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Oh it's about the world of warcraft I thought it was about those nerds who would get mad at you for wasting their time in warcraft 3 ladder games when i was younger
I have been playing some of the StarCraft 2 Arcade minigames recently, like Direct Strike and oh man, people get fucking LIVID if you do ANYTHING out of the ordinary, holy SHIT
StarCraft used to have a somewhat good community, pretty average to slightly above average, lots of nice people and some assholes.
But in the last 5 years it's become a literal Nazi cesspool.
Those old ban lists legit made me stop playing dota out of fear for being so bad
I almost never played the original DotA because I would get kicked from lobbies for not already having the most current version.
I played LoL for several years until I realized moba's turned me into a real asshole.
Multiplayer video games make you dedicate lots of time and effort into it and people get mad when they feel like their time and effort is wasted because of another person.
The best raiding for me was playing The Burning Crusade on Zuluhed, a very low population server. We could barely form enough of a group to handle Karazhan let alone Serpentshrine Caverns. Those were monumental events after endless wipes. But there were like 50 level 70s with raid-ready gear so I knew practically everyone on the server. It was repeatedly wiping with friends. Tried a more serious raiding guild on a high population server and it was miserable. People losing their shit daily because they didn't get the gear which gives them 1% more performance. Nerds doing intrigue against each other and ragequitting when their pseudo-employees didn't perform to the standards of what some website told them is optimal. Zuluhed's emptiness made the world feel real.
interesting video. definitely articulates some of my suspicions.
i played wow from vanilla launch until early 2007, which was burning crusade. i never once gave half a turd about raiding or even dungeons. i only played on a pvp server and only gave a shit about improving my ability to spontaneously fight against every class, exploring the overworld for ambush sites, and mixing it up in random encounters with other players. i felt the PvP battlegrounds were merely OK, but definitely preferable to all the instanced PvE content if i have to grind something for gear. neither captured the anxious energy of a random encounter far from any road with someone from an opposing faction while questing. hostile guild? name recognized? level differential? are there others out of sight? fight or flight, maybe both!
i worked with a ton of people that played WoW and every time they described how awesome some dungeon/raid content was, it all just sounded like a choreographed job orchestrated by some busybody who wants to tell others what to do. i get why people like it, but it's not my style of game.
i found a couple of friends that felt the same, we formed our own little guild of weirdos and over the course of time formed into a well-oiled gank squad of run and gun troublemakers who could adapt our tactics spontaneously and predict each others' moves. our fighting abilities only eclipsed by our abilities to escape justice! pocket sand!
i left due to circumstances of life, but my friends who continued playing told me it steadily became worse over time. even the people who really liked all the PvE stuff seemed to find it all to be a chore after some time, no matter how much new content was added.
The tension between the two play objectives really hit home. Almost every good experience I had in the game was doing world PVP or non-instrumental things. Sneaking around Orgrimmar killing defeated duelists, mind controlling people off the boat in Stranglethorn Vale, raiding Stormwind with 200 people, using pathing glitches to climb above the world. Short of Alterac Valley matches, no organised progress thing was anything more than a means to better gear for me. It was more exciting to set off a snake trap at the Goldshire Inn and then evade guilds hunting me than it was to raid or do arenas. A level 10 character was more fun to play than my tiered armour level 70s.
Sneaking around Orgrimmar killing defeated duelists
lmao, hell yeah.
mind controlling people off the boat in Stranglethorn Vale
i loved the engineering shit. i strived to create the gnomish death ray at level 47. it was such a piece of crap but i loved it and used it as often as i could. like a 5 second channel, if you move it breaks and you have to wait another hour, always takes 500-1000hp off your life no matter what, and then does random damage between 0 and 4000. one hour cool down, iirc.
one time it was just perfect. i sapped some level ?? on the road (likely 60, the cap at the time... already a nice bit of luck to not miss) and then one-shot insta-killed them for 3600. i almost pissed myself as i ran away, pretty much half dead from its life drain. i can only imagine what that guy thought about that encounter.
When arenas first launched my server had some of the most insufferable assholes fully decked out in PVP armour with Illidan's legendary glaives and shit. They paid guilds to run them through Black Temple farming the best stuff possible to boost their arena performance, and then they'd stand outside Orgrimmar endlessly dueling people. There was nothing like sapping them as a rogue, pulling off a quick ambush at 1hp, and then sprinting away before the other could react. I'd taunt them on my horde account while I did it and it caused the purest nerd rage.
this video just made me depressed because the healer overhaul in ffxiv made me quit the game :deeper-sadness:
but yeah its very true. unless the game is designed to avoid it then MMO communities devolve through the 'been there done that' feeling and turn into jobs. this triggers an arms race between the devs and the players, killing the world and substituting it with a virtual office. of course its rude to be bad at your job, you're punishing everyone else's workload that way.
me, i used to play astrologian but then the cards got worse and the time mage themes were all removed
I've stopped playing most multiplayer games where they require you to do a bunch of min/maxing and look at spreadsheets all day, and instead opted for games that are entirely centered around min/maxing and staring at spreadsheets like Victoria 3