Anti-Aliased: Yu rack disriprine pt. 2

HEAR HEAR!
Completely agree with this article. I'd like to add that anyone who wants to raid in warcraft as either a healer or a tank when they reach maximum level should consider the upcoming dual specs feature a godsend.

If your leveing a character get dual specs at the lowest level you can possibly afford it, then run as many outland/northrend leveling dungeons as possible and learn group mechanics to death.

Your life WILL be ten times easier when it comes to doing heroics and raids.

i'd also point to the emergence of non-warrior tanks (specifically in WoW) as cause to this effect.

i'll never forget the first time i watched a REAL pally tank round up two full rooms in a Burning Crusade heroic. it took me a good 8 or 10 seconds of gawking before i could bring myself to cast [Rain of Fire] to start the AoE frenzy.

it's only been heightened with the addition of 2.3 zillion n00b DKs.

Warrior tanking has always been a true artform and heavily relies on well executed group dynamics for success. take that piece of the equation and dumb clearing dungeons down to an AoE loot party and new players get a seriously diluted version of what playing an MMO is all about.

One of the most surprising shortcomings of WoW that your article alludes to is that the game does a very poor job of teaching the player how to play it. Beyond the most basic play mechanics during your earliest levels, the game just assumes you have a basic competency and never explicitly expands upon that. Imagine you were to play WoW without any addons and without ever reading a single website or forum about it. How would you ever know what "threat" was the first time you step in Wailing Caverns? The dungeon game is entirely different, dependent on the "holy trinity" of tank/dps/healing classes. Yet even that basic fact could be unknown to a new player, even if she had managed to level to 80 solo. Blizzard really needs to rethink how they teach people to play the game but I doubt they will address this problem in WoW. I can't wait to see their next MMO though...

An excellent article.

Here's the problem as I see it, however.

The mix of "casuals" and "hardcores" (imperfect and subjective terms at the best of times) is not really the issue. A lot of people, including a couple of folks who ended up being 'famous' raiders and Arena fighters, who became very good players had never played MMOs or even video games before WoW. Yet they mastered it.

First time gamers are not necessarily eternal fodder for endgame bosses.

The problem has more to do with the phenomenon you outlined at the start of your article which is soloing. Now before some old-guard elitists begin clapping me on the back I should say it's not what you think.

Soloing is needed at this point. There aren't enough people in the low-level areas anymore. If you didn't make these levels more soloable people would be put off by LFGing for Scarlet Monastery for 5 hours and getting nothing, eventually quitting and taking the phat lewt Blizzard so desires with them.

The problem is that A) The game is old. B) The linear, isolating expansions broke the community.

Outland was an island, and so too is Northrend. Prior to those expansions, the game world from Noob Zone to Teh Endgame was contiguous and a shared space. You flew over the Cool Place when you took a gryffon from Ironforge to Stormwind. Now the Cool Place is Lame. The Cool Place became Outland, another planet. Now it's Northrend, an island that only the uberest of uber level 70s can access (speaking from the perspective of a neophyte player, naturally).

So it creates a desire to rush through Azeroth, rather than savour it.

Combine this with the looming demographic problem (a game utterly topheavy with level 80s) and you see why soloing is all but required if *any* new players are to join the fight against Arthas eventually.

Prior to Burning Crusade there were always groups forming for Deadmines, SM, Stockades... and even Uldaman and Mara. Does *anyone* group at-level for those anymore? People don't even get their max level friends to pound them through Maraudon anymore. Yet just prior to BC, these places were hopping.

The age of the game and the use of geographically and socially isolating expansions deadened that thriving mid-game community. Also, it is very likely WoW's population is peaking.

All of this culminates in what Mr. Brennan was cataloguing here. People reaching their 70s without ever having had to play their class *cooperatively* in a group setting. Where once we worked out those kinks in RFC, Deadmines, or Stocks, now they're working it out in Northrend. But I had been noticing this in BC too, where I met people in, say, Mana Tombs that never tanked before.

C'est la guerre.

While I can agree that some people level to 80 without grouping and this can sometimes be a problem.

I've never run into a group such as represented in this article.

Until last night (after about 2 years of playing wow) I did not have a real guild. The closest I came to preplanned groups was with my girlfriend and a couple friends we have once or twice. Otherwise, nothing but pugs.

Perhaps your servers have a different sort of population than mine does.

My girlfriend's first character made stops in dm, scarlet, gnomer, zf... this was about halfway between tbc and lichking. She never seemed to have a problem.

My nephew was powerleveled by people he'd met and yet when he was around 72 and I took him into dungeons as a group, he had no problem.

Maybe I'm just lucky... but I think my experiences disagree with the article at least on pugs.

With a community as big as WoW you are bound to get the good with the bad. I was doing Utgarde Pinnacle last night with some guildmates and some random people. We were doing well until we got to the boss you have to shoot down with the harpoons. We wiped four or five times but it was due to not having enough firepower to take down all the mobs. We tried different tactics but nothing worked. It was a good group, like I said we just did not have enough firepower to do it.

That being said, I've done Blackwing Lair with my guild and it was terrible. No one was listening to directions. People were just running ahead and doing what they felt like and this was a guild only run.

You take the good with the bad. You just hope you have more good experiences than bad ones.

While I can agree with most of this article... this stuck in my craw:

"The fail wipes of today will become the successes of tomorrow, as long as players learn to stick with it and take the good with the bad."

Having been through more than my fair share of soul-sucking PUGs, I refuse to do any remotely difficult content with a PUG anymore. I just can't stomach the bickering and lack of skills, both with their character and social.

Sorry, I don't buy this. People have been whinging about PuGs forever, this isn't new. As long as I've been playing the game (nearly four years now) I've known people who refused to PuG anything, ever.

I don't take this point of view, maybe it's just my server but PuGs have never been a big issue for me, I've never considered them as bad as they've always been made out to be and I haven't noticed any decline in the standard of PuGs over the lifetime of the game.

P.S. A note on anecdotal experiences: People's personal experiences, including mine, the author's and the other commenters' can reflect the state of your own server as much as the game as a whole and the relative health of the two things don't always coincide.