World of Warcraft is not a game

[Boddhi]

I recently came to that realization after just letting my sub run out and played something else.

WoW is not a game because 90% (or more?) of the activities do not offer the slightest amount of challenge at all. Your character pretty much is immortal in open world content, you press your few buttons to kill a mob, or 5 or 10, rinse and repeat to reach X of Y or to fill up a bar. That makes levellling more of sequence of cutscenes and NPC doing things with some button pressing in between. A video "game" for me is "playing", that means reaction, hand eye coordination, getting used to AI patters and appropriate reactions to them. At the beginning you fail, the longer you play the better you become, in the end you master the challenge and move on (either to next difficulty or you pick another game).

So what about instanced content, i.e. raiding? normal difficulty no challenge at all, even if individuals fail to deal numbers or to not stand in fire, in the end your raid group as a whole will balance that out. Being bad at the game has no other consequence than having to wait for the others to complete the encounter.
HC raiding is where the earliest kind of challenge comes into play, but as its grouped content, indiviual failings again can and will be balanced out by others individual skill. Apart from that, in a real game you can just keep on training by repetition as often as you want. But you cannot train a HC raid encounter as you can train a rogue-like run. You need to wait for raid night, when you got a good group you can faceroll through encounters without your individual perfomance mattering. So to actually become a better -player- it required a bad group that enabled you to repeat the gameplay as often as its required to master it eventually. But again, this only once per week.

If you want to "play" the game (meaning learning gameplay patterns and success wherei failed before) using LFR (leave out nuisance like toxic players and leavers) you have to wait 30-60 mins as a DPS, so thats not really an option.

I realized WoW is nothing else than a way to spend/waste lifetime. Everything is kind of pointless, loot is pointless, character strength is pointless, your skill is pointless because it's either not required at all, or required at a level you cannot reach because you cannot train into it. So you what you actually need to do in WoW to have some challenge is go through all those not challening activities, socialize with people for scheduled activities and those people need to have an average skill level of yourselfs one, to neither get carried nor others being an obstacle for your skill progression and success.

After i realized all this i lost all interest in Shadowlands, as now i always have the idea in mind i am not playing a video game here. I just press und click buttons without any feeling of pride and accomplishment. It's entertainining yes, at least the first time you see some content, but it's not "playing" as i understand the term.

Quite a bummer for me actually, WoW was my favorite and only game for a very long time and now i realize i should have actually played other "real" games instead.

[Sesethi]

Welcome to depression, I guess.

[Ashenhoof]

Thanks, for your insight for what a "real game", as you call it, is.

[Kaeth]

Sorry you're not finding the game fun or challenging. But nothing you've described excludes WoW from being a "game" or engaging with it from being considered "playing."

It's a game, it's just grindy, tedious, and most of the actual challenge is in instanced content that requires a large group of players who all manage not to screw up too much. Or PvP, if that floats your boat.

[Borgmore]

Well go back to Valium and porn for you

[Kallor]

I like the storydriven parts of the game in modern WoW, but when those are over with there isn't much appeal left to me. I stopped playing the game around the time I realised I was just playing the "collecting" game. Somehow I managed to convince myself that doing the same old dungeons over and over again for a mount I'll never use was somehow worth spending time on. Could I have prioritized my ingame time better? Yes, but the things I liked with WoW are all gone from the game with cross-realm play etc.

I'd pay so much if they made an expansion that was a homage to the first three iterations of WoW, only in a more modern style (in terms of storytelling, ingame cinematics, etc). I just want a damn server community and player interactions to actually mean something. I had more fun leveling in classic (endgame is dire, so let's not go there) than I've had in modern WoW for years.

[A Chozo]

If someone overthinks a word too much, it loses it's meaning and becomes a thing.

You just did the same, but with a game (WoW).

[Dread Pirate Phayde]

We definitely needed a blog post, didn't realize that you get to dictate what a "real game" is, that type of attitude is right up there with people telling others they aren't "real fans".

A game doesn't have to be about challenge, it can be about the story, the experience, or whatever enjoyment people get from it.

[Pebrocks The Warlock]

WoW is not a game because 90% (or more?) of the activities do not offer the slightest amount of challenge at all.

Who says a game must be challenging to be considered a game? This is the first time I've ever heard of such a requirement.

[Linkedblade]

Wow has always been an interactive chatroom.

And games are meant to waste time. Most people like to enjoy that time they waste.

[Vakna]

Imagine being this guy.

[tamarin]

i realized what op realized back in 2007, but afterwards I also realized there's an actual game hidden inside wow. it's pvp

[Boddhi]

A game doesn't have to be about challenge, it can be about the story, the experience, or whatever enjoyment people get from it.

Not wanting to dictate anything, just showing up that, in my eyes, wow is less than a game but more of meaningless button pressing to get you from one tiny "entertaining" moment to the next (cutscene, NPC monolog etc.), driven by the desire for something that in the end doesnt really matter to obtain (quest reward, emissary chest, loot in general).

But yeah, i guess thats my personal point of view, and others have a different stance. what's fine. Probably i am just disappointed that it turned out like that for me.

[kflay]

I recently came to that realization after just letting my sub run out and played something else.

WoW is not a game because 90% (or more?) of the activities do not offer the slightest amount of challenge at all.

Tons of games don't offer a challenge, especially nowadays.

And different people have different skill levels, so WoW still offers quite a challenge to a lot of people.

[Neuroticaine]

Who says a game must be challenging to be considered a game? This is the first time I've ever heard of such a requirement.

There is a surprisingly large chunk of people who feel this way. They are not correct, though they have chosen to limit their own definition of a game to fit their own desires.

[Thenadrys]

Absolutely everything in life, virtual or real, is pointless and a waste of time, if you approach it from a nihilistic full blown existential crisis.

[tamarin]

There is a surprisingly large chunk of people who feel this way. They are not correct, though they have chosen to limit their own definition of a game to fit their own desires.

the reasoning is simple: games are supposed to be entertaining -> a trivial activity is not entertaining -> therefore a game that is trivial is not really a game

but you know, if you like watching paint dry, i'm not judging

[Kanegasi]

What an entertaining thread. Thank you, OP, for your opinion.

[fatgunn]

the reasoning is simple: games are supposed to be entertaining -> a trivial activity is not entertaining -> therefore a game that is trivial is not really a game

but you know, if you like watching paint dry, i'm not judging

plenty of trivial activities are entertaining....

playing fetch with your dog is entertaining.
watching tv can be entertaining.
listening to music is entertaining.
according to the guy above me, reading this thread is entertaining.

[arkanon]

the reasoning is simple: games are supposed to be entertaining -> a trivial activity is not entertaining -> therefore a game that is trivial is not really a game

but you know, if you like watching paint dry, i'm not judging

So just to be clear, you dont consider movies or music to be entertainment? You should stop, honestly, this doesnt end well for you.