The Warcraft Civilization by William Sims Bainbridge

The Warcraft Civilization by William Sims Bainbridge

Author:William Sims Bainbridge [[Bainbridge, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780262288378
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2010-07-15T05:00:00+00:00


Figure 5.2

A chaotic group meeting on the roof of the bank in Orgrimmar, celebrating the new year.

Evolution of Cooperation

Even without a formal agreement to cooperate, one player can benefit implicitly from the actions of another whenever their goals differ but overlap. A notable example benefits skinners, characters who have developed the skill to skin dead animals and then sell or use the leather they get. Most characters are not skinners, but must kill skinable animals to get through many areas, looting the corpses for some valuables, like fangs and eyeballs, but leaving the rest of the carcass intact. A skinner who comes upon a recent kill can take the leather very quickly with a simple application of a skinning knife, without the risk and effort of killing. This is a completely asymmetrical kind of cooperation, but it is not exploitation, because the character who killed the animal loses nothing. Once the leather is on the market, it adds to the total wealth and thus benefits everybody. On occasion, a skinner will kill animals just to get their leather, thereby clearing a path for other characters without specifically intending to help them.

Folwell first experienced implicit cooperation when he was just reaching level 5 in the Night Elf newbie zone. A quest required him to find a spider egg deep within caverns infested with adult spiders. These arachnids were spaced out along the corridors and needed to be killed one by one. He encountered Direnight, a level-5 Night Elf druid, who was doing the same quest. They did not talk, gesture, or otherwise communicate with each other. But they quickly fell into a pattern of killing alternate spiders, thereby reaching their goal nearly twice as quickly.

Formal cooperation often rests upon the division of labor, in which different people specialize in accomplishing different parts of a complex task.11 In WoW, as in many similar MMORPGs, there are three main roles in battle: tank (holds the enemy in pace), healer (sustains the tank), and DPS (applies maximum damage per second to the enemy). Having someone to play the tank role can be the difference between success and failure. Maxrohn saw this with his own eyes when a Human rogue asked him to help her kill Durn, the Hungerer, an elite in the level-64 to level-67 Nagrand zone. The quest calls for five characters, and the team was completed with a Human mage, a Dwarf hunter, and a Night Elf hunter. None of the five was well equipped to be a tank. The Hungerer has an estimated health of 120,000, which means he must be attacked severely to be killed, and the team had ample DPS members who could do this job. The problem was that the Hungerer aggressively stomped on the nearest of them, moving so quickly that Maxrohn could not heal them fast enough to keep them alive. A good tank capable of resisting damage could have been saved. After the team was swiftly defeated, the Night Elf hunter left, and the leader got a replacement.



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