[WoW] Guides ruined raiding?
In response to Gnomeaggedon's challenge: "Find one of my old posts from the 830 odd posts I have written and choose to agree or disagree with it. Compare life during TBC with life pre-MoP. Hate me, go on, hate me – ill love you for it!", I have chosen his post on how guides ruined the magic of raiding, with which I partially agree, but find lacking.
Gnome lists some of the complaints that raiders have made since time immemorial, and argues that everything amounts to the fact that we now resort to guides for everything. I do agree that guides deprive the players of that sense of discovery that only guide-writers (top guilds) get to experience (and possibly top tier raiders couldn't care less about the wonder of a boss mechanic, they just want to get the job done). Let's see step by step those claims made by raiders and what Gnome answers:
“Vanilla was the best because it was hard back then!” (regarding rotations) Theorycrafting, again, harms the learning process and provides the player with an alien but efficient rotation. There is really no solution to this, specially in the case of DPS, because there is often one very specific way of dealing more (the most) damage, whereas there are several ways of keeping people alive or pulling a mob without hampering your performance. Playstyle is key here; and I believe that healers and tanks have more choice regarding this.
"If I didn’t have to grind I could enjoy the game" Gnome believes that having a guide tell you how to grind will in the long term deprive the player of that feeling of accomplishment of succeeding by himself. I mostly agree with this, but consider also that there are many ways of obtaining gold which can also be a playstyle choice, out of the many suggestions that gold guides make, and therefore not harm the personal experience of grinding. For instance, my father didn't like the other options that guides promoted, like selling glyphs, and preferred to flood the AH with Savory Deviate Delights, a consummable which turned people into pirates. I never liked grinding or playing the AH, but still don't think that guides are to blame of the weariness of the players. Grinding, when it's a personal choice for a personal goal (like deciding to sell yourself for an epic mount) is a meaningful activity. Grinding dailies for each and every profession is not, it is a chore, there is no way around it, and doesn't allow choice. Dailies implemented as a necessity, a way to keep players occupied, are just wrong.
"Instances aren’t a challenge anymore." Because they can't be. Gnome believes this lack of challenge comes originally from guides. It might be so, but I remember a time when my friends and I ran the heroic BC instances, knowing more or less what to expect, and still found them difficult. But we wouldn't complain because we strove for progress (in equipment and playstyle). Instances were there to teach us about cooperation and prepare us for raiding, in the same way that Gruul was meant to teach you what to expect from SSC. Nowadays this motivation is not valid because players don't want to experience progression in their instances, because they are not playing them with friends. If Gnome's argument is that guides ruined everything, I believe that it was LFG. Not just because of the many faults of the system, but because the system harmed the sense of community.
"I raided when raiding meant something." Guides, again, act as a sort of nerf because the initial step of learning about the encounter is removed. But Blizzard did something about this, and this is why what Gnome states: "Problem: We can’t one-shot the raid trash let alone the raid bosses; Solution: Read the guides." is false. Nowadays, WoW expects you to read the guide, but requires you to perform a set of 'dance steps' that must be learnt in the same way that 'boss moves' were learnt and dealt with in Classic and TBC. Additionally, the claim that raids meant something has to do with the feeling of progression through content; raiders were the elite that worked hard to see the most engrossing content of the game (in TBC it was Black Temple and then Sunwell). Later on, with WotLK, content was accessible to everybody through the normal modes, and thus not the motivation of progression; that would be the bare accomplishment of beating the heroic mode and its loot. Raiding actually means less not because of the guides, but because it has foregone lore and progression.
Guides made the content more accesible. WoW is not a journey of discovery anymore (was it ever? Perhaps to our newbie-self that didn't know of the possibilities of the internet). But even then, when guilds demanded from their members to read the guides, they were not guaranteed that the strategy they would follow would be in the guide. Encounters were not designed to follow certain steps, or else wipe the entire raid. Before this was customary, bosses could be killed with some players afk or dead, as long as the boss and its abilities were managed. To fail a step did not mean that we were left with less people, and then decidedly fail. Downing A'lar, for instance, had less to do with guide-perfect performance and more with finding that intimate way your tanks could coordinate; taking down The Lurker's minions, with the tools (CCs) that you had available; Moroes was about combining multiple CCs with tank-switching and bursts of healing to the ones bleeding. You either had exceptional healers or quick DPS; you decided the strategy depending on your assets. There was so much the guide could tell you, because the encounters had multiple ways of beating them; not just one overly complex but quite straightforward.
And yet perhaps listening to us old players is not such a good idea after all. The demografics of WoW have changed, its target audience too. Do new people want harder, guide-less content, or just to be left playing alone?
Click to share thisClick to share this
Ha, that one…
Nicely written.
Yeah I must admit, as someone that now only plays the content that is always the same, just the opponents change, I don’t even think about guides (except to write them I guess).
Yet if I was to do anything else, and perform adequately, I would grab a guide, as realistically, I don’t intend to waste anyone’s time, including my own, marveling in wonder at my corpse.
I get to see that often enough as it is.
But hadn’t you played back then without following a guide? I thought it was a very inspiring, I wish more guilds would do the same. In any case, I don’t think it’s the guide’s fault, I believe it’s the system (as usual!) – if a guide is just a handrail, a support for devising a strategy, then it’s perfect. The problem is nowadays we tend to follow the guide step by step, and there’s no room for randomness and wonder. Thanks for your comment :).
Yeah I still remain “blissfully” ignorant, but that is a little easier a I primarily PvP. On a couple of occasions I have been dragged into the newer instances, completely ignorant, and the results have indicated that.
There is, ironically, something to be said for me reading guides in those circumstances, as I don’t intend to repeat the process until I get it, so understanding the mechanics prior would help me kick back and enjoy the graphics and story line.
Likewise my one trip to the new Darkmoon Faire ended pretty quickly. While it was as confused and exciting as a real Faire, I had neither the time nor the inclination to weave about the stalls and work out what the various objectives were. My friends did & loved it. I just left, never to return.
The magic was there, but at present it isn’t in my playstyle. If I felt compelled to complete the content, at this point in time, I would probably reach for a guide.
Of course, then I would just be racing about following a series of steps and the magic would probably be depleted.
Thanks for making me read my post (which wa unlikely to happen otherwise) and for inspiring a new post.
My opinion on your final question: players will participate in whatever is fun and entertaining. They will repeat it if it’s fun and meaningful enough. They will complain if its trivial and pointless.
I’m not sure guides ruined raiding or any part of the game either. I think about guides in WoW and then I think about all the other games that use guides. There are still communities of gamers out there who prefer not to use guides, and so guides within their community are few. Then there’s WoW where players don’t seem to be able to stop themselves from sharing ANYTHING. This community reaction is something Blizzard games seem adept at creating.
For starters, players feel powerful in WoW. And this attitude spawns a number of good and bad behavior. One of the good behaviors is a willingness to help others. One of the double-edged behaviors is rampant competitiveness–to a fault. One of the bad behaviors is elitism. Guides are an outcome of these behaviors and not a bad one. The problem is players are willing to spoil the game for everyone and very few seem to *not* want a spoiled game. When you have those 3 behaviors, and especially the elitism, you get a community packed with players afraid to fail. Best to read a guide and pretend you know what the hell you’re doing than to fail and have millions of elite nerds tell you how stupid you are.
Guides, in this context, are the only way many players can continue to enjoy the game. For many others, they find it better to enjoy it alone because the competitiveness of the community is abrasive to the MMO experience for them.
I agree with what you’re saying – the outcome of elitism is lack of tolerance towards failure, and thus players are compelled to follow a guide and play the way the guide states. Just think about the amount of criticism that you are subject to if you step on an instance with a less-than-perfect build. I’ve witnessed the aggressive patronising of this elite, and I’ve felt really bad for the player who tried to play his way (without negatively impacting the success of the instance).
Guides were always there, they didn’t have such a terrible impact back in vanilla or TBC because of what I referred before: there were many more ways of beating encounters and, generally, of playing the game. Now, as you said, you either read those guides or be ostracized. Blizzard started assuming that we’re raiding with a guide and made the encounters in such a way that you had to memorise your moves almost to a subconscious level. Which is a pity, because I miss the times when, even if we knew what a boss did, we had to devise a strategy that was suited to our raid composition and preference.
I think the main problem with guides is that there was a subtle distinction between “watch this guide to learn the boss’ moves so we don’t waste time wiping when the boss did something unexpected” and “watch this guide so you know exactly what to do and when to do it”. I think a lot of people get frustrated when the boss unleashes an ability they couldn’t anticipate, so it makes sense to view the guide. But, the next logical step is to just do what the guide shows.
It might be interesting if there were a way in-game way to see boss abilities without enduring wipes first. That might make guides less necessary up front. Although, I think the genie is out of the bottle and raiding to figure out optimal strategies is something we’ll have to deal with for now.
Yes, I see what you mean. It’s difficult to draw the line between ‘preemptive knowledge’ and following a choreography. My point was that the balance has tipped at the latter, not allowing for any creativity in dealing with the bosses. Knowing beforehand the abilities is undoubtedly a requisite of modern raiding, and I’m not against it; my problem is with boss designs that offer just one way to effectively deal with them (by positioning here and there, using X to counter Y), instead of providing the player with options to tackle them (like with Moroes, whom you could tank with two tanks, or one rogue and a tank, or just one heavy tank and a good amount of praying; and his CC-able minions, which you had to decide whether to deal with or to keep CCed, depending on your assets and group playstyle).
@psychochild
What could possibly be the point of fighting an enemy when you know every single one of his abilities up front and when he will do them? I don’t understand how any player finds that more than the surprises one encounters while adventuring/fighting. I mean …isn’t that the point?
I don’t think general guides are an issue, but the catch 22 with guides is that when they’re available in a community like WoW, the expectation from many players is that you will read them. They expect that you won’t fail. I don’t think that’s a fair expectation. Not even sure that’s something we should encourage. I don’t think guides are the fault here, I agree with you both. But I also don’t see why we would want designers to effectively spoil the game for us by telling us what to expect from encounters we’re supposed to be discovering on our own. I don’t understand the point of that.