The roots of my soloist tendencies

A recent shared topic over at Blog Azeroth has asked us about the ways that how we handle our real-life jobs affect how we play WoW. Considering that I am still a student and the ways I handle my part-time jobs don't exactly speak volumes about who I am as a person, I consider it fair to instead look at how I handle school and whether that might say something about my play habits in WoW. And after some reflection, I realized that is does say something about how I play WoW, and could reveal exactly why I'm a solo-er.

Back in high school, group projects were the bane of my existence. I feared any assignment where I would be forced to work with other people and put together something decent, because I simply had higher standards for my work in high school than most of my pears did. I have always been something of an overachiever, and my grades in high school were no exception, so I tried my hardest to get the highest grades I could possibly get in all of my classes. The thing is, the people I was grouped with usually didn't share this attitude, so I would be put in groups with people whose standards of what is acceptable work were lower than mine. I grew to detest needing to put my name on something that wasn't up to my standards, especially because these projects often contributed a significant amount to our final grade. So I often ended up as either the overbearing leader or the person who did the whole project himself (usually the latter), just so I could be sure it would be up to my standards. To this day, I still detest working with people on something where we will be judged as a group, rather than by our individual contributions and efforts, for the very same reason.

This anecdote illustrates something that has long been one of the defining aspects of my personality: I do not like depending on other people. Perhaps I'm jaded because I have many experiences that show just how undependable people can be. I've had dozens of friends not keep their commitments to social plans, sometimes showing up hours later than they said they would with the flimsiest of excuses and without even a hint of repentance for keeping me waiting, twiddling my thumbs (I have learned since then to always have something to do if I'm waiting for a friend to hang out, or to go to their place instead). I took a bus to school all four years of high school, and though the bus was usually dependable, the numerous times when it wasn't has made me hesitant to let a person be the linchpin in my plan to get anywhere. Point it, because of my less-than-solid faith in others to always come through when they say they will or when I need them to, I became a fiercely independent person in many aspects of my life. I took up biking so I wouldn't be dependent on others to give me rides places. I opted for solo-projects whenever they were an option so that other people wouldn't drag the quality of my work down.

WoW has been no exception to the general rule that anything I do that involves other people will invariably show me that people aren't dependable. I've seen people miss raids and provide no explanation afterward. I've seen people ragequit and leave the raid stranded in the middle of an instance, then come back the next day as if they had done nothing wrong and owed no one an apology. I've seen people leave their computer in the middle of a boss fight, then come back after we had managed to just barely kill the boss without their help, and simply say that the phone rang. After some time, I just grew sick of it, and the truth is, I didn't enjoy raiding enough to put up with this nonsense or up my game enough to become worthy of a top-end guild that wouldn't put up with those kinds of shenanigans. So I gave up on this supposedly integral part of the game, and I have never been happier.

The beauty of the solo-er's world is that whether you succeed or fail, whether you rise or fall, is solely dependent on you. In raiding, you can bring your A-game to every raid, but if other people aren't bringing their A-game too, you aren't going to succeed. Effort put in does not always scale with the quality of the results. In the solo part of WoW, however, that is completely different. When I decide to go solo an elite for fun, whether I succeed or die will be determined solely by whether I bring my A-game to the fight. If I decide to go on a long grind for some purpose or other (like getting Guardian of Cenarius), whether I succeed will be determined solely by whether I have the perseverance to see it through. And should I fail, I have no one to blame but myself, which means I can examine my playstyle and potentially find the flaws that lead to my failure, and either fix them or remember them when considering future endeavors. I am dependent on no one else for my own success, and that makes me very happy.

That said, the question I get asked most often when I tell people that I don't raid or PvP in WoW is, why even play a massively multiplayer online game if I'm not going to play with other people? The answer is quite simply that the solo content is good enough to hold my interest. I may be a square peg in a round hole, but that hole is big enough to contain my supposedly incompatibly shaped playstyle. As long as that fact remains true, I see no issue with playing this game the way that I find most fun, and should I stop finding it fun, I'll simply stop playing. See, that's another beauty of solo play: social obligations won't keep you playing if you don't enjoy the game anymore. I know some people who kept playing long after they had lost interest in the game simply because their guild depended on them, and they really grew to hate it. Yet they still spent a lot of time playing WoW, when they could have been doing something they enjoyed, because their guild needed them. No such conundrum faces us soloists, which is one more reason why I like this playstyle.