(repost) JULY 12TH 2023
TL;DR When the community of a video game starts sharing dominant strategies, glitches, and guides around social media, game time is optimized, diminishing the fun of a game for the player, and lowering revenue for subscription based games like World of Warcraft. To avoid this “cybersocial optimization” of video games without embargoing the internet forums and communities, we create a companion vector space to the original World of Warcraft character statistics and perform KMeans clustering, concentration analysis on those clusters, and n-sphere sampling to counter strategies developed by internet forums and communities.
Lot’s of gamers that were brought up in my generation are questioning if games are still fun or if their enjoyment is nostalgia that we are trying to relive. Today’s oeuvre is this blog’s first, and a specific solution to an observation I have had that I am going to name cybersocial optimization.
Gamers are experiencing cybersocial optimization of their gaming experience, this post will be a technical solution to this social phenomenon. The solution is intended for the legendary World of Warcraft released in 2004, but the philosophy behind it could be applied other places.
Let’s talk about World of Warcraft and its cybersocial situation. World of Warcraft was released as an enormous place for players to explore, fight, make friends, and team up to defeat enemies that stood 50 feet tall. This popularity spun out of control. Millions of players from all of the world joined together to defeat enemies of The Alliance or Horde and collect powerful weapons and armor. The collection of this arsenal took months, guilds of players were created to defeat the raid bosses. Which took, in many cases, hundreds of tries consisting of very coordinated efforts of dozens of players representing months of hard work just to defeat one. This is when games were fun, or at least, this is the time where many gamers remember their favorite games being fun.
Back then, very small internet forums were made for the most dedicated players to share secrets about how to have the best try at defeating a raid boss. Little gems of advice found in the nooks of the internet. Later, social media created standard places for the community to interact, and boy did the community interact.
Now there are data science dashboards that show your live performance of your character, simulations that show you exactly which spells to cast in real time, data miners get gameplay clues about patches and expansions that haven’t even been released, and youtube creators race to see who will make the best boss fight guide. Games in the past weren’t more fun, they just weren’t being played for you.
To make games fun again we need to immunize a video game from the community it creates. If this were possible the community could grow and interact as much as they would like without hurting the gameplay experience.
How can World of Warcraft counter cybersocial optimization?
In World of Warcraft, to become more powerful, every player goes on a quest to gain more powerful weapons and more protective armor. Players have a choice of a class (Mage, Warrior, Paladin, etc…) and each class has multiple specializations but all of their goals remain the same: get the best items, which give the best stats, and use them to get the next best items and stats – until you are ready to fight the raid bosses.
Just to save you a Google search, the primary stats that every piece of gear can have are the following: Strength, Agility, Intellect, Stamina, and Spirit.
In combat, a World of Warcraft player uses the armor and weapons they have obtained in order to survive. These statistics from their gear help them do more damage and protect themselves from oncoming damage, however, the arsenal of spells each player has allows them to augment their ability to do damage and protect themselves. For the sake of this post we will call a player's ability to do damage DPS (damage per second) and their ability to protect themselves Defense Ability. DPS and Defense Ability are positive real number values that are determined by the player's skill and the stats on their armor/weapons.
Player’s stats are restricted by their class. A mage will never have a high strength stat so a mage player needs to rely on a warrior player in order to deal with close hand-to-hand combat scenarios. This inspires comradery and thus we can’t mess with this old stat line too much. If we did, we could ruin the delicate balance between classes and their need for each other. So, the old stays and the need for a companion vector space is recognized.
A representation of a character with stats shown
World of Warcraft is big. Sometimes you’re fighting in a place called the Firelands, and sometimes you’re underwater fighting the Naga. All have beautiful artistic themes and the weapons and armor that are awarded there all have some themed visual presentation. Let’s put this geographical theme to use.
Fire, Frost, Holy, Shadow, Arcane, Nature are a pretty good set of themes that players fight in. Those themes are also the themes of classes in the game. Paladins and Priests are students of the light, Mages study fire, frost, and the arcane. Druid’s fight with the power of nature, there are more classes but you get the point.
The old stat line determines the DPS and Defense Ability of a player, so let’s add another vector space that represents what themed armor/weapons the player has on. Called the Elemental Vector Space. Each vector in the elemental vector space will be normalized and summing across the elements of the vector results in one. Each basis vector in this space will represent the elements mentioned previously.
Old stat line (left) suggested new stat line (right)
To frame our testing later we will assign two elemental vectors to each player. One for their currently equipped weapons and one for their equipped armor respectively named elemental attack and elemental defense. If we multiply the DPS and Defensive ability by their corresponding elemental vectors we are given a vector that represents the distribution of DPS or Defensive ability across the different elements in the game. We will call these vectors the total attack and total defense vectors and they are the ones that we will focus on for the rest of the post: