Update! This article is well-intended but the truth has been revealed, and I guessed wrong. More information in the article “Wrath Emblem Design Revealed”. However, it kills me to delete text, so I’ll leave it here anyway. Also as a reminder to myself that design is opaque. Only raid or instance once a week? Wondering […]
Tag Archives: zomgepics
Overview of Loot Systems
Zomgepics! The joy, the sorrow. The absolute headache for anyone running a guild. This is a followup article to The Most Successful Loot Systems. Any system that involves large teams and limited loot (for example, PvE raiding in World of Warcraft) requires a system to sort that loot out. If your 25-person group takes down […]
Game Terms Overcome
I saw the following title on my gmail homepage: Wired: Awesomely Bad Defense Trinkets, Part II …and thought, “A WoW theorycraft article in Wired?! Is this a parody or…?” It’s funny, because of course the word trinket existed before WoW. However, in the last three years, I haven’t seen that word once outside of a WoW context, […]
Historicity and WoW
In his excellent book “Man in the High Castle”, Philip K. Dick talks about items and historicity: She said, ‘what is “historicity”?’ ‘When a thing has history in it. Listen. One of those two Zippo lighters was in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s pocket when he was assassinated. And one wasn’t. One has historicity, a hell of […]
Geeky Game Design and Automated Character Audits
My guild fell in love with be.imba and wowheroes a while back. Look, they have gear scores! Trumpets played throughout the geeky core of the guild: “Finally! A way to grade and communicate to people their relative progress in the endgame!” For example: “Hey, you’re not ready for X because you don’t have Y score. […]