Skill?
My viewpoint on skill will come as no surprise to those who know me. With the increasingly popular view that high-end raiders are a closed off, elitist group of people, I think it’s important to consider the concept of skill and the skill ceiling in a game like World of Warcraft.
It’s certainly true that there are plenty of elitists in WoW just as there are plenty of elitists in any part of the world, but the pervasive and self-destructive belief that certain levels of skill are unattainable to all but the most gifted has perhaps made the cultural gap between high-end raiders and ‘casuals’ (also a rather loaded term, admittedly) unacceptably large.
I had a discussion with one of the other raiders in my guild a few weeks ago that is more or less the inspiration for this post. She had confessed to me that she had once quit because someone else of the same class she raided with seemed to be significantly better – something she perceived as an insurmountable gap. It had demoralised her. This statement ended up being the point of contention between us for a solid couple of hours, but needless to say I disagreed vehemently with the idea that it was impossible for any single person to get better at the game and attain a certain level of skill. My argument was that the real differentiating factor between people was how much time each person took to reach that level of skill – it certainly differs between people, but the underlying point was that it wasn’t impossible unless you were handicapped in some way from actually reaching that ‘skill level’. It took a bit of time, but I was able to convince her that it really just depended on how much she really wanted to reach that height. If she wasn’t as naturally gifted (and don’t mistake this as any actual judgment on this person’s natural talent with video games), then was she prepared to sacrifice more effort than more naturally gifted players in order to reach the same level of skill?
A lot of people never even try because they don’t believe they’re good enough. Others try but don’t go past a certain point because they believe they’ve reached their personal limit. I’ve always took issue with this; why engage in such a self-destructive belief that you cannot continue improving? Just as I argued to my guildmate, perhaps a little more passionately than intended because she now spends almost all her spare time in the game in PuGs trying to improve, this way of thinking is nothing more than a self-fulfilling philosophy. If you believe you can no longer improve, you won’t improve because you’ll inevitably stop trying to improve and your drive will disappear.
It’s almost certainly true that no one can be a perfect player, but does that have to mean that you need to set arbitrary limits on yourself? I don’t think so.
But what does this have to do with the unacceptable culture gap between high-end raiders and people that are not?
The answer is: pretty much everything. The more that people believe they cannot become as good as another player just because, the more that the two apparently distinct groups become estranged from each other. Which is strange, because every good raider has to start from somewhere, surely? Everyone has their own starting point; you don’t just sign up to WoW and become a high-end raider because you ticked off a box on the signup form declaring yourself amazing at the game. The raiding community is constantly losing and gaining players; it cannot sustain itself on only the members it has now. It needs to be fed by the rest of the playerbase, and that’s why it’s so important that people never believe in an arbitrary limit that stops them getting better or reaching a certain level of skill.
I know some people who have let this belief bleed into their confidence. It saddens me that people let it stop them from finding more driven raiding guilds even when they really want to.
My early days playing WoW, signing up for the game in the few weeks preceding the release of Siege of Orgrimmar, certainly were not indicative of a good player. I hit level 90 not realising that my hunter had an ability called Readiness or another major CD called Stampede. It seems incredible to even me that I had known so little or played so badly. But I hardly wanted to rest on my laurels – I wanted to raid and I wanted to be good. So the couple of months following that became a whirlwind of activity, from a drive to get where I wanted to be.
First, that meant reading a few guides. Then it meant getting into my very very casual raiding guild’s second team. Then it meant persuading my guildmaster at the time to give me a chance in the main raiding team. Before a few weeks had passed, it meant a move to a more driven raiding guild. A month later, it was an essay of an application to the realm’s top guild that had always unfailingly cleared raids on the highest difficulty in 25M before the next tier, and the subsequent trial they rewarded my efforts with. I had not ever believed that I could stop improving, and that belief allowed me to go from a meager progression level of 3/12 10N Throne of Thunder to 14/14 25HC in Siege of Orgrimmar three months later. The point of this is that I never let myself believe that I had reached my skill ceiling, and that meant that I was able to push myself to an ever higher level of raiding.
Roughly two years later and having raided in guilds with people who had come from various guilds like the defunct T16 World-13 Not So Serious or the more recently defunct Inner Sanctum and now in a guild managed by a couple players who raid in Paragon, I can readily say that the only thing that has always continued to push me along and further was a refusal to believe that I had or would encounter some kind of arbitrary skill ceiling. Given Collision’s (our dear warrior simcraft editor and theorycrafter) story of Jalopy going from being one of the worst fury warriors he’d ever seen in Patch 5.0 to raiding in Duality, I think it’s hardly surprising that people can cross the barrier from casual to high-end raiding so easily, given the right amount of effort. It doesn’t need to be considered impossible for someone to go from being completely clueless to becoming a high-end raider. I just wish that more people would believe this.
What do you think?