Let's Go Round Again

Kaylriene has a long post up about rotations and one-button mode in World of Warcraft and reading it made me think about the whole twisty topic in something of a different way. I'm not sure if I have enough to say about it myself to warrant a whole post but let's see how it goes.

I used to get quite irritated at the very mention of "rotations". At first it just wasn't a term I was familiar with from MMORPGs I'd played so I was suspicious of it on a purely linguistic level. What did it mean? Was it jargon from one or two specific games, bleeding across and staining the others? Why did people keep throwing it into conversations as though everyone obviously knew exactly what it meant?

I didn't know what it meant, not from personal experience, but it became clear enough from context quite quckly; it seemed to mean the order you cast spells or used abilities in combat. Or, if you prefer, the order you pressed the buttons to make it happen. Same thing.

This seemed weird to me from the get-go. Why would you have any sort of set order for something like that? Surely it would always be dependent on too many outside factors, like where you were, what you were fighting, who you were with and so on? I found it hard to imagine many situations where it would be advisable, let alone necessary, to stick to a pre-defined set of spells or abilities rather than assessing the situation in real time and choosing accordingly, which was how I'd always played.

By the time I'd seen the term "rotation" often enough to take notice of it, I guess I'd been playing MMORPGs for maybe a decade and a half. I'd been through my grouping years and come out the other side. Even though I was pretty much a solo player by then, I had done a lot of group play in my time and anyway it seemed the "rotation" concept applied to solo play, too, although obviously there it was deemed less crucial since if you were doing it wrong, no-one was going to suffer except you.

And that was even weirder; the idea that you could do it wrong. It was strange enough to me that people thought there were sequences of button presses that ought to be followed to begin with, let alone that you could be ostracized for not getting it right. Then again, I was well aware that MMO players were perfectly capable of refusing to have anything to do with each other over things far more ridiculous than that, such as which race they'd chosen at character creation, based not on RP prejudice but on the tiny variation in starting stats.

Whatever, I thought it was affected and obnoxious to tell other people they were playing the game wrong, even if it was true that the way they were doing it was less effective than it might be. It wasn't that I thought it was a bad idea to give people suggestions on how to hit harder or kill faster. Helpful advice is always welcome, or should be. It was more that I'd always felt that it was other people's business how they played and that if I didn't like the way they were doing it the solution was not to play with them.

Which, now I come to write it down, does sound like saying ghosting someone is better than telling them to get lost. But by and large we rarely did either. What we mostly did, all those years I was grouping with friends, guildmates and passing strangers, was to put up with pretty much anything anyone did that didn't get us all killed. 

There were certain names that used to make Mrs Bhagpuss and I groan out loud when they asked to join a group we were in or who we'd see log in and hope they didn't start asking us what we were doing and if we had space, but when the moment came, we pretty much always invited them anyway and worked around whatever their peculiarities or incompetencies might be. I'm sure other people felt the same about us but we all generally just muddled along and had fun somehow.

One reason I was never really aware of any kind of pressure to perform was that I never went near anything that could be called top-end content. I didn't raid and I was mostly behind or just up to the endgame, which was a lot harder for anyone to get to in those days.

The other significant factor was that in all the time I was grouping as a matter of course, roughly from the turn of the millennium to about 2008, in maybe half a dozen or more games, I never had to deal with damage meters. There were parsers in use, particularly in EverQuest. I ran one myself for a while, when there was a fad for them in the guild I was in. It was fascinating to see who was doing what, but everyone treated them more as something to gossip about than an indication anything ought to change. 

That makes it sound as though we were all little plaster saints and we certainly were an easy-going bunch but also gameplay was very different then. If you were down the bottom of the parse for damage or healing it might mean you were bad at playing your class but it could just as likely mean you'd been doing something else equally important like crowd control or debuffing, both of which were abolutely crucial to success in some MMORPGs of the era.

There were two ways you could be welcome in a group back then; one was being good at your role and the other was being fun to be with. The first is self-explanatory. We'd put up with some fairly irritating personal behavior to have a tank who could hold aggro like the tar-baby and knew how to turn mobs, and a healer who could be relied on not to let anyone die was allowed a great deal of leeway when it came to being grumpy and sarcastic (Holds up hand!) 

I imagine that still holds true today. The second, though, I suspect was an artefact of the time. Group combat back then involved a lot more down-time between fights and there was a lot more conversation both between pulls and during combat itself. People talked non-stop, frankly. It was like being in a chat-room where every so often a mob ran in and we beat it to death for interrupting our conversation.

In that scenario, being funny, amusing, witty, sharp-witted and a good conversationalist was about as likely to get you invited back as coming top of the parse for DPS. More so, in fact, since anyone can poke a sword into a monster from behind but not everyone can time a punchline.

In an environment like that the idea of a specific rotation designed to eke out the last few drops of damage seems like a luxury at best and a fantasy in most situations. While it's true that some groups did develop a rhythm that had them killing mobs like shelling peas, for the most part every pull was at least partly a surprise and every fight was likely to turn into a scramble for survival, with everyone living on their wits and their reactions. 

My persepctive as a Cleric in EverQuest also colored my understanding of what a fight was. I only had access to a limited number of spells and I had to choose them in advance. I had a lot more potentially useful spells than I could load so I had to try and predict which I'd be most likely to need. 

That meant a bunch of heals, of course, but also some cures, buffs and utilities, some of which would end up not being used at all. And there were plenty of times when things happened that I hadn't planned for, leaving me without the tools to do the job I'd suddenly been given. Many times I ended up leafing through my spell-book mid-fight, frantically trying to load a spell I never expected to want.

later, when I was playing a Beastlord, something I did for a couple of expansion cycles, I never even knew for sure what my role would be from fight to fight. As a swiss army knife class, I might be off-tanking, back-up healing, debuffing or adding DPS. Sometimes I'd be doing all of them in the same pull. The idea of a rotation would have seemed laughable.

With all of this in mind, later, when the concept became clear to me, I saw it is as restrictive, unintuitive, unimaginative and fundementally opposed to most of the reasons I'd ever played the games to begin with. Why would I want to limit myself to a set pattern of key-presses just to make a few numbers go up? 

My philosophy had always been the same; any fight that ends with the mob dead and the player alive is de facto a good one. The idea that there might be some kind of gold star on offer for doing it faster seemed nuts. TTK is another term I never heard used in those days.

Not that I was against efficiency. As a sit-and-heal Cleric of the strictest order, I used to rate my own success by how few heals I cast and how much mana I had left. A perfect fight for me would be one in which I sat and medded through the entire thing. With an attitude like that, you can see why the concept of rotation wasn't doing anything for me. 

As I was reading Kaylriene's post, though, something occured to me that I hadn't thought of before, whenever the topic came up: when I was playing my favorite class of all time, in any MMORPG, the Disciple in Vanguard, I did have a rotation.

Well, of sorts. It wasn't hard-coded. I did vary it a bit. But in essence, there was an order in which I pressed the buttons and I followed that order in nearly every fight. And it was great!

Why did I do it there, when I didn't do it anywhere else? Because the Disciple relies on builders and finishers and they are displayed on-screen in such a way as to be blindingly obvious and extremely easy to understand. You press some buttons to kick and punch and after a few of rounds of that some other buttons light up and you press those to heal yourself or debuff or do damage. 

It's a very simple system as used in countless games but the Disciple is by a long way the most intuitive and organic version of the mechanic I've experienced. It has an amazing rhythm to it that makes playing the class feel like playing an instrument or dancing. It's very satisfying when you get it right and as I read Kaylriene's post, which goes into great detail on why and how rotations operate, I finally felt a glimmer of understanding as to why people might not just feel getting one right was necessary but also why they might even enjoy it.

That was my epiphany, such as it was and with that insight, looking beyond that one class and character, I can now see elements of kinds of rotation in the gameplay of a number of classes I've enjoyed playing. The cyclical nature, the repetition and the predictability have a kind of zen-like appeal, particularly when you find a rhythm. Rather than being restrictive, the pattern frees the mind from outside interruptions and allows entrance to the fabled "zone".

Or it can do, when it works. On the other hand, when it doesn't, what you get is grindingly dull, slavish drudge-work, the hallmark of one or two classes I can think of (Looking at you, LotRO Guardian...) 

So, in conclusion, thanks to Kaylriene I feel I now have a clearer understanding of the rotational concept and a better appreciation of its merits. I'll try not to be so openly sneering about it in future.

I had something to say about the whole "One Button" thing, too, but that's going to have to wait for another time. Seems like I had more than enough to say about the subject after all.

Get Good

 

It's not immediately obvious because, typically, it was night-time when I took the shot, but the picture at the head of this post was taken with my new Kamera. 

I say "new". New to me, that is. As far as the game's concerned, it's very much the old Kamera.

I wanted it for the usual reason. It takes a better picture. Or at least a clearer picture. The first Kamera I got, the one I've been using for most of the shots in recent posts, adds a dingy, orange-brown tint around the outside and also sometimes splatters a few faded spots around that may or may not be lens flare. 

To me, they look more like the kind of processing errors I used to get when I took holiday snaps on cheap film with the clunky russian camera my aunt gave me and sent them through the mail, in pre-paid envelopes, to an anonymous box number at some windowless warehouse on an out-of-town industrial estate somewhere in the midlands. We all used to do it. It's so nostalgic there's probably an Instagram filter for it now.

As I said in the post, I was just grateful to have a Kamera at all. It makes for a much more convenient and practical way to take screenshots in Genshin Impact than the regular method. A few brown splotches are a small price to pay. 

I was mildly frustrated that I wasn't able to get the vanilla version, though. Particularly since all the guides I read seemed to think I should. I went back to see Xu several times but he resolutely refused to pop a blue exclamation mark. I decided it was never going to happen and forgot about it.

It's not as though I haven't had plenty else to do in the game. Thanks to that teapot, the one with the "must be AR 35 to enter" sign slapped across the lid, I have a long list of things to be getting on with.

The first hurdle was getting to AR 25. That's as far as you can go before taking a test. I was AR22 when I came back and at first I found it slow going. As is generally the way of things in mmorpgs (Disclaimer: Genshin Impact is not an mmorpg.) progress began to speed up the moment I decided to stop pratting about and buckle down to playing the way the developers intended.

After I'd nailed AR25,  bumped some of the team up to 40 and knocked off Stormterror I did a little research on how to proceed. Luckily for me I'd never tried to level and gear up all of my characters, something that's strongly discouraged, so I hadn't wasted too many resources getting to where I was.

I spent some time considering my options. After a lot of thought and some research on the options I decided to carry on with three of my team and keep one slot open for now. My line-up was going to be:

Traveler - The one I consider to be "my" character. Also the one I feel most comfortable with in combat.

Diluc - Lucky five-star pull. By far my best DPS. Dies too much. Needs to stop doing that.

Kaeya - Very useful cryo skills. Otherwise not really sold on him.

Barbara - Team healer and very good at it. Also the only ranged character in the team.

 

I'd already leveled Traveler, Diluc and Barbara to 40. I took them to try the open-world version of one of the bosses they'd have to beat at the end of the instance that would grant me the right to carry on leveling my Adventure Rank to thirty five, just to get some kind of benchmark.

Things did not go well. I had a think about it and decided I needed to do two things:

1. Ascend my three main characters so they could carry on leveling to fifty. 
2.  Learn how to play.

There was a certain synergy involved. After a good deal of research I found I either already had or was able to obtain all the materials required for Ascension except for Everflame Seeds (for Diluc) and Cleansing Hearts (for Barbara). 

I had everything for Traveler, who for some reason is able to Ascend from 40 to 50 without having to kill any bosses at all. Once I'd figured out how to use the Souvenir Shop and the Alchemy table I was able to bump her up to 43 before I ran out of leveling mats.

For the other two, though, there was nothing for it but to take on some very challenging (to me, anyway) overland bosses. I did some more research, found out where the Pyro Regisvine that drops the seeds hangs out, read the strats for beating it and went to give it a try.

It wasn't a total disaster. The vine was under half health when the last of my four characters died. It definitely felt doable. Most importantly, I could see what I was doing wrong. I was playing like an idiot.

She's obviously seen me fight.

 

Here's the thing. Genshin Impact feels like an mmorpg but it isn't one. It also looks like a button-masher and it's not one of those either. If it reminds me of anything it might be Wizard 101 and for a couple of reasons:

1. It looks like a kids game but it doesn't play like one.
2. Boss fights in Genshin Impact feel like W101 card play on fast-forward.

Once I'd started to think of my characters as cards in a pack it got... no easier to play them at all. That's going to take practice. What did get easier was understanding how they interact. Characters have to set up for each other, using their powers like the cards in W101. All that talk about Elemental Combos was what confused me. Thinking of them as different cards made it much clearer.

Then there's the old consumables issue. I rarely take anything like the necessary advantage of consumables in any game. I'm doing pretty well if I remember to keep a few basic, long-duration buffs up from things like food and drink. 

It was only when I was working out how to use the Alchemy table that I noticed I could make potions. Since my team were singed around the edges from the fight with the vine some fire resist pots seemed like they'd come in useful.

They probably will, too, some time. Not for that fight, though. I went back to give it another try now I'd figured out I needed to do more than just try to weed-whack it death. I forgot to drink the potions but it  went much better anyway. Really very much better. I won. And no-one even died!

 Fine! I'll go back to Mondstadt, then, where I'm appreciated!

Using Barbara much more often, only making her run away instead of just letting her stand there yelping when the vine set her on fire, helped a lot. Ignoring all the guide advice about using Hydro and Cryo on the beatdown phases helped even more. 

This is a lesson I really should have remembered from countless other games. Sometimes you really do have to use specific abilities or classes or characters because some mobs have complete immunity to certain things. Outside of that, though, if it's just that some things do more damage than others, then it's much more nuanced calculation. Kaeya may have the right kind of elemental attack and the vine may take less damage from fire, but Diluc hits so much harder than Kaeya it's still much more effective to let him do the hard burns.

Naturally the blasted vine only dropped one seed. Since I needed two we had to kill it again. Second time, of course, it dropped two so now I have a spare. I also have a level 43 Diluc, which is as far as I got before once again I ran out of mats.

That just leaves Barbara. I took her over to kill the boss that drops the Cleansing Hearts but it didn't go too well. It went about the same as the first fight with the vine, in fact. The boss was on about half health by the time my whole team was dead. Having only one ranged character, against whose attacks the mobs are completely immune, is kind of a problem when they choose to float in the water out of melee range.

I could have carried on but I was distracted by some map marker that I spotted when we revived. It looked as if I had a hand-in in Liyue. I thought I'd do that first so I ported over and as I was running through the streets (the authorities seem to have forgotten all about the Traveler being wanted for suspected deicide, luckily for her and me), who did I happen to spot but my old friend Xu wearing a smart, new blue exclamation point for a hat.

You have got to be kidding me...

 

Long story not as short as it could have been, it turned out he wanted me to help him deliver some snapshots he'd taken on commission and when I'd done that he gave me one of his old Kameras. Why he'd suddenly decided to do that when he didn't even appear to know what a Kamera was every other time I spoke to him I have no idea.

Well, I guess I do have a few ideas. I'm not sure if I already passed him after I dinged AR25. I think I did but I can't be absolutely certain. I might have been on the run from the law at the time, anyway. It's possible the quest is level-gated. It's also possible there's some kind of pre-requisite. I've done quite a lot of stuff since I last spoke to him, including a whole tranche of the main story quest and a bunch of things around Liyue and its environs. Maybe I set some kind of flag.

Whatever, it's done. It happened. I got my Kamera. No more grubby-looking prints. Just nice, clean shots from here on in.

My rough plan going forward is to hold off on Barbara's ascension while I work on easier stuff to accrue plenty of mats so that I can 

1. Level Traveler and Diluc to 50, thereby making the fight with Barbara's boss-mob significantly easier
2. Practice fighting until I am not completely terrible at it
3. Work on improving everyone's gear, some of which could certainly use it.

Also, have some fun. Genshin Impact is a very entertaining game in all kinds of ways of which the fighting is probably the least. It would be a shame to miss the actual good parts just because I need to "git gud". 

And let's face it, I am never going to get good. I'll settle for just good enough.

Pass The Cheese, Please

UltrViolet is wondering why he's not feeling the same buzz around WoW's upcoming expansion as everyone else. (Alright, not everyone). In reply, Jeromai, another WoW refusenik, describes his own unconvincing introduction to the West's biggest-ever MMORPG:

"I’ve tried WoW, and it’s not for me either. The furthest I’ve gotten is soloing an undead hunter to 60 or so during the Cataclysm era. I’ve blanked out on most of the story/quests. I got speedrun by a friend through a dungeon via him outleveling it and gifted stuff (a faster way to kill my interest in the mode I cannot imagine, to realize that someone can solo cheese their way through something via incrementing numbers rather than through skill, ie. that gifted gear will be valueless in a few levels, so why bother to even group through it properly?)"

I did get a bit further than that my first time through, although not much. I think I topped out in the early 70s, back in mid-WotLK, when the level cap was 80. It took me six months to get that far.

I was playing WoW as my main MMO at that time and from memory I would probably have put in around 25-30 hours most weeks, which suggests leveling must have been a much slower process than it is today. Of course, I did play a lot of other characters and I recall doing an inordinate amount of PvP in Battlegrounds, which maybe didn't give leveling xp. I can't recall.

At the time I knew no-one who was playing WoW, except Mrs Bhagpuss, who started at the same time I did. I knew of people who played but I wasn't blogging then so I didn't even have that shared experience to draw on. Consequently I didn't have the problem of over-zealous friends trying to give me an unwanted leg-up.

It is something I've run into in other MMOs. It's something I've done myself. When you know and love a game and you see someone not quite getting it there can be a huge temptation to jump in and carry some of the weight, just to get them over the hump. Or maybe you think the real game begins at the end and everything that comes before is just an annoyance, to be disposed of as fast as possible. Or perhaps you just get a kick out of playing the all-knowing, all-powerful superhero. There are as many reasons to jump in and lead the way as there are players to be led.

Always keep an eye on the horizon.

Sometimes it works but often it has the effect Jeromai describes. Instead of connecting someone with the game it alienates them from it. Even so, it always puzzles me when someone comes to the conclusion that because a higher-level, better geared, more experienced player can trivialize lower-level content that content is by definition trivial.

This seems to me on a par with believing that because you can read the precis of the plot of a mystery novel on Wikipedia there's no point or purpose in reading the book. Yes, you could turn to the last page, solve the mystery and be done in a moment. You wouldn't, though.

If you did, you'd not have read the book. You would have no feeling for the language, no understanding of the characters, no sense of the author's purpose. You'd have gained nothing, learned nothing and felt nothing. Oh, you'd know who did it. There's that.

Anyone who reads mystery novels  - any novel, really - knows they could turn to the end to see how it all turns out but they don't. Knowing doesn't void the experience of doing. The content is the content. This is similar to but different from the journey being its own reward.

MMOS are all about the content. A traditional MMORPG is a portmanteau and a palimpsest. The leveling game hasn't been the be-all and end-all for a very long time. Story, plot, narrative, they form only a small part of what there is to do. You don't have to focus on any one aspect and you don't have to buy in to all the expectations. You can pick and choose.

Even with that freedom of choice, in all MMORPGs with vertical progression, which is almost all of them, you have to accept impermanence. Yes, your Best-in-Slot weapon will be time-expired the day the new expansion drops. Yes, the Tier 1 armor set that took a month of grinding will serve as the bare minimum for your next month as you grind for T2. So what?

That's the process. If it seems hollow then congratulations, you've seen through the trick. Magic happens because you choose to believe in magic not because magic's real.

If we keep the lights low enough no-one will see the wires.

Some people like to know how magic tricks are done. For them, understanding the mechanics make the whole thing more fascinating, not less. For most, though, once a trick's explained, it's dead. Explain enough tricks and all of magic dies.

Which is why you need to be careful and cautious when showing someone around the back of the set. If you reveal all the trapdoors and uncover all the mirrors there's nothing much left but dusty boards and flat canvas. At least let the newbie see the trick done properly, once.

I love cheesing dungeons. I love outleveling content and sueprheroing through it. I love soloing bosses meant to challenge two dozen mighty heroes of yester-year. I love doing it because I did it the hard way the first time and now it's payback. Or because I never could, then, and now I can.

Blizzard clearly understand that mindset. They are building it into the structure of their benchmark MMO. You can go back and cheese WoW's dungeons and Blizzard will make sure you get all the drops you would have gotten with friends, at level, back in the day.

You did do those dungeons with friends, at level, back in the day, didn't you?

Even when I played WoW a decade ago, when my highest level characters were in the fifties or sixties, I went back and soloed The Deadmines for fun. Because I could. Because it was profitable and because it was satisfying. It might only have been a few weeks since I struggled through those caves, dying often, but already it was history. My history.

In EQ, there was a genuine, visceral thrill in going back, years later, to romp around the Gates of Discord zones. They'd terrified me at launch and broken my guild along with many others. I had, quite literally, my most terrifying times in MMOs ever there. Now I owned them. It was glorious.

It also works when you level up to see content that you couldn't even get to first time around. In EverQuest some of the most fun I ever had was in a duo with Mrs Bhagpuss, clearing the Planes in the Planes of Power expansion . We were half a decade behind the curve and twenty levels over par but who was counting? We came late to Castle Mistmoore in EQ2 as well, but by the time we were able to duo it it was a fun riot.

How many pairs of pants does the average character get through in 120 levels anyway?

The thing about all of these experiences is that they were aspirational. In every case I was doing something I'd always wanted to do but never could until then. That aspiration needed space to grow and time. Doing those dungeons, those zones, that content, attritionally or awkwardly, slowly, painfully or arduously, at level, built that desire. So did being locked out, left out, denied. Or trying and failing.

It's all a mind game. You know none of it matters yet it does. It matters because you make it matter. Yes, that again. It's the trick that works until it doesn't.

It's also a trick that comes easily to me. I can believe two contradictory things at the same time. Always could. Understanding that something both matters and doesn't matter is second nature.

I have a lot more trouble with the other part of Jeromai's assessment, that things would be different (better) if there was skill involved. Treating the intellectual, emotional, psychological and physical cost of acquiring high-level skill in a specific video game, let alone a specific encounter, as an appropriate use of my finite personal resources is a step too far for my suspension of disbelief.

It's around that point where pragmatism pitches in. If I find myself up against a skill wall in a video game my response generally isn't to git gud. It's to get out. If it's going to take that much effort there's plenty of work around the house that needs doing. Or if we're talking skills, maybe I could learn to speak another language or to play a musical instrument...

Which is not to denigrate the efforts of those who worship skill in video games or the satisfaction they get from their successes. Everything is worth precisely what it's worth - to you. I don't deny the value, I just can't share it. Instead, when people start discussing the need for "skill", I find myself questioning my sense of belonging, just like UltrViolet.

It's all about finding your tribe. And my tribe likes cheese.