Tag Archives: wow
Old(ish) School Fail
During the days when Naxx 25 was the hardest content available in early WotLK, I was guildless. I happened to play frequently with a guild called ASM, however, as a fill-in priest since they were always short healers.
Over a few days, I started recording Vent and paring down the 4 hours of audio into 3 or 4 minute clips of funny things from throughout the night. The most popular one was a night where the raid leader, Vanek, had a hell of a time trying to nail down the healer assignments on Patchwerk.
Once we all had a good laugh about it, I eventually took it off my profile, but Vanek hounded me for months to put it back up – however, the file was on my laptop, which was back in Washington.
Well, I just got back from Seattle and while I was up there, I grabbed the raw audio and reconstructed the healing assignments just for him. So for your amusement, please laugh at my old raid leader:
Life After WoW
I’ve never really been a big PC gamer.
Some of you may recall a video I made some time ago that could use some serious editing in the beginning and a complete re-voicing with better sound quality. More importantly, though, it was entirely about the days of console gaming with the SNES and Genesis. Part of the reason I talked about those games so much was because they were all games I owned as a youngin’.
They were also games that came out when the internet was still in its fledgling stages. The first version of the internet I ever had access to was America Online 1.0, and we didn’t do much more than IM, e-mail, and occasionally roleplay in the chat rooms (because I’m just that nerdy).
Most of my gaming was done either by myself or with one other person. Even as I got older, “A lot of people” was playing a system that had 4-player capability. Replay value for a game just meant it had great multiplayer so that you could bring it out whenever there was a party or you just wanted to invite a few friends over for an all-nighter of GoldenEye.
WoW is thus a very unique anomaly in my life. It was unlike the games I played before it, and it completely changed the way I play games. It was a very large part of a very long portion of my life, and now that I’m done, I feel like taking a look back at what it was as a way of perhaps putting it to final rest.
Would you use a maturity filter?
After observing more than a few immature trade chat arguments lately I got to thinking about the whole maturity thing again. I’ve posted in the past about how age and maturity are difficult to quickly determine over a medium like Warcraft.
If you were out in public you probably wouldn’t easily get caught up or emotionally invested in an argument with a random misbehaving child. That’s thanks to the fact it’s very easy to get a feel for what level of maturity and life experience a person is speaking from in the real world.
So I got to thinking about how you might translate that into WoW. One thing my love of statistics and data analysis has taught me over the years is that with enough transactional information it’s possible to tease out just about anything – maturity levels included!
Finding the right data
No doubt some of you are shaking your heads right now thinking stuff like “How? By the age on the account?” and “GG, people could easily abuse a system like that”. I would answer that you’re thinking too simply, for starters here are some of the factors I would include in the weighting algorithms:
1) – Age of the players account – eg game experience, this can be a good measure of an individuals emotional investment. Less investment in an account/character/social environment severely reduces the perceived consequence of any repercussions arising out of negative behaviours
2) – Number of other player accounts with this account on ignore
3) – Number of times this account reported for spam, or for maturity if such an option were added
4) – A ratio measuring public channel (general, trade) participation compared to total reports
5) – A ratio measuring public channel participation compared to instances of mature language used (eg anything that the mature language filter would ordinarily strip)
6) – Account warnings/suspension history
7) – A decay mechanism to factor in elapsed time/playtime versus negative behaviours over time.
I envision a sophisticated system somewhat like the one used by [Google PageRank]. Even though the above information is just for starters and off the top of my head I can imagine it would net a majority of the more attention starved trolls we face on our various servers.
Why a system like this is not likely to be adopted.
In the cost benefit analysis for a piece of work like this the benefits (financial, PR, whatever) must outweigh the cost of implementing the work in the first place.
While a change like this would be a positive experience for many of us (as customers) it would only stand to potentially lose money for the company when the less mature players quit.
There would be no outstanding PR benefits either. Thinking about our current WoW experience, there’s no pressure from us whatsoever for Blizzard to provide us with some kind of solution for the behaviour of OTHER players!
We only got the ‘Report Spam’ button added after gold spammers started to get worse and worse. Doing nothing in that situation WAS having a negative impact on Blizzard’s image. So before long we were gifted with a neat little cosmetic fix that a) removed the problem from our sight and b) made us feel like we’d taken action by ‘reporting’ the bad people!
Would you use the filter?
So this is the ultimate question! Forgiving my attempts at selling you on how I think the mechanics would work let’s assume it just magically does.
If players received a ranking from A to F on their maturity, and you could automatically filter chat (for starters!) based on that, would you use it? If not why not? What unforseen or unintended consequences do you think might emerge from a system like this?
I’m interested to hear thoughts from everyone on this!
“Controlling the Market”
People often chat to me about their gold making techniques and experiences. From time to time I see the phrase ‘controlling the market’ used and it bothers me. The economically uninitiated throw it around freely and for them it’s all about ego ego ego.
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” -Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride
If you’re the single person on your server with an ultra-rare recipe then you’re definitely entitled to say you ‘control’ the market. Similarly if you’re supplying a large majority (ie 90% plus) of a high demand item you may also be able to make that claim.
In reality, though, how often do you think that’s the case? It’d be a very rare occurrence these days, I can tell you that. I know that even the items I profit from most regularly I don’t have any sort of monopoly on.
There’s a big difference between controlling a market and identifying a market with reasonable demand and low supplier participation rates.
The above is a simple diagram I put together to help demonstrate my point. Unless you can control supply you can’t control the market. At the very best if you’re buying out everything in the Auction House you can temporarily set a higher price. That is until additional suppliers come along of course.
If the resupply rate is sufficiently low and there’s demand then you can make a profit this way. Although, again, most of the time I see people bragging about this it’s been for foolish high-supply materials.
I fondly remember, some years back, getting a hate whisper from someone after I’d posted a bunch of Greater Eternal Essences on the AH. The person abused me and told me I was setting my auctions too low. I responded and said something like “I set them at what I felt was an appropriate price, buy them if you think they’re too low”.
Totally misunderstanding what I’d said, the person assumed that in saying the word “set” I meant I’d “set” the market price. Boy was he hopping mad at that – “YOU SET THE PRICE? I’ve been controlling the market and setting the price for weeks!” he exclaimed. Wrong wrong wrong!
Clearly because he did not control the supply he did not control the market. Some random person was able to come along and unknowingly upset his imaginary little tea party.
So next time before you throw about the term ‘Controlling the market’ maybe have a think about it. Is it really the best way to describe what you’re doing or is perhaps “Minor manipulation through focused and regular intervention” more apt? actually…never mind me :p