Damned if you do, damned if you don't

A blogger I've never heard of, Silverspar (apparently just started), has gotten into a tiny little tussle with a podcaster I've never heard of, TotalBiscuit (podcasts are for the illiterate, true story). I can't say I have much of an opinion on their fight, since I've never listened to him and have little incentihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifve to do so. Apparently he quit WoW and as is the popular thing to do, blamed it on WoW being a gigantic pile of crap and noobs wrapped in noobish crap, to paraphrase the general claim.

So all that aside, I came across this comment on her post.

If your idea of raiding is whiping 50 times on a boss then you obviously aren't very good at the game and are probably part of the problem that in the new WoW community, players that lack skill and have to have the content nerfed into the ground so they can do it all the while not actually developing the skill that the rest of us had to do while in Vanilla and TBC, you are a disgrace to the game and you have no right to talk about this subject.

The classic damned if you do, damned if you don't. Let's leave aside the part that 50 is obviously a big, round number chosen for effect rather than accurate reflection of a raid experience. Instead, let's consider this: whhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifat if she wiped once? Never? She'd probably have a much different perspective. And there it is, the classic issue in anything about balance, fairness, challenge, or whatever other word of the week you can think up: If you have difficulty you're a noob, but if you're successful you're proof that everything is fine.

Or as I phrased it three years ago (minus a few weeks):

If you're in Kara complaining about your class/spec, you're just a noob. Get better gear and see the real game, until then, shut up.
If you're in Sunwell, what is there to complain about? You're proof that your class/spec clearly does work, at least well enough to be in demand.
If you're 1400, you're a noob and shouldn't talk like you know real PvP.
If you're 2200, aren't you proof that it can be done, that your class/spec does work?

But wait, there's more! (of the other guy, not my old post)

Also to argue the teirs mean that raiding is about gear if absolutely ridiculous, apply to any raiding gear that's worth a damn and they'll require you to show logs so that they can till have efficiant you are with your performance to your gear level, you all around have no idea what you're talking about in this blog post and it sickens mean that there are some idiots out there that'll agree with your horrendously bad points of view.

So funny story, I seem to recall a whole lot of gear-checking for raids. Let's see, during Wrath when things were all flat. But also in BC. And vanilla. Hm. I wonder if maybe, just maybe, gear is something that people are always checking, because it's a hell of a lot easier to check gear than dig through logs.

Let's go back to this bit in the first block: "developing the skill that the rest of us had to do while in Vanilla and TBC... you have no right to talk about this subject."
So obviously we're looking at a bit of generic internet asshole, mixed in with an unhealthy dose of "I played vanilla so I'm better than you" (guilty). But the no right to talk part, that's something uh... okay even beside the censorship aspect of it, let's pretend that Silverspar is incredibly bad at WoW, ungodly bad, so bad that you'd weep to see her pitiful attempts at play. Does that mean she should shut up? Well perhaps we don't particularly want to listen to her noobish opinions, but silence is risky. Silence is an undiagnosed problem. Not with her, but with the game. Let's pretend that from Wrath onward no one (or a sufficiently large portion of the population) learned to play better. That would be a very strange situation! Would it be caused by some unusually concentrated influx of idiots? Or some sort of change in the game design?

Or am I reading far too much into just another jackass? Vanilla and BC grouped together? Hm, bit of a revision there. I remember more than a little bit of how vanilla was so much harder and better than BC and how back then people had to be better. Could we be looking at a bit of fuzzy history? No, perish the thought, we all know memory is a perfect record.

Heh, earth shock used to have a massive aggro component on it. Fun times.