The Burn | Scorching thoughts on WoW, Warlocks & Business

Liveblogging the first two minutes on the new Dingblog.com

5 seconds:

Hey, thats a pretty new frontpage!

10 seconds:

Feeling like someone cleaned my apartment while I was gone – nothing is where I left it, fuck!

15 seconds:

Hey, Marie is a featured blogger! Has that geeky-sexy look going on. Love it.

30 seconds:

Sick, I'm on the frontpage – time to scream like a girl, tell me friends on Facebook and take screenshots to make myself feel better.

60 seconds:

FUCK. MY LAYOUT. Sucker punch guys, deleting my css/html/graphics :/ I hope they're backed up at home somewhere...

90 seconds:

The new user dashboard is pretty useful, wanted decent statistics for ages so I ended up installing Analytics on my own, but this could do as well.

120 seconds:

Comment numbers are displaying wrong on most pages – clearly a punch in the face for attention-whores like myself.

Overall, a big visual improvement along with some much needed user dashboards. I'm not completely sold on the new frontpage, atleast it displays more recent posts, but there's just an overwhelming amount of stuff on it, presented in a pretty busy manner. I'll get back on this once I fix my damn layout – maybe I'll just whip up a new one that flows better with the new site.

Edit: Found my old css and HTML, but the engine has changed a lot, so the HTML no longer produces anything meaningful. This is a bit rough to be honest, but I guess its a good incentive to make a new design. Meanwhile, Mario!

And so came the first patch ever to be released on or before expected launch date. Can't say thats a bad thing.

A couple of hours later we did the 10man, 5man, and 25man in quick succession – leaving us back in Ulduar within 3-4 hours of the new patch. Can't say I was entirely pleased with that turn of events, but I guess it was to be expected with one boss available, and only on normal mode at that. Overall I'm for gates and artificially slowed progression to lower strain and prevent weeks of full-on raiding, but it sure made for an anti-climatic patch day :/

The destro nerf was noticable – but nothing special. Overall the patch so far gets a resounding "meh" from me :)

So to celebrate the newly upgraded Dingblog (stronger, better, faster?), I'd like to talk about a phenomenon I find oddly... fitting! I'm sorry but I'm not good at "here's my life" updates, I'd rather do this.

Between my other summer escapes, (slouching on a couch and other great pasttimes) I flipped through a book called "The Cult of The Amateur", which argues something I've been thinking about lately, concerning new media and blogging amongst other brazenly communist activities.

Basically, the author argues that the new "webocracy" kills expert knowledge by allowing everyone to produce and distribute their opinions and creations. Being an expert no longer means truly mastering something – it only requires you to be marginally smarter than your audience, who in the spirit of this new media will applaud, upvote, digg and link the bile to others, further lowering the common denominator.

Harsh accusations? Recently on Youtube, I came across this guide to PvE Destruction Warlock. Fair game, decent fellow, semi-erotic voice, calm music – its all good isn't it? No it ain't, its a sub-par rotation that will cause your DPS to be less than intended. The problem here is obvious; with no fact-checking or review process, content is judged by the unknowing webocracy, leading to back-patting because onlookers know even less than the proposed "expert". This happens all the time just with WoW, and it begs the question if we're getting better or worse the more sources of information we have available.

I know a lot of people that will defend this as a revolution, and celebrate the cult of the amateur – and hey god knows I'm part of it as well – but sometimes I get the feeling that the stuff I absorb from the web is a bunch of second-hand bullshit from pseudo-experts, preaching the choir and narrowing, not expanding my mind. Maybe this ties into what I learned about my study; presentation, confidence and delivery is king. Deep understanding of a subject is a waste of time, go out there and get some Digg's instead!

Watching MLG Columbus right now – and despite my reservations for WoW as an E-Sport, its pretty entertaining so far. The commentators are improving wildly, and doing a lot to position the players as real people. Can definetly recommend going to MMO Champion and give it a look, maybe the WoW community has it in itself to pull off this after the rotten apples have been cleaned out.

The big surprise so far is the absolutely brutal death knight / BM hunter / paladin comp from eMazing Gaming, and so far they've yet to drop a game, even 3-0'ing Ensidia's heroes. Its a total joke of a zerging setup, but entertaining to have all the cookie-cutter RMPs shook up.

So far I lost 500g by betting for Kollektiv's crew, but hoping to win it back when I find someone else to gamble with!

Just noticed I never posted a picture of myself around here, so here you go – don't diss the fro'. Was taken about 30 minutes before I gave a speech at my mother's 60th birthday, which was a suprisingly good experience – can recommend it to everyone looking to improve their presenting skills ;)

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Meanwhile, the World of Warcraft summer has hit in a familiar manner. At the same time last year, we had one of the strongest rosters to date, but just couldn't finish off Sunwell Plateau before vacations, exam, general disliking of computers and chain heal-spam took its natural toll. End result was that we had to kill Kil'Jaeden after the ridiculously stupid patch – a anticlimatic ending to say the least.

This year, we're a couple of hardmodes from Algalon (Freya and Mimiron), and face weeks of hard work to crack them. The choice is basically:

- Going hardcore 5-hour raids 5 days a week to get it down before vacations, or
- Chilling, avoiding burnout and keeping the guild intact until we're past summer

In hindsigt, we've burned a lot of really good members with the first tactic, and a even though a part of me want to push it to the limit, I now know myself and others well enough to realize that the second option could prove the wiser. I'd sure as hell love to hear experiences from other guilds :)

- - -

In other news, I just watched the Bourne Trilogy in one sitting to answer the age-old question: Do car-chases, CIA-drama and – let's be honest – Matt Damon, ever get old?

The answer is no. Fuck its awesome.

Today: Working harder, not smarter.

- - -

This year has been all about doing more with less for me. I realized I was spending too much energy and time getting the results I wanted – at university, my business, my job, everything. 2009 was going to be a complete change, and I've begun to see the effects now.

I'm nearly done with my masters degree and I felt it was time to put my ideas into practice. Hence, this semester I signed up for an additional 50% classes, bought none of the required litterature for any of these (2500+ pages total), and attended classes in a casual fashion, missing maybe 30% of the total lectures.

Now its crunchtime, exams are coming in the following weeks and I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of results I can pull off. Strangely enough I feel confident because I think I finally honed in on exactly the skills you need to learn and be examined in any given subject. Time will prove me right or wrong – I'll share them if its satisfying :)

I've seen similar things happen at my workplace, where I've been able to cut down on hours spent, but get better clients in the process. The age-old idea of 80/20 (80% of your results are from 20% of your effort) applies again and again – the challenge is all about finding the 20% and expanding it to fill the void – or take the rest of the time off!

- - -

In wholly unrelated news, I was amused to see that our old server-clown Mullenix, after getting abandoned by the guild he helped run into the ground, jumped servers and joined forces with Showdown (Stina's guild). I wonder how long his mediocre play, single-minded attitude and above-average ego will last there, but he sure left a laughable going-away message when he claimed to "already be top-tps" in his new guild.

I hope, should I go far over the edge as he has, that I have good friends to give me a proper smacking and restore some sense in me :)

Subject of the day is:

What can WoW-players and businesses learn from Italian restaurants?

- - -

Lately I've been involved in Venture Cup – a competion for "entrepreneurs" that submit business plans, receive evaluation and ultimately a nice cash prize for the best idea/business. Reading what people think can be a viable source of income is not only good entertainment, it also confirmed something I've thought about for some time now:

Your ideas aren't worth shit. Execution is everything.

I swear if I have to read another Facebook inspired business plan I'm gonna projectively vomit. The lesson to be learned is that if you've got an idea, chances are that 10 other people have it too. Despite this, we seem to be in an idea-driven society, always talking about innovation, celebrating the great idea, but never checking if there was actually any real results.

In these situations, comparing businesses to italian restaurants is one of my favorite things to do. Everyone loves italian food (don't be stupid, everyone loves it), and italian restaurants can make money in any town of reasonable size in any country, if you execute it well enough. So just go ahead and say, what if your blogging site, social network bullshit, peer-to-peer peepshow or similar junk was an italian restaurant. Would it make money? Or would people go next door and eat sushi? Judging by the execution I've seen around, people would rather eat dogshit.

For some reason I'm not the most popular to get feedback from at these events :/

- - -

I've been noticing a trend of ignoring execution in WoW as well. We've been struggling on Thorim hardmode during the week, despite having the basic strategy down within the first hour or so.

The strategy (idea) is freely available, so it has zero value, yet people have a tendency to think that strategy is somehow the path to raiding nirvana, instead of just focusing on executing properly. If you don't know how to make a pizza, discussing the topping is moot. Learning to make a pizza takes time and hard work, just like figuring out the small details of where the lightning strikes on Thorim, how to move better and so forth.

Back in "the old days" we wiped for weeks on fights like C'thun, but these days there's whine after one day of limited progress. I hate to be one of those fruits romantisizing the past, but I think working hard for proper execution somehow got lost in neo-naxx :/

Following my last post, I wanted to delve a bit deeper into WoW's possbilities (or lack thereof) in e-sports. I've actually been an avid follower of the Starcraft pro-scene, both in the Korean and "Foreign" scene, and am just consistently impressed by the level of skill, broadcaster professionalism and scene's they pull off.

In my eyes the e-sport part of WoW has been a dead horse for ages, but since people are beating it like a piñata, I thought it was about time to burn the remains.

The problem lies both in the fundamentals and in the implementation. The basics of a successfull sport – be it involving computers, frisbees or bicycles is:

- Heroes
- Spectator-friendliness
- Money

You will notice that, right now, arguably WoW has neither or these in abundance. Let's take them one by one, shall we?

Heroes
Most people would agree that professional cycling is, honestly, fairly boring. 100 people hammer away on their bike for 6 hours a day, then go up the next day and do it again. Right. Yet Tour de France pulls viewers in the millions, enough sponsor money to buy up Mozambique and does this during the summer, even. Que??? The answer is of course that what Cycling lacks in direct excitement it makes up for in heroes. Mans struggle against himself, the mountain and the competiting riders in extreme conditions has bred people like Armstrong, Indurain, Ulrich, Pantani, Chippolini just in recent time. Who does WoW have? Serennia? Hafu? MING?! We're not kidding anyone here, the "professionals" of WoW are a bunch of kids with too much time on their hands. If I was a sponsor, I wouldn't touch these people, let alone actually pay money to associate them with my brand.

Spectator-friendliness
Chances are that most people that read this have actually tried watching a competitive WoW game. Probably a 3v3, probably with the same monkey of a commentator talking about cheap shots and trinkets. Its gotten better with time, but its still completely impossible to digest whats going on, despite having played WoW and arena for years. In Korea there's actually a rising popularity of 1v1 tournaments because its possible to see whats actually happening as long as its 1v1 – which just goes to show that RNG and balance have nothing to do with the popularity of any sport (Poker, anyone?)

Money
This follows my previous my post but is also connected to the above two. Say you're actually a company interested in supporting a team. Say you actually really want to invest in WoW because its players represent your target group. Say you're actually thick enough to consider sponsoring a group of raging asians. Already this is a far out assumption, but then consider that your players may or may not play together next month. That a patch could potentially destroy your teams viability with no notice. That there's only a handful of tournaments per year that get over a thousand eyes on them. If you have any kind of business-sense you know you're in deep water, and are pretty likely to keep your costs as far down as possible while still keeping your name on the plate. From what I gather, that means paying a couple of airline tickets once in a while and mailing your players a decorated mousepad. If anyone thinks this is even close to be being a professional e-sport, think again. Get paid or get lost.

If you're sitting there and thinking its unfair to compare WoW to "normal" sports – consider that there are over 10 million worldwide players that daily involve themselves in the game, and compare that to say, how many go down once in a while and kick a ball around some grass – I think you'll find that the numbers are not extremely far off.

I think anyone with a calculator and a couple of brain cells firing in the right directions can conclude that World of Warcraft is a billion dollar business. Whats less obvious (and perhaps more interesting) is how the whole eco-system around WoW is doing. We've got millions and millions of players deeply engaged in the same activity – in most cases this means a serious opportunity for smaller businesses to earn a living feeding off the larger phenomenon.

Its actually surprising to me how little money there appears to be here.

The e-sport PvP part is negligible, and I just don't see it taking off with the current spectator and game possibilities. Sponsor money is riding on pure hype at the moment, and it won't get easier in the current marketplace.

Community portals are dime-a-dozen, with sites like MMO-Champion, World of Raids, Wowinsider, Curse and now Ensidia leading the charge. So are any of these portals making real money? Strongly doubt it. Despite an incredibly focused audience, the banner/adsense market really isn't what it was 5 years ago, and if either of these sites cover more than just the basic costs with advertising, let alone any kind of proper salary, I'll be genuinely surprised. If you've got the arab millions behind you, I guess everything is possible – but community-portals isn't making anyone rich.

My own theory was that paid add-ons would take off in a big way – but Blizzard effectively shut this down a couple of weeks ago.

What do you think? Is the WoW eco-system in a financial shithole? Would you invest in dingblog.com, mmo-champion.com or similar sites? Is there a successful business model? Where is the money in WoW?

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To be continued :)

So with all my deadlines at university and work magically congregating in a weeks time, there's little incentive to continue writing my epic 10.000 word post on threat since vanilla. Guess that'll have to wait for after I finished writing about wholly uninteresting subjects like Software Business Models, Interaction Design and fucking Scientific Theory. Yeah they are all about as interesting as they sound!

Oh well, its pretty hard to compete with norweigan housewifes anyway (just unfair!).

Ulduar still rocks – 10man hardmodes are pretty doable, and 25man hardmodes are, well, hard. I think Blizz finally found the formula to keep instances interesting for longer times for a huge variation of guilds. With PvE pretty much perfected right now, except PvP whine instead – if I meet another priest/rogue team I'm gonna violently vomit.

Oh btw, – look at this fucking hipster!