Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft
Vložit
- čas přidán 22. 05. 2024
- You enter a bright new digital world, exited to explore and hyped just to enjoy the vibe. Ten months later you're yelling at someone for standing in fire. What changed?
Produced by Dan Olson
Written by Nathan Landel and Dan Olson
Choice's channel - / choice_au
Bibliography
A Reports/Books/Articles
Ask, Kristine, ‘The Value of Calculations: The Coproduction of Theorycraft and Player Practices’ (2016) 36(3) Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 190.
Boellstroff, Tom, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton University Press, 2008)
Chen, Mark, ‘Leet Noobs: Expertise and Collaboration in a World of Warcraft Player Group as Distributed Sociomaterial Practice’ (PhD Thesis, University of Washington, 2010) [Not: College of Education].
Consalvo, Mia, Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames (MIT Press, 2007) 28.
Egliston, Benjamin, ‘Play to Win: How competitive modes of play have influenced cultural practices in digital games’ (Honours Thesis, University of Sydney 2013) [Not: School of Art, Communication and English] 24.
Genette, Gérard, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Glas, René, Battlefields of Negotiation: Control, Agency, and Ownership in World of Warcraft (Amsterdam University Press, 2013).
Golub, Alex, ‘Being in the World (Of Warcraft): Raiding, Realism, and Knowledge Production in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game’ (2010) 83(1) Anthropological Quarterly 17.
Iser, Wolfgang, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993)
Lehdonvirta, Vili and Edward Castronova, Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis (The MIT Press, 2014).
McArthur, Victoria et al, ‘Knowing, Not Doing: Modalities of Gameplay Expertise in World of Warcraft Addons’ in CHI ’12 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM, 2012) 101.
Prax, Patrick, ‘Co-Creative Interface Development in MMORPGs - the Case of World of Warcraft Add-Ons’ (2012) 4(1) Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 3.
Skare, Roswitha, ‘Paratext’ (2020) 47(6) Knowledge Organization 511.
Skare, Roswitha, ‘The paratext of digital documents’ (2021) 77(2) Journal of Documentation 449.
Steinkuehler, Constance, ‘The Mangle of Play’ (2006) 1(3) Games and Culture 199.
Taylor, T.L, ‘Does WoW Change Everything?: How a PvP Server, Multinational Player Base, and Surveillance Mod Scene Caused Me Pause’ (2006) 1(4) Games and Culture 318.
Taylor, T.L, ‘The Assemblage of Play’ (2009) 4(4) Games and Culture 331.
Taylor, T.L, Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (MIT Press, 2006).
B Other
Crusader3455, ‘MIESTRO DOES A LEGIT 2v3 AT 2500 CR’ (CZcams, 30 August 2022)
AzAMOus, ‘It’s 2922 and You Enter Utgarde Keep’ (CZcams, 29 September 2022)
Mark Chen, ‘Mark Chen presenting Leet Noobs 10 years later’ (CZcams, 12 March 2021)
www.pcgamesn.com/world-of-war...
Crowdfunding: / foldablehuman
Twitter: / foldablehuman
00:00:00 Preface
00:01:28 Chapter 1 - Instrumental Play
00:17:58 Chapter 2 - Paratext
00:31:44 Chapter 3 - How Add-ons Ruined my Manchildhood
00:40:50 Chapter 4 - Join a Guild, They Said
00:56:45 Chapter 5 - WoW Classic, A Hellscape of Instrumental Practices
01:12:03 Chapter 6 - Decomposing the World
01:19:37 Conclusion - Zábava
The irony of being called a tourist in a game you’ve played since 2005 because you didn’t take classic seriously is rich
It's because the paratext tells you that you need to become an eltist asshole, else you are not true wow.
Main pld since wotlk up to current, but its not until lately i started main one in the classic servers too, I'm fully aware about the class variations in power, but always been giving those snobs the middle finger. I like metzen the draw artist for some stuff in warcraft 2 and such, since he likes alliance and paladin, all other blizzard staff is for the horde. Ion however hates pld , so thats probably why they got made bad. That guy needs his royal silverspoon stuck up his ass he was born in his mouth with. I am just simply a fan of arthas since wc 3 at least up until he turning undead.
@@NathanWubs literal plague of this game
@@makingadjustments It makes sense when you consider that most of them have this mindset because it's what they've been told they should have rather than anything they've determined independently. That kind of thinking doesn't generally generate quality.
You're called a tourist because you are not going to stay in the game, you will revert back to retail or wherever else. Your opinion as a tourist doesn't matter, because your fashions are ephemeral, only playing classic for the hype not for the love of the game.
I relate to this so hard just playing Stardew with my family. One brother maximizes and optimizes absolutely everything, aiming to unlock things as soon as possible. Meanwhile our cousin just makes his character look like Luigi and walks around eating sap.
I mean, I know which person I'd rather play with 🤷♀️ cousin Luigi sounds like he's onto something
@@NoOneSpecific365 yeah Im going with luigi as well
Your brother sounds like he has way too much time on his hands.
Your cousin OTOH sounds like a true Stardew player. 👍
@@Cha0sCloud his brother sounds like he enjoys min maxing, and might enjoy speedrunning. Both of which are valid ways to have fun so long as you aren't shaming other people.
Your brother sounds like he'd REALLY enjoy Factorio
That line “Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game” is painfully relevant in MMO style games. I remember when Black Spindle came out in Destiny you couldn't get into raids without it. Almost every LFG group demanded you have Black Spindle with specific rolls or you'd be denied entry. Never mind the fact that the raids had been completed countless times before the weapon even existed. If it wasn't "optimal," it wasn't acceptable.
Not to mention the "Have Gjally or Kick" Posts lmao
Destiny is a good example of toxic optimization in gaming. Crucible is constantly being ruined by people playing ONLY to win.
Guild Wars 2 was horrible for this around launch (haven't played much since then.)
Since no character is really built to be Tank or Healer, and everyone can heal themselves, the fastest strat was for everyone to be a DPS. I think about 50% of max-level dungeon group would ve "zerk only", meaning you HAD to have berzerker gear (+crit rate, +Crit Damage, +damage) it sucked. Hard.
Not to mention that LFR did more damage with specific perks too.
Any sniper would have realistically worked tho
A ridiculous ask even at the time, given that at that time, there were exactly 2 raids - Vault of Glass, the very first one, and the raid Black Spindle drops from, Crota’s End. There were no strategies for either raid that required Spindle - Crota was functionally the only boss in his raid and damage was done with rocket launchers, and Vault of Glass could certainly have been made easier by Spindle, but it was months old and plenty of strategies already worked in Vault lol
I played wow when I was little on the family computer. I played in what I called "single player mode" I turned off the chat box and I would spend hours exploring the maps, doing fetch quests for npcs, and selling pelts from low-level animals I killed. It was great! I didn't know what guilds were and I leveled up very slowly. WoW has some really cool areas to check out! The games pretty fun when you don't know what people are saying.
exactly how im playing my return to wow
im not going to go past the free trial on any of my characters until theyre all lv20 and all im doing is questing in the starting areas
one character per race. each has a different thematically logical subclass
just finished my first, a female dreanei holy priest
wow is by far at its best in the early game
probably will stick to only classic content whenever possible
Basically the same thing I do now in dragon flight. It is super rare for me to say anything in chat, I rarely ever run dungeons, haven’t raided since Cataclysm. I quest, and farm mounts / pets. Level characters of each race and class just to have fun playing.
@@aa-tx7th you got the right idea! Happy exploring friend
@@sdranch2800 I'm so glad I'm not the only one who enjoys Single Player Mode. Get those pets/mounts in peace!
I can relate to this, but on another game: Runescape. When I was a kid I was doing just things I thought were cool, like leveling only killing zombies cause why not, and just farming rune essence because the cave looked cool. When I went back and played on the oldschool server I got to the point it took me 2 years in about 15 days and I stopped playing. It sucks that the optmize mindset got to me, cause it ultimatelly killed the fun for me.
As someone who has never played WoW, my biggest takeaway from this vid is "wait, it's not SUPPOSED to look like that?"
The plot twist is that the game is quite beautiful under all that UI.
The irony is a lot of players don’t have a shit ton of ui
I’m general you want as little UI as you can while still having all the info you need. Back in the day players crammed thier screen with it but also there was a lot less to need to see back then. Mechanics have gotten to the point now where you need to see as much of the screen as possible
@@erichall090909 Not only were there less need to see, there was also more time to absorb information. Back then it was okay to just stop for 10 seconds to look at all the information you had available and to figure out what's up because not much would happen in that 10 seconds. Now in a typical boss fight in a raid in that 10 seconds 3 different mechanics are going to trigger that you have to react to.
Funnily enough my need for boss timers has actually gone *down* over time because if the boss takes like 10 wipes to kill, it's simple enough that you don't really need them anyways. And if the boss takes 50+ wipes to kill, you'll have good enough grasp on the ebb and flow of the boss by the end that you'll just *know* when mechanics are about to happen.
@@erichall090909also 16:9 monitors make our 4:3 UIs look way uncluttered
Feels relevant: Countless years ago, in the earliest days of Vanilla WoW, I'm just poking around somewhat aimlessly killing Troggs for a quest that was taking just forever, and some wandering Warrior I don't know suggests we party up and kill them faster. All well and good, but then he tells me, "You take Aggro."
So I ask him, "What's Aggro mean?" I had never heard the word before--never played an MMO before, in fact. He was totally incredulous, but after some prodding he explained the meaning of the term and why it made sense for me to do it, which it did; we killed some bad guys, finished out the quest, and all was well. Or so I thought.
Literally YEARS later there's a thread on Blizzard's WoW forum asking what's the worst party you've ever been in in the game, and sure enough, some Warrior stops long enough to pipe in, "Oh man, I met a Paladin once who didn't even know what Aggro was."
They're going to carve this on my tombstone, just you wait and see.
At least it sounds like he was patient with you in the moment. That's worth a lot.
oh gosh, that reminds me of the first time i tried playing a healer, and in ragefire chasm people were yelling at me about not using bubble, and i had no idea what they were talking about because i didn't have a spell called "bubble".
I hate that someone even considers that worthy of putting in such a thread. "New player doesn't know how to play" shouldn't come off as a significant affront to anyone.
I knew nothing of dungeons or anything when I got randomly invited to deadmines as a fire mage. I had no idea what i was doing so i just started blasting. thankfully after making a mess the party was patient with me and explained aggro to me
I have never been one for multiplayer games because of the fear of interaction, doing bad and/or dragging other players down.
But I did play LoL with my ex and after getting absolutely reamed in the chat for being a sub-par healer I never played the vanilla game again and just stayed in the other game modes.
These are meant to be games I enjoy in my spare time, not an unpaid second job where I get yelled at by some random. It was a normal match too, not even ranked.
Not to mention how you get treated if people find out you're a girl, I'm a transguy and my voices passes but I am forever scarred from voice chat.
I feel like a lot of people are missing the point here. The point isn't that instrumental play or number crunchy min max players are bad, but that the way many multiplayer game communities force less crunchy players into this way of play sucks ass
Looking at the comments section, especially recently, I think "people are missing the point" could sum up a LOT of what's going on.
Most of the people missing the point have not watched the whole video. It's not a new thing people come to a video with the bias based on title and then skim through it at most and make a comment.
But they don't force them? Even now, wow has multiple RP servers where you are allowed to do goofy stuff like not wear shoes in raids, as long as you find consenting party members. You are not just by existence entitled to enjoy all of the content in the game, in every conceivable way. Some of it is made hard enough that your goofy ass can't progress through it alone, so you have to enlist the help of other people. In those cases, you need to all agree about the standards that are acceptable for that group. People are obviously going to be mad if you enter a raid without footwear that has an objective benefit to you and by extension the group, if you didn't first communicate that with them. If you cannot find enough like minded people, then others are not in anyway required to still let you play that way with them.
@@ruukinen dude chill. You are exactly the type of guy I was talking about
@@somedragonbastard You've never played a game with me, and most likely never will. You are making assumptions about me based on nothing. In the exact same way the players you are "talking about" make about you.
56:00 is a really interesting point. My small guild did the same back in 2009. Outside sources were discouraged. We banned reading WoWhead. Theorycrafting was right out. We wanted to experience the game and encounters organically, and it made everything harder but more satisfying.
After a couple months we got good at it. We started "solving" dungeons and bosses faster. We felt good. Then we noticed that Brian was always the first one to "remember" a boss' big attack and "anticipate" a movement or a mob spawn. He was always the first to crack a strategy. Once we started looking for it, we saw that Loren almost always had the right element enchanted on his weapon the first time we fought a boss, and Jon was exact to the tenth of a second with his threat generation. I got called out for my Tankadin's rotation being a macro when someone heard my bag of chips crinkling over VoIP. We were all lying.
And it turns out, people just naturally like to learn things and will do it anyways even if you ban it xD
😂
oof :(
this is why people say it's baked into the game design, what ends up happening is you either emulate the same guides, or, you hit a brick wall that requires guides, because developers are making the game's challenges with those guides in mind..
@@ich3730if you learn anything from this video, learn that this behavior is not "natural", but a consequence of how the environment is structured.
even if these players went into it specifically with the goal of not playing optimally, they still existed in a wider social environment that valued optimal play, and they still played in a game world biased toward optimal play. these factors influenced their decisions.
As the original author of WeakAuras, I never expected it to become such a pervasive (and perhaps controversial) piece of paratext in relation to WoW.
It's really interesting to encounter someone whose original work went far beyond their initial expectations for the mod. I remember downloading WeakAuras back when I played WoW in WotLK (the first and only expansion I played), when it was part of a suite of mods that would help in raiding and it really did help! The work you did there was absolutely appreciated by not only myself, but I'm sure everyone else who used that mod. I am curious about your history with it, as well as your viewpoints on the material covered in the video as someone who is tangentially involved in the whole thing.
@ChRoNiC717 Well, for one, I think I'm firmly on the side of enjoying addons and how they evolved alongside raid encounter design in WoW. But that's inherently related to two factors that the video covers: 1) I'm one of the people who enjoys the hierarchical stratification produced by modern end-game raids, and 2) I'm a software developer, so the actual act of creating software solutions to raid mechanics (or seeing other people create them) is both interesting and accessible to me.
And then, to downplay my contribution a bit: WeakAuras was the second major addon I developed, the first being a very complex and niche addon for coordinating assignments on the Lich King. A fight-specific addon. WeakAuras is very popular because of its great flexibility, but that flexibility is mostly just a thin translation layer that provides convenient access to Blizzard's underlying tools for addon development. The point is, WeakAuras doesn't allow you to do anything you couldn't do anyway with fight-specific addons. And honestly, the way it is used nowadays - with prominent streamers and raiders releasing comprehensive class and raid "packs", which become well-known and proliferate across the playerbase - it is almost indistinguishable from what addons are supposed to be in the first place! If WeakAuras didn't exist, I think a lot of the exact same things would be done through custom addons. They would just be slightly more difficult to share around.
So I guess my thought is that I'm honored and bemused to have had an opportunity to affect so many WoW players, and to have made a concrete contribution to a years-long push and pull in game design that has inspired books and video essays like this one. But in the grand scheme of things this tension - the tension between addon-lovers and no-addon purists, the tension between structured and unstructured play - seems inevitable to me.
@@Mirrormn Thanks a lot for your viewpoint, it's quite illuminating and is interesting by dint of being quite unique as someone who developed add-ons - as opposed to being a developer of the game or simply a player.
WA is one of the main reasons i'm always coming back to WoW. I really love to have my UI, the way i want it and the way i can read it the best. To me and many players it's already a part of the game, next to raids and dungeons :D
The best part was a friend of mine who wanted to start progressing in WoW and he was like "WAs? nah not my thing..." a few weeks later: "i need a WA for this, oh and i want this to be displayed, and i need to change this other WA. I reworked my entire UI, it's so much fun!"
I never really used weak auras and had quit the game by the time they became necessary. What was the original intention of weak auras?
In Mario Kart, while I was hugging curves and defending my lead my son decided to ram his kart in front of a stage full of Koompas dancing, throw down the controller, jump up, shake his ass shouting "Woo Hoo! Yeah! Let's Party!". I've never been more pwnd in my whole life. Not only was I playing THIS game incorrectly, I was playing EVERY game incorrectly. GG son.
Wholesome content right here, +1,000,000
@@HighOctane01 as long as you're not grieving ofc
LMAO damn, you won the race but your son beat the game. absolutely amazing
Ill take an exaggerated and possibly made up story for 500 Regis
@@whitemoose8667 literally what about this story is in any way exceptional or unusual
In Vanilla I rolled a Tauren Druid, purely because he looked and sounded cool. I knew nothing about classes and roles, the meta etc. I knew nothing about playing optimally (or even somewhat decently probably) and would form an early version of a hybrid druid purely by accident. I'd get asked if I could tank, I'd look at my kit and be like "Yeah it's possible", and it would go poorly. I'd be asked to heal, see that I have healing spells, and it would go poorly. After that, I eventually just started collecting rare things. Miscellaneous items, critters, objects that have literally no value, weapons, anything that even sounded fun. I made so many bank alts, dressed them up like pimps, then just started playing to make gold from buying, selling, and farming. I literally didn't care to raid or even dungeon unless there was a cool item. I became a merchant and in my mind I won.
Oh hello vanilla tauren druid, I'm WotLK/Cata tauren BM Hunter, and I'm barred from ever doing any raids or heroics because I am a leper worthy of only scorn and disgust.
back when no game needed achievements, we made our own fun goals to do
So you basically just became trazyn the infinite
This really hit me hard as a disabled gamer. I always feel like I can't really join any kind of game related community because so much are focused on optimizing everything, and my body just can't keep up. No matter how many videos I watch I'll never be as optimal as an able bodied player who doesn't struggle to use a keyboard. If I join a guild that wants to focus on being the best then I'll always hold them back. It's really depressing because that's also how I tend to get treated for my disability anyway. I can't even escape being judged for my physical ability in a completely virtual environment. It's really awful how isolating it is. I really just wish there were more spaces where I wasn't judged on my abilities in some way.
You kick ass no matter what. I wish you the best
My experience with gaming communities is that they always, always replicate the worst aspects of our society while suppressing the good ones.
Every form of intolerance you can think up, they're eager to practice it. They relish in their obsession with numbers, competition and prestige. They insult you for performing poorly, for playing certain ways, for being a certain way.
Honestly, I can't imagine why anyone would choose to be in a game community of their own volition. The real world might be harsh, but at least it has laws, various types of ice cream, and people discussing how to make things more tolerable, not less.
@@grzegorzbrzeczyszczykiewic563 Fr fr spittin' straight fax
On the other hand, most gamers that don't have any serious health problems lack the time to devote to such guild.
Amazing reflection. Thank you for sharing that!! It's a bit counter-intuitive how isolating games like WoW can be, it being a social game and all. Someone else mentioned the game brings out social extremes and I agree completely. There is such a strong hierarchy and sense of power elicited by the game that so many players (myself included) are very drawn to, "to fit in", and I think it's why a lot of people can be so intolerant. When you bring someone down, you lift yourself up. There is no stronger motivation than feeling socially cohesive within "the group".
My college friends and I still laugh about back in 2005 when a guy in our dorm kept looting during fights in wailing caverns. And he would actively deny it. Then during a fight the game lagged real hard and everyone was stuck moving around in whatever animation they were stuck in. Zach was stuck in the loot animation. He still denied it. 😂
Is that a pathological liar or did I just misunderstood the term?
@@ultimaxkom8728 Yes some people literally cant help it and are massive pos lol
I remember this bug.
And that's when you kick him from the group and block him.
@@ultimaxkom8728 Pathological liar means something pretty extreme, and someone that compulsively lies all the time.
Dont think that thing in WoW is enough to make that deduction^^
one of my closest friends i've ever had played like that barefoot gnome at the start, only he refused to cave. i love that guy and he played the game HIS way until everyone else got tired of the game like 7 years in. he told me later it was because he hated Warcraft a lot, but loved spending time with us, so he made the game fun for himself. it made us all feel terrible because we never considered if he enjoyed the "correct" way of playing WoW
Reminds me of a guy in Eve Online who absolutely refused PVP or really any of the normal ways to play. He just sat around the main market regions and socialized. Eventually he got so trusted by everyone that he was the games go-to mediator for disputes, and trusted middle man for risky trades, and when one day someone managed to glitch a capital ship into a market system by mistake, he brought the capital ship off them knowing that the devs would delete the ship thus kinda screwing up the player. The devs ended up doing something unusual, let him keep the ship on the condition it was never used for pvp (In theory, though probably not in practice, a dreadnaught could defeat the concord npc space police, thus defeating the protections of hi-sec space. They would not have trusted any other player to keep the ship. And the entire player base was 100% down with this one off bending of rules.). So he spent his time in this giant dreadnaught mining newbie area rocks with battleship mining lasers (no such thing as capital ship mining lasers at that point of the game, though those came later) and resolving problems for people. Dude blazed his own trail and became beloved for it.
@@shayneoneill1506 never heard of this guy, so i thought it would be difficult to find his name in such a massive game as eve online. but typing "eve online trusted player" immediately his name appeared 😂i guess there's not that many that have his level of reputation.
The man, the myth, the absolute legend, Chribba. God bless 'im.
@@shayneoneill1506 That is fucking amazing. I miss EvE dearly and if I ever lose my entire social life I am comming back to it.
I've been there, both as the person trying to get their friend into playing the "right" way, and also being the friend who hates the game, but is just there to vibe and chat to friends.
This is something that actually puts me off games, but not for the reason you'd expect. I'm a very instrumental player, I have a long term goal and I like to optimise for it as much as possible. However that actually puts me off playing a lot of games that encourage that behaviour, because I find it super overwhelming. Instead I'd much rather do that in smaller games not designed for that optimisation, where the act of optimising feels like a departure from the game, and a whole new horizon, not the intended result.
I think of this when me and my friend play PlateUp. I love to optimise the placement and automation, being very careful about making the most of the least number of items, ensuring to prep things in advance to get the best number of conveyors, desks etc. However he is very much the opposite, he loves when the cosmetic rounds come about because he can plan how he wants the restaurant to look, he spends time at the beginning coming up with a fun name.
One obvious example is the meat fridge: it has roughly a 2/3rds hitbox, whereas most items have a 1 square hitbox. What this means is that when the fridge is facing the correct "aesthetic" way i.e. the door is towards the player, there's a common risk of getting caught on the object next to it when walking away with the item, which could genuinely end a run later on. The optimal solution is one I do without question: reverse the fridge. Due to it's orientation, the back of the fridge is perfectly aligned with the border, meaning that this issue doesn't happen. However he would prefer to having it the door round, because even though it can actively hinder the ability to cook the meal, it looks better, and immerses more as it fits his aesthetic.
And I've actually come to realise that us being opposed like this is why we love playing games together so much. If we play a game together, he love to handle the aesthetic stuff that I don't care for, and I love to optimise the technological stuff he doesn't care for.
Another example is in Modded Minecraft, when we played a server of mods I put together, I built a nuclear reactor, I put together all the machines to power the base, create items, further "progression" etc. He put together a cool looking base for us, plus handled all the food requirements and had an amazing time working with magic, bees and farms. It worked together perfectly, cause I could show him what I've been working on and give him something that makes his life easier, then he can show me his ideas for our space base, for our warehouse etc, and I can work my functional parts around the cool designs he has. It's just a perfect synergy between our opposing play styles!
I love the talk about PlateUp because I find myself in both camps. I love having a good looking kitchen but I also love a well-optimized kitchen
This is bromance for life right here. Don't ever fall out of touch with this friend.
i will never forget putting this on as bed time noise and getting woken up by 21:36 with a genuine feeling of being confused and under attack
Thank you for that amazing mental image lol
Thank you for the warning
mfw I nap so bad a twitch screamer sorry streamer calls me trash
Please do not put on video essays as a bedtime noise, you will lose language concentration function.
@@user-lt4ty5ij6z i tried searching for any evidence of this and found nothing so a source is welcome.
"worlds become real when we care about them, not when they look similar to our own." gonna go find a window to stare out of for the next 500 years. this month has been so good for the longform videos, but i am also so incredibly full of big existential thoughts
I haven’t gotten to this place in the video yet, but that quote reminds me of The Velveteen Rabbit.
i’ve always described my aversion to multiplayer team games as “i was bad at sports in middle school and got yelled at by my teammates for it, and i don’t have a strong desire to relive it”. all that to say that this video is so real to my experience not just with WoW but multiplayer team games as a whole.
I was about to say haha. I played WoW casually with close friends mostly so I was lucky not to deal with too much of this, but this is like PTSD for my league of legends days
I tried playing League of Legends. Played a few games against bots, tried my first multiplayer match, got badly insulted and uninstalled the game.
I would assume that competitive WoW players are much less likely to play other competitive games where they are not part of a team or are playing directly against human opponents. Or games where progress as a player is less clearly defined in numbers.
Team games have bad habit attracting players that can't handle losing too well and makes it easy to bully lower level players. Also team gives easier route to victory as your personal playing skill matters less if you have a very good team.
Players who do not like playing against human opponents often do not like how unpredictable they can be. This type of player often prefers to learn single strategy that will work every time with minimal variation. Commonly also people that are not very good at handling losing and this is made worse by the opponent being a human.
RPG games attract players that care more about stats and how much you can sink time into the game than other gameplay features. Numbers and time spent gives easy set of visible signs of progress within the game. You make progress more because how much you play and game rewards you from it instead of your progress being more direct result of your playing skills increasing. This means usually that the player values more stat numbers and how much time it took to reach those numbers than less visible skill improvement. This leads to being more likely to take shortcuts that require less skill and give better results, bigger numbers and ability to gain them faster.
It is no wonder competitive WoW players are so toxic, they are some least compatible people with actual fair competitive play in good spirit. And explains why competitive play causes so severe problems in MMORPG communities in general.
I totally feel that. Every now and then I dive into MWO or this WWI multiplayer game (the 4 person survival mode) and everyone is almost always super nice.
@@gregoryford2532 You have to grow up and learn to accept those things. Not just run away
The “stand here and do what you are told” aspect of raids is what made me stay away from them. I mean, why would I trade the freedom of doing what I want on Friday evenings to get, over a period of months, slightly better items where I would get to stand somewhere different and do what I was told.
To get better items? You literally answered the question. My question would be “why would I keep playing an mmo without achieving the obvious goal of getting better gear”
@@Frameygamey Oh, so your idea of “play” is to stand in a spot and do what you are told. Your idea and my idea of play are apparently different.
@@Frameygamey The burning question is "why do I want purple items if I have to raid for months?" My answer is that I don't and would rather do 5-mans or play Smash Bros.
@@slackerman9758 Yes they are, I would prefer to actually progress in the game
@@Frameygamey If doing exactly what you are told (and getting yelled at when you don’t) is how you want to spend your free evenings, good on you. Not what I consider fun, though. You don’t have to play that game, you know.
I think this might be one of the best video explanations of how “toxic” behavior and development of gameplay changes over the years. Amazing knowledge bomb
it's really cool that Dan has started making hours-long documentaries SPECIFICALLY for me, I appreciate that.
my two biggest interests in High School were Pink Floyd and World of Warcraft, so Dan's channel feels like targeted advertising 😂
on the opposite hand, i could not care less about warcraft but am somehow absolutely enthralled listening to him talk about it. either im easily amused or dan is really good at what he does
uh sorry they are for me, i can prove it because i subbed to his channel like a month before he did the NFT video. Coincidence? Suuuuuurre.
Oh I feel that
@@yamii3281 Any subject can be interesting if it's conveyed by a knowledgeable, engaged person in an entertaining and well-arranged way. I too could not care less about WoW (I tried it during a free weekend, stopped after about an hour, it's just not for me), but I find the evolution of rules/norms and subcultures very interesting. (Like, I never watch F1 racing because one or two drivers/teams being guaranteed to win the year due to an absolutely ridiculous monetary advantage is not entertaining, but I like watching videos discussing the ramifications of F1 rules changes.)
I once saw someone(a much worse player at the game in question than me, if that matters) say, "if you're this terrible at the game then you're obviously not ready to play online." My immediate impulse was to turn it around on him. If someone is unprepared or unwilling to encounter a playerbase full of all levels of skill, all sorts of priorities and playstyles, etc, then they are mentally and emotionally unprepared for online play. My belief is that, in a very real way, someone who can't cope with another player not equipping boots is a far worse player than the no-boots guy could ever be.
EDIT: To be clear I'm mostly just talking about people who get, like, ANGRY angry or pitch a fit and make their frustration everyone's problem. I'm pointing more to a lack of social skills and emotional regulation, rather than simple disapproval and exclusion
To be honest, I think there are two sides to this. Playing FF14, I've kinda encountered the other extreme quite a few times, of players who don't even know the very self-explanatory and simple rotation of a black mage or barely heal a group while also never ever touching a single dps button in level 80+ dungeons, content which you will usually only reach after having played through dozens of hours of content that forces you to play through both dungeon and trial content. At this point my position is, its fair to hold basic expectations a player should be able to fulfill while at least trying to give their best appropriate for the difficulty level of the content played at this moment. Take the no boots example: Doing that in a casual environment where nobody is giving a fuck with people who are in on the joke? Sure. Doing it in an environment that tries to beat a given piece of content and may even be in the middle of progress through that content, where it is expected that people cooperate to the best of their ability to beat it? Not so cool. Doing it with complete strangers who are not in on the joke and just want to beat the content comfortable? Kinda rude.
I think in this way, context really matters in where you play how.
Well said.
@@shizachan8421 This is probably fair. My own experiences from which my views arose are in purely pvp contexts, mostly shooters, where one team has to lose either way and outside of professional play there's no real downside to just taking the game and teammates as they come
@@Sahdirah Thanks. I also feel like in these discussions we really hit the problem of negative experiences sticking harder in the human psyche than neutral or positive experiences, especially in games where the content you play can be fairly repetetive. From my anecdotal experience, in the case of WoW I probably will have experienced 10 or so dungeons where everything runs smoothly with a hi and maybe a bye and just rushing through the dungeon without anything remarkable and even some particularily pleasant interactions sprinkled in between for any time where I met a toxic shithead. Same for FF14, the dungeon runs while leveling where we just do smooth wall 2 wall pulls beating the dungeon in 15 or so minutes will outweigh the annoying experiences with sylphies or "You don't pay my sub1111!!!" types. On average the average player you meet will probably have both a basic level of competency and expectations for any level of content.
And if players do something stupid just for the fun of it, it's always the best to let the players you play with in on the joke and decide whether or not they want to participate. Me and my friends sometimes randomly jump into the dungeonbrowser while being wasted with the intention of getting more wasted, like for example making up rules to drink a shot each death and the best way to avoid negative feelings is to just write in "drunken run, no salt" or something like that.
@@shizachan8421 the context and the following consent from fellow players really is the big thing.
I am fine with a dungeon taking twice as long if people just don't know what to do but to gimp yourself, and by extension the whole party, by not equipping your boots or job stone is just shitty especially so in random groups where to disengage the game systems would punish me
Very interesting, this really captures for me how I feel playing modern WoW. Its a game until you reach endgame, then it turns into some kind of continued performance assessment.
Thats a nice way of putting it
That's exactly why I stopped playing wow.
I remember doing my first LFG in Destiny 1. Vanilla Destiny 1. When the raid Vault of Glass had been out for about a month and very few people had completed it. Our group, assembled over some random app, was 5 "normal people" (me included) and one guy who opened with "Let's get this done, I've got shit to do". He yelled at everyone who didn't know the way, didn't know the mechanics, didn't already have an optimised loadout.
We got to Atheon (somehow) and he shouted "Why aren't there Weapons of Light at the back?" and 2 people didn't know what that meant - it was a class specific ability you had to have active on a specific build on a specific ability (Titans needed to be running Bubble and have the buff active on their bubbles, the default was something else). You literally heard him throw his controller across the room when 2 people, one a Warlock and one a Hunter, didn't know. This was so early on in the game's life VERY few people were running alt characters of other subclasses (I ran all 3 for 5 years but even at that point I only played Titan).
He made the first VoG clearance for most of us bitter-sweet. He was a terrible person who had no time for anyone else but himself. Aside from the clearance 2 other positive things came out of that experience - 1. myself and another guy added each other on PSN and did the raid many many times over the next few years and 2. I made sure to always ask in any LFG group "Is there anyone unsure about the mechanics of the next section?" and I'd always take the time to explain, politely and hopefully with humour, what we needed to do, emphasising stuff like "Don't worry if it sounds complicated, it needs a few tries to get the hang on it. I got stuck here my first time for 3 hours".
If you're in a shit LFG group be nice to them, they'll not get better just by calling them "dipshit" and "fag". Or just leave and give yourself and them another role of the LFG dice.
I've had experiences like this myself multiple times, some better than others. Funnily enough, one of them was in the D2 version of VoG. One of my friends is, well... not very good at following directions. He needs things explained to him in a very specific manner, something that I can achieve, as I've known him my whole life, but other people don't get. Long story short, we get to oracles and he has no clue what he's doing. Everyone has to shoot their oracle in order or you will fail. The people we were with explained this to us (as we've never done the raid before,) but he just didn't get it. We kept failing and nobody was sure why. I figured that it was him, so our next phase, I just watched him without focusing on anything else. Sure enough, yeah, it was his fault. I explained what was going on and sort of took him to the side to help him understand how he was fucking up. Next go around, got it done with no problem. Another experience I've had was in WoW, doing normal dungeons for the first time. In Freehold, there is a mechanic that makes one of the boss fights much easier, but this mechanic (in my opinion) is not explained well at all to new players, such as myself. The other BFA dungeons were pretty much just "kill thing, move on." Incredibly simple. But this mechanic, if you hadn't learned of it yet, there was no hints or anything to guide you. You either knew or you didn't. Some guy got furious with me because I didn't understand what this mechanic was, and just left without even bothering to help. After that, one of the other players took me to the side and showed me what to do, and we finished the dungeon with ease as a 4-man group. Patience truly is a virtue. It's important to remember that nobody knows everything without learning it first. If someone messes something up, that doesn't mean they're a complete lost cause, they just need to be taught. Sure, some people may struggle more than others, but everyone is ignorant at some point. At the end of the day, if you don't have money riding on this, it's just a damn game. If you feel it's a waste of time, then fine, you can leave, but there's zero reason to be a dick about it.
You're an American hero, my friend! I've been a victim of toxic cowboy players too, and I appreciate how you stepped up to do something about it!
the performance of my Visions of Confluence with Rewind Rounds and Firefly is all the more satisfying for the 3 hours of listening to a white child calling everyone in the LFG call the n word that i had to put up with to get it
Thank you for verbalising why I never got into WoW. You get absolute freedom to run around in an interesting fantasy world and players made it an office job with spreadsheets.
Beautifully put.
You can always choose to ignore the gear/ilvl farm/grind and play completely casually. Just saying. You still need a thick skin and a strong stomach. Also arguably *some* of the optimizations are fun and help push some things you wouldnt be able to do without them.
@@The86Ripper If you need a thick skin and a strong stomach to play completely casually, maybe it's not a good MMO to be played completely casually.
@@The86Ripper Or... People can go to FFXIV where the community is eager to help people learn. And that's one of the main reasons people switch.
@@The86Ripper I'll stick to my NMS trading faction lol
In Guild Wars 1 there was a tutorial world, which was a completely different instance from the main game to which you could not return to once leaving. To get the best armor in this tutorial - which was somewhat useful in the main game - you needed to farm x items from two different enemies. I’ve put 100+ hours into Guild Wars, 99% in the main game, but the best memory I have from all that time is when I created a character named „Tutorial Merchant“, farmed those two mob items and then sold it to other players for very little gold, gold that I had no use for, because I already had the best tutorial equipment. Whenever I sold out, I ran into the woods again, farmed, got back into town again and announced my goods to the travellers. Most people were really appreciative. Some were on their Xth character and just wanted to get the tutorial over with. Others were new players and I like to think I added just that much to their wondrous experience with my small nonsensical business. Great memory for me.
I remember having a vaguely related experience where I played GW1 for maybe, idk, 20-35 hours? Most of it in the tutorial because I wanted to do all the exclusive things there first before fully leaving since I didn't really intend to come back. I was really struggling to get some specific rare drop, I think it was just like a bag or something, and I spent like 3-4 hours trying to farm it. Then I mentioned that on the discord server at the time and some guy just came up and gifted it to me, and that guy's kindness making my day is genuinely the only memory I have of GW1.
In Runes of Magic, I used to farm the resources you needed for the lvl 10 and 20 special abilities. I had fun, farmed low lvl dailies items, and made good money. And, being a priest, buffed newbies with 400+ hp. Ah, memories… =)
When I was playing Elden Ring in 2022, I really wanted to create a new character named ¨Helpful Invader¨ then invade in the starting areas and genuinely help whomever I invaded. I wanted to lead that player through dungeons and point out threats for them. I wouldn´t have minded if they just outright killed me either. I really just wanted to help the community since there was so much anger about PVP and online play at the time.
Even as someone who doesn’t play MMOs, I’m inclined to call you a saint for providing that kind of service.
Something I loved about City of Heroes were the groups of high-level players who'd just sit in the spot where all new heroes spawned out of the tutorial and handed out free equipment and resources to anyone who'd clearly put a lot of work into their character/backstory.
A few years ago, around Cata, I was teaching a new gamer (she'd never played anything but solitaire) how to play Wow. They asked me about doing dungeons and I warned them off that people would be rude and inpatient. She was still learning to use WASD without looking at the keyboard. So we agreed she would join but I would take over if things got rough.
This group... like.. "oh, you are new? We we shall sit here while you grab loot, just tell us when you are ready for the next room." Nicest players I'd EVER met. Wish there had been more.
They are. Most people are nice but there comes a tipping point with people who just want to get carried or are rude themselves.
I have 16000 hours played in this game. Having that entire portion of my life so expertly outlined, rationalized, discussed, contemplated, and articulated by someone else like this is... fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable.
I'm reminded of the incident that first made me quit WoW altogether (as in not just "taking a break" but intending to never play again). It started as something of an instrumental play bullying thing-I was the only melee, a rogue, in an heroic Lost City of Tol'vir run with 4 guildmates. Not my guildmates, unfortunately: the other four were all in the same guild, I was the odd man out. So after the first boss is done, they start making fun of how bad my DPS is, way below the other two, almost in range of the tank's damage output. I briefly explain the first boss is considerably less melee-friendly so of course the ranged DPS will shine, they're not having it, so fine, I stop talking to them and we move on.
We get to the second boss. I end up a good 10% ahead of either of them. I don't tease them about it; I just link the meter results.
We get to the third boss. I'm even farther ahead of the other DPS. I don't even bother linking the meter, because they all shut up about it after the second boss anyway, I figure I made my point and don't need to rub it in. And as I'm headed toward the entrance to the last boss's area...
I get kicked. No warning, no discussion, just poofed out of the group.
See, the boss of that heroic had really nice agility drops-it was why I was running it in the first place, to get some upgrades for the rogue-in particular a really good agility-stacking trinket. And they didn't want me in the party to compete for that drop with their hunter.
So they kicked me, which meant I was locked to an instance that only had one boss left in it for the day, which meant I was unlikely to be able to find a group willing to join that instance only to kill the last boss while missing out on the first three. They didn't just screw me out of a chance at the loot for that run, they'd effectively scrapped my ability to finish that run at all that day.
I logged out and uninstalled. Who needs a community like that in their recreation time?
Yeah, that’d make me uninstall too.
I’ve had 2 instances where I ragequit. One almost, one actually did.
Guild Wars 1, played the Monk (healer) in a PUG, along with another guy, so 2 Monks. Mission went bad, one guy started yelling how bad the Monks were, that we sucked, etc. And he would show us what build we should have had and how to play it. He literally ordered us to stay there so he could switch to his Monk.
The other Monk just laughed and left (logged out I think), I just moved to another town, not wanting to listen to a crazy weirdo. Bad move. He private messaged me all sorrs of very colorful swearwords. Copypasted too, since nobody could type that fast. In like 5 seconds my entire screen was filled up with him cussing me out. I typed a response (just a “screw you” I think), only to find out he had blocked me! He ranted and raved at me and I was blocked from saying anything back. After I had blocked him in return, it took me a while before I played again. Never again did I do multiplayer with my Monk again though.
The other instance where I actually quit was a small MMO which name I don’t remember. Had played it for a bit, trying out all the classes, and stopped for months. So I hop back in the game, on the last char I played. The second I logged in, someone messaged me in chat for me to heal him. I’d forgotten all the controls, and was desperately trying to find the button for the heal. Ofcourse, he started cussing me out constantly. I somehow found the chat function and told him I had just logged in after months and forgotten the controls. Know what he said? “Oh. Wanna team up?” As if he wasn’t just telling me to go unalive myself.
Told him “F you”, logged out and uninstalled the game.
Hell is other people.
I'm sorry that happened to you, they were just a bunch of salty noobs. you could have laughed it off, but I respect your decision.
Blizzard did eventually address this problem by enforcing personal loot for all content. But on WoW Classic in pugs this behavior is rampant. People will either stack classes that don't compete with them on loot for their group or kick damage dealers before the last boss in heroics to reduce loot competition. This happens often.
@@hhattonaom9729 It was a last straw/camel's back thing, really. I'd been on the fence about sticking around in general and that kinda exemplified why it wasn't a community I enjoyed playing with anymore, along with a laundry list of other things. Uninstalling was, in a way, laughing it off to move on to other things.
And as @mag points out below you, this is the kind of behavior that was clearly becoming more prevalent rather than less. That incident may have been some "salty noobs," but it was indicative of the direction the game was going for, well, the reasons given in this video. And as anonymous, server-spanning PUGs became the norm and changed group dynamics.
I *loved* running heroics in BC content, I had so many heroic badges from that that I could buy anything I wanted from the Sunwell vendor when that patch released with hundreds left over. But that was when groups were all still on your server, still people you might actually run into in the world or whose guilds you'd know or who might know yours. I wouldn't go so far as to say there were more consequences for being an asshole, but it felt like people respected the group at least marginally more. I can't say the *game* was any better then, I'm not some BC purist (though I do still badly miss the BC warlock talents, rip 0/21/40 nuke squad), but the atmosphere around pugging then felt different.
And then we got global group-finder and that kinda gradually went out the window. Not a direct cause-effect situation, but it sure didn't help.
I'm glad you brought this up, and I also wanted to ask about your last sentence here:
Is there a community worth our time? The experience you've recounted here is similar to my own, and not just with WoW, but also Dota, Dead By Daylight, and even Adventure Quest.
Are there any communities for games like these worth it? It seems people like you and I get the same results, no matter where we go or what we do.
Personally, I've gotten back into Terraria, and also the Dynasty Warriors (and all their spinoffs) games.
As a blind gamer, I was glad to hear the world of opportunity opened up by addons for people with disabities get a mention. I have struggled to find playable games, struggled to play those games, and struggled with feelings of isolation and rejection as I continually try and fail to contribute in multiplayer games. The one and only game I have ever found where I didn't constantly feel like I was letting the team down was World of Warcraft.
I don't play anymore, but bigwigs voice and weakauras weren''t simply ways I used to enhance my play, they were the sole reason I was able to play at all. Not only did they enable me to enjoy the game, they also enabled me to play at a decently high level. I've cleared Mythic raids and got KSM several times. In a world which is at best difficult, and at worst actively hostile, the feeling of triumph I got from being able to contribute productively to my team's success cannot be understated.
It's nice to know I'm not the only one.
I genuinely cannot even begin to imagine functioning let alone thriving as a blind gamer, or even a user of computers. That speaks volumes not only about you but about the influence of community generated software to aid people with disabilities, and how important it is to have a space where people can help each other like that.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about alternative controller layouts for people with physical disabilities, or missing digits or limbs. But I can't say I've ever even considered the possibility of accessibility for blind gamers. It just seemed too impossible to be worth thinking about.
I'm happy to find out how narrow minded I've been about that, and that there are thankfully others who are not so narrow minded, and have made significant progress.
@@LochNessHamster yea but imagine the savings in pc monitor , dude could have a very old cheap one and be done with it
@@facundogarcia1118 I mean it is an advantage, but I'd rather keep my eyesight
that's so sick! I can see the screen and I couldn't even get _close_ to beating a Mythic raid lol.
What class did you main?!
wait what how? and why? Maybe if the layout of the raid or dungeon was actively voiced out every meter or so, like chess.
Imagine turning a videogame into a workflow
That may be a little too reductionist of a view perhaps. Players trying to min-max their way to success isn't inherently a problem. In either way, whether somebody has made a multiple sheet excel file, scripts that automate certain things, gathered likeminded individuals through a selection process, coordinated and executed the perfect strategy may have attained the same result as those who just fumble around barefoot - satisfaction in one form or another. The problem is when these two player groups come into contact with each other by the game's defined rules of how to proceed without any clear indication as to why they ended up there. That's fundamentally a social or communications issue, rather than anything wrong with a set of individuals. This is exemplified best in MMOs as, to the surprise of nobody, they are games that require or at minimum highly encourage social interaction.
Maybe it was just a snyde remark without any deeper meaning and I'm digging too deep here, but ultimately it paints a picture of "people trying to have relaxed fun" against "those weirdos who take it too seriously". If the game facilitates both styles of play, both player groups are valid.
@@LeadHeadBODthe problem arrives when youre asking some random player to be as obsessed with the objective statistics and as knowledgeable as you are
@@BoOb-yd4dkI’m kinda confused by this association ngl. I genuinely enjoy playing some really micromanaging games, factorio, stardew, graveyard keeper, etc. I don’t have spreadsheets but I do have post it notes, and it’s genuinely fun to achieve things this way.
I agree that if this style of play isn’t your thing, that’s cool and nobody should force you to do it that way, which is probably why I also don’t play any mmo. Too much info I can’t learn on my own pace.
I don’t see how it’s sad that I’m enjoying playing games the way I like.
I see how you could find sad the fact that someone needs to take refuge in games like these to have that control, but like. That does not change the fact that they’re having fun and reducing stress?
Genuinely think what’s happening there is that to you this isn’t fun, to you this is more like “work” and the fact that someone can spend hours of free time you might not have Bc of work and life, and use it to do smtg you think is “work” feels kinda offensive? But I promise you it’s fine to have fun any way you want as long as you don’t hurt anyone
thanks to this video i realised i do this to every game i can
for some reason i consider it part of fun
then again i play mostly economic strategies
Imagine Eve Online.
I bumble about in FFXIV just enjoying the music and scenery. Multiplayer dungeon thingies seemed scary but I found them really enjoyable once I realized there was a lot of room for mistakes and most people were accomodating of sprouts like me who like watching cutscenes for the first time.
Yeah, I think FFXIV has a much more chill community compared to WoW it seems, at least from watching this video haha.
I am still left wondering why?
Is it really just because ff14 does not push mods/addons the way WoW does? There *are* mods for raid performance, the devs just don't want them openly talked about.
@@Heriarka WoW has a much more competitive nature than other MMOs because of the emphasis on things like World Firsts and Arena Tournaments etc. Elitist Jerks exist in every MMO space, but in WoW they are directly catered to and rewarded for their behavior.
@@Krakoan_Lorax I don't play WoW so I don't know this- are World Firsts actually immortalized and celebrated in some big way officially? Because first raid clears are also things people compete for in FF14, it's just not something most players will really think and aspire about.
@@Heriarka I think it helps that a lot of people consider FFXIV as a JRPG first before it's an MMO. A bunch of people that play it are trying to enjoy the main campaign and the other activities around that. Not to say there isn't a toxic side to the game, especially with raiding, but it's rare because I guess the community is conditioned already to just be chill about it. Also the devs themselves encouraging people to take breaks if they get bored instead of needing to constantly stay subbed to get the best gear.
I stopped playing WoW because I like being bad at it. Everyone was always harassing me to get my character to max level so I could raid with them, but I was enjoying exploring and soloing dungeons and collecting pets. I tried playing fully solo without a guild, but that was lonely.
Literally took 30 seconds of comment scrolling to find people lamenting how hard it is for us bad players to advertise that they "need coaching" by their group. It really doesn't occur to some of these people that we aren't lost souls waiting to have our lives improved by the right instruction in how to play our character on-meta.
I got invited to play with some people my fiancé knows but I don't care about maxing dps or having the 'right' spells or kit. I liked just wandering around and playing music through my headphones and for the most part they respected that but they would try and 'fix' my character by telling me what to equip or what spells I needed.
But there was no room for me to figure out what I think best fit my character or how I wanted to play. I would turn up to raids since they wanted to help level us (most of us were completely new) but I felt like I was just decoration and didn't have any interest when the second aggro came off the tank, all of us would die. I just made my goal to get a cool mount instead and it was way more fulfilling.
@@fadedjem Well, to be fair, they know what you don't. They were once newcomers, and now they are not - so they can see both sides of a transition you only know one side of. That, and it used to be outright not possible to play with people that aren't roughly similar to you in power. Sure, some people just want to be egotistical and flaunt their superior skill in a video game - but they aren't the only people who are trying to help newcomers get up to speed. Some people feel that it's just more fun to play together on the same level, and want you to share in that fun
@@TheXVodkaXFairy yeah, exactly... When I used to play, I liked playing as a discipline priest. (2007ish) At the time, there was exactly 1 way to "correctly" play a priest, and that was shadow. Later it became acceptable to play holy as well, but discipline was "wrong."
And people would constantly tell me it was wrong. And I KNEW that. I just liked it better. It fit my play style. People constantly trying to explain why my choices were bad made the game really boring for me. I knew the reasons. I understood the reasons. I just wanted to play the game the way it was fun for me without constant annoying input from people trying to make me have fun the way THEY would.
You might enjoy FFXIV friend. There's a ton of non-raid stuff to do (including a main story that doesn't get retconned every patch like wow seems to), and most people are chill about explaining mechanics
You verbalised and researched a feeling I've had for a long time that has caused me problems in multiplayer games; I don't want to spend time calculating the mathematically optimal way for me to walk in a straight line, I don't want to practice my mousework every day to the point I give myself hand tremors, I just want to enjoy the game and enjoy getting better. That's part of the reason why I enjoy games like TF2 and Overwatch because the casual modes enable goofy behaviour and I can just stay there. You get people who take it too seriously, but it doesn't really matter in the game.
You can be an absolute goon, spec something outlandish and non-meta with non-optimal talents and you will be able to clear all of the game's content offerings at the lower difficulties. If you're fine with playing casual modes on OW and TF2, that's pretty comparable to LFR or normal raid difficulty. You have the same freedom to be goofy in those places.
Obviously, there's limitations to your goofiness, no you can't throw on all intellect cloth gear on your warrior and expect success. I don't think WoW would be a very worth-while game to play if you could get away with that though on any level.
Last time I played Overwatch the casual play rooms were filled with shitbags and assholes who would yell at people for things as simple as picking a character they didn't like. Has it changed since then? (I last played in 2018)
@@sunn7615 I've heard this but never seen it very much, no more so than in any other game. I play on EU servers so perhaps they're different?
Finding people to play with beforehand might be worth it if you want to get back into it.
I understand why you wouldn't play after that though. It's not very nice to experience.
You should give Deep Rock Galactic a try. It basically lives in that space of being as casual or high-skill as the player wants, with built-in systems that promote camaraderie and goofing off at every level. It's completely cooperative and non-competitive, but can get just as tense as any PvP shooter (just without all the trash talk).
@@mysticwizard1943 i love Deep Rock Galactic, and I can vouch for everything this guy is saying..
But I think the game hates me
The moment this video started I got immediate Jon Bois/Secret Base vibes, thought maybe it was a coincidental similarity, and then it became clear pretty quickly that it wasn't, and the little note at the end confirmed it. But at first blush it made me unexpectedly emotional? Like I watch a lot of JB videos as a comfort - lovingly assembled, edited and soundtracked documentaries on subjects I am a total outsider to and otherwise have 0 investment in, and by the end I have a newfound appreciation for the intricate ecosystem behind a little world I never knew existed...and a lot of feelings to boot. And your videos have been similarly inspiring deep dives and there was just something about a) knowing that there was a flow of inspiration between you two, even if purely aesthetic and b) seeing that same approach here that idk, just Got To Me. It works and it fits though. I associate the format with a deep love for a niche subject, a love that nonetheless makes no excuses for the flaws of the thing even as it suffers its foolishness. Really good stuff.
I think this is the top rated comment pointing out the pretty good/secret base parody and that’s too bad considering it is such a clear and lovingly crafted homage to jon
Edit: meant it’s too bad it has so few likes/ so low on comment list
Nothing says "death to fun" quite like turning an adventure game into an office job. I joined a guild 6 months into WoW, and quit the entire genre about 3 months later. Sorry, i just wanted to have fun.
I played WoW for 10 years, starting with the end of BC/beginning of Wrath. I'd found a great community of friends, people I thought I'd want to experience the game with for the rest of its life. It's a bit sad and maybe pathetic to say now but I found someone I had loved through WoW. I'd started and built a raiding guild with my friends and my girlfriend, I'd been one of the raid leaders and the main tank for our raids for years. Then when my job meant I couldn't play as much as the others, I get ONE item level behind some other guy and I'm replaced as tank, told I don't have enough gear to join as DPS, and that I could come back when I had better gear. How? When my one source of improving in the "numbers" game, playing with my friends, had been taken from me?
I would eventually stop talking to all of them over time and decided to just play the game for myself, leaving the guild I had helped build from the ground up and experiencing what content I could on my own. It was really sad for me, having spent about ten years playing this game and all these characters and helping shape a small community. It worsened the depression I had already suffered from to play like this, knowing what I was leaving behind (or rather, what I felt had been stripped from me) and playing alone, and I eventually stopped playing altogether at some point during BFA.
I know some people like the numbers part of the game, making sure everything is completely and 100% optimized to make the most of each click. But, for me, this video puts into words everything wrong with the game I've never been able to put into words myself. It's a combination of nostalgic, cathartic, sad, and reassuring to watch this video. Thank you, Dan.
I don't think it's sad or pathetic at all to have found love through a hobby you enjoy, lucky maybe.
Yeah, it was exactly this feeling that led to me quitting. Wonderful to see it beautifully analyzed by Dan, many years later
I had a similar experience. I think one of the worst things that I did in my life other than heroin was getting seriously good at this game where you never really have fun doing the hard content anyway.
I definitely had fun, but we also would say things like "us shouting at you is an understandable reaction to failure" after we made a female member cry and leave out of stress. We genuinely believed that was perfectly acceptable behavior. Well, she drives ambulances now, is married and doesn't play MMOs. My bad for real, we taught each other it was OK to bring each other to tears about numbers and split-second timing. She wasn't a thin-skinned person.
Logging in just makes me feel crushing depression where everyone I played with has either moved entirely or is a burnout early 30s nobody who plays WoW all day. This isn't all WoW players of course - just that small subsection who experienced social and in-game success near the beginning and had it all slowly slide downward from there, refusing to let go. I play FFXIV and see the same kind of numberlovers, chuckle at myself, and keep my distance.
As for love? I know of a couple today that met in RuneScape when I was seven and are still together. They have a child and still play video games. Don't call yourself sad and pathetic. That's just a bitter feeling because of how it was taken away from you, it's not the truth.
For me, I got older and needed to work then suddenly "What do you mean you can't play this game up to six hours a day?" was a question i got, a question that pushed me out like yourself.
I'm so sorry that happened to you. Losing friends is never easy, the friendships we make with people online can be just as fulfilling & meaningful as those we make in the actual world, so losing them is just as difficult. I wish you all the best 💛
Oh man there's people in WoW that treat the game like a corporate business job. You must log in. You must do your drills. Etc. Can't imagine playing like that
I think there is another idioculture that is often overlooked - and it's the one I belong to: The solo background players. People just doing some quests and maybe some random dungeons. We are basically the player-controlled "NPCs" you see questing in the overworld, roaming the old world, or filling out the heroic dungeon queue
As an ex player, questing, leveling alts, collecting mounts and running outdated content because its fun? I feel you.
That was, but I just quit the game. The UI update has more information so it is less readable for me. I am just done now. My account is still going so I logged on today to help a friend while I still can. I was in a zone alone. Warcraft combines players in zones. The means no one in the world was playing in this particular high level zone in warcraft. Frightening.
@@dudere final straw was a more customizable UI? Seriously?
Yep. WoW works far better when the player is treated as 'A' hero, not 'The' hero.
This was me during my fairly brief trysts with WoW back in the day! I just wanted to explore, maybe level up.
I wish I could like this video more than once. I cannot understate how much you guys managed to identify and articulate something about WoW that I've observed for a long, long time but haven't been able to ever express properly. Thank you for this video!
The interesting problem here is not people that optimize the game. The problem is when it becomes part of the Zeitgeist, and is then enforced on the players through shame, yelling, etc.
The bigger problem is the developers making content (specifically raid content) around the assumption that certain mods will be used.
This is what happened with WoW. In order to increase the difficulty of raids and dungeons they had to increase the complexity of the encounters. There’s so much going on that if you don’t use threat meters, DBM, WeakAuras, Clique, or any number of other mods, it’s nearly impossible for a raid to coordinate everything that’s going on or for players to be able to react quickly enough.
And to think, it all started with keyboard turning vs mouse look.
@@tgs7515Well, one problem with your hypothesis, the elitism started before they did that.
So that isn't "the bigger problem", especially since all of that content was possible to beat without certain mods, and was regularly, outside of specific raids, as some raids were not meant for PUG play regardless.
The elitism was even building BEFORE item lvl addons, but it became far worse after that.
Especially because you could have lesser item lvl, but more optimized stats, etc. and item lvl doesn't actually tell you how good a player is, which also affects DPS quite significantly (even if it is just a basic rotation, stupidly enough).
Anyway, elitism didn't build from content design, it was quite literally built from people being able to inspect, and even worse, get a direct "single stat" to judge players on.
As the knowledge of the game improves, people can get snobby even having the knowledge.
This is a trap that essentially EVERY game runs into.
@@tgs7515 The whole "making content with the assumption that players will use WeakAuras" thing only really matters for the highest levels of raiding, Mythic raiding isn't meant to be done by most of the playerbase, it's been designed with the assumption of WeakAuras because nobody who is raiding Mythic isn't using WeakAuras, and because designing with that in minds allows them to create more complicated encounters than they otherwise could, which is what those players want.
As SioxerNikita said above, the elitism started long before that (designing encounters with WA in mind is recent, BFA is where it really became a thing), the elitism been a thing since Vanilla and carried over from Hardcore Everquest guilds, of which some of WoW's original devs had been in.
It'll always be part of games like this because there is a somewhat competitive system in place no matter what you do, guilds historically would guard the knowledge of how to kill hard bosses so that other guilds wouldn't know, just so they could hold that prestige for themselves, people tune into the world first now for the same reason that world first kills of any final raid boss have always been memorable moments in the game's history.
It's entered the zeitgeist because gaming more generally has shifted to a more optimised manner simply due to the information being more readily available, the game has matured and previously guarded knowledge has become commonly known. For better or for worse it's simply the course of things in an online game in the modern era of gaming, there is a far far shorter grace period before optimised knowledge becomes widely known these days, even in offline single-player games.
@@SioxerNikitaI’d argue the elitism can be even more broad than that. I’ve seen people say “this is a hardcore fps” about casual arena shooters when in reality most games in the genre barely scratch the surface when we use real life tactics as a baseline (er, not that I’d argue we should though).
I think it’s just the result of insecure people wanting to justify their achievements via any means available, and quantifiable data is the easiest way to do so.
@@oscaranderson5719It often becomes an issue more of people wanting to be able to compare one another, and when there is metric to do so, some people need to be able to divert the blame to someone else.
The healer was bad, that is why we lost, see, his ilvl is 10 below what it should be, it wasn't me who aggroed a group I shouldn't have, etc.
It is also when a game is "mature" and someone watched a ton of videos on how to play, or similar, and thinks they are better than they are.
hbomberguy, jenny, defuctland, and now folding ideas giving us hours long videos about stuff most of us weren't previously interested in but the execution is so good that it makes us invested. i cant wait to watch this!
another one to add to the queue
Forgot knowing better
now imagine actually playing 5 hours of wow every day and getting served this video
We're getting so blessed with great content
Who's Jenny? Looks like I might have to add her to the list.
Hearing someone speak up for healers getting starved for gear warms my heart
Same
It's not just in WoW either. In early Overwatch competitive, support points were severely undervalued, which led to pro-healers getting ranked out of their teams and casual healing players getting stuck in a loop of rank loss/ELO Hell (because they needed to win 2-3 times as many games as they lost to gain rank).
This kind of focus on "killing power" is an industry-wide issue and has drastically affected the makeup of competitive multiplayer team-based games. Games NEED healers to be interesting, but DPS players are always given drastically preferential treatment.
If God wanted you to have gear he wouldn't have made you healers.
Unless you're a Holy Paladin, in which case you're giga geared due to literally zero competition. Heck, even the off spec Paladins in my guild are giga geared better then their main spec right now.
@@DairunCates FK em bro who gives a sht
This video expresses something I've been feeling for years.
The competitive nature of games and most players' numerical approach to them removes all the joy from entering a new world and discovering it on my own or other players.
The unimaginative and dry way the majority of gamers interact with games has turned me of gaming almost completely.
And I used to love it.
It even affects single player games.
In whatever community you visit for any game, there will always be that group of people who turn everything into spreadsheets and min-max the entire game from start to finish.
Eventually they'll accumulate a critical mass of individuals that think like this, and the entire community will then slowly devolve into an endless morass of mathematical posts "proving" that this one particular way of playing is "better" than every other way, and therefore anything else is "objectively" wrong.
Dude I just want to play a cool game for funsies and then talk to people about it, not have a second job.
Stuff like this is why I barely participate in communities anymore.
@@MareSerenitisHonestly, just don't engage with gaming communities. Just play the game. I'm a completionist and a perfectionist, but the communities are just too much. Perfection needs to give way to "not being stressed out of my mind" at some point, and some games are almost begging you to not engage with them with a completionist mindset (Stardew Valley). As for multiplayer: just don't.
@@MareSerenitis Then... just do it? Nobody is stopping you from playing a cool game and then talk to people about it. I do it often, its very fun :D
@@ich3730 I do too, but removing yourself from conversation around a video game isn't the social norm nowadays, and if you don't understand why that alters the subjective experience of playing video games, you may want to watch the video you're commenting on
The game is what you make it, if you let others dictate how you play thats a YOU issue not the game and not the community
The stress I feel watching this video underlines why I just don't play online games
Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.
The curse of multiplayer. The accusation that you hold others back, because your presence forces others to rely on you. You just cannot play any co-op or team game that has years of history.
I think this misses the mark of the video. As said multiple times instrumental play and fun are not separate.
Word.
Main reason I quit playing Diablo 3 and multiplayer games in general
@Your Wrong Moby Dick is about a man trying to kill a whale. No need to read the book now!
Literally just finished the contrapaneur video and was like 'ah well. 4 months until the next one' and then this came up!! My excitement is immeasurable
Same I was not expecting anything this soon! This guy makes my month.
Your day has been made
Same, I was literally in the middle of that same video
and my day is made.
had opened the video some time ago, and refreshed it now, and it seems I commented way too late
Watching this video really makes me appreciate my favourite MMO, Sky: Children of the Light.
It's an exploration/social game clearly and specifically tailored to foster a supportive community. Instead of open text or voice chat, you have to actively sit down at a bench and actually spend time out of exploring or collecting candles to chat with them. To even have open text chat with other players you have to exchange gifts with them and friend them. This small, but present threshold of commitment makes trolling and aggravating beyond being slightly annoying in social areas is basically non-existent. The eight-player cap on groups also limits this, as trolling impact is limited.
The in-game currency isn't really tradable, except through gifting hearts (a more coveted currency) to other players, something which inherently encourages being pleasant and amicable to others. Without the outright competition of an economy, there's a focus on working on your own stuff or spending time just vibing instead of competing.
There is some social clout that comes with having rare cosmetics, but the already chill atmosphere and lack of tradability feed into a more toned-down heirachy. And although this creates a clear distinction between newer and older players, there's not that much hostility towards the latter. Newer players are known as "Moths," (a rather cute nickname tbh) and the game has a guide system for helping them, as well as a strong social pressure cultivated by the community to at the very least be polite. Memes and jokes about Moths exist, but it's almost always in an endearing light. Offering friend candles to every living being, running into the Krill light, not knowing how to burn darkness trees, etc. This behaviour is generally viewed as mildly annoying, but cute and understandable.
The social mores and community exceptions mainly revolve around being polite and helping out other players. Emoting in a friendly manner, helping in wax events, not interrupting music, it's all to make the game more pleasant for the community in general.
All this in total creates a community LEAGUES (pun intended) less toxic than your typical MMO or MOBA. Honestly I can't stress just how damn well TGC made Sky's mechanics foster a community pretty much devoid of the elitist nonsense you see in other MMOs. It's a chill social game about making friendships and flying around a beautiful world, and that's what its mechanics encourage.
As a FF14 player this was a really fascinating look at just how different the values are between the different communities. I think the screenshot part is perhaps the most direct contrast to make. In WoW it was a source of considerable backlash to limit the maximum zoom out. In FF14 the last "world first" race was marred by controversy when someone leaked footage of a top team using a zoom out mod, an act that apparently drew condemnation even from the mod creator them self. For context one of the main uses for the mod from the community was to help with taking screenshots.
Beyond that the idea of using mods to tell you how to do a fight or even turning off the music (one of the best parts of of a fight) are so foreign to me as a FF14 player and so antithetical to the values this community has developed as to appear dystopian.
Well, at least to the casual FF14 community. WoW is at least blessed with a limited addon API that isn't allowed to do certain things.
Because ff14 mods are actual hacks on the game, there is 0 limits on what assistance addons are made, and we are seeing this appear in droves.
The same rot will consume ff14 if there is not a big rebellion from the players and a serious crackdown from the devs. But this dev crackdown can easily kill the enourmous social community that has developed through Penumbra and Mare... which could death spiral the game.
It's a tricky situation and yeah the future of 14 looks rocky at best as these problems get worse and worse.
@@ugoboom Game mods can be detected. They really don't care much unless you are botting for profit - RMT. Things like Bard Player actually kind of add to the ambiance of the game. If you know the philosophy of the designer you would realize that is what he wants Yoshi P wanted a social game more than a PvP or PvE game. Those parts were secondary to his goal of creating a social game. Bard Player adds to that by encouraging player to player interaction in a positive manner. That was Yoshi P's dream - positive player to player interaction. That's why PvP is really secondary to the game - it's almost a mini-game within the game. Also, 14 has been out WAY longer than people realize, so it's not like it's a new problem. It hasn't brought down the player base yet. It might encourage Wow players to stay away, and I'm 100% okay with that.
There is quite a bit of end game content in wow, particularly as the expansions started coming, in which playing without certain addons made it virtually impossible to clear some of the more difficult raids. The number of things you have to simultaneously pay attention to would require professional StarCraft player like reflexes and focus and the vast majority of the population just ain’t got it. I never played FF14 so I can’t relate on how necessary addons are for that game.
I think the biggest problem with add-ons in FFXIV is that only one platform, PC, will ever get to benefit from it. I assume that’s a big reason why the devs heavily frown upon using them: if these mods take off and become integrated into future strategies for future raid encounters, PS4/PS5 players would be out of luck if PUG strategies require the use of said mods.
@@rizzorizzo2311 Former WoW raider, current FFXIV raider. Mods/add-ons/plugins are FAR less necessary than in WoW. Fights are far more scripted, with "needing to be in one of a set of specific positions that changes each time" almost always designated by a limit cut (numbers above your head in game). I use exactly one add-on for any level of combat help, and it's a mouseover action add-on I use because WoW healing ruined me and trying to switch between targets while healing sounds like hell.
"Each video represents a brick in an echo chamber that carries a subtle yet deafening resonance" is a hell of a line
All in all it's just another brick in the wall. -Pink Floyd
I still remember my favorite videos from Classic and TBC. They were just videos of people breaking the game, screwing around, trolling other players... all of the things that modern Blizzard and the community views as haram.
A lot of this articulated my fundamental problem with MMORPGs. Their primary, unique selling point is their persistent shared worlds, but the most hardcore players-the ones who often have the most influence with the developers-play by blowing past all of that as fast as possible so they can get to repetitive instanced content. What the community of nearly every MMO tells new players is, essentially, “all of that open world stuff is a chore you have to get through as fast as possible so you can reach the *real* game, which is nothing like an MMORPG.”
It's self-reinforcing, too, because people who desire the world experience will just quit MMOs once they get to the repetitive instance grind meta.
Sometimes I look at WoW stuff, sigh, and go "well at least there's the Elder Scrolls games"
I feel like the player created notion of "only the instanced content REALLY MATTERS" is how you end up with a game like Destiny, an airquotes MMO where the only content is instanced content and there's not much in the way of a persistent shared world at all
That's one of the reasons I've avoided MMORPGs for years, and only recently I've given FF14 a try because it shares many core elements with WoW but allows you to play at your own pace and encourages you to take your time and enjoy the story and the world. Now I feel like I wouldn't be able to enjoy any other MMO.
I think one of the biggest problems here is structural. The game has a built-in rewards systems that gives higher value to "repetitive instanced content". The game does not have built-in rewards systems that gives higher value to... everything else.
The lack of value by the player-base for open-world stuff is a reflection of the design of these games giving them no actual value. They're pretty to look at, and if you want to assign aesthetics a value, you can. But the game will not mechanically give you any value for it. And in any interactive media, mechanics matter more than aesthetics.
I play SWTOR off and on and the thing that I can't stand is that many of the instanced activities - that are only playable in 4-person groups - have interesting internal stories, but I have repeatedly gotten kicked from lfg for wanting to even take the time to skim the cutscene dialogue before skipping, much less let them play out fully. My choices here are: sit in queue over and over until I eventually find a pickup group that will wait 30 seconds for me, watch other people's CZcams uploads of those scenes and grumble to myself about them making different choices than I would, or just let that whole section of gameplay be closed to me
I love that first quote. It's kind of sad that developers set out to create deep interlocking systems that are beautifully hidden under the art and graphics of a game, and then players take that and reduce it back down into numbers and code.
It's but it's even harder to ever fully on change that. Even FFXIV devs can't do that. Some developers lean into things like this too like Fromsoft, be elite look up things, etc to become this elite.
Yeah, it almost feels like a weird form of vandalism but perpetrated by number crunching type people.
The thing is ... That is what people have always been like.
You made a radio? Someone will pull it apart and see how each component connects ... Not much different here.
People are interested in what is below, and it is a thing they enjoy quite significantly.
The problem is when looking it up becomes expected general play, that is when it is sad.
There are certainly devs that loves seeing people dissect the systems that they created, and end up discovering quirks they hadn't even known was possible.
You are kinda... Ignoring that part.
@@NathanWubs It cannot be understated how much better of an experience FFXIV is as a result of it being against the rules to use 3rd party software, though. Structurally, functionally, and culturally, FFXIV is a far healther game all around.
1:21:22 "The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience." - Dune
my only WoW experience was a friend badgering me for 2 months to play, so i downloaded it and within the first 5 minutes got told i was making the wrong character and was forced to change classes and not 3 minutes later had the laptop taken away from me because i didn't know the controls.
so much of this just makes the way they acted make too much sence.
That’s so sad you experienced that! But not uncommon for the community. My dad introduced me and he never criticized what I picked or how I set up my talents, he just helped me quest and would mail me 20 slot bags. That was back in TBC. I’ve played on and off since, sometimes with friends I made in game but eventually people always stopped logging in, and since I mostly do solo stuff, I became more and more isolated in-game. A month ago I convinced my boyfriend to get it, because I want so badly to just have a buddy in the game (and, we have been needing a new game to play together!). He kept asking what he “should” play and stuff and I told him not to worry about picking the right race/class/talent combo, just pick something and we’ll explore the world. He’s a gnome mage and he we are having a blast even when we wipe.
@FruitFruit Federation it sounds like your friend is just an asshole
@@BigHotSauceBoss69 oh they sure where in that instance, but the root of why they were being so rude was down to efficiency. Like that was his issue; that I wasn't been efficient. It was really weird because up till that point they were super chill about other games, i was being an inefficient dummy all the time, but that was the one time he was very "You gotta do This, This way. You Cant be That. That's Not the Best way to do it."
@@fruitfruitfederation3932 Strange, it's like he just wanted you to skip learning about the game and just play with him at whatever his skill level is. Terrible way to get anyone to play any game.
@@Joralion I used to be like that. "why aren't you me, wtf!?" lol. Don't recommend it.
I forgot the name of your channel and was trying at some point to find it back by searching phrases like "angry man critics suicide squad editing while drinking booze" with no success.
I am so happy that the algorithm brought you to me once again with an astounding work about my favorite game. cheers
This has to be one of the funniest comments I’ve ever read on this website.
Of course you couldn't find the video searching that - he was pretending to drink _cough syrup,_ not alcohol.
Looking back on this video a year later, it's a testament to Dan's skill as a filmmaker and his well-earned good faith with his audience that something this profoundly niche, technical, and outside the usual purview performed so well. Truly out of left field, but just a great watch.
This kind of makes me want to see a video by you talking about how normalized hostility and verbal violence is in competitive spheres of video games and sports, when in other types of environments those behaviors would be seen as abhorrent or morally wrong.
Upvoting
That could segue well into a broader point about how toxicity thrives under anonymity
Yes! Lets not be tyrannical and monitor everyone all the time just in case someone cant handle toxic kids expecting you to win games for them. No freedom for all is best freedom.
@@hollowmass738are you actually trying to make a point (well, less "point" and moreso "lobotomite-tier strawman"), or are you just having a stroke?
1:17:53
"And with all of this established, we can finally say the quiet part out loud: players make world of warcraft look fucking ugly."
GOD JESUS YES
THANK YOU
just false though, a lot of pro wow players have insanely clean UIs
@@bluegaming1346not in that sense my dude
@@bluegaming1346 WoW's soul looks like the most generic creep chris hansen talks to on to catch a predator. i think that's whatthey meant.
@@holstatt6896I think you mean it looks like Chris Hansen. Dude is a predator of another kind.
@@SnailHatan really weird take, dog
I work as an agricultural extension officer and holy shit, the similarity between the problems outlined here and the problems surrounding adoption of best practice in the agricultural industry are mind blowing. Truly, this video is just shining a light on human nature
I've never played a moment of WOW. In fact, the most footage of WOW gameplay I've ever encountered is by watching this video... I say this as someone in technical product marketing, listening to the information presented here, all I could think of for context was trying to understand and communicate with open-source software developers. This world (pun unintended) is indeed a microcosm of typical human behavior patterns.
Can i ask for a little bit of elaboration? What is the problems in agricultural industry that are similar here? That efficiency must be embrace or distributors will remove you?
@@Vasoslaihiala gosh, maybe the skin care or make up online community. There's a lot of in versus out practices you can see on the reddit subs dedicated to them.
That said, wow is definitely an online game that has fairly even gender participation
Seconding @FFXfever's request for an explanation - do you mean that agricultural engineers are obsessed with min-maxing? I'd love to hear more from you on this
@@FFXfever I think the issue outlined is that people care more about the rules, about the ritual of doing something, than they do about the actual outcomes, which is why he's referring to "problems surrounding the adoption of best practices".
I face similar things in my job in education, where if I have a method that produces tangible improvements over the old method, I can't get it adopted unless I show proper obeisance to the company culture by writing an extensive proposal, passing it through my team lead to my manager who then discusses it with the management team who will eventually vet the proposal and send it back down to me to implement.
And if the proposal is too complex (not in execution but in theory), that last bit just doesn't happen, because it then touches upon tangentially existing habits that people don't want to change. Not because they can't, but because they don't directly address the original problem directly, but are only indirectly affected by the necessity of executing the improvement.
Simply put, an existing ritual takes precedence over actual results and whenever introducing some kind of improvement you each time have to overcome the mountain of "how things are done".
I feel like WoW is essentially not the same game anymore, not because we changed as players but because the MMO landscape changed. When I go WoW boomer on people I explain that MMOs back in the day were limited in design, like I could get a repeatable quest to kill 200 of a mob that I would do over and over until I leveld up and then I'd maybe go fight other mobs to level up. People could essentially get a comparatively transformative experience from WoW and everyone played the game at one point pretty much. I spoke to people at parties as an adult and it was like we had a shared childhood memory when we talked about WoW. The thing we miss is not only being bad at the game and not having to perform to exist, but also that era of MMO gaming that has now passed. So I feel like the problem is not only that we optimize the fun out of games sometimes, but also that we are not living in the correct era to not optimize them. I'd say that a solution to optimization is limitation, and that the limitations aren't going to be a thing as long as this current era of games as predominantly competative is ongoing.
It's interesting to watch this as someone who's never played WoW, but has a lot of experience with FFXI and FFXIV. In FFXIV in particular, there have been some recent incidents involving addons/mods that has caused the devs to begin cracking down on them. A few weeks back, a group claimed to have gotten a world first clear on a new high-end raid.
But then, it was found that one of the players in the raid had a mod installed that allowed them to move the camera back much farther than you normally can, allowing them to get a larger view of the arena. The entire group had their clear titles erased, the loot they won was deleted, and the person who had the mod was banned from the game.
Along with punitive measures, the devs have gone out of their way to include as many features as possible in the base game that players would normally mod in. There are moving markers you can place on players and mobs, as well as stationary markers you can place around the arena. There's an on-screen threat indicator that lets you know if you're 1st, 2nd, or 3rd in that mob's threat list. The HUD is also very customizable, with unrestricted control over every single on-screen element you see, and you can save multiple different configurations for different jobs/situations if you want.
In cases like that one player who didn't want to wear footwear, the outer appearance of all gear in FFXIV is completely customizable. You can create preset outfits out of any gear your character/class can wear, and easily swap them on the fly. This includes one set of cosmetic gear that makes it appear like you're wearing nothing on your feet, or any other body part you choose. And there's a whole separate game mode you can activate called Gpose which lets you pose characters with other characters and NPC models and change lighting to create any kind of screenshot your heart desires. Want to make a screenshot of your character passionately kissing your favorite NPC? You can do it in Gpose.
There is still a large FFXIV modding community, obviously. But it's kind of at odds with itself. On one side is the cosmetic mods, that swap in custom outfits, changes to the character's body or NPCs, or changes the look of housing furniture. On the other side is the gameplay mods, which come in relatively harmless forms like damage trackers. And egregious gameplay enhancers, such as much more elaborate marker systems, timers that normally aren't visible, and extended camera controls.
The cosmetic modders hate the gameplay modders because they're making the devs crack down on mods even harder, to the point where if you live stream with purely cosmetic mods you can get permabanned. And gameplay modders hate dealing with the ire they draw, giving the usual excuses like "I CAN do without them, I just use them to practice" or "I can't play at my guild's level without them."
It's neat to see all the sociology and history relating to these sorts of things, and how the same issues play out in other and older games :)
I am in a similar boat, I played XIV for years and it feels like the devs are really afraid of ending up in the same space WoW is in with weakauras .etc
I know a lot of players are angry about crackdowns, but a huge part of the XIV community is merely invested in the casual content and story. After watching this video I wonder how much of that community is only there because the devs have tried to keep the optimization hidded just below the surface.
I like using a damage parser purely so I know my own performance, but holy shit if Square uses that as a pretense to neuter my dress-up doll simulator holy shit I'm gonna be so mad.
It's always been funny to me as a WoW player who had never touched a mod or addon in his life that wasn't an RP addon or an addon to make nights look darker; how elitist these cheaters are 😂
Like, the "best" WoW players all use ridiculous levels of addons to do everything, like weakauras and ugly as sin UI mods. And they look down on you if you don't use them too. Its a community of cheaters, who have normalized cheating to become essentially a requirement of play, and as such they don't even consider it cheating anymore. They'll get mad butthurt if you call it cheating or point out that they shouldn't need all that stuff to play the game if they're as good as they say.
I wonder how it would go, if blizzard released a classic server that allowed absolutely no addons at all.
Ok so funny enough there's an old adage about being involved with stuff 'maybe it's just not for you'. If you have to go against what the devs have specifically said is not ok to do just so you can 'clear' a ultimate raid first...maybe that content just isn't for you and that's ok and you should be ok with that.
If you have to trick yourself into thinking you need these addon's to play with others then you'll convince others that they also need it as well and that's kinda how it started with WoW at first it was alot of QoL stuff and customization mods .....and then people saw how 'easy' it made raiding and why wouldn't you use it if everyone is? Don't you wanna be like everyone else? Why would you make it harder on others just because you refuse to use them.
If you don't quash the addon's that'll happen to 14 because people will start to fold and eventually 'optimization' will take over unless you stop it before it starts.
Take it from a WoW vet who saw it happen to his game in real time.
guy was talking about vanilla. wow already has had all of this for quite a while now
Hey Dan, not related to the video, but one of my all-time-favorite internet moments happened a few months ago.
I was in a discord channel for Slay the Spire, when a random user hopped into the general chat to suggest that the game devs could make Slay the Spire NFTs.
What commenced was the online version of an audible groan from everyone in the room as everyone proceeded to cite your video on NFTs, and rebuffed the newcomer with well-articulated points. The newcomer must have been someone at least a bit invested in NFTs or fairly young as he just didn't seem to grasp any points made to him. He just seemed to think NFTs were good, and why wouldn't the devs want to make NFTs of the game?
This unanimous agreement on a subject none of us had talked about up until that point was so satisfying to me, so thank you for changing so many minds on the subject, or more so just giving a link to throw at dumbass crypto bros who come calling. It's a beautiful thing.
The FTX scam that's dominating news headlines is just yet more proof that nobody should be mucking around with cryptocurrency.
Really proud of both Folding Ideas to have such an impact, and you guys for taking it to heart. I hope the dude in question at least starts having second thoughts about his NFT investment if he unfortunately has.
This had absolutely happened to me as well. I was in a group argument about nfts a few days ago and I remember slowly realizing that everyone on my "side" of the argument had watched Line Goes Up and agreed with it's excellent points.
This is heartening and why we need to produce and watch more content like this. You can influence people through reasoned arguments, if their beliefs hadn't been solidified already.
"Worlds become real when we care about them, not when they look similar to our own."
That's a line that's going to stick with me for years to come.
Thank you for this fantastic analysis; I really value the clear love you have for the game despite and sometimes even BECAUSE of all the messiness of optimization it pushes us to. I think there's genuinely a lot of value in WoW's community, but it's crucial to take a step back and identify when the numbers get warped into being an end in and of themselves, rather than a tool along the way.
I only saw this months later, but it is going to be a quote sticking with me as well. Just beautifully put.
I swear, the 'metaverse' came to mind, as an world that isn't "real" for most people because only advertisers and megacorps care about it.
This video is absolutely packed with complex ideas and is so beautifully crafted. I've watched it like 6 or 7 times now and I find myself coming back every few weeks because there are just so many things to think about. Astounding work.
My friend last year described modern raiding to me as a "space race between Blizzard and third party software" and I thought that was exactly right.
When I first played WoW - with the 2 week free trial - you want to know what I did in that second week, once the limitation began to press in? I ran. I ran from Dun Morogh to Booty Bay, then from Ratchet to Thousand Needles, a mid-teens Dwarf Hunter dying over and over and over and over just to see what was over the next hill. I knew my time was limited and I wanted to see as much of the world as I could. And I fell in love with wow through that experience, but after I had the game the deeper I got and the more I played with others the less welcome I felt until I eventually left.
There's something about imagining a dwarf speeding up a hill and dying repeatedly only to speed up the same hill that just makes me smile.
Making your own fun like that is what role-playing games were (at least to me) what role-playing was meant to be about.
It does bum me out that not playing the 'right way' means that people think they get a free pass to bully/dictate the play style of other people who just wanna have a good time.
I did the exact same thing in WoW Classic a few years ago. After it became clear the game wasn't for me, I just took an in-universe vacation. My druid had just unlocked his shadow wolf thingy that let me stealth past enemies, so I just wandered around. I even took screenshots and compiled them into a travel journal of sorts.
It remains my best memory with the game, and it genuinely made me feel like I was on an adventure, carving my own path. I actually got to engage with the world and its environmental storytelling more, now that I wasn't following quest markers.
After checking out almost every zone in the game (and even briefly leveling an Alliance alt to see their cities), I ended my journey, my character, and my account all at once by jumping into the depths of Blackrock Mountain.
@@hoodiesticks Totally got that.
My best memories of the game was standing on a mailbox in Bloodhoof handing out bags to noobs.
Nothing brought that feeling of helping others back. Not any expansion, not Classic re-relase.
Some of my best memories of WoW are running through the tram tunnel between Iron Forge and Stormwind (because I wanted to see what was in it), seeing the Naga and the treasure chest, then being immensely disappointed when I figured out it didn't exist in the overworld. The death run of newbie elfs trying to get to Ironforge, and going back in my 20-30s to escort a few. Riding around the world on my first slow-ass mount, just because I could. On my server there was a thing where a bunch of level 1 undead ran to Glodshire, with a few higher level priests, and caused a zombie invasion. It was amazing.
I joined the game, met my spouse and am in a guild with decades old friends, we still raid/m+ to this day.
This is vidicating to watch. I played WoW a bunch in highschool. I was "bad" at it, but enjoyed it well enough. I ended up questing solo most of the time since most group play had this dynamic, which does seem antithetical to the whole MMO concept, so, felt like kinda a shame.
The most fun I had was self-directed. Sneaking as a Horde rogue into Alliance early zones and steathily helping low-level Alliance players meet their questing goals. They cannot talk to me, so they couldn't tell me my DPS sucked.
I had no words to explain why I lost interest in Overwatch other than "it's not fun anymore" until I watched this. It explains my issues so well! I always wanted to play the character I liked the most, but if everyone else picked certain characters and YOU didn't pick the ones that matched, your own damn team would shit on you and blame you if they lost, and if they won then they'd say it was in spite of you. I play games to have fun with the side effect of feeling good if my team wins. But it's not fun to be yelled at for trying to enjoy yourself. It's a shame because I really enjoyed Overwatch but the playerbase ruined it for me.
I haven't seen your videos before, I was a bit scared that this will be another bashing "wow is dead" type of video which I really avoid. I was so pleasantly surprised, this was one of the best videos I have seen in a very very long time. Nicely researched, perfect examples and great thoughts shared. Thank you so much!
As an anthropologist who's been trying to convince academia of the relevance and importance of 'virtual' worlds this video is so cool. It's satisfying but also a little bit sad how we all have only a handful of references that we circle around.
You're a visionary. Dig in and write a paper!
if this cheers you up, when i get to university ill be doing researches and papers and studies on this kind of topic, if i dont manage to do this in philosophy or public relations (or whatever you call it in english) which are the courses im attempting, i will in the future when i manage to get into psicology
It is astounding how much a microcosm of human behaviour can reflect that of the behaviour of the world at large, at least to some degree. It seems we can actually learn a lot about human behaviour via smaller, virtual worlds because of the fact that they are sometimes more direct and, well, smaller, and thus potentially easier to holistically study than, say, that of a country. There's still a lot to learn from mediums like games...
@@TheShanoGamerPlays well the problem with that is that people will, even is very social virtual settings, not really be themselves (or more of themselves) in this setting vs the real world.
Of course, the virtual world strongly affects the real one - so... maybe actually you need to look at both, not because one helps inform the other, but because you need both to understand all of reality.
Isn’t the point of anthropology to learn about cultures? This is a trivial recreational activity in the developed western world, yet there are still people whose language and religion and way of life we know nothing about, that you think this deserves priority honestly seems a bit prejudiced
I think another aspect about paratext in WoW is that it's made WoW exceptionally hard for anyone to get into. It's decades of systems and hundreds of thousands of videos and guides built upon each other where each iteration makes the previous version entirely absolute. For example, I started WoW on Legion after my friend encouraged me to try it. In fact, it was my first MMO. And at the time, Legion had a level cap of 120 and when you make a new character it just throws you into the deep end.
Suddenly, I had dozens of options on my rogue and none of them made sense. My only tutorial was on how to auto-attack. I tried to look at a guide but they all assumed you were familiar with the previous system in Warlords and you mostly just needed a refresher. And wherever I tried to turn to for advice... people just had a hard time explaining it because they've engaged with the system for a decade. It took months for anyone to even think of explaining keybindings to me, let alone proper rotations and raid load outs. This even happens in the same expansion. I had to quit at the beginning of Legion since I was moving and when I came back at the end of the expansion I had to tredge through so many old systems that I had to wonder what the point of any them was. Like I had to spend a good week getting mana for the Nightbournes before getting supplies for the Lightforge then getting materials for my Artifact weapons or spending gold on my Order Hall. I was just doing them because I had to.
This also goes for the narrative too. Legion was the culmination of a lot of storylines in Legion and Legion refuses to really explain any of it. It was only after I played Warcraft 3 some 5 years later that any of it really made sense to me. Who was Varian? Sylvannas? Sargeras? Archimonde? The Burning Legion? WoW just assumes you know. And even if you don't know, WoW just assumes you'll find out eventually through the community. And the resources the community points you to are exasperating long videos by people like Nobbel who, imo, gets the story together but has a hard time contexualizing the importance of any it, at least compared to likes of Platinium WoW. It was even worse in Shadowlands where it felt like the story demanded you watch lore videos to understand anything happening.
This is part of the reason WoW is slowly bleeding out, and will continue to do so unless they somehow fix this mess and soft reboot the mechanics, and i mean core mechanics of raiding etc. It's just too much these days. Most people dip a toe in, see how insane it is, usually by looking at one image of weakaura's or whatever, and they nope out.
@@EQOAnostalgia Exactly, therefore, my advice to Blizzard would be simple: don't fix WoW, end it. Then build a new MMO that can start anew, and allow new players to flood in again.
Your use of absolute instead of obsolete really messed with m y mind.
@@MaartenKok This is something I got pushback on once before when I said it, but I stand by it: Any MMORPG should stop at 3-4 expansions and reboot itself, offering bonuses to longtime players as well as those who have accomplished certain things. Once it's been ~10 years, accrued technical debt hogties the developers while accrued game mechanics make it oblique to get into. And as Cataclysm showed, players won't accept a complete restart on what they think the game should be like without bitching about it for literally decades after the fact, not to mention the low level of impact all that spent time had on their largest group of players, endgame grinders.
Sounds like a skill issue to me my man
"Either you buy in and end up here, or you embrace the identity of a tourist" that's just a dope line. I don't think it surmises the situation but it's just hella quotable lol. 10/10 analyzes.
I never really agreed with the phrase(used by GMT quite often)that "Given the chance, players will optimize the fun out of the game".
Until now.
In Disney's Toontown Online, the playerbase developed a very specific strategy for getting through high-level Cog facilities as fast as possible, mostly based around the Sound Gag Track; Sound Gags are low-damage Gags (weapons) that hit all enemies, and you get a pretty substantial damage boost if multiple Toons use Sound on the same turn. Now, I was a very young child (like, 5 or 6 when I started out) when I created my main Toon, and I built her without the Sound Track (Toons could have all but one Gag Track; I think most people went without Trap, it has the highest damage but needs to be used in conjunction with Lure, so most considered it too risky to be worth it). All this culminated in me regularly being denied entrance to HQ Boss Battles (raids) for being "Soundless", despite having almost maxed out Gags and Laff (health, but also basically equivalent to character level) otherwise. It's funny to think about it now, but back then as a little kid, it really felt like I was being bullied by everyone, especially since I named my Toon after myself.
It's also quite hard to imagine that a Toontown dungeon would require all that much from a group of players
MMOs truly are all bullshit lmao
I really think people who play games like that, where all that matters is a number going up as quickly as possible, are fundamentally missing something in their irl lives. Like they're basing their entire being in how good they are at a game and it can't be healthy.
You don't understand, they couldn't possibly have you least the Boss battle take an extra 2minutes of their time.
@@DsiakMondala lmao
there is an adage in skateboarding that the best skater at a park is the one having the most fun. I play Old School RuneScape and this quote helped me stop worrying so much about efficiency and achievements but focus on actually enjoying the time I spend logged in.
A friend of mine (who doesn't talk to me anymore) is very competitive. So competitive in fact, that he doesn't differentiate between ranked and unranked online matches. In games like Overwatch, Rainbow Six Siege and Apex Legends he tended to tell us what to do and how to play. Everything, no matter if ranked or unranked, has to be the way he wanted it to be and if you do something your way he would be mad at you. This even applied to Co-op games like Payday. We didn't play to win, to have "good" stats and stuff like that, we played to have fun with friends. Nobody cared, how good you were since we are all friends and this is all that matters. He was fully aware of it and didn't care. So when we pointed out his sometimes rude behavior, he disappeared and never talked to us again.
This case might be more of a social matter than anything else, but for me this was the ultimate form of competitive toxicity, where "wanting to be the best" leads some people to yell at you for basically anything, no matter what kind of game you play. In this case, one of these people, was one of our closest friends.
The ending of this video is so much more beautiful then the ones you guys wanted, incredible documentary. I just wish I had realized and said something on my first watch, not 10 months late.
That story about Moistrainbow getting shit for not maxing out his keys hits home as someone who raided somewhat seriously for years when I was younger. I was in guilds where me and friends would be much higher on meters than other players, but we would get shit for not min-maxing our gear, or using a different set of talents than what the “meta” was from the top rated guilds or not playing as much or whatever.
It always bothered me that the other members seemed to care more about following what the big boys were doing and following some “meta” or “rules”, and less than the actual results. Yes, I did not run dungeons every hour of every week, and sometimes I would forget flasks or food buffs and sometimes I would prefer non-meta talents or non-BiS gear pieces or whatever. But if I’m #3 on the DPS meter and everyone below me didn’t forget that stuff, is me not following the “meta” or the “rules” really the problem here?
It really bothered some officers than I just did not care to sim craft every piece of gear I got. I knew what stats I needed, and had enough of an understanding of the mechanics to know which piece would generally be better. If it was something like a side grade that might give me an extra 0.5% more dps, I didn’t care. I’d just use whatever I think would be better. Always pissed me off that they would give me shit for this when I would kick their ass on meters without doing any of the simcraft bullshit.
Famously, one of my friends, Jelly did not use a boss mod. He literally refused to tell anyone in the guild this, because he assumed they would just boot him. Jelly was a fucking savant at his class. This man was parsing like 98 percentile *consistently* but he just didn’t need a boss mod and didn’t want one. Eventually one of the officers learned that he didn’t have one and gave him shit, but he was #1 on the meters in every single fight, so they couldn’t exactly just boot him. Hope he’s still out there kicking ass and not giving a shit.
I think this is all really true, but it’s funny that we only feel comfortable defending people’s choices of not following best practice, or installing mods, if they fulfilled the objective (such as dealing the most damage) anyway
Lol, the fact that you still get worked up about it 😂
@@AJD-od9nq Grass
@@AJD-od9nq It's like you didn't even watch the video you're commenting on. His story is completely relevant, and he doesn't seem "worked up" at all.
Im a healer and dont raid because its too time consuming for me but often rush HC raids in rdm groups on first few weeks of the addon for the story.
But i can understand that kind of if the boss is almost down and for example i got a little bit better gear it could save the group from wiping and we would have killed him.
But as long as you are only in HC just play the mechanic because dps or hps is never the problem.
I hate when people get so fixated at the meta. so often seen hunters or locks at m+25 that have about the half of the dps than an off meta class because they think about their talents and class rather than just copy pasting.
I remember when I specced endless rage on my warrior even though 'the math was bad' as far as using up a talent point on something that on paper didn't pay off for the cost. Thing is, I was using it to make other players panic and make mistakes with all that coming down on them. It wasn't anything you could point to on a spread sheet, it was a psychological terror tactic. I was eventually justified learning that some Korean arena players certainly DID spec ER for the same purpose.
I may not have ever played WOW, but what you're describing here sounds a whole lot like a situation that comes up every once in a while in competitive fighting games. that situation being that a player will choose to play with a character or methodology that has been established as "low tier" or otherwise not tournament viable with the explicit intention of exploiting that exact establishment. Competitors don't see X character as viable, and as a result don't care about learning the intricacies of their matchup, and as a result, are caught off guard when they go up against a player using said character.
@@burnin8able so pretty much being unable to counter a character or strategy because it's off meta?
@@zizzlefax8861 yeah pretty much. in fighting games "off meta" basically is just all the characters that don't get played often at a high level, so when they do see the spotlight few players know the matchups.
@@burnin8able Right but i mean, during the peak of Socom 2 i would pull out a pistol just to merk a fool for the dominance factor. If i died, who cares? I had a pistol, i mean wtf do you expect!? If i kill yo ass... bro, break your disc, you're buttcheeks lol.
Another case of "the math is bad" in a very different context :
While leveling a character through dungeons, a rogue specifically, there was that one time our tank died to a boss that we hadn't even downed halfway through. One of the DPS players told us to stop fighting and just die so we could get our tank back quicker and start over.
But I, another DPS, turned out to deal high enough damage to consistenly keep the boss' aggro, and was mobile enough to keep the boss moving without it constantly dealing damage to me. The healer was able to keep me alive and, finally, we downed the boss with me, the rogue, as a "tank" for most of the fight.
Rogue tanks are not a build that exists ; a rogue shouldn't be tanking a boss, it's not effective, and so on... but we pulled it off. And it was **really fun**.
This is how I felt trying to pick up playing League of Legends when I was bored. Even un-ranked games are full of people who get furious if you're not an APM god so there's really nowhere to 'git gud' unless you feel like suffering abuse all day.
APM is so funny as well. As like 80%+ of it are useless clicks it basically become a tick with severely diminishing returns.
I came across your video by chance,but oh boy, I can totally identify with it.
I am a casual WOW player.
I like questing and social interaction.
I started playing WOW in the Pandaria expansion when I started playing.
I knew nothing about how to play the game.
I also have arthritis and so I play with a game mouse rather than my keyboard.
In Pandaria, I came across a group of guys who were really nice and had enough patience to teach me how to become better as a player.
They told me about addons and how to use them.
I played with them all the way through legion.
They have stopped playing and because of things in my life I had to take a break.
I came back in Dragonflight and the social interaction is worse.
I have not even tried to do dungeons or raids.
I did some battle grounds and got kicked from those.
So I just quest and do my proffesions.
I don't like how toxic the game has become.
I think that it also turns off new players.
Try guild wars 2, it's way more casual friendly
I was one of those in 2004/5 who stuck to my pirate aesthetic and refused to wear any helm other than an eye patch or any shoulder armor at all. And I was one of those who put that beloved character on the shelf for the next 5 years I played to instead play a character with no fixed aesthetic so I wouldn't feel like I was holding back my friends when I spent time with them in dungeons and raids.
Thank you for the video. It brought back a lot of feelings, and a whole new wave of gratitude that I got out when I did.
transmog was such a great addition to the game.
@@shizachan8421 Even with transmog some concepts have limitations.
When Cataclysm came out, I decided to try starting a new character on a new class and went with a Belf paladin. But her story was goofy: she was a rabbit who'd been turned into an elf to wield justice after escaping the culling of Stratholme. Pure silliness. But it's why I always had her wearing the easter ears as her helm.
You can't transmog that holiday hat onto a real helm.
Or at least you still couldn't as of the last time I played in early Shadowlands. Maybe that's changed now. You definitely couldn't in Cata. So she was effectively not wearing a helm from level 1 up to the early-mid 70's in LK content, where you can get a helm model that is close enough to looking like it has bunny ears to work for the idea.
@@ShjadeNexayre the current thanksgiving event has a holiday hat that doesn't have an armour class so it can be transmogged into anything, but i don't know about the easter one
at some point in dragonflight we're supposed to be able to transmog white and grey rarity gear as well, but it's not here yet
@@ShjadeNexayreThese limitations became a LOT better though but I get it, this is still limiting.
Transmog used to just have goofy fun is something I never really focused on but it makes me appreciate it a lot more. Thanks for this perspective.
My girlfriend is actually the sole SIMC dev for the warlock class, and the first thing she said when I linked the video was "oh man, I hope my work isn't pilloried in here" and its funny because you explicitely used the warlock sims, and when I brought that up she was really worried. I'm glad you didn't lambast the people who do spend the time to work on the functionality that everyone uses, and instead focused on the people who focus so much *on* those things, because the people who actually dev for stuff like SIMC are very often the ones chased down with pitchforks and torches when discussion on these sorts of topics are done.
Yeah the culture isn’t their fault, people are people and those devs making tools for everyone to use in their freetime deserve a lot of respect for doing it. They’re passionate about it and there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with using those tools or enjoying that type of play. Even as someone who’s never player WoW, I thank people who make those tools for everyone since they’re useful and, whatever the reasoning is, they’re just making something people like to have.
I had returned to WoW after taking a break when shadowlands dropped and was ready to jump into dragonflight!
Then i found out how much i NEEDED mods for even basic dungeons or else i was getting kicked
My guild had shrunk, i wasnt entirely surprised by this after what id heard about shadowlands.... however what i didnt expect was how toxic the remainder had become.
I was a coleader with another guy who started the guild, we went way back along with one other friend who was attached to him at the hip. I made an offhand comment to someone asking me a question about the guild, they were "new" and had just joined. It was the middle of the day in the US and on a weekday so no one else was online. He asked me "hey so is this a smaller guild or less active?" And i said "yes, at this time we are rebuilding" he didnt respond and left the guild shortly after.
I was underfire the second the coleaders friend logged in and showed him the guild chat log. I got calls on discord nonstop about how i fucked up. I was confused because i said a very professional response in my opinion while i had been busy as well. They showed me the log and i just didnt understand what the problem was. They were upset that i didnt say "no we are highly active, its the middle of the day" even though i had personally never seen anymore than myself him and his friend online for over 2 weeks at that point. I wasnt going to lie to someone and try to keep them, if they didnt feel like it was a good fit and had decided already then who am i to stop them? This guy had joined like a handful of hours earlier at that so i doubt he had even given it much more thought than "im bored where is everyone?"
Anyways, i tried to ask our leader "hey, so i get youre angry... but this seems like a lot of pent up frustration. Whats going on man? Whats actually eating you up? Because this seems like a really small thing." I thought he had already exploded, this made him erupt with the force of mount vesuvias. I could not believe just how much this bothered him, and at the end of it he was screaming "i am your commander in chief, you do what i say so admit you were wrong or youre out of the guild!"
I said "i guess im out of the guild then, because even if i somehow stay in the guild i dont know how either of us could get along after this" his friend was on his side as well as the other 3 officers.
I was stunned, shocked, and stuck in disbelief as i was bombarded by PMs from everyone saying i was a psychotic sociopath.
And that was when i knew i was done with WoW for good.
I moved over to FF14 and it was fun for some time, but then i started to have the mod problem crop up. It was okay for normal dungeons... but raids you had better have it or else. Most of the time people were noce regardless but you get a hooha here and there that is just an asshole. This was when i learned the hard way that when people get bored they want to move up in content... and even with mods i am just not skilled enough to do savage/extreme/ultimate raids etc
This caused me to get kicked out of my first FC, then my next FC, then another one died because they couldnt get enough people to do the harder content and everyone left.
The mod scene is really creeping into ff14 hard, and you can see it with characters marked with sprout icons obtaining highly coveted legend titles. The average player is able to complete the hardest content available if they have the mods and a team willing to work with them. This just increases the amount of content being cleared at faster rates the same way explained in this video with classic.
The major difference is that mods in ff14 are like a secret, because theyre a bannable offense. However, literally everyone uses them and content is not explicitly made with them in mind.... but you cant do most hard content without it either...
maybe you would like Guild Wars 2? The community is much more casual, our content is doable by a vast majority of people, and we don't have nearly as many addons. I think the only "standard" one (most players don't use it) is a DPS meter.
I get it though if you're just burned out on MMOs. I'm really sorry for your experience. Harassment and bullying over things that don't really hurt anyone is just harsh and unnecessary.
Thanks for the great video Dan. I have been thinking along very similar lines recently after getting back into OSRS in the last couple of years. I mean, I played this game as a child nearly twenty years ago, and absolutely nobody cared about doing anything efficiently. How times have changed.
It was truly a land of adventure and fun and unlike anything I had experienced, and I learned a lot about myself and the real world through those experiences. Fast forward to the present day, and OSRS is all about BiS, leaderboards and efficiency. Areas of the map and dead content with ever-so-slightly worse exp rates or methods, regardless of the fun factor, are totally abandoned. Third party client Runelite and its plug-ins (add-ons) are standard, which massively informs how new content will look.
The biggest paratext for OSRS is the Wiki, which details what you 'should' be doing, and any player sitting outside of the zeitgeist is fodder for ridicule. There are always players sticking up for those who don't know or don't care about instrumental play, championing a 'play the game however you want' attitude, but I have a strong feeling most of the community is judgemental as heck...
Regardless of all this, I'm still having a great time. Plug-ins are an absolute game-changer, improving accessibility for farming through to raiding. It's just very, very different. And I guess I am different!
The reason I'm typing this out is that I can't help but ask 'why' players have shaped these games in such a way. Have MMO's unwrapped the modern subconscious human state for us to see and study? It is very interesting to think about. Is this culture a result of the majority of users growing up through capitalism (and thus individualism), seeing time as a resource, naturally competing against one another for the highest status and the best gear to flex in front of others? A bit like a guy in his sports car with the roof down? Possibly, who knows.
If the majority player-base had grown up under a different political system, would the collective hivemind bend the virtual world and its culture toward different end goals? Is this why players report that FFXIV seems friendlier overall - perhaps because of the ideologies of the developers themselves, seeping back into the game in different ways?
This video is very engaging and I really enjoyed it, but there's so much room to dive even deeper... I truly believe MMO's can help provide answers to some of life's big questions.
this truly has been a blessed month for long-form content
why. what other ones have you been watching
Yes please give examples, I would love more to watch
The most recent Hbomberguy video about the oof sound is pretty crazy/Interesting and he's very aligned with folding ideas ideologically if you care about that
@@greg4629 defunctland, Jenny Nicholson, and hbomberguy
@@aryelovestrand2143 I don't
I still remember the first time I realized that the community was going to kill Classic WoW. I was playing some AV on the Alliance side, and for once, we were winning. People in chat were complaining about this, actively encouraging us to lose and do worse so they could continue farming honor.
When we got pushed back towards Dun Baldar, the people in the chat were celebrating the game going into an unfun, endless grind between the two armies. They weren't playing for fun. They weren't playing to win. They were playing to lose in a slow, unfun, unengaging way, simply because it was the ideal way to farm honor.
I unironically, genuinely, cannot understand why'd you want to waste your time on Earth doing that. Deliberately losing at a game over the course of hours, just to get marginally more honor than you would by playing seriously and actually having fun.
On my server, for horde, the serious honor grinders would quit less than 10 minutes in if they released we wouldn't win fast enough. It was better for honor gain to leave and start a new AV
A similar thing happens on the server I’m playing on. I play bgs for fun and I’m sure other people do too. However, there’s always someone in the chat that’s complaining about the score or about playing badly. They just want to finish the game as fast as possible. Why do these people play games if not to have fun…
"Mostly because that particular grind was/is the most hellish, and anything to make that even slightly faster...."
Is probably what the reasoning is.
Same reason the same species of tech bro never factor mortality into the equation or even think about it conceptually when building a system: they have no clue at all that their time is limited and zero appreciation for what it means to actually waste time.
They are playing to have fun, it's just that what they find fun is different from what you find fun
This is such a great case study on not just Warcraft, but multi-player co-op/PvP in general and toxic activity geared SOLELY towards being the most efficient and optimized method of playing any video game. Really well done.
FFXIV is the MMO I have played the most, but I also played quite a lot of WoW (Legion being THE expansion for me as I really wanted to see where the narrative went there).
Anyways, during one of those rare patch cycles of XIV when there's a slight lull, I suggested to my best friend in game whether she wanted to give WoW a try. She agrees, and rolls up a tauren priest I think, (I rolled up a new character as well) and we get through the starting zones, reach 15 and queue up for our first dungeon. I believe it was ragefire chasm but I could be remembering wrong.
In the dungeon we end up with a tank who had full heirloom gear, along with what I presume were his two friends. She has never played wow before and as the fight started she understandably struggled a little getting used to the CDs and GCDs, and just the overall flow of the game as it is very different from XIV. To make matters worse our tank was not about to give anyone any time and pulled as many mobs he could. He also was just not using aoes at all, and a lot of the mobs went loose and came for my friend as she was a healer and pulled a lot of aggro. She died and typed an apology in the chat saying she's new to the game. Without a response, he started a vote kick, which the other 2 agreed with, and kicked her out.
Keep in mind, we do savage raids and extreme trials in XIV. We had cleared umbra savage while it was still current content just the night before this. We're not outstanding, but I can assure you we're used to clearing top end fights and know our way around the hardcore side of MMOs. She is a white mage main and one of the best damn healers I've ever played with in ANY MMO. And they kicked her out in a beginner dungeon AS A BEGINNER.
Needless to say, I never suggested she try the game again, and she also lost any interest I had garnered in her. We sometimes bring this up and laugh about the sheer irony of it though. Its still one of the most baffling, and slightly enraging, experiences I've ever had in an MMO.
Yup that's 100% a quit moment for many people. WoW's community in guilds is really fun and inviting, but in queued random content is the exact opposite; people expect you to know every dungeon, have played the game for 10+ years and if you haven't they'll be as rude as the game allows them to be. It's infuriating. As someone who's been playing since Vanilla I ALWAYS defend new players and teach them the ropes. Whenever you just mention in chat "You were new once, give them a shot", 9/10 times the people who were pissed before give it a second and then are like "oh yeah true", at least for easier content like your mentioned low level dungeons.
Sadly the 10/10 time also happens and people just coninue to be rude, or they quit and fling insults. It's a shame, the game's fun.
I was playing SWTOR years ago and stepped away to refill my drink while a cut scene played during what was effectively a dungeon raid and came back to the others screaming at me for not skipping the cut scene. That was my breaking point where I was like "This isn't fun anymore. I'm done." Went back to just single-player games and never looked back.
This is the main reason why I never bothered to play multi-player anything (unless it was couch co-op). Too many people take these games as life or death work and I just cannot exist in that head space. This is my escapism method, I don't play to feel frustrated and stressed
This is why I don't touch multiplayer unless I'm just playing with good friends. I already have social anxiety disorder and I don't need a freaking video game triggering a panic attack.
Yeap, that's why I never touch MMOs and why I don't play any MP games unless I have at least one person I know offline playing with me. Games are not fun if you have some salty try hard who always wants to have the game played in the way they want and expect it to be played, especially if you are like most people and are tired after work and have a finite amount of time to do anything for your own enjoyment.
That's why I only played the single player content. I wanted to play the flashpoints and stuff, but I would always get yelled at for not pressing spacebar during cutscenes. So I didn't know the actual stories for any of the flashpoints (even though I wanted to) and my multiplayer experience amounted to mindlessly chasing map markers and trying to keep up with the rest of the party.
That was the entire reason I stopped playing multiplayer WoW too! There were too many sweaty tryhards who made everything stressful-boring.
Well we now know why there was such a long time between "Line Goes Up" and "Contrepreneurs" Dan was working on at least two major videos at the same time.
Also, based on some editing streams, the process of making Contrepreneurs seemed like kind of a nightmare (he had to rerecord some bits because of bad lighting, the editing was tough, stuff like that). Really makes you realize how much time and effort goes into videos like this. It's honestly incredible, and I admire anyone who does it.
and spending a lot of time playing WoW
@@Raph584 Research! I did like the sniping back in forth between Dan and choice. "where he posts barely watched videos that die on the vine." "Dan's sad guild sits about here."
This section on addons really hit home for me.
It's crazy how of a game about wandering and expansive fantasy world and killing dragons has turned into a "Listen to this addon thats a glorified version of Bop It".
I miss the game of killing dragons. Now it's just Enter Instance, Listen to Add-on 1 tell you what part of the map to stand on, Listen to Add-on 2 tell you which button in your rotation to click.
Not only does the community push back against self directed play, the developers also do everything in their power to limit it aswell
Another thing, when I came back to Classic, I was having a blast, going from quest to quest, helping a dwarf do this, fight off bandits from that.
Everyone else using Questie and stuff were like "Man this quest is sooooo boring. I have to walk from A to B, it's not exp efficient"
Like homie, you're the one using an addon that makes the game more boring, the call is coming from inside the house.
I like Questie because it saves me time. It keeps me focused and i dont want to spend hours running in circles in the wrong place, not progressing. Addons like it are the types that dont ruin the purity of Classic imo. Because i dont use them for the sake minmaxing my character or being efficient for other people, just making the most of my time in the game. I also turn off that awful party chat announcement it does, because its just clutter. I notice a lot of people dont shut it off.
You can experience the dichotomy of instrumental and non-instrumental play in any competitive game by simply playing for fun. I used to play World of Tanks, and over time they added more and more tools to change the characteristics of your vehicle in unique ways, which I would use to make a vehicle behave like a different class of vehicle, because it was a unique experience that I found captivating. Having more hit points? Nah. Going faster than medium tanks in a heavy tank? Yes please. I don’t mind if I aim or fire more slowly, or have less hit points than I could… but oh boy does everyone else mind.
I have had two main experiences with WoW. The first was as a young kid who couldn't get a subscription, so I could only try out the free demo, and the second was in college trying to play with friends who were veteran players. When I was young, I wasn't any good at the demo, but I still felt a huge amount of wonder at all of the cool stuff you could get and explore, and I wished I could have played more. In college when I tried to play with my friends, they told me to use the max level boost, pick a healer since it would let us get into dungeons easier, and had me run through the first quests needed to play the first dungeon. I felt like I couldn't even stop to read the quest giver's text, and I only ended up playing a couple of days.
Oh man I had the same experience when I returned to WoW after an absence of 8 years. Difference being that I DID have an decent first experience back in 2005 when I enjoyed the RPG side of things with like minded players who, like me, played their first MMORPG. Like you said: just wandering around, discovering stuff, etc. I expected some of this magic to return, but no..... It felt so pointless not to be able to EXPERIENCE anything, just rush through everything without uttering so much as a word. Gave up on MMO's after that since they ALL suffer from the same mindset among the playerbase. Back to single-player CRPG's for me....
Playing with veterans, even when they're your friends, is always a rushed joyless experience when it comes to MMOs sadly. I don't want to skip the whole game, follow a wiki for the meta, and have my friends one shot everything for me.
@@Dermetsu A real friend makes a new character to start with you ❤
@@asmrtpop2676 that's true!
@@oilslick7010 i guess thats why im never going to abandon my roguelikes :)
HONEY THE NEW FOLDING IDEAS DROPPED!
I am simple man. Between weekly dose of Perun and monthly dose of Dan i am happy to continue my struggle.
Start the CZcams!!!!!
HE DON'T MISS
Don’t talk to bee spit like that
This is maybe my favorite video on youtube. Obviously the subject matter is right up my alley, but its so well done that I've put it on in the background or passively and have watched it fully probably 10 times at this point and its not that old. Truly my youtube "comfort food", just thought you should know.
I once tried to join a raid that demanded I have gear from said raid to even join, nvm the fact the raid got beaten when players had worse gear, how am I supposed to get gear from the raid if I'm not even able to enter without already having been there?
"this entry level position requires at least 5 years worth of experience"
As a "Wallace" type WoW player, I really appreciated this. I'm perfectly content to just play the game solo, at my own pace, working on achievements that sound fun, exploring and casually leveling through zones, and just sort of "vibing" throughout Azeroth. Thanks, Dan!
I'm a wallace too, I just wish I had someone to hang out with and talk to in game too.
Same! Been playing for +10 yrs and in my early years tried my role as a healer- never worked. It didn't worked in wow, lol or any other pvp type of game.
Now I'm happy to vibe on my own collecting mounts and achievments.
This is why RDF being yeeted from WOTLK Classic is problematic.
Promotes folks siloing entirely.
Hi fellow Wallace's!
Yeap, I would give up stats because I refused to dress my wizard in vests and trousers. Kept my lower level robes for quite a while. Nobody shouted to me about it though, because I hated the minmaxers so I never joined their guilds or went raiding. I just understood that part of the game was not for me.
I only played WoW on-and-off for a little over one year circa 2005/2006. At that time everyone I interacted with who also played WoW was rushing to the end-game content with an incredible fervor. They *all* powerleveled to maximum immediately. They left me in the dust. I explored the world, played through various minor quest chains, enjoyed the little stories, and eventually got stuck and bored because there was nobody at my level to play with and the quests became too difficult in many places for me to play solo. Basically, I had no one to play with because I played the game "wrong" in their eyes. I've never come back. WoW Classic tempted me, but I wasn't about to pay a subscription and then join a guild that would push me to powerlevel. Instead I spent the intervening years/decades playing all up and down the gamut of strategy, shooter, single-player RPG, and casual indie "whatever-genre" games. Sounds like I made the right choice for my fun.
This is my experience as well and the reason I have played basically every MMORPG solo since EverQuest. I will never forget the time I agreed with my friends to start new characters and all play together every night and then I had a date on Friday (it did not even go well, weak) and the next day everyone was like level 30 and I was still 18. I literally never grouped in another MMORPG again after that week
God this is such an illuminating video. You never cease to dramatically shift my perspective on topics by providing context, and information when you post a new video...
I like factory building games and management sims. However I HATE talking to anyone else about them - even if they like them. I enjoy finding my own solutions, or trying to make a suboptimal solution work because I feel thats a challenge. However there IS a best way to do things, and if they know it they are gonna try and make me feel like I am playing the game wrong.