"I have a life."

| Friday, April 16, 2010
Short version: This is not directly related to the recent mount/pet store chatter.
This post wasn't written recently. It is at least a month old. I was having a lot of trouble writing it, for no clear reason. What finally fixed that was copy-pasting what I had in an email to Gordon at We Fly Spitfires and asking if he wanted to do a quest post on the subject. I never actually sent it, trying to explain what I wanted to say resulted in me saying it, more or less. This was even scheduled several days ago, so it coming out at this time is just remarkable coincidence.

"Why is that people who do not work or choose not to work can have all the best stuff and those of us who actually pay taxes and have lives can not?" - Copied from the forums; I didn't bother to remember the poster or thread. As an individual the poster is irrelevant to the discussion.

What is this shit? When did "having a live" become the catch-all excuse for wanting to skip parts of the game or being bad? I won't say lazy, since that sounds weird since it's a game.

If this life is so great, why do they care so much about the game? When I play WoW I don't then get mad that I am bad at basketball. I wish I was better, but clearly I have decided that I care more about WoW than basketball, so my skills at basketball will suffer as a result. That doesn't mean there's something wrong with basketball. If anything, it means there's something right with it, that people who dedicate time to it are better.

Besides, the topic at hand, which was gold-selling, isn't a "people who have lives use this to compensate for their reduced time" deal. It's more likely to be used by extremely hardcore players who care perhaps too much; the exact opposite group!

The great irony seems to be that the "I have a life/job" people so often seem to treat WoW as a job. They cannot simply enjoy playing it. Instead they must meet their deadlines and quotas and all sorts of nonsense like that. A person who took it as a game might wish to play more and kill more, but they'd recognize that it is a game, not their place to derive life satisfaction and self-worth.

I like playing Civilization, and working takes time away from that; should I blame Firaxis and insist that games take less time? No. That would be stupid.

It all comes down to a disconnect between how much people care about their status in the game and how much they can actually play it. When someone wants more status than they can play for, there is a problem. Perhaps they would be happier in another game, but the root problem is probably with them, and so they need to evaluate where their priorities lies and not complain when they put higher priorities before lower.

5 comments:

Dwism said...

It fits so well with the recent hot-topic, because an alternative ending could be:
"But luckily Blizzard, now provides an easy fix solution to those people who want the status, but cannot be bothered with achieving it, they can buy it."
-or something similar/better written...
Maybe thats just me.

Leah said...

to me, its not about status. its about actually being able to see content. its not blizzard's fault though, they made it as accessible as they can possibly manage, its the players themselves that are not happy about it and keep finding ways to exclude others.

case in point - gearscore. my characters who were perfectly fine to progress through ICC a month ago, especially my shaman who was pretty well geared, are now undergeared for most everything...in the same gear...despite zonewide ICC buff.

and its not like BC anymore. In BC we had the true 9 hours a week raiding schedule, becasue most guilds were at a certain step in progression ladder and simply didn't have all the extra content to farm.

now you have main 25s, main 10s, and do it all over again on alts. and god forbid, you skip running on that hamster wheel for a few weeks, now that anyone with enough time can grind up the gear, you can lose your raid spot faster then you can say "break"

"I have a life" is not an excuse for having zero understanding of how your class works. it is however, now more then ever, a reason why someone might not be keeping up with ever increasing player demands and feeling just a bit bitter about being left behind in a dust.

Paul Espiritu said...

Its the fundemantal flaw with the Gearscore system. It is not taking into account skill in any way. So people get so frustrated when people in 5k Gearscore pull 3k dps that they step up the requirement and hope to god they do not run into anymore baddies.

We Fly Spitfires said...

The forum poster who can up with the topic is being a bit extreme, agreed. However, saying that, I suppose I can see where they're coming from.

Back in the "good ol' days" MMOs games like EQ rewarded time over skill. It wasn't a hard game to play but it took a heck of a lot of time to acquire items and gear. You would quite literally have to spend hours camping the same spot in order to get a specific drop. In that situation the game rewarded those people without 'lives'.

Of course, we now have games like WoW which are accessible on every level and thus you're totally right and there's no need to bitch about it. I couldn't agree more. Being able to progress or raid in an hour or two at a time is a magnificent thing... especially when you compare it against games like Everquest.

Klepsacovic said...

@Dwism: Meh, what's a mount, really?

@Leah: People don't seem to know history in real life or WoW. They forget that we did heroics in blues and greens, naxx is blues and a few heroic epics, and even into ulduar we might not be in full naxx gear.

@Rice: And yet the more we inflate gear, the more emphasis we place on gear, the more people assume their gear can carry them. It's a terrible cycle.

@We Fly Spitfires: I'll put him in the "Living in the Past" category.

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