Tracer's butt

Yeah I'm going there. I haven't been following Overwatch's development closely. It seems to me like a modern TF2, which I never felt compelled to play even after it went free to play. The player characters, however, were strong, one of the key factors to its success, and as a result have found their way into all sorts of other games and media.

One thing they weren't, as has been highlighted on numerous occasions since its release, was significantly diverse; despite a range of backgrounds and accents, they were all male, and mostly white. This is not a problem for me, it is not what I look for in a game, in the same way it wouldn't concern me if they were all female, and/or all non-white. Equally, a diverse cast is fine by me. Irrelevant, even. The only issue I see for developers is falling into the 'characters you can identify with' trap, where in trying to deliver identifiable characters for a broader range of people, you simply highlight the minorities that you don't cater for. Taking this approach, you cannot please everyone.

But I digress; for Blizzard, in [current year], I don't think there was any option but commitment to diversity for Overwatch.

And so we come to Tracer, the unofficial poster girl of Overwatch's diversity, and specifically, her tooshie. A number of people have found they identify with Tracer, and one such person came across a pose accentuating her rear end, that conflicts with their found identity. Rather than accept it as an insignificant point of difference, choosing to use a different victory pose, or dis-identifying with that character, they call for it to change. Blizzard, having been burnt by these type of people and their demands in the past, appear to capitulate by ignoring all the negative comments, approving the OP's request, and closing the discussion.

The community erupts, naturally, and we go from a situation where almost nobody was thinking about Tracer's butt, or considering her in a hyper-sexualised context, and now everybody is, examining it to the nth degree. She is now a sexual character - you have put her in the box that you didn't want her in. People are now actively debating whether, as a 26 year old, this fictional female would ever flaunt her sexuality. Congratulations.

I admit it is almost entirely down to how Blizzard handled it, and not the OP. If they had decided internally that the pose didn't suit her and replaced it with something else, rather than bringing attention to the request, there would have been no issue. Or at least nothing for the community to grasp onto.

Instead, the response, an unreserved apology and change of position, left the impression that they were at fault, that issues hold more weight if they are PC, and as a result, that the community holds sway over Blizzard on such matters. Unlike far more substantial controversies such as RealID, Diablo's RMAH, and removal of flying in WoW, where they stood fast. Kaplan's follow up explanation, and reopening of the discussion, helped - but it was forced by the community reaction. They had to own the decision to prevent future repercussions, but it was largely seen as PR and the damage was far from undone. Oops.

And so, the debate rages on. Is it a sexual pose? I don't know, is it when another character does it?

Probably not. Is it because of what she's wearing? Should figure hugging clothing be replaced? For all characters, or just females? Can large tattoed biceps and pectorals not be sexualised?

Compare the following: on the left the normal stance from behind, in the centre, the 'problematic' pose, and on the right, the same pose but from a slightly different angle.

Splitting hairs here. Why is only the centre inappropriate? This argument could, and inevitably will, go on for days. That's as far as I'm going to participate, as someone with no emotional investment in the character, or even the game. It certainly isn't going to influence my decision to purchase, and I think anyone who states they won't purchase on the back of this alone, are either overreacting or pulling their own leg. Either way, it's an idle threat, one that would not concern Blizzard one bit.

It's unfortunate that increasingly, in all walks of life, threats from the PC crowd are not treated in the same manner.

I'll leave with the following relevant video from Maddox, recalled when I read a comment or two that stated Tracer was 'presenting' /lol

Off season

Obviously not finding much to write about at the moment. My WoW time has been decreasing and not particularly interesting; completing nemesis in Ashran again, this time on my shaman, and a lot of pet collecting and levelling. I've finally caught all the old world pets, and there's now less than 100 pets I don't have, but most of those are store bought, promotional, recruit-a-friend rewards, and collector's edition pets that I simply won't be getting. So I'm waiting for the next pet bonus week to get back to pet levelling, and in the meantime I've run into a progression brick wall. Most of what I need to do is in battlegrounds, and trying to accomplish anything there solo is not enjoyable (especially as Horde), so I'm sticking to our one PvP night a week.

In the meantime I've been playing a fair bit of Pinball FX2 - I simply love this game. I'm not brilliant at it, but with persistence and time, can get respectable scores. I've also played a bit of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive for the first time in a couple of years. By the time I'd ranked up in freeplay (as I found out, now required to play competitive games) and played ~15 matches, I'd started losing interest. You need to play a lot to improve and rank up, and playing the same few maps with (at my skill level) a fair share of unpleasant people, it gets boring.

Draenor Curator

Finally finished up archaeology in Draenor today, getting the last Pristine artifact. Such a relief, and not quite as arduous as I was dreading - but still a big commitment. A newish player in our guild asked what the reward was, to which we answered nothing but achievement points. They then asked what do achievement points get you - an innocent question, but one which puts the whole task in perspective :p

At first I was spending my solved crates on Explorer's Notebooks for the missions, even after completing Arakkoa, but once I had also completed Ogre I switched to using Draenor Archaeologist's Maps and ignored any dig sites that weren't Draenor Clans, using the Archy addon. I saved the remaining crates for the Pandaria artifacts I still haven't completed.

Total number of solves required were as follows:

• Arakkoa 82 (126 all up by the time I switched to Draenor Clans only)
• Ogre 217
• Draenor Clans 333
• Total 632 (676 including surplus Arakkoa)

The macro to count the number of solves for you is here, you must have the completed artifacts pane open, and if you wish to see all races, not just Draenor, change the 13 to a 1:

/run for r=13,15 do local c,t=GetNumArtifactsByRace(r),0 for i=1,c do local _,_,_,_,_,_,_,_,n=GetArtifactInfoByRace(r,i) if n>0 then t=t+n end end print(GetArchaeologyRaceInfo(r)..": "..t) end

Whilst grinding this out, I was looking for an image that showed the location of all the digsites in Draenor and wasn't able to find one, so I started taking screenshots and sliced them together. This may not be absolute, but it contains all the sites I got for the last ~250 solves.

Location of most/all Draenor archaeology dig sites.

Last week I also finally got round to finding a decent image for a background to brighten up the blog look a bit. The image credit may not show depending on screen resolution, in which case it is by Tontokawa.

WoD pet levelling circuit

This is the circuit I take when levelling pets on the Draenor and Pandaria trainers. It is intended to take a maximum of 1 hour, to match the length of the pet food buffs, and because 1 hour is a nice, fixed time commitment. It is possible even with mistakes or lucky crits requiring restarts, to complete the circuit within an hour. It doesn't include the western Pandaria trainers (Burning, Flowing, Zusshi and Shu), which I have found to either be less reliable or take longer, but of course you can go on to them if you wish.

That makes 13 trainers per day. On a normal week, this will raise a level 1 pet to 14, and a level 14 pet to 20. On a bonus week, this will raise a level 1 pet to 19, and anything 14 and above to 25. So, it is possible to level a pet in 2 dailies, 1 to 14 at any time, and 14 to 25 in a bonus week. I have done this at times, but generally your pet levels are all over the place, so I just get them close to 25 (say 21 and above) and finish them off with battle stones. Some prerequisites:

• Safari Hat and 1 of each pet food - you easily get enough Pet Charms to buy them every day.
• Hearth set to Shrine in Pandaria.
• Admiral's Compass (could also use Vivianne follower).
• Spirit Lodge with portals to SMV and Spires.
• Rematch addon with teams saved.

Starting off at the Horde garrison (sorry Alliance, but easily adapted):

• Fly to Gargra (use pet food buffs here prior to battle).
• Fly on to Cymre.
• Garrison hearth.
• Portal to SMV, do Ashlei and portal back.
• Portal to spires, fly to Vesharr.
• Fly to Taralune.
• Admiral's Compass to Shipyard, Fly to Tarr.
• Hearth.

This can be done in 20 minutes so if you are short on time you can stop here.

Then just fly around the Pandaria trainers as indicated by the red arrow. If you have the Path of the Jade Serpent CM portal, you could start there instead and follow the blue arrow, avoiding the longest flight segment.

There are plenty of guides as to how to level off these trainers so I haven't gone into that detail here but feel free to ask, or offer improvements below.

Alpha avoidance

It's hard to keep a good balance when it comes to being informed about the alpha. I don't want to be completely out of the loop, as that can result in uninformed decisions you later regret, but I also don't want to spoil the game for the playing once it arrives. It's hard because that's all people are talking about - perfectly understandable, but I've already read or seen a couple of things I wish I hadn't. If I need to choose between one of two extremes on Legion alpha/beta, I'm starting to lean towards crawling under a rock for a while. I've got other things to focus on without getting caught up in all the speculation and worry that accompanies an alpha, and that will allow me to enjoy exploring the game live, even if that makes me a slow leveller.

I'm glad to say that I've now got all of the Draenor rare spawn mounts - completed over 4 weeks with Poundfist obviously taking the longest. I also got the Ashes of A'lar from Tempest Keep (43 kills in WoD, unsure beforehand as I wasn't tracking. Estimate 120 total). The guild has been doing Highmaul and BRF achievement and mythic runs, whilst raiding Mythic HFC 2 hours a week, getting the first 3 down. I've been doing a lot of Ashran again, finishing the 2000 bloody coins achievement, and I started doing nemesis a second time (this time on my main) to help out others and have been sucked into completing it again.

But what I've been doing more than anything is levelling pets. This has seen me go from 238th to 72nd on wowprogress pet score, although it doesn't update reliably so I've started using warcraftpets.com instead. I've still a lot to go, but after seeing how effective it is to level during pet bonus week, I'm doing the bare minimum until that comes around again (17th Feb) so I don't burn out. I'll post a follow up explaining my circuit.

It's also a good time to be levelling alts. Not that I really need more alts or that I'm enjoying the levelling process, both topics I should write about. But I took a self-RAF during the sale so I'm taking advantage of it. There's always reasons cropping up to have alts on the opposite faction/another server/another account.

Ashran tides

A while back I commented on Ashran and the changes made after 6.2 that included the removal of entering as a raid group. I thought that the problems largely came down to PvP population imbalance, and hoped that further changes in 6.2.2, including mercenary mode, would help this.

In the weeks following that patch, I didn't notice any real changes, but as stated at the time I enjoyed it whenever it wasn't being dominated by one side, and hoped it had reached a point where people might start looking past its bad reputation. So I visited the Ashran forums to see if there had been any change in mood, but unfortunately it was persistently flooded with complaints about premades, specifically by a group called Hydra. As far as I've seen, they don't seem to have a presence or be a problem on Oceanic realms. So I didn't get anything useful out of that, and after getting full conquest gear, I stopped doing Ashran regularly. I'm back in it now, so time for another look.

The biggest trend I've noticed is that winning seems to come in waves that turn around every couple of hours. If you get in at the right time, you can win everything for quite a while, which is great, but eventually there will be a moment where the tide will turn, and then you'll start losing everything. On the face of it, as long as both sides have an opportunity to succeed, this is not a bad thing. But it is not enticing gameplay, it is purely rewards driven. Something we need to do, rather than want to do.

Tide goes in, tide goes out. You can't explain that. Image source: wowhead

The invisible buff to the event losing side obviously contributes to this swing, but it's more than that. It is still possible for a team to continue winning even when the other side has a significant buff. This is due to the losing side also having a numbers deficiency, as player numbers constantly bleed and many choose not to participate as a group. When things aren't going so well, you frequently see new joiners ask 'are we winning?' and then leave immediately, unless you lie to them. This is compounded by the delay upon leaving the group - if you run or even hearth out of Ashran, your spot is retained for 30 seconds.

People on the winning side are more likely to hang around while succeeding, and then leave en masse. This is often due to the weekly quest reward system, which requires 4 events and 1 faction leader kill. Usually, with a constant flow of players, different people will finish the weekly and leave at different times. But let's say one side has had 7-8 event wins without a faction leader kill. Everyone in the group will be calling for it, and when the kill happens, a large number of people leave at once, the threshold is passed, and the pendulum swings the other way. I'm not sure what the right reward structure is to prevent this, perhaps one where points are earned individually for completing objectives on a diminishing basis.

When your side is down, and there is high player turnover, the reinforcements come in dribs and drabs. Players entering to outnumbered battles get discouraged and leave, reinforcing the cycle. To help minimise this, players could be entered in waves. This could be as simple as spawning new players as ghosts in the graveyard, so that they are released together with the dead as a larger group, or as a new group spawning mechanism of some sort, that release a wave of reinforcements every couple of minutes. The goal being to resemble the start of battlegrounds.

Another part of the problem is putting in large numbers of players and then encouraging them all to be in the same spot at the same time. Tol Barad at least had 3 control points to capture, and 3 towers to attack/defend. Battlegrounds like Arathi Basin and Eye of the Storm work well because players need to split effectively between different objectives. Both have 30 players, but you'd seldom see them all at the one objective. In Ashran, the only real group decision is to whether to pursue the next event, or pursue the faction leader. Much of the time this results in no contest, the rest of the time a clearly defined loser (no reward).

They can't hold multiple concurrent events with equal rewards, as that too would discourage PvP. Instead, 'events' could be boosts to ongoing objectives. For example, the fires at Brute's Rise could be always active capture points, providing an ongoing reward, but the Brute's Rise special event could reset this and provide a greater reward to the winner. Teams could commit everyone to the active objective, but they would potentially lose the other objectives in the process. The ongoing reward could be somewhat less than the event reward, balanced over time to how often events occur.

Finally, there should be a comeback/catch-up mechanism that doesn't reward losing. Buffing losing sides may inevitably be necessary, but it should be an active objective, rather than just waiting for the other team to win more. This could be in the form of faction specific objectives that increment the invisible buff, but only whilst 'losing' (or are more frequent whilst losing). For example, the faction leader could demand blood (20 PvP kills) or a rarespawn kill, or running an artifact back to base (like the carts in Deepwind - no flying or town portals). This would give players incentive to pursue minor objectives when they don't have the large, coordinated group to contest the main objectives.

TL:DR:

• Spawn players in waves.
• Instantly remove deserters.
• Change reward structure to no longer encourage mass desertion.
• Implement concurrent, secondary objectives to spread the combat.
• Don't reward losing; provide incentive catchup mechanisms to losing side.

Taralune

I hadn't had much luck with other people's 2 pet teams for Taralune. Then I saw this post from a blue, and thought surely it would be more successful. Unfortunately it seemed unreliable like the rest of them. But this helped me actually come up with something that works for me.

The problem with starting with your leveller is you switch into a cocoon, and cop a second effective counterspell in round 4. For example, using the Azure Whelping goes like this:

2: switch in, Cocoon strike
3: Breath to remove cocoon
4: Get Counterspelled
5: Arcane Storm, 197 damage
6: Another cocoon, so Breath
7: Counterspelled, but ineffective. Surge of Power. Does not kill.

You only get 2 rounds of damage in 7, so I went defensive with a mech instead. The Sunreaver Micro-Sentry (1 1 2) is perfect for this.

1. Extra plating, Counterspelled
2. Extra plating, Cocoon strike
3. Ignore Cocoon and Supercharge
4. Laser until dead.

This will easily defeat Serendipity, and you can switch your leveller in when Atonement enters, as it will always buff itself the first round. But even doing it this way, I'd be defeated by lightning storm and moth balls.

Nether Faerie Dragon (2 2 1) can moonfire to change the weather, and life exchange to recover after switching back in to moth balls. I'm sure it's not 100% reliable but it works best for me, and seems quicker than Emerald Proto Whelp healing.

TL:DR - Rematch import string: Taralune:87125:1178:482:392:208:0:0:0:0:557:421:277:595: