What do most players think is bad about World of Wacraft but it's actually good?

[schmonz]

I'll go with toxicity, people say wow is toxic but it's really low on the toxicity totempole compared to any FPS, MOBA or RTS.

WoW is toxic for another reason. Mainly because people abuse it to compensate real life issues. Escapism is one thing, but replacing real life jobs with computer games is far beyond that. And blizzard replacing gameplay with meritocracy just accelerates that.

[Adamas102]

"Real life" does not exist as a separate thing; everything is real life (when you play a video game it's real life ..of you playing a video game); do you realize there are guilds of people who were playing online for years and became friends and years later they met in ["]real life["] and now their families are good friends?

Also everyone makes their choices; some are "video gaming" for their "real life" job to be great at it; others do it on video gaming or they do both.

"When you play a video game it's real life"? Seriously? You think that's what people are talking about when they make the distinction between gaming and IRL?

The difference (which should have been clear) is basically the distinction between responsibilities and consequences vs leisure time activities. Playing video games, whether you want to do so competitively or casually, don't have any sort of impactful consequences. At any point you can choose to just opt out and do something else with your time. In the middle of a raid might not be the best time, but ultimately the stakes are pretty much as low as they can get. You can't really do that with ACTUAL responsibilities such as going to school, working your job, being a parent, home maintenance, etc where there are real consequences to the actions or inaction that you take. Again, we're not talking about the people who earn a living via gaming because that dynamic doesn't apply to 99.9999% of people.

To bring it back to the OP where you suggested that people see competitiveness as bad, the only time anyone actually says that is with respect to non-professional gamers who overvalue the importance of their success in the game AND IN DOING SO bring to it a toxic mentality. There's nothing good about that.

PS and not sure why you imply at the end that team skills are "inherent"; you are not born with them; even if you think you were born with them: you probably don't remember that your parents and your environment and other experiences played an important role [and video gaming can be an important experience when it involves real people having real relations (especially when nowadays people are often chatting on video and audio for hours daily)].

I didn't say inherent or born with, so unless you think that people start playing WoW at birth I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion. I said that you come to the game with those skills or you don't, which is to say that you learn them outside the game. There are some things that you can learn and/or improve via video gaming (like hand-eye coordination, vocabulary, basic math), but social interaction isn't really one of them when everyone is shrouded with anonymity and there are no real stakes or consequences to what you do. This isn't anything like interacting with people remotely for work.

[Sialina]

WoW is toxic for another reason. Mainly because people abuse it to compensate real life issues. Escapism is one thing, but replacing real life jobs with computer games is far beyond that. And blizzard replacing gameplay with meritocracy just accelerates that.

I'll go out on a limb and guess that you can't possibly back this up in any way.
I've seen this before, the old internet classic: Everyone that is better than me is a no life loser, everyone worse than me is a noob.

If you stream, wow is your job, if you play in the evenings and you are better than me, or you for that matter, it says nothing about that person. Some people just have a more competitive mindset.
You'll see it in real life if you do any activities, you go bowling, with a friend group, you'll usually have 1 person that couldn't care less if they score 0, and another person trying to figure out the optimal technique and watching videos on how to bowl. It's just the way people are, some enjoy being relaxed, others enjoy being pushed.

[schmonz]

I'll go out on a limb and guess that you can't possibly back this up in any way.

You know what players did first when they played SoD? They built meta groups. In a setting which needs no meta groups.



Also, high end raiding is all about premade groups. So is mythic+. Instead of playing with friends you have playing in mercenary groups.

[epigramx]

Do you realize there are people who stopped working in their jobs just to play world of warcraft?

And that's still "real life". They did the mistake to be addicted. What exactly about the problems of addiction are not "real life"?

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Big SMH when i hear the whining about expansions, BIG.

For me it was always clear that it is combined with people being addicted to the game and trying to find an excuse to make it "not my fault that I hate the game"("it must be the game at fault")[or "the expansion sucks so the game now sucks generally!"].

I know it because it happened to me; I was massively addicted and I was [incorrectly] hating the game and not the addiction; the difference in my case was that I had the clarity to understand "I hate the game and not a specific expansion because I doubt an expansion is that different from the overall game".

Maybe if people are addicted then the game is good.

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2) "Legiondaries are bad" - The items themselves were fun, only putting them on RNG was bad because they became a requirement. Make them fun and they'd actually be pretty cool

Yeah fully agree. It's why for me the expansion is the most overrated ever released; people often cite it as the best expansion ever since WotK or something; for me it's absolutely critical to have a fair competition.

And seeing our shadow priest getting 5 legendaries (including 2 of their most OP ones) and the rest of us getting nothing[good] after WEEKS of playing multiple hours a day was just purely oppressive and unfair.

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I'll go with toxicity, people say wow is toxic but it's really low on the toxicity totempole compared to any FPS, MOBA or RTS.

I'll say it's easily lower in toxicity than when it was new. Vanilla and early TBC was for me a realm of bullies for most of the time. If you did the mistake to enter a PvP server "because even the PvE is better there" then you'd be constantly ganked left and right for little reason other than pure spite; those people (probably teenagers in most cases) were not getting rewards; they just wanted to see a new player who is very pure and innocent about world PvP to be corpse camped [most players back in the day (until at least mid-WotLK) were very new to the game so chances are: if you saw a low level character: they were usually very inexperienced in WoW].

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There are some things that you can learn and/or improve via video gaming (like hand-eye coordination, vocabulary, basic math), but social interaction isn't really one of them

Yes and no and I will explain exactly why. If you are someone that "in real life" is very social already and very expanded on that then a video game is not going to do wonders for you; you might say "well that's a regression to me; I'm like a very social person in real life; I'm getting worse socialization in video gaming"; also if you are very experienced in "team building" then a video game is not going to do much about it.

But consider the fact someone may only have like 1 or 2 remote friends in "real life" and they never really went into the process of being a part of teams and they are now already ~20 years old at least and completely out of a school that offers those things (and they might be very intelligent (biologically) but they never had a good school (easy to happened in impoverished areas)); that person might find a vast "school" in WoW"; this is easy because there is AUDIO AND VISUAL contact with people (e.g. they may open deep conversations with their guild for multiple hours a day or video calls or even meet in "real life" eventually as I know several guilds do on at least an annual basis!).

[loras]

I'll start:

1) People think end game competition is bad; it's supposedly "sweaty" people who don't care about the "true" game; no: being competitive is not just subjectively good: it's also a good benefit to your real life self because it trains you to think harder and try harder even in real life.

2) "Cata/WoD/Shadowlands is bad"; no: there was never an expansion that was truly horrible: they all had very similar gameplay at least when you actually played the most hours (e.g. raids or pve or questing); also people seem to self-hate their addiction and blame "the expansion".

3) "Pay2Win is definitely bad"; not necessarily; a) it may make a game survive when otherwise it might close shop b) not paying a subscription is the ultimate "didn't pay and lost" c) if those who paid are clearly identified(e.g. achievement but bad logs) then nobody else is harmed.

I find #2 a bit odd, since it managed to dissuade not just me but quite a lot of others in exactly those three expansions, and with dissuade i mean that it made me unsubscribe.
Cata managed this the first time and i skipped Pandaland entirely only to return for Legion. SL almost got me to quit fully again, i only had three months of active game time over its entire span.

1# is a complete bullshit argument, though i agree competition is by no means bad. Still, one should not allow it to blind you in downright dumb ways; if losing doesn't award you anything meaningful then you'll simply lose players as there always need to be losers in a competitive game; in a game every winner needs a loser, so don't be a retard and keep the losers motivated.

3# Disagree heavily, if survival requires such practices then death is preferable. Doesn't need to be death of the game in general mind you, just its death to me.
It should also be noted that in this case i define "pay2win" as "creating not-reasonably-surmountable disadvantages to those who do not pay", so it's not talking about shit like boosting for cosmetics or buying a level boost and such.
The WoW token comes a lot closer, same for i.e. the current legendary being raider-only (and thus boost/pug -locked for the rest).

[epigramx]

Cata managed this the first time and i skipped Pandaland entirely only to return for Legion. SL almost got me to quit fully again, i only had three months of active game time over its entire span.

For me it was always clear that Cata was not "horrible" and Legion a "masterpiece"; e.g. Cata had exceptional PvE and artistic design compared to everything that came before it with the exception of Ulduar being the absolute masterpiece of the game artistically; Legion was purely shit at being fair at competition since for several months it had brutal RNG drops for some of the most important items in the game (it was not a "bad" expansion but it's clearly overrated when people portray it as "a masterpiece VS the horrible expansions").

So there is something fishy here; it can't be that something like Cata is "absolutely horrible" and Legion is "absolutely a masterpiece" because it's so clear that deep down when you actually play the game for the most hours: it's just almost the same game: it's almost the same game in the many hours of your raiding or the many hours of your PvP; those people have some kind of cognitive dissonance or other going on.

And I think the true reason at the end of the tunnel is some kind of cycle of addiction or just "getting bored of the game" and because this is time-sensitive: it hits certain expansions in waves; e.g. Cata was absolutely hated to illogical levels but notice it also happened right after most people historically were ADDICTED to the game (during mid-WotLK); also notice how you loved Legion ..after you had a break.

[Adamas102]

Yes and no and I will explain exactly why. If you are someone that "in real life" is very social already and very expanded on that then a video game is not going to do wonders for you; you might say "well that's a regression to me; I'm like a very social person in real life; I'm getting worse socialization in video gaming"; also if you are very experienced in "team building" then a video game is not going to do much about it.

But consider the fact someone may only have like 1 or 2 remote friends in "real life" and they never really went into the process of being a part of teams and they are now already ~20 years old at least and completely out of a school that offers those things (and they might be very intelligent (biologically) but they never had a good school (easy to happened in impoverished areas)); that person might find a vast "school" in WoW"; this is easy because there is AUDIO AND VISUAL contact with people (e.g. they may open deep conversations with their guild for multiple hours a day or video calls or even meet in "real life" eventually as I know several guilds do on at least an annual basis!).

It feels like you just keep moving the goalposts since this has nothing to do with your OP or what I originally responded to. You noted "end game competition" as something that most people see as bad but is actually good with the explanation that trying hard in game trains you to try hard in real life. Now you're talking about fringe cases of extremely introverted people maybe finding an avenue for real life social interaction via WoW which isn't really tied to competitiveness anyway.

So sure, I'll agree that SOME people with social anxiety MIGHT open up more in a setting that removes the face-to-face component. I wouldn't say that WoW is a great tool for that, but it could still work for some people.

Going back to the OP though, I still would argue that a.) MOST people don't have any problems with end game competition, but maybe you need to define that a bit better. And b.) trying hard in video games is completely separate from trying hard in real life endeavors that have actual consequences. Not that some people can't do both, but WoW (competitive or otherwise) doesn't train you for anything other than WoW.

[epigramx]

MOST people don't have any problems with end game competition

It's implied that the topic isn't about defining what opinion is higher than 50% popular. People are talking about opinions they heard a lot. It might be 30% people or it might be 60% of people; it doesn't matter much; it's implied it's about talking about what we think "a lot of of people" consider "bad" but it might actually not be that bad.

[It's technically impossible to know those percentages anyway (even a poll can't do it (because a poll only asks a certain limited number (and type) of people))]

[That also implies YOU have no clue what is >50% opinion either (because you just stated you do)]

[schmonz]

And that's still "real life". They did the mistake to be addicted. What exactly about the problems of addiction are not "real life"?

It is a bad consequence for real life. And a reason not to turn a computer game into a meritocracy.