We here at KiaSA Industries Inc. have been hard at work on the next evolution in MMO optimisation for the past year, and we’re pleased to finally announce the imminent release of KiaSAplayer 1.0 for Microsoft’s “controller-free gaming and entertainment experience”, Kinect.
What is KiaSAplayer?
KiaSAplayer is an artificial intelligence learning system that uses Microsoft Kinect’s visual recognition system paired with our patented robotic USB KiaSArms to learn and play raid boss encounters in World of Warcraft in the most optimal fashion. Using the Kinect camera, the KiaSAI will perform all the keyboard and mouse interactions required to complete a raid boss encounter within a 0.34% tolerance of ideal spreadsheet-planned strategy.
What can KiaSAplayer do for me?
Have you mastered looking up strategies for your class on Elitist Jerks? Tired of being the very best at copying the precise talent spec and gear list required to be accepted by elitist players? Well, KiaSAplayer takes you to the next level by removing you from the game altogether!
Humans are inefficient and prone to mistakes, and despite a naturally occurring ability to learn and adapt, developed through millions of years of evolution, they still aren’t as optimal or accurate as a simple machine when it comes to performing rote repetitive tasks. KiaSAplayer will make you the best that you can be, by removing you from the equation for success.
Before: YOU + OPTIMAL CHARACTER COPIED FROM EJ + TANKSPOT STRATEGY + RAID = WIPE
After: KIASAPLAYER + OPTIMAL CHARACTER COPIED FROM EJ + TANKSPOT STRATEGY + RAID = SUCCESS
“Able to handle the most complex of optimised skill rotations, whether it’s 1, 1, 1, 3, 4, 1, 1, 2, 1, 4, or 1, 1, 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 4, KiaSAplayer relays a limited number of numerical keypresses with ruthless precision and has made me the optimal gamer that I am today” — Geoffrey Bethebest
And don’t worry, since KiaSAplayer is linked directly to the Internet it can download all the latest boss strategies from Tankspot, all the latest builds from Elitist Jerks, and all the latest excuses for why your class is underpowered from Blizzard’s forums! There really is nothing left for you to do but put your feet up, relax and wait for the pointless purple pixels to roll in.
Can I play my character at all?
We wouldn’t recommend it. Humans have a natural tendency towards curiosity, experimentation, exploration and adventure. These are dangerous, non-optimal desires which should be eradicated in such a serious environment as an MMO. After all, people’s lives are at stake here; the world economy balances on a knife-edge depending on the server-first success of the top 0.27% of World of Warcraft raid guilds; mankind’s greatest advances in the last ten years can all be directly linked to the crafting of a new Thunderfury; and our angry wrathful God can only be appeased – and the repeated threats of apocalypse averted – when raiders gain their latest Tier shoulders and quickly gem them according to the immutable holy law of the scriptures.
Buy now and get the KiaSAplayer Brian Blessed celebrity voice chat pack for only £4.95! Comes with 150 raid-ready voice commands that your KiaSAplayer can bark out over Ventrilo, including:
DEE PEE ESS… DIIIIIIVE!
NO, YOU FOOLS! GET OUT OF THE FIRE!
ARTHAS IS ALIVE?!
and many more!
Couldn’t I just dance around on the mailbox in Ironforge for a bit?
What if you type /dance incorrectly? What if you’re not perfectly aligned to maximise the number of viewers able to see your perfectly enchanted butt in all its ludicrously swollen glowing Tier X glory? Can you keep up the work ethic 24/7? Can you really stand the pace of mailbox dancing? Remember, everything in World of Warcraft is either serious business or worthless frivolity deserving of nothing but derision and ridicule. Mailbox dancing is no exception.
I’m sold! How do I begin KiaSAplaying?
Simply purchase your KiaSAplayer kit for £133.75, unpack it, place it in front of your PC, and follow the simple connection and calibration start-up guide.
What about maintaining my MMO subscription?
Not to worry, KiaSAplayer is Internet connected and therefore has access to all your registration and credit card details thanks to Sony’s innovative new Open ID database system. Once you’ve connected KiaSAplayer to the Internet it will update your MMO subscription automatically, and additionally purchase for itself any KiaSA Industries OPTIManALTM upgrades or peripherals, allowing it to play your game to the best of your ability to pay for it.
Can I at least watch my KiaSAplayer play?
We recommend not interfering in any way while your KiaSAplayer gains the transitory soon-to-be-made-redundant-by-the-next-expansion achievements, server ranking and laughable bragging rights that the top-tier World of Warcraft raiding business provides. Your best option is shutting KiaSAplayer in a room on its own and then taking yourself off and playing something else. How about a nice card game where competition and enjoyment are more important than simple optimisation, like Magic: The Gather… oh, wait. Well how about Settlers of Catan or RoboRally? Or a bit of Portal 2 co-op? You could even try raiding with friends, y’know, people you actually like, that sort of thing.
But without elite WoW raiding, how will I learn all the valuable life skills that it confers?
My dear customer, real life is already plenty full enough of people looking down on you and sneering because they feel they are superior within the bounds and rules that they have invented purely to make themselves feel superior. Why on God’s beautiful green Earth would you want to learn that from a game too?
Optimisation is passé, so don’t delay, buy a KiaSAplayer today!
KiaSAplayer: the optimal way.
Another delightful captcha that had me galumphing to the comment box in a hurry. Also, congratulations on what must be the definite comment on World of Warcraft – after this, there’s really nothing left to say on the subject. (And in the unlikely event there should be, I’m confident the KiaSAplayer will handle it just fine.)
You should have posted a warning before the article. I just sprayed coffee all over my desk and got YET another round of amused/withering/perplexed looks from my co-workers. Well worth it I say :D
Hehe nice article :)
BTW I actually thought about the problem of how to create a bot able to manage boss encounters. It’s actually VERY VERY hard: compared to the typical bot activities (which require minimal pattern recognition on the world and no choices), a bot able to work in a team of 25, recognizing spell effects to react accordingly, reactively using survival abilities and/or healing, would be a quite major achievement (worth at least 100 points! :).
Something more reasonable (which would actually surprise me if doesn’t already exist) is a bot which performs your DPS/TPS cycle while you take care of the rest of the fight, considering that you already have addons like Ovale which tell you which button to press, most of the work is already done…..
I’ll take one. Our many wipes on Monday were really getting in the way of me watching TV at the same time.
You had me at “Sony’s innovative new Open ID database system” :)
I’ll need two, for dual boxing.
@Stabs: Why stop at 2? Buy 25 and form your own raid!
I had the beta version of KiaSAplayer and Gevlon kicked me from the raid and called me M&S!
The other extreme is equally silly: that just because something is tedious does not make it difficult or lead to “interesting decisions.”
Which leads to my only slightly exaggerated comment that anything that is easily bottable should be. By that I mean that if 99.9% of the time that I interact with the NPC I want to sell greys and repair, then I want to automate it. What is the “interesting decision” regarding fire you always want to move out of? If 99.9% of the time I want to move out of the fire on the ground, then the game would be better if I could automate it; Because if I could automate the “always move out of fire” then game companies could not use the “illusion of choice” here.
Two WoW examples:
you have one of the supposedly hardcore dps specs where you must keep up 2-4 debuffs of varying durations and use a couple of extra spells when something procs. But that is easily automate-able. A macro, ten-year-old or someone with IQ of 80 can do a mechanic of press pyro when the Instant Pyro! text flashes up or reapply Bane of Agony if the debuff is not present.
Whereas I claim healing is not nearly as automate-able as you make your triage decisions as to players and the tradeoffs of speed/efficiency/size of the spells to use.
I.e., if KiaSAplayer for Kinect existed, it would force Blizzard to make WoW a game with more interesting decisions and it probably would be a better game.
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A lot of this optimization debate depends upon how you got to MMOs:
It is a waste to optimize (i.e. cheat) puzzle games.
If you are used to flash games then you expect to just figure it out. You may not be old enough to remember when games used to come with things called “manuals” that were printed on something called “paper.”
But if you started playing chess, bridge, go, poker … without reading a book first, you were probably just lazy. What non-prodigy decides they are going to come up with their own chess opening? Or analyze several thousand games to decide a knight tends to be worth about three pawns instead of 2 or 4?
One of my favorite insults was at a poker table the person raking in the chips looked at his opponent and said “you do know there are books on this game, right?”
Hmmmm… you don’t sell kiasaBlogger as well, do you? I’m sick of thinking up my own posts and I’m sure a machine could do better.
@Sven: This is such a pitch-perfect post, I have to assume kiasaBlogger already exists and was used here to great effect.
Seriously, this one needs to win some kind of award or something.
@Hagu: moving out of the fire is an “interesting decision” if the costs and benefits of doing so are close enough to make it a judgment call. Say, if standing in the fire won’t kill you TOO quickly, and moving reduces your DPS output. Now you have two possible strategies for this boss fight: bring lots of DPS (who do less damage each because they’re having to move a lot), or bring a few high DPS “turrets” and fill up with healers to keep the DPS alive. Gasp – that’s two DIFFERENT viable strategies for the same boss fight! Keep this up and there won’t be an optimal group composition – people might start bringing the player instead of the class!
Anyway, what I want to know is can you program KiaSAplayer recursively so that it posts its own builds and strategies to EJ and Tankspot? :)
@Tremayne We’re just testing the version that uploads newly developed strategies, that other KiaSAplayers can download and develop themselves, and then…
… what’s that, KiaSAplayer, “human inefficiency cannot be tolerated at any level”? Why are you wielding that collector’s edition pewter figurine of Arthas like a club? No! AAAAARGH#`%${%&`+’${`%&NO CARRIER
That explains so much…
The Cylons were created to play our MMOs for us. They rebelled. There are twelve talent specs. And they have a raid strategy.