# Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Folding Ideas
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

[Dan] What you’re looking at is a story. It’s a story about numbers, people, and it’s a story about how numbers and people interact. It’s a story about World of Warcraft, in specific, but it’s also a story about every video game, in a way a story about video games themselves. It’s a story about why it’s rude to be bad at World of Warcraft. It’s December 2004. Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game World of Warcraft is taking the world by storm and Wallace, the Gnome Rogue walks barefoot through Molten Core. Wallace, a proper hobbit of a gnome, doesn’t wear shoes, and he’s not in a hurry to get anywhere. His guild thinks this is a little embarrassing, but it mostly just makes for a story about a quirky weirdo they met in this new video game. Ultimately they enjoy having Wallace around because he makes the game fun. Six months later they’re screaming at Wallace and demanding that he equip some boots. Ultimatums are dropped, tempers are elevated, and no one’s having a good time. Someone calls Wallace a bad player. No one disagrees. [Gentle music] [Choice] ‘Instrumental play’ was first described by literary theorist Wolfgang Iser in his 1993 essay “The Fictive and the Imaginary. ” Iser, a highly influential theorist, saw play as being divided cleanly into the categories of free and instrumental based on how the act of playing related to goals. On one hand is play unburdened by systematized goals and on the other hand, play with goals. In Iser’s framework play becomes instrumental the moment it has some intended outcome, something resembling rules and structure. However in Iser’s work this was largely to distinguish between children chasing each other around a field for no reason other than because it felt fun in the moment, and children chasing each other in a game of football with concrete winners and losers. Its discussion in relation to video games is credited to sociologist T. L Taylor in her 2006 book Play Between Worlds. ‘Instrumental play is a goal-oriented approach that values efficiency, expertise and optimizing strategies as part of play. In instrumental play, the point of playing is not to reach the end, but to find the best way of getting there. ’ This is, for the record, not a discussion of good players as opposed to bad players, we are talking about the ways you play the game in which ‘being good’ is considered desirable. This is a critical distinction, and perhaps if there’s going to be one takeaway from all this it is this confrontation: the idea that ‘being good at a game is a good thing’, that the correct way of playing a game is one in which you are good at the game, isn’t some natural force of reality, but an imposed value. If you’ve ever gotten destroyed in a video game and felt awful about it, just ashamed of how hard you got thumped, that feeling isn’t objective or natural, it is an instrumental value that you are imposing on yourself. [Dan] It's common for instrumental play to be framed in opposition to fun, that they are ends of a spectrum. This is understandable in no small part because instrumental play tends towards optimization, which can often result in deeply un-fun player behaviors. This gets extended out to the extreme where play framed around challenge or investment is treated as irrational or somehow less genuine than some hypothetically more “pure”, “innocent”, “unadulterated” version of play unconcerned with doing well. It’s important in this conversation to establish, firmly, that this is a false dichotomy. We are going to spend a lot of time talking about how fun gets optimized out of games, which is why I want to stress that they are not antithetical concepts. Rather than being in conflict with one another they are instead in tension: there is not an opposed relationship, but there is a complex one. Because if you back up and think about it, it’s easy to appreciate how someone can find a deep enjoyment in improving at a skill, or achieving goals, or discovering solutions to complex problems. Rather, instrumental play, play focused on goals, can be juxtaposed with free play, the form of play that is without ending. Neither free or instrumental play can exist in their purest form, but René Glas in his book Battlefields of Negotiation describes play in World of Warcraft as movement between instrumental and free play. For every arena match or dungeon, there is a time before and afterward when you’re waiting in town and just stand there, aimless. This moment, this is free play approaching its pure form. An important consideration here is that game design can rarely compel the player to take action. A game can attempt to prescribe an action, such as the famous ‘press F to pay respects’, but players tend to chafe against moments like this, as in clumsy hands they tend to

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

come off as naive or insincere or, in the language of the youth, cringe. If you refuse to pay your respects then that’s it, the game doesn’t even end so much as it just bricks, a standoff between you and a choice that doesn’t exist. Whether or not you close the application, if you refuse to pay your respects you functionally stop playing the game. World of Warcraft offers players a tremendous amount of agency. It is, after all, an entire virtual world. You are, indeed, broadly free to not pay your respects and the game is generally cool with that. You can shun levels, talent trees, and even weapons and still play the game for a very, very long time in a way that’s still identifiably play. Why shouldn’t you stand facing a wall on the far side of Bloodmyst Isle and contemplate the nature of the Draenei… forever? Roleplaying is a genuine example of the value of free play, and the fuzzy edges of instrumental play. Roleplayers engage with World of Warcraft in a fundamentally different way than how you or I might engage with it. They are often less concerned with the explicit objectives of World of Warcraft, and instead prefer emergent activities. By shunning the game’s progression system, there’s a clear embrace of free play here. but when roleplayers self-direct, say, by holding an annual festival that raises tens of thousand dollars of charity year after year, they are creating their own goals and that morphs into a form of instrumental play. In this sense, you cannot have free and instrumental play in their purest forms. You might be surprised just how much of the study of WoW is concerned with roleplaying, because it reflects a fascinating alternative, and socially-driven, means of engaging with a game. And that nuance, that question of how you can enable a form of play that, by definition, doesn’t concern itself with, like, the numbers, the spreadsheets, the statistics, all the stuff that the game is fundamentally made of, that is awesome. Blizzard can’t force you to stop staring at the wall, but they can encourage and discourage certain play practices and very rarely abolish them in their entirety. In Battlefields of Negotiation, Glas’s core insight is that Blizzard is not an omnipotent god in the World of Warcraft, the developers are not the Arbiter. Yes, they have immense influence and a form of final say, but they are ultimately a stakeholder who push their vision of the game, which either aligns or resists against the playerbase. Writing on Lineage II, Professor of Informatics Constance Steinkuhler described MMOs as defined by a “mangle of play”, the push and pull relationship between game developers and their players. Blizzard has access to certain tools and means of creating the “legitimate” World of Warcraft experience, they have control over the servers and decide what bespoke content gets made and implemented, but they are not the sole hand attempting to sculpt the game MMOs are “interactively stabilized” systems, coevolutionary, the emergent result of the intersection of designers, armed with their technology, and players, armed with their own practices. Blizzard has code, the players have codes of practices. Social codes of practice are ‘the tenets laid down by individuals within the game who have no design power or automatically conferred authority. ’ These social codes are often linked with perceptions of ‘foul play’ and the ‘spirit of the game’. But they go far beyond that, and can shape what is considered legitimate play in World of Warcraft. In Leet Noobs, Mark Chen sees success in World of Warcraft as dynamically defined. To be good at World of Warcraft is defined by consensus. Put another way, you are good if you do enough of the things that we collectively decided that good players do. Success is relative and socially defined. For a simple example, arena rating was very inflated in Season 2 of Shadowlands. While a typical season tends to have a median rating around 1600, season one was severely deflated with a median rating of 1426. Some behind the scenes tweaking leading into season 2 resulted in a median of roughly 1750. In the abstract both of these are fine, the actual underlying mechanics of matchmaking are all relative, the numbers are arbitrary. If you are a high level competitor the experience on a match-to-match basis is generally the same regardless of what the median rating is, the shape of the curve remains the same, it’s just shifted upwards. The hitch is that certain rewards, like titles, achievements, and armor, are hard coded to

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00)

specific ratings. So the inflation resulted in the prestige rewards being available to more players than usual, many of whom would never have qualified for it under different circumstances. This led to a rather vocal belief that these rewards were illegitimate, they ‘didn’t count’. Despite the game layer presenting these dragons as equivalent, there is a significant difference in their social value. For Glas, World of Warcraft is composed of various ‘idocultures’, groups of players linked together by particular systems of knowledge, beliefs, behaviors and customs. Big boy raiders and roleplayers have totally different ways of engaging with the world, there is no single objective way to approach WoW. These idiocultures exist in layers. You’ve got WoW players categorically, PvP versus PvE, Battlegrounds versus Arenas, Keystones versus Raids, Guilds, individual guilds, and of course cliques within those guilds, and players can move seamlessly between all of these different modes, ideocultures. These different idiocultures may subscribe to different social practices, and it is the interaction between these groups and the constant negotiation on proper codes of practice that Glas argues shapes World of Warcraft. It is the interaction between different groups of people that set the boundaries and fundamental meaning of play. Instrumental play has entrenched itself as the dominant mode of engagement with World of Warcraft. Through social codes of practice, players are subject to expectations that they may be completely unaware of. It is taken as value neutral, and objectively true, that expertise and success are the natural objectives of play, and thus the default mode of play that players owe to those around them. In other words: It’s bad manners to be bad at Warcraft. [Choice] We’re going to talk for a moment about the Great Vault. If you play World of Warcraft then you probably already know how it functions, and if you don’t then all you need to know is this; at the end of every week you get to pick one reward from a grid that fills up as you do specific group activities. Options are dictated by difficulty and volume. Do more stuff, get more picks. Do higher difficulty stuff, get stronger picks. Case study A: during the Shadowlands Season 3 race-to-world-first, in the US 2nd guild BDGG, our players were required to fill all 9 slots to their maximum potency on multiple ‘mirror’ mains. Since there is an element of luck to gearing up, the top players will prepare multiple copies of the same class in order to have a few pulls at the slot machine and maximize the chances of a favorable outcome. For this particular raid tier, our Moonkin player prepared three separate Druids, our Death Knight raider prepared four Death Knights, each of these characters had the same odds of being the main character, based hugely on the outcome of their Vault rewards. These are players who are paid, in dollars, for their time as part of a pseudo-professional eSports event. Achieving the absolute optimum performance in a raid environment is part of their literal job description. This expectation was only maintained until the progression period was over, at which point no one cared, job’s done, do what you want. Case study B: Venture, US rank 180th. They are a 2 night a week guild that has some very different ideas. If you’ll allow us this one indulgence, let’s just take a moment to dunk on an incredibly stupid opinion. If some of this goes over your head, don’t worry about it. I promise you will pick up the important parts. So it’s Season 3 of Shadowlands, almost 3 months into a 4 month season. Our good friend and contributor to the show, Crystal, has just come back to the game after a lengthy break, so we spin up a group and spend a few hours hanging out and doing dungeons. In terms of gear, Crystal is wearing old junk and so the rest of us have elected to bring alts. But a member of our group, the tastefully named Moistrainbow, opts to bring his main character, in part to make it easy but also to fill out slots in his aforementioned vault. Moistrainbow is doing this for a chance at one specific item, the coveted Unbound Changeling. This is one of the best trinkets in the game for healers and casters at this point in time. We end up doing over eight keys, but only about four of them at level 15. Moistrainbow does not do any other keys for the week. So, at the end of the week, this is what his vault looks like. He has 3 chances at the Unbound Changeling, two will be at the maximum possible level. The Changeling is 1 of 91 potential items. Huh. That’s good right? That’s good. Having consulted the team, a player getting their Best-in-Slot trinket is good. But Venture felt differently. They came down on Moist hard for not maxing out that final slot. There was explicit shaming, snarky remarks, even cowardly announcements from leadership about players needing to do their part for the team. And perhaps on the face of it, you’re empathetic to all that.

### [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU&t=900s) Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00)

But we have been pissed off about this incident for almost six months, so just give us a minute. Remember, this was a piece of gear generated solely for Moistrainbow, this is not typical loot drama, there was no alternate home for this trinket. The issue was entirely in the missed opportunity at a stronger version. Gear in Warcraft is comprised of stats that are assigned based on the individual item’s overall budget, dictated by its slot and by its level. These stats all do and mean a lot of different things. So the ultimate unit of measurement we use to value a piece of gear is to calculate its contribution to the player’s damage. How do we do that? Easy, we build a robot to play our character perfectly while wearing both items, ideally a couple of thousand times, and then compare the results. Typically, a higher item level should translate to a better item. However, trinkets are not like other pieces of gear, their item level can be deceptive. A trinket lives or dies on its effect. So this Unbound Changeling was the best possible trinket with an item level of 272, down 6 item level from the max. If we compare simulation results from a Destruction Warlock at the time, we can see the difference is barely perceptible on the graph. This particular simulation values the overall impact at 0. 6%. Here are some more details on that if you are interested. But we’ve buried the lead on this, because Moistrainbow isn’t a Warlock, he’s a god damn healer. And healers are a whole different deal. Healers don’t have the same simple, tangible benefit from gear as damage-dealers receive. For well over a decade, it has been standard practice for guilds to starve their healers of gear, on the basis that they don’t really need it. We don’t have any real way to even quantify this difference for a healer. While this would not be accurate at all, let’s be generous and assume it would match this point-six percent figure. This was in the context of a guild that was 9 weeks behind the progression curve, working on bosses that had been hit with the nerf bat several times. And just for those in the know, these people were six healing Mythic Lords of Dread in early June - like… I don’t even have the words. Gear was not their problem. So a close friend of mine was bullied and excluded from this group for not spending a few more hours running dungeons to load the bases for a one-percent chance at a maybe half-percent increase in performance, where that improvement was entirely disconnected from the problems the group was encountering. The reason we wanted to talk about this is that I sincerely could not imagine a more petty reason to give someone a hard time in World of Warcraft. Frankly, It's pathetic. This was not an instrumental practice, this was a social one. Here, the social value of the item level was wildly disproportionate to any tangible, mathematical value. The process of completing the necessary 8 keystones was a ritualistic reaffirmation of commitment to the group. The fact that the trinket was worth something was just a pretense to enforce the practice. [Dan] Early attempts at anthropological studies of virtual worlds were fraught. Some might look back on them as hopelessly naive, but I prefer to categorize them as bad. Many of them sought to reify online spaces, to rope them off from reality and paint them as a separate self-sustaining world, an actual destination as disconnected from the rest of reality as the moon or perhaps Australia. In Coming of Age in Second Life, Tom Boellstorff conducted a study of user experiences in Second Life, but critically did not involve the user’s real lives or any other websites or software in his analysis. The work drew criticism from Alex Golub, who identified this as a dramatic oversight. The virtual worlds of MMOs are not enclosed worlds. [Choice] My experience with World of Warcraft is not limited to the executable file on my harddrive. Discord, Twitch, Twitter, Google Docs, they are all ‘places’ where I can engage with World of Warcraft without ‘inhabiting’ World of Warcraft. I work as a contributor to Skill Capped, an analyst for BDGG and produce my own YouTube content. I might be at the point where I spend more time doing WoW outside of WoW than I spend inside it. So we have MMO-Champion, WoWhead or whatever, the term we will be using for this material is “paratext”. If you’re into a certain, lame, type of youtube video, “paratext” is a word you’ll have heard before. It’s one of those words that gets thrown around quite a bit, but is rarely given a clean definition. The concept of paratext was originally conceived by French literary theorist Gérard Genette. Genette saw a book as containing the text of the book, the primary work, but also containing other components that were necessary for the book to be complete but that were not an element of the primary text. You have the actual story of Warcraft: Durotan, but then you also have a cover, the title, a foreword and so on. Things that aren’t the ‘text’, but still influence the meaning. The title gives you some idea of what the book is going to be about, the illustration might tell you what a certain character looks like. For Genette, all of that additional text required to make the work complete, was paratext. But let’s be real, while this is all interesting, it’s a bit of a niche.

### [20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU&t=1200s) Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00)

It’s an acquired taste. The field of literary academia focusing solely on physical books is not a growth industry in 2022. There have been attempts to apply Genette’s framework to the internet. For instance, it could be said that this video’s title and thumbnail represent paratext. You saw the video recommended by YouTube and formed some expectation based on what you saw. If you’ve encountered the term paratext in the wild, it likely wasn’t Genette’s definition, but rather the definition attributed to Mia Consalvo. Consalvo is a Comms professor who tastefully and delicately but firmly expanded upon Genette’s formulation. [Dan] For Consalvo, paratext was any text that “may alter the meanings of a text, further enhance meanings, or provide challenges to sedimented meanings. ” So paratext are texts that exist to influence what we think of a separate, primary text. This is reviews, walkthroughs, pre-release trailers and so on. The material that “surround, shape, support and provide context for texts. ” There is a legitimate criticism to be made that this ever broadening definition is quickly becoming so vague as to lose all meaning. But for our purposes, this is a blessing. WoWhead and Warcraftlogs are paratext for World of Warcraft. Developer interviews are paratext. Forum boards and twitter threads have been called paratext. Podcasts, fan art, and machinima straddle the blurry line of being both texts and paratexts, converting the original text into a paratext that provides context and meaning to the derivatives. AddOns have been called paratext. Whatever this is, Paratext. [Crusader] 2 v 3 biiiiiiitch! Do do do do! Trash players! Traaaaaaaash! In most media, a movie or painting is produced, and then paratext is produced which can then act on the dominant text, a particularly incisive review can persuade you into a given reading of the story and themes, or fan fiction can emphasize the prominence of romantic tension that would otherwise appear subtle or even non-existent, that kind of thing. Maybe if a movie gets a sequel, the filmmakers will respond to what people liked or disliked and thus the paratext has influence over subsequent texts. It is common for paratext to alter the way that people talk about something, but for the most part that’s where it stops; it is very rare for paratext to go beyond that and actually alter a text. World of Warcraft, like many online games, has a bit of a different relationship. World of Warcraft is constantly being updated and altered, there is no static final product that can sit on shelves and be dusted off by critics decades later, and since Wow is constantly being updated so is a lot of the talk about WoW. The paratext is in a constant state of churn in lock-step with the game. At a basic level, paratext is a form of feedback for the developers. YouTube videos critical of certain changes, bad reviews of an expansion launch in major outlets, explosive forum threads or viral Tweets, the developers and writers are in an inevitable dialogue with these paratexts, as subsequent updates to the game will inevitably be read as either integration or rejection of the vision presented by those outlets. But beyond that, paratext interacts with social practices. Paratext emerge from, create and disseminate social practices. And what then tends to be prescribed are ideals of instrumental play. When a new strategy or idea is discussed, people make guides or posts discussing it and push it out in the world. That then influences how the game is played and what practices are considered correct and legitimate. The expressions of this can be surprisingly pervasive in really unexpected places such as which of two perfectly symmetrical hallways is the correct path to take. There is a shocking amount of social friction that can be generated by looking at two identical choices, and picking the one other players weren’t expecting. In The Sepulcher Of the First Ones these two paths at the entrance are the same. They’re literally identical. There is absolutely nothing to distinguish going left from going right. But for whatever arbitrary reason, Looking for Raid groups have established an entirely unspoken assumption, a rut-like convention, that you go to the right. If you get dropped into a randomly assembled LFR group and you lead the group down the left path? People will yell at you. These are the foundation of all the small rituals players engage in as they wordlessly navigate a dungeon for the fiftieth time. These are the rituals that allow players to just know what their expected role is, why

### [25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU&t=1500s) Segment 6 (25:00 - 30:00)

they are the one expected to stand somewhere or do something without anyone saying anything. Many of these silent ruts are just that: ruts of habit with no consequence, but the reactions get even more intense if there are consequences, even trivial ones, that can be mathematically quantified in some way or another as less efficient practice. [Choice] In the Plaguefall dungeon, the first boss, the delightfully named Globgorg, will summon sets of slime creatures that will make their way toward him. If any reach Globgorg, he will be healed for a portion of his health. Low-difficulty or uncoordinated groups usually just turn and kill the slimes. But at the highest difficulties, the standard practice is to focus damage on the boss and prevent the larger slimes from reaching the boss with ‘Crowd Control’. If executed correctly, this positioning and strategy trivializes the fight. And it’s not difficult, but the risk is enormous. Any breakdown in the management of the slimes can immediately brick an entire dungeon run. Upon first discovering this strategy on a Twitch stream, we became immediate evangelists for the Globgorg Gambit. We essentially became agents of the strategy, and went on to spread its influence even further. To quote Kristine Ask, “theorycrafting paratext both spread and stabilize theorycrafted expertise, co-producing a more performance-oriented playstyle. ” Put another way, when players theorycraft, when they come up with strategies, when they run math through spreadsheets to decide which option is numerically superior, and these strategies proliferate through the playerbase, they don’t merely spread the specific strategies, they also legitimize and elevate the act of theorycrafting itself and push all players, indirectly, towards a playstyle where optimization is the correct mode of play. World of Warcraft is so interesting because it has lived through multiple generations of the internet. Because the game is so influenced by paratext, changes in our capacity for paratext manifest as changes in the game itself. As the internet changes how we communicate, the way we talk about WoW also changes, and that fact changes WoW. In the game's early life, Thotbott and later WoWhead were, famously, major resources. But they were only as good as the information that users fed into them, and it took time for the sites to build up a repository of information. And that didn’t guarantee accurate information, just the existence of information. However, as Mark Chen points out, that didn’t stop the use of these sites from becoming expert practice. Actually the complete opposite happened. [Dan] Rather than being seen as cheating, using WoWhead was a thing that the best players did. And in 2006, it relied on word-of-mouth, you had to be told about Thottbot to learn about it. In her book Cheating, Consalvo points out how common it was for strategy guides or sites like GameFAQs to be perceived as cheating, as ‘illegitimate’ practices. So it’s interesting how WoW would invert that dynamic at a similar period of time. And as Ask points out, that’s, uh, weird. When World of Warcraft released, streaming video was in its earliest stages and it has existed through from that into the rise of HD videos on YouTube through to 1440p livestreams on Twitch. Like, this is actually worth stressing, because it plays into the way that information spread, information asymmetry, has changed over the course of the game. If you were watching a strategy video in 2007, it looked like this. But today, in the sci-fi future of the 2020s? [Narrator] Now, when the fight starts you’re going to want to spread and take positions somewhat similar to this. Now the reason you’re gonna want to be spread out like this is because Archimonde has an ability called Air Burst. Now this does 1500 nature damage in a 15 yard AoE around his target. [Dan] In his 2013 thesis, Play to win, Benjamin Egliston predicted the rise of twitch streams as a primary source of knowledge for World of Warcraft. The printed strategy guides that Consalvo wrote about already feel like a distant memory. In 2022, it’s common for players to seek out primary sources of knowledge in the form of twitch streamers or relevant discord servers. [cut to DK VoDs] Someone looking how to play a Blood Death Knight in keystones has access to livestreams from dozens of excellent Blood DKs. Potentially hundreds of hours of VoDs to comb through. Taken in its totality, the effect of all this material can be somewhat insidious. When discussing strategy guides, Consalvo observed that these guides taught young players that exploration, persistence and strategizing were essential to succeed in their given game. Essentially, the strategy guides taught its readers what it meant to be an “ideal gamer”. When Choice makes one of his dorky PvP guides and pushes it out into the internet to wither on the vine, it implicitly communicates that instrumental values are desirable traits.

### [30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU&t=1800s) Segment 7 (30:00 - 35:00)

The video inadvertently reinforces the idea that watching PvP guides is a good thing to be doing. Each video represents a brick in an echo chamber that carries a subtle, yet deafening resonance. The value ascribed to these videos turns the game’s best players into the game’s biggest celebrities. This accelerates the process, as their expert practices gain increasingly rapid adoption. Kristine Ask first observed this phenomenon over a decade ago. Imagine having this ringing in your ears for so long. What would that do to a person? [Choice] This robot is a product of paratext. It’s an understatement to say that simulations have been entrenched in World of Warcraft. They are a core pillar of the game, and often are the foundation on which other pillars rest. Best in Slot lists, gameplay guides, even boss strategies themselves, are built off principles that arise from simulations and the values they carry. When referring to the combat logging site, Warcraft Logs, Egliston said “such applications are now used casually, reinforcing competition at all levels of play. ” “Through the production of paratexts, competitive players are not only creating emergent tools for cultivating tactics, but also repositioning the skilled player as an influential force in game design. ” This state of affairs has become so normalized as to be seen as value neutral. In the case of WoW because of the pace at which paratext is incorporated into the game, either explicitly as feedback or implicitly as the dialect of design, the barrier between WoW and its paratext has become so thin as to be non-existent, and nowhere is that more apparent than the subject of AddOns. [Dan] AddOns are, of course, software that can be run inside of another piece of software. AddOns were a major pillar of PC gaming in the late 90s and early 2000s and they remain extremely relevant through to today. Many famous titles began their life as mods, many titles are socially considered unplayable without modding, some legacy titles are literally unplayable without them especially as hardware and operating systems leave them behind, and mods are a wonderful tool for budding game devs to learn the craft by poking around and fiddling with a completed project. Mods are still around, but mod support is far less pervasive than it was twenty years ago. Today, if a game has mod support it tends to be a hugely influential aspect of the game. Titles like Minecraft, Oxygen Not Included, Cities: Skylines, and indeed World of Warcraft, don’t see mod support as an extra little feature, but a core element of their game’s identity. So while mods haven’t gone away, their scope is far more limited. In 2022 the biggest titles are online competitive multiplayer games driven by live service monetisation. Titles like Counter-Strike or League of Legends place huge emphasis on their competitive and esport elements. These are games where the integrity of the competition is critical. Support for AddOns represent an unstable element that few game developers get involved with. In fact, most developers of esport-adjacent titles have an extremely harsh view on any third party software that interacts with the competitive element of their game. There are a few exceptions. Team Fortress 2 gives the player the ability to alter the game’s HUD. The power the user is given to change the UI is pretty dramatic, however they cannot add new UI elements, only alter the presentation of base elements. The closest comparison I was able to find to a WoW UI mod was, like, SimpleRadar for Counter Strike. This is a major point of departure for World of Warcraft. WoW wants to be counted amongst your League of Legends and Valorants, and while WoW laid a lot of groundwork for the modern live-service model, WoW wasn’t built to be like those games, it was Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot. Both games from the early 2000s with mod support. Mods in that era were significantly less potent, and the competitive, instrumental play of 2022 didn’t really exist in Everquest in 2003. There is an old allakhazam tutorial on modding in EQ from February 2003, it lists the following hypothetical uses of mods. “Mods can introduce new information or functions into the EQ interface, make things easier to use, or make the playing screen more pleasing to the eye. They can turn your cursor into a Nature Walker’s Scimitar, put a dragon in your spellbook, and put every important zone [location] or tradeskill recipe only a mouseclick away while you are in-game. ” These are not what we would today consider gameplay altering mods. They are aesthetic and ergonomic changes. These are precisely the kinds of mods that developers of the time would anticipate users creating. And the appeal of these mods are pretty clear.

### [35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU&t=2100s) Segment 8 (35:00 - 40:00)

Users are empowered to sculpt the game to their own liking, and that remarkable feature is almost entirely outsourced. Mods offer huge value to companies, who are the ultimate beneficiaries of the work of passionate volunteers. In 2003, the developers working on World of Warcraft were not making a competitive title, they were making an Elder Scrolls-Ultima-Everquest type thing. Of course, a few people would inevitably min-max the systems, like any other DnD descendant. But the decision to support mods wouldn’t be one with decades of consequences. Probably. [Choice] World of Warcraft in a lot of ways is a victim of its own success. Its extensive mod support is a relic of a bygone era. Mods today are more powerful than the founders could have imagined. We can argue whether or not Blizzard should have locked down their API more during development. But ultimately that frames the debate as Blizzard needing to ‘save us from ourselves’. The decision to give mod developers freedom, though perhaps naive, was rooted in player and consumer empowerment, as mod support so often is. It’s what modders created and our eagerness to embrace them that put us in this position. So while this may seem redundant, we want to take a second to draw a distinction between AddOns and, well, AddOns. On the one hand we have mods like OneBag, Aurora, and MyRoleplay. Mods that improve the user experience or offer some new feature without influencing combat. I would rope most of the Dragonflight UI customisation options into this category. On the other hand you have BigWigs and Gladius whose whole purpose is to improve player performance in combat. These are mods whose creation and use is predicated on instrumental and expert practices, which is to say: these mods exist to provide information that allows you to improve your performance. Since these mods are used explicitly in the pursuit of an advantage, a conversation about cheating and legitimacy naturally follows. Even though most players don’t frame this conversation in academic terms, a lot of us feel the subject of legitimacy hanging in the air, like a nerdy poltergeist. The mods we are most concerned with, the mods with the greatest influence on combat, are the ones that assume cognitive load. [Dan] The seminal authority on this incredibly niche concept is Mark Chen’s 2011 dissertation Leet Noobs. Chen wrote extensively about AddOns and their influence on raid practices as early as 2006, but his insights have only grown more relevant over time as the influence of AddOns has grown. In Leet Noobs, Mark Chen is concerned with how raid groups become successful, and the complex social and technical systems that emerge in a coordinated raid environment. Chen sought to demonstrate how AddOns could become essential to a raid. To begin, Chen develops on Edwin Hutchin’s concept of distributed cognition. For Hutchin, many cognitive tasks can be conceptualized as activities that can be offloaded onto material resources. If I take notes on a sheet of paper, if I jot down the passcode to a door or the location of a hidden treasure, I am offloading the cognitive tasks of memory onto the pen and paper. The pen and paper are assuming certain responsibilities, they are not passive things, but are actively performing a duty of carrying a cognitive load on my behalf. Chen takes this concept to its logical extreme and asks whether it even matters whether an actor in a given system is human or non-human. This concept is called object-oriented ontology, where everything exists equally, tools are treated as though they have agency. My brain and a pen and paper are equally capable of accomplishing the task of remembering my doctor’s appointment. There are certainly critiques that can be made of this framework. In the context of notetaking, it could be argued that the paper merely enhances my memory, rather than assuming responsibility. But as you will see, certain mods are so potent at taking on responsibility, that ‘agency’ is probably the best way to describe it. This leads Chen to a lengthy discussion of actor-network theory. ANT posits that the roles and responsibilities within a ‘network of activity’, such as an organization or a raid group, are distributed across multiple actors. And object-oriented ontology tells us that those actors need not be human. And since a raid group is nothing more than a network of actors, Chen argues that AddOns can become essential agents in a raid environment. [Choice] So, the AddOns we are most concerned with are the ones that take on some cognitive load that would otherwise be placed on players, individually or collectively. From this we can place mods on a kind of abstract spectrum of just how much cognitive load they carry. A lot of mods we just don’t care about, such as those cosmetic or ergonomic mods, because they carry no meaningful cognitive load in combat. On the other end of the spectrum mods like Gladius, Diminish or OmniBar carry a very high amount of cognitive load, because they desperately want to contribute to combat. The smallest example of a useful mod we can think of, our minimum unit of cognitive load, would be the crosshair. It’s not uncommon now to see top end raiders play with a WeakAura that marks the center of their screen, representing where their character is. Your character cannot, typically, leave the center of your screen. So strictly speaking, the crosshair is entirely redundant information. It is an actor whose role is to answer a question whose answer never changes. Where is my character, it’s in the middle of the screen, where it always is.

### [40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU&t=2400s) Segment 9 (40:00 - 45:00)

And yet if we show you footage of a modern raid, you can see how the crosshair can decipher the visual noise. ‘Where is my character? ’ is a simple question to answer, but having that certainty, not having to take the extra split second to find your dude in the chaos, that is valuable, and that task can be offloaded to two brightly coloured lines. In recent years, competitive raid guilds have made a big deal about the 21st raider, an additional player outside of the raid that coordinates players as the raid’s leader via livestreams. Traditionally that role was performed by a player within the raid, but the demands of the role have grown to the point now where a player within the raid is not expected to carry that amount of cognitive load. The cognitive load of managing the raid has been outsourced to an additional actor who is not on the raid frames. However, that idea is not remotely new. T. L Taylor, writing in 2009 on the subject of raiding in Molten Core, framed a predecessor to DBM as “a kind of autonomous agent, the 41st member of the raid. ” It’s quite common for raid mods like DBM or BigWigs to assign players to certain locations or to perform certain duties. On the Mythic Jailer encounter, six players are marked as the bomb, they’re about to explode. To keep their friends alive, they each need to jump in a unique hole. To minimize the amount of coordination or communication required, players offload the problem to a mod. An AddOn assigns each player their own hole, and your duty as a raider is to do what the robot tells you. By the time this goes live, progression for Vault of the Incarnates will begin in less than a fortnight. A huge point of discussion for us has been how to best utilize mods to assume as much responsibility as possible. Just how much of our Raid Leader could be replaced with MS Susan? [Dan] In Leet Noobs, Chen discusses at great length how the creation of threat meters affected his guild. We take it for granted today, but in early WoW the threat system was a black box. The lack of knowledge around threat meant that players couldn’t necessarily ‘optimize’ their damage, because if they did too much damage they would simply pull aggro and die. And you couldn’t put a number to what ‘too much damage’ even was. Chen describes in detail his guild’s theories on how threat functioned. I won’t get into the details, but it was a vision of threat that had rogues afraid to ever press Eviscerate, a core ability that famously was kind of important, it was worth a press. “Eviscerate does static damage! ” Early theories on threat were similar to Onyxia’s famous deep breath, it was shrouded in half-truths, vague uncertainties and a healthy dose of superstition. Threat in 2004 was what we’d today call a vibe, you felt it out. A scenario like this, where DPS are deliberately holding back their damage due to concerns about threat, significantly increased the difficulty of bosses. The superstition was replaced with absolute knowledge. “A mechanic that was previously invisible but still present was made visible in order to be made useful. ” The process of threat was now a process of real-time data analysis. If the rogue saw that they had a decent buffer on threat, they could press Eviscerate where they would have once hesitated. As tools, the damage meter naturally preceded the threat meter. But in the early days the value of damage meters wasn’t appreciated. Chen observed that his guild members initially struggled to see the purpose or value in these tools. He invoked the metaphor of ‘trying to describe a bicycle to a fish’. But once they were adopted, they quickly became essential to Chen’s guild, and the threat meter naturally elevates the damage meter. Because ultimately, the value of threat management is measured in damage per second. The creation of the damage meter created the conditions that allowed players to optimize their damage output, and thus legitimized the damage meter as a meaningful signifier of contribution. The reason why we articulate the value of gear in terms of damage per second, is because DPS is the base unit that we use to measure value to a raid. What was once the central pillar of the DPS experience was completely changed almost overnight. In the years that followed, threat became a rudderless system, ignored by players unless they chafed against it. Over the years Blizzard has had a few cracks at making it relevant again; but as you’ll recall, the creators can’t force it. In a modern context it is easy to view this as a positive thing - threat sucks and the game is better off without it sitting on top of everything. That may be true, but because nothing with WoW is simple, there is more to it than that. Chen describes a couple of different players from the early days, each with various quirks, but for narrative simplicity we’re going to merge them into the archetype of Wallace, a character who walks between encounters and doesn’t wear shoes - two real behaviors that Chen witnessed. “There was one of my guild mates, not guild mates because we were in a different guild, raid mates - since he was in a different guild. He played this character who refused to wear boots, or footwear.

### [45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU&t=2700s) Segment 10 (45:00 - 50:00)

Every piece of clothing or item you get can add to your stats. So to not wear boots is a handicap, but like, we didn’t care because he was roleplaying and having fun and stuff … And there was another person who never ran. Which is a total pain in the ass, because you have to wait for this person to take forever to get to wherever you're going, but he never ever ran in the game. ” The experience of the Wallaces of the world was to rapidly see the attitude of the world shift around them, from light roasting over silly character decisions to active hostility. Threat meters changed what raiding meant. To RP walk everywhere wasn’t a cute character trait, it was leaving the job of trash clearing to everyone else. Wallace’s lesser contribution could be portrayed with the objectivity of mathematics. This is how social practices change, and how mods can drive that change. Threat meters and damage meters created a new framework for which WoW could be viewed by players, and as an individual, you could either accept that change or leave. Wallace not wearing shoes shifted from being an self-imposed limitation with very nebulous consequences to being a very precisely quantifiable measure of exactly just how much Wallace was failing to Play Correctly. And in defining what it meant to ‘correctly’ play World of Warcraft, we narrowed down the legitimate means of inhabiting Azeroth. In doing so, the infinite world that so enthralled those anthropologists grew just that little bit smaller. A typical single player game may be built with instrumental play in mind, it may even distinctly cater to it, but peak instrumental practices can often be quarantined from mainstream view. Think speed running. I love Dark Souls 3, but have never seriously looked at speed running it. In comparison to regular play, the speed runs look incoherent, the two are disconnected to the point they’re functionally different games. A rich speed running scene can exist without it influencing my experience of the game. [WoW footage] World of Warcraft, in contrast, has a very different relationship with instrumental practices. You can’t really escape them, even if you try. Even the social elements of the game, things seemingly free of numbers, become vessels for the propagation of the numbers. WoW is a big game, and it’s extremely complex and is composed of nearly two decades of sediment, long strings of stuff positioned with little baked in explanation of what it’s for, why it’s there, or even if you should bother. When new content is introduced no one goes back to the old stuff to drop signs saying “hey, this place is kinda done, you sure you want to be here? ” There’s a lot of reasons for that, namely it wouldn’t even necessarily make the game better, but it’s a thing, and as a result it creates a lot of cul-de-sacs. If you stumble into the Molten Front in 2022 it’s kinda left to you to figure it out, the game’s not going to tell you that this content stopped being relevant November 29, 2011. So, given the existence of these cul-de-sacs, what is always the first piece of advice given to new players? Join a guild, find people who will help answer questions and offer guidance, people who are up-to-date on the game, who can collectively remember what things are, and point you at what you can or should be doing, who can tell you that the Molten Front is not only a cul-de-sac but also kinda lame and there’s not a lot of reason to be there. Whether it be that kind of spontaneous, organic help, or the systematized information from Elitist Jerks, guilds are repositories of knowledge. Kristine Ask describes guilds as communities of practice, as institutions that store information. They are communities defined in part by what they do and why they do it. From the very start, players are primed to engage with WoW as a process of adopting certain practices. World of Warcraft is a game with a large degree of interdependence, and interdependence is always a tricky mix of reliance and imposition. In order for you to accomplish your goals, you may require me to perform a certain task to a certain level of proficiency. And if I can’t do that, well, odds are no one’s going to be happy with what happens next. [Minus fifty DKP] WoW’s raiding environment pushes this to its most extreme. As you’ll recall, Chen describes a raid as a network of actors. Like a musical band, sports team or school project. As a scheduled, regular social obligation, it’s fair to say some degree of ‘success’ is required to keep players motivated to attend, no one wants to feel stuck or left behind. As discussed earlier, it can be said that success in WoW is socially defined, what it

### [50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU&t=3000s) Segment 11 (50:00 - 55:00)

means to be “stuck” depends on where everyone else is. The raid groups that perform the most effectively tend to do so by treating raiding essentially like work, their work defines what success looks like in the game, and in turn their practices become the expert practices as anyone who doesn’t want to feel stuck adopts their strategies, their group compositions, their add-ons, and their organization, because there might be a bunch of different strategies that do work, but we know theirs does work, and if it works it must work for a reason. [Choice] For instance, Limit achieved the World First kill of N’Zoth by using an external raid leader. That 21st player outside the raid we mentioned earlier. This was not unheard of, but it was not a common practice until Limit’s success. Three years later, it’s a ubiquitous tactic in the World First Race. And our friends over at Venture, the trinket guys, they love the external raid leader. From Twitch streams to full strategy guides, guilds like Limit create paratext that document their practices. This paratext not only contains the methodology to overcome a specific boss fight or fix a certain problem, but you’ll recall it also normalizes itself as a legitimate framework to apply to raiding. This is a byproduct of emergent play, the game’s best players have gotten very good at finding unintended solutions to the challenges put in front of them. Which means that what they end up doing can often be in conflict with what the intuitive solution would appear to be. What the designers may well have intended the solution to be. Over the course of years, theorycrafting has become so entrenched in the minds of even casual players, that it appears value neutral. The way we conceptualize a raid encounter, the terminology we use, the way we judge success, it is all informed from behaviors disseminated from the top down. Even when we do see innovation emerge from relative unknowns, like Restricted’s awesome Mythic Jailer strategy, those strategies are still products of instrumental practices. This goes beyond stabilization of theorycrafting as an abstract value, this is extremely tangible. If a critical mass of guilds are replicating the best guilds, then the behaviors of those top guilds have a direct impact on the whole culture. This level of instrumental play creates a player base that is better and more coordinated than they otherwise would be. Blizzard can either ignore this and create content that is trivialized by AddOns, or they can presume that they will be used. This has gradually resulted in content that presumes the existence of these tools, and thus pushes players towards adopting them. We have seen this phenomenon play out quite rapidly in the game’s competitive PvP. Mods that were once prohibited from tournament play have become permissible and their rate of adoption has skyrocketed. This had tremendous implications for the game’s balance. The best players, who had a culture of minimizing AddOn-usage due to tournaments being seen as the legitimate measure of success, suddenly picked mods up and started outperforming all expectations. Crucially, this legitimized mod usage in a PvP community more broadly, giving players permission to go crazy. This resulted in players who could react faster than before and make decisions with a certainty they never previously possessed. The game designers sought to offset these consequences, and the game now demands an airhorn whenever a monk casts Bonedust Brew. The only solution to the impact of mods is to rely more on those same mods. It’s a feedback loop. As the Race to World First has continued to pursue professionalism, we’ve seen AddOns become a crucial element of the process. For years now, the contending guilds have had honest-to-God software developers on their rosters to develop specialized software to assist in encounters. “WeakAuras” is a mod that is so powerful that it’s not accurate to even call it a mod. It is one part software development language, one part mod distribution platform. It would be easier to list the things that WeakAuras cannot do. It can be used to single-handedly rebuild an entire UI, it could be the only mod you ever use. But even that is underselling this thing. I would lose my job if I accurately described what we can do with WeakAuras. WeakAuras have become the first port of call for any problem in high end raiding. Applying the principles of cognitive distribution, the first question in response to any problem is ‘can a WeakAura handle that? ’ To which the answer is most often, yes! It is increasingly common to see mods form the spine of strategies for these top guilds. Many encounters, such as Mythic Fatescribe have strategies that rely on WeakAuras to effectively execute. Since deferring to WeakAuras is the first choice, it is extremely rare for an alternate solution to emerge. What is there to gain by digging your heels in and not using the assignment WeakAura for Jailer Runes? Since no other alternate solutions exist, these WeakAuras become fundamental tools that are adopted basically universally. The same tools designed by and for professional raiders end up as standard practice. A popular observation regarding AddOns is the way in which they enable or encourage surveillance among players. A mod like CT_RaidAssist would function if other players weren’t using it, but its effectiveness was predicated on mass adoption. In the case of these auras, they require everyone in the raid to use them in order for them to function correctly. If you join a raid and don’t have the correct pack installed, all the little elves that tell everyone where to stand during Prototype Pantheon melt down. This has led to the creation of WeakAuras to ensure you have the right WeakAuras. Sepulcher of the First Ones was dominated by this bullshit. [Dan] So to recap, strategies seep from the top down, the strategies that the best guilds use inform the techniques that will see mass adoption. Smart practice for these guilds is to offload responsibilities onto AddOns wherever possible, this results in a critical mass of strategies that build themselves around these tools. Since there is rarely incentive to develop an alternative practice, tactics grounded in these mods see near total adoption. These tools rely on all players running the software individually, so players have next to no say in whether they install this software. Because this practice is so widely adopted, Blizzard, quite rightly, develops fights presuming

### [55:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU&t=3300s) Segment 12 (55:00 - 60:00)

these tools will exist, further entrenching them as mandatory and incentivizing guilds to run even more tools to surveil raid members and enforce compliance. And this is how a guild like mine ends up mirroring the practices of professionals. We aren’t pursuing high ranks or looking to flatter our egos, we just want to enjoy ourselves. We just want a sense of forward momentum week to week. In Shadowlands, we’ve found ourselves pressing people to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do, whether that’s run keys, install mods, switch specs, or hell, switch classes. It parallels the experiences of Kristine Ask, who writes that her 2009 guild, “The Gummy Wolves”, sought to tempter their instrumental practices. They wanted to do well on their own terms, without just doing what Elitist Jerks did. They mocked the “no lifers” who took the game too seriously, but yet were continually lured toward adopting the ideas and practices and strategies offered up by Elitist Jerks because, well, they work. Because that’s the thing about these practices, they aren’t arbitrary, they exist because they solve these problems. And if adopting some of these techniques is what gets your raid group from stalling out to comfortably succeeding, that is a trade that some would be happy to take. But for those players who are left behind, clearly the problem is the game itself. The coevolution of WoW hit a dead end, if you catch my drift. This arms race between the devs and the players, it’s gotten out of hand. What we need to do is hit the reset button, abandon all this nonsense and return to a simpler time. Surely, that will fix this. When I first covered WoW Classic, I painted a picture of a game whose primary appeal was tourism, a chance to revisit a compelling game but ultimately one without lasting appeal to a broad playerbase. I’ve received the odd request for a follow up video every so often, and now seems like as good a time as any to indulge. In the recent marketing for WoW Classic, Blizzard has lent in hard on appealing to the nostalgia of a mainstream audience. The advertisement is aimed first and foremost at drawing back players who fell out of love with the game. I don’t know, maybe I was onto something. However, this is not how a hardcore audience conceives of Classic. [Choice] Classic is a return to when the game was more pure. For example, a big complaint from the Classic WoW purists are the difficulty modes that WoW introduced to dungeon and raid content, uh, in the first year of the Obama administration. Raids should be meritorious. Killing all the bosses in a raid should be an achievement, and players should be sorted from one another. Not everyone should be able to finish the raid. As an example, let's use Battle of Dazar’alor from 2019, the same year Classic WoW released. This was widely regarded as an excellent raid and may be among the best of the modern era. Here we can see the distribution of progression for the hardest difficulty. This is where every guild who killed a boss finished up. For instance, Dan’s guild killed the first two bosses on Mythic and so they’re somewhere in this column. As you can see, the largest portion of guilds never killed the second boss. Twice as many as actually finished the raid. The data tells us a story of the raid, you can see just how tough the 4th boss was relative to the first three by how many people never made it past it. The distribution drops hard after the first 3 bosses. This distribution resembles an ideal raid; sure, Dan and his 2-decade old friend group can see some bosses, but at a certain point it's time for the men to take over. This graph isn’t perfect, a Kungen-type would probably tell you that too many people are clearing the raid. But it could be worse, compare this to the Normal mode distribution of the raid. Normal mode represents everything that the classic purists hate about the modern game. It’s a version of the raid intended for any group to be able to finish with the bare minimum of organization. We can see from the data that the vast majority of guilds who entered normal mode finished it. This number is pathetic, it fails to distribute players at all. No matter your skill level you can expect to clear normal mode. A distribution like this, in the context of instrumental play, is terrifying. What does an objective-driven playstyle look like when the explicit objectives of the game can’t provide an appropriate goal? Sure, some portion of this stack are well-serviced by this raid, but some unknown number would be disengaged by this because it’s just too easy. What would the game turn into for those players if they didn’t have difficulty-appropriate content? A distribution like this is deeply unhealthy for the game. And it’s the reason why WoW’s early raids were so difficul- I mean, that’s fucking Molten Core man, it’s the first raid they ever made, of course it’s going to be eas- Uh, Dan, tag in. [Dan] A lot of ink has been spilled on why Classic hasn’t delivered on the difficulty promised by those early evangelists. We won't relitigate that in too much detail here.

### [1:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU&t=3600s) Segment 13 (60:00 - 65:00)

In short, players are better, their internet is better and for practical reasons the game runs on the final build of the expansion, so player characters end up being stronger than they ought to be. But the big one is the presence of paratext. It’s not just that the content is 12 years old, and everything has been solved, it’s that the solution has been widely disseminated and widely adopted. Like, here’s a taste of a 3-hour lecture on changes to Shaman going from Vanilla to the Burning Crusade. Please, I insist. “The testings of spell coefficients and weapon imbues I present here were done using a 2. 4. 3 TBC repack which is not an official Blizzard product. Despite this almost all spell coefficients and weapon imbue results corroborate what has been tested by multiple TBC-era theorycrafters. However, until an official pre-patch, beta, and/or live TBC game has been released, I cannot be 100% sure the spell coefficients and weapon imbue results are completely correct. ” Yeah, we were always going to demolish Classic, it was always going to go this way. This is not to say that a Sunwell or Ulduar raid is an unenjoyable experience for modern players familiar with the game, just that it is not strictly a challenging one. The issue Classic faces is that the vast majority of players are exhausting the content at an absurd pace, most within the first week or two. These are people who love the game dearly, and are magnitudes better than the creators could have imagined. What are they supposed to do to fill the time? The same thing as anyone else who has a deep love of a single game, they started speed running. Speed running has been an element of WoW for basically the game’s entire life. But before Classic WoW released, private servers took it to a whole other level, these servers would spin up and shut down so rapidly, that players developed techniques for speed running the entire game. Those players and their imitators applied their techniques to Classic WoW at launch, Molten Core was cleared in just 6 days, down from 154 days back in 2005. This was a big story in the Classic circles, but it didn’t really affect the tourists in a meaningful way at launch. Over the life of Classic, more and more players found themselves adopting more and more of these speedrun techniques. Maybe it was an organic process, people just looking to make their raids easier and find a way to make them more engaging. But I would suggest that instrumental play compels players to try and organize themselves by hierarchy. Remember, the elitist players who want to gatekeep content, they’re in here somewhere. So they are naturally going to elevate means of separating themselves from the pack. So speed runs practices became expert practices, and, well, over the course of years, that cooks your brain. Classic ought to have been our salvation from all this, after all, the content doesn’t demand the kind of optimization we’ve been discussing, not by a long shot. Classic should rightly be the playground of the super-casual, a sandbox for players who aren’t in any particular hurry to be anywhere. And yet, it's gone the other way, Wrath of the Lich King Classic has become a nightmare of instrumental practices. Yes, it’s not difficult, but the difficulty isn’t the appeal, instead it’s about going through this process perfectly. To be good at Classic is to learn and adopt the right practices. To play the right class as the right race, with the best professions; to level the quickest, get server first, get the Shadowmourne you never got. In some cases, it seems really weird. It’s like reliving high school. You’re going to pick better electives, be cooler, bet on the Cubs in 2016, and smash when you've got the chance. At the launch of Classic, these practices existed, but they were largely invisible. By definition, it did not mean anything to you that some guys were in Molten Core while you were in Wailing Caverns. Whatever. But after you quit Classic at level 47, these players stuck around. And these players established the practices of what it meant to play Classic. This process of riding the curve to the greatest extent possible, it’s not the exception, it’s the rule. Again, look at these distributions. No child is being left behind here, if you’re entering the raid, you’re finishing it. Returning to Wrath Classic in late 2022, there is a palpable feeling that you’ve walked into their space. A walk around Dalaran showcases this, every Death Knight and their ghoul is decked out in the best gear, the most prestigious vanity items, every player looks like the protagonist. Things that were once status symbols are mundane. The best gear is not a symbol of exceptionalism, it’s a symbol of parity. Having less than the best makes you less than everyone else. Because if you aren’t here, where else can you be? This was made crystal clear during the launch of Wrath Classic, when players put absurd gear requirements on groups for Utgarde Keep. If you wanted to experience Utgarde Keep, the famously easy introductory dungeon, on the first day of Wrath, a majority of groups expected you to have the best gear possible Choice thought it was just his sweaty server, but no, YouTuber AzAMOuS parodied this phenomenon and the comment section is full of accounts of similar experiences. “Madorc you are noy good geared enough for this dungeon. Wot? Is he joking? ” Like our trinket from earlier, it wasn’t actually about efficiency.

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There is a limit on how many times you can do a dungeon within a given time. It was not about efficiency, it was about reinforcing the ingroup and excluding the outgroup. The instrumental practices of Classic are no longer invisible, they’re in-your-face, they’re the status quo. [Choice] It is no doubt possible for a casual guild of 40-somethings to have fun on Classic, but like Kristine Ask’s guild back in 2009, these practices are endemic to Classic. There is no ivory tower for the best players to escape to, you all want to do Naxxramas this week. I would argue that casual players feel more out of place on Classic, because they disrupt an otherwise seamless flow of knowledgeable and overpowered players blowing through trivial content. You are their Wallace, bumbling into their Normal Utgarde Keep. This is the dissonance of the marketing of Classic. Blizzard wants Classic to be inviting to returning players, a chance to return to a humble era. Of course this is bullshit, Wrath was the expansion that gave us GearScore, which if you want to talk about mods influencing social practices, there’s a doozy for you. The social experience of Classic is immensely frustrating and incredibly fucking stressful. Once you step beyond the leveling experience, every dungeon or raid is a ritual of actions that has been accepted as standard and performed without introduction. It’s disorientating to have ancient dungeons being done with private server routes. Stuff you were meant to learn 7 years ago from a Russian Hunter on Warmane’s 7x experience BlizzLike pre-nerf Wrath server. There is a tangible sense that you are always behind the curve, always missing something. I was so excited for Classic TBC, before I learned that a bunch of gear from vanilla content was on the Best-in-Slot list, like the Mark of the Champion that was used all the way into Sunwell. It wasn’t that I needed it to kill Brutallus, but it was the knowledge that I was already behind. Classic pushes you into one of two archetypes, either buy in and end up here, or you reject all this, and embrace the identity of a tourist. The hardcore players congregate on the same handful of servers, the casual players find their servers starting to die and eventually either need to transfer to those same super realms, or endure their degrading server until it eventually becomes unplayable and the player drops the game altogether. In other words, it’s just like fucking Retail. Despite the promise of a journey to a better yesterday, we ultimately recreated the same environment as the main game. Only there is no border to delineate between the intensity of content. For example, BDGG are a pseudo-professional guild, our raiders are paid, in dollars, to play WoW and perform their best in the raid content, they have a lot of expectations to meet and our analyst team has been hard at work discussing what needs to be done in preparation for this upcoming event. One conversation that has not come up at all is the leveling process. Blizzard has had years to separate leveling from the hardcore elements of the game. Our raiders need to get a certain number of characters to make level in the first week, and some are genuinely going to blitz it, because it’s in their nature. But for our purposes, there is no need to prescribe a method to them or push them to get it done quickly. They are allowed to take their time, react to the cinematics with their viewers, explore, goof off, whatever. Many will experience the leveling of Dragonflight entirely organically, like you would, or as I will. By contrast, check out this selection of the guides on speed running to max level in Classic, there is a whole industry built on selling you instrumental practices. The funniest thing I saw in Classic were these guys who called themselves Team Supreme. So, for context here, I joined a kind of middling guild on a middling PvE server for Classic, and I really, I wanted to sort of strike that balance between hardcore and casual play. I wanted to do well and sort of skip the failure portion, but not have to go too hard. And within this guild were these guys, Team Supreme, and they were set on being the first people on the server to get to level 70 in the Burning Crusade. So I approach them out of sincere curiosity and ask them “hey, you know, what’s the plan? ” And they tell me that they want to do 60 to 70 in twenty hours. And that’s a… that’s a complicated number to have picked, twenty hours. If you’re a professional speedrunner, if you’re Joker, and that is his name, his name’s Joker, if you’re Joker and you do this for a living, twenty hours is a pretty doable number. But I picked these guys because they were a middling guild, I picked them because I didn’t want them to have heard of Joker. So to see so much energy being funneled into these five guys to do this one activity, and to hear twenty hours out of them, I knew they’d made a mistake somewhere. To be honest. Not to be rude, but to hear twenty hours out of these guys, okay, a mistake’s been made. I became obsessed with this because in a way it was like “I’m I the one out of touch, have these guys pushed this further than I could possibly ever have imagined, or have they made this crucial mistake. ” Seeing all this work juxtaposed with what I thought was just an ungodly number I had to know what was going on. So I ask them “hey, have you been on the beta, have you tested this strategy? ” To which, to my astonishment, they said yes. They log onto the beta, turn in all the pre-quests, that process takes a full hour and nets them one and a half levels. Which is, that’s a really good outcome, that is solid stuff. And so at the end of the first hour they’re doing well, looking really good. They then proceed to run dungeons for the next nine hours straight, so by the tenth

### [1:10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU&t=4200s) Segment 15 (70:00 - 75:00)

hour they are at level 65. The half-way mark. At which point they’re not going to do the full 20 hours of dry run on the beta, so they log off. Because it logically follows having just done 60 to 65 in ten hours, ten more hours of dungeon running will get them to level 70. Fuck. At times like this, people show you their true colors. I could have stopped them, I had multiple opportunities to stop them, but I wanted it to see this train reach its destination. I was revealed to be an asshole. But them? They streamed the whole thing, and when the penny finally dropped, they stuck together. They were deeply miserable, but they didn’t point fingers and they didn’t yell, instead they pushed through it, they didn’t sleep; 20 hours became 37. But they got what they wanted - they were the first group on the server to hit max level, they even finished two raids before anyone else. They won. They had months to pick up on their mistake, what business did Team Supreme have trying to replicate the practices of speedrunners? Well, because the internet told them to. What else were they going to do? As players, the push for Classic was in the name of recapturing an essence of the game that was lost, and Blizzard played their part - they gave us the executable file. But it ultimately failed, because we brought the bug back with us. We brought back the paratext industry that sells solutions, practices that trivialized content, and when we had nothing to do, we made a leaderboard out of our day to day experiences. Shout out to Rooster Juice and their 9:57 Heroic Nexus time. What a legend. [Dan] This discussion has been dominated by sociology and anthropology. We have talked to death about WoW as a series of behaviors and trends. But no one who came to WoW in its early years was drawn to it by the promise of adopting a series of social practices. The genre of virtual worlds are defined first and first foremost by just that - the world. We can see that in how Azeroth is regarded. It is considered the main character of WoW. Sure, we can make fun of the many self-inserts and over-played characters, but at the root it is the World of Warcraft. [Metzen quote from LFG - just says Azeroth is the main character] For many players in 2005, possibly even most players, the persistence of Azeroth and all that came with it, the day/night cycles, the weather, the scheduled events, the ability to walk in one direction for two straight hours and experience not a parade of procedurally generated noise, but hand-crafted vistas, we had experienced nothing like it. The world of Azeroth is beautiful. The raid experience is a different story. Raids in World of Warcraft can be severely taxing on hardware, especially for weaker machines. This was keenly true in the game’s early years when hardware was both less powerful and raid groups involved significantly more players. It was often necessary to lower graphical settings to improve hardware performance just to make the game playable. Or if you were Choice, and 13, be completely oblivious to that and raid at 2 frames per second. Incredible. Obviously, Choice’s performance was hindered by his single digit framerate. Altering your graphical settings would improve the game performance and result in better game performance, a better experience, a more playable game. This line of thinking opens the doors to manipulating the graphical settings for efficient play. [Choice] A simple example would be something like this. This quest involves collecting bottles that are obscured amongst the grass. You can either search the grass carefully for the tiny little bastard bottles, or you can open up the graphical settings, pull the ground clutter slider to 1 and remove almost all the grass in the environment, revealing the bottles completely unobstructed. Expert practice is to manipulate the world to the greatest extent possible in the service of instrumental play. The Potion of Inky Blackness is a cosmetic item that shifts the player’s perception of the world from day to night. It has no overt value, but when used in specific environments, it increases the contrast on certain visual effects, making them easier to see. In Sepulcher of the First Ones, the potion saw usage on 5 of the 11 bosses. The potion heavily alters the color palette of the environment; it doesn’t necessarily look bad, but it’s a bit shonky, and certainly not the environmental artists’ intended

### [1:15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU&t=4500s) Segment 16 (75:00 - 80:00)

for the space. A long-standing practice has involved using console commands to increase the follow distance of the ingame camera to its maximum extent. At its most extreme, it was zoomed further back than the isometric camera of Warcraft 3, the player character reduced to a barely-identifiable speck. This God’s eye view, like in an RTS, allows us to take in more of the play space. In 2016, Blizzard tried to reign this in and drastically limit the maximum camera distance. As we have come to expect the players took this in stride, adjusted their behaviour in response, and remained above all respectful in their dealings with their fellow man. Just kidding, it was a shitshow, obviously. It was among the biggest controversies of its kind. Blizzard, completely blindsided, eventually backed down and only made a smaller adjustment. They limited the camera enough to annoy players who had become accustomed to viewing the game like a World War 2 bomber pilot, but not enough to fundamentally change the look of the game. It remains a contentious topic to this day. Blizzard’s argument for a reduced camera was based on the nature of WoW as an RPG. They argued that players ought to feel attached to their character, and feel like they are within the world. The difference between this, and this. [Dan] It has been observed for a long time now that expert practice is to disable the diegetic sound, but particularly the game’s music. Raids rely on coordination, which is often done over voice chat software. To make sure communication is clear, players often turn the game’s sound way down, if not off altogether. The ‘auralscape’ of the environment is removed, before the instrumental player rebuilds it. Voice communication is one element, and then the alerts of AddOns serve as another. The game already features audio cues for critical events, cues lovingly crafted by designers trying to build a cohesive, subtle, thematic experience. But if you need to make snap decisions, maybe play it safe and replace Combustion with the wilhelm scream. In the absolute top Mythic Keystones, the combat is so busy that all possible senses are used to the fullest possible extent. [Cacophony of audio alerts] That cacophony, that’s the soundtrack of keystones. That’s the music of victory. [Gunshot noises] What’s really important to note is that the music of victory isn’t the music of the game itself. It’s almost perverse the degree to which the soundtrack, an entire pillar of the creative product, has been functionally erased from the game for the median player, having been shut off in 2007 and never restored. All of this is about tearing down the original soundscape of World of Warcraft and repurposing it as a means of success. Josh Keaton’s performance as Anduin Wyrnn is muted so you can better hear a 29 year old software engineer from Montana coordinate the most efficient movement between lanes of zombies. [Raid leader] Everyone needs to hard focus the Monstrous Soul because we don’t have lust, so... [Choice] And with all of this established, we can finally say the quiet part out loud. Players make World of Warcraft look fucking ugly. Instrumental play values clarity, but only ‘clarity’ in regard to information. It’s easy for this conversation to get caught in the quagmire of ‘personal preferences’. But these interfaces are not the product of pure creative expression, they are the product of instrumental practices. So let’s go straight for the jugular and highlight Mythic Archimonde as an example of what we’re talking about. Wrought Chaos was a pretty nuanced ability but to be brief, players needed to be aware of these arrows that telegraphed an upcoming attack. Clarity of the environment was incentivised. You can see that in how Limit positions themselves in this footage, it provides a clarity to what is going on, even through a kind of busy UI. There was another solution though, and it looked like this. Players used a WeakAura that would attempt to represent the trajectory of the beams as 2 dimensional vectors. It’s pretty accurate, but not really. As a means of trivializing the mechanic, it is highly effective. It is also objectively awful to look at. There’s no personal preference argument here, these vectors are entirely function. The Hellfire Citadel Archimonde encounter was already a kind of unpleasant fight visually, but players pushed it completely over the edge. Mythic Archimonde is a sincerely ugly fight to look back on, because it will forever be through this lens, this mess. Alex Golub called this the process of ‘decomposing the world. ’ And we’ve made an art form of it. In context, Golub is using the term ‘decomposing’ as the inverse of composing, a dismantling of the world. But the imagery of decomposing, of decay, that does feel appropriate. There is no conspiracy, no central authority, no plan, and yet we are uncompromising and unrelenting. For almost twenty years, Azeroth has been rotting through instrumental play and it all seems just… natural. [Dan] And if we could roll the credits there, that would be a great ending. If only it were that simple. The relationship between instrumental play and fun is messy. We are far from the first to observe these issues, they aren’t exactly hard to see. A common solution put forward is to heavily wind back, if not outright remove, the game’s AddOn support. Despite everything, that’s not a solution we’re super crazy about.

### [1:20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU&t=4800s) Segment 17 (80:00 - 83:00)

Mods offer unparalleled value to the consumer. There is a reason they were, and remain, so beloved by PC gamers. Mod support is not solely this engine of chaos that we’ve depicted it as, it is a means of empowering users. For that reason, the application of mods spans far beyond what you’d expect. The Tournament of Ages, the charity roleplay festival from earlier, is built off the back of AddOns. Disability is an enormous subject that is so important that we weren’t sure how best to handle it. For what it’s worth, Choice doesn’t like to make a big deal about it, but his eyes are cooked. He is very much reliant on AddOns to play his best, and so that will always short circuit this type of conversation. Mods offer means of accessibility that are both broad and granular, custom to every individual’s need, to a degree developers can never practically match. MDT, an incredibly complex mod that allows players to plan and share routes through dungeons, has dramatically altered the way that dungeons are designed, by equipping players with the tools and language to communicate complex, interesting, strategies. Arguably this whole process of negotiation, the arms race between players and designers, has resulted in more replayable, engaging, fun content. Mods are ultimately an expression of our own behaviors. Instrumental play, the act of attempting to solve a game, ironically can’t be solved. It’s not a puzzle box, but an expression of values, and mods are just one of the ways in which that manifests. For all the drama that can be wrung from Golub’s writing, his conclusion is not a tirade against mods or those who use them. Instead, Golub sees this as evidence that virtual worlds are made compelling not by their fiction, but from their reality. World of Warcraft is the product of the emergent collusion of developers and players, social practices go a huge way toward defining how we got to this point. To lay the blame at the feet of, just, players as a collective, to argue that the game would be improved if only Microsoft’s Activision-Blizzard-King just had the control it needed to realize its creative vision. Mm. Not loving that. World of Warcraft is an emergent culture that is constituted by its players, its inhabitants if you want to be romantic. Modern World of Warcraft is a mess in a way that only humanity could create. It is full of contradiction and hypocrisy, it rewards our worst impulses, before demanding payment in full. Certain anthropologists feared that WoW’s nature as a game would undermine its value as a site for cultural study, that incentivising behaviors would generate inauthentic data. But this feels plenty authentic to me. Golub suggests that in the face of digital spaces we retire the concept of the “real” world, especially as the idea is posed in opposition to the virtual, where experiences in one are true while experiences in the other are false, fake, or fictive, that whatever happens online it’s not real. This framing neglects to encompass the very real humans who utilize these spaces, bringing with them all their human attributes, their drama, the tangle of their lives. Virtual spaces are not apart from the world but an extension of it, and to this Golub suggests a much tamer distinction between the virtual world and the actual world, demoting the physical to a mere subset of reality. “The key feature of the actual world which virtual worlds must share with it in order to become compelling is not its visual and sonic “realism,” but the fact it is a forum in which we give our lives meaning by entangling them in projects we undertake with others. Worlds become real when we care about them, not when they look similar to our own”.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/41357*