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I dont actually own SC2 yet, but judging from my own WC3 experience (first learing it when I was like a 12 years old, mous-only-using kid proceeding to see that kind of behaviour Gheed describes from others) I will try to give an explanation for the utter unwillingness to "learn".
I think the biggest thing about the low-low bronzies is thay play SC2 like they casually browse youtube. Left hand on their chin, right hand on their mouse. If you ask them to "hit the a-button" they first have to take a long look at their keyboard and look for it. The little more advanced players have about one to three hotkeys they use. They might Hotkey their Main building and use the Hotkey for producing a worker.
Walling off your base, defending it with static defenses and then eventually use air units to attack the enemy is probably the most standart way of playing most strategy games. Also I think many "newbies" have just fun in building stuff, finding out what buildings and upgrades you need to build certain units to proceed looking at them.
But I have no clue what "strategy" people use who have hundreds of games in bronze leauge. I really dont get those neither.
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On March 11 2012 09:28 box-killa wrote:
I think it's somewhat the game's fault that people don't want to learn. If you look at a game like super mario, you die, you get a clear reason why. Just don't fall in that hole next time.
You also have to look at context. For some, having fun is getting kills (league of legends example), for others its showing off items (wow), and for others its winning(sc2). Having fun does not involve learning, or in other words, the only step in the goal, is to achieve the goal.
To sum it up, for a game like super mario, you don't fall in the same hole 100 times, because you remember the hole is there after the first few times. In a game like starcraft, this is not the case because learning is not clear, and because the true improvement is masked by the desire for items(wow) and for wins(sc2).
This is correct only to a degree. Goals are not the same for every person playing a specific game. I, for example, do not desire better items for myslef in WoW. Items are a means to an end for me and my raid group, we are after the feeling of accomplishment we get when we finally kill the boss we've been working on for weeks.
Some people undoubtfully DO want new gear simply to show them off, but saying that EVERY player is like that is a serious misconception that only serves to narrow down your point of viev to a dangerous Tunnel-vision.
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On March 11 2012 08:23 Liquid`NonY wrote:
Well written as always.
The WoW issue was something that made me really dislike WoW PvE because new content has to be balanced around the assumption that people are reading a bunch of out-of-game information from unofficial sources. Checking EJ for optimal spec, rotation and gear selection, watching videos and reading guides to learn how to do encounters, and customizing the UI in a million different ways to minimize your mistakes are all incredibly efficient ways to accomplish more in the game. But it's all cheating. I believe that reading a guide should be a last ditch effort and it should be done only to experience content that is otherwise off limits.
On the other hand, lines get blurred by the social aspect of MMO's. If a guy in your guild figures something out, it's not fair to call you a cheater for listening to him explain it. Players are supposed to work as a team. It's just that the web has made it far too easy for any player to tell every player what they know. 99.99% of the information being shared is between strangers. It's not social.
I won't push the cheating accusation but I think it's pretty clear that a ton of WoW players do not consider all that research as part of the game. But if they don't research then they are significantly worse than everyone who does, sometimes to the point that they get kicked out of groups and blacklisted. That's because, as you say, knowledge is so much more important than skill.
So I think there are three perfectly reasonable groups:
(1)Players who race to complete content (they naturally have no knowledge of uncompleted content but they do research everything that is possible to research)
(2)Players who copy everything group 1 does in order to accomplish as many things as efficiently as possible
(3)Players who just play the game, figuring things out for themselves
Of course there is a vast amount of gray area between these groups. Most players probably land between groups 2 and 3. They aren't trying their absolute best to optimize but they do use a lot of outside resources. Although most players aren't really making an effort to figure things out for themselves. They either copy something or they're bad at it.
Players in group 3 are more hardcore than those in group 2, even though they have worse gear and progression. Group 2's pride for being so much better than group 3 is bizarre. They must know how little skill it takes to play the game and how little knowledge they've gained by themselves. Their condescension is unreasonable because it assumes everyone plays only after they've consulted a guide. But then there's the catch: Blizzard makes the raids require an amount of knowledge that an average guild is not willing (or able) to figure out for themselves. So that assumption is not so unreasonable for WoW.
If Blizzard lowers the knowledge ceiling, hardcore players will be unhappy. Well, everyone might be unhappy if it makes the game less interesting. If Blizzard raises the skill ceiling, the average player will be unhappy. Heroics and hard modes could be a way to raise the skill ceiling without letting content go to waste. But I don't think they've been particularly successful at raising the skill ceiling because a lot of the skill problem is with the UI, not the encounters.
I land very close to a pure group 3 player. But it is nearly impossible to find a big enough group of people to form a guild under the condition that no one ever consults a non-Blizzard resource except each other. I'm sure some exist but I'm also sure that they knew each other before they formed the guild. Oh well!
P.S. For the record, I don't play WoW anymore.
At different points in my MMOing career I've been in all 3 of those camps to some degree. Way back in EQ1 doing hardcore raiding we were doing server and world wide firsts. The knowledge base of the internet wasn't nearly what it is now so finding guides for things was basically impossible. There were also virtually zero quests in the game so there wasn't much need for it.
People kept things close to the vest. Nothing was instanced so if you told another guild how to kill X raid mob you suddenly had competition for it. If some completely sick rare item dropped off a mob you didn't tell them which mob dropped it so you could farm it for your own benefit. The whole game was set up as a big ass competition to be the top dog. It was grindy, everything took forever, dying meant something, etc. Which all lead to people being more skilled on the whole.
The only real guides you could find for a quest was the "epic" weapon quest. A class specific weapon of complete ownage that took a lot of people collaborating to figure out what you did, then getting together to actually do it. The things they made you do were insane. Turning in super super rare items to an NPC, if you turned it into the wrong one that item was lost forever, go get a new one! It took balls of steel for the first people to complete them. Eventually the guides were out there and everyone could do it. But they still needed raids to accomplish the quest which did force people together.
The whole game being non-instanced with this old school harsh mindset forced people to socialize. Everyone knew everyone. People were generally nice with each other so you didn't get black listed. That to me is what is missing now days in MMOs. The social aspects.
As I played more games and got older I lost the time to be able to play 18 hours a day. To dedicate the immense time to figure all that crap out, to camp things to no end. But I never lost that competitive spirit, the need to push the envelope and do better than those around me. I'll look at guides, I'll consult others and sites to knock down on the time commitment. But I still do like figuring out things for myself. That new car smell of a new MMO, exploring and finding things for the first time. I'll always mod my UI too. I just can't stand the standard UIs of any game. They're poorly designed all around, give you worthless info, not the info you need, not clean enough. I want the info I want immediately and to get rid of the worthless stuff.
By and large in my experience if you find someone from the older school of MMOs like EQ1 you're going to have a more solid player than people from WoW. There are exceptions to the rule both ways of course. But I think when you dealt with the stuff that game would hammer you with, things now days are EZ-PZ.
I don't think your group 3 is dead, but having lived that figure it out yourself age and being more cramped for time than I was when I was a teenager it's nice to sometimes just go "F this, looking it up!".
(Played EQ1 pre-PoP. Virtually all major MMOs since either in beta or launch. Currently playing nothing, waiting for GW2 as my last hope)
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Love these blogs. Keep them up!
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This reminds me of the George Carlin quote: "Think how dumb the average person is, and half of them are dumber than that."
I think that is basically what is going on here. These people are just fucking stupid. There isn't really anything else to say. You see this crap in MOBAs too. People who do the exact opposite of what they want to do. They run from things that they want to kill. They buy random items, not to troll, but because they lack the cognitive capacity to actually figure out what they should get. These are the dumb people of the world, playing starcraft, mixed few with a few people that aren't dumb and are just new to the game/genre.
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This is incredible, how one man can find enough time in his sad little life to go to the lowest level of a skill based game and then ridicule the people there. You realise they are learning the game right? They don't have the same time and dedication as you clearly do to sit and grind out hours of gaming and to learn the game. I find this sad and also amusing, how you still are able to find humour (to you) in playing people worse than you. You can't be more than gold yourself on a real account, but you think yourself big enough to give all these noobs shit about how they can't play? Poor show chap.
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On March 11 2012 11:14 TSBspartacus wrote:
This is incredible, how one man can find enough time in his sad little life to go to the lowest level of a skill based game and then ridicule the people there. You realise they are learning the game right? They don't have the same time and dedication as you clearly do to sit and grind out hours of gaming and to learn the game. I find this sad and also amusing, how you still are able to find humour (to you) in playing people worse than you. You can't be more than gold yourself on a real account, but you think yourself big enough to give all these noobs shit about how they can't play? Poor show chap.
The "no life" argument doesn't really work when it comes to SC2. It took me about a month and a half and something like 80 wins to get out of bronze. I was winning against people who had HUNDREDS of wins and were terrible despite having played the game far longer than me. What takes more dedication: putting in some effort in order to improve, or playing 1000+ games and not improving at all?
And yes, I did lose to a worker rush. ONCE. And since I have no life, I spent the next 5 minutes on Google, looking up the counter and lo and behold, I now don't lose to worker rushes anymore.
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On March 11 2012 11:14 TSBspartacus wrote:
This is incredible, how one man can find enough time in his sad little life to go to the lowest level of a skill based game and then ridicule the people there. You realise they are learning the game right? They don't have the same time and dedication as you clearly do to sit and grind out hours of gaming and to learn the game. I find this sad and also amusing, how you still are able to find humour (to you) in playing people worse than you. You can't be more than gold yourself on a real account, but you think yourself big enough to give all these noobs shit about how they can't play? Poor show chap.
idk bro that guy with 1600 games in bronze sounds like he has a lot of time. Gheed's also said he was plat, as reading his blogs (the part where it says 'READ FIRST', fyi) will show.
I mean, at least go for accurate insults.
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Well, in regards to Nony's point, one of the things Blizzard has done recently with WoW to try to address the "knowledge gap" is to put some of the key information about PvE encounters (abilities, phases, etc) into the game itself in an easy-to-access format. That way, even if you don't consult an outside source, you're not completely gipped compared to someone who has; you still know enough about the encounter going in to theorize a little and come up with strats, even if those strategies will take a lot of ironing out in practice. I think it's certainly an interesting move.
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I don't know what is more entertaining, your blogs or the people that rage about them. Yet another entry that makes me drop whatever it is I was doing just to read. Funny stuff Gheed :D
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That was a fantastic read.
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On March 11 2012 08:23 Liquid`NonY wrote:
Well written as always.
The WoW issue was something that made me really dislike WoW PvE because new content has to be balanced around the assumption that people are reading a bunch of out-of-game information from unofficial sources. Checking EJ for optimal spec, rotation and gear selection, watching videos and reading guides to learn how to do encounters, and customizing the UI in a million different ways to minimize your mistakes are all incredibly efficient ways to accomplish more in the game. But it's all cheating. I believe that reading a guide should be a last ditch effort and it should be done only to experience content that is otherwise off limits.
On the other hand, lines get blurred by the social aspect of MMO's. If a guy in your guild figures something out, it's not fair to call you a cheater for listening to him explain it. Players are supposed to work as a team. It's just that the web has made it far too easy for any player to tell every player what they know. 99.99% of the information being shared is between strangers. It's not social.
I won't push the cheating accusation but I think it's pretty clear that a ton of WoW players do not consider all that research as part of the game. But if they don't research then they are significantly worse than everyone who does, sometimes to the point that they get kicked out of groups and blacklisted. That's because, as you say, knowledge is so much more important than skill.
So I think there are three perfectly reasonable groups:
(1)Players who race to complete content (they naturally have no knowledge of uncompleted content but they do research everything that is possible to research)
(2)Players who copy everything group 1 does in order to accomplish as many things as efficiently as possible
(3)Players who just play the game, figuring things out for themselves
Of course there is a vast amount of gray area between these groups. Most players probably land between groups 2 and 3. They aren't trying their absolute best to optimize but they do use a lot of outside resources. Although most players aren't really making an effort to figure things out for themselves. They either copy something or they're bad at it.
Players in group 3 are more hardcore than those in group 2, even though they have worse gear and progression. Group 2's pride for being so much better than group 3 is bizarre. They must know how little skill it takes to play the game and how little knowledge they've gained by themselves. Their condescension is unreasonable because it assumes everyone plays only after they've consulted a guide. But then there's the catch: Blizzard makes the raids require an amount of knowledge that an average guild is not willing (or able) to figure out for themselves. So that assumption is not so unreasonable for WoW.
If Blizzard lowers the knowledge ceiling, hardcore players will be unhappy. Well, everyone might be unhappy if it makes the game less interesting. If Blizzard raises the skill ceiling, the average player will be unhappy. Heroics and hard modes could be a way to raise the skill ceiling without letting content go to waste. But I don't think they've been particularly successful at raising the skill ceiling because a lot of the skill problem is with the UI, not the encounters.
I land very close to a pure group 3 player. But it is nearly impossible to find a big enough group of people to form a guild under the condition that no one ever consults a non-Blizzard resource except each other. I'm sure some exist but I'm also sure that they knew each other before they formed the guild. Oh well!
P.S. For the record, I don't play WoW anymore.
This is precisely why I don't like mmorpg's. People are always puzzled at why I don't like them, and yet love single player rpgs. To them it's the same thing only better because you play with friends, which of course makes every game better. And it does. It really does. But mmorpg's ruin every aspect of rpg's that I like. I want to explore dungeons, soak up a ridiculous over the top yet heartfelt story, listen to some wicked nobuo uematsu, and eventually find a point of conclusion. I do NOT want to stay glued to guides and walkthroughs min maxing all my fucking bullshit and making sure I don't miss a single sidequest. I don't give a shit... I just want to play the game. You shouldn't have to use a fucking guide of any kind to play a fucking rpg.
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The most painful part of watching a bronze player play is the crippling, overwhelming idleness. I saw it in Warcraft 3, too, which was even more bizarre because WC3 has creeps to kill. For whatever reason, bronzies just don't do anything. They don't scout. They don't harass. They don't "poke" or "shark." They don't expand. They don't make any fucking sense. They just sit there in the general area of their base waiting for something. They aren't even macroing well during this time period, either, despite their protestations to the contrary. I don't expect multi pronged harass while never missing injects, but dear God, do something! Take a watch tower, send a ling to scout, spread some creep, anything. People in bronze are so inactive that they're almost not playing the game at all. I don't know how this could possibly be an enjoyable pasttime for them. I cannot understand why someone so disinterested in moving their units around the map would play an RTS and not a TBS or other genre of game entirely. No matter how hard I try, no matter how long I spend down here, I just don't understand these people. What are they doing? What are they thinking? Why are they here?
It's almost maddening trying to come up with solid pieces of advice for people so bad. Everything they do is so unnatural, so counterintuitive that I'm not sure anyone can actually teach them. Clearly even Day9's continued efforts have failed. If even Uromacef, who in all respects appears to be a nice, literate fellow, struggles to learn even the most basic ideas, what hope do the raging masses of the bronze league have? I fear they have none, for there is something innate in their character that holds them back and prevents their growth as Starcraft players. It's not that they are casual. It's not that they are bad. It's that they are bafflingly, unexplainably dense.
Seriously if you can't imagine reasoning behind their play i think you lack a little imagination.
I understand that if there's a 'normal' 20-30 year old guy who has played 200+ games of sc2 and is still doing this stuff i'd be baffled aswell but i could most certainly imagine a person like my mother playing a game sc2 and it would look exactly like the ones you're describing. She is extremely slow with keyboard+mouse and she has to look carefully what is going on in the screen and i think the sc2 ui would be hard for her to understand and you typing instructions how to beat your worker rush would mean absolutely nothing. Obviously my mother would never play sc2 let alone hundreds of games but i can imagine there been people like her who play the game, older generation if you may.
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Glad that banner I made was put to good use.  The WoW analogy was a little long, but it got the point across. Great read as always. 5/5
Here's what confuses me though: The small mass of people that read this blog, that they fully know is a blog about the Bronze League, and see this as some kind of condescending, bad manner, lets-laugh-at-the-stupid-bronze-league blog. At this point, it's slowly become a how-many-people-cant-learn blog. The game has been out for a while now. If there are new players, they probably would have the capacity to learn, albeit very slowly, like Uromacef. But how people can consider Gheed condescending, when the majority of games end like this, or this, utterly baffles me. It's a wonder Gheed hasn't degenerated into a bad-mannered, worker-rushing robot.
I don't think it's "condescending" to tell people how to beat the worst possible strategy in a game, to (the majority of) people who would either ignore it completely or outright refuse to learn. Worker rushes are so common in NA Bronze, that learning how to beat it would guarantee at least winning half your games in Bronze. Would that not make the game more enjoyable? More FUN?
I could go on with how I disagree with the people who disagree with me, but odds are, like Bottom Bronze, those people would not change their attitudes at all.
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On March 11 2012 17:37 Carbonthief wrote:Show nested quote +On March 11 2012 08:23 Liquid`NonY wrote:
Well written as always.
The WoW issue was something that made me really dislike WoW PvE because new content has to be balanced around the assumption that people are reading a bunch of out-of-game information from unofficial sources. Checking EJ for optimal spec, rotation and gear selection, watching videos and reading guides to learn how to do encounters, and customizing the UI in a million different ways to minimize your mistakes are all incredibly efficient ways to accomplish more in the game. But it's all cheating. I believe that reading a guide should be a last ditch effort and it should be done only to experience content that is otherwise off limits.
On the other hand, lines get blurred by the social aspect of MMO's. If a guy in your guild figures something out, it's not fair to call you a cheater for listening to him explain it. Players are supposed to work as a team. It's just that the web has made it far too easy for any player to tell every player what they know. 99.99% of the information being shared is between strangers. It's not social.
I won't push the cheating accusation but I think it's pretty clear that a ton of WoW players do not consider all that research as part of the game. But if they don't research then they are significantly worse than everyone who does, sometimes to the point that they get kicked out of groups and blacklisted. That's because, as you say, knowledge is so much more important than skill.
So I think there are three perfectly reasonable groups:
(1)Players who race to complete content (they naturally have no knowledge of uncompleted content but they do research everything that is possible to research)
(2)Players who copy everything group 1 does in order to accomplish as many things as efficiently as possible
(3)Players who just play the game, figuring things out for themselves
Of course there is a vast amount of gray area between these groups. Most players probably land between groups 2 and 3. They aren't trying their absolute best to optimize but they do use a lot of outside resources. Although most players aren't really making an effort to figure things out for themselves. They either copy something or they're bad at it.
Players in group 3 are more hardcore than those in group 2, even though they have worse gear and progression. Group 2's pride for being so much better than group 3 is bizarre. They must know how little skill it takes to play the game and how little knowledge they've gained by themselves. Their condescension is unreasonable because it assumes everyone plays only after they've consulted a guide. But then there's the catch: Blizzard makes the raids require an amount of knowledge that an average guild is not willing (or able) to figure out for themselves. So that assumption is not so unreasonable for WoW.
If Blizzard lowers the knowledge ceiling, hardcore players will be unhappy. Well, everyone might be unhappy if it makes the game less interesting. If Blizzard raises the skill ceiling, the average player will be unhappy. Heroics and hard modes could be a way to raise the skill ceiling without letting content go to waste. But I don't think they've been particularly successful at raising the skill ceiling because a lot of the skill problem is with the UI, not the encounters.
I land very close to a pure group 3 player. But it is nearly impossible to find a big enough group of people to form a guild under the condition that no one ever consults a non-Blizzard resource except each other. I'm sure some exist but I'm also sure that they knew each other before they formed the guild. Oh well!
P.S. For the record, I don't play WoW anymore. This is precisely why I don't like mmorpg's. People are always puzzled at why I don't like them, and yet love single player rpgs. To them it's the same thing only better because you play with friends, which of course makes every game better. And it does. It really does. But mmorpg's ruin every aspect of rpg's that I like. I want to explore dungeons, soak up a ridiculous over the top yet heartfelt story, listen to some wicked nobuo uematsu, and eventually find a point of conclusion. I do NOT want to stay glued to guides and walkthroughs min maxing all my fucking bullshit and making sure I don't miss a single sidequest. I don't give a shit... I just want to play the game. You shouldn't have to use a fucking guide of any kind to play a fucking rpg.
Ok, so i thought i'd give my two cents in reply to Nony's post and also address some issues pointed out by another reply.
I have played wow roughly since vanilla and i have tried my best to be at the top of pve raiding from the beginning (not always successfully, depending on guild). In later years i made friends with a lot of "high-skilled" people and we started playing more together and forming guilds to raid, which means we end up with a guild that is made purely for the sake of being a top contender (we managed to get top 25 in the world in icecrown citadel and firelands).
When you have a competitive environment (yes it is competitive, check WoWProgress) then you resort to any means necessary to win the race for first kill on a boss. Not only is this competition server-wide, it's world-wide. As another player pointed out, to not use Elitist Jerks / guides / forum posts for information sharing / efficiency optimizing, would be like for a pro-sc2 player not to look at replays of other players or with other players, or practice together.
Wow is at its core a singleplayer game, with multiplayer aspects, when it comes to raiding. Yes you are a "team", but there's very little teamplay invovled in a fight, compared to how much singleplayer gameplay there is. There are team consequences, so that if one player fucks up, you all die, but that still doesn't make it a teamplay based game (pvp is teamplay based for the record).
I don't want to go indepth with the why it's a singleplayer game, since that's not the topic, and yes there are encounters with more multiplayer than other encounters etc., i just want to point this out because it means that you cannot practice as a team and improve as a team other than doing encounters.
The problem with this is that you can't practice teamplay before an encounter is released, which means you can only practice your OWN singleplayer performance, and how do you do that? Well you spend hours hitting a target dummy to get your dps right, you use TOOLS to improve your gameplay (such as talking to other highskilled people of your class, checking optimization simulators for talent-tree improvements and gear optimization, min/max'ing your stats etc.). This is not frowned upon in any other competetive environment, why should it be in wow?
Therefore i cannot agree that it is cheating or ruining the game. In fact it's improving the game.
There are a LOT of people in wow, and a LOT of those people aren't very good at the game.
Consider this:
There are 25 people in a raid group. If any one of these fail at an encounter, all 25 people will get the consequences.
That means that if one player is bad or doesn't know what to do, then the rest will have to suffer for it.
In reality the BAD player who hasn't looked at a guide or tried to better his gameplay is actually ruining it for the 24 other people who depend on him doing an at least mediocre job correctly.
People are very quick to throw around the word elitist, saying we are jerks for requiring people to read up on how to play your class better, or to know the encounter, but in reality people who hate doing those things shouldn't expect to get into a group where most, if not all, of the other players have done the encounter before or put some effort into being good / knowledgeable enough to actually beat the encounter. Not unless the "ignorant" / "lazy" person knows somebody who can vouch for him or can "he's a friend" him in. It's plain pretentious and arrogant to think that people will put up with you ruining the game for them.
Especially with things like raid-finder / dungeon-finder can this be problematic. Luckily blizzard has made these things so ezpz that you won't be able to fail a dungeon if 80% of your team is mediocre, so people have stopped caring about it at that level. But in raids you can easily fail if one person doesn't move, which means you have to spend TIME running back in, buffing, waiting for people who randomly afk etc. all over again, then try again at beating the boss.
As another post pointed out, a lot of raiding people aren't that young anymore. They don't have time to play 10 hours a day, they have other real-life things to do. This means that the amount of TIME they have for the game is limiited, and when someone wastes their time it's annoying.
Ok so that was a bit of a rant :p I'm sorry if it sounds angry or arrogant, it's just annoying to constantly hear the bad player whining that people tell him he is bad when he doesn't want to improve or put effort into improving.
Anyway the point of it all is that everything that improves your gameplay is a TOOL for you to be better, which i cannnot in good conscience call cheating.
Blizzard realized that people used guides a long time ago, and has focused more on execution of than "knowing" the encounter for a long time. The "knowing" part is just the mechanics of an encounter (abilities, events), and it is much more the performance and execution of your players that are at the core of raiding now. If you know WHAT to do, you can easily fail still, because you are required to keep track of a lot of things (not as much as starcraft obviously, starcraft is a harder game, unless you cheese/all-in, imo), dodge a ton of things and still keep up your tanking/dps/healing so that everything goes smoothly.
Consider the ragnaros in firelands. That's a 17 minute fight on heroic. 1 mistake during those 17 minutes can make you wipe. I know this is the last boss so far, but it exemplifies the whole point. It doesn't matter how much you know, because if you screw up once in 17 minutes of playing, you might have to start all over. Of course it's not like you're CONSTANTLY dodging things or whatever, but it's often enough to put a pretty big strain on you, especially considering you have to be efficient as hell in your core-gameplay (nuking/healing).
In reality i don't actually consider WoW an RPG. Not for end-game anyway. It has no remarkable storyline, you aren't emotionally invested at all, and you have to repeat content constantly. These things violate my interpretation of what an RPG is. If you want a true RPG, go play Final Fantasy or chrono trigger, they are way better
Wow is not a game of knowledge, it's a game of execution. You need to be thrown timers and information in your head, because there's too much shit for people to forget in the spur of the moment, so you will end up failing a lot due to "sorry i didn't have the timer for lava explosion calculated in my head, so i was too far away" and such things.
However this is only true for the hardcore raiders (ignore pvp), when it comes to casual raiding, you don't need that much skill, because blizzard has made it ezpz when a key core of the raid has good skill and good items. The knowledge of an encounter has become an assumption in modern wow, because it's so easy to get (it doesn't take more than 5-10 minutes to get up to speed on an encounter). But because WoW is a game of item-progression, then it becomes exponentially easier the better gear you have. Which is the reason for people who do casual raids require the other members of the raids to have pretty good gear (better than required strictly), because it makes it waaaaay easier.
And STILL people fail and it causes wipes.
To nony:
i would not call group 3 the more hardcore. Group 1 is pretty clearly the most hardcore considering how much time is invested. Yes they don't stick true to the true RPG style of "don't read a walkthrough", but as i have pointed out, i don't consider WoW to be an RPG at endgame content.
At most it's an actiongame with item progression.
I feel that calling WoW "skillless" is a huge insult and plain wrong for the people who are top pve, but very true for the middleground raiding. The core issue is that it requires very little skill to be "good enough" to beat an encounter at some point, however to be 10% better than everyone else is where it requires a lot of skill. It means that there's a very small difference between really good players and mediocre players, just the same way as in SC2 compared to SC1.
TL;DR? gtfo =)
PS:
Okay, as another point as to why WoW endgame raiding isn't knowledge based. Every boss has a good amount of abilities, and they have quite complex rotational patterns, which are randomized because all abilities have a random delay before it's used. Therefore you CANNOT just get everyone to know exactly what to do when, you have to improvise and know what to do in a situation where you have to prioritize what to focus on: ability1, ability2, dps. Blizzard has improved the content a great deal and made it a lot harder to just "hardcode" how to perform an encounter. Mostly you'll do similar things every time you engage a boss, but it's usually different timings.
This also leads to annoying situations where you can acually straight up die because "your healer got linked twice in a row, so too bad".
Also, the randomization isn't "much". We're talking seconds here, but seconds is all it takes to make the encounter dynamic instead of static.
An example from firelands: Baleroc heroic
He somtimes gives 2 RANDOM players link and they have to run to touch eachother or the whole raid dies within 8 seconds. On top of that he REGULARLY spawns a pylon at a RANDOM location (near a player) and it gives a debuff that you cannot get too much of, but if nobody gets the debuff the whole raid dies.
If a player with debuff touches another player, that player gets a debuff too. If the healer gets the debuff he practically can't heal, so he must NOT get the debuff.
This requires you to dynamically make assignments to who stands at the pylon, and then switch them out with someone else before they die from the debuff. At some point the pylon disappears, and you usually have 3 people with debuff. They cannot stand at the next pylon, because the debuff doesn't wear off in time. So you have to assign 3 new players when the next pylon spawns.
ok so "why can't you assign fixed teams?", because of the LINK! you have to assign the 3 players WHEN the pylon is ABOUT TO SPAWN (you NEED a timer), because otherwise the person who was assigned may be linked to someone with debuff and get debuff himself.
Sometimes this link happens the same time as pylon is up, so you have to super fast assign someone to replace him.
The problem is when healer gets linked with debuff person twice in a row, he can't heal for a long time and you wipe due to other mechanics that i won't go into.
With that knowledge you now KNOW how to play the fight as a dps, but you can easily fail still, you need a shitton of dps on him. However the hardest part of the fight is healing which i won't go into, but the point is there, it's a dynamic encounter where you have to constantly re-evaluate the situation.
end of rant
PPS: omg took so long to write, it logged me out T.T
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On March 11 2012 00:41 Perseverance wrote:
I will never understand how people can be in bronze league (at the current skill level of bronze) without having some sort of horrible mental disorder.
That's probably because you have some mental disorder of your own.
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You, Mr. Gheed, would be a perfect PR / advertising guy. Really. When I read your stuff it all sounds so fun and cool, I just keep laughing and so on. Yes, even if you explicitly stated that Bronze League is a depressing experience, it still seems to be fun.
Now when I actually get on the ladder and do shit in bronze league, there's nothing fun about it, just depressing. Today, for example, I have won twice building nothing but workers all game long. Once PvT and once ZvP. I am not talking worker rush, I am talking nearly maxed all-worker force (and nothing but workers all game long) while the guy does drops in your base(s) or constantly tries to cannon-wall you. But there is still hope. In the second game I asked the guy, after flooding into his cannons my workers 200th time, if he was aware that workers cannot attack air. He said yes so I asked if he knew protoss has air units to wich he responded by starting a stargate, alas it way too late already. So they are able to understand stuff and who knows maybe in ten years this guy will be a proud Silver leaguer!
Anyway. Another great write up, looking forward to more 
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Unfortunately this blog tells the truth. On my offrace zerg account I wanted to start in bronze to work on my mechanics from the very bottom up, but I didn't want to simply leave my placements so I decided to worker rush every game. I won 3 out of the 5, one being bronze, one being silver, and one being gold... In any case I got placed into silver. It's actually scary how bad these lower players mechanics are. They always get defensive about it, I know, I used to be one of them and I used to think that my macro was fine and that the only thing keeping me back from plat+ was cheesers, but until they reach diamond+ they really don't understand that that's not the case at all. Take note sub-plats!
Anyway, I love your blogs Gheed, this one is no exception: 5/5
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I can totally see the parallel between a bronzie and someone who blows up the raid on Geddon, haha.
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Reading this makes my brain explode. How is it possible to not even understand a-move.
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EPT
