Skill?

[Frankzor]

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?

[Doctor Amadeus]

I don't know how much skill has ever been wow, when you die you don't lose levels, or armor or loot or gold. Nothing is really all that I the line if you game others against the game just right. And along with short cuts and variables

[Deleted]

I don't know how much skill has ever been wow, when you die you don't lose levels, or armor or loot or gold. Nothing is really all that I the line if you game others against the game just right. And along with short cuts and variables

That's your definition of skill? There aren't too many sports where you're killed for losing; so don't football, cricket, rugby, tennis, etc have any skill to them?

[Doctor Amadeus]

That's your definition of skill? There aren't too many sports where you're killed for losing; so don't football, cricket, rugby, tennis, etc have any skill to them?

Yeah but those are sports I don't consider gaming a sport.

[theostrichsays]

I don't know how much skill has ever been wow, when you die you don't lose levels, or armor or loot or gold. Nothing is really all that I the line if you game others against the game just right. And along with short cuts and variables

I feel like that is a very poor way to define skill. In general skill is something defined by competition, and where one stands against their peers.
Is there much skill in 1550 PvP? No... But those guys think there is a lot of skill in the 1750 bracket. The guys at 2.2k and above don't think there is much skill in the 1750 bracket though.
I think a lot of people have a skill ceiling, some people just don't respond quick enough, whether it is to pushing buttons of moving out of something. Granted it is side steppable by using scripts, but I would like to think that we are not using cheaters as a barometer of skill.
PvE skill is a bit harder to define and qualify in my opinion because I think parsing is a crappy way to view the totem pole, but it is the most common way to view.
But even things like art, that is not a competition you can say that anybody is skilled. But you're easily able to tell who is more skilled.

Anyways to the OP, as I said I think a lot of people have a skill ceiling, I know people who just react and respond faster then me in game. It doesn't mean I'm bad, just they are better. I don't think many people play close to their skill ceiling because they don't have much desire to, and it is easier to think its impossible then to say to themselves that they are not trying hard enough (which frankly to many trying hard in a game isn't enjoyable.)
More then anything, if everything you wrote is true, it is more heart warming to see a relative new comer growing and getting better (as I see few that match that description in game.)

[Deleted]

Yeah but those are sports I don't consider gaming a sport.

A sport is any competitive activity that uses skill rather than chance to determine the winner. You can't just make up your own definitions of words.

[Deleted]

Some people are just bad at games and their maximum skill capacity is lower than others. Hard work does pay off, but someone identical amount of hard work might pay off more.

[Adramelch]

Not quite in agreement with OP. There are several virtues that I don't think are completely down to "how much time" you put in the game, or actually they are but in a different way. Reflexes, calmness to name but a few of them. How much time you put in your class is not the only defining factor on how "skilled" a raider you are (I'll just stick to that aspect of the game). Where one might need 10 wipes to understand how to handle a new mechanic, another one might need 30 or 50. High end raiding and especially cutting edge raiding doesn't allow much room for someone who is a "slow learner" so how much time you need to get to the expected level of performance starts being important and in the end makes the difference between a good and a great player. Surely, overall experience in the game will help people learn new mechanics fast, but in my opinion not everyone can reach that "elite" level (I don't think I'm one of them either) of adaptivity.

[Erolian]

WoW raiding requires next to no actual physical prowess through reaction times or otherwise. You just have to be willing to calmly assess your own gameplay and possess some form of critical thinking in order to improve yourself in new situations. The entire game is in your head and nowhere else and it isn't very complex once you get past the overbearing amount of general knowledge of how the game functions

[Srg56]

What do you think?

Nice read. What i think is that there are fewer and fewer people who care about improving at a game, and especially a game such as this. Not that they were many to begin with. The game essentially is a RPG, or wants to be. That means that you play pretend, not play the game yourself. What i mean by that is that the character power is central to the game experience, and not your skills. The gear and class participates in the game world, you're just the puppet master. The opposite of that is active, skill dependent gameplay, such as active mitigation and the like.

There will always be people who are better at things than others, and that means that no matter how hard we try, we will never be astronauts or presidents. The rift between high-end raiders and normal players is what replaced the old rift between hardcore dedicated players and casuals back in classic and TBC. There will always be a rift of sorts, because people like to congregate with the likes of themselves for obvious reasons, i.e. common interests, common ideas/culture, etc etc.

The important difference between a skill rift and a time investment rift is that with the latter, everyone can participate, irregardless of their level of skill, but in different amounts of time, while with the first everyone can participate but with different amounts of content. If you've made the mistake of switching the game from a character based progression to a skill based game, now all the content isn't available to all players anymore, because not everyone wants to spend their time becoming better at a game, or cannot, for various reasons. So, then you HAVE to create different difficulties and rehash content because you can't just create more content with the same sized team, and then you get into the mess WoW is in right now, the same content with different numbers attached.

Instead of having a varied diverse palette of content that goes up in difficulty incrementally, without turning into a brick wall at any point, you have mainly raids, of which: LFR, which is easier than heroics, normal, which is comparatively to LFR a steep incline, the brick wall of heroic, and mythic which may as well not exist for the vast majority of players, and they're all more or less identical from a scenery, boss and encounter point of view.

They need to realize that dungeons can be progression again and should be. Another way to create more diverse content would be world events which spawn multiple bosses or items you need to acquire by hunting certain creatures in the world to get those bosses to spawn etc. Not everything has to be instanced.

[Jellospally]

Skill?What do you think?

Hey I raided with Jalopy for a while good guy.

TBH yes time helps, but a lot of people literally don't have the ability to sit and play a game for X hours per day to raid in a good that is good. They don't have the ability to be aware of mechanics, timers, reacting to something going wrong, raid frames/debuffs on people(even if not a healer), maxing dps(figuring out where you can max it on a per pull basis), etc. all at once every pull for a few hours a day.

Yes, time = perfecting your rotation. I know at this point at least maxing the rotation would take a whopping 5m for me on a class I haven't played, but maxing their dps on each individual fight still takes more time and dealing with mechanics from a different perspective(melee/ranged/healer/tank)does take some more work. Obviously once you know a fight people get a lot better overtime.

I am in no way saying people should just give up and stay where they are, but if they do actually want to get better its more than dps.

DPS can be learned. Its just a rotation/priority system and adjusting to mechanics to max dps.

Mechanics and Boss fights are another thing. Im in the opinion of if someone can't handle mechanics almost instantly they shouldn't be playing with you. Obviously talking towards serious guilds here, I do raid with friends and understand since I used to be there back in vanilla and mid BC myself that not everyone is 100% serious raider and wants to push for a guild rank or a dps rank or w/e people want to push for. But this game is mechanics first and foremost. You don't do damage if you die. You don't do damage if you stop and run around just dodging shit because you don't know how to adjust.

I've personally taught people from my side guilds that I either help in or raid in myself and helped their dps because it was bad and showed them what they can do to improve in that area. I did this because they were actually good at mechanics and didn't die. Their rotations and way of tracking buffs/debuff was bad. This is why I help their UI as well. They have since left those guilds and gone into top guilds.

Hell even one of my best friends who raided in a guild I ran in MoP joined my main guild and got accepted and made a raider. He used to be in guilds that could barely doing heroics at the start of MoP. By the time he left the guild I ran he was Rank 1 Lock in 10M Heroic. He then got recruited to my main guild and raided with us since then.

My friend was sorta like your story except you just had the push to want to raid higher and be better. My friend just wanted to literally be better at the game and didn't have this misconception that you can't get better. He got sent to me and I helped him be a better lock. He then became real competition for me back while I used to warlock.

TBH I don't know where I was going with this post its late, but ya things that came to my mind after reading your post.

[Spraxle]

Skill in WoW has become solely about how good you can macro and then mash said macros. What I mean is in Molten Core you had to have people that had the skill to do things like banish before it fell off (just an example) to keep mobs from destroying people. The content today is just who can button mash the best. Is there skill involved there? Perhaps.

[Jellospally]

Skill in WoW has become solely about how good you can macro and then mash said macros. What I mean is in Molten Core you had to have people that had the skill to do things like banish before it fell off (just an example) to keep mobs from destroying people. The content today is just who can button mash the best. Is there skill involved there? Perhaps.

Yet there are still SO MANY people that can't max their dps and never mess up mechanics and be able to react on the fly when something goes bad. People literally give up on a given pull because every single thing doesn't go right.

This game is still all about mechanics first and foremost. Banishing things... so hard. Keeping a Banish up, maxing dps, and keeping a target feared? Now thats a game I want to play. I personally would rather have boss fights have more interesting mechanics while still having the same dps checks of a fight that required almost no movement. Then you could see who really sucked at the game or couldn't handle doing 3 diff mechanics and maxing their dps at the same time.

Though back then you DIDN'T have to max your dps because basically every class was 1 or 2 buttons with no rotation changing procs. Hell go watch some early day videos of first kill Ragnaros kills in the world. Frost mage: 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1(Frost Bolt btw). He ran oom and used his mana crystal. Sometimes had to just wand the boss cuz he was oom. Like what? WTF kinda of game is that.

[cFortyfive]

While http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:King-Size_Homer.png this is about the skill 90% of the wow population show I obviously don't believe that's actually because all these people are incapable of performing better.
Still though there are a lot as well who legitimately can't perform on a "higher" level and very likely regardless of how many hours they put in will never reach the capability for a top 10 kill. Also time doesn't solve everything. I actually know enough players who just got worse over time mostly because they entirely lost their competitive nature and lied about it to themselves.

[Ryme]

The skill ceiling is the lowest it's ever been in WoW, rotations take about an hour to master so it's all about the boss mechanics. WoW's difficulty stems mostly from gear gating and having everyone not mess up at a time, that's about it for dps and tanks.

Healers have arguably the only challenging job in a raid any more, if you're not progressing, it's very often a healer issue if you're in any kind of competent guild.

[Jellospally]

Healers have arguably the only challenging job in a raid any more, if you're not progressing, it's very often a healer issue if you're in any kind of competent guild.

Or padding idiots who fuck mechanics up because they aren't good players and only care about their damage.

[Pyroballer]

Rotations are easy, Following mechanics is easy... but doing multiple mechanics while executing a perfect rotation is hard and the people who are the best at it are the best players.

[Deleted]

The skill ceiling is the lowest it's ever been in WoW, rotations take about an hour to master so it's all about the boss mechanics. WoW's difficulty stems mostly from gear gating and having everyone not mess up at a time, that's about it for dps and tanks.

Why not try the hardest content of the game? At mythic level, your output is the least of your concerns as it's a given that you have pretty much mastered that. I don't PvP but I imagine that cutting edge PvP players also have other aspects of their game that they consider more difficult than simply their 'rotation'.

[Visor]

I have slightly different vision of skill. If ppl raid 7/7 days per week for 16h per day and have better progress than guild with 2/7 scheduler -where do you see skill here? It more like "china farmers". It more about stamina not about skill. I know many raiders don't like wotlk times when you had only few tries. Or BWL time. WHen you have only 5 hours to success. If you didn't finished - your problem. Come back at next week. At this point you need some skills. But now what we see in requirements? You have to raid 7/7, need share your acc and be able to play at least on 5 chars. Thats how chines optimize their progress - farm gear. And many ppl call this madness "skill".

[cFortyfive]

I have slightly different vision of skill. If ppl raid 7/7 days per week for 16h per day and have better progress than guild with 2/7 scheduler -where do you see skill here? It more like "china farmers". It more about stamina not about skill. I know many raiders don't like wotlk times when you had only few tries. Or BWL time. WHen you have only 5 hours to success. If you didn't finished - your problem. Come back at next week. At this point you need some skills. But now what we see in requirements? You have to raid 7/7, need share your acc and be able to play at least on 5 chars. Thats how chines optimize their progress - farm gear. And many ppl call this madness "skill".

Considering that most people aren't capable to play a single class on a decent level I feel there is nothing particularly wrong in calling it that. Obviously also are guilds that make the most out of their time but they also end up having decent advantages going on for them. Even the guild I play in required way less than half the pulls on blackhand method did but arguing from that we are the better players is ridiculous.
The wotlk system where a disconnect could ruin your weekly progress was more than retarded. Fine system every once in a while for a boss and that's about it.