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
@@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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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".
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
"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 was pretty well into WoW up until shortly after Cataclysm, and when I was asked why I stopped playing by my guildmates, I told them I didn't want another job. All this boils down to you having to be geared well enough to even participate, do enough research to know what to do, and ultimately deal with the stress of not effing up your role to the point where you're not invited any more. Each one of those is a huge time sink and seemed more like work than a thing I did to have fun in my off time, and as I grew older, I had less disposable time. I'm glad I watched this video, as it breaks down essentially what caused this new work, and was just a result of the circumstances of the era it came out in, the technology involved, and just plain people. Thanks Dan and everyone else involved in this great piece.
People have always considered me weird of silly for never really running Dungeons or Raids in any game. But this is why. I have to sit down and understand what to do, I have to play enough to be geared enough to do it, and even during that first time I'm worried about effing up, and constantly checking the guide to see I'm doing what I should. So I rarely do WoW Raids or Destiny Dungeons/Raids. It's a chore
This is why I stopped playing WoW after legion. everything this is funneling into eventually making you raid now, and raids are so fundamentally unenjoyable I find the entire game pointless now. they used to have so much to collect and do outside of that where if raiding wasn't your thing you still had plenty to do every xpac, now everything is locked behind raids. I used to raid when I was younger, and its apart of why I fucking hate most other people today. I don't want another job. I want to play a fun game and have an enjoyable adventure with friends. WoW threw that aspect in the trash long ago.
This has unlocked ancient memories. Our guild/raid leader would run Molten Core in first-person mode, we'd laugh and ask how he could see anything happening, but didn't get mad at him. Kind of wild in hindsight.
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.
"Even the social elements of the game, things seemingly free of numbers, become vessels for the propagation of numbers." 47:30 - brought to mind the way 'numbers' become omnipresent in even the most intimate parts of our personal lives; our time, food, family, through the vein of Capital. We have to grind, and because that is the way the 'game' has been shaped by social consensus, we watch the macros of ourselves and our relation to labor even when we're not being observed by a superior. We feel the pressure at all times, work, sleep, or play, to keep an eye on our cooldowns.
Every time Dan makes a Wow video, I’m reminded of how little of the game I played back in 2006, when I played it for a month max, because it was in the zeitgeist. It’s the equivalent of watching the first hour of the first episode of a show, then watching the final ever episode of the tenth season. I love learning more about the game.
@@asmodiusjones9563 burning crusade was either just about to come out or had just come out when I stopped, my retail copy came on a disc, in the box, something which, I’m told, WoW doesn’t do anymore.
The most fun ive had playing wow was helping randoms level. Being stuck in raids for hours was something that ill never do again. Being ex-military, the power trips based on a video game never sat right with me.
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.
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 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.
@@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.
Really love the Jon Bois/Secret Base shoutout at the credits. I'm so glad the style is spreading. Truly a fantastic outline for compelling storytelling from a medium that is so obsessed with the noise and grandiose, the simplicity displayed by both you, and by Bois/Secret Base, is such a welcome calm from otherwise chaos. Thank you for these wonderful stories!
the wild thing about it is that, and I'm not saying Jon didn't develop the style deliberately, but so much of it's conventions idosyncracies grow out of Google Earth of all things. I'm watching a WOW video with aesthetics borne out of Jon Bois drawing football plays on top of football stadiums in google earth and then just layering more and more content and style into the format until something sublime comes out the other side.
BobbyBroccoli is my other favorite pioneer of this style, his recent one about the guy who faked discovering a new element was so good and the visualization helped my squishy humanities brain understand it
This is why I have tended to stick to playing by myself. When I play GTA V, I drive the buses and do my thing, or when playing Minecraft, I stick to digging my tunnels and exploring areas alone. It's been a decade since I've played with other players online. Less fun when most people online are interested in grinding it out.
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.
As someone apart of the DS3 Speedrunning community I am happy you mentioned that your enjoyment can coexist with the speedrunning strategies regardless of how insane True Any% runs are. You would be surprised at how many people insult speedrunners and the runs due to us using extreme strategies and glitches. It is a running joke that we make fun of when people tell us that "Glitched runs aren't real speedruns".
I think more people need to learn that using a few speedrun techniques doesn't mean you're ruining the game, once the game is in your hands it's yours to do as you please (death of the author and all that)... I was having a fucking miserable time doing the Master Trials for LoZ BotW and just decided to cheese it thinking the speedrunners would've found a few good tricks... I ended discovering that wall clipping was a thing and actually pretty accessible so I spent an hour learning that and loved it! Was it "true to the game" in that I didn't spend another 30hrs being miserable? Maybe... Was it a blast to just break the game anyway? Fuck yeah it was!
The dumbest complaint about speedrunning by far is "you're not even seeing the game" as if the strategy crafting part didn't involve tearing apart every polygon.
I don't find glitchier speedruns fun to watch for the most part especially when they're games I have personally played - I want to see actual, but highly optimised, gameplay because it's what I find fun - but the idea that glitch heavy runs aren't real speedruns is entirely ridiculous. Plenty of games have categories with high levels of conventional play if that's what you find fun but there's no reason to piss on someone else's enjoyment.
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!
The entire time I was, for some reason, waiting for this to then become a perfect analogue of the systematization of our society and then drawing a caparison to how agents use instrumental play in our own society, and how WoW becomes a wonderful microcosm of the dynamic of "ruining the experience" and this "cultural division" we experience between those trying to "game the system" and those of us trying to, effectively, get health care and live an enjoyable life from a qualitative perspective.
@@yoyoyobottleoyos Sure, I think op was simply saying that Dan didn’t outright make the comparison in the video. The conclusion he reached was ultimately about the game and its playerbase as opposed to the social paradigm. Which I personally think would have made for a much more interesting conversation/conclusion
This is the inevitable result as the Universe moves in its study and inevitable decline from qualification to quantization. From cosmic egg, to heat death. This will be reflected in all things.
To be frank, I'm glad he didn't, because while the comparison is there, you're assigning a moral high ground to "qualitative free-play." Like, no joke, instrumental practice in the real world is harmful because of the material impacts it has on us, our society, our environment, etc. We all would be better in a system designed to not reward instrumental practices. But this is a video game. While it matters to some extent, to give it the same moral weight as the real world would essentially paint people who authentically participate in a game to get better and clear challenges as morally deficient. Which is wild. You can both wish for an economic, social structure built on mutual care and not on competition, and still like to play competitive games. To say that they are mutually exclusive is honestly a bit much.
As I am someone who is trying to look into anthropology and sociology of MMOs and virtual worlds thank you for looking into this so well, as this is absolutely fascinating. This is a space that is still lacking so much discussion and research so I am so happy for this deep dive. I am actually really sad that so much possible really interesting research on many games ,from my childhood like Fantage, club penguin and moshi monsters, never really got much academic work put into them at the time, and now that the original forms of the games are gone this research may never be able to happen. Even though I remember there being just as much possible depth in looking into those player bases as there is for WoW. Like all the social classes being formed and the interactions between these sites, new words and phrases are being created and used to get around censors and becoming commonplace on these sites, and growing fandoms on youtube which marketed fake tutorials and strange rumors that affected player behavior on these sites (breaking the ice in an animal jam, trying to find the third dojo in club penguin, whatever was going on with those Webkinz horror stories). Like there is so much there about how these young players interacted with these games, other players, and the internet as a whole which is fascinating and I would love to see some research on it. But most of these games were overlooked by researchers as this was seen as a less critical space for research for so long, and by the time people really started to care a lot about researching the internet and sites like this were already dying or were dead.
I'm a psychologist (though I study leadership and workplace psychology and not online gaming outside of a side-interest), and from my personal experience it's likely because these online communities and games tend to have lifecycles that are faster than the normal academic publishing cycle, and more importantly are mostly seen by people in my field as not really important to the overall health and development of humanity at large. Usually one of the criteria for publication is that you must show how your research will add to and enhance the overall body of scientific knowledge, and advance your particular field. Most games and gaming communities are seen as entertainment products and consumers, and thus outside of consumer studies, addiction studies, and other research streams that link these contexts to their broader impact on society, they aren't really seen as worthy of the time and effort, and definitely aren't going to enhance your curriculum vitae, your university's/program's prestige, or bring in grant money to fund the research. Hence why a lot of these sources are dissertations, and a lot of the larger and more common research is conducted by industry consulting firms who fund and publish the research as part of their industry product lines.
Hey, if you are interested in other academic literature on Mmos eve online is a game you might not otherwise hear about and frequently is cited in economics as a simulated space. I played it a while ago but found almost more enjoyment reading about it during my time at uni
If you aren't already a listener you should check out the Games Studies Study Buddies podcast. They cover a different work of critical games study every month, and some of those certainly cover the ideas you're talking about.
My interest in the subject is similar to the quote the video starts with. Why do people engineer the fun out of the game. Thankfully the video dives into the topic.
@@mauree1618 Honestly? It's not a popular answer, but stimulus habituation. After the initial dopamine hit they need more and more of the stimulus to get the same rush. They expect the development team to continually provide that ever increasing stimulation (they often use words like "progression" instead), and they lose interest and the activity becomes progressively less enjoyable as the dopamine hits become slowly weaker. It can be staved off by continually increasing the level of stimulus (making content more and more difficult, for example), but there is a point where doing so is no longer profitable/realistic for the developers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This documentary was captivating and heartbreaking at the same time. As a player who took a long break after Wotlk only to return for Legion and classic i feel like this video peers into my thoughts about the game and how i engage with it, it felt deeply personal and gave form to my abstract thoughts and feelings that something is fundamentally "wrong" with the game after all these years. Years ago it dawned on me that games that see widespread success (WoW, LoL, Overwatch) were subject to a certain form of degradation, i couldnt put my finger on to it but i could detect its' more prominent characteristics.; the emergence of "metas", correct ways to play the game, strict community adherence to guides, game feeling like a chore and the general trend to gravitate towards sources outside of the game to solve problems inside the game. At the time - and until i watched this video - i couldn't put my finger on to it, and lacking any desire for literal research, i described it as "the game collapsing under the weight of its' own community". I just realized that what i - very poorly - attempted to put in words back then was the existence of paratext and instrumental play, and its this exact reason why this video felt so personal. You put into words my thoughts and troubles about my favourite games in the best manner possble. Thank you.
@@Fragenzeichenplatte Its alienation, really. That's all it is. Everyone is so alienated from each other and the material basics of life that a facsimile of a community is enough for people to latch onto and enforce an "order" to something that is only ever really meant to be a leisure activity. The skinner box nature of games is purely a result of profit motive and capitalism preying on this to make a buck
@@brandonwalker5011 This, plus the unfortunate difference in levels of optimization. If I refuse to wear shoes and walk everywhere because that's how I have fun, that's fine on its own. But it creates an issue when I'm playing with people who have fun through clearing content and my shoeless, walking self is actively hindering that just by being there. The problem is less that I and that group have different ideas of fun, and more that those ideas clash enough that we simply can't play together without hurting each other's experience.
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.
As a fellow content creator and overall minidoc editor the planning and execution of the visual assets of this video are excellent. I greatly appreciate the time taken in this video to provide a visual guide to largely non visual story elements. Superb job
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.
I avoided watching this video for awhile but after I sat down and watched it, I can’t tell you in words how square they hit the mark on this. Nobody could explain this better. 👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿 amazing work
I was worried that these folded words might make me feel personally attacked at first because I suck at WoW even though I've been playing since vanilla closed beta but then they folded their way right back into my heart
not a WoW player but a longtime ESO player & did my academic work in cybernetics before GTFO’ing of academia-one of my favourite courses was in game studies and i encountered all of these works. made me feel way better about being a conflict-averse MMO dork on a trackpad obsessed with home design in a PVE setting (: the best play is the one that fulfills you
@@eCodex I couldn't agree more, even though I understood little of what you said. But I will say that, agree though I may, it really does weigh on you when all you want to do is your own thing and the vitriol is so ubiquitous that you basically can't go anywhere or do anything without some kid (or dude in his 20s with the mentality of one) deriding you every step of the way. But there's also a very large community of like minded people in WoW, I usually only play 1-2 months worth of each xpac and I'm in a guild with other people my age that just don't really have the time and they're all very nice and helpful.
@@Andrewbert109 elder scrolls online! essentially i couldn’t ever actually be “good” in combat-i couldn’t (and still can’t) afford anything more than my ancient thinkpad laptop, and i didn’t own a mouse for the longest time. so in PVE & PVP combat i can’t play in groups-super slow, but 16 FPS is generous, etc. so i fell in love with home/housing design in the game instead and those guilds ended up being the bulk of my “play” in-game lol. i’m glad you have that community-there’s just something really wholesome about MMORPG communities that don’t revolve around “optimization”/the esports mentality. there’s a difference between being passionate about something and using it as an excuse to feel important+have a misplaced superiority complex & those same types of players made my time trying to “play normally” so…stressful and caustic
@@eCodex You can be an optimizer and non-toxic too. I like optimizing - but I see the optimal state as "having fun" rather than "being better than other people". I don't think about comparing myself to others at all, in fact. When I'm solo, I pursue the peak of my playstyle and build choice, which is generally "whatever nonsense I feel is fun or interesting enough to warrant investment". In a group, which I prefer to keep small, I like it when everyone is having fun, and don't particularly have any attachment toward being the fastest or the most efficient. Those are artificial values foisted on people by social expectations of competitiveness and hierarchy. Why would I care about that?
@@FelisImpurrator Yeah no doubt. I actually used to be a hardcore optimizer type back in vanilla through WotLK. It's also important to remember that for a lot of people, optimization IS how they have fun. Just for me, that's not been the case in a very long time. And unfortunately the Venn diagram between optimization oriented and toxic has a pretty big overlap. Not everyone, probably not even most people are toxic, but it seems like most of the toxicity overlaps with optimization(usually/especially with the younger crowd).
imo, a game's content should NEVER make the difficulty of its content based on the presumption of addons or mods. And in pvp, there should be strict enforcement of rules. I hate all these addons that give information youre not supposed to have..
I was initially going to say this help give me words to the problems I have with MMOs, but on a more optimistic note, seeing it broken down like this actually gives me reason TO play them, to know the parts I don't like helps separate them from the parts I will like.
Thanks for the wave of nostalgia for the great times RPing on Moon Guard. Some of the best interactions I ever experienced, and I miss it frequently. There was something so thrilling about making a unique character and creating stories with others in real time. Honestly, RPing in WoW got me through hard times in high school and college.
I admit, as someone who's never played WoW, a lot of this video was obtuse to me, but I was fascinated by the parts that I could understand. Nifty stuff!
Thank you so much for putting into words everything I have experienced in WoW for the past 18 years. Years ago I gave up on the increasingly "instrumental" play of the game and decided to take things at my own pace. Finding fun in my own way. It really improved my experience. I missed my guild buddies from the early years, but I feel like I kind of dodged a bullet by not getting sucked into the numbers game. I took a break for a few years before Dragonflight because the weight of peer pressure was turning my play time into misery time. I'm hoping that all the new design in Dragonflight around different ways to earn rewards will help change the meaning of success in the game. This expansion offers new ways to acquire all kinds of rewards no matter how the player enjoys their playtime. I am hopeful, but not optimistic, that the instrumental mindset will no longer dominate the game for players that don't want to dedicate so much energy to finding the fastest way to progress in the game.
Fortunately, due to changes in the transmog system, Wallace can now wear boots for the stats, but still have his character look like he's not wearing any. Progress :)
I've come back to this video every so often because of how relevant it is to, well. Everything, I guess. I remember as a young kid I loved sports, not for the competitive aspects, but just because kids tend to be active and full of energy and I was no exception. I wasn't good at them though, and by the time that I was only EIGHT, my mother stopped letting me sign up for them because I wasn't up to the standards of the other kids. My brother on the other hand was great, and got signed up for everything, even the ones he hated like baseball. Nobody ever wanted to play casually outside of scheduled after-school activities, so all I could do was walk around town aimlessly and try to have my own fun and get my own exercise by myself. Now, as an adult, I've been trying to get into more individualistic sports that don't require teams, like rollerblading or iceskating. It's more fun, and the exercise is healthy, but man is it a bit isolating. There are either no groups to do it with nearby or they're trying to make a non-competitive sport into something competitive. And on top of that, video games are even worse. I've been getting into this cute little Tower Defense game on Roblox, something you'd expect to be fun and casual, and the people I run into on there are so MEAN for no reason! I always make it a point to be extra nice to my teammates. There's a good chance they're just young kids to begin with, and there's no reason to be hostile over a goofy videogame anyways. I've never understood why people get so worked up over this shit. Aren't we here to have fun? Appreciate your cute little tower guys and stop yelling at people, dammit!
I think this is the first of Dan's videos where I was almost entirely lost for the majority of the time. I don't play these sorts of games, so that's probably why, but what I got out of it is this - there is a play-style that turns play into work, with imposed responsibilities and consequential qualitative performance reviews. Fair enough. WoW, through a series of non-unique business and managerial choices, became the sort of game that fosters only this workmanlike play-style, and highly discourages any of the unstructured, non-qualitative, or self-directed engagement play-styles that were, and in many places still are, the foundation of the role-playing genre. Again, fair enough. But, when the business of WoW attempted to sell itself as a place that encouraged the latter through nostalgia, without making allowances for the prevalent, and indeed presently dominant, population of the former, that showed up the massive conflict of interest WoW represents. Or, to put it another way - when a thing is work, being bad at it can be considered a moral failing. But when a thing is merely play, the goal is quality of experience, not quality of performance, and so doing a thing badly is either inconsequential, mildly inconvenient, funny, or any combination of all three. Rarely is it important. Games are often play, but not always. It is allowed to turn games into work, but doing so without acknowledging the shift in both the goal, and the means to reach the goal, only makes for trouble.
You're still missing a core component: It's neither the players nor the developers who are at fault for this, but rather a combination of the two. The top-end players have very real external motivations to perform the way they do. The rest of the playerbase decidedly does not, but has convinced themselves that they must play similarly or else they are failing at the game. This is layered on top of the developer intent of creating various alternate routes to power. The result of the two colliding created the monster. Player freedom and behavior was, at first, restricted solely by social pressure (the gearscore addon mentioned during the wotlk segment being arguably the first time it happened across the entire playerbase) and not directly by anything the company did. Blizzard is of course not free from accusation. The incentive to drive up subscriptions to keep the cash flow going has led to, debatably, knowingly increasing these routes to power that they know players feel pressured to pursue, in an effort to drive up playtime and foster a form of dependence. But without the original social pressure from the playerbase to needlessly do these tasks, that would've never been an option for the company to pursue.
@@vonriel1822 I didn't attribute fault at all - in fact, I don't think Dan attributed fault either. He described two methods of gameplay, and the consequences of colliding them.
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.
Getting told, excuse me, berated incessantly for being the wrong damage specialization during a pvp dungeon was enough for me to realize I have a life and this guy thinks hes at work
I'm not a WoW player, but what you describe also very much relates to the world of making music, and I'm doing constant translations and discovering things I sort of knew but never heard expressed. Super interesting, thanks!!
The story of Wallace and the rise of DPS reminded me a lot of the ways in which people are reduced to entries in spreadsheets in the eyes of capitalism and the state. Measurements are not, as Nathan mentioned a few times, values neutral. But they can be made to seem that way. It's much easier to ask what someone's DPS is than it is to stop and wonder about whether DPS is actually the most important thing to you. Once you have a measurement you can optimize it, do whatever it takes to make the line go up, to borrow a phrase, and meanwhile all the intangibles get crushed. Whether it's the little joys of a fun quirky RPer, the aesthetic pleasure of music, or the ability of people to live happy, fulfilling lives. And as the video shows, this isn't just a matter of individuals, but of the structures and assumptions that they create. You don't have to set out to be mean for a ruthless focus on DPS to drive you to yelling at your friends. The most insidious of all systems are the ones which can be self perpetuating without any bad faith actors.
It doesn't sound very capitalistic to me. Nobody ends up owning property that produces results without the owner doing any further work. The leaders have the same grind and entry in the spreadsheet as everyone else
@@lomiification I think the point was more how both systems encourage acting (living, playing) in such a way that's numerically "optimal", but has a tendency to rob you of the potential joys that acting non-numerically optimally could bring you. How existing in the world needs a balance of acting numerically optimally enough that you don't get punished too hard by the system, while finding ways to also act such that you get enough joy out of existing in the space. Frequently, that balance is literally impossible for most people to find, with only the _very_ few who get enough joy out of acting numerically optimally actually thriving.
I run a RP/PVP server for Conan Exiles and I am constantly complimented for my unique take, the level of passion, nuance, and love I put into it. Which is strange because it is strictly vanilla with a very well crafted social overlay. Griefing is discouraged and shot down hard due to overlapping alliances, trade systems that aid clans in wars, and in extreme cases, a special jail in the extreme north with an insanely overpowered guard and the jail itself is SURROUNDED with very powerful monsters. To be honest the community I have is self-policing and wonderful and is the main draw and why it works so well
Capn: "Yo check out my sweet 272 that had a 1-100 chance of dropping! Pretty sweet, right?" The rest of the guild: "tHAt'S nOT a _278_ tHOugH!" The members of that guild need to go to the hardware store, visit the garden section, buy a pot, soil, seeds, and a watering can, take it home and *_grow some gosh dang perspective._* Incidentally, this is why I don't do collaborative play in anything and lone wolf every chance I get.
I never understood this logic in wow if the content was clearable without all the gear why does everyone make such a big deal out of something that isn't needed in the first place, maybe I'm just spoiled from years ff14 where I can just buy crafted gear and use that to beat the raid tier and not worry about having bis ....maybe good enough is just good enough for me
@@cyanmage1 And that's really all anyone needs to strive for. But instrumental play is so deeply ingrained, I caught _myself_ getting worked up over a game of pictionary with my friends on discord because their desire to have fun was directly at odds with my desire to win-simply because scoring and leaderboards exist in the game. They were drawing prompts in a way that was too difficult for me to guess, and I got sour because they wouldn't draw the concept itself; they would draw derivative memes based on the prompt which people sometimes guessed and sometimes didn't. I automatically switched mindsets without realizing it, because I kept seeing 3 other people take the win slots, with my significantly lower score below theirs on the screen, staring disgustedly back at me as if I'd failed. _At a game of Pictionary._ I felt like I was being sabotaged and dropped out because they weren't playing "fair." I consistently picked easy prompts that hopefully everyone could guess, and everyone guessed mine consistently. But no one ever afforded me the same "courtesy." I can only imagine what those things do to the minds of people who become "professional gamers," when what is supposed to be a leisure activity gets turned into a nose-to-the grindstone job by sponsorships and monetization.
this happens a lot in hypixel skyblock. if you don't use mods that lower your dungeon time people will get angry at you, if you don't have xyz item people won't let you join parties and thus won't let you progress. not using the "best" methods for progression is considered being intentionally dumb. dungeon solvers are not required for progression and remove the small variety that the game has, but god forbid you don't use mods
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.
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.
This video hits home. I really lost the interested in wow at the time a small part of my guild tried to change from casual to hardcore. The core players had recruited new players, played only among themselves and gradually replaced all the players who were not good enough in their eyes. This then led to a family-like guild breaking apart. And without playing with the people i really cared about i quit. There was no interest in even trying to get better equally. Every bad player was seen as someone who is standing between them and the loot they clearly deserve. Im enjoying FFXIV at the moment now. And with the design there, while not perfect, i am starting to wonder about the roleplay community in WoW more and more. It feels like the whole game was never made for them and is working against them. And still they are faithful to their character. There is literally no mechanic in the game to enhance a role playing experience exept perhaps toys which is sad for an RPG even if you are not interested in that kind of play.
I spent about 8 years playing WoW, and the things that stand out to me as fond memories are 1) Exploring the world and 2) Having fun with my friends and guildmates. I never saw any high-end raid content, mostly because it required a time commitment approaching that of a job.
I love Asmongold's content where he berates players for dying in hardcore wow. It really shows the ego behind these people who still try to be "the best" at what is fundamentally a game so simple it can be automated away and yet have a superiority complex around doing it "well". We saw this exact same behavior in text-based muds. As soon as tools got sophisticated, there was no gameplay for those simple games. You had to use tools to stay competitive. The only solution is to ban 3rd party addons and to design content which cannot be trivialized by a bot. But this is hard. And at this point, players expect the game to be a certain way.
I howled when you pulled out the Morgoth/Sauron fanart, amazing. I wonder when you went down that road. Anyway, thanks for making my day brighter reminding me of this pairing.
Great video. I kept waiting for you to mention final fantasy 14, because it's learned a lot from WOW specifically on how mods that become widely adopted eventually change how the developers create new content. Ff14 doesn't want/ allow mods for that very reason. This creates a "don't ask, don't tell" idea for cosmetic mods and changes. Where you WILL get banned if you use them, BUT there's no mechanism for finding if you are. Some world first group had a win taken from them when they where cought with mods recently. It's definitely worth a follow up video.
I feel like the strategy FF14 is going with is both experience from WoW and its mistakes, and a different culture. It values a comfortable playtime a lot more than it values freedom of play. Add-ons are discouraged, a lot of systems are in play just to give new players a better time, including content moderation. The difficult raids are the exception to the main mode of play. Almost everyone can play the normal raids, they're easy by design. People who complain that content has to be gatekept basically have no place in the game (though there is highly difficult content for the challenge that does gatekeep, but only by difficulty, barely anything else). I think its, fundamentally, a much more curated experience. You have a linear story, you have cinematic fights, including music which is one of the main parts of those fights, meaning that a lot of raiders even keep it on for a while. It's about the spectacle, about getting something presented - much more than it is about instrumental play like WoW.
I remember this cultural shift.... it turned the game from one where the playerbase fely inviting as a 12 year old learning english as he explored the world into one that fealt hostile for a 15 year old that still just wanted to explore.
I stopped playing wow mid-way through the Panda expansion, but i think that my guild's hiatus just gave me the excuse to stop that id craved perhaps for even years before that. I still remember BC/Wotlk guild application processes that were not at all unlike job applications. I remember feeling anxious of being judged during ventrilo guild interviews. One rather funny memory was hiding that i was a "clicker" for literal YEARS by tempoarily turning on mods & enabling hotkeys for guild application screenshots---before finally taking on the grueling process of relearning the game from the ground up so i could "stop" being a clicker...three days before my guild was attempting Cataclysm heroic raid progression. I still remember tanking very complex bosses while barely understanding many mechanics to the game id never used for years up to that point---all while trying to keep this struggle a secret les my guild realize I'm "bad" at the game. It was both horrifying & hilarious. But i also remember a night with IRL friends where we went to the movies & then hung out at my then-girlfriend's place. Not a trivial event for twenty-somethings who all work full time &/or have extensive schooling schedules. The plan was for me to drive many of these friends home afterwards before ending the night so i could go home & raid with my guild. But my car died, and it was far past midnight so trivial means of getting a jumpstart were long past. But i was more worried about disappointing my guild than anything else, and if my car wouldnt jumpstart---itd be an hour-plus walk home for me. If i didn't start that journey immediately, id be late to my guild's raid. So i did the only thing that i felt didnt leave my reputation with online strangers to chance: abandonned my car and walked home so i could raid on time with my guild. Leaving my IRL friends stranded even further from their homes with no way to safely get back, and forever ruining any trust they might have had for me. I remember my time raiding that night being completely overshadowed by guilt felt by that decision---and flipped a switch in me that made my resentment for WoW to grow evermore for years to come. To be clear: it was my fault, not the game's, but i can't help but wonder what other similar decisions others might have made under the influence of the mentalities this video talks about.
As an FFXIV player I now feel slightly more grateful for the game's generally very simple and predictable gear progression and clear separation between normal and high end content. (I already appreciated duty roulettes keeping old content populated.)
@@kittyshippercavegirl A lot of the kinds of things mentioned do happen but keeping Extreme and Savage as explicitly optional walled gardens really helps keep more elitist mentalities from permeating the whole game.
Probably had these conversations 14:11 a hundred times over the course of an expansion, this incessant need for "top raiders" within the guild to be Best in Slot by the start of every raid tier. It really makes you question.. "why exactly do I play these games?" and many times its because of the friends made but eventually even that isn't enough. When you are spending more time trying to parse data and find the best numbers you almost feel the game is playing you at that point. I still stand by the idea that the worst thing to happen to WoW was not the dungeon finder but the first “dps” addon. It fundamentally altered the structure of the game.
I remember playing back in WotLK when Ulduar had just been released. The General channel in Dalaran was always full of people looking for other people to fill raid slots, and without fail this would be followed with some variant of "You must have all the achievements to prove you have completed this raid before" The one time I actually managed to bullshit my way into one of these groups, we wiped on Mimiron. Before I knew it the dps log was posted in chat, and I was called out for having a low item level, and promptly kicked. Didn't matter that the healers were standing in the fire or that the tanks lost aggro, I had the lowest DPS so I was the reason we wiped. That was when I realised that this wasn't a fun game about exploring a huge world and having fun goofing around with your friends. It was about getting to the level cap as fast as possible with the ideal class-race combo the correct spec and talents, grinding the best gear, covering the screen with add-ons, and sitting in a discord with 24 weirdos shouting at each other about who didn't grind enough this week. I'll stick to collecting mounts, pets, and transmog.
Wotlk was when Gearscore became a thing too. The playerbase literally made and proliferated an addon for the sole purpose of gatekeeping other players more efficiently.
I have never played WoW. A friend sent this to me, because I am a sociology student working on my masters. This is an IMPRESSIVE work of research. Have you published it as a formal paper in anyway? 👀
@PifnPaf you could view it that way, but formal is more about just publishing through a group. I was interested in citing their paper in the future, had one been published.
@RUclips University If I get a chance to use it as an example, I certainly will. I have some research planned regarding games, rule structures, emergent behavior (stratagies) and how we can apply lessons from these concepts social engineering.
@@AE149823Hey there, I know it's been a while but out of curiosity, have you been able to use this video as a source for your work and if so can we read your paper somewhere?
I see some parallels to real-world economics. Since Wrath or so there’s been a narrative that players _used to be_ better, but looking at Tier 1-2 Classic raids that’s not the case; those raids were tuned to the expectation that half the group didn’t know what they were doing, and what video we have of the era suggests that was a good assumption. What really seems to have happened is that the ceiling got higher, and with that expectations rose for every tier along the way. We see that on the message boards when a new gearing option is added, hardcore raiders complaining that this new option will for them become mandatory. Because we _can_ do more, it’s assumed we _will_ do more. Because if we don’t there’s someone else who will, and soon they’ll take your spot on the team.
And this is why I'm guildless and don't run pugs for anything and never touch BGs. Lone wolf, off to play however the fuck I want to with no one else dictating how they think I should be playing. It's the most glorious and freeing gameplay to me. Seeing people in the open world and working together toward a common, short-term goal feels like my character truly being immersed in the world. I hate repeating instanced content. I'm an open-world solo Andy and I will never apologize for playing how I like. I also know I'm never going to live up to group-play standards, so I politely avoid them so folks who do like this "meta" style of play aren't bogged down by my casual ass. Win/win for us all. And as for addons, just give me a mod for a single bag inventory, vendor price, and Altoholic... and I'm good to go. I don't want any addons that play the game for me, or tell me when to push buttons, or what mobs are about to cast. That's half the challenge.
I played Runes of Magic pretty much the same. Just freeplay for me and my s/o, with the option to chat/group up with others, and a market simulator tacked on. =) Also, randomly going back to the starting areas and just buffing newbies was so much fun. Just give them a buff to hp, and maybe snipe them my shield bubble while they’re in a fight. Playing a priest/knight might have been frustrating in many gameplay aspects, but the headcanon/roleplay was so much fun. And people randomly buffing ME in that starting phase was always such a pleasant surprise, so doing the same wasn’t even something I had to think about…
This over optimization of rpgs to the point were the casual elements of the game are cast aside in favor of a constant grind for only the best of the best sounds like doing business or simply living under a capitalist system that was ONLY taught to value money above all else. In effect, the over optimization and over focus on instrumental play in MMORPGs sounds like a reflection of our flawed and cracking capitalist system.
I'm not a gamer in the least bit, yet I still watched this entire video, and that's just a testament to how good your content is. My ADHD ass can't ever watch especially longer videos without breaking them down, even when they're about my interests, but the way you do this stuff is so engaging and thought provoking and i always come out of it way more knowledgeable than i was before i watched it. I've literally binged your entire channel and it makes me sad there isn't more but given the quality of these, i know why it takes time. Cheers!
I know I’m quite late, but I would actually suggest some of the channels who actually get short cameos as speakers on this channel fairly often, Philosophy Tube and HBomberGuy, and maybe Shaun but he is a bit dry to listen to
I have been playing WoW for years, and this is probably the best break down I have ever seen. I loved the excellent examples and sources used to analyze why the game and it's community has become what it is. It's tragic to see the game's playerbase embrace so many of the worst parts. Yet so many of those I have played with, including myself, embraced it so we could do the content in the same endless cycle you explained. What a great video!
It's so weird how this video came up when not even a few hours ago I was booted for accidently pulling some adds in a dungeon. Sad part is it wasn't even a heroic or mythic it was just a regular dungeon I needed to do for a quest. I just couldn't stop laughing because I actually got kicked for pulling some adds on accident, cause they were doing skips that I didn't see cause I looked at my second monitor.
Asmondgold is a parasite living off from other people's work and content. That said he's not really bright enough to make interesting content without outsourcing the work by reacting to it.
I’ve never played a second of WoW and this is the only piece of media surrounding it that I’ve ever consumed, but I was engaged the entire time. It also made me feel very justified in my choice to not play WoW.
Same here, makes me glad the most I ever did was play on MUDs. And yes, I know I'm dating myself. This also reminds me of the quote 'Hell is other people.'
The closest thing to a game like this I ever played was Animal Jam as a child. You wouldn't think a website aimed at children could be as harsh and cruel with it's weird communities, but, here we are.
It really is a fantastic 84 minute ad on why if you haven't been playing WoW already for the past decade or so, it is Not For You, will bend over backwards itself to yell at you that it is Not For You so don't even bother. Maybe not intended to come off that way, but it sure does all the same.
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.
@@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.
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. 😂
@@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^^
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.
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.
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.
@@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.
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!"
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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
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!
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
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).
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
@@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.
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
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.
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
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.)
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.
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.
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.
A few year ago around cata would be 14 years ago lol
Women privilege
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".
"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.
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".
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
"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.
I was pretty well into WoW up until shortly after Cataclysm, and when I was asked why I stopped playing by my guildmates, I told them I didn't want another job. All this boils down to you having to be geared well enough to even participate, do enough research to know what to do, and ultimately deal with the stress of not effing up your role to the point where you're not invited any more. Each one of those is a huge time sink and seemed more like work than a thing I did to have fun in my off time, and as I grew older, I had less disposable time. I'm glad I watched this video, as it breaks down essentially what caused this new work, and was just a result of the circumstances of the era it came out in, the technology involved, and just plain people. Thanks Dan and everyone else involved in this great piece.
You always had to get gear to participate in vanilla, just in 40 man raids many got carried
People have always considered me weird of silly for never really running Dungeons or Raids in any game. But this is why. I have to sit down and understand what to do, I have to play enough to be geared enough to do it, and even during that first time I'm worried about effing up, and constantly checking the guide to see I'm doing what I should. So I rarely do WoW Raids or Destiny Dungeons/Raids. It's a chore
Exact reason I stopped playing pretty much any mmo
This is why I stopped playing WoW after legion. everything this is funneling into eventually making you raid now, and raids are so fundamentally unenjoyable I find the entire game pointless now. they used to have so much to collect and do outside of that where if raiding wasn't your thing you still had plenty to do every xpac, now everything is locked behind raids. I used to raid when I was younger, and its apart of why I fucking hate most other people today. I don't want another job. I want to play a fun game and have an enjoyable adventure with friends. WoW threw that aspect in the trash long ago.
When it becomes a chore, it loses the fun factor. Same reason why I quit EverQuest.
This has unlocked ancient memories. Our guild/raid leader would run Molten Core in first-person mode, we'd laugh and ask how he could see anything happening, but didn't get mad at him. Kind of wild in hindsight.
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.
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 feel the same
"Even the social elements of the game, things seemingly free of numbers, become vessels for the propagation of numbers." 47:30 - brought to mind the way 'numbers' become omnipresent in even the most intimate parts of our personal lives; our time, food, family, through the vein of Capital. We have to grind, and because that is the way the 'game' has been shaped by social consensus, we watch the macros of ourselves and our relation to labor even when we're not being observed by a superior. We feel the pressure at all times, work, sleep, or play, to keep an eye on our cooldowns.
Every time Dan makes a Wow video, I’m reminded of how little of the game I played back in 2006, when I played it for a month max, because it was in the zeitgeist. It’s the equivalent of watching the first hour of the first episode of a show, then watching the final ever episode of the tenth season. I love learning more about the game.
Same. Last time I played WoW they were about to add PVP play.
I still can help but see it as a Warcraft III spin-off.
@@asmodiusjones9563 burning crusade was either just about to come out or had just come out when I stopped, my retail copy came on a disc, in the box, something which, I’m told, WoW doesn’t do anymore.
The most fun ive had playing wow was helping randoms level.
Being stuck in raids for hours was something that ill never do again.
Being ex-military, the power trips based on a video game never sat right with me.
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.
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.
Really love the Jon Bois/Secret Base shoutout at the credits. I'm so glad the style is spreading. Truly a fantastic outline for compelling storytelling from a medium that is so obsessed with the noise and grandiose, the simplicity displayed by both you, and by Bois/Secret Base, is such a welcome calm from otherwise chaos. Thank you for these wonderful stories!
the wild thing about it is that, and I'm not saying Jon didn't develop the style deliberately, but so much of it's conventions idosyncracies grow out of Google Earth of all things. I'm watching a WOW video with aesthetics borne out of Jon Bois drawing football plays on top of football stadiums in google earth and then just layering more and more content and style into the format until something sublime comes out the other side.
BobbyBroccoli
is my other favorite pioneer of this style, his recent one about the guy who faked discovering a new element was so good and the visualization helped my squishy humanities brain understand it
Came here to say this as well! The Jon Bois influence is strong here, and it's a great method of storytelling.
I was thinking the same thing! Love the statistical analysis angle with every graph/graphic.
Digital media can provide a truly enormous canvas to work on and more people need to take advantage of that.
This is why I have tended to stick to playing by myself. When I play GTA V, I drive the buses and do my thing, or when playing Minecraft, I stick to digging my tunnels and exploring areas alone. It's been a decade since I've played with other players online. Less fun when most people online are interested in grinding it out.
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.
As someone apart of the DS3 Speedrunning community I am happy you mentioned that your enjoyment can coexist with the speedrunning strategies regardless of how insane True Any% runs are. You would be surprised at how many people insult speedrunners and the runs due to us using extreme strategies and glitches. It is a running joke that we make fun of when people tell us that "Glitched runs aren't real speedruns".
I remember all the idiotic comments like that about Elden Ring runs that uses the zip glitch
I think more people need to learn that using a few speedrun techniques doesn't mean you're ruining the game, once the game is in your hands it's yours to do as you please (death of the author and all that)...
I was having a fucking miserable time doing the Master Trials for LoZ BotW and just decided to cheese it thinking the speedrunners would've found a few good tricks... I ended discovering that wall clipping was a thing and actually pretty accessible so I spent an hour learning that and loved it!
Was it "true to the game" in that I didn't spend another 30hrs being miserable? Maybe... Was it a blast to just break the game anyway? Fuck yeah it was!
I'm an outsider, but I always thought the glitches were the point.
The dumbest complaint about speedrunning by far is "you're not even seeing the game" as if the strategy crafting part didn't involve tearing apart every polygon.
I don't find glitchier speedruns fun to watch for the most part especially when they're games I have personally played - I want to see actual, but highly optimised, gameplay because it's what I find fun - but the idea that glitch heavy runs aren't real speedruns is entirely ridiculous. Plenty of games have categories with high levels of conventional play if that's what you find fun but there's no reason to piss on someone else's enjoyment.
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 need a friend like yours 😭
The entire time I was, for some reason, waiting for this to then become a perfect analogue of the systematization of our society and then drawing a caparison to how agents use instrumental play in our own society, and how WoW becomes a wonderful microcosm of the dynamic of "ruining the experience" and this "cultural division" we experience between those trying to "game the system" and those of us trying to, effectively, get health care and live an enjoyable life from a qualitative perspective.
That’s exactly what it was.
@@yoyoyobottleoyos Sure, I think op was simply saying that Dan didn’t outright make the comparison in the video. The conclusion he reached was ultimately about the game and its playerbase as opposed to the social paradigm. Which I personally think would have made for a much more interesting conversation/conclusion
This is the inevitable result as the Universe moves in its study and inevitable decline from qualification to quantization. From cosmic egg, to heat death. This will be reflected in all things.
It's an arms race. Meanwhile everyone at the bottom left behind just trying to live becomes a victim.
To be frank, I'm glad he didn't, because while the comparison is there, you're assigning a moral high ground to "qualitative free-play." Like, no joke, instrumental practice in the real world is harmful because of the material impacts it has on us, our society, our environment, etc. We all would be better in a system designed to not reward instrumental practices.
But this is a video game. While it matters to some extent, to give it the same moral weight as the real world would essentially paint people who authentically participate in a game to get better and clear challenges as morally deficient. Which is wild. You can both wish for an economic, social structure built on mutual care and not on competition, and still like to play competitive games. To say that they are mutually exclusive is honestly a bit much.
As I am someone who is trying to look into anthropology and sociology of MMOs and virtual worlds thank you for looking into this so well, as this is absolutely fascinating. This is a space that is still lacking so much discussion and research so I am so happy for this deep dive.
I am actually really sad that so much possible really interesting research on many games ,from my childhood like Fantage, club penguin and moshi monsters, never really got much academic work put into them at the time, and now that the original forms of the games are gone this research may never be able to happen. Even though I remember there being just as much possible depth in looking into those player bases as there is for WoW. Like all the social classes being formed and the interactions between these sites, new words and phrases are being created and used to get around censors and becoming commonplace on these sites, and growing fandoms on youtube which marketed fake tutorials and strange rumors that affected player behavior on these sites (breaking the ice in an animal jam, trying to find the third dojo in club penguin, whatever was going on with those Webkinz horror stories). Like there is so much there about how these young players interacted with these games, other players, and the internet as a whole which is fascinating and I would love to see some research on it. But most of these games were overlooked by researchers as this was seen as a less critical space for research for so long, and by the time people really started to care a lot about researching the internet and sites like this were already dying or were dead.
I'm a psychologist (though I study leadership and workplace psychology and not online gaming outside of a side-interest), and from my personal experience it's likely because these online communities and games tend to have lifecycles that are faster than the normal academic publishing cycle, and more importantly are mostly seen by people in my field as not really important to the overall health and development of humanity at large. Usually one of the criteria for publication is that you must show how your research will add to and enhance the overall body of scientific knowledge, and advance your particular field. Most games and gaming communities are seen as entertainment products and consumers, and thus outside of consumer studies, addiction studies, and other research streams that link these contexts to their broader impact on society, they aren't really seen as worthy of the time and effort, and definitely aren't going to enhance your curriculum vitae, your university's/program's prestige, or bring in grant money to fund the research. Hence why a lot of these sources are dissertations, and a lot of the larger and more common research is conducted by industry consulting firms who fund and publish the research as part of their industry product lines.
Hey, if you are interested in other academic literature on Mmos eve online is a game you might not otherwise hear about and frequently is cited in economics as a simulated space.
I played it a while ago but found almost more enjoyment reading about it during my time at uni
If you aren't already a listener you should check out the Games Studies Study Buddies podcast. They cover a different work of critical games study every month, and some of those certainly cover the ideas you're talking about.
My interest in the subject is similar to the quote the video starts with. Why do people engineer the fun out of the game. Thankfully the video dives into the topic.
@@mauree1618 Honestly? It's not a popular answer, but stimulus habituation. After the initial dopamine hit they need more and more of the stimulus to get the same rush. They expect the development team to continually provide that ever increasing stimulation (they often use words like "progression" instead), and they lose interest and the activity becomes progressively less enjoyable as the dopamine hits become slowly weaker. It can be staved off by continually increasing the level of stimulus (making content more and more difficult, for example), but there is a point where doing so is no longer profitable/realistic for the developers.
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.
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.
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 take things that didnt happen for 100.
This documentary was captivating and heartbreaking at the same time. As a player who took a long break after Wotlk only to return for Legion and classic i feel like this video peers into my thoughts about the game and how i engage with it, it felt deeply personal and gave form to my abstract thoughts and feelings that something is fundamentally "wrong" with the game after all these years.
Years ago it dawned on me that games that see widespread success (WoW, LoL, Overwatch) were subject to a certain form of degradation, i couldnt put my finger on to it but i could detect its' more prominent characteristics.; the emergence of "metas", correct ways to play the game, strict community adherence to guides, game feeling like a chore and the general trend to gravitate towards sources outside of the game to solve problems inside the game. At the time - and until i watched this video - i couldn't put my finger on to it, and lacking any desire for literal research, i described it as "the game collapsing under the weight of its' own community". I just realized that what i - very poorly - attempted to put in words back then was the existence of paratext and instrumental play, and its this exact reason why this video felt so personal.
You put into words my thoughts and troubles about my favourite games in the best manner possble. Thank you.
Yeah I can't understand why people enjoy all this stress. It's worse than a job because you pay for it.
@@Fragenzeichenplatte Its alienation, really. That's all it is. Everyone is so alienated from each other and the material basics of life that a facsimile of a community is enough for people to latch onto and enforce an "order" to something that is only ever really meant to be a leisure activity. The skinner box nature of games is purely a result of profit motive and capitalism preying on this to make a buck
@@Rhugor You may be right.
And maybe some people are just dicks.
@@Fragenzeichenplatte for some people optimization is fun and does not produce stress
@@brandonwalker5011 This, plus the unfortunate difference in levels of optimization. If I refuse to wear shoes and walk everywhere because that's how I have fun, that's fine on its own. But it creates an issue when I'm playing with people who have fun through clearing content and my shoeless, walking self is actively hindering that just by being there.
The problem is less that I and that group have different ideas of fun, and more that those ideas clash enough that we simply can't play together without hurting each other's experience.
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.
As a fellow content creator and overall minidoc editor the planning and execution of the visual assets of this video are excellent. I greatly appreciate the time taken in this video to provide a visual guide to largely non visual story elements.
Superb job
If someone called themselves a content creator to me in real life I would start fight or flight mode and I would choose fight I think
@@dongvermine content creation is what I call my poop times
Piqued?
@@kwarra-an it's a pun
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.
I avoided watching this video for awhile but after I sat down and watched it, I can’t tell you in words how square they hit the mark on this. Nobody could explain this better. 👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿 amazing work
I was worried that these folded words might make me feel personally attacked at first because I suck at WoW even though I've been playing since vanilla closed beta but then they folded their way right back into my heart
not a WoW player but a longtime ESO player & did my academic work in cybernetics before GTFO’ing of academia-one of my favourite courses was in game studies and i encountered all of these works. made me feel way better about being a conflict-averse MMO dork on a trackpad obsessed with home design in a PVE setting (: the best play is the one that fulfills you
@@eCodex I couldn't agree more, even though I understood little of what you said. But I will say that, agree though I may, it really does weigh on you when all you want to do is your own thing and the vitriol is so ubiquitous that you basically can't go anywhere or do anything without some kid (or dude in his 20s with the mentality of one) deriding you every step of the way.
But there's also a very large community of like minded people in WoW, I usually only play 1-2 months worth of each xpac and I'm in a guild with other people my age that just don't really have the time and they're all very nice and helpful.
@@Andrewbert109 elder scrolls online! essentially i couldn’t ever actually be “good” in combat-i couldn’t (and still can’t) afford anything more than my ancient thinkpad laptop, and i didn’t own a mouse for the longest time. so in PVE & PVP combat i can’t play in groups-super slow, but 16 FPS is generous, etc. so i fell in love with home/housing design in the game instead and those guilds ended up being the bulk of my “play” in-game lol.
i’m glad you have that community-there’s just something really wholesome about MMORPG communities that don’t revolve around “optimization”/the esports mentality. there’s a difference between being passionate about something and using it as an excuse to feel important+have a misplaced superiority complex & those same types of players made my time trying to “play normally” so…stressful and caustic
@@eCodex You can be an optimizer and non-toxic too. I like optimizing - but I see the optimal state as "having fun" rather than "being better than other people". I don't think about comparing myself to others at all, in fact. When I'm solo, I pursue the peak of my playstyle and build choice, which is generally "whatever nonsense I feel is fun or interesting enough to warrant investment". In a group, which I prefer to keep small, I like it when everyone is having fun, and don't particularly have any attachment toward being the fastest or the most efficient. Those are artificial values foisted on people by social expectations of competitiveness and hierarchy. Why would I care about that?
@@FelisImpurrator Yeah no doubt. I actually used to be a hardcore optimizer type back in vanilla through WotLK. It's also important to remember that for a lot of people, optimization IS how they have fun. Just for me, that's not been the case in a very long time. And unfortunately the Venn diagram between optimization oriented and toxic has a pretty big overlap. Not everyone, probably not even most people are toxic, but it seems like most of the toxicity overlaps with optimization(usually/especially with the younger crowd).
imo, a game's content should NEVER make the difficulty of its content based on the presumption of addons or mods. And in pvp, there should be strict enforcement of rules. I hate all these addons that give information youre not supposed to have..
I was initially going to say this help give me words to the problems I have with MMOs, but on a more optimistic note, seeing it broken down like this actually gives me reason TO play them, to know the parts I don't like helps separate them from the parts I will like.
Thanks for the wave of nostalgia for the great times RPing on Moon Guard. Some of the best interactions I ever experienced, and I miss it frequently. There was something so thrilling about making a unique character and creating stories with others in real time.
Honestly, RPing in WoW got me through hard times in high school and college.
I admit, as someone who's never played WoW, a lot of this video was obtuse to me, but I was fascinated by the parts that I could understand. Nifty stuff!
Thank you so much for putting into words everything I have experienced in WoW for the past 18 years. Years ago I gave up on the increasingly "instrumental" play of the game and decided to take things at my own pace. Finding fun in my own way. It really improved my experience. I missed my guild buddies from the early years, but I feel like I kind of dodged a bullet by not getting sucked into the numbers game. I took a break for a few years before Dragonflight because the weight of peer pressure was turning my play time into misery time.
I'm hoping that all the new design in Dragonflight around different ways to earn rewards will help change the meaning of success in the game. This expansion offers new ways to acquire all kinds of rewards no matter how the player enjoys their playtime. I am hopeful, but not optimistic, that the instrumental mindset will no longer dominate the game for players that don't want to dedicate so much energy to finding the fastest way to progress in the game.
Fortunately, due to changes in the transmog system, Wallace can now wear boots for the stats, but still have his character look like he's not wearing any.
Progress :)
I've come back to this video every so often because of how relevant it is to, well. Everything, I guess. I remember as a young kid I loved sports, not for the competitive aspects, but just because kids tend to be active and full of energy and I was no exception. I wasn't good at them though, and by the time that I was only EIGHT, my mother stopped letting me sign up for them because I wasn't up to the standards of the other kids. My brother on the other hand was great, and got signed up for everything, even the ones he hated like baseball. Nobody ever wanted to play casually outside of scheduled after-school activities, so all I could do was walk around town aimlessly and try to have my own fun and get my own exercise by myself.
Now, as an adult, I've been trying to get into more individualistic sports that don't require teams, like rollerblading or iceskating. It's more fun, and the exercise is healthy, but man is it a bit isolating. There are either no groups to do it with nearby or they're trying to make a non-competitive sport into something competitive. And on top of that, video games are even worse. I've been getting into this cute little Tower Defense game on Roblox, something you'd expect to be fun and casual, and the people I run into on there are so MEAN for no reason! I always make it a point to be extra nice to my teammates. There's a good chance they're just young kids to begin with, and there's no reason to be hostile over a goofy videogame anyways. I've never understood why people get so worked up over this shit. Aren't we here to have fun? Appreciate your cute little tower guys and stop yelling at people, dammit!
Pairing the phrase "emergent activities" with censored MRP profiles in the Lion's Pride Inn was a nice head nod.
I think this is the first of Dan's videos where I was almost entirely lost for the majority of the time. I don't play these sorts of games, so that's probably why, but what I got out of it is this - there is a play-style that turns play into work, with imposed responsibilities and consequential qualitative performance reviews. Fair enough. WoW, through a series of non-unique business and managerial choices, became the sort of game that fosters only this workmanlike play-style, and highly discourages any of the unstructured, non-qualitative, or self-directed engagement play-styles that were, and in many places still are, the foundation of the role-playing genre. Again, fair enough. But, when the business of WoW attempted to sell itself as a place that encouraged the latter through nostalgia, without making allowances for the prevalent, and indeed presently dominant, population of the former, that showed up the massive conflict of interest WoW represents.
Or, to put it another way - when a thing is work, being bad at it can be considered a moral failing. But when a thing is merely play, the goal is quality of experience, not quality of performance, and so doing a thing badly is either inconsequential, mildly inconvenient, funny, or any combination of all three. Rarely is it important. Games are often play, but not always. It is allowed to turn games into work, but doing so without acknowledging the shift in both the goal, and the means to reach the goal, only makes for trouble.
You're still missing a core component: It's neither the players nor the developers who are at fault for this, but rather a combination of the two.
The top-end players have very real external motivations to perform the way they do. The rest of the playerbase decidedly does not, but has convinced themselves that they must play similarly or else they are failing at the game. This is layered on top of the developer intent of creating various alternate routes to power. The result of the two colliding created the monster. Player freedom and behavior was, at first, restricted solely by social pressure (the gearscore addon mentioned during the wotlk segment being arguably the first time it happened across the entire playerbase) and not directly by anything the company did.
Blizzard is of course not free from accusation. The incentive to drive up subscriptions to keep the cash flow going has led to, debatably, knowingly increasing these routes to power that they know players feel pressured to pursue, in an effort to drive up playtime and foster a form of dependence. But without the original social pressure from the playerbase to needlessly do these tasks, that would've never been an option for the company to pursue.
@@vonriel1822 I didn't attribute fault at all - in fact, I don't think Dan attributed fault either. He described two methods of gameplay, and the consequences of colliding them.
I came to the comments to find this breakdown and here it is! Thanks from another non-WoW player.
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.
Getting told, excuse me, berated incessantly for being the wrong damage specialization during a pvp dungeon was enough for me to realize I have a life and this guy thinks hes at work
I'm not a WoW player, but what you describe also very much relates to the world of making music, and I'm doing constant translations and discovering things I sort of knew but never heard expressed. Super interesting, thanks!!
The story of Wallace and the rise of DPS reminded me a lot of the ways in which people are reduced to entries in spreadsheets in the eyes of capitalism and the state. Measurements are not, as Nathan mentioned a few times, values neutral. But they can be made to seem that way. It's much easier to ask what someone's DPS is than it is to stop and wonder about whether DPS is actually the most important thing to you.
Once you have a measurement you can optimize it, do whatever it takes to make the line go up, to borrow a phrase, and meanwhile all the intangibles get crushed. Whether it's the little joys of a fun quirky RPer, the aesthetic pleasure of music, or the ability of people to live happy, fulfilling lives.
And as the video shows, this isn't just a matter of individuals, but of the structures and assumptions that they create. You don't have to set out to be mean for a ruthless focus on DPS to drive you to yelling at your friends. The most insidious of all systems are the ones which can be self perpetuating without any bad faith actors.
It doesn't sound very capitalistic to me. Nobody ends up owning property that produces results without the owner doing any further work.
The leaders have the same grind and entry in the spreadsheet as everyone else
@@lomiification I think the point was more how both systems encourage acting (living, playing) in such a way that's numerically "optimal", but has a tendency to rob you of the potential joys that acting non-numerically optimally could bring you. How existing in the world needs a balance of acting numerically optimally enough that you don't get punished too hard by the system, while finding ways to also act such that you get enough joy out of existing in the space.
Frequently, that balance is literally impossible for most people to find, with only the _very_ few who get enough joy out of acting numerically optimally actually thriving.
I run a RP/PVP server for Conan Exiles and I am constantly complimented for my unique take, the level of passion, nuance, and love I put into it. Which is strange because it is strictly vanilla with a very well crafted social overlay. Griefing is discouraged and shot down hard due to overlapping alliances, trade systems that aid clans in wars, and in extreme cases, a special jail in the extreme north with an insanely overpowered guard and the jail itself is SURROUNDED with very powerful monsters. To be honest the community I have is self-policing and wonderful and is the main draw and why it works so well
Capn: "Yo check out my sweet 272 that had a 1-100 chance of dropping! Pretty sweet, right?"
The rest of the guild: "tHAt'S nOT a _278_ tHOugH!"
The members of that guild need to go to the hardware store, visit the garden section, buy a pot, soil, seeds, and a watering can, take it home and *_grow some gosh dang perspective._*
Incidentally, this is why I don't do collaborative play in anything and lone wolf every chance I get.
I never understood this logic in wow if the content was clearable without all the gear why does everyone make such a big deal out of something that isn't needed in the first place, maybe I'm just spoiled from years ff14 where I can just buy crafted gear and use that to beat the raid tier and not worry about having bis ....maybe good enough is just good enough for me
Expected this to be a grow a lawn so they can touch grass gag. Somewhat disappointed
@@cyanmage1 And that's really all anyone needs to strive for.
But instrumental play is so deeply ingrained, I caught _myself_ getting worked up over a game of pictionary with my friends on discord because their desire to have fun was directly at odds with my desire to win-simply because scoring and leaderboards exist in the game. They were drawing prompts in a way that was too difficult for me to guess, and I got sour because they wouldn't draw the concept itself; they would draw derivative memes based on the prompt which people sometimes guessed and sometimes didn't.
I automatically switched mindsets without realizing it, because I kept seeing 3 other people take the win slots, with my significantly lower score below theirs on the screen, staring disgustedly back at me as if I'd failed. _At a game of Pictionary._ I felt like I was being sabotaged and dropped out because they weren't playing "fair." I consistently picked easy prompts that hopefully everyone could guess, and everyone guessed mine consistently. But no one ever afforded me the same "courtesy."
I can only imagine what those things do to the minds of people who become "professional gamers," when what is supposed to be a leisure activity gets turned into a nose-to-the grindstone job by sponsorships and monetization.
this happens a lot in hypixel skyblock. if you don't use mods that lower your dungeon time people will get angry at you, if you don't have xyz item people won't let you join parties and thus won't let you progress. not using the "best" methods for progression is considered being intentionally dumb. dungeon solvers are not required for progression and remove the small variety that the game has, but god forbid you don't use mods
Yeah it's just an MMO problem
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
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.
This video hits home.
I really lost the interested in wow at the time a small part of my guild tried to change from casual to hardcore. The core players had recruited new players, played only among themselves and gradually replaced all the players who were not good enough in their eyes. This then led to a family-like guild breaking apart. And without playing with the people i really cared about i quit.
There was no interest in even trying to get better equally. Every bad player was seen as someone who is standing between them and the loot they clearly deserve.
Im enjoying FFXIV at the moment now. And with the design there, while not perfect, i am starting to wonder about the roleplay community in WoW more and more. It feels like the whole game was never made for them and is working against them. And still they are faithful to their character. There is literally no mechanic in the game to enhance a role playing experience exept perhaps toys which is sad for an RPG even if you are not interested in that kind of play.
well wanting good team is normal while you find playing your way fun these guys find playing their way fun.
I feel like the more I know about the culture around MMOs the less I understand why people get involved.
I spent about 8 years playing WoW, and the things that stand out to me as fond memories are 1) Exploring the world and 2) Having fun with my friends and guildmates.
I never saw any high-end raid content, mostly because it required a time commitment approaching that of a job.
I love Asmongold's content where he berates players for dying in hardcore wow. It really shows the ego behind these people who still try to be "the best" at what is fundamentally a game so simple it can be automated away and yet have a superiority complex around doing it "well".
We saw this exact same behavior in text-based muds. As soon as tools got sophisticated, there was no gameplay for those simple games. You had to use tools to stay competitive.
The only solution is to ban 3rd party addons and to design content which cannot be trivialized by a bot. But this is hard. And at this point, players expect the game to be a certain way.
I howled when you pulled out the Morgoth/Sauron fanart, amazing. I wonder when you went down that road. Anyway, thanks for making my day brighter reminding me of this pairing.
I was watching on my phone the first time and didn't catch what pairing the fan art was for but that brings back fun memories for me too!
anyone got a time stamp?
@@yaphetgreen0222 right about 22:10
Great video. I kept waiting for you to mention final fantasy 14, because it's learned a lot from WOW specifically on how mods that become widely adopted eventually change how the developers create new content. Ff14 doesn't want/ allow mods for that very reason. This creates a "don't ask, don't tell" idea for cosmetic mods and changes. Where you WILL get banned if you use them, BUT there's no mechanism for finding if you are. Some world first group had a win taken from them when they where cought with mods recently. It's definitely worth a follow up video.
I feel like the strategy FF14 is going with is both experience from WoW and its mistakes, and a different culture. It values a comfortable playtime a lot more than it values freedom of play. Add-ons are discouraged, a lot of systems are in play just to give new players a better time, including content moderation. The difficult raids are the exception to the main mode of play. Almost everyone can play the normal raids, they're easy by design. People who complain that content has to be gatekept basically have no place in the game (though there is highly difficult content for the challenge that does gatekeep, but only by difficulty, barely anything else).
I think its, fundamentally, a much more curated experience. You have a linear story, you have cinematic fights, including music which is one of the main parts of those fights, meaning that a lot of raiders even keep it on for a while. It's about the spectacle, about getting something presented - much more than it is about instrumental play like WoW.
I remember this cultural shift.... it turned the game from one where the playerbase fely inviting as a 12 year old learning english as he explored the world into one that fealt hostile for a 15 year old that still just wanted to explore.
Sounds like a skill issue
@HenriqueRJchiki it's not a skill issue, maybe stop borrowing unoriginal disses
I stopped playing wow mid-way through the Panda expansion, but i think that my guild's hiatus just gave me the excuse to stop that id craved perhaps for even years before that. I still remember BC/Wotlk guild application processes that were not at all unlike job applications. I remember feeling anxious of being judged during ventrilo guild interviews. One rather funny memory was hiding that i was a "clicker" for literal YEARS by tempoarily turning on mods & enabling hotkeys for guild application screenshots---before finally taking on the grueling process of relearning the game from the ground up so i could "stop" being a clicker...three days before my guild was attempting Cataclysm heroic raid progression. I still remember tanking very complex bosses while barely understanding many mechanics to the game id never used for years up to that point---all while trying to keep this struggle a secret les my guild realize I'm "bad" at the game. It was both horrifying & hilarious.
But i also remember a night with IRL friends where we went to the movies & then hung out at my then-girlfriend's place. Not a trivial event for twenty-somethings who all work full time &/or have extensive schooling schedules. The plan was for me to drive many of these friends home afterwards before ending the night so i could go home & raid with my guild. But my car died, and it was far past midnight so trivial means of getting a jumpstart were long past. But i was more worried about disappointing my guild than anything else, and if my car wouldnt jumpstart---itd be an hour-plus walk home for me. If i didn't start that journey immediately, id be late to my guild's raid. So i did the only thing that i felt didnt leave my reputation with online strangers to chance: abandonned my car and walked home so i could raid on time with my guild. Leaving my IRL friends stranded even further from their homes with no way to safely get back, and forever ruining any trust they might have had for me. I remember my time raiding that night being completely overshadowed by guilt felt by that decision---and flipped a switch in me that made my resentment for WoW to grow evermore for years to come. To be clear: it was my fault, not the game's, but i can't help but wonder what other similar decisions others might have made under the influence of the mentalities this video talks about.
As an FFXIV player I now feel slightly more grateful for the game's generally very simple and predictable gear progression and clear separation between normal and high end content. (I already appreciated duty roulettes keeping old content populated.)
was gonna come down here to comment just this
@@kittyshippercavegirl A lot of the kinds of things mentioned do happen but keeping Extreme and Savage as explicitly optional walled gardens really helps keep more elitist mentalities from permeating the whole game.
@@09philj I mean, Zenos is just a savage raider....
Probably had these conversations 14:11 a hundred times over the course of an expansion, this incessant need for "top raiders" within the guild to be Best in Slot by the start of every raid tier. It really makes you question.. "why exactly do I play these games?" and many times its because of the friends made but eventually even that isn't enough. When you are spending more time trying to parse data and find the best numbers you almost feel the game is playing you at that point.
I still stand by the idea that the worst thing to happen to WoW was not the dungeon finder but the first “dps” addon. It fundamentally altered the structure of the game.
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.
Surprised the bald man never reacted to this
I remember playing back in WotLK when Ulduar had just been released. The General channel in Dalaran was always full of people looking for other people to fill raid slots, and without fail this would be followed with some variant of "You must have all the achievements to prove you have completed this raid before"
The one time I actually managed to bullshit my way into one of these groups, we wiped on Mimiron. Before I knew it the dps log was posted in chat, and I was called out for having a low item level, and promptly kicked. Didn't matter that the healers were standing in the fire or that the tanks lost aggro, I had the lowest DPS so I was the reason we wiped.
That was when I realised that this wasn't a fun game about exploring a huge world and having fun goofing around with your friends.
It was about getting to the level cap as fast as possible with the ideal class-race combo the correct spec and talents, grinding the best gear, covering the screen with add-ons, and sitting in a discord with 24 weirdos shouting at each other about who didn't grind enough this week.
I'll stick to collecting mounts, pets, and transmog.
Wotlk was when Gearscore became a thing too. The playerbase literally made and proliferated an addon for the sole purpose of gatekeeping other players more efficiently.
I have never played WoW.
A friend sent this to me, because I am a sociology student working on my masters. This is an IMPRESSIVE work of research. Have you published it as a formal paper in anyway?
👀
Formal = Jargon = Gatekeeping
@PifnPaf you could view it that way, but formal is more about just publishing through a group. I was interested in citing their paper in the future, had one been published.
@@AE149823 Honestly, just cite this here video.
@RUclips University If I get a chance to use it as an example, I certainly will. I have some research planned regarding games, rule structures, emergent behavior (stratagies) and how we can apply lessons from these concepts social engineering.
@@AE149823Hey there, I know it's been a while but out of curiosity, have you been able to use this video as a source for your work and if so can we read your paper somewhere?
I see some parallels to real-world economics. Since Wrath or so there’s been a narrative that players _used to be_ better, but looking at Tier 1-2 Classic raids that’s not the case; those raids were tuned to the expectation that half the group didn’t know what they were doing, and what video we have of the era suggests that was a good assumption.
What really seems to have happened is that the ceiling got higher, and with that expectations rose for every tier along the way. We see that on the message boards when a new gearing option is added, hardcore raiders complaining that this new option will for them become mandatory. Because we _can_ do more, it’s assumed we _will_ do more. Because if we don’t there’s someone else who will, and soon they’ll take your spot on the team.
And this is why I'm guildless and don't run pugs for anything and never touch BGs. Lone wolf, off to play however the fuck I want to with no one else dictating how they think I should be playing. It's the most glorious and freeing gameplay to me. Seeing people in the open world and working together toward a common, short-term goal feels like my character truly being immersed in the world. I hate repeating instanced content. I'm an open-world solo Andy and I will never apologize for playing how I like. I also know I'm never going to live up to group-play standards, so I politely avoid them so folks who do like this "meta" style of play aren't bogged down by my casual ass. Win/win for us all.
And as for addons, just give me a mod for a single bag inventory, vendor price, and Altoholic... and I'm good to go. I don't want any addons that play the game for me, or tell me when to push buttons, or what mobs are about to cast. That's half the challenge.
I played Runes of Magic pretty much the same. Just freeplay for me and my s/o, with the option to chat/group up with others, and a market simulator tacked on. =)
Also, randomly going back to the starting areas and just buffing newbies was so much fun. Just give them a buff to hp, and maybe snipe them my shield bubble while they’re in a fight. Playing a priest/knight might have been frustrating in many gameplay aspects, but the headcanon/roleplay was so much fun. And people randomly buffing ME in that starting phase was always such a pleasant surprise, so doing the same wasn’t even something I had to think about…
This is how I play osrs lol. It's more fun this way to me
This over optimization of rpgs to the point were the casual elements of the game are cast aside in favor of a constant grind for only the best of the best sounds like doing business or simply living under a capitalist system that was ONLY taught to value money above all else. In effect, the over optimization and over focus on instrumental play in MMORPGs sounds like a reflection of our flawed and cracking capitalist system.
I'm not a gamer in the least bit, yet I still watched this entire video, and that's just a testament to how good your content is. My ADHD ass can't ever watch especially longer videos without breaking them down, even when they're about my interests, but the way you do this stuff is so engaging and thought provoking and i always come out of it way more knowledgeable than i was before i watched it.
I've literally binged your entire channel and it makes me sad there isn't more but given the quality of these, i know why it takes time. Cheers!
I know I’m quite late, but I would actually suggest some of the channels who actually get short cameos as speakers on this channel fairly often, Philosophy Tube and HBomberGuy, and maybe Shaun but he is a bit dry to listen to
I have been playing WoW for years, and this is probably the best break down I have ever seen. I loved the excellent examples and sources used to analyze why the game and it's community has become what it is. It's tragic to see the game's playerbase embrace so many of the worst parts. Yet so many of those I have played with, including myself, embraced it so we could do the content in the same endless cycle you explained. What a great video!
It's so weird how this video came up when not even a few hours ago I was booted for accidently pulling some adds in a dungeon. Sad part is it wasn't even a heroic or mythic it was just a regular dungeon I needed to do for a quest. I just couldn't stop laughing because I actually got kicked for pulling some adds on accident, cause they were doing skips that I didn't see cause I looked at my second monitor.
You just know Asmondgold is going to end up watching this on stream and pausing every minute.
hope he reads this comment where I say "asmongold go fuck yourself"
Asmondgold is a parasite living off from other people's work and content. That said he's not really bright enough to make interesting content without outsourcing the work by reacting to it.
I’ve never played a second of WoW and this is the only piece of media surrounding it that I’ve ever consumed, but I was engaged the entire time.
It also made me feel very justified in my choice to not play WoW.
Same here, makes me glad the most I ever did was play on MUDs. And yes, I know I'm dating myself.
This also reminds me of the quote 'Hell is other people.'
The closest thing to a game like this I ever played was Animal Jam as a child. You wouldn't think a website aimed at children could be as harsh and cruel with it's weird communities, but, here we are.
100% agree! I’ll stick to my quaint little D&D game with my non-optimized game group …
drug addiction seems merciful in comparison
It really is a fantastic 84 minute ad on why if you haven't been playing WoW already for the past decade or so, it is Not For You, will bend over backwards itself to yell at you that it is Not For You so don't even bother. Maybe not intended to come off that way, but it sure does all the same.
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
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^^
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.
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.
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 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.
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!
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
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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
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
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
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 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
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.
there are servers for roleplaying and there are single player games. dunno why you'd inflict your own lack of interest on other people.
@@Jeff-uu9vomost people don't want to deal with self obsessed number crunchers, actually
@@feihceht656 most people don't want to take two hours to complete a heroic dungeon
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
So to make the game fun you became a gold farmer?
that's awesome
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
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.
I would prefer not to get called out like that.
😂
woah random
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
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 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.
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