entire dungeon run.
26:02 Upon first discovering this strategy on a Twitch stream,
26:04 we became immediate evangelists for the Globgorg Gambit.
26:07 We essentially became agents of the strategy,
26:09 and went on to spread its influence even further.
26:12 To quote Kristine Ask,
26:14 “theorycrafting paratext both spread and stabilize theorycrafted expertise,
26:17 co-producing a more performance-oriented playstyle.” Put another way,
26:21 when players theorycraft, when they come up with strategies,
26:23 when they run math through spreadsheets
26:25 to decide which option is numerically superior,
26:27 and these strategies proliferate through the playerbase,
26:29 they don’t merely spread the specific strategies,
26:32 they also legitimize and elevate the act
26:34 of theorycrafting itself and push all players,
26:37 indirectly, towards a playstyle where optimization is the correct mode of play.
26:41 World of Warcraft is so interesting because it
26:44 has lived through multiple generations of the internet.
26:47 Because the game is so influenced by paratext,
26:49 changes in our capacity for paratext manifest as changes in the game itself.
26:54 As the internet changes how we communicate,
26:55 the way we talk about WoW also changes, and that fact changes WoW.
27:00 In the game's early life,
27:02 Thotbott and later WoWhead were, famously, major resources.
27:04 But they were only as good as the information that users fed into them,
27:07 and it took time for the sites to build up a repository of information.
27:11 And that didn’t guarantee accurate information,
27:14 just the existence of information.
27:16 However, as Mark Chen points out,
27:17 that didn’t stop the use of these sites from becoming expert practice.
27:21 Actually the complete opposite happened.
27:23 [Dan] Rather than being seen as cheating,
27:26 using WoWhead was a thing that the best players did.
27:30 And in 2006, it relied on word-of-mouth,
27:32 you had to be told about Thottbot to learn about it.
27:37 In her book Cheating, Consalvo points out how common it was for strategy
27:40 guides or sites like GameFAQs to be perceived as cheating,
27:44 as ‘illegitimate’ practices.
27:46 So it’s interesting how WoW would invert
27:49 that dynamic at a similar period of time.
27:52 And as Ask points out, that’s, uh, weird.
27:56 When World of Warcraft released,
27:58 streaming video was in its earliest stages and it has existed through
28:02 from that into the rise of HD videos
28:05 on YouTube through to 1440p livestreams on Twitch.
28:08 Like, this is actually worth stressing,
28:10 because it plays into the way that information spread,
28:14 information asymmetry, has changed over the course of the game.
28:18 If you were watching a strategy video in 2007, it looked like this.
28:28 [Music] But today, in the sci-fi future of the 2020s?
28:37 [Narrator] Now, when the fight starts you’re going to want
28:40 to spread and take positions somewhat similar to this.
28:43 Now the reason you’re gonna want to be spread out
28:45 like this is because Archimonde has an ability called Air Burst.
28:48 Now this does 1500 nature damage in a 15 yard AoE around his target.
28:53 [Dan] In his 2013 thesis, Play to win,
28:55 Benjamin Egliston predicted the rise of twitch streams
28:57 as a primary source of knowledge for World of Warcraft.
29:01 The printed strategy guides that Consalvo wrote
29:04 about already feel like a distant memory.
29:07 In 2022, it’s common for players to seek out primary sources
29:10 of knowledge in the form of twitch streamers or relevant discord servers.
29:15 [cut to DK VoDs] Someone looking how to play a Blood Death
29:18 Knight in keystones has access to livestreams
29:20 from dozens of excellent Blood DKs.
29:23 Potentially hundreds of hours of VoDs to comb through.
29:27 Taken in its totality,
29:29 the effect of all this material can be somewhat insidious.
29:33 When discussing strategy guides,
29:34 Consalvo observed that these guides taught young players that exploration,
29:38 persistence and strategizing were essential to succeed in their given game.
29:43 Essentially, the strategy guides taught its readers
29:46 what it meant to be an “ideal gamer”.
29:49 When Choice makes one of his dorky PvP guides and pushes
29:52 it out into the internet to wither on the vine,
29:55 it implicitly communicates that instrumental values are desirable traits.
30:00 The video inadvertently reinforces the idea that watching
30:03 PvP guides is a good thing to be doing.
30:08 Each video represents a brick in an echo chamber that carries a subtle,
30:13 yet deafening resonance.
30:14 The value ascribed to these videos turns
30:16 the game’s best players into the game’s biggest celebrities.
30:20 This accelerates the process,
30:22 as their expert practices gain increasingly rapid adoption.
30:27 Kristine Ask first observed this phenomenon over a decade ago.
30:31 Imagine having this ringing in your ears for so long.
30:35 What would that do to a person?
30:38 [Choice] This robot is a product of paratext.
30:41 It’s an understatement to say that simulations
30:43 have been entrenched in World of Warcraft.
30:45 They are a core pillar of the game,
30:47 and often are the foundation on which other pillars rest.
30:50 Best in Slot lists, gameplay guides, even boss strategies themselves,
30:53 are built off principles that arise from simulations and the values they carry.
30:58 When referring to the combat logging site, Warcraft Logs,
31:00 Egliston said “such applications are now used casually,
31:03 reinforcing competition at all levels
31:05 of play.” “Through the production of paratexts, competitive players are not only
31:10 creating emergent tools for cultivating tactics,
31:12 but also repositioning the skilled player
31:14 as an influential force in game design.”
31:16 This state of affairs has become so normalized as to be seen as value neutral.
31:21 In the case of WoW because of the pace
31:23 at which paratext is incorporated into the game,
31:26 either explicitly as feedback or implicitly as the dialect of design,
31:30 the barrier between WoW and its paratext
31:32 has become so thin as to be non-existent,
31:35 and nowhere is that more apparent than the subject of AddOns.
31:39 [Dan] AddOns are, of course,
31:42 software that can be run inside of another piece of software.
31:48 AddOns were a major pillar of PC gaming in the late
31:51 90s and early 2000s and they remain extremely relevant through to today.
31:55 Many famous titles began their life as mods,
31:58 many titles are socially considered unplayable without modding,
32:01 some legacy titles are literally unplayable without them
32:05 especially as hardware and operating systems leave them behind,
32:09 and mods are a wonderful tool for budding game devs to learn
32:13 the craft by poking around and fiddling with a completed project.
32:17 Mods are still around,
32:18 but mod support is far less pervasive than it was twenty years ago.
32:23 Today, if a game has mod support it tends
32:25 to be a hugely influential aspect of the game.
32:28 Titles like Minecraft, Oxygen Not Included,
32:30 Cities: Skylines, and indeed World of Warcraft,
32:33 don’t see mod support as an extra little feature,
32:36 but a core element of their game’s identity.
32:39 So while mods haven’t gone away, their scope is far more limited.
32:44 In 2022 the biggest titles are online
32:48 competitive multiplayer games driven by live service monetisation.
32:52 Titles like Counter-Strike or League of Legends place
32:55 huge emphasis on their competitive and esport elements.
32:58 These are games where the integrity of the competition is critical.
33:03 Support for AddOns represent an unstable element
33:06 that few game developers get involved with.
33:09 In fact, most developers of esport-adjacent titles have an extremely harsh view
33:13 on any third party software that interacts
33:16 with the competitive element of their game.
33:18 There are a few exceptions.
33:20 Team Fortress 2 gives the player the ability to alter the game’s HUD.
33:24 The power the user is given to change the UI is pretty dramatic,
33:28 however they cannot add new UI elements,
33:31 only alter the presentation of base elements.
33:34 The closest comparison I was able to find to a WoW UI mod was,
33:38 like, SimpleRadar for Counter Strike.
33:41 This is a major point of departure for World of Warcraft.
33:44 WoW wants to be counted amongst your League of Legends and Valorants,
33:47 and while WoW laid a lot of groundwork for the modern live-service model,
33:52 WoW wasn’t built to be like those games,
33:56 it was built to be like Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot.
34:00 Both games from the early 2000s with mod support.
34:03 Mods in that era were significantly less potent, and the competitive,
34:08 instrumental play of 2022 didn’t really exist in Everquest in 2003.
34:16 There is an old allakhazam tutorial on modding in EQ from February 2003,
34:21 it lists the following hypothetical uses of mods.
34:25 “Mods can introduce new information or functions into the EQ interface,
34:29 make things easier to use, or make the playing screen more pleasing to the eye.
34:33 They can turn your cursor into a Nature Walker’s Scimitar,
34:35 put a dragon in your spellbook, and put every important zone [location]
34:38 or tradeskill recipe only a mouseclick away while
34:40 you are in-game.” These are not what
34:44 we would today consider gameplay altering mods.
34:47 They are aesthetic and ergonomic changes.
34:50 These are precisely the kinds of mods
34:53 that developers of the time would anticipate users creating.
34:57 And the appeal of these mods are pretty clear.
35:00 Users are empowered to sculpt the game to their own liking,
35:02 and that remarkable feature is almost entirely outsourced.
35:05 Mods offer huge value to companies,
35:07 who are the ultimate beneficiaries of the work of passionate volunteers.
35:11 In 2003, the developers working on World
35:13 of Warcraft were not making a competitive title,
35:16 they were making an Elder Scrolls-Ultima-Everquest type thing.
35:20 Of course, a few people would inevitably min-max the systems,
35:24 like any other DnD descendant.
35:26 But the decision to support mods wouldn’t be one with decades of consequences.
35:31 Probably.
35:33 [Choice] World of Warcraft in a lot of ways is a victim of its own success.
35:38 Its extensive mod support is a relic of a bygone era.
35:41 Mods today are more powerful than the founders could have imagined.
35:45 We can argue whether or not Blizzard should
35:46 have locked down their API more during development.
35:48 But ultimately that frames the debate
35:50 as Blizzard needing to ‘save us from ourselves’.
35:52 The decision to give mod developers freedom, though perhaps naive,
35:55 was rooted in player and consumer empowerment, as mod support so often is.
35:59 It’s what modders created and our eagerness
36:01 to embrace them that put us in this position.
36:04 So while this may seem redundant,
36:05 we want to take a second to draw a distinction between AddOns and, well, AddOns.
36:10 On the one hand we have mods like OneBag, Aurora, and MyRoleplay.
36:15 Mods that improve the user experience
36:16 or offer some new feature without influencing combat.
36:19 I would rope most of the Dragonflight
36:22 UI customisation options into this category.
36:24 On the other hand you have BigWigs and Gladius
36:26 whose whole purpose is to improve player performance in combat.
36:30 These are mods whose creation and use
36:32 is predicated on instrumental and expert practices,
36:34 which is to say: these mods exist to provide
36:37 information that allows you to improve your performance.
36:40 Since these mods are used explicitly in the pursuit of an advantage,
36:43 a conversation about cheating and legitimacy naturally follows.
36:45 Even though most players don’t frame this conversation in academic terms,
36:47 a lot of us feel the subject of legitimacy hanging in the air,
36:49 like a nerdy poltergeist.
36:50 The mods we are most concerned
36:51 with, the mods with the greatest influence on combat,
36:51 are the ones that assume cognitive load.
36:53 [Dan] The seminal authority on this incredibly niche
36:55 concept is Mark Chen’s 2011 dissertation Leet Noobs.
36:57 Chen wrote extensively about AddOns and their influence
37:00 on raid practices as early as 2006,
37:03 but his insights have only grown more relevant
37:05 over time as the influence of AddOns has grown.
37:08 In Leet Noobs, Mark Chen is concerned with how raid groups become successful,
37:12 and the complex social and technical systems
37:15 that emerge in a coordinated raid environment.
37:18 Chen sought to demonstrate how AddOns could become essential to a raid.
37:23 To begin, Chen develops on Edwin Hutchin’s concept of distributed cognition.
37:27 For Hutchin, many cognitive tasks can be conceptualized
37:31 as activities that can be offloaded onto material resources.
37:36 If I take notes on a sheet of paper,
37:38 if I jot down the passcode to a door or the location of a hidden treasure,
37:42 I am offloading the cognitive tasks of memory onto the pen and paper.
37:46 The pen and paper are assuming certain responsibilities,
37:49 they are not passive things,
37:50 but are actively performing a duty of carrying a cognitive load on my behalf.
37:56 Chen takes this concept to its logical extreme and asks whether it
37:59 even matters whether an actor in a given system is human or non-human.
38:03 This concept is called object-oriented ontology,
38:06 where everything exists equally, tools are treated as though they have agency.
38:12 My brain and a pen and paper are equally
38:14 capable of accomplishing the task of remembering my doctor’s appointment.
38:18 There are certainly critiques that can be made of this framework.
38:21 In the context of notetaking,
38:22 it could be argued that the paper merely enhances my memory,
38:26 rather than assuming responsibility.
38:27 But as you will see, certain mods are so potent at taking on responsibility,
38:33 that ‘agency’ is probably the best way to describe it.
38:38 This leads Chen to a lengthy discussion of actor-network theory.
38:42 ANT posits that the roles and responsibilities within a ‘network of activity’,
38:46 such as an organization or a raid group, are distributed across multiple actors.
38:51 And object-oriented ontology tells us that those actors need not be human.
38:55 And since a raid group is nothing more than a network of actors,
38:59 Chen argues that AddOns can become essential agents in a raid environment.
39:04 [Choice] So, the AddOns we are most concerned with are the ones
39:07 that take on some cognitive load that would otherwise be placed on players,
39:12 individually or collectively.
39:13 From this we can place mods on a kind
39:15 of abstract spectrum of just how much cognitive load they carry.
39:19 A lot of mods we just don’t care about,
39:21 such as those cosmetic or ergonomic mods,
39:22 because they carry no meaningful cognitive load in combat.
39:25 On the other end of the spectrum mods like Gladius,
39:28 Diminish or OmniBar carry a very high amount of cognitive load,
39:31 because they desperately want to contribute to combat.
39:34 The smallest example of a useful mod we
39:35 can think of, our minimum unit of cognitive load, would be the crosshair.
39:39 It’s not uncommon now to see top end raiders play
39:41 with a WeakAura that marks the center of their screen,
39:43 representing where their character is.
39:45 Your character cannot, typically, leave the center of your screen.
39:48 So strictly speaking, the crosshair is entirely redundant information.
39:51 It is an actor whose role is to answer a question whose answer never changes.
39:57 Where is my character, it’s in the middle of the screen, where it always is.
40:01 And yet if we show you footage of a modern raid,
40:03 you can see how the crosshair can decipher the visual noise.
40:06 ‘Where is my character?’ is a simple question to answer,
40:09 but having that certainty,
40:10 not having to take the extra split second to find your dude in the chaos,
40:14 that is valuable, and that task can be offloaded to two brightly coloured lines.
40:18 In recent years, competitive raid guilds have
40:20 made a big deal about the 21st raider, an additional player outside of the raid
40:24 that coordinates players as the raid’s leader via livestreams.
40:33 Traditionally that role was performed by a player within the raid,
40:35 but the demands of the role have grown to the point now where
40:38 a player within the raid is not expected to carry that amount of cognitive load.
40:42 The cognitive load of managing the raid has been outsourced
40:44 to an additional actor who is not on the raid frames.
40:47 However, that idea is not remotely new.
40:49 T.
40:49 L Taylor, writing in 2009 on the subject of raiding in Molten Core,
40:54 framed a predecessor to DBM as “a kind of autonomous agent,
40:58 the 41st member of the raid.” It’s quite common for raid mods like
41:01 DBM or BigWigs to assign players
41:03 to certain locations or to perform certain duties.
41:06 On the Mythic Jailer encounter,
41:07 six players are marked as the bomb, they’re about to explode.
41:10 To keep their friends alive, they each need to jump in a unique hole.
41:13 To minimize the amount of coordination or communication required,
41:16 players offload the problem to a mod.
41:19 An AddOn assigns each player their own hole,
41:21 and your duty as a raider is to do what the robot tells you.
41:24 By the time this goes live,
41:25 progression for Vault of the Incarnates will begin in less than a fortnight.
41:28 A huge point of discussion for us has been how
41:30 to best utilize mods to assume as much responsibility as possible.
41:34 Just how much of our Raid Leader could be replaced with MS Susan?
41:37 [Dan] In Leet Noobs, Chen discusses at great length how
41:40 the creation of threat meters affected his guild.
41:42 We take it for granted today,
41:44 but in early WoW the threat system was a black box.
41:47 The lack of knowledge around threat meant
41:49 that players couldn’t necessarily ‘optimize’ their damage,
41:51 because if they did too much damage they would simply pull aggro and die.
41:55 And you couldn’t put a number to what ‘too much damage’ even was.
42:00 Chen describes in detail his guild’s theories on how threat functioned.
42:03 I won’t get into the details,
42:04 but it was a vision of threat that had rogues afraid to ever press Eviscerate,
42:09 a core ability that famously was kind of important, it was worth a press.
42:15 “Eviscerate does static damage!” Early theories on threat
42:19 were similar to Onyxia’s famous deep breath, it was shrouded in half-truths,
42:23 vague uncertainties and a healthy dose of superstition.
42:27 Threat in 2004 was what we’d today call a vibe, you felt it out.
42:31 A scenario like this, where DPS are deliberately
42:33 holding back their damage due to concerns about threat,
42:37 significantly increased the difficulty of bosses.
42:44 The superstition was replaced with absolute knowledge.
42:47 “A mechanic that was previously invisible
42:50 but still present was made visible in order
42:53 to be made useful.” The process of threat
42:56 was now a process of real-time data analysis.
42:58 If the rogue saw that they had a decent buffer on threat,
43:01 they could press Eviscerate where they would have once hesitated.
43:05 As tools, the damage meter naturally preceded the threat meter.
43:08 But in the early days the value of damage meters wasn’t appreciated.
43:13 Chen observed that his guild members initially struggled
43:16 to see the purpose or value in these tools.
43:19 He invoked the metaphor of ‘trying to describe a bicycle to a fish’.
43:23 But once they were adopted, they quickly became essential to Chen’s guild,
43:26 and the threat meter naturally elevates the damage meter.
43:31 Because ultimately, the value of threat
43:32 management is measured in damage per second.
43:35 The creation of the damage meter created the conditions
43:37 that allowed players to optimize their damage output,
43:40 and thus legitimized the damage meter as a meaningful signifier of contribution.
43:46 The reason why we articulate the value of gear in terms of damage per second,
43:50 is because DPS is the base unit that we use to measure value to a raid.
43:56 What was once the central pillar
43:59 of the DPS experience was completely changed almost overnight.
44:05 In the years that followed, threat became a rudderless system,
44:08 ignored by players unless they chafed against it.
44:11 Over the years Blizzard has had a few cracks at making it relevant again;
44:15 but as you’ll recall, the creators can’t force it.
44:18 In a modern context it is easy to view this as a positive thing-
44:23 threat sucks and the game is better off without it sitting on top of everything.
44:28 That may be true, but because nothing with WoW is simple,
44:31 there is more to it than that.
44:34 Chen describes a couple of different players from the early days,
44:37 each with various quirks, but for narrative simplicity we’re going
44:40 to merge them into the archetype of Wallace,
44:43 a character who walks between encounters and doesn’t
44:46 wear shoes- two real behaviors that Chen witnessed.
44:49 “There was one of my guild mates,
44:50 not guild mates because we were in a different guild,
44:52 raid mates- since he was in a different guild.
44:55 He played this character who refused to wear boots, or footwear.
45:01 Every piece of clothing or item you get can add to your stats.
45:06 So to not wear boots is a handicap, but like,
45:10 we didn’t care because he was roleplaying and having fun
45:15 and stuff… And there was another person who never ran.
45:20 Which is a total pain in the ass, because you have to wait for this person
45:24 to take forever to get to wherever you're going,
45:27 but he never ever ran in the game.” The experience of the Wallaces
45:31 of the world was to rapidly see the attitude of the world shift around them,
45:36 from light roasting over silly character decisions to active hostility.
45:41 Threat meters changed what raiding meant.
45:44 To RP walk everywhere wasn’t a cute character trait,
45:47 it was leaving the job of trash clearing to everyone else.
45:50 Wallace’s lesser contribution could be
45:53 portrayed with the objectivity of mathematics.
45:56 This is how social practices change, and how mods can drive that change.
46:02 Threat meters and damage meters created a new
46:04 framework for which WoW could be viewed by players,
46:07 and as an individual, you could either accept that change or leave.
46:13 Wallace not wearing shoes shifted from being
46:16 an self-imposed limitation with very nebulous consequences to being
46:20 a very precisely quantifiable measure of exactly just
46:24 how much Wallace was failing to Play Correctly.
46:30 And in defining what it meant to ‘correctly’ play World of Warcraft,
46:34 we narrowed down the legitimate means of inhabiting Azeroth.
46:37 In doing so, the infinite world that so
46:41 enthralled those anthropologists grew just that little bit smaller.
46:50 A typical single player game may be built with instrumental play in mind,
46:54 it may even distinctly cater to it,
46:57 but peak instrumental practices can often be quarantined from mainstream view.
47:02 Think speed running.
47:03 I love Dark Souls 3, but have never seriously looked at speed running it.
47:07 In comparison to regular play, the speed runs look incoherent,
47:11 the two are disconnected to the point they’re functionally different games.
47:14 A rich speed running scene can exist
47:17 without it influencing my experience of the game.
47:21 [WoW footage] World of Warcraft, in contrast,
47:24 has a very different relationship with instrumental practices.
47:27 You can’t really escape them, even if you try.
47:30 Even the social elements of the game, things seemingly free of numbers,
47:35 become vessels for the propagation of the numbers.
47:38 WoW is a big game, and it’s extremely complex
47:41 and is composed of nearly two decades of sediment,
47:44 long strings of stuff positioned with little baked
47:47 in explanation of what it’s for, why it’s there, or even if you should bother.
47:52 When new content is introduced no one goes back
47:54 to the old stuff to drop signs saying “hey, this place is kinda done,
47:58 you sure you want to be here?” There’s a lot of reasons
48:01 for that, namely it wouldn’t even necessarily make the game better,
48:04 but it’s a thing, and as a result it creates a lot of cul-de-sacs.
48:08 If you stumble into the Molten Front in 2022
48:10 it’s kinda left to you to figure it out, the game’s not going to tell you
48:14 that this content stopped being relevant November 29, 2011.
48:18 So, given the existence of these cul-de-sacs,
48:20 what is always the first piece of advice given to new players?
48:23 Join a guild, find people who will help answer questions and offer guidance,
48:27 people who are up-to-date on the game,
48:29 who can collectively remember what things are,
48:31 and point you at what you can or should be doing,
48:34 who can tell you that the Molten Front is not only a cul-de-sac
48:37 but also kinda lame and there’s not a lot of reason to be there.
48:41 Whether it be that kind of spontaneous, organic help,
48:44 or the systematized information from Elitist Jerks,
48:47 guilds are repositories of knowledge.
48:51 Kristine Ask describes guilds as communities of practice,
48:55 as institutions that store information.
48:57 They are communities defined in part by what they do and why they do it.
49:03 From the very start, players are primed to engage with WoW
49:07 as a process of adopting certain practices.
49:10 World of Warcraft is a game with a large degree of interdependence,
49:13 and interdependence is always a tricky mix of reliance and imposition.
49:18 In order for you to accomplish your goals,
49:21 you may require me to perform a certain task to a certain level of proficiency.
49:25 And if I can’t do that, well,
49:28 odds are no one’s going to be happy with what happens next.
49:33 [Minus fifty DKP] WoW’s raiding environment pushes this to its most extreme.
49:39 As you’ll recall, Chen describes a raid as a network of actors.
49:43 Like a musical band, sports team or school project.
49:46 As a scheduled, regular social obligation,
49:48 it’s fair to say some degree of ‘success’
49:51 is required to keep players motivated to attend,
49:53 no one wants to feel stuck or left behind.
49:56 As discussed earlier, it can be said that success in WoW is socially defined,
50:00 what it means to be “stuck” depends on where everyone else is.
50:05 The raid groups that perform the most effectively tend
50:07 to do so by treating raiding essentially like work,
50:10 their work defines what success looks like in the game,
50:13 and in turn their practices become the expert practices
50:16 as anyone who doesn’t want to feel stuck adopts their strategies,
50:20 their group compositions, their add-ons, and their organization,
50:24 because there might be a bunch of different strategies that do work,
50:27 but we know theirs does work, and if it works it must work for a reason.
50:32 [Choice] For instance,
50:33 Limit achieved the World First kill of N’Zoth by using an external raid leader.
50:37 That 21st player outside the raid we mentioned earlier.
50:42 This was not unheard of, but it was not a common practice until Limit’s success.
50:46 Three years later, it’s a ubiquitous tactic in the World First Race.
50:49 And our friends over at Venture,
50:51 the trinket guys, they love the external raid leader.
50:54 From Twitch streams to full strategy guides,
50:56 guilds like Limit create paratext that document their practices.
50:59 This paratext not only contains the methodology to overcome
51:01 a specific boss fight or fix a certain problem,
51:03 but you’ll recall it also normalizes itself
51:05 as a legitimate framework to apply to raiding.
51:08 This is a byproduct of emergent play,
51:10 the game’s best players have gotten very good at finding
51:13 unintended solutions to the challenges put in front of them.
51:16 Which means that what they end up doing can often be
51:18 in conflict with what the intuitive solution would appear to be.
51:20 What the designers may well have intended the solution to be.
51:21 Over the course of years,
51:22 theorycrafting has become so entrenched in the minds of even casual players,
51:25 that it appears value neutral.
51:27 The way we conceptualize a raid encounter, the terminology we use,
51:30 the way we judge success,
51:31 it is all informed from behaviors disseminated from the top down.
51:35 Even when we do see innovation emerge from relative unknowns,
51:38 like Restricted’s awesome Mythic Jailer strategy,
51:40 those strategies are still products of instrumental practices.
51:44 This goes beyond stabilization of theorycrafting as an abstract value,
51:47 this is extremely tangible.
51:48 If a critical mass of guilds are replicating the best guilds,
51:49 then the behaviors of those top guilds
51:49 have a direct impact on the whole culture.
51:50 This level of instrumental play creates a player base
51:51 that is better and more coordinated than they otherwise would be.
51:54 Blizzard can either ignore this and create
51:56 content that is trivialized by AddOns,
51:58 or they can presume that they will be used.
52:01 This has gradually resulted in content
52:02 that presumes the existence of these tools,
52:04 and thus pushes players towards adopting them.
52:07 We have seen this phenomenon play out
52:09 quite rapidly in the game’s competitive PvP.
52:11 Mods that were once prohibited from tournament play have
52:13 become permissible and their rate of adoption has skyrocketed.
52:17 This had tremendous implications for the game’s balance.
52:19 The best players, who had a culture of minimizing AddOn-usage
52:20 due to tournaments being seen as the legitimate measure of success,
52:22 suddenly picked mods up and started outperforming all expectations.
52:25 Crucially, this legitimized mod usage in a PvP community more broadly,
52:25 giving players permission to go crazy.
52:27 This resulted in players who could react faster than before
52:27 and make decisions with a certainty they never previously possessed.
52:29 The game designers sought to offset these consequences,
52:30 and the game now demands an airhorn whenever a monk casts Bonedust Brew.
52:33 The only solution to the impact of mods is to rely more on those same mods.
52:37 It’s a feedback loop.
52:40 As the Race to World First has continued to pursue professionalism,
52:42 we’ve seen AddOns become a crucial element of the process.
52:45 For years now, the contending guilds have had honest-to-God software developers
52:48 on their rosters to develop specialized software to assist in encounters.
52:53 “WeakAuras” is a mod that is so powerful
52:55 that it’s not accurate to even call it a mod.
52:58 It is one part software development language,
52:59 one part mod distribution platform.
53:01 It would be easier to list the things that WeakAuras cannot do.
53:04 It can be used to single-handedly rebuild an entire UI,
53:06 it could be the only mod you ever use.
53:09 But even that is underselling this thing.
53:11 I would lose my job if I accurately described what we can do with WeakAuras.
53:12 WeakAuras have become the first port of call
53:14 for any problem in high end raiding.
53:15 Applying the principles of cognitive distribution,
53:17 the first question in response to any problem is ‘can
53:20 a WeakAura handle that?’ To which the answer is most often, yes!
53:23 It is increasingly common to see mods form
53:26 the spine of strategies for these top guilds.
53:28 Many encounters, such as Mythic Fatescribe have
53:31 strategies that rely on WeakAuras to effectively execute.
53:34 Since deferring to WeakAuras is the first choice,
53:37 it is extremely rare for an alternate solution to emerge.
53:40 What is there to gain by digging your heels
53:42 in and not using the assignment WeakAura for Jailer Runes?
53:45 Since no other alternate solutions exist,
53:46 these WeakAuras become fundamental tools that are adopted basically universally.
53:50 The same tools designed by and for professional
53:53 raiders end up as standard practice.
53:55 A popular observation regarding AddOns is the way
53:57 in which they enable or encourage surveillance among players.
54:00 A mod like CT_RaidAssist would function if other players weren’t using it,
54:04 but its effectiveness was predicated on mass adoption.
54:07 In the case of these auras, they require everyone in the raid to use
54:09 them in order for them to function correctly.
54:12 If you join a raid and don’t have the correct pack installed,
54:15 all the little elves that tell everyone
54:16 where to stand during Prototype Pantheon melt down.
54:19 This has led to the creation of WeakAuras
54:22 to ensure you have the right WeakAuras.
54:23 Sepulcher of the First Ones was dominated by this bullshit.
54:28 [Dan] So to recap, strategies seep from the top down,
54:31 the strategies that the best guilds use
54:33 inform the techniques that will see mass adoption.
54:35 Smart practice for these guilds is
54:37 to offload responsibilities onto AddOns wherever possible,
54:40 this results in a critical mass
54:41 of strategies that build themselves around these tools.
54:44 Since there is rarely incentive to develop an alternative practice,
54:47 tactics grounded in these mods see near total adoption.
54:50 These tools rely on all players running the software individually,
54:53 so players have next to no say in whether they install this software.
54:57 Because this practice is so widely adopted, Blizzard,
54:59 quite rightly, develops fights presuming these tools will exist,
55:02 further entrenching them as mandatory and incentivizing guilds to run
55:06 even more tools to surveil raid members and enforce compliance.
55:10 And this is how a guild like
55:12 mine ends up mirroring the practices of professionals.
55:14 We aren’t pursuing high ranks or looking to flatter our egos,
55:17 we just want to enjoy ourselves.
55:19 We just want a sense of forward momentum week to week.
55:23 In Shadowlands, we’ve found ourselves pressing people
55:26 to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do,
55:28 whether that’s run keys, install mods, switch specs, or hell, switch classes.
55:34 It parallels the experiences of Kristine Ask, who writes that her 2009 guild,
55:38 “The Gummy Wolves”, sought to tempter their instrumental practices.
55:42 They wanted to do well on their own terms,
55:45 without just doing what Elitist Jerks did.
55:47 They mocked the “no lifers” who took the game too seriously,
55:51 but yet were continually lured toward adopting the ideas and practices
55:55 and strategies offered up by Elitist Jerks because, well, they work.
56:02 Because that’s the thing about these practices,
56:04 they aren’t arbitrary, they exist because they solve these problems.
56:09 And if adopting some of these techniques is what
56:11 gets your raid group from stalling out to comfortably succeeding,
56:14 that is a trade that some would be happy to take.
56:19 But for those players who are left behind,
56:21 clearly the problem is the game itself.
56:23 The coevolution of WoW hit a dead end, if you catch my drift.
56:27 This arms race between the devs and the players, it’s gotten out of hand.
56:34 What we need to do is hit the reset button,
56:36 abandon all this nonsense and return to a simpler time.
56:40 Surely, surely, that will fix this.
56:45 [Music] When I first covered WoW Classic,
56:49 I painted a picture of a game whose primary appeal was tourism,
56:55 a chance to revisit a compelling game but ultimately
56:58 one without lasting appeal to a broad playerbase.
57:01 I’ve received the odd request for a follow up video every so often,
57:04 and now seems like as good a time as any to indulge.
57:07 In the recent marketing for WoW Classic, Blizzard has lent in hard on appealing
57:11 to the nostalgia of a mainstream audience.
57:14 The advertisement is aimed first and foremost at drawing
57:16 back players who fell out of love with the game.
57:21 I don’t know, maybe I was onto something.
57:30 However, this is not how a hardcore audience conceives of Classic.
57:35 [Choice] Classic is a return to when the game was more pure.
57:38 For example, a big complaint from the Classic WoW purists are
57:41 the difficulty modes that WoW introduced to dungeon and raid content,
57:44 uh, in the first year of the Obama administration.
57:48 Raids should be meritorious.
57:49 Killing all the bosses in a raid should be an achievement,
57:51 and players should be sorted from one another.
57:54 Not everyone should be able to finish the raid.
57:57 As an example, let's use Battle of Dazar’alor from 2019,
58:00 the same year Classic WoW released.
58:02 This was widely regarded as an excellent raid
58:04 and may be among the best of the modern era.
58:06 Here we can see the distribution of progression for the hardest difficulty.
58:10 This is where every guild who killed a boss finished up.
58:12 For instance, Dan’s guild killed the first two bosses
58:15 on Mythic and so they’re somewhere in this column.
58:18 As you can see, the largest portion of guilds never killed the second boss.
58:21 Twice as many as actually finished the raid.
58:24 The data tells us a story of the raid,
58:26 you can see just how tough the 4th boss was relative
58:28 to the first three by how many people never made it past it.
58:31 The distribution drops hard after the first 3 bosses.
58:34 This distribution resembles an ideal raid; sure,
58:37 Dan and his 2-decade old friend group can see some bosses,
58:40 but at a certain point it's time for the men to take over.
58:44 This graph isn’t perfect, a Kungen-type would probably tell you
58:46 that too many people are clearing the raid.
58:49 But it could be worse, compare this to the Normal mode distribution of the raid.
58:53 Normal mode represents everything that the classic
58:55 purists hate about the modern game.
58:57 It’s a version of the raid intended for any group
58:58 to be able to finish with the bare minimum of organization.
59:02 We can see from the data that the vast
59:04 majority of guilds who entered normal mode finished it.
59:06 This number is pathetic, it fails to distribute players at all.
59:09 No matter your skill level you can expect to clear normal mode.
59:12 A distribution like this, in the context of instrumental play, is terrifying.
59:16 What does an objective-driven playstyle look like when the explicit
59:20 objectives of the game can’t provide an appropriate goal?
59:23 Sure, some portion of this stack are well-serviced by this raid,
59:26 but some unknown number would be disengaged by this because it’s just too easy.
59:29 What would the game turn into for those players
59:32 if they didn’t have difficulty-appropriate content?
59:35 A distribution like this is deeply unhealthy for the game.
59:37 And it’s the reason why WoW’s early raids were so difficul- I mean,
59:40 that’s fucking Molten Core man, it’s the first raid they ever made,
59:46 of course it’s going to be eas- Uh, Dan, tag in.
59:52 [Dan] A lot of ink has been spilled on why
59:55 Classic hasn’t delivered on the difficulty promised by those early evangelists.
59:59 We won't relitigate that in too much detail here.
1:00:02 In short, players are better, their internet is better and for practical reasons
1:00:07 the game runs on the final build of the expansion,
1:00:09 so player characters end up being stronger than they ought to be.
1:00:13 But the big one is the presence of paratext.
1:00:16 It’s not just that the content is 12 years old, and everything has been solved,
1:00:21 it’s that the solution has been widely disseminated and widely adopted.
1:00:26 Like, here’s a taste of a 3-hour lecture on changes
1:00:30 to Shaman going from Vanilla to the Burning Crusade.
1:00:34 Please, I insist.
1:00:36 “The testings of spell coefficients and weapon imbues I present here were
1:00:39 done using a 2.4.3 TBC repack which is not an official Blizzard product.
1:00:44 Despite this almost all spell coefficients and weapon imbue
1:00:47 results corroborate what has been tested by multiple TBC-era theorycrafters.
1:00:52 However, until an official pre-patch, beta,
1:00:54 and/or live TBC game has been released,
1:00:57 I cannot be 100% sure the spell coefficients
1:00:59 and weapon imbue results are completely correct.” Yeah,
1:01:02 we were always going to demolish Classic, it was always going to go this way.
1:01:08 This is not to say that a Sunwell or Ulduar raid
1:01:11 is an unenjoyable experience for modern players familiar with the game,
1:01:15 just that it is not strictly a challenging one.
1:01:19 The issue Classic faces is that the vast majority
1:01:22 of players are exhausting the content at an absurd pace,
1:01:26 most within the first week or two.
1:01:29 These are people who love the game dearly,
1:01:31 and are magnitudes better than the creators could have imagined.
1:01:35 What are they supposed to do to fill the time?
1:01:38 The same thing as anyone else who has a deep love of a single game,
1:01:42 they started speed running.
1:01:44 Speed running has been an element of WoW for basically the game’s entire life.
1:01:48 But before Classic WoW released, private servers took it to a whole other level,
1:01:53 these servers would spin up and shut down so rapidly,
1:01:56 that players developed techniques for speed running the entire game.
1:02:00 Those players and their imitators applied
1:02:02 their techniques to Classic WoW at launch,
1:02:04 Molten Core was cleared in just 6 days, down from 154 days back in 2005.
1:02:10 This was a big story in the Classic circles,
1:02:12 but it didn’t really affect the tourists in a meaningful way at launch.
1:02:15 Over the life of Classic, more and more players found themselves adopting
1:02:18 more and more of these speedrun techniques.
1:02:20 Maybe it was an organic process, people just looking to make their raids easier
1:02:24 and find a way to make them more engaging.
1:02:26 But I would suggest that instrumental play compels
1:02:28 players to try and organize themselves by hierarchy.
1:02:32 Remember, the elitist players who want to gatekeep content,
1:02:35 they’re in here somewhere.
1:02:37 So they are naturally going to elevate
1:02:39 means of separating themselves from the pack.
1:02:41 So speed runs practices became expert practices, and, well,
1:02:43 over the course of years, that cooks your brain.
1:02:46 Classic ought to have been our salvation from all this, after all,
1:02:49 the content doesn’t demand the kind of optimization
1:02:51 we’ve been discussing, not by a long shot.
1:02:52 Classic should rightly be the playground of the super-casual,
1:02:53 a sandbox for players who aren’t in any particular hurry to be anywhere.
1:02:54 And yet, it's gone the other way,
1:02:56 Wrath of the Lich King Classic has become a nightmare of instrumental practices.
1:02:59 Yes, it’s not difficult, but the difficulty isn’t the appeal,
1:03:02 instead it’s about going through this process perfectly.
1:03:05 To be good at Classic is to learn and adopt the right practices.
1:03:09 To play the right class as the right race, with the best professions;
1:03:12 to level the quickest, get server first, get the Shadowmourne you never got.
1:03:16 In some cases, it seems really weird.
1:03:18 It’s like reliving high school.
1:03:20 You’re going to pick better electives, be cooler,
1:03:22 bet on the Cubs in 2016, and smash when you've got the chance.
1:03:26 At the launch of Classic,
1:03:28 these practices existed, but they were largely invisible.
1:03:30 By definition, it did not mean anything to you that some
1:03:33 guys were in Molten Core while you were in Wailing Caverns.
1:03:36 Whatever.
1:03:37 But after you quit Classic at level 47, these players stuck around.
1:03:43 And these players established the practices of what it meant to play Classic.
1:03:48 This process of riding the curve to the greatest extent possible,
1:03:51 it’s not the exception, it’s the rule.
1:03:53 Again, look at these distributions.
1:03:55 No child is being left behind here,
1:03:57 if you’re entering the raid, you’re finishing it.
1:04:00 Returning to Wrath Classic in late 2022,
1:04:02 there is a palpable feeling that you’ve walked into their space.
1:04:06 A walk around Dalaran showcases this, every Death Knight
1:04:09 and their ghoul is decked out in the best gear,
1:04:12 the most prestigious vanity items, every player looks like the protagonist.
1:04:16 Things that were once status symbols are mundane.
1:04:18 The best gear is not a symbol of exceptionalism, it’s a symbol of parity.
1:04:22 Having less than the best makes you less than everyone else.
1:04:25 Because if you aren’t here, where else can you be?
1:04:29 This was made crystal clear during the launch of Wrath Classic,
1:04:31 when players put absurd gear requirements on groups for Utgarde Keep.
1:04:35 If you wanted to experience Utgarde Keep,
1:04:37 the famously easy introductory dungeon, on the first day of Wrath,
1:04:41 a majority of groups expected you to have the best
1:04:44 gear possible Choice thought it was just his sweaty server,
1:04:47 but no, YouTuber AzAMOuS parodied this phenomenon and the comment
1:04:50 section is full of accounts of similar experiences.
1:04:53 “Madorc you are noy good geared enough for this dungeon.
1:04:57 Wot?
1:04:58 Is he joking?” Like our trinket from earlier,
1:05:01 it wasn’t actually about efficiency.
1:05:03 There is a limit on how many times you can do a dungeon within a given time.
1:05:06 It was not about efficiency,
1:05:08 it was about reinforcing the ingroup and excluding the outgroup.
1:05:12 The instrumental practices of Classic are no longer invisible,
1:05:14 they’re in-your-face, they’re the status quo.
1:05:17 [Choice] It is no doubt possible for a casual
1:05:19 guild of 40-somethings to have fun on Classic,
1:05:21 but like Kristine Ask’s guild back in 2009,
1:05:24 these practices are endemic to Classic.
1:05:26 There is no ivory tower for the best players
1:05:29 to escape to, you all want to do Naxxramas this week.
1:05:32 I would argue that casual players feel more out of place on Classic,
1:05:35 because they disrupt an otherwise seamless flow
1:05:37 of knowledgeable and overpowered players blowing through trivial content.
1:05:41 You are their Wallace, bumbling into their Normal Utgarde Keep.
1:05:42 This is the dissonance of the marketing of Classic.
1:05:43 Blizzard wants Classic to be inviting to returning players,
1:05:46 a chance to return to a humble era.
1:05:48 Of course this is bullshit, Wrath was the expansion that gave us GearScore,
1:05:51 which if you want to talk about mods influencing social practices,
1:05:54 there’s a doozy for you.
1:05:55 The social experience of Classic is
1:05:58 immensely frustrating and incredibly fucking stressful.
1:06:00 Once you step beyond the leveling experience,
1:06:02 every dungeon or raid is a ritual of actions
1:06:04 that has been accepted as standard and performed without introduction.
1:06:07 It’s disorientating to have ancient dungeons
1:06:09 being done with private server routes.
1:06:11 Stuff you were meant to learn 7 years ago from a Russian Hunter on Warmane’s
1:06:14 7x experience BlizzLike pre-nerf Wrath server.
1:06:16 There is a tangible sense that you are always behind the curve,
1:06:20 always missing something.
1:06:21 I was so excited for Classic TBC, before I learned that a bunch of gear
1:06:24 from vanilla content was on the Best-in-Slot list,
1:06:26 like the Mark of the Champion that was used all the way into Sunwell.
1:06:30 It wasn’t that I needed it to kill Brutallus,
1:06:33 but it was the knowledge that I was already behind.
1:06:36 Classic pushes you into one of two archetypes, either buy in and end up here,
1:06:40 or you reject all this, and embrace the identity of a tourist.
1:06:44 The hardcore players congregate on the same handful of servers,
1:06:47 the casual players find their servers starting to die
1:06:49 and eventually either need to transfer to those same super realms,
1:06:52 or endure their degrading server until it eventually
1:06:55 becomes unplayable and the player drops the game altogether.
1:06:58 In other words, it’s just like fucking Retail.
1:07:01 Despite the promise of a journey to a better yesterday,
1:07:04 we ultimately recreated the same environment as the main game.
1:07:07 Only there is no border to delineate between the intensity of content.
1:07:10 For example, BDGG are a pseudo-professional guild, our raiders are paid,
1:07:15 in dollars, to play WoW and perform their best in the raid content,
1:07:18 they have a lot of expectations to meet and our analyst team has been
1:07:21 hard at work discussing what needs to be
1:07:22 done in preparation for this upcoming event.
1:07:24 One conversation that has not come up at all is the leveling process.
1:07:28 Blizzard has had years to separate leveling
1:07:30 from the hardcore elements of the game.
1:07:32 Our raiders need to get a certain number
1:07:34 of characters to make level in the first week,
1:07:36 and some are genuinely going to blitz it, because it’s in their nature.
1:07:39 But for our purposes, there is no need to prescribe a method
1:07:41 to them or push them to get it done quickly.
1:07:44 They are allowed to take their time,
1:07:46 react to the cinematics with their viewers, explore, goof off, whatever.
1:07:49 Many will experience the leveling of Dragonflight entirely organically,
1:07:52 like you would, or as I will.
1:07:55 By contrast, check out this selection of the guides
1:07:57 on speed running to max level in Classic,
1:07:59 there is a whole industry built on selling you instrumental practices.
1:08:02 The funniest thing I saw in Classic
1:08:04 were these guys who called themselves Team Supreme.
1:08:06 So, for context here,
1:08:07 I joined a kind of middling guild on a middling PvE server for Classic,
1:08:12 and I really, I wanted to sort
1:08:13 of strike that balance between hardcore and casual play.
1:08:15 I wanted to do well and sort of skip the failure portion,
1:08:19 but not have to go too hard.
1:08:21 And within this guild were these guys, Team Supreme,
1:08:24 and they were set on being the first people
1:08:27 on the server to get to level 70 in the Burning Crusade.
1:08:30 So I approach them out of sincere curiosity and ask them “hey, you know,
1:08:34 what’s the plan?” And they tell me that they
1:08:37 want to do 60 to 70 in twenty hours.
1:08:40 And that’s a… that’s a complicated number to have picked, twenty hours.
1:08:46 If you’re a professional speedrunner, if you’re Joker,
1:08:48 and that is his name, his name’s Joker,
1:08:51 if you’re Joker and you do this for a living,
1:08:53 twenty hours is a pretty doable number.
1:08:55 But I picked these guys because they were a middling guild,
1:08:58 I picked them because I didn’t want them to have heard of Joker.
1:09:02 So to see so much energy being funneled
1:09:05 into these five guys to do this one activity,
1:09:08 and to hear twenty hours out of them, I knew they’d made a mistake somewhere.
1:09:12 To be honest.
1:09:13 Not to be rude, but to hear twenty hours out of these guys,
1:09:18 okay, a mistake’s been made.
1:09:19 I became obsessed with this because in a way
1:09:21 it was like “I’m I the one out of touch,
1:09:24 have these guys pushed this further than I could possibly ever have imagined,
1:09:29 or have they made this crucial mistake.”
1:09:31 Seeing all this work juxtaposed with what
1:09:34 I thought was just an ungodly number I had to know what was going on.
1:09:39 So I ask them “hey, have you been on the beta,
1:09:42 have you tested this strategy?” To which, to my astonishment, they said yes.
1:09:45 They log onto the beta, turn in all the pre-quests,
1:09:47 that process takes a full hour and nets them one and a half levels.
1:09:51 Which is, that’s a really good outcome, that is solid stuff.
1:09:54 And so at the end of the first hour they’re doing well, looking really good.
1:09:57 They then proceed to run dungeons for the next nine hours straight,
1:10:00 so by the tenth hour they are at level 65.
1:10:03 The half-way mark.
1:10:04 At which point they’re not going to do the full 20
1:10:07 hours of dry run on the beta, so they log off.
1:10:11 Because it logically follows having just done 60 to 65 in ten hours,
1:10:14 ten more hours of dungeon running will get them to level 70.
1:10:29 Fuck.
1:10:32 At times like this, people show you their true colors.
1:10:37 I could have stopped them, I had multiple opportunities to stop them,
1:10:41 but I wanted it to see this train reach its destination.
1:10:45 I was revealed to be an asshole.
1:10:48 But them?
1:10:49 They streamed the whole thing,
1:10:50 and when the penny finally dropped, they stuck together.
1:10:53 They were deeply miserable, but they didn’t point fingers and they didn’t yell,
1:10:58 instead they pushed through it, they didn’t sleep; 20 hours became 37.
1:11:03 But they got what they wanted- they were
1:11:05 the first group on the server to hit max level,
1:11:08 they even finished two raids before anyone else.
1:11:14 They won.
1:11:23 They had months to pick up on their mistake, what business did Team Supreme have
1:11:28 trying to replicate the practices of speedrunners?
1:11:30 Well, because the internet told them to.
1:11:33 What else were they going to do?
1:11:35 As players, the push for Classic was in the name
1:11:37 of recapturing an essence of the game that was lost,
1:11:40 and Blizzard played their part- they gave us the executable file.
1:11:44 But it ultimately failed, because we brought the bug back with us.
1:11:47 We brought back the paratext industry that sells solutions,
1:11:50 we brought back the practices that trivialized content,
1:11:52 and when we had nothing to do,
1:11:54 we made a leaderboard out of our day to day experiences.
1:11:58 Shout out to Rooster Juice and their 9:57 Heroic Nexus time.
1:12:02 What a legend.
1:12:06 [Dan] This discussion has been dominated by sociology and anthropology.
1:12:12 We have talked to death about WoW as a series of behaviors and trends.
1:12:16 But no one who came to WoW in its early years was
1:12:19 drawn to it by the promise of adopting a series of social practices.
1:12:23 The genre of virtual worlds are defined first
1:12:26 and first foremost by just that- the world.
1:12:28 We can see that in how Azeroth is regarded.
1:12:31 It is considered the main character of WoW.
1:12:38 Sure, we can make fun of the many self-inserts and over-played characters,
1:12:45 but at the root it is the World of Warcraft.
1:12:49 [Metzen quote from LFG- just says Azeroth is
1:12:50 the main character] For many players in 2005, possibly even most players,
1:12:53 the persistence of Azeroth and all that came with it, the day/night cycles,
1:12:58 the weather, the scheduled events,
1:12:59 the ability to walk in one direction for two straight
1:13:02 hours and experience not a parade of procedurally generated noise,
1:13:06 but hand-crafted vistas, we had experienced nothing like it.
1:13:10 The world of Azeroth is beautiful.
1:13:15 The raid experience is a different story.
1:13:30 Raids in World of Warcraft can be severely taxing on hardware,
1:13:34 especially for weaker machines.
1:13:36 This was keenly true in the game’s early years when hardware
1:13:38 was both less powerful and raid groups involved significantly more players.
1:13:42 It was often necessary to lower graphical settings
1:13:45 to improve hardware performance just to make the game playable.
1:13:47 Or if you were Choice, and 13,
1:13:49 be completely oblivious to that and raid at 2 frames per second.
1:13:53 Incredible.
1:13:54 Obviously, Choice’s performance was hindered by his single digit framerate.
1:13:59 Altering your graphical settings would improve the game
1:14:01 performance and result in better game performance,
1:14:03 a better experience, a more playable game.
1:14:06 This line of thinking opens the doors
1:14:09 to manipulating the graphical settings for efficient play.
1:14:12 [Choice] A simple example would be something like this.
1:14:15 This quest involves collecting bottles that are obscured amongst the grass.
1:14:18 You can either search the grass carefully for the tiny little bastard bottles,
1:14:22 or you can open up the graphical settings, pull the ground clutter slider to 1
1:14:26 and remove almost all the grass in the environment,
1:14:30 revealing the bottles completely unobstructed.
1:14:32 Expert practice is to manipulate the world to the greatest
1:14:34 extent possible in the service of instrumental play.
1:14:37 The Potion of Inky Blackness is a cosmetic item that shifts
1:14:40 the player’s perception of the world from day to night.
1:14:42 It has no overt value, but when used in specific environments,
1:14:46 it increases the contrast on certain visual effects, making them easier to see.
1:14:50 In Sepulcher of the First Ones, the potion saw usage on 5 of the 11 bosses.
1:14:55 The potion heavily alters the color palette of the environment;
1:14:57 it doesn’t necessarily look bad, but it’s a bit shonky,
1:15:00 and certainly not the environmental artists’ intended for the space.
1:15:03 A long-standing practice has involved using console commands to increase
1:15:06 the follow distance of the ingame camera to its maximum extent.
1:15:09 At its most extreme,
1:15:10 it was zoomed further back than the isometric camera of Warcraft 3,
1:15:13 the player character reduced to a barely-identifiable speck.
1:15:16 This God’s eye view, like in an RTS,
1:15:18 allows us to take in more of the play space.
1:15:21 In 2016, Blizzard tried to reign
1:15:23 this in and drastically limit the maximum camera distance.
1:15:25 As we have come to expect the players took this in stride,
1:15:28 adjusted their behaviour in response,
1:15:30 and remained above all respectful in their dealings with their fellow man.
1:15:34 Just kidding, it was a shitshow, obviously.
1:15:38 It was among the biggest controversies of its kind.
1:15:41 Blizzard, completely blindsided,
1:15:42 eventually backed down and only made a smaller adjustment.
1:15:45 They limited the camera enough to annoy players who had become
1:15:47 accustomed to viewing the game like a World War 2 bomber pilot,
1:15:50 but not enough to fundamentally change the look of the game.
1:15:52 It remains a contentious topic to this day.
1:15:55 Blizzard’s argument for a reduced camera was based
1:15:57 on the nature of WoW as an RPG.
1:15:59 They argued that players ought to feel attached to their character,
1:16:01 and feel like they are within the world.
1:16:04 The difference between this, and this.
1:16:07 [Dan] It has been observed for a long time
1:16:11 now that expert practice is to disable the diegetic sound,
1:16:15 but particularly the game’s music.
1:16:17 Raids rely on coordination, which is often done over voice chat software.
1:16:21 To make sure communication is clear,
1:16:23 players often turn the game’s sound way down, if not off altogether.
1:16:27 The ‘auralscape’ of the environment is removed,
1:16:30 before the instrumental player rebuilds it.
1:16:33 Voice communication is one element,
1:16:35 and then the alerts of AddOns serve as another.
1:16:37 The game already features audio cues for critical events,
1:16:41 cues lovingly crafted by designers trying to build a cohesive,
1:16:45 subtle, thematic experience.
1:16:46 But if you need to make snap decisions,
1:16:48 maybe play it safe and replace Combustion with the wilhelm scream.
1:16:52 In the absolute top Mythic Keystones, the combat is so busy that all possible
1:16:56 senses are used to the fullest possible extent.
1:16:59 [Cacophony of audio alerts] That cacophony, that’s the soundtrack of keystones.
1:17:06 That’s the music of victory.
1:17:09 [Gunshot noises] What’s really important to note is that the music
1:17:14 of victory isn’t the music of the game itself.
1:17:17 It’s almost perverse the degree to which the soundtrack,
1:17:19 an entire pillar of the creative product,
1:17:21 has been functionally erased from the game for the median player,
1:17:24 having been shut off in 2007 and never restored.
1:17:28 All of this is about tearing down the original soundscape
1:17:31 of World of Warcraft and repurposing it as a means of success.
1:17:35 Josh Keaton’s performance as Anduin Wyrnn is muted so you can better hear a 29
1:17:38 year old software engineer from Montana coordinate
1:17:41 the most efficient movement between lanes of zombies.
1:17:44 [Raid leader] Everyone needs to hard focus
1:17:47 the Monstrous Soul because we don’t have lust, so..
1:17:52 [Choice] And with all of this established,
1:17:55 we can finally say the quiet part out loud.
1:17:58 Players make World of Warcraft look fucking ugly.
1:18:01 Instrumental play values clarity, but only ‘clarity’ in regard to information.
1:18:04 It’s easy for this conversation to get
1:18:06 caught in the quagmire of ‘personal preferences’.
1:18:08 But these interfaces are not the product of pure creative expression,
1:18:11 they are the product of instrumental practices.
1:18:14 So let’s go straight for the jugular and highlight
1:18:16 Mythic Archimonde as an example of what we’re talking about.
1:18:19 Wrought Chaos was a pretty nuanced ability but to be brief,
1:18:21 players needed to be aware of these arrows that telegraphed an upcoming attack.
1:18:25 Clarity of the environment was incentivised.
1:18:27 You can see that in how Limit positions themselves in this footage,
1:18:30 it provides a clarity to what is going on, even through a kind of busy UI.
1:18:34 There was another solution though, and it looked like this.
1:18:42 Players used a WeakAura that would attempt to represent
1:18:44 the trajectory of the beams as 2 dimensional vectors.
1:18:46 It’s pretty accurate, but not really.
1:18:49 As a means of trivializing the mechanic, it is highly effective.
1:18:51 It is also objectively awful to look at.
1:18:54 There’s no personal preference argument here,
1:18:56 these vectors are entirely function.
1:18:58 The Hellfire Citadel Archimonde encounter was
1:19:00 already a kind of unpleasant fight visually,
1:19:02 but players pushed it completely over the edge.
1:19:04 Mythic Archimonde is a sincerely ugly fight to look back
1:19:07 on, because it will forever be through this lens, this mess.
1:19:11 Alex Golub called this the process of ‘decomposing
1:19:14 the world.’ And we’ve made an art form of it.
1:19:17 In context, Golub is using the term ‘decomposing’ as the inverse of composing,
1:19:21 a dismantling of the world.
1:19:23 But the imagery of decomposing, of decay, that does feel appropriate.
1:19:27 There is no conspiracy, no central authority,
1:19:29 no plan, and yet we are uncompromising and unrelenting.
1:19:33 For almost twenty years, Azeroth has been rotting through instrumental
1:19:35 play and it all seems just… natural.
1:19:39 [Dan] And if we could roll the credits there, that would be a great ending.
1:19:42 If only it were that simple.
1:19:44 The relationship between instrumental play and fun is messy.
1:19:47 We are far from the first to observe these issues,
1:19:50 they aren’t exactly hard to see.
1:19:52 A common solution put forward is to heavily wind back,
1:19:55 if not outright remove, the game’s AddOn support.
1:19:58 Despite everything, that’s not a solution we’re super crazy about.
1:20:01 Mods offer unparalleled value to the consumer.
1:20:04 There is a reason they were, and remain, so beloved by PC gamers.
1:20:07 Mod support is not solely this engine of chaos that we’ve
1:20:10 depicted it as, it is a means of empowering users.
1:20:14 For that reason, the application of mods spans far beyond what you’d expect.
1:20:17 The Tournament of Ages, the charity roleplay festival from earlier,
1:20:21 is built off the back of AddOns.
1:20:23 Disability is an enormous subject that is so important
1:20:26 that we weren’t sure how best to handle it.
1:20:29 For what it’s worth, Choice doesn’t like to make a big deal about it,
1:20:31 but his eyes are cooked.
1:20:32 He is very much reliant on AddOns to play his best,
1:20:35 and so that will always short circuit this type of conversation.
1:20:38 Mods offer means of accessibility that are both broad and granular,
1:20:42 custom to every individual’s need,
1:20:44 to a degree developers can never practically match.
1:20:47 MDT, an incredibly complex mod that allows
1:20:50 players to plan and share routes through dungeons,
1:20:53 has dramatically altered the way that dungeons are designed,
1:20:56 by equipping players with the tools and language to communicate complex,
1:21:01 interesting, strategies.
1:21:02 Arguably this whole process of negotiation,
1:21:04 the arms race between players and designers,
1:21:07 has resulted in more replayable, engaging, fun content.
1:21:11 Mods are ultimately an expression of our own behaviors.
1:21:14 Instrumental play, the act of attempting to solve a game,
1:21:17 ironically can’t be solved.
1:21:18 It’s not a puzzle box, but an expression of values,
1:21:21 and mods are just one of the ways in which that manifests.
1:21:25 For all the drama that can be wrung from Golub’s writing,
1:21:28 his conclusion is not a tirade against mods or those who use them.
1:21:32 Instead, Golub sees this as evidence that virtual
1:21:34 worlds are made compelling not by their fiction, but from their reality.
1:21:39 World of Warcraft is the product
1:21:41 of the emergent collusion of developers and players,
1:21:43 social practices go a huge way toward defining how we got to this point.
1:21:47 To lay the blame at the feet of, just, players as a collective,
1:21:50 to argue that the game would be improved if only Microsoft’s
1:21:54 Activision-Blizzard-King just had the control it
1:21:56 needed to realize its creative vision.
1:21:59 Mm.
1:22:00 Not loving that.
1:22:02 World of Warcraft is an emergent culture that is constituted by its players,
1:22:05 its inhabitants if you want to be romantic.
1:22:08 Modern World of Warcraft is a mess in a way that only humanity could create.
1:22:12 It is full of contradiction and hypocrisy,
1:22:14 it rewards our worst impulses, before demanding payment in full.
1:22:17 Certain anthropologists feared that WoW’s nature as a game
1:22:20 would undermine its value as a site for cultural study,
1:22:23 that incentivising behaviors would generate inauthentic data.
1:22:26 But this feels plenty authentic to me.
1:22:28 Golub suggests that in the face of digital
1:22:30 spaces we retire the concept of the “real” world,
1:22:32 especially as the idea is posed in opposition to the virtual,
1:22:36 where experiences in one are true while experiences in the other are false,
1:22:40 fake, or fictive, that whatever happens online it’s not real.
1:22:45 This framing neglects to encompass the very
1:22:47 real humans who utilize these spaces,
1:22:49 bringing with them all their human attributes,
1:22:52 their drama, the tangle of their lives.
1:22:54 Virtual spaces are not apart from the world but an extension of it,
1:22:57 and to this Golub suggests a much tamer
1:23:00 distinction between the virtual world and the actual world,
1:23:03 demoting the physical to a mere subset of reality.
1:23:07 “The key feature of the actual world which virtual worlds must share
1:23:10 with it in order to become compelling is not its visual and sonic
1:23:13 “realism,” but the fact it is a forum in which we give
1:23:17 our lives meaning by entangling them in projects we undertake with others.
1:23:21 Worlds become real when we care about them,
1:23:23 not when they look similar to our own”.