Altitis

33rd America’s Cup: Thanks God it’s Over

2010-02-15T22:48:43Z

So the 33rd America’s Cup is finally run, congratulations to Oracle who crushed the Swiss team Alinghi.

Ironically, despite writing about the shameful display of court action (that would continue for a long while) a couple of years ago, I almost missed that the race has taken place last week.

I wasn’t alone.

The America’s Cup used to be one of the most popular sailing contests the layman knew of, and being Swiss, I had been caught up in the enthusiasm of the 2003 win that helped capture the people’s imagination here.

When the next edition was held in Summer 2007 and Alinghi successfully defended their title, the mood in the country was the one you’ll see in any place when your favourite sports team is in a final and has solid chances to win the contest, no matter the sport itself.

At my workplace, for instance, we had an overhead projector showing all races live, and most of my co-workers (the vast majority of them who wouldn’t otherwise give a damn about sailing, and for good reason – for those among us who aren’t sailing aficionados, watching a regatta on TV is often barely more exciting than watching grass grow) would regularly mill around between their desk and the recreation area to watch the races, or at least part of it.

The contrast couldn’t have been more stark with what happened last week. Before even the first race saw our “champion” Alinghi severely spanked by its challenger, you’d be hard-pressed to find people giving a damn. The talk of last week, in terms of sports, was about the Olympic games and in what disciplines “we” would have chances to bring home a medal (incidentally, at the time of this writing, Switzerland didn’t just win the first gold medal of the games, we secured our third gold a few moments ago, marking this the most probably only time we’ll be #1 on the medal table. Woot. Ahem. Where was I? Oh yes).

Only the one colleague I know for participating in local sailing competitions himself admitted having watched both races. Everyone else was ‘meh’.

And the reality, plain and simple, is that the figureheads of both teams, billionaires Larry Ellison and Ernesto Bertarelli, have pretty much ruined everything that could even remotely be thought of as “sportsmanship” for this 33rd contest.

Spending more than 30 months fighting it out in courtrooms, both teams have first and foremost demonstrated that winning at all costs was way more important than the sport itself. Both teams have fought teeth and nails, with all means at their disposal, to try and win by default, disqualifying their opponents or running the clock so that they would not be able to compete. Setting totally unfair rulings favouring the defender, having these tossed out by the court in favour of an even more outrageously unfair counter-rule that would itself be overruled, most of the 33rd America’s cup was actually fought in the dirtiest arena in the world, a court of law, by the most dishonourably unsporting contenders, two armies of lawyers intent on only one thing, to crush the others, no matter the consequences.

At the end, two impressive looking boats were produced, in a size and format more removed from every day sailing than F1 is removed from a normal family car. The first two races had to be cancelled, one because there wasn’t enough wind to move those juggernauts, the second one because the waves were too high for these beasts.

What won on the water, in the end, isn’t even clearly to be attributed to the skill of skippers and crew, but first and foremost the prowess and the flair of the engineers who made a far superior technical decision.

Of course, what heavily contributed to the loss of Alinghi, beyond the inferior technical design, was also the unbelievable hubris of the very man the country had admired for making the two previous victories happen, Ernesto Bertarelli, who tried to helm the boat himself and mostly demonstrated that he lacked any skill on the water, just like he had shown, together with his opponent, that he knew no shame and no move so vile that he wouldn’t have his team try to win before the race could take place.

The disgust I’m expressing here isn’t just mine alone. For instance, the 32nd edition in 2007 attracted over 200M € worth of sponsorships. The 2010 disgrace just about 11M, and no matter how you slice it, the financial crisis isn’t the only factor to blame for this.

And speaking of the crisis, in the end, the amount of money thrown away in the court contest but also those two completely uneven boats, in the face of the crisis, is nothing short of obscene. A sporting event is something that very much can lift the spirit of the world even in the darkest of times, but the shameful spectacle that led to this underwhelming race pretty much achieved the contrary: It is, in the end, the mirror image of what led the world into economic downturn, greed without restraint, a will to win at all costs without regard to ethics nor consequences, a take-no-prisoner dog-eat-dog contest that leaves the bystander exhausted and thoroughly disgusted by what the rich, powerful and depraved billionaires are doing.

Oracle won fair and square on the water, but they won a pyrrhic victory. The reputation of America’s cup is in shambles, and nobody trusts the future to reintroduce “fair play” and “sportmanship” in the event. Only the insanely wealthy stand any chance of running another race of the same format, and the vast majority of the public is most definitely not going to care about a 34th edition if that, too, is held after the courts decide on every minute detail while the competitors try to out-cheat each other.

Is the event salvageable? Perhaps. It would require nothing short of a totally neutral and balanced set of racing rules where every boat is to be constructed within the exact same specifications (ideally under a similar budget) and not a single line exists to favour either the defender or the challenger.

Only under such conditions will the next edition pit sailors against sailors and decide what racing team is actually the best in the world, instead of who has the better lawyers and smarter engineers. But just as the early warnings in 2007 and 2008, like the January bust of French trader Jerôme Kerviel, went unheeded by the finance world, there is little hope to see that happening. Team Oracle has most definitely demonstrated that victory could be acquired by extending every mean no matter how low or dirty (and again, Alinghi’s approach was the very same on the other side of the Atlantic), and I’d be highly surprised that they would suddenly look at restoring honour to their disgraced cup.

And coming full circle with the long series of posts that occupied my Warcraft gaming days, where in retrospect PvP completely fails is in the possibility to build totally unbalanced match-ups where superior gear and the right team composition removes most of the player skill before the match has begun.

Truly meaningful PvP would require that the teams duking it out be as evenly matched as possible before the gates open, including wearing the same level of preset gear as everyone else. That would of course be a lot less attractive, because people aren’t looking for a fair and challenging fight, the vast majority is playing to crush at any cost.

And therein lies the misery of these contest. In the immortal words of XVIIth century author Pierre Corneille, “A vaincre sans péril on triomphe sans gloire” – “Triumph without peril brings no glory”.

So it was on the Sea near Valencia, and so it is in our MMOs.

This was a post from Altitis.

33rd America’s Cup: Thanks God it’s Over

SW:TOR, My Line in the Sand

2010-01-06T12:45:28Z

Since this comes up on various other blogs from time to time, let me be clear on one thing:

If SW:TOR features Tatooine in any meaningful fashion (that allegedly completely backwater planet that for whatever reason has been prominently featured in every single dirt-side Star Wars game even when it makes no sense, ie KOTOR settings), in particular as a newbie zone, I’m going to totally boycott the game no matter how well it does.

In fact, in an Old Republic setting, the following Star Wars tropes and locales are going to be a definite turn-off for me:

Kashyyk and life-debted Wookies as henchmen
Anything Endor-related

Yes, I know that many many Star Wars fans are attached to all of these, and that BioWare as well as Obsidian have already felt that they just couldn’t do without the inclusion of the sand ball and the enslaved furballs-you-must-save so the chances that these won’t be prominently featured are near to none, but still…

BioWare is betting the farm on their storytelling. Either the dirt rock is insignificantly backwater (but will undoubtedly see a massive boost to its tourist industry once SW:TOR is released), or it is the birthplace to thousands of jedi and sith alike and George Lucas will have to re-edit his movies yet again.

Oh, and happy 2010 .

This was a post from Altitis.

SW:TOR, My Line in the Sand

The Threshold / Wikipedia story, 10 months later

2009-11-25T13:50:51Z

Wolfshead’s excellent blog (on which I can no longer comment because I’m sitting behind a proxy) took the opportunity of a sensationalist news report about Wikipedia losing contributors to revisit the Threshold fiasco, and it’s interesting to go back to what I wrote then, having followed this fascinating train wreck as it unfolded.

For those unwilling to read up the entire background, in January, after a long edit war on the Wikipedia entry for Threshold, one of the more well-known MUDs ever produced, the article was proposed for deletion for lack of notability. Followed two bitter weeks of fighting and concerned / angry / outraged posting throughout the online gaming blogosphere, including reactions from people like Richard Bartle, Raph Koster or Scott Jennings.

Many posts painted a picture of a Wikipedia subjected to the whims and tantrums of the so-called Deletionists, a dark troop of book-burners intent on building reputation by deleting thousands of articles on the flimsiest grounds, about to doom the free encyclopedia with their antics.

I was largely under that same impression – for instance I commented on Wolfshead’s initial post with “The problem I have with the whole matter, like Wolf(shead) pointed out, is that based on the Threshold (and other similar matters, eg the webcomics purge of 2007), I have a hard time conceiving the displayed behaviour as an exception rather than the norm.”

I believe this isn’t too different from what most of the gamers reading about this at the time were thinking.

It’s also pretty much entirely wrong.

In the 10 months since, the English Wikipedia has passed 3 million articles. The Threshold article has remained entirely untouched by anyone since March, and is since then getting between 200 and 300 clicks per month.

And from a critic, I actually turned into an editor myself. See, after the Threshold fiasco passed and my temper cooled off, I read a gaming article, found something that was not correct, created an account, and fixed it. 5′000 edits later, and I’ve found that I was wrong back then.

Deletionists, and their counterparts inclusionists, may make for good headlines because their clashes are always loud, spectacular and sensational, but they are a tiny, tiny minority among regular contributors. There are far more people called deletionists in anger (it’s Wikipedia’s equivalent of Godwin’s Law) than true deletionists among regular editors.

The claim that deletionists build their cred with the internal Wikipedia cabal by getting stuff deleted is patently false. Since I started editing, about 150 editors submitted themselves to the community’s appraisal through a “Request for adminship”, to become administrators with the tools to, among others, delete articles. Among these 150ish editors, how many true deletionists have been promoted to administrators?

Zero.

Yes, not a single of those decried book burners has been successful in getting access to the tools that would allow them to delete more content. In fact, during all these months, the two most important criteria the Wikipedia community has looked at before voting whether a candidate should get access to administration tools (beyond deletion, they also include the ability to block users and protect pages from editing) were their interactions with other users, in particular in conflictual situations, and the amount AND quality of their content contributions. Or, in other terms, what they have done to build the encyclopedia rather than destroy it.

In 10 months of contributions, I haven’t run into any of the Threshold antagonists, I could probably count the interactions I had with true hardcore deletionists on one hand, and I’ve had exactly two articles I contributed to deleted, on what I found to be valid grounds in both cases.

What is true is that the inclusion standards are strict and become stricter as time passes, and these rely on the four core content policies: that an article be written in a neutral tone, its content verifiable through independent, third party reliable sources and that they contain no original research. The oft-decried notability criteria isn’t even a policy (and is unlikely to become one for quite some time), and in general, pure rationales of “it’s just not notable” aren’t considered in a deletion discussion at all.

Notability itself is a bit of a misnomer anyway. What the notability guideline tries to do is to specify some (relatively) objective criteria a topic must adhere to in order to be written about, most importantly, that the subject has been noticed and commented about by these famous reliable sources in a sufficiently non-trivial fashion that a neutral article can be written on it. If nobody ever heard about a topic before, Wikipedia cannot, and should not, be the first place to talk about it.

Threshold was a typical example of the kind of train wreck that happens when the need for reliable independent third party coverage clashes with a topic that is extremely familiar to a (all things considered) small group of people, where most coverage is available only on specialized, user-generated sites. Many MUDers of old and most people who dabbled in MUD content design or coding are intimately familiar with TopMudSites or TMC, probably used its forums, and have a relatively decent notion of what MUDs were / are imp0rtant to the genre. The older among us will also remember using Usenet rec.games.mudding.* discussions and will definitely be familiar, for instance, with Michael Hartman and Threshold from these days. We probably all remember the MUD Commandos and the design discussions we held there, and from that, we have a good feeling of what is / was key to our hobby and what isn’t.

The problem is, none of the above fit Wikipedia’s criteria for Reliable Sources. And that’s where culture clashes happen, and Threshold is a perfect example of that. The thing is, when trying to build an online, entirely volunteer-based encyclopedia, you need to draw a line somewhere on what kind of information you base your articles. Stupid marketing slogans put aside (If you’re really trying to find “The sum of all human knowledge”, Google + archive.org are probably the closest you will get), should Wikipedia have an article on my pet cat or the great maths teacher I had in 3rd grade (OK, I lied, he was anything but great but you catch my drift)? Should this blog have an entry on Wikipedia? Of course not. My own personal delusions of grandeur put aside, nothing I did so far has been noticed and commented upon sufficiently to warrant an article in Wikipedia, and that’s probably unlikely to change for that matter.

But back to the original topic, or rather, this new round of “look at the disaster that is Wikipedia, people are leaving in droves”. Well, first of all, this statement is pretty much similar to all the doomsday prediction we get when WoW’s overall activity level decreases. Yes, people stop contributing, and yes, you could very easily measure the decay then make a projection on when Wikipedia will die off if you speculate that the curve is entirely linear, and like WoW keeps proving, those predictions would probably end up quite wrong.

That being said, the learning curve for a newbie is steep, in particular since while Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, creating a new article for the first time is usually a quite unpleasant experience.

What typically happens to an article created by a new contributor is:

It gets first checked by a bot against obviously copy / pasted material, if the bot comes up with a positive result, the article will probably be deleted very swiftly. Wikipedia does its best to weed out copyright issues as soon as it is made aware of it, and many people simply do not understand that just because a text has no copyright notice that doesn’t mean it is free for taking. On average, between 30 and 80 copyright issues are identified and manually verified every day, of which about 50 concern new articles exclusively. This is a first deterrent to new contributors, but one that is difficult for Wikipedia to bypass, because of the legal ramifications.

Next, it will be visited by the so-called New Page Patrol, and this is where the user experience can become negative pretty fast. The average new user will start an article and write a couple of sentences, then save it, and continue working on it, in a quite natural editing process. Between the first and the second save, though, chances are that a patroller will have visited the article, and, in the best case, placed a series of maintenance templates highlighting its most glaring defects (it’s a draft after all), or nominated the article for speedy deletion. When that happens, the article is often gone before the new user has finished reading through the warnings (provided he got some). This is definitely where the process can be improved, and a discussion is currently underway to seek venues to improve that. Wikipedia has also recently created an Article Wizard which guides new users through a series of key questions to cover in order to build an article that has staying power.

One other reason for the drop in active contributors is that with over 3 million articles, topics with abundant third party coverage become more rare. Also, undeniably, when I talk about a steep learning curve, the trend is definitely worsening as the years pass – at the same time, we’re now in an age where less and less people bother to RTFM before they do anything (I still remember the old Netiquette recommendation that people lurk for a while before posting on a new forum, it seems outlandish nowadays).

Wikipedia has its problems, and among them, the biggest is that when you purport to be the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, anyone does, and that includes teenage pranksters who believe it’s great to insert swearwords into articles or make up stuff in biographies of personalities. It also includes politically motivated people who will try to influence the perception of the side their backing or of their opponents, it includes PR representatives from small or new companies who want to use Wikipedia as an extension of their advertising campaign, and many people editing sensitive stuff in which they are way too emotionally involved, like national topics or, let’s say, their own MUD’s entry. But protecting biographies of living people is currently the biggest issue, and it’s one of the core reason why the New Pages and Recent Changes Patrols exist.

Because of the fallout generated by vandalism, regardless of pranks or pure malice, many well-meaning contributors get turned away at the door as well. As indicated above, in order to ease the learning curve a bit for new contributors, there’s the article wizard (Wikipedia’s newbie zone if you will), there is also a feature called Articles for Creation where people can start on their drafts and get reviews before their article goes live. In a Blizzardish “soon” way another feature is due to be piloted called Flagged Revisions, which will hide from public view any changes to an article as long as they have not been reviewed by a human – to ensure some of the most well-known fiascos and defamation scandals that have happened in the past will no longer be repeated, and to provide a better layer of protection when events like Thierry Henry’s infamous hand action in a highly disputed qualification match for the 2010 FIFA soccer world cup happens.

The other reality is that in the grand scheme of things, you cannot rely on Wikipedia alone for information. Some articles are excellent, some are abysmally poor. In any case, you should stay well clear of re-using it in a school work for instance. Two things are valuable in any case, though: the footnotes on a well-referenced article will allow you to cut short a bit on bibliographic research and provide you with a good starting point on any topic. And on most articles’ talk page, you will find a quality assessment of the article that should help you decide whether you’re dealing with something Wikipedia’s community has self-identified as decent work or not. Articles are classified on a scale which starts as a Stub (a couple of lines, barely more than a draft), then from Start class to C, B, A, then Great Article and Featured Article. The last three quality classes are subject to multiple reviews and more stringent criteria, and while far from perfect, will give at least some measure of the article’s content quality.

To conclude this overly verbose post, let’s go back to what Wolfshead had written in the immediate aftermath of the Threshold trainwreck:

“The other problem is that the fastest way to earn points is to delete articles, which has the deleterious effect of removing information from Wikipedia instead of adding to it. It is far easier to destroy then it is to create. A project like Wikipedia that deems to hold the public interest with regard to being a virtual library of the “people” like Wikipedia should be held to a higher standard then it currently is. Their current admin policy which incentivizes and rewards destruction and penalizes creation is woefully flawed and should be overhauled immediately.”

In over 10 months of contributing, I’ve found this assessment wholly without merit. Despite my own initial impressions, generated in the same context, and pretty much in line with Wolfshead’s sentiment at that time, the Threshold case, from what I’ve since experienced, is a rare exception rather than the norm, and the current community’s overall sentiment is, on the contrary, very unforgiving of the few people who try to earn points through deletion of information. Once a contributor is identified as a true deletionist, he has less than a snowball’s chance in hell to get the community’s trust for any additional responsibilities.

The reality is that the majority of the regular contributors are reunited around a single goal, to build the online encyclopedia along the above mentioned content criteria, to remove the “suck” still remaining in way too many insufficiently referenced pages, to weed out plagiarism, copyright violations, vandalism and libel wherever they find it.

They strive relentlessly to produce and improve content, driven with one unified passion, to share knowledge. And they all could do without the drama of these rare, but visible, exceptions like the Threshold affair.

This was a post from Altitis.

The Threshold / Wikipedia story, 10 months later

Pure Offline: Must Read for Both Nerds and the Rest of Us

2009-11-13T18:45:22Z

I’m traveling this week. This used to be completely unremarkable only a couple of months ago, as I spent about half of my time abroad training colleagues.

But in the latest economy-is-down-let’s-reinvent-ourselves, my role has changed, and heck, training has changed a lot too. Among things done differently is shifting much of our training from classroom-based to online.

That concretely means two things. I normally no longer travel around, and several hundred of our colleagues now have to put up with my funny accent over a phone line while watching a slide deck instead of having to deal with my antics on a whiteboard and flipchart.

Of course, they get some advantages out of that, the first thing, I’m actually not really good looking so they can concentrate on what’s on their screen, the second thing, they are actually shielded from my endless questions (I used to be a firm practitioner of the socratic method of transferring knowledge through questioning), and last, they probably are checking their e-mails and doing their normal daily jobs during most of the conference calls we’re holding.

I suspect it’s also less enjoyable, but heck, it’s work, we’re all here to make money, for having a good time, the after-work-drink-bar is thataway. And after all, the tenants also need to make a living, so relieving you of your hard-earned money right after you’re done earning it is, at the very least, both convenient and efficient.

But this week I’m back in Ireland to go through a training myself (which was pretty interesting BTW), and when I’m flying I’m usually reading.

For this trip, I picked up “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by a fellow called Bill Bryson. The book itself is a bit of an oddity, because Bryson pretty much built his reputation on writing travel stories – as an American expatriate to the UK for a longer part of his life, he got around, and he has a very engaging, and humorous way, of recounting his adventures and discoveries in the wide, vast world. I first was introduced to Bryson’s “Neither Here nor There” account of a youthful trip across continental Europe by a British acquaintance who was himself following in Bryson’s footsteps and had stranded in Geneva on a miserably rainy Sunday where pretty much everything was either closed or soaking wet.

”A Short History” is not exactly your standard travel book. As he recounts in the preface, Bryson was traveling by plane earlier this decade and suddenly realized that while he had visited plenty of amazing places, he knew (in his eyes) remarkably little of how our planet works. He therefore spent the next couple of years pestering scientists in countless fields to find out, and “A Short History of Nearly Everything” is the result of his relentless inquiries.

Before you get the wrong impression, it’s not a science textbook, rather, an amazingly entertaining and well written history of science. Written in an accessible prose and a wit I could only dream of possessing, the key figures in all of the major scientific fields of the past half millennium come back to life as the actors of a fascinating tale of how we went from believing completely wrong things to knowing that we were ignorant of much (but at least having dispelled certain of the now more scurrilous-sounding myths like Earth being only 7 millenia old or so in the process, probably a net benefit in the grand scheme of things).

It is also a constantly renewed exposure of the endless tragedy of the true discoverers of much we now take for granted. Indeed, by painting all of these countless portraits, Bryson makes it abundantly clear that if you’re really the first genius to make a revolutionary discovery, you are most likely to be rhetorically challenged, end up broke, divorced and alone, die and remain forever unnoticed by the rest of the world (unless you become the victim of backstabbing and deceit, which is also a very frequent occurence) and your contributions to the advancement of human knowledge attributed to someone who is by necessity less brilliant than you, came to the same conclusions as you did several decades after you, stole your ideas and never credited you for it, or was able to turn whatever you had written in a way so obscure and unintelligible (remember, rhetorically challenged is a common trait among geniuses) that nobody understood it into concepts so clear and simple that nobody would believe it was actually just a reformulation of your original ideas.

Unless you’re Albert Einstein, of course. Still, even when discussing those rare scientists, inventors or discoverers who managed to combine inventiveness with originality and dodge the bullet of ruin and misery, Bryson will be quick to remind you of their humanity, exposing, to the reader’s utter delight, various character flaws marking them as utter jerks, or, just for fun, rubbing in the one most glaring mistake they made in their life.

Under his artful pen, the history of science unfolds as a joyous and deeply enjoyable gallery of portraits that explains what we know today and how we found out. Fascinating and at times so hilarious that people sitting across the aisle start looking at you funny wondering why you’re laughing out loud at cruising speed and 10′000 meters of altitude, I just cannot recommend “A Short History of Nearly Everything” enough.

But whether you’re a nerd, a geek, or just a normal person, this is a highly recommended read, if only for passing the time of the next server maintenance. The only danger ahead is that you may actually miss the moment the servers come back online, and keep reading, and reading, and reading.

This was a post from Altitis.

Pure Offline: Must Read for Both Nerds and the Rest of Us

Phoenix Reborn?

2009-10-09T12:27:59Z

It most definitely was a Blizzardish soon, but there we go. A new post after a semester-long hiatus.

So, what happened to Altitis?

Real life, that’s what happened. While I don’t want to dwell on things too much (or turn this into a “fishing for sympathy” post), I went through a situation not unlike what Big Red Kitty went through. Oh, the circumstances were different, and WoW was a mere symptom of what had gone wrong in my life, but the background is similar.

Except in my case, I went a bridge too far, and almost failed to mend and amend what I once thought would be lasting for the rest of my life. My family was on the brink of dissolution, and I moved out for about six months, convinced it was the end. And while I used to qualify blogging as cathartic, I never found the strength to blog about that at all. That explains the long hiatus.

In the middle of it, I thought I would be able to resume blogging, but for some reason, I never managed to do so since that cryptic one-worder a few months back.

Against my pessimistic outlook six months ago, though, events took a turn for the better, and we finally worked things out.

This isn’t however a sob-story serving as the testimonial on how MMORPGs have ruined (or almost ruined) the life of yet another family. As I said, it was a mere symptom of things gone wrong – spending too long in the game, investing too much into the completely wrong thing. And it wasn’t just gaming either, my job had taken an overblown importance too. What happened is probably just one in a million similar stories, where the people change, the context changes, and the symptoms change, but to keep this short, where we went wrong was that my significant other and myself started to take each other for granted and stopped communicating on tiny issues at first, and then on bigger and bigger issues, and this almost brought our couple down.

So the only advice I can give to any gamer out there, in particular if you’re in a stable, long term relationship, and more so if you have kids: you may want, periodically, to examine your gaming habits and ask yourself if they are an innocuous hobby or have become escapism for you. If it’s the latter, it may be worth taking a honest look at your life, figure out what you’re fleeing, and address the issue, because trust me, leaving your home while your 4-year old daughter starts asking “why is daddy taking his pillow with him?” is not an experience you will enjoy.

But that’s enough background already. This was then, and as I said, we finally worked it out a couple of weeks ago.

What is going to happen to Altitis?

Frankly, I don’t know really. When crap hit the fan, I jokingly remarked to my friend Adventsparky that at least I’d be able to play during raiding peak times. In reality, that never happened.

I continued playing WoW pretty casually for a while, first on my mage, and then I picked up my shammie and eventually reached level 80 with her.

At the same time, for the first time since joining in May 2005, I actually let my subscription run out, and didn’t notice for several weeks. And it happened a second time more recently – a few weeks ago, before moving back, I wanted to check out something in the game and found, again, that I could no longer do so.

I haven’t resubscribed since.

Interestingly enough, Adventsparky once asked me whether I was still playing the game, explaining that some evening this Spring he just logged out after a raid, and never logged back in. The heart isn’t in it anymore.

Oh, I read the cataclysm announcements, but they failed to raise any kind of enthusiasm. I think the only thought that entertained me was when reading about the split of the Barrens zone, I started wondering whether this would be the end of the Mankirk’s Wife jokes.

In reality, like many other commentators on the blogosphere, I now find myself playing various different games extremely casually, either purely single-player games, or trying out one of the several viable Free2Play MMOs out there: From Wizard101 to FreeRealms, over Jade Dynasty, World of Kung Fu and Runes of Magic. I’m currently exploring Dungeons and Dragons Online (which recently went Free2Play) a bit, when I have time. I’m not really far in the game.

World of Warcraft? A while ago, I pondered resubbing for the anniversary pet and the headless horseman event. I probably won’t do that any more. In reality, the Free2Play games out there, and their microtransaction schemes allowing you to buy and consume content at your leisure, represent simply much more entertainment value for my money than shelling out 15€ / month for WoW when I might play it for little more than a couple of hours at best, if at all.

And while I could definitely afford it, I also find that the subscription fee actually participates in generating a compulsion to play in me, at the exclusion of other games, becoming enough a narrow focus that it might again draw me in and provoke another spiral that may, next time around, no longer come with a happy ending.

So the future of Altitis is similar to what a few other former WoW bloggers have done – altitis no longer confined to one game, but offering, perhaps, comments, reviews but also broader thoughts on several games.

Or maybe not. Time will tell.

In the meantime, the tagline of the blog has changed (I actually changed it when I posted the “Soon” message already), it has now become “Seeking Better Worlds”.

It is a combination of Dr. Richard Bartle’s continuous action to try and push developers and players alike to create and demand better, richer virtual worlds. At the same time, it is also a play on the fictional Weyland-Yutani (of the Alien movie series) corporate slogan, “Building better worlds”, as a reminder that the quest for better virtual worlds in itself may very well become perverted if it turns, again, into a threat to my real life.

This was a post from Altitis.

Phoenix Reborn?

Soon…

2009-07-23T19:42:20Z

This was a post from Altitis.

Soon…

Altitis Goes on Indefinite Blogging Hiatus

2009-03-17T21:45:35Z

Just a quick note to my readers, due to real life circumstances I am currently (as has become obvious in the last month) not in the required mindset to keep on blogging. I can also not predict how long this state of affairs may continue, or whether I’ll ever resume writing.

I will therefore thank all my readers, commenters, respondents, and the fellow bloggers in the WoW gaming community for your participation, interaction and readership over the roughly 18 months during which Altitis has remained active.

Of course, since an inactive blog doesn’t actually take too much space in your feed readers, you can always keep it in in case I get back to blogging about WoW in the future. If not, thank you for the shared journey, and the best to all of you.

This was a post from Altitis.

Altitis Goes on Indefinite Blogging Hiatus

Honourable Foes

2009-02-02T22:38:07Z

Leveling to 80 on a PvP server brings its share of mistrust about the opposite faction, the amount of backstabbing gankers on both sides sees to that.

I’m therefore always quite wary of my surroundings when engaged with some NPCs when alliance shows up.

Today, deciding to clean up my dragonblight quest log of the remaining group quests I never managed to do before, specced tankadin for a change to see where my ragtag offspec looting left me (532 def, 50% avoidance ex holy shield), it was no different, or so I thought.

I had an appointment in New Heartglen, to put an end to the High General in charge there.

After clearing around and waiting for the general to show herself, I quietly engaged her and calmly worked her down. And suddenly, behind me, a lower level alliance death knight shows up.

One of 73 seasons would probably have been manageable in tank spec – after all, it’s not as if the fight were taxing me to the limit, only my mana pool was something to keep an eye on from time to time.

The Death Knight engaged in combat too – with the general. So once my affair was over, and he picked his own fight, I gave him a hand in return. Death Knights may be powerful, but soloing the general at level 73? Nah. She was having him for dinner. The most difficult part? Not using any AoE abilities for fear of killing the DK.

We parted ways after exchanging salutes. Would the outcome have been different if he too were level 80? Possibly. Still, the human Death Knight Horcan was honourable in battle, and Honour I returned.

This was a post from Altitis.

Honourable Foes

The Four Learning Styles and How They Can Help Team Progression

2009-02-02T16:00:31Z

Are any of these familiar?

Some of your players simply never seem to read strategies posted to the website?
Some others, no matter how, will always forget about vital buffs or die to ground fire at least once?
When you explain tactics over vent, some people may be heard sighing after a while, grow restless and want to just go on with it?
After a wipe (or an arena defeat), part of the team wants to jump straight back into the fray while others want to analyze what just happened, seemingly to death?
Do some people seem to have a hard time remembering when to blow their trinket cooldowns in the heat of battle, finding themselves short at crucial times?
Do you find that your arena team is split between those who want to immediately queue up for the next match and the guys who want to discuss what just happened?

If it does, the above symptoms are just a reminder that people learn things in different ways.

Two Psychologists, Peter Honey and Alfred Mumford, expanding upon the earlier works of one David Kolb, have identified four major ways by which people acquire new knowledge:

Activists are people who respond best to Scout Movement founder Lord Baden-Powell’s credo of “Learning by doing”. These players will learn a new encounter or a new arena tactic best by simply experiencing it. They are the people most likely to interrupt a strategy session with “let’s just do it”, they want to be in the thick of things and will learn best through practice.
Theorists are on the opposite side of things. Half of what we’d call our Theorycrafters stem from this group, they have to model something in their head to grasp it completely. The better the model they build, the better their practical execution later on. These players will usually respond best to long and detailed boss strategies, the more the information you provide them with beforehand matches the reality of a fight, the better they will respond.
Reflectors mainly gain their understanding from analyzing and reviewing their experiences. The second half of the Theorycrafters belong in this group, as they will tend to collect as much data as they can to support their analysis. Players in this group, more than any other, will be ready to spend hours on training dummies running large sequences of tests and changing tiny elements just to find out the single most optimal cookie-cutter approach to whatever they are reviewing. Where the theorist will be content to calculate the best possible output with maths only, a reflector will thrive on maths derived from hard data.
Pragmatists will learn best from information which is directly tied to practical use. Contingency planning, adapting to the situation in the thick of battle is something they love, endless strategy sessions and what-if-scenarios tend however to quickly bore them unless you can tie every aspect of it to direct and concrete use. A pragmatist would be quite likely to ask “can we do it with one less?” and willing to go through with it.

Learning styles aren’t mutually exclusive. In general, people will respond strongly to one learning style and a bit less to the others in various degrees. Studies in the past tend to demonstrate that the best learning effect is achieved when many or even all learning styles are being catered to.

That’s All Fine But How Does That Help My Groups?

A fine type of pragmatist question, raid leaders and battlegroup tacticians may want to make their briefings appeal to a wider type of learning styles to maximize their progression speed:

Theorists will continue to thrive on strategies posted on the guild website. Keep it up, you’re most likely already catering to them
Activists can greatly benefit from videos implementing the strategy (if available). To help their learning, post them in a thread separate from your strategy post
Reflectors can be brought up to speed by linking to existing parses and combat logs.
For the Pragmatists, building a checklist with a direct link to in-game effects can work well. Eg: “Keep your trinkets up for phase 2 because we need to produce XXX dps in 30 seconds otherwise we wipe”.
After a wipe, instead of running straight back into the fray the moment everyone is rezzed and rebuffed, leave some time for the reflectors to review their combat logs, they might not only improve their own performance but also find out exactly what went wrong on the last attempt
Make sure you foster a climate where Activists and Reflectors in particular aren’t being singled out: both of these more than the other two will really need to experience things in order to truly understand them. Yelling at an activist because he hasn’t read your 10′000 words of strategy explanation won’t help him get better but rather discouraged, but after two or three attempts, he will probably understand the flow of the fight better than anyone else.
Theorists and pragmatists are the most likely to come up with intellectual leaps of faith going against the official strategy – if yours just doesn’t work, try it out their way. They might just have thought of a way to get around whatever roadblock your team is encountering.
Keep your pre-encounter briefing short and to the point. The theorists and reflectors will have done their preliminary research, the pragmatists only want the telegraphic style short overview and the activists want to rush straight into battle. Long explanations will just waste everyone’s time for little concrete benefits.

These, and more, can all help speed up the time your group needs to adapt to a new strategy and put it to successful use. Being mindful of the four different learning styles, and trying to cater to all of them, can speed up your preparation time and help you conquer new content faster.

This was a post from Altitis.

The Four Learning Styles and How They Can Help Team Progression

Hand of Reckoning Macro

2009-07-24T19:28:12Z

As usual, we’re finding out that the barebones behaviour of yet another ability is pretty poor. In order to make the brand new ranged paladin taunt more efficient, here’s a macro you can use:

#showtooltip Hand of Reckoning
/cast [target=mouseover, harm][harm] Hand of Reckoning

Bind it to a key.

This enables you to either taunt your current target or simply hover with your mouse over another foe to taunt with a simple keypress.

A more advanced version if you focus one specific add, eg one which gets CCed (to avoid having a mage or priest sandwich after sheep or shackle runs out):

#showtooltip Hand of Reckoning
/cast [modifier:shift, target=focus, harm] Hand of Reckoning
/stopmacro [modifier:shift]
/cast [target=mouseover, harm][harm] Hand of Reckoning

If you’re holding down shift, it will taunt your focus, otherwise behave just as the other one.

This was a post from Altitis.

Hand of Reckoning Macro