Round #25817 of the reincarnated hardcore vs. casual debate, which has now morphed into Hardcore Raider vs Arena, Rohan (and the various people supporting his positions in the comments to his recent Welfare epics posts) gives us an insight why he and his peers get so annoyed by arena gear that they must have it fixed no matter what (while paying lip service to recognizing that PvE loot distribution may need some work, at long last). Megan from Out of Mana made a terrific job of pointing out the extremely narrow-minded perspective displayed in that post, but beyond that, there’s yet another recurring theme which bears some examination.
When my daughter has visiting friends, very often a fight will erupt because she is hell-bent on denying the visitors access to her toys, regardless of whether she’s currently playing with them or not. This behaviour is understandable, though, when you realize that she’s two years old, and it’s also possible to educate her out of it.
What does this have to do with WoW? Well, the tiny but rabidly vocal minority of raiders having an issue with arena gear will basically tell you that you have no right to get T6 equivalent through means they don’t approve of. That different progression methods shouldn’t exist, in fact you should either catass your way to Illidan through Kara, Gruul and TK, or you stay in quest blues (just like it was in WoW 1.0). And they will make it known vocally that you shouldn’t really be allowed another method of progression whatsoever.
This is actually even beyond my daughter’s behaviour, it’s not merely refusing that other people get access to similar things you have, it’s also about campaigning to deny you any access to these. And where my daughter’s age can excuse her attitude, there’s something deeply disturbing, even alien, when supposed adults display the same.
In the broader perspective, among the vast playerbase, chances are that you will find several representatives of tomorrow’s economical and political leaders. We are in a world where the gap between the Haves and the Havenots is wider than ever before, and an important part of the coming geopolitcal challenges are directly tied to the rise of today’s Havenots to wealth levels and buying powers allowing them similar conforts than the Westerners. Contrary to WoW where the resources (epix) are in limitless supplies, the real world has hard limits to the amounts of good it will both produce and sustain. How much wars and bloodshed are we going to get if the new generation isn’t just not willing to share but actively seeking to deny the citizen from emerging countries any possibility of access to goods, services and conforts they enjoy?
Shrill, hysterical, alarmist, over the top you will say, and you will have a point. WoW is, after all, just a game. But let me ask you, if someone already displays this kind of mentality, feeling directly threatened, nay, wronged, by other players using a different progression method than them, what will they become once they get into positions of power and management? And don’t think this can be contained and is just a MMOG-only behaviour. Just look at blogs and sites from companies taking green initiatives - you will always get one or two very strange, agitated and usually abusive posters berating them for their initiatives, even when it is stuff like voluntary offsetting your carbon emissions by planting a tree or something, which does not threaten them or their lifestyle in the least. The exact same mentality.
And not only does it frighten me, I also find it utterly alien. When contained in an environment where anyone can gain something without taking anything away from anyone, why are the raiders feeling slighted by different progression paths? What has the PvPer, even the mythical arena dancer, removed from the progression, the gear and the past accomplishments of an Illidan-killer? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Why they would get so agitated about it to the point of wanting to actively removing these alternative paths of progression escapes me completely. And I’m far from the only one.
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8 Responses to “The Hardcore Raider’s Alien Mindset”
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It’s Jealousy plain and simple. They’re jealous because they think they worked harder for equivalent rewards. Asshats
Great post, Gwaendar. I want to gear up my guys in the quickest manner possible. Sometimes that involves 3 weeks of losing arena to get a chest piece, while I can PvE for my gloves and shoulders or something.
3 weeks of losing arena? hhmm… Is that really enough points for a chest piece.
Considering we’ve spent 4 weeks trying to win arena so that I can afford my next piece (which happens to be the chest), and I’m still gonna miss 300 points, I’d say nope, at least not current season
Sitting in AV trying to protect Drek, Nerf stunlock please
My two cents on the issue…
I am a raider. I enjoy PvP as a diversion every now and then, but aside from the random forays into AV or WG, I mostly stay away from that aspect of the game. I personally find it repetitive and boring but again, that’s me. It’s not that I’m bad at PvP or that I lack the skills to take out other skilled players (as many of the pro-PvP epics people tend to claim); it’s just that the PvP aspect of the game doesn’t interest me very much. To each his (or her) own.
Anyway, I don’t have any problem with people being able to purchase epic gear with their honor/arena points. Besides, epic just means that they’ve colored the item name purple. It’s what the player does with the gear that’s important. Why should I care if someone who bought his/her rating is decked out in purple arena gear? From my point of view, I will rarely interact with that person outside of the PvP setting, and even if I do, the good gear doesn’t make the person a good player. All that extra resilience just means I’ll have to take a few more seconds out of my time to kill him/her. No biggie. And in all likelihood, a player who buys his/her epics with ill-gotten arena points is going to be little use in a raid anyway (which is what I spend most of my WoW time doing in the first place).
So what’s the big deal, then?
I think the main issue is that raiders feel like players who aren’t putting in the real time and effort are being handed gear that they didn’t work for. This is not the case. All the purple arena gear in the world doesn’t make up for a lack of raiding experience. Likewise, all the Tier 6 gear in the world isn’t going to earn you an 1800+ arena rating. I have yet to see a person epic’d out in arena gear jump into raiding and start downing bosses in Black Temple. I have also yet to see the top raiders in the game just jump into arena and start pwning everyone in sight. Both aspects of the game take separate sets of skills that take time and practice to develop.
My only qualms with the new PvP gear are these:
1. I am annoyed with Blizzard’s laziness in just reskinning the tiered gear as arena gear. Speaking from a warlock’s perspective, the T6 helm is (in my opinion) one of the coolest looking and most unique pieces of gear in the game. I can speak for a lot of locks when I say that this one piece of gear was a big goal in raiding for a lot of players. The day after S3 gear came out the number of warlocks running around my server with horns and demon wings easily quadrupled. For me, this was very disappointing. I could care less about the stats of the S3 helm. I just wish that Blizzard had taken a bit of time to design NEW gear for the arena rewards. This gear could look equally as unique and cool, but it would not look the SAME as gear that some players have been spending many, many months of their time working to get. Besides, with new designs for the new gear, we’d have two separate sets of gear that each represent their own levels of prestige in their representative aspects of the game.
2. Some of the new pieces of gear are a bit “overtuned” in terms of their quality as raid gear. That is, they work better in raids than much or all of the gear currently out there. This issue, i believe, is simply a matter of Blizzard working hard to take the PvP player’s experience to a new level while not taking their current raiding situation into account. No biggie, as obtaining said gear as a serious raider still requires a fairly sizable chunk of time taken out of an already busy raiding schedule. For those people that are really going to put it to its maximum raid use, the extra time and effort will be well worth it. And again, who cares if the “welfare” people get ahold of it and try to raid? Odds are they’re not going to be able to use it to its full potential anyway. Maximizing burst damage and PvP survivability is a much different skill than maximizing DPS and situational (read: boss encounter) mobility.
So anyway, yeah… the point is that Blizzard shouldn’t have just copied the visuals of the old gear. Lazy bastards.
I agree wholeheartedly to every single point you have made, Logan.
I agree also Logan, I’ve maimed purple clad pallies on my lock that was decked in only blues.
It’s how you use the gear, and whether you know what you’re doing.