Putting it all into Perspective

Posted by Markco at 8:00 AM

EDIT: Ironically on the day of this post GreedyGoblin blogger Gevlon has called it quits (sort of) on his blog. He reached the gold cap on his main and sees no reason to continue collecting/blogging. See possibly his final post here. He apparently has 'won' in his mind, and I think that's an appropriate example to bring up for this post. Congrats to Gevlon.

Rule #1 of blog posting, never put the word 'it' into your post title, it's misleading (pun intended).
I'd like to take a day to put this time sink we call warcraft into perspective and possibly enlighten a few players of the nature of this massively multiplayer game. The reason wow is so successful can be summed up by conversing with players currently engrossed in the game.

The discussion would usually go as follows:

Outsider: "You play wow?"

Player: "Yeah, great way to use up my free time."

Outsider: "Are you good?"

Player: "Oh yeah, really good actually."

Outsider: "Oh nice, I heard a lot about that game and how it takes forever to get good at it."

Player: "Actually, I have awesome gear and it didn't take long at all. I have mostly epics, which are the best items in the game and just have a few more things left to get. I'm really good at killing other players and love stomping the noobs."

Outsider: "Noobs?"

Player: "Yeah, the other players that suck at the game. Everytime I kill someone I laugh at their noobness."

Outsider: "Oh, so you're really high ranked for, oh what's it called..."

Player: "Arenas? Oh I don't really try at those but still have a 1600 rating and my teammate is kind of garbage."

If you haven't noticed, a mediocre, probably decent player has just talked about how amazing he is at wow. Now I'm not going to go into who's good or who's bad as it doesn't matter. All that matters is having fun with friends and enjoying the game, whether you like winning or not.

The amazing part about wow is that you get to define your own definition of success! You don't have to even succeed according to other players to consider yourself a winner or even the best.

Just look at me. When people ask if I consider myself a good player I make my own excuses/stories. I'll say something like: "Well I'm the #2 ranked prot warrior in the world, have battlemaster and of the horde, but I don't really try at pve so I haven't finished 3 drakes yet and only recently downed razorscale in 25 man ulduar." See? I focus on what I put up as my definition of success: arenas and pvp prowress. A hardcore pve'er would look at me and laugh, calling me a noob.

Anyways, just my two coppers. For some laughs, check this out.

For zee comments:

What's your definition of success in this game, and have you reached it? Do you even care about the end result and choose to focus rather on the journey?