On his blog Lum writes the shoking revelation that his highest level character in WoW is in his upper 30s, while Foton is leading his own guild and has been clearing Molten Core out of habit for the last six months. Well, almost always.
The question is: who is legitimated to speak?
The answer is: Who cares?
I’m the best advocate for those who speak without having a clue. I could make a club. I almost always speak about things that I’ve never seen and have negative practical experience about. But I revindicate this right to speak. And make sense. And maybe make more sense than those who have that experience.
This is the same diatribe about the movies. Who the hell says that I cannot discuss a movie if I haven’t watched it? That’s a basic principle. We don’t have to watch every movie, read every book and play every game to have opinions that make sense, preferences and all the rest. Most of what we “know” is derivative anyway and sometime you learn way more about a game by reading a forum than spending hours into it. We explore things till we feel they are worth the attention and when we decide they aren’t anymore, it’s because we have already what we need. It’s the essence of the culture! We have the possibility to learn from the stupidity of someone else. We don’t need to be stupid ourselves.
I mean, it’s like having an expertise in sex because you have seen tons of porn. It totally makes sense, doesn’t it?
So we are all legitimate to speak. We can surely see where things are going without the need to follow along. There’s definitely not enough time available to buy those ‘licences to speak’. And that aren’t even fun to get for the most part. We need to skip and bypass here and there. A little cheating is not all that bad.
But DO NOT REVEAL IT! Lum, you crazy!
On the other side my experience in WoW isn’t *that* bad. I was in the game three days after the launch, which was impressive considering that the box had to cross the ocean to get here. Then I spent way more time writing than playing and, in fact, in February I was still in my upper 30s and then slowed down even more and dinged 60 only in June. A couple of weeks later and my guild kicks me out because I cannot use Ventrilo and I’m slacking again, doing little PvP and a few instance runs. I play just one character and nothing else. I cannot join any guild because of the mandatory voice chat and I do what I can. Then a couple of weeks ago I found one who is moving the first steps into MC and ZG.
On the official forums of the game there’s a thread with someone complaining because an encounter in ZG is too hard. Who writes the rant plays this:
I am the main tank of our guild. My armor is buffed around 9000, I have 395 defense, 5500+ health. And Thekal in Phase 1 hits me with his mortal cleave for ~3500!
Holy Sh*t!
Well, I’m definitely not the main tank of my guild but my warrior isn’t that young either. When I dinged 60 (and I did *all* the quests in *all* the instances up to BRD) my character was barely above 3k of hitpoints. Right now I have 6400 armor, 330 defense (10 due to talents) and 4500 HPs. I should add a fabulous 23 in Fire Resistance. And this is in my tanking asset! I can switch a few pieces but I always finish to gain here and lose there. The blanket is too short! I have gathered plenty of similar items but nothing really standing out.
In the meantime I also managed to reach “honored” in Alterac Valley and “friendly” in Arathi Basin. Next week I’ll also reach “catass rank” 6. Whohoo!
In my career, beside having beaten all the instances in the game with 5-man PUGs at appropriate levels (the hardest were Zul’Farrak, Sunken Temple and BRD), I’ve seen dead Onyxia twice, Azuregos once and I’ve beaten three encounters in Zul’Gurub and Lucifron, Magdamar and Gehennas in Molten Core. (update: we cleared ZG and killed Garr, Shazzrah and Baron Geddon in MC)
Then, going back at that thread on the forums, I find posts like this one:
A good tank will have 9-12k buffed. The most i’ve ever seen is 13240hp but the tank had to pop last stand. You need more hp.
Holy Sh*t!
I think I’ve seen myself reaching 6k with all the buffs in the game stacked up. We have some “character progression” there. It doubles all I am after months at the ‘endgame’ and probably thrice myself in other fields, like resists and defense values.
Now I can see how these guys clear Molten Core, Zul-Gurub and Blackwing Lair easily. Give me and my guild access to those sort of things and we could do the same.
I have to agree with both Tigole and Tseric, the raid game is something unique that would never be possible with 5 or 10 man instances. It’s a unique experience. But then it’s still true even the opposite. These huge and complex encounters are again rather simple in the practice. It’s all about choreography and equipment. In fact the guilds spend weeks and months to progress in the raid instances more because of equipment limitations than actually learning and figuring out proper strategies. They believe they are getting better each time (which is also true, choreography is all about practice), but for the most part is that with each run the loot flows in progressively, “promoting” the whole guild and letting it advance in its path to catassery.
I already commented some of the problems of this approach. The impassable barriers, the need to isolate the guild from new players, the need to shape the guild around those 40-man raids. It’s not a news that at 60 the game shapeshifts into something completely different. Those choice in the design will have stronger effects in the longer term.
It’s surely involving and addicting but there isn’t another type of necessary value. Designing hard raid encounters is *extremely easy*. Really. Every raid mob has just a selection of few skills mingled together and not much else. Want to make Magdamar much harder? Add something in the mix that makes the choreography harder. Killing the players is so exquisitely easy. 95% of the work at Blizzard is probably about fine tuning all these encounters. That surely takes a lot of time and meticulous, boring work, but coming up with fancy, fun ways to kill the players must be like a walk in the park.
So we have an exponential character progression between freshly dinged 60 characters and godlike Lum’s wifes that makes pale the whole level 1->60 game. 40-man raids that require all sort of UI mods, fancy tools and third party programs. Full, dedicated guilds that shape themselves around the uber content like a second skin. To not even consider the lore-gurus who even understand what the hell is going on between Eranikus, the Emerald Dream, Malfurion and all the rest of the mess. And this game is like night and day.
Still, we don’t need anything of this to have an idea of what is going. Lum probably knows more about the game by looking over his wife’s shoulder than by burning hundreds of hours in the game directly. I’ve seen more than Lum and less than Foton, myself. I’m curious to see all the stuff that is still beyond my level (and probably will always be, if not when it will be totally mudflated out of the game. And then again because I’ll never find someone else willingly to do obsolete, worthless stuff. Myself included). I’m also having a satisfying fun when I can have access to that. But this isn’t changing my point of view or telling me something new that I couldn’t expect already. My competence about these games isn’t improving. In fact I still spent most of my time reading stuff between books, blogs and forums. And I do this in the measure I find interesting or useful. And it gives me something because I make these choices and decide what is worth and what isn’t.
We don’t need to be catasses to know the smell of it. And we don’t need any sort of competences if not in the case we feel the need by ourselves. Without having other people dictating us the proper path. Fuck the proper path. I go trekking where I like.