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http://soulkerfuffle.blogspot.com/2006/10/view-from-top.html

Tuesday, October 17, 2006
The View From the Top
The top of what you ask? The height of World of Warcraft greatness.

A few weeks ago, a good friend of mine quit playing Warcraft. He was a council member on what is now one of the oldest guilds in the world, the type of position coveted by many of the 7 million people who play the game today, but which only a few ever get.

When he quit, I asked him if he would write a guest blog post about the experience. What follows is a cautionary tale about the pull an escape from reality can have on you.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

60 levels, 30+ epics, a few really good "real life" friends, a seat on the oldest and largest guild on our server's council, 70+ days "/played," and one "real" year later...

Mr. Yeager asked me to write this "guest blog" for him. I figured I should oblige him this request - it was none other than Mr. Yeager who first introduced me to (begged for me to buy, actually :-p) the World of Warcraft. It was the "perfect storm" for me; a time in my life when I was unemployed, living at my family's house far from my friends, and had just finished my engineering degree and was taking a little time to find a job. I had a lot of free time on my hands and WoW gave me a place to spend it.

This could be a many page epic tale, but I figure I'd give you the brief history and pertinent information. The guild Mr. Yeager got me into and with which I became an officer is the oldest and largest on the server I played on. It is around 18 months old and extremely well-versed in endgame instances. I was both the "mage class lead" and an officer. I have many very good friends I met through WoW (in real life - no kidding) and even have been "involved" with another councilor in real life (yes, I know, I'm weird for meeting girls through an online video game but honestly, ask Mr. Yeager, she's head and shoulders better than all the girls I met DJing, waiting tables, in college, and bartending at clubs in Philly). But I digress...

I just left WoW permanently. I was a leader in one of the largest and most respected guilds in the world, a well-equipped and well-versed mage, and considered myself to have many close friends in my guild. Why did I leave? Simple: Blizzard has created an alternate universe where we don't have to be ourselves when we don't want to be. From my vantage point as a guild decision maker, I've seen it destroy more families and friendships and take a huge toll on individuals than any drug on the market today, and that means a lot coming from an ex-club DJ.

It took a huge personal toll on me. To illustrate the impact it had, let's look at me one year later. When I started playing, I was working towards getting into the best shape of my life (and making good progress, too). Now a year later, I'm about 30 pounds heavier that I was back then, and it is not muscle. I had a lot of hobbies including DJing (which I was pretty accomplished at) and music as well as writing and martial arts. I haven't touched a record or my guitar for over a year and I think if I tried any Kung Fu my gut would throw my back out. Finally, and most significantly, I had a very satisfying social life before. My friends and I would go out and there were things to do every night of the week. Now a year later, I realize my true friends are the greatest people in the world because the fact I came out of my room, turned the lights on, and watched a movie with them still means something. They still are having a great time teasing me at my expense, however, which shows they still love me and they haven't changed.

These changes are miniscule, however, compared to what has happened in quite a few other people's lives. Some background... Blizzard created a game that you simply can not win. Not only that, the only way to "get better" is to play more and more. In order to progress, you have to farm your little heart out in one way or another: either weeks at a time PvPing to make your rank or weeks at a time getting materials for and "conquering" raid instances, or dungeons where you get "epic loot" (pixilated things that increase your abilities, therefore making you "better"). And what do you do after these mighty dungeons fall before you and your friend's wrath? Go back the next week (not sooner, Blizzard made sure you can only raid the best instances once a week) and do it again (imagine if Alexander the Great had to push across the Middle East every damn week).

What does this mean? Well, to our average "serious" player this equates to anywhere between 12 hours (for the casual and usually "useless" player) to honestly 10 hours a day, seven days a week for those "hardcore" gamers. During my stint, I was playing about 30 hours a week (and still finding it hard to keep up with my farming) and logging on during my work day in order to keep up with all the guild happenings and to do my scheduling and tracking for the raids. A lot of time went into the development of new policies which took our friendly and family-oriented guild further and further away from its roots but closer to the end goal. Honestly, what that end goal is I'm not totally sure - there is truly no end to the game and every time you feel like you're satisfied with your progress, another aspect of the game is revealed and, well, you just aren't as cool as you can be again.

There are three problems that arise from WoW: the time it requires to do anything "important" is astounding, it gives people a false sense of accomplishment, and when you're a leader, and get wrapped up in it, no matter how much you care or want people to care, you're doing the wrong thing.

First off, let's go back to the time it takes to accomplish anything in the game. To really be successful, you need to at least invest 12 hours a week, and that is bare minimum. From a leadership perspective, that 12 hours would be laughed at. That's the guy who comes unprepared to raid and has to leave half way through because he has work in the morning or is going out or some other thing that shows "lack of commitment". To the extreme there is the guildie who is always on and ready to help. The "good guildie" who plays about 10 hours a day and seven days a week. Yes, that's almost two full-time jobs. Funny, no one ever asks any questions, though.

The worst though are the people you know have time commitments. People with families and significant others. I am not one to judge a person's situation, but when a father/husband plays a video game all night long, seven days a week, after getting home from work, very involved instances that soak up hours and require concentration, it makes me queasy that I encouraged that. Others include the kids you know aren't doing their homework and confide in you they are failing out of high school or college but don't want to miss their chance at loot, the long-term girl/boyfriend who is skipping out on a date (or their anniversary - I've seen it) to play (and in some cases flirt constantly), the professional taking yet another day off from work to farm mats or grind their reputations up with in-game factions to get "valuable" quest rewards, etc... I'm not one to tell people how to spend their time, but it gets ridiculous when you take a step back.

The game also provides people with a false sense of security, accomplishment, and purpose. Anyone can be a superhero here if they have the time to put in. Not only that, a few times I've seen this breed the "rockstar" personality in people who have no confidence at all in real life. Don't get me wrong, building confidence is a good thing and something, if honed appropriately, the game can do very right. But in more than a few cases, very immature people with bad attitudes are catered to (even after insulting or degrading others "in public") because they are "better" than the rest. Usually this means they played a lot more and have better gear. I'd really hate to see how this "I'm better than you attitude" plays out in real life where it means jack how epic your loot is - when you say the wrong thing to the wrong person it's going to have repercussions and you can't just log out to avoid the effects of your actions.

And people put everything on the line for these accomplishments with which they associate much value. I know of children and spouses being forced to play and grind for their parents, threats of divorce, rampant neglect, failing grades in school, and thousands of dollars spent on "outsourcing" foreign help. For what, you ask? Honor. The desire to be the best for at least one week. To get the best loot in the game. What do these "heroes" receive? Why, cheers and accolades of course as they parade along in their new shiny gear... which is obsolete the first time they step into one of the premier instances. The accomplishment and sacrifice itself are meaningless a few days later. Then it's usually off to the races again.

Finally, when you're a leader there is a call (or more appropriately a demand) for success. Usually those you represent want to keep progressing. They want to keep improving. They want more access to the best things. It is on you to provide it. In my experience, when you fail to progress fast enough, waves ripple throughout the guild and people become dissatisfied. It's your fault, no matter what. Everything you've done to keep things fair and provide for everyone does not mean a damn thing. A few will stand up for you, but when you have 150 people who all want 150 different things, you end up listening to 150 voices complaining about the job you're doing. This volunteer job usually takes at least 10 extra hours a week (on top of regular playing). Towards the end of my year of service, I apparently couldn't do anything right with my class. I had to rotate people to make sure everyone was getting a fair shot. I wrote actual mathematical proofs the allowed for fair and effective (yes, both) raid distribution according to efficiency, speed, and guild class population. I even rotated myself more than any other class member. People still took it upon themselves to tell me what I was doing wrong (constantly) and how their way was more fair (usually for them).

The thing that kicked me in the ass more than anything else was I really cared if my guildies were getting what they wanted out of the experience. I truly thought my efforts would make them happy. I wanted to make a difference to them. The greedy and socially phobic high school kid I thought I could help through the game, all of the couples (both married and not) who were falling apart because of the game I thought I could rescue, the girl who was deeply wounded by a guy who left her for the game but was herself addicted I thought I could save, not to mention a host of others, I thought my efforts were helping. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks: I was providing them with an escape from their problems and nurturing the very thing that was holding them back. Oh yeah, it hit me like a ton of bricks after I had changed so much and lost enough of myself that the most wonderful girl I ever met broke up with me.

I remember clearly after fumbling around life for a few weeks that I dragged myself into the bathroom to get ready for work. I was tired because I was up until close to 2 AM raiding. Every week I read though email or I would run into one of my "real" friends and I'd hear "Andy, what's up, I haven't seen you in a while." I looked in the mirror and in a cinemaesque turn of events and a biblical moment of clarity, told myself "I haven't seen me in a while either."

That did it. I wanted to do the things I wanted to do again and be with the people who appreciated me even if I abandoned them for a year and sucked to high heaven as a friend. The prodigal son returned and my friends were happy. The best advice I got was from the girl who dumped me for being a jackass (and after I decided to really quit and be "myself again" became one of, if not my best friend in the entire world), who said "your real friends like you even when you screw up." It's true.

Funny side note was the reaction I got from the guild that I spent a year pouring my heart and soul into. I made my post in the guild forums saying I was leaving (half of it RPing - something that doesn't happen after you start raiding) and that it was time for me to move on. Three days later I didn't exist any more. The machine kept on moving without this gear. A few people asked me over email (and when I logged on to clean out the old bank) when I was coming back (I'm not going to). There are a few others I keep in contact with and am planning on going to visit sooner or later so I can hang out in person and they can finally meet me. But in the end being forgotten about so soon after still left a bittersweet taste. But one that was a lot easier to swallow than the one I chugged down every day for the better part of a year.

Don't get me wrong, WoW did a lot of things right. At times it was a fun game that allowed me to keep in contact with friends who lived far away. More importantly it introduced me to some of the best real life friends I've ever met. However, it did take an undeniable toll on me and is taking a far greater one on many, many people when taken too far.

posted by robustyoungsoul at 10:36 AM

One good thing about so many people playing WoW is that many will envitably come to the same conclusions as this guy (the same conclusions some of us came to from playing past games). More recruits for the anti-catass brigade and whatnot.

Yes, it's World of Warcraft's fault. They coat the disk with crack and MAKE you play. Jesus, if you substitute "drinking" for "World of Warcraft" there, it actually sounds a little more sensical.

It's really simple -- if you're an obsessive personality who will ignore real life to play a game 40+ hours a week ---well, you're going to ignore real life to play a game 40+ hours a week. Odds are your work, personal life, and health might suffer from playing games forty fucking hours a week.

I'm in a raiding guild. I have epics and level 60s and shit. I play 5 hours a week -- at most -- because I have a full-time job and take two grad classes a semester. I spend most of my weekends either doing homework, or hanging out with actual friends. Life is priorities. What I see there is someone unwilling to take responsibility for his choices of priorities, and blaming a fucking game for it.

The people that lead my guild? They spend a lot more time at it. But it's their fucking choice, and their fucking time, and for them it's more of a hobby than a game. More power to them. When they burn out -- and some do -- they either step down or quit, and we wish them well either way.

If you're a catass, you're a catass -- it isn't the game's problem, it's yours.

His conclusions are very similiar to why I quit WoW as well. I think my catass days are behind me for better or worse.

Since it's the popular thing to do lately:

(http://www.enchantedlearning.com/mgifs/Mole_bw.GIF)

Yep, true or mostly true on all accounts.

I've mentioned this before, the WoW endgame is the only portion of the game that I will not longer participate in at a high level due ot the real life impacts.  I'd like to go on a raid every once in a while because some of the encounters are genuinely fun, but to get back into the 3-4 night a week, 2-4 hours a night routine is murder.   I can honestly say the greatest strain on my marriage has been when I tried to hang with the big boys in WoW.

I mentioned this once to someone in my guild and their response was "get divorced, I've never been happier."  This coming from a 40 year old who gets to play "weekend dad" to his teenage children (he ignores them and plays WoW). I suppose if playing 40-80 hours of WoW a week is what makes you happy, then so be it, but I've always been a person that enjoys the company of my wife and the prospect of little Tom-lets running around.

You got to see a lot of this disfunction that was clearly caused from the game and the lifestyle these folks had chosen.  The guy touched upon all of that.  The most disturbing were the parents who ignored their children during their 7+ hour WoWathons or treated their children's visitation days like an impending rectal exam.  Young losers are easy to reconcile, neglectful parents are not.  I really admired the fact that my old guildmaster had taken long, long breaks from the game to be with his family and especially around the birth of one of his children.  He didn't just scale back his time playing, he handed off the reigns and let someone else take over.

Of course, that never stopped the guy from forgetting about all of that once he got back into the full swing of things. Whenever we'd hit the inevitable roadblocks in advancement, things would start getting scary for those of us with actual real life commitments.  First the requirements to stay active were just attend 3 raids a week every other week. Only needed to be there for 1 hour of raiding.  Then it went to 3 times a week, every week strictly enforced.  Then 3 times a week and 6 hours must be learning new material.  Then the new material requirement was 10 hours a fucking week.  People who were minutes late would often be benched for the entire raiding night. 

The message was clear, you're either as hardcore as us or you are no longer needed.  Plus, there were issues of people blaming failures on officers, an officer being exposed as 8 years younger than he advertised and going off on power trips (the guy told me to shut the fuck up and quit talking to him after we had a discussion on shaman talents), and other veteran members making power plays for officer positions.  There were guild bank issues: favored members got their stuff with rapidity and others kept being brushed aside. 

They ended up moving to a pvp server.  A move that was intended to fix the problems of the guild.  Well, your room doesn't get truely clean by sweeping the mess under a rug, the mess is still there.  They didn't last long on the new server and dissolved.

It all comes back to Pardo's donut.  The center is an empty place.  A part of the game that is taken from the nothing and shaped by us into these juggernauts called "raid guilds".  They live on momentum. 

Like the dude in the blog, I'm just done with them unless they can find a way to a non-intrusive part of my life and not a parasitic being trying to replace my awesome tennis forehand with 8/8 tier 2.

If "WoW destroyed" your life, it's because you let it.  You simply found something you let get inside your head and run your life into the ground and showed no self-restraint.  The same can be applied to Television, Internet Message Boards, biking clubs, whatever.  These people have a disfunction and if the internet or WoW weren't there to fill it, something else would.   From the sound of it, the guy did the same thing with DJing and his other activities.  Lacking the discipline to pull away from anything isn't healthy.

I can't pull away from your avatar. What should I do.

The irony of course is that if someone spends 30-40 hours a week towards, say, their sport of choice, then they get lauded as being 'dedicated' and 'having put in the hard work for their success' and all that type of stuff.

People are obsessive-compulsive, life is full of inconsistencies, news at 10.45.

I love how a guild formed in WoW to these guys is one of the "Oldest guilds in the world", as if there was no life before WoW.

The guy that introduced him said the "world" portion. The guy actually writing only mentioned server.  Tangentally, with 7 million players, a lot of the player base has WoW as their beginning, not another notch on the timeline.

There are more benefits to the person who dedicates his life to athletic activities than the guy who dedicates his life to foozle whacking. That should be pretty obvious.

A good heart, a far more functional body, a good chance of achieving extended life, higher degree of attracting the opposite sex (err..or the same sex for that matter) > having permanent ass sores and no friends.

A bit melodramatic.  I think that getting absorbed in a game and having to scale back, everyone goes through that process.   I'd hope that most people realize it and scale back before RL hits them in the face, but I guess we only hear from those for whom it's a big wakeup call for whatever reason.

It's only a matter of time before someone starts WoWAnon.

And just wait until the media get ahold of THAT story...

You should have played hard with us and been done with WOW by Feb. See the sights. Taste the local dishes. Get the fuck out.

Repeat a few years later.

You forget the drugs! Don't forget them drugs! Them athletes sure go at it.

Oh, and the fact that many of them have ruined bodies when they're in their 30s, depending on the sport.


If by "many" you mean 'not that many at all really' then... yeah.

It's funny that you should post this not long after I came to a similar conclusion, though not to quite as an exaggerated degree. My social life didn't really suffer due to WoW, and I never really get a lot of exercise anyway, but as BC approached I started to realise that the reasons I was running raid instances (gear) would soon be pointless and that my choices were either 1) log on occasionally to pvp, 2) raid hardcore to see the last bits of aq40 and naxxramas before expansion, or 3) quit. Since I can get my 'pvp' fix with counterstrike-clones or DotA, and I simply don't have the time to raid 'hardcore' anymore, I quit, and I'm sure it was the right decision. Especially at this stage of my life, I was wasting time in WoW accomplishing things ingame when I could have been spending that time getting better at the things I want to do when I graduate from college in a year-ish.

Sure, I'll buy Burning Crusade and probably level to 70, maybe even take part in the arena, but I no longer have any interest in doing the crazy raid instances. It's too much of a life investment for a ridiculously minimal reward, and once you've seen it the first few times it gets old.

It's people like you, those who were fuleing the misguided raid mentality of Blizzards devs in the past, who are now waking up and hopefully making the game more of a friendly fun place.

So thanks, in a way.

Or maybe it's people like me, who were quitting the game and complaining about how it was a raid farce, who have caused the incomming changes and have made you realise you're wasting your time in raids.

So thank me, in a way.

Either way we can all agree the situation is changed for the better.

Reminded me of the Southpark WoW episode, where the Blizzard execs kept pausing after "world", and I mentally added it into the text.  "This could mean the end of the world... of Warcraft!"

Do people overplay MMOs? Sure. Is it rewarded instead of penalized? Most of the time. Can it be fixed?

Uh, I dunno. Maybe if you design the game to encourage RMT so people can come to the conclusion that the most efficient way to play is not by catassing, but instead by getting a promotion at work and spending their newly earned wage on phat epics. Oh, and it wouldn't hurt if that RMT somehow gets a bit skimmed off the top by Blizzard!

...

But, without sounding silly, the only thing anyone can really say is that gaming, like everything, needs to be practiced in moderation. Maybe it's best that some people discover that while playing WoW instead of addicted to something that cant be turned off with the press of a button.

It's amazing how a generic blog post about EQ... oops, WoW... can inspire the same debates we were having at Waterthread version 1 and Ltm before it. New people learning old lessons indeed


Hehe exactly. I long ago decided MMORPGs were my hobby. That makes all the difference in everyday conversation. Some people woodwork. Other people golf. In my spare time, I MMORPG, whether playing the game or talking the subject to death and back again. I think a lot of us treat it the same way actually. Few of us here consider these as "just games", as that implies this is something we casually do in our spare time. No, we make time for this stuff, the essence of "hobby".

I wasn't talking about professional football players who spend the majority of their time getting their knees smashed in or boxers who spend their day being punched in the head. I'm talking about people who would rather surf or play tennis, go out and skate for several hours a day, or go to aerobics class rather than "succeed" in an MMO. People who, when posed with the situation, find more benefit in doing a hundred pushups rather than spend the same amount of time camping epic spawns.

Hell, this goes for just about any other hobby or recreational activity for that matter. This guy was doing more with his life as a DJ than he was as an epically equipped World of Warcraft Mage. I do more in my life with 20 minutes on my guitar than I do with 20 minutes in an MMO. A chef does more with his life cooking a dish for 2 hours than the guy who farmed a hundred gold in 2 hours.

These aren't merely different activities. They're better activities. There are many secondary benefits associated with them.....While MMO obsession carries virtually none.

Furthermore -- Even the person who spends their time "catassing" in single player games is doing more for themselves than the person wasting all their time in an mmo. They might have the same problems of being physically and socially bereft, but at least they're mixing it up a bit. At least the games they play challenge their brain more often with various kinds of puzzles and patterns -- Their minds are sharper than the guy or gal who sits around repeating the same boneheaded actions and games over and over again.

It'll take roofies for me to play on another PVP server in a level based game.  Sorry, AC2 was bearable because we exploited at a level that only Turbine ineptness would allow.

Someday we will see ads like this:

(http://www.exploiter.org/l-c/misc/bkad1.jpg)

You're comparing well adjusted people with obsessives.

Know anyone who was obsessed with surfing and dropped out of 'life' and became a bum?
Know anyone obsessed with their career (maybe a chef) who burnt out on that?

Idiotic comparison. To imply that playing tennis for 2 hours a week does more for ME than playing a game for two hours is just stupid. I hate Tennis. I relax and get a lot of pleasure from playing games. I also get pleasure from playing soccer and squash, and playing card games.

There are no rules to life, stop trying to make them.

Lol, rules.

Replace tennis with something else then. "Tennis" is not the point. I'm not that fucking rigid.


Replace it with "Soccer" if that's what you like. The point was that for every second to every month you spend "obsessing" about any one of these other activities, you'll find yourself better off, whether in mind, body, and general social well being, than the person who obsessed about mmo's.

Secondly, you don't have to defend your desire to play games. Stop being a shithead. This is F13. Duh.

I'm talking about comparing an obsession with mmo's with an obsession with other activities (in response to pants' post).

It's time to stop saying "it's not the game's fault, it's your problem" whenever someone posts about compulsive WoW behaviour. Yelling at people who have a problem, generally doesn't help them at all. It has the effect of intensifying the problem, forcing them to retreat further into their escape.

It's an involuntary move, an instinct to do what gives you relief. Compulsive MMOG playing is the same problem as compulsive gambling, exept it consumes time instead of money. Some people have a susceptibility to it. I'm one of them.

It's not a matter of self-control, because while you are free to walk away at any time, you find it fucking impossible to do that. Even if you manage to, there's a worse challenge in stopping yourself going back to it in a weak moment. Being tired or depressed or drunk or lonely or having time to kill, checking your email and just popping into the game for a look ... and it's on again. The things you lose, the things you play at the expense of, are things you want to stop losing. But the struggle against the instinct to escape becomes amazingly difficult.

Whether it's compulsive gambling or compulsive MMOG playing, you need to get your head around the fact that there is a subsection of the population for whom these things are happening. Whether the game or the person is to blame in your mind is irrelevant. There is a real problem around these games, like poker machines or casinos, and you can't make it go away by claiming you have greater self-control.

[EDIT: This is in the past tense for me. That's what it was like though. The vulnerability to it is still present tense.]

I'm speechless.

I'd suggest the idea that you can still play them without making them a high priority in your life (i.e. you don't have to scare yourself into some all or nothing scenario).....But my guess is that isn't very helpful advice to the people you describe in your post.

People can be obsessed with anything but MMORPGs encourage it.

The more time you spend the better you get. This is not true of nearly anything else in life, past a certain point. In sports you can overtrain and become injured. *Just* putting in time doesn't make you better at anything in life, but it does in MMORGs. Putting in time, thought, effort and energy - yes those are required to be good at anything. But to be good at WOW you don't need thought, effort or energy. You can't grind away in soccer to become better. No matter how much basketball I practice I'm not going to be as good as someone with real skills, and in addition there are greatly diminishing rewards on training. The same goes for mental excersizes- your brain can also suffer from overtraining. In a game like WOW you can't suffer from overtraining and time spent does not give diminishing rewards. (A little but not much) It is hard to find many activities where time spent correlates directly to overall ability.

With the glacial time-scale games work on, the repeated content with random rewards, the games encourage addiction. Furthermore they teach no transferable skills.

I can understand an 18 year old spending tons of time, or adults spending their free time. MMORPGs aren't worse than TV or light reading. But people ignoring their kids and skipping work and that sort of thing - you would think once you hit 25 or so you have a bit more perspective. Those people make me sad.

I don't think I could live with myself creating a game where I not only expected but hoped and encouraged people to spend time in it to the detriment of everything else in their lives. That to me is the biggest problem - devs encouraging (actively or passively) people to turn into the fatass players from South Park.

I fail at searching. Insert the onion's article from a while back "Man has healthy relationship with girlfriend, plays World of Warcraft" where when questioned the girl says uncertanily "Is that that video game he plays sometimes? I don't know, he doesn't really talk about it. It's not really a big deal."

You guys are mad.

People who need help with gamlbing need help; they don't need gambling to be illegal.

People who need help with .... computer games need help; they don't need different computer game/etc/whatever.

The glacial time-sink nature of WoW encouraged me to Quit playing it, not play it more. The fact the World of Warcraft is changing so much in the Expansion is, I assume, due to the fact that people find the time sink aspects of it boring and would be inclined to stop playing it if it remained the same. If everyone was hooked and addicted so easily as you say then there would be no need.

Compustive and addictive types will find something to throw their life away at regardless; don't blame the games. Just try to give those people the support and assistance they require to deal with their problems.

I mean seeesh.

I don't think it's time to stop saying it's the people's problem.  I feel for people who become obsessive and lose perspective, but the fact is that it is those people with the problem.  Not that yelling at them will, as stated, do any good, nor do I mean to belittle it as a problem or claim that it's easy to fix.  But the problem IS with the person, and blaming it on the fact that a fun game exists doesn't get them any closer to breaking free of it.

The OP also seems to indicate that it's an automatic thing and if you play too much you will eventually catch epic fever and be lost.  There are plenty of people who play and have fun, and even sometimes raid, but also still exercise, hold down jobs, have families, etc.

I for one would be glad to see a concept like WoWAnon to help those people, but insinuating that the game is to blame for all those wrecked lives he goes on about is really missing the point.  At some point they have to take responsibility for their addiction and do something about it.  Sometimes life sucks and you have to make hard choices.  That has always been the case and will always be.  Saying that we have too many good and fun things, and if we just eliminate them all, then we will all live happily ever after is unrealisitic, not to mention silly.

I think so, yeah.

MMOs are designed to give you rewards based on time played because that way you stay subscribed; to get the next uber whatchamadingle you need to spend a week paying them to let you play the game.  It's a way to ration out content so you don't see all of it too quick (and run out of things to do) or too slow (and get bored).

But you don't have to correlate rewards with time played; you can just as easily do it with time subscribed, and achieve the same results (from the publisher's point of view, anyway).  Blizzard doesn't give a rat's ass if you're playing ten hours a day or ten hours a month; you're paying the same fee (so ten hours a month might even be slightly preferable, since you're eating fewer of their resources).  Log in when you feel like playing, log off when you're bored/frustrated/whatever, and you'll still hit that next milestone eventually.  This would be hard to do with a game as item-centric as WoW, but you could probably turn it into a game that would fit this model with just a few tweaks.

TBH the real problem is the goals in the game, not the way they're attained. Whenver people talk about the differences between MUDs and MMOs... it's right there. Did any of you play a MUD to reach the endgame and slay the dragon?

I didn't.

What the hell went so wrong that beating an "unbeatable game" somehow became the focus of our goals? Fix that, and you fix the issue. But uh... I don't think you'll have 6 million subscribers.

Okay, THIS IS WHAT I FLIP OUT OVER.


This STUPID oversimplification that is precisely the same as "Jerry McNeall reached the highest score of Bejewelled, the type of position coveted by many of the 10 million people who visit Popcap Games, but which only one person will ever get."

There is NO LONGER ANY REASON TO BE THIS STUPID. Many of the 7 million people who play WoW DO NOT WANT TO BE A COUNCIL MEMBER ON ONE OF THE OLDEST GUILDS IN THE WORLD. This is not a coveted position, this is stupid stupidhead writing that must be stopped for fuck's sake for the children and all that! I'm flipping out because ten years ago, this is what we said. Today, what we say is "He was a high-ranked player in World of Warcraft."

AND THAT'S ALL YOU FUCKING FUCKFUCKS. People understand games. They understand ranks. They have understood this since Ancient Assyria and Babylon, when they played chess. This is something that is hard-coded in our forefathers of old, and we can say "high-ranked player in World of Warcraft" and even my grandmother will understand it.

Holy shit. This stupid-fucking-shitfuckery reminds me of a Douglas Adams story. He was watching the news fifteen years ago. The newsguy was also a fucking fuckfuck. He said "Go to www-DOT-bbc-DOT-com." And Douglas Adams said it in a way that made you know, that the newsguy was over-emphasizing things, as though to say "I don't understand it, but maybe you do, it's so crazy and foreign to me, your new technology ways!"

Because the seven million people playing WoW don't give a rat's hemmorhoidal ass about the oldest guild in the world. They just want to kill their ten rats in peace.

The people who care about the oldest guild in the world are, STRANGELY ENOUGH, the people who don't play, and read articles like this, and shake their heads at the shame of humanity, because oh-emm-gee it's finally come to this.

Next our kids will be playing pool and saying words like "sure" and "swell." RIGHT HERE IN RIVER-FUCKING-CITY!!!

An Auto debuff when player hit 8 hour play time daily would be a fix. LOL
Like :
Exhausted (Your character needs sleep, please get some rest for about 5-6 hours and come back again)
MaxMana -25% MaxHP -25% Damage done -25% increment penalty by 10% every 15 minute interval capped at 90%
And reduce game gamma gradually by 10% per 15 minute to simulate difficulty in staying awake. Capped at 90% by that time the only thing you can see if probably the logoff button LMAO.

One thing I strongly disagree with in many articles and quotes of this nature is the general sentiment that the friends one makes in these games are not 'real friends' in some way or another.  Obviously there's a clear difference between someone you meet in a game, like playing with there, but never speak to again should you quit playing, and the people you meet in a game and become good friends with even after you drift to separate games or cease playing altogether.  Some of the friends I have made in these games are people I trust more than people I know in person.  In general, the attitude taken in a lot of these tends to be that one must be in a person's physical presence in order to be a 'real friend' which is an attitude that is really quite foolish.

Hey baby. Don't hate the game, hate the players!

this bores me.  People who lose themselves are "losers".

As much as people like to think that they can, you often cannot save people from themselves.

Doesn't hurt to try.  I got my roommate to stop playing EQ by presenting the evidence he was close to failing a class for the second time (he needed it for his degree) and losing his then girlfriend (and now wife).   This is probably easier to do with something that isn't physically addictive.

The eqholic was recovered, last I knew. But that ate up three years of his life, lost his house and job, though his dumbass wife stuck with him. I think she finally stopped making EQ and weed payments and he had to get the jizzob.

The kid I know who was addicted to UO got married to some old woman who played UO and now they ignore her kids somewhere in online bliss.

The guy who became an EQ guide/whatever is recovered, though he still gets the shakes to play his female wood elf druid at times.

Everyone I know who was into mmo was scarred by the experience. Even I ignored my social life for a year when I was playing EQ, it just sucks you in with the timesinks. I got out before the major raiding shit, though, only did the oldschool planes and chardok type stuff. I imagine when I get old I'll regret having wasted a whole year in my late 20s playing a computer game.

That's why it's on the bottom of the priority list these days.

I agree.  Just saying that the only way people recover is because they want to.  Helping them find the path out is a good thing and you are right to correct me. 

They planned something similar to this initially in WoW. Remember the early days of the rest system, where you were going to eventually get kicked down into some sort of anti-catass "red mode", where all gains were reduced by a sizable percentage? Yeah. That tested out well with the beta group (i.e. catasses), and got replaced by what you know today as the blue bar.

The physical presence of a person is absolutely an important difference between online interaction and in-person interaction. Body language is one of the most basic and instinctive methods by which we communicate, and it's simply not present in an online context (unless you're talking via webcam, I suppose). I think the lack of this mode of comm. in video games like WoW is the reason a lot of the 'drama' in game happens - because it's simply a lot harder to gauge the people you talk with. So yes, communication and meeting people in WoW is quite similar to real life, but it lacks a very vital element of actual relationship-building.

if you think you can maintain a "friendship" with strangers only through the medium of a game (via text IM and audio)  with the only gating criteria being duration ("I've known them in-game for a LONG time"), then may I present Eve-Online as a counter example where there are some wonderful example of people duping others for months at a time (if not more than a year). 

I just feel a lot more obligation to people in the real world than I do online.  I don't take online friends for granted, but I think I have to work harder at those onlinr friendships and be more sceptical/realistic of them as well.

I'm pretty sure that these people came to mmos with problems.  The problems weren't created by mmos.

And Slyfiend's post is the Best In Thread.

I feel more comfortable blaming non-entities (like mmo's and the forces that drive them) rather than people.

All I can say about the original poster is... Pussy. All that shit you complain about with WoW, it was 20 billion times worse in EQ. Yes, this is the crotchety old man in me saying how I walked uphill through snow 15 miles to play Everquest on a CGA monitor. But he'd have never lasted a year doing that in EQ. Or worse, it'd have taken him 2 years to come to the same conclusion, if he'd lasted that long.

Yeah, it's a grind. But the real problem isn't that the game is grindy (that's the game's problem) it's that the person is obsessive compulsive and doesn't want to admit the problem was him. The game was just his particular poison. Too many people think escapist entertainment is the problem, but the problem is the individual wants to escape.

I don't understand why people get caught up in what the douchey guy that introduced the story said.  Anytime someone not connected to gaming communties hears a story of EQ/WoW addiction, ebaying characters, or anything else a lot of people haven't even pondered; they relate the stories with the utmost hyperbole and gross generalizations (often false).  I'm sure after telling my family how I ebayed characters/plat in EQ/insert-mmo-here, they relate stories of how I made thousands doing so and how people playing these games are just itching to buy high level characters.  They know nothing of the reality, just their perception of it and their retelling often resembles a game of "telephone".

Ohh, naughty words.  :roll:

Getting caught up with this in EQ made me just feel stupid.  You could seeing the writing on the wall miles off.  WoW whispers in your ear telling you it's all going to be about content and quests in just about any form you can manage (solo/group). Then you reach the end and it's a different game.  EQ is the same game on all levels. 

WoW can be a game for casuals, rather easily, I've found at 60.  It's just a different game at 60 than at 1-59. 


It's not the grind that's the issue, it's the core gameplay that Blizzard has built the game around.  Raiding. And yes, it's the person's fault not the game's.  However, I think a more easily accessible game would alleviate some of the pressure to raid in the game and may prevent a few people from diving a little unhealthily into the game.

There isn't much more accessibility you can add to raiding other than dropping the lockout timers and auto-scaling the event to the party that spawns the instance. Or having loot that auto-scales power to the difficulty of the opponent whether in PVP or PVE. Of course, at that point why not do away with levels and put some player skill into the game, but then we're not talking about WoW-ku.

Other than that, getting into the raiding is pretty fucking accessible. Leveling to raid levels isn't hard. The item mudflation is the thing that starts to drain accessibility.

WoW's raiding is almost exactly like EQ with a compressed time-to-enter and instancing.

I'm not talking about making raiding more accessible.  I'm guilty here of using terminology that I haven't clearly defined. 

Pardo and Blizzard consider the 1-59 game their "accessibility".  This is getting people into their game, letting them have fun, and eventually grooming them to the point that they want to partcipate into the core game, which is raiding.  What I'm saying is that a more accessible experience at 60 would give people something interesting to do without them having to partcipate in what Blizzard considers the center of the game.

Battlegrounds are part of this.  Faction grinds (uggh, I hate this shit) are part of this.  Hell, gold farming is part of this. There needs to be more though.  Solo/small group content specifically for people that have gotten to end of the leveling line.  And you mentioned mudflation, mudflation does limit the accessiblity to activities like PVP that should be part of the overall accessibility to the game.  Give casuals/fence sitters a way to combat this without making them jump into raiding. 

Burning Crusade extends the overall accessibility of the game through extending the leveling curve and adding more 5-10 man content and lowering the raiding size requirements.  I'd rather see less of the later and more creative ways of the allowing people to maintain part of the post leveling curve community.  Until I've seen/tried BC I can't really comment if they've made true strides in endgame accessibility other than the superficial gestures like reducing raid size.

Don't forget the new honor system which is basically taking the catass out of the old system. Since I don't raid - for reasons this thread has made abundantly clear - for a while I looked to PvP to advance my character at 60 - but even that quickly sours when you get to the middle ranks and realize how much time you're going to have to put in to advance - it's just another system that pressures you to play. The new system is great because you don't have to worry about decay or competition for points - you just gather points at whatever pace you like and eventually cash them in.

I usually make a new character once I get to 60 and get bored. I find the core 1-59 game enjoyable enough to go through several times. But basically I've made a decision to play the game on MY terms. That includes playing without feeling pressure to do so and playing in a way that lets me log out whenever I feel like it.  With a wife and two kids I just can't lock myself into some imaginary commitment to a game. I spend enough time just playing casually - "Sorry Honey I'm on a raid and can't get up for 3 more hours" just doesn't work.

The fact that the Blizzard assheads see the raiding game as the core focus of their game tells me all I need to know. McQuaid really has poisoned the MMOG medium for all of us, thanks to his devotees Furor and Tigole. They spread their sickness everywhere.

You just don't get it.  You see... by raiding you get better stuff so that you can kill even tougher monsters and get even better stuff!

Raiding wouldn't have been so bad if you didn't have to raid the same place hundreds of times to collect your loot. I could have handled two or three trips to MC. I'm glad I got banned before my MC raid count reached the twenties.

Just how many games have you been banned from anyways?  :lol:

Despite his problems with WoW, the writer of the article linked in the original post says he made some of his best real friends through the game.

Almost all of them.

I bet I've been banned from more PLACES than naughty LC.  Not all of them MMOs, though.  Some were MUDs and those silly places where you play cards and stuff.  I was also banned from TSN, back in the olden times, twice, and numerous forums.  I didn't deserve any of it though.  I was completely innocent every single time.  People just over-react.  Much of it was for less than I've done right here, in front of all of you.  I am totally misunderstood.   Bastards.

Do forum bans (http://www.corpnews.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2783&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=40) count? I have been banned from countless forums. I probably have 15-20 banned IGN accounts. You don't even have a chance if we are counting forums.

Also banned from:

usenet (twice)
4 isps
2 muds
ebay

What did you do, shoot down a GM's biplane?

Is getting banned like a nerd badge of honor?

I was just curious about LC. I only knew about SB.

I just can't get banned no matter what I do....Then again, my exploits (figuratively and literally) in the online world have all been "accidental".

As for Signe, she's just a freak. Or misunderstood. Either/or.

I was banned from :nda: for :nda: but they :nda: because I :nda:. I'd love to tell the story in the :nda: thread, but :nda:.

Also, another thought about compulsive MMOG playing - one of the things you're getting hooked on is inactivity. If gaming becomes your default behaviour, it cuts into your previous exercise behaviours. Doing nothing but sitting in front of a computer gives you a body made for sitting in front of a computer some more. The more you compulsively play, the more your body prefers playing. A compulsive player has both a physical and mental loop to break and fitness can't be fixed overnight. It takes some hardcore motivation to break out of that.

Think of it as "building up xp debt", except in real life.

Don't quit in frustration. There's tons of more wicked content if you lvl up, yo!

Perhaps that's motivation enough. ;)

I'm kinda scared of re-investing time into MMO again myself.After getting my diploma in networking I tried out Lineage 2 and raellly got caught up in a tight clan. Suddenly I dropped my job, and didn't really place much importance in having only 6 months of student visa left (if I don't study or work it doesn't get extended).

By the time my bank account has less than 50 bucks in it and only 1 month of student visa left, I knew I had to quit or die lol. I had to beg my uncle to pay for a ticket home, recover with my parents...who never asked a lot of questions they just think 'I have a temp job in IT line' for 6 months. I still never told em the truth but anyways I got sent back overseas to study for my degree. So yeah here I am now getting addicted to grinding again on City of Villains 2 weeks trial. Fuckage lol.

If you want some good stories ask him to talk about his AO exploits.

Seems everyone is on the same sort of bandwagon these days. We wrote a State of Online Gaming Pt1: MMORPG's (http://www.lotd.org/index.php?page=31) article over on our website.

One of the quotes from our article came from a discussion forum for another game, but it hits on the OP's point and the point of some of the folks here.

What many of you don't understand about casual players is their schedule limits. This ISN'T some teenager who bargains with his mom to get 30 hrs / week of play time between homework and dinner and weekends. This is the husband who happens to wake up 90 minutes before his wife and wants to kill time playing a game, and isn't going to even consider browsing the boards waiting for the next scheduled dungeon raid because chances are it's happening the same time he has to do honey-do's. This is the software engineer who hit "compile" on his work machine and has 30 minutes before the result, who's not going to spend 29 of those waiting for groups to form. This is the college student who has 45 minutes between classes and work that's usually busy but today, and today only, can spend those 45 minutes logged into DAoC. This casual gamer can log in and get to 50 on multiple characters, even make LGM crafters and get moderate RR, but next to impossible to synchronize their schedule to rarely ongoing raids or even well-balanced groups.

Either way if MMORPG's don't start putting in more solo content or quick content that someone with an hour or so to game can play, then I forsee the market moving more towards Guild Wars type games.  You still spend time to get good in Guild Wars, but its free and there's no sense of urgency to keep up with your friends. Running guilds in games like that is a cake walk.

The average PC gamer is 30+ years old, and people in that age bracket simply can't play 25-60 hours a week that is required to get anywhere fast in today's MMORPG games.

Except in MUDs, all my bannings from MMOs are not because of doing anything naughty, except one, but for things I've said.  If someone acts like a total dumbfuck loser, they shouldn't be surprised if someone calls them a total dumbfuck loser... whether it's in a game or on a board.  My perfectly reasonable attitude about total dumbfuck losers has gotten me sacked from two jobs, too.   :cry:  I really am misunderstood.  It's ALWAYS their fault.  It's their total dumbfuck loserness that pushes me to say radical and extreme things.

Please add "loserness" to the spelldickymabob.  I'm too depressed not to go all the way over to that thread. 

One of my favorite quotes from EQ: "It's ok to act like an asshole, just don't call someone an asshole." Some guy had been kill stealing me for an hour or so, and I told him to stop being an asshole. He petitioned me and I got a warning from that, with three CS people showing up, no less. I asked if he was going to get a warning for being an asshole, they said no. Thus the quote.

I would go as far to say the level grinding and raiding experience in WoW at level 60 is worse than EQ.  Blizzard has so completely sold out to 'uber' guilds and timesinks.  Just look at the content they've added.  1 5-man instance and 5 raid instances; and they pretty well follow a linear progression.  They've managed to find more miserable grinds: faction and honour.  Hell, grinding honour isn't just a grind, its a job, since you have to do some each week just to maintain your rank.

I guess I'm lucky I fall under the category of players with limited time.  If you're limited in time, you're pretty well frozen out of the raid content since your not 'hardcore' enough to fill a limited number of raid slots.  And if you can't do that then you're not left with a whole lot to do at level 60 other than grind miserable grinds.  Made my decision to quit pretty easy.

...

I've been saying this all along, but it gets lost in the noise somehow.  I DO play a lot of hours.  I DO NOT play more than 2 hours at a time.  That time includes the point of turning the switch on for the computer to the point of standing up from the computer.  ANY activity that is required to progress through a game has to fit within that time period.  I can't fudge it.

Those 2 hours are also never planned exactly.  I never know when I'll get it.  Gaming is a priority in my life, but no where near the top.  I do it when ALL other things have been taken care of.  I never use the excuse to get out of things with, "I plan to raid in WoW from 8-11:30 tonight, sorry."  When my guild schedules raids, I always respond with, "We'll see.  Thanks for letting me know."

My game night consists of logging on, telling everyone in guild chat that I'm available for a raid if it gets started in 30 minutes and is a short 5 - man or something, then going about solo'ing quests, farming rep., working the AH, etc.  If nothing comes together in that 30 minutes, I log out after about 60 more minutes and go to bed.  That is it. 

That is my gaming time.  If a game is developed that does not work with that type of schedule, I can't play it.  It isn't that I don't want to.  It is that I CAN'T.

WoW has so far allowed me to continue to play outside of the raiding experience and still progress.  I have to admit I'm getting to a point where 4 lvl 60 alts with a few more getting close is about as far as the current "casual" content takes me.  That's why this whole talk of more casual content coming and allowing casual players more opportunities to progress through the game is wonderful news to me.  It will keep me playing and paying.  It is as simple as that.

Yep, I WoW'd to 58 and then quit and never went back. Critics would say that's because I burned through the content so quickly, but it was entirely because the level 60+ content held zero appeal for me (more than that, I actively dislike that style of gameplay). Ok, throw in a bit of anti-solo 'elite mob' bullshit as well. I saw one single dungeon the entire time I played and that got old pretty fast.

When I played Asheron's Call, I got bored after a week and decided to quit.  Then I figured I would get banned just for shits and giggles.  I understand things have changed since then, but back around 2001 I found it simply impossible to be banned.  I would spam the GM request queue with obscenities, and the most they would do is slap a five-minute squelch on me.  It was insane.

In UO I've been referring to killstealers as fucknuts who should get cancer and die for years with nary a warning.  But one time I had an extra account that I decided to get banned just for the hell of it.  (Wasn't using two accounts, was just getting rid of this one and re-activating my old one.)  So I made Adolf Hitler.  Or maybe Ad0lf H1tl3r to get around the filter, I don't remember.  Then I just started walking around West Britain bank emoting *goosesteps* and yelling "Heil me!"

Yeah, didn't take long for that account to get banned.  Especially once I was in jail and told the GM that he must be in league with the jews.

What'd he do, manage to keep it from deleting his C: drive's FAT table on release? Cos that'd be a wicked hard exploit.

I remember one huge exploit in AO where some invulnerable guy came bounding over the city walls like The Hulk, murdering and looting.  Other than that, I mostly just remember bugs, lag, this one guy running around in just boxers wielding a pillow, lag, how I put womens' clothing on my fat, bald engineer, lag, and lag.  It was also a shitty game.

I backed out of WoW about the time I saw it consuming my life the way UO and SWG started to. Now I just take the shotgun approach to killing myself with MMOs. I'm currently playing 6-8 at any given time. But that's ok, right, since I can only spend 2-3 hours in each one a week, that makes me a casual player, right? (Cry for help!)

oh dear god, why!?

There can't possibly exist 6 MMOs that are actually worth paying for.

The thing is that one CAN play on a limited schedule, both in terms of per-session time and per-week, and raid, and solo, and quest, and farm. It requires two parts:

• The right mindset: how much do you care about the pace at which others advance? If you don't care, or only care a little out of maybe-I'll-get-that-someday-too curiosity, then good.
• The right guild: I was lucky. When I quit UO and joined EQ, I fell into a good family guild and have been with them on and off through countless dikus since. To me, "family guild" is one with a good cross section of playstyles, from budding uber raiders to roleplayers. That's a family: everyone's different but still together. Anyway, some weeks I don't raid. Others I'll hit MC twice and AQsomething once. We're not Fires of Heaven because we just don't give that level of shit about these games, and it allows everyone to partake. We typically rotate people in and out of raids as people log off after 90 minutes to 2 hours.

Yes, we schedule things. And yes, they absolutely do work. If you've got a three month old in the next room, don't expect to Raid consistently. If you've got a needy spouse, same deal. Know your life, know yourself. Most of these games can be scaled to accomodate as long as you make the mental compromises.

Forget the other people. There are folks who will ALWAYS play more than you. That's the way of things.

Y'know, I'm surprised how many people are here at F13 who really like mmo's.....Let alone people with a (slight or not so slight) addiction to them.

Being lured by the promise and ideas behind massive multiplayer games is one thing. Actually liking the currently existing titles in the genre? Haha.

First time I ever ran across Waterthread, it was because of some rant by Faust -- Who utterly ripped apart SWG (the "big" mmog at the time). After that, I scoured through other front page articles from the community, and found that there was this entire mmo subculture who dedicated a good deal of their posting time to lambasting the mmo industry.

I liked it. They were vocalizing everything I couldn't put into words.

I became addicted to that.

So.....What's going on here? Have I deluded myself?

No, I don't expect total "groupthink" necessarily, but I really was under the impression that we had a few things in common: Hate. Disgust. Great Expectations.

Not fans. Not addicts. Not closet catassing.

Anyone ever seen the Tao of Steve?

I feel like that guy Dex was teaching the "Tao of Steve" to......Only to tell him in the end that it was all bullshit.

Try pulling off instead.



In a way they encourage it, but it all depends on how much time people have to play. I was on break from work a few weeks ago, and basially catassed 3 toons to Exalted AV rep back to back. I had the time, and no committments. This week I've been working all week. I think I logged on to do my transmutes but haven't otherwise played at all. Honor/rank grinding? Fuck that shit for a joke.

Those are two extremes, but it goes to show that MMOGs really have to cater to people with very different amounts of time to play. The all-day player (unemployed, students, etc) as well as people who work jobs of varying hours. I'd also debate your assertation that games don't require thought, effort or energy. If they didn't require effort or energy, I'd be on farming gold to pay back a mate who lent me money for my epic mount. But honestly, I just can't be fucking bothered logging on right now. I'd also say that you can get better at most sports by "grinding", to a point, and that getting to that plateau takes quite a bit of time.

These games do teach transferrable skills though, I learned to type at a decent speed through playing years of Everquest, and learning my way around a PC.

Raiding? Never been interested. I had fun doing it in EQ and all, but I'm just not interested in doing it in WoW. Now pretty much all the raid loot/content that WoW has is about to be superceded by world drops from the expansion. Something my Ex-EQ mates and I have been laughing about for a few months while continuing to not raid. My guild, who I barely know any of, has gone from raiding once a week with another guild to raiding a minimum of 4 nights a week, though since they started as a "family" guild, raiding isn't mandatory. Unless you're a priest, so some dumbfucks aseem to think. Their recruiting page though has now got all the usual "raiding guild" bullshit on it, so you can really see how the guild's focus has changed.


Seem familiar? What amuses me is that based on the criteria listed here, none of my characters, and especially my wife's would never make it in.




Yeah, that was a pretty retarded idea that Blizz had, and let's face it, it wasn't for "the health of the players" or anything, it was so the hardcore wouldn't be able to catass their way to 60 quite so fast, since there was little conent way up the top end. It's easy to decry anyone you don't like as "catasses" but as someone who will sometimes not play at all during the week then play a lot on a Sunday or something, well, you know, I'm an adult and I can make my own playtime decisions based around when my schedule allows, so you know, enforced "red zones" can fuck off.

And the "rested" xp was in at the same time. They planned on having both at the extremes.



This is an aspect of the "gimme LDoN/DoD/AAs" drum that I've been, erm,  beating here for some time. Hopefully the token/points/whatever grind here isn't too incredibly hardcore (like, you know, AD or CS rep) and there's a few nice items to be had from it without a massive time investment. After seeing the way WoW decided to implement faction/rep, I won't hold my breath, however.

The game is ok. I'm not enamoured by the level 60 game, but it's a lot of fun playing alongside my wife, and it's also fun playing with my RL mates. My alt and the wife's main (both mages) are in the mid-50's now, so by the time we can all properly play together, the expansion will be out, my mates will be on the fast train to 60, and the pair of mages will be trailing along, to hit 70 sometime around the middle of next year or so...

I'm in the same boat playing with my girlfriend and her main.  I've hung up WoW for awhile. I got really burnt when after trying to solo Uldaman with just the two of us (after 3 or 4 tries at earlier levels), we at mid-fifties get to the end only to find out you need 5 players to unlock the last area/boss.  That really pissed me off.  Not only because we could've checked and saved hours, but that it was there as a useless constraint.  I can understand putting in n+1 or n+2 requirements for endgame raids, but who cares if you can access a zone boss at lower levels?  All their drops get soulbound to you.   It's just an example where Blizz still focuses on the raid as a team sport. 

You were misinformed. It's like summoning, It only requires 3. It *was* annoying, when I had a 60 friend run me through, that we had to dig up another person. As far as I can recall, that is the only place in the game that limitation appears, except for UBRS.

Family guilds moving into raiding guilds is never pretty. I was in a guild mostly because my buddy the eqholic was. It wasn't bad at first, we'd group regularly because they were /always on/. But then they melded with some other guild that had this inane 'inner council' leadership structure that ended up pissing me off to no end because they basically used the guild as a way to get phat lewtz for the inner council. And gone were all the friendly 'raids' (just doing dungeons), everything became set up like that stuff Az referred to.

Fuck that noise. If you want those kind of requirements, if I have to submit a resume, you're paying me for my time, bitchhog.

I enjoy PvP in 1v1, group vs group, and large scale battles but don't particularly enjoy FPS.  For this reason, I play and enjoy DAoC. I can log on for 30 mins and have fun.  I have yet to find a multiplayer game out there with both the PvP experience and the social structure.   

I'm certain that some of the games you enjoy would make me laugh as well... it's all about playing what we like.  Pissing all over that makes little sense to me.

Fixed that for you.

Seriously, 6-8? Seek help, bitch. Now.

My job lets me write off as a business expense any game related cost I incur over the tax year. Games, hardware, and subscription fees.

That's the why. Your second point is correct, there aren't. I'm not even sure that one exists that is worth it.

I guess I could qualify the 6-8 statement by saying while I actually do have active subscriptions to several MMOs, I only seriously play 1 or 2. The others are mostly there for research and reference material for anything I happen to be writing. If I seriously were trying to play 6 MMOs, I would dip the shotgun barrel in cinnamon oil, to really taste the hot burning death.

I'm currently spending most of my time in EVE and Guild Wars. And by spending time in EVE, I log in when it's time to change skills, until I have time to launch and pew pew some miners. Everything else is just there. I haven't played WoW in about a year, but my kid uses the account to tame dinosaurs in the Barrens, and my brother turned my 60 Warrior into his PvP project character.

There's a difference between actively liking everything out there and trying to understand why they're liked by so many millions of people. Just spewing hate ends conversations, and is, quite frankly, boring as hell.

That doesn't serve as proof that all Family/Raiding/Alliances suck. It does mean you need to go into them both eyes wide open and knowing exactly what's what. My own organization stands as proof that this can work. You just need to blend with the right people. We've already ditched a few guilds in WoW alone (due to them imploding or going Raid-only), but we did that in DAoC and EQ too. We're long past the point, collectively, of expecting consistency, either in our ranks or without. There's the core 20 people and the rest who come and go because they slowly realized we weren't what they thought we were. It happens.

You know, if money was not a factor then I'd have a huge number of subscriptions.  Some just for comedy effect.  Shit, I maintained a subscription to Seed for the duration of its miserable life.  I never tried to make progress in the game in any way, I just logged on to peep the freaks like I was at the circus, and to be as disruptive to the population as possible.  In-character, of course.  I'd scream that we were all doomed, fixing the ship was futile, that sort of thing.  I wonder if I'll be remembered for my accurate prophecies?

Overlord Raph says that spewing hate about a game is a valid part of the game.

Anyway, I am one of these "No Life" people that could (and have in the past) spend all their time in a game.  But I don't because I am no longer willing to make the emotional investment into games.  I believe that before I figured this out, I would continue to play the game well past the point I was no longer having fun. Gradually frustion and anger would rise up until I'd have outbursts rage. At some point I decided this wasn't what I wanted and taught myself how to quit when I stopped having fun.  Guild Wars has been a happy medium for me.  I don't feel compelled to invest myself very much and I can start/quit at my leisure. I am hoping one day there'll be a MMOG that'll be fun past the second month out of the box, so I can invest myself without the fustration.

Why would you blame me? :(

Heh. Thought you were a gimmick for a second there.


Then again, maybe you are.

Not a gimmick.  It is real and it rubs Summon Knight on its skin.

Jesus.  And you tolerated this horseshit for even a minute?  "Benched" in a video game, for fuck's sake.

This is why I've never been in an uberguild. 

I find it odd how people who have spent many hours a week in MMOGs could see a requirement for spending hours a week in an MMOG as a bad thing.

What is often missed in these sorts discussions about "requirements" though is two things:

• It makes everything easier. For every five dozen pickup raids that even hit the first Boss there is one scheduled Raid that clears a dungeon
  
• It makes winning more likely

There's a reason for scheduling, and it's mostly done for consistency. I realize it'd be ideal if everyone who paid a fee had equal access to all content in the game, but nobody's making games that way. It's just about opportunities, and recognizing that everyone is welcome to figure out ways to maximize those.

There are rules beyond those the developers created.

Another thing to keep in mind here is that developers don't just say "this event drops really cool items, let's cockblock our player base on it because we can!".

It's actually (for those games that play this type of design) a quite involved decision making process aimed at correctly preparing timelines for new content based on expected progression of the groups of players the new content is aimed at.

If you let every single player access every single "end game" encounter on a triggered basis on demand, you are going to see 90% of your player base crammed into your latest content, instead of a relatively smooth progression throughout at least the last 2-5 levels of content. To combat that type of trend, you control the influx rate of "inflationary" items so that you can at least aim at keeping your player base both spread out, and "enjoying" (I use that term loosely given the nature if the OP) content that takes many personnel-months to develop more than a few weeks of play.

Sure, in a 100% completely isolated/instanced game like some people here seem to want that wouldn't be a problem--but there aren't any games that have ever been designed completely around that type of scenario, and a vocal miniority aside it hasn't been proven that the market wants it enough to be worth a new design and business model over.

Yes. It's effectively the same payout discussions casinos and the chains behind them have to evaluate.

MMOGs often have more shiny than the Pokies though. Amen for that.

I don't think people are saying that it's a bad thing for everyone - but it's a bad thing for people who don't have a lifestyle that supports it.

I cannot be in a guild that has requirements for raiding.  I just can't do it, my life doesn't permit me.  I have kids that need to be picked up from school, homework to help with, and meals to prepare - the other tasks in my life can be done at odd times, but not those.  I could raid once or twice a week, but which day and what time can't be arbitrarily determined by some raidleader.

I do, however, have many hours to play my mmo of choice - in between laundry loads or telephone calls or balancing bank statements or paying bills or cleaning house or any of the other tasks of daily life that fall to me in our household. 

I raid when I can.  I also don't want to take a spot from a more dedicated guildie; I don't mind sitting.

But to imagine me ever being in a guild with attendance requirements - no, I don't think that's going to happen.  I'm not that dedicated to getting phat lewt.

Oddly enough, I have the same requirements. Heck, some of the folks in my guild are grand parents. But we are all Central and East Coast US (after years of triage, to be sure), so don't do our raiding until 8-9pm EST.

The only reason I mention this is to keep hammering home the core point: the right people can unlock lots of the game. If you're able/willing/interested in building the social network.

Some are fine not doing so. We all have our own limits. As easy as it would be for me to Raid, I find I careen in and out of interest with it. Lately I don't really care. It's mostly because come the expansion, I plan to never again set foot in any zone I've already memorized.

This is completly true.  The guilds to accomodate anyone's schedule are out there if you want to find them.  I'm in a raiding guild that's doing BWL.  We're also made up of mostly 25+ year old folks with jobs/ school/ kids to deal with.  As such we raid Friday and Saturday nights, starting at about 8pm and do Onyxia on Sundays at about 5.  None of these last more than 4- 4 1/2 hours.  For the majority of us it'd be Raid in WoW or watch TV, as it's late in the evening and most of our kids are in bed.

  The biggest requirement we have is that you attend 3 out of 12 raids a month to stay in the guild.  If you or your schedule can't accomodate that, then it's not something you're really interested in doing, is it?  More likely it's just something you want to experience or check-out.

"Omg I have to catass"  is an excuse you're making to feel better about not being willing to find other people with requirements that match yours.  "OMG i have to group" is perhaps more valid, but I still don't understand the grouse about having to group for some things in an online multiplayer game.

Just wondering...

How long has your guild been running? You're on Alleria, right (a launch server, if I recall)? How long did it take to move beyond Molten Core? How far geared are most of your members in BWL gear?

Interesting thread. 

My take:  Nobody ever, EVER, looks back at their life and says, 'I wish I had spent more time playing MMO's.'

I'm wondering, for those in guilds with raiding requirements - if you have a guild member who is a crafter but has a week or month where they can't raid - or just don't want to raid - you kick them out?  Or what?

I'd say more people would do this than those who would say "I wish I had spent more time at the office".

Keep in mind this is the primary social outlet for some people.  What I've read indicates that online socialization is not a oranges-to-oranges replacement for real life, but there are those who wouldn't get ANY if it weren't for MMOGs (severely disabled, physically or socially).

I got sucked into MMO's (UO 8 years ago) because I had no social life anyways.  I was living in a strange new city after college and I had a shitty job at the time, so I had no money to do anything and $10/month for UO was cheap.  I stopped playing for a few years in an attempt to build a better real life, but having failed at that, I started playing a new MMO called DAOC.  Fast forward to WOW...which I quit a year ago.  In the past year of my reintroduction to real life, I got my fat butt into lean, muscular shape, started dressing better, going out more, and made some actual real-life friends.  I have a decent fulltime job and a nice place and area where I live.  Well, my life still sucks and I can't ever seem to get laid no matter what.  So I'm contemplating starting up WOW again when TBC comes out.  Face it(and you know who you are), some of our realities were destined to suck and MMO's are not a bad way out of it. 

Really, when I think of what I would do if I didn't have to work for a living or had millions of dollars...I would probably get a nice pad in Manhattan or somewhere cool like that and play an MMO all day and night.  (In NYC, delivery services for everything ^^)  Oh yeah, my mother would live with me.

I flopped guilds a lot until I found one I liked. - Part of that work to build a social network thing.  I joined the initial guild last September, and we started raiding MC as part of a two-guild alliance back in late March.  We merged with our alliance guild in July and started BWL in early September of this year.   We're regularly DEing loot in MC now, and the biggest problem is getting the rare-for-us stuff to drop so we can complete some folks sets and pickup more T2 legs.

In the once-a-week runs we're already downing Razor regularly, took two weeks to learn Vael and would have downed Broodlord on Friday but ran out of time after finally getting the supression room timing down. (Got him to 24%, wiped and it was 11:30 so we called it.)   As for how geared-out we are, the DKP site says we've only gotten 19 bits of loot and 4 nexus crystals so far.   But given we're still working on the 3rd boss, that's not too terrible.


While we've got the requirement, we won't kick anyone who's active in the guild.  Several folks you wouldn't recognize as being members if you didn't see their names in the DKP site because they play alts when we're not raiding.  Several we won't kick because they're on a lot, and help run coffer runs, or the odd UBRS/ Strath/ Scholo run, etc even tho the way their jobs work out they can't raid with us.   The rule's there just so we can take care of the leeches and avoid their rules-lawyering friends.


Everyone, EVERYONE here throws away time. You're doing it just reading this post. The "nobody ever looks back.." argument is bullshit, based just on that fact alone. 

It also makes the assumption that if you weren't playing an MMO you'd be doing something more productive with your time.  For the vast majority that's just not the case.  People need downtime and decompression, for MMO players that comes from playing MMOs.


Yep, MMOs are my social outlet. Staying at home w/ the kids during the week while the wife goes to work means it's games or TV after their bedtime.  I'd rather do something more with folks I can shoot the shit with around a common interest and have some kind of network of people outside my job.

Yes folks, we have a winner!

I think you made some good points about raids not equaling catassing (though they still require a great deal of time investment anyhow...just more spread out), but you can't be serious here. You speak as if we were all serfs. That real life is generally unproductive anyhow.

Hell, even if we were serfs, I'd still make the argument that downtime in a serf's life is more productive than downtime in a mmo enthusiast's life. As shallow as some things in the real world might be, they're still more productive simply by virtue of being real.

I would think someones idea of what they have enjoyed in their life, and how it meets their goals and expectations and contributes to their level of happiness, would be up to that person to decide.

I've had things that I look back on my life that have been very productive eye opening experiences that have broadened my world. But I do not, and I doubt I will ever, rate them 'above' my time relaxing with a book or playing a game. Whenever I get to that point I stop playing those games or stop reading so much and go do other things.

I quit WoW in Feb 2005 and didn't play again untill Auguest this year. I played it quite a lot before I quit then (about 20 days /played) and I still remember enjoying it. I spent the first 6 months of this year traveling around the world and found it to be very rewarding too. But I got sick of it also and came home.

Please stop trying to make up rules for life, especailly other people's lives. If YOU are unhappy with the way you are leading your own life then do something about it, don't take it out on others and imply they are in the same situation; One person's "productive" is another persons waste of time.

Heh. Again with the "rules".

It has nothing to do with rules. Stop projecting that stupid bullshit on to me. It has nothing to do with telling you what to do or enjoy. If you think that, then that's your own guilt on your head. I don't give a fuck about you enough to make rules for you. I don't even give a fuck about you to make small suggestions.

I'm merely stating that real world recreation, productivity, and cause and effect > just about anything you'll do in a virtual space. It's not a value judgement (unless you think tangibility is a value.....).

How is making objective statments about the 'real' world verus the 'virtual' one not equavialient to defining rules?

Are you daft?

This virtual discussion is obviously stopping you from demonstrating ignorance and stupidity to someone else - Face to FACE! - so I won't keep you any longer.

Thanks.

A more formalised approach to Stray's assertion is developed in Nozick's Experience Machine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Experience_Machine): he uses it to attack hedonism, but it is useful, if not perfectly mappable, onto the idea of the relative values of real or virtual activity.

At the same time, Lamaros has a point in that Stray is going Kant on his ass: introducing universalised maxims about "anything you'll do in a virtual space...".  It's just that Lamaros resorts to "no, you're a big poop" as a rejoinder...

No, I'm saying most Americans are fat and lazy.  Population stats tend to bear this out.

   If you want to argue that if MMOs dissapeared today everyone playing an MMO would be out there curing cancer, building for the homeless, and working out then I don't know what to tell you.  It would take a massive cultural shift for anything like that to happen.  Instead they'd simply find another, likely more passive, way of entertaining themselves.

Beyond that I'd argue that watching TV in reality is hardly more productive than playing a game in virtual reality.. which oddly enough you have to DO in reality.

I find it more productive (read: makes my life better/whatever) to resort to ad hominum when the discussion is becoming cyclical.

That is really well put.

With my personality there is almost nothing I do in moderation - but mmorgps make things worse.  I am not as bad as most folks classified as addicts - but the effects are enough to impact other areas of my life.

To manage this - and in concert with the game - we are focusing more on doing 5 mans than raiding.  Ironically, at 60 on some servers it is just as hard to raid as it is to have a good 5 man group to get esoteric gear.  Thinking 5 mans with my mates may address this more.

Or it is time to return to pen and paper DnD - clearly harder to get into on just any night.

Most MMOG players aren't 65+ and doing the life retrospective thing yet.

     True.  But even right now I can look back at college and high school (neither which was that long ago for me) and wish that I had gone out and socialized more often, instead of staying to play computer games, or watch tv, or reread a book for the fourth time, etc etc. 
     I like MMO's a lot.  Right now I'm still subscribed to EVE just so I can skill change even though I haven't actually PLAYED in two or three months.  But once I recognized what I was using all those things for - an escape from the real world, a way to stay inside my comfort zone instead of risking a little social awkwardness - it all felt like wasted time.  No, not everyone uses these games as an escape, but a lot do, and I don't feel that suggesting that people take the times to think about WHY they're playing these games, and if they wouldn't be happier or better off doing something else, is a bad thing. 

Yes, but then you could have picked up an SSD or inadvertently become a parent or been hit by a bus or ...

Looking back and saying "if only..." is of very limited use, considering that whatever option you could have taken would likely also have resulted in unexpected consequences.

I don't think anyone is saying that you should not even suggest that people think about why they play and whether it's too much.  IMO that is an extremely healthy weekly or even daily thing to do, and not just regarding online gaming. 

The thing I object to is those who, because they got addicted, suggest that everyone who ever sits down at to a MMOG session will become a hopeless addict.  I submit that the addicts are the minority.  It's just that they are more vocal, because no one trumpets "I"m not addicted!" from the rooftops (unless they are, ironically).

When I'm 65+ I'll either be playing golf or computer/console games.  Mostly that will be MMOG's.  Otherwise, I'll be travelling as much as my retirement will allow.

I know I'll wish I had allowed myself more time for recreation.  Some of that recreation time will be on gaming.  I'm a gamer.  That's what I do.

I am with you. Retirement seems like a good time to catass.

I don't get this whole "virtual" has less value than "real" thing. First of all, I don't even know what's real anyway. It's all philosophy and BS, but at the end of the day you're still not left with any answers anyway. You're making an arbitrary judgement call. Based on your statement, someone with the job of web developer is wasting their time, except for the fact that they make a lot of money doing it. So the only value in a web developer's job is the money they get? Their job is to create "virtual" things, therefore it has no value. Same as us here on this website. This website is "virtual" therefore it has less value than say if we were all in a room together in real life just yelling at each other.

Your value judgements on real and virtual are off. You can't judge the value of something based on whether you do it in "real-life" or "virtually". You have to judge based on the merits of what actually goes on with it. As time goes on and our technology increases, the line between real and virtual is getting blurrier and blurrier. You're going to find yourself lost in 10 years when you're yelling at the guy jogging on virtual stairmaster in his virtual workout room that he should go get some excercise in the real world.

Is he actually getting exercise? No amount of running around in Azeroth or on a virtual treadmill will make your heart or your body more efficient and lengthen your lifespan. No amount of raiding will get you the money to pay the rent or loan, buy your groceries, or give you the money to go out and enjoy yourself. No amount of cybersex will actually get you laid (last time I checked, anyway).

So I suppose if your objectives in life aren't living to a decent age and experiencing the good things in life, then yeah virtual things may have more value to you than real things. But to me, that's a pretty miserable existance.

Psst.  "The good things in life" are different for each person. 

I misworded that a bit. My point is that the things people value are different, and to me (and, I suspect, most people in this thread) virtual things are not the central focus in life.

That's fine. I'm not saying you have to value things in WoW equally to real life. But I disagree with not valuing it for what it is. It's a hobby, an enjoyment, something to spend time on. It's not a realistic expectation that people should be "productive" with all their time, or even a majority of their time. It's even worse to say the time spent enjoying yourself in a MMO is worthless and a waste of life. The fact is that humans are better at wasting time than anything else and if you want to judge one specific thing more harshly than all the other BS that people waste time doing I think that's not fair. Whether in a virtual world or a real world, it's all "wasted" time, whatever that means.

Worked for me a few times.  Of course, it has to be the intermediate step, and not the end result.

See, the thing you all are getting hooked on is using Virtual Life to replace real life.  Instead, there's a larger number using it to supplement and expand real life across what would otherwise be boundaries.

If you're that strapped for answers, then all I can say is take comfort in the fact that you don't have to reinvent the wheel.


Except I never said it didn't have value. I said the real world inherently carried more value (not that it hijacked all value) just by virtue of being tangible and real, as well as being the very thing that gives definition to virtuality.

Secondly, my original reply was to Merusk, and his statements alone. My only point was to defend the worth of real world activities and achievements against his statements (as I perceived them). It seemed as if he was writing much of it off. It had nothing to do with totally denigrating virtual activities or making "rules" for anyone.

Some of you have blown this way out of proportion. I'm not the post modern subjectivist some of you appear to be, but I never made this an either/or situation either. I'm opened minded enough to see that perhaps.....Perhaps "cybersex" or "virtual exercise", to take two extreme examples, might have value or some kind of amusing quality to them.....But I'm sure as hell not going to say they're equal to real sex and real exercise. I will call you a fatass who's needs to get laid if it gets to that point.

No one is ever going to look back and wish they had spent more time reading "Catass Everquests himself to death, are these games addictive?!" thread number 2,408,216.

But posting in said thread. Ahh, what a life to lead.

Why does everyone around here seem to be so obsessed with getting 'laid'?

I would assume that cybersex and real sex are what we commonly call "different things" and thus while they share some common ground are not to be compared directly. Which seems to be what Stray said.. except then he said that real sex was better than cybersex...

But yeah. Exercise (including epic sex) > Running around the Barrens.

Yes, they are "different". Lets just agree on that. ;)

Look, I don't want to go into details here, but I've managed to do some field research and, frankly, it is.  Way better.  Call me subjective, I know, but copping off with a night-elf in the Deeprun tram while a dwarf goes "Yar Yar Hump Hump" in the background (http://www.outofmana.com/index.php?itemid=4&catid=1) just doesn't compare, even with the closest possible experience, which I admit would probably involve getting off with a girl with foot-long eyebrows in a metro tunnel while an alchoholic throws a torrent of abusive criticism from the platform.

In real life, STDs are BoP.

:|

You're joking...right?

Yeah, but most of them have a dupe bug that allows you to pass them along to other people in your group.

Finding a group is also a real pain in the ass. Hell, finding any group is tough. We need to work on better LFG tools.

The best LFG tools in the world still won't effectively filter idiots.

That is why I have reversed my personal feelings about mmo naming policy over the years. While they may break immersion, I want idiots to have dumb names as a self-selecting filter. Sorry, S00p3r MaNG, I won't group witchoo.

Exactly :)

Otherwise, LFG tools don't solve the problems. They're a small part. Transport tools and downtime tools, sheer zone size and respawning wandering mobs, those elements need to be addressed as well.

About?

If you think I was equating cybersex and sex on some level (of productivity/enjoyment) you need to read again my friend. I was just being a bit of a philosophical pedant.

Why, I even say on the very next line that sex and exercise hold far greater value for me than activities in a MMO...

I'm surprised you typed that sentence. At all.

Hmm. Meet the warbiker (http://www.joystiq.com/2006/10/31/the-wow-diet-41-lbs-in-90-days/).

I could use one of those setups.  The worst part of exercise for me is that tedium. Listening to podcasts helps but not enough.  My gym has CNN on the TV, which I can watch for 15 minutes before it starts repeating itself.  Playing WoW while on the elliptical though, now that would be cool.  I'd stay 4x as long on that thing easy.

I've had that idea before, and if I had the right bike/ elliptical for it I'd have done it a while ago.  It's how I watch TV as it is, since the bike is in my bedroom.   Problem is I play games more than I watch TV.  Hrm.. perhaps I should just give-up on Computer games entirely and go for consoles.  That'd be an easier setup.

I've seen project managers lynched for less biznospeak than this boy. I sure hope you can run fast.

In that contingency he would leverage his existing bipedal resources to ramp up velocity.

I haven't had a job in ten years and despise biznospeak.  I had no trouble comprehending the sentence; it's not bad at all.

Time to play  Buzzword Bingo. (http://www.lurkertech.com/chris/bingo/)

Dilbert Mission Statement Generator (http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/games/career/bin/ms.cgi) for the win!

Business speak gets a bad rap because some idiots learn the lingo and use it to obscure concepts. In the hands of people who know what they hell they're talking about, they express important concepts that generally need to be addressed.

And that was pretty easily readable. I don't bring out the whup-ass stick for bizspeak until they start "levering synergies" and shit. Stick to timetables, milestones, deliverables, customer requirements, and things like cost/benefit analysis and you're fine.

I'm impressed that you didn't type "leveraging synergies". That tends to be the actual business speak.

Leverage is traditionally a noun, meaning the effect you get from using a lever. The correct verb for creating leverage is "to lever", not "to leverage". The correct use of the word is really "levering our existing resources", not "leveraging our existing resources". As far as I'm aware, until ignorant people started copying "to leverage" from each other in the 1990s in an attempt to look smart, there was no such word. Besides, anyone who says "we will leverage our existing resources" instead of "we'll use what we've got" is being unclear.

That's it. Boys, get me a yellow memo pad, a silk tie, a jar of honey, an 11 million fire ants.

P.S. Who said anything about it not being readable? It's the principal of the thing damn you!

What bothers me most about business speak is that it generally presents 'concepts' with very little thoughts as to how the work is going to get done.

"Levering resources" more often than not means "Lets overwork the poor schmucks some more" or "let's sacrifice quality for quantity" or some other bad business decision all made acceptable by using the aformentioned business lingo euphamisms.

Let's not kid ourselves; the language was largely created to let CEOs sleep better at night.

I've always suspected that it's used to make people who know they're not that smart seem brighter.  It's just the same with other areas who harbour inferiority complexes: critical theory is used in the arts to make simple and obvious (and - often - wrong) things sound complicated and clever.  Why else talk about "aggressively anthropomorphisised figurative representations" when you could say "cartoon animals"?

So at G8 Summit meetings, who is less bright: All the diplomats and UN representatives spouting their equivalent forms of politico-diplo-speak? Or Bush, who decided that greeting the Prime Minister of England with "Yo! Blair!" and giving the German chancellor a backrub were good ideas?

---

Zepp's sentence wouldn't have seemed so bad if he had only slimmed it down a bit.

Good analogy. If you look at modern English departments at major universities they are mostly overrun by these people that strive to "complexify" simple concepts. I've seen professors tell grad students straight out they need to make their thing sound more complex by obfuscating it.

For a kick try reading some academic feminist literary theory sometime. I randomly picked up a book of that junk that was sitting in a classroom, it was hilarious. In one essay the author spent the first 5 pages redefining existing terms, making up new terms, then using them inconsistently the rest of the way. A lot of paragraphs were seriously 50% made up words.

My limited experience with this type of language is that it attracts those who have a sense of linguistic inferiority. My boss, for instance, is very undereducated in English. She's barely passable as a 9th grader in terms of writing an informal email, replete with dyslexic misspellings, missing verbs, etc.

However, she's been in IT management for 15 years, and boy, she can write a mean mission statement, technology plan document, etc. It's nearly as if at some point in her life she learned an entire subculture's language in the same way someone learns Perl scripting. She knows what words to tack together with the internal logic of a demented German 8 noun word. It's a skill to read her documentation, let alone understand it.

If  you have a preponderance of catch phrases and buzzwords, upper management thinks you're a serious business person with an eye towards efficiency and the bottom line. Lets just not bring up the ugly fact that when I got hired, all 60+ workstations had viruses, our bank server had so much dust in it that upon opening it, it acted like an impromptu catholic censer and we were running our main data server on a Dimension home desktop x800 from 1999. She had a 26 page Technology Plan!

I believe this thread has undergone a paradigm shift.

/I'm sorry.

Kind of like an MBA: More words with neither context or thought!!

I attribute this to self-esteem issues.  There are many brilliant people in the arts and business that still feel they don't get the credibility that they deserve do to tired old hierarchical systems.  I think they'd be better served riding the merits of their work rather than trying to embellish it with language.

This thread reminds me of when I had to write a booklet to explain the use of our new drafting system a few employers ago.  You all have seen my postings and conversational style, my writing isn't too much farther from that.  I was rudely awakened to the fact that most folks have - at best- a 9th grade reading level.   Words with more than 2 syllables and complete sentences seem give people headaches.

I think you missed the point.  You can either choose to call a pencil a "pencil" or you can call it a "meticulously honed, graphite-tipped calligraphic device".  I don't think anyone really minds the use of large words when it's appropriate to do so. It's using large words to show that you can use them rather than because the use of the large words was required that causes the rub.   

You should write any documentation or press releases, anything for general consumption, at an 8th-grade level. That's what I've always been told.

I have no idea what an 8th grade level is these days.

What grade was that sentence?

8th grade level would be something akin to:

OMG wtf r u?  any1 no?

That's what I remember from my tech writing classes. It's not just "Managers are dumb" but because if you're writing at that level, you're less likely to make invalid assumptions about what your readers know. I can't count the number of shitty-ass documents floating around here that are only readable if you already know what they say, because half the fucking document is acronyms that are never defined.

For the same reason, I always write a Janet-and-John level "executive summary".  It's not just that it's the bit that will get read (allowing me to hedge freely with caveats within).  It's the fact that, if I can write a three-paragraph summary of a proposal, then I am more confident that I truly understand it myself.

I wrote an internal memo on web services (and why we should pitch them as a solution to a specific interface problem between us and another contractor who doesn't want to give up access to his OH SO FUCKING PRECIOUS DB). I then got asked to "summarize" it for our customers, then got asked for a "quick two sentence explanation".

I went with: "It's a much faster and more compact way to serve information over the web.". I dread the day I have to explain the difference between HTML and XML. "One describes how to display data and the other descibes data" is not something that's going to go over well.

My take on the social reason why "business speak" prolifer... ahh, spreads is as follows; A simpleton at or near the top pays someone smart to explain something to him/tell him what to do.  During one of those sessions, the smart person uses jargon as part of the explanation that has a certain pinache... er, sound or meter, to it that the simpleton likes.

The simpleton then repeats the phrase, occasionally not in the right context.  The herd that wants his/her favor immediately takes up that catch phrase to prove their loyalty and that they "get it".  From this fruit is "leverage", "synergize", etc born.