I just got done explaining why people shouldn’t be so uptight about the problems with World of Warcraft, and here I am preparing to explain the improvements I’d make on the game.

If I were in a position to do so, I’d make the following suggestions. I don’t expect that any developer will ever read them, nor do I think they’d follow them if they did. I spent years and years playing console games (which can’t be patched, at least not easily), talking with my friends about features that would be cool. I have never really expected these types of things to be implemented, but they’re fun to think about.

• The Bounty System: Diablo II used to provide trophies for PVP action. I’d like to see us get similar trophies on here. If I kill someone named “Alliancejerk” I should get a unique, time-limited trophy called “Alliancejerk’s Ear.” In general, these trophies should be worthless, but there should be a way to put a bounty on someone from the opposing faction.

  What I’m thinking is that you’d set up a “Bounty office.” When a particular Alliance member has been a nuisance, I could put a small bounty on that person’s head (or ear, as it were), and possibly also define the number of times I want him killed (I could put a 1g bounty on him for one kill, or ten 10s bounties, for example.) The first person to bring in that person’s ear gets the money. Each town should, at least, have a poster saying who the ten or so “most wanted” are, and how much the total bounty is for them. It’s a PVP-based “Honor” system, because as you offend the opposing faction more and more, you would generate higher and higher bounties, causing people to go out of their way to hunt you down. Every tavern should also have a “rat”, someone who (for a small fee?) will let you use the “/who” query for the opposing faction, letting you know the name, level, class, and general location of an individual on the other side.

• The Honor System: Activate the dishonor system. Set it up so that getting more than X Dishonor points in, say, a week, will turn all the guards at Booty Bay, Gadgetzan, and Ratchet against you until the end of the next week. If you get 2X dishonor points, the cities where you’re seen in a friendly light have guards who turn against you. At 3x, the cities where you’re honored turn against you. At 4x, the cities where you have the next higher reputation turn against you. See the pattern?

  Similarly, at 1x, whatever price benefits you might have in a given city should be nullified. At 2x, you take a price hit that gets progressively worse as your dishonor grows.

  I’m aware that there will be those who think that it’s cool to be an outlaw and who will abuse the system in order to make themselves such — I’m okay with that. There are those who like to live outside the “system” in the real world, too. To help them make it “on their own,” there should be a few “outlaw” vendors set up that sell trade goods and who can repair items, but nothing else. If the outlaws need anvils and forges and the like, they can fight their way in to one.

• Making the Honor System Stick: Every individual in a guild has a banner under their name that proclaims their guild. Their actions reflect on not only them, but their guild. I propose that honor points belong to the individual, but dishonor is shared by all members of the guild. Guild officers should be able to see the honor/dishonor stats of everyone in their guild. (Or, maybe, all members should be able to see these stats.) Since bad actions on one person’s part would have bad effects on his friends, the guilds will, no doubt, provide peer pressure to force people to act honorably.

  Does anyone really think that “gankers” gang up on people or attack people much lower than them because they just get a perverse thrill from it? They do it because their friends encourage it — they laugh at it. While it’s true that honor, for a few people, is something that matters only because of how they feel about themselves, most people only care about honor as it affects their standing in society. The symbolic “standing” represented by the current honor system is nice, but society in the game isn’t just the NPCs, and making dishonor spread to the guild will make the honor system have more of an effect in the society as a whole.

• Fix Dispel: Dispel is a very useful ability, when I can use it. Like most spells and abilities, if I’ve got a valid target selected, it hits that target. If I don’t, I get a nice cursor that lets me select that target. The problem is, unlike most abilities, Dispel can be used on friends or foes. If I’m in a battle, the only way to use it on a friend is to target them, which interrupts my fighting. I’m a priest, so that’s not a huge deal, really. The bigger problem is when I want to dispel something on myself. I can’t target myself, so I have to untarget everything (because everything’s a valid target), click Dispel, then drag that cursor back up to click myself. Not a problem, if I ever want to dispel something when I’m not being attacked. If I get attacked, though, it auto-targets what hit me, and screws up my dispel.

  The best way to fix that, I think, is just to make the user always manually click the Dispel recipient, though there may be other ways.

I’m sure there are other things I’d like to see changed, but those are the biggest ones.

I was a little bored today, and the World of Warcraft servers were down for maintenance, so I went to the official World of Warcraft forums. For those of you who’ve never been to a forum of that type, let me summarize what kind of thing you’ll see:

Company representative: These are our plans to make things better.
Anti-fan #1: u idits ned to fix this gm s o i can mor easy be a ashol on it, not try to impr.. um… fix stuf.
Anti-fan #2: Don’t you know that there are 800 other problems that need to be fixed? And that this will make things worse? You don’t care at all about the fan base. I swear, this game has a lot of potential, but it sucks. SUCKS, I say! … Oh, here’s my $15 for this month’s gaming.
Fanboy #1: This is awesome! You guys are great! Everything you do is great! Will you have my babies? Or, can I have yours?
Rational fan #1: I understand that you guys are trying, but could you possibly try to fix the following things? There are pretty simple ways you could do it, like this…
Anti-Fans #1 and 2: Shut up, Fanboys! Blizzard is the devil!
Rational Fan #2: If you hate the game that much, stop paying to play it, get off the forums and leave us alone!

Really, reading the forums is just an exercise in masochism. It’s like a bad car wreck. You don’t want to keep reading, but you just can’t help it.

I have my complaints about World of Warcraft, but very, very few of them have anything to do with the developers. See, people are idiots. You’ve got the PVP servers filled with people who don’t want fun, fair fights — they just want to win. They attack people 10-20 (or more) levels below them, because they get a kick out of ruining other people’s game. They watch while you fight a creature and wait until you’re injured before jumping in. Basically, they’re just jerks.

The thing is, if you joined a PVP server, you should have expected this. Sure, it’s annoying, and sure, I complain, but I don’t blame the developers. It’s the nature of a PVP server, and either suck it up, or move to another server.

In addition to the annoyances of the actual game, I’ve now discovered the annoyances of the forums. Most of these people, I’ve decided, are kids. They don’t remember what it was like to buy a game that was too hard for them and was never patched. They think, when a game is a challenge, the solution is to whine until the developers “rebalance” things so that it’s easier for them. This might involve changing some non-player dynamics, like quest rewards and the like, or it might involve cutting back on the amount of damage that other players can do.

Anyway, the point is, stop your freakin’ whining. If you don’t like the game, quit. Free up bandwidth for me and my friends.

As horrific as I find abortion, I’m going to agree with Deb on this one:

Stacy Dow, who was 16 when she found out that she was pregnant, is seeking compensation and damages for the “financial burden” of raising her daughter. Miss Dow, whose father has had to take on a second job to help to pay for his granddaughter, is claiming for “loss, injury and damage” suffered at the hands of Tayside University Hospitals NHS Trust.

Deb says, and I agree, that if you must sue over anything at all, this is an entirely appropriate thing to sue over. This young girl was the recipient of a legal procedure, which was botched. I see nothing wrong with holding those who botched the procedure responsible for the costs that she received because of that.

That’s not to say I’m defending the girl, exactly. I’m just thinking that if one considers an abortion a perfectly ethical (or, at least, legal) “service”, then one shouldn’t be surprised if people are held responsible for providing a sub-standard service.

That said, this quote sent chills down my spine:

She added: “I still don’t know if, or what, I’m going to tell Jayde when the time comes. I just hope she understands what happened and why I did it.”

I can’t imagine what that would do to a child. “Dear, I just want you to know that I tried to kill you before you were born. I succeeded in having your sister killed, but you survived. Then, because I was so put-out by your survival, I sued the people who killed your sister. But, just so you know, I love you.”

I’m thinking that might constitute a mixed signal, but I’m not sure. I’m usually all for honesty, but I’m not so sure that people should tell their children about their botched abortions.

Other posts:
Outside the Beltway

Here’s a bit of odd news from Germany. Danger: Exploading [sic] Toads! (All emphasis added):

The residents of Hamburg have been told to avoid one of the city’s lakes after a spate of mysterious explosions in the area. It seems the lake’s toads have been violently and spontaneously combusting.

…

Explanations include an unknown virus, a fungus that has infected the water, or crows, which in an echo of the Alfred Hitchcock movie The Birds, attack the toads, literally scaring them to death.

Okay, I’m going to withhold final judgement here, but I’d be completely shocked if the “terrifying birds” explanation is the real one. I’m pretty sure that if fear could cause toads to explode, we would’ve had some evidence of it before now.

All I know is that we’d better figure out what’s causing it soon, before the frogs decide that it’s all our fault and turn on us.

I’ve been without a telephone for the last couple days, so I haven’t had the chance to write any posts (or read anything to inspire any). So, instead, here’s a link that I’ve been meaning to share.

From a quick read of some random posts, I think Chris Clarke and I have little in common politically, but you must read his post titled “Life and Death“, about Chris’ relationship with a serial killer. He’s a great writer, and it’s a powerful piece.

It’s chilling from the very beginning:

One morning twenty years ago this month, I opened the front section of the Washington Post and read that my friend Stephen Peter Morin had been executed by the state of Texas for capital murder.

There are two reasons that that sentence, while accurate, felt awkward to write.

First reason: it has been a long time since I thought of Morin as a friend. He was a twisted, manipulative and malevolent person, and if I hate anyone in the world or out of it I hate him.

Second reason: I knew him as Ray Constantine.

Because of a mention Chris makes about Morin’s supposed deathbed conversion to Christianity, the comment section eventually devolves into an argument about Christianity, but the comments are still worth reading at least down to Chris’ mom’s comments.