Posts with tag theoretical

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill will tell you how she became the princess warlock of a continent called Pandaria by switching to saur'lock spec.

You know me: I play a warlock spec that starts with a 'D' only over several dozen copies of my cold, dead body. I'm diehard affliction whether the spec is on top or not. But that doesn't mean I don't ever pay attention to the DPS simulations. I just think the vocal playerbase hedges their bets a little too much on what comes out of the BiS heroic simulations.

Fortunately for me, Ghostcrawler also feels players put too much emphasis on SimulationCraft when it comes to spec balance in PvE. Does this mean SimulationCraft is not valuable? No, it just means that players should be more aware of what's going into a particular simulation and how to interpret whatever data comes out.

This idea from Terra Nova would certainly help clean up Barrens chat: nerfing characters as a penalty for bad behaviour in-game. If you use an alt to misbehave, then they'll all lose a level every time you break the bounds of decency.

Key problems with this idea include inconsistency between GMs (we've already seen the trouble one slightly misguided GM can cause) and the systematic targeting of players; if you really want to hurt someone, get everyone you know to report them and suddenly they'll be back at level 0.

As Terra Nova's commenters observe, social pressure and access control (making the players ashamed to misbehave, and banning them) are the most effective ways to control behaviour at the moment. However, if you lost a little bit of xp every time you called someone "gay" in general chat, you might well be less inclined to bigotry in public--the idea's got some potential.