celluloid_dream
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User ID: 758
celluloid_dream
7d ago
The point, for a lot of players, is to be the best.
They are obsessed with it, often to their detriment.
If there's an boss to kill, they're tracking their DPS and posting the logs to compare against the rest of the world. They sharpen their characters into the finest instruments of damage, or healing, or mitigation, trading off literally everything else that isn't perfectly optimal for their role. They will never be satisfied until they get the #1 "parse". If this results in the raid having 40 characters without a single extra point of health buffer, so be it. If this means any mistake would kill them, or wipe the raid, they would take that trade in a heartbeat. They're always chasing that perfect parse.
If there's a dungeon, they're mentally tracking how long it takes and trying to do it faster. If they can shave 30 seconds by doing a mechanically difficult jump to skip some enemies en route, they will try it every time. If there's an 80% chance a teammate gets the timing wrong, and they all die, and it ends up costing them 5 or even 10 minutes, they will still try it every time. The "best" way to do that dungeon is to skip the trash packs, so they will try and skip.
If they need to farm, they will always go to the "best" farm. That is, the one that theoretically pays the most per hour. If this area is heavily contested, and everyone else is farming it too, they will not adjust their strategy, because farming a less contested zone would not be "the best". If the area is better farmed by one class that is not the one they are playing, they will level an entirely new character of that class from scratch just to farm (taking weeks of effort).
If there is gear that is "BiS" - Best in Slot - they will spend every waking minute trying to get it, until they do, and it's an act of mercy by Blizzard that the raids can only be attempted once per week. In vanilla classic, there was a dagger that dropped from the end boss of a dungeon at a 0.2% rate (not a typo. zero point 2 percent, and later 2% after the devs changed it). Players would solo this dungeon boss 5 times an hour (the limit) nonstop until they got it.
But "best" only has value in a social game. If everyone leaves, they're just playing solitaire on Blizz's servers. They naturally move to the new thing and try to become the best there.
Physical logistics used to be a bigger part of the day to day. My dad took pride in knowing all the alley/residential shortcuts to avoid traffic on his way home when the bridges were stuck. People took pride in maintaining a house and car. A person's car was an extension of their competence, a reflection of their personality, etc. Handling all the small bullshit in the world was life.
Downstream of this:
- It works as a proxy for really asking how things are going without prying, as @birb_cromble notes. In a guess culture, you can't just be like, "HELLO FELLOW AUTIST. ARE YOU DEPRESSED?", but you can triangulate it by asking about their life and reading between the lines. They haven't done anything with friends in two months. They aren't cooking, aren't eating anything interesting. They haven't fixed those problems with their car in half a year. Etc.
- It's signaling, because conversation is not about exchanging information. When ye olde person says "Oh sure. Just head down Lakeview, take a left at the legion and you're there", it's kind of giving directions, but it's also boasting that they are a competent person who has experience navigating the area and plenty of knowledge to share.
- It leads to deeper conversation. "How's your car runnin?", "Not bad but I picked up a flat when I was coming down the old forest road on Mount Pointytops." "oh whatcha doin up Pointytops way?", "me n' Sophie went camping. You know Sophie from dance class", "just the two of you?". or whatever.
and like, a lot of that is still relevant. I think there's just a lot more to life that people who frequent this forum care about and we (projecting) maybe wish people wanted to talk about. Like, I would love to get into conversations (and sometimes I do try) about people's online lives, their philosophical musings, etc, but most people just aren't that thoughtful or online. e.g. Most people's thoughts on AI are like "boo datacenters", "hate AI slop", and aren't keeping up with it. Most people aren't in niche internet subcultures. Most people haven't read Heidegger.
Never played retail, so I'm not 100% certain, but as I understand it, the reward structure has been gradually made less rivalrous there. This is "good", in that no one gets screwed out of their vertical progression by luck or politics, but it undermines the thing they were chasing all along. They want to be the best, and if the best isn't rare or difficult, it doesn't mean anything.
In vanilla/classic, only one person gets the legendary sword Thunderfury (maybe 2 or 3 if the guild gets very lucky). That represents potentially months and months of effort by 40 people, and it can only go to one recipient (typically the main tank and guild leader first, then a second tank, then maybe the top performing dps). It's not guaranteed either. Some guilds can run the raid for a year and never get it.
As for the Anniversary/TBC realms, it was generally understood from the start that those were "Classic plus waiting rooms" and that the population was always planning to drop them as soon as the new Classic came out. Maybe in a nod to the sheer number of classic releases, they called Classic Plus "Forever" and are planning horizontal progression. We'll see how that goes when it meets the population of minmaxers always itching for a little more vertical.
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