Part of it has to do with Darth Bunnywabbit’s beloved bunny, who is very old and getting progressively more paralyzed. Which means that when I get home, I might have to spend a couple hours cleaning him up and giving him his various meds and making sure he’s comfortable rather than immediately logging in to raid.
Part of it has to do with Sims Medieval, which I am very close to thoroughly defeating on platinum level, and still enjoying immensely. A strategy game where you can take a break from strategizing to hang out in the tavern swilling ale, or redecorate the palace. What a great concept.
To be honest, the vast majority of it has to do with being thoroughly annoyed with the playerbase. And as I’m writing this, the top thread in the guild/raid leading forum has to do with people being annoyed by the incessant flow of homophobic insults in guilds, and in the general forum there is a lengthy thread started by a “secret” disabled person who keeps it in the closet, due to haters. So it’s not a matter of Darth Bunnywabbit being subjective and oversensitive and needing to relax and lighten up (and all the other stuff haters tend to say when you call them on it, as opposed to what they say when you aim some hatred in their direction, which is usually very different).
And frankly, yeah, I’m a snob. I’m better than people who spend their time hating on others for being gay, or disabled, or ethnic, or religious, or female. No, I do not need to relax and lower my standards to please them, because they are insignificant people who lack power. They never have to worry about having their comments taken out of context by the media, or having their employees sue them. That’s because the media really doesn’t give a rat’s ass about them above and beyond selling them various permutations of highly processed corn, and haters with employees go broke from paying settlements, assuming the CEO who outranks them doesn’t boot them out the door. It’s hard for me to imagine a habitual smack talker being entrusted with anything more complex than a cash register or a broom. Sometimes homophobes are a little more prosperous, depending where they live, but science shows they’re all a bunch of closet cases anyway, and I usually assume they have miserable lives faking straight, punctuated by brief, panicked encounters at truck stops. And all the haters who demand I tolerate their lifestyle choice can just deal with my opinions (and relax, and chill).
I’m also having a “should I stay or should I go?” moment with my guild. I’ve been in the guild for over 3 years now, most of it raiding constantly, and I’ll save the full blown guild drama whining for another blog post. Because to be honest, some of it is them being clueless, and some of it is me being passive aggressively hostile, like when I let that redneck chump with the obnoxious porn references die repeatedly in heroics. Some people seeing that might assume I’m an incompetent player. Nope, just a silent and hostile one. Arguing with these people takes valuable energy that I could devote to productive things, so I tend to treat the bulk of my shallow in-game relationships in a spectatorly way. If the content is annoying, I wander off to another distraction. Change the channel.
Besides, if I did wander off, I’d have to find another guild. I’ve done that twice, the result being that I have one alliance toon in a guild that isn’t really motivated enough to raid, and another toon in a guild that raids before I get home from work. I could engage in the whole boring and time consuming guild interview process frequently recommended by WoW in response to these type complaints, but that opens up a whole new can of worms. How do I find people that are (a) playing the game at the level I want to play while (b) interacting the way I want to interact? What if I find a guild with no hate speech whatsoever where I still can’t get along with them? Compatibility rests on more than shared values. In fact, I've had pretty good gaming experiences with people who definitely don't share my values, but are diplomatic enough to shut up about it long enough to cooperate on the mutual goal. And I've had horrible times gaming with perfectly nice people who lack the humility, or edge, or strategic talents to get anything accomplished.
(I’m thinking of an raid I did with another guild where a couple of their "star" players dominated vent with fail strategies. I could have taken over with a “listen, the 27 times I did this successfully we did A, B and C.” But that would have led to drama over usurping dominance.)
(Plus it costs twenty five bucks to transfer a toon, and if I moved my main somewhere, I’d probably also want to move her staff of alts that do all the mining and herbing and enchanting, thereby saving me from spending the hours necessary to earn enough gold to buy all that stuff.)
(Then there's the Big Question: do I still want to raid? I've already proved to myself that I can, and the only thing really standing between me and videogaming excellence is my failure to find the right group. I have to admit, having my evenings free is definitely nice, and I should probably get off my butt and write, or clean house, or something.)
(And one more thing -- from encountering them in pugs, the good players with compatible values are definitely interested in keeping to themselves. Especially if they've been around for a long time. A lot of them purposefully avoid chat, forums, the greater world. They recruit by word of mouth. Sometimes I actually find these types too insular, and find myself longing for all the energy that comes with having a bunch of caffeined-up college studentscracking jokes.)
After a brief frenzy of rolling yet another toon on a server full of WoW bloggers while trying to advance even more toons, I arrived at the “or I could just stop playing this blasted game for a while” solution, which so far is serving me well, although I miss the interaction. Frankly, what I miss is the interaction with a group of 25. My guild stopped doing them, and is currently only doing 10 person raids. I like 25s because there are enough people there intent on the purpose that nobody really gets to cause distraction without being 86’d by the group. In a 10, there’s always somebody who wants to keep everybody waiting while they go find supplies, or spends half an hour talking about some BS I’m not interested in, such as their sex life.
I think what I was really aiming at with this post is how the game defines the players. For example, basketball is played by tall people. Short people can still play it, just not competitively. Football is played by great big heavy people. Sumo wrestling is played by even bigger people. Women’s volleyball is played by women. Blackjack is played by people who can count up to 21. Tennis is played by people physically capable of seeing tennis balls. Good poker players need to be able to lie, or at least conceal their thoughts. The activities required to win the game progressively weed out people who inherently can’t perform them, for whatever reason, and the nature of the game restricts certain people from even participating on a basic level. This is not really discrimination because there are plenty of games, and if your genetic gifts aren’t suited to one, there are plenty more to choose from.
When I first started playing them, online games required a lot more social finesse. Even in WoW, until late last year, to get to the finish line you had to play nice with 24 other gamers. And they still had problems with virulent trolls, to the point where they policed the forums more, and (mercifully briefly) came up with the idea of tagging everyone with their real name, an idea that could only occur to a guy. In fact, there was one GM who responded to the anti-real name complaints by posting his real name and daring the trolls of WoW to do their worst. Moments later they were posting his Facebook pix and his home phone number and other personal details everywhere. That’s not as likely to happen to a hockey referee, but in order to play WoW, you need at least rudimentary computer skills, and the players are more likely to cyberstalk you than throw cups of beer. So that’s one way the game defines its player base.
WoW victory now rests on the ability to bond in (increasingly) small groups. As I mentioned, it costs twenty-five bucks to move, and Blizzard has definitely noticed they can make more money if players are constantly transferring around looking for a small group to call their own. There is actually a statement in their current terms of use forbidding players from creating their own matchmaking services. I had wondered why there aren’t any really good third-party sites dedicated to that and now I know why. There are a few old stale ones sitting around still trying to recruit people to kill Arthas, and there is the official guild recruitment forum, which is sort of like what would happen if you collapsed all the Craigslist jobs ads into a single category, then halfway disabled the search filters. They want you to move around, yet at the same time, they want it to be sort of difficult. Maybe so you’ll move again, and again.
In any event, the advantage is moving away from people-mellow-enough-to-tolerate-large-raids toward people-who-can-find-small-cliques. This seems, to me, in my subjective unscientific opinion, to have increased the hostility. Considerably. They’re basically incentivizing the narrowly-social players while throwing the broadly-social players a handicap. Possibly this is a good thing, and will eventually result in less people having to put up with crap to get their gaming jollies, but at the moment, it seems to be inspiring a lot of people to quit, jump servers or complain.
Consider two games, both very similar. To get to the end of one, you need to outcompete other players -- be there first, hit buttons the fastest, outstrategize, whatever. To get to the end of the other, you have to get four other people to cooperate with you for about an hour (sort of like a WoW heroic pug). Doesn't take a degree to assume the players of the first game will be a lot more caustic than the players of the second. WoW is sort of morphing in that general direction.
The more independent a game becomes, the less cooperative the player base. Conversely, if you force the players to constantly depend on each other, you get a lot of drama and anger, and complaints demanding that antisocial players (who pay the same fees as the social ones) be given an avenue to accomplish everything the social players do. So there's a fine balance involved in keeping both the antisocial misfits and the manipulative drama mongers from taking over.
Meanwhile, I'm quite occupied with my paraplegic bunny and my medieval sims and my kindle. Maybe I'll figure out my WoW dilemma before SWTOR launches. Maybe not.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment