PvE Nerf Police!

Again I've been wasting my time reading various forums, including my old realm's independent discussion forums. As a new patch is under way, and nerfs on old content are more than probable, some people have started crying wolf again. The common whine is that as the previous content is nerfed, and new welfare epics are introduced, some endgame players seem to think Blizzard is stealing the epics from their pockets. Atleast that's how it seems when you read their rants.

It makes sense to me that Blizzard re-adjusts the difficulty level of older instances as new material is published. This gives more people a chance to see the fruit of their devs' hard work, and also to enjoy some of the best instance designs in the game. They are simply opening up, or atleast giving out the keys to some doors that would otherwise be closed to majority of the people, once the hard-working, hardcore people move on up to new challenges. And I fail to see how this hurts anyone?

Usually the person writing those posts is someone who is on their first lap around the endgame block, and probably have not been in a really good Guild all that long. Perhaps they have, for the first time in their WoW career, just reached a spot where they have killed "everything" in the game, and are a bit too cocky about it. They claim that other people getting epics and getting to kill easier bosses robs them of their honor as champions of PvE, and takes away the glory. But they are barking up the wrong tree.

The people who do the endgame pre-nerfed know who's done what and when. They know the difference between earlier and later versions of bosses, and pay their respects accordingly. Maybe for the very casual players a kill is a kill, but they wouldnt know how to respect your achievements any way. So why care?

When Ahn'Quiraj opened up I had finished Blackwing Lair some weeks earlier with my (then) Guild. A lot of new gear became available through AQ20 and of course AQ40's first boss, even to Guilds with very little prior success. This made it easier for them to go back to BWL, and get further down the road. But I can honestly say I never, ever thought it in any way hampered my satisfaction of knowing I had cleared the instance when it was still the hardest challenge in the game. Quite the contrary: I was even happier, as now even more people knew what sort of challenges we had been facing, and could only imagine how much more effort it took without the new gear and boss nerfs.

But I guess almost everyone goes through these stages at some point. At every new major patch there's always someone new who thinks they're being kicked in the teeth by Blizzard. Come the next patch, they're older and wiser, and know that they still cherish the memore of beating that one boss back then when it was breaking news all across the realm.

Blizzard can nerf a lot of things. But they cant nerf your memories. Viva la Emmies, back in 2006, BWL.

Skill in WoW?

I happened to read a few threads on the official forums again, mostly flame wars about this or that. There was one recurring theme, however, and it is between casuals and the hardcore. Or, to be more precise, the assumptions regarding these groups. Very few people seemed to really think they belong to either. I am not going to be trying to analyze that, however, but another underlying issue, which came across in post after post: does WoW involve skill?

A lot of people, especially those coming from the FPS genre, state that WoW only requires time, and there is no skill involved. I beg to differ, even though I come from that genre as well (having roots in Rainbow Six, Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat, to name a few). I agree that a player does not benefit from fast hand-eye co-ordination as much in WoW as in, say, Counter-Strike. But is that really the only merit of skill in a computer game? There are other issues to consider. I'll divide my opinions into two categories, PvE and PvP, as I think they are somewhat different.

Skills in PvP

PvP style of gameplay in WoW does not require the same sort of accuracy as your average FPS does. You dont need to pinpoint your pointer, nor do you need to position yourself with a single pixel accuracy. The movement is still there, requiring some fast reflexes to be able to make use of your surroundings, and even though WoW gives substantially more room for error in terms of range and positioning, it still requires both the knowledge of what to do, as well as the nerves, reflexes and over all ability to actually do so. And to compensate for the lack of requirements in accuracy, WoW players are faced with the necessity of keeping track of multiple counters, timers and the general Paper-Rock-Scissors theme of the various skills.

I think it is quite evident this requires both skill and understanding. The skills related are not necessarily directly comparable to those required in a first person shooter, but there are too many similarities not to notice them. In terms of raw mouse accuracy and subletly of movement, the skill requirement is lower, but on the other hand WoW requires the player to keep track of more things than in the average shooter. And I believe this requirement only grows stronger as you move up from 1vs1 fights. Compare a 5vs5 Arena match and a 5vs5 Counter-Strike matchs, and you can see how much more complicated it becomes, as you need to keep track of your own skills and cooldowns, the abilities of your 4 team mates, and of course those of the 5 opponents. At the same time you need to move fast and react to everyone else's movements as well. It's not as fast paced as in a shooter, but it's not even supposed to be.

Perhaps the biggest difference is that the personal skill level of any single player is not as easy to spot, or even to define, as in a first person shooter. The skills of the group are more blended together, and no one man stands that much taller than the rest.

Skills in PvE

PvE does involve some of the same ingredients as described above; you need to position yourself, react to changes in your environment and the movement of both your teammates as well as the mobs. You need to keep track of your skills, the mob's skills, and also some of your friends'. Of course the mobs are not nearly as unpredictable as a human being, so it could be said that this part of the game is more about memorizing the tactics, and carrying them out, than any reaction based skills that are required in a shooter - even in a tactical shooter. But again I ask if the skills need to be exactly the same as in the FPS to be considered skills?

Another major issue in PvE, especially endgame, is the huge social skills that are required to build up a Guild, and keep it going. Of course for the majority of the people, even within the Guild, this may seem like something that's automatic, but it is not. And I dare to say that most "casuals" do not even begin to understand how hard a jigsaw puzzle it is to get 25 people to work together for months, to keep the schedules and to forge a team out of a bunch of people. Is this not a skill? Is there no skills required to be able to effectively communicate with people from different nationalities, cultures, timezones and age groups? How easy do you think it is to fit a schedule evenly between a 34 year old Swedish single mother and a 16 year old Italian teenager?

Gamer on Gamer Hate

It seems odd to me that so many players have the urge to bash other gamers. Again and again I read idiotic posts about how someone "apparently has no girlfriend and never got laid", or "is so idiot n00b that they shouldnt be allowed in the game". Why is this? The game offers a ton of options for everyone, so why the need to put ourselves up there on the high horse, and kick everyone else in the face? Why is it that we have to urge to defend our own gaming habits as the "one and only" way of doing it, and claim all the rest to be just random morons who should quit playing, learn to play, play more, play less... or at the very least, learn to enjoy the game in the exact same way that we do?


This cow thinks we should all focus more on learning to play our own game better, and less on telling other people how to play.