3.69. Blizzard's First Mistake (Revisited)

Visualization of The Public Goods Game
(Source: FieldOfScience.com)

The Public Goods Game

When I said Blizzard never repeated their first mistake...I lied.

An economics experiment that teaches about human nature and cooperation was all the proof Blizzard needed to cast doubt on their latest revelation. Whether their designers knew of the experiment's existence or not was moot, as the announcement of 10-Man and 25-Man being joined to a single lock in Cataclysm, producing the same rewards, was peppered with the colorful language of "good intentions". Sadly, good intentions are not enough to divert years of evolutionary adaptation away from the hard wired ways we fool ourselves. Spending only a few moments reviewing this simple textbook experiment should have convinced Blizzard that what they were about to embark on was going to have lasting, powerful repercussions, and 25-Man guilds would never be the same.

Imagine for a moment, that you are sitting around a table with nine strangers. Each stranger is given $100.00 and told that, in each round of this "game", you are free to contribute any amount of money from your holdings into a pot. At the end of the round, the pot is doubled, and all winnings are divided evenly back amongst the group. Depending on how fast you catch on, you come to realize that by withholding less and less of your own money from the pot, you begin to turn a much larger profit than the other players of the game. Over time, other players will pick up on this trend, and begin to do the same. Eventually, the economy of the game crashes, because all the players stop putting money into the pot. After all, why join the others and only come out $10.00 ahead...when you could put nothing in, and get $18.00 back? Why would anyone in their right mind be content with contributing, just to break even, when they could do nothing and turn a profit?

Things get more complicated when punishments and rewards are introduced to the Public Goods game. Punishing the stingy keeps the economy flowing through the pot, yet rewarding good behavior causes an economic crash again. It is a bizarre reflection of human nature that flies in the face of all logic, since on the surface, it makes sense that as long as everyone contributes, everyone will profit. But buried deep in the synapses of the highly evolved human brain, the rational often gets suppressed by the emotional. When you see other people gaming the system, you instinctively feel that they should be punished, as bad men/women should be. Just how that behavior manifests is subject to the type of game being played. In this experiment, it means that you withhold your funds from the pot, just as the others do, until no money remains.

In World of Warcraft, it manifests nearly the same...the only difference is that it isn't money you withhold from the pot, it's effort.

Contributions during the Public Goods game,
with and without punishments
(Source: AskWhy.co.uk)

Tragedy of the Casuals

Nobody wants to feel like they're being taken advantage of, yet this is exactly what happens when you look at two different levels of effort that both produce the same reward. Instead of tossing money into a pot each round, you're weighing all of the variables that help you decide which size of a raid you're wishing to run that week. And there are a lot of variables to consider. What kind of effort goes into dealing with that boss each week, trying to set aside a new schedule so that you are available for your raids each week? Maybe it means sitting down to a have a talk with your significant other, running the risk of it escalating into an argument over whose time is more valuable. And what of the risks involved in the actual raid itself? Any player worth his/her salt knew well that heading into a 25-Man raid was going to be a bigger challenge that a 10-Man; all the evidence in Wrath of the Lich King had proven 10s were the easier gamble by this point.

It all boils down to risk aversion.

Our free time is valuable to us; what we decide to put our off-hours into can mean more than money itself. With each decision we ponder regarding the allocation our free time, risks are constantly weighed against payoffs. We're more likely to avoid risk if a loss is possible, yet illogically we favor risk when only gains are on the table -- just ask any financial investment expert. As the blue post began to circulate the Internet, risk aversion chemicals had already begun their flow through the brains of raiders across the world. So, I can do a 10-Man, which I already know is easy-sauce, or take a chance at maybe getting my foot in the door of a 25-Man...for the exact same reward?

Cataclysm was still months away, but I already saw a crystal clear picture of what was to come.

Risk aversion is our default mechanism to fall back on when evaluating how we allocate our spare time. The situation is exacerbated by the fundamental need to want to punish "wrong doers"; its our mind wanting closure in a just world that otherwise doesn't exist. And when we see other players putting in less effort for the same rewards, our instincts aren't to "show them the right way", it's instead to come up with justifications on why we should do the same. We don't want to feel like we're being cheated out of money in the pot. We can't beat them, so we join them. We can't take a risk on the 25s...so we fall back on the 10s. It's safer, it's easier. Easier to roll with a small group of friends that aren't judgmental in watered-down mechanics, than deal with the possible criticism of a raid leader attempting to turn you from a mediocre player into a great one.

The pool of 25-Man options dwindle as a result, a term coined by Garrett Hardin as the "tragedy of the commons". The only way to combat it is the punishment of those "free riders", those folks unwilling to contribute to the pool. Blizzard may not have realized it, but the punishment of those free riders had already long been in place: the separation of the 10 and 25 by their individual loot tables. Players who wanted to take the easy way out, dumping out of a 25 in favor of a 10, were punished implicitly -- they no longer had the option to reap the achievements and rewards of the 25. I liken this separation of rewards to the guardrails that come down over a bowling alley lane, protecting an easily manipulated ball from rolling into the gutter. When the 10s and the 25s were merged to a single lockout and a single set of rewards, the guardrails went away.

Blizzard's opinion expressed bewilderment at the proposition that "one group of players doing something you didn't want to do" would somehow take something away from you. And the bewilderment was understandable...provided you look at the issue from that same skewed perspective. Unfortunately, the situation was never about "10-Man players get the same rewards as us 25-Man raiders, and we're not having fun now!"...

...it was "10-Man players are going to get the same rewards as 25-Man, and they will...which means whatever pool of players existed to fuel 25-Man guilds will all but dry up."

When players can take the easy way out, they do. I saw it once before in The Burning Crusade, as players came/went from the 25-Man as if the front door to our raid was a steamboat propeller. Because they could. They didn't need a warlock's Malefic Raiment from Black Temple...they could slough off any accountability a raiding guild attempted hold over their heads, and pull Vengeful Gladiator's Dreadgear out of a few weeks of smashing heads together like coconuts. Once that pool runs dry, the economy of available raiders crashes as a result. It was a matter of perception. Blizzard simply refused to "perceive" the issue the way 25-Man raiding guilds did.

Klocker stands naked atop the bank next to Annihilation,
Haribo, Crazzyshade, and Demus (circa Vanilla),
Orgrimmar

Promoting the Perv

Even as Descendants of Draenor were preparing to dig their heels deeply into the first heroic encounters in 25-Man ICC, I feared that the 10/25 decision would spell the end of many 25-Man raiding guilds, including our own. Blizzard felt confident that 25-Man raiding guilds would live on and thrive, but not paying attention to the fundamentals of human behavior, blinded by their "best intentions", was without a doubt Blizzard's Third Mistake in World of Warcraft. Amusingly, this was a far worse version of their first mistake in The Burning Crusade, having both PvE and PvP sets share the same visuals, something many wagered they had already learned from. Of course, the damage done during TBC was minimal (if any), and amounted to inconvenienced guild/raid leaders losing occasional PvP players from their raiding roster. This time, the change had the potential to reach far deeper into the blood of each and every raiding guild that wasn't listed on the first few pages of WoW Progress. It didn't look like Blizzard was going to budge on this one, so I mentally prepared for the devastation it would levy on the roster, each night going to bed, lost in a cloud of ideas on how I could save Descendants of Draenor from something that it couldn't be saved from: human nature.

First on that to-do list was to find a replacement for Dalans; he'd been gone over a month now. I always felt comfortable with he and Neps in charge, in the off-chance I were to be hit by a bus. In the absence of Dalans, I grew concerned that serious issues wouldn't get the clarity they needed by just Neps and I. We tended to agree on most generic stuff -- there wasn't anyone to play devil's advocate. This lead me to return to an oft overlooked player. Sir Klocker was one of my few remaining core members from the days of Vanilla, his years of experience making him one of only a handful of players that knew the guild inside out. Newer members like Bullshark, Jemb, even Mangetsu didn't carry the baggage associated with our early days of struggling in SSC, withstanding the setbacks of losing guildies to competing hardcore guilds like Pretty Pink Pwnies, or being subject to months and months of work in Ahn'Qiraj and Naxxramas (40), only to turn away empty-handed.

Sir Klocker had been there for it all.

If anything, Klocker would bring his veteran experience to the table, keeping reason in the face of irrationality. If players in the roster were to ever express disinterest in pursuing the 25, I could place a safe bet that Klocker would be one of the few to argue my side -- because he had lived through it himself. He knew what sacrifice went into real raiding and would staunchly defend it if challenged. With Blizzard's hand played for the next expansion, I wagered that keeping similarly-minded folks in the officer core was going to be our best chance at survival.

Sir Klocker had been shortchanged in the officer department several times already. When I shifted to role officers at the start of Wrath of the Lich King, Klocker ended up on the unfortunate end of the stick, as I had no place for him in the core. I re-arranged guild ranks to finagle his way back into officer chat, but this move was simply a band-aid taped across a much larger wound. Now, Klocker could finally make the move into a role befitting of his knowledge of the game and experience of the guild's people. He obliged at my request, and took up the rank of 2nd-in-command, alongside Neps. Once promoted, he wasted no time at all at bringing up a long-standing concern:

Loot.