If there's one thing that brings out the "old man yelling at cloud" meme, it's the people who rush to the end in a game.
Unless the game you're playing is predicated on a timer to win, what's the point?
 |
| Like oh, say, THIS one. From Hasbro, which is also the owner of Wizards of the Coast, ironically enough. |
Sure, in a video game there are your share of DPS races that you have to go fast for if you want to win a game, but I'm talking about a methodology about approaching the game itself. And unlike a methodology of following the current metagame, which can encourage skips and bypasses and speed running*, I'm talking about injecting speed into a game that wasn't built around it.
Obviously it's diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks, but when I first encountered this phenomenon early in WoW's Cataclysm expansion, there were all of these players who rushed to the end and then spent their time in Stormwind or Orgrimmar complaining that they were bored.
 |
| Pick a Feral Druid, any Feral Druid... |
"I'm bored" is now a tired old meme, but back then in 2010 that was my first encounter with it, and I was thrown for a loop.
I still am, honestly.
If you're bored in an MMO, go play something else. Nobody put a gun to your head and told you to try to go as fast as you could in a game to finish it as quickly as possible. And from my perspective, "the internet told you to do it" is the 2023 version of "the Devil made me do it". To which my response is "What a load of horsecrap."
And that's coming from someone who had an email address back in the 1980s. I may be a grumpy old man, but I'm a grumpy old man whose internet activity from the mid 1990s can still be found online today.**
Hey, if you enjoy speed running, great. Go for it. But don't expect any sympathy from me if you chew through a game and ingest all the content and then complain there's nothing to do.
#Blaugust2023
*Or even the entire concept of Mythic and Mythic Plus, which in Retail WoW is based upon how fast you can finish an instance while still accomplishing certain tasks; essentially a video game version of Perfection while hyped up on meth.
**You have to do some hunting, but it's still there.
Perfection! I loved that game. I wonder if we still have it. I’m only bored if stuck someplace I don’t want to be. Maybe it’s a phenomenon that people don’t know how to set their own pace anymore, that they’ve got to speed run. Or it’s just another form of challenge mode like Hardcore Classic. Atheren
ReplyDeleteI know that Dan Oslon of Folding Ideas believes that the speedrunning tactics came about from the private WoW servers, where players knew if they wanted to get a full Vanilla raiding experience in before the servers got yanked they had to speedrun. That might be true, but I also think that the race to max level has been hyped up by Blizzard's WoW design, and that has just been exported to other games (such as Rift and SWTOR when they were first released).
DeleteWow was still functionally a social network on top of being a game at this time, so I can see people running to max, hitting that Heroic Dungeon wall and complaining there was noting to do. Cata's lack of content was noticeable. If they'd had a bit more to do, the wall that Heroic Dungeons were might have been ok. Mythic or Chalenge dungeons sure would have helped, but the gearing was a definite throwback and had no space for something like that.
ReplyDeleteHaving now seen what the content was in TBC Classic and Wrath Classic, I'd say that Cata Classic (assuming they release it) will have roughly the same amount of content on release as those first two expacs. From what I can tell, I believe that TBC and Wrath didn't streamline the quests to get you to max level the same way that Cataclysm and subsequent releases did. TBC used the attunement grind to spread people out, and Wrath used the sheer size of Naxx to slow people down, but Cata's big contribution to the initial end game experience was the sheer toxicity (and queue times) in the Heroic 5-person instances, added difficulty or not. That was obviously not what Blizzard intended, as they spent all this extra time reworking the Old World which people went and blitzed through on their new Worgen or Goblin toons and promptly found alternate ways to level (battlegrounds and dungeons for example).
DeleteOkay, flying was pretty much a from-the-get-go thing for the Cataclysm zones as well, which sped up quest completion considerably.
The "flying right away" allowing people to burn content certainly is something that they obviously regret and then made impossible to avoid for 5 expansion and 10 years. Dragonflight is very odd as a switch, but I think they made the gameplay somewhat engaging. It did drive someone away from the game that I played with and I hate that.
DeleteHeroic dungeon toxicity was a direct result of the difficulty. Getting to the first boss of Shadowfang after 4-6 pulls and getting stuck on the first boss because people didn't know where they were supposed to interrupt or interrupted the wrong thing made it miserable. The toxicity was inevitable. The funny part was that you could skip some of the "problematic" bosses in new dungeons but the reworked dungeons always seemed to be traps. It didn't help that Wrath gutted personal responsibility for three quarters of the expansion unless you were doing Glory of the Hero.
Pvp xp was intended though. I think I can see the design intentions but it wasn't considered "degenerate" gameplay, even though I think it failed some of its intentions and definitely wasn't the most "efficient" way to level for many expansions. I am pretty sure they thought the old world rework would stand on its own and encourage people to play through them multiple times. Sadly we saw how that turned out. At least they learned how to use phasing for old zones. In BfA.
I can agree with that, although I'd point out that the toxicity began at the end of Wrath, with guilds imploding while trying to down Arthas. The Heroic Halls of Reflection didn't help much either, but I was part of two guilds who did blow up because of their inability to down Frozen Boy. Now that I think about it, Rhii (from I Sheep Things and... shoot, can't recall her other blog) experienced a similar raid team disintegration, instigated from the raid lead of all things.
DeleteNow that I look back on it, I realize that Arthas was just the opening act for what was to follow.
Aha conspiracy theory of the day. It’s Blizzard themselves who don’t want RDF because for a long time they’ve disliked how people just power level via dungeons and don’t spend the time questing in the world they so lovingly created. That makes sense. My son is an example. He always claimed he never left Stormwind, he just queued as a tank and boom boom boom. When he played Classic, I realized he really meant it because he didn’t know where anything in the world was. Atheren
ReplyDeleteGiven the amount of heat from the people who want the RDF and haven't gotten it, I'd be inclined to believe that either the people who don't like RDF are extremely quiet or are actually more in the minority than I realized.
DeleteI do believe that the WoW Classic team has decided that the RDF is their hill to die upon, and that's not coming as long as the current team is in charge.