The Game Goes Ever On

Looking back on my history playing MMOs, I'm surprised I lasted as long as I have.

Oh, not from the "does this game interest me" perspective; after all, I still play Civ IV a lot and do get my feet wet in Baldur's Gate from time to time. What I meant was truly how ignorant I was for the first several months of playing MMOs, and how that didn't deter me from playing despite not knowing jack shit about how to play MMOs.

Okay, let me step back a second and explain a few things.

The concept of talking to people and getting quests in a computer game isn't new. After all, you see that in just about every RPG computer game, even in the old Ultima IV days. In the same vein as opening each freaking cabinet or chest in a video game might earn a player some gold (or in the case of Link smashing vases and amphorae, rupees), talking to everybody you see in a game is critically important when you're trying to figure out what to do and where to go. 

That's the case even in Stardew Valley.

Even in pencil and paper RPGs, talking to NPCs is frequently how you find out plotlines and adventure hooks, but in a pencil-and-paper game the GM is free to redo their adventure hooks to make it relevant to the group. Is the group going to the wrong inn, or the wrong town? Never fear! The hooks just swapped names, that's all. In fact, one of the hallmarks of a "meh" GM is one that can't adapt their campaign to accommodate players' various whims and flights of fancy.*

But I digress.

The basic cadence of questing, I understood. And after a disastrous misunderstanding that a Priest != a D&D style Cleric, I adapted to what I was presented with. 

Understanding gearing and how to pick out gear, however? Well....

Let me put it this way: pencil and paper RPGs are a LOT easier to understand than MMOs as far as gear is concerned. And while Pathfinder and D&D 3.0 have all sorts of crunch for min/maxing Classes and Feats and Skills, they don't have anything on the complexity of MMOs for all that.

Probably the biggest difference between the two is that a significant portion of people who play pencil and paper RPGs probably don't care quite so much about min/maxing or making optimal choices for your character as they do in MMOs. When the goal is raiding and killing the big bad, MMOs are pretty unforgiving about numbers. In pencil-and-paper RPGs, GMs have far more flexibility to adjust things on the fly as needed. They can also read the room and make decisions because, well, the GM is the ultimate arbiter of things, and if there's a conflict with what is in game versus the rules, the GM's rule is law.

MMOs simply can't compete like that, so raids become a test of skill. And gear. And talents. And other options such as enchants, potions, glyphs, etc. 

And there's that small matter of physical dexterity as well.  

***

When I started playing WoW back in 2009, I was ignorant of all of that. I was ignorant of even where to go and what to do, as far as gearing goes. I knew Mail (and then Plate once it became available) for my Paladin was good (because armor), but what stats were good was a completely different thing. After all, Paladins do cast spells, and their abilities rely on mana, so Intelligence is good, right?

Well... Not really.

I mean, not even Blizzard had a good handle on things like that in Vanilla Classic, since the gear that comprises your class tier set is frequently not as good for your role as individual pieces cobbled together. And while leveling, you're likely to not even run into gear such as bonuses to Hit and Expertise. You actually have to go out of your way to find such gear, which is why such guides exist.

This screencap is from Wowhead's TBC
Classic Ret Paladin Guide.

Take a look at the listing above, which not only shows the BiS gear for pre-raid Ret Paladins in TBC Classic, but specifically if your raid doesn't have a Boomkin with Improved Faerie Fire. There's a lone piece of Green gear there, which I chose to highlight, that has Expertise. So without looking that up and going down that rabbit hole, the piece likely a quest reward or a random drop as part of a quest chain. That's something that unless you were clued in using a guide, you'd likely have replaced with a Blue or Purple piece at earliest opportunity.

Oh, and the goggles? Yeah, you should have chosen to level Engineering, noob.

This is what I was talking about being ignorant of. 

I had no clue that anything like this existed back when I started WoW in 2009. Sure, I knew of print guides for video games, and I did have a few myself**, but websites that crunched numbers and somehow figured out the math behind the game so they could reliably tell players what they should do to min/max their characters? No, I didn't know that at all. 

Not until Soul and I had a chat in-game while hanging around Org, and he pointed out a Ret Paladin nearby. He told me to inspect that person's gear --I was pretty ignorant of how to do that, even-- and said that this is the sort of gear that I should be aiming for. He then pointed me in the direction of Elitist Jerks and their guides. 

This was in 2010, a month or two after I reached max level in a game that I'd already been playing for months, and I was wondering why I was still struggling to kill mobs when other Ret Paladins were just cruising through them.*** After all, I was finally running dungeons by myself and accumulating Blue gear.

When I finally opened up the guides, they were a revelation.

There it was, in one summary, what I needed to do to properly gem and enchant items for my use. What gear to focus on. What rotation to use.**** And why it was okay to ignore gem bonuses and just go all out on gemming Strength. 

And almost immediately my DPS output leapt upward.

Back then, I immediately became a believer in the usefulness of these guides to make me a player better, and while I can appreciate the work behind the scenes, I'm glad I wasn't involved in creating those guides. That would have taken a lot more work --and free time-- than what I had available to me.

So, when All-Trades Jack talks about the hoops you must go through to raid in WoW in his This Game Wasn't Made For You video, and how a new player would be completely ignorant of all this unless someone points them in that direction, I get it because I've lived it.

***

In retrospect, I was lucky.

I mean, I had Soul to point me to the guides rather than being ripped on or called out in group content*****, and he was nice about it. Given that I didn't have any aspirations to raiding, I wasn't trying to do anything more than simply not embarrass myself in an instance. The Quel'Delar questline alone was worth it not simply because it was the best non-raid weapon in the game at the time, it had a fantastic story in the quest chain. Gearing for T9 and then T10 may have started with simply gaining access to better gear than found running heroic 5-person instances, but because the gear looked so damn cool it became a reward in itself.

I don't have the fashion sense that
Kamalia does, but I do like the look
of a well designed set of gear.

Even when I quit WoW back at the end of Wrath, it had more to do with dealing with bots and whatnot in battlegrounds more than anything else. Because of those guides, I could at least hold my own compared to other people, even when I transitioned to other MMOs over the years. 

But if I had nobody there to tell me where to look for guidance, it's not exactly a given that I'd ever have stumbled on those external guides at all before I gave up the game. As much as I found WoW fun and interesting, I felt that there was a level of skill and understanding that separated the end game raiders from me that I couldn't match. Even when I began to get what was supposedly "good" gear, the Blue and Purple varieties, I lagged in output. How much of that poor output being due to a lack of understanding what was important for the role I had chosen --first as a Healer and then melee DPS-- is likely pretty significant. 

What was also immediately apparent once I began reading those guides was the lack of such guides on the official Blizzard website. You'd think that information such as this would be available on the website, or at least the game would have identified as such and oriented certain bonuses (such as gem bonuses) toward what was considered optimal for a player's class and spec. 

Over time, some things were fixed by Blizzard, such as using Reforging to correct gear, and aligning gear stats/drops to better match classes and roles, but also due to the hiring of some of those Elitist Jerk theorycrafters on the development staff. However, the accompanying mindset that brought about those changes reinforced other aspects of WoW (raiding/PvP focus) at the expense of others (older expacs, story, the world). 

***

I can't go back and relive the past, because my experiences helped shape who I am. I can't erase memories, such as in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and because of that I know what the answers are likely to be. 

The joy of discovery is gone, because that was a one time event. I never got to experience the Marshal Windsor storyline back in the day, so it was new and epic to me in 2019/2020. Raiding was new and fresh to me, even though it wasn't to most people I have encountered in Classic. Looking ahead to the Wrath Classic release, there will be no fumbling around, trying to figure things out, and getting frustrated when I hit a DPS/healing wall. I know where to go and what to do to discover what the meta should be. 

From all over the internet.

However, I will feel constrained by the chains of doing things the "right way", knowing that most people will simply accept them as the cost of doing business, without stopping to wonder what it would have been like to look upon the game with fresh eyes, with all the joys and frustrations contained therein. 

Will the tolerance be there for those people, I wonder?

*I should know, since I was in a campaign with one for 20+ years. I only found out when it blew up this past Spring that we "missed all sorts of encounters" along the way. Which is pretty silly, given that we had no idea we missed that stuff.

**Such as the in-depth understanding behind the original Sid Meier's Civilization and the first Master of Orion games.

***I went hunting to try and find a post on the matter back in the day, but either I'm just looking in the wrong place or it's simply not coming up. Kind of a bummer.

****In the case of Ret Paladins in Wrath, there wasn't one. I breathed a big sigh of relief that I was actually doing it right for a change.

*****Okay, that happened too, back when I was still leveling as a Holy Paladin, which directly led to me switching to Ret.

What Do You Want on Your Tombstone?

“Most people do not have a problem with you thinking for yourself, as long as your conclusions are the same as or at least compatible with their beliefs.”

― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

There are times when I have to remind myself that while the name "meta" for "metagame"* is relatively new --within the pencil and paper RPG Era, certainly-- the concept of following the crowd for an optimal solution is anything but.

Anybody remember peer pressure? Or how financial bubbles are created?  Or the concept of The Greater Fool?

Yeah, that stuff is "the meta" in another form. 

I was reminded of this the other day during a discussion at work when the magic word "Gartner" came up. If you work in IT --or in Corporate America to any degree-- you can't help but run up against the monolith that is the Gartner Consulting Group. They are a $4.7 billion per year consulting business, of which most people know them by their White Papers that they use to identify trends in the business world. I use the word "trends" rather loosely here, because if you talk to people in the corporate world you run up against the belief that Gartner doesn't really identify trends as much as they create them.

I believe I just twitched when I posted this
snippet from Gartner's "About Us".
From gartner.com.

Gartner likes to say that they are data driven when they create recommendations for clients or industry leaders, but when you reach a certain critical mass of influence --and believe me, Gartner has that-- you begin to dictate the trends. By elevating one trend over another, Gartner acts as a force multiplier for those trends as CIOs and others (or their wannabees) in the corporate upper echelons of power implement their recommendations. 

Or use their recommendations to choose a company to do business with. After all, the Gartner Magic Quadrant lays it all out quite nicely: you want to do business with people in the upper right hand of the quadrant chart, because those are the true leaders in an industry. By making these charts, however, Gartner alters the dynamic within an industry by the sheer weight of their influence. They make the industry leaders even more so, and those left behind even farther behind than before. 

Which ought to explain the groans that went up when someone mentioned Gartner at work. There's always a Gartner shill in any corporate gathering, because it's the safe bet. But because it's the safe bet, there's no room for creativity or quirkiness. 

***

Now, replace Gartner with "influencer" or "popular kid in high school" or... say... Wowhead...** and you get the idea.

Or maybe a better way of looking at the meta is under the viewpoint of data analytics, because that's pretty much what it is. Someone crunches the data to determine the optimal way of doing things, and that becomes the meta. Data analytics has even crept into the sporting world, as early adopters such as baseball's Tony La Russa*** led the way for widespread use of data crunching to determine the best way to do things for a variety of situations. 

While perusing the Sports Illustrated for this
post, I realized just how much also happened
in that issue: Hank Gathers of Loyola Marymount
University's basketball team collapsed and died on
the court, and Dayton defeated Notre Dame
and Xavier in their quest to make the NCAA Tourney.
(From Sports Illustrated, March 12, 1990.)

On the face of it, data analytics makes sense: you use raw data to determine what successful outcomes are for a variety of scenarios. You can drill down and add all sorts of variables to help with your analysis, but in the end what you get is the likelihood of success for various situations. The goal is to maximize that likelihood of success, but athletes still have to perform out on the field to realize that success.

In the business world issues such as employee retention, sales success, market penetration, and other things that would make my eyes glaze over are ripe for use with data analytics. The age old problem of how to keep employees in the fold --without simply paying them more****-- has been subject to many a data crunching session. And a Gartner White Paper, to be honest. The thing is, even if the data show you an obvious path forward, there's no guarantee that it'll work. 

Just like in video games, the meta will only get you so far; you have to actually perform to live up to your potential. But just like in video games, if you're not following the identified "trend", then you're already at a disadvantage. It doesn't mean that you can't do the job effectively, but nobody ever got fired for following the current Gartner recommendations, either.

***

As someone who disliked following the current trends, whether it was in school, at work, or in gaming*****, I've struggled to put my aversion to words. Part of it is that I want to maintain my own individuality in the face of corporate sameness. I remember an article from the late 90s about the music industry's infatuation with boy bands at the time, and the assertion was that the industry professionals had figured out how to package music to such a degree that they could influence the trends all on their own. The boy bands of that era --Backstreet Boys, N-Sync, 98 Degrees-- were corporate sameness personified. Of course, the music industry was about to be blindsided by a wave of music file sharing and downloads, proving that dictating trends and thinking you know best isn't always the correct bet. 

Same same but different.
Also, Southern Rap and Green Day
were coming for your ass.
From Entertainment Weekly.

I guess another part of it is the loss of creativity when everybody follows the data driven outcome. If everybody is following it, then where's the fun of finding something else that works for you? Oh, it's out there, but like I mentioned above you're at twice the disadvantage: once for not following the data driven recommendation, and once for people's doubts of your abilities because you're not following those recommendations.

Still, my only advice for people is to be yourself. In the end, "They followed the Analytics" doesn't make for a good quote for a tombstone.

#Blaugust2022

*No, not the even newer and more pretentious "Meta" as in "Metaverse". Even that in it's non-corporate state isn't that new, given that the concept of the metaverse has been around in comics for what feels like ages. It was enough of a trope that when WoW's Warlords of Draenor came out, that "alternate universe" Draenor concept was enough of a turn off for me to contribute to the cancellation of my WoW subscription. But still, Mark Zuckerberg has a certain spot in my heart for pure loathing.

**Or Icy Veins, or even Elitist Jerks if you're old like me.

***Tony was most famous during his time spent as manager of the Oakland A's and St. Louis Cardinals from 1986 through 2011. Columnist and baseball aficionado George Will devoted a large section of his book Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball to Tony La Russa and his managerial techniques.

****Don't get me started on that bullshit. Companies come up with all sorts of ways to keep from doing the obvious two things when you want to retain people: pay them more and treat them like people. I know, I know, what a concept!!

*****I mean, come on. I played D&D during the Satanic Panic, and lost all my stuff to the same. If you ever wanted to meet girls in the early-mid 80s, playing D&D and board games such as Civilization or Axis and Allies was most definitely not the way to do it. I think one of the biggest shocks to my system was during the first week of classes at UD I was at the game room down in Kennedy Union, playing a video game, when a couple happened to walk by and paused to watch me play. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the shirt she was wearing --a Dungeons and Dragons shirt-- and nearly died in the game due to my surprise. That had to have been the first girl I ever "met" who actually was into RPGs. Usually I got the "ew, gross" if any of them ever found out that I played.

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.

The World's Okayest...

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.
--Sir Isaac Newton

I guess ol' Isaac never played video games.*

Even though this is a rotation for the
Enhancement Shaman circa 2016,
I laughed. (From Reddit)

 

Playing a video game for any length of time is an exercise in managing complexity. Even the simplest of games, such as Tetris, get complex the farther along you play. (Or faster you play, in the case of Tetris.) 

But the scope creep of video game complexity, particularly in MMOs and other games that require multiple moves and an ever evolving amount of complexity to play at a high level, is very much a real thing.

I thought about this even before I saw posts from Shintar and Bhagpuss on their blogs, but their posts certainly did push these thinky thoughts into the forefront. And rather than contemplate the state of Briganaa's and Linna's gear** I'd much prefer to instead poke that roadkill that is theorycrafting.

***

On the face of it, theorycrafting deconstructs a video game into its component parts --numbers and data structures-- and attempts to make sense of it all. The overall goal is to find the "best" way of doing things, which can be both bedeviling and satisfying at the same time.

Yes, there is both a good and a bad to the meta.

The bad is that the meta becomes all consuming to a not-insignificant number of gamers, to the point where if you're not doing it perfectly there's bound to be problems.

 

Totem twisting as an Enhance Shaman
in TBC Classic. Thankfully, I've never
had to deal with very many of these types.
(From Reddit.)

 

But the good... Well, the good is that you still have to execute the meta to make it work. Just showing up with the correct gear might be 3/4 of the battle, but you still have to play well.... in a group.

I highlighted that last part because what works out in the field while questing in a solo format may not work well in smaller groups, and that may not work in raids.

For example, Linnawyn is a Retribution Paladin, and one of the hallmarks of Ret Pallys is that they need water to regen mana. Lots and lots of water. When I go out into the world to quest with her, I typically carry 80 food and 80 water with me, and that doesn't last nearly as long as I'd like. I also have to freaking drink after every pull --my questing buddy can tell you allllll about that-- so any way to improve my mana efficiency and keep me able to fight enemies longer is a welcome thing. 

If you read up on Ret Paladin rotations and whatnot, you constantly hear about keeping the Seal of the Crusader judged on the enemy you're attacking --I'm not even going into the Seal of Blood/Martyr part, as I'm keeping this simple-- but all of this costs mana and will suck you bone dry. So... Enter Seal of Wisdom and judging that Seal while out in the field. Sure, my DPS takes a hit, but I can handle twice as many enemies before stopping to drink, which is more important when questing as opposed to simply killing something quick and then having to drink far more often.

I suppose someone could calculate the timing difference between taking a few seconds longer to kill an enemy versus the extra downtime spent drinking, but my admittedly "winging it" feel to the game seems that I gain a bit more uptime when judging Wisdom rather than Crusader. 

However, I get to spend more time doing what I want to do --questing and exploring-- without as much downtime spent drinking, so my modification to what is "supposed to be followed" is based on my solo questing experience on Linna. 

Yep, that's me.
From etsy.com.

But.

This simple explanation about the best way to play a Ret Paladin goes totally off the rails once you start talking about maximizing DPS in raids. 

There's the "Basic" option of Judging Crusader and keeping that going with Crusader Strike, and then keeping Seal of Blood/Martyr going to maximize DPS at the price of your own health, not to mention keeping the Judgements going as soon as it comes off of CD. Oh yeah, and there are other attacks to sprinkle in there, but that's the Basic option. 

The "Advanced" option, however, is Seal Twisting, where you try to get two Seal effects within a single melee strike. So you have to have a swing timer to get that just so that you can hit that second seal in the last 0.4 seconds before a melee swing engages. Oh, and did I mention that even sites such as Icy-Veins say it's a very advanced tactic that is very hard to do, but you can seriously up your DPS if you get it right?

Well... guess what version progression raid teams want your Ret Paladin to do?

I mean, the numbers don't lie, but can you execute it?

I know my answer to that question: I can't.

From the comment section of the Reddit
post of that Windfury pic shown above.

 

It doesn't make me a bad player, despite what the hardcore crowd might think. I just simply can't do it. Maybe a decade ago I could, and if I'd the time to practice a lot maybe I could pull it off even now, but given the stress of totem twisting + shock twisting + AOE totem twisting***, I'm just not interested in dealing that stuff.

I suppose it's a matter of the old saw about how "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink," but despite all the numbers pointing toward an optimal method of doing something you still have to execute. And the numbers can't make someone execute if they don't want to. 

 

In case you think I'm picking on WoW,
here's a rotation posted on MMO-Champion
on a thread titled "Do All Classes Require
15+ Buttons Rotations?" for FF XIV. Makes the
Enhancement rotation at the top look quaint.

The thing is, most people will figure out a basic rotation without needing all of the theorycrafting, just on feel alone, and will come pretty close to something that the numbers say works. If you just play and fiddle around with what seems to do the best mix of efficiency and damage, you'll get probably about 75-80% of the way there. 

So yay, common sense.

***

But let's talk about the other part of theorycrafting: gear + enchants + gems + whatever.

You know, the part that might or might not fall into your lap during a dungeon run or a raid.

That's not quite true: you can buy some stuff using gold and/or badges (or whatever), and having a ton of gold does solve quite a few ills. Art truly does imitate life in this regard. 

The irony about Classic WoW was how far off the tier sets were compared to what gear popped out as the "best" gear when crunching the numbers. 

Which is how you ended up with
this Holy Pally meme in Classic.
This is why Cardwyn never had her
head slot visible: that damn pre-raid BiS
turban looked incredibly stupid.
(From Reddit.)

Crunching the numbers to find the best gear makes sense. 

But understanding what is the best gear for you, that involves nuance. 

For example, our Mage Lead recently told me that he was going to switch back from Arcane Specialization to Fire, even though Arcane had more DPS. "I just like Fire more," he told me. Because of that, he's going to optimize his gear for Fire Mages. 

So what if it's a pencil and
paper RPG thing. It's still fire.
From displate.com.

 

Or for me with Neve, I have no designs on taking her raiding beyond maybe Karazhan and/or Gruul/Mags, so I'm planning on sticking with Frost for her. If you listen to the guides and theorycrafters, the DPS isn't optimal and the gear is different, but if you go with what you like you can still find what works for you (and what's optimal gear for that specialization).

Now obviously Fire Mages aren't that off the top of the damage meters compared to Arcane Mages, and they have the additional bonus of giving Destro Warlocks who specialize in Fire an additional DPS boost. So it's not like you walked up to the raid leadership and said "Hey, I want to suck at DPS but since I like it you have to live with it." There's a tradeoff here. And when I was recruited into AQ40, it was explicitly stated that I'd have to switch to being a Fire Mage, because even if my DPS personally sucked, my presence would boost the DPS of the rest of the Mages. But still within the realms of reason you should be able to do what you want to do, and what works for you, and still find a way to do well within that paradigm.

***

So what am I getting at?

Well, the TL;DR here is that while theorycrafting does a good job of identifying what the meta is for a specific class and/or build, telling you what rotation and gear are both optimal, you can't simply be a slave to it. You have to do what feels good for your enjoyment in a game, complexity or not. Some people love their meta, and some people have their own way of doing things. Telling people "yr doing it wrong" isn't going to win you friends and admiration of your peers. 

People will figure things out on their own if you give them enough time and a basic understanding of how a game works. Even when it may seem counterintuitive to do so, just letting people learn at their pace does wonders for their enjoyment in a game. It's when you try to accelerate the process artificially --such as the race to max level when the Dark Portal opened-- that people stop having fun and become slaves to the meta, because they don't have the time (or inclination) to figure it out for themselves.

Of course, that sort of idea kind of flies in the face of "how to play an MMO correctly", but that's the crux of the thing: there is no one way of playing an MMO correctly. 

That's the entire point of an MMO: to allow people to play the game their own way. If you want people to just "play it right" by following the meta, then why have all this extra crap lying around in the first place? Because it's "how things are done?" No, all of the extra stuff in an MMO isn't there to bedevil the people who tinker with the meta, it's to allow people to have options. Perhaps too many options in the case of Retail, where it frequently feels like you have to do all the things in order to satisfy the meta, but those options are there for people who want to play and figure things out for themselves. 

Or just hang around and fish all day.

*Or tried to solve the Schrodinger Wave Equation for the Hydrogen atom, for that matter. Admittedly it's the easiest of the elements to solve, but I remember it taking at about a month in my Atomic and Nuclear Physics class to go through it for the first time. When we commented on the difficulty involved, my professor told us about this one grad student he knew who decided that his dissertation was going to be solving one of the higher level elements --I think an atomic number somewhere in the 80s-- and we all just kind of shuddered.

**Maybe in another post, but not now. I'd prefer to pretend that we're still back in Phase 1, where Karazhan + Gruul/Mags gear was the best you could get, because the reality of where I am versus where seventyupgrades says I could be is pretty damn depressing. And that's just for Brig; Linna is still entirely in quest greens, having not poked her nose into a BC instance this entire time.

***And moving around. Don't forget that part. Throughout Karazhan, Gruul/Mags, Serpentshrine Cavern, and The Eye, I've yet to find a melee friendly raid like there were in Classic. There might be a boss or two here and there, but when you're constantly on the move your totems ain't worth crap once you move out of their range. At least Ret Paladins do have that advantage over Enhancement Shamans in that their Judgements are on the enemy, not a specific place on the ground, but still, the mana costs do add up.

Do You Have a Moment to Hear The Good News About The Meta?

Remember when I posted this YouTube video a few entries ago?

 

Well, now is as good a time as any to discuss this.

John's premise in the video is that anybody who has 'solved' an MMORPG and figured out the optimal path toward achieving the goals set out in said game is providing people with the 'metagame'. No, not the Facebook 'Meta', which is abjectly silly and just marketing speak for trying to bring as many disparate concepts/items/whatever under one roof*, but something quite different. 

This is the roadmap of "how to level in TBC Classic properly", or the definitive boss strategy in raids. Or the optimal raid composition and/or class spec for raiding. Or how to get yourself attuned (or Attune-d (tm), couldn't resist) most efficiently. Or.... Well, you get the idea.

But to continue, Josh believes that the metagame or 'meta' is ruining MMORPGs because it eliminates player choice. 

Yes, you read that right. And, once you hear him out, you'll likely agree with him.

The entire point of the meta is that it is the optimal way of doing something. And if that is the optimal solution presented to the gaming community, why would you do anything else BUT that? To do so is to cheat yourself of the best solution in a game. 

I was reminded once again of the metagame after the Friday Karazhan run** when during the Discord chatting post-raid someone mentioned about getting rep for Cenarion Expedition. Another person chimed in with how you "ought to do it" by buying those Unidentified Plant Parts and turn those in, one after another, until you reach Honored. Then you can go questing and get the rep needed rather than running Steamvault multiple times. Considering that I just went out and quested on Linna, not really caring about rep, until I hit Honored and the Plant Parts left in my bag*** were useless. But I was more annoyed that I knew about the meta for Cenarion Expedition rep and I deliberately chose not to do it, and I was --unintentionally-- having my nose rubbed in a pile of dogshit because of my choice.

And that's the thing about the meta: it exists, and because it exists you are always reminded of it even when you aren't following it. Unless you turn off Discord or chats and eschew grouping in favor of solitary play. Even then, the knowledge that a meta exists in some form or another will haunt you, despite your protestations of innocence. 

After all, even I end up on some WoW websites, trying to figure out the optimal builds and talent trees for my toons. Those published entries are as much a metagame as Attune or other attunement walkthroughs, and a not so secret reason why I haven't gone into any 5-person instances on Linna**** is because I messed up and took an extra level to finally get the talent for Blessing of Kings, and I didn't want to blow any extra gold on resetting my talent trees just to fix my screw up. 

And then I thought, "Why the hell should I be apologizing for not having the 'right' build, anyway?"

My brain almost immediately responded with multiple instances in the past where I was in instances, learning, and being told that I suck and the rest of the people dropping group. 

"Oh, right."

Then I thought about guild groups, and then I remembered that I was --rather politely-- told to 'get gud' by being 'counseled' on how to improve my DPS in SSC/The Eye and in Naxx.

***

Oh, you didn't know about that in Naxx?

Oh yes, I was given some unsolicited 'counseling' by a fellow guildie one evening --who didn't even run a Mage as anything other than a lasher farming alt-- on how to maximize my DPS. I was seething afterward, because I knew exactly where I needed to go but gear held me back, and here was someone who didn't even take part in our Mage Crew discussions trying to tell me what to do. I basically took the 'advice' and threw it in the trash, because I had my own roadmap and I knew that the rest of the Mage crew would back me up.

And now, having been on the other side of the raiding leadership, I know how this works: someone in raid leadership asked him to talk to me about it, rather than asking my class lead who was likely not involved at all. (And I have a really good feeling as to who it was who asked him, too.) Even though I didn't raid with him in TBC Classic (or that part of guild leadership), that experience soured me considerably on whether some random person might want to 'help' me by 'informing' me of the meta for whatever it is I'm doing.

So yeah, I don't need any guild groups in 5-person instances while I'm learning things, thankyouverymuch. 

Even if I did want to group up in guild, guildies would soon learn about my toons outside of the auspices of the guild and start adding them to their friends list. The only person who knows Neve and Linna are attached to me is my questing buddy, and I prefer it that way. A few other people are aware that I boosted a Paladin in case Ret were needed, but that's all they know.

***

Regardless, Josh's 'solution' isn't one that I think would work. You'll have to watch the video to form your own opinion, but my belief is that the meta is here to stay, and it will pretty much rule the MMOs that already have been 'figured out' because of human nature. 

If you ask someone what their goal is in playing an MMO such as WoW Classic, what is the answer?

How many say 'To win"?

How many say "To have fun"?

But the kicker is what does 'winning' and 'fun' mean to people? 

If it means 'endgame', odds are very good that it also means utilizing the metagame to win the endgame. Even if 'having fun' means that people want to 'raid with friends', eventually raid leadership will have to come to some hard decisions about people who simply aren't doing a very good job but happen to be good friends. Who do you pick, the friendship or finishing a raid tier?*****

If it means 'winning PvP', it means following the PvP meta. After all, the PvP crowd is more intensely driven to winning and min/maxing their way to success than even progression raiders.

If it means doing anything other than that, then perhaps the meta doesn't matter that much. But to an MMORPG, where everything is geared around Endgame and PvP and raiding, the meta will still rule.

***

So....

Where does this leave me?

Probably trying my damnedest to keep my head down, run the Friday Kara until it simply isn't viable anymore, and just mind my own business. Eventually I'll get over this funk, and since I've got about 10 months or so until Wrath drops I've got plenty of time. I can console myself in that no matter what MMO I play, there will be a meta lurking out there, so it's not like I can change a game and free myself from the metagame. It's all about the community, and how overt --or backhanded-- they are in pushing people toward the metagame that matters.

And that last statement probably deserves a post of its own.

 

*There's another Josh Strife Hayes video on that, right here:

**You remember the person who was interested in learning to raid lead and was offered --without my knowledge-- a chance at running my Friday Kara run? He never followed through. I was going to contact him directly, but I was told to wait to see if he followed up with me. So far, he hasn't. Of course, he might contact me this week because that's just my luck. I post about it, and it happens.

***And a few mailed over by my questing buddy.

****Outside of 'Normal' runs for Hellfire Ramparts, Blood Furnace, etc. being very hard to find.

*****A couple of weeks ago, during the Friday Kara someone said in Discord that they missed raiding with me on Mondays. "Thanks," I replied, "but you at least have [raider's name] now, and she brings 300-400 more DPS than me." And nobody said a word about missing raiding with me after that. It's very easy to assuage your own guilt by saying platitudes, but the reality is that my replacement brings significantly more DPS than me. People can't deny the uncomfortable fact that when I replaced her for Vashj in SSC on my very last progression raid night we couldn't bring Vashj down. The next week, they nailed her on the second try. My questing buddy continues to insist that I'm missing the point and that people do miss me, but I believe I just simply said the quiet part out loud that nobody wanted to admit.