How to fix human racial (advanced users only)

As the title says, this is for advanced users only. The only thread I've had deleted recently was because it talked about SW:TOR in the introduction (comparing Xfire stats during the first few days of its pre-launch week) but I kept being mildly surprised when threads I posted in the General forum were not deleted.

The solution is simple in essence: make people smarter so the genre is more competitive. This may seem like an incredibly oblique way of approaching the problem, but anyone who has played WoW for a few years or any other MMO knows that no matter how much 'technical' polish a game has (such as graphics), it can still fail at the most basic things.

But ignoring the above paragraph: someone who wanted a better game to play, and is willing to expend some amount of effort in pursuit of this objective has several options:
[ul][li]Make suggestions on how to improve WoW, and hope they are seen by the developers.[/li]
[li]Convince other players of some broad point, so that collective feedback on an obvious issue leads to change.[/li]
[li]Look for another game or activity, including those outside the MMO genre.[/li]
[li]Create your own company.[/li]
[li]Change the entire environment so customers are more discerning of quality, so good companies can acquire the financial base and a motive to create high-quality content whether they are established companies or new ones.[/li][/ul]

First, the reasons why many things in life which are not controlled by a single person have a tendency to 'jump the shark': this is because the number of people with awareness of factors that cause a divergence between short and long-term benefit is low; these people are not able to convince the majority of people involved in a decision or lack the confidence to do so and so quality suffers; and finally because there is not enough incentive for the people with a poor understanding of reality to improve their competence.

Specifically, if a company creates a successful MMO, the only compensation that many people at that company will feel they receive is a financial one, and even that isn't guaranteed. This is a slight simplification (for example, NCSoft's employees had a two-week vacation after the launch of Aion in the West, but the game continually declined due to unfixed problems) but one of the main 'rewards' that many people feel they receive from working is an upholding of social values, so in this sense it can lead to a decline in product quality for reasons entirely unrelated to poor understanding of game mechanics.


To skip further vague generalizations, MMO design is unconsciously being influenced by an existing conflict in society: the debate over whether or not economic unfairness and non-optimal resource distribution exists. If economic unfairness does not exist, then the way to maximize utility for society would be to do whatever necessary to increase GDP of a country, which is what most economists support. If economic unfairness does exist, then higher GDP or corporate profits are not morally justified if they increase wealth disparity and unemployment.

This argument is spelled out more precisely here: http://daughterofankh.blogspot.com/2011/11/ikebukuro.html

The reason the unemployment problem has not been addressed yet is described here: http://pastebin.com/Wy8B0hK9

How to address the unemployment problem is described here:
http://pastebin.com/SrWHNFxS

The benefits to currently employed workers by addressing the unemployment problem are described here:
http://pastebin.com/Q86Zhgs9


[b][u]The effect on MMO design[/u][/b]

The basic problem that WoW has is that people refuse to say whether they want WoW to be challenging or easy. http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3933043613

The secondary problem is that Blizzard accepts automatic support of its decisions by part of the playerbase as confirmation that the game is moving in the right direction: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3941314207


The motivation behind not stating one's opinion on difficulty is uncertainty over whether knowing the maximum or minimum limits of one's capabilities will lead to improved life outcomes. At the root of this uncertainty is a lack of understanding of why many people in life, even seemingly intelligent and successful people, seem to not be aware of or able to understand things that are "obvious" and whether it's possible to fix this problem, which compounds itself by causing people to ignore 'hidden' problems ( http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3933044382 ) and instead be content with a facile surface appearance of awareness of issues that support existing social values, such as people in the West who 'supported' protesters of the 2009 Iranian election by talking about it on Twitter.

And at the heart of [i]this[/i] issue is uncertainty over whether goals can be accomplished when deviating from the existing social order and measures of life success, due to lack of confidence in the abilities of oneself and other people. Somewhat circular but that's why it exists at all.

Since this has run into the hidden post limit (probably from HTML being added for links) I will keep typing.

So the general solution depends on increasing confidence in the ability to accomplish goals. This depends both on factors that one can conceivably influence, but also on factors that there appears to be no way for one to directly influence.

It's a commonly cited statistic that the United States of America actually has [i]less[/i] social and economic mobility than Europe, and that after accounting for inflation average wages haven't increased in over 30 years. The effect of this lack of economic options is seen in critiques of the book [i]Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia[/i] (which I have never read): 

[ul][ul][ul]. . . "Eat, Pray, Love is not the first book of its kind, but it is a perfect example of the genre of priv-lit: literature or media whose expressed goal is one of spiritual, existential, or philosophical enlightenment contingent upon women’s hard work, commitment, and patience, but whose actual barriers to entry are primarily financial." The genre, they argued, positions women as inherently and deeply flawed, and offers "no real solutions for the astronomically high tariffs—both financial and social—that exclude all but the most fortunate among us from participating."[/ul][/ul][/ul]
A reduction of unemployment would therefore be an important step in giving people more confidence to support accurate measures of achievement that benefit the rest of society by increasing efficiency.

However, one factor that affects goal completion, but which we do not control, is our own memory, as well as the memories of other people. An important aspect of memory is remembering the value placed in us by other people, which is influenced not only by overt measures of success but also by less immediately apparent considerations such as the ability to adhere to promises or to discern an effective course of action.
http://daughterofankh.blogspot.com/2011/01/buddha.html

Ultimately, one of the largest influences on the perceived ability to make effective decisions is a local variation in the accuracy of standards of achievement that results from a lack of awareness that these standards can be inaccurate — again, it's a bit circular. But in this case results from the migration of more intelligent people away from situations with inaccurate standards, without having any way to inform people who don't have any prior knowledge of how this situation relates to the rest of the world or the feasibility of convincing a group that supports an inaccurate standard of the eventual problem with this approach.

This can be seen in WoW with the idea that anyone who clears raid content is a hero, the introduction of LFR, and the subsequent devaluing of LFR and attempts to get normal and Heroic modes nerfed as well.

As a result, anyone who values raid achievements in WoW may feel that they are "worth" less for not being able to understand or prevent this situation, and as a result may feel that they were mistaken in thinking that certain persons cared about them.

Again, it's a bit circular. The solution in this case is to prevent measures of achievement from degrading in the first place by increasing awareness of the variations in their accuracy. This can be accomplished within a specific game if these fluctuations lead to sub loss and the game's developers feel no qualms about doing something that would lead to higher corporate profits and likely higher unemployment in society, or it could be accomplished at the same time as expanding economic options if the change is structured in such a way as to lead to this awareness of variation in the accuracy of people's judgements.

The links in the first part of this post would accomplish this goal, and are therefore the best way to fix human racials as those changes would have a clear benefit to society and would also resolve the debate on whether economic unfairness exists.