Yes, but it would be silly to ignore that value added by personalization. If I can enjoy my character more by giving them a flaw which is detrimental to their tactics—always attacking orcs first because of some childhood trauma, even if there are more threatening enemies on the grid—that may be more valuable to me than the increased efficacy of attacking in the order most likely to result in the quickest resolution to the battle. Similarly, some of these “worse than worthless” things may be worth the value in style or sentiment that they lose in efficacy.
Also, the question is not “does the personalization value outweigh the reduction in efficiency”; the question is whether the person recognizes the fact that there is a reduction. If you say “yes, I know this is strictly less efficient, but I choose to take the efficiency hit, because I value the roleplaying benefit more” — then fine. If you say “this isn’t any worse! and I like it better like this!” — that’s something else.
“Always attacking orcs first” is not the sort of thing I am talking about; I am referring to the sort of thing that has no real roleplaying significance.
Then might I ask for an example of the sort of behaviors you’ve seen? I don’t deny that there are some which players may cling to out of a status quo bias, but I would guess that even in the counterfactual world in which the status quo bias doesn’t exist/doesn’t apply, there are some behaviors which seem worthless which are actually subjectively valuable. The person mentioned in the top-level post, for example—I wouldn’t be surprised if he enjoyed his flourish because it made him feel stylish. (It may be possible that the flourish was such that it wasn’t stylish at all, even from that fellow’s point of view, and he was mistakenly attributing an aversion to the effort required to fix it to a preference for the flourish, in which case I withdraw my hypothesis). My point is that we should be cautious about such things, unless the portions of the utility function which deal with the consequences of this supposedly “worse than worthless” thing are clear enough to outside observers such as ourselves.
In group content in WoW (i.e. teaming up with other players to kill big monsters — the high-end, maximally challenging game content), one of the key roles is the damage-dealer, or “DPS” (damage per second). One of the DPS classes is the hunter, a ranged attacker. The hunter’s job is to deal as much damage to the enemies as fast as possible.
Like all DPS classes, hunters have a wide variety of damage-dealing abilities, with names like Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot, Serpent Sting, etc. Traditionally, damage-dealing classes use their abilities in complex, shifting sequences, called a “rotation”, to maximize DPS. (The reasons for this are beyond the scope of this discussion.)
At one point, I was playing a hunter in high-end raid encounters, and consistently performing very well (doing significantly more damage than anyone else). I would often group with other hunters, who were not performing nearly as well. I often had conversations that went like this:
Other hunter: Hey, how are you doing that much damage? Me: Oh, I just use Steady Shot over and over. Nothing else. OH: Haha (they think I am joking) Me: No, seriously. Look at the damage meters. Steady Shot over and over, never use any other ability. That’s how you maximize DPS. OH: That’s dumb / that makes no sense / some other similar reply
OH: I still am not doing very much damage... Me:looking at damage meter You’re using Serpent Sting / Arcane Shot / thing that is not Steady Shot. Why? Just use Steady Shot. Literally never hit any other button. I promise you that is how I’m doing it, look at the meters if you don’t believe me. OH: But Serpent Sting does damage over time! Me: … it’s less damage than just using Steady Shot and nothing else. I can show you the math that proves this, or you can just look at the fact that you are doing the thing you said and doing much less damage than me. OH: Well, you can do it that way, but this rotation works for me. Me:gives up
In short, I met many people whom I simply could not convince that the way to maximize performance was to just hit one single button over and over. They insisted on complicating things, gaining no performance benefit and incurring a significant performance penalty. Note that none of these people ever said anything like the following:
“Yes, I realize that hitting Steady Shot repeatedly would maximize performance; however, I find that boring, and so I prefer to hit various buttons, because I find that more entertaining, and I willingly incur the performance hit involved.”
These were people who were denied spots in raids (and rightly so!), i.e. denied access to game content, on the basis of their poor performance. They had a clear incentive to improve, yet did not.
Those three things in particular all seem pretty obvious wins, though the analogy is limited—you wouldn’t literally want to do only those three things.
Something along the lines of “plow field, plant seeds, wait, harvest”? Of course, in real life we can just build machines to mash those buttons for us.
Or, the buttons that people keep ignoring: getting enough sleep, eating right, taking supplements (fish oil, D3, piracetam, etc.), not wasting time, learning new things...
Ah. I see your point now, and I agree that the available evidence points to the conclusion that the people in question refused to acknowledge that their methods were detrimental, instead of making a conscious choice to embrace a suboptimal strategy in exchange for greater amusement/variety/other.
With that in mind, the lack of variety (on many scales, not just a single rotation) is one of the reasons why I left WoW. I’d be interested in learning what you, who have acknowledged that the most effective option is “to simply hit one single button over and over”, enjoy about the game, if the best choice is so monotonous.
Well, one short answer is “not much anymore, which is why I hadn’t played in a long time before coming back recently”.
Another short answer is “I often say that WoW is a glorified IRC server; I mostly sign on to socialize with guild mates”.
There’s a longer answer, though, and it’s this:
Hunter is one class. I play others. Actually, I’ve always primarily played tanks, and tank classes have never been anywhere near so monotonous to play.
Even in 2006-2008 (the period of the Burning Crusade expansion, when the “only hit Steady Shot” approach worked), to say that hitting that one button repeatedly is the only thing you needed to do to win was a bit of a simplification. True, your rotation was as simple as can be; but there are other aspects of correct play, both in-the-moment (DPS cooldown timing; mana management; positioning and other things to do with fight mechanics; pet control) and during-downtime (gearing; pet optimization; writing appropriate macros). I can honestly say that playing a hunter in raids at this time was genuinely and unreservedly fun (in addition to the aforementioned other aspects of play, this was partly because being the best at DPS was very satisfying and rewarding).
The game content itself (story, characters, fight mechanics, etc.) is interesting (though this is less true recently, imo).
So, while I understand and acknowledge your reasons for not playing (and indeed they were my own reasons as well for a long time), I disagree with taking my aforementioned hunter experience as a strong example of WoW being boring.
They insisted on complicating things, gaining no performance benefit and incurring a significant performance penalty.
But have you ever wondered why so many people are so biased to do something like this?
As a videogame developer.… In reality if you were to go hunting a mammoth, things you traditionally carry would be relevant. Games try to capture that, but this is difficult, and mistakes are made, and something ends up overpowered. Then there’s also the health being single variable. In reality there would be different types of “health”, which can combine super-linearly or sub-linearly. E.g. you have a ship, and you keep shooting at one section. You made a hole, it is flooded, ship didn’t sink and you can shoot at this section all you want it is not going to sink. You need to shoot at another section. Or you can have a tank with reactive armour, that’s the total opposite, you need to hit same spot twice to take it out.
I’m… not actually sure what point you are making. I don’t think I disagree with anything you’re saying, necessarily, I’m just not following the thrust of your comment.
I will note that playing a hunter in WoW is sufficiently abstracted from any realistic hunting of any realistic creatures that trying to apply such logic to gameplay is… misguided. To say the least.
The point is, it’s an adaptation. Also, my anekdote… I used to play Spring RTS (and did a bit of development for). The behaviour that you describe is almost unobserved—instead everyone’s loudly discussing what single thing (out of an unit class) is the most OP at a given time/map and should be “spammed”. But then, it’s open source and hard to install, so maybe there’s a cut-off on IQ or age.
I quit WoW a long time ago, before Burning Crusade even, so I could be wrong. Still:
The hunter’s job is to deal as much damage to the enemies as fast as possible.
This is, strictly speaking, true, but somewhat misleading. A more complete description would be something like this:
The hunter’s job is to deal as much damage to the enemies as fast as possible, without causing the death of any players in the current party, including oneself (recall that dead players deal zero damage)
I have no idea how Steady Shot works, so the correction may not apply in this specific case; but in general, the more damage you do, the more aggro you draw. In the old days, it was entirely all too easy to deliver maximum DPS, thus grabbing maximum aggro, causing the boss to break off the tank and kill you in one hit (usually followed by the rest of the team). Because of this, some form of aggro mitigation was usually included in every DPS rotation, even if the mitigation was something as simple as “stop DPSing for a bit”.
However, I’ll take the time to respond in detail anyway.
This part is for WoW players:
Feign Death, for anyone who understands WoW but hasn’t played a hunter, instantly clears 100% of your threat. Misdirection transfers[1] all threat you cause for the next several seconds to another party member (typically you’d use it on the tank). For these two major reasons, and a couple of minor ones, hunters don’t have to concern themselves with pulling aggro by doing too much DPS (unless of course your tank is really bad, but then you have many other, larger problems).
[1] This is how it worked at the time I wrote about; it’s a bit different now.
This part is for everyone:
Yes, you don’t want to things that cause you to fail, such as (in this case) drawing aggro (i.e. causing the monster to hit you instead of the designated tank). If your relentless mashing of the Steady Shot button is causing you to do too much damage, then the answer is to stop mashing that button for a bit — not switch to some more complex and inferior rotation. Then, after some appropriate pause, you start Steady Shotting again.
After all, I didn’t say that the correct rotation was necessarily “hit Steady Shot constantly; never take your finger off that button even for a second”. My point was that using abilities other than Steady Shot was always inferior to using Steady Shot. Always. Steady Shot was provably the optimal ability to use, in 100% of cases where you wanted to be doing damage to the enemy.
It also goes almost without saying that the aforementioned less-competent hunters that I sometimes played with didn’t have anywhere near enough damage output to have the slightest aggro issues. No, there is no construal of the situation under which their behavior was sensible in terms of effective play. They might have found their play style “more fun”, while understanding that it was less than optimal — but as I mentioned previously, I’ve never heard anyone actually claim this as the reason for their behavior.
For these two major reasons, and a couple of minor ones, hunters don’t have to concern themselves with pulling aggro by doing too much DPS...
In that case, Feign Death and Misdirection essentially become a part of your rotation, so you’re no longer just spamming Steady Shot. You say:
If your relentless mashing of the Steady Shot button is causing you to do too much damage, then the answer is to stop mashing that button for a bit
But in this case, there might be some other rotation that outputs more damage than “Steady Shot, Steady Shot, nothing”. Or there might not be, I don’t really know, since I’d quit WoW long ago, as I said. All I wanted to do was to point out that thinking along the lines of, “I’m a DPS class, my goal is to maximize DPS without looking at any other variables” is exactly the kind of thinking that gets you wiped (and it sounds like you agree).
In a more general sense, this ties in to my other comment on the thread: it’s easy to say, “this action is worse than worthless”, but it’s not nearly as easy to say that and be right about it.
They might have found their play style “more fun”, while understanding that it was less than optimal — but as I mentioned previously, I’ve never heard anyone actually claim this as the reason for their behavior.
Just because they did not claim this as the reason, does not mean that this was not, in fact, the reason.
In that case, Feign Death and Misdirection essentially become a part of your rotation, so you’re no longer just spamming Steady Shot.
No… that’s not what a “rotation” is. The term refers to a sequence of offensive abilities. I say in this comment that
… to say that hitting that one button repeatedly is the only thing you needed to do to win was a bit of a simplification. True, your rotation was as simple as can be; but there are other aspects of correct play, both in-the-moment (DPS cooldown timing; mana management; positioning and other things to do with fight mechanics; pet control) and during-downtime …
You can have a rotation of Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, …, and use FD and MD when appropriate. You can also have a rotation of Serpent Sting, Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot, Multi-Shot, …, and likewise use FD and MD when appropriate. FD and MD do not take up “slots” in the rotation; they don’t replace offensive abilities (because one is not on the global cooldown and the other is cast pre-fight).
But in this case, there might be some other rotation that outputs more damage than “Steady Shot, Steady Shot, nothing”. Or there might not be, I don’t really know, since I’d quit WoW long ago, as I said.
No, there is not, which has been my entire point.
In a more general sense, this ties in to my other comment on the thread: it’s easy to say, “this action is worse than worthless”, but it’s not nearly as easy to say that and be right about it.
I don’t agree that it’s hard. It seems pretty easy, actually. If your complaint is that my statements were insufficiently precise (“Ah, but surely you have to hit your arrow keys to move your character! That’s something other than Steady Shot!”), or “technically incorrect” in some other way, then… I think you’re being somewhat pedantic, and missing my point. If you’re saying that my claims are actually false, in the sense that the opposite is true, then… you’re incorrect.
Just because they did not claim this as the reason, does not mean that this was not, in fact, the reason.
Granted. I find this unlikely, however. The people in question almost always maintained that their way of doing things was more effective, or at least least as effective, than mine (and blamed evidence to the contrary on having inferior gear, on bad luck, on other players… on anything but their own technique). Furthermore, as far as I could tell, said people never actually tried my way. (I say “my way”, but it’s not like I came up with it; all hunters in high-end raiding guilds used this approach.)
Here’s another formulation of my hypothetical instructions to underperforming hunters that you might find more to your liking:
“If you’re using Serpent Sting in your rotation, you’re doing it wrong. If you’re using Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot, Multi-Shot, Concussive Shot, or any other shot or sting in your rotation, you’re doing it wrong. Any time you consider pressing any of those buttons in your rotation, don’t do it; press your Steady Shot button instead. When I look at the damage meters after this fight, the only entry I want to see on the list of damaging abilities used by you is Steady Shot. So much as a single Aimed Shot showing up on that damage meter will tell me that you missed at least one opportunity to use Steady Shot. That is bad. You should have used Steady Shot instead. You would have done more damage that way, thus increasing our chances of success.”
I believe that should avoid accusations of imprecision or technical inaccuracy. If I have misread the nature of your disagreement, please elaborate further.
No… that’s not what a “rotation” is. The term refers to a sequence of offensive abilities.
Fair enough; I always thought that “rotation” included any abilities, both offensive and defensive, but your terminology works too. That said, if you have an ability that builds up aggro faster than the tank can compensate for it, then you will end up either casting FD periodically—and while you’re casting FD, you’re not casting Steady Shot. This is all that I meant. That said, I was unaware that FD was off the GCD; I don’t remember if it was always like that or if they changed it at some point.
I think you’re being somewhat pedantic, and missing my point.
Your original post made it sound as though you only cared about the final DPS readout, to the exclusion of anything else, such as aggro management. When I still played WoW, there were plenty of players who thought exactly that way; you couldn’t throw a snowball without hitting one. These people were the leading cause of death in dungeons. I understand that you are not one of them, but I think I can be forgiven for misinterpreting your original post, given the prior.
That said, in the more general sense the DPS aggro monkeys were victims of over-fitting; and my point was that declaring actions “worse than useless” is often—though obviously not always—a symptom of over-fitting, or perhaps merely of solving different goals. For example, the fencer who ends every move with a flourish might have a very different goal in mind (“showing off”, “roleplaying”, “added challenge”, etc.) than a purely competitive player whose only goal is “winning the match as quickly as possible”.
From the point of view of the competitive player, his opponent is indeed performing “worse than worthless” actions; yet the assessment is still incorrect.
From your description of events in WoW, I understand that the above probably does not apply to those Hunters whom you’d described; however, I still maintain that it is often the case.
That said, if you have an ability that builds up aggro faster than the tank can compensate for it, then you will end up either casting FD periodically—and while you’re casting FD, you’re not casting Steady Shot.
This is true, and in fact I have an amusing anecdote about this very fact (amusing in retrospect, of course).
I understand that you are not one of them [people who only care about DPS and not threat], but I think I can be forgiven for misinterpreting your original post, given the prior.
Granted. The prior is pretty strong there, true enough.
That said, in the more general sense the DPS aggro monkeys were victims of over-fitting
I’m not entirely sure what you mean here. Could you clarify?
From your description of events in WoW, I understand that the above probably does not apply to those Hunters whom you’d described; however, I still maintain that it is often the case.
Well, perhaps. I don’t have anywhere near as strong an opinion on this once we broaden the context beyond games (even to games I’m unfamiliar with); you may well be right. I wonder if we couldn’t try and break down the categories of activity in which apparently “worse than worthless” things can be reasonably construed as optimizations for different targets?
A couple of preliminary stabs at an answer:
Whether the person understands that, and acknowledges that, their behavior is not optimized for the default target, should affect our probability estimate of whether the behavior is just a failed attempt at optimization, or successful optimization for something else.
For our purposes, there’s a difference between activities or aspects of activities that have a performance component and ones that do not; e.g. fencing (people are watching you) vs. WoW huntering (no one can see what buttons your are pressing on your keyboard).
That said, in the more general sense the DPS aggro monkeys were victims of over-fitting
I’m not entirely sure what you mean here. Could you clarify?
Right, sorry, that was kind of a weird metaphor on my part.
Imagine that you’re building a classifier (f.ex. a neural network or something) that tells you which houses are “good” and which are “bad”. You have a bunch of features that describe each house; among them are longtitude and latitude. You feed some training data to the classifier, hoping that it will draw you some volume in the feature-space. Everything inside the volume is “good”, everything outside of it is “bad”.
Over-fitting occurs when you don’t give the classifier enough training data, and when you punish it too severely for any errors. Thus, it either ends up drawing a really convoluted shape that fits exactly those 5 data points that you gave it; or it ends up ignoring most of the features because they didn’t have as much of an impact on the outcome; or both. So, your classifier gets a perfect score on the 10 houses it knows about, and fails miserably at real-world data.
Similarly, these Hunters, and many WoW players in general, have been trained on low-level encounters, where the mobs are weak and the penalty for dying is small. They don’t know anything about aggro management, mana conservation, bandaging, etc… All they ever look at is the DPS readout. Thus, when they get to end-game content, they fail miserably.
You can sometimes see the same pattern occur in other situations, too. For example, programmers who are used to working with microcontrollers typically end up writing really terrible host-computer code. Their code is extremely fast and uses very little memory… and is also impossible to modify or maintain. In a microcontroller, using 2x less RAM is the difference between success and failure; on a PC, using 2x less RAM is usually not even noticeable.
e.g. fencing (people are watching you) vs. WoW huntering (no one can see what buttons your are pressing on your keyboard).
You might be right about that, though every WoW move does have a corresponding animation that other people (as well as yourself) can see. I know at least one person who picks their characters based on how awesome they look, but I have no idea whether that is a common pattern or not.
Knowing someone designed the game is prior knowledge. So each element of the game probably has a purpose. So you just use them and it becomes a habit which rationalizes itself if needed.
I have indeed also met WoW players who reasoned something like this: if X ability exists in the game, it must have a purpose! It can’t be the case that it is useless and not worth using; why would the game designers do that? Therefore, the people telling me not to use it must be incorrect.
Of course, this reasoning is incorrect (I leave off the full, general justification of why it’s incorrect), but one may legitimately hold the opinion that it points to a failure of game design. After all, shouldn’t all abilities given to the player be useful? Shouldn’t the aforementioned reasoning work? Why give me a button if I’m never to press it?
Well, there might be several reasons. The more fundamental one is what Monte Cook has called “ivory tower game design”: a design wherein the optimal way to play is non-obvious, is possibly obscured or obfuscated by the fact that the purpose of abilities the player gets is not stated outright (only what the abilities do is stated), and further muddied by the presence of options that are not even intended to ever be optimal (“trap” options, or, less disparagingly, “flavor” options).
Ivory tower game design is usually written about derisively, but I am a fan of it. In gentler incarnations, it adds much-needed cognitive challenge to a game (and Blizzard’s quest to strip the ivory tower out of WoW entirely has contributed much to the game’s sharply decreased attraction for me).
Another reason one might be given a button that one is not expected to use is situational appropriateness. There may be abilities that are useful when e.g. fighting a monster solo, by yourself, but not appropriate when you’re teaming up with other people. Other examples abound. Expecting every button to find an application in every situation is unreasonable.
Finally, it may be that whatever the game designers intended, what turned out was something else. A game like WoW is a very complex system. It’s difficult to predict the effects of all variables, even when you have huge design teams and vast playtesting resources at your disposal. And so: the only-Steady-Shot rotation, designer intent notwithstanding. Believing that anything that exists in the game must have been deliberately thus designed is akin to another, larger example of teleological reasoning...
(Magic Online is an online version of the trading card game Magic the Gathering, a draft is a type of tournament between a fixed number of players, and 4-3-2-2 means that the first, second, third and fourth place get, as prizes, 4, 3, 2 and 2 “boosters packs” with more cards.)
Yes, but it would be silly to ignore that value added by personalization. If I can enjoy my character more by giving them a flaw which is detrimental to their tactics—always attacking orcs first because of some childhood trauma, even if there are more threatening enemies on the grid—that may be more valuable to me than the increased efficacy of attacking in the order most likely to result in the quickest resolution to the battle. Similarly, some of these “worse than worthless” things may be worth the value in style or sentiment that they lose in efficacy.
Also, the question is not “does the personalization value outweigh the reduction in efficiency”; the question is whether the person recognizes the fact that there is a reduction. If you say “yes, I know this is strictly less efficient, but I choose to take the efficiency hit, because I value the roleplaying benefit more” — then fine. If you say “this isn’t any worse! and I like it better like this!” — that’s something else.
“Always attacking orcs first” is not the sort of thing I am talking about; I am referring to the sort of thing that has no real roleplaying significance.
Then might I ask for an example of the sort of behaviors you’ve seen? I don’t deny that there are some which players may cling to out of a status quo bias, but I would guess that even in the counterfactual world in which the status quo bias doesn’t exist/doesn’t apply, there are some behaviors which seem worthless which are actually subjectively valuable. The person mentioned in the top-level post, for example—I wouldn’t be surprised if he enjoyed his flourish because it made him feel stylish. (It may be possible that the flourish was such that it wasn’t stylish at all, even from that fellow’s point of view, and he was mistakenly attributing an aversion to the effort required to fix it to a preference for the flourish, in which case I withdraw my hypothesis). My point is that we should be cautious about such things, unless the portions of the utility function which deal with the consequences of this supposedly “worse than worthless” thing are clear enough to outside observers such as ourselves.
Here’s an example from World of Warcraft:
In group content in WoW (i.e. teaming up with other players to kill big monsters — the high-end, maximally challenging game content), one of the key roles is the damage-dealer, or “DPS” (damage per second). One of the DPS classes is the hunter, a ranged attacker. The hunter’s job is to deal as much damage to the enemies as fast as possible.
Like all DPS classes, hunters have a wide variety of damage-dealing abilities, with names like Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot, Serpent Sting, etc. Traditionally, damage-dealing classes use their abilities in complex, shifting sequences, called a “rotation”, to maximize DPS. (The reasons for this are beyond the scope of this discussion.)
At one point, I was playing a hunter in high-end raid encounters, and consistently performing very well (doing significantly more damage than anyone else). I would often group with other hunters, who were not performing nearly as well. I often had conversations that went like this:
Other hunter: Hey, how are you doing that much damage?
Me: Oh, I just use Steady Shot over and over. Nothing else.
OH: Haha (they think I am joking)
Me: No, seriously. Look at the damage meters. Steady Shot over and over, never use any other ability. That’s how you maximize DPS.
OH: That’s dumb / that makes no sense / some other similar reply
OH: I still am not doing very much damage...
Me: looking at damage meter You’re using Serpent Sting / Arcane Shot / thing that is not Steady Shot. Why? Just use Steady Shot. Literally never hit any other button. I promise you that is how I’m doing it, look at the meters if you don’t believe me.
OH: But Serpent Sting does damage over time!
Me: … it’s less damage than just using Steady Shot and nothing else. I can show you the math that proves this, or you can just look at the fact that you are doing the thing you said and doing much less damage than me.
OH: Well, you can do it that way, but this rotation works for me.
Me: gives up
In short, I met many people whom I simply could not convince that the way to maximize performance was to just hit one single button over and over. They insisted on complicating things, gaining no performance benefit and incurring a significant performance penalty. Note that none of these people ever said anything like the following:
“Yes, I realize that hitting Steady Shot repeatedly would maximize performance; however, I find that boring, and so I prefer to hit various buttons, because I find that more entertaining, and I willingly incur the performance hit involved.”
These were people who were denied spots in raids (and rightly so!), i.e. denied access to game content, on the basis of their poor performance. They had a clear incentive to improve, yet did not.
I wonder what is the equivalent of the Steady Shot in real life that I keep ignoring...
Perhaps “exercise, go out to meet new people, and keep smiling”?
You might want to try the munchkin and cheat codes posts in Discussion:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/h9b/post_ridiculous_munchkin_ideas/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/i3r/low_stress_employment_munchkin_income_thread/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/379/cheat_codes/
Those three things in particular all seem pretty obvious wins, though the analogy is limited—you wouldn’t literally want to do only those three things.
Something along the lines of “plow field, plant seeds, wait, harvest”? Of course, in real life we can just build machines to mash those buttons for us.
Or, the buttons that people keep ignoring: getting enough sleep, eating right, taking supplements (fish oil, D3, piracetam, etc.), not wasting time, learning new things...
Ah. I see your point now, and I agree that the available evidence points to the conclusion that the people in question refused to acknowledge that their methods were detrimental, instead of making a conscious choice to embrace a suboptimal strategy in exchange for greater amusement/variety/other.
With that in mind, the lack of variety (on many scales, not just a single rotation) is one of the reasons why I left WoW. I’d be interested in learning what you, who have acknowledged that the most effective option is “to simply hit one single button over and over”, enjoy about the game, if the best choice is so monotonous.
Well, one short answer is “not much anymore, which is why I hadn’t played in a long time before coming back recently”.
Another short answer is “I often say that WoW is a glorified IRC server; I mostly sign on to socialize with guild mates”.
There’s a longer answer, though, and it’s this:
Hunter is one class. I play others. Actually, I’ve always primarily played tanks, and tank classes have never been anywhere near so monotonous to play.
Even in 2006-2008 (the period of the Burning Crusade expansion, when the “only hit Steady Shot” approach worked), to say that hitting that one button repeatedly is the only thing you needed to do to win was a bit of a simplification. True, your rotation was as simple as can be; but there are other aspects of correct play, both in-the-moment (DPS cooldown timing; mana management; positioning and other things to do with fight mechanics; pet control) and during-downtime (gearing; pet optimization; writing appropriate macros). I can honestly say that playing a hunter in raids at this time was genuinely and unreservedly fun (in addition to the aforementioned other aspects of play, this was partly because being the best at DPS was very satisfying and rewarding).
The game content itself (story, characters, fight mechanics, etc.) is interesting (though this is less true recently, imo).
So, while I understand and acknowledge your reasons for not playing (and indeed they were my own reasons as well for a long time), I disagree with taking my aforementioned hunter experience as a strong example of WoW being boring.
Acknowledged. I mistakenly assumed that your description of Hunter DPS mechanics was meant to be a current and representative example of the game.
But have you ever wondered why so many people are so biased to do something like this?
As a videogame developer.… In reality if you were to go hunting a mammoth, things you traditionally carry would be relevant. Games try to capture that, but this is difficult, and mistakes are made, and something ends up overpowered. Then there’s also the health being single variable. In reality there would be different types of “health”, which can combine super-linearly or sub-linearly. E.g. you have a ship, and you keep shooting at one section. You made a hole, it is flooded, ship didn’t sink and you can shoot at this section all you want it is not going to sink. You need to shoot at another section. Or you can have a tank with reactive armour, that’s the total opposite, you need to hit same spot twice to take it out.
I’m… not actually sure what point you are making. I don’t think I disagree with anything you’re saying, necessarily, I’m just not following the thrust of your comment.
I will note that playing a hunter in WoW is sufficiently abstracted from any realistic hunting of any realistic creatures that trying to apply such logic to gameplay is… misguided. To say the least.
The point is, it’s an adaptation. Also, my anekdote… I used to play Spring RTS (and did a bit of development for). The behaviour that you describe is almost unobserved—instead everyone’s loudly discussing what single thing (out of an unit class) is the most OP at a given time/map and should be “spammed”. But then, it’s open source and hard to install, so maybe there’s a cut-off on IQ or age.
I quit WoW a long time ago, before Burning Crusade even, so I could be wrong. Still:
This is, strictly speaking, true, but somewhat misleading. A more complete description would be something like this:
I have no idea how Steady Shot works, so the correction may not apply in this specific case; but in general, the more damage you do, the more aggro you draw. In the old days, it was entirely all too easy to deliver maximum DPS, thus grabbing maximum aggro, causing the boss to break off the tank and kill you in one hit (usually followed by the rest of the team). Because of this, some form of aggro mitigation was usually included in every DPS rotation, even if the mitigation was something as simple as “stop DPSing for a bit”.
Your entire post is rendered moot by:
Feign Death
Misdirection
However, I’ll take the time to respond in detail anyway.
This part is for WoW players:
Feign Death, for anyone who understands WoW but hasn’t played a hunter, instantly clears 100% of your threat. Misdirection transfers[1] all threat you cause for the next several seconds to another party member (typically you’d use it on the tank). For these two major reasons, and a couple of minor ones, hunters don’t have to concern themselves with pulling aggro by doing too much DPS (unless of course your tank is really bad, but then you have many other, larger problems).
[1] This is how it worked at the time I wrote about; it’s a bit different now.
This part is for everyone:
Yes, you don’t want to things that cause you to fail, such as (in this case) drawing aggro (i.e. causing the monster to hit you instead of the designated tank). If your relentless mashing of the Steady Shot button is causing you to do too much damage, then the answer is to stop mashing that button for a bit — not switch to some more complex and inferior rotation. Then, after some appropriate pause, you start Steady Shotting again.
After all, I didn’t say that the correct rotation was necessarily “hit Steady Shot constantly; never take your finger off that button even for a second”. My point was that using abilities other than Steady Shot was always inferior to using Steady Shot. Always. Steady Shot was provably the optimal ability to use, in 100% of cases where you wanted to be doing damage to the enemy.
It also goes almost without saying that the aforementioned less-competent hunters that I sometimes played with didn’t have anywhere near enough damage output to have the slightest aggro issues. No, there is no construal of the situation under which their behavior was sensible in terms of effective play. They might have found their play style “more fun”, while understanding that it was less than optimal — but as I mentioned previously, I’ve never heard anyone actually claim this as the reason for their behavior.
In that case, Feign Death and Misdirection essentially become a part of your rotation, so you’re no longer just spamming Steady Shot. You say:
But in this case, there might be some other rotation that outputs more damage than “Steady Shot, Steady Shot, nothing”. Or there might not be, I don’t really know, since I’d quit WoW long ago, as I said. All I wanted to do was to point out that thinking along the lines of, “I’m a DPS class, my goal is to maximize DPS without looking at any other variables” is exactly the kind of thinking that gets you wiped (and it sounds like you agree).
In a more general sense, this ties in to my other comment on the thread: it’s easy to say, “this action is worse than worthless”, but it’s not nearly as easy to say that and be right about it.
Just because they did not claim this as the reason, does not mean that this was not, in fact, the reason.
No… that’s not what a “rotation” is. The term refers to a sequence of offensive abilities. I say in this comment that
You can have a rotation of Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, …, and use FD and MD when appropriate. You can also have a rotation of Serpent Sting, Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot, Multi-Shot, …, and likewise use FD and MD when appropriate. FD and MD do not take up “slots” in the rotation; they don’t replace offensive abilities (because one is not on the global cooldown and the other is cast pre-fight).
No, there is not, which has been my entire point.
I don’t agree that it’s hard. It seems pretty easy, actually. If your complaint is that my statements were insufficiently precise (“Ah, but surely you have to hit your arrow keys to move your character! That’s something other than Steady Shot!”), or “technically incorrect” in some other way, then… I think you’re being somewhat pedantic, and missing my point. If you’re saying that my claims are actually false, in the sense that the opposite is true, then… you’re incorrect.
Granted. I find this unlikely, however. The people in question almost always maintained that their way of doing things was more effective, or at least least as effective, than mine (and blamed evidence to the contrary on having inferior gear, on bad luck, on other players… on anything but their own technique). Furthermore, as far as I could tell, said people never actually tried my way. (I say “my way”, but it’s not like I came up with it; all hunters in high-end raiding guilds used this approach.)
Here’s another formulation of my hypothetical instructions to underperforming hunters that you might find more to your liking:
“If you’re using Serpent Sting in your rotation, you’re doing it wrong. If you’re using Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot, Multi-Shot, Concussive Shot, or any other shot or sting in your rotation, you’re doing it wrong. Any time you consider pressing any of those buttons in your rotation, don’t do it; press your Steady Shot button instead. When I look at the damage meters after this fight, the only entry I want to see on the list of damaging abilities used by you is Steady Shot. So much as a single Aimed Shot showing up on that damage meter will tell me that you missed at least one opportunity to use Steady Shot. That is bad. You should have used Steady Shot instead. You would have done more damage that way, thus increasing our chances of success.”
I believe that should avoid accusations of imprecision or technical inaccuracy. If I have misread the nature of your disagreement, please elaborate further.
Fair enough; I always thought that “rotation” included any abilities, both offensive and defensive, but your terminology works too. That said, if you have an ability that builds up aggro faster than the tank can compensate for it, then you will end up either casting FD periodically—and while you’re casting FD, you’re not casting Steady Shot. This is all that I meant. That said, I was unaware that FD was off the GCD; I don’t remember if it was always like that or if they changed it at some point.
Your original post made it sound as though you only cared about the final DPS readout, to the exclusion of anything else, such as aggro management. When I still played WoW, there were plenty of players who thought exactly that way; you couldn’t throw a snowball without hitting one. These people were the leading cause of death in dungeons. I understand that you are not one of them, but I think I can be forgiven for misinterpreting your original post, given the prior.
That said, in the more general sense the DPS aggro monkeys were victims of over-fitting; and my point was that declaring actions “worse than useless” is often—though obviously not always—a symptom of over-fitting, or perhaps merely of solving different goals. For example, the fencer who ends every move with a flourish might have a very different goal in mind (“showing off”, “roleplaying”, “added challenge”, etc.) than a purely competitive player whose only goal is “winning the match as quickly as possible”.
From the point of view of the competitive player, his opponent is indeed performing “worse than worthless” actions; yet the assessment is still incorrect.
From your description of events in WoW, I understand that the above probably does not apply to those Hunters whom you’d described; however, I still maintain that it is often the case.
This is true, and in fact I have an amusing anecdote about this very fact (amusing in retrospect, of course).
Granted. The prior is pretty strong there, true enough.
I’m not entirely sure what you mean here. Could you clarify?
Well, perhaps. I don’t have anywhere near as strong an opinion on this once we broaden the context beyond games (even to games I’m unfamiliar with); you may well be right. I wonder if we couldn’t try and break down the categories of activity in which apparently “worse than worthless” things can be reasonably construed as optimizations for different targets?
A couple of preliminary stabs at an answer:
Whether the person understands that, and acknowledges that, their behavior is not optimized for the default target, should affect our probability estimate of whether the behavior is just a failed attempt at optimization, or successful optimization for something else.
For our purposes, there’s a difference between activities or aspects of activities that have a performance component and ones that do not; e.g. fencing (people are watching you) vs. WoW huntering (no one can see what buttons your are pressing on your keyboard).
Right, sorry, that was kind of a weird metaphor on my part.
Imagine that you’re building a classifier (f.ex. a neural network or something) that tells you which houses are “good” and which are “bad”. You have a bunch of features that describe each house; among them are longtitude and latitude. You feed some training data to the classifier, hoping that it will draw you some volume in the feature-space. Everything inside the volume is “good”, everything outside of it is “bad”.
Over-fitting occurs when you don’t give the classifier enough training data, and when you punish it too severely for any errors. Thus, it either ends up drawing a really convoluted shape that fits exactly those 5 data points that you gave it; or it ends up ignoring most of the features because they didn’t have as much of an impact on the outcome; or both. So, your classifier gets a perfect score on the 10 houses it knows about, and fails miserably at real-world data.
Similarly, these Hunters, and many WoW players in general, have been trained on low-level encounters, where the mobs are weak and the penalty for dying is small. They don’t know anything about aggro management, mana conservation, bandaging, etc… All they ever look at is the DPS readout. Thus, when they get to end-game content, they fail miserably.
You can sometimes see the same pattern occur in other situations, too. For example, programmers who are used to working with microcontrollers typically end up writing really terrible host-computer code. Their code is extremely fast and uses very little memory… and is also impossible to modify or maintain. In a microcontroller, using 2x less RAM is the difference between success and failure; on a PC, using 2x less RAM is usually not even noticeable.
You might be right about that, though every WoW move does have a corresponding animation that other people (as well as yourself) can see. I know at least one person who picks their characters based on how awesome they look, but I have no idea whether that is a common pattern or not.
Knowing someone designed the game is prior knowledge. So each element of the game probably has a purpose. So you just use them and it becomes a habit which rationalizes itself if needed.
I have indeed also met WoW players who reasoned something like this: if X ability exists in the game, it must have a purpose! It can’t be the case that it is useless and not worth using; why would the game designers do that? Therefore, the people telling me not to use it must be incorrect.
Of course, this reasoning is incorrect (I leave off the full, general justification of why it’s incorrect), but one may legitimately hold the opinion that it points to a failure of game design. After all, shouldn’t all abilities given to the player be useful? Shouldn’t the aforementioned reasoning work? Why give me a button if I’m never to press it?
Well, there might be several reasons. The more fundamental one is what Monte Cook has called “ivory tower game design”: a design wherein the optimal way to play is non-obvious, is possibly obscured or obfuscated by the fact that the purpose of abilities the player gets is not stated outright (only what the abilities do is stated), and further muddied by the presence of options that are not even intended to ever be optimal (“trap” options, or, less disparagingly, “flavor” options).
Ivory tower game design is usually written about derisively, but I am a fan of it. In gentler incarnations, it adds much-needed cognitive challenge to a game (and Blizzard’s quest to strip the ivory tower out of WoW entirely has contributed much to the game’s sharply decreased attraction for me).
Another reason one might be given a button that one is not expected to use is situational appropriateness. There may be abilities that are useful when e.g. fighting a monster solo, by yourself, but not appropriate when you’re teaming up with other people. Other examples abound. Expecting every button to find an application in every situation is unreasonable.
Finally, it may be that whatever the game designers intended, what turned out was something else. A game like WoW is a very complex system. It’s difficult to predict the effects of all variables, even when you have huge design teams and vast playtesting resources at your disposal. And so: the only-Steady-Shot rotation, designer intent notwithstanding. Believing that anything that exists in the game must have been deliberately thus designed is akin to another, larger example of teleological reasoning...
That sounds like the same psychological effect as this.
(Magic Online is an online version of the trading card game Magic the Gathering, a draft is a type of tournament between a fixed number of players, and 4-3-2-2 means that the first, second, third and fourth place get, as prizes, 4, 3, 2 and 2 “boosters packs” with more cards.)