I would like your thoughts on….this. I’m not sure if anybody has seen/sent you this already, but I’m kind of wondering if there is any merit to what is being said. But it does interest me that this guy is examining the social aspects of the game and using that as a frame for team work in a business environment. It definitely flies in the face of all this dreck flying around lately about video games ruining society and such. Is this just nonsense or is there some actual merit in this?
It’s nonsense. Whatever you do, never tell an employer that you play World of Warcraft.
The video is comparing World of Warcraft to academia. It is not that World of Warcraft is so good, it is that academia is so bad. Academia has severe weaknesses in how it prepares people for the real world. Academia does not teach leadership (can leadership even be taught?). There are other things a young person can do where they can get this experience such as, say, the Boy Scouts.
I’m seriously considering quitting WoW and not buying Mists of Pandaria. I’ve had enough. While people have gone into the WoW spinner and come out sounding and acting the same lines, perhaps I might be able to shed some more light.
Everyone who quits WoW has a similar complaint: the problem is the playerbase.
No one actually plays WoW. What they do instead is play their ego. This goes from bad players to good players. In the real world, you don’t get to play your ego. In many ways, you have to sacrifice your ego to get things done. Do you think a salesman wants to look like the idiot and pest and run around selling the product? No. But the art of selling is everything in business. Everything.
Elitism in WoW tends to come from the bad players. They are unsure of themselves so they have to criticize everything else. Basically, everything they say is aimed at puffing up their own egos.
On the other side is the hardcore raider who spends more than six hours a week inside raid instances, has over half a dozen alts all maxed out, and plays all the roles. This character loves giving unsolicited advice. But all is vanity. If you say, “Isn’t hardcore WoW playing an oxymoron? WoW is a casual MMO. If you want a hardcore MMO, why not play EVE Online or Ultima Online?” They get very angry. They’re not interested in playing WoW, they’re interested in their ego. Someone trying to describe themselves as a hardcore WoW player is like someone saying they are a hardcore Kirby player.
I played in Vanilla and I played today. The entire playerbase of WoW has dramatically changed. In Vanilla, there was no problem benching people for raids. They didn’t have the gear or didn’t have the skill to do their role or whatever. Today, there is a huge problem when you have to bench someone. Why?
Some major guild leaders (who write in the guild leadership forum bizarrely the least used WoW forum) identify this change in the playerbase due to changes in the game that Blizzard made. Many of them point to Wrath of the Lich King. Where something like epics were uncommon in Vanilla (people would admire that guy wearing epics when he waited for the zeppelin), everyone has epics from doing 5-man dungeons. The gameplay of Vanilla had many moments where it said, “You aren’t good enough” from dungeons (the complexity of Blackrock Depths is a good example) to some difficult questing areas. There were elite quests where you, obviously, weren’t good enough if you tried to solo it (elite quests require multiple people). The game has been dramatically changed where the player is never told he is not good enough. Maybe he might not have a high enough ilevel to get into a dungeon, but the content never prevents him from progressing. Ever.
Until he starts raiding.
For those who don’t play WoW, I’ll try to explain how the raid leader goes about this. Raids come in two sizes, 25 man or 10 man. Since most groups go 10 man, I’ll just use that.
The ‘rules’ that the raid leader must follow are actually created by Blizzard. The reason why a raid has two tanks is not because the raid leader thinks it is ‘cool’ but because that is how Blizzard designed the raids. So the 10 man raid would look like:
2 tanks
3 healers
5 DPS (often 2 melee and 3 range)
However, the raids are also designed for synergy of different classes. Each class brings different buffs. So it is good for the tanks to be different classes, for the healers to be different classes, and the DPS to be different.
The raids are also designed for every raider to be in PvE gear that drops from heroic 5 man dungeons and to be gemmed and enchanted with the gems and enchants appropriate for their classes.
Now Blizzard will design what is called ‘DPS checks’ with the raid bosses. What this means is that a raid boss requires a certain amount of DPS, and no lower, or else it cannot die no matter what the tanks and healers do. Bosses have enrage timers. There are also ‘healing checks’ as well as ‘tank checks’. The raid leader needs to know what these are and not bring people who cannot fulfill them. Time in raid groups should be spent on mechanics, not on someone being unable to to use their class.
Even the first raid boss has a minimal DPS, healing, and tanking requirement. Obviously, you can’t bring in a DPS where he doesn’t do any DPS. He has to do some. But how much?
The significant difference between Older WoW and Today WoW is that Blizzard has shifted all the times it said ‘You aren’t good enough’ from itself (Blizzard) to the raid leaders. The first time a WoW player, today, will ever hear ‘You aren’t good enough’ will be from the raid leader. And that shouldn’t be the case. The only reason why the raid leader says that is because of how Blizzard designed the raid. The raid boss can’t die unless certain things are done.
One of the things Blizzard says is that so much time was being spent on designing raid content that only 1% of the people would see. The CORRECT RESPONSE would be to not spend all that time on content the 1% see. Spend the time on content that everyone is already seeing.
But Blizzard behaved extremely selfishly (probably due to the developers enjoying raiding and wanted to design content for themselves). Instead of acknowledging that the vast majority of WoW subscribers don’t enjoy raiding, they said, “How do we make everyone a raider so we can keep making these elaborate raid instances?”
And this is what has led to the soft implosion of WoW. At the beginning of Cataclysm, Blizzard put in tougher dungeons and all to teach everyone how to raid. The result was massive subscriber loss. At the end of Cataclysm, Blizzard put in easy dungeons and LookingForRaid. Instead of trying to get people to raid, they realized their focus was to get everyone through the raid instance. This is why LFR exists. It is not about helping people with odd schedules to ‘see all the content’. If Blizzard gave a damn about that, they’d have done it much sooner. No, it is all about Blizzard justifying itself to make more elaborate raid instances even though most WoW players don’t like raiding.
“Will MoP change all this?” No. Everything still revolves around raid instances. You’re not actually ‘going out in the world’, you are just ‘raiding outside the raid instance’ with the World Raid Bosses. And there are tons of treadmills all over the place with ‘do daily quests to gain reputation’. Pet battles are another enormous treadmill. You can have up to THREE of the same kind of pets now. And you can level each pet to level 25. And some of the focus on World PvP is just to take pressure off of Blizzard for providing more content (which Blizzard has struggled to do).
Blizzard recently said, “It will take longer to do content because the art requirements have gotten higher.” But I say, “No one plays WoW for the graphics. Why not lower the art requirements and put out more content?”
Don’t be fooled by all the ‘feedback’. Blizzard developers are like any other industry developer. They want to do what they want to do.
World of Warcraft never revolved around raiding… especially that is not how it became popular. Blizzard doesn’t care. They want to make elaborate raids and need to justify it. So the playerbase of WoW is radically changing. People who didn’t enjoy raiding didn’t try to raid. But now if they don’t enjoy raiding, what is there to do? Daily quests? Pet battles? Challenge dungeons are just miniature raids. Scenarios are a joke where all roles don’t matter.
The reason why WoW subscribers are declining and will continue to decline after the Pandaria bump is because Blizzard developers are designing the game towards their tastes and not what the public wants. The shift of ‘you’re not good enough’ from the content to stacking it all on the raid leaders is cowardly from Blizzard and is causing more and more raid leaders to quit.
WoW is something that should be tasted and not swallowed. Trying to say that a video game about slaying fantasy dragons can improve your real world life is just absurd. Everyone I know who plays WoW falls into the following categories: Manchild (has no job or a joke of a job but is grown adult, spends all day in raid instances), Older Adult Who Can’t Play Any Other Game (WoW’s gameplay is so simple that other games are beyond their ability), and Grandfathered (people who played WoW earlier and didn’t stop or came back from a break).