World of Warcraft and Human Nature

You may have noticed that there is a feed on this site that links the activity of my level 80 Paladin, Orissa, in the game World of Warcraft (WoW). I put that there because I wanted to see how it would work, which leads me to this post.

I've played this game since 2007 and Orissa has always been my main character (typically refered to as a 'main') and she has always been the character I use to participate in the hardest raids. There are several things about human nature that I've noticed while playing this game that I want to describe in this post, but first, some background information or my post won't make a lot of sense to people who have never played this game.

WoW is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) made by Blizzard Entertainment. Massively meaning that it takes place in a fantasy world some 15 square miles (which is enormous for a virtual environment) and is broken into some 200 servers each with 5-20 thousand players (and usually 3-10k online at one time.) And I'm not even counting the Asian and European versions of this game. It is multiplayer. At end game, you either find yourself fighting other players, other real people spread across the US (since I have the North American version of WoW, I typically only meet other Americans, a few Canadians and the occasional Mexican) or you cooperate with them to defeat difficult bosses. Also, the economy is player driven, with an in-game auction house, where players trade with each other, using gold as a virtual currency. It is online, obviously. It is also role-playing (RP) in that you pick a class and a particular role to play in the game and its a game. Each of these roles has its own function in the game.

Orissa is a Level 80 Protection Paladin with a Retribution off spec, on the US-Ghostlands server, and an officer in the guild Tribute to Insanity. There are 80 levels of character advancement. Protection is her primary talent specialization, which defines her role as a tank and Retribution is her secondary and when activated, defines her role as melee dps. And a guild is basically a group of players who have come together under one name to work together. As an officer, I help make policy decisions and occasionally lead raids.

Raiding in Wrath of the Lich King, the second expansion of the game, is broken down into two levels: 10 man and 25 man. 10 man raids are for the smaller guilds (such as mine) and 25 man raids are for the larger guilds. 25 mans are typically a bit harder to succeed at, harder to organize and drop better loot. However, each raid can be run as a 10 man or a 25 man. The reason Blizzard designed the game this way was because they wanted people to see the raid content. Before Wrath and Burning Crusade came out, all the raids were 40 man raids and thus only the largest and most hardcore of guilds could get in. A grand total of 3% of the game's population saw the interior of the Naxxramas 40 man raid, which was, during Vanilla WoW, the last and the hardest raid. Now 40 mans are gone, and every raid in Wrath has a 10 and 25 man setting.

Wrath of the Lich King, starts at Tier 7 (T7) for loot and goes up to T10 and raid progression looks like this:

Naxxramas (Naxx): 14 bosses, T7 (Naxx was brought back in Wrath as a 10/25 man and entry level raid)
Eye of Eternity (EoE): 1 boss, T7
Obsidian Sanctum (OS): 1 boss, T7
Ulduar (Uld): 14 bosses, T8
Trial of the Crusader (ToC): 7 bosses, T9
Onyxia's Lair (Ony): 1 boss, T9
Icecrown Citadel (ICC): 12 bosses, T10
Ruby Sanctum (RS): 1 boss, T10

Each raid with 1 boss takes about 45 minutes to an hour, ToC takes about 90-120 minutes, and the rest take 4-6 hours. However, you have one week, from Tuesday to Tuesday, to finish a raid and raids are usually scheduled by guilds and spread across a week. My guild will do about 2 hours of ICC on Tuesday, another 2 hours on Wednesday, and then finish it on Friday. Then we do it again, starting on Tuesdays. The reason for Tuesdays is that Blizzard takes down all the servers for a few hours each Tuesday for maintenance and they decided that was a good time to do raid resets as well.

I am going to focus on the 10 man versions of these raids as my guild does not have the people to field a 25 man. Each raid requires three arch-typical roles, which are Tank, Healer and DPS. There are 10 classes, all of them can perform DPS, 4 of which can be Tanks, 4 of which can be healers, 2 of which can be all three.

Each 10 man requires 2 tanks, 2-3 healers and 5-6 DPS. What are these roles? The Tank is the heavily defensive character who's job is to ensure that the boss hits him and not the other, more fragile classes. Orissa as I've said is a Tank. What she does is she gains threat on the boss (threat is a variable in the boss's AI; when a player does something, he gains threat and the person with the highest threat is the person the boss attacks) while using her abilities to reduce incoming damage (for example, keeping Holy Shield up, an ability that increases her chance to block by 30%.) DPS stands for Damage-Per-Second and indicates a player whose job it is to do as much damage as possible while avoiding taking damage as best as possible and the Healer is pretty self explanatory. This is a trinity, if you will. Tanks require healers to stay alive. Healers require tanks to stay alive. DPS is required as most bosses have some sort of mechanic that makes them impossible to kill if the fight goes on too long and thus high dps is needed to kill the boss in a certain time frame. A raid without one of these three roles will fail.

Thus we get into what I wanted to say about this game. Sometimes I wonder if WoW could be a college major with all the crap that goes on in the game, but I digress. The interesting fact about this game is how everyone in this game works together and knows each other but no one in this game really knows each other. Take, for example, the Guild Master (GM) of my guild, a man who plays a Priest named Angoth. I know a few things about him. He's married (to another player in the guild), was in the Navy in nuclear submarines, loves a good joke and is a pretty funny guy and a good GM. But I don't know his real name or what he looks like. All I know is the personality I see when he's online and when he's in Ventrilio (a voice-chat 3rd party program.) And this is true for every guildy. I know them by personality, by voice and by screenname, but I don't know what they don't reveal in Vent or in guild chat.

These are the people I work with and coordinate with however. Since most raids require a great deal of coordination in order to down a boss, it requires that I know how these people will play and how to communicate with them and yet it is difficult to learn anything about them through such an impersonal interface.

Just to get a view on how complicated a boss fight can get, lets look at one of the bosses for a moment. Mimiron is one good example. Mimiron is the 12th boss out of 14 in Ulduar. The raid does not actually fight Mimiron, but the inventions he controls. It is a four phase fight. First phase, Mimiron is in a battletank-like vehicle called Leviathan MKII. It requires that all the melee dps, including the tanks, keep an eye out for land mines and ensuring they have a path to run away from Leviathan. It requires that they keep an eye out for Shockblast and run away from Leviathan when this occurs. The healers must heal the tank through heavy damage from Leviathan, especially when he uses Plasma Punch. Then after Leviathan is defeated, it rolls away and Mimiron goes into an anti-personnel cannon, which then requires that players avoid the five-million damage instant death rockets, that they avoid the Laser Barrage that'll make about a 100 degree arc and instantly kill anyone hit by it. Then if they survive that, the third phase begins in which case a helicopter comes out, again, with Mimiron driving it. A ranged dps has to kite the head, while one tank has to pick up robots that spawn around the room and the other tank has to grab all the little bomb bots that the helicopter drops before they explode and kill the healers. Furthermore, DPS have to loot a magnetic core from dead robots to bring the helicopter down so they can do damage to it before it flies again. Once defeated, you enter phase 4, in which all three earlier vehicles, the Leviathan, the Anti-Personnel Cannon and the Aerial Command Unit, all come together as V-07-TR-0N, a big robot. With the exception of the little robots, everything in the previous phases, occurs again in this phase, all at one time and worst of all, each of the three components MUST die within 10 seconds of each other, or the surviving components will repair the dead one to full health and the raid will wipe (which is slang, meaning "everyone dies") because the berserk timer (which increases Mimiron's damage by 5000%) will be met. The hardmode (which leads to better loot) of this fight is everything I've mentioned, and fire. Lots and lots of fire.

Point being, it takes a lot of coordination, situational awareness and teamwork in order to down the more difficult bosses. Mimiron was, when Ulduar was the final raid in WoW, one of the hardest bosses in game. My guild would be in vent while raiding and we'd be warning each other when a rocket launches or when Mimiron was doing his shockblast or other abilities. Tanks would be calling out for stronger heals during Plasma Punch and DPS would be calling out when they needed to use the magnetic core to bring the Aerial Command Unit to the ground. Strategy would be discussed, failed attempts would be analyzed and we'd be constantly working out how to perform better next time so we can get a kill.

Its teamwork against a difficult objective, with strangers. People whom I've never met in real life, working together for a common goal. But as an officer, it is my job (if you will) to help keep all these people working together, and try to get the guild to fit their needs as best as possible.

And yet there is a serious darkside to this, one that is illustrated by WoW, but also very common on the internet wherever anyone can hide behind a shield of anonymity. On Trade Chat one morning, I was discussing something with another character in the game, when a third character popped up and called me things like 'baddie' and flamed me because I hadn't been past Professor Putricide (7th boss of 12 in ICC and more difficult that Mimiron) at the time. It was a display of immaturity and foolishness and he could get away with it easily because I don't know who he is. He'll suffer no real life repercussions for that, his real life reputation remains untouched and heck, he might be a nice guy in real life, so long as he has a reputation to maintain.

Which frightens me.

This isn't a problem unique with WoW, it is found on every on-line venue, from other multiplayer games to the Fark.com forums to 4chan (which is infamous for their internet hijinks and complete lack of manners, entirely because there is no accoutability.) It makes me wonder then, if people are only decent towards other people because they have a reputation to maintain. Is there any true honesty or is it all play acting? Remove our faces and our real names, and our true personalities emerge.

Not everyone acts like a jerk without a name and a face, but a large number do. And maybe they are just jerks. It is still however, a frightening concept to think that everything we do is simply an act to appease our fellow man.

"We haven't much time, friends! You're going to help me test out my latest and greatest creation. Now, before you change your minds, remember, that you kind of owe it to me after the mess you made with the XT-002!" -Mimiron at the start of Phase 1 (XT-002 is a huge robot and is the fourth boss in Ulduar)

J Kuhl Signing Off