Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few years ago, around Cata, I was teaching a new gamer (she'd never played anything but solitaire) how to play Wow. They asked me about doing dungeons and I warned them off that people would be rude and inpatient. She was still learning to use WASD without looking at the keyboard. So we agreed she would join but I would take over if things got rough. This group... like.. "oh, you are new? We we shall sit here while you grab loot, just tell us when you are ready for the next room." Nicest players I'd EVER met. Wish there had been more.

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

Thank you for verbalising why I never got into WoW. You get absolute freedom to run around in an interesting fantasy world and players made it an office job with spreadsheets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think this might be one of the best video explanations of how “toxic” behavior and development of gameplay changes over the years. Amazing knowledge bomb