Metron Ariston

The ancient Greeks had a recipe for long, happy life: "Metron Ariston" roughly translated: good things in moderation. The emphasis of this quote is in the word moderation. Why on earth he talks about this, you might wonder. Well, even Blizzard uses a paraphrase of this quote in its loading screens with 'Take all things in moderation, even world of Warcraft'.

Many people flamed this quote as the epitome of 'mediocre' in warcraft. Reminded me of the time people flamed Richard Bartle, saying who the hell he is to be talking about Warcraft. Being a researcher myself I am alway suspicious. What is said, by whom, why, how and where. I listen, I think, I accept, I defy.

So, that old quote came to haunt me the last few days. You see we had a few people leaving the guild in order to seek even more competitive guilds that would allow them to do realm first, or a higher number of raids, or possibly what in their eyes is a higher level of player ability - which alone in my eyes is a subject of great debate and analysis. Now, I am not knocking their decision, everyone is entitled to play the game however they want. I wish them good luck in their search. But in the same time I am going to defend my decision - which was taken a loooong time ago - to take WoW in moderation. And the fact I am done searching.

I am in a relationship that leading to marriage, and like all my close friends I decided to take that step by the end of the year. I am blessed to have a beautiful, considerate and extremely fun person next to me that puts up with my nerdiness and love for virtual dwarfs, swords, spells and dragons. I am working in the Telecoms industry and I get to socialise with my friends in coffee-shops (not the ones in Amsterdam, the ones in Athens where we only drink coffee in various flavours and gossip about politics, football and celebrities - so much for the ancient Hellenic civilization), bars, cinemas and our ultra-comfortable couches watching Champions League (soccer to my friends from the US), NBA and Euroleague basketball games, the national tournaments and quite a few HD movies. But more than anything else spend time with my GF and wife to be.

At the same time I am keen on seeing the content through, in Warcraft, gearing up my paladin with whatever I get my hands on, eager to experience fully another spec (being Holy for a loooong time), but most important feel that sense of accomplishment when my team hammers that dragon boss down. I consider my guild as a very capable bunch that has gone very far, albeit with a moderate 3-day raiding schedule.

But I will do all of the above in moderation. I will not loose my head over some achievement that I can not have now, but I will do my best to obtain it. In the mean time I will explore the content as much as possible, but I will be patient and take it one step at a time.

Why? Because I want all of the above. I do not want to sacrifice anything, I want everything to be part of my life, my leisure time. It keeps me sane, reduces my stress and allows me to keep a brave face when something awkward crops up.

Moderation ladies and gents is what keeps our lives full. I am not a sports champion, I am not a politician (OK that's a bad example), I am not someone who has to sacrifice a great deal to achieve something. I am the average punter, a bloke in his 30ies that likes what he does, how he does it and when.

Excuse the tone of the post, but there is one point on has to stand up to all the 'opposition' that claims its seeking more and more, whether that's justifiable or not.

No, I will stick to my decision. Wow is and will be one of my hobbies for as long as my relationship and future family allows me. It will be my Escape from my real life. I will try to go as far as possible, for as long as possible, doing as much as possible. But I will not replace my real life with that of my toons.

My opinion is simple. Sacrificing something should be done only for life-changing, life-defining actions and decisions. Otherwise, as Frankie said... Relax.

Quick 'n Dirty - II

The last few days have been spent running around the major cities, fragrance all over the place, seeking candiebags and rose petals. Unfortunately, meeting the ever elusive candie bag was as difficult as Baron's mount in the good old days. Blizzard claimed they hotfixed the drop rate but I saw no difference. In fact I had two bugs the very first day of the even but saw none in the next days. Ironicaly, the candy missing is the Be Mine! for the Be Mine! achievement...
Oh well, next year...

Still, I had some time to gather up gear for my Holy-PvP and Retry-PvE sets. I had some badges lying about, bought the odd resilience gear just to give it a try and compare it to my tier7.5 and went around pissing horde off with my shields :-p. I must say Holy palas remain powerful as ever, just as the class-population reports from top arena teams depict. Oh, and Death Knights are

I think its time to do some 10-mans to get some nifty epic items and then wait patiently for patch 3.1.

Not much to report otherwise, our Sarth3D tries are still going, hindered a bit from the lack of healers. But we will get those lizards eventually.

Dual Specs and Bartle's gamers

So, dual specs will be with us soon. Assuming there will not be any bugs with the interface, the switching and all that... there are few things worth considering.

The first thing is the mechanics. How will the switching take place?

It has been mentioned in the past:

Swapping specs (going from A to B) will truly be free in towns and possibly during the prep phase of PvP. In an instance it may cost a nominal fee (think reagent level). We want you to be able to do it when you want to do it, but we also don't want to slow things down if everyone is constantly flipping spec from fight to fight. But if it's free in town, then obviously it can't be more of a burden out of town than just hearthing and being summoned back is or nobody will use the remote option. (Ghostcrawler on Dual-Spec)

Interestingly, there is no mention of such a thing in these `preliminary' info. To be honest, I appreciate that there needs to be some policing of the changes, but from my completely lazy point of view I'd rather there was not. Still, certain assumptions like not being able to switch in an arena game, or in combat, go without saying. It remains to be seen what the devs will think about it. Besides, the mechanics might as well change along the way. What is mentioned, and could not have been otherwise, is that the glyphs and bars will change accordingly. Very convenient indeed, almost like having two separate chars (but with the same Achievements :P )

Second is the effect they will have in the game:

For starters, it is a massive addition in my opinion in the game. Almost groundbreaking. The reasoning is simple. For that, we must first look on gamers types. I have been fortunate enough to be in the same University as the controversial Richard Bartle, the 'father of MUDs' as we used to call him. He probably does not know my existence as I was under the supervision of another researcher there, who nonetheless always spoke highly of him. During my stay there I encountered his Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology (rough info here) which essentially classifies gamers in three categories:

• Achiever
• Explorer
• Socialiser
• Killer

These categories exist within each gamer by some percentage, as you can see in the aforementioned link. I'd like to think myself as a 50% Achiever , 25% Explorer, 20% Killer and 5% Socialiser (no, I did not take the test, its a rough estimate :-p). An AEKS for short. With all respect to R. Bartle, I am going to use his classification in a crude way.

Dual specs will appeal essentially to Achievers and Killers. Possibly under certain circumstances to Socialisers. But mainly the first two categories will see DSpecs as more appealing. Achievers will be able to use the dual specs towards... achievements. For example Holy Paladins might be able to go Prot, tank the odd instance and have higher chances of completing dungeon achievements. Others might do the same in raids or pvp. Arena teams can become more flexible. All in the name of going further, higher etc. On the other hand some achievers might think of gearing up a second spec almost to the bone is an achievement itself. With DSpecs switching between the specs and being in groups becomes easier. I would place in this group even pure DPSers, which may see less benefit in DSpecs, like say healers or tanks. Having the option of getting two tweaked specs (whether PvP-PvP, PvE-PvE or the more common PvE-PvP) is a step towards increasing the means for achieving more.

Killers will be benefited even more (killers can be healers, this is not a dps tag, more like a 'I crunch number and I pwn' tag, although the closest paradigm to Bartle's definition is the PvPer). The option of raiding like Holy and smacking things, like Retry in my free time, is hugely appealing for me. One of my paladin guildies wanted to tank for ages but due to our Holy heritage from the MC days, never put his mind to it. Now he has the chance. We all get to see another aspect of tha game, for which we were `cut-off' to a certain extent. We can explore the ‘art’ of that other elusive spec that we only tried the odd-weekend or in the PtRs and Betas.

Overall, I think Dual Specs will add a subtle variety in the game - the art of tweaking your toon, collecting the gear or mix and matching with your friends in groups. Its quite funny, but yesterday I was looking for groups to complete my Elders of the Dungeons achievement. One of my guild mates was in there with an alt, asking for people to join. But he was looking for a DPSer. Where is that secondary retry spec when you need it...

/Lance

P.S. The next post will be about the negative aspects of Dual Specs. Or to be precise, the issues that might arise once they are ingame.