Tranquility

The incredible aging demographic

Cheiee — Fri, 05 Sep 2014 05:42:01 GMT

Let me put it on the line - LFR and Flexible raid sizes are the most important raiding experiences currently available in World of Warcraft, and the upcoming Mythic 20 person raid difficulty is an atavism, barely even an appendix, that only a vanishing few players will experience when it is current. It exists for a sense of achievement and prestige that only a few players really have the time for anymore, and every year, that group of players gets smaller.

The reason for this is simple - as Tom Chilton put it, the demographic is getting older over time. People like me who played for the raid game back in classic are older. They have jobs, kids, schedules that don't permit the kind of time investment hard modes currently demand, the kind Mythic will demand. And it's not that you can't do cutting edge raiding in, say, six hours a week. I'm not arguing that you will have to put in 20 hours a week to do Mythic. I'm arguing that even scheduling one or two nights a week and being there reliably is actually really hard when you have other commitments that can often demand your time on a moment's notice - in essence. being able to go when you want/need to raid instead of when the group is scheduled to go is a huge boon to that aging demographic. For all the elitism, all the sneering, and all the slurs directed at the LFR player base, the feature allows people who love raiding but who can no longer commit to scheduled WoW play a place to do it.

Source

Going back to the subject of 10 years, and talking about changes in the subscribership, different playstyles and different expectations, have you seen a shift in your demographics?

Chilton: We certainly have. Our demographic has gotten a lot older over time. A lot of that is because we have a lot of players who’ve been with us for 10 years, and now they’re 10 years older than when they first started playing. Our age has shifted up over the last 10 years.

That has interesting implications in that essentially the playerbase becomes more casual over time. As people get older and have kids and careers, they have less time to spend on playing the MMO.

It definitely influences how we evolve the content and trying to make sure that there are good ways to engage with the game that aren’t massively time-consuming.

Source

World of Warcraft as a religious experience

Cheiee — Tue, 26 Aug 2014 10:34:15 GMT

Extremely interesting article up on wow insider. Link at the bottom of the page.

it's just about virtual reality - in particular, virtual reality experiences that millions of people are seeking out. From a religious perspective, people are making their lives rich and meaningful and interesting in these virtual worlds. The grant project was to expand on that and say, 'Ok, in what other ways are virtual worlds meaningful for their participants?

Another statement from Dr. Geraci struck me as particularly interesting when discussing the evolution of religious thought as applied to the MMO player experience.

For example, in World of Warcraft, you get people who can build communities and reflect on questions of ethics. These communities matter to the players; the online friends are really important to them even if they never meet them in a physical, conventional reality. The questions of right and wrong appear throughout the game, engaging good and evil, of course, but also environmentalism, consumerism and other moral concerns. There are these little ways that World of Warcraft provides a kind of religious experience but also this really big question of how one becomes more than oneself, which ties into a wider religious phenomenon of transhumanism. Within transhumanism, science and technology are used to fulfill fundamentally religious goals such as eternal happiness, becoming smarter, wiser, and more powerful, even acquiring immortality, which is a key religious goal.

There are certainly narratives about ethics to be found in WoW -- one could argue the entirety of Mists of Pandaria was a reflection on the use of force, when it is justified and when it is not, to give just one example. There have been quests that explored the permissibility of torture, that discussed the spiritual damage that choosing the ends justify the means perspective can have on the psyche, that have displayed the desperation of people who felt forced to the edge. But to my eyes all of these experiences pale in comparison to the first part -- the player built communities Dr. Geraci mention reflect less on the ethical questions presented by the game's narrative, and more often on the ethical questions presented by the game's experiences - to my perspective it's less important what we think about the story of Arthas than what we do in that raid when the item we want drops. Do we collude with other players to deny someone we don't like that piece of gear? Do we steal it and hearth out? Do we obey the strictures set down at the raid's beginning? These questions are individually answered, of course, but their impact is more immediate than ruminating over whether Garrosh Hellscream went too far in the Pandaria campaign.

You can read the full article here.

Guild perk changes in WoD

Cheiee — Mon, 07 Jul 2014 12:18:12 GMT

What you're seeing in the current build is a change that's mid-implementation. Since the introduction of the guild system in Cataclysm, the nature of guild leveling and guild perks has shifted from being a reward for dedication and collective effort, to effectively being a penalty and barrier to entry for new guilds. We've made it easier to level guilds over the years, allowing low-level quests to count fully towards guild experience, and removing weekly caps on progress. That helps ease the barriers, but it's more of a band-aid than a true solution to the underlying problem.

Our current plan for Warlords is to effectively remove guild leveling (you could also think of it as "all guilds are automatically level 25"). We originally came up with two dozen perks in order to offer something at every guild level, but without the continued need for that granularity, we can streamline the system a bit. Many perks can just be rolled into default behaviors, since a majority of players already had them and the world was designed and tuned around their existence: Flight path taxis can just inherently move 25% faster instead of requiring "Ride Like the Wind"; Honor rewards and item costs can be balanced as if you had "Honorable Mention"; and so forth. For most players, who are in max-level guilds, nothing should perceptibly change.

We still want to incentivize guild membership, aside from the social benefits, so we're keeping conveniences like faster mount speed, instant guild mail, Mass Resurrection, etc., as exclusive benefits to all guilded players. The guild achievement system, and unlocked items and other benefits through completion of guild achievements, will remain as-is. We'd like to emphasize that system a bit more as a yardstick for collective accomplishment, rather than guild level which primarily just reflects individual effort.

The Cash Flow perk is obviously popular, though in most guilds it actually contributes less gold to the guild bank than something like Guild Challenges, since it only applies to looted coins. However, it also fuels some degenerate player behavior: if you've made an alt lately, you've probably noticed that you can't go more than a minute or two without receiving a guild invite - typically from "leaders" who are looking to recruit armies of often-unwitting players to both level guilds for later sale, and to increase the amount of Cash Flow gold that is siphoned into coffers to which only they have access. It can be a meaningful amount of gold for one player's pockets, but for something like a raiding guild, Cash Flow gold barely makes a dent in something like total repair costs. We're removing the Cash Flow perk in Warlords.

We do recognize that it's essential for guilds to have ways of financing their costs, and we will offer alternative, and more lucrative, options for doing so in Warlords (for example, bringing back some Bind on Equip epic drops in raids).

I really like the changes. You can read the full article here on wowinsider.

We need more mammoth mounts!

Cheiee — Fri, 20 Jun 2014 10:39:37 GMT

We were beaten by some wowinsider readers!

Fishing in Warlords of Draenor

Cheiee — Wed, 11 Jun 2014 05:19:51 GMT

Back in April, we were all trying to make some sense of the datamined cooking and fishing items -- fish, as a base item, didn't appear to be used in cooking any longer. Instead, the flesh of the fish was used. For example, Blackwater Whiptail Flesh. Now that the alpha is available, and more items have been populated, the process has become a little more clear. Using the Blackwater Whiptail example, the following fish can be caught:

Small Blackwater Whiptail

Blackwater Whiptail

Enormous Blackwater Whiptail

Each size of fish yields a differing amount of flesh. The larger the fish, the more flesh.

You can read the rest of the article here on wow insider.

Bashiok on the lack of flight in Warlords of Draenor

Cheiee — Sat, 07 Jun 2014 13:27:28 GMT

Ever since the first round of Warlords of Draenor interviews, the idea of flight being disabled indefinitely in the expansion has been floating around. Very little information on that concept has come out since then. Will it be like previous expansions, where you get flight back at max level? Will it come back in the first content patch? Will it ever come back? We still don't have the answers to that, but community manager Bashiok took to the forums yesterday (in addition to what he said earlier this month) to provide more insight into the developers' thought process. Some highlights:

The developers will try to ensure flight paths are more direct, not scenic loops

Being able to lift off and fly over all content compromises gameplay

There will be max-level questing content, not just daily quest hubs

The developers are not attempting to make the game laborious, but rather create a world that engages the player

You can read the full article here.

Elephant stampede prevented by Tranquility

Cheiee — Tue, 03 Jun 2014 15:55:30 GMT

Great job all for jumping on the elephants and keeping them calm!

We're moving up the rankings

Cheiee — Fri, 30 May 2014 22:16:42 GMT

Amazing progress all.

^.^

Gender in wow

Cheiee — Thu, 15 May 2014 13:22:52 GMT

Because players see their avatars from a third-person perspective from behind, men are confronted with whether they want to stare at a guy's butt or a girl's butt for 20 hours a week. Or as the study authors put it in more academic prose, gender-switching men "prefer the esthetics of watching a female avatar form." This means that gender-switching men somehow end up adopting a few female speech patterns even though they had no intention of pretending to be a woman.

When men play female avatars in online games, they change the way they speak to conform to female stereotypes—but the way they move betrays their masquerade.

In a recent study reported in Information, Communication and Society, researchers created a custom-built quest in World of Warcraft—the popular online game where players can work together to slay dragons and discover magical treasures. The researchers recruited 375 World of Warcraft gamers and ran them through the quest in small groups. The quest took an average of 1.5 hours to complete, and every participant’s movement and chat were recorded and meticulously coded.

The researchers found that the men were more than three times as likely as the women to gender-switch (23 percent vs. 7 percent). When selecting female avatars, these men strongly preferred attractive avatars with traditional hairstyles—long, flowing locks as opposed to a pink mohawk. And their chat patterns shifted partway toward how the real women spoke: These men used more emotional phrases and more exclamation points than the men who did not gender-switch. In other words, these men created female avatars that were stereotypically beautiful and emotional.

Although the gender-switching men could partially talk the talk, they completely failed to walk the walk. The researchers found that all the men in their study moved around in a very different way than the women. The men moved backward more often, stayed farther away from groups, and jumped about twice as much as the women did. When it came to moving around, the men behaved similarly whether they gender-switched or not. So if you’re trying to figure out if that female Night Elf is really a man, focus on how they move around. As study author Mia Consalvo, a professor at Concordia University, says, “movement is less conscious than chat, so it can be an easier ‘tell’ for offline gender.”

You can read the full article here on wow insider. There are links to the studies in the wow insider article, one is a paid paper and pretty costly!

Updated Nightelves

Cheiee — Wed, 14 May 2014 09:07:55 GMT

You can see more images of the new character models here, thanks to Leu for the link!