I Blog With My Face

I’m at the Make-a-Strip panel right now, blogging on my phone. We’ll see how effective this is.

Normally, I am staunchly anti-pirate. Being of a ninja-like persuasion (one might say ninjesque), pirates have no place in my heart. They are sea rats and brigands, barely fit for those floating masses of jetsam they call “ships”. However, even pirates are afforded a port of safe harbor with me, sometimes.

Piracy for video games is a problem. I think we can all respect the idea that people want to be paid for services they provide and products they create, and the people who create video games are no different. They make something we enjoy, and there are a lot of people behind the project: artists, writers, musicians, voice actors, producers, directors… Modern gaming is a lot like a movie in that way. But movies and other “intellectual properties” are viciously guarded by certain entities, who take really drastic measures to protect them, and the video game industry is following suit.

Let’s take a look at Ubisoft’s latest attempt to get into the debate. Recently, Ubisoft introduced some of the most stringent anti-piracy policies ever implemented. In essence, Ubisoft requires your game to keep a constant connection to the internet so that the game can log on to their servers and authenticate your copy of Silent Hunter 5 and Assassin’s Creed 2. This policy turns what are nominally single-player games into something else, since you can’t play them alone under all circumstances. If your internet connection goes out either because your hardware at home is crappy or your ISP is having a bad hair day, or Ubisoft’s own servers go down or are DDoS’d into oblivion, you’re out of luck.

The reaction to this policy has not been pretty. (The link on “pretty” is my favorite, by the way. If you only click on one link this entire article, that should be it.)

Though this only applies to the PC version of these games, it’s definitely a slap in the face to legitimate consumers who wanted to play AC2 on their home computer. X-Box and PS3 aficionados can still enjoy wacky medieval Italy just fine, but there are still gamers who prefer PCs to consoles. A friend of mine told me that she and her father eschewed home systems entirely: “What good is an X-Box that doesn’t run the games I want to play? My computer is more customizable and does things I need it to do, other than playing games.” Her stance is completely rational, and Ubisoft’s policy is not only infuriating to those people who feel like they are being punished for their preference of system, but it doesn’t even do what Ubisoft is trying to do.

Ultimately, Ubisoft’s aim is to stop pirates. They don’t want their product stolen. They want to have it paid for, which is reasonable. Their response is unreasonable, given the fact that pirates have in fact, cracked the game.

This is normal for pirates.

Everyone in the industry saw this coming. Really, everyone. Ubisoft especially must’ve seen this coming, because I don’t believe they can be this blind, this naive. Any gaming company that has been around this long cannot possibly be this stupid, and I chose to believe that what Ubisoft really is, at their core, is this desperate. They have thrown everything else at the wall, and none of that shit has stuck.

So while Ubisoft is becoming more like the RIAA, let’s consider people who are trying new things in combating piracy.

This is Jonathan Coulton. He’s a musician, and as such, people are interested in his goods: songs. Many people in fact are interested in his songs, particularly people who are good at computers, as he tends to sing about geeky things. As a result, he’s well aware that people are going to try and take his stuff without paying him. What does he say to that? Well, he’s kind of okay with it.

I don’t wish to misconstrue his position here. He would like to get paid for his work, since he has a child and a wife and wants to be able to contribute things like taxes to his community and so forth. What he does differently than big labels though is realize the truth: “The truth is, artists are already competing with free — your music can be obtained for free, I guarantee it. So it’s important to realize every music purchase represents a choice to spend money. I’ve always been clear that while I’m happy to let you download for free, I’d rather you actually gave me money. And a lot of people make that choice.”

He’s experimenting with something called a Creative Commons license to distribute his music, and it’s worked out pretty well so far.

Really, the trick to combating piracy seems to be aware of them, and to accept them as a reality. Dealing with the existence of pirates is working out better for people who are trying it, as opposed to doing everything possible to counteract their efforts.

I want to take some time out of your busy gaming schedule to talk about a couple of things: Child’s Play and Heroes Without Borders.

“Tabor, what are these marvelous things?” This is what you would ask, if you called me Tabor. I would reply thus: they are organizations worthy of your charity, attention, and resources. Too often, gamers and nerds have bad reputations. Anti-social, misanthropic, disorganized, and all around dysfunctional people. These stereotypes have by and large created a need in us to defy them. Challenges and conceptions be damned, my friends are among the most generous and interesting people I know, and so I think you should take a look at them and consider helping out.

Let’s start with Child’s Play, because it pertains more to this blog than Heroes does. Child’s Play started in 2003, and is a charity devoted to helping children in hospitals worry less about their time there. In order to entertain kids and distract them from all the scary parts of a hospital visit (pain, fear, questions you can’t answer when you’re 10), Penny Arcade started raising money to donate to the Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle. It got a lot of press then and continues to do its mission, and do it well, consecutively raising more donations
each year the charity has been in existence. It’s even expanded into Egypt!

That’s neat, and kind of takes us close to the other charity: Heroes Without Borders.

So, my friend Jenn decided she would give several years of her life to other people, and joined the Peace Corps. When she was accepted, she was sent off to Rwanda, which is not actually close to Egypt at all. Her job there is teaching English, and as a secondary project, she focused on making English more accessible to the children of that nation. She needed a way to make reading fun for them, and more importantly, cheap for Rwandans, and came up with a brilliant solution: comic books.

Comic book stores often have lots of back stock of comics, you see, and are dying to get rid of them. They are still entertaining however, especially to people who have never read them, and they can be purchased in bulk rather easily. This, combined with the number of geeks she knows, means that comic books are actually quite the practical solution to her project.

So please, please please please, pretty please: Get in touch with either of these great organizations, and try to help out.

Let’s talk about responsibility.

There are very few things in life we have to do, and they mostly include automatic responses from our nervous system. That being said, there are things we should do, and we largely lump these things together in a category of things we call “being responsible”. These involve getting a job, paying your taxes, treating other humans with respect and courtesy, and generally being a productive member of society. Responsibility is sometimes given a bad break, because it’s tedious, and mostly doesn’t make us feel great. While the end result is sometimes a positive feeling, or even pride at having accomplished something important, the tasks we undertake while being responsible are arduous, time consuming, and most often, and this is the important part kids, not fun. Which often means things we consider to be fun should be devoid of responsibility.

This however, is not the case. It shouldn’t be. There are some great examples of a lot of fun to be had, particularly fun with other people, that need to be pursued responsibly. Driving is one. You don’t drive a car without a seat belt and without regard for your passengers’ safety and the other drivers on the road, even if you’re going really fast. Especially if you’re going really fast. Same thing with sex: you work out with your partner ahead of time what is acceptable behavior, and you stick to it. You don’t deviate outside of the guidelines you’ve set up without a lot of unacceptable risk. Amusement rides are full of safety precautions that you have to meet before you can enjoy responsibly. Speaking of enjoying responsibly, did anyone mention alcohol? In essence, responsibility when it comes to having fun is about meeting the demands of everyone, and creating the most happiness for those involved. It also means, perhaps explicitly, not raining down on someone else’s parade.

Thus, our responsibility while having fun is clear. There are plenty of good examples of what are bad ideas, and when not to do them. Gaming should be no different. Much like sex however, what is acceptable differs from person to person, and group to group. There are perhaps a few commonly accepted rules, which I believe can be addressed as common fare, but given the large scopes of kinds of gamers as I addressed in my last post, what is understood as necessary by one group may be totally superfluous for another. Let’s start with the basics then.

1. People should be ready to game. This means that, whoever you should be, you should be wherever you need to be, whenever you need to be there, with whatever you need to game. I wanted to fit however into this, but why ever for?

In essence, be punctual and prepared. This doesn’t mean that you have to be in someone’s face about them showing up 5 to 10 minutes late, but let’s not waste people’s time here. When you’re going to be 15, 20, 30 minutes late, that’s definitely when you should be telling people, at the very least. Have whatever you need with you too: dice, character sheets, books, laptop… whatever you need to be ready to throw down and kick some goblin’s ass. In line with being prepared with the mechanical pieces of the game, be prepared by knowing the mechanical essence of the game.

2.Know the system. This doesn’t necessarily mean game the system, or abuse it (and it’s important for DMs to know when the system is being abused), but know what you need to know for the game you’re in, and your character in particular. If you’re playing a combative character, be prepared to be able to throw down some dice and say what you hit with. If you’ve got to know how to cast a spell, or do some occult research, know your pools.

This is important for DMs and MMO gamers as well. DMs need to be even more well versed than players with the mechanics of the game, but by the same token, don’t abuse it and make the game unfair for your players. You have to be aware of what they’re capable of, as well as what the obstacles that lie in their way are. Tangentially, if you’re playing a MMO like WoW, know what your role is (Tank, Healer, Damage) and be prepared to know the mechanics of it. If you’re playing a Feral Druid for example, you should know that contemporary theory says that because you should be crit immune, you should stack Stamina and shouldn’t pick up a lick of defense gear.

Most importantly comes the synthesis of rules 1 and 2.

3.Don’t be a dick. I hate to steal Wheaton’s Law, but its elegance is amazing, and works into the discussion like this: Don’t do anything that ruins someone’s enjoyment of a game. Whether that’s being 45 minutes to an hour late and wasting people’s time and energy, or harping on someone’s choice of mechanics without a grounded reason. Most importantly, don’t be cruel about it. Someone can make a decision for a lot of reasons, and if you’re a dick about it, you’re only going to agitate and disturb what should be a fun activity.

What this all means is that you should, when you game, lay down certain ground rules about what is acceptable behavior and what is not. Players gonna miss a few games? That might be okay, or it might not fly. Prot Warrior’s thinking of respeccing to a slightly different build? Make sure that the raid leader and Warrior Class Lead (if such a person exists) know about it, and do what they need to do about it. Or just let him go wily-nilly. If people in your group are deviating from what others in the group think they should, it’s important to correct the small deviations before they grow into large ones, and make what was once something awesome into something resembling a burden. Playing well together’s important, but the fun’s the thing.

This is a blog written by a gamer. This is a blog designed to be read by gamers, and to be contributed to by gamers. I want gamers to connect over this, and maybe get some enjoyment and some thoughtful discussion going about this blog. That’s my hope.

But what is a gamer? Would that which we call a gamer by any other name would have as much fun?

I was going to do a little research on the term gamer, etymologically speaking. Where did the word come from? Where was it first used? What is our shared history as gamers, so to speak, but I’m not quite sure that it matters, for reasons I’ll get to shortly.

A gamer is someone who plays games as a primary form of enjoyment. They may deeply analyze the rules and structure of the game, or they may be new to the game they’re experiencing. They might participate over a wide variety of games (tabletop, console, card, computer), or they may devote themselves to one game, and believe that it is superior to others that try to emulate it. Despite all these different kings of gamers, they all share the same aim: to get enjoyment from playing a game, and devote some amount of time to it above their other interests.

Thinking that this is a reasonable definition, I submit the argument before you, dear reader, that anyone who wants to claim the mantle of Gamer is free to do so. Hell, they should be encouraged to do so. More people at the gaming table means more fun to go around. Exclusivity should never be our aim, as we’re too often misunderstood anyway.

In a very excellent article, Jeffrey Michael Grubb notes that gamers tend to instantly leap upon accusations of impropriety, defending their passion with a furor that may scare “normal’ people. He writes, “…if we are going to be more concerned about protecting the reputation of a video game than about fighting international sexual tourism, people are going to continue to look at gamers as an unbalanced people with twisted priorities.”

So when people want to call themselves gamers, embrace them as gamers, and invite them to play. Don’t question their title, or where they fit into the hardcore vs. casual debate, just accept that they are a gamer, and want what you want. They want to have a good time playing a game, just like you.

This week, patch 3.3 went live for WoW. MMO-Champion had been predicting it for a while, and we all knew it was going to be messy and chaotic like patches often are, but out of the stampede of players, clamoring to get new content, something amazing arose. In the hubbub and the hoopla of tens of thousands of people trying to storm the new five-man dungeons and 10-/25-man raids, the random instance tool came quietly, and changed the way I play this game.

It might be the single greatest thing seen over the last two expansions. Honestly.

For those of you who are still reading and don’t know what the system is, the LFG engine has been redesigned. They opened up instances to be battlegroup-wide, just like battlegrounds. You queue up in much the same way, except that for an instance you declare what you bring to the party, in terms of tank, healer, or damage. You can choose to enter the queue with a group that you already have, filling in the last few spots you don’t have, or you can just queue in solo and get a full party. That’s when the amazing parts start happening. You immediately get teleported to the instance when the group is formed and ready, saving a lot in the way of travel costs. You suddenly don’t have to be in Northrend all the god damn time, and indeed, I was thinking of setting up my hearth in some place that isn’t as laggy as Dalaran tends to be. Maybe Shattrath City, but honestly, I think my Tauren is ready to go home to TB.

After you kill the last boss in it, you get a reward, which is a small gold amount, and some badges. If this is your first random heroic dungeon of the day, you get two badges of Frost. If it’s not, you get two badges of Triumph. On patch day, I managed to pick up 47 badges of triumph, more than I have in two weeks of 3.2. Granted, all the bosses in Northrend drop Triumph badges now, but the speed involved in just tearing through dungeons radically redefines the fun I have with this game: I don’t have to stop chaining heroics together once I know that my group works. We’re like the God damned Energizer Bunny. I ran through the three new five-mans, OK, VH, HoS, CoS, Nexus, and Drak’Tharon Keep last night, in the span of about 6 hours. 9 dungeons, three of them brand new content, on a patch day. This is fast.

Now, it isn’t all plums and roses. Sometimes, you’ll get a fail group. It happens with every randomized action you take, in real life or not. I got a terrible warrior, who had never even run the dungeon we were in (Old Kingdom), and was proud of his 1.2k DPS. The chances of a fail group go down however when you get people you know in your group, and only allow one or two spots to be filled, particularly if those spots are damage dealers, and as more people get used to the system, especially with the amount of loot being tossed around, I imagine these failures will become less and less.

All in all, I think the random instance tool is a great success, and will be very happy with it for some time to come. There are a couple of other of features about 3.3 that note some attention:

I was hoping for something slightly different with the new disenchanting tool. I was hoping it would just let you break all the greens down into enchant mats, but it requires you to have an enchanter of the appropriate skill to do it. That’s both good and bad news. It means that enchanters aren’t useless, but it also means they are in fact more useful. Not having a main who is an enchanter in the guild will get to be a bigger and bigger problem, especially since the guild has been using a lot of materials. I only got one group randomly with a ‘chanter who could help me, and failed to win any of the items that were sharded. Oh well.

The five-mans are very well constructed, but I fear the heroics to be a bit daunting for players. They seem to be a bit on the long side, and I worry how casual players will get to see this content, because it’s very challenging. The bosses in the Heroic Pit of Souls for example have almost one million hit points, far more than any other boss in any five-man. Hell, the trash mobs almost as much health as some five-man heroic bosses. I suppose I should count myself lucky to have finished it with no wipes on heroic on the first go, but it was very intimidating, even for someone who has two BiS items.

I’m sure, as with all patches, it will eventually become commonplace. For a lot of new players, or recently-turned-80s, this is what will be normal. They have always gotten Triumph badges from heroics, and the LFG system always worked this way. But for me, it seems a small bit of heaven. I don’t get to have to be bogged down by the weight of the game, I can just do what I love doing most about WoW: taking 20 minutes and tearing through some fantastical dungeon.

Gaming wouldn’t exist today without the internet. It has changed the way we share information, the way we communicate, and the way we live our lives, totally and completely. Gaming in particular is affected thanks to ability to play online, and to share information about games in such diverse mediums as IRC channels or blogs. Working at an ISP, I see first hand the impact of “the tubes”, and know that it would be a much, much different world if none of this existed.

The internet still continues to grow and change however, and affect our lives in more diverse and interesting ways. Social networking is an excellent example. I’ve connected with friends I haven’t seen in years thanks to Facebook, and have made deep and meaningful contacts with people over e-mail and forums. Yet at the places where social networking sites and channels come into contact with gaming, I don’t see much of a change in the way that it affects gamers’ social behaviors, particularly those they have in the real world. By that I mean that gamers are usually socially awkward, not really brave enough to talk to or meet new people, for fear that their interests that they so love will be rejected. I do not think social networking changes this basic IRL social behavior, even given that social networking is specifically adapted to let like minded people group together.

Twitter hasn’t been around long enough to have a real component or factor in gaming, or on gamers, I think. I’ll choose to ignore it for now, unless someone can point me in a different direction. The most interaction I get out of Twitter when it comes to gaming is following funny things that @cwgabriel and @wilw say. Twitter to me feels like it’s still figuring out what it’s trying to do, and I don’t think social interaction is something it’s actually good at. Two people have to be interacting to be having an interaction. Then again, there are some excellent examples to prove me wrong.

Facebook might be one of the newest form social networking takes, and it relates to gamers in interesting ways. Besides becoming fans of games such as WoW, D&D, and Modern Warfare 2, popular games have actually spawned on Facebook. Foremost among them is the omnipresent Farmville, and its spin-off/rival Island Paradise. Mafia Wars is another excellent example of a game that spawned entirely in Facebook.

Yet for all Facebooks’ ability to make people interact, I don’t think of these games as multiplayer, or indeed, particularly interactive. Maybe it’s because I haven’t played them (and likely won’t) but all that I see are applications on Facebook that try to be RPGs, rather than actual games. Really, for these applications it breaks down to “do this task over and over again”. Examples of actual games that run this scheme better? I can think of a few.

But really, social networking is more than just Facebook and Twitter, and has been deeply involved in the gaming community for a long time. Blogs, IRC channels, Forums, and E-mail lists have been influential in steering modern gaming culture, and none of these relate to real world interactions much, with the possible exception of E-mail. If you’re not familiar with it, John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Dickwad Theory(vaguely NSFW) is an excellent example of why interactions over the net break down, and why the basic social behavior of gamers isn’t significantly changed online. People who hide behind façades of internet identities have nothing to lose by being rude and abrasive, arguing about nerfs to their favorite class abilities and insulting each other endlessly. Arguments over the internet can’t be won, and indeed, are often lost by even claiming to win (see Danth’s Law). When we feel empathy for people, we tend to behave better towards them, and that empathy is lost when connections are channeled through the lens of a computer screen. Gamers are too shy to get to know people in real life, and too proud to accept people in cyberspace.

Overall, social networking hasn’t done a great favor for gamers. It hasn’t really hurt them per se, but it’s not like friending someone on Facebook or following them on Twitter is actually going to give you a social connection with them. It may give them a starting point, and connections have to start somewhere of course, but these communication methods only facilitate interactions; they don’t make them any easier or any harder, and they’re certainly not going to teach gamers Wheaton’s Law.

This week is well known throughout the gaming/geek community: This is PAX. For three days, Seattle will be on fire. It will be lit by DSs and iPhones, and the sirens will not be the wails of fire engines, but the tweets that float through the ether, the beeps and clicks of programs and keyboards, and the great cheering of a thousand geeks, screaming in unison.

Does the rest of America know what’s going on this weekend? There’s Labor Day, sure, so people get to relax instead of getting to work immediately, but I don’t think that they realize quite yet that at this 5th PAX, the rules are changing. PAX sold out on the West Coast this year. We have complete dominion over the convention hall. If we had the Pike St. Annex, that would be ours too, as it was last year.

Google changed its logo for Comicon, which gets national attention from media sources ranging from newspapers to TV stations. Comicon deserves that attention, but what is more interesting to me is how long it will be before people pick up on what we’re doing here. Blizzard’s demoing Cataclysm, the newest WoW expansion, more than a year before its scheduled release, and its two games that are much closer are also here: Diablo III and Starcraft II are on the tweets of a lot of people.

The panels are wide ranging, from topics involving gay gamers to the law with regards to the industry and how to get involved in the community through blogging and podcasting.

A conversation last night and a panel in a few days about Nerdcore has got me wondering about the shifting landscape of music. As more people become interested in MC Frontalot and his work, and all the other Nerdcore rappers, we have to wonder if the mainstream is becoming us, or if we’re infecting them. What may be more interesting is that all the buzz about nerd rock isn’t new at all. Weird Al Yankovic was doing it back in the early 80′s, and one might make a valid argument (or at least it was suggested last night) that prog rock group Devo could be pointed at with regards to the music of geeks.

When the subculture becomes mainstream, and when the minority becoms the majority, it’s something to recognize and accept. But what if we’re not becoming the mainstream? What if we’ve been the majority for a while, and are just now realizing it?

Lots of people gave the groups participating in the Triwizard Drinking Tournament last night, but they were just as eager to be horrified at a bunch of kids dressing up as wizards as they were willing to ask us questions and get plastered with us. People wanted to feel like they belonged to a group as integrated and together as we did and do.

I think that we’re not going to be talked about as if we were outsiders for very long. I think we’re on the way to being the center.

This post is dedicated to Carie, for the original idea, and for Lark, who wants to see a revolution in her lifetime.

Science Fiction tells us how people think the future will wind up, among other things. Flying cars, time travel, cryogenic stasis, and a host of other subjects are often very popular, but arguably the most talked about in the genre are computers, or more specifically robots. A sub-topic that doesn’t get focused on a lot (in one blogger’s humble opinion) is self-replication of robots. Robots that are self-sustaining, and can perpetually build more of themselves. Surprisingly, the concept of self-replicating machines, at least as looked to by scientific study, is fairly recent, less than 100 years old. Mathematicians and philosophers were debating the point through the 1920s and 30s, and in 1948 and 49, a mathematician named John von Neumann really brought it to the fore when he started talking about a thought experiment in which he theorized that a machine could replicate itself if given the instructions on how to do so and a system by which is could transmit the those instructions. This remained relatively obscure until 1955, when it was published in Scientific American in an article titled “Man Viewed as a Machine”.

Several prominent examples of self-replicating machines exist in fiction however. The influential Terminator series was one of the first examples of modern fiction to depict a system of machines that self-replicate and evolve. Though others exist, it can be safely said that Terminator formed the basis for this generation’s concept of self-making machines.

Though real world examples are coming into their own, fictional examples remain constrained somewhat.

It’s with this in mind that I’d like to talk about procedurally generated content (PCG). Accordingly, it’s kind of a new term in gaming, and doesn’t have a lot of background as far as actual video games go. It might best be defined as neither player generated content nor developer generated content, but content that is entirely made up by the system by which the game is governed. There are only a handful of examples, and none are very old. Diablo II might be the widest known example, and the arguably the least impressive. First released to critical acclaim in 2000, Diablo II’s dungeon maps were created wholly within the game, and no two were alike. Though they featured consistent content (for example, the Den of Evil always has the same number of monsters in it, including Corpsefire), the layouts and treasures were different for each game. Older examples exist, including the precursor to many space faring games, Elite. Probably the oldest example of procedurally generated content, almost the entire setting of Elite’s gameplay is drawn forth procedurally, allowing the system to process them all simply without accessing the memory of the machine as it’s made on the spot. There are some interesting advances being made. Hellfury, a mostly defunct MMO, used a lot of procedurally generated content, and GAR looks to be one of the more interesting displays of where this technique can take us. Further, the upcoming Star Trek MMO promises to use a great deal of it to allow players to interact with a great deal of the Star trek world without mapping it out explicitly.

So where does this bring us? Where do self-replicating machines and procedurally generated content meet? It’s a little hard to say. i think part of the draw of this topic for me has been the potential interactions between the two coming up with AI. It seems that currently, our ability to come up with procedurally generated content is limited by the scope of what we tell the procedures to come up with. GAR is a good example: The weapons made it the system are unique, but GAR doesn’t come up with unique ships, maps, or anything other than guns. Diablo III will use more of the mapping techniques pioneered by its predecessor, but that’s all. Nothing we’ve heard so far suggests anything other than maps will be the procedurally generated content in Diablo III.

But what if the procedurally generated content in a game told it how to make more procedurally generated content? It might be what’s next in gaming, or perhaps robotics. There are some interesting things generated by GAR, and I look forward to Star Trek’s use of procedurally generated content to map out the Star trek universe, but when the system can write itself, that’s when I get really interested. Until then, all I think that PCG actually does is allow the system to develop in unexpected ways, but in ways that are functionally the aim of the programmer or designer in the first place without the designer’s intervention. That is to say, lets them be a little lazier and keep the system nice and simple.

I’ll start off by saying a lot changes in the upcoming Patch (3.2, which is already on the PTR) so I’m focusing for right now on the changes to instances.

The two critical changes are the addition of a complete new instance, for 5 man, 10 man, and 25 man content. The second change is about the Emblems that drop off of every instance that drops one.

The addition of a new five man dungeon is fairly exciting, along with a new 10 and 25 man dungeon. For them all to be in one place is a little unexpected, but there’s a kind of precedent in the last patch of Burning Crusade which released both Magister’s Terrace and the Sunwell Plateau, meaning that the high end of casual content had been expanded, as well as the high end of hardcore content. I remember Magister’s Terrace being particularly difficult pre-3.0, so if the difficulty is akin to that, lots of guilds are in for a treat. It was a source of great pride to be able to tank 5-man content that was harder than 10-man.

It’s difficult to say that I endorse what appears to be the concept of the instances. I can understand the tournament grounds as a concept for dailies, and for rep and rewards; glory to the knights in the service of their king, and so forth. The problem comes in that I feel very attached to the idea of instances as places for monsters to live and bad things to happen, so it’s hard to get behind the idea of a tournament ground being used in such a way, thematically. That being said, there was a bit of foreshadowing about the Black Knight being an agent of the Scourge, so we’ll see if that’s how it plays out. You’d think, though, that people would notice as it’s being built about the less than subtle signs of blight growing everywhere, and cultists chanting unspeakable incantations praising the Lich King. Edit: After I wrote this section, it turns out that is just a big ol’ Tournament grounds. Still don’t know how I feel about that. Hope the execution’s good.

The more substantial change is going to be in Emblems being dropped. Right now, Emblems are dropped according to the difficulty of the instance or raid. Heroic Instances and 10 man raids drop Emblems of Heroism, 25 man raids and 10 Man Ulduar drop Emblems of Valor, and 25 man Ulduar drops Emblems of Conquest. This scaled system was meant to give incentive to people to try the harder instances (25 man content as opposed to 10), but there was a great clamor on the forums when it was announced that 10 man Ulduar wouldn’t give better than 25 man gear. The problem, as many people (including me) saw it was that there was no tactical reason to run 10 man Ulduar. The progression would not be as good as 25 man ulduar, or even other 25 man raids, since the Emblems, one of the sources of progression that is universal to people, wouldn’t buy anything new. That is to say, though certain bosses drop loot that is better for certain classes or specs, everyone could acquire Emblems. With enough Emblems, you could buy something that was useful to you, even if you didn’t get that ultra rare drop.

3.2 changes this entirely. Everything that dropped Emblems of Heroism or Valor will now drop Emblems of Conquest, and the lower two Emblems are being removed entirely. The new instance will have 5, 10, and 25 man modes, and will drop either Emblems of Conquest (the 5 man dungeon) and will feature a new badge, the Emblem of Triumph. The dungeon dailies are being reconfigured to drop Emblems of Triumph as well. This means that functionally, rewards for everyone live everywhere. You can acquire enough badges of Conquest with any raid or instance to get a large number of them to upgrade your gear, including buying you some t8 pieces. The new content is still worth while for the new badges, and heroics and normal dungeons (well, the four 80 dungeons) become relevant again.

Does this make raiding obsolete? Not necessarily. Consider that in one lock out period, you can run a pretty quick Naxx 10 (Let’s call it 3.5 hours) and get 16 Emblems of Heroism. For the same time investment, you might be able to get the same number of badges doing conventional Heroics, but you not only include more people in the guild (something a 10 man guild is interested in) but you have a good time. Naxx at this point can be done almost blindfolded. You don’t have to treat it seriously, and so it’s fun. It’s actually kind of appealing to go into Naxx and just talk about non-WoW stuff, and still get credible rewards, even help out some of the less geared people in the raid.

The equipment being put into 3.2′s raids and dungeons looks to outstrip Ulduar by a fair shake, but I think the ease of Naxxramas might be a compelling enough reason to keep running it. Additionally, Heroics are likely to surge back into prominence, given their speed and ease as well. This change might affect Ulduar 10 raids the most, as they’re the hardest content in the game currently, and since the change will give players gear equivalent to just beyond them, one could argue that they become a raid with no good reason to run. Ulduar 25 might come out unscathed, since it still provides Emblems of Conquest and has a lot of unique items (notably relics and idols) but isn’t being PuG’d on my server, and I don’t know if it is on others.

These changes are dramatic in the world of PvE. Shifting the focus away from the latest raid to older dungeons, while adding worthwhile newer content is huge. I’m not sure of the reasons behind the change, and they aren’t explicitly stated anywhere I can see, but I might suggest that they wanted to gear people up for the end game. Heroics are relatively simple to do at 80. With a little bit of gear, they become sleep-through easy, except Halls of Stone. Fuck Halls of Stone. Nonetheless, with easy access to Ulduar 25 gear that you can make a decent raid set out of, Blizzard lowers the bar as to what’s accessible, and I think that’s a great idea. Ulduar felt too hard for 10 man groups to do, unless they were dedicated raiders. My guild has recently suffered at its sadistic feet, and we haven’t cleared past four bosses. With the 25 man gear soon available to us, we’ll be able to access content that we’ve all wanted to see, but weren’t able to, despite our skill at raiding.

We’ll have to see about the difficulty of the new instance, but I’m hoping for something akin to Magister’s Terrace: a solid yet beatable instance that you might not get in three runs, but that doesn’t screw you on the RNG, and will eventually buckle to your playstyle. Blizzard has said they wanted to make all the content available to everyone, and it looks like this is a good first step.