Questionable wow skill levels, possible cause?

[OrcsRLame]

This is the truth of it OP. You are 100% wrong. You wife is far far FAR better than you think, comparing her with the average gamer. As bad as your wife is compared to real hardcore gamers, you must understand that hardcore gamers are in the extreme minority. Your wife is probably in the top 10% of all gamers concerning skill level, because the sad truth is that most people are bad.

Look at it this way. Wow has 11-12 million players. Most of them are not level 85. Of those that are 85, most have never set foot inside of a raid, let alone downed the first boss. Most raiders are going to be somewhere in between your wife's skill level, (good) and the skill level of those that have yet to reach 85, (so bad it's not even funny.)

36890 Guilds in the world have killed normal mode Shannox. 33130 Of those are 10 man guilds. 4265 Are 25 man guilds. Assuming each 10 man has 2 backups that have seen the fight, and each 25 man has 5 backups, that gives us 397560 people that have killed the first boss in 10 man, and 127950 people that have killed the first boss in 25 man. That gives us a total of 525510 people that raid. Just around 5% of wow's playerbase.

Even if we assume that only half of the normal Shannox kills are reported to wow progress, that leaves us with about 10% of the playerbase having killed a raid boss. This is with the Firelands nerfs, and that number starts to drop off substantially with each boss. If your wife killed multiple normal mode bosses before the nerfs, I think that puts your wife firmly in the elite raider category compared to the majority of the playerbase.

Also, your example of FPS games isn't a very good one. Games that are mainly pvp focused have a much smaller playerbase than wow. For example, I could get on Gears of War 3 right now, I doubt there will be more than 40k people playing Team Deathmatch, the most popular gametype. Most of the people that play games like that for the pvp, will have a much higher skill level in general.

Also, your car analogy is spot on, but your conclusion is wrong. In other words, I shudder to think of how many people were killed by drunk or incompetent drivers in the time it took me to make this post.

I don't think wow is the bottom of the barrel concerning skill level though. Wii Sports probably just barely beats it. Barely. And that's exactly the sort of people that make up Blizzard's primary demographic.

[Bauwagast]

Sometimes people stand in fire(s) and die because they're too busy focusing on other things, like phate deeeps rotations or healing many people. Their attention just doesn't shift to the right places at the right times.

[Ashareth]

This is the truth of it OP. You are 100% wrong. You wife is far far FAR better than you think, comparing her with the average gamer. As bad as your wife is compared to real hardcore gamers, you must understand that hardcore gamers are in the extreme minority. Your wife is probably in the top 10% of all gamers concerning skill level, because the sad truth is that most people are bad.

Look at it this way. Wow has 11-12 million players. Most of them are not level 85. Of those that are 85, most have never set foot inside of a raid, let alone downed the first boss. Most raiders are going to be somewhere in between your wife's skill level, (good) and the skill level of those that have yet to reach 85, (so bad it's not even funny.)

36890 Guilds in the world have killed normal mode Shannox. 33130 Of those are 10 man guilds. 4265 Are 25 man guilds. Assuming each 10 man has 2 backups that have seen the fight, and each 25 man has 5 backups, that gives us 397560 people that have killed the first boss in 10 man, and 127950 people that have killed the first boss in 25 man. That gives us a total of 525510 people that raid. Just around 5% of wow's playerbase.

Even if we assume that only half of the normal Shannox kills are reported to wow progress, that leaves us with about 10% of the playerbase having killed a raid boss. This is with the Firelands nerfs, and that number starts to drop off substantially with each boss. If your wife killed multiple normal mode bosses before the nerfs, I think that puts your wife firmly in the elite raider category compared to the majority of the playerbase.

Also, your example of FPS games isn't a very good one. Games that are mainly pvp focused have a much smaller playerbase than wow. For example, I could get on Gears of War 3 right now, I doubt there will be more than 40k people playing Team Deathmatch, the most popular gametype. Most of the people that play games like that for the pvp, will have a much higher skill level in general.

Also, your car analogy is spot on, but your conclusion is wrong. In other words, I shudder to think of how many people were killed by drunk or incompetent drivers in the time it took me to make this post.

I don't think wow is the bottom of the barrel concerning skill level though. Wii Sports probably just barely beats it. Barely. And that's exactly the sort of people that make up Blizzard's primary demographic.

Your reasoning isn't all that bad... except that your numbers are totally off because you are using worldwide Blizzard numbers for players (including China ones), that are already grossly exagerated, and numbers that are restricted to NA, EU and Korea/TW from sites like Wowprogress and such.

Meaning that the playerbase they cover is maybe 1/3rd of the official 11M players (and if you take into account the state of servers right now, the HUGE loss of subscriptions for the past year AND the fact that Blizzard is announcing something like a 10 or 15% growth on Chinese players last time they announced something, it's closer to 3M players outside the Chinese market than 5M or even 4M), it means that roughly 20% of the players out there have downed a raid boss in FL.

And out of that, there is lot of good players out there that aren't raiding, and even more being carried in 25 man guilds in position that allow them to not impact the raid if they fuck up (like ranged dps Mage/Spriest/Boomkin that requires nearly no attention and greatly lower difficulty of steping out of things, not taking the important roles like kiting/interupting and such, playing raid healers in setup with more healers because you don't really need the added dps but the safety and so on).

Once again we are just back at the fact that some people refuse to learn and get better, but it's not the question of downing or not a boss (i've seen people, both in Wrath and Cata that had half or more of the current tier downed in 25 guilds that, and i quote a friend there, "could be replaced by binding random cast macro to all my mouse buttons and keyboard keys, and taping my dog's pawns to the keyboad and mouse"), more a question of mindset and how you play.

[Deleted]

I think that the main reason for so many players playing so badly (if you exclude bad computers / connection since it's really impossible to tell whether or not that's the problem) is due to WoW being absolutely terrible at teaching players how to play properly. The average player is going to spend months leveling up to max level, during that time they only have to stand completely still pressing the same buttons over and over again thinking nothing of movement or countering your enemies attacks / mechanics. People are literally taught to pay attention to nothing but their action bar, staring at cooldowns; doing their rotation which may or may not be the optimal one. The difficulty curve in the leveling zones is a completely straight line, so when players step in to a raid environment it just all feels unnaturally and uncomfortable for them.

A lot of people likes to claim that WoW is an easy game, but it really isn't. In no other game have I ever wiped for so many countless hours as I have on some of the harder bosses in WoW even though I've played it for years. Even the easier bosses which some of us would consider "unwipable" can seem mildly challenging (I suppose) simply considering that there is so much that you have to pay attention to in this game. Just controlling the camera, player and doing the rotation seems to be unnatural for people who usually doesn't play computer games, then add in to the fact that each character has about 50+ different skills and abilities, they have to be coordinated with 9-24 other people and have to pay attention to every thing that the boss encounter is throwing at them. Just compare that to an FPS where you pretty much just aim at something and click you'll understand that for people not used to games might not be as aware to their surrounding in a game where you have to pay attention to so many other things.

[OrcsRLame]

Your reasoning isn't all that bad... except that your numbers are totally off because you are using worldwide Blizzard numbers for players (including China ones), that are already grossly exagerated, and numbers that are restricted to NA, EU and Korea/TW from sites like Wowprogress and such.

Meaning that the playerbase they cover is maybe 1/3rd of the official 11M players (and if you take into account the state of servers right now, the HUGE loss of subscriptions for the past year AND the fact that Blizzard is announcing something like a 10 or 15% growth on Chinese players last time they announced something, it's closer to 3M players outside the Chinese market than 5M or even 4M), it means that roughly 20% of the players out there have downed a raid boss in FL.

And out of that, there is lot of good players out there that aren't raiding, and even more being carried in 25 man guilds in position that allow them to not impact the raid if they fuck up (like ranged dps Mage/Spriest/Boomkin that requires nearly no attention and greatly lower difficulty of steping out of things, not taking the important roles like kiting/interupting and such, playing raid healers in setup with more healers because you don't really need the added dps but the safety and so on).

Once again we are just back at the fact that some people refuse to learn and get better, but it's not the question of downing or not a boss (i've seen people, both in Wrath and Cata that had half or more of the current tier downed in 25 guilds that, and i quote a friend there, "could be replaced by binding random cast macro to all my mouse buttons and keyboard keys, and taping my dog's pawns to the keyboad and mouse"), more a question of mindset and how you play.

I'm willing to admit that my math is off based on the information you've provided. That being said, it doesn't change the overall idea, which is that most people are so bad you physically facepalm if you could live in their mind for 5 seconds.

[Shakalager]

Hmm well as i was graduating high school, i taught my dad how to play call of duty modern warfare. He was so painfully bad when he started, and he knew it. But after a few months of just getting one kill a match, he began to learn and improve. Now he goes like 16-0. It's insane, and I'm proud! Haha

[Deleted]

I used to play on 400 ms and didn't realise it was higher than most people. I learnt to play just fine, with the advantage that when my ping dropped to 40-120 ms (what it varies between now) I had better reactions than a lot of people, since I'd learnt to react with 0.4 secs latency.

EDIT: Just to clarify, this is to make the point that a higher latency doesn't exactly make it impossible to play. If by high latency you mean 500ms+ then I really don't know, it could well make a noticable difference to getting out of the fire/interrupts/etc.

[Aqua]

If I fail, it is usually because of my connection or technology, I'll agree there. But there are some people who just do. not. get. it.
You can drag them to the encounter for weeks, and they will still not wrap their mind around what they need to adjust to survive AND output a satisfactory dps/heal/tank result.
Maybe it's something in their brain, a form of inability to learn.

My advice if you ARE one of these people, while learning an encounter:
Do not play music
Vent is on
GAME SOUNDS are on
Visual effects are tuned to only show what needs to be shown
Connection has been checked and adjusted to suit you
Computer has all unnecessary applications and processes off


Learn with all of your senses. Hearing the cues to do and mentally prepare can help you. If you don't take authority screaming at you well, or you're visually bad at learning.
Hear what you need to, start trying to feel the correct rotation of keys rather than panicking.
Everyone in this game learns differently, if you've ever raid led in the slightest, you see it.
But some people are just refusing to learn in whatever way that might be, and that is not fixable.

[Vasti]

Mist of Pandaria details revealed:
-new races blablabla
-new level cap blablabla
-new continent blablabla
-DAMAGE TAKEN REDUCED PROPRTIONALLY to how high your ping is
-Damage dealt increased by how high you ping is

This is to prevent bad-connection players from sucking and increasing overal enjoyment of WoW by over 9000%. No more Rtards, Nubs, etc...now everyone can win!

[Drihan]

I see this type of lack of skill everyday in WoW. When running low level dungeons on an alt it's perfectly natural, but when you get into a Zandalari heroic you would expect there to be some brain activity required. WoW hasn't been known to be a "difficult" game to get to max lvl in, quite the opposite, however, I'm a firm believer of that the average WoW-player's IQ has probably dropped considerably since I started playing (pre-tbc). I'm not talking IQ as in how quick a person can solve a math puzzle, I'm talking the kind for reaction time, logic, reasoning and figuring out solutions quickly.
It could be that we're just in a little stage of "WoW-player burst", in which many new youngsters are discovering the game.

I doubt there is any one solution to it, or any one reason for that matter. We just have to live with it and hope these people learn quickly. The only solution, or at least a step in that direction, would be if Blizzard were to make very obvious mechanics deadly no matter what: "Stand in fire = Dead after 4 seconds", "stand infront of cleaving boss = dead when he attacks" etc.
I believe they tried it in Cataclysm, worked fairly well, but after all the nerfs I feel it's right back to Wrath of the Casuals.

(Ps:

I have been in a guild now since mid WotLK and I still see many people horribly failing at very obvious mechanics, even after playing for a few years. Some of them have learned and are doing MUCH better, but I still see some of the same-old failing where you really shouldn't. I know all of our brains are made differently, some people are better at logic than others, some people react faster, some people can figure out solutions faster than others, some people can see the road through a maze in a matter of seconds.)

[Klutzhoof]

I'd agree with the person who said it was mostly our rotations that are to blame. I spent a large portion of last night watching my girlfriend play Legend of Zelda. What I noticed is that it, too, requires that the player be on top of things and know the fight. If they sit still, they die. If they just want to run up and hack the boss, they're probably not going to get anywhere. But with Zelda, you use weapons and mechanics timely to outsmart your foe.

I've said this for a long time, but rotations are a bad gimmick to make up for shallow game play. Creatures are not programmed to interact with us in very complex (or convincing) ways. Nor are we programmed to interact with them. So instead we play... STAT WARS. Ooo, isn't that exciting? We fight with numbers! And we learn ways to put up these numbers without every really learning to fight.

If our spells weren't so heavily dependent on each other, and the order they go in, we could have all sorts of fun and interesting fights. But alas, we are trained to think that an optimal situation is one where we can sit and cast in peace. Or that doing optimum numbers while not standing in fire is a rewarding experience.

Even a noob understands basic things from a concrete perspective. But WoW's playstyle is so abstract. And the sad thing is, we're all so used to it that we don't even notice.