Reader census, redux

Back when my blog was just starting to become noticed, I did a poll asking my readers what they spent most of their time doing in-game, what their main focus was. Did they spend most of their time raiding, for example? Or did they prefer battlegrounds, or perhaps leveling alts. I did this to get a better idea of what kind of advice posts I should write, back when I wrote those regularly. I later realized something which caused me to post a second poll of a similar nature, and that something I realized was that some players might have resigned themselves to certain activities because the activity they enjoy hasn't been fleshed out by the developers. I, for example, spent much time leveling alts in the days of Wrath of the Lich King because I enjoyed questing and solo-ing, but the solo content at the level cap grew pretty stale over time due to the fact that no good solo content (in my opinion) was added after Wrath came out (I didn't care much for the Argent Tournament). So I added a second poll asking people what they would spend most of their time doing if all parts of the game were given equal development effort and were equally fleshed out, interesting, and rewarding.

The problem was that I added this poll well after the first poll had gone up, so the population (to use the statistical term) surveyed by each poll was not consistent. This meant that disparities between the two polls could have been explained by a different subset of players voting once the second poll went up, rather than by legitimate disparities between what players spent their time doing and what they enjoyed most. There were also flaws with the way I picked the choices for the poll, such as the fact that I included "leveling alts" as one choice, a choice which I later realized told us nothing about how people chose to level their alts, which they could do with quests, dungeons, or battlegrounds. With Cataclysm changing the face of WoW so extensively, that could also have changed people's choices.

It is with all that in mind that I post these new polls now. The first poll is simply asking, what do you spend most of your time doing when you are playing WoW? Pretty simple, I think. The second poll might be a bit more confusing, so let me give it a bit more exposition. If all parts of WoW received equal development time and were equally fleshed out, interesting, and rewarding, what would you spend most of your time doing? Would you stop leveling alts and focus on your main now that the level cap actually had interesting solo content? Would you leave the raiding scene for the less stressful scene of heroics? Or would you remain where you are because the part of the game you currently play either does receive this kind of attention or because you just enjoy it that much?

If you would like to say why your answers on the two polls are the same or are different, I encourage you to do so in the comments section of this post.

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.

Why I'll be taking the expansion slowly

At this point in the expansion, I have spread my time out quite a bit between all there is to do. I have quested a bit in Hyjal, played through the Worgen starting experience and gotten my little rogue to level 13, gotten my archeology to 37, leveled cooking about 25 skill points, fished a bit, leveled enchanting to 460 with my leftover Wrath mats, an through it all, gotten my druid half way to level 81. And I have thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. But something captured my attention more than the great new quests, the fragments I find with archeology, and even being able to fly in the old world (which is, in my opinion, the best part of this expansion pack). That something was the goblins and worgen I saw questing along my side in Hyjal. Yes, characters which I thought couldn't have existed for more than a day or two, now above level 80. Seriously?

Now, I quickly realized that these particular players may have simply race changed an old character that was already level 80, and I felt very silly, but my moment of myopia did remind me of a thought that always comes up for me when new content comes out: power-levelers, and how little I understand them. Now, I'm no one to judge other people for how they play and suggest that they play otherwise; as a solo-er, I'm on the receiving end of enough of that to know better than to subject anyone else to it. So let me just say right now that I'm not writing about power-levelers to judge them, or admonish them, or suggest that they change their ways. I am only writing about them because someone choosing to race through the new content that quickly just boggles my mind.

But even with that said, I understand that there are some people who enjoy the challenge of finishing content as quickly as possible, and for them, the content itself comes second to its speedy completion in terms of what they find fun about the game. If that's the way they want to play, I'm happy to see them finish so quickly. I, however, am not that type of player; I play for the content itself. And the thing is, once you finish the content, that's it; it will never be new and exciting again. It is forever in the realm of "seen it", and you can never enjoy it as much as you enjoyed it the first time. And considering that this is my chance to "start over", to break all of the bad, fun-killing habits I formed in Wrath of the Lich King, one of the habits I would like to break is the habit of steamrolling through content and exhausting it quickly.

Now, one might say, as long as you play through the content itself a slow pace when you do play, what does it matter how much time you spend playing? If it takes me fifteen hours spent over the course of ten days to get to level 85, and a friend of mine gets there in the same amount of /played time but spends two days doing it, haven't we both soaked up the content at an equal rate, and shouldn't we have theoretically enjoyed it just as much? It is to this question that I say no, and that is the fundamental reason I am taking the expansion slowly, both in terms of content experienced per hour of play and in terms of real-world time I spend playing. There have been some games that I played through in a short amount of real-world time, and it has been my experience that playing through a game like that can ruin the game for me because I simply get sick of it faster. The rate at which I get sick of a game just seems to increase as I spend a greater fraction of my time playing it.

It is with this knowledge that I have become very deliberate about how much I allow myself to play WoW. WoW is a big part of my life, you see; I spend a lot of time reading about it online, blogging about it here, and, of course playing it. Yet WoW became stale for me quickly because of how much I played during Wrath of the Lich King. With Cataclysm breathing new life into the expansion pack in so many ways, I'm not going to allow that to happen again. I plan to play more casually than I did before (you could say I was a dedicated soloist before), and by doing that, I hope to maximize the amount of /played I can get out of this content before I stop enjoying it. If that means that I can't write about things from first hand experience until long after others have already experienced them, so be it; I'll take that fall for the sake of a game I enjoy this much.

Is WoW a Caillois-complete game?

If that name looks unfamiliar to you, don't worry; I didn't know who the man was myself until a week or two ago. Roger Caillois was a French philosopher who wrote a book called Les Jeux et Les Hommes, which traslates to English as Men, Play and Games. In this book, Caillois discussed games and what truly constitutes a game, and he came up with six points about what makes a game a game. For a game to be a "Caillois-complete" game, it must fit all six of these points, or else it is just not a game. It might be an interesting tool or an entertaining diversion, nonetheless, but it is not a game. For a game to be Caillois-complete, it must be:

-Free: “in which playing is not obligatory; if it were, it would at once lose its attractive and joyous quality as diversion.”
-Separate: “circumscribed within limits of space and time, defined and fixed in advance.”
-Uncertain: “the course of which cannot be determined, nor the result attained beforehand; and some latitude for innovations being left to the player’s initiative.”
-Unproductive: “creating neither goods, nor wealth, nor new elements of any kind; and, except for the exchange of property among the players, ending in a situation identical to that prevailing at the beginning of the game.”
-Governed by Rules: “under conventions that suspend ordinary laws and for the moment establish new legislation, which alone counts.”
-Make-Believe: “accompanied by a special awareness of a second reality, or of a free unreality, as against real life.”
(transcribed from a post on the blog "Cope")

What I would like to look at today is whether World of Warcraft is a Caillois-complete game, i.e. whether WoW counts as a game. Now, astute readers will remember my post, Is WoW "just a game"?, in which I concluded that, in some instances, WoW was more than a game. However, I did end the post by saying, "WoW is not just a game, but it is still a game," so I can still examine whether it is a Caillois-complete game. Besides, even if I had concluded that WoW was not "just a game", it would not prevent me from examining whether WoW is a Caillois-complete game, for one could not conclude that WoW not being a game means it isn't a Caillois-complete game. That would be a "converse error", a logical fallacy in which you assume that if one fact implies another, and that if the second fact is true, then the first one must also be true. In this case, the implication is that if WoW is not a Caillois-complete game, then it isn't a game. If I had concluded that WoW isn't a game, it would be a converse error to assume that that means it isn't a Caillois-complete game.

Right, so now that your lesson in logic is over, let's get to the examination.

Free: “in which playing is not obligatory; if it were, it would at once lose its attractive and joyous quality as diversion.”

Interestingly, WoW is one of the few games that actually has a mechanism in place to encourage players to play less and rewards players who do not play as if they are required to play; that mechanism is rested state, which you gain when you log out and which doubles the experience you gain from killing enemies. Of course, once you hit the level cap, rested state is no longer useful to you, so this point no longer necessarily applies. Thus we must ask; at level-cap content, it playing obligatory? Are players at a disadvantage if they take a break from playing?

I would say that in the days of Burning Crusade, that answer to this question was a definite "yes". I tried to get into raiding back then, but I was behind in gearing up, and the guild I was in didn't have the time to run me through older content to help me catch up. Now, granted, this lack of gear was a result of trying to start raiding too late, rather than a result of me taking a break, but the end product would have been the same either way. Fortunately, in today's WoW, we have the emblem system, which allows people to get gear in heroics that is good enough for them to go right into the current tier of raiding. Thus players are able to take a break from raiding, and if their gear falls behind, it's easier for them to catch up without their guild needing to drag them through old content. This was a big step for making WoW a more Caillois-complete game, in addition to a more casual-friendly game.

For progression guilds filled with hard-core players, however, the situation is likely not the same. After all, if you are doing cutting-edge content, you need to get as much gear as you can get your hands on so you can gain that much of an edge, and if you take a break and fall behind your guild, even if the difference is small, it could be enough of a disadvantage that your guild will leave you out in favor of someone who is more geared than you. And all that practice you missed? Not to mention needing to make it to raids on time or else being replaced and being less likely to be picked for a future raid. Of course, that content isn't going anywhere, so if you do take a break, you can always find a group of people who are at your current skill and gear level and run with them, instead. Suffice it to say that the design of WoW is Caillois-complete in the sense of being "free", but the social structures and obligations created by the players sometimes make it otherwise.

Separate: “circumscribed within limits of space and time, defined and fixed in advance.”

Well, it's certainly safe to say that WoW and the real world are separate entities... objectively, at least. But as I said above, when you look at the ways hard-core players approach WoW, the line between WoW and the real world gets blurry quite fast. When I was in a raiding guild, it wasn't uncommon for one guild member to call another guild member when we were trying to form a raid and were short one person. If that isn't WoW bleeding into the real world, I don't know what is. So, again, WoW is only as separate as its players want it to be.

Uncertain: “the course of which cannot be determined, nor the result attained beforehand; and some latitude for innovations being left to the player’s initiative.”

On the surface, this one seems much harder to defend than the others. After all, think of all of the raiders who do dailies for the money to enchant and gem their new gear, as well as pay the repair bills that endless wipes will lead to. Why do they run these dailies? Because they know exactly how much money they will get from those dailies, and they know it's enough to pay the bills. Think, also, of the raiders who run a heroic each day for the extra Emblems of Frost to get their tier gear that much faster. They know exactly what is going to happens in those heroics, and because of their gear, they know that failure just isn't a possibility. In other words, the outcome of dailies and heroics is certain, and thus they are not a Caillois-complete part of the game.

Of course, players only do these chores (let's call them what they really are) because they feel they have to, but the game doesn't require them to enchant and gem all their gear, and the money from the raid enemies themselves is usually enough to pay the repair bills if you don't wipe. And there are even ways to earn the money for gems and enchantments that are uncertain, and thus are a Caillois-complete part of the game. After all, one of my favorite parts of the game is fishing, and fishing is a great way to make money. The out-come is still uncertain, though; you don't know how much of the profitable fish you are going to get, and you don't know whether people will actually buy your fish. Still, it is a great way to make money, and the same facts apply to all gathering professions (except perhaps skinning). Thus, once again, dailies and heroics are only a Caillois-incomplete part of the game because players chose to continue to do them when they become chores.

Unproductive: “creating neither goods, nor wealth, nor new elements of any kind; and, except for the exchange of property among the players, ending in a situation identical to that prevailing at the beginning of the game.”

Two words come to mind when I see this rule: gold sellers. Where it not for the trade of in-game currency for real-world currency and the hacking that takes place as a result, this point would apply to WoW without exception. But gold sellers exist, and their presence means that WoW can be a productive activity, and thus not a game. Of course, their presence is only made possible by players who buy the gold those gold sellers sell steal, so yet again, the only reason this point doesn't apply to WoW is because the players don't let it.

Governed by Rules: “under conventions that suspend ordinary laws and for the moment establish new legislation, which alone counts.”

WoW certainly suspends ordinary laws and establishes new legislation. The fact that a human being can drop down in Goldshire and throw fire at a wolf, or the fact that the Undead Forsaken exist is enough proof that the game makes its own rules of what is possible. The game also makes new rules that are less fantastic and are still feasible by real world sensibilities, like the fact that we are literally unable to directly kill anyone on our side. The key to this point, however, is that the game establishes new rules to replace the old rules, and only those new rules matter. This means that none of our real-world rules bleed into the game unless we want to them to. Well, as a social game, it's likely that the rules we have for social interactions in the real world are going to become a part of WoW, but its safe to say that we want that to happen. WoW is just more fun when people act civilly around one another.

But what about when a player doesn't want that to happen? I'm talking about trolls, griefers, and people who generally make other players' experiences miserable. Where do we get the idea that their activities are to be frowned upon? Why, from the real world of course. If WoW somehow punished griefing and trolling in some way other than players reporting trolls and griefers to GMs, this wouldn't be the case. However, there currently exist no in-game mechanics (and thus no "new legislation") to discourage this kind of behavior, so because the players bring with them their sensibilities of what is and isn't allowed in social interaction, WoW doesn't fit this point.

Make-Believe: “accompanied by a special awareness of a second reality, or of a free unreality, as against real life.”

I think you can see the pattern developing. While WoW certainly can invoke a second reality for us players, that reality is tainted by all of the exceptions brought up in the previous points. It's difficult to acknowledge WoW as a second reality when there are consequences for not entering that reality regularly, when players contact each other outside the game to ask each other to enter that new reality, when we know how exactly how some of our interactions with that reality will end, when financial transactions take place in which currency within that reality is exchanged for currency in real life, and when our rules for social interaction in our reality bleed into our second reality. Suffice it to say that because of the players themselves, WoW doesn't create a second reality, or an unreality against real life.

So it seems that the general trend is that WoW is an objectively Caillois-complete game, but not a subjectively complete one. In other words, once players actually start playing, the Caillois-completeness of the game breaks down. I wouldn't say that this is WoW's fault, though. Perhaps with a smaller, more intimate playerbase, these issues wouldn't arise the way they do now. Because there would be fewer raiders to pick from, the raiding guilds would be happy to help guildies who took a break gear up again. With fewer potential customers, the gold-selling business wouldn't be as lucrative. With a more intimate playerbase, it's less likely that trolls would necessitate the infusion of real-world social rules into the game. Maybe WoW isn't a Caillois-complete game because it's playerbase is just too big.

Or perhaps we don't want WoW to be just a game, so we try to make it more than just a game, subconsciously or otherwise, and thus is loses some of what makes it a game in the process. That's an issue too big for me to consider in this post, though. Maybe next time.

What other games could learn from WoW

I sometimes see posts on other blogs by people who have spent significant time playing other games, talking about what WoW could learn from those other games and how taking up those aspects of those games could make WoW better. While they often make good points, I think we need to take some time to consider the opposite; the things WoW does well that other games would do well to imitate. After all, Blizzard did many things right in their design of WoW, things other developers would do well to take note of.

-Streamlining pre-playing processes
Games can throw a lot of obstacles in your way to prevent you from reaching your objective: enemies, puzzles, bosses, or even the level you are playing on, but the game itself should not be an obstacle. WoW has done a great job streamlining the things we need to do before we can play the game so we can spend more time actually playing the game. The dungeon finder is a great example of this. Say what you will about how it promotes trollish behavior and reduces the feeling of companionship among group members, but it definitely streamlined the process of getting a group for an instance run and made it much more convenient.

-Not denying content to less skilled players
Let's get one thing straight before we continue; I am not in favor of not rewarding skilled players for overcoming difficult challenges. What I am in favor of is giving the majority of players access to the fun rewards, and at least a good number of players access to the practical rewards. However, the big thing I am talking about here is content, the meat of the game itself: the sights to see, the things to do, the bosses to fight, etc. Raiding in WoW was once confined to the great minority because of the effort it took, and Blizzard has done a great job of making raiding easier for the more casual players to jump into, allowing more of their playerbase to see the content they make. Normal modes, 10-man raiding, the new emblem system--all of them made it easier for players to see the content, while the inclusion of 25-mans and the addition of hard modes ensured that the more dedicated players wouldn't lack for a challenge to overcome.

Most games do something similar in this regard in the form of difficulties, such as easy, medium, hard, etc., that scale the challenge of the game to the desires of the player, and that's a good thing in my eyes. However, what isn't a good thing in my eyes is when a game saves the best and most fun rewards for the people who beat the game on the highest difficulties, be it a special weapon, an extra level, etc. WoW is good about this in that, though the best gear is only available to the hard-core raiders, gear itself is not difficult to get, and the important things (basic mounts and the like) aren't denied to all but the most dedicated players. The only things that are denied to the less skilled players are better gear (which they don't need, after all) and cool-looking mounts, which are cosmetic, anyways.

-The ability to undo mistakes or misinformed decisions
I'm a bit of a perfectionist, and for that reason, I don't like it when a misinformed decision or flat-out mistake plagues me for the rest of the game. Because of this, when I play expansive and complex RPGs like Oblivion and Fallout 3, I often find myself replaying the first hour or two of the game multiple times because I don't like the way it played out or because I looked up a guide on the game and found out a way to make a certain decision much more intelligently. Perhaps I found out that making a certain choice during a certain quest would have been a better decision in the long run, or perhaps I chose a sub-optimal way to design my character. Either way, I often find myself restarting the game simply because I don't want one bad choice to hinder my future chances of success.

One of the great things about WoW is that that problem is not present. Make a bad talent choice? Pay gold to reset your talent points. Didn't like the pet you trained? Train another. Pick the wrong quest reward? You'll replace it soon anyways. Pick the Oracles but like the Frenzyheart more now? Do the quest to switch over. Pick the DPS Ashen Verdict ring but want the tank one now? Do the quest to switch it. Don't like the race you picked? Pay to change it. Don't like the faction you picked? Pay to change that. There are very few decisions in this game that will permanently hinder you for the rest of your time with that character, and the few there are can usually be undone with a ticket to a GM. I wish other games would take WoW's example on this, because it's one of the things I love the most about WoW.

So what about you, dear readers? What aspects of WoW do you like that you wish other games would adopt? Failing that, what mistakes has Blizzard made that you hope other developers can avoid?

New poll for profit and pleasure

In addition to the poll I have had on the side of my blog for some time now, I am adding a new one to hopefully gain a deeper understanding of my readership. I use the original poll to get an idea of what my readership spends most of its time doing, which is fine for when I talk about WoW in the past and the present, but what about the future? Since WoW is an ever-changing game, the way we play now may change as the game changes, and since the game could change in any number of conceivable ways, the percentage of players who play a certain part of the game can change easily. In discussing these kinds of changes, I think it's important to consider not just what the players currently do, but also what they like to do. That's where this poll comes in.

My new poll is going to be very similar to my old poll, and for good reason; I want to get an idea of how the answers to my new question compare to the answers to my old question. My new question is this: If all parts of WoW received equal development time and were equally fleshed out, interesting, and rewarding, what would you spend most of your time doing? Would you stop leveling alts and focus on your main now that the level cap actually had interesting solo content? Would you leave the raiding scene for the less stressful scene of heroics now that they weren't the same stale heroics you are used to? Would you abandon arenas for battlegrounds? What would you do? If you would like to say why your answers on the two polls are the same or are different, please do so in the comments section of this post.

And since I'm sure someone is curious to know, I haven't voted in these polls myself because I want them to provide a snapshot of my readership, and I don't want my votes to sway that snapshot one way or another. However, if you are curious, I'll answer them now: I spend most of time leveling alts when I play WoW, but if all content were equal, I would spend most of my time doing solo content at the level cap on my druid.

Where is the line where If you don't like something, WoW is not for you?

I think it's reasonable to claim that Blizzard has tried to make their game appeal to a wide audience, and their massive number of subscribers attests to their success in that department. One of the things that I would argue made Wrath of the Lich King a successful expansion pack was that it opened raiding to a wider swath of WoW's playerbase, and though that did have potentially negative repercussions for the solo content, considering that WoW's primary focus is on raiding, I'd say that it was a good change in the grand scheme of things. Of course, WoW cannot be everything for everyone, so a line must be drawn somewhere between trying to increase the game's appeal and simply saying, "If you don't like X, then WoW is not for you."

But where is that line to be drawn? I ask because four days ago on WoW.com's Q&A column The Queue, Alex Ziebart answered a commenter's question about the complex and bombastic nature of the design of high end gear by saying this: "The Warcraft aesthetic is all about those huge shoulders, the random spikes, the intricate little decorations on each pauldron. In Azeroth, bigger is better. Bigger is much better. Having that massive gear is prestigious. The stripped-down gear is for nameless schmucks that haven't fought a proper battle in their lives. If you're looking for a simpler aesthetic, you're really better off looking at a different game. I don't mean that in a rude or smug way in the slightest. It just isn't Blizzard's style. It definitely isn't Warcraft's style."

While I agree with Alex's claim that WoW's style is one where bigger is better, something about the answer just doesn't sit right with me. Is WoW really the kind of game where something like the look of gear can be a game breaker? Where if someone doesn't like something as simple as aesthetics, that means they shouldn't play the game? I won't spend much time considering the spiky-ness of gear as I look at this issue, for I am the kind of person who never paid much attention to aesthetic considerations like that (though I suppose it helped that the old Night Elf Cat Form model had a certain timeless beauty to its design). I'll just say that this issue could perhaps be solved by Blizzard adding armor skins to the online store, if only to change the way your armor looks to you, while not changing the way it looks to everyone else.

With that issue out of the way, we must look at two conflicting facts and how they affect the issue of where the line should be drawn where if you don't like a part of WoW, then WoW isn't for you. One, video game design is an art-form. Two, Blizzard is a for-profit company. As I said in my post on whether Blizzard should be more loyal to their fan-base or the lore, video games are a form of art, and thus they have all of the responsibilities of an art-form: they should "challenge our perceptions, our beliefs, and make us ask questions about ourselves." While I was referring to the storyline when I first made that statement, the same rule applies once we stop reading the lore and pick up the keyboard. Unfortunately, games like WoW are only possible because they are big business, and it's the profits WoW generates that allow it to continue to exist. It's because money makes the world go round (sadly) that most contemporary art (at least, most successful contemporary art) sacrifices artistic merit for popular appeal.

Why do I bring up these issues? I bring them up because widening the game's appeal is a good move commercially and increases WoW's popular appeal, but may not be a good move artistically. After all, widening the game's appeal is usually done by loosening the standards that players need to fit before they can see certain content, and that means less challenge for the players. Now, if the lore of WoW is supposed to challenge our perceptions, then the gameplay must, by reasonable extension, challenge us. However, most of the things that Blizzard has done to widen WoW's appeal has taken some of the challenge out of the game: shrinking raid sizes, reducing the number of consumables by removing sharpening stones and oils, allowing the use of heroics to gear up so plays can skip entire tiers of raiding, etc.

Of course, what some would call taking challenge out of the game, others would call removing needless barriers. Though my experience with raiding is pretty scant, what I do know is that raiding is still a challenge; that has not changed since the days of Molten Core. What has changed is that the challenge is now mostly in movement and strategy, not in the logistics of organizing and buffing forty people. When you think about it that way, you could say that WoW has struck a balance between the two aforementioned issues (art vs. profit). Blizzard has managed to increase WoW's commercial appeal without sacrificing the things that make it a truly great game. They have increased its allure without sacrificing its character. It might not be a very impressive conclusion to come to, but I think we can conclude that any change that increases WoW's appeal without alienating those who already play by sacrificing the game's merit is a good change.

Musings on the changes to raids coming in Cataclysm

To say that Blizzard dropped a bombshell when they announced the changes being made to raiding in Cataclysm would be a gross understatement. I will assume that if you read my blog, you are relatively well informed about current WoW events, so I won't patronize you by summing up what was announced; you can read the announcement itself if you need to get up to speed. Naturally, the community erupted into debate upon hearing these changes, with reactions that were as varied as they were passionate. Before I delve into this issue myself, I just want to say for the record that because of my limited raid experience, I won't be focusing on the specifics of how these changes will affect raiding. Though I will consider those specifics, I will also look at the potential consequences of these changes and examine those.

The worst possible outcome of this new system would be 25-man raiding dying entirely, and it's something that could conceivably happen if the rewards for running 25-mans aren't much better than the rewards for running 10-mans. I say this is the worst outcome because there are people who actually enjoy running 25-man content more than 10-man content. It's more epic, the challenge is greater, and thus the satisfaction is greater as well. The trouble with the tangible rewards for the two modes being the same (but in different quantities) is that the satisfaction of organizing more people to accomplish the same goal may not be enough to motivate people to meet that challenge. This makes me wonder, though; if 25-man raiding risks dying because the objective rewards for doing it won't be as good, are the people who run it now running it for the right reasons? Might they be like the people who did arena content in Burning Crusade just for the gear, and then dropped arena once Wrath hit? Far be it from me to decide what is the right and wrong reason to play the game a certain way, but it's something to think about.

So, what if 25-man modes go away? If something is lost because the community loses interest, is it really that big of a loss? I think so. Some say that the better gear is the only thing that keeps people running 25-mans, but if it really were all about the gear, I don't think that 25-mans would be around. After all, 10-mans and 25-mans theoretically run along the same difficulty path, and gear is only about getting further along that path, and that path is more easily traversed with ten people than twenty five. Some combination of increased scale, greater socialization, and a greater organizational challenge keeps people coming together in groups of 25. Theoretically, that should be enough to let 25-man raiding survive through the changes being made in Cataclysm, but it may not be.

The real question is, does Blizzard owe it to 25-man raiders to give them a motivation to run 25-mans other than the increased personal rewards? As I said in my musings on micro-transactions, people expect the rewards for completing a challenge to scale with the difficulty of doing so. Thus far, 25-man content has been more difficult both in terms of the gear required and the organization required. Blizzard can take one of the factors that make 25-mans more difficult (gear), but 25-mans will always be more difficult to organize than 10-mans. Unless Blizzard can somehow change that fact (which is doubtful), then 25-mans will always be more difficult than 10-mans. The only thing they could do about that fact would be to lower the objective difficulty to compensate for the increased organizational difficulty, but that would only exacerbate the problem, since 25-man raiders would feel cheated of the "true WoW experience" and would probably drop down to 10-mans in response, which is the exact opposite of what Blizzard seems to want to happen.

Will giving more gold, badges, and gear be enough to compensate for that increased organizational difficulty? I wish I could say that I think it will, but I have a feeling that there will be a sense among the 25-man community that they are working harder for the same rewards, regardless of the increase in quantity. This increase in quantity also risks making 25-man guilds burn out faster than 10-man guilds. If they get gear faster, what with getting more badges and drops, they'll gear up faster than 10-man raiders and burn through the content faster. I wouldn't be surprised if this makes 25-man raiders drop down to 10-mans as a final straw that breaks the camel's back. We may be hearing complaints like "We burned through tier 11 so fast that I never go to savor it; we're not making the same mistake with tier 12."

Of course, this is all speculation, and it's difficult to talk about "should"s without knowing any "will"s. What we do know is that some people enjoy running 25-man content more than running 10-man content. 25-man content is a more difficult de facto challenge than running 10-man content, and no de jure changes Blizzard makes can change that fact. When players work harder, they expect a greater reward. The increased personal reward of running a 25-man would be sufficient if the increased challenges of running a 25-man were also just personal, but they are also organizational. It takes extra effort on the part of guild leaders to make 25-man raids happen, and they deserve extra reward for it.

Luckily for us, Cataclysm will give us just the way to reward guilds for the extra effort they spend putting those 25 people together: guild experience and currency. If Blizzard wants 25-mans to live, an easy way to make it happen is for them to make 25-man raids give more guild experience and currency than 10-mans. That would allow them to directly reward the people who suffer the most to make 25-man runs happen: the guild leadership. Since running 25-mans is a team effort, it makes sense to reward that effort in a way that benefits the team, and guild experience and currency will do just that. Though balancing the exact ratio of experience and currency granted by 10-mans and 25-mans may take some time, it's worth it to reward people for the extra effort they put forward to play the game they love, and it won't compromise any of Blizzard's goals that they wish to accomplish with the changes coming to raids.

Raiding advice for people who raid infrequently

I am part of a unique group within World of Warcraft: I have a character at the level cap, and yet I rarely raid. I do raid occasionally, but I do it so infrequently that the way I approach raids is fundamentally different from the way regular raiders approach raids. I know I'm not alone in this. Some of us don't raid because our schedules are so inconsistent that we can't commit to raiding with a guild at specific times each week. Some of us don't raid because we play the game to relax, and having all of those other people depending on you performing your job perfectly, ready to pounce on you if you mess up, is anything but relaxing. Some of us simply don't want to repeatedly fight the same bosses over and over again just to earn the right to fight more bosses over and over again. Whatever our reason, we simply would rather not group up with 9 or 24 other people to fight bosses on a regular basis.

That doesn't mean that we don't ever raid. Sure, there are people out there who never do step into the raiding scene, but some of us do dip our feet. We come along when our guild says they need a healer, we PuG a single-encounter raid (like Onyxia or Sartharion), or we may even get bored one night a run a longer raid all the way through. Hell, we may even enjoy it. However, stepping into the raiding scene from heroics can be a scary prospect, which brings us to this post. What follows is advice for people who wish to raid infrequently, just to see what it is like, but don't know how to get started. If you raid regularly or at least have raided, this advice isn't for you. However, if you don't fit into either of those categories and would like to fit into the latter, then to quote Wowhead, "OK HERE IS HOW SO LISSEN GUD."

1. Start small.
The single-boss raid dungeons are good places to start if you want to dip your feet into raiding. They don't require much more time than a heroic, so they will allow you to adjust to all of the other aspects of raiding that will be new to you: the increased number of people, the increased complexity of the encounters, etc. Running those raids also means only needing to learn one boss strategy (or one and a few more simple ones for the sub-bosses). As such, try to start raiding with Obsidian Sanctum, or, if you gear is good enough, Onyxia's Lair.

2. Be realistic about what you can handle.
If you don't raid frequently, you may not have the skills and habits common to most raiders that you need to carry you through the raid. As such, you may need to make up for that lack of skill with your gear. As a casual raider, I can tell you that out-gearing content is a great help when you want to dip your feet in raiding but don't think you have the skills for it. Sure, gear can only take you so far, but it certainly helps. If you just want dip your feet in raiding, use a site like be.imba to gauge the general quality of your gear, then try running a raid that won't offer many upgrades for you. If you get more comfortable with raiding, you can move up into the "upgrade range," meaning you can try running raids that may help you upgrade your gear.

You may be asking, how can one over-gear a raid without ever raiding? Heroics. Heroics these days are an easy ways gear up for raids without needing to raid, helping you catch up with other people in terms of your gear. Even in the days when heroics only dropped Emblems of Heroism, I used heroics to get the best gear one could get without entering a raid, and was more than prepared for Naxx-10. Since then, getting gear through heroics has only gotten easier.

3. Know the strategies
If you don't raid frequently, it isn't worth your RAM to download a mod like Deadly Boss Mods to help you anticipate a boss's attack. As such, you need to know the in-game cues that make raiding without DBM possible. It's imperative that you read the strategies for the bosses in whatever raid you plan on running so that you can be prepared for them. Knowing what attacks are coming and knowing when they will come is an integral part of raiding, and you need to be intimately familiar with the strategies to do that. As a guild I was once in said, casual raiding is not sloppy raiding. You don't get to do this frequently; give it your all. If that all seems like too much to take in, then as Saniel said bellow, ask for a brief reminder of the strategies before each boss fight. Sometimes one little reminder is all it takes to bring back what you read earlier.

4. You are in this for the long-haul.
One of the biggest shocks for a first time raider is just how long the bosses take to kill. Bosses can take anywhere from five to ten minutes to kill, so get used to being in this for the long-haul. If you are a healer, use your mana-restoring abilities early and often and make sure you have enough MP5 so that you don't run out of mana. If you are a DPS, use your cooldowns early and often (unless you need to save them for a burst phase) so that you can cause maximum damage. Above all, don't be surprised when you see how slowly the boss's health meter falls. Also be prepared for how long a raid will take; most non-single-encounter raids will take you a few hours unless you run with a group of people who know the raid inside and out and out-gear it immensely. You probably won't finish the raid in one night, so don't be surprised if your raid leader asks whether you plan on showing up the next night to continue.

Why have solo content in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game?

Whenever I talk about solo content in WoW, if I ever lament the sad state of it these days (whether it be on this blog, in the comments section of WoW.com, or anywhere else), I frequently get reactions that sound something like this: "WoW is a massively multiplayer online RPG. Why worry about the solo content?" I think we can all agree that WoW needs some solo content. The question is, how extensive should that solo content be? Should we expect Blizzard to deliver engaging solo content to us players on a regular basis, or should we greet extensive solo content with a surprised, "Solo content? In my MMO?"

Picture is unrelated.

It's pretty obvious why an MMO needs any solo content at all: when players are just starting out, it's a pretty big challenge for them to try to get a hold of all the new game mechanics that WoW throws at them; needing to learn group mechanics would make it even more difficult. Solo content allows people to become familiar with the game and get a feeling for the way their class plays. It allows them to push their class to its limits without the risk of letting other people down if the fail. Solo content is, if nothing else, a training ground for new players to get them comfortable with the game before they enter group play. There is a risk in that set-up, though. Blizzard could, if they so desired, make sub-par solo content to try to motivate people to move into group play, but if they did that, no one would stick around to see the group content, no matter how awesome it may be. Blizzard needs to make WoW's solo content fun and engaging to draw players in, so they do. This is where the trouble starts.

Though WoW may be a MMO, it is really the solo content that gets people hooked. However, people respond differently to the solo content: some say, "If playing alone is this fun, I bet playing with other people must be even more fun!" These people end up being raiders. Some say, "If the game is this fun fighting computer-controlled enemies, fighting other players must be even more fun!" These people end up fighting in battlegrounds or competing in the arena. Then you have the players like me. Players like me go into raids and say, "Ack, this is too much of a time commitment/too much pressure/etc." Players like me go into battlegrounds and say, "Ack, this is too much of a variable experience, and I play this game to relax. " Or maybe we just don't PvP as a matter of principle. Either way, we don't enjoy the group content that WoW seems to be geared towards getting us to play, so we are quite content with playing the part of the game we enjoy, the part that drew us in in the first place: the solo content.

This leaves Blizzard in a tight spot. They designed WoW to be, at its core, a group game. Ghostcrawler has even said explicitly that their goal is to get PvE'ers into raids. The solo content was meant to draw us in so we could move on to bigger and supposedly better things; to paraphrase one of my commenters, "If I want to play a solo-RPG, I'll play Dragon Age or Mass Effect." However, if the poll on the side of my blog is anything to go on, a fair amount of us prefer to stick with the solo content, in spite of the greater challenges to be had by grouping up.

It seems Blizzard doesn't mind that fact, though, or if they do, they have at least resigned themselves to designing solo content in spite of their larger goals for WoW players. Why else would they release solo content with each expansions pack and with many of the patches? In spite of Ghostcrawler's statement, it seems Blizzard has made it their goal to satisfy all WoW player, including those of us who are quite happy to chuckle at Ghostcrawler's sentiment and keep on solo-ing.

Why is he smiling? That can't be a good sign.

That could, however, all be an illusion. As I said in my post on the homogenization of Wrath of the Lich King solo content, solo content in Wrath of the Lich King has been streamlined to make it more straightforward and make the road from solo-ing to heroics to raiding a smoother one, and the road is only going to become smoother. One of the major promises of Cataclysm is that the old world will be made over to make leveling from 1 to 60 more fun and more like leveling through Outland or Northrend, i.e., smoother. After all, one of the biggest obstacles to getting to level 80 is vanilla Azeroth, which wasn't designed for fast leveling, but that's going to change. Come Cataclysm, the road to the level cap will have even fewer roadblocks than it does now, and the road to raiding will be similarly affected, assuming Blizzard sticks with their current design for solo content. What am I trying to get at here? It seems to me that Blizzard is designing their solo content to make it easier for people to get into heroics and raids, rather than as its own stand-alone content. Solo content in WoW is merely a stepping stone to bigger things, and they are making those steps even smaller.

I know that's a tough contention to prove. After all, why would Blizzard add two extra zones (Icecrown and Storm Peaks) of quests to do after hitting level 80 if they wanted to get us into raids as soon as possible? Well, those quests certainly provided a large chunk of cash, cash we needed to get some basic gear upgrades before starting heroics. (Hell, if you put in enough gold and effort, you could get your gear to the point where it was good enough for starting Naxx-10 without ever entering a heroic; I did. It wasn't advisable, but it was possible.) They also provided the back-story and starting points to the plots of the various heroics and raids those zones contained or would eventually contain, plots we could only see the conclusions of by running those heroics and raids. I think you get what I'm trying to say.

Now, I'm not saying that this design is a bad thing. There are plenty of people who just want to get into the group play, but without solo content, those heroics and raids would have no back story, and there would be no motivation to run them. Solo content also allows those who didn't get good gear in the last expansion to get on even ground with those who did, which prevents people from being locked out of raiding because they arrived at the party late (metaphorically speaking). Solo content is a good thing, even for people who prefer group content. The question is, how far should this smoothing of the path from solo-ing to heroics and raids go? When solo content is designed for the people who hope to surpass it, those who are quite content to stay within it are left behind.

I think Blizzard owes it to us soloists to not leave us out in the dust with their solo content. They drew us in with the solo content, and though they might want us to move on to bigger and supposedly better things, we would rather not. We like where we are, and that isn't going to change any time soon without a big change to the way raiding or PvP works. Now, granted, solo content shouldn't hinder people who want to go right into raiding or PvP, so where can a happy medium be found? Long-term goals. Burning Crusade had reputations like the Consortium and Sporeggar that gave solo-ists something they could work for that couldn't be steam-roled by grouping. The closest thing we have to them in Wrath of the Lich King is the Kalu'ak, and I hit exalted with them a week after hitting 80. What we need is more solo content that takes a large commitment of time to complete and provides appropriate rewards for that commitment. Supposedly, the Path of the Titans will be along the lines of what I am thinking of; let's hope Blizzard does it well.

Does the difficulty of What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been justify the reward?

Oh Violet Proto-Drake. The debates I have seen you inspire in the WoW.com comments section have been nothing short of remarkable. And yet to think, had Blizzard simply made you just another 280%-speed mount, we would not have these disagreements. As I come to the end of my long, strange trip, I can't help but wonder, have I really deserved that 310%-speed mount? Of course, being philosophical by nature, I have no choice to but to ponder this question, so here we go.

Let's establish the basics: there are many rewards for your various exploits and adventures in World of Warcraft, but they all fall into two categories: practical and aesthetic. Aethetic rewards include mounts, pets, titles, and other such things that don't actually make gameplay easier or more enjoyable (other than by looking at them.) Practical rewards somehow enhance your gaming experience. Practical rewards are things like gear, which allows you access new content, and certain mounts, like the Traveler's Tundra Mammoth, the usefulness of which I can definitely vouch for. I bring this up because, in the end, practical rewards are the only ones worth getting worked up over. Yes, aesthetic rewards can represent certain achievements (like the title of "the Insane" representing your uncommon dedication to the game), but in the end, assuming the criteria for their acquisition doesn't change significantly, they aren't worth getting worked up over.

So, which category do 310%-speed mounts fall into? Though the difference of speed may seem negligible, the fact is that it is a difference, making them a practical reward for anyone who already has a regular epic flying mount. In fact, that difference of speed isn't as negligible as it seems. Let's say there is a trip that takes you five minutes to make on a 280% speed mount. That same trip will take you a bit over four and a half minutes on a 310% speed mount. What that means is that using a 310%-speed mount instead of a 280%-speed mount makes you around 10% faster, i.e. a significant amount. What all that math means is that 310%-speed mounts are very practical rewards, and definitely worth considering seriously.

So, now that we know it's worth it to consider whether completing What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been justifies owning a 310% speed mount, it's time to ask that question. Let's get one thing straight before we start: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been is not as difficult to get as it used to be. I won't go over all of the changes that have been made to the holiday achievements in the interest of saving time, but I'll sum it up by saying that a lot less is based on chance these days, with most of the achievements being based on whether you have enough time to do them, and they don't really take that long to do, either. If other holidays go the way of Love Is in the Air, we won't be able to use the difficulty of the holiday achievements to justify What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been rewarding a 310%-speed mount.

But then again, it never was about the difficulty, was is? Considering that the only other way to get a 310%-speed mount is to be really good at raiding, really good at arena, or really lucky with raid drops, the Violet Proto-Drake was meant to be a way for people who can't raid really well or fight in the arena really well to get a 310% speed mount. So how did Blizzard justify giving such a reward for something that isn't that hard compared to all of the other sources? Dedication. What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been is possibly the only thing in WoW that is guaranteed to take about year to earn; there's just no way to get around that. That's why such a great reward can be rewarded for such simple actions.

But is dedication enough? After all, considering how little time the holidays take to complete these days, the only real dedication required is simply participating in the holidays when they come around. One can't deny that School of Hard Knocks is pretty difficult, and Sinister Calling takes quite a bit of luck, but Blizzard could up and change those on us the next time those holidays come around. I suppose the only objective way to determine whether the Violet Proto-Drake is a fair reward is to look at the other ways 310%-speed mounts can be obtained. The raiding mounts require you to fight boss battles in ways that make the battles exceedingly difficult, meaning you need to be really good at raiding and be part of a raid with good coordination. The arena drakes require you to be part of a really good arena team, meaning you need to be good at PvP and your teammates need to be good team players. The Onyxia drake requires you to get really really lucky with your loot and your roll and have the basic skills needed to down Onyxia (.2% drop chance divided by 25 players equal you'll never get it, i.e. .008% chance of getting the drake on any given kill). So, to get a 310%-speed mount, you need to be either really good at the game or really lucky. I suppose the solo-equivalent would be being really dedicated to WoW, so does working on holidays on and off for a year qualify as really dedicated?

Here's the thing about 310%-speed mounts: some people may not see them as a necessity, but they are without a doubt the next step up in mounts. They are as much of a non-necessity as epic flying mounts are a non-necessity: sure, you could get by without them, but your playing experience wouldn't be as enjoyable if you had to. That said, as the fastest mounts in the game, they should without a doubt be difficult to get, just as epic flying used to be difficult to get when 5,000 gold was big money. Still, you could grind a bit each day and get that 5,000 gold without spending too much time each day in game. It would take you a long time, but you'd get it eventually. The Violet Proto-Drake is the same way, except the real-world time you need to spend grinding for it is forcibly stretched out to almost a year. The only difference between how a casual player would go through the holidays and how a dedicated player would go through the holidays is that the dedicated player would get all of the achievements really quickly, while a casual player may need the whole duration of the holiday to earn them. Hell, the only reason I got Fool For Love in only two days was because my schedule was such that I really had nothing else to do, so I spent almost all of my waking hours working on the meta, and I found a really good spot for grinding Lovely Charms. I bring that up because the reason this is even an issue is that dedicated players go through the holidays really quickly and end up feeling cheated, as if Blizzard has made What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been easier just to cater to the casuals.

But here's the thing: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been is supposed to cater to the casuals. As I have said, 310% speed mounts are the logical stepping-point after regular epic mounts, and the purpose of What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been is to allow casual players to get those mounts. The people who complain that the holidays are too easy are the ones that the raid and arena mounts are intended for. The Violet Proto-Drake is the 310%-speed mount for people who can't spend a lot of time in-game each day, which is why many of the changes that made dedicated players angry were made to the holiday achievements. Making someone spend a whole year on holidays, only to make them wait longer once they have done everything they need to do is decidedly non-casual friendly. Forcing people to run a boss every day in hopes of getting a mount to drop when they could very well be screwed over by RNG is decidedly non-casual friendly. Forcing players to log in every hour because the RNG keeps giving them the same candies is decidedly non-casual friendly.

Point is, the Violet Proto-Drake is supposed to be easy to acquire, which is why it takes so long to do so in real-world time. The various holidays should only take a dedicated player a few days to complete, because that means they would take a casual player longer. If you think about the amount of dedication someone who can only play for an hour a day or so would need to complete these holidays, it's probably similar to the amount of dedication needed to get the raiding drakes. Holidays are just a different game, one that is designed for the casual player; players who blast through the achievements and then complain the holiday is too easy are, to borrow terms from Halo, heroic or legendary players playing on normal mode.

Where is the line between "playing your way" and being a burden?

In the constant (supposed) conflict between casual and hardcore players, one argument that frequently comes up from the casual side is, "I play this game to have fun, so let me play it my way!" This reply is used in a wide variety of situations, from suggestions on how the casual could better contribute to the raid to base taunting by hardcore players who think that casuals are somehow inferior to them. The advent of raids that are easy enough that casuals can actually run them has brought these two groups together more frequently than they have ever been together before, so this kind of conflict has begun to arise more and more. Who has more ground to stand on in this debate?

One of the arguments I see frequently cited by those arguing that they are only playing there was is that WoW is "just a game." I have already addressed this argument in a previous post and found it to be untrue. WoW is more like a sport (at least in the group setting): people come together to cooperate towards some competitive goal (even in PvE, the raiders are still competing against the raid bosses) for the sake of recreation. When you look at it that way, it's easy to see why someone who wants to "play their way" could bring the whole team down and make it less fun for the other people to take WoW more seriously. After all, some people find fun in success and measure their success by whether or not that raid boss was downed, so a more casual player could easily make that more difficult if they aren't pulling their weight. In that case, the river flows both ways: casuals often accuse hardcores of ruining their fun by taking the game too seriously, but hardcores can just as easily lob the accusation that casuals ruin their fun by not taking the game seriously enough.

Who's right? We can't say; WoW is a game, and how one plays it is completely up to each individual player. No one has the right to say that one person "should" play one way or another, so it seems the only surefire solution would be for casuals and hardcores to not raid together. However, in the grand scheme of things, this would do nothing to resolve the underlying issues that cause this kind of conflict in the first place. If the real source of the conflict is the idea that one group is preventing the other from enjoying the game, then the only thing that can really resolve this kind of conflict is for both sides to be more accommodating of the other. As they say, treat others as you would like to be treated.

Is WoW "just a game"?

This is a question I have considered in the past, but this edition of WoW.com's The Queue, entitled, "It's Just a Game," particularly the comments that followed, got me really thinking about the issue. Something you often hear said derisively about WoW, as well as many other "games," both of the virtual and real type, is "it's only a game." Whenever anyone does anything to show that they take the game seriously and see victory as a worthy goal, expect someone nearby to tell them they take the activity (whatever it is) too seriously, and that if it is something they do in their spare time, they should take it lightly. I have several problems with this idea, the idea that WoW is "only a game." (What I say in the following post could really be applied to many activities that people snidely refer to as "only a game," but let's keep the focus on WoW for now.)

When someone says that WoW is "only a game," there are a few implications they are making. These implications stem from a few "facts," which may or may not be accurate, that people know about the game, which lead to the following assumptions:
1. WoW is done to relax, and thus it should be low-stress and (depending on who you ask) easy.
2. WoW is completely virtual; the rewards for playing (gear, money, mounts, achievements, etc.) are not real, and thus not worth getting worked up over.
3. Because WoW leads to no tangible rewards, it is not worthy of being taken seriously as a hobby.
4. Because of all the above factors, WoW is not worth spending a large amount of time on.

From the beginning, these assumptions fall apart. Not everyone plays WoW to relax; I do, which I why I often don't run content until I vastly out-gear it, but many people play WoW for the challenge--the challenge of learning new encounters, of fighting other players, of understanding the nuances of your class, of working towards a long-term goal and finally achieving it. WoW is a hobby, but that doesn't mean it should always be relaxing. After all, the true definition of a hobby is something done in one's spare time for pleasure, and what greater pleasure is there than the satisfaction of overcoming a difficult challenge? So no, just because WoW is a hobby, that doesn't mean that it should be low-stress or easy. Well, maybe low-stress, but difficult is completely fine. After all, we have enough stress in our lives as it is.

Still, we can't deny that WoW is completely virtual. That armor your character has is just an item number that the game associates with your character. Does that mean that armor (and loot in general) isn't worth getting worked up over? Is gear drama completely baseless? As I have said in the past, loot serves two functions: it serves as a gatekeeper to new content, preventing you from walking into Trial of the Grand Crusader the moment you hit 80, and it acts as a representation of your achievements in the game. For these two reasons, gear is worth getting worked up over, to an extent. Because gear is necessary to progress through the game's content, an unfair loot system or ninja looting is a malicious act because it prevents people from enjoying all that the game has to offer.

But what about mounts? I'd wager that rare mount drops have caused more drama than all other loot drops (except maybe the Dragonspine Trophy), but mounts are purely cosmetic. Not having a certain cool-looking mount doesn't prevent the player from enjoying the game, so is ninja'ing mounts worth getting worked up over? Let's be honest; as cool as rare-drop mounts looks, when you look at them critically, they are just a sign of really good luck. Sure, that person needed to be able to beat the encounter in the first place, but really, it all comes down to luck. To get one of those mounts, you need to be lucky enough for the mount to drop in the first place, and you need to be lucky enough to win a roll against the other raiders. Even if someone wins the roll, did they do anything more than the other raiders to "earn" that mount? Not really. In the end, the mounts' only benefit is that they look cool, so I would say someone getting worked up over loot drama caused by a mount dropping is one time when the phrase "It's only a game" can be justifiably used.

The next thing we need to consider is, can we derive satisfaction from WoW? In the end, everything we do in WoW can be reduced to some signals sent by our computer in the form of zeros and ones that causes a server to send signals back in the forms of zeros and ones, which our computer interprets as images. Does that make our achievements in game (in both sense of the word) any less real? I don't think so. The fact is that achievement is defined by satisfaction, and if you get satisfaction out of something, then it doesn't matter whether another person considers it real or not. Because WoW provides satisfaction, as well as a challenge (as we have gone over), I think that is enough to make it worthy of as much respect as other hobbies.

Because the first three implications mentioned are all bogus, the fourth one doesn't have a leg to stand on, but where does that lead us? I seem to have deviated a bit from my original question, so now I return to it; is WoW "just a game"? When we look at what people usually mean when they say that phrase, we can see that they are wrong, (unless they are saying it to someone who is freaking out over a mount drop), and that in the context they are referring to, WoW is not just a game. Put simply, if someone says that WoW is "just a game," they are probably wrong.

Still, even if the phrase itself is usually wrong, is WoW, in the end, just a game? My Macbook's Dashboard dictionary defines a game as "a form of play or sport, especially a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck." WoW certainly fits this definition, and yet it is so much more than that. It is a social medium, a way for people to play together, satisfying both the urge to be with other people and the desire for an entertaining distraction. It is a cooperative exercise, wherein people work together to accomplish a common goal. WoW is more than a game; it is an experience, one that is worth taking seriously. Not too seriously, though, for that's when you get loot drama and fun-suckers who prevent people from enjoying the game. If you can't enjoy WoW, why play it? It is, of course, possible to take something that you enjoy seriously without going overboard, which is why I say that WoW is something that can be taken seriously, just not too seriously. So, in the end, WoW is not just a game, but it is still a game.