Spontaneous Monotony

After the latest ill-thought out gimping of the Guild Wars item drop system, I joined the many people on fansite forums who were questioning whether there is any point in buying Guild Wars 2, when it eventually appears. I’m not about to retract that, but I’m not as pessimistic as I was. I think that the farming nerfs (coupled with some tidbits from the GW2 previews - only the online ones, the UK GW2 preview mag doesn’t come out till next week) show that ArenaNet might be about to dramatically change the way we obtain weapons and other gameplay-necessary items in Guild Wars 2.

The current Guild Wars is fatally flawed. No, this isn’t a ‘Guild Wars is dead’ type comment. The problem ArenaNet (and, through nerfs, GW players) has is the way Guild Wars items are distributed. Quality items are distributed randomly - the only way to increase your chances of getting one is not through being better at the game, but by increasing the amount of time you spend killing the monsters who drop those items. Arenanet made a slight change to this with inscriptions - the ability to combine stats from different items into a better item - but they cannot ‘fix’ this properly because they can’t just rewrite the whole of GW1’s item system. Guild Wars 2 is the solution to this:

Design Guild Wars 2 so that players can get stat-perfect weapons without grinding or farming (I have a very fervent hope that the ‘improved crafting’ the previews talk about means a crafter capable of creating such weapons for a reasonable price). Those who wanted rare skins could still buy them for lots of gold from other players (e.g. some in GW1 want a req8 Fellblade - I’m happy with my collector sword thanks) but ordinary players would no longer rely on farming to get items they need to play the game normally. Remove the need for farming to get ordinary gameplay items and you remove any upset when farming is nerfed.

They did this with armour in GW1 and it has been one of the greatest success stories of the game - ordinary 1.5k armour looks nice (personally I think my 1.5k Druid’s looks better than the 15k version) and is stat-perfect. You don’t need to farm to get armour you need to play the game, but 15k armour is still sought-after by those who value the kudos of it. This shows that making stat-perfect items available to casual players at reasonable cost is a workable idea. If there is one lesson I hope ArenaNet take from GW1 into GW2, I hope it is that one.

If GW2 simply uses GW1’s weapon/item system and tweaks the instancing, then it will suck badger gonads. But if ArenaNet put as many changes between the game systems of GW1 and GW2 (such as the weapon acquisition thing I mentioned) as they did from normal MMOs when they made the original Guild Wars, it will be beyond superlatives.

I will begin this article with a controversial proposition: the Wikipedia community is fundamentally dysfunctional, and unless something drastic is done the great progress made by Wikipedia to date will grind to a halt.

At this point you might expect some tiresome comment about cabalism, process wonks, rogue admins or some other such tripe. Those ‘problems’ aren’t really the problem at all - the problem is that a community of people writing an encyclopedia even has such terms at all.

When I started editing Wikipedia ((My first edit as a registered user - I had made a few anon edits before then - was correcting a misplaced bracket on the 22nd of May 2004)), everyone was concerned with the quality of the articles we were writing. There was no need for a ‘process vs product’ flamewar, because nobody was behaving in such a way that we needed product-restricting processes to control them.

At some point in the intervening three years ((OK, I’m out by a month, who cares)), vocal elements within the Wikipedia community - both ordinary users and the hierarchy - have decided that they don’t want to write an encyclopedia any more. What they really want to do is spend all their time promoting or shouting down each other’s RFAs, deleting or saving each other’s articles, arguing about the said behaviours, arguing about arguments, and arguing about arguments about a policy controlling arguments. Still following me?

At the centre of this is the ‘instruction creep’ which has become overwhelming under the banner of ‘helping Wikipedia cope with a larger userbase’. Before, a Vote for Deletion ((Yes, I was editing Wikipedia back when a vote was still called a vote - now it is called a ‘Discussion’, and calling it a ‘Vote’ is doubleplusungood. This despite the fact that the process involves users giving the Wikipedia equivalent of Yea or Nay, and an admin counting those for and against deletion)) was a simple matter - was the article good or bad. People might have differing opinions as to when a poor quality article (or a very short one) became so bad as to warrant deletion, but on the whole everyone agreed that bad articles should be deleted, and good or mediocre articles (or those which had a reasonable chance of being improved to such a state) should be kept.

Now, on the other hand, everything is codified. What used to be ‘I don’t think this person, product etc. is important enough for a Wikipedia article’ is now an acronym soup of ‘notability policies’. What used to be ‘this is obviously some kid writing an article about his band, which plays in his garage’ is now ‘DELETE. national TV broadcast about them only 29 minutes long, therefore fails WP:MUSIC’ ((I’m really not kidding about that one!)). When did Wikipedia users stop being judges of article content and start being cybermen?

Hopefully you are now aware of the problems ((If you weren’t already)). The catch is that I don’t know what the solution is. A start would be to take a blowtorch to all the excessive policy, notability fluff, and other quasi-legalese which does nothing but hamper article editing. Delete everything except the core policies that are actually necessary to run Wikipedia - the Five Pillars ((Of Wikipedia, not of Islam)), and possibly a cut-down version of the deletion policy.

The wikiwarriors, of course, would not allow this. Take away the notability policies and you take away their excuse to argue over whether Latvia constitutes a ‘medium-sized country’ or not for the purposes of music notability. Take away most of the responsibilities of adminship ((In a properly-organised Wikipedia, it would be the community that decides whether a particular article or image is deleted, and all that the admin would be required to do is what the community tells him)) and you take away their excuse to argue over whether 68% of the unvote is sufficient for ‘promotion’ to admin. That is why I think that, while Wikipedia might have more than a million articles ((Actually approaching two million now - about 1.7 last time I looked)), it is in a noticeably worse state than it was in 2004, or even a year ago, and will not go much further without some radical changes.

As probably the most popular self-hosted blogging system ((I have a sneaking suspicion that, maybe, Typepad > Wordpress in terms of overall users - it seems helluva popular with corporate blogs)), Wordpress is now attracting the sorts of parasites that did more to kill P2P file sharing than the copyright cartels could ever have.

I’m talking, of course, about the adware peddlers. Such people create themes for Wordpress (of varying quality), and then use licensing restrictions to force the users of those themes to carry free adverts for sites of the theme author’s choice. Matt Mullenweg (in a post on the Weblog Tools Collection) suggests that this might actually be illegal:

Finally many of these themes try to legally disallow you from removing the advertising link by claiming it’s part of the Creative Commons attribution to leave it. This is almost funny, because these themes are on shaky legal ground themselves. WordPress is Free, meaning you’re free to do pretty much anything you like with it. It’s under a license that encourages user freedom called the GPL, which says if you distribute something that links internal functions and data structures of a GPL program (like themes do with WordPress) that also needs to be Free. At best, theme authors claiming you can’t remove the link are ignoring or ignorant of the license issues, at worst they’re actively exploiting (…) WordPress. ((Weblog Tools Collection - On Sponsored Themes))

I’m not convinced by that argument - proprietary Wordpress modules have been about for ages (most prominent among them Spam Karma 2, which is frequently promoted on the Wordpress Codex), and other GPL applications are distributed with proprietary modules without any legal issues at all ((Proprietary Linux graphics, wifi drivers ring a bell Matt?)).

Legal or not, adware themes are definitely not something that anyone associated with Wordpress - whether as a developer or a user - should want if they value the credibility of the project. I’m glad that Matt has come out heavily against these parasites ((They prey off the work of the Wordpress developers, and the PageRank of blog authors, so ‘parasites’ is a descriptive rather than a purely abusive term)) and that the Wordpress community more generally seems to be against adware themes.

If I say to you ‘Scottish Green Party’, what do you think of? No, I don’t mean a very small group of people, I mean policies. Maybe you’d agree that many of their policies could be summarised with three words: ‘plastic is evil’. The Greens want a tax on plastic bags ((No thought, of course, as to the volume of carbon emissions necessary to run all of the computers, office buildings etc. necessary to administer and collect this tax!)), parents to use cloth ‘reuseable’ nappies instead of disposable ones for their babies ((Eugh…)), and other such cunning plans.

So, walking along Gibson Street earlier today ((Huge traffic jam caused by some spill or another that the fire brigade were hosing away. When the bus caught up with the jam at the St Andrew’s Building - with the one 15 minutes before it not far ahead - I realised it would be quicker to get off and walk)) I see the usual ‘Vote such and such’ signs attached to lampposts ((Why the hell would I vote for the ‘Scottish Christian Party’ when I’ve never heard of it?)), including some for the Greens.

Let’s take a guess what their signs were made of. Paper? Cardboard? Bio-degradable plant fiber? Nope. Oil-based, landfill-filling, planet killing plastic. So where does that leave their ‘no nappies’ and ‘no bags’ policies?

Typically when one of the best Champions League games in ages is on, I’m stuck fiddling with phpmyadmin Anyway, Roma thoroughly deserved to go out of the tournament, not just because of the woeful play of all but a couple of players on the night, but also because of the behaviour of the Italian rent-a-thugs police at last week’s game. The Champions League is a safer event without Roma in it.