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

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.

This video was very hard to watch for me, as someone who played WoW from 2006 up until very recently.

The main problem these people are missing - unsurprisingly - is that to them, playing an MMORPG and doing World of Warcraft style raiding are one and the same. To them, and to the players, and to the devs as well, pretty much since Wrath of the Lich King originally launched the only truly relevant part of the game, is the raiding experience. But I remember a time when nobody fucking raided. In vanilla, almost nobody did 40-man raids. It wasn't because we were too dumb, it was because no one wanted to do all the obnoxious, grindy bullshit you had to do in order raid. And those who did, largely, were viewed literally as "elitist jerks". And I remember when the main selling point of an mmo was how immersive it was, how much adventure awaited you, how much the game would enable you to be what you want to be, rather than a game where people are looking up "best talent builds" before they even finish installing the game. Warcraftlogs, parses, and most raiding addons are abominations.

I could do a whole response video to this thing but who has the time for that, plus it would just make me sad. The main point is that this video puts basically all the blame on the collective subconcious of players, but that's only partially true, and Blizzard 100% enabled this mindset. Just look at Wrath Classic - there is literally nothing to do but log in and raid. There's hardly even any daily quests. You log in, you raid, maybe you do a little farming, you log out. This is not what an MMORPG is supposed to be, but to the people who made this video, to Blizzard, and to most WoW players, that's all it is now. You make it so only one part of the game is relevant, and then you break everyone down into number values ranking how good they are at that one relevant part of the game, and hey, what a shock, it gets toxic as fuck.

As someone who has done nearly every single thing WoW had to offer, including ample raiding: fuck raiding, fuck raiders, fuck Blizzard. Even though I have many problems with it, I'm just gonna play FFXIV for a while purely because standing around in a city playing music for people all day is a completely relevant thing to do.

Raider culture has always been an aggressively obnoxious energy vampire to me.

Even when I did raid and got somewhere with it, the happiest I was with it was "the mumbling Epic G!mer calling everyone "terribad" and telling them to commit suicide for standing in the wrong place is finally satisfied... maybe (one time the mumbling Epic G!mer didn't like that the completion time wasn't optimal and called everyone "terribads" anyway).

For me, it was draining, exhausting, yet the raiders in most MMORPGs were the loudest and most aggressive lobby, not just demanding almost all of the developers' time, but foaming with rage if there was an entry level version of anything for the "casuals" with "welfare epics." :frothingfash:

I remember when the Epic G!mers foamed with rage at the idea of appearance slots of any kind, because they wanted some pretentious boot-style uniform system where everyone wears their tier of obedience to raiding.

I'm glad FFXIV, for all its faults, usually has entry level versions of pretty much all content instead of locking tons of story behind obedience to the mumbling Epic G!mer calling everyone terribads. :debord-tired:

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.

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.

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