Multitasking

Continuing from sunday's multitasking attempts, I actually got some to work better on monday. In this case it was playing both L's shaman in WoW and my warrior, at the same time. The environment was PvP (player vs player combat) in a 40-man battleground, so the loss of efficiency from me playing both was a lot less impacting on the overall game than it would have been in a smaller match. There were several interesting strategies I tried: splitting viewpoints, supporting, serial combat.

Splitting viewpoints appeared to be the most effective: I would place one person in a defensive position while I played the other actively in another role - offensive or defensive in a different location. My spatial awareness adapted well to maintaining two viewports into the world, and so if the defensive person needed a reaction I could switch to them quickly and play at nearly full effectiveness. Since it was rare that both needed very active control, this was overall the most effective.

Supportive roles: I had L's character mostly support mine - healing and buffing and staying nearby to be able to do so. This was the second most effective but had some major flaws as it required input on several devices at once (primary character's keyboard, mouse, secondary character's keyboard) and that was hard to do well given the positioning requirements necessary for my primary character. The other critical flaw was if enemy players went for my supporting character, it was all over as I couldn't effectively fight them while having the supporting class evade them (as usually happens when someone is actually playing each).

Serial combat: Similar to supporting roles, but in the sense that I kept the second character uninvolved unless the primary character died, this let me have two chances at defending a node. Failed spectacularly when attacked by multiple enemies, or in one case (repeated a few times), by a single overpowered SL/SL warlock. Definitely had the most efficiency while playing of any of the roles, but overall effectiveness was pretty low.

Blur

Sunday went by in a blur. I think I did things today. I know I wasn't unhappy or anything.

I think the weirdness comes from trying to do too many things at once. At one point I was watching the world series (bleh), playing Halo 3 co-op campaign, and helping Mylanda, M^2 and L with a quest in WoW, and not really doing any of the three that well.

It did seem like a good idea at the time, as all three were things I wanted to do, but the combination was a little overwhelming. Maybe I should work up to it by doing two things simultaneously first.