Greatest freak out
- Thread starter Flipmo
- Start date
This made me laugh. In one sentence you question the video's credibility, in the next sentence you give testimony to having seen it happen yourself. You probably weren't thinking while typing that response. 
I think the video is most likely fake cos of the way it starts and ends like someone else said.
So maybe your the one who wasnt doing the thinking,
Dont ever fucking question me again J/K
I wasn't high lol.
Right now, an X number of youth around the world are using prescribed medication for mental problems that are a result of constricted freedom in one sense or another, or sexual/physical abuse.
Some people are really eager on the veggie shit but this is my shit. People that are fucking ignorant and cause their children displeasure and psychological problems because they are too stuck up to admit fault. Ie you can't admit that you're an asshole and deal with it and change yourself, so you carry on being an asshole and built a web of lies around you to justify your own horrible actions to yourself.
A temporary punishment because your child did something wrong is one thing, that's disciplining. You tell your kid to go to his room, and he sits there until he becomes so bored that he actually bothers to man up to say he's sorry. Cutting a kid's WoW is like stealing a kid's toys. Whoever disagrees is wrong, it's that simple lol.
Right now, an X number of youth around the world are using prescribed medication for mental problems that are a result of constricted freedom in one sense or another, or sexual/physical abuse.
Some people are really eager on the veggie shit but this is my shit. People that are fucking ignorant and cause their children displeasure and psychological problems because they are too stuck up to admit fault. Ie you can't admit that you're an asshole and deal with it and change yourself, so you carry on being an asshole and built a web of lies around you to justify your own horrible actions to yourself.
A temporary punishment because your child did something wrong is one thing, that's disciplining. You tell your kid to go to his room, and he sits there until he becomes so bored that he actually bothers to man up to say he's sorry. Cutting a kid's WoW is like stealing a kid's toys. Whoever disagrees is wrong, it's that simple lol.
This is another misinformed, uneducated assumption, which you made from your own narrow point of view.
Do pardon me if I'm mistaken, but I think what you mean to say is, "I would never care this much for a computer game, so I don't understand why he does. Since all of the logic i apply to this situation shows me that he does in fact care more than what is healthy for the computer game, I must be right. Conclusion: He takes WoW way too seriously."
I don't take watching TV very seriously. I don't take that cup of coffee in the morning very seriously. I don't take music very seriously. I don't take the pleasure of taking a good long shit very seriously. None of these things are the be-all end-all of my world on their own. Together, they make up the life that I am accustomed to. I built this life around me because it makes me happy. How would you react if I came into your house and cut your TV coord though? "Ah, I was taking it too seriously and was watching too much TV, they were right to cut it."? Of course not.
Some times, people's happiness realies on things that directly hurt other people. If I need to murder people to be happy, then other people need to die for me to happy, and their relatives will have to mourn. My desire is no longer just my desire, it's an act that has horrible consequences for other people.
Other times, the only thing people need to be happy is to play games. Or to be a lone, with little to no social activites. Some people give up their personal life in favor of a career. Who is to dictate what is okay to take serious, and what shouldn't be serious? In a thousand years we're all gone. These ideas of your about the world, the assets you are saving for future generations, will all be gone, and you will matter nothing. The same is true for all of us, and we all find different ways to cope with that fact. For some people, that way is a gamer lifestyle.
It comes down to the fact that certain people think drinking beer is okay, but smoking weed is not. Some people think playing football is okay, but playing World of Warcraft is not. Why? Has it ever occurred to people that some people are gifted in the physical department - they are good at sports, they are strong, they are fit. Other people are clumsy, always sucked at sports, but are hella smart. The math club geeks. The latter can never live up to the former, and being the one that gets picked last your entire life fucking sucks. If in WoW you're suddenly a good player, and people want to play with you based on your in-game reputation, it's not as good as having a friend tell you you're a really cool guy, and it's not as good as having a girlfriend, but it's 10x better than taking shit from assholes that think you're able to take the joke, just because you never mustered up the courage to tell the friends that you feel mistreated by them.
What you're effectively saying is that your interests are worth more than the interests of others. By simply saying "takes it way too seriously" you demonstrate that you don't even know why he's playing the game in the first place. Maybe it's one of the few things in life he's good at where people don't give him shit. It's almost like I can sense in the way you worded yourself that you sorta look down on him, like he's caught up in something without realizing it. That's most often not the case.
Do pardon me if I'm mistaken, but I think what you mean to say is, "I would never care this much for a computer game, so I don't understand why he does. Since all of the logic i apply to this situation shows me that he does in fact care more than what is healthy for the computer game, I must be right. Conclusion: He takes WoW way too seriously."
I don't take watching TV very seriously. I don't take that cup of coffee in the morning very seriously. I don't take music very seriously. I don't take the pleasure of taking a good long shit very seriously. None of these things are the be-all end-all of my world on their own. Together, they make up the life that I am accustomed to. I built this life around me because it makes me happy. How would you react if I came into your house and cut your TV coord though? "Ah, I was taking it too seriously and was watching too much TV, they were right to cut it."? Of course not.
Some times, people's happiness realies on things that directly hurt other people. If I need to murder people to be happy, then other people need to die for me to happy, and their relatives will have to mourn. My desire is no longer just my desire, it's an act that has horrible consequences for other people.
Other times, the only thing people need to be happy is to play games. Or to be a lone, with little to no social activites. Some people give up their personal life in favor of a career. Who is to dictate what is okay to take serious, and what shouldn't be serious? In a thousand years we're all gone. These ideas of your about the world, the assets you are saving for future generations, will all be gone, and you will matter nothing. The same is true for all of us, and we all find different ways to cope with that fact. For some people, that way is a gamer lifestyle.
It comes down to the fact that certain people think drinking beer is okay, but smoking weed is not. Some people think playing football is okay, but playing World of Warcraft is not. Why? Has it ever occurred to people that some people are gifted in the physical department - they are good at sports, they are strong, they are fit. Other people are clumsy, always sucked at sports, but are hella smart. The math club geeks. The latter can never live up to the former, and being the one that gets picked last your entire life fucking sucks. If in WoW you're suddenly a good player, and people want to play with you based on your in-game reputation, it's not as good as having a friend tell you you're a really cool guy, and it's not as good as having a girlfriend, but it's 10x better than taking shit from assholes that think you're able to take the joke, just because you never mustered up the courage to tell the friends that you feel mistreated by them.
What you're effectively saying is that your interests are worth more than the interests of others. By simply saying "takes it way too seriously" you demonstrate that you don't even know why he's playing the game in the first place. Maybe it's one of the few things in life he's good at where people don't give him shit. It's almost like I can sense in the way you worded yourself that you sorta look down on him, like he's caught up in something without realizing it. That's most often not the case.
^I'd also like to add that the whole "WoW player = no social skills loser" is such a retarded stereotype. I'd played WoW when I was 15-16. And I mean I played that game, at minimum 40 hours a week (someone slap me). People who have never played WoW or a game like that don't understand it and never will. That game is literally a whole nother world with its own social structure and it sucks you in like heroin. I really don't know how to explain it, maybe you can Preach.
Back when I played it, if someone cancelled my account like that or deleted my toon or whatever I would fucking flip, but I would flip in a completley different way than that kid
Back when I played it, if someone cancelled my account like that or deleted my toon or whatever I would fucking flip, but I would flip in a completley different way than that kid
The fact is that I used to know a lot of people who ended their social lives because of WOW.
A guy from my high school gave up on everything - he can sit in front of his pc playing wow without even going out for a month or so. He had plans to go to uni, had a girlfriend, was a good student and now he just sits at home playing Wow doing nothing with his life - for a third year now.
I also know a few other guys who became retarded once they started playing wow.
After everything I've seen Wow = retard-maker.
A guy from my high school gave up on everything - he can sit in front of his pc playing wow without even going out for a month or so. He had plans to go to uni, had a girlfriend, was a good student and now he just sits at home playing Wow doing nothing with his life - for a third year now.
I also know a few other guys who became retarded once they started playing wow.
After everything I've seen Wow = retard-maker.
If it was real, the kid overreacted, but it's not "just" a computer game. It's not a scripted event that rolls past like a an interactive story. It's not a game where you shoot Nazi's in WW2 and that's it. Like Funk said, it's literally a real "world", with it's own structures and whatever comes with it. It's a massive game so you can spend days doing new things instead of replaying for a better score.
Someone who hasnt really played a game like that, especially WoW itself, just cant understand it. I never really gave a shit about my tuned Corvette in a Need for Speed game. If the savegame would get messed up, fuck it, i'll beat the game again. But if for some reason your WoW character was gone, it's not funny. It sucks big time. You spend a lot of time perfecting that little bugger.
So no, WoW is not "just" a computer game, and it's not a nerd's special. Theres like 5 or 6 million people worldwide playing it. A fraction of those are no-lifers. There's college students, plumbers, lawyers, housewifes, 12 yr old kids, every fucking age category (with exception of the outer ranges of the age bracket) and social category are represented. That's also what makes it so much fun.
It's so simple. Humans are social creatures. Add a working functioning social environment to the already kick-ass idea of a video game and you have a real, practical "world of it's own".
Now sure there are people that lose themselves in such a game. What else is new?
The numbers beat the stereotypes. Too many people play WoW, which effectively made the online RPG concept accessible to a much broader demographic category than previous titles, to focus on the small bit of people that lose themselves in it.
Most people I know that play WoW are normal people, believe it or not.
And one last neuron spark: I don't think one can say that a WoW-player that does nothing else but play WoW can be described as having "no social life". Because there is the alternative, actually social life. Now whether this a healthy social life or not is a different matter and better left to Preachy-boy to spend a few paragraphs on, with alla dem big words. Personally, I'd say it's not. But ok.
And now I'm gonna desecrate a Midsummer bonfire, so if you'll just excuse me...
Someone who hasnt really played a game like that, especially WoW itself, just cant understand it. I never really gave a shit about my tuned Corvette in a Need for Speed game. If the savegame would get messed up, fuck it, i'll beat the game again. But if for some reason your WoW character was gone, it's not funny. It sucks big time. You spend a lot of time perfecting that little bugger.
So no, WoW is not "just" a computer game, and it's not a nerd's special. Theres like 5 or 6 million people worldwide playing it. A fraction of those are no-lifers. There's college students, plumbers, lawyers, housewifes, 12 yr old kids, every fucking age category (with exception of the outer ranges of the age bracket) and social category are represented. That's also what makes it so much fun.
It's so simple. Humans are social creatures. Add a working functioning social environment to the already kick-ass idea of a video game and you have a real, practical "world of it's own".
Now sure there are people that lose themselves in such a game. What else is new?
The numbers beat the stereotypes. Too many people play WoW, which effectively made the online RPG concept accessible to a much broader demographic category than previous titles, to focus on the small bit of people that lose themselves in it.
Most people I know that play WoW are normal people, believe it or not.
And one last neuron spark: I don't think one can say that a WoW-player that does nothing else but play WoW can be described as having "no social life". Because there is the alternative, actually social life. Now whether this a healthy social life or not is a different matter and better left to Preachy-boy to spend a few paragraphs on, with alla dem big words. Personally, I'd say it's not. But ok.
And now I'm gonna desecrate a Midsummer bonfire, so if you'll just excuse me...
But you're so quick to jump the gun and make conclusions based on your own filtered way of seeing the world that you have neglected a series of questions you should have asked yourself in search of understanding what truly happened to your friend. I'm willing to bet a hundred million trillion dollars that your friend was miserable and his life was heading nowhere. If it hadn't been WoW, it would have been heroin, working late at the office, going to a pub every day by his self and ordering the same shit every night and then going home and watching tv for 30 minutes before going to sleep and waking up to another pointless day. People don't do shit just because. There's always an explanation, and it's most often way more complex than people think. Maybe his WoW friends treated him better and with more respect than his real friends, or maybe he just felt like he could identify more with them because they more so shared his interests and his way of thinking than you and his other friends.
As for why it takes a life over, I can actually lend a few thoughts there. These are all theories of mine and so forth, but if ever there was something I really wanted to do, it was to write a doctor's degree about this shit or something. One day maybe.
Human social structure is based on ranks. We have the expression "alpha-male" which describes the type of person who receives a lot of social attention. It's a dynamic relationship where the attention he receives fuels his confidence, while his confidence fuels other people's desire to give him attention. The leader of the pack. Now from a nature point of view, those that fall behind, the insecure and weird ones, they don't make it. Our advanced social structure and our technological capabilities have enabled us to strive for the ideal that everyone is equal. I don't know how an alpha-male is selected in nature. I guess it's what's boggling every animal behavior researcher's mind to this day. It's just something that happens. Presumably it's an aesthetic thing, thus, a genetic thing. You are genetically predestined to be an alpha-male or a weak follower. I truly believe so, but whether or not it's actually so is irrelevant in the point I'm gonna make anyway.
If you, in depth, take in this distinction between alpha-male type people and non-alpha male type humans, and the equivalent distinction among women, you can make further distinctions/comparisons. We can take the distinction between physically fit people with good coordinating skills (stereotypically the "brute"), and the people with less physical agility, but more intellect (stereotypically the math club geek). Then there's all kinds of layers of gray in between the two. If you look at how this second distinction relates to the distinction between alpha male characters and "weaklings", you'll find that the weaklings are often the ones in the math club. The alpha males are often the ones on the football team. I know I am being overly stereotypical, but I'm doing so for the sake of the point that's coming somewhere down the line here.
Some people just won't understand that the notion that you can be whatever you want is a flawed notion. You can't. The only correct way to describe where you might go in life is to say that you will be what you will be. People that think they control their future are most often proven wrong. You may be able to control a certain aspect, but it's common knowledge that you grow up to find that nothing is what you thought it would be. Everyone have these experiences every day.
I am not predestined for physical greatness. I can work out, but my body is not cut out of athletics. I have a bad knee due to an injury, and then later minor injuries in the same knee. Due to lack of workout over a substantial period in my life, my knee will never fully recover, and I will always struggle with knee pains. Due to heavy abuse of marijuana I have a frail body. I'm sensitive to bodily discomforts, because when you're high there's few of those. You sweat less, you have less chilling sensations. You get butterflies in your tummy, and those are awesome.
I sidestepped for a second there, but back to WoW. I was never great at sports. I was never great at social dating. I am not very confident around girls because between what I've read in magazines, what I've seen on TV, and what I've heard different girls say, I no longer know what the fuck a girl wants to hear. So I have stopped trying to get with girls. Maybe that was my problem before, I tried too hard, and maybe that shit will change. But as my life stands right now, I got nothing. I'm told I'm a cool person, and people like to hang out with me because I'm easygoing - people easily fall into their comfort zone while hanging out with me, because I have felt judged my whole life and therefore try to behave in a way that's non threatening and non prejudice.
I had a whole girlfriend experience (the irony in my choice of words is astounding from my point of view, but I'm not gonna bore you with why) that went down the crapper, and in hindsight I realized a lot of things about myself and about that relationship. Either way, the breakup plunged me into a depression where I got taken right back to four years ago when I was in love with my best friend's girlfriend, and we were both fat but he suddenly became skinny and a player and I fell in his shadow and felt like a fat ugly loser. I also felt very betrayed, I felt angry, I felt misunderstood, I was too much of a chicken to talk to someone about it so I harbored my feelings. In the middle of all this, I started playing World of Warcraft...
Now let me explain why World of Warcraft is so popular, and let me try and explain to those who never played it before how the people who do play it relate to it. There's various degrees of playing the game. In-game, we use terms "casuals" and "hardcores". I'm gonna get back to that, after I explain how the game works in simple terms.
You select a "realm" which is like a server to play on, and you create a character on that server. When you create a character, you pick one of two factions. Both factions have five different species of beings that have different properties, and after selecting a race you can also select a class. Faction and race choices are (almost) entirely preference based/aesthetic, class choice is what really matters. There is about 10 classes or so. Some are damage-dealers and use ranged weaponry or magic to deal damage. Some are healing classes, and use healing spells to heal team mates. Some are melee warriors. There is a rogue class, whose speciality is to stealth up behind an enemy and keep them stunned from behind (sounds kinky eh?
).
You start leveling your character by doing "quests" and killing "mobs". "Mobs" are essentially creatures everywhere in the world that are non-player controlled. If you kill one, another will spawn in its place a few minutes later. The quests are given to you by non-player controlled characters. The world of Warcraft is divided into regions, and each region is divided into sub-areas. In each area you will normally find some sort of settlement, a castle, a village, some tents, and there's normally non-player characters there. They give you quests that yield experience points, you gain levels and start getting more and more abilities.
When you reach top level you have a total of about 20-40 abilities. To use an example, I play a hunter class. Hunters stand at range and use bows or guns to do damage, and they also have a pet that they can control. In a fight with another player I will frequently use over 20 abilities that I have bound to different keys on my keyboard. Anyway, at top level (which is level 80 at the moment), the game changes. Since you no longer have to do quests for experience points to raise your level, the game now changes to becoming a numbers game where you go in groups of 5, 10 or 25 players. These groups travel into instanced dungeons (which means that you enter a portal and bam, you're inside a dungeon. If someone else enter the same portal they also enter the dungeon, but a very own instance of that same dungeon is created for the other group so the two groups don't run into each other). In these dungeons you fight bosses that drop gear items. Shoulderpads, chest pieces, swords, bows, gems and dragon scales that you can use to forge armor with, etc. Each boss you kill drops a limited number of items that are picked from a pool of possible items, and when a group of people go there together and down a boss there's like a lottery aspect to it. Will I get item X tonight or won't I, that kind of excitement. The point is, you're no longer playing a role-playing game. You're no longer doing quests for some king and becoming a grand crusader or some other bullshit that won't matter. You can either start a new character of a different class and continue playing casually, or you can start raiding. "Raiding" is a term which basically means, you group with people. In the game's own user interface, these groups are referred to as "raids".
End-game raiding is quite different to what you see when you see your friends playing WoW. Most people that do end-game raiding do so in solitude, for it truly is a demanding task. I don't know what it was like before, cause Duke and Chronic both played back in the days when raids consisted of 40 players instead of 25, and from a management side of things that was quite a bit different. But today, end-game raiding is mentally challenging. You aren't spamming buttons Tekken style. You can't brute your way through things, you need to coordinate and think and use your brain. You need to react to things fast. Certain elements of boss fights are random in nature, and you need to be able to adapt to changes that occur during boss encounters on the fly, or you don't cut it.
Obviously, coordinating something like this for 10 or even 25 players is a massive task. I personally orchestrate 10-man raids at least once a week. We use voice communication and I am the one that explains tactics to the group. If someone has to do a specific job, I assign those people and so forth. I distribute the items that we get from bosses we kill, and I motivate the group while also keeping them in line and disciplining them.
I'll explain the mechanics of a boss encounter just so you get an idea of what you have to think about. There is a boss called Hodir. He is based off of Northern mythos (although not sure what God exactly), and he is powerful within the element of frost magic. The whole fight and all it's mechanics are based on frost/ice.
- During the fight, a mark is put on any player that stands still for 1.0 seconds. This mark takes about 500 health from the player. If the player continues to stand still for another 1.0 seconds, the first mark receives one extra stack and this time does 1000 damage to the player. For each extra second you stand still, a mark stacks on you, and the damage you take per second doubles. To be cured of this mark, you need to be in movement for 1.0 seconds for every stack of the mark that is currently on your character. The solution is to always keep moving.
- The boss himself hits like a truck. The way raids are built up is, you normally have one melee class whose armor is the kind that boosts his health and not his damage. This person's job is to generate what is called "threat" from the boss. Every time a person uses a spell, the boss registers an amount of "threat" from that player. The boss will keep attacking the person who has the most threat. Some melee classes have abilities that do huge loads of threat in one hit, and they act as "tanks" - they stand there and eat damage while healers spam their buttons and keep healing them even when they are at full health. Because bosses can kill a tank with two hits in a row. You can't ever not heal the tank for a second. Consider this with the fact that you always have to keep moving, and that some spells require you to stand still to use.
- The boss occasionally gains something called "Frozen Blows", which makes him hit for even more damage, while every member of the group also takes damage equal to about 10% of their full health, each second, for 20 seconds. Meaning they die twice and 3 people have to heal the other 7 while also ALWAYS keeping the tank at full health.
- The boss has an enrage timer. If you take more than X minutes to beat him, he goes into enrage mode and is unbeatable and will kill you all in seconds. This mechanic is there to ensure that players are able to substain a good enough DPS (damage per second) throughout the fight. The reason for this is, if they could take forever then the other mechanics like having to move all the time would be easy to counter, you could just safe it and take your time with it. The healers are pressured by the Frozen Blows damage and the damage to the tank, the DPS is pressured by the limited time they have to do X damage. The tanks are pressured by having to position the boss correctly at all times, and to do enough threat. Some times, when the tanks are bad and the DPS is very high, the threat generated from the damage-doers makes the boss turn and run for one of them instead. This usually results in a failed attempt, so managing your threat is another aspect of every encounter that you need to take into account.
- My DPS rotation is a priority rotation. I have about 10 abilities I frequently use in boss fights, and I have to spam the next one while I'm casting one to make sure I keep my DPS numbers high enough that we can beat the boss. Some abilities need 10 seconds to cool off before being usable again, some abilities need 6 seconds, some need 30. Some abilities work as such that they mark the boss with a mark that makes you do more damage to the boss while that mark is on the boss, and considering the way certain abilities need to cool down, I need to make quick choices to maximize my damage output. While always being on the move.
- Another part of this encounter are iceblocks that fall from the roof of the cave the boss is located in. You see a shadow on the floor for 2 seconds and then an iceblock hits. So while always moving, you also need to watch where you move.
- Inside the room where the boss is there are 4 non-player controlled characters frozen in ice blocks. If you break the ice blocks, the NPCs help your group out. This is a key part of the encounter as you likely won't beat it without the help of these frozen NPCs. Every 45 seconds, the boss does an ability called Flash Freeze. What happens is, two huge iceblocks fall in random locations in the cave and leave snow mounds where they land. Once they hit the ground, you have two seconds to get into the mound. Whoever isn't in a snow mound gets frozen into a block of ice, like the NPCs that were there once you enter the room - the ones you keep freeing. The NPCs you freed always get frozen in ice, so you need to free them again every 45 seconds. While staying out of iceblocks falling from the sky, while always moving and never standing still too long, by positioning yourself correctly and being in range of healers so they can reach you and keep you alive, and while keeping up your DPS rotation.
The point is, this isn't Super Mario. It's tactical play.
It's a game, like soccer. The "computer" part, I don't understand. Previous in my post I tried to make a distinction between people that are good at sports and people that are good at technical things like what I just described. Have it ever occured to you that people like me can never be good at the stuff that you consider cool enough that you would let yourself be seen doing it? Ever occured to you that playing a game and having to lead 10 people and coordinate my movement with theirs from a mental point of view is more stimulating to me than running around on a football field being an asshole and bumping into everyone trying to make them fall over and make it look like they fell so I can get the ball and score a goal and be hot crap for a minute, is just more fun for me?
The reason people don't understand what it is about WoW that draws people in is, people don't understand that people are different, and they are unwilling to try and understand. Let's face it, we all have enough shit to deal with in our lives, we don't need one more cause to fight for. I bet that's how everyone feels. But WoW isn't just a game, and it's not the fact that I'm a knight in shining armor that's giving me a boner that makes me play the game. I enjoy the story elements of the game like I enjoyed Lord of the Rings, but make no mistake about it, I thrive under the pressure of having to do a bunch of shit. And I'm good at it. I'm almost renowned on my server for making good pick-up groups, and I'm a talented player. I'm also very intuitive, so I find new ways to do things that repeatedly yielded reactions of muse. Why do you have to put me down when I'm being good at something I enjoy (which you may take for granted being super-awesome, but is rare to me)?
As for why it takes a life over, I can actually lend a few thoughts there. These are all theories of mine and so forth, but if ever there was something I really wanted to do, it was to write a doctor's degree about this shit or something. One day maybe.
Human social structure is based on ranks. We have the expression "alpha-male" which describes the type of person who receives a lot of social attention. It's a dynamic relationship where the attention he receives fuels his confidence, while his confidence fuels other people's desire to give him attention. The leader of the pack. Now from a nature point of view, those that fall behind, the insecure and weird ones, they don't make it. Our advanced social structure and our technological capabilities have enabled us to strive for the ideal that everyone is equal. I don't know how an alpha-male is selected in nature. I guess it's what's boggling every animal behavior researcher's mind to this day. It's just something that happens. Presumably it's an aesthetic thing, thus, a genetic thing. You are genetically predestined to be an alpha-male or a weak follower. I truly believe so, but whether or not it's actually so is irrelevant in the point I'm gonna make anyway.
If you, in depth, take in this distinction between alpha-male type people and non-alpha male type humans, and the equivalent distinction among women, you can make further distinctions/comparisons. We can take the distinction between physically fit people with good coordinating skills (stereotypically the "brute"), and the people with less physical agility, but more intellect (stereotypically the math club geek). Then there's all kinds of layers of gray in between the two. If you look at how this second distinction relates to the distinction between alpha male characters and "weaklings", you'll find that the weaklings are often the ones in the math club. The alpha males are often the ones on the football team. I know I am being overly stereotypical, but I'm doing so for the sake of the point that's coming somewhere down the line here.
Some people just won't understand that the notion that you can be whatever you want is a flawed notion. You can't. The only correct way to describe where you might go in life is to say that you will be what you will be. People that think they control their future are most often proven wrong. You may be able to control a certain aspect, but it's common knowledge that you grow up to find that nothing is what you thought it would be. Everyone have these experiences every day.
I am not predestined for physical greatness. I can work out, but my body is not cut out of athletics. I have a bad knee due to an injury, and then later minor injuries in the same knee. Due to lack of workout over a substantial period in my life, my knee will never fully recover, and I will always struggle with knee pains. Due to heavy abuse of marijuana I have a frail body. I'm sensitive to bodily discomforts, because when you're high there's few of those. You sweat less, you have less chilling sensations. You get butterflies in your tummy, and those are awesome.
I sidestepped for a second there, but back to WoW. I was never great at sports. I was never great at social dating. I am not very confident around girls because between what I've read in magazines, what I've seen on TV, and what I've heard different girls say, I no longer know what the fuck a girl wants to hear. So I have stopped trying to get with girls. Maybe that was my problem before, I tried too hard, and maybe that shit will change. But as my life stands right now, I got nothing. I'm told I'm a cool person, and people like to hang out with me because I'm easygoing - people easily fall into their comfort zone while hanging out with me, because I have felt judged my whole life and therefore try to behave in a way that's non threatening and non prejudice.
I had a whole girlfriend experience (the irony in my choice of words is astounding from my point of view, but I'm not gonna bore you with why) that went down the crapper, and in hindsight I realized a lot of things about myself and about that relationship. Either way, the breakup plunged me into a depression where I got taken right back to four years ago when I was in love with my best friend's girlfriend, and we were both fat but he suddenly became skinny and a player and I fell in his shadow and felt like a fat ugly loser. I also felt very betrayed, I felt angry, I felt misunderstood, I was too much of a chicken to talk to someone about it so I harbored my feelings. In the middle of all this, I started playing World of Warcraft...
Now let me explain why World of Warcraft is so popular, and let me try and explain to those who never played it before how the people who do play it relate to it. There's various degrees of playing the game. In-game, we use terms "casuals" and "hardcores". I'm gonna get back to that, after I explain how the game works in simple terms.
You select a "realm" which is like a server to play on, and you create a character on that server. When you create a character, you pick one of two factions. Both factions have five different species of beings that have different properties, and after selecting a race you can also select a class. Faction and race choices are (almost) entirely preference based/aesthetic, class choice is what really matters. There is about 10 classes or so. Some are damage-dealers and use ranged weaponry or magic to deal damage. Some are healing classes, and use healing spells to heal team mates. Some are melee warriors. There is a rogue class, whose speciality is to stealth up behind an enemy and keep them stunned from behind (sounds kinky eh?
).You start leveling your character by doing "quests" and killing "mobs". "Mobs" are essentially creatures everywhere in the world that are non-player controlled. If you kill one, another will spawn in its place a few minutes later. The quests are given to you by non-player controlled characters. The world of Warcraft is divided into regions, and each region is divided into sub-areas. In each area you will normally find some sort of settlement, a castle, a village, some tents, and there's normally non-player characters there. They give you quests that yield experience points, you gain levels and start getting more and more abilities.
When you reach top level you have a total of about 20-40 abilities. To use an example, I play a hunter class. Hunters stand at range and use bows or guns to do damage, and they also have a pet that they can control. In a fight with another player I will frequently use over 20 abilities that I have bound to different keys on my keyboard. Anyway, at top level (which is level 80 at the moment), the game changes. Since you no longer have to do quests for experience points to raise your level, the game now changes to becoming a numbers game where you go in groups of 5, 10 or 25 players. These groups travel into instanced dungeons (which means that you enter a portal and bam, you're inside a dungeon. If someone else enter the same portal they also enter the dungeon, but a very own instance of that same dungeon is created for the other group so the two groups don't run into each other). In these dungeons you fight bosses that drop gear items. Shoulderpads, chest pieces, swords, bows, gems and dragon scales that you can use to forge armor with, etc. Each boss you kill drops a limited number of items that are picked from a pool of possible items, and when a group of people go there together and down a boss there's like a lottery aspect to it. Will I get item X tonight or won't I, that kind of excitement. The point is, you're no longer playing a role-playing game. You're no longer doing quests for some king and becoming a grand crusader or some other bullshit that won't matter. You can either start a new character of a different class and continue playing casually, or you can start raiding. "Raiding" is a term which basically means, you group with people. In the game's own user interface, these groups are referred to as "raids".
End-game raiding is quite different to what you see when you see your friends playing WoW. Most people that do end-game raiding do so in solitude, for it truly is a demanding task. I don't know what it was like before, cause Duke and Chronic both played back in the days when raids consisted of 40 players instead of 25, and from a management side of things that was quite a bit different. But today, end-game raiding is mentally challenging. You aren't spamming buttons Tekken style. You can't brute your way through things, you need to coordinate and think and use your brain. You need to react to things fast. Certain elements of boss fights are random in nature, and you need to be able to adapt to changes that occur during boss encounters on the fly, or you don't cut it.
Obviously, coordinating something like this for 10 or even 25 players is a massive task. I personally orchestrate 10-man raids at least once a week. We use voice communication and I am the one that explains tactics to the group. If someone has to do a specific job, I assign those people and so forth. I distribute the items that we get from bosses we kill, and I motivate the group while also keeping them in line and disciplining them.
I'll explain the mechanics of a boss encounter just so you get an idea of what you have to think about. There is a boss called Hodir. He is based off of Northern mythos (although not sure what God exactly), and he is powerful within the element of frost magic. The whole fight and all it's mechanics are based on frost/ice.
- During the fight, a mark is put on any player that stands still for 1.0 seconds. This mark takes about 500 health from the player. If the player continues to stand still for another 1.0 seconds, the first mark receives one extra stack and this time does 1000 damage to the player. For each extra second you stand still, a mark stacks on you, and the damage you take per second doubles. To be cured of this mark, you need to be in movement for 1.0 seconds for every stack of the mark that is currently on your character. The solution is to always keep moving.
- The boss himself hits like a truck. The way raids are built up is, you normally have one melee class whose armor is the kind that boosts his health and not his damage. This person's job is to generate what is called "threat" from the boss. Every time a person uses a spell, the boss registers an amount of "threat" from that player. The boss will keep attacking the person who has the most threat. Some melee classes have abilities that do huge loads of threat in one hit, and they act as "tanks" - they stand there and eat damage while healers spam their buttons and keep healing them even when they are at full health. Because bosses can kill a tank with two hits in a row. You can't ever not heal the tank for a second. Consider this with the fact that you always have to keep moving, and that some spells require you to stand still to use.
- The boss occasionally gains something called "Frozen Blows", which makes him hit for even more damage, while every member of the group also takes damage equal to about 10% of their full health, each second, for 20 seconds. Meaning they die twice and 3 people have to heal the other 7 while also ALWAYS keeping the tank at full health.
- The boss has an enrage timer. If you take more than X minutes to beat him, he goes into enrage mode and is unbeatable and will kill you all in seconds. This mechanic is there to ensure that players are able to substain a good enough DPS (damage per second) throughout the fight. The reason for this is, if they could take forever then the other mechanics like having to move all the time would be easy to counter, you could just safe it and take your time with it. The healers are pressured by the Frozen Blows damage and the damage to the tank, the DPS is pressured by the limited time they have to do X damage. The tanks are pressured by having to position the boss correctly at all times, and to do enough threat. Some times, when the tanks are bad and the DPS is very high, the threat generated from the damage-doers makes the boss turn and run for one of them instead. This usually results in a failed attempt, so managing your threat is another aspect of every encounter that you need to take into account.
- My DPS rotation is a priority rotation. I have about 10 abilities I frequently use in boss fights, and I have to spam the next one while I'm casting one to make sure I keep my DPS numbers high enough that we can beat the boss. Some abilities need 10 seconds to cool off before being usable again, some abilities need 6 seconds, some need 30. Some abilities work as such that they mark the boss with a mark that makes you do more damage to the boss while that mark is on the boss, and considering the way certain abilities need to cool down, I need to make quick choices to maximize my damage output. While always being on the move.
- Another part of this encounter are iceblocks that fall from the roof of the cave the boss is located in. You see a shadow on the floor for 2 seconds and then an iceblock hits. So while always moving, you also need to watch where you move.
- Inside the room where the boss is there are 4 non-player controlled characters frozen in ice blocks. If you break the ice blocks, the NPCs help your group out. This is a key part of the encounter as you likely won't beat it without the help of these frozen NPCs. Every 45 seconds, the boss does an ability called Flash Freeze. What happens is, two huge iceblocks fall in random locations in the cave and leave snow mounds where they land. Once they hit the ground, you have two seconds to get into the mound. Whoever isn't in a snow mound gets frozen into a block of ice, like the NPCs that were there once you enter the room - the ones you keep freeing. The NPCs you freed always get frozen in ice, so you need to free them again every 45 seconds. While staying out of iceblocks falling from the sky, while always moving and never standing still too long, by positioning yourself correctly and being in range of healers so they can reach you and keep you alive, and while keeping up your DPS rotation.
The point is, this isn't Super Mario. It's tactical play.
It's a game, like soccer. The "computer" part, I don't understand. Previous in my post I tried to make a distinction between people that are good at sports and people that are good at technical things like what I just described. Have it ever occured to you that people like me can never be good at the stuff that you consider cool enough that you would let yourself be seen doing it? Ever occured to you that playing a game and having to lead 10 people and coordinate my movement with theirs from a mental point of view is more stimulating to me than running around on a football field being an asshole and bumping into everyone trying to make them fall over and make it look like they fell so I can get the ball and score a goal and be hot crap for a minute, is just more fun for me?
The reason people don't understand what it is about WoW that draws people in is, people don't understand that people are different, and they are unwilling to try and understand. Let's face it, we all have enough shit to deal with in our lives, we don't need one more cause to fight for. I bet that's how everyone feels. But WoW isn't just a game, and it's not the fact that I'm a knight in shining armor that's giving me a boner that makes me play the game. I enjoy the story elements of the game like I enjoyed Lord of the Rings, but make no mistake about it, I thrive under the pressure of having to do a bunch of shit. And I'm good at it. I'm almost renowned on my server for making good pick-up groups, and I'm a talented player. I'm also very intuitive, so I find new ways to do things that repeatedly yielded reactions of muse. Why do you have to put me down when I'm being good at something I enjoy (which you may take for granted being super-awesome, but is rare to me)?
I don't expect ANYONE to read it.
I do ask that you either quit bitching at people that play WoW, or make an attempt at understanding it. If someone wants to make that attempt, that brick wall up there should help you, because you know nobody puts as many words to things as me. But if you cba, at least try to not be an asshole, and pretend like you understand. For some people, it's a lifestyle. And poking fun at people that play WoW and fucking with them for it... It's as mean as picking on the fat guy. I speak from the heart/experience now. Picking on the fat guy, by the way, is funny as hell, but you know you fuck that guy's life up. People make their own choices for how they want to live though, and how they want to treat people around them, but WoW/online gaming is a new fad like social network websites. It's gonna become an equally big part of a lot of people's everyday (and for some people it already is - in the guild i play in, we have three married couples, and one of them have their son in the guild also), and it would make sense to understand it. Just, considering the world you're gonna be living in.
But that's all I can do, is ask that of people.
I do ask that you either quit bitching at people that play WoW, or make an attempt at understanding it. If someone wants to make that attempt, that brick wall up there should help you, because you know nobody puts as many words to things as me. But if you cba, at least try to not be an asshole, and pretend like you understand. For some people, it's a lifestyle. And poking fun at people that play WoW and fucking with them for it... It's as mean as picking on the fat guy. I speak from the heart/experience now. Picking on the fat guy, by the way, is funny as hell, but you know you fuck that guy's life up. People make their own choices for how they want to live though, and how they want to treat people around them, but WoW/online gaming is a new fad like social network websites. It's gonna become an equally big part of a lot of people's everyday (and for some people it already is - in the guild i play in, we have three married couples, and one of them have their son in the guild also), and it would make sense to understand it. Just, considering the world you're gonna be living in.
But that's all I can do, is ask that of people.
What im going to say might not be well thought-out but im gonna say it anyway.
I read everything you wrote in this thread, Rizzle. The whole point of why dont "we" tolerate it when some guy is so into WoW is the following: You are right, people who are spending so much time on a computer game, who get suck into a completely different world, the virtual world, do it because they are good at it. Well, good is a relative term, so lets say they are better at it than at anything else in their life (more or less). I do understand this point and i do think there is much truth to it. Like you said, a lot of them maybe gotta eat shit everyday in school or stuff like that. So once they find a way to escape this life of getting beat down, physically or mentally, it becomes appealing.
What they do though is flee. They flee from real life because what is recquired there is something they cant live up to.
Somewhere in your posts you said being good at WoW will never be as good as having a girlfriend or having a real close friend. Thats true as well.
If you basically shut yourself off from your social life by sitting infront of your pc countless hours a week, you will never reach a certain level of happiness in your life. Human beings need friendships, companionships, relationships to "succeed" and "find happiness". Those people we are talking about here, completely loose the connection to the real world.
One thing i should not forget to say is: What i just said only applies to a minority of the 5 or 6 million people playing WoW. Obviously.
I will end my post by saying that looking down on "them" and treating them like freaks wont help them in any way though.
I read everything you wrote in this thread, Rizzle. The whole point of why dont "we" tolerate it when some guy is so into WoW is the following: You are right, people who are spending so much time on a computer game, who get suck into a completely different world, the virtual world, do it because they are good at it. Well, good is a relative term, so lets say they are better at it than at anything else in their life (more or less). I do understand this point and i do think there is much truth to it. Like you said, a lot of them maybe gotta eat shit everyday in school or stuff like that. So once they find a way to escape this life of getting beat down, physically or mentally, it becomes appealing.
What they do though is flee. They flee from real life because what is recquired there is something they cant live up to.
Somewhere in your posts you said being good at WoW will never be as good as having a girlfriend or having a real close friend. Thats true as well.
If you basically shut yourself off from your social life by sitting infront of your pc countless hours a week, you will never reach a certain level of happiness in your life. Human beings need friendships, companionships, relationships to "succeed" and "find happiness". Those people we are talking about here, completely loose the connection to the real world.
One thing i should not forget to say is: What i just said only applies to a minority of the 5 or 6 million people playing WoW. Obviously.
I will end my post by saying that looking down on "them" and treating them like freaks wont help them in any way though.
^^
Exactly.
I have played WoW in unhealthy amounts but I don't any longer. Right now I am waiting to start my job, I'm being social every day, and I look at my guild's raiding schedule like some people would look at their workout sessions or their soccer practice. It's recreational for me to do a few hours of raiding and keep on a schedule, it gives my days substance. And since it's something I happen to enjoy doing, it's grrrreat.
I think something I failed to point out in all that text is, I don't expect people to respect those that favor WoW over EVERYTHING. But people need to start to look at people that play WoW as individuals, not just as another WoW geek. Everyone that plays it has different reasons for being there. Just like when you watch some old movie from World War 2 and like, every soldier there had some backstory that had led them to that point. Shouldn't the same be true about everything in life? There's a reason why we do what we do.
So anyway, not everyone that plays WoW does so in an unhealthy way. For me, it's the only way to feel what you're feeling Sebastian, when you and your friends play soccer and you score a goal (for some reason I always thought you were good at soccer), like a really nice one, you just place it right in the upper left corner, you just cockily chip it there. All those little things that boost your ego, the only way I can experience that right now is in WoW. So yeah. Don't play too much, I agree with that.
And it's actually more like 11 million active subscribers.
Exactly.
I have played WoW in unhealthy amounts but I don't any longer. Right now I am waiting to start my job, I'm being social every day, and I look at my guild's raiding schedule like some people would look at their workout sessions or their soccer practice. It's recreational for me to do a few hours of raiding and keep on a schedule, it gives my days substance. And since it's something I happen to enjoy doing, it's grrrreat.
I think something I failed to point out in all that text is, I don't expect people to respect those that favor WoW over EVERYTHING. But people need to start to look at people that play WoW as individuals, not just as another WoW geek. Everyone that plays it has different reasons for being there. Just like when you watch some old movie from World War 2 and like, every soldier there had some backstory that had led them to that point. Shouldn't the same be true about everything in life? There's a reason why we do what we do.
So anyway, not everyone that plays WoW does so in an unhealthy way. For me, it's the only way to feel what you're feeling Sebastian, when you and your friends play soccer and you score a goal (for some reason I always thought you were good at soccer), like a really nice one, you just place it right in the upper left corner, you just cockily chip it there. All those little things that boost your ego, the only way I can experience that right now is in WoW. So yeah. Don't play too much, I agree with that.
And it's actually more like 11 million active subscribers.
Damn Preach, Damn. I read everything also but it was really long.
After all I still think that Wow causes a new mental disease. People who work out are happy because besides doing something they enjoy they also help their personal growth, improve health, physical condition, looks etc so in my opinion it's hard to compare these 2 things as Wow does nothing good for you except merely being a substitute for a healthy normal life.
It's unbelievable how for some WOW players it's perfectly normal but I guess that doing drugs is also normal for people who do heroin.
Playing Wow from time to time is okay, like playing any other video game if you enjoy it and it helps you after a demanding day of normal life.. if you have one.
People massively playing WOW are called "no-lives" for a reason and while they think that they have their own world it's all fictional. It doesn't exist and I believe that in the end they have to realize that they wasted a lot of time while other people were making some progress.
I believe that drowning into a world that doesn't exist is like lying a few years in bed living only in your imagination. It's pointless.
Fat or mentally disabled people in many cases don't have a choice - Wow players do as they're usually physically healthy and could potentially live successful lives. Then why pick a cheap substitute that will give you nothing and waste a lot of time from your precious life?
I think that for normal people being "hardcore" in WOW is pathologic and the fact that they could perfectly explain it and think that there's nothing bad about it makes it sound even worse.
On a serious note - I don't pick on people playing WOW in real life - I just think that it's really sad and feel sorry for them. We tried to help that guy I mentioned before but he clearly didn't want it. A few times he tried to sell his account for a huge amount of cash but after all he cancelled the deal and started playing again. I think that he knows that he failed but cannot escape the world of warcraft.
And he had huge chances for a successful life. He could pick a good university, was rather fit and had a really nice girlfiend that clearly loved him. If you ask me I'd say that he fucked up his life, I don't think that he's happy when he thinks about it.
He has no ambitions right now and tries everything to delay searching for some crappy job that his parents force him to do since all that he's doing is playing Wow.
Do you really think that when he stops he'll honestly think to himself : "ahh I love my life and for those last 3 years I achieved so much, I'm proud of myself"?
Best choices are usually not the easiest ones and like Sebastian said - playing WOW in many cases means escaping from your problems you don't want to deal with but it's not a good option as they will only become worse with time.
While being "so cool" in WOW his real life health becomes crappy, he has no friends and I believe that he's far behind in any real life quality including education and social skills. Is it really worth it?
After all I still think that Wow causes a new mental disease. People who work out are happy because besides doing something they enjoy they also help their personal growth, improve health, physical condition, looks etc so in my opinion it's hard to compare these 2 things as Wow does nothing good for you except merely being a substitute for a healthy normal life.
It's unbelievable how for some WOW players it's perfectly normal but I guess that doing drugs is also normal for people who do heroin.
Playing Wow from time to time is okay, like playing any other video game if you enjoy it and it helps you after a demanding day of normal life.. if you have one.
People massively playing WOW are called "no-lives" for a reason and while they think that they have their own world it's all fictional. It doesn't exist and I believe that in the end they have to realize that they wasted a lot of time while other people were making some progress.
I believe that drowning into a world that doesn't exist is like lying a few years in bed living only in your imagination. It's pointless.
Fat or mentally disabled people in many cases don't have a choice - Wow players do as they're usually physically healthy and could potentially live successful lives. Then why pick a cheap substitute that will give you nothing and waste a lot of time from your precious life?
I think that for normal people being "hardcore" in WOW is pathologic and the fact that they could perfectly explain it and think that there's nothing bad about it makes it sound even worse.
On a serious note - I don't pick on people playing WOW in real life - I just think that it's really sad and feel sorry for them. We tried to help that guy I mentioned before but he clearly didn't want it. A few times he tried to sell his account for a huge amount of cash but after all he cancelled the deal and started playing again. I think that he knows that he failed but cannot escape the world of warcraft.
And he had huge chances for a successful life. He could pick a good university, was rather fit and had a really nice girlfiend that clearly loved him. If you ask me I'd say that he fucked up his life, I don't think that he's happy when he thinks about it.
He has no ambitions right now and tries everything to delay searching for some crappy job that his parents force him to do since all that he's doing is playing Wow.
Do you really think that when he stops he'll honestly think to himself : "ahh I love my life and for those last 3 years I achieved so much, I'm proud of myself"?
Best choices are usually not the easiest ones and like Sebastian said - playing WOW in many cases means escaping from your problems you don't want to deal with but it's not a good option as they will only become worse with time.
While being "so cool" in WOW his real life health becomes crappy, he has no friends and I believe that he's far behind in any real life quality including education and social skills. Is it really worth it?
sorry, I wrote it in a hurry and that's how it usually ends 
Yeah it's just hard to understand to me. Preach said that if it wasn't for WOW he would escape to something else, probably worse but I think that it wasn't an escape untill someone showed him WOW and he started liking it. In high school it was only about geeky talks with other people who used to play WOW but then it turned into an obsession. So I think that it wasn't a result of him having problems or a need to escape his real life. I think that he started playing for fun, got hooked and then started having problems.
Yeah it's just hard to understand to me. Preach said that if it wasn't for WOW he would escape to something else, probably worse but I think that it wasn't an escape untill someone showed him WOW and he started liking it. In high school it was only about geeky talks with other people who used to play WOW but then it turned into an obsession. So I think that it wasn't a result of him having problems or a need to escape his real life. I think that he started playing for fun, got hooked and then started having problems.
But you're so quick to jump the gun and make conclusions based on your own filtered way of seeing the world that you have neglected a series of questions you should have asked yourself in search of understanding what truly happened to your friend. I'm willing to bet a hundred million trillion dollars that your friend was miserable and his life was heading nowhere. If it hadn't been WoW, it would have been heroin, working late at the office, going to a pub every day by his self and ordering the same shit every night and then going home and watching tv for 30 minutes before going to sleep and waking up to another pointless day. People don't do shit just because. There's always an explanation, and it's most often way more complex than people think. Maybe his WoW friends treated him better and with more respect than his real friends, or maybe he just felt like he could identify more with them because they more so shared his interests and his way of thinking than you and his other friends.
As for why it takes a life over, I can actually lend a few thoughts there. These are all theories of mine and so forth, but if ever there was something I really wanted to do, it was to write a doctor's degree about this shit or something. One day maybe.
Human social structure is based on ranks. We have the expression "alpha-male" which describes the type of person who receives a lot of social attention. It's a dynamic relationship where the attention he receives fuels his confidence, while his confidence fuels other people's desire to give him attention. The leader of the pack. Now from a nature point of view, those that fall behind, the insecure and weird ones, they don't make it. Our advanced social structure and our technological capabilities have enabled us to strive for the ideal that everyone is equal. I don't know how an alpha-male is selected in nature. I guess it's what's boggling every animal behavior researcher's mind to this day. It's just something that happens. Presumably it's an aesthetic thing, thus, a genetic thing. You are genetically predestined to be an alpha-male or a weak follower. I truly believe so, but whether or not it's actually so is irrelevant in the point I'm gonna make anyway.
If you, in depth, take in this distinction between alpha-male type people and non-alpha male type humans, and the equivalent distinction among women, you can make further distinctions/comparisons. We can take the distinction between physically fit people with good coordinating skills (stereotypically the "brute"), and the people with less physical agility, but more intellect (stereotypically the math club geek). Then there's all kinds of layers of gray in between the two. If you look at how this second distinction relates to the distinction between alpha male characters and "weaklings", you'll find that the weaklings are often the ones in the math club. The alpha males are often the ones on the football team. I know I am being overly stereotypical, but I'm doing so for the sake of the point that's coming somewhere down the line here.
Some people just won't understand that the notion that you can be whatever you want is a flawed notion. You can't. The only correct way to describe where you might go in life is to say that you will be what you will be. People that think they control their future are most often proven wrong. You may be able to control a certain aspect, but it's common knowledge that you grow up to find that nothing is what you thought it would be. Everyone have these experiences every day.
I am not predestined for physical greatness. I can work out, but my body is not cut out of athletics. I have a bad knee due to an injury, and then later minor injuries in the same knee. Due to lack of workout over a substantial period in my life, my knee will never fully recover, and I will always struggle with knee pains. Due to heavy abuse of marijuana I have a frail body. I'm sensitive to bodily discomforts, because when you're high there's few of those. You sweat less, you have less chilling sensations. You get butterflies in your tummy, and those are awesome.
I sidestepped for a second there, but back to WoW. I was never great at sports. I was never great at social dating. I am not very confident around girls because between what I've read in magazines, what I've seen on TV, and what I've heard different girls say, I no longer know what the fuck a girl wants to hear. So I have stopped trying to get with girls. Maybe that was my problem before, I tried too hard, and maybe that shit will change. But as my life stands right now, I got nothing. I'm told I'm a cool person, and people like to hang out with me because I'm easygoing - people easily fall into their comfort zone while hanging out with me, because I have felt judged my whole life and therefore try to behave in a way that's non threatening and non prejudice.
I had a whole girlfriend experience (the irony in my choice of words is astounding from my point of view, but I'm not gonna bore you with why) that went down the crapper, and in hindsight I realized a lot of things about myself and about that relationship. Either way, the breakup plunged me into a depression where I got taken right back to four years ago when I was in love with my best friend's girlfriend, and we were both fat but he suddenly became skinny and a player and I fell in his shadow and felt like a fat ugly loser. I also felt very betrayed, I felt angry, I felt misunderstood, I was too much of a chicken to talk to someone about it so I harbored my feelings. In the middle of all this, I started playing World of Warcraft...
Now let me explain why World of Warcraft is so popular, and let me try and explain to those who never played it before how the people who do play it relate to it. There's various degrees of playing the game. In-game, we use terms "casuals" and "hardcores". I'm gonna get back to that, after I explain how the game works in simple terms.
You select a "realm" which is like a server to play on, and you create a character on that server. When you create a character, you pick one of two factions. Both factions have five different species of beings that have different properties, and after selecting a race you can also select a class. Faction and race choices are (almost) entirely preference based/aesthetic, class choice is what really matters. There is about 10 classes or so. Some are damage-dealers and use ranged weaponry or magic to deal damage. Some are healing classes, and use healing spells to heal team mates. Some are melee warriors. There is a rogue class, whose speciality is to stealth up behind an enemy and keep them stunned from behind (sounds kinky eh?).
You start leveling your character by doing "quests" and killing "mobs". "Mobs" are essentially creatures everywhere in the world that are non-player controlled. If you kill one, another will spawn in its place a few minutes later. The quests are given to you by non-player controlled characters. The world of Warcraft is divided into regions, and each region is divided into sub-areas. In each area you will normally find some sort of settlement, a castle, a village, some tents, and there's normally non-player characters there. They give you quests that yield experience points, you gain levels and start getting more and more abilities.
When you reach top level you have a total of about 20-40 abilities. To use an example, I play a hunter class. Hunters stand at range and use bows or guns to do damage, and they also have a pet that they can control. In a fight with another player I will frequently use over 20 abilities that I have bound to different keys on my keyboard. Anyway, at top level (which is level 80 at the moment), the game changes. Since you no longer have to do quests for experience points to raise your level, the game now changes to becoming a numbers game where you go in groups of 5, 10 or 25 players. These groups travel into instanced dungeons (which means that you enter a portal and bam, you're inside a dungeon. If someone else enter the same portal they also enter the dungeon, but a very own instance of that same dungeon is created for the other group so the two groups don't run into each other). In these dungeons you fight bosses that drop gear items. Shoulderpads, chest pieces, swords, bows, gems and dragon scales that you can use to forge armor with, etc. Each boss you kill drops a limited number of items that are picked from a pool of possible items, and when a group of people go there together and down a boss there's like a lottery aspect to it. Will I get item X tonight or won't I, that kind of excitement. The point is, you're no longer playing a role-playing game. You're no longer doing quests for some king and becoming a grand crusader or some other bullshit that won't matter. You can either start a new character of a different class and continue playing casually, or you can start raiding. "Raiding" is a term which basically means, you group with people. In the game's own user interface, these groups are referred to as "raids".
End-game raiding is quite different to what you see when you see your friends playing WoW. Most people that do end-game raiding do so in solitude, for it truly is a demanding task. I don't know what it was like before, cause Duke and Chronic both played back in the days when raids consisted of 40 players instead of 25, and from a management side of things that was quite a bit different. But today, end-game raiding is mentally challenging. You aren't spamming buttons Tekken style. You can't brute your way through things, you need to coordinate and think and use your brain. You need to react to things fast. Certain elements of boss fights are random in nature, and you need to be able to adapt to changes that occur during boss encounters on the fly, or you don't cut it.
Obviously, coordinating something like this for 10 or even 25 players is a massive task. I personally orchestrate 10-man raids at least once a week. We use voice communication and I am the one that explains tactics to the group. If someone has to do a specific job, I assign those people and so forth. I distribute the items that we get from bosses we kill, and I motivate the group while also keeping them in line and disciplining them.
I'll explain the mechanics of a boss encounter just so you get an idea of what you have to think about. There is a boss called Hodir. He is based off of Northern mythos (although not sure what God exactly), and he is powerful within the element of frost magic. The whole fight and all it's mechanics are based on frost/ice.
- During the fight, a mark is put on any player that stands still for 1.0 seconds. This mark takes about 500 health from the player. If the player continues to stand still for another 1.0 seconds, the first mark receives one extra stack and this time does 1000 damage to the player. For each extra second you stand still, a mark stacks on you, and the damage you take per second doubles. To be cured of this mark, you need to be in movement for 1.0 seconds for every stack of the mark that is currently on your character. The solution is to always keep moving.
- The boss himself hits like a truck. The way raids are built up is, you normally have one melee class whose armor is the kind that boosts his health and not his damage. This person's job is to generate what is called "threat" from the boss. Every time a person uses a spell, the boss registers an amount of "threat" from that player. The boss will keep attacking the person who has the most threat. Some melee classes have abilities that do huge loads of threat in one hit, and they act as "tanks" - they stand there and eat damage while healers spam their buttons and keep healing them even when they are at full health. Because bosses can kill a tank with two hits in a row. You can't ever not heal the tank for a second. Consider this with the fact that you always have to keep moving, and that some spells require you to stand still to use.
- The boss occasionally gains something called "Frozen Blows", which makes him hit for even more damage, while every member of the group also takes damage equal to about 10% of their full health, each second, for 20 seconds. Meaning they die twice and 3 people have to heal the other 7 while also ALWAYS keeping the tank at full health.
- The boss has an enrage timer. If you take more than X minutes to beat him, he goes into enrage mode and is unbeatable and will kill you all in seconds. This mechanic is there to ensure that players are able to substain a good enough DPS (damage per second) throughout the fight. The reason for this is, if they could take forever then the other mechanics like having to move all the time would be easy to counter, you could just safe it and take your time with it. The healers are pressured by the Frozen Blows damage and the damage to the tank, the DPS is pressured by the limited time they have to do X damage. The tanks are pressured by having to position the boss correctly at all times, and to do enough threat. Some times, when the tanks are bad and the DPS is very high, the threat generated from the damage-doers makes the boss turn and run for one of them instead. This usually results in a failed attempt, so managing your threat is another aspect of every encounter that you need to take into account.
- My DPS rotation is a priority rotation. I have about 10 abilities I frequently use in boss fights, and I have to spam the next one while I'm casting one to make sure I keep my DPS numbers high enough that we can beat the boss. Some abilities need 10 seconds to cool off before being usable again, some abilities need 6 seconds, some need 30. Some abilities work as such that they mark the boss with a mark that makes you do more damage to the boss while that mark is on the boss, and considering the way certain abilities need to cool down, I need to make quick choices to maximize my damage output. While always being on the move.
- Another part of this encounter are iceblocks that fall from the roof of the cave the boss is located in. You see a shadow on the floor for 2 seconds and then an iceblock hits. So while always moving, you also need to watch where you move.
- Inside the room where the boss is there are 4 non-player controlled characters frozen in ice blocks. If you break the ice blocks, the NPCs help your group out. This is a key part of the encounter as you likely won't beat it without the help of these frozen NPCs. Every 45 seconds, the boss does an ability called Flash Freeze. What happens is, two huge iceblocks fall in random locations in the cave and leave snow mounds where they land. Once they hit the ground, you have two seconds to get into the mound. Whoever isn't in a snow mound gets frozen into a block of ice, like the NPCs that were there once you enter the room - the ones you keep freeing. The NPCs you freed always get frozen in ice, so you need to free them again every 45 seconds. While staying out of iceblocks falling from the sky, while always moving and never standing still too long, by positioning yourself correctly and being in range of healers so they can reach you and keep you alive, and while keeping up your DPS rotation.
The point is, this isn't Super Mario. It's tactical play.
It's a game, like soccer. The "computer" part, I don't understand. Previous in my post I tried to make a distinction between people that are good at sports and people that are good at technical things like what I just described. Have it ever occured to you that people like me can never be good at the stuff that you consider cool enough that you would let yourself be seen doing it? Ever occured to you that playing a game and having to lead 10 people and coordinate my movement with theirs from a mental point of view is more stimulating to me than running around on a football field being an asshole and bumping into everyone trying to make them fall over and make it look like they fell so I can get the ball and score a goal and be hot crap for a minute, is just more fun for me?
The reason people don't understand what it is about WoW that draws people in is, people don't understand that people are different, and they are unwilling to try and understand. Let's face it, we all have enough shit to deal with in our lives, we don't need one more cause to fight for. I bet that's how everyone feels. But WoW isn't just a game, and it's not the fact that I'm a knight in shining armor that's giving me a boner that makes me play the game. I enjoy the story elements of the game like I enjoyed Lord of the Rings, but make no mistake about it, I thrive under the pressure of having to do a bunch of shit. And I'm good at it. I'm almost renowned on my server for making good pick-up groups, and I'm a talented player. I'm also very intuitive, so I find new ways to do things that repeatedly yielded reactions of muse. Why do you have to put me down when I'm being good at something I enjoy (which you may take for granted being super-awesome, but is rare to me)?
As for why it takes a life over, I can actually lend a few thoughts there. These are all theories of mine and so forth, but if ever there was something I really wanted to do, it was to write a doctor's degree about this shit or something. One day maybe.
Human social structure is based on ranks. We have the expression "alpha-male" which describes the type of person who receives a lot of social attention. It's a dynamic relationship where the attention he receives fuels his confidence, while his confidence fuels other people's desire to give him attention. The leader of the pack. Now from a nature point of view, those that fall behind, the insecure and weird ones, they don't make it. Our advanced social structure and our technological capabilities have enabled us to strive for the ideal that everyone is equal. I don't know how an alpha-male is selected in nature. I guess it's what's boggling every animal behavior researcher's mind to this day. It's just something that happens. Presumably it's an aesthetic thing, thus, a genetic thing. You are genetically predestined to be an alpha-male or a weak follower. I truly believe so, but whether or not it's actually so is irrelevant in the point I'm gonna make anyway.
If you, in depth, take in this distinction between alpha-male type people and non-alpha male type humans, and the equivalent distinction among women, you can make further distinctions/comparisons. We can take the distinction between physically fit people with good coordinating skills (stereotypically the "brute"), and the people with less physical agility, but more intellect (stereotypically the math club geek). Then there's all kinds of layers of gray in between the two. If you look at how this second distinction relates to the distinction between alpha male characters and "weaklings", you'll find that the weaklings are often the ones in the math club. The alpha males are often the ones on the football team. I know I am being overly stereotypical, but I'm doing so for the sake of the point that's coming somewhere down the line here.
Some people just won't understand that the notion that you can be whatever you want is a flawed notion. You can't. The only correct way to describe where you might go in life is to say that you will be what you will be. People that think they control their future are most often proven wrong. You may be able to control a certain aspect, but it's common knowledge that you grow up to find that nothing is what you thought it would be. Everyone have these experiences every day.
I am not predestined for physical greatness. I can work out, but my body is not cut out of athletics. I have a bad knee due to an injury, and then later minor injuries in the same knee. Due to lack of workout over a substantial period in my life, my knee will never fully recover, and I will always struggle with knee pains. Due to heavy abuse of marijuana I have a frail body. I'm sensitive to bodily discomforts, because when you're high there's few of those. You sweat less, you have less chilling sensations. You get butterflies in your tummy, and those are awesome.
I sidestepped for a second there, but back to WoW. I was never great at sports. I was never great at social dating. I am not very confident around girls because between what I've read in magazines, what I've seen on TV, and what I've heard different girls say, I no longer know what the fuck a girl wants to hear. So I have stopped trying to get with girls. Maybe that was my problem before, I tried too hard, and maybe that shit will change. But as my life stands right now, I got nothing. I'm told I'm a cool person, and people like to hang out with me because I'm easygoing - people easily fall into their comfort zone while hanging out with me, because I have felt judged my whole life and therefore try to behave in a way that's non threatening and non prejudice.
I had a whole girlfriend experience (the irony in my choice of words is astounding from my point of view, but I'm not gonna bore you with why) that went down the crapper, and in hindsight I realized a lot of things about myself and about that relationship. Either way, the breakup plunged me into a depression where I got taken right back to four years ago when I was in love with my best friend's girlfriend, and we were both fat but he suddenly became skinny and a player and I fell in his shadow and felt like a fat ugly loser. I also felt very betrayed, I felt angry, I felt misunderstood, I was too much of a chicken to talk to someone about it so I harbored my feelings. In the middle of all this, I started playing World of Warcraft...
Now let me explain why World of Warcraft is so popular, and let me try and explain to those who never played it before how the people who do play it relate to it. There's various degrees of playing the game. In-game, we use terms "casuals" and "hardcores". I'm gonna get back to that, after I explain how the game works in simple terms.
You select a "realm" which is like a server to play on, and you create a character on that server. When you create a character, you pick one of two factions. Both factions have five different species of beings that have different properties, and after selecting a race you can also select a class. Faction and race choices are (almost) entirely preference based/aesthetic, class choice is what really matters. There is about 10 classes or so. Some are damage-dealers and use ranged weaponry or magic to deal damage. Some are healing classes, and use healing spells to heal team mates. Some are melee warriors. There is a rogue class, whose speciality is to stealth up behind an enemy and keep them stunned from behind (sounds kinky eh?
).You start leveling your character by doing "quests" and killing "mobs". "Mobs" are essentially creatures everywhere in the world that are non-player controlled. If you kill one, another will spawn in its place a few minutes later. The quests are given to you by non-player controlled characters. The world of Warcraft is divided into regions, and each region is divided into sub-areas. In each area you will normally find some sort of settlement, a castle, a village, some tents, and there's normally non-player characters there. They give you quests that yield experience points, you gain levels and start getting more and more abilities.
When you reach top level you have a total of about 20-40 abilities. To use an example, I play a hunter class. Hunters stand at range and use bows or guns to do damage, and they also have a pet that they can control. In a fight with another player I will frequently use over 20 abilities that I have bound to different keys on my keyboard. Anyway, at top level (which is level 80 at the moment), the game changes. Since you no longer have to do quests for experience points to raise your level, the game now changes to becoming a numbers game where you go in groups of 5, 10 or 25 players. These groups travel into instanced dungeons (which means that you enter a portal and bam, you're inside a dungeon. If someone else enter the same portal they also enter the dungeon, but a very own instance of that same dungeon is created for the other group so the two groups don't run into each other). In these dungeons you fight bosses that drop gear items. Shoulderpads, chest pieces, swords, bows, gems and dragon scales that you can use to forge armor with, etc. Each boss you kill drops a limited number of items that are picked from a pool of possible items, and when a group of people go there together and down a boss there's like a lottery aspect to it. Will I get item X tonight or won't I, that kind of excitement. The point is, you're no longer playing a role-playing game. You're no longer doing quests for some king and becoming a grand crusader or some other bullshit that won't matter. You can either start a new character of a different class and continue playing casually, or you can start raiding. "Raiding" is a term which basically means, you group with people. In the game's own user interface, these groups are referred to as "raids".
End-game raiding is quite different to what you see when you see your friends playing WoW. Most people that do end-game raiding do so in solitude, for it truly is a demanding task. I don't know what it was like before, cause Duke and Chronic both played back in the days when raids consisted of 40 players instead of 25, and from a management side of things that was quite a bit different. But today, end-game raiding is mentally challenging. You aren't spamming buttons Tekken style. You can't brute your way through things, you need to coordinate and think and use your brain. You need to react to things fast. Certain elements of boss fights are random in nature, and you need to be able to adapt to changes that occur during boss encounters on the fly, or you don't cut it.
Obviously, coordinating something like this for 10 or even 25 players is a massive task. I personally orchestrate 10-man raids at least once a week. We use voice communication and I am the one that explains tactics to the group. If someone has to do a specific job, I assign those people and so forth. I distribute the items that we get from bosses we kill, and I motivate the group while also keeping them in line and disciplining them.
I'll explain the mechanics of a boss encounter just so you get an idea of what you have to think about. There is a boss called Hodir. He is based off of Northern mythos (although not sure what God exactly), and he is powerful within the element of frost magic. The whole fight and all it's mechanics are based on frost/ice.
- During the fight, a mark is put on any player that stands still for 1.0 seconds. This mark takes about 500 health from the player. If the player continues to stand still for another 1.0 seconds, the first mark receives one extra stack and this time does 1000 damage to the player. For each extra second you stand still, a mark stacks on you, and the damage you take per second doubles. To be cured of this mark, you need to be in movement for 1.0 seconds for every stack of the mark that is currently on your character. The solution is to always keep moving.
- The boss himself hits like a truck. The way raids are built up is, you normally have one melee class whose armor is the kind that boosts his health and not his damage. This person's job is to generate what is called "threat" from the boss. Every time a person uses a spell, the boss registers an amount of "threat" from that player. The boss will keep attacking the person who has the most threat. Some melee classes have abilities that do huge loads of threat in one hit, and they act as "tanks" - they stand there and eat damage while healers spam their buttons and keep healing them even when they are at full health. Because bosses can kill a tank with two hits in a row. You can't ever not heal the tank for a second. Consider this with the fact that you always have to keep moving, and that some spells require you to stand still to use.
- The boss occasionally gains something called "Frozen Blows", which makes him hit for even more damage, while every member of the group also takes damage equal to about 10% of their full health, each second, for 20 seconds. Meaning they die twice and 3 people have to heal the other 7 while also ALWAYS keeping the tank at full health.
- The boss has an enrage timer. If you take more than X minutes to beat him, he goes into enrage mode and is unbeatable and will kill you all in seconds. This mechanic is there to ensure that players are able to substain a good enough DPS (damage per second) throughout the fight. The reason for this is, if they could take forever then the other mechanics like having to move all the time would be easy to counter, you could just safe it and take your time with it. The healers are pressured by the Frozen Blows damage and the damage to the tank, the DPS is pressured by the limited time they have to do X damage. The tanks are pressured by having to position the boss correctly at all times, and to do enough threat. Some times, when the tanks are bad and the DPS is very high, the threat generated from the damage-doers makes the boss turn and run for one of them instead. This usually results in a failed attempt, so managing your threat is another aspect of every encounter that you need to take into account.
- My DPS rotation is a priority rotation. I have about 10 abilities I frequently use in boss fights, and I have to spam the next one while I'm casting one to make sure I keep my DPS numbers high enough that we can beat the boss. Some abilities need 10 seconds to cool off before being usable again, some abilities need 6 seconds, some need 30. Some abilities work as such that they mark the boss with a mark that makes you do more damage to the boss while that mark is on the boss, and considering the way certain abilities need to cool down, I need to make quick choices to maximize my damage output. While always being on the move.
- Another part of this encounter are iceblocks that fall from the roof of the cave the boss is located in. You see a shadow on the floor for 2 seconds and then an iceblock hits. So while always moving, you also need to watch where you move.
- Inside the room where the boss is there are 4 non-player controlled characters frozen in ice blocks. If you break the ice blocks, the NPCs help your group out. This is a key part of the encounter as you likely won't beat it without the help of these frozen NPCs. Every 45 seconds, the boss does an ability called Flash Freeze. What happens is, two huge iceblocks fall in random locations in the cave and leave snow mounds where they land. Once they hit the ground, you have two seconds to get into the mound. Whoever isn't in a snow mound gets frozen into a block of ice, like the NPCs that were there once you enter the room - the ones you keep freeing. The NPCs you freed always get frozen in ice, so you need to free them again every 45 seconds. While staying out of iceblocks falling from the sky, while always moving and never standing still too long, by positioning yourself correctly and being in range of healers so they can reach you and keep you alive, and while keeping up your DPS rotation.
The point is, this isn't Super Mario. It's tactical play.
It's a game, like soccer. The "computer" part, I don't understand. Previous in my post I tried to make a distinction between people that are good at sports and people that are good at technical things like what I just described. Have it ever occured to you that people like me can never be good at the stuff that you consider cool enough that you would let yourself be seen doing it? Ever occured to you that playing a game and having to lead 10 people and coordinate my movement with theirs from a mental point of view is more stimulating to me than running around on a football field being an asshole and bumping into everyone trying to make them fall over and make it look like they fell so I can get the ball and score a goal and be hot crap for a minute, is just more fun for me?
The reason people don't understand what it is about WoW that draws people in is, people don't understand that people are different, and they are unwilling to try and understand. Let's face it, we all have enough shit to deal with in our lives, we don't need one more cause to fight for. I bet that's how everyone feels. But WoW isn't just a game, and it's not the fact that I'm a knight in shining armor that's giving me a boner that makes me play the game. I enjoy the story elements of the game like I enjoyed Lord of the Rings, but make no mistake about it, I thrive under the pressure of having to do a bunch of shit. And I'm good at it. I'm almost renowned on my server for making good pick-up groups, and I'm a talented player. I'm also very intuitive, so I find new ways to do things that repeatedly yielded reactions of muse. Why do you have to put me down when I'm being good at something I enjoy (which you may take for granted being super-awesome, but is rare to me)?
As for your last 2 paragraphs, the comparison is rubbish. There's a difference between PASSION and OBSESSION. Secondly, for the reason i mentioned in the above paragraph, this comparison cannot be made. If you are playing football or something, at least you're outside, getting exercise, and being immersed in something that is "real", with REAL people.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong wiht playing computer games. But to the point where you're obsessed and addicted it's just ridiculous. And instead of conceding that it IS actually loserish, you try to rationalise it by saying "well, it's a borderline addiction, so that makes everything OK".
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