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World of Warcraft Teaches the Wrong Things?
Gamasutra has a 'Soap Box' editorial up discussing the bad lessons World of Warcraft teaches. From the article: "1. Investing a lot of time in something is worth more than actual skill. If you invest more time than someone else, you "deserve" rewards. People who invest less time "do not deserve" rewards. This is an absurd lesson that has no connection to anything I do in the real world. The user interface artist we have at work can create 10 times more value than an artist of average skill, even if the lesser artist works way, way more hours. The same is true of our star programmer. The very idea that time > skill is alien."
Funny, I thought it was the kind of thing that was universally applied.
Good thing it is a video game, otherwise I would be upset at the useless life lessons being promoted here.
Slashdot: Where anecdotes and generalizations can be freely substituted for facts, logic, or intelligence
What's wrong producing in-game properties and selling them on eBay? Got to give the Bill Gates-in-training something to do.
... but I've never transferred any skill I've learned in video games to real life.
At an early age, my demon hunting skills were top notch in Doom but I never took the extra step to transfer those to the playground.
Probably because video games are a virtual reality meaning that different laws apply there. I have learned never to use the same strategy when different rules are in effect. That's been pretty useful.
My work here is dung.
World of Warcraft wasn't designed to teach you anything. It was designed to entertain you.
If they were to say that, as a whole, MMORPGs teach that time > skill, I'd be willing to agree with them 100%. Trying to say that WoW teaches it is sort of unfair. I learned that time > skill back in EQ, and nothing's happened to change that lesson.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
They're comparing apples and oranges. Street Fighter is a totally different animal than WoW. WoW is a world in of itself, as are all MMORPG's. As far as getting better items with more time spent, well, you have to reap what you sow. You don't HAVE to do anything, if you want X you must do Y...
1. Good raid-quality gear takes time to obtain.
2. Good raid-quality gear *should* be better than easily obtainable gear you can get while soloing
3. The time it takes to get good raid-quality gear is the price to pay for having better stuff
This is not unique to WoW. Every MMORPG since the dawn of time has worked on a similar philosophy.
The very idea that time > skill is alien.
;)
Ah, but time = money, therefore, in what is quickly becoming the "Formulae of WoW," money > skill, which I think everyone will agree is a lesson modern America teaches pretty much every day.
This is also substantiated by the original axiom, WoW = Golf.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
I've worked at a few places where seniority trumped skill. Thankfully, I've also worked at several where it didn't. The sad truth is that the "lesson" that WoW teaches is in fact real in many places.
This guy's the limit!
Here are some other life lessons games teach us:
- Killing cops and prostitues is funny
- In war, once you die, you come right back to life (or maybe there is a slight delay)
- etc
A lot of the enjoyment I get out of a game is in progressing - in feeling like I'm becoming a more capable player. In some games (eg. Tetris), this is a big part of why I play: I enjoy getting better and breaking that old high score.
Levelling over time is a way of introducing this element of "getting better" artificially. It's not perfect, but it's very controllable. Developers who mete progress out in time-based levels can control how long it takes to reach the "flat", unsatisfying portion of the curve (where many will quit playing). When you get paid by the month, it's in your interest to have the most control possible of the progression curve (and thus how long you get paid) - and that's why pretty much all MMOs end up with time-locked progression.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
It is pretty bad. I've known a few Rank 14 pvp guys, who get the good rewards. Every single one of them without exception had to spend all waking hours playing and usually have multiple other people also play their characters in order to gain that Rank. In the end they're burned out and hate playing.
Liberty.
More times you roll a dice the more times you get a 6! Hot damn that's unfair! All 6s should be equally divided between all players.
Not news, just people whining over WoW.
I like muppets.
Once we reach the point where we're handing of the job of teaching kids things like ethics to video games, I suspect we've got bigger problems than the content of the video games.
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Why not look at it as the flip side of a coin? Up until recently, the only really popular multiplayer games were fighters and first person shooters. Now you can choose to build up skill over time (or have it innately), or plod the way of monotony in an RPG. More options is always gooder.
Since when was the purpose of WoW to teach the fundamentals of life and fairness?
Look, it's a video game. It's not a job interview, a checkout line in a grocery store, a pay-scale within a company. It's a video game. Act accordingly.
And if you still insist on trying to learn lessons from it, at least consider all of the lessons. For example, getting used to and interacting with a variety of classes and races without discriminating based on each characters appearance. And that a womans appearance does effect how you treat her. And that age doesn't matter, maturity of mind does.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
The author's main complaint seems to be that everyone doesn't enjoyed playing games the same way he does.
He is an introvert, so he disapproves of needing to play with groups. He doesn't want to play too many hours a day, so he disapproves of any rewards that encourage excess time.
So? Some people want to get a reward for time. Some people want to play with their friends without getting lower quality loot.
The amazing power of Wow is that you _can_ play any way you want. Solo, group, 24/7, infrequently. Do whatever you want, and the game will remain fun. Just don't be annoyed if not everyone wants to play the same way you do.
-Cassia
Vericon is coming!
World of Warcraft(and by extension ALL MMORPGs). He compares them to games such as chess and street fighter(because we all know that Chun Li is a modern day Confucius, only hotter!) and saying that in those games you don't have any material advantages over your opponent so they make better games. What he neglects to take into consideration is that chess and Street Fighter have very clearly defined goals: checkmate in the former, and beating the crap out of your opponent in the latter. However, a lot of games such as MMORPGs don't have such clearly defined goals. Yeah, you can build your character up to level 60 and be the mightiest warrior of all time if you want, but you don't have to do that in order to enjoy the game. There are many other goals you can take on which don't require that you "beat" your nemesi so to speak.
Me thinks this guy doth protest too much...
Monstar L
Time you spend online playing WoW = Money for WoW's makers
Every ORPG suffers from this basic problem, the only limiting factor for progress up the scale of "I won!" is time in game.
The makers of this style of game fear the twitch style or the kill points style or the land grab style of advancement. Nope, time in = advancement, is all they know.
Thanks to eating disorders most chicks are reasonably good looking these days.
WoW! Who coulda thunk?
The article misses the point in a big way by comparing WoW with Street Fighter. The latter is indeed supposed to be all about a contest of skill. But in fact the huge popularity of RPG-style games with many gamers lies precisely with the fact that they can gain a feeling of progress from simply playing the game.
It's not about hardcore vs casual either - some very serious gamers play only RPGs and absolutely do not want their "skill" tested too much.
You've clearly never been in a union... Pay raises keyed to the amount of time you've worked somewhere, and never to any measure of "skill" or "quality".
Just look at how hard teachers unions are fighting against merit pay; we wouldn't want some youngun with newfangled ideas about how to teach getting more money than a burned out old fogey who has put in their time.
1. Investing a lot of time in something is worth more than actual skill. If you invest more time than someone else, you "deserve" rewards."
2. However, when you reach Level 60 none of your efforts are rewarded anymore.
Nothing is more retarded than designing a game based on one paradigm, only to have it come to a grinding halt at some arbitrary point(level 60). Even the Everquest designers were bright enough to implement an alternate-advancement system, and that was years ago. If anything WoW took a step backwards in MMORPG design.
Sure I don't miss the corpse runs and XP loss on death, but at least I always had some character development to look forward to while playing EQ.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Life lessons? I don't think so. It's a game. If you're learning life lessons from WoW I'd say you need better parents.
Anonymous Cowards are at -6...
Back in the early 90s, I worked nightshifts in a petfood plant. Dry food only, thankfully. I'd spend 12 hours a night sitting on a line where the pellets rolled off a conveyor belt watching for large clumps that could damage the automated sorting systems. It would handle most of them, but sometimes something bad happened only a human could react to. I was paid $24 an hour in 1991 for that job, due to the time & conditions.
Fast forward to one my tech jobs 12 years later. In house support for education systems, a job that required the experience I'd gained in 10 years of previous tech & support work, and I was paid $19 an hour.
Looks like WoW doesn't have it wrong in all cases.
Ummm, that's exactly what modern society teaches us. Effort X skill = results. Determination and effort = results. Skill is often just an effort modifier. More skill = less work for same production, at least if many of life's pursuits.
Or to put it mathematically for the programmers:
1 effort X 5 skill is less than 10 effort X 1 skill.
What do business leaders, inventors, scientists teach us? They say don't give up. Skill determines how far you CAN go, but your effort determines how far you DO go.
This may not apply so much to art, etc., because those disciplines are very dependent on skill, rather than effort, making your question self-answering.
Who won again? The tortoise or the hare?
Not's not just WoW that teaches it, most schools and businesses do it too. People are scared to admit that one child is smarter than another. Don't start with that "different kinds of intelligence" bollocks, a lot of kids are just plain dumb at everything. And when you go into the workforce it's no different, don't bother expecting people to do their job well, and FFS don't criticise them for doing dumb things, you just get labelled a pretentious troublemaker.
The idea that it doesn't matter how well you do something, but it's that the trying that counts is an awful idea that pervades society at every level. Sorry, but if your best isn't good enough, then it's not good enough, and it's not society's job to mollycoddle you until you feel better about being dumb. If I have to explain how something works fifteen times because you can't remember how to do it for longer than a day, then perhaps you should go into a line of work that isn't out of your depth.
Time := Money, but Money := Time.
No matter how much money you have, you can't buy back your wasted life.
So this quashes your argument.
Ok, I stopped reading this article at 4. : when the author admitted had only made two points even though he felt the need to start 4 sections. This is a poor way to construct the arguement, and the points he has made thus far really don't support that WoW is teaching bad things.
Yes, RPGs are not first person shooters. You acquire in game attributes, spells, divine favors, equipment, reputation, etc., which make your character stronger. "Skill" still exists in an RPG, the cunning to adapt to tactics, the social skill of building and maintaining a successful balanced cooperative group or guild, the dexterity to select skills at a split second. The game encourages you to build all of these, Streetfighter was all about hand-eye coordination and what he called yomi, which really is tactical adaptation. In other words, what WoW teaches less the social skills.
Yes, MMORPGs have their roots in RPGs, which, contrary to the first CRPGs which were all single player, are inherently group activities. Find me a DMG (Dungeon Master's guide) that doesn't somewhere mention encouraging the players to work together and leverage their differences to create a strong party. While a few solo minded peeps who only know single player RPGs will take offense to this and whine, I find the majority actually like working in groups. Personally I would group even if it wasn't necessary, because it's a hell of a lot more fun to kill 100 beetles if you have someone to talk with while you do it.
And I've seen what a "challenging" single player quest looks like - take the hunter's quest for his epic bow, where he essentially has to kite a demon for a few minutes and hit his snare abilities with precision timing. Wow. Use the same 3 skills over and over for 3 minutes, run back and forward, and hope you don't lag out. Compare that to the Vaelastraz fight, where random people get destroyed by a debuff, and your group has to adapt to the gap.
I'll go back and read the rest of this now, and if the author manages to wring a good point somewhere later in contrast to the beginning, I'll come back and comment on that.
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
You may not like this. You do not have to like this. However, this will happen in ANY game where you CAN group.
To be blunt, x+x > x for all x > 0. Here, x skill argument, MMORPGs are not beat 'em up games. It's hardly an RPG if you can't build or improve something about your character. Go play an FPS; they're not the same kind of game. Some of us LIKE these games. They're RPGs. Not fighting games. Get lost.
As for "safe" worlds, most people feel really screwed over and hate the game if they lose things they've worked 999999999 hours for. But there are still a few such games out there: see Eve Online. Of course, if you're scammed out of all your stuff, don't expect any sympathy from me. I'd pod you just for whining about it, bitch.
If you have to whine that the whole world doesn't suit you, go play some other game. You're obviously playing the wrong one.
Now get offa' my lawn, ya' damn kids.
How much time did your star programmer spend learning his skills? I'd assume quite a bit. In WoW you spend massive amounts of time getting gear so you can kill off mobs quickly and effectively. In the real world you spend massive amounts of time learning a skill so you can tackle your job quickly and effectively. In my opinion the OP is looking at it from the wrong way.
While Time > Skill is something that is not usually true in the real world, a more realistic model is very hard to achieve.
In Real Life(tm) there are two kinds of abilities: ones where the "best" action is known and ones where it isn't.
In the first case, these abilities are either limited by physical attributes or not valued. Consider Tic-Tac-Toe. It's known how to achieve the highest possible skill level in that game so having that ability is not valued.
Consider sports. It's known how to make the best free throw in basketball. A robot could be built that makes that shot 100% of the time. The twist is that achieving that perfect motion is difficult because of physical limitation. So we value those who can perform it well.
In the second case, you have abilities where the "best" is not known. We don't know how to be a 100% perfect scientist. Or a 100% perfect artist. So we value those who push the limits and show us new "bests" because they are a rare commidity.
Now, in video games by their nature can only contain abilities with limits. We don't yet have the ability to code the unknown. So any ability you put into a game can and will be learned to its 100% limit (and probably automated by a bot at some point). Because of this the only two ways you can possibly give value to a ability in a game is via physical skill (the best twitcher wins in an FPS) or time.
Since the resource heavy nature of a MMO game makes physical challenges difficult, that leaves...
Time > Skill
2. However, when you reach Level 60 none of your efforts are rewarded anymore.
That is the most absurd commment about WoW I've heard.
Even over on the WoW boards, there's a huge argument over why the poeple who have tons of time to invest get the better rewards, and how WoW is allowing the people who don't have the time to acquire rewards differently.
When it all comes down to it, blizzard is in it to make money. Lots of money. Keeping you tied up in pointless tasks keeps you subscribed until you accomplish your "goals".
That's why I hate PVP. It's not skill based at all. It's based on how much time you grind honor. So those of us with lives and jobs and families can't acheive the ranks that college kids failing class because they don't go can acheive.
Ask any talented musician and they will tell you that talent/skill comes with a lot of work.
For 95% of the population--skill has very little to do with success in real life. Everything takes time to learn. Becoming a master anything in the real world is estimated to take 10,000 hours. Doesn't really matter what you do... carpentry, nursing, driving trucks... Sure a person might have some raw skills. Compare two people: One with raw skill, the other with raw skill and 10,000 hours of experience. Who do you think is going to perform better? If both demanded the same wage--who would you be likely to hire? The only exception to this rule would be those involved with extreme manual labor--pro athletes and coal miners, I'd think, fall into this catagory. Over time the phsyical stresses and natural aging would lead to decline in ability for most. For the other 95% of the real world, being successful in the professional environment requires certain credentials. Doctors, lawyers, and accountants come to mind. Teenagers will show aptitude certain areas--but do you seriously think any of them would pass the certification tests on skill alone? Hopefully everyone is still learning at least two new things every day...
The author of TFA, David Sirlin, mentions several times how certain concepts from the game are "alien" to him, where at best some of the things he talks about are exaggerations of things I see all the time (time vs. skill, the clique-ish nature of guilds, etc). I wonder if it's because he has a job/background that would be alien to most people who live/work in less game-oriented environments?
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
Because everyone knows that an MMORPG should be where you get all your life lessons from!
Another thing: time > skill? Well. In the real world time spent learning = skill. Those WoW addicts that play hours at a time daily are much more likely to have skill than others. Just like those that play Counterstrike are much more likely to have the "Mad Skillz."
Also, the honor system is not as flawed as he makes it seem, you only have to worry about your rank if you're WAYYYY up there, which is totally up to you. And you get points for losing so people still play, for chrissake if you lost every time, spent 4 hours in battle and got *nothing* but broken equipment. That's a flawed system.
Sound like he's whining cecause he didn't have enough DKP to buy the uber item that dropped last night.
That article may well be a "learning experience" for the author, but it's not a valid criticism of WoW. WoW was designed to be as it is, namely a very traditional MMO with all the normal grouping issues and guild orientations, its inevitable time sinking, and all the other problems that go with the territory.
.... simple, Guild Wars was made for you. It does that by design, very clever indeed.
It summarizes quite simply: for that person, WoW is the wrong game.
But that isn't a valid condemnation of WoW. He simply chose wrongly.
If you want to remain in the MMO genre but don't want any time sinks, and you want your personal skill to matter rather than time invested, and you want to be able to solo a lot of the time rather than suffer the incompetence of other people, and you don't want ridiculous mass guild raids in which you are just a cog in a machine, and you don't want the 101 other ills of traditional MMOs like EverQuest
But don't complain about WoW not being adequate. Horses for courses.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
wesley willis rocks so much that it's against the law.
Genius/Success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
Author does have a few interesting points, even if he reaches the wrong conclusion.
The main thing I hate about WoW is:
- Dead Time (you WASTE so much time travelling)
- Combat-only (impossible to be a pure tradesman)
Sure, WoW is the "Best", but it still sucks.
"Eighty-five percent of life is just showing up."
-- Woody Allen
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I've learned that pretending to be a girl gets me free money, and can pay for my mount.
/ignore them, and never have to deal with them again.
I've learned that sometimes killing your friends can be hilarious.
I've learned that Alliance are whiny bitches, and are Kill On Sight, and don't pull thier weight to open those damn gates.
I've learned that living in a more colorful world then reality is very comforting. A world where my physical limitations don't apply. Where I'm a giant on the field, instead of an ant under the magnifying glass of real life.
I've learned that it someone does something you don't like or hurts your feelings, you can
I've learned that people like me more in this fictional world, and people like me less in reality.
I've learned that I am a WoW Addict, and that maybe I should get some help. I've spent all my money buying gold in this fictional world, and that maybe it's time I....
Hang on, my MC raid is starting...
There are no gods but ourselves.
That is the most absurd commment about WoW I've heard.
Even over on the WoW boards, there's a huge argument over why the poeple who have tons of time to invest get the better rewards, and how WoW is allowing the people who don't have the time to acquire rewards differently.
Rather than flame me why don't you include a link or at least a quote that explains your point?
My post was about experience points having no value at level 60. Gaining levels through xp is a huge part of the MMORPG experience. If you're the type of guy that enjoys spending two weeks crawling through the same dungeon over and over again to find a shoulder pad that increases your stamina by 3 points then WoW is your game. For sophisticated players who remember how much fun an MMORPG can be I'd say WoW's high-end game is a joke.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
I see nothing but whining in that article. Wanting everything for free with no time or effort put forth... He must have rolled a Pally.
Time may not be fully greater than skill. But to get skill you need to put forth the effort... and effort takes time. He talks about all these 40 man/woman instances and neglects to say that not even the most skilled players can run in there and beat the place on the first try. It takes a lot of time and effort to figure out those strategies to beat the encounters that this game puts forth. And then relaying that strategy to 39 other people (Sometimes more when you dont have the same 40 people there each time) so that the encounter goes as planned takes a lot of dedications/time/effort on everyones part. Why should people that put forth a lot of time not get the best rewards?
I am an officer in a guild that I am in and we have a member who is 12 years old. When he first came into the guild he was pretty much staying to himself wanting to do everything solo and wanting everyone else to help him achieve his goals. Over the past couple of months he has really started to open up to us and wants to know what he can do to help the guild he is constantly offering to help people with everything and has never turned anyone down when they need a warrior for something that they are doing. This is a complete 180 from where he was when he first came into the guild. Some may think that teaching people that time is more important than skill is bad... but it does teach kids how to work with others to accomplish goals and to work as a team. Both of these are very important life skills.
"The two most abundant elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity." -Harlan Ellison
Wait, so being dedicated to something is not a good thing anymore? Natural Skill vs. Hard Work and Dedication. I wish I naturally had great skills to start with, but alas I have to work hard at certain things until I am skilled at them.
World of Warcraft teaches, as the name implies, Warcraft. They should teach Peacecraft.
It's a long list, here's a snippet:
....
1. It's always ok to Kill The Bad Guys (*almost* every game ever made)
2. I'll get the girl in the end, by just being myself, regardless of my deficiencies [most every JRPG]
3. I can't kill certain bears, they will give me bad druid faction [Everquest]
4. Stealing cars & beating hookers is OK, because the government is out to get us [GTA]
5. It's better to be part of a gang, because they can protect me from urban violence [UO]
6. The only important factor in building a great plane, is being a great pilot and having a dream [Grandia 3]. Oh yeah, also something nebulous about being able to cut out portions of wing "if it weighs too much"
7. Befriend your enemies, so that you can subjugte them militarily or culturally when you are resource starved, but not have to defend yourself in the mean time. Other people are my pawns, move them with skill. [Civilization 4]
8. Working Harder >> Working Smarter. I will eventually obtain all my goals if I spend a long time at it, while using my brain is always cheating. [Every MMOG ever made]
9. High twitch skills designate me a superior person who Gets Laid Often [FPSs, and a few MMOGers who don't get it yet]
10. Ancient relics are always of higher quality and provide better AC/DMG/Mana than new goods bought from modern vendors [Most RPGs]
Lesson Infinity +1 - Perhaps video games are not exactly a good place to learn life skills after all
Now, how will employers get employees to spend more time at work unless they are conditioned into thinking that the more time you put into something they better you are? Next up is to get rid of that pesky thing called "wages".
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
The very idea that time > skill is alien.
I've certainly seen companies where it wasn't. It's not unheard of for a PHB to promote John over Sally because John puts in more unpaid overtime, even if Sally's productivity far outstrips John's.
The user interface artist we have at work can create 10 times more value than an artist of average skill, even if the lesser artist works way, way more hours. The same is true of our star programmer.
What do you think the "great user interface artist" and the "star" programmer did to become good at what they do? I'm guessing it took a little bit of time to get that good. It's not really the amount of time you spend doing things but what you spend your time doing that matters the most; A truth that is reflected in real life (the star programmer spent years studying to understand what he knows) and, to a certain extent, in WoW (You could sit around and spend all your time getting great at fishing, but that wouldn't get you in the endgame areas like Molten Core, where the best loot is).
And come to think of it, I kind of like the idea in WoW; your character gets better for spending your "time" doing things that are challenging for their skill level. I think there's a lot of people that could learn something from that.
Super Mario taught me eating mushrooms makes me bigger and that certain flowers will change the color of my clothes and allow me to throw fireballs. Oh, and when presented with a challenge, smoosh it by jumping on it.
If I rely on my coworkers around my job, I know I am not buying WoW anytime soon because: 1- I need to borrow money to buy myself a new peecee; 2- I will stop going to work because WoW will be too fun to go work; 3- I will lose my job, my computer will be seized by the lending company AND my WoW CD with it.
printf($randomline(sigs.txt) \n "-- "$randomline(authors.txt));
-- myself
Stop trying to glean life lessons from video games.
If you're drawing parallels between video games and reality (including for purposes of lawsuits), you're delusional.
The better lesson to learn is *why* video games are *different* from reality.
Yes, we understand these tags always apply: fud, dupe, typo, slashdotted, topic name
I like Planetside. Working towards a higher battlefield command rank (where the top doesn't get stagnant, it actually affords more control) actually has more oomph.
And you get XP for shooting people!
Bury me in mashed potatoes.
It's worth it if you are into the MMO scene. Some of it get's a little preachy like it is from a burnt out player, but he makes some very valid points.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
If you invest more time than someone else, you "deserve" rewards. People who invest less time "do
not deserve" rewards. This is an absurd lesson that has no connection to anything I do in the real
world
Obviously author never worked in a gub'ment position.
this sig is deprecated
Learn to Play
you do not get somehting by just investing 'time' in the game. I can have my character sit around all day and he won't get diddly squat.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Ok, why is it that we have to continue bashing WoW? Especially those of you who want a freaking cookie, because you don't play! No one cares! I play WoW, I have a job, and I have a life. I'm no worse for wear... As for this article, since when have video games (such as WoW) been an acceptable form of education?? Last time I checked it was a form of entertainment, and in this case a social form of entertainment. WoW is not going to be the downfall of society as we know it!!!
All "twitch" gaming systems can be cheated if played on remote hardware not controlled by the server, and even chess style games can be easily cheated by writing an AI bot to calculate optimal moves for you. Not even having a fast enough connection to stream video to the clients and a powerful enough CPU to calculate *everything* serverside solves this problem, as it just turns cheating into a vision procession problem. See the captchas arms-race.
Time is the only thing that can't be cheated.
Chess is so unrealistic, and it teaches the wrong lessons. It's monarchial, antidemocratic, and rewards you for killing clergymen. And it tells us that women should be put up on a pedestal, but that if you touch them you will die.
There are many ways to interact in an MMORPG, combat is just one. I had a friend in Asheron's Call who was quite self-sufficient and tended to gather his own cart goods (dye plants, etc), but he also knew tons of people on the server because he spent a good deal of his time trading. He was extroverted in the real sense of the word, even if he didn't group.
Also, just because your pixels happen to be onscreen with other people's pixels doesn't make the activity extroverted. I've been in many groups were I interacted more with my guild then the people around me.
Bottom line is that to judge introverted/extroverted, you need to watch the player, not the character.
-Jeff
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
FTA:
Street Fighter was so fun for me because there so many things to learn. Looking back, these are life lessons that I couldn't do without.
Yes, indeed, whenever I'm faced with a difficult decision, perhaps something that could truly change the course of my life, I think of those lessons. Like the other day, when my girlfriend told me she wanted to see other people, my first thought was: "Down, Right, Up, Left, Y, B."
Old people fall. Young people spring. Rich people summer and winter.
Hi,
I play WoW. A lot. When I can. And one thing I can tell you, FOR SURE, is that skill is required to do well in this game.
Let me illustrate an example that relates it to time:
You have to farm 2,000 bug shells to turn in for a quest. You might think, hey wtf, this is only a time sink and requires no skill. But of course you'd be wrong. Because if you are a skilled player you can cut the amount of time it takes to kill the bugs in HALF. So right there skill equates to less time spent.
And also, let me tell you something about PvP and raids in WoW. Yes, they both require time, guess what, everything you do requires time. But if you aren't skilled, in PvP or raiding, YOU WILL GET PUNISHED.
PvP is at least 75% skill. I've got full epics on my Warlock, with Nefarian loot. And yet when I duel other locks with full blues, on occasion, I lose, despite the fact that I spent all this time getting the gear. SKILL ALWAYS OUTWEIGHS TIME. ALWAYS.
Raiding is the same way. Your whole raid can have full epics and wipe on Nefarian over and over and over because they don't have the skills necessary to work as a unified force.
Methinks the writer of this article learned a lesson from WoW, but not the one they wrote about. The lesson they learned is that they have no skill. And so they choose to complain about the game. Oh, no, it can't be anything about THEMSELVES. I see this so much on the WoW forums that I am totally desensitized to anyone who claims WoW takes no skill.
Get over yourself,
TLF
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
It is not arbitrary. It is designed that way. WHen designing a computer game, you have to have limits so you have a boundry around what needs to be accomplished to get the game out the door.
It is actually balanced towards 60 very well. Talent point are set where if many characters had one more point, they would be unstopable.
This is whay when the changed the boundry(soon to be level 70), they have to rework the talent systems paradigm.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Exactly. It's not like anybody doesn't already know this stuff is unbelievably unrealistic. Wait, with less negatives:
Everyone already knows this stuff doesn't apply to real life.
There, that was better.
We already know the labor theory of value doesn't apply in real life. We all know that no matter how much effort you put into something, it could be worthless. We all know that you could put only a little effort into something, and everyone wants it. Thank you, TFA, for catching up with the last 150 years of economics. We were already caught up, but thanks.
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
Who says it has to be that way in a MMORPG?
Just because the programmers built it that way doesn't mean it has to be done that way.
A skilled player can quad box his toons to get to some goal much faster than someone who sits around LFG all the time.
A skilled player (or group) can invent strategies to defeat the timesink.
The fact is, all MMORPG companies know that time = money, and so the more time they can get you to put in without getting bored (and thus stop putting time in), the better.
You'll soon see, if not already, such companies employing psychologiests to pinpoint the apex of timesink vs frustration to keep you playing the most amount of time without giving up.
And since 90% of the players in the world will fit the model, profits will be maximized.
Cry more, noob.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
I'm aware they designed it that way, and my point is that it's crap design.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
I think there is a lot of missing the point in this thread.
The objection is not that someone who works hard gets rewards. The objection is that there IS NO WORK involved in advancing in MMO games beyond the timesink.
And that's why it isn't fun.
If I want to get good at Street Fighter, I can practice because the rules do not change. If the person playing against me has been practicing more, he does not get Super Chun Li. He has to use his skill. There is a chance that I can advance due to effort and luck.
Now imagine if every time you wanted to play Street Fighter, someone playing Super Chun Li and another person playing Super Guile could come in at any time and not only kick your ass, but steal your special moves so you couldn't use them any more AND they could block off access to Bosses like Bison. In fact, only huge 'guilds' would even have a chance at getting good moves or winning the game.
Fun, right?
Oh, and all they would have to do to get the Super Status would be to drop out of school and press "Fierce" 6000 times a day. Just playing so much would be enough to get the 'gold' and 'experience' they needed to get upgrades to Super status. They wouldn't really have to use any skill- 40 hours a week of crappy play would be enough to do it. Even better, they could go on eBay and BUY Super status from someone in Malaysia hired to get 'gold' for them.
Wow! Sign me up!
Anyone want to sign up for a Counterstrike game where I get Nuclear Weapons, Phasers, and Invisibility Cloaks because I am a Level 60, and you have to play in teams of 40 or you can't advance beyond Private First Class otherwise?
Or, let's play Mario Kart. I get a much better car and a 5 minute head start because I put a lot of time in, and you didn't. Wheeee! Fun!
How many of us learned the hard way that brick blocks aren't only very hard to break with your bare hands... But they also rarely conceal hidden gold coins. My poor disfigured knuckles. DAMN YOU MARIO!!!
Honest question: why, then, is it called Guild Wars? I like to solo; I don't want to be in a 40-man raid; I would like skill to matter even though I don't have much of it (gamewise). But I would never have thought something called "Guild Wars" would be what I was looking for.
Oh my god, how long will it be before complete societal collapse?
From TFA: "Grand Theft Auto appears to be about shooting cops and hookers, but it's actually a game of exploration and freedom."
It is? Because I thought it was about shooting cops and hookers. If you want to boil it down to what it "actually" is then it's an adventure, or perhaps an escape.
No wonder American science and industry is going to hell.
Right or wrong, there are quite a few companies out there that reward years of service more than skill. There is also a dichotomy in thought on that point - those who "put the time in" want greater rewards (the "Gold Watch" philosophy), while those who are a bit more skilled want greater rewards (the Darwinian philosophy). Seems the game is a bit too real...
"1. Investing a lot of time in something is worth more than actual skill...This is an absurd lesson that has no connection to anything I do in the real world."
Really? To cite a sports counter-example, how many times has the "skilled" athlete pissed away rewards / championships / etc. because they just don't care or don't put in the hard work.
I really don't know what world you live in. How do you think skill comes about in the first place?
Hard work can create skill over time, but skill without hard work equates to nothing.
one of my good friends just landed a job more or less because he plays WoW. the position was supposed to require a 4 year degree and 2+ years of in-industry experience. he has neither. he has taken a few college courses, but has no experience. however, the person that got him the interview, the person that interviewed him, and one of his new managers, all play WoW. he now makes more money than some of my friends with engineering degrees and several years of experience.
WoW does have something of a dynamic that seems to reward people who spend a lot of time as opposed to having some innate skill. However, I think its silly to say that those who spend time at the game are necessarily skill-less.
As I imply in the title, you can spend a lot of time in WoW and go absolutely nowhere because time management is a skill. Or you can spend a lot of time, exploring, working out the encounters, researching and other things and do well. I know people who have been level 60 for months without a single purple item, not even a simple one. And I know people who hit 60 and already have a number of things taken care of and even if they don't want to be in a raiding guild, they use their time to best effect to get what they want.
It's true that WoW is not going to reward those with high twitch gaming skill. Those are games where you come in fully loaded or close to fully loaded and your curve to top equipment is completely based on one thing, usually your ability to headshot people. It gets a little annoying to listen to those people complain, because they are playing the wrong game. This game is social, has a lot of playing options, a big levelling curve and an equipmnent bias that rewards people who take advantage of the content. Perhaps the PvP could be a bit more bad ass, but this isn't Counter-Craft, if you get my meaning.
Still, there are real life lessons in this game, some of them not intended. For instance, the poster points out that a "skilled" programmer is worth 10 average programmers. This may or may not be so, but real life does reward both skill and persistence. Sometimes it rewards persistence over skill. There are plenty of prima donna "skilled" artists/programmers/players who may have the skill, but use it completely unproductively. In the real world, they are difficult to work with, don't feel they need to answer to anyone, and refuse to document things. In those situations, people of average skill who are persistent, are the ones who actually tidy up the loose ends and make projects work. Those people also have a way of latching on to seniority and clinging to it like a barnacle to a rock. You can still spend a lot of time and go no where, but you don't have to be a genius in real life to get somewhere. You just have to apply yourself to the tasks you can excel at, even if your talent is 1/10th that of a genius in your field.
That is not to say that there are no complaints *within* the dynamic they have set up. For instance PvP Rank 14 is basically a grind, period. There is almost no way you can finesse your way to that level without simply putting in brutal amounts of time, often frequently having more than one human play the same character so that you have 10-18 hours a day of end to end gaming. That system could really, really use some tuning so that PvP skill is emphasized and simply sitting in a battlefield 9-10 hours a day as a hunter auto-shooting people, is not the way to get HW/GM.
WoW rewards people for spending more money to play the game longer. It's strictly a profit thing. Give them more money (by playing longer) get more stuff.
The part about time vs skill is a good point.
Just sitting on your butt shouldn't entitle you to things. Unfortunately- skill games are too hard for the majority of people. Selling a game based purely on twitch skills appeals to a smaller market.
The part about solo vs guild play is just whining tho.
In the real world, there are many activities that a single person cannot do as well as a group. Maintaining the logistics and politics of a guild for encounters and administration is a major challenge and develops useful real world skills. Running a guild is too hard for most people- but being a member of a guild usually isn't.
If you don't like mmorggs that center around guild activites, then DON'T PLAY THEM. Go play a game that focuses on solo or small group play. I admit that WOW advertised it would be such a game at the start and isn't any more.
But to join guild play with some kind of screed about the noble value of skill play is stupid- obviously you lack the social SKILL to prosper in guild settings and need to work on that SKILL.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Bad or good, who cares. It's a game. It's not intended to develop skills useful in the real world. Do all the shooter games provide useful skills? Wait a minute!
when I say, "yeah, that's why I quit, too." It's one thing to be stuck in the slow lane because you "only" play 25 - 30 hours per week; it's another to know that many of the in-game rewards are completely out of reach, forever and ever, no matter how smart you play or how skilled you become. After about 10 months, I just gave it up.
Firstly, the author states that WoW is the most successful MMORPG on Earth. My understanding from the MMORPG tracking groups is that Ragnarok Online has about 17 million subscribers worldwide. But that's beside the point.
But about the time > skill, that's an accurate statement. But the root of the problem lies in WoW's (and EQ's and other games') focus on gear. There are essentially two driving forces in WoW: experience gain and gear acquisition.
People play and quest in order to get more experience so their characters level. Ultimately the characters become level 60 (max) and cease to need any experience. Meanwhile, during the leveling, there is a fairly strong focus on acquiring newer, better (more level-appropriate) gear because that makes your character perform better, which of course helps you level faster.
The problem is that gear can have a very significant affect on the character's performance. That makes sense to a degree, but it becomes way out of proportion at level 60. Throughout the lower levels, the typical best gear at any given point can be acquired by making a few runs thru the appropriate instance. That doesn't require too much of a timesink, at least since the instances don't usually take more than two hours each to run. Some can be done very quickly.
But at 60, the time-haves get separated from the time-have-nots because the people with great amounts of time can raid N times in the same place just to get one or two pieces of gear. And unlike at lower levels, the disparity between the high end raid gear and the typical ("typical magic gear" - a cheapening of the idea of special items in the first place) gear is huge.
A caster 60 who makes no effort to raid will likely have around 3500 hitpoints and 4500 mana. A same class caster who wears the best raid gear will have 5000 hitpoints and 8000 mana. These are example numbers, but the % increase is roughly accurate. In some cases the better geared player will have things that increase their spell damage, so they may be consistently doing 25% more damage than the poor guy. In addition to just the armor (which gives all the stat and damage bonuses), there are a variety of trinkets and toys, some of which can give a big benefit.
When it's all said and done, a poorly geared player with good skill will be hard pressed to beat a well geared player with mediocre skill. This means that gear > skill. And since it took vast amounts of time to get the gear, time > skill.
There was a game, long ago... oh wait, it's still humming along, albiet with small playerbase, called Ultima Online. It's been going for 8 years, and I've not seen it since beyond the first 18 months (when I quit), but at that time there were very few magical items. Players actually ran around wearing plain old gear. In WoW you've got stuff like the Archer's Leggings of the Wolf/Bear/Eagle/..., and there are so many types and variations that I'd guess the item database for WoW is orders of magnitude larger than many other MMORPGs. In UO you had (IIRC) cloth, leather, chainmail, or plate boots. In UO if you needed a new sword, you paid a player (Grandmaster Blacksmith typically) to make you a shiny new katana, or halberd, or whatever. In UO, skill > gear, because everyone had basically the same gear.
WoW is hopelessly broken because it follows in the footsteps of EQ (and Diablo) by making magical named items the norm. It's like trying to imagine getting rid of all foods except dessert, and then going so far as to make all desserts just different arrangements of icing. What was once special is now utterly commonplace.
The PvP "honor" system is similarly broken. It rewards time spent doing Quake-style deathmatch zerging with honor kills, and the more honor kills you get, the higher rank you get. There is much greater reward for mindless repetition than there is for skill and teamwork. It's worse now even as people have figured out how to manipulate the Battlegrounds system to ensure easy victory for their team. Consequently, many level 60 Battlegrounds games are utterly one-sided honor point farming sessions that last 6 minutes each.
And there are 5+ million rats pressing that cheese button every night.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Whoever marked your post as troll is dumb in the head. You said precisely what I was going to.
Anyone who looks in video games for lessons on how to live your life has *already* failed at life. And no, taking down Nefarian does not make you a better person.
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
If you want reality then go to work. If you want entertainment it's hard to beat a good video game. I think it's absurd to try and draw relationships between the two. If you do then you prob have more problems then this.
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
This guys, to me, sounds like a whining gamer who is having trouble playing World of Warcraft. He makes the argument that World of Warcraft teaches gamers the evil lesson of "time > skill" while I would argue that this is almost completely false. Yes, in this game, if you invest a lot of time you get an advantage, but it is no substitute for skill. Truly skilled players can still outthink, outmaneuver, and ultimately outplay players with excellent weapons/armor but who are novices in the art of fighting. First of all, this game was not built for player versus player action originally anyway, so arguments as to it's player versus player lessons aren't really worth the time of typing them out. If he speaks of mainly player versus environment scenarios, then yes, this is what the game is teaching. It is teaching people that working together in large coordinated groups can accomplish much more amazing and beneficial results than one person operating as a lone wolf.
Since when?
There hasn't been a MMORPG out to this date that required any skill. Sure, the people who put in countless hours and have no life will tell you they got uber weapon A and uber armor piece B because they have skill and took down a specific mob with help of their 60 friends on a raid but in the end, it was the time they put in. Skill had nothing to do with it.
In fact, I think the reason skill is not needed is why these games are so popular. You really don't have to do much except let the system handle your attacks for you with "auto-attack" - you just need to be online playing 12+ hours a day.
If you don't enjoy it, by all means don't play. It is a game after all, and the point is to have fun. If you aren't then find something else. But please spare us the self-righteous insults, m'kay?
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
That getting drunk is fun and makes you do silly stuff, but doesn't really have any bad consequences. Good lesson for the kids. :)
Ok, essentially in the real world skill builds over time so that your success rate on a task increases while having to spend less time to achieve it. Internally, you keep that skill.
In video games, we have a problem, classically shown in sports games. If I am supposed to be playing a baseball game, and I am playing Barry Bonds, I'm supposed to be one of the best. But, as a novice player, I clearly may not be. So, what to do? The disconnect from the player occurs when I sit there and am represented by Barry Bonds, but I strike out too often. The player may not have the skill that is supposed to be represented by the avatar they inhabit. A good game copes with this transparently, but it's a tricky problem.
Now, the same thing happens in WoW. Basically, if I take a lvl 60 character and hand it to a newbie, s/he may not have the skill I have, but one swing of that sword from that character will do the damage corresponding to a lvl 60. We all know how non-difficult swinging a sword is in WoW, and it's designed this way to separate the skill so you DON'T have lvl 1's taking out lvl 60's.
Chess analogies don't hold here, because the player is generic, and everyone has the same skills/pieces/abilities. However, games of that sort are limiting in many ways. RPG's have traditionally had to balance the fact that players of different skill levels have different abilities and items, and therein lies the challenge.
The author of the piece clearly isn't differentiating between different game styles, and the "lessons" learned clearly aren't applied across games. Unless WoW is the first (and only) game you ever play, players will quickly learn that being a master at chess may not help you play Robotron.
How is this not like real life? One guy can learn some impressive martial arts skills. However, that person will always fall to to the one with superior time, technology, or numbers. It is for this reason that police forces are comprised of mostly normal individuals and yet are able to maintain order for the most part. It is also for this reason that warfare has become a matter of who can build the most planes and bombs. Certainly, WWI era fighting aces may have been more skilled, but that ace will always lose to a guided missle.
In fact, all of the key points in TFA seem to be rejections of the world we live in:
My conclusion is that the author of TFA has a problem with the way the world actually is. While I've never played WoW, from the description it sounds to me as if WoW teaches truths far more universal than Street Fighter and it's ilk. The world of Street Fighter is the world of the action movie where The Hero can overcome All Adversity and Live Happily Ever After. Games that teach that sentiment seems to me to be far more dangerous to their players than WoW.
From the author's bio:
So this guy has twitch skills, but no time. And he's written an article complaining that WoW rewards time more than skill. I can't help but feel that the complaint is really only a valid complaint for the author. So then the question is, is the author raising a valid flaw in WoW's game balance and to answer that we have to ask "How many of WoW's players feel the same way as a multiple-time national Street Fighter champion?" Pretty few I'd imagine.
I haven't played WoW, but I've played DAoC and Raph Koster's Star Wars Galaxies. I had a lot of "fun". I'm glad that my progression was not linked to my ability to compete in joystick twitching contests against Street Fighter Champions.
At some level the author seems to be suggesting that in the real world, skill is more valuable than time. If we ignore the fact that the author is ignoring the many skills of WoW players, e.g. social skills, marketing skills, leadership skills, and accept his premise, do we find agreement in the real world? Honda makes many more cars than TVR. Honda's are assembled by people with less skill than the TVR engineers. Is an individual Honda worth more than an individual TVR? No. Is Honda as an entity worth more than TVR? Oh boy yes.
To teach anyone that maximizing one's personal skill is the way forward in life would be to fail to acknowledge that humans achieve much more in groups.
i thought it just made everyone racist?.... damn aliance care bears....
I just recently started playing WoW after avoiding it like the plague (as many others have done so and continue to do). I do have to agree in some aspects it's a matter of time vs. skill, but let me make a note there. I'd definitely take a hard working employee who's not quite as skillful over a lazy employee who is skillful. For a simple reason that I can trust the hardworking employee, when given a task, to do his best, spend lots of time working on it, devote his energy to it, etc. In the end, I'd trust the resutls more. The lazy employee, though he might have advantages in skill, I'd be worried if he tried a shortcut that ignored a problem or if he would not get the job done or was goofing off instead of working.
Second, WoW has BOTH aspects of things. I definitely think skill comes into play - particularly social interaction skills. I've played on my own for a while, and you really have to pay attention to how you organize your items/abilities/etc. to survive. At the higher levels of the game - this situation is MANDATORY. You can NOT get the best items in the game, nor operate decently at the higher levels without assistance. Just spending more time won't grant near as much when compared to someone with skill.
Let me explain. To get the best items in the game, you have to do Player vs. Player. You also need to do "Raids". Both systems require you to work with other people to complete the various tasks. The inability of a player to operate efficiently in a group or in a battle makes that player a liability. I've kicked several people from my group because they didn't know what they were doing and got the rest of us killed. Afterwards, I refused to have anything to do with such players. This issue becomes much MUCH more noticeable at higher levels where your chances of dying increase, and your dependency on other players increase.
SO, lots of time IS required, but so is lots of skill. Skill in working with other people effectively, skill in learning how to play the system, etc.
To summarize. Time > Skill is NOT alien to people who actually work for a living, and don't want to "just get by". You need Time && Skill. WoW can be initially played with lots of time, but eventually requires more skill than Time.
I agree as well. I only wish I had mod points.
Cry more noob. lrn 2 raid.
A lot of people will say that WoW actually starts at level 60, nothing comes to a halt except for xp/level. There's still the whole items, raid, pvp, etc. part of the game.
It really depends on how you look at it.
Unions function just like this: Time -> Seniority -> Paid more. Same thing as thinking time invested entitles you to reward.
So this concept is hardly foreign. It's just foreign to people that actually work for a living.
Let's see..
Time spent > skill employed
Group > individual
+ Xenophobic nationalism?
Turning Japanese, I think I'm turning Japanese, I really think so!
I think MMOs have picked up and accurately translated a few Japanese cultural traits. Further, I think Blizzard - often known as a refiner, rather than an innovator - has captured this spirit in full.
http://www.wowglider.com/
- Right....wrong....I'm the guy with the gun.
I'm an introvet myself, and having to -- feeling forced to -- hook up and coordinate with massive numbers of other players (turning game play into more of an 'obligation' than fun) in order to progress is a real turn-off.
I was originally attracted to this game by the notion that I could "quest with other people, alone". When that turned out to not be the case, I decided not to bother purchasing the game at all. And I haven't to this day, and am unlikely to in the future at this point.
So in essence, I'm all about his #4, and it was a deal-killer for me. If it had let me get in and quest alone for a while and feel productive and unforced to get into huge groups, etc., I might have ultimately warmed up to that idea over time.
While I do think the author is taking things too seriously, I think he has a lot of valid points of criticism of the overall game design, especially when it comes to the terms of service issue.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
Just like real life. Going to give that up as well?
Of course we learn from games.
We learn from anything in life. Games reflect our feelings
our sense of action, our sense of adventure, our sense of wanting
to be the "hero" of our boring every-day. Why do you think
you go to the movies? Same thing! We want to be entertained!
The Good thing about videogames compared to videos/movies is that
you're not a passive audience - your're watching and participating
and you're solving PUZZLES! This increases your IQ and it also
CAN increase you responce to unknown situations.
Several tests indicate that video-game players increase their
awareness and responce time compared to those who don't!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
As much to the dismay of gamers, Blizzard and every other major game developer out there exist to fulfill their primary goal: to MAKE MONEY.
While it would be nice to have more of skill based element in WoW, they are constrained by a few variables:
1: Technical limitations, for example: Latency. I've been playing WoW for quite some time now, and I remember when they released the pvp honor system patch. The first day I loaded up the game, it was a lag nightmare. I was at the fort in Stranglethorn Vale, along with roughly 80 fellow horde members. My chat log start spamming with ppl yelling "THEY ARE COMING!!", and I roughly 200 alliance started to steam roll us. It was beyond laggy. We crashed the server. Several times. The server was Mannoroth. Massive pvp raids are not that massive in WoW, which is a shame.
2: Appeal to a wide audience. This generally means the Lowest Common Denominator, as in your average run of the mill gamer. If you cater too much to the hardcore gamer, guess what: someone else will create a game that WON'T and will take your subscribing members away. You wanna tell that to their investors?
3: Appeal to the narrow audience. I.E. the hardcore gamer. Or in this case, the hardcore group of gamers. You know who they are: the ones that got to Onyxia the first 2 weeks of release. The ones that killed Nefarious the day Blizzard released the 'cockblock.' These are the ones that generate the most noise in the gaming community, the ones that make the game alive. These are the players that average players look at in awe at the type of gear they are wearing (2nd tier epics), the title they hold (High Warlord Someandsuch) and the mounts they ride ("What the hell is that? That doesn't look like a wolf at all!"). They are what the average player looks up to and goes "Wow, I wanna be just like that someday.." and drives them keep playing (and keep paying). What do you think will happen when the hardcore group 'beats' WoW the first two weeks of playing? What's their incentive to continue paying the monthly fee? It's not called the Treadmill (or the Grind) for nothing.
The World of Warcraft did not create the beast, it was created by it.
That if you have money, you can forego a lot of hard work while keeping a bunch of chinese employed.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
This is idiocy. Of course time > skill ;)
The example given with the UI artist is not substantiated in any way, shape, or form. It would make more sense that an average UI artist could create something on par with a brilliant UI artist if the average one invested the time.
Methinks the writer of the article is just pissed off about something or the other and wants to rant. Much like me.
But I'm in Mexico, on a beach, with free booze, so I don't care.
"1. Investing a lot of time in something is worth more than actual skill." Hmm, maybe that's why I play Guild Wars...
have you read the Moderation Guidelines Addendum?
It like to be shown one person that got rewarded in WoW for spending time. Actually it's the other way around: coordinated groups of skilled people get molten core done in 3-5 hours and receive more rewards (killing all bosses = more drops) than the "improvers" who spend 20 hours bickering and not getting the very basic concepts of teamplay in this world.
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
The great minds of our civilization, notwithstanding - our entire society was built by groups. The solo accomplishments of Einstein, Newton and other great inventors and philosophers are fine and all, but their accomplishments are pretty meaningless if there wasn't a social group to benefit from them.
I constantly here people equate how hard they worked on something to how much time they spent on it. It has nothing to do with that. Work smarter, not harder, eh?
Anyways, being really good at what you do in comparison to your peers is really advantageous as it allows you to be a bumb and still get your work done at a faster pace and with superior quality affording you more luxuries/savings.
But this also gets you in trouble, as many things in life seem/are easy you don't know how to work really hard to accomplish something hard that will take time. I mean you can, but it's weird to have to really spend time on something in your domain. Humbling anyways.
Ah well.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
On the issue regarding the time spent vs the rewards, I believe the difference lies in that there are creative and non-creative skills/jobs. When designing a new chair, I would prefer a guy that does less work/hr, but produces better quality work. But when the product is ready for production, I want people who just pump them out, with only the minimal skill required to make said product.
This concept is very hard to create in a game, since there are usually very rigid game rules that need to be followed. For example, in most games that have crafting, you don't really have an unlimited range of things you can craft. Ultimately, you can only craft the things the game designers allow, the only skill required is clicking a button. Same goes for gathering items, etc.
Anyway, no one should be learning anything from WoW in the first place. It is a game. Like many others have said before, just enjoy it without looking for any deeper meaning.
...hammering away at enough typewriters for long enough, we'd have all the works of Shakespeare. Therefore, on the timescale of eons, lower skill applied for a longer period of time can equal greater skill applied for a short period of time.
If you want fairness and good values for your kids then don't abdicate the responsibility to schools, games or others.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The issue isn't about what lessons WoW is teaching. Basically, it's about a social sickness that pervades the game.
That's probably a little harsh. I played the game for a bit and it was pretty fun going through the very absorbing storyline-like quests. Like most people, once I hit 60 it was a pretty emty field. There was nothing mre besides Battlegrounds and 40-man raids. My guild wasn't large enough to do that (and we kept loosing players to "big-name" guilds which were more often than not the haven of assholes and jerks, but who did Molten Core and Zul'Gurab weekly) so we tried to settle for Dire Maul runs and pickup Battlegrounds fights. (You can tell that those went really well.)
The social sickness comes in, in that WoW fosters an insanely intense us-vs-them philosophy, and not only between the two factions -- that's a given, though I wish it could have been handled better. It's that even within a faction, there is intense rivalry, bickering, and TEH DRAMA!!!1! which turns otherwise rational people into frothing Greater Internet F*ckwads. It can make a person sick at times. Oh, and God forbid you disagree with someone. Forget about reasonable, rational dialogue. 'Cry more, noob.' 'It's fine, learn 2 play.' Yeah. Lots of good dialogue going on there, The old saying was that if assholes were airplanes, battle.net would be an airport. WoW very much lives up to that. See this article for an excellent discussion about this and related issues.
So, what to do? Kowtow and beg guys like Pals 4 Life or Banana Boyz to take you in and hope that they'll deign to let you do an MC or Onyxia run, after leaving a small guild of folks whom you've played with for months and been good friends with? Level up another character to 60... and lather, rinse, repeat? 'Learn 2 play?' Nah. There are better things to do with your time. If you can deal with the culture of immaturity in WoW, and if you can pump 40+ hours a week into it... more power to you. Just don't start whining when you fail to develop decent communication skills. It's fine, learn 2 live.
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
You're talking about the Labor Theory of Value, which says that all value is derived from somebody's labor; thus management provides no value beyond the labor they put it. Yes, it's a now-discredited economic idea promulgated by unions, socialists, and other communists. Economists have replaced it with the subjective theory of value -- which says "If you're selling something, it's only worth what someone else will pay for it." Or to put it in modern-day terms, "If you try to sell it on EBay, and you get no bidders, it's worth nothing; throw it out or keep it yourself."
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Last I checked WOW was for entertainment purposes only. Just thought I'd point that out.
Games often offer players worlds where rules, standards, and rewards are very different from the real world.
"Grand Theft Auto appears to be about shooting cops and hookers, but it's actually a game of exploration and freedom."
Oh come on. Don't try to falsely elevate GTA to prove your point. It really IS about shooting cops and hookers. Sticking "freedom" in your conclusion doesn't make it right. Or would you consider a game that lets you violate virtual pre-teens with broomstick handles "a game of exploration and freedom"?
ok, try to follow this buisness model, there are lots of people that don't have much skill, but they want to think that they do .... so we tap into that market by substituting time for skill. that way every one can play and have fun. you may be climbing an endless level ladder, but given enough time you can be really nasty. so spend a few months leveling and send me your 19.95 each month, and you can live in a virtual world where you are respected, nay feared because you have nothing better to do. doesn't bug me just keep the fees comin, i've got a mansion to pay for.
Hmm... I always thought that video games were designed to ESCAPE reality. You know... that reality that I suck at pretty much everything, and can never get ahead in? Of course I could be wrong about this... As I am usually wrong about everything else... Oh well, I'm gunna go play some video games now :)
Well, I learned from Steel Panthers W at W how to assault anti-tank positions and how to counterattack with Panthers. These all came in handy in my real world job of Field Marshall.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Go around shooting cops and prostitutes and youll get rich. Learn it well.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
This guy's got a serious disconnect somewhere. I've got a CS degree from a nice 4-year school. Most who know me who would swear that stands for Counter-Strike, though, not Computer Science.
Even with my four years of advanced tactical training, I'm pretty sure I couldn't realistically (and more importantly, -shouldn't-) expect to sit on a rooftop somewhere and headshot a terror suspect with a pistol from 15 stories up. Likewise, having invested more hours than I care to think about in World of Warcraft, I don't expect to be able to walk outside, turn into a bear, and tank a core hound that just happens to be wandering down my street. It's just not going to happen.
I guess slamming the games is just easier than admitting your own delusions.
If you work at a company where it is truly believed that skill > time, never ever quit. Most of the working world still values time spent working far more than daily/weekly/etc productivity. I generally get yelled at for not taking long enough to do things, because my consulting company bills by the hour, and if I haven't maximized billable hours," then I'm in trouble. Never mind that I'm keeping clients happy, thereby generating repeat business, which is far more valuable to my company than a one-off day at a one-time client.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
Sirlin writes from the perspective that, at their core, all competitve activities are the same, whether they be video games, card games, other games, or real life. His philosophy is simple: "play to win". In fact, if you Google "play to win", one of his articles on his site (sirlin.net)comes up in the first page.
His argument would be that competitive activities that have lots of room in their "strategy space" are good ones. Activities that quickly expose the fact that there are only a few (or possibly just one) viable strategies in it are inferior. This is why he likes games like Street Fighter, Starcraft and Warcraft, as they have many opportunities to reward strategic, skillful play, and dislikes WoW, as there's little strategy, skill, or thought in just mindlessly "levelling up".
Personally, I agree with him that if you are going to participate in a competitve activity (and I would place "real life" in that category), you should do whatever it takes to win, provided that you stay within the rules of the activity.
I would agree that time is not greater than skill; however I would also argue that skill is not greater than time. If anything they are orthogonal, and there are some situations where you can't replace one with the other, and others where they are both necessary. Now, having the skill to recognize this, and taking the time to recognize this will save you a bunch of time and help make sure your skills aren't wasted.
Nathan's blog
Can't the journey be more rewarding than the end finish?
the entire point of the game is to keep paying that monthly fee.
so, of course, they're going to make everything take exorbitant amounts of time.
don't like it? don't play it!
it's just an AOL chat room with monsters anyway.
They're using their grammar skills there.
It seems that you're the only who learns from WoW.
Remember, quality of content > number of posts.
Such as ..
- Leeroy Jenkins has chicken
- Chuck Norris is so fast, he can run around the world and punch himself in the back of the head.
- Hot Night Elves aren't always what they appear to be.
... 4tl! DiRL IMO.
World of Warcraft teaches one thing very effectively: log on and play more World of Warcraft. Of course they REWARD you for playing longer! They WANT you to play longer! Some people out there will just have to have level 60. Normally they'd "play well" and get there fast, but in this case "play long" is what has to be done instead.
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
http://www.despair.com/consulting.html
I have a friend who is addicted to WoW. He doesn't belong to any big guild and it has been long since he got to lvl 60. He basically plays everyday for long hours the tiny content WoW offers to small (10 people) guilds and solo players.
What I have observed when he rants about the game is that he truly thinks the game is about skill rather than about time investing. He is obsessed with the unfairness of players with epic equipment (which is obtained in 40-people raids) killing him again and again. I have never told him, but he is clearly wasting the time he spends playing, in terms of achieving goals in the game. He simply plays, without doing what he is supposed to do to continue powering up his character, yet he thinks that time he spends is reflected on his skill.
So in my opinion the bad thing WoW is teaching is making players think what they've achieved through routine and time, but not difficulty, should be admired and respected. They pour hours of plain work into something without really worrying about efficiency or hard work, and they expect the time they spent to be rewarded.
It's like going to work for 10 years at 8am but only sit on a chair the whole day without doing nothing, and still expect to be well paid.
---------
Thinking never hurt anybody --MacGyver
The idea that more time invested yields more rewards and more power is very much a reflection of the real world. In fact, I find most of WoW's design has strong analogies in the real world.
At first, I absolutely hated the idea that more time invested trumped more skill. It was unfair and frustrating. Most of my online play had been in the form of the various Unreal Tournament style games and the idea that I'd be competing with people who had better weapons and armor and abilities simply by having gotten there first infuriated me.
The key here.. and I can't stress this enough.. is that more time invested trumps skill *to a point*. Yes.. there will be the odd player who powered their way to a level 80 epic weapon but in general, how good you are at the game is very much determined by how well you understand it.
In real life, you could be a really great programmer but if you haven't finished third grade yet you won't be doing senior developer work yet. By the same token, once you've gained a solid education in how to run your character (often times through repetitive annoying tasks) it's all about how you plan and invest your time as to what kind of rewards you get and at that point it's more about skill than it is about time invested.
I first pushed a single character to level 60, never bothering to start an alt. I pushed at 60 for a while and then started working on some other characters. Suddenly I found myself in a low level instance with a group that was a bit underpowered and was absolutely tearing the place up. I asked around and everyone there was very experienced. That's when it hit me... my hatred of the inequalities of being low and ill-equipped blinded me to the fact that it wasn't level but understanding and strategy that made the difference as to how good you were. I recently found myself in an end game instance with a group of brand new L60's and it drove the point home. They were all over the place, consistently using bad strategy and it was slow and hard and very wipe prone.
Albert Einstein accomplished far more in the field of physics by himself during off-time as a patent clerk than a 40-man raid of so-so physicists ever would.
But here's where the author gets it exactly backwards. Einstein wasn't born a L60 physicist, he had to learn it and he learned it very well gaining a lot of respect along the way. He wasn't a patent clerk doing physics, he was a physicist working an unrelated day-job waiting for a good physics job to open up. He came up with his theories and he didn't just post them on his door and walk away.. he gathered a 40 man raid group and had them try out his ideas and test and think and experiment and put them up against the toughest of problems and see if they held up. Einstein, the father of the nuclear age, never worked on the Manhattan project, and never designed a power plant. It was his ability to come up with an idea and communicate it to others and to get them working on it too that made his work so powerful. The same skills are needed to be good at WoW.
The author also objects to big rewards only coming from large groups. To that I'd respond that figuring out how to get a rogue to perform at optimal efficiency against a monster is a FAR FAR easier problem to understanding how to get 40 people in 8 different classes to perform at optimal efficiency. This is why 40 man raids are hard. This is why 40 man raids deserve better loot. It's because it's a far harder problem to solve. Yes, coordination is an added obstacle but that's not all. The strategy involved is much more complicated as well.
I'll also point out that using a great strategy if you are self employed will make far less money than if a 40 person company all follows a great strategy. That reflects reality very well.
The article also mentions the honor system and it's crack like nature. To that I'd point out that the real word has crack too. Just because it's there, doesn't mean you need to get addicted to it.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
It doesn't strike me as "more difficult" to write a bot which grinds predictable enemies all day, than a bot which actually has to think about strategies in a game like StarCraft. Seeing as how the AI in StarCraft pretty much wiped the floor with me every time I played against it, I'm sure one could do the same for WoW.
This idea that time > skill is not the best way to do things, but it is completely understandable.
Blizzard cannot create an infinite amount of content, so in order to sustain the game (and their profits of course) they have literally no choice but to turn elements of the game into time-sinks. It's the only way they can encourage most people to continue playing over long periods of time, rather than quitting after they 'beat' the game.
This applies even to dynamic things such as PvP. Speaking from experience, PvPing as an organized team is not a dynamic thing. After the first few times you develop very clear strategies which you then mindlessly repeat in 99% of future games. The limited number of opponents means that after a week you have probably already played extensively with the majority of the opponents you will ever encounter. At this stage, the game is pretty pointless. The only reason you continue to play it is that time, rather than skill, is a factor in your eventual rewards (rank, items, etc).
This effect is even more pronounced in PvE, where there really is limited if any choice in how you complete an encounter.
I'm not advocating this; I really wish this wasn't the way things worked. But it is, and it will continue to be until there is some fundamental breakthrough in how MMO content is created.
Everything I needed to know, I learned in Pacman.
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
I challenge you to a game of Madden 06! There's a game that takes some skill and not 32 hours a week to be good at.
There's no place like ~/
... has tought me to steal every single thing not nailed down as soon as the owner turns his back.
While I do think there should be more solo content, there are problems with that as well. Making a quest that is challenging for a solo player is quite difficult, considering that certain classes are easier to solo with than others. A quest that is hard for a warlock or hunter would probably be near-impossible for a priest. Also, I think he's diminishing the difficulty of raid encounters by implying that 40 mediocore players could do them. With strategies being leaked by the various uberguilds, a group of 40 mediocore players can manage some of the high-end stuff, but not without falling flat on their faces repeatedly for weeks if not months. Even the top guilds have to try various strategies to get that first kill of a raid boss. With each kill, people become more comfortable with the encounter, and also gain a little bit of wiggle room with new and better equipment, which I think is a fitting reward for the time spent to coordinate 40 people working near-flawlessly on a boss. I do agree that time does not equal skill, and I'm sure there are some people out there that would be willing to put on some non-epic gear to beat the pants off the author in a duel. :)
Why don't blizzard and others create servers for players who prefere to play less than 1h a day ? Since they don't make money on the actual number of hours you play, they shouldn't care.
Knowing that I'd have to compete against hard-core players is definitely one reason I do not even try MMPORPG ...
He did say, "invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration". Which does translate into those who work harder and longer achieve more than the "super-stars" who are here today gone tomorrow.
Mozart was a flaming blowtorch, but Beethoven was just as good painstakingly working at it note for note.
Heard of the tale of the tortoise and the rabbit?
...Jack Thompson doesn't think of this.
With time and practice. Time is how we become talented. You practice and practice something and that is how you get good at it. It doesn't matter if it is drawing, painting, sculpting, skating, fighting or shooting. More practice makes for more talent.
Based on his little diatribe, it seems that he's an antisocial, competitive gamer who has good reflexes and thinks that skill should trump all and that something isn't a good game unless it lets you dominate some other player. His argument is essentially that if a game doesn't cater to his particular gaming desires then it is meant for intellectually / morally inferior gamers. Some of us actually like interacting with other people. Some of us don't exactly have great hand-to-eye coordination but are good at other things. According to him, we shouldn't be allowed to have fun because all games should be made for him and not for us.
Screw him and the high horse he rode in on.
There's a website where table-top game designers and players gather to discuss the theory of gaming -- specifically focused on what makes games fun called The Forge. A lot of what they say there applied quite well to PC and console games as well. In particular, there's a theory of three types of gaming goals that a player typically has. Broadly defined, these are:
(If you have any interest in table-top gaming, I highly recommend that you read the site's articles section, starting with System Does Matter and the much more long-winded GNS and Other Matters of Role-Playing Theory after having some time to think about and digest the first short article. I digress, though...)
Players of games usually have one of these three goals as their primary definition of "fun," though many people can appreciate more than one type. Generally, if you're not getting what you want out of a game (challenges, exploration, or stories), you're not having fun.
MMORPGs like World of Warcraft are primarily focused around exploration with light challenges placed primarily to add difficulty to exploration. Fighting monsters in general is not as much fun as fighting new monsters until you get to high levels. Then the game shifts to cooperative challenge-oriented play once you've already explored most of what the game has to offer in terms of your character, equipment, monsters, and geography. There are skills required to master Level 60 play, but they're very different from the twitch-reflex skills that the author of the article has (and it requires a lot of patience and teamwork to get to these parts of the game). They're strategic skills which he may or may not appreciate.
Anyway, this was a very long way to go just to illustrate my point. There are different goals that gamers can have, and this guy is an arrogant jerk for slamming everyone else for having fun doing things that he doesn't like. There are more than enough games out there that satisfy his style of play, and he should realize that not every game has to be made for him.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
In real life you have the exact same mentality in lots of places, at least where I come from. If you have a long education (have spend alot of time on it) you are automatically given a higher salary (more time -> "deserve reward"). It does not matter if another person is more skilled than the person with a long education, in the same job the one with the longer education gets more. The one who may just have a natural talent for that type of job and perhaps is alot better than the guy with a long education, is "not deserving of a reward" and thus gets a lower salary. That is not true of all types of jobs, but it is true of alot of jobtypes that I know.
WoW is about entertaining players, and rewarding them, in return for the money they spend playing the game. Now what's hard to understand about that?
Players who don't want lengthy entertaining, but a skills match, play UT, CS, or maybe some kind of strategy game.
RPGs have never really been about skill, but about entertaining in return for a lot of time.
Ummm... time invested is not more valuable than skill. Time invested IS skill. Do you think your "talented" graphic artist sprang from the womb, pencil in hand, and immediately started producing fantastic work with ten times less effort than everyone around him? Did your star programmer start producing his best work when he was five?
Time invested is directly proportional to skill. Your graphic artist may not be investing very much time into each of his projects right now, but it took years of practice and disciplined study of his art (or her art, blame English's lack of gender neutral pronouns for this particular bias). Your star programmer spent a great deal of time learning how to program, learning new languages, learning new patterns and techniques and developing new habits before he was capable of producing the great work you now expect from them.
All "talented" individuals invested just as much time and effort in what they do as people who are less "talented". They just made that investment at an earlier time. They spent countless hours drawing or tinkering with computers when they were young, when they were still in school or at some point prior to working on the project you now see them pump out at great speed.
Talent is a myth, a myth that serves as a convenient excuse for those people who haven't invested the time and effort into mastering something. "I can't draw/program/whatever because I lack the talent for it," is the same as saying, "I wish I could draw/program/whatever without putting any effort into learning how."
I used to believe in the myth of talent myself. I was a software developer who wanted desperately to be a designer, but I thought I couldn't draw worth a damn and convinced myself that I would never be able to cut it in the industry. I stayed in the job I hated until I completely burned out and could take no more than wound up delivering packages for a living. Finally, I pulled my head out of my ass and decided to return to school to study Industrial Design.
Having never taken an art course ever before starting this new challenge, I am now pretty good at drawing, painting and 3D design. I have no "talent", but I do have skill and that skill continues to grow because I continue to invest time into improving it.
Meanwhile, my friend who desperately wants to write but has convinced herself that she isn't "talented" enough to continues to work dead-end jobs and basically uses the talent-excuse to make herself feel better about not pursuing her dream. It never occured to her that even Hemingway started out writing garbage that no one would want to read. Listen to Gibson talk about how he started writing and how long and painful a process it was for him.
Talent doesn't exist. Skill is a direct consequence of time. WoW teaches exactly the right lesson. Time invested is not better than skill, it is equivalent to skill. Now if only people would take the lesson outside of their game (their safe environment) and into their lives (their risky environment), they'd all be much better off (and probably play less WoW).
In WoW when you die you lose TIME. (Have to run back, and man sometimes I have to run for a long ass time to get to my corpse).
And after all, the whole article is about the more TIME you put into WoW the better you are...
So whats the worst concequence of dieing? Take away the TIME!
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
Well.. the thing is, time isn't directly rewarded, althought the gameplay is so mundane that it often may seem like it. What's actually rewarded is repetitive action.
Also I find the idea that "games should teach lessons" to be absurd. The reason games are appealing is that they reward behavior which is either a) not possible in the real world, or b) not generally rewarded in the real world. WoW falls into the latter category. I think one of the reasons games of its type are so popular is that there are clearly defined rewards (Ding!) and clearly defined paths to those rewards (kill 5,000 goblins); something which is largely lacking in the real world. (Not to mention, it's a classic example of Pavlovian training). Games are entertainment after all, and most entertainment is escapist by nature. Some entertainment may provide valuable and/or insightful lessons, but that's not its primary function, and "entertainment" which focuses on teaching lessons is often not very entertaining at all.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
If you look really close at the environment most games comes from: time is rewarded over skill. This is problem that plague the whole game programming industry. It doesn't really if you got excellent skills in programming/graphics/sound... If you aren't ready to pull 60 - 90 hour weeks you are most probably not "skilled" enough. Or as they say in the biz, "commited to the project".
It is not something that WOW or any other generic MMORPG invents, that is the way that our culture see things, through the average middle class worker. If you have to invest more time creating something then its got to be worth more than the something other person did in less time, otherwise is a waste of personal resources.
When you're using a product that charges by the month for usage, you'd better expect it to reward continued subscribership. If the publishers of Street Fighter had been able to charge for monthly usage, they wouldn't have given you instant access to everything contingent on your skills. If you are very skilled and have subscribed a month, and some toddler can barely press the buttons (but whose parents have steadily paid the monthly fee for 2 years), you're going down because you haven't been putting out long enough.
I find the slashdot priesthood's control of this forum to be just as odious as Blizzard's emperious policing of WoW. In both cases you have a mob in which individuals are singled out and judged by unwritten rules by an invisible elite and given summary judgement. Try making positive comments about the Bush administration, or negative comments about global warming, the space elevator, or Star Wars and watch your privileges get suspended for 'bad posting'.
an ill wind that blows no good
Compare that to Doom 3, where the shit WILL hit the fan if you try to
stock up on any and all valuable supplies.
I don't understand how this got published in Gamasutra - it's a rant by some guy who's clearly burnt out on WoW, with logic that defies explanation.
;p). His solution is to rant about it with flawed analogies like the one above, created just to prove his point and push some anti-WoW angst.
No skill in WoW? How do you explain the masses of PvP videos released everyday? How did names like Drakedog become famous? Dumb luck? The whole "lead programmer is awesome" analogy is flawed too, how many years experience do they have compared to your assistant programmers?
But this points to a bigger problem - how did this even get to Gamasutra? For years now, people like Ernst Adams have been publishing 'design articles' without actually playing games in the last few years, let alone working on them. While this guy has more experience at playing games and making them than Adams, the end point is that he's burnt out and doesn't like/can't get into 40-mans, and doesn't want to craft, or run DM, or PvP for fun instead of grinding (you know, like Street Fighter
Gamasutra needs peer-review, to make sure that good articles get through, and rants are restricted to the letters page.
He thinks rpg's should play like fps games. They are different styles of games. The moral of his story should be "If you don't like rpg's, stick to what you like."
Just as a brief example of my point. His first argument is time > skill. That's a basic staple of rpgs. You are supposed to be playing a role (the fact that nobody really does is beside the point). You are your character, not just an extension of "you" in another environment. Most "skill" elements are then based on your character's skill, not your own twitch reflexes, at least that's the theory. In practice, if two roughly even characters go toe-to-toe in pvp, the more skilled the player, the better chance he has of winning... even again superior opponents.
An rpg let's even those who are reflex challenged play and have a good time.
Evolutionary theory implies the opposite, and is very relevant to the real world: Despite the appearance of skillful design in biological life, no skill was actually involved, only time.
This may be the dumbest editorial I've ever read. He complains about everything. Even collusion with the opposite faction to "fix" games in battlegrounds is not the players fault, its their duty. He claims that it is outrageous that they have rules on genre-appropriate character names. He claims that any loophole, exploit, or ability you can find is legitimate until prevented by hard code. This guy has no credibility and just looks like an idiot making these kinds of claims.
Yea this is just stupid, I just quit WoW too, too much racism and swearing for my taste it just gets old... you get those 14 year old kids who think "oh mom got me this game to babysit me, I am going to swear all I want" Blizzard does nothing about swearing time to try DDO
I was disappointed when I found out that they weren't talking about how WoW teaches you that wolves only eat non-seafood meat, while tigers and such eat both fish and non-seafood meat. In what universe are dogs more picky than cats about food, you ask? Warcraft, of course.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
I skimmed the article and disagree with both the premise and his point by point breakdown of the idea. I speak with some authority here, as my priest on Alleria was a founding officer of Risen, which is currently the most advanced guild in the game world-wide (furthest progression in AQ), and while I no longer play, I'm sure most players will agree with what I'm about to say.
Firstly, in order to measure if time or skill is more important, we must have a basis of measurement for what the goal behind the game truely is. Items? Level? Wealth? Influence? Content defeated? Some people have preferences for any of the above, but I argue that skill is the determining factor in dominance of any of these options.
Time is not the primary requirement needed to advance in World of Warcraft. At the very minimum, a level of skill is necessary to even advance to the second level; surely Mr. Sirlin (the writer of the article we're discussing...) agrees with this concept. In order to advance to the second level, one must have knowledge of how to use skills, read quest dialogs, or at the very least, hit auto-attack. This is the Minimum Requirement necessary to advance to the next level. As you progress through the game, content becomes more difficult. No matter how much time you give the game, if you do not learn more about your class as you progress (thus, upping your "skill"), then you will not advance towards level 60. Thus, some measure of skill is required to reach level 60. In addition, if you are RACING towards level 60, in hopes of beating other players, skill determines the rate at which you advance (meaning that you can do so in less time than other players). I've done this. I promise you, while time is important, skill is four times so. We used a large pool of those first to reach 60 to form our guild on Alleria, and ended up with an extremely talented base of players upon which to build what has become now an incredibly powerful force. You can argue this, but I have emperical data to support my conclusion: skill > time, when leveling.
Wealth: it's all about knowing where to go. This pillar requires more time than anything else, but your skill at the various money-making methods determines your strength in this area too. No matter the time you throw, those who know how to work markets or the best money making areas will have a leg up over the average joe aqcuiring wealth. I'd say it's a fair balance between the two, but some people are just increadibly skilled at making money, and do so without effort, while others struggle to get their level 40 horse by level 45. Conclusion: skill > time.
Items: the best items in the game are only available in dungeons, moreso in raid dungeons. This means that those with the skills necessary to defeat the most difficult content in the game are allowed the best items. You can not walk into a top tier raiding dungeon with 40 random talentless shmucks and expect to defeat anything. It takes practice, knowledge of your class, knowledge of your allies classes, and knowledge of the encounters (which can only be earned through time; but the time required to learn the encounters is directly attributable to talent and skill at the game). The first ones with the best items are generally the best players for their time, who have "mastered" key concepts required to get to the level of play they are at.
Influence... those with the most sway over server politics are those with the most sway with people in general. It takes knowledge of how to work people, and how to get what you want from them. There are some people who are simply incredible at this; it's a skill that can be learned, though some people are just talented to begin with. Time again plays an important role, in that the more time you spend working people, the more influence you have over them. Regardless, if you're a 14 year old speaking leet 24/7, respect will be the last thing you get in return for all of that time. Skill > time, again.
Content. You can't defeat content with time. You can thro
DRM = Digitally Restricted Media. This is a viral sig, pass it on.
At which point in your life did you suddenly realize that you were a highly skilled, trained professional? How did your skills miraculously appear? Mine came from almost 35 years of applying myself and learning skills. You can't pick up a paintbrush and just be an artist, nor can you be "talented" at something and still excel without studying and training. Most people I know with money didn't just find it, they spent years scrimping and saving and investing. Most people I know with possessions didn't get them all at once, they spent their lives gathering them.
You may live in a world of right-place-right-time, look good when the boss is looking and move up, but I think most of us had to spend our lives for our rewards.
Just like the church of WoW teaches us.
Second Life is like the anti-WoW. It's like a mirror image of WoW.
Success in SL comes primarily from creating things, which is a largely (though not exclusively) solitary pursuit. You're allowed and encouraged to sell items, and exchange game money for real-life currency. Skill counts more than time spent in the game. You are allowed and encouraged to join multiple groups. There's little censorship (large areas of SL are "adult" rated). For every bad lesson of WoW exposed in that article, SL appears to teach a corresponding good lesson.
You know games for kids that help them learn maths or other things if an amusing way?
Colosse.
Everything good in life comes from Street Fighter. Winning is a meritocracy, which is some holy thing and should be the decider of all events, fuck all those other virtues. It is the game of kings and a promoter of world peace.
I should be able to rooftop camp and harass people at my whim in WoW. Its just part of the game right? Clearly though, leveling a char to 60 is not part of the game, and should be disallowed, it gives them an unfair advantage. All games are only composed of short 1 minute rounds like Street Fighter. I should be able to abuse the mechanics of the world at my whim, leveling a character to 60 is not part of the normal game mechanics.
I am angry that somebody who plays the game more than me has a "10" next to his name and I only have a "9". Although it means nothing, I think I am so cool that I should just get a "10" anyway, and fuck him, he should get an "8" because it took him too long to get "10".
Persistance and tenacity are stupid, they never solved any problems, if I can't do something in an hour it must be stupid.
As a sophisticated introvert, this game offends me. All raid encounters are mindless, I hear anytime 40 people just stand together the loot just falls from the sky. There should be solo epics that depend on skill, and since I'm so uber, it should only take me an hour to solo a full epic set, otherwise they're just rewarding retards. Again, how dare I ever have to consider other people to succeed in this game, that is not like real life at all. The fact that the game is only online is a novelty, you aren't supposed to group with other people to acomplish goals, and if you do you must be cheating and that isn't part of the game. Street Fighter was cool because it was 1 on 1 and you could really explore your world. Albert Einstein didn't need a raid group, and of course would insist on bitching about the game instead of actually playing it because he is smart and would lose to a bunch of really dumb people who were stupid and made a raid group and went to a dungeon and had fun.
People shouldn't work together to solve problems. They should just stand around and wait for the necessary individual genius to show up and do it for them quickly. Collaboration has never worked.
Guilds could have caused WWII. They are an evil system, people from guilds never speak, hate each other, and never join other guilds. People never group with people not in their guilds. The realm forums are always empty.
I should be able to buy gold on Ebay. That's what a meritocracy is all about.
Mostly I'm just sad this game isn't street fighter. What kind of stupid game isn't street fighter? 1 on 1 with no rules is the way it ought to be. I was playing cards with a friend the other day and I stabbed him in the face to win, because that's meritocracy. Rules are for sissies, especially rules that don't automatically reward the way I want to play the game over everybody else.
It basically comes down to this: It's hard to coordinate 40 people to do anything.. it's almost like a 2nd job, in fact. Trying to build up a good friendly guild to be able to do 40 man instances is a huge pain.
Everyone always wants to go, when you're trying to plan a time, but life intervenes.. People have flat tires, get called in to work, make last minute plans with their significant others, etc etc.
So it leaves the people who cleared off their schedule for that date annoyed, and discouraged.
So I'm in the situation where I've invested a lot of time into a game, have 3 level 60 characters(and yes I know many people have a lot more 60s than that), and am bored with the 5-15 man instances(because I've done literally hundreds of dungeon runs) and can't break into the large raid content easily. Sure, my guild can do hald of ZG pretty easily in 3 hours or so on a weekend afternoon, but to be honest, it's hard to do the later boss encounters unless you have most of your people geared at least partly in epics.
Yes, time >> skill in WoW. It's unfortunate to people that work 40+ a week that all these kids failing their college classes have the best equipment, I guess.. but I can't raid Mon-Sun 6pm to midnight after working 8-5 and live a normal life.. I have to do laundry, eat, clean, and sleep sometime during that nightly period...
I guess the solution would be to be in a guild with people that I don't necessarily like, but have similar schedules as I do. That way we could all log on at the same times instead of being spread out accross different time zones and such, like my current guild is... it's mostly a pure logistical issue, because we have plenty of people with the skills.. it's just getting them all together at the same time.
Try and remember, Joe's 10 hour program might have extra features compared to yours, and Frank's 1 hour one might be completely unstable. . .
If you really want to turn someone nationalist with an MMO, you might consider how Lineage II has been tuned to be Chinese Farmer Friendly. Search for the terms "FinalElf" "Farm the Farmers". You'll find out that farming here is not only encouraged, reporting the violation will only get you banned, (or if they do get banned they just tap 50 other accounts). WoW might have a point where you can do something, but you're going to need heavy duty legal regulation (They're just as xenophobic over there) to keep them in check.
If that doesnt turn you nationalist after a while, you're probably working with them. For you, I say: Cao ni ma de.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
is for porn http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7997646050 642417046&q=internet+for+porn
But, doesn't investing more time in something generally give more rewards from that something? There are obvious exceptions (e.g. someone who is naturally talented can invest less time)...but if i spend more time studying to be a DR, shouldn't that help me be a better DR? If I invest more time in my boxing class, shouldn't that make me a better boxer? That is not a bad lesson to learn. Are there exceptions in this world sure, but not everyone can say their daddy is a millionaire.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
I was particularly amused by this gem: "As an introvert, I'm pretty outraged that this game is marginalizing my entire personality type."
If you don't want to interact with other people, why sir, did you purchase a Massively Multiplayer game in the first place?
Second: Are you unaware that one of the magical things about the personal computer is that it can run all sorts of different programs? This includes lots of other games that might be more suited to your particular personality type! If you don't like WoW, you could go play something else. Imagine that. Finding a reasonable alternative instead of whinging about how the big bad game hurt your feelings. What a novel concept.
For everyone who argues that WoW, or any other MMORPG, is a game only for hardcore gamers, and that they alienate the casual fanbase, which has been argued over and over, I can only say that while I feel their pain, the people at Blizzard are not stupid. This is just standard marketing strategy.
I can tell you that the core base of WoW, from a marketing perspective, will always be for the hardcore segment of the population. This is because they are the ones who will always pay, month after month, for the service, and who will continue to remain loyal to the game for years. This is their core profit center, like it or not. If you look at customers of any industry there are four types of customers:
1. short term, high paying customers - These are casual gamers. They play maybe several months but don't stay on. They lose interest or are alienated by the hardcore players. This is me, btw.
2. short term, low paying customers (they try the trials but never pay for the service)
3. long term, low paying customers Also casual gamers who might start and stop, or decide to play some time later when a trial comes along.
4. long term, high paying customers (hardcore gamers). These guys generate the most profit for the company. They will be around for years after the casual players have decided they don't want to play.
Marketing strategy dictates you make the game most enjoyable for the hardcore gamers, because they will stay on long after the casual gamers have left, and they pay the most. They make the most money for the company, so they will be the ones that are cared for the most. Once the hardcore segment has left, you might as well put a dagger in the project. This is one of the reasons MMORPGs, which unlike most games, require a monthly subscription, will remain the boring levelling treadmill many people detest. Subscription models state that hardcore clients are the best center of profit. Hence the continuance of levelling treadmills. End of story.
1. If you can organize groups, you will get more done than if you work solo. Look at manager's salaries compared to the majority of other professions.
2. Einstein did good work. But he never beat Kazaak. MMORPGs don't teach you how to be a good theoretical physicist.
Some players develop skills in planning.
3. Video games don't really teach planning and coordination. It'd be nice if they did. They may teach basic tactics, but the hallmark of nearly all games is instant gratification in various doses. No video game I've ever played made me any better at project management or scheduling. At best, they've helped to reinforce my understanding of 'just in time solutions.'
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
My dad, who is an avid WoW junkie, says that this is his main complaint about WoW. He thinks that people who get to level 60, for the most part, have done so because they enjoy the game up to that point -- the questing, in other words. Which can almost entirely be done solo, apart from the dungeons, and it's really easy to get a pickup group for those.
But at level 60 you can't quest for advancement... the only advancement potential remaining is gear, which you can get from raids or from PvP. PvP gear only reaches the general level of raid gear when you hit the highest ranks, so only a handful of people on a server can actually get it.
So for the majority of endgame players, raiding is THE form of advancement. And it's totally different in character from the entire game leading up to it.
This explains why his pattern seems to be getting a character to 60 then starting a new alt, repeating ad infinitum.
Note that he switched to WoW from EQ, another game where the endgame was all about the raids. He blames Blizzard's hiring of a bunch of EQ guys to design the high-level content.
(My entire family plays WoW. My mum and dad, both my brothers, my wife, me... it's crazy. My wife and I got into it after visiting my family for Christmas this year and being persuaded to give it a try. It's like crack.)
- "I'll probably get modded down for this."
maybe the problem isn't with the players that play this game perhaps without thinking of this inherited knowledge they're subconsciously learning, but by the programmers who sit around extrapolating what real life lessons they might be learning from playing these games.
And putting more time in does give you bigger rewards for lots of things, maybe not in the computer world, but look at senior tenureship at any company for a good example. Doesn't mean you're the most skilled, just been there longer.
This is a completely flawed and useless arguement. Even more of a waste of time than WoW (if that is possible).
Not all MMORPGs are like this. Guild Wars rewards skill over loot/level.
You guys should really try this game out. It's not about how good your sword/axe/staff is, it's about how good YOU are are using them situationally.
Think of Guild Wars as a professional level MMORPG. Everyone has 'regulation' equipment. No one's stuff is better than anyone elses. After all, Baseball and Football require teams to play with 'regulation' gear. You can't use a corked bat even though it hits farther.
Guild Wars provides a 'level-playing field' that has been lacking from RPGs since the beginning. Oh, and it has MUCH better graphics also.
This article is totally pointless and backwards. The guy got it all wrong.
Who the hell said fast leveling is WoWs prime objective?
I've been registred for 8 months now and am at level 21 with my first character (a Dwarven Priest). Yeah, go ahead, just laugh. I'm laughing at you just now.
*The sound of ten thousand slashdotters spewing ten thousand cups of coffee across their monitors*
Whenever I log in I usually run around join parties here and there do some soloing. Sometime I get a powerleveling rage and do half a bar in one night. But most of the time I just move about and explore the world. And that's where the fun is - if you haven't notived.
It can be real fun btw moving through territory that's 'meant' for 15 levels higher. It takes some real skill to do that. Yeah, leveling is a neat extra but if you're only looking at your bar you might aswell be playing a browsergame. And they're for free.
I sometimes feel pitty for those constatly racing from quest to quest - most of them are probably unemployed and lack the ratrace in real life. I come to WoW to avoid the rat race.
Bottom line:
This article is bullshit. If your into powerleveling - which really is boring and pointless - quit the complaining. At stop saying WoW teaches the wrong stuff. It's a fantasy world, for crikeys sake. Do fantasy stuff or let it be. If there's one thing you'd like to learn from this than maybe it's that leveling isn't what it's all about.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
He's right though, it IS a crappy design.
There is nothing to do at the cap but level a new character, tell me how that is good?
While entertaining to read it doesn't make any sense.
1. I saw it in an earlier comment but let me reiterate. While natural talent does play a role (even in world of warcraft which I will touch upon in a bit). I don't think your user interface artist woke up with mastery of his craft. I imagine either A. countless hours refining his technique/honing his talent and/or B. Countless hours of education/experience. So investing a lot of time does equal better reward. I will also challenge this statement by pointing out that if you have a tenacious motivated and take initiative employee of average skill. I doubt you would not take them over the sloth-like, lackadaisical employee who has better than average skill.
2. see 1. And to add, with regard to PvP, yes you can spend numerous hours in PvP and eventually get the rank you desire. But here is the interesting thing. One. As the player invests more hours playing you are gaining experience in battle, how to attack certain classes, optimal areas to attack, how to work as a team. Etc. And 2 if you take an new player and pit them against an experienced player and both invest equal time. The experienced player will always be higher rank. As they will get more kills and also know to kill certain mobs that yield greater bonuses.
3. Being a fellow introvert you do realize that this is an MMORPG right. And not only that but this is one of the few (if any)that you can actually achieve the highest level in the game and never be in a single party. Want to get a high end game weapon/gear/mount?? PvP. You can achieve it all by yourself. You may not be able to do every single thing in the game (but again you are comparing this to real life. Can you do every single thing by yourself in real life?) Some things do require teamwork, otherwise why would you need a user interface artist ^_^. In any case out of all the games I played this was the first one that did give you the liberty to solo as well as gently introduce you to the possibilities of teaming up with others. To me this is why WoW is successful. You don't get penalized for dying other than a walk back so you can try and kill that mob a million time by yourself if you so desire. And if you'd like you can even ask someone to help. (though not necessary in most cases)
4.see 3. Although your "be alone together", doesn't really hold up again as WoW is one of the few MMORPG's where you can just sit back and enjoy content with everyone else without being "with" anyone else. From their stylized environments, to all the different characters animations. The holiday treats (drink it up with the rest for New Years. Bob for an apple or try on a costume for Halloween etc etc.) Even just watching some of the world events that occur in game all lead to a very well rounded environment.
Lets see can you reach level 60 soloing? Check!
Can you PvP solo Check!
Is Uber gear available to you while soloing? Check!
If you want could you farm all day, amass large quantities of gold and read lore to your introverted hearts content? Well I'll be, Check!
Being a level 60 player since this game came out I would say 85% of my time I spent I do soloing. And I have yet to find a lack of content for me to do, explore or enjoy.
5. Guilds. Yes you can only join one guild but why would this pose a problem for your introverted self? However while I do see your point about your different status in different arenas of gaming/life etc. I don't agree with your statement about it not being reflected in the game. You can be in a guild but not get the same "respect" if you will from someone who is a Marshall in WoW. Likewise you can be a lonely Marshall but get no love b/c of your solitary existence by not being in a guild or even a non-reputable guild. Doesn't emulate life?? First I find it amusing that you would state that there is no constant us vs. them mentality in the real world. Gamer geeks vs. Tech geeks (You suX0r n00b I'm 1337 111111) riiight. Geeks vs. Jocks.... blue-collar vs white collar. de
I'd suggest you change sides and try being GAY...
but I think you are more likely needing to try being STRAIGHT to change sides!
Guild Wars is indeed different, better. Skill is rewarded in GW, not loot, armor or weaponry.
You can solo in GW, but it's not easy. You have to *understand* how your skills work and use them appropriately.
People fed up with WoW should really give GW a try. It's an awesome game.
author of this post is a moron and no more information should ever come out of that person ever again. its a game. poor baby is probably just upset wow doesn't support gays. way to lash back.
fact: microsoft > linux
With a few exceptions, time = skill is the way that RPGs work. It should be no surprise that online RPGs are the same way.
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
Honest question: why, then, is it called Guild Wars? I like to solo; I don't want to be in a 40-man raid
It's called "guild wars" because the game has an optional PvP side to it. A guild can put forward one team to fight against a team from another guild. GW teams have a maximum size of 8 people.
That's all. Just one team against one other team, no huge wars where individuals matter little. And what's more, the PvP is strictly optional, and has no impact whatsoever on the MMO side of GW.
So as you see, it's just a name.
I've seen a lot of posts that in one form or another tried to assert that a high skill level is reached by practicing a lot, i.e. spending a lot of time. Based on that assertion they argue that the article's author's gripe that time should not be rewarded more than skill is based on invalid assumptions.
You haven't read the article.
The author's gripe is that time spent in the game is _directly_ awarded. His own example is that spending a lot of time honing your skills in a game is fine. If the skill level is rewarded, then the time you spent attaining that level is indirectly awarded as well.
In WoW, you enter an instance with 9-39 other people and hardly have to pull your weight. An item drops, people roll on who gets the item. If you're lucky, you get your desired item right away, if not, you have to play that instance lots of times. You spend time to get a reward, but your level of skill is pretty much unimportant (not completely, that's true, you can't behave like an idiot, but that's about all). WoW rewards time spent directly, regardless of how you used that time. I've been in groups of people where the main healer was watching TV and let people die, but he still got a chance to roll on items and won some of them. Even if he had a high skill level, he didn't even need to apply his skill to be rewarded.
And that's what the author's gripe is about. He claims that this sort of thing teaches you that "no effort" should be rewarded in the same way as "lots of effort", basically robbing you of any motivation to put effort into anything. That's teaching the wrong thing to players, because it won't help you in the real world.
The truth is (well, as I see the truth), that the author's a bit idealistic here. In the real world, you'll quite often encounter systems that reward patience more than skill. In the IT sector, for example, it is relatively common to employ people based on what skills they have and what they have _done_. That's laudable, and uncommon. In most other sectors the degree you have (or not) is more important. Now it's entirely possible to get a degree with mediocre skill and some patience. Who's the better employee? In most cases it will be the degree-less person that has proven his worth. And still people get employed because of their degree...
I do agree that WoW teaches the wrong things, namely things that are not very beneficial to yourself nor to the rest of society if they have to deal with you. I'm just less outraged than the author, because the real world works in a similar way quite often.
Whoever marked your post as troll is dumb in the head.
Well, remember that Slashdot is full of WoW fanboys. Even though the post was defending WoW, they won't have liked anyone pointing out that WoW has all the problems of traditional MMOs.
So, instant troll score to be expected.
It's true though. GW was designed specifically to avoid those problems.
He's welcome to try soloing a 40 man, or gee is it actually too hard for him to solo?
What is fundamentally wrong with the notion that perserverance can lead to success? Absolutely nothing. It's as true a life-lesson as 'skill can lead to success'.
The reviewer wants a PvP environment that is like chess or tennis in that each side starts each match on absolutely equal footing so that the victory reflects who the better player (not character) was. That's fine, but that's not WoW.
The reviewer wants an adventure/exploration game that is not social (no guilds, no teamwork). That's fine, but that's not WoW.
It's not that WoW is teaching bad lessons, it's just that WoW has gotten to be a lot like life (having friends helps, past aquisitions help gain future acquisitions). If this reviewer wants to go find another gaming environment that suits him better, that's fine, too. But is doesn't mean that something is wrong with WoW.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Not Guild Wars
Starting in the ancient Atari times...
Silent Service (submarine simulator): Patience and careful approach. If you gave full-ahead, you had the destroyers with depth bombs on your head in matter of seconds. Lie in wait on the route of the convoy, or approach at 1/4 the power. And don't fuckin' move when the destroyers approach! (helped me a lot with handling horses. They require the same approach even if you don't launch torpedos at them afterwards...)
The Last V8: Gradual increasing of difficulty will be more efficient in teaching than maxing out and trying to get further with each try on max difficulty. (you had to drive the car to the goal within a time limit. The car was very fast but very easy to crash. The way to finish the game was to drive slowly without crashing till time ran out and then trying slightly faster until you finally reached the goal, instead of driving at full speed at once and trying to crash further from start than at the previous try. You were bound to fail while driving slowly, but you learned where you can't drive any faster and where you can speed up that way, instead of just blaming crashing on not braking fast enough). That way I learned programming. Don't dig up the heavyweight techniques unless you mastered the easy ones.
Gunship 2000 (helicopter simulator): Being a good manager can take you further than being a skilled worker. If you can't do it yourself, you can still manage well. (when you get wingmen, set difficulty to maximum, way over the top, something just impossible for you to beat. Then don't even start the engine, let the wingmen do all the work, they will do just fine. And you're likely to get a medal you'd never get on lower difficulty and you won't get yourself killed the moment the wheels rise off the ground. Of course wingmen get killed all the time, too bad. You're alive and fine though.)
Eye of Beholder 2: Versatility beats specialization. Nuff said.
Body Blows Galactic: Once you've mastered the rules, you find out that great most of them don't make sense at all, some of them make sense only little of the time and there are maybe very few rules total that when properly applied allow you to retain your master level. (I kept playing the game with lots of people. One character, three or so moves, and I was totally unbeatable. Defense at all times, a very fast attack when the enemy drops their defense.)
Ufo: Enemy Unknown (or XCOM: Defense): If you can afford over-the-top solutions, they tend to be cheaper in the long run than cautious resource management. Invest more to earn more. (my favourite weapon: Blaster Launcher, HUGE blast. If the enemy -may- be in given area, I don't check if they are there, I just make sure they aren't there anymore. No wounded/killed soldiers, always enough alien remains to sell and restock, any collateral damage is not -my- damage.) - was helping me at school, preparing to difficult exams by covering -all- the bases, preparing both for passing by learnt knowledge and by cheating, to always have a fallback solution when the other one fails.
UT2000: If you're too weak, RUN! You can always get back later when you're stronger. Not so, if you're dead.
Tetris: Stay cool. Strong emotions dull your senses.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
here are some cliffs for those who don't want to read it all.
1. the author plays alot of street fighter and probably alot of fps games
2. the author is angry that his mad mousing skills can't help him in a rpg
3. the author doesn't understand how rpg's work
4. the author wants a rpg that is really a fps
5. the author apparently wants the ability to pull out a noob cannon and scream "boom headshot"
6. the author hasn't listened to all those l2p tells
7. the author doesn't play well with others
further more, and to steal a quote from maddox, if you're too much of an impressionable idiot to play World of Warcraft, don't. WoW isn't teaching any lessons, it's a game and it has certain rules that the player agrees to play by.
lose != loose
Most of the time, those lessons are true.
There's a shitty person in your guild. You KNOW there is. And s/he's been on many, many runs. Not doing a whole lot or playing his class well. Guess what? He 'deserves' the item more than you, never mind that you're the same class and bust your ass on every run to help out..
Like real life, eh? He's got seniority. Unless he's simply horrible, he'll probably get promotions before you. Doesn't matter your skill. I know this first hand. There are people who got there way after I did (when I was temp), but since I was temping, they will be first in line for promotion. Nevermind that I know the job better and am better AT the job. I'll probably be answering to them eventually..
What do you think businesses are? Boss raids against the economy. Trying to pull loot to distribute so that everyone gets a little piece, but the higher on the totem pole you are, the more 'piece' you get. Armies? Raid groups. Teams? Raid groups. You name it.
You rarely see a one-person business stay one-person. Why do I want to kill normal monsters at 5 silver a pop when I could team up with another person and kill elite monsters at 15-20 silver a pop?
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
On the other hand, the amount of time working may be equal to skill (efficiency). Doesn't practice make more skill?
Ultimately, the worker with the most skill will finish the work faster. However, the ideal worker will be efficient and spend more time working.
Personally, I think Blizzard should reward players that show both skill and commitment.
A friend was working on a crossword puzzle and asked me what the name of the fleshy thing that hangs in the back of the throat was called.
In my minds eye I was instantly transported back to the interior of a giant, hercules colored whale wherein, armed only with a giant feather, I was trying to tickle said fleshy thing to get out.
So: I did learn something useful from a video game. The uvula.
He's a Libertarian! Get him! How dare he imply that some people's time is more valuable that others?!? Where's your social concience? You're offending those of us that are skill-challenged and competence-imparred.
Time I have, but I mean, I need some special skills. You know, like nunchuck skills, bowhunting skills, computer hacking skills...girls only want boyfriends who have great skills.
This is an absurd lesson that has no connection to anything I do in the real world.
See this fellow learned a valueable lesson about escapism.
It's one or the other.
The simple reason that the focus is on time investment rather than skill in WoW is not because the designers 'got it wrong' but rather an intentional occurance aimed at broadening there playerbase to more casual 'mom & dad' type players. Anyone can play WoW if you have enough time, this is good for some people, but sadly lacking for those of us who are seasoned gamers looking for a challange.
As for Ralph Kostler, Im realy not sure why so many people continue to blow smoke up his backside. The days of Ultima Online are dead and Starwars Online flopped. But I guess its much like the rest of the gaming world, its not what you know, but how you market it.
Anyway, I believe I have made my point.
Other skills I've acquired from games include a facility with logic I attribute to learning chess from my father at an early age. D&D and MMORPGs taught me a bit about group dynamics, and resisting the pull of addiction.
The same is true of our star programmer. The very idea that time > skill is alien.
Then play another game without this mantra? Guild Wars is having a much greater focus on skills > time for example. Why complain about WoW here? Is the poster assuming we hadn't notice WoW rewards time spent playing a lot? Gee...
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I mean, come on! Why play a MMO to solo all the time when the game is for groups? Why cry about lack of solo content, when solo content would be exploited by groups? You can't have it all ways with ease.
CoH/V was the closest to getting solo content viable, but it didn't work in non-instanced outdoor zones. You simply had to wait until you were higher level to take on groups of 10 or more mobs. So be it. And even their model was abused all the time. Have a single player go into an instance, and then invite a friend after it started. Same # of mobs, less difficulty, easy xp.
Many people DO like to play a game where they can group up with a few friends. Or a lot of friends. And for them, WoW hits the spot. And while most classes in WoW can solo up to 60, you miss out on some important events/dungeons.
Me, when I want solo play, or to duo with the wife, I play stuff like Diablo II, or Sacred. We don't have to worry about anyone else's schedule, ideas on gameplay, or whatever. We start when we want, we take a break when we want, and we divvy loot how we want. Zero hassles.
Frankly, TFA was a joke. You could take almost any aspect of life and prove that it teaches people poor behavior, based on some viewpoint.
Play Unreal or something down that line...besides the cheaters it's all about the skill !
This is why we human beings live in isolated huts, rather than in cities. This is why we run around anarchically without any social structures. This is why one man/woman can rule the world through the force of will. This is why masturbation is better than sex.
We never have to get groups to work together and learning to herd cats, juggle egos, cajole and coddle are irrelevant lessons for real life.
All I needed to know I learned from Ms. PacMan^H^H^H^H^H^h^H^H^HStreet Fighter.
you win this thread.
Its the thinking man's Battlefield 2, whith a earn/purchase/personal account/team account system that closely mimicks managing a real team's resources to beat a team you're competing with.
Worth checking out if you want a combo of tactical team combat and strategic resource management.
I found the XP gotten from lots of hours in Live for Speed and Papy's Nascars with a racing wheel setup helped me when doing an advanced driving course (www.murcott.com.au - high performance driving). Even though now past 30, I only started driving 3 years ago, and I wanted to do some experience catching up by attending such a course. I did first do their level 1 and 2 defensive driving - something I wish was mandatory down here. (In Australia you'll pass the test if you can do a tiny little drive ending in a reverse park and can answer a pretty simple multiple choice test -- no further skills required, an absolute disgrace).
:)
My instructor (an ex race driver) said my car control was impressive, and that I was almost ready for CAMS - all I needed was a bit more track time. Had been practicing heel toe downshifts in my then 2002 Civic Hatch VI (96kw thing - great car) for weeks before the course, and got reasonably good marks on that too.
Now, racing lines, throttle control, brake points and situational awareness (the day ends in a club race, and features several timed laps too) are all key skills that sim training will tell you - even though I didn't have the Sandown VIC AU track in any of my sims.
If you crash out in an online game like Live for Speed, or cause a stack, there's loss of standing amongst your peers - winning a race requires lots of concentration and you really don't want to spin out. I don't think this would compare to much to playstation like driving games.
Having done Superbikeschool level 1 & 2 on a 250cc motorbike before that course might have helped a bit when it came to the experience of being on a race track, but the two are vastly different. Now here's to hoping that Rossi joins F1) and car control.
ISO certified == THX certified
It doesn't matter whether teaching these things is WoW's purpose. The point is that it does teach these things, and that is a matter of concern. There is no "trying" to learn here, these concepts are fundamental to the function of the game, and if you don't learn them, you can't play (or at least, you'll be severely hamstrung).
This is an issue of social responsibility that is far more important than the surface issues which the media tends to focus on. Does a game like Postal teach kids that it's a good idea to kill people? Doesn't seem likely to me. But does WoW teach players that laboring interminably at mundane tasks is more worthy of reward than actual excellence? Without a doubt. And the question asked by the article is whether or not this is a good and right thing.
the described behavior (time>skill, group>solo) just means that the game producers get paid when more people play the game longer. remember, a public company exists to make money for the shareholders, not to make the world a better place.
Of course, having a salary (i.e. being paid for your time and not your output) is good for employees, too, not just because it's too difficult for payroll departments to gauge output. What if your company says, "Oh, sorry, we don't have much for you to do this week, I'm afraid you won't be getting paid."?
This is one of the most short-sighted views I have ever seen. Yes every situation is not the same, but Skill gernerally equals time.
If the guy is better than you at something, then he most likely put alot more time into it than you. And yes this is what the game teaches. It also teaches groupwork, how to survive and be democratic in a group.
All of these things help you out in daily life, thought locking yourself in a room playing a game kinda defeats all that though wouldn't you think?
The concepts that the game teaches is not wrong though, and the writers opinion is that of a young high school kid with no expierience in life.
On the topic of Group > Solo. I can think of many companies and organisations that would be delighted with this outcome. They routinely spend tens of thousands of dollars sending their management team or call centre staff on 'team building' weekends where endless exercises serve to re-enforce the point that 'the whole is greater than the sum of the parts', to use a worn out clique.
As for the Terms of Service. To quote: 'The very idea of using the terms of service as the de facto way to enforce a certain player-behaviour goes against everything I've learned'. Gosh, the author doesn't get out very much. Let me rephrase this as: 'The very idea of using the rule of law as the de facto way to enforce a certain individual_-behaviour (in society) goes against everything I've learned'. Just because I can break into your house, shame on you for not making it impossible for me to do so, and steal your favourite Star Wars mug does not make it right. There seems to be a mixed message in the article. The author contends that they have learnt valuable life lessons, but then goes on to suggest that if you can get away with cheating by dis-obeying rules, the smarter you are. Valuable lessons for who, the individual, or society?
Don't like it, don't play it, or even better, make you own with a superior 'morals' engine embedded and a flawless design that makes the dreaded 'terms of service' redundant, as the author suggests. You may need to work with a team of 39 to do it though.
MC.
In any case, this is one of the reasons why I stopped playing WoW after about a week.
You can't become good.
You can become experienced, you can invest a lot of time and thus get a higher experience level, you can build a large network of people to chat with... But you can't become a skilled WoW player.
Just about the only skill you can obtain is learning all the maps and the missions. The rest of the time is being spent doing the same thing over and over again in order to raise your XP. Even games that I utterly dislike, such as CS, allows you to become skilled. Actually, most glames do, but not the MMORPGs. I honestly don't understand why. Perhaps it's because most people are not prepared to practice something? Perhaps WoW is just an alternative to planting oneself in front of the TV, watching MTV? (i.e. no intelligence required). I don't know, and by now I don't really think I care.
Now that I'm writing a post about WoW, I have to add my pet peeve as wel:
Playing WoW, it feels like I'm trapped in the Twilight Zone. I walk around in a living world, things happen all around me, but no one can really see me. I'm like a walking shadow, somehow being able to touch things, but still not. Anything I do have absolutely zero effect on the world. It really kills the immersion for me when an NPC tells me that I need to save the village by killing this or that monster. I do it, I arrive in a triumphant return... but... No... Wait... Nothing changed! The village is apparently still held in the grasp of this monster, since the very same person is still handing out the same quest to other players. I'm still the same no-one I was before, altough with a couple of more experience points, and the world laughts in my face saying: "Don't think you can be someone special. You're always doomed to be a boring no-one, and you'll never affect the world".
I think that's the real problem with WoW.
I'm not sure that all these criticisms hold up other than from a peculiarly individualistic north american perspective. Many of the things that the author holds up as bad values are perfectly in line with what those of us from social democratic countries consider 'good values'.
... if you will 'bubble' created by hardcore gamers investing ridiculous amounts of the time-capital that they have to spend into acquiring goods. This leaves those who are time-capital poor (casual gamers) further and futher behind in the game. A familiar real-world situation. Interestingly Blizzard seem to be heading towards something which is analagous to an across-the-board minimum wage rise for casual gamers in the next patch, in the form of an easy-to-get high level armour set for all classes. Given that the motivation for this is the probability of having time-poor casual gamers dropping out of WoW society because they can't compete, this is spookily reminiscent of economic situations that we face in RL.
Even from a strictly capitalistic perspective, the notion of a player deserving reward for time invested is not at all alien. Time is a form of capital and we do have the right to earn returns on that capital, no?
What isn't good is the effective 'inflation' caused by the
As for grouping together for greater rewards, this is real-life behaviour and IMHO, reinforces norms of social solidarity which are considered good form most places in the world. A player who can work well with 39 other people getting more reward and more 'honour' than one who stays on the outer and quests for his/her reward only? Well that's a good thing surely. It rewards sociable behaviour. The assumption that the game result should reflect the innate capability of the individual player rather than their willingness to contribute to a group endeavour is not universally held, by a long shot.
The assertion that Albert Einstein accomplished things alone is deeply wrong.
Finally i'm not sure why a virtual law against money-laundering through ebay is a bad thing either?
Now World of Warcraft is a subscription-based game. Because of that, maximising players' loyalty also maximises publisher revenues.
So ... of course it's crafted in such a way that it rewards loyalty. By quitting his account, a player who has played for say 3 months will feel that he has something to loose that's proportional to the total time spent on the game. Also he'll feel he'll have "achieved" something that complete newcomers don't have.
I would have thought that this was obvious and transparant, and I can't imagine that players don't see that. Instead of getting excited about lessons supposedly taught within the make-believe world of the game, why not take a look at what it teaches in the real world? I'd say that it teaches a few age-old marketing truths.
This attitude seems to be very common among college students: I cannot get C! I spent so much time studying! I did so much work in this class! I deserve an A! You mean you don't give any points for effort?
AccountKiller
There is one lesson that he overlooked that seems to pervade video games. That lesson is that 'Cheating is OK'. How many games have cheat codes? How many games are Xploited to the detriment of competitors? How much WoW gold is purchases on eBay and not earned? How many 'Mods' are you running when you play a game? It is all good if you don't get caught and the penalties if you are, are minor.
World of Warcraft wasn't designed to teach you anything. It was designed to entertain you.
When I was growing up, I played:
- Carmen San Diego
- Robot Odyssey
- The Ancient Art of War at Sea
- Red Storm Rising
- Apollo 18
Sure, they aren't accurate simulations, but they kind of try, and got me interested in a lot of things I wouldn't have otherwise gotten into. They were both entertaining and interesting -- when's the last time you got out a pencil and pad of paper to try to win a computer game?
I've tried playing games these days, and a large fraction seem to be simply "shoot the bad guy" -- Defender for the 21st century, with pretty graphics. Where's Broderbund or The Learning Company of today?
Phantasy Star Online.
There are weapons there that are SUPER weapons, but take somewhere around 400 hours of continuous play to find. they have find rates of 1/200,000 or something along that level, and while there are ways to cheat on this and get them earlier, youre somehow less of a person for having a life rather than spending every waking hour searching for it for 3 years.
I agree with the rant in general. games like WOW are a training ground for the kind of conformist, work your butt off or you just suck american workplace.. The "new workplace", where dedication and loyalty mean nothing, because youre just a tissue to be used, worked to death, then thrown away.
kind of like in online rpgs where you work to death on your character, then the next new game comes out, and you throw your old one away and start all over.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
This article is built upon hours and hours of self adoration. Its hard to read between "I'm so good I could work in Blizzard" and "I'm so smart I read a book once".
"I see undead people" Warcraft III - Necromancer
I learned that if I spent enough time fighting wimpy monsters in a dungeon I'd already cleared
that I could make myself tougher with minimal risk.
Yet, there was nothing challenging about that.
I think this has always been the lesson of computer RPG's.
Even nethack has a little bit of that... early in the game though the need to pursue food usually drives
you downward (and into riskier situations) preventing you from simply milking the easier levels for lucky equipment drops.
The authors of the article must not have attended school. At least in the US, school values repetitive labor far more than it values aptitude. Students are graded mostly based on the amount of homework they complete, with aptitude playing a minor role. If this is a good thing is debatable; many say that part of learning to become an able worker in society is learning to work, especially when it's assigned, but on the other hand many (mostly the students doing the work) wonder if it's the best thing they could be doing.
No I didn't read the article, so I don't know if this is the only 'lesson' they cite.
This is the casual vs. raiders argument, as found all over the Blizzard general forum.
You could equally say that the lessons I learned from WoW were:
People, especially 'casual' gamers like to bandy around the idea that they should get rewards based purely on the amount of time they spend in game. They also suggest that no skill is required to raid successfully - any monkey could do it given a strategy guide.
I was talking to a group of players on the weekend who have exisiting L60 characters who were talking about how easy levelling their second (or 3rd, etc...) characters were, even on different servers where twinking was not possible. A large part of this was the skill they now had in knowing how to fight various mobs, no longer fearing dying, understanding the impact of being on low health, mana management tactics, etc...
I've also been in pick up raid groups where the raid leader was experienced and knew the instance well, but people weren't following instructions and it was an absolute mess.
There is plenty of skill to be displayed in WoW, they're just not the skills you think they are - it's risk assessment, team work/leadership, ability to adapt to a changing situation, resource maanagement. It's not being able to hit a particular sequence of keys in a inhumanly timely manner, or to aim a mouse/cursor with incredible precision.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
it is true, in these types of games, that putting in more time euqals getting more rewards. if you are going on raids with your guild every day, you do deserve to get more of those epic drops because you are more valuable to your team. ad just being there more often means getting more of the better gear, just because you are there.
obviously this doesnt always apply to real life. i don't know who said it did. i dont know why the author of the article is trying to apply the facts of a game to real life, and saying that a game is teaching kids the wrong lessons. if you are so dependent on games to give you advice about the real world, you are most likely not a successful person, and you will be in a position where more hours put in at work = more pay. i.e., flipping burgers, the more you work, the more burgers you have flipped, and the more you get paid. if you are a successful person, in a position where skill is valued over amount of time put in, you are not the kind of person who is letting games dictate your life. even if you do play games, even play games a lot, you already have the skills you need, and are not learning life lessons from a game.
http://www.officewhisper.com/blogs/businessdevolut ion/archive/2006/02/18/33.aspx
Business Devolution : Attendance Equals Revenue
What is come down to is the author of the artical wants everything handed to him from the start without actulay have to Earn said items. His example of street fighter is flawed. Cause the people who were the most skilled they Got that skilled by investing alot more time practicing that some one who just picked up the game a week ago. IF a game such as wow gave you everthing from the start, the game it self would have a short life as people would get board quickly.
In most rpg game you have to Earn your place and you items Nothing is for free if you want something you go out and work hard and long to get it. That is called a good work ethic which sadly seems to be lacking in the author of the artical
At first, it read like he was just whining because things were different now, but the best part of the article is near the end with the Terms of Service to enforce gameplay both inside and outside the game. That's just stupid.
For the anime fans out there, they might remember .hack/SIGN which deals with a WoW-like MMORPG and how the player/characters interact on-line and off. One of the important things about the game was that there were no rules: just decisions and consequences. What made the "game" good was the freedom to do anything and interact in any way you want: from bullying to protecting the weak with your own guild, from playing solo to playing as a group. It was all supported.
Trying to use Terms of Service to enforce gameplay is just really, really stupid, Blizzard. And you won't have much of a future unless you also learn the lesson that Freedom == Good Gameplay. The biggest raves I've heard from recent games has been the freedom to explore the environment (e.g., Spiderman, The Hulk, GTA) and the freedom to play the story line or not. Heck, that's what made previous Blizzard games so successful, right?
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
then how come people who have been with a company the longest often get the promotion or the good office? seems like a real world example to me.
Stop complaining about slashdot.
Didn't your mother teach you anything?
Are you a better person because you let you dishes pile up for two weeks? That way, you only have to wash dishes on 1 day! You are so smart... your seconds/dirty dish ratio is sure to be higher than that poor sod that washes them every day or two.
Wow! You can live in complete filth... you get to have 30 minutes/day "extra" than all those dumbasses who waste all that time cleaning.
You're so smart... you pay $200 for an hour with a companion, whereas those dumbasses waste hours dating women... god people are dumb.
You're so smart you attain enlightenment without ANY meditation... you simply will enlightement into existence never once having meditated... what were those other people thinking!!
F*k off and let the hard workers out there keep ensuring that your existence and way of life can continue...
Personally, I'm looking forward to Dungeons and Dragons Online. From the sounds of it (i.e. Having to complete quests to level, rather than grinding) they will be creating an environment that doesn't cater to the guy sitting in his underwear all week doing PvP or tribute runs.
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
Don't we already subscribe to this in real life?
But I just wanted to ask: What in hell is wrong with this guy? Go back to playing counterstrike or something.
Actually, the original Lemmings had 120 levels. The other 5 you're thinking of were added in the SNES version, which wasn't the original. =)
</nitpick>
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
The very idea that time > skill is alien.
Unless of course, you're a manager for a programming shop, in which case it doesn't matter who you put on a project, how long they've been doing it, or what experience they have, just so long as they're willing to work 80-120 hours a week. With a preference for young people who have lots of energy and no family to wonder when they're coming home.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Why is this article considered interesting? Of the author's two main themes, one is an unoriginal rehashing of the inherent problem with MMPORGs (that a subscription based service has an interest in dragging out progression in the game for as long as possible, and this works against making the game as fun as it could be), and the other is the standard whine of the over-caffeinated Twitch Monkey (tm - ID Software) whenever he encounters a game that doesn't depend purely on reaction time and hand-eye coordination. It's doubtful he'd like any RPG (any real RPG, not that Diablo style crap), because as a rule, they don't worship at the throne of the caffeine god.
Hey Kids! Tune in next week for his article on why Civilization IV sucks!
I am a developer that typically falls into the category of being able to develop tremendous amounts of clean, documented, structured, functional code in a short time. It has taken me 25 years (starting at age 5) to learn to code quickly and cleanly. It's taken me a very long time to learn the thought process behind structured development. I've learned during this time the difference between shortcuts that are beneficial and short cuts that simply waste time later.
/played). Since I only play the game on my day off and after my children are in bed, this is quite a bit of time spent. But, with the exception of a much needed armour upgrade, my character is imba. My alt when I occassionally play it levels like wild fire. The reason for this is that like when programming, I spent years learning the little bits and facts needed to develop quickly and efficiently. With my main, I learned through an impressive amount of grinding where the best places to gain XP and cash are. Let me clarify, that I don't use my main to supply my alt, I consider this cheating.
For example, when moving to my new job as an engineer at a video production firm, one of the tasks I've taken on was to develop an offline subtitling solution that integrates with Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Sony Vegas 6, DVD Architect, and is able to read formats dating back to linear sector data written as raw files (no file system) on 8" floppy discs from 1979. The software required OCR for bitmap text of low quality and required the ability to produce varying levels of quality of bitmapped text images to suit the limitations of different formats. For example, 16:9 subtitles on DVD need to be rendered at 720x405 and then stretched vertically to 576 using a rough monochrome algoritm on the 4 individual colors channels. It also required the development of a text rendering engine for a subset of HTML with editing abilities. The program has many more features and items that I can list extensively here, however I believe I've at least clarified at least some of the complexity of the program.
The ability to parse text files and manage time codes (shifting and spacing) and then output text for DVD studio pro with formatting was finished in 2.5 hours. The second version of the application, adding support for bitmap rendering was developed in a week between my other responsibilities. The support for 8" floppy connectivity required an additional week including the development of a hardware controller board to connect a Shubert 8" double density floppy drive to USB.
The user interface of the application is cleanly designed and is highly usable and is currently being used for subtitling new films.
The application was written using Visual C++ 6 and Qt 4 for Windows. The code is documented in the same manor as Qt itself and there are flow charts designed in Visio for clarification of certain items such as parser flow. (I wrote a state based unicode replacement for Lex that is runtime based using QRegExp, not terribly fast, but given the circumstance, it doesn't need to be). The application itself is used on Mac and Windows.
All together this project has used a maximum of 60 hours of development time, though many more hours were spent while laying on the couch at home playing world of warcraft thinking the design out.
So on to World of Warcraft... my main char is a level 50 that I've grinded on for 15 days (when typing
All in all, I can easily compare the learning process and style of skill building in World of Warcraft with that of programming.
If I were to make a more fair statement that you have, I would instead say the following :
World of Warcraft, teaches that the time spent grinding through learning efficient character building in game, while applicable to many other areas in life, consumes the time that would be better spent learning a skill to help players in real life such as programming or graphics art.
(Sorry for posting anonymously, but I don't remember my login, don't often post)
If it is subscription based you would expect that the time people stay online is rewarded in some cheap way.
Je me souviens.
Um, a typical player will reach the level cap in WOW within 10-15 days of playtime. At 24 hours a week, that's only 2-4 months. Of course, there's a lot of endgame content, but even the hardcore gamers will eventually plateau.
Really, it's a matter of perspective. If your'e the kind of person who can't stand being "second best", than a game that so distinctly differentiates bettwen those who invest a lot of time and those who invest a little is certainly not for you.
I've learned that the best students at my university aren't the smartest students - they are the students who work the hardest. There are so many bright students who refuse to study and so many average students who excel because they are willing to invest the time to practice and study the material.
Oh, and as a sidenote, WOW is as much about playing smart as it is about playing a lot. Having a guild that is smart (and not filled with assholes), knowing how much honor to get per week and the easiest way to get it, knowing what mob(s) drop the best items, etc. It took me less time to get from 40-60 than it did to get from 20-40, precisely because I got better at playing and made better use of my time.
Finally, I'd like to remind everyone of one thing: it's just a game. Letting WOW become intertwined with your life is unhealthy. I play 10-15 hours per week, mostly on the weekends, because there are more important things to me than WOW. If you're avoiding social contact, damaging your performance at school or work, or (worst of all) are screwing up your sleep schedule, you are playing far too much and it's time to realize what your priorities really are.
The rule breaks down for top execs, who have their fantasy salaries set by committees of other companies' top execs in a "scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" arrangement, but it works for 99% of salaried employees.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Do you play on a PVE server? On a PVP server, "second best" is "first dead," so yes, I had a problem with that.
I fully understand the point this writer is making, however, i must ask if people would really go for the solo content, if it were as hard to get as the Raid content ....
... - what drives you to continue is that _some_ get pieces in each run, and you have something in common with the people that do, and this creates anticipation that you also will get it ..
... without fellow raiders .. would people go for it .. ? ... i'm not sure ...
If you go on MC raids with 40 people today that starts at scratch, it might take you several weeks to get any lott, and several months to get the full armor sets
Now, if you would have to do quests several times a week for several weeks, and even months, solo, to get equal stuff
I Play WoW, and used to play War3 on a tournament level. I play GW as well. Quite frankly playing gw and war3 has improved me as a person, and taught me a LOT about winning. WoW has, on the other hand, taught me about the lowest common denominator. First and foremost, all mammals learn through play. Heck we learn more when we play than if we forced ourselves to study. Simcity, strategy games, FPS, squad level games, all teach the user something. ALLways. And all these games have simple rules. Simple understandable rules. Some rules are dumb, and some have loopholes, but they have no person enforcing them. Now as a nod to everyone whos thinking, its just a game you play for fun, you learn a LOT when you play. You may not be conciously aware of it, but your brain IS adapting to the rule set. It IS evaluating its choices based on what it sees as its best options. Your brain does this all the time. WoW has a lot of dumb rules and loopholes. THE game is not consistent with itself. It gives you the promise of "world to explore" and the feeling of a free environment, but then begins to put arbitrary limits to prevent people from gaming the environment. But WORST of all, allmost EVERY quest, must see the DEATH of some creature, which will MAGICALLY spawn again. You can depopulate ENTIRE regions, and have more to kill! The solution to almost EVERY quest is "Kill 30 coyotes! 10 parakeets! On the way kill 5 lions" why? Oh i couldnt be bothere to kill 1 and get their fur or pluck their feathers. The game IS GREAT as a gambling simulator and an enhanced barbie doll dress up simulation. But man, if your kids is going to play this, hes going to have to "kill" some million creatures. Blizzard was smart enough to make the exp bar huge so even small increases in exp are visible; smart enough to break the quests down so that they become manageable. But the game still tells you to "Kill 30 badland coyotes" or "Avenge us by killing 30 alliance scouts" Your subconcious IS picking this up.
nub.
The article is trying to find lessons learned in an one on one game with a MMO, which is not really fair. There are lessons in WoW, as I'm sure there are in other MMOs such as EQ, they are just not the same. Managerial Skills - As an officer in a large, raiding guild, it is not easy to keep everyone happy and focused on the same goals. Team Work - As someone who has been on both sides of the interview process, I can attest to the fact that most employers are looking for someone that works well in a team, something that one needs to be successful in WoW. Diplomacy - Again, as someone who is an officer, we try, and successfully do, keep good relations with other the other guilds. Now, two of these points were from an officer's perspective, which not everyone gets to experience, but they are lessons all the same. MMOs teaches skills that are more social then self reliant in nature. The author freely admits to being an intervert, and maybe that is why he dismisses MMOs, and WoW in particular.
So it's not *you*, the human player who is improving his skills at a game. It's your character.
And that is why WoW is a complete waste of time*
* I play several hours a day.
A lazy but skilled person will go nowhere in life, and will be a bitter old person, regretting how they didn't do anything with their life.
A motivated but less-skilled person will likely become a millionaire.
If you read anything from extremely dedicated, successful people (there's a transcribed speech I read a couple of months ago from one of the people at Bell Labs in the old days who goes into this in great detail if you can find it), they all say (as in every single one of them) that it doesn't matter if you've got a great idea or not, what matters is that you put in time to see it through to fruition. Most entrepreneurs are not geniuses, but are motivated.
As a small example, there's someone who I work with who is a really bad programmer. She has no sense of process, rolls out new bugs with every release (and by release I mean "goes in and changes code in the production system" it's that bad), generally makes a dismal show of the whole programming thing. And yet, she's extremely successful within our enterprise. Why? She works about 14 hours a day, including weekends, and makes up for her lack of skill out-of-the-gate by putting in extra hours to fix it. If she had a "handler" who was her exact opposite (and who wouldn't strangle her) she'd be a millionaire by now...
For you AA players out there go to Bridge Crossing SE and look for "tony_montana" - he fits this perfectly.
He's got high honor because he's always on even though he isn't that good. He just keeps SCREAMING "respect me, I have more honor" and "give me that weapon because you should respect me because I have more honor". Needless to say, nobody respects him.
That being said, WoW isn't alone in creating a REAL contrast between hard-earned achievements and the easily gotten ones.
In the game world, when you level up, you get better armor, better weapons, and more hit points. In the airline world, you get better seats, better meals, and more peanuts.
The author started losing me when he based his philosophy and life lessons on Street Fighter. Lost me even more when he considers Raph the creator of UO and SWG. He was a team member, but I wouldn't credit him with the creative initiative. (I like Raph personally, but I strongly disagree with his odd ideals of how MMO players/societies should function.)
I think the points of time > skill and group >solo are taken completely out of context. As many others have stated here, investing time in most situations means that you will finish with a better result. Investing time in WoW means that you want to reach those lofty goals set by the developers. The amazingnly attractive thing about WoW is how it appeals to so many different playstyles, namely leisure and hardcore. I'm a leisure player. I don't expect to have the elite loot because I haven't invested the time or the skill to earn it. Hardcore players do. If the author thinks that simply playing the game and spending time in the virtual world earns rewards, how sadly mistaken. What did he do those two years in WoW? It takes a coordinated group with the right mix of skilled individuals a serious amount of time to accomplish one goal that may result in a reward for two to four people. From where I come from, we call that "teamwork" and "compromise."
Group > solo? I'm an introvert, too. That's why I enjoy MMO's. It allows me to be the fly on the wall and raise my hand to speak up when I feel like it. No one forces anyone to be in a group, a guild or run an instance. More often I see individuals from different guilds get together to conquer a quest, a boss monster or an instance. You rarely hear about a single guild running an instance. There are always openings for others. Listen to the LFG channel for five minutes. I like soloing, too, because it allows me to avoid commitment to a group or responsibility of helping anyone else. I know I'm missing out on some awesome experiences and better equipment. My choice; my loss. Blizzard knows this, though. One of the developers has already spoken out that the expansion will include quests to get high level equipment for casual gamers. The whole experience system with the rest bar was designed for casual gamers. If you don't play for a while, you'll be able to gain XP faster when you return than someone who plays constantly. Blizzard knows the different types of players and they know how to appeal to most of them. 5.5 million gamers are proving that.
ToS. "...treating players like they're children..." Have you listened to general chat in WoW? They ARE children or at least juvenile-minded. Blame this on our country's legal system. "Someone spilled coffe on themselves and was burned? Sue the company." Someone got sick because they drank shampoo because the bottle didn't say they couldn't? Blame the company." Blizzard is legally protecting themselves just like any other company must these days. It's simply that's Blizzard's arena is a virtual world, not a restaurant or grocery store. Personally, there are numerous other activities that I believe should be added to the ToS.
While I completley and totally disagree with Sirlin, I'll gladly give him his space for opinion. We're all different and we all have different tastes. I cannot fathom how someone could stand to play Street Fighter for more than an hour without getting completley bored. Obviously, he cannot fathom how to play a MMO in your own style and enjoy it.
It's almost impossible to come up with legitimate puzzle-solving missions that won't be listed on websites with full, step-by-step solutions 20 minutes after they go live.
Random Content
Or AI generated content.
But this might be a few years before we get to that point. We've got to have computers be able to solve logic problems before they are able to create them.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Seriously though, some things in that article seemed wrong to me. One: He mentions Magic The Gathering, which is the king of examples when it comes to money > skill seeing as some of the best cards are so rare you have to buy heaps of booster packs to get one or pay the going rate from a collector. Seems hypocritical. (Disclaimer I like MTG but haven't played in years.) Also there is skill in WoW, a total newbie who has read the manual and some forums for 2 hours and played for 1 hour, with a level 60 decked out in purple will still lose to an experianced player in half decent gear. I will concede that I agree that gear plays too large a role in the game, wearing great purple gear is the equivilent of wearing like 3 sets of green gear in extreme cases, and that seems pretty wrong. But the author focuses on winning all the time. He ignores the fact that I the barely level 60 character with one purple item to my name came OH SO CLOSE to beathing that other character who has been raiding for 1 year is actually fun, and the gear gap lets me convince myself that I'd have won given equal gear and I feel I accomplished something. If you need to wait to see who wins and check that you got your valuable Honourable Kill before deciding if you had fun or not then I don't think you're having fun at all.
I'll second the Guild Wars comment. It's actually possible to do well in the pvp side of things with a new account, because skill > everything else in that game.
Yea if you want to PvP in Guild Wars you only have to grind for ~500 hours to get ~90% skills (if you're hardcore). Without many skills Guild Wars PvP ain't so much fun. Maybe you can be competetive but the fun part for me is trying out many odd, weird and interesting builds.
1. You don't go through life by collecting coins on the street.
2. If you die, you die. You can't give it another try by reviving at a previous save point.
3. You can't throw fireballs in real life. I know a lot of video games pretend to show that you can but nobody in real life is actually able to do this.
4. You don't recover from injury instantly by eating food or drinking potions.
5. When you get beaten up, it's unlikely that you're able to function properly as long as your health bar hasn't reached 0.
6. If you jump down a distance 10 times your size, you're probably gonna die.
Kudos for the author of this article, for realizing that video games are not like real life!
Wow has a simple premise. You pay to play. Those who play more, get more, because they play more. Keeping you playing is the goal of the application.
Anything that consumes time is valuable in the code. Every function you perform in WoW is consuming the only pure (not derivative) comodity available to MMOs - time.
Get it?
It's just a business model.
-Monty Python
Joe would get fired three weeks before his multi-million dollar revenue generator of a project was due in test. You and Frank would work a hundred hours a week for the next four weeks getting Joe's code cleaned up to send to test. Test would reject the project because you didn't follow the obscure archaic bundling requirements for binaries the customer requires for the project.
After you and Frank busting your buns getting the binaries repackaged and fixing all the bugs at the expense of losing your health, GF and any hope of a real life to get the project out six months late. The customer rejects the project because of a technicality in the functional specs that you and Frank overlooked because you were over worked and under slept. They sue your employer for failure to complete critical requirements, cost overruns and failure to meet the completion date. You employer ceases to exist except as a shell company that out sources all the technical work to Bangladesh.
You are now out of a job and blackballed as a "problem" employee because while you were cleaning out your cube, they over heard you saying you were on your way to kill some trolls. Not knowing you were a WoW play the eco-freak HR rep thinking you were going to go kill real trolls, (which must be an endangered species since they are so rare they are mythical), decided to use you and Frank as scape goats for the brew-ha-ha and bad mouths you to every potential employer in the multi-verse.