Monthly Archives: July 2010
Clever Concepts – Different approaches to business that work
I always appreciate interesting and innovative approaches to old problems. Over a decade ago in the relative lawlessness of pre-trammel Ultima Online you really needed to have your wits about you to not get screwed over.
There were always new scams and you had to make sure you were well researched and permanently ‘on guard’ to prevent yourself getting ripped off. I really enjoyed the savageness of this. As a result I always had an appreciation for scams that nearly got me because they took my abilities and awareness right to the edge.
So when I read [this article] today about select McDonalds restaurants in Sweden being used as polling places for the coming 2010 election I was intrigued to say the least.
Not only will people be able to vote at the McDonalds restaurants but they’ll be able to vote there up to two weeks ahead of time! The stated reasons for this initiative are to improve a historically lower voting rate in these areas and to create more engagement particularly from younger voters that frequent the establishments.
My initial reaction was that this was a bad idea. Mixing private enterprise and the democratic process? Never work! Then as I thought about it more over the course of the day I came to appreciate how clever this really was.
As the article didnt go into detail on how they’ll ensure the process is secure and the venue politically neutral I shall wear my [Yellow Hat] and assume those points ARE taken care of. So what, then, are the potential results of this initiative? Increased voter participation for the government and increased sales for McDonalds.
When I hear about clever ideas like this that potentially make for great synergies I always wonder why nobody thought of them until now. I’m not just talking about large scale stuff like this but even little process improvements in the workplace. Stuff that you never thought of but that hits you like a breath of fresh air and you make that “ahhhhhhh!” realisation.
Have you come up with ideas like this yourself? Been around when others had them? How much did they change things for you? I want to hear about your experiences with innovative concepts and clever ideas. Let’s have them!
Take These Points and Shove It!
( July 8 ) To those who don’t keep up on World of Warcraft news, get out from under your rock and pay attention. ’cause this might be one of the biggest news items about Cataclysm since it being announced.
We’re going from 51-point talent trees to 31, and you’re only getting 41 talent points to spend by 85.
“WHAT?!?!?!?!” Don’t believe me? You can read it here.
If you’re pathetically lazy or perhaps just in a hurry (either way, what are you doing here?), here are the important points:
- When you reach level 10, you’ll be asked to select a talent tree. When you do, the other two trees will be locked out for use, but you will be given the associated defining skills right away. For example, if you’re a warrior and you select arms, you’ll get mortal strike at level 10. Discipline priests will get penance at level 10. Enhancement shaman will get dual wield and lava lash at 10 – and so on.
- The other trees don’t open up until you’ve put 31 points into your selected tree.
- Instead of gaining a talent point every level, you will gain one every 2 levels. This means you won’t have access to your secondary tree until 70, and you will only get 41 points to spend by level 85.
- The Mastery system is being reworked. Now the passive bonuses associated with putting points into a tree will just be automatically given to you when you pick your specialization. These will be flat percentages instead of values that increase as you put more points in. The unique ability from the previous Mastery system will now be learned from your class trainer, and improved by the Mastery stat, found on Cataclysm items from level 78 on.
This means the class-defining talents will no longer have to be buried deep into a tree to prevent the other specs from getting it – you’ll just be handed it right away. It also means it will be significantly easier to cut away all the little filler talents required to get deeper into the tree, so you can just start picking up useful stuff right away.
As someone who has leveled 8 characters to 80, and is currently at level 53 with a 9th, among a slew of other alts, I happily welcome this idea. I’ve played 7 of the 10 classes fairly extensively, and almost all of them are a royal pain in the ass until at least 20, most until 40. Hopefully it will help prepare everyone for their roles at 85 much quicker, as well, as they’ll be handed the tools they’ll use at end-game content from the get-go, so they have plenty of time to get used to them.
How do you feel about it? Are you concerned there won’t be enough variety, or do you welcome the changes and trust Blizzard to make each talent a significant upgrade?
Warcraft Word Jumble – Sephrenia
Here’s the jumble for the week a few hours earlier than usual. I’ll be keen to see if McRaffles, Lei or Cal are first across the line on this. I think the smart money would have to be on Cal “he who does not sleep” Henderson for this one.
Sephrenia recently celebrated two years blogging over at [GuildMum] which is an amazing accomplishment! I enjoy following her WoW adventures so make sure to check out her blog sometime!
Without giving away too much the words are all RealID related – nothing overly difficult. I think I’ve done a decent job of jumbling the letters up, though, so hopefully a few people might get caught up. Enjoy!
On Podcasts and AddOns
As I’m sure some of you have noticed, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted up a podcast or a video. I’ve been working on a new guide along with Saate and a few others using GoogleWave, but I’ve also been making raid videos for my current guild.
I’ve also been playing Tetris.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, often making a video can take several hours for only a few minutes’ worth of information, so I’ve been really trying to find a topic I feel passionate enough about to basically spend the entire day working on a presentation for.
Unfortunately, while I’ve had a few ideas to kick around, I haven’t really come up with much – part of the reason is that I feel somewhat obligated to make more and more impressive visuals, and I often just don’t quite feel up to the task. For example, I recorded a few flawless heroic Halls of Reflection runs that I’d done with PuGs as a holy priest, and was considering making a quick H HoR guide. But then I wondered if it was really something people would particularly care about – it might be mildly interesting, but is it something people would sit and watch for 15-20 minutes?
I’m going to be very upfront here and just let you guys know that I’m a feedback whore – I tend to be more enthusiastic about working on creative projects when I feel confident that I will get feedback about them. So I’d love to hear what you guys are interested in seeing.
Anyway, Saate brought up an interesting idea to me, and since I may still go with it, I’ll keep it a surprise for now, but suffice to say that one of the ideas I had to go with his suggestion was to basically poke fun at how reliant everybody has become on AddOns to play WoW.
I currently raid with a guild that wants to make it policy that in order to raid, you must have DeadlyBossMods installed, and if you’re capable of removing important debuffs, you must use Decursive. This isn’t an uncommon request from many guilds, and this kind of mindset that you can’t play WoW without certain AddOns is pretty prevalent.
In fact, if you go to the Shaman forums, almost every thread asking for advice on how to play the enhancement spec will have somebody telling the poster to get an AddOn called Shockandawe. If you go the druid forums, almost every thread asking for feral DPS advice will recommend getting Rawr. For shadow priests, it’s MFClip. For all healers, it’s healbot coupled with grid.
Someone demoing MFClip for shadow priests:
Now personally, I believe some AddOns can be genuinely useful to the game. Things that make repetitive tasks easier (Gatherer for example), or that change how things are displayed so that you more easily notice important information (various UI AddOns) are, I think, a good addition to the game. Blizzard tends to incorporate the more useful ones, like ScrollingCombatText. Most bosses even come with raid warnings on their “you’re all about to die” abilities, vis-a-vis DeadlyBossMods.
But something makes me feel very angry about AddOns that “play the game for you,” as it were. Many of you are probably familiar with the DBM feature that whenever you’re standing in fire, an alarm will sound and the big bad wolf will yell, “RUN AWAY, LITTLE GIRL! Run away…”
I think Blizzard has done a very good job of incorporating most of the “necessary” AddOns into the game by now, and I’ve yet to participate in a raid encounter that I was not able to hold up my end of the slack with just the default raid UI. In fact, I’ve often been asked “what AddOns I use” in some of the instructional videos I made, like this one (fair warning, it’s old and outdated!), even though I don’t use any:
It used to irritate me to no end when I’d be a raid leader for Naxx 25, and our tank on Maexxna would die because the poison debuff wasn’t getting removed. That wasn’t even what irritated me, though, it was that, when I’d ask why it wasn’t removed, the response would be, “My decursive isn’t working.”
I’m all for AddOns making the game more convenient to play, or perhaps making some aspect of your life easier, but it bugs me just how many players have become so reliant on AddOns that they actually are unable to perform without them. To me, it’s like someone never learning to do simple calculations because they could just have a calculator do it for them. “Sorry I couldn’t get out of the fire. DBM didn’t tell me to.” And yet, these AddOns are often accepted as so necessary that you can be kicked out of raids for not having them!
Don’t even get me started about AVR.
So what do you guys think? Is it a bad thing that people have become so dependent on AddOns? Is it important that people learn how to play without them before they start customizing with them?
Posted in Zevia
Prevalence of Gifted Gamers
Hi all, this will be my first post and to introduce myself I wanted to do a quick excursis into the realm of gifted gamers. I’m currently studying gifted education and I thought it might be interesting to apply some of these theories to the gaming world.
The first question I hope to address is, how many gifted gamers are there?
According to wowprogress.com there are currently 54765 guilds that have cleared at least 1/12 ICC 10man and 43647 guilds that have cleared at least 1/12 ICC 25man. Assuming a 25m guild has on average 35 raiders, and a 10man guild 20 raiders and that all 25man guilds also raid 10man occasionally, this represents 1.75 million raiders in the world. Lets add a few casuals who may not have reached that far yet and round it up to a nice 2 million world of warcraft players. (keep in mind this doesn’t include china who are still playing TBC unfortunately!)
Now the question is, how many of these WoW players are actually talented. Stealing from psychology the definition of giftedness refers to the top 10% of the population (Françoys Gagné, 2003). However, current understanding of giftedness indicates that there are various levels of giftedness. Feldhusen (1993) indicates the following statistics for the ranges of giftedness and I have used these to extrapolate the estimated number that currently play wow:
| Level | Prevalence | Estimated # in WoW |
|---|---|---|
| Mildly gifted | 1:6 to 1:44 | ~200,000 |
| Moderately gifted | 1:44 to 1:1,000 | ~20,000 |
| Highly gifted | 1:1,000 to 1:10,000 | ~1,000 |
| Exceptionally gifted | 1:10,000 to 1:1million | ~50 |
| Profoundly gifted | < 1:1 million | ~2 |
Let’s compare this to the current number of players that have defeated the Heroic: Lich-King encounter:
- 25 man – 218 guilds = 7630 people
- 10 man – 792 unique guilds = 15840 people
- total – 23470 people
Hence, it seems this encounter is a good measure of identifying the moderately gifted among us. Well done blizzard in implementing a difficult encounter.
Do you think you belong on this scale? If so where would you place yourself and why?
I intend to run a theme on ‘gifted’ gamers, up next we’ll look at what a gifted gamer ‘looks’ like and whether the image above represents a true image of them.
Warcraft Word Jumble – Anaalius
Shout out to a good friend, Anaalius, this week! Check out his gold making progress on his blog [Anaalius' hunt for Gold].
Anaalius actually supplied the words for this one. All the items on this week’s list are his favourite things from various parts of the game. For example number 3 is ‘favourite zone’ and so on.
Bonus points this week for correctly identifying what category of ‘favourite’ the other words refer to once unscrambled. Enjoy!