Fishing off the pier in World of Warcraft

I'm Doing It Wrong

My name is Momgamer, and I've been playing World of Warcraft. That's not an easy sentence to say. My mind always tacks on a susurrus shifting of seats and a ragged, singsong, "Welcome to MMORPG-anon." But my own qualms about going down this path again aren't what I'm here for.

Playing MMORPG's again has brought to light a long-running theme in my gaming life: I always seem to be playing the game "wrong" when compared with others.

Free-range stuff like Minecraft is a given. But even in more strictly-shaped games I always seem to be doing it differently than anyone else I know. When I was playing Metal Gear Solid 4, my younger son and I were handing the controller back and forth taking turns on our respective games at the same time, but our extremely different approaches to the game's challenges brought wildly different results at the end. My careful, stealthy approach gave me the Panther emblem, and my younger son's dead-eye lemming tactics won him the Bear and Eagle emblems. In an open-world like an MMO, it's even more pronounced.

Let me tell you a story that highlights what I'm talking about.

Both of my daughters have also begun playing WoW, and have joined my guild. One of my other guildmates and I were helping them finish converting their free accounts and get things arranged to their liking in their UI. After a few hints about how to hit the broad side of a barn from the inside, we started running some shakedown quests around Tranquillien. I was logged into one of my very high level toons so I could chauffeur them around on the mount that turns me into a big green and gold dragon they can ride.

That village is right next to the Blood Elf starting area. Most of the players around here are pretty new, and they're still figuring things out. So when you go back there as a higher-level character, you have to get used to incomprehensible behavior like the random frog-hoppers, the @($&% idiots who don't loot their kills and people randomly hacking at various objects to see what will happen. But we ran into one guy who raised the bothersome newb bar up to pole-vaulting territory.

This was no fun for anyone, so I got his attention and pointed out to him that he was bothering my daughters in a way that gently implied that if he didn't quit it I was going to festoon every tree in the Ghostlands with charred, tattered bits of his anatomy. Thankfully, he took the hint. He stopped hopping and started chatting solely at me. That was fine. I don't mind talking, and he actually understood the use of vowels in words, which can be in short supply in open chat.

We volleyed back and forth a bit, but it was pretty clear we came at the game from two very different worlds. I've never raided much – I can be eaten by something large and toothy well enough out here in the main instance, thank you very much. But to him, there's no other way to play. You log in, round up some intrepid adventurers, and hit the nearest vertical swirly-portal.

It wasn't just game mechanics; his whole personal approach was different. The way that player was talking, his guild takes their min-maxing very seriously. Every stat and damage point is pursued with the fixity of a miser chasing a coin rolling along a crack in the floor, and with that fixity then pushed all the way out to the edge of the envelope. With my play-style and composition of my guild group, those few damage points aren't worth the heightened risk of dying for both myself and them. We're not a big guild, so that kind of fine-tuning is counter-productive. He didn't quite get that.

And in between the conversational gambits, he kept challenging me to a duel. Over and over. Even after being repeatedly reminded that the character he was challenging was level 99 and he's level 14. Finally, I realized he really wasn't going to quit it if I didn't let him throw down, so I finally accepted.

That was, uh ... interesting.

He hit me a couple times, but didn't manage to inflict any actual damage. He wouldn't even have got any hits in at all had I known what I was doing. I'd never fought a duel in WoW before. I was expecting some sort of count-down when the flag dropped, but that doesn't happen. So he got the drop on me while I was standing there waiting for the moral equivalent of the ref to drop the puck. Once I got a clue, I beat him like a blind carpenter's thumb.

Me having too much sword for the mob, so to speak, wasn't my point here. The most illuminating part came after the fight -- the achievement announcement for winning my first duel rolled up in the chat window. He freaked out.

I don't think he really believed that I was telling the truth about the way we play. But here was incontrovertible proof. I really had leveled my character that high and never fought a single duel along the way. I pointed out to him that I'd never had to; I play with people I know in real life and we already know all we need to know about the comparative sizes of everyone's nethers and don't need to test that out here.

At that point, we wished each other a good night and went on our respective ways, shaking our heads at the other's approach to the game.

I do feel like I'm the weirdo in situations like those, but I can't be alone in this. Blizzard wouldn't have invested the resources to build the robust crafting and profession mechanics into the system just for me. I'm betting I'm not the only one pulling giant weeds out at Sunsong Ranch and cooking dubious parts of even more dubious dead things.

Since my first engagement, I've taken a short walk on the other side. I was in Orgrimmar with my level 93 goblin hunter, cleaning out my pockets of stuff I'd gathered, when there was an all-call on the general chat window. Someone was attacking the city. Happens fairly regularly, and I usually I don't do much with that because I really don't know how. It's usually just a few Alliance players counting coup on one of the big NPC characters, and by the time I even figure out where they are, it's all over.

This time, it was serious. Someone running a multibox setup was repeatedly dropping 30 level-100 raid-equipped Death Knights with healer support into the middle of town, right in front of the transport hub. Why this isn't against the rules is beyond me. This guy is a known quantity – he does this for fun, and streams it. He has previously managed to pretty much empty the city of NPC's and lower-level players (as is shown in that video). It also causes a crippling lag-spike across the entire server, which makes life hard for everyone. So the call went out to camp the spot where his script was dropping them.

When he showed back up, there were more than a hundred of us clustered around the area, waiting for him. I don't know why, but all of his characters spawned crammed into an elevator. I was waiting along with all the other range-types to shoot him when he popped his head up.

That works better if the foes are not max-level raid-spec monsters with a habit of spewing a fountain of evil magic that inflicts killing-level bad status effects at range. This character has no defenses against that, so all I saw was a swirl of red tendrils and I was dead. I hiked back to my bones from the graveyard and threw a few more shots in before he caught me again. Lather, rinse, repeat until I figured out how to stay outside his range and within mine. I still died several more times, but it was for less humiliating reasons.

It's a characteristic of his script that he has to wait for the automatic 6-minute respawn delay once the lead toon driving things is down, so we defenders had a breather and chance to heal up and talk a bit between spawns. I admitted generally that, despite my level, I was a total newb at this, and got some pointers and some heal/rez support. And he just kept coming, crowing across the battlefield as if he was the one winning. We took him down, over and over again, but in some ways it felt like playing chess with a pigeon: No matter how the game is actually going, they just strut around like they've won and poop all over the board. I don't know how it ended – I had to bail at 4 am.

Despite the frustration, it was fun. I learned more about the communication system than I'd learned in all the time I'd played. I now have achievements in PvP, and knowledge of a whole new realm of gameplay that I didn't even know existed. I'm not sure it's going to change my day-to-day play much, but when the call goes out, I'll be a little more ready to respond.

I get a tirade from others (even developers) about how I'm doing things wrong, but I'm of the opinion that they don't get to tell me how to play the game once I plunk down the cash. Other than the ways it can complicate my relationships to other players, I don't see our different approaches as a problem. There's plenty of room in this for all kinds. That palladin can go bother Kel'Thuzad in Naxxramas. I won't repeat in public what I think that multiboxing tool can do, and I'll just keep drinking my coffee out of my guild's Yak-Shaving Division mug while I fish.

Comments

I got another 2 years out of WoW by playing it differently to how I'd been playing it before. It's a big game like that.

Heck, playing WOW at this point is going against the grain.

I'm quite happy to see that video only has 140 views and his channel has 300 subscribers. I was afraid he'd be popular or something.

Reminds me of Bartle's player types.

I've never played WoW, but I can relate to taking a road-less-travelled in games.

Love it!

As someone who played Asheron's Call for 150+ hours and never got past level 30 because I was playing it wrong (exploring > grinding!), and who leveled my cooking skill to 300 in Guild Wars 2 so I could send fancy pastries to my guild members, I salute you!

I've been on 'both' (all?) sides in WoW from time to time.
Started playing for the exploration (exploring the world for the first time is still the best experience WoW has to offer) and levelling/questing.
Stayed for the raiding for 5 years, and since I have frequently come back for a more casual exploration and levelling.

Even at the heights of my raiding days I never understood the obsession with gear, which seem to be one of the main thing lots of people play for - and the main thing that shapes the conception of right and wrong ways to play. No actually 'never understood' is the wrong word, I despised it, for all the drama it could add to player behavior in a guild.

The duels I have done for other reasons than to get the weird achievement (I most certainly also played for achievement hunting at some point) from time to time can probably be counted on one hand, on the other side I played a ton of battlegrounds in the early days (before Blizzard ruined the sense of a small competitive environment with cross realm! /end rant).

While Blizzard do emphasize raiding and arena as the 'right' ways to play, in the end, they also did build into the game all those other ways to play. It can't be that wrong.
All those different ways to play is the main beauty of MMOs.

Well, unless you are a roleplayer in Goldshire. That is just wrong!

Shadout wrote:

Well, unless you are an exotic roleplayer in Goldshire. That is just wrong!

FTFY.

Really. My life was complete without seeing pixilated gnome-on-nelf, ah, action.

@momgamer: WoW is indeed so huge that there's no right way to play it. If you want to raid, great. If not, that's great, too. (Me, I'm looking forward to the Pet Battle holiday that started today ... )

I'd be careful dueling low-level toons, however. Back in the day, my eldest managed to roll a level 1 rogue twink that would absolutely destroy anyone up to about level 25 or so. That was the damnedest thing.

Good read! Thanks. Even with ignorance of WoW which I've never played.

Turns out that competition is a young player's game, anyway. I can't say I'm surprised that folks over 35 are least into competition, power, challenge, and excitement. That sounds like an overview of what I'm glad to be done with once I get home and the kid is asleep.

wordsmythe wrote:

That sounds like an overview of what I'm glad to be done with once I get home and the kid is asleep.

That's definitely it for me.

danopian wrote:
wordsmythe wrote:

That sounds like an overview of what I'm glad to be done with once I get home and the kid is asleep.

That's definitely it for me.

and Destruction is higher for people above 35 than below it. I guess people want to just shoot things that die easily after a hard day at work, or they're just all "Calgon take me away!" with how high Fantasy is.

That's interesting info, but I wasn't even getting there with this. For one thing, I have been like this since I was a girl.

I imagine a lot of it has to do with gender. I mean, that study talks about it pretty thoroughly. And I've seen it anecdotally all my gaming life. A D&D game with half a dozen jr. high girls is a very different critter than with half a dozen guys.

That's not to say I don't enjoy a spot of zombie-killing with my friends after a hard day, or that my ex didn't enjoy chasing down that dragon with us back in school.

But I've had someone tell me I'm playing Pokemon Go wrong, for crying out loud. Because I hadn't fought in a gym yet.

momgamer wrote:

But I've had someone tell me I'm playing Pokemon Go wrong, for crying out loud. Because I hadn't fought in a gym yet.

Did you respond with the fact that gym battles are terrible and they should feel bad for mentioning them?

Jokes aside, the whole 'playing wrong' theory is automatically bunk when you're already succeeding at what you're trying to do. On the flip side, being open to new ways to play a game as huge and diverse as this one is great too. Keep going, and you might find yourself in one of those raids that kids talk about these days. It sounds like skies the limit for Momgamer!

Great article Momgamer! If it's any consolation, my way of playing WOW is to pretend to be hardcore for a month or two then realize I don't have anywhere near the time to be truly l33t then quit.

And just remember, even if some people think you're too laid back, there's a guy who got to max level by just picking herbs and mining on the Wandering Isle. Took him nearly 175 days played.

Says the one who won't misdirect me ever.

cube wrote:

Says the one who won't misdirect me ever.

Misdirect is SOOO Burning Crusade.

Sounds like you are doing it right to me.

I've been playing since vanilla and was a "hardcore" raider through Burning Crusade. On October 29th, 2008, I received the best gift in my entire life. A beautiful baby girl. I still play but my time is spent doing a few daily quests, maybe some random PvP, exploring, etc. and I still enjoy the game. My now 8 year old daughter and 6 year old daughter also enjoy watching me play. They especially enjoy "helping" me with quests that require searching for items and what not. Our newest thing now is hunting for new dress up gear and new battle pets and mounts. My 8 year old likes to point out mounts that I don't have (which are still quite a few as I get screwed by the RNG stupid Ashes of Al'ar mount!)

Blizzard has done a great job in my opinion of making the game fun to play any way you would like. I can still raid and do a Friday raid now with a group and the raid finder is fun too if you just want to sit back and smack some stuff without much risk or stress.

There is no right or wrong way to play at this point and that is how a game should be.

BTW, the WoW hardcore raiders seriously have no clue what a "hardcore" raid is. Anyone that played Everquest and remembers the 72 person raids? Yeah, 48 hours straight raiding in Plane of Time anyone? Been there! Raids these days are nothing compared to the farming and crap that had to be done in Everquest to min/max.

Been thinking about the column for a couple of days and something occurred to me when I was doing my list for the Community Game of the Year - The First 10 years.

I feel that fundamentally games are for enjoyment. (duh!) So as long as you're enjoying the game you can't be playing it wrong.

Sometimes people play a game in a way that compromises their enjoyment, usually because the game fails to communicate the more enjoyable way to play it. Mass Effect 2 is guilty of this. It presents like a cumbersome cover shooter so many people tend to play it that way, especially because the Normal setting is too easy. Meanwhile the "right," which is to say "more fun," way to play it is by using the skills and powers at higher difficulties to take advantage of skills playing off each other and exploit the weaknesses of enemies.

It's not what you are talking about momgamer, because I agree that enjoyment means you're playing right for you. But it's the one time I feel the 'You're doing it wrong' accusation holds water.

MrDeVil909 wrote:

Been thinking about the column for a couple of days and something occurred to me when I was doing my list for the Community Game of the Year - The First 10 years.

I feel that fundamentally games are for enjoyment. (duh!) So as long as you're enjoying the game you can't be playing it wrong.

Sometimes people play a game in a way that compromises their enjoyment, usually because the game fails to communicate the more enjoyable way to play it. Mass Effect 2 is guilty of this. It presents like a cumbersome cover shooter so many people tend to play it that way, especially because the Normal setting is too easy. Meanwhile the "right," which is to say "more fun," way to play it is by using the skills and powers at higher difficulties to take advantage of skills playing off each other and exploit the weaknesses of enemies.

It's not what you are talking about momgamer, because I agree that enjoyment means you're playing right for you. But it's the one time I feel the 'You're doing it wrong' accusation holds water.

Bringing your own bit back around, "If you're having fun, you aren't playing it wrong" flips to "If you're not having fun, maybe you should try playing a different way." And I think that applies to Mass Effect pretty well. Not that I blame someone for not having fun, though.

Yeah, I can totally relate... not only did I play all the way to Legion without ever doing a battleground... but I had actually played into Draenor while only doing about 5 dungeon runs, total:

... all about the story, and the lore, and the journey, for me.

So, probably not that surprising that my main is a healer (monk, mistweaver), and that I *LEVELED* in that spec... ignoring the advice to "level as a DPS, if you want to play as a healer".

In fact, the only reason why I started playing dungeons a lot in the past 6 months, after 2 years of mostly ignoring them, is because I *ALSO* like "playing together" -- esp. with my daughter, who is the biggest *reason* I started playing in the first place -- while she's half a day away at her university, WoW together is one of the only ways I get her time -- AND I also enjoy playing with her small guild.... [rambling I know]...

... but I only (mostly) get time playing with them if I'm up for doing dungeons together.

So... I'm finally looking at rolling tanks.

But here's where what you wrote is so pertinent for me:
-- Frankly, I wonder if our guild is both a good and bad influence on my daughter.

Because: she's already got a personality that thinks things are "wrong" when they're not optimal. And the guild totally re-inforces that: if the dungeon play isn't being done right, a few leaders will quickly get disappointed, or even frustrated.... and they SOOO do not understand how I can enjoy PUG (pickup groups -- LFG -- randomly-collected groups to play a dungeon).

... which totally reminds me of a recent re-run of The Big Bang Theory, where Sheldon had to go back to our fav group of buddies, because his "new friends... were having fun wrong."

(By the way, I do have a character named "Sheldohr"

In any case, I get sad, sometimes even angry, when my daughter gets angry or sad because I didn't watch chat enough during the dungeon... and could have not died in the last run.

The guild (again: SMALL guild here) are great players, and have taught me a lot. And I get that complete *failure* to overwhelm a boss, after multiple attempts, can cost the rest of the group hours... but that actually didn't happen with me, and not (that I know) recently... but the group... well, you get it.

Having fun wrong never (well, maybe rarely) stopped me from having fun.

Christian practices such as forgiveness and Buddhist practices such as non-attachment come to mind... but that's probably all I need to say about that.

Thanks for the share... very familiar.