Afraid of Wiping.

While this is a more specific WoW occurance I’ll be talking about, I think it’s a pretty universal truth across any sort of multiplayer competitive team game.  Recently Precious and Soft left World of Warcraft for what were a mix of health issues (a brain tumor like disease) and social issues (caused by learning a little slow in a now fast paced game.)  I have to admit I’ve never known this person, didn’t follow them, didn’t read them.  I was pointed there by the mightiest of bear butts.  What I can say is that the post is very heartfelt and well written.  The one important bit though is she says it was essentially PuG asshats that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I’ve always believed that making mistakes and learning the fight is okay, explanations, attempts, etc. . . And the one thing that’s always been true in any game I’ve played, I’m not afraid to wipe or fail.  In fact, when there isn’t a failure state for a long time, I get contented, I get bored, I start trying to add in my own challenge.  Why do I suddenly take 8 groups at once?  Because I want a real fear of failure, I want to challenge myself and my party, and occasionally, I want to lose.  This is a really common occurence in PvP, and nobody -seems- to complain about their third or fourth death in Alterac Valley.  Perhaps they see other players as a truly worthy adversary, whereas a boss never can be, especially a psh, -heroic- boss.  I’m not sure, but more and more often I run across one wipe losers.

What’s a one wipe loser?  Well it’s that person that either immediately jumps the healer or tank, says it’s obviously their fault because they’re not geared enough or ‘just bad’.  It’s the person that either leaves right after they die, or starts a vote kick on the person they feel is responsible for a loss, without ever giving the chance for an explanation or to make it right.

There are new people, there are people who have never had a fight explained to them.  Occasionally even I run into mechanics I didn’t know were at play and I’ve defeated Yogg+0.  Sometimes things fall through the cracks when you’re not trying to stay completely up to date with all the content or you even take a break from the game.  I’m always willing to stay, and go more attempts, as long as the person is learning and getting better.

I think this mentality of runs should be painless really came about the same time as gearscore and incentivizing dungeons with raid gear/points came into play.  So early Wrath.  When the more progressives and ‘elitists’ had to run random dungeons to get optimum gear as fast as possible.  When the average joe felt he had to do daily or weekly questing and wanted to knock it out as fast as possible, and when dungeon difficulty took a nose dive.  It’s occasionaly reared it’s ugly head, and generally harder dungeons are just immediately dropped by one wipe losers.  Occulus was a great example.   And when dungeon runs were fairly difficult (the troll ZA/ZG runs) groups were painful at best, particularly just the player attitudes inside them.

When did dying and running back become a phobia or a sign of terrible play and not just learning or a bad attempt?  Why did blizzard make kicking rules akin to your typical corporate legal contract?  There have always been one wipe losers, but I think the generally mismatch of risk/reward, the idea of an expontentially declining difficulty curve in dungeons and raids has caused the odd phenomena of these sort of players, the players in a rush to get nowhere, to be the vocal -majority- of runs.  As players get gear, dungeons get easier, as blizzard nerfs dungeons they get easier.  The raid’s are now at I believe 30% nerf, with another 5% datamined.  When players are outgearing the content -and- the content is geting easier, people grinding their points, for points sake get impatient that their run isn’t fast, flawless, and clean.

So remember to try to explain the fight or pull the next time a mistake is made.  Perhaps they were uninformed?  Try to understand that the people aren’t undergeared if they’re in there, they’re doing the content at the level it was -designed- for.  And for goodness sakes, don’t jump down the healer’s throat if the healer can link the damage taken meter and point out in the breakdown you were standing in fire.

Remember, the slow to dispel priest might not know they should.  Remember the mage who misses an interrupt might have a mental health issue.  And most of all, remember it’s okay to lose sometimes, as long as the same mistakes aren’t made multiple times.