Yes, I'll use them from time to time if I'm stuck and multiple hours of beating my head against a wall hasn't yielded any results*, but by and large I'll avoid guides and walkthroughs and the "correct" way of doing things.
That is both the joy and curse of doing group content in an MMO: everybody has their own opinions, but if what you do is different than what is considered optimal, are you simply wasting other people's time?
For the average random group or raid, the answer is likely yes, you ARE wasting people's time if you're not doing your best. And for those people, 'doing your best' means following the correct build and performing the correct rotation in an optimal fashion.
It's the "Sure, you can do whatever you want, but it had better be what you're supposed to be doing!" conundrum, embracing the concept of freedom for all until it starts to impact your own freedom to complete things as quickly as possible.
I think that's partially why I tend to stop worrying about completing quests when I'm with people who are 'questing together': my idea of fun and questing is different than other people's, so in the name of expediency I just kind of tag along as 'hired muscle' and go back and do the quests at my own pace later.
Well, Josh Strife Hayes has been playing Mass Effect on his stream, and apparently some people have been telling him "he's doing it wrong" or "you need to do X next". Josh kind of squashed that one really fast.
Yeah, I'm on board with Josh here.
He articulates my issues with guides and guide culture very nicely, without me having to add any extra commentary to the matter.
***
On a semi-tangent, Runescape streamer and content creator J1mmy created a video about 3 months ago that kind of blew up:
Now, you have to settle in, as it's a 42 minute video, but considering that he'd never played WoW before but was familiar with MMOs (courtesy of Runescape), I found it fascinating to watch. He does have a very dry wit, and it's very much worth a watch.
I also found WoW PvP streamer Xaryu's reaction to it very interesting as well, as he points out that the problems that J1mmy highlights are not easy ones to fix.
Do I have answers to the problems? I'll be honest here: no, I don't. And to be fair, I'm not exactly sure if a significant portion of WoW's fanbase believes there even are problems that can't be fixed by a good expansion and the presence of Chris Metzen. Kind of a 'wave your hand and make all the issues magically go away' sort of thing.
But what J1mmy and StarCraft streamer Day9TV (see above) found in their initial exposure to WoW highlight is that we, as gamers who have played MMOs in the WoW and WoW clone subgenres, have too many blind spots about the game that only become apparent when someone outside of the ecosystem tries to play.
When I saw a neighbor try WoW for the first time --during Cataclysm in 2011-- and he got totally flummoxed trying to figure the story and everything out, I understood. All of the richness to the story of Azeroth is wasted if it's not presented in an understandable manner to a new player. And the problem is compounded by almost 20 years' worth of additions to the base game. **
Maybe what's needed is an expansion that absolutely, positively presents itself without a single iota of reliance upon prior expansions or even the base game for the story. If you cut out the albatross that is 20 years' worth of lore, you stand a chance of making this particular expansion's story more understandable.
It's a thought, anyway.
Just how would you do that?
Beats me, but whatever they come up with surely has to be better than t-shirts proclaiming "What Sword?" as an in-joke for Legion veterans. I kinda get it, but if you asked me any details beyond "There's a sword out in a zone that was untouched by Cataclysm", I'd simply make some stuff up.
And that highlights a bit of a problem for WoW. Modern WoW is made for people who play WoW already, not people who may in the future play WoW.
*And, I might add, when I'm out of ideas. While inaccurately attributed to Albert Einstein, I am a big believer in the credo "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." So, if I find myself doing the same strategy without making any changes, just hoping that "I'll get it right this time", after a certain point I'll cave and go look at a strategy. For the record, I haven't done that yet in Baldur's Gate 3, which is kind of amazing given how much I have to police my feed and usage of social media.
**Before you ask, yes, I don't like the modern story very much. I really haven't liked it since about Cataclysm onward, and now having gone back and played Vanilla and BC in their Classic incarnations, I don't like Wrath's story much either. That being said, just because I don't like it doesn't mean that Blizzard should simply give up and not bother trying to make the story understandable for new players.
I have a couple of notes for Josh Hayes.
ReplyDeleteFirstly, if "Every single person says "You must do this" " you have to at least entertain the idea that you don't know better than every single other person. Not to do so is to place yourself somewhere between arrogance and psychopathy.
Secondly, "We don't like perfect characters. We don't like perfect stories." What do you mean "We", Lone Ranger? I love perfect characters and perfect stories. The whole idea that there has to be growth or character development or imperfection, let alone that protagonists need to come close to losing before they win drives me fricken' nuts! I'm more than happy for my adventure heroes to cruise to victory so long as they do it with style and some good one-liners.
Other than that, obviously he should play the game how he wants to play it. The problem is that he's trying to make a living by getting other people to watch him doing it, which means he's an entertainer not just some guy playing a game. That does change things.
I disagree. (Obviously.)
DeleteFirstly, if "Every single person says "You must do this" " you have to at least entertain the idea that you don't know better than every single other person. Not to do so is to place yourself somewhere between arrogance and psychopathy.
My response to that is pretty straightforward: just because I don't know any better doesn't mean I can't learn by trial and error.
Back when I was far more heavily into board games than I am now, the Grade A #1 rated board game on BoardGameGeek was Puerto Rico (it's #44 now, some 18 or so years later). It is a classic Eurogame, as it's a worker placement mathematical exercise with a theme pasted on. I knew people who loved the game, and people who spent hours deconstructing it and figuring out the best strategy. While those two groups did overlap a bit, that latter group became very strident whenever they would play with someone who wasn't playing optimally. The "You're doing it wrong!" from the hardcore Puerto Rico fans would begin basically on the first turn, where if you didn't place your workers in exactly the correct locations you were going to lose.
Full stop.
Why bother playing, they'd argue, since you weren't setting yourself up to win?
That sort of argumentation is what I hear when I hear the "You're doing it wrong" crowd telling someone how to play a game. For me, there's a clear delineation between not playing the game correctly as in "breaking the rules", versus not playing correctly because you're not playing optimally. Whether or not there's some validity to the commentary, it's the 'backseat driver' mentality translated into gaming.
Secondly, "We don't like perfect characters. We don't like perfect stories." What do you mean "We", Lone Ranger? I love perfect characters and perfect stories. The whole idea that there has to be growth or character development or imperfection, let alone that protagonists need to come close to losing before they win drives me fricken' nuts! I'm more than happy for my adventure heroes to cruise to victory so long as they do it with style and some good one-liners.
I am not the person to defend this tendency in novels for the protagonists to suffer before reaching the end. All that depression just ends up getting me depressed, and as I've said plenty of times before if I want to see crappy things happen I'll just turn on the news.
That being said, perfect characters doing perfect things also drive me crazy nearly as much as their polar opposite. The people I admired were the people in school who struggled to succeed and eventually overcame their limitations. There was a guy I knew in high school who wasn't the greatest talent as a distance runner, but he had heart and drive. And a messed up knee, that ended up requiring arthroscopic surgery (this is the 80s, so it was still fairly new for high school kids.) I remember watching him run laps around our football field, his face twisted in pain, as he strove to get his knee back to working order. He didn't have any blissful moment of triumph on the track, just getting a chance to compete and finish a live race after all that effort was the reward.
My dislike of the perfect people cruising to victory is analogous to my dislike of the New England Patriots, Manchester United, the New York Yankees, the Michael Jorden-led Chicago Bulls, and any other sports team who always seemed to come out on top all the time. As a fan who cheered for teams that rarely made it to the top of the mountain, enjoying perfect characters that have a perfect story crafted for them is simply not in my DNA.
My issue with what Josh said is, in both cases, an issue of language, not of content. It irritates me no end when people say "every" when they mean "some" and "we" when they mean "I". I get that he's performing, even in the rebuttal, but it comes over like a stand-up doing recognition humor about something that isn't nearly as universal an experience as he's suggesting.
DeleteIn the first quote, I totally agree with his intent, especially in the case of Mass Effect, which is a solo game. He should absolutely play it however he wants. And as a streamer/creator he can spin that into entertainment, probably more effectively than if he played the game the way people are telling him to play it. It's not what he's doing or even what he's saying I take issue with - it's the way he's saying it.
On the second point, if we stick to fiction and not fact, again I think it's purely an issue with how he chose to express himself in that clip. He's appropriating my experience by using the second person plural and he's doing it inaccurately. Again, he's reaching for a universal constant when he's describing a local variable. It's just a very annoying thing to do - tell other people how they feel about things. Especially when you get it wrong.
Ah, I can understand that in the context of the language.
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