Entering the No-Judgement Zone

(Apologies to Planet Fitness for co-opting their slogan.)

 

Here's a question that I've been wondering about lately:

Can you even play Retail these days without an external guide?

Or maybe a better question is whether you can play either Retail or the current iteration of Classic without external guides, but the Retail version of the question came out when I began contemplating what it would take to begin playing again before Dragonflight.

I'm still on the fence about it, especially given the experience this YouTuber had picking up the game.

"With that being said, I plan to talk about my adventures through the story as the narrative is very important to me in video games such as World of Warcraft. I'd expect the story itself would keep a hold on me, but what I found out while playing through Shadowlands and BfA was something I can personally compare to was jumping in the middle of new playing film which is on its fifth sequel."

And I thought, "Uh oh."

Apparently he had the extremely bad luck to choose the three class/race combos that don't start in Exile's Reach, but that's on Blizzard for making those decisions. If you want a new player to start in Exile's Reach, don't give an out for a few class/race options. That's a huge mistake.

The Blizzard Forums thread about WoW and casual players where I found the YouTube video shown above began with this YouTube video being posted,

and reading through set of forum comments that was enough to make me wonder whether it was worth it to try to catch up in Retail at all. I mean, Shintar was able to pick up Retail fairly easily after having been away even longer than I have, and she is enjoying the game as a casual player, but she also wasn't fazed by all of the systems that had sprung up since, well, Cataclysm. (Mists doesn't count, since I'd kind of mailed it in on PvE content --and especially group content-- at that point.) She also has the advantage of being a long time raider and officer in a raiding guild on SWTOR, so she's far more used to picking up the complex end of MMOs than I am.

Which is when I realized that I'd need to do a ton of out-of-game reading to try to figure everything out.

Hence the question.

***

I suppose that the question itself is a bit of a bait and switch, since I'm about 95% confident that the answer is "no".

As I mentioned in a comment on one of Kamalia's recent posts, I was helping my questing buddy make the transition from Enchanting to Tailoring and so I hit Wowhead to see if my memory was correct in where the best places to farm Silk and Mageweave were. That was when it hit me: I already had done this for Neve (and Cardwyn before her) by memory and educated guesses, confirmed by Wowhead, just a month or two ago. I've also been playing Classic since launch --and then the pre-Cata Retail back in the day-- so why should I feel the need to look it up?

But I did anyway, approaching the question like I do most other research topics.

That experience does beg the question I asked in the comment: why should we feel the need to do this in the first place? Have we been conditioned to look at guides for the meta on various things in MMOs so much that we never realize that we're basically utilizing unofficial third party documentation as manuals?

And how on earth did we let game companies get away with letting their fans write the manuals for their games without the game companies paying them?

After all, that's what Wowhead and Icy Veins and other websites are: the game manuals and reference manuals for WoW. The meta that I beat on quite frequently is basically the "how to do it" manual for WoW.*

***

I'm old enough to have PC video games in storage that not only came with a real manual, but a manual filled with historical details, such as the Lawrence Holland developed video games from LucasArts. 

Those manuals were more like a textbook, complete with references, and developers spent a ton of time working on them.

And for popular games, there were also the third party "how to do it" manuals, like this: 

I have a copy around somewhere.
From eBay.

Given that --comparatively speaking-- the manual for Civ was pretty thin, having a guide along from people who loved the game** was a godsend. 

And I suppose these sort of manuals were the genesis of the current phenomenon of requiring a visit to Wowhead before you can do pretty much anything in game.

***

So I guess it's not a matter of these external guides being a requirement to play the game, because you can try to play without any guides at all, but if you want to do any form of decent group content you're pretty much going to have to follow said guides. 

And you thought peer pressure was merely part of your growing up. 

For example***, one of the most recent times I was in an instance on the Alliance side, our guild group was joined by an unguilded Warlock. More than once, one of the guildies commented on his rotation, wondering why the Lock was doing some of the things they were doing. 

"They could have learned to do this out in the field, where you do things differently than in group content," I posited. "When you're a Fire Mage in group content, you lead with different spells than when you're out questing where survival is more important."

"Maybe."

"You could provide some guidance," another guildie added. "If they joined the guild they could find out how things worked in group content."

"....Nah. Not worth the trouble."

Okay, maybe not all guilds have those sorts of discussions when running group content, but having seen how the sausage is made in both these sorts of runs --or in reviewing personnel to join a raiding team-- you can't unsee it. The lead team examines gear, raiding logs, and rotation before they make a decision to give someone a tryout. Sentiment and emotion aren't allowed into the review process when you're trying to stay on current content.

From the movie Invincible (2006).****

It can be soul crushing at times, and it frequently feels like the managing by spreadsheet crap which I rail about at work all the time.***** There's no room for hunches or for how well people fit into a group environment; if they don't follow the meta why should you take a chance on them?

***

I guess the answer to the overarcing question as to why we use these third party guides all the time is because of the age old problem of peer pressure. It may not be obvious to the uninitiated, especially if you've been steeped in the game for so long, but the pressure to conform if you want to do anything beyond solo content and some basic group content is a constant. The desire to not look like an idiot can be a big motivator to conform to what the guides tell you to do, especially if content in those guides are what the team/raid leaders for high end content are looking for. 

For a non-conformist, who zigs when everybody else zags******, that can be the death knell of interest in a game.

Does it mean that I'm going to set aside my interest in Retail? Not yet, but I'll admit that my interest is dimming somewhat when I realize just how much work I'd have to do just to get current with things. Because I'd like to do some group content, and realizing that I've just as much work ahead of me as if I were going progression raiding does not endear me that much to the process. Add to that I'm apparently supposed to do BfA content to get to Dragonflight isn't a favorite topic of mine, either.

From Blizzplanet's interview with
Jackie Wiley and Tina Wang.

*For all those posts in forums and elsewhere about how "casuals don't even know Wowhead exists", I call bullshit. If you play the game for any length of time and look at in game chat channels, you'll see people told to look at Wowhead, typically in a condescending fashion. Or if you have a question about the game and do a quick search, Wowhead inevitably comes up. It's not like other games --especially RPGs and MMOs-- don't have their Wowhead equivalents. So I'm not buying that crappy "casuals don't know" excuse. It's just that people who say that about casuals have their heads in the sand; people know about Wowhead, they just don't really care about slavishly following everything it suggests.

**And with an official imprimatur from Microprose, too.

***Again, paraphrasing. I don't have all the conversation written down, and I don't turn on recordings while on Discord.

****Vince Papale (Mark Wahlberg) noted his name was spelled wrong in his locker after being granted a tryout as a walk-on with the Philadelphia Eagles NFL team. The equipment manager wasn't exactly concerned about that, given he believed Vince was going to be cut from the team in a week or two.

*****Part of the reason why this is bugging me so much is that I noted that --in pursuit of the meta-- the 2x/week raid team began putting one of their two Mages on the bench in favor of pulling in an extra Warlock, who used to be a Warrior but then changed to a Ret Pally before they had a Ret Pally join their team. So nothing personal, buddy, but we only need one Mage now and you're out of luck. Which drives me bananas, because I wanted so much to make sure that all of the Mage crew from Classic had a landing spot for TBC, and despite all that one of them is getting put on the bench for Sunwell. 

******Guilty as charged. I still haven't regularly done any of the dailies in TBC Classic aside from the occasional PvP daily, and for the dailies from places like Ogri'la, Terokk, and Quel'Danas, I haven't even picked up the seed quest for them. The easiest way to get me to NOT do something is to be loudly told by everybody in every single channel I'm in --guild, global, or whatever-- to DO YOUR DAILIES.