Warlords of Draenor: Garrisons

One of the major reasons I started playing World of Warcraft again was a lot of positive buzz about Warlords of Draenor, and in particular Garrisons. I've enjoyed the Garrison, but it is in many ways flawed and I've been exploiting these flaws rather severely.

When I quit all those years ago the "minimum wage" of WoW was daily quests. Each day your average player could complete 25 of these, generally taking an hour or so, for a reasonable amount of gold. Savvy players could make far more gold by manipulating the Auction House, selling dungeon/raid runs, or crafting/farming rare items to sell, but daily quests were the primary source of gold income for the vast majority of players.

One of the more interesting aspects of the Garrison is that it replaces daily quests. Rather than require players to spend more so much time each day completing repetitive quests to secure their gold income, players can now send followers on missions that yield gold and other rewards. This takes mere minutes, and thus allows players to engage in the activities they actually enjoy.

This change is a fairly smart one, as much of WoW's original player base is aging, having kids, and losing hours of time they once spent player WoW to other tasks, goals, and needs. However, it has some unintended side effects.

With the time commitment for this income essentially non-existent, securing it on every character a player has is now fairly trivial. The time commitment, and repetitiveness, of daily quests made trying to complete them on alts prohibitive; few people had the time or patience to spend 10 hours a day on daily quests. Now that the same income can be achieved in less than a minute per character altoholics like myself are exploiting this quality of life improvement like crazy.

This only became worse when Blizzard recently introduced a follower trait which doubles gold rewards from missions they complete. Doubling one Garrison's gold income isn't a big deal, but doubling 11 Garrisons' gold income becomes silly quickly.

There are other aspects of Garrison design which obviously did not account for multiple characters. Each Garrison comes with a mine and an herb garden that fill with resources daily, but with just a couple of alts you get more resources than you can possibly ever use. Even more casual altoholics can become wholly self-sufficient, never needing to actually leave their Garrison at all save for dungeons and raids.

Garrisons are fun. I enjoy sending my followers out on missions and I enjoy the rewards I receive, but they were never designed with alts in mind. It's an oversight I expect Blizzard won't be able to correct until the next expansion, but in the meantime I'll enjoy these Halcyon days.

Grace

Some time go Roger Ebert, the acclaimed movie reviewer, wrote a piece stating his opinion that video games were not, and could not be, art. As one might expect, video game enthusiasts came out in droves to dispute this assertion.

More recently, Ebert wrote a follow up in which he had the incredible grace to concede two very important points, and essentially the entire debate. Having not played any video game his opinion, by his own admission, was effectively irrelevant. Moreover, because he had not and was not interested or willing to play video games, he could not make an informed argument against them being, or eventually becoming, art. In our modern age of stubbornly holding to opinions as though they were immutable and informed absolutes, this public declaration of ignorance stands as a beacon of refreshing honesty.

The honesty of this article comes in many forms and facets. It's not a matter of the article being forthright or factually correct, but the manner in which Ebert engages the discussion and, by extension, himself. He takes an honest look at the counter arguments, he takes an honest look at his own mistakes, and with honesty and humility admits the irrelevancy of his own opinion yet also acknowledges that it is still his honest opinion. This response is faultless, and a shining example of how to gracefully engage a debate.

Sadly, in today's world this careful, thoughtful and introspective approach is misunderstood. Many comments on this follow up from gamers indicate the exact type of predetermined observational bias which they decried as Ebert's error. Rather than reading and attempting to understand, they have read and attempted to directly translate.

It's an odd comparison, but I think it apt. Translators, at their best, are not concerned so much with wording as they are with communicating the meaning of one language and culture into another. That requires, above all else, understanding of both one and the other. A direct translation, however, is only concerned with running the words or text through a set of preexisting rules. The result of this second process is warped and alien, bent to the preconceptions or ignorance inherent in the rules themselves.

I find it odd that these comments even bother to declare that Ebert is a jerk, or that he's still a stuck up old fart or any other silly insults. The man admitted, as we had wanted him to from the moment the debate started, that he is not an authority on video games, that he can't declare them to not be art, and that he can not know whether they are or will become art. What more do we want? Is he to prostrate himself before the gates of E3, kiss the feet of Nolan Bushnell 7 times, and swear to never defile the sacred wakka wakka wakka ever again?

Gamers have in this article a great victory. Don't ruin it by being exactly the type of person we complained Ebert was.