Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft

I relate to this so hard just playing Stardew with my family. One brother maximizes and optimizes absolutely everything, aiming to unlock things as soon as possible. Meanwhile our cousin just makes his character look like Luigi and walks around eating sap.

Feels relevant: Countless years ago, in the earliest days of Vanilla WoW, I'm just poking around somewhat aimlessly killing Troggs for a quest that was taking just forever, and some wandering Warrior I don't know suggests we party up and kill them faster. All well and good, but then he tells me, "You take Aggro." So I ask him, "What's Aggro mean?" I had never heard the word before--never played an MMO before, in fact. He was totally incredulous, but after some prodding he explained the meaning of the term and why it made sense for me to do it, which it did; we killed some bad guys, finished out the quest, and all was well. Or so I thought. Literally YEARS later there's a thread on Blizzard's WoW forum asking what's the worst party you've ever been in in the game, and sure enough, some Warrior stops long enough to pipe in, "Oh man, I met a Paladin once who didn't even know what Aggro was." They're going to carve this on my tombstone, just you wait and see.

The irony of being called a tourist in a game you’ve played since 2005 because you didn’t take classic seriously is rich

one of my closest friends i've ever had played like that barefoot gnome at the start, only he refused to cave. i love that guy and he played the game HIS way until everyone else got tired of the game like 7 years in. he told me later it was because he hated Warcraft a lot, but loved spending time with us, so he made the game fun for himself. it made us all feel terrible because we never considered if he enjoyed the "correct" way of playing WoW

My college friends and I still laugh about back in 2005 when a guy in our dorm kept looting during fights in wailing caverns. And he would actively deny it. Then during a fight the game lagged real hard and everyone was stuck moving around in whatever animation they were stuck in. Zach was stuck in the loot animation. He still denied it. 😂

As the original author of WeakAuras, I never expected it to become such a pervasive (and perhaps controversial) piece of paratext in relation to WoW.

That line “Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game” is painfully relevant in MMO style games. I remember when Black Spindle came out in Destiny you couldn't get into raids without it. Almost every LFG group demanded you have Black Spindle with specific rolls or you'd be denied entry. Never mind the fact that the raids had been completed countless times before the weapon even existed. If it wasn't "optimal," it wasn't acceptable.

I played wow when I was little on the family computer. I played in what I called "single player mode" I turned off the chat box and I would spend hours exploring the maps, doing fetch quests for npcs, and selling pelts from low-level animals I killed. It was great! I didn't know what guilds were and I leveled up very slowly. WoW has some really cool areas to check out! The games pretty fun when you don't know what people are saying.

As someone who has never played WoW, my biggest takeaway from this vid is "wait, it's not SUPPOSED to look like that?"

i’ve always described my aversion to multiplayer team games as “i was bad at sports in middle school and got yelled at by my teammates for it, and i don’t have a strong desire to relive it”. all that to say that this video is so real to my experience not just with WoW but multiplayer team games as a whole.

56:00 is a really interesting point. My small guild did the same back in 2009. Outside sources were discouraged. We banned reading WoWhead. Theorycrafting was right out. We wanted to experience the game and encounters organically, and it made everything harder but more satisfying. After a couple months we got good at it. We started "solving" dungeons and bosses faster. We felt good. Then we noticed that Brian was always the first one to "remember" a boss' big attack and "anticipate" a movement or a mob spawn. He was always the first to crack a strategy. Once we started looking for it, we saw that Loren almost always had the right element enchanted on his weapon the first time we fought a boss, and Jon was exact to the tenth of a second with his threat generation. I got called out for my Tankadin's rotation being a macro when someone heard my bag of chips crinkling over VoIP. We were all lying.

In Vanilla I rolled a Tauren Druid, purely because he looked and sounded cool. I knew nothing about classes and roles, the meta etc. I knew nothing about playing optimally (or even somewhat decently probably) and would form an early version of a hybrid druid purely by accident. I'd get asked if I could tank, I'd look at my kit and be like "Yeah it's possible", and it would go poorly. I'd be asked to heal, see that I have healing spells, and it would go poorly. After that, I eventually just started collecting rare things. Miscellaneous items, critters, objects that have literally no value, weapons, anything that even sounded fun. I made so many bank alts, dressed them up like pimps, then just started playing to make gold from buying, selling, and farming. I literally didn't care to raid or even dungeon unless there was a cool item. I became a merchant and in my mind I won.

it's really cool that Dan has started making hours-long documentaries SPECIFICALLY for me, I appreciate that.

In Guild Wars 1 there was a tutorial world, which was a completely different instance from the main game to which you could not return to once leaving. To get the best armor in this tutorial - which was somewhat useful in the main game - you needed to farm x items from two different enemies. I’ve put 100+ hours into Guild Wars, 99% in the main game, but the best memory I have from all that time is when I created a character named „Tutorial Merchant“, farmed those two mob items and then sold it to other players for very little gold, gold that I had no use for, because I already had the best tutorial equipment. Whenever I sold out, I ran into the woods again, farmed, got back into town again and announced my goods to the travellers. Most people were really appreciative. Some were on their Xth character and just wanted to get the tutorial over with. Others were new players and I like to think I added just that much to their wondrous experience with my small nonsensical business. Great memory for me.

This really hit me hard as a disabled gamer. I always feel like I can't really join any kind of game related community because so much are focused on optimizing everything, and my body just can't keep up. No matter how many videos I watch I'll never be as optimal as an able bodied player who doesn't struggle to use a keyboard. If I join a guild that wants to focus on being the best then I'll always hold them back. It's really depressing because that's also how I tend to get treated for my disability anyway. I can't even escape being judged for my physical ability in a completely virtual environment. It's really awful how isolating it is. I really just wish there were more spaces where I wasn't judged on my abilities in some way.

I feel like a lot of people are missing the point here. The point isn't that instrumental play or number crunchy min max players are bad, but that the way many multiplayer game communities force less crunchy players into this way of play sucks ass

"worlds become real when we care about them, not when they look similar to our own." gonna go find a window to stare out of for the next 500 years. this month has been so good for the longform videos, but i am also so incredibly full of big existential thoughts

As a blind gamer, I was glad to hear the world of opportunity opened up by addons for people with disabities get a mention. I have struggled to find playable games, struggled to play those games, and struggled with feelings of isolation and rejection as I continually try and fail to contribute in multiplayer games. The one and only game I have ever found where I didn't constantly feel like I was letting the team down was World of Warcraft. I don't play anymore, but bigwigs voice and weakauras weren''t simply ways I used to enhance my play, they were the sole reason I was able to play at all. Not only did they enable me to enjoy the game, they also enabled me to play at a decently high level. I've cleared Mythic raids and got KSM several times. In a world which is at best difficult, and at worst actively hostile, the feeling of triumph I got from being able to contribute productively to my team's success cannot be understated. It's nice to know I'm not the only one.

i will never forget putting this on as bed time noise and getting woken up by 21:36 with a genuine feeling of being confused and under attack

This is something that actually puts me off games, but not for the reason you'd expect. I'm a very instrumental player, I have a long term goal and I like to optimise for it as much as possible. However that actually puts me off playing a lot of games that encourage that behaviour, because I find it super overwhelming. Instead I'd much rather do that in smaller games not designed for that optimisation, where the act of optimising feels like a departure from the game, and a whole new horizon, not the intended result. I think of this when me and my friend play PlateUp. I love to optimise the placement and automation, being very careful about making the most of the least number of items, ensuring to prep things in advance to get the best number of conveyors, desks etc. However he is very much the opposite, he loves when the cosmetic rounds come about because he can plan how he wants the restaurant to look, he spends time at the beginning coming up with a fun name. One obvious example is the meat fridge: it has roughly a 2/3rds hitbox, whereas most items have a 1 square hitbox. What this means is that when the fridge is facing the correct "aesthetic" way i.e. the door is towards the player, there's a common risk of getting caught on the object next to it when walking away with the item, which could genuinely end a run later on. The optimal solution is one I do without question: reverse the fridge. Due to it's orientation, the back of the fridge is perfectly aligned with the border, meaning that this issue doesn't happen. However he would prefer to having it the door round, because even though it can actively hinder the ability to cook the meal, it looks better, and immerses more as it fits his aesthetic. And I've actually come to realise that us being opposed like this is why we love playing games together so much. If we play a game together, he love to handle the aesthetic stuff that I don't care for, and I love to optimise the technological stuff he doesn't care for. Another example is in Modded Minecraft, when we played a server of mods I put together, I built a nuclear reactor, I put together all the machines to power the base, create items, further "progression" etc. He put together a cool looking base for us, plus handled all the food requirements and had an amazing time working with magic, bees and farms. It worked together perfectly, cause I could show him what I've been working on and give him something that makes his life easier, then he can show me his ideas for our space base, for our warehouse etc, and I can work my functional parts around the cool designs he has. It's just a perfect synergy between our opposing play styles!