Nerd par excellence Sirlin, the man who can never stop telling us about the life lessons he learned form being a pro Street Fighter 2 player, and the creator of a site about game design, always gets on my nerves. But usually, he's got a seed of truth sequestered in his geekspeak, and this rant about WoW is, for the most part, summary of why we quit.
Let's not talk about the lowest depths of hell each soul logs in to delight in on the PvP servers, the torture and abject disregard for life and decency of the weaker player. Honor system… what a fuckin' euphemism for wholesale slaughter. Let's talk about why it exists. It exists because Blizzard has set an example for arbitrary rules. This is ok, this is not, that is not, that is ok. Sirlin is exactly right in that their abuse of their own ToS has left a culture that respects no boundaries, except those profitted from and still under the radar.
In a sense, this form of control has yielded Blizzard a co-conspiring consumer, complacently paying away and assuming fault when their flawful system offers yet another exploit. Xstine and I dealt with this since beta, and we learned that there is no which way about it. It's completely at Blizzard's behest.
Which brings me to this picture. And ones like it.
Having lately read Dogs and Demons, I felt that, despite the book's failings, it is essentially correct. The Japanese society too is held in a thrall of social control so cleverly surreptitious that it permeates every level of the ladder. When asked at a job interview what he would do to improve the company, one applicant responded immediately by saying "Goodday" and being polite to all.
Like World of Warcraft, arbitrary rules have become culture. The Tea Ceremony, once a simple and spontaneously hallowed ceremony, was turned into a veritable manufacturing process post-WWII. And taking the way it is today as "tradition," no one is able to deviate from a cultural paint-by-numbers given to the people by the state. Same goes for flower arrangement, today an ugly cyborg completely devoid of the awe of nature it once had.
And just like WoW, there is a need for an outlet. When I looked around Gadgetzan, I saw Nanking. In Japan, where everyday every hour every moment you are stapling your life and hopes to your work or your study, tossing away personal achievement in their world of kamikaze sacrifice, your identity warps. In WoW you see unbridled violence, often the dishonorable repeat killing of the same person by the same hunting party to the point where the person logs out, resolving to do the same when he is empowered one day. I was shocked at the things I did in-game, having considered myself a chivalrous gamer. In Japan, violence and perversion is enacted in hentai, love motels, the streets of Shinjuku, the noise scene.
It's funny that we embrace Japan in the West as "hardcore." We think of them as extreme, pushing the limits for all cultures. We don't see a school system that abandons all but the highest scoring, condemning unsatisfactory detritus to a shameful future. The "world's most advanced educational system" in which you study more and make less progress? In Japan, talent is defined differently than America: it is the ability to get along with others. The ability to conform. Women in particular are disposable, becoming housewives, eschewing the path their education suggested. We don't see a workforce that has words describing "death by work exhaustion." We see their lone company of creativity, Nintendo, and then ignore the lack of imagination that led to a befuddling collapse in economy.
We've confused their outlet with their strength.
At the entrance to Onyxia, my first raid, I realized what stupidity it was to have waited for two hours for forty idiots to assemble and be wiped within an hour. I realized that moment that WoW was headed in a direction that would never recognize the feats of one person outside its unspoken rulesets. I realized that if my raid had survived, I wouldn't have been any more satisfied, as Blizzard would continue to heap more hitpoints on more lowpoly models for bigger and bigger player mobocracies to attempt an extraction of fame. I realized that anime's lure was addictively drawn glistening eyes and intricate robots, and permutations thereof, which after a certain volume, began to insult my intelligence. I have not yet regretted leaving Azeroth, for it lies in the hands of confused, fate-wrought masses, much like Japan.
TJ writes:
I'm still there, though.
But maybe I just see it differently than you. For me WoW is just an outlet to beat the crap out of someone on "the other team". My day-to-day here at Pete AFB is all nice and dandy, I have yet to see someone act in a way that's even close to being identified as "hostile". My violenct outlet through WoW prevents me from getting into barfights when some punk looks at or says something to one of my friends wrong.
I read that article by Sirlin and the first thing that came to mind is that I totally don't see things the way he does. The forming of guilds and groups is just us adapting to the encounter. Sure, bliz says "soandso encounter requires X number of people to complete", but I think it's just bypassing the process of me stumbling into some place by myself, realizing that to explore this place solo would mean to die, calling for backup, then returning with an appropriate sized group. This "strength in numbers" is appropriate in alot of situations in the real world, such as class action lawsuits, petitions, letters to the legislature, military battles, bar confrontations… I don't see the whole "group > solo" thing as being a bad lesson to learn, it's just a lesson when groups have their advantage over the solo man. And also, to be quite honest, I think Sirlin's depiction of the solo warrior is a bit romantic. Just a bit. But it's still entirely possible. Maybe it's because I played FFIV through Xenogears and since then thought about how I could change the world for the better with my own two hands. A General who sees something that needs fixing can hand down an order throughout a major command, and everyone has to follow it. If it's a good order, then everyone instantly becomes better because they have guidance on what new thing to do to make the AF a better place, and hopefully the world after that.
Anyway, WoW has changed alot since I left, and since I joined. I guess I'm just infinitely patient when I see progress, no matter how slow it is. But really, their progress isn't even that slow. They've only been up for over 1 year and the game has changed alot… I know some motherfuckers (Irving Sarreal comes to mind) that years and years can go by, but you talk to them and they're still doing the same old shit, acting the same shitty way that you remember. You might not want to hear me saying this, but just be careful not to get so focused on wanting change that you forget that a certain amount of time has to pass for change to happen. You know that whole thing about "Rome wasn't built in a day?" Shit I'm already 25 and I'm still not "finished", still evolving, and that's two point five decades worth of lessons learned and pain underwent and happiness experienced, and I'm still not finished. I'm still changing. I'm still improving. Blizz has only been around for a little less than half of that, so I'd say just give them a break.
Well, I completely understand where you're coming from, and it actually tells me that that article's intended audience isn't you at all. You have to keep in mind that Sirlin comes from the world of competitive gaming. I share his mindset coming from UT. Games in themselves are not fun to us, it's the interactivity they provide between players I dig. It's like in Texas Hold'em when they say you don't play the cards, you play the man.
In that sense, what we're frustrated with isn't Blizzard per se, but the genre as a whole. If you read his article, you'll see that is the conclusion he makes. More importantly, we're asking if that is a problem inherent to the genre. Is it possible to make an MMORPG that balances skill, time spent, soloing, and grouping? Some have tried, Guild Wars namely.
So you have to see where we're coming from. We're a different type of player, one that unfortunately can't enjoy a game that rewards people arbitrarily. I actually didn't want change, as in beta they had things right. Over time, to serve their own inabilities, rules were changed and gameplay was artificially slowed. Skillfullness dwindled to being inconsequential. They had a chance to be better than other MMORPGs, but ended up so only nominally. At upper level 60s, you literally cannot participate in anything interesting without a clan of similar folks with critical mass. You can't PvE, you can't PvP. Period.
Normally, I would give Blizzard a break. But the lies, cover-ups, tyranny, and sheer impulsiveness of their "fixes," often with disastrous results, does not befit a company who says things are done when they're done. They do not befit the company who gave us WC3 and SC. This new Blizzard is Vivendi's whore (just look at the release), and if the exodus of top Blizzard talent into five newly formed companies doesn't reflect that, I don't know what does.
WheresMyRailgun writes:
So are we just agreeing that we just enjoy different genre's of games?
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with either types, but be prepared to expect a different community. Some people want to build a character from ground up, spending hours and hours training or looking for the best equipment in order to gain an advantage in the game. Others just want to play games, on equal footing with their friends, and they could care less about finding the best equipment or having the best skills. And still, others want the heightened sense of awareness and intensity of popcorn games, and don't really care with whom they're playing. It's their skill against the world.
I'm sure you guys agree that there is no perfect genre and there is no perfect game and there is no cow level. Okay, I just threw that last one in there for kicks. People play for different reasons so it's hard to accommodate all types of play into a single world. Everybody focuses on different aspects of the same game, and they'll continue to play, or not, depending on whether that's their type of game.
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