Shut Yer Mouth – WoW Getting Too Easy
I’m not much of a news guy, so I don’t do news. I can’t keep track of what is going on in my own life, let alone what other people are doing. Sometimes, however, things come to my attention that just irritate me or people will need to be put in their place. Since a vast majority of the time I can do nothing about it, I write it out. My therapist says it’s… therapeutic. So, at completely random times you can expect to see another installment of Shut Yer Mouth, where I basically complain about how stupid people are.
Today, I want to talk about World of WarCraft. They’ve recently announced a new expansion pack in the works, which Chad covered the hell out of during Blizzcon. Fantastic. I am really looking forward to the new expansion. When just the name was leaked, Dan and I had talked about how awesome it would be if they got rid of all that old, stale, vanilla content that you have to play through to level up new characters and just erased that whole section.
Well, when they announced the expansion, they said they were doing exactly that. Well, not exactly, but close enough to make me think Blizzard has tapped my Ventrilo line. The problem comes from the expansion, and even a little before that. It’s been especially profound with this latest patch (3.2) that pretty much allowed anyone with even a few minutes of time a day to eventually get high level raiding gear without ever stepping foot in a raid.
It sort of popped up even before this, as each expansion sort of made things a little easier for people to get into. Raids used to be 40-man; now you can do them with 10 (and the 25-man version is considered the “heroic” version). You used to have to meet a minimum skill requirement to fish in certain waters; now you can fish anywhere. Let’s not even start on riding skills and the merging of hit ratings, spell damage and healing, etc. There was no end to the bitching that went on. Wrath of the Lich King was a firestorm of tears from the hardcore, who complained that their elite raiding guild found the content too easy and didn’t take enough skill or time to master. Now I see it all the time. There are people complaining that WoW has gotten too soft, that it’s not the hardcore game that it started out being.
Excuse me?
Hardcore?
Are we talking about the same game here? I have been playing MMOs for a long time and frankly, WoW at launch was one of the, if not the, most casual game on the market. That, my friends, is why it was so successful. People say it was the smooth launch or the great quality, but having played at launch, I can tell you it wasn’t smooth. Anyone remember how many days people were reimbursed thanks to server down times? Anyone remember 3-hour queue times to get into the game? [Editor's note: I do!]
But I digress.
The point I was making was that WoW was a casual game for casual audiences that didn’t have eight hours a day to put into a game. I’m sorry if I sound a little harsh here, but WoW was, and still is, an MMO for gaming pussies. Yes, fucking gaming wimps. You want to complain about WoW being too casual? Why the fuck aren’t you playing Everquest? Don’t like twenty-hour spawn timers for raid bosses? Don’t like quest objectives that only spawn every twelve hours on a random cycle, so there might be a placeholder instead of the quest objective? Don’t like getting experience debt every time you die so it takes even longer to level up? And PvP is so much lamer. I mean, playing on a PvP server may be more difficult because you’re getting ganked all the time, but it’s not like it costs anything. People can’t loot your corpse and steal even a portion of your money, let alone any of your items or gear. Shit, it doesn’t even damage your equipment! You want some hardcore PvP go play something like EVE, where people can actually make a career out of ganking people and stealing their shit.
It just amazes me that people can complain that WoW has become too casual when it has always been catered to a causal audience. It’s like buying a Ford Focus and then complaining that the next year’s model has become too centered on economy class. I just don’t understand how people can even consider themselves hardcore when the extent of their hardcoreness is some lame WoW raid boss that takes fifteen minutes to beat. Half the time the reason people can’t do raids is plain old stupidity. Yes, gear is a huge factor, but it’s amazing how many people don’t grasp the concept - that standing in fire is bad. I stick by my observation that the only thing making WoW raids difficult is that seventy-five percent of their player base is dumber than a box of shit.
You want hard boss fights, go play Final Fantasy XI. They’re boring as shit, but they’ve got some pretty difficult bosses in there, from what I hear.
I’m not saying that WoW is a bad game. I enjoy it, but I enjoy it for what it is. It’s the McDonald’s or Burger King of the MMO world. It’s the Micheal Bay of online gaming. It’s mass market crap broken down into easily digestible tidbits for a wide audience to, quite simply, make as much money as possible. The only hardcore thing about WoW is the amount of money they make off people who think that spamming their DPS after every trash encounter makes them cool or think that naming their guild something Latin makes them sound like badasses.
There you go, feel free to comment if you want, but if you disagree you’ll just have to deal with me telling you how wrong you are. If you agree, though, you’re a fucking follower and should get a backbone before you devolve into a tube worm or something. You can’t win here, so just Shut Yer Mouth. I’m out.
