They be takin' mah points

All week long I had been looking for a good topic to write about. I'd seen the phrase “welfare epic” a time or two and was ready to unload on all and sundry how wrong I thought everyone was about that. Using welfare as if it's an insult makes me want to hit people over the head with a bound copy of Das Kapital, just so you know. But thankfully, Blizzard released some patch notes for 4.2 that caused a bit of a stir and I rejoiced!

As things stand right now, Blizzard intends to lower the weekly cap of valor points from 1250 to 980, while leaving points gained from Zandalari dungeons and regular heroics at their previous caps. Previous heroic raids will give only half the current valor points and the new Baradin Hold boss will also drop a mere 35 points in a 10-man raid. This means that a player may cap their valor points in a week through Zandalari dungeons alone, but will find it difficult doing so by raiding. Cue the rage.

Mind you, I find the cap to be a nuisance at best, as I am a burst player. I spend weeks doing very little in game and then find myself in a fortnight of frantic activity. WoW and many other MMOs, especially those with a subscription model, do not support that kind of play-style. They live on sustained interest and need me to log on, if not every day then at least every week to not fall behind the curve too much, to facilitate uninterrupted subscriptions.

But let's examine the valor point system. One of the main reasons why we have valor and justice points at all (previously tokens) is to off-set the ridiculous RNG-heavy loot distribution in raids and dungeons. Intelligent loot, it is not. Downing a raid boss is its own reward, but more often than not it is also its only reward, because it drops a spell-sword and heal-plate in a raid without mages, warlocks or paladins. No matter how lucky you get, there is a very real limit to the items that a raid group can gain from a boss, the loot table is not an endless fount of beautiful sparkling epics.

Valor points offer supplemental items. There are the three set pieces and there may be a best-in-slot item for a particular spec or class, but the items on the valor gear vendor are hardly the be all, end all of progression raiding. They are supposed to be a personal back-up for when the RNG gods hate you personally, or as a way to catch up for people who've just gotten back into raiding or are doing so for the first time. Hardcore progression raiders don't need valor gear. In fact, the highest ranking ones are so far ahead of the curve that by the time they've collected enough points to buy their second item, they're already retiring until the next patch.

The point system is a way to reward and progress the unlucky. Currently a group may be getting more than 2 useable items per person per week, if the loot fits the group make-up and gear status. That same group may also get a whole lot of nothing, especially in 10-man when they may not have all classes or even all armor and weapon proficiencies present. To alleviate an individual's or group's bad luck, valor points are a constant, but much slower source of new gear. Equalizing prices and needs, right now it takes a bit less than two weeks for a player to get one valor item.

Of course, if there were no cap at all and we had an unlimited supply of points (perhaps as reset-able raids or valor points for all random heroics instead of just the first 7) serious raiders might feel they had to chain-run raids and/or heroics to the detriment of their own health and/or sanity. More casual players might then feel they were being punished for not being insane enough.

The valor cap was always an arbitrary number. It paced the gear progression of a single player – not a raid group. Any group tended to have some visible progress over the course of several weeks and across all their members, but a single player may outpace or fall behind that progress by being exceptionally lucky or unlucky (not just on loot rolls, but also simply by which loot becomes available that week). Valor helped with that by offering a base-line of sorts for each raider to gain new powerful gear.

Lowering the cap in the next patch to 980 points is essentially lowering that base-line, but there is also a lot more viable potential gear. The difference between old heroic and new normal gear is negligible and that ups the number of items a group may want and get in a given week, while still maintaining a reward floor for those few of us who still haven't even seen the one item they truly wanted.

As for the heroic dungeon caps – the reason these remain the same is extremely simple and has nothing to do with veteran raiders. Valor also provides new or newly returned players the ability to get ready for any given tier of content without having to raid through older content. Let's face it, if my new guild is raiding Firelands, they're not going to take time out of their schedule to pull me through Bastion of Twilight and Blackwing Descent first. It's an accessibility feature. Valor gear won't make me a better raider, but it will give me the chance to prove myself. It's also turnover protection for a guild or raid group, so perhaps it's better not to scoff at it too hard.

In conclusion, the new cap is hardly the end of the world for raiders – if it were any higher they would have to supplement their points with heroic runs and nobody seems to want that. It doesn't affect non-raiders at all, as they will still get the same amount of points. It's a tempest in a tea-cup filled with delicious troll tears.

Accessibility

A few interesting things happened this past week that caused a lot of predictable outcry in the community.

For one, they're taking my keys. Count me among the people who went a little bit off-the-rails at the news, not that I would stoop low enough to write lengthy comments on WoW news sites or anything, but I was a little miffed. See, I'm a Keymaster. I loved collecting keys, I loved that stupid achievement they took away, and I really did think the keyring was a fantastic little helper. It bothers me that they're going to dump keys that may or may not still have some use into my already over-crowded inventory, making me have to make the decision between keeping them for sentimental value or throwing them out when they were, to my mind, just fine where they'd been. But I suppose Blizzard know their messed up database the best and if it helps them get those damn tabards out of my bank, bring on the key-pocalypse.

The other thing, of course, is the announcement of 4.2 nerfs for tier 11 raids. There's a lot of talk, but this one is a change I whole-heartedly embrace. Don't get me wrong, I have high hopes my guild, with new, enthusiastic members strengthening our ranks, will manage to get that Defender title before then, but this change is great not just for casual guilds but for people who may, despite their best efforts, have not been able to do it until now.

You see, accessibility is not just about "casuals" or "bads". I've seen those two words thrown around a lot by people who should know better. Hardcore progression raiding guilds can and do choose their players for min-max reasons and will bench someone if they can't perform to highest standards and that's fine for them. If you want to be World First you have to be ruthless and performance must come before personality, unless the personality affects the performance of that player or the whole raid detrimentally.

But most raiders are not in it for hardcore progression. They want to experience the content, even face and defeat a tough challenge, but they want to do so with a set group of people they happen to like. For most players, personality and guild atmosphere comes first, and that's fine, too. In that case, however, a raid encounter needs to be more forgiving of individual situations.

My personal reaction time in a go/no-go situation (basic psychological reaction time to a stimulus being present or not present and pushing a button accordingly) is pretty good. With little distraction and a bit of tunnel vision I can get to around 300ms on a good day and barely miss. Older people, people more easily distracted, people with a lot of unavoidable distractions in their environment, or people who simply have worse brain function in that regard can have reaction times up to 700ms and more and miss more often. Having a construction site under your window isn't something you can just train yourself out of either. There is a lot of variability just in the base ability to see a thing happening and telling your fingers to move you out of the way, half a second between your best player and your worst, if they're both concentrating as hard as they can.

Then there comes the variability of gaming machines and internet connections. Not everyone can afford dedicated broadband or a personalized high-end gaming rig. Some people have to steal their time for WoW after a hard day of work on an off-the shelf all-round system that plays the game only sluggishly with most of the effects turned off, but they play anyway because WoW provides them with some enjoyment and they like to spend some time with their friends. Don't be the raid-leader who sits out a raider for being working class, that's just crass. There are people playing on shoddy connections that can't change it if they wanted to, maybe because they're in countries or regions that are still mostly dial-up dependent, maybe because their service provider is the only one around and can afford to mess them around with little to no repercussions. Seriously, who wants to be the raid-leader sitting out a guy or gal serving in the military abroad?

Making the current content more accessible and less punishing for random disconnects, slower reaction times, high lag spikes or lower levels of concentration is, in my mind, an entirely necessary step to make WoW enjoyable for everyone. Raiding shouldn't be just for the elite, there's too much effort and content creation involved that otherwise most people would never see. It's only fair to give everyone a shot. The encounters still won't be free loot, but at least now a high latency day for one of our raiders isn't going to make for three hours of frustration.