The Time-Value of Health

This blog post builds on the concepts suggested in 'Not All Hitpoints are Created Equal', helping to adjust healing for the health level of the recipient.

Experts in finance speak of the time-value of money. Under this concept, the value of a certain quantity of dollars (or other currency) will decrease as time passes. Many attribute this to the fact that people want money now rather than later. Therefore, to keep this time-value the same, interest must be paid on top of this quantity of dollars.

Hitpoints restored by healing also seem to have this time-value, since a heal of the same size will be more valued the sooner it is received (considering that people wish to keep their health at a maximum). How should such heal weighting be done?

Of Ladders, Mirrors and Black Cats

Superstitious people may believe that performing certain actions endow bad luck on the one performing them, causing them great misfortune in the future. Are these worries justified?

Inspecting these superstitions further, it becomes evident that they do have substance, even if only a little! Think twice before doing any of the following...

Why should you not step on a crack on a footpath?

• If not careful, you could get your foot caught in one and trip.

Five reasons to like (Northrend) Ghouls

World of Warcraft's portrayals of things are noticeably cartoony when compared to real life equivalents. Northrend ghouls (ghouls) are no different, being any combination of cute, adorable, cuddly, pitiable, likeable and silly.

1. Descent into undeath

These lumbering, rotting corpses were once innocent townsfolk who have made the final transition into true undeath... They are vicious creatures, retaining little of their humanity. The plague has torn away most of their memories, leaving only hunger and basic survival instincts in their place... Even those who were close to the individual in life have difficulty recognizing their loved one; the transformation removes most vestiges of humanity as well as identifying features of voice and body structure.

WoWWiki

Responsible Guild Leadership

Government is a human institution that exists to exact order on an otherwise chaotic society. Its citizens willingly surrender some amount of freedom to be able to take some solace in a sense of security.

Because government is conceived by the people, it must uphold the interests of the people, lest its purpose be defeated. Responsible government is a principle that attempts to achieve this by giving the people a direct say, or at least allow them to elect representatives. Under this framework, the government becomes directly responsible or accountable to the citizens it governs.

This widely accepted (by many democratic countries) principle can readily be applied to guild leadership in World of Warcraft. The guild's officers simply need to act in the best interests of the membership.

Succeeding at not being trampled

FailBot has been retired, but EnsidiaFails has taken over! What remains the same is the humiliation that arises if a boss ability, if avoidable, is not handled properly.

In the Trial of the Crusader, the Northrend Beast Icehowl casts Massive Crash, which can send players scattered throughout the instance. If players do not move out in time to avoid the following Trample, the situation can become very messy (in both senses of the word!).

Dilemmas in Guild Matchmaking and Promotion

In the ideal world, prospective guild members would quickly find the guild of their dreams, and the guild would swiftly recruit them. However, in reality, asymmetric information exists, and this hampers the guild matchmaking process.

Asymmetric information occurs when one party (in this case, the person or guild) knows something that the other does not, and such knowledge cannot easily transfer from one to the other. This may be because of significant distance between the two, or one does not quite believe what the other claims.

WoW Mathematics: My Large Brown Sack

To help find items easily, players often organise them in their bags in a certain way. It might be interesting to know just how many ways those items can be arranged, and what happens of those arrangements are restricted in some way.

Permutations are very useful in this process. It is a special case of the fundamental counting technique where an object, once picked, cannot be picked again, and so the available pool of objects decreases by one each time. Consider a certain 10-slot bag, the Large Brown Sack...