Achieving RL / WoW balance — biggest threat to you

Posted by Tepisor in Uncategorized | 4 comments

I wanted to write about this very del­i­cate sub­ject for a long time (it was on my to-write-about list even since the begin­ning of the blog). But what really got me going was this won­der­ful post. I rec­om­mend you to read it. Really read it even tho it’s long. And old. It’s still very fresh.

I find myself in some of the sit­u­a­tions the poster describes. I too have (tried to) lead a guild as an offi­cer and found myself not able to please the greedy. I also have neglected really impor­tant aspects of my life for WoW. And for what? To be “bet­ter”? “Bet­ter” in what, a video game? Like that’s going to pay my rent and kiss me good­night when I go to bed.

WoW is made in such a way that you can’t achieve some­thing impor­tant unless you play like an addict. True story and you know I’m right. Let’s focus a bit on this con­cept of achieve­ment in WoW.

When can you say that you are some­one in WoW? When you fin­ish the game and kill Ill­i­dan? That will count as noth­ing in a few months when the next expan­sion is out. And things will start over again from the begin­ning. How about being the best PvPer out there? Heck, you might even get there, but think of the work you have to do to main­tain your posi­tion! And then the sea­son is over and it’s the same story all over again. In both sit­u­a­tions you have to spend hours, days and even weeks to grind for materials/reputation/consumables/money for respecs/repairs or to con­stantly do Arena matches. For the casual gamer that’s insane. But the sad part is that for some gamers that’s life.

And I’ve reached another aspect of WoW: the play­ers. On one hand we have the casual player and on the other one there is the hard­core gamer. Let’s talk about each one, shall we?

The casual player enjoys the game. He plays around 2–3 hours/day (some­times more, some­times less), at his own pace and wants to have fun together with his friends. He is also known as the slacker and is often mocked by the hard­core gamers. He’s the guy that comes unpre­pared for raids and prob­a­bly will have to leave half through the raid the do some­thing else other than WoW. This player has a very hard time adjust­ing to the game because of his style of play. Hav­ing fun, enjoy­ing the game doesn’t go to well with end-game raid­ing so the casual gamer will find very hard a guild to his lik­ing. If he’s lucky enough to find a raid­ing guild that accepts him, he will often pass the loot to the whin­ing, bitchy and greedy under­cover hard­core gamer, who will soon leave the guild because “I’m not hav­ing fun, I want to raid more. nOobs!”.

The hard­core gamer on the other hand is a well-versed, “skilled” player. He plays any­where from 5 to 10 hours/day. He will always be avail­able to raid and will always be online. He thinks it’s his duty to tell you what do to (even if he’s not an offi­cer or has no lead­ing posi­tion what­so­ever) and how to play the game (“Lis­ten, we’re lack­ing a healer today, you will have to heal”; “Why aren’t you con­sid­er­ing to switch Holy? There is no need for you after Kara.”; “Why should I attack only from the back?!” — my guild’s Co-Founder and rogue, a “skilled” hard­core raider). This kind of player will always com­plain about the raid­ing sched­ule and will not hes­i­tate to leave the guild if he doesn’t get what he wants very fast (God for­bid to put him on rotation-based raid­ing regime). He has no real friends except “his” loot and will step over peo­ple to get it. Usu­ally, the day of a hard­core player looks like this: Job Eat WoW Sleep (/wave to JEWS guild from Karazhan, too bad you aren’t doing as well as you used to). He will neglect him­self, his fam­ily (if he has one), his friends and will ulti­mately lead to a lone­some life. I must admit, there are some play­ers out there of this type that play hard and man­age to have a suc­cess­ful and ful­fill­ing life, but they are SO rare that they almost don’t count com­pared to the oth­ers. They should be the ones set­ting exam­ples for the addicts. Like this guy does here.

I can’t judge peo­ple for their life style. I respect other peo­ple choices. But from my posi­tion of a casual player, I just can’t under­stand why any­one would waste so much time to achieve exactly noth­ing. Life is won­der­ful, you just have to know how to live it.

As I already said, I am a casual player. I’ve been to the other side, play­ing almost 10 hours/day but I took a step back and real­ized I’m wast­ing pre­cious time of my life for noth­ing (I’m only 22 you know). Lucky for me, I had some­one to smack me down to real­ity. I pity the one who doesn’t.

WoW is a great game and Bliz­zard did a good job cre­at­ing it. It offers us an alter­nate uni­verse where we can be almost whoever/whatever we want (yeah, like Sec­ond Life). If peo­ple say WoW > RL, it’s their own fault. These peo­ple have seri­ous issues and they truly deserve what they will get.

So how can you achieve the much sought after bal­ance? I’m not the one to answer that ques­tion. Sim­ply because I can’t tell you what to do. I can only give you a piece of advise: enjoy the game! Have fun play­ing it! Don’t hes­i­tate to RP from time to time. If your def­i­n­i­tion of hav­ing fun is 10+ hours/day raiding/farming then.. sigh.. good luck! If not, I con­grat­u­late you.

Flame away!

Sim­i­lar Posts of Interest:

• My evo­lu­tion as a World of War­craft player
• My WoW Memories
• The con­cept of Main tank
• Here we go!
• Pro­tec­tion Pal­adin guide to Karazhan: a few words of introduction