Yo Miss Medicina, I'm really happy for your post, and I'ma Let you finish, but Oculus has to be one of the best instances of all time!

*grumblegrumblesmartassesgrumble*

Dear WoW.com,

While I am grateful for you linking to my Oculus post, next time give me a heads up so I can fix the spelling BEFORE all the commenters rush over to tell me I should have dropped out of high school.

Love,

Miss Medicina

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So I think this will be my last post concerning Oculus, but there was just so much feedback, that I felt it warranted some response. When you wake up from a nap to find 40 new comments on a day old post, it can be tricky to keep up.

My post was about the development and design problems in Oculus. Not really the problem about the people running it. Let me preface this by stating that I have never dropped a PuG group as soon as I landed in Oculus. I actually don’t grind heroics, and the one time I did get Oculus… well I already related that story to you. Sorry, commenter who said that my fail level was obviously so high that I ought to unpublish my blog.
Point #1: It is actually very rude to queue up for a group, and then drop the moment you see what it is. Miss Medicina is all about being courteous.

Point #2: HOWEVER, it seems to me that there are a lot of people who drop group and leave because they really struggle with Oculus. Reading all the vitriol spewed forth by those who don’t see what the problem is makes me completely understand why someone wouldn’t want to stick around to slow down another person’s heroic run and be called (reading back to some of the names I was called…) an asshole, lazy, noob, lazy ass, stupid, L2P, directionally challenged (okay that one is totally true), coward, and so forth.

Why do I want to stick around in a PuG and learn an instance if I know that I am making the people who already know it miserable, and that they will, in turn, make me miserable by being so completely rude to me?

There are also quite a few people who commented and said that they happily explain the fight to newcomers, and are patient and helpful. I applaud you folks, I really do. Unfortunately, when you land on that first walk, you don’t know which type of player will be in your group. If you are already feeling self-conscious about your ability to run that instance, and have it ingrained in your head that people will rip you apart if you struggle with it, there's not a lot of incentive to stay. All of you nice helpful people need macros that you can spam as soon as Oculus finishes loading IMO.

Point #3: I think we sometimes lose perspective. World of Warcraft is a GAME. That means it is supposed to be fun. You know what I don’t find fun? PvP. Therefore, I choose not to PvP. I know a lot of people absolutely love PvP, and I think that’s great.

WoW is a huge game, people. There are tons of things you can do within its world. You pay to play, so you get to pick how you play. Do you have fun grinding dailies? Do you absolutely adore professions? Because I do. But a lot of people don’t. Does that mean I think they are lazy and worthless players? ABSOLUTELY NOT. They choose to spend their game time, for which they pay the same amount as myself, doing what they consider fun.

I don’t do grinds I don’t enjoy. If I don’t like a heroic, I will not run it. LFG tool has changed this, because it is random, and you do not know what you will get. The only reason I’m running a bunch of heroics that I have traditionally hated is because it is rude for me to drop group as soon as I see what it is. To me, this negatively impacts the game other players are paying for, and while that is perfectly “legal”, that doesn’t mean it’s not rude.

Oculus may just be the one exception I make to that rule, because trust me when I tell you that having me in your group, if you know what you’re doing, will make the run not-fun for you. I will die a lot, and get frustrated, and you will want to kick me anyway. Thus, the only way I can justify the rudeness of me dropping group at the start is by knowing that the time you spend finding a new healer will be much more pleasant than the time you would have spent dealing with my scrubbutt in your group.

Blizzard has made WoW big enough to have something for everyone. They fully understand that not everyone is going to like everything. That’s why they offer so many alternatives. And that is why I think the game is awesome.


BUT NONE OF THIS CRAP EVEN MATTERS BECAUSE I HAVE 100 REP WITH NETHAERA FACTION AND YOU HAVE NONE

The Know Your Blues Series

To start off this azure-overload, I’m going to begin with Nethaera. Why? Because she is well-known for playing a priest, and all three specs to boot. She’s also a rare Blizzard chick. And I’m a priest. And a chick. And this is my blog. So I’m biased. CHICK PRIEST POWAH

Who is She?

Her icon is a candle, blowing in the wind. She plays a priest (among other classes). She is known for her creative use of smiley-face emoticons, even when people are being characteristically rude on the forums. And she is also one of the few women popularly known to work at Blizzard.

Now, I’m not saying there are no girls at Blizz. But, when I think of women at Blizzard, the only one that comes to mind is Nethaera – and she is an awesome representative. I am very close to someone who works at a gaming company, and when he started his job there, he was required to sign a waiver in order to secure his employment that essentially said he would not sue the company if he were offended by potentially sexist or extreme female stereotypes in the act of doing his job. Think that’s completely unfair? Have you played Grand Theft Auto? Just sayin’.

While I doubt any such extreme policies exist at Blizzard, I still stand by the fact that Neth gets a hat tipped to her from this chick for no doubt putting up with a lot of crap. I wonder what she would say about Archetypes of the Female Gamer?

Her Posts

Are you looking for Priestly advice on the forums? If you have a question, Neth might provide your answer. In fact, depending on the current level of her caffeine consumption, she may provide even more!

· Holy vs. Disc

· Disc Priest Needs Advice (wherein Nethaera gives us a nice buffet of her various smiling emoticons, and informs us that coffee is her RL mana pool. Amen sister.)

· I am Your Tank. (This post was cute because a tank came and posted in the Healing forums… and was welcomed with open arms by the rest of us healers in addition to Neth!)

· I Am Outraged. (In which Nethaera admits that she has not farmed quite enough trolls to be at the level where she can offer up ponies)

· PSA Re: Vote-Kicking Healers. (Even Neth admits that sometimes she just can’t resist doing a LITTLE damage whilst healing…)

· Shadow Priest single target dps still too low. (This is the post where Neth tells us a bit about her experience as a priest.)

· Sometimes Zarhym likes to put on his Nethaera mask, and pretend he’s an awesome chick priest as well.

· One of the few instances I’ve found in which Neth actually gets a little irritated when someone calls a little piece of RPing a “girl thing”.

· She politely declines a creepy forum gnome trying to hit on her.

But I think out of all the posts that Nethaera has made or in which she has participated, this one is the best. In it, Nethaera tells us a little about her philosophy - one that manifests itself in the patient, emoticon wielding CM we know and love.

I prefer to see the positive side of people even when they are being negative. I'd rather people be invested than be apathetic. Apathy adds nothing to conversation and yes, too much negativity draws away from it as well, but apathy is probably the worst of it.

If you don’t read the forum, you may still have read the interview and announcement when Dual-Speccing was released. Nethaera was the official interviewer asking community questions about Dual-Speccing from Ghostcrawler.

Supposedly she is also involved in Blizzcast, but I confess that ever since being spoiled by the quality of Save or Die, I don’t listen to many other podcasts. I may start listening to this one in particular though – and I will confess that one of the main reasons will mostly be to listen to Nathaera. FANBOI ALERT

On the Wowwiki page for Nethaera, there is also a link to an unfortunate incident in which Nethaera herself was victim to some hacking/mimicking/insert relevant internet badness term here.

Why I Love Her

Obviously, I relate to her because she’s a girl, and I love that she’s a priest. But more than anything else, I love her attitude. I’m sure you have to have a pretty thick skin in order to survive as a CM on the forums, but she goes above and beyond by always sporting some smiley faces (maybe they are grimaces, I don’t know for sure), and giving more class-based help than most other CMs. I don’t see a lot of other CMs giving direct aid to people asking for advice. They are usually too busy moderating, banning, locking, trying to deal with a feisty troll population. Nethaera, however, takes the time to respond to requests for help.

As someone who loves helping others who have questions myself, I respect anyone who takes the time out of their day (I don’t even think it’s a requirement of her job as a CM) to cheerfully offer help and advice to those who ask.

So here’s to you Nethaera! From one priest to another, thanks for doing a great job. Don’t let the trolls get you down – you are admired and respected by many others in the WoW community.

You probably thought I was done in bashing Oculus. Oh how wrong you were. MWAHAHAHA. If you are not interested in psychology of gameplay, you may just want to skip this post, or at least just scroll on down to the very last section. You’ve been forewarned. Please don’t stop subscribing to Miss Medicina just because I find psychology of gameplay a worthy wall of text topic. This is what happens when instead of writing my thesis, I wax poetic on World of Warcraft.

In response to my own post yesterday, I can answer my title question quite easily. “Why Occulus is a Failure?” Because even some of us grammar Nazis just can’t spell it. Sigh. Thank you Shintar for pointing out my egregious error. Even Larisa gave me some light teasing, and informed us all who Occulus really is. If I had not misspelled Oculus in the title of the post itself, I would go back and correct my spelling, but now it’s out there, and everyone whose spelling I have criticized can redirect me to it.

Earlier I touched upon the problems with Oculus in regards to the Vehicle Mechanic. I stand by my hypothesis that this is one of the major issues influencing the overall failure of Oculus as an instance, but I wanted to post separately about something that was brought up in the comments that has also contributed to its failure.

Many people mentioned that their biggest struggle with this instance has nothing at all to do with learning the abilities of a new vehicle, and more related to flying. Oculus and Eye of Eternity phase 3 are both three dimensional fights. That is to say, they not only require you to properly move left, right, forward and back, but also up and down. For some of us this is a more serious problem than for others.

Traditionally our game fights are horizontal. Adding that extra vertical element can either be perceived as a welcome challenge that adds a lot to the fight for some, or a vertigo inspiring nightmare for others. I fall into the latter category. I won’t even talk about PvP fighting in Aion. Regardless, I don’t blame Blizzard. No, I blame my hippocampus.

The Hippocampus

First I will draw you a pretty picture that shows where your hippocampus is. By the way, I’m totally accepting commissions for my now famous MSPaint diagrams.

So what does your Hippocampus do? Well, to be honest, there is still some debate on this, but here’s what scientists currently think the Hippocampus does (simplistically of course). I originally wrote a lot more about the first two duties of the Hippocampus, but if you are interested in that, go to that wiki – I will try to cut this post down only to the relevant material.

· Helps you form new episodic memories.

· Another theory that is apparently not very popular currently is the inhibition function. The idea is that if you have hippocampal damage, you may seem more hyperactive, or have difficulty learning to inhibit your responses to things based on how you first learned to respond. You may seem a little… well, tweaky.

· The most relevant function of the Hippocampus to this post, however, is its role in spatial memory and navigation. This is related to the discovery of what is called “place cells” in the Hippocampus. These are spatial firing fields in the neurons in the Hippocampus, and they are triggered by recognizing your location, the direction you are faced, if you’ve been there before, where you suspect you are heading, etc etc etc.

The discovery of place cells led to the idea that the hippocampus might act as a cognitive map — a neural representation of the layout of the environment… Studies with animals have shown that an intact hippocampus is required for simple spatial memory tasks (for instance, finding the way back to a hidden goal)… the hippocampus plays a particularly important role in finding shortcuts and new routes between familiar places. Some people exhibit more skill at this sort of navigation than do others, and brain imaging shows that these individuals have more active hippocampi when navigating.

(Taken from the Wiki linked above)

Why am I bringing this potentially boring topic into a discussion about flying fantasy drakes? Because I suck at flying in a 3d environment, and I wanted to know why. I get disoriented. I don’t know what direction I’m facing, or where I’m heading. Even though I stated yesterday that the overwhelming problem with Vehicle Mechanic fights is learning the new abilities at the drop of a hat, that’s not actually the biggest issue for me and many others. Sure, I don’t particularly LIKE it, but that’s not enough to make me rudely drop group after landing in Oculus. However, my complete inability to navigate within a 3D environment is. And apparently I’m not the only one.

Do you find yourself getting lost in Oculus? Are you useless flying on your own near Malygos? In spite of all that, are you still pretty good at Flame Leviathon and jousting? If you do not have a problem with vehicle mounts on a flat surface, but struggle in a vertical one this may be your issue. If you have tried to PvP in Aion by flying around, and struggle with it, this may also be your issue. Hippocampal damage can have severe debilitating effects on your spatial navigation system. And it is not uncommon to have some minor degree of Hippocampal damage. It’s not just for people with Parkinson’s or Alzheimers Syndrome.

The Role of Depression in Hippocampal Damage

I’m going to throw some statistics at you, folks. Take them as you see fit – 326% of statistics are bogus, right?

· 15% of the population of most developed countries suffers severe depression.

· 30% of women are depressed. Men's figures were previously thought to be half that of women, but new estimates are higher.

· 80% of depressed people are not currently having any treatment.

· 80% of people who see physicians are depressed.

Basically, all that means is that a lot of people are depressed, a lot of people don’t take it very seriously, and I deliberately did not include the stats on suicide. It’s just too… well, depressing. I will save my soapbox rant about people misunderstanding exactly what depression is for another time, another place. That having been said, I know it’s a controversial topic here in the states, but please do not comment here to tell me all about how people are whiney, and depression is a silly pill-popping conundrum. Link me a peer-reviewed journal article on the topic and I will take you a lot more seriously.

And it probably comes as no surprise to you that a lot of depressed people play MMOs.

I can’t find the actual article Dr. Noshir Contractor wrote, or a copy of the presentation, but it was a pretty hot topic amongst MMO players for while. Here’s the skinny:

· 7,000 players of EverQuest II were surveyed.

· 21% of the players who didn’t play the game that often were depressed.

· 30% of the players who DID play the game often were depressed.

· "This could mean that highly active players get more depressed or that depressed people are more likely to be active role players," said the author of the study, Noshir Contractor, a professor of behavioral science.

One of the reasons Dr. Contractor won my respect is due to that very quote – showing a correlation between two things does not show causality. What that means in layman’s terms is that just because a bunch of depressed people play an MMO does not mean that the MMO makes them depressed. Maybe they play the MMO BECAUSE they are depressed.

Without reading the actual study, I cannot tell you how “playing the game often” was quantified, or how researchers determined who was depressed. I also can’t tell you if folks who play EQ2 are inherently different than those who play World of Warcraft. To someone who doesn’t play these games, we all may be the same. But to those of us who do, there could be vast differences. According to tables shown at mmodata.net, WoW has just over 11.5 million players. Aion is fairly new in North America, and has just south of 3 million players. EQII is listed as having around 200,000 players.

This leaves me wondering… if you surveyed Aion players (a game which is developed around a concept of three dimensional PvP via flying) and compared them to WoW players (which is not), would you see a lot fewer people sticking around to play in the Abyss in Aion if they are depressed? I know, I know, what a logical leap. But this is MY kind of theorycrafting, mmk?

Get to the Point, J-Bizzle

Alright, alright. TLDR like whoa, I know. I find this stuff fascinating. My point in this argument is actually very simple. A lot of people have a problem with Oculus and Eye of Eternity, not because they struggle to learn new vehicle mechanics, but because they struggle with the 3 dimensional, vertical aspect.

I am merely suggesting that since deficiencies in spatial navigation are often connected to problems in the Hippocampus, which is also linked to depression, and that since depression is allegedly more common amongst MMO players than the average population, maybe this isn’t really that big of a surprise. I’m not saying that if you suck at Oculus, you are Hippocampally challenged either. There is truth in the argument that a lot of people hate Oculus simply because they can’t zerg it, and therefore, in an attempt to maximize their badge-grinding time, drop out of it.

The hippocampus is often directly linked to depression.

The hippocampus is also linked to spatial memory and navigation.

Lots of depressed folks play MMOs.

So let’s just go out on a limb here, and say that IF 25% of WoW players suffer from some degree of depression, and IF depression does have a solid link to hippocampal damage, maybe, just maybe, 25% of players struggle with the Oculus because three-dimensional fights are particularly challenging for them.

The other 75% just hate those whelps in the first pull, yo.

I absolutely loved reading Larisa’s “List of 2009” posts. My favorite, of course, was the section on the community.

But there was something that made me so very sad.

The largest response to “Most Charming Blizzard Employee”? Ghostcrawler.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I rather like Greg Street. I personally think he does a pretty good job, and I’m a fan. I have nothing against the guy. But I strongly suspect that the main reason so many people voted for Ghostcrawler is not actually because he is so charming, but rather because he is just so well known. I think a lot of people voted for him because they didn’t really know of anyone else to vote for. I would venture to say that a lot of us bloggers actually spend most of our time reading blogs and NOT the forums. This isn’t a criticism, mind you. We can’t all be as supah-fly as Megan, yo.

But most of us immerse ourselves in the blogging community because we simply love the concept of community. Ahmahgah we’re infested with socials.

So really, if you say you A) Love WoW and B) Love the concept of community, then I personally think it’s important you be informed who our Community Managers are.

Here’s your public service. I’m beginning a new series called Know Your Blues to introduce you to the best of the blue, and tell you why. I mean, maybe you already know that I follow Bornakk around like a little lost puppy dog drooling in Orc-stasy, but truly, there are other awesome Blues.

This post is a bit of a placeholder. I intend to keep a little table of contents here with links to my future Know Your Blues posts, and to provide something I can link to that will give a bit of background info regarding the series.

• Jan 6th: Nethaera
• Feb 4th: Vaneras