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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2817 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 17, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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WoW Geoguessr videos are... wow.

There are 125 zones in WoW and 190 dungeons, and the base game sprawls ~80 square miles and the full game maybe 150 square miles now. Each zone has at least 60 unique identifiable “places”, possibly more, whether that be a random feature of the environment, a mob encampment, a random hut, an npc, etc. This includes major landmarks and the random “things to see” in-game. Longterm WoW players are able to determine the location of 7500 unique identifiable places covering 150 square miles down to the meter, often able to name the residing zone and town and what “happens” their ingame. Counting dungeons, that’s about 19,000 unique things they have pinned down on a map sprawling 150 square miles.

19,000 pieces of information navigable on a map.

And then you remember it’s a game, and the game is not even about this information. There’s also maybe 4000 cosmetic items, and players like Asmongold are likely to tell you the name and where to find them and what quest it involves. There are 30,000 quests, half of which these players could tell you about just by seeing the NPC. There are bosses and mob types, surely at least 500 unique ones which can be named. 9000 spells, and a given player will know 150 of them and what they do by their image and when to use them.

Then there are the random things: the potions and other consumables, the emote commands, what you do in a raid, the hundreds of different vendors, the hundreds of materials for building things. Not to mention the lore!

These longterm WoW players easily know 45,000 pieces of distinct information. It’s crazy when you add it all up like that.

These longterm WoW players easily know 45,000 pieces of distinct information. It’s crazy when you add it all up like that.

And it is ever crazier when you grok that all this knowledge belongs to mega corporation that can alter or delete it by one click of some minimum wage employee, mega corporation that can easily decide the game is no longer profitable and shut it down.

Imagine - you dedicated days and weeks and months and years to exploring Black Troll Land and mastering the lore. Suddenly someone sees how extremely problematic it is, and deletes all racist content.

You are screwed.

Building your life and your identity on something so fragile is like living on a quicksand. Do not do it.

... to an extent, and indeed WoW already did so to a small extent once (Cataclysm rebuilt a lot of the early zones, albeit in most cases for the better). And there's certainly worse: Tabula Rasa got smashed by some back-office NCSoft smuckery (literally faking a resignation e-mail while the guy was in space), and attempts at a private server are... not great.

On the other hand, some leaks of City of Heroes lead to the game having a small but lively rogue server community.

On the gripping hand, "mega corporation that can alter or delete it by one click of some minimum wage employee" is a surprisingly wide net. Don't get me wrong -- I do much prefer the private server models of MineCraft or ARK, of ripping every eBook through Calibre rather than waiting for Amazon to revise or retract it, of running *nix for personal computers rather than letting Microsoft have all my data backed up on the Cloud, so on -- but I would caution doing this doesn't actually get you that much protection. If Microsoft decides to fuck over Minecraft's authentication model again, it doesn't get easier to legally play (including old versions!). Buying physical media doesn't mean it has what was written on the box. And going private for multiplayer just changes the threat model rather than eliminates it: my last big MineCraft server lasted about three months before player interest dropped too low to justify the maintainer keeping it alive; my last ARK one restarted just yesterday due to save file corruption and player interest in changing maps.

It’s interesting to think, “what’s the information most important to devote to memory”? Not for professional life, but for one’s life satisfaction.

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