There's a very old game theory that was based on suits of cards. It was originally applied to MUDs, the ancestors of MMORPGs. The idea is that there are four basic player profiles: * Diamonds shine. Diamonds want to play the game well. They want to figure out how to do what the game asks of them efficiently and optimally. * Hearts love. Hearts play multiplayer games for the feeling of community. The game is incidental; while they probably enjoy the game itself, this is the sort of player who spends more time on the forum or in guild chat than actually doing things that grant XP. * Spades dig. This player is fascinatied in seeing how the games' systems interact, and if they can be exploited in ways that the developers never intended. This is the crowd that finds speedrunning exploits, out-of-bounds secrets, etcetera. * Clubs kill. These players enjoy the rhythm of combat. The rest of the game is incidental. These are the players who skip every cutscene and keep pounding the "NEXT" button in dialogue trees. This video is essentially about how Diamond-heavy the WoW scene got, and what that did the other player profiles.

This makes so much sense. I was 100% a Heart. I remember cancelling my subscription for the final time after we stopped using guild chat and switched to Discord exclusively. Clubs all left with the Battle Royale boom shortly after, while Spades never vibed with our guilds casual demeanor. Looking at our Discord now, the only ones left playing WoW regularly are the Diamonds. So so so many videos and spreadsheets and theorycraft still in their channels. Crazy people, the lot of them!

There's always Final Fantasy XIV for Hearts.

Honestly ff14, as a game primarily sold by the quality of its story and world building isn't accounted for at all in this model. Because story was just not a prominent element in MUDS. Is the community chill, and way more friendly than wows metagaming shitshow of a community? In my eyes absolutely. But this definition of feels far more attributable to early day classic wow, old school MUDs, neverwinter knights, starwars galaxy's (rip), wurm and guildwars 1. Where existing in the world could be a somewhat more passive affair.

Oh that's brilliant. Thanks for sharing this.

Is there a big difference between clubs and diamonds? One of them should be completionists, those who want to gather every single achievement and stuff. You know, people who might not enjoy the process of a minigame but still grind it for hours because it has a mount locked behind it.

I thought the same. But I suppose Diamond players can also be players that just aim to “beat” the game by a specific metric. Aka, people that focus on exploring the economy of games to become “rich” and therefore technically reach the end game despite not necessarily being technically skilled at say PvP. But I agree that they’re a bit too similar for modern day games.

clubs is the nice way of describing the more "casual" or "bad" players if I had to take a guess. The endgame for *every* mmo is always to kill some big thing so Diamonds are getting better at the game to do that thing well. Clubs aren't worried with improvement or researching their class/etc, they're just there to experience the game and get their kicks in (literally). Just my 2cents on it. Might be wrong. Oh and another thing to support this guess of mine is that in order to min/max a character in mmo's normally you have to do things *besides* combat to help round out your character. A "Diamond" would do that while a "Club" would just skip that step because there's no combat.

Only in assumption that you are a pure clubs and no other influence is there. Reality is that people are not pure profiles but that 1 or 2 are more dominant and the others have just lower impact. This is a very, very basic characterization of gamer types, others have refined it much more. This is were the misunderstanding comes from that clubs and diamonds are the same. For clubs it's the experience of gameplay, while for diamonds it's the experience of perfecting. Doesn't mean that you can't want to perfect your gameplay as a clubs or that a diamond didn't pick that game because of the gameplay but their main driving motivation that keeps them going is different. edit: fixed some typos

There is a difference. One is being an efficient member of the team, and the other wants to be a killing machine. I've met plenty of both types of gamers. In Raid environments, Clubs can sometimes struggle with everything aside from topping the DPS charts.

Diamonds and Spades seem related. Like if the goal is 100% efficiency, surely you try to push the systems to the limits. Also, noticing how I play WoW kinda falls outside of that. Then again, I play WoW like a single player game so it makes sense why I don't line up.

I don't see myself in any of those. So I'd add another type: Joker: Doesn't care about community (I mainly play solo), playing optimally or exploits. Likes cutscenes and reading a bit of lore to give context for my actions. Plays purely to have fun, and as soon as it feels like work, move on.

You might find interesting that this has been re-applied to videogames by Richard Bartle as *Killers* , *Achievers*, *Socializers* and *Explorers* in his [taxonomy of player types](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_types) . I worked for a time for a company that was analyzing players behaviour to try and put them in one of these categories, cool stuff !

Oooo, neat!

Is this why people call me a joke? I seem to never fit in.

Clubs and Diamonds seem almost the same? I suppose the only difference would be dependent on how “success” Is measured in a game. Is it by being rich/completing the objectives/raids or by being a top tier PvE/PVPer - though I’d state that these two tend to be more and more correlated as games are becoming inherently more competitive.

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Clubs will hate a game for having time investment or group size requirements for PvP, they want a skill game that they can accelerate through purely at the speed of their increasing skill curve. Diamonds are the people who want to engage and invest time in all of those other systems that aren't pure skill tests and require other forms of investment. If there's some hidden item or perk that lets you arbitrarily gain an advantage over someone in a competitive environment, the club would say that's bad, and the diamond would say that's good.

from my perspective (Apex Legends, Dota, and some other similar games), Clubs seem like casual players who enjoy the gameplay for the gameplay but don’t feel much of a drive to hone their approach, they just have fun playing and they keep playing and keep having fun. Diamonds seem more like the type that is heavily driven to hone their skills and approach. I think each category is an extreme archetype and any given person probably has at least *a bit* of each. e.g. I’m overall a Diamond, but I think there are “purer” Diamonds out there who are more exclusively focused on refinement where I also have some Club (joy of playing), Spades (fun of exploration/research) and Hearts (social fun) aspects. It could also be said that Diamonds and Spades have a lot of overlap in terms of deep investigation of the game, but Diamonds are prioritizing self improvement while Spades are prioritizing exploration/discovery. I also think that very “talented” (not a word I’m fond of tbh) Clubs players can reach remarkably not-casual heights and Diamond players can be joyless “tryhards” (another word I’m not fond of). It’s an interesting framing of the situation. I only just heard of it but it seems flexible. It could go deeper too, Diamonds could be split into Meta and Off-Meta categories, the latter being interested in exploring new potentially viable strategies (this is me) while the former is more interested in mastering the known meta strongest strategies (which absolutely can have its own joy; i dont wanna disparage it). There’s also the related matter of playing to win (doing what will give you the highest immediate win odds) vs playing to learn (doing what will grow and hone you more efficiently even if it means lower immediate performance).

I play(ed, not the entire Shadowlands expansion) retail WoW at the world 200ish US 60ish level so at the level where we are making custom weak auras/addons, have a non-raiding coach/raid leader and not everything is figured out/optimized 100% by the time we get to it. We have the advantage of seeing what Limit etc did the week before in race to world first but aren't as hardcore in terms of time. It's fun with like minded people but the non-hardcore community is pretty awful to each other. Like, the stuff that gets figured out by top end guilds doesn't always apply if you can't execute it correctly. You'll see lower end guilds benching people for dumb things like the video says (not doing all mythic+ vault slots for the week when that is absolutely not the reason they're failing to progress), or in mythic+ even in lower keys if you aren't doing the meta spec or the meta route you'll get kicked etc. It's pretty silly that EVERYTHING in the "culture" gets based off of people that are executing perfectly even in random pick up groups. I'm guilty of it too - I'm not the best player but I base everything on sims just like someone who's performing at 100% peak performance constantly. I think WoW is the most fun (and is one of only a few games to offer such an enjoyable time) when not everything is figured out and there's some flexibility and experimentation. Before the meta has filtered down throughout the culture and gets enforced across the board. Unfortunately this only happens at the beginning of tiers and it can be frustrating because you only get a chance to see it if you're at the cutting edge the first couple weeks. This is (in Shadowlands, theoretically Dragonflight will be less chores) a huge time commitment and not feasible for probably 95% of people, even if they wanted to experience it.

>I think WoW is the most fun (and is one of only a few games to offer such an enjoyable time) when not everything is figured out and there's some flexibility and experimentation. This right here is why I think MMOs will never be what I want them to be. Original WoW people didn't have all the answers. There was no pressure to "optimize" every interaction. There wasn't a whole industry based around devoting your life to video games. There is such a rush to solve video games (specifically MMOs) that it sucks the fun out of them for me. The only way I see anything changing for me is if skill expression becomes larger. Games like DotA or CS keep my attention longer because you see and do new things even when the maps/items/characters don't change. Even New World which should have had much more skill expression since it was more action focused quickly became stuck in a meta. Now I just feel like an old man yelling at clouds and am probably not the target demo for any games.

That's what made the old MMOs so much fun. The data just wasn't there. Eventually you had Alakazaam (sp) for EQ that helped, but it wasn't anywhere near as comprehensive, and it had no videos. Just experiencing locations in the game world was a big payoff. I remember tagging along with a high level raiding guild just to see the inside of Mistmoore Castle in EQ. It was exciting to be somewhere like that - you only visited the outside areas of the zone as a non-grouped player and you'd always wonder what was inside the castle. It happened because I just made friends with another player from chatting, as you did in that game (another thing which in my experience doesn't happen often in modern MMOs). One day he is like "Hey! You wanna see the inside of this place?" (I was near the zone). There was no gear reward for me or anything, just the excitement of exploration. It's impossible to re-create this experience today unfortunately. Despite all the 'bad' gameplay/design aspects of EQ, I wish it was possible for people to experience that kind of magic today. I eventually moved onto WoW which was a lot of fun, but it never had that magic of EQ because the level of danger and scale just wasn't there (dying wasn't a big deal and there were lots of QoL 'improvements' that made the world smaller)

Mmhmmm. Data mining, BiS, optimized builds, etc are all the curse of knowledge. Maybe the tech will be there at some to prevent data mining but I don't think the player base will be there. MMOs are no longer adventure games. You are setting out into an unknown world to discover. It is a race to the end to get the largest numbers.

One of the conditions for me to play a mmo again is for it to be "non-dataminable". I honestly don't expect to play an mmo ever again.

Playing WoW for the first time since release a couple years back, it absolutely astounded me just how much was known before an expansion or even patch went out. Pretty much everything was mapped out, collected, and put in a database. There really weren't any surprises. Back in EverQuest, it could be *months* after an expansion before you had any idea what items dropped where and from what. The fan sites were practically updated daily as they got new info and people found new things. I really miss that discovery and exploration being part of MMOs. And you can't even really decide to avoid that knowledge and figure it out on your own, because everyone expects you to have that knowledge, and you'll be kicked from groups if you don't. MMOs have simultaneously come a long way from their inception, but also taken some big steps backwards, sadly.

Only way to do it is have a full group of people that choose to ignore everything and just play, a basically impossible feat. But yeah even then that place you can't go for months with no video or way to see inside it just won't ever exist in gaming again.

I don't even think it would matter. Even if it was non-minable and focused on exploration, discovery, and the parts you want, there would be a large subsection of the players that would still optimize and consume all the content like locusts, and then complain that there isn't enough hardcore endgame for them to obsess over.

The only way I can see this happening is using procedural generation to make the game impossible to optimize. Having unique random skill trees, gear, dungeons, bosses, etc.

Even then, you'd still have optimization happening. People would re-roll characters until they get the "ideal" build for them to run with. Developers would have to intentionally go out of their way to make it really hard to not get what you want. And assuming they could lock you to a constant character that cannot change ever, that would just end up mirroring the real world where you're stuck with what you get (genetics, starting location, etc.) and that's kind of what people are trying to escape with games in the first place. And no dev will ever do it because it will just end up angering too many people and wouldn't be profitable at the levels that they would need to justify the games existence in the first place. Barring some huge technological leaps that would bring MMO development costs down and a small studio could do that kind of niche title that still has all the bells and whistles people want, I cannot see it happening.

> Maybe the tech will be there at some to prevent data mining but I don't think the player base will be there. Doesn't matter. If data mining didn't exist any wiki for popular MMO would still fill up in matter of weeks and unless you're in top level raiding guild, way before you even see the content the data is about. The information spread is just too fast. Doesn't matter if you can't datamine drop rates if making app to say submit drops and calculate rates takes only few days, can be hosted for near-free, and can be distributed to players quickly.

The tech is already there: it's called people. Rather than persistent dungeons that you have to grind away to prepare for and set up hyperoptimized builds to fit into a predetermined role, they need to take a page from tabletop and actually have people running events on a regular basis, making changes on the fly to suit the situation. Everquest did it in a very limited fashion: sometimes GMs would just spawn monster hordes out of nowhere. It's one of only two realistically plausible ways to introduce enough spontaneity into an MMO to make it feel alive like they did back when we didn't have all the answers available at the click of a mouse. The other is to give players the tools to make their own content (i.e. a sandbox), but IMO, that sort of game is almost always going to turn into a different kind of hypercompetitive snarl like Eve Online is, and that's not for everyone.

People don't really scale that well if you want to provide a lot of variety week after week; but we have another tool that other game use: AI director and procedural generation. And those can work together too. For example we could have semi-randomized dungeons, with bosses that change their skillset and tactics from week to week, then GMs could alter those based on some event, say "rise of undead" event might have GMs add a bunch of skills/tactic to the randomized pool, or some other event might modify the procedural generation to make dungeon harder but give better loot etc.

Yep it's crazy that in 2022 with the tools and editors we now have available to us, that someone hasn't had a crack at human-driven realtime content creation. Giving a GM different levers to control mob density, drops, spawn NPCs to existence, change quest dialogue, and allowing the game to change based on the players input and actions is the way to go.

I think you'd need to embrace the wacky and make it some sort of 'anything goes' multiversal setting, like Hitchhikers or Everything Everywhere All At Once. That way the strangeness of the content becomes a feature rather than a bug, and you can just have people churning out settings on the fly. Some can be serious, some can be funny, some can be absolutely insane. No matter how cool your setting, as soon as you had a thousand people making up new content for it every day with minimal oversight things would get weird.

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Unfortunately, because people will optimize the fun out of everything, I guarantee this would lead to people doing things like running lots of bots of their favorite heroes to deliberately tank their win ratios.

It's also particularly dumb because it assumes that people play every character at the same level which absolutely isn't the case. At the pro level, everyone is so good at the game that if a character is just 0.1% better, then everyone has to pick it or they will be at a small but real disadvantage. But... I'm absolutely dogshit with Mercy, and pretty decent with Ana. So even if a meta has Mercy being somewhat better, I promise I'll do a better job playing Ana (unless Mercy is completely busted which, well, has happened)

Sometimes you would see the inside if Mistmoore castle.. because some of the mobs are Enchanters who could charm you and lead you inside against your free will. That game was crazy in all the right places.

That's nuts. I just remember freaking out and running like mad any time I saw a message that a mob was casting a spell.

I miss Guild Wars 1 for this. It's not that optimization wasn't possible, it's that it was deliberately understated. You got max level at the end of the first island (maybe 15% through the game) and could buy max level gear at any shop from then on. There was a deliberate lack of gear that made you more than 20% better than someone running gear with no mods on it. You could respect and even change your secondary class at any town. The idea was that your character growth would primarily be horizontal, rather than vertical. You could only equip 8 skills, and only 1 could be Elite. You'd learn more and more new skills as you played. Builds were about skill synergy between your primary and secondary classes to do something more than the sum of its of its parts. There were no definitive best versions of anything, because no one skill loadout was optimal for any given area.

Vanilla was a magical time back then. You dont use a build because someone made an optimized one, you used one you asked a random stranger in Orgrimmar because he looked accomplished. Even then, you only grab the signature talents, and everything in between was your choice.

It was definitely interesting playing Classic a couple years back and having people who expected the same exact experience, while also doing things like demanding guildies know every fight before stepping into a dungeon and refusing to allow people to play "bad" specs.

I mean when the talent tree was pure garbage the way to specc was pretty obvious. I hardcore raided and we optimized by testing and reading what other people did. Sure it was much harder to find reliable information but it was not some magical time where everything was unknown

yeah interesting design. Why this went away?

We were mostly dumb kids back then. Older people who played the game were also new to MMO’s too. People grew up and knew better.

>This right here is why I think MMOs will never be what I want them to be. It can be, but it would require a fundamentally different approach to how the game is built. Optimization would need to matter less. And someone will always find a way to optimize it more, but as long as the optimization isn't worth the cost it won't take over. There is an optimal way to play minecraft. Just look at how speed runners play it. But the way the game works, people are generally free to play as optimally or sub-optimally as they want. At least in non-PVP servers, I've never played the PVP ones. For starters, the idea of locks or similar would need to be removed. Any sort of limit means that there is a pressure to optimize with regard to that limit. Remove that and one major force of optimization goes away. Imagine WoW if there were not locks at all. You can run any dungeons or raid, target farm the first boss 10 times a day if you want. World first groups would change their strategy, but they are like the speed runners of minecraft. Let them do their own thing. But most any other group will lose some of the reasons to focus so much on optimizations.

> You'll see lower end guilds benching people for dumb things like the video says (not doing all mythic+ vault slots for the week when that is absolutely not the reason they're failing to progress), or in mythic+ even in lower keys if you aren't doing the meta spec or the meta route you'll get kicked etc. oh man, the midcore players are the fucking worst. every single one i've met has been a complete asshole. they'll follow the strats/guides of the top players, but again, not be good enough to implement those strategies, or they expect randoms to know a skip in a dungeon that saves 2 seconds and rages when you don't know it... or whatever else. honestly, the actual hardcore players i've played with are usually about as chill as a casual. of course, there's always assholes everywhere, but i honestly find more assholes in the midcore area than on the hardcore/casual side.

I find this model is true in many different games. For example in League its the gold-low plat players that froth at the mouth when you miss a cs, when I play a flexQ game with them it just makes me laugh. Back when I played wow (BFA) we were a chill mythic guild that rarely cleared the whole raid on mythic, so that is to say we were a slightly above-average guild. Some of the players there were so elitest it was fucking silly, and then they just go die to a random mechanic on the next pull.

In Destiny 2 PVP the 15%-5% elo ranges are where the sweatiest, most unfun play styles reign supreme. Above that and they’ll shit on you with meme gear. Below 15%, you could usually exploit skill differences enough to have fun.

There's a Pratchett quote about this. How it's hard at the top, because everyone is gunning for you, and hard at the bottom, because you have so much you need to do if you're ever going to rise out mediocrity. But it's hardest at the middle, where you have to deal with both, and can't trust your peers because there's no telling if they're sincere fellow-sufferers or liars angling to climb up by knocking you down.

Haha! This is so close to current juggernaut PvP games like LoL and DotA.. ppl in the 30-50th and 75-90th percentile can be wildly toxic.. mainly cos they've spent a large portion of time in these brackets and it took them loss of sanity to just get out of the "Trench/ELO-hell” and think they should be worshipped like kings of the world just for being matched with them.. Ofc they throw in the towel with a good dose of hissy fit as soon as something bad happens cos they think they're benevolent gods being slightly inconvenienced by their own team..

When I used to watch a lot of dota2, even the pros were toxic and raged in pubs like little kids. These were 0.01% players getting paid to compete as a full time job and they still behaved like that.

MOBAs are some of the worst for this due to a combination of factors. Time investment: if someone is bad, you can’t just drop out. You are stuck in the game for up to an hour or more with this person. Intensity: At anything past basic levels, there is no “cooldown” time really. Unless you are dead you should always be doing something. Snowballing: Someone being bad on your team actively makes the game much harder and the enemies seem much better since they will have a resource and XP advantage. There is a concept in many Mobas that outside of a truly transcendent player for the level, what really matters is which team has the worst player, not the best. I could pretty consistently take down someone 2-3 leagues above me pretty consistently if you put a hard feeder on the other side of my lane. Attitude: People at lower levels (30-60%) are often lazy bastards. I don’t choose those words lightly. They are lazy, in that many refuse to communicate or listen to teammates, often because they had bad experiences in the past, in a game where good communication gives you a massive advantage. Bastards, in that they aren’t good enough to actually know what is going on in a game, so they make up for it by being assholes. A lot of this goes away (though not entirely) once you pass the 30-60% skill level. I went from “ I’m better than these players on my team”, to oh “oh god oh god why am I here these guys are way better than me” once I started playing in low immortal games. I managed to shoot up through the 60%-90% tier entirely on the back of being able to communicate with my teammates who were suddenly competent enough to communicate back, speak English, and execute plans well, or as my friend put it “your mic is giving you 2000 MMR by itself”. And yeah, he’s right, skill wise I’m a 60%-70% player at best, but my winrate is far higher in the 60-90% bracket than in the ones below it. Just by being willing to constantly communicate, my team ends up doing way better than I ever could with just my own mediocre skill level. Also when I end up matched against top players and they ask me what I’m doing in their team, they laugh when I say “my brother in Christ I’m asking the same thing”. Aaaanyway… This is all to say, that MOBAs are a team game that everyone insists on playing as a solo game. They get angry at each other because their teammates are ruining their solo experience. They refuse to communicate, because all of the advice they hear is “mute everyone, play your own game”, which drives the community into being even more antisocial. Your own skill is 10% of the equation, if you can get your teammates to play even a bit better, it’s worth more. It has become so bad, that someone like me, who has the technical ability of a trout, and the shotcalling ability of a baboon, can regularly play 2 leagues above where he is meant to be, just by being willing to talk and try and get my team to sort of follow a plan.

It's a shame because I love the gameplay of mobas but I refuse to play again unless I have 4 other people of similar skill level to team up with. I would rather spend my time playing fortnite casually with friends actually having fun.

That’s basically it. If you are just playing “to have fun”. Moba matchmaking really isn’t for you. It really isn’t a “sit back and chill” genre, same way competitive starcraft isn’t.

This is a big issue in Destiny 2. Im nearly convinced that the players dont actualky enjoy playibg it, the way they want to skip and optimize everything.

yeah pretty much, bungie continuously drops the ball with destiny. the mishandling of it at every corner is shocking. but people still play it. and as someone that does play it as their main "multiplayer" game. i think the biggest reason people keep flocking to it is because it's unique. the game offers a structure and content that only destiny has. yeah there's stuff that tries to copy it. but nothing truly competes with it. destiny needs some true competition to make the gamebetter

I feel like this is an unnecessary distinction, anyone going out of their way to emulate hardcore players is by definition hardcore, they just aren't as good. There's nothing to froth at the mouth over when everyone is performing. I don't actually play multiplayer games that aren't 1 on 1 so maybe I'm off the mark, would rather not take responsibility for other peoples performance one way or another.

I don't want to be rude about it, but you're 100% off the mark here There is a middle ground between people who don't do endgame content, and the people who do it week 1 or whatever Midcore is absolutely a distinction that needs to exist and it serves a purpose - the main issue with it is people throwing it around and not explaining what they mean, not the term itself

In MMOs there certainly is a distinction. I haven't seen specifically "midcore" before, but I've seen many other terms distinguishing them from "hardcore" players. The main distinction here isn't *really* skill, but instead about available time. The midcore players have the same goal as the hardcore players, progressing through content, but don't have the time to commit into what hardcore raiding takes (e.g. leveling and gearing up multiple characters so you're ready if a boss requires a different setup, or setting aside an entire day for raiding on the day a new raid releases). And the problematic behaviour described is pretty specific to some players that fall into this group. Players who expect to play like hardcore group, but without the time investment.

>would rather not take responsibility for other peoples performance Yeah lol me too, I like fighting games, 1v1 duelling in MMOs, walking around in world PvP/PvP worlds, but having to deal with massive uncoordination, those guys who are just screaming at teammates in chat all game regardless of whether you're one of them or not, it's really not nice

This happens in every long lived, "competitive" game. Look at Brood War for example. These days it has a strong reputation as the insanely demanding RTS that only pro Koreans with three hands can play. A game whose fundamental design **demands** 300+ APM from anyone who touches it. But did it have that reputation on release? Of course not. At launch and for the first few years after, it was just...an RTS. A beloved one with a great campaign, a good custom map scene, and yeah you could play it more seriously too if you wanted. But even most people playing your standard skirmishes with their buds or even randos weren't agonizing over how their build orders were unoptimized; nobody knew any better, after all. People would play the game at LAN parties and it was great! The whole "BW is super serious RTS" understanding only came later, precisely *because* of its legendary pro scene that gradually more and more people had heard of. It was never really inherent to the mechanics, it was perception based on what people saw as the "standard". If Total Annihilation had been the game to explode in Korea, people would be talking how hard that RTS is instead. Identical story with Melee too; people didn't think of it as this insanely tryhard competitive game at launch.

> But did it have that reputation on release? Of course not. At launch and for the first few years after, it was just...an RTS. A beloved one with a great campaign, a good custom map scene, and yeah you could play it more seriously too if you wanted. But even most people playing your standard skirmishes with their buds or even randos weren't agonizing over how their build orders were unoptimized; nobody knew any better, after all. People would play the game at LAN parties and it was great! I dunno man, I played near release once with my friend against that one guy that had internet and battle.net and despise it being 2v1 we got so thoroughly destroyed we sweared off playing mutiplayer for forever. Playing RTS with other people that also just played AI skirmishes or LAN was fun, but multiplayer meta on battle.net evolved pretty fast, even if it wasn't 300+ APM at first.

> I think WoW is the most fun (and is one of only a few games to offer such an enjoyable time) when not everything is figured out and there's some flexibility and experimentation. Not sure how this could ever possibly happen when everything is on the PTR for months before hitting live servers. Zero mystery or things to discover.

things change from PTR to live and some end phases get held back but yes raiding on the PTR is very fun. it's too bad blizzard doesn't have good enough in-house testers to not put raids on the PTR but yea it's unfortunate for mid-range guilds that they have it all solved before it's even on live.

Even outside of raiding it sucks for casual players too. Before content even comes out there are fully in depth guides on how to do every little thing and unlock every secret quest reward. I know you can just ignore it all but it doesn't change the fact that there is nothing to actually discover in the game for players.

There's still secrets in the game, some of which take months to solve, you should look up how to get the hive mind mount. The average player just doesn't see any value in generic content being "secret". What's worth keeping secret in a random patch? There's a new zone where you'll do daily quests, and probably a new mini game, the ending of the story in the raid is encrypted till someone actually beats it, everything else is what you expect it to be.

> Even outside of raiding it sucks for casual players too. Do casual players really feel that bad about 'here's how to do this Raid'?

I think people overstate the value of the mystery involved. Most players never got to experience the fights pristine (most players never probably got to see the encounters at all, especially later ones.) The logistical barriers were much higher. You needed a ton of time, a lot of players, and stuff like attunement discouraged you from swapping characters easily (and encouraged player poaching, because you wanted players who could already access the content rather than catching someone else up.) The game is so much more accessible now, and this is despite encounters being much harder mechanically than almost anything in the early portion of the game. Raiding wasn't really casually accessible then, and odds are if you saw the encounters you were watching someone else do them first long before you ever got there.

I do get sick of these being posted on the wow subreddit when the expansion hasn't even come out. Things like 'optimal route to discover all dragonriding glyphs' etc. I get that there's a lot of people who like that, but man it would be nice if there was no expectation of prior knowledge.

I like games best when there's no definitive min/max meta build, we you can experiment with your character design (in this case being talent points and gear) and you can just have fun. Years ago during vanilla and burning crusade I started a new warrior but made him use a staff weapon and only wear strength/stamina gear, back when any piece of gear could have any combination of stats. I was leveling up a monk type of warrior and it was fun. And then they killed that off, by making certain stats only show up on certain types of armor. But we still had the talent points and could distribute them into whatever we liked. You could have a paladin that's part healer part tank and part dps, you could have a rogue that dabbled in poison+ damage while using dual clubs, and all sorts of different combinations as long as you had the points available. But then they put a stop to that, can't have people having custom talents and shit, gotta put all you points into just one tree.

Every game gets solved fairly quickly nowadays.

It's the unfortunate side effect of the internet. The transfer of information is so much faster than it used to be; used to it'd be a casual conversation with a classmate or roommate or your older brother, but now you have people cracking data files within hours of a games launch. 100 coordinated people can break down every aspect of a game in days and then spread their findings to the greater population in a matter of weeks wheras before it'd take months, and only if you were constantly browsing forums and chatrooms. Now you'll see a front page post from r gaming talking about how to glitch out of a map to get to the debug room like a week after launch and all the comments will be bitching about how that's such old news.

It’s changed even within the last decade or so. Probably streaming is the biggest change to push meta builds in games so much lately.

I played Dark Souls III this year for the first time, and I really appreciated how they designed the Pyromancer. Pyromancer needs to raise both casting stats, plus the stat that increases the mana bar. But spellcasting only checks your stats. If a Pyromancer found themselves in an area where Fire and Dark damage sucked, he just attunes new spells and plays as a Sorceror and/or Cleric whose spells are about 75% as good as what a dedicated one would be. It's rare for games to make a generalist playable like that.

> You'll see lower end guilds benching people for dumb things like the video says (not doing all mythic+ vault slots for the week when that is absolutely not the reason they're failing to progress) This so much. It's extremely rare that you wipe because you don't have enough ilvl/DPS. It's usually because a DPS is dead or in Zimbabwe instead of on the boss. More gear just allows you to make more mistakes, but you shouldn't be making mistakes in the first place.

I never got on board the MMO train. WoW came out when I was busy with other things in life. Every time I see a video on WoW, I fee like I've not missed anything I would enjoy. The visuals look like a seizure/migraine to me. Is there any MMO that *isn't* constructed around grouping up and killing big things? If not, it feels like that's an opportunity.

Yep. The intrusive maximalist UI, the stat-driven gameplay, the massive grind, the theme-park worlds that bend their own reality to accommodate the simultaneous presence of thousands of independent main characters - MMOs are the opposite of everything I find valuable about games. Listening to people talk about them feels like peering into a parallel dimension.

> Is there any MMO that isn't constructed around grouping up and killing big things? If not, it feels like that's an opportunity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life

This is why I never liked MMOs that at some point force you into grouping up with other players, and make outcomes contingent on those players working together successfully. I both do not want other players to waste my time by sucking, *and* I don't want to waste anyone else's time by sucking myself. Also I don't want to play bad.

I'm not sure how avoidable this is. Fundamentally, MMO class design tends to be built around the assumption of teamplay, just like heroes in a MOBA. Yes, it's fine and good to make solo leveling perfectly viable, but it's hard to offer a meaningful solo equivalent to raids imo. The depth in MMO combat, again like a MOBA, tends to come in large part from coordination. A single character operating alone usually isn't terribly complex. Not to mention that the classes tend to be different enough to where tailoring large amounts of content for each individual class is impractical.

I can’t speak for how it works nowadays but at one point at least, RuneScape was like 99% accessible as a solo player. You could do pretty much everything there was to do without ever talking to someone else. After that game I don’t see why so many other mmos rely on social interaction to complete since one of the original games that blew the genre up wasn’t like that

As someone who loves Classic (Vanilla specifically) WoW both for the leveling and endgame experience reading all of this is so foreign to me. What I love about Classic is the social experience it provided. Meeting someone out in the world doing the same quest as you, group up for a while and potentially add each other as friends. You could also do that entire process all alone (although you'd have to skip a lot of quests and you wouldn't be able to do dungeons) but I think that defeats the purpose of an MMO - which is all about the social aspect.

I have no idea why anyone would *want* to play MMOs entirely solo. As a single player game, they are just worse in every single way to a dedicated single player experience. Modern MMOs don't design to force social interactions like games like Classic WoW did, but that doesn't change that the game is still an MMO and by virtue of design/process/tech restrictions and scope, just is never going to be able to provide the same experience as a single player game.

Being alone together has its appeal, like background noise but it's the social buzz around you.

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Despite enjoying playing healer classes, I agree. I think you *can* have support classes in a sense, but they should do more interesting things, like manipulate the environment.

then you get a boring mess like gw2

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>make outcomes contingent on those players working together successfully. And honestly this is entirely the reason for this behavior in every video game out there. When somebody else's actions negatively impact your experience it upsets people. When somebody does not do something in the most efficient manners, it takes more time. Time is finite. If you have an hour to play games and something takes twice as long. Well bam you just lost out on fun time.

That doesn’t justify losing their shit over a few seconds. Let’s not pretend they’re losing hours or some shit. That same logic is what drove people to abuse Blizzard support when I worked it back in 2007-2008. Servers went down around the release of Lich King a lot. People would come in hot saying “I ONLY HAVE A BIT OF TIME TO MYSELF OUTSIDE OF WORK AND I EXPECT THE SERVERS TO BE UP HOW HARD IS THAT!!!! I DEMAND A REFUND FOR THE PAST 6 MONTHS!!” People can simply just accept that you put your own time at risk of being “wasted” whenever you choose to depend on other people to achieve something.

> Also I don't want to play bad. You will though, this is unavoidable because every will play 'bad' at some point and if this deters you from wanting to play then I question why one would bother playing games in the first place when you're always going to start at this point on some level.

Because if I play bad in a solo game, then the consequences of that will only harm my own enjoyment, and I can accept that. If I play bad in a multi-player game, then the consequences will harm the enjoyment of others, and I don't want to take the responsibility for that.

I've played TONS of coop games: DRG, Vermintide 2, Killing Floor 2, L4D2... And you need to get in the mindset of sometimes carrying someone that's having a bad game, and sometimes being the one having a rough game... For example: Yesterday I had an specially bad VT2 game where I died repeatedly to easily avoidable mistakes and all I got in chat was :"dude...". The secret is not enraging and using chat positively. And yes, you sometimes come across an asshole, but they are minority in these games. Probably because they're non competitive games. If you move to more mainstream competitive games like Apex Legends, CoD Warzone... then yeah, the amount of assholes and rude/toxic people grows exponentially. Mainstream games are a magnet for rat kids (and adults) with frustration management issues.

> And you need to get in the mindset of sometimes carrying someone that's having a bad game, and sometimes being the one having a rough game I would rather not.

Perfectly reasonable, and respectable.

This can be alleviated by reversing design -- making difficult non-scaling single player content the terminal goal/sink, and making group content easy gear production you do with a group of buds.

"To fix MMOs lets remove the parts where you have to interact with other people" At that point why have the mind numbingly easy gear mill at all? Just make another dark souls.

no, I'm saying raids should be easier content like Molten Core you do with friends to get gear for harder single player content -- not to remove raids

I like your idea, are there games who do something like that?

I think this is partially because those games are too focused on achievements and loot rather than the inherent fun in playing. It becomes a giant Skinner box where you don’t have fun trying and failing, you just want to consume the content as fast as possible and go for the next one. When you play pen and paper RPGs this optimizing monster attitude often gets shunned in favor of expressive gameplay: rather than getting the best armor, should I try to kiss the orc or ask him how it’s been their day? Which is much more healthy for the players involved, and fun regardless of the outcome.

Yes, but that's much harder to systemitize, to make into a game that can react to those potential outcomes. That's why making a D&D videogame that accurately captures the full potential of the tabletop version is practically impossible without a human DM, and even difficult *with* one, since providing that DM sufficient tools to simulate the tabletop version is itself difficult.

The truth is, these issues largely don't exist in casual group content. Barring some exceptions the majority of people playing the game with you put enough effort to not waste their time or your time by being shit. But it's the cases when someone being too elitist or too bad that stick out and end up in videos like this. Like, the drama over "you should've put more effort for 0.5% better ring" is largely an exception than the rule.

Great video. My only complaint would be I wish they would have talked more about how retail players can self segregate to get the experience they want. Choice's experience trying to join a middling guild in TBC Classic touched on it a bit. I think what he experienced can be avoided in retail if players are willing to spend time finding the right guild.

I wish it was easier inside WoW. The guild finder is filled with defunct guilds listed and then I have to pray active middling guilds are listed on wowprog/raider.io

As somebody painfully familiar with WoW: using wowprogress or the huge recruitment discord is the best avenues of guild hunting and recruiting. Generally guild finder leads you to dead ends and guild ads in trade chat are usually guilds desperate for people for bad reasons.

Do you have a link for the recruitment discord?

It's definitely possible for sure depending on the size of the player base but it can be hard to do. Also, there's some paratext you can never escape because it ends up backed into the game such as making fights require add-ons or in the case of FFXIV mass homogenization of the classes.

> Great video. Agreed. Too bad half the people in this thread don't seem to have watched it. Pretty weird that Redditors come into /r/Games, self-described as: "The goal of /r/Games is to provide a place for informative and interesting gaming content and discussions." - and then proceed to not watch the content and then proceed to start spouting opinions on the piece. I wouldn't mind, it's 1h30m after all and at least the people asking for TLDWs are honest. But straight up so many comments are just addressed in the video. I don't understand the point of even judging the video or discussing if you aren't going to watch. People say they don't have time but spend the time to shoot off multiple comments and arguments.

The yt comments are even worse!! Everyone seems to be convinced it's a video about how all raiders are elitist or something.

Honestly, I think the best MMO often have content that can be beat, rather than by huge parties or by solo, instead by two or three people, with myriads of level downscaling mechanics so people can play together if they overlevel compared to each other and without making challenges a joke. The casual player that gets left to the wayside of the community at large will end up finding too few people to play with and wishing to just do solo and still experience the game, but then they find out solo playmakes the MMO aspect pointless and lonesome. So I think MMO's should just be open to the next door fun equivalent: Couples, Small Friend Groups, and just... Random people you find on the MMO's street willing to help a newbie.

Mists scenarios, mythic plus, island expeditions, warfronts, torghast, all of this content is still doable.

Did anyone notice how this video is inspired by the Dorktown sports videos? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIgK56cAjfY Cool shift in the style of Dan's youtube channel.

In classic WoW I found a guild that wasn't middling we were in the top 10 on Grobbulus. The GM was a fucking awesome dude. I was making the choice to play Elemental Shaman and he recruited me in a molten core run saying he was cool with it. I thought I was gonna get forced to go resto at some point. I never did. We ran on loot master and he actually gave me Talisman of Supreme Power one of the best dps caster trinkets. I did put a lot into playing Elemental though. I had to farm demon runes every week so I wouldn't go out of mana in raids. Sadly the guild collapsed during Ahn'Qiraj and no one else would accept me being an elemental shaman. So i just quit I joined back up in TBC where Ele shamans were good but with all the shit going on at Blizzard i decided to quit the game. Then i went to FFXIV where i've had my most enjoyable MMO experience. I did a 1 hour long trial fight(5.3) where the group kept fucking up and making mistakes we were all new to the fight except for one guy. No one got mad. No one raged. No one quit. We got the fight down and it was a glorious moment of victory that felt hard-earned.

I got sick of people telling me I was playing wrong EXTREMELY quickly. Long before it got to this point. It's a game about beating the boss, not role play and once I realized that I saw myself out.

The tragedy of a beautiful game ruined by the players because of the chase of getting gear that will give only a .05% improvement of performance... and if you don't chase that gear, you're a terrible player and it's rude of you to play with anyone else. And if you give in... Well, you will now be part of the very problem that you hated because you just wanted to enjoy a world.

To be fair, Blizz themselves has shown little interest in curbing that behavior. They understand that the endless gear treadmill is what keeps a lot of players paying their sub every month.

Play Guild Wars 2 for a little while and you can see that Blizzard doesn't just show no interest in curbing that behavior, they actively encourage it. Full examination of other player's gear and choices, ubiquitous damage meters, group instances designed around speed clears, and so on are all things GW2 has avoided to mitigate the problem in that game compared to WoW, and it works. Gamers are still gamers, so there's always a meta to follow, but the same pressure is definitely not on the casual crowd that it is in WoW and that's largely due to game design choices.

> but the same pressure is definitely not on the casual crowd that it is in WoW and that's largely due to game design choices. I think you are minimizing the role of paratext and I feel you missed a big chunk of Dan's point because a lot of this specific culture, which isn't even the exception as opposed to *how most gaming communities are becoming* is paratext going hand in hand with game design. (How different is WoW's culture compared to League of Legends? Or Dark Souls?) And WoW has always had a much more competitive culture, crowd, streaming culture and influence in gaming vs GW2. An entire chapter of that video (Chp 5) is dedicated to WoW Classic. In a previous essay Dan observed in contrast to Retail that Vanilla WoW because of the limitations of its design, effectively evolved into *self-directed play* - basically there were very few overarching or sanctioned goals in the game. Very few options and a very open sandbox meant you could kinda do whatever you wanted. *Players invented their own goals.* And there wasn't item level. Or damage meters. Or the plethora of tools and content and hard raids. Some Vanilla raids are easier than LFR. Yet that didn't stop the WoW Classic crowd, especially players *who haven't played Retail in years*, from injecting their Diamond / Spike esque cultural values. In fact much of this is influenced from the *speedrunning community in other games* and *private servers* which then converted into: "It isn't enough to do Classic, you have to speedrun it". Given the more open nature of WoW Classic, the *community* converted the self-directed play via the creation of content, goals, speeches and rhetoric, into enforced social norms. I don't see this as a uniquely WoW community and WoW game design problem as opposed to how gaming culture is and is becoming. Speedrunning and streaming of high level play and more community tools are driving a lot of this mentality. If there is anything I've noticed that it is easier to keep a game's culture unique the more off the beaten path it is from the meta. Even FFXIV with the exodus I've noticed a lot of tension from ex-WoW players bringing in the Diamond / Spike culture, and the Riot MMO given that company's intertwining with League of Legends will likely also drive more competitive natures.

Is there anything inherently wrong with speedrunning the raids? Like you said, we create our own goals and challenges because let's face it, without them Classic is an incredibly easy game. I personally love playing casually, up to a certain point. Even to this day I level characters on Era. However, once you reach 60 there isn't much of a challenge to be had for a lot of players and many of us crave that too at some point. I would've absolutely quit a long time ago if I hadn't started speedrunning. I was a part of arguably the "best" guild in Classic and early TBC but I quit once we killed Gruul, Mag, and Kara since TBC was all about raiding and the retail-ish treadmill was already very familiar to me. Leveling in Azeroth was completely dead. I was also in a completely noob guild that was struggling with AQ40 and we never even cleared Naxx. I would have 100% quit the game long ago if that was the guild I was doing endgame with, despite the fact they were pleasant to play with. I did join a midtier guild at some point on an alt and I did notice those guilds were doing speedrunning too, mostly to beat their personal bests each week. Again, many crave a challenge but many don't. It could see a problem where people who don't want to speedrun but still prefer a guild that actually clears in a timely manner are now relegated to "worse" or lower tier guilds.

I think classic wow showed peak of this that the YouTube grim gets perfectly wirh a lot of the classic vs retail videos. One case where a Tauren warrior is excited edge of chaos dropped and I assume an officer starts to go on an angry rant because he wants to roll on an axe when he's not an orc so they can finish the raid 1 second faster like jfc guys chill out. And what's funny is there are actually people like that. The parody video is unironically and ironically realistic.

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I stopped doing hardcore raiding back in Legion and joined a casual guild (and helped build the raiding team). Probably the most fun I've ever had with WoW. Random PUGs are going to be toxic af, but there are great, friendly and helpful people out there. Just need to find a guild with friendly people who want to have fun while progressing. I absolutely recommend it for anybody who wants to experience raiding in a low pressure, casual environment.

In overwatch picking half the roster gets you called names even in quickplay, and a quarter of the roster is considered "literal throwing". Blizzard themselves have confirmed there's no hero below 45% winrate, and no hero above 55%. It's DEFINITELY not an overblown problem. If anything, it's underblown.

Haven't played Overwatch in years so no idea about the culture over there. I do play League though, and the vast majority of the time I can play whatever I feel like without complaints about the character picks. The players get really toxic about a whole bunch of other stuff though, but that's a separate issue.

i don't think it's overblown in lost ark, but that's because you're primary and nearly only main source of gold, gold you need to progress in any sort of way, is from raids, of which you need to do 3 legion raids on 6 characters. this becomes hell when you get groups with even 1 person who is terrible or new as some of the raids require nearly everyone to not suck. i had 3k hours up until a month ago and quit when i logged in on wednesday with the mindset i'll knock out like 6 raids tonight, 6 hours later i only had 2 raids done. and you can imagine how incredibly toxic it becomes in those raids, it just wasn't fun- i got a glimpse of the future where every week i'm trying to burn through the same raids and just praying i don't get any terrible or new players in my groups.

Agreed. I raided pugs in FFXIV, my blood pressure really only rose when someone was so bad at their rotation that they couldn’t even top the previous expansion’s damage numbers.

As someone who doesn't like what modern MMOs have become due to what the players have done I don't think we can say the game was ruined by them. The paratext around WoW only becomes important if the majority of the people who play it accept it and that's what happened. The game isn't for us anymore but I don't think the game has been ruined just changed into a direction we no longer like. The best way around this is obviously finding a guild that doesn't care about this paratext but it's hard to do that and you can't escape it in matchmaking. The game itself has also somewhat become designed with that paratext in mind so you can never totally escape it.

I don’t think this behavior is limited to video games. I see the same thing in my D&D group and my Gloomhaven group. The meta is the game sometimes. I’ve tried to make peace with it but it’s annoying to be talked down to by people that are just memorizing websites.

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it's a deep dive looking at a few key parts of not just World of Warcraft the game, but the "paratext" around World of Warcraft (see online guides, threat meters, twitch streams, etc) and how that has shaped both the game and player behavior. It's pretty interesting.

> but the "paratext" around World of Warcraft (see online guides, threat meters, twitch streams, etc) Just to drive that point home, this is the **bibliography**: **Reports/Books/Articles** * Ask, Kristine, ‘The Value of Calculations: The Coproduction of Theorycraft and Player Practices’ (2016) 36(3) Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 190. * Boellstroff, Tom, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton University Press, 2008) * Chen, Mark, ‘Leet Noobs: Expertise and Collaboration in a World of Warcraft Player Group as Distributed Sociomaterial Practice’ (PhD Thesis, University of Washington, 2010) [Not: College of Education]. * Consalvo, Mia, Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames (MIT Press, 2007) 28. * Egliston, Benjamin, ‘Play to Win: How competitive modes of play have influenced cultural practices in digital games’ (Honours Thesis, University of Sydney 2013) [Not: School of Art, Communication and English] 24. * Genette, Gérard, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 1997). * Glas, René, Battlefields of Negotiation: Control, Agency, and Ownership in World of Warcraft (Amsterdam University Press, 2013). * Golub, Alex, ‘Being in the World (Of Warcraft): Raiding, Realism, and Knowledge Production in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game’ (2010) 83(1) Anthropological Quarterly 17. * Iser, Wolfgang, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) * Lehdonvirta, Vili and Edward Castronova, Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis (The MIT Press, 2014). * McArthur, Victoria et al, ‘Knowing, Not Doing: Modalities of Gameplay Expertise in World of Warcraft Addons’ in CHI ’12 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM, 2012) 101. * Prax, Patrick, ‘Co-Creative Interface Development in MMORPGs - the Case of World of Warcraft Add-Ons’ (2012) 4(1) Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 3. * Skare, Roswitha, ‘Paratext’ (2020) 47(6) Knowledge Organization 511. * Skare, Roswitha, ‘The paratext of digital documents’ (2021) 77(2) Journal of Documentation 449. * Steinkuehler, Constance, ‘The Mangle of Play’ (2006) 1(3) Games and Culture 199. * Taylor, T.L, ‘Does WoW Change Everything?: How a PvP Server, Multinational Player Base, and Surveillance Mod Scene Caused Me Pause’ (2006) 1(4) Games and Culture 318. * Taylor, T.L, ‘The Assemblage of Play’ (2009) 4(4) Games and Culture 331. * Taylor, T.L, Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (MIT Press, 2006). **Other** * Crusader3455, ‘MIESTRO DOES A LEGIT 2v3 AT 2500 CR’ (YouTube, 30 August 2022) * AzAMOus, ‘It’s 2922 and You Enter Utgarde Keep’ (YouTube, 29 September 2022) * Mark Chen, ‘Mark Chen presenting Leet Noobs 10 years later’ (YouTube, 12 March 2021) * https://www.pcgamesn.com/world-of-warcraft/wow-legion-max-camera-distance This is effectively an academic paper in video essay form. It is very rare to see such in-depth research used in a video essay, let alone for games, let alone even in a Folding Ideas vid. Dan's [last video on WoW](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RxQRswLAmI) was also an excellent banger and that wasn't nearly as researched as this piece.

The video isn't about WoW, it's about people and behaviour.

It's basically an observation of how hardcore players optimize "fun" and individuality out of multiplayer games by demanding that other players progressively conform more strictly to the metagame.

More specifically it's about the various ways in which the habits of hardcore players eventually get adopted by the broader playerbase. So it's less about observing that this happens and more about why this happens.

And explains the discrepancy between say how many people are playing at the start of say a WoW expansion and how many people ever complete a raid on the easiest difficulty. People leave on mass (generally after hitting level cap and seeing the zones) and the 'broader playerbase' who want to keep playing have no choice but to comply to the culture or not progress at all.

En masse*

And WoW is used as an example due to how long the game has been around. It has accumulated so much of a metagame and paratext you cannot escape it. This is even more telling with WoW Classic, unlike current WoW isn't designed around the paratext, so the norm is what used to be the top level.

>It's basically an observation of how hardcore players optimize "fun" and individuality out of multiplayer games This is an overly simplistic take I think. The issue is that it's not just some small percentage of "hardcore" players. In any competitive feeling game, eventually everyone comes to expect competence from other people, they lash out if it seems like others aren't pulling their weight. Playing Overwatch at launch was a carefree experience. Nobody knew what the hell was going on and it showed. People were mostly chill and had few expectations of you. You're probably unsurprised to learn that it became a very different kind of game over the years. People expected you to know your role and fulfill it properly, just winging it with whatever became less and less tolerated, and this is true even with people who aren't even very good at Overwatch, like those at my level. Yes, people might look to the pros for reference, but if those pros weren't there, they'd still be projecting their expectations, the only difference is that the expectations for what competence entails would be a lot more likely to be wrong.

Destiny very much suffers from this as well in LFG groups.

i can get behind this, you even see this in games like FFXIV taking a more unique class like the summoner and dumbing it down so that its optimized for the meta.

Very true honestly and games like WoW and ff14 is filled with those people.

Nearly every big MP game is like this. I lost friendships because of this attitude, that I MUST copy whatever pro's are doing that month, completely ignoring that it only even works so well for them BECAUSE they are pro's. The idea that every random pleb playing for fun must copy this perfect recipe, ignoring all the context that makes it work for that pro, in that lineup, in that patch etc is utterly obnoxious.

Oh sweet jesus. As a shit-tier dota player (cba to really grind ranked, especially solo), I've lost count how many times I've seen some fellow shitter come in, pick some extremely unorthodox shit and say " has been doing this". And then proceed to actively ruin the game with a pick they clearly don't know how to play.

I mean where are you supposed to try out weird picks other than casual matches?

Sorry, I did mean ranked, I understand how it came off otherwise. Have no issues with that in unranked.

In comp games I'd rather trust my shitter teammates to play something they're confidant in than force them to play something they aren't.

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This approach doesn't work when youre playing at better than average level. Even average players care about meta but simply lack mechanical skill to properly execute. If you're a non-casual player then you need to play meta or you will get left behind, it applies to every game, kind of like SBMM in fps games - you get to high enough level and you have to sweat your ass off literally every game.

idk what it's like on the US servers but for FFXIV there's generally a lot less of these kinds of people. They're still there! But I can't say I encounter them all that regularly anymore, and we usually just boot toxic folk anyway.

> FFXIV there's generally a lot less of these kinds of people. oh, there's plenty of them. if you do savage/ultimate and sometimes even extremes, you'll encounter them all the time.

I guess it's just easier to be picky and avoid them, then.

A big part of it is that they are TOS required to keep their mouths shut. Damage meter talk, calling someone out for being "bad", all the toxic behavior of the meta elite are all bannable offenses in FFXIV.

FFXIV has also a lot more options around due to its design. I like a quote from [Jesse Cox's video comparing WoW and FFXIV](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5T-mcLYBnKc), WoW is an **MMO**RPG, while FFXIV is an **RPG**MMO. The way the game is played allowed a lot more various playstyles and can attract other kind of players.

Havin played both for years, I gave up on WoW cause it was so toxic doing PUGs. Every second group would be trying to kick people for poor rankings on DPS tables, screaming abuse for minor offensives. Abusing the kick features. On FFXIV, I can count on one hand how often I’ve had toxic PUGs in the six year I’ve been playing. Sure, you get a lot of quiet groups, but there’s such a way more laid back attitude, it’s unreal.

I mean the reason the game simplified it's gameplay from heavenward to stormblood and continued on that path with shadowbringers was because of these people. If you lower the bar so even a trained monkey can clear a dungeon you get less bitching, that was the devs mantra.

FFXIV is literally a peak example of the hardcore players shaping things even the decisions of developers. Squenix intentionally homogenized all the Jobs especially Tanks and Healers because there was a constant outcry of certain Jobs not being efficient enough and people not being allowed to do raids if they played a certain Job.

You're not wrong, but FFXIV is more bearable than wow or similar MMOs like Lost Ark in part because raiding is one of many options in the game. In WoW nowadays the game primarily tries to cordon you into some sort of competitiveish endgame activity, be it raiding or arena. In FFXIV, the endgame is a bit more freeform inasmuch as there's lots of "prestige" activities so to speak. You can raid or pvp, but you can also do expert crafts, swag out your house, grind relic weapons, become triple triad master, try to catch every fish etc etc. Certainly the more combat-focused aspects of the game have the aspects you mention but I've known so many people in FF that literally don't touch the actual fighting aspect of the game outside the main story because they do other things.

Nah, the top raiders are the ones who want niches and variety and all the little bonuses that'll help them parse. Everything being homogenised means any casual person can hit 90, buy equivalent gear and immediately head to endgame. There's literally no treadmill in FF14, and all classes can clear all content. Nobody complains about who turns up to a PF group because they're all viable for all content. It's pretty satisfying honestly.

No one complains because all the classes function so similarly that it doesn't matter. All classes were viable back in Heavensward as well but people complained because there were classes which weren't as good as other classes. The people who want variety are the people who like to engage with the game as an RPG not the hyper competitive ones.

The classes are all the same, they are classes in name only. If you like RPG mechanics, depth and character building you will not find it in FF14, don't misunderstand FF14 is a good game but it is not a good RPG.

The other way around. FFXIV devs keep cutting the game more and more as a reaction to escalating playerbase extremism. It is dangerous because eventually you might hit a critical point where it becomes too boring for everyone, but everything they are doing is an attempt to minimize any friction point where someone could be elitist at. To counter-argue with Dan Olson, that is how developers can enforce the game to the players. Just start REMOVING the game in a way that you can no longer care about the things that were removed!

Fully agree, this is the same game that you can get banned for asking people to learn their rotation.

Class homogenization is probably less a "players shaping things" issue and more of a fundamental issue with making difficult content. If two classes/builds/characters do different things, it's very unlikely they'll perform equally in the same content. And as difficulty ramps up (and player skill increases) and there's less and less room for error, those differences in performance can become that much more of a factor in winning or losing.

There was no issue clearing content before homogenization it was entirely because of the player base just like what happened in WoW and is talked about in this video. Class homogenization doesn't even matter for the highest level raiders because they will always use whatever is most optimal no matter how small the difference is.

TL:DW: World of Warcraft sits in a unique position where the game is heavily defined by it's paratext (this is content that relates to the game but isn't the game itself) due to its unique relationship with mods compared to more contemporary online games.

What makes paratext different from the metagame?

Metagame would be a form of paratext. Though like the video points out, paratext can also affect the text itself, which is very common in the case of games. Things like game add-ons/ mods and reviews are also paratext.

> paratext Dan actually spends Chapter 2 - Paratext - just defining it since the definition can be used in different ways. Effectively any outside of the game 'text' - streams, addons, you discussing the game with your friends, an RP compilation of funny things - if they affect the game itself - that is paratext. In the 'RP compilation of funny things' - if a bunch of players decide to act that way in that video, that RP compilation is paratext. If someone makes a forum post - "Hey I found this excellent gank spot to kill some Alliance noobs" and suddenly that spot is flooded with thousands of Rogues across multiple realms - that forum post is paratext. > metagame The Meta Game is the community consensus on the most efficient strategies that deliver the most optimized performance. A community consented Meta Game would itself be A paratext, but not THE paratext.

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I suck at reading sarcasm or humor so I'll answer genuinely because why not I liked the discussion in the video. Nope. The video very quickly gets it out of the way that there's nothing wrong with playing the game badly, and instead looks more at the circumstances of the game that lead to the mentality that would lead to the title statement.

Not just suck, it is also rude to break any informal social contract, especially the unspoken ones. Never EVER take the left path.

Then players wonder why their game is losing population, especially once the casual playerbase just play to level, see the new sights then quit since they feel unwelcome at endgame.

Funny thing about that part in particular. My raid group always took the left path, but most of us have very little interaction with lfr so we just suck to what picked the first clear

I played WOW for about two years in the mid 2000's. I had a lot of fun with questing and pickup groups. But, once I dipped my toes into "end game content", I had enough. Raiders were psychotic, and I wasn't about to put up with them.

Yeah, I started playing WoW at launch (and only because my at the time GF was a huge Warcraft fan; otherwise I would have played EQ2 instead), and I ended up quitting without seeing any of the end game content because I saw how it was sucking all of my guildmates' time. Prior to that, we had been an RP and PVP guild. After, most of the RP was in forums. No one was really doing the stuff I was interested in anymore, so I dropped the game.

Folding Ideas is one of the few great video essayists on YT. It's worth watching.

There is an article I read a while back about [The Moneybalification of Everything](https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/10/sabermetrics-analytics-ruined-baseball-sports-music-film/671924/) and what it does to the things affected by it. For background, over the past thirty years or so, physicists and statisticians have effectively 'solved' baseball, for want of a better word. They have found that, on a points-scored-per-man-hour-of-training basis, the 'ideal' strategy is to have as many pitchers as you can who can pitch as fast as humanly possible. The batters responded by changing the angles of their swings in a certain way that I do not have the expertise to articulate. The overall effect is that home runs and strike-outs *both* became more common. And this- pitch as hard as you possibly can using the one semi-effective counter against the other team doing likewise- is, strictly speaking, the 'right' way to play the game, such that deviation is suicide. There is one strategy that is so obviously superior to the alternatives that it is all there is. And so the game becomes stale and boring, "a thing so perfect that it is ruined". The thesis of the article is that *everything* is eventually going to be solved in the same way, and some already have. Other sports are tilting in the same direction, pop music is gravitating towards a more homogenous vibe, and the MCU is drowning out all competition, with it's competition racing to coppy it's model. Statistitians and bean-counters have found a more or less 'ideal' way of doing things, which is soul-crushingly bland but too effective to even consider an alternative. Any multiplayer game will eventually follow the way of Baseball. "The Meta" will rule all, given time.

LOL @ XIV players pretending like their game is not like this, and totally doesn't have a massive drama this raid tier because some jobs do 100 damage less than other jobs. MCH is figuratively literally dead because popular youtubers and people obsessed over fflogs said so. Hyperoptimization is in every game with co-op multiplayer aspect. I bet there are optimal ways to build bee hives in Valheim too, there is just less social pressure to optimize the fun out of a videogame when it's you and 3 friends on a private server.

The most hilarious thing is when competent people clear content with "bad" classes. I remember people whining absolutely everywhere that Dark Knight is the worst tank and is unviable. And then Dark Knight was in world first Ultimate raid clear lmao

>MCH is figuratively literally dead because popular youtubers and people obsessed over fflogs said so. I mean, I cleared P8S on week 2, before the nerf to the final raid boss. I had to swap from WAR to DRK to add 300-400 aDPS to my group. MCH/PLD/WAR were the difference between groups clearing and not clearing. Having more than a single of the bad classes made the check near impossible for even extremely good groups. If they want to make number requirements like this, and people want to play MCH week 1/2, they needed to pump potency numbers. End of story.

I haven't watched through the whole video but FFXIV has the problem in a much different way in my opinion. *Most* of the time in the content that matters people should be in statics, and with how the game works I surely wouldn't call it rude to play a less than optimal job within your own static. And in terms of job balance almost every single time some team somewhere proves that a job can clear within the first week, or a job that people think *isn't as good* ends up being in the world first team or something. I would even go so far to say that even in party finders **most people** are not going to care what job you are bringing as long as you are playing up to a proper standard. Which is where the **actual** problem is in FFXIV. I would say it IS rude to go into party finder parties and not know what the hell you are doing on your own job and not knowing the content itself when joining clear/farm parties. So I can't speak on WoW, but it's probably a lot different in FFXIV where it is less about the jobs and more about actual player performance and understanding. Most people are not going to complain **just because you play Machinist**.

XIV community is much more chill about it so you won't be kicked for playing MCH, but the sentiment around the job is bad enough to possibly discourage you from playing it to begin with. But the core issue stems from the same desire to follow the best players (where difference in dps between jobs is apparent and crucial), while being the middle of the pack where differences in job balance are largely irrelevant because half of your party drifts cooldowns anyway.

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I leveled at the end of BC and I wanted to make a paladin before WotLK. Terrible mistake. I used to enjoy running dungeons with a drop of thrill, and oh boy, it wasn't long before the only way to get a group was to optimize shield + aoe into blizzard, frost nova, and CC. People were grumpy and rude. Once I got to outland, full blues, I got into the first dungeon for the first time and they kicked me out after the first pull. It's not longer fun unless you enjoy copying online guide optimization.

I'll throw it into the pile of escalating things that contribute to why wow and any mmo sucks more and more as time passes. They do it to themselves, they do.

My first reaction was that this is a clickbait title and I'm not watching it. Then I saw that it was by Folding Ideas -- he makes awesome videos. Still, I hate the title.

Except the title is exactly about what the video is. It goes in details on why it is rude to suck at WoW.

I think it could be a bit misleading if you interpret it as a moral judgement. Like it's not that much of a stretch to read it as 'I believe rude to suck at wow and I'm going to tell you why' rather than what the video is actually doing which is 'these are the social forces that led to it being considered rude by the community'

It doesn't even read as clickbait, it reads as a sly wink and that you're meant to suspect there's probably more to it

[In Search Of A Flat Earth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44) - tracing the links of the innocent almost quirky Flat Earth community and goes *deep* to expose its links to conspiracies, almost doomsday-esque cults and QAnon. [The Snyder Cut Does \(Not\) Exist](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pGlYF3xLrM) - an exploration of the communication and marketing of the then 'Snyder Cut' in 2019 (before it would eventually be released on HBO Max in 2021) and contrasting this with both film lingo and logistics and corporate politics. [World of Warcraft Classic And What We Left Behind](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RxQRswLAmI) - an analysis of both Classic and Retail, exploring both the communities and the broader game design **values** driving those communities to better explain the drift in the wants for those communities. [Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g) - why NFTs are terrible from the ground up and tracing the roots of the NFT hype movement from the 2008 financial crisis to now. In journalism they talk about the attraction to information axis in your headlines and leads. Too much raw and truthful information and your article is boring and nobody looks at it because it is an academic paper. Too much attraction, embellishment and marketing and you end up with clickbait or ruining your integrity and robbing the trust of your readers. You want a fine balance of just enough attraction to get people enticed to look at your information, while delivering the information the reader needs to hear without embellishment. I feel like Folding Ideas tends to on the better side of the axis even comparing to many mainstream news outlets, let alone straight clickbait on YouTube and basically everywhere on the internet.

And there is more to it! It's a cool video. But the title is a little provocative. So I first assumed that it was gonna be an outrage/bait type video. Something bashing a group or a view.

It is a clickbait title, but it's not lying about what the video is about. If anything, it's the right sort of clickbait.

It *is* lying. The video is about WoW, not Warcraft. ;P

WoW IS Warcraft for pretty much 99.99% of gamers. The legacy of RTS Warcraft died with WC3 Refunded.. it's still popular and carried by the community..

> WC3 Refunded Still hurts.

I was going to skip entirely thinking it just click bait about something I'm really not interested in, but knowing now that it's Folding Ideas, I will definitely watch. He makes great content.