America Online

| Monday, September 3, 2012
WoW is the America of MMOs.  It is big, profitable, and gets a huge amount of attention.  It is culturally dominant.  It is perpetually 'dying' as an upstart appears, and then somehow fails to overcome it, since inertia keeps things moving just as well as it keeps them stationary.

The tourists are the worst.  They blunder about with their maps out, perpetually lost.  They don't know the language and refuse to learn it, or even accept its legitimacy.  "Why is the character screen called a hero screen?  It should be C, not H.  And why are bags I for inventory instead of B for bags?"  They don't like the responses, for any response suggests that another game could have sprung up and done things just as correctly yet not the same way.

The entire time they complain about how much better things run in their game.  "Our auction house works.  And it isn't a trading post."  They forget the launch problems of their own game, cleaning up the little bit of history they know.  It makes for a shinier picture.

Thankfully, they do go back home.  Of course once they get back they think they are worldly and now superior and so they go about the reverse business of criticizing everything and saying how they do this thing so much better over there, seemingly forgetting all their previous complaints, until such time that they feel the need to remind themselves how much better they are for having been born in WoW.  "If your bags are full you can just send back all the ore into the collectible slot in the bank.  And you can access the bank from a crafting station.  And mail is everywhere.  Waypoints are instant!"

Give them a few days and they'll be back to normal, trading their insufferable there worship for insufferable here worship.  They'll be yelling in trade chat about how Guild Wars 2 is the gayest game ever and then someone will call them a fag and finally they'll be on the same page of agreeing that they don't like gay people, though they can't quite give any good reasons.

I've had a nice time so far in Guild Wars 2.  I expect that forTuesday or Wednesday I'll write a post about all the terrible things in it.

3 comments:

NetherLands said...

Spot on.

It's one of the reasons I always wait with joining the 'hip new MMORPG' out of the gate, as nothing is as annoying as converted WoW-fanbois.

They're basically the 'new players' from Bartle's famous opinion piece from 2004 or so (how time flies) that keep perpetuating bad designs.

Klepsacovic said...

I'd planned to wait a week before starting GW2, in part for that reason, but ultimately decided that I wanted to make my Norn engineer sooner rather than later. Surprisingly, only a day or two were filled with WoW players whining in map chat. I did the responsible thing and restricted my negative comparisons to WoW to chat with friends.

Siha said...

To be fair, it's not just WoW tourists who are thrown by the "H for Hero Screen" thing; it's C in pretty much every other MMO ever, and many non-MMOs too. That one rather felt like GW2 was reinventing the wheel just for the sake of being different. ;)

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