Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft 

A few years ago, around Cata, I was teaching a new gamer (she'd never played anything but solitaire) how to play Wow. They asked me about doing dungeons and I warned them off that people would be rude and inpatient. She was still learning to use WASD without looking at the keyboard. So we agreed she would join but I would take over if things got rough. This group... like.. "oh, you are new? We we shall sit here while you grab loot, just tell us when you are ready for the next room." Nicest players I'd EVER met. Wish there had been more.

I relate to this so hard just playing Stardew with my family. One brother maximizes and optimizes absolutely everything, aiming to unlock things as soon as possible. Meanwhile our cousin just makes his character look like Luigi and walks around eating sap.

Feels relevant: Countless years ago, in the earliest days of Vanilla WoW, I'm just poking around somewhat aimlessly killing Troggs for a quest that was taking just forever, and some wandering Warrior I don't know suggests we party up and kill them faster. All well and good, but then he tells me, "You take Aggro." So I ask him, "What's Aggro mean?" I had never heard the word before--never played an MMO before, in fact. He was totally incredulous, but after some prodding he explained the meaning of the term and why it made sense for me to do it, which it did; we killed some bad guys, finished out the quest, and all was well. Or so I thought. Literally YEARS later there's a thread on Blizzard's WoW forum asking what's the worst party you've ever been in in the game, and sure enough, some Warrior stops long enough to pipe in, "Oh man, I met a Paladin once who didn't even know what Aggro was." They're going to carve this on my tombstone, just you wait and see.

I played wow when I was little on the family computer. I played in what I called "single player mode" I turned off the chat box and I would spend hours exploring the maps, doing fetch quests for npcs, and selling pelts from low-level animals I killed. It was great! I didn't know what guilds were and I leveled up very slowly. WoW has some really cool areas to check out! The games pretty fun when you don't know what people are saying.

My college friends and I still laugh about back in 2005 when a guy in our dorm kept looting during fights in wailing caverns. And he would actively deny it. Then during a fight the game lagged real hard and everyone was stuck moving around in whatever animation they were stuck in. Zach was stuck in the loot animation. He still denied it. 😂

As the original author of WeakAuras, I never expected it to become such a pervasive (and perhaps controversial) piece of paratext in relation to WoW.

it's really cool that Dan has started making hours-long documentaries SPECIFICALLY for me, I appreciate that.

In Guild Wars 1 there was a tutorial world, which was a completely different instance from the main game to which you could not return to once leaving. To get the best armor in this tutorial - which was somewhat useful in the main game - you needed to farm x items from two different enemies. I’ve put 100+ hours into Guild Wars, 99% in the main game, but the best memory I have from all that time is when I created a character named „Tutorial Merchant“, farmed those two mob items and then sold it to other players for very little gold, gold that I had no use for, because I already had the best tutorial equipment. Whenever I sold out, I ran into the woods again, farmed, got back into town again and announced my goods to the travellers. Most people were really appreciative. Some were on their Xth character and just wanted to get the tutorial over with. Others were new players and I like to think I added just that much to their wondrous experience with my small nonsensical business. Great memory for me.

As someone who has never played WoW, my biggest takeaway from this vid is "wait, it's not SUPPOSED to look like that?"

That line “Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game” is painfully relevant in MMO style games. I remember when Black Spindle came out in Destiny you couldn't get into raids without it. Almost every LFG group demanded you have Black Spindle with specific rolls or you'd be denied entry. Never mind the fact that the raids had been completed countless times before the weapon even existed. If it wasn't "optimal," it wasn't acceptable.

This really hit me hard as a disabled gamer. I always feel like I can't really join any kind of game related community because so much are focused on optimizing everything, and my body just can't keep up. No matter how many videos I watch I'll never be as optimal as an able bodied player who doesn't struggle to use a keyboard. If I join a guild that wants to focus on being the best then I'll always hold them back. It's really depressing because that's also how I tend to get treated for my disability anyway. I can't even escape being judged for my physical ability in a completely virtual environment. It's really awful how isolating it is. I really just wish there were more spaces where I wasn't judged on my abilities in some way.

one of my closest friends i've ever had played like that barefoot gnome at the start, only he refused to cave. i love that guy and he played the game HIS way until everyone else got tired of the game like 7 years in. he told me later it was because he hated Warcraft a lot, but loved spending time with us, so he made the game fun for himself. it made us all feel terrible because we never considered if he enjoyed the "correct" way of playing WoW

"worlds become real when we care about them, not when they look similar to our own." gonna go find a window to stare out of for the next 500 years. this month has been so good for the longform videos, but i am also so incredibly full of big existential thoughts

As a blind gamer, I was glad to hear the world of opportunity opened up by addons for people with disabities get a mention. I have struggled to find playable games, struggled to play those games, and struggled with feelings of isolation and rejection as I continually try and fail to contribute in multiplayer games. The one and only game I have ever found where I didn't constantly feel like I was letting the team down was World of Warcraft. I don't play anymore, but bigwigs voice and weakauras weren''t simply ways I used to enhance my play, they were the sole reason I was able to play at all. Not only did they enable me to enjoy the game, they also enabled me to play at a decently high level. I've cleared Mythic raids and got KSM several times. In a world which is at best difficult, and at worst actively hostile, the feeling of triumph I got from being able to contribute productively to my team's success cannot be understated. It's nice to know I'm not the only one.

In Vanilla I rolled a Tauren Druid, purely because he looked and sounded cool. I knew nothing about classes and roles, the meta etc. I knew nothing about playing optimally (or even somewhat decently probably) and would form an early version of a hybrid druid purely by accident. I'd get asked if I could tank, I'd look at my kit and be like "Yeah it's possible", and it would go poorly. I'd be asked to heal, see that I have healing spells, and it would go poorly. After that, I eventually just started collecting rare things. Miscellaneous items, critters, objects that have literally no value, weapons, anything that even sounded fun. I made so many bank alts, dressed them up like pimps, then just started playing to make gold from buying, selling, and farming. I literally didn't care to raid or even dungeon unless there was a cool item. I became a merchant and in my mind I won.

I'm reminded of the incident that first made me quit WoW altogether (as in not just "taking a break" but intending to never play again). It started as something of an instrumental play bullying thing-I was the only melee, a rogue, in an heroic Lost City of Tol'vir run with 4 guildmates. Not my guildmates, unfortunately: the other four were all in the same guild, I was the odd man out. So after the first boss is done, they start making fun of how bad my DPS is, way below the other two, almost in range of the tank's damage output. I briefly explain the first boss is considerably less melee-friendly so of course the ranged DPS will shine, they're not having it, so fine, I stop talking to them and we move on. We get to the second boss. I end up a good 10% ahead of either of them. I don't tease them about it; I just link the meter results. We get to the third boss. I'm even farther ahead of the other DPS. I don't even bother linking the meter, because they all shut up about it after the second boss anyway, I figure I made my point and don't need to rub it in. And as I'm headed toward the entrance to the last boss's area... I get kicked. No warning, no discussion, just poofed out of the group. See, the boss of that heroic had really nice agility drops-it was why I was running it in the first place, to get some upgrades for the rogue-in particular a really good agility-stacking trinket. And they didn't want me in the party to compete for that drop with their hunter. So they kicked me, which meant I was locked to an instance that only had one boss left in it for the day, which meant I was unlikely to be able to find a group willing to join that instance only to kill the last boss while missing out on the first three. They didn't just screw me out of a chance at the loot for that run, they'd effectively scrapped my ability to finish that run at all that day. I logged out and uninstalled. Who needs a community like that in their recreation time?

Hearing someone speak up for healers getting starved for gear warms my heart

56:00 is a really interesting point. My small guild did the same back in 2009. Outside sources were discouraged. We banned reading WoWhead. Theorycrafting was right out. We wanted to experience the game and encounters organically, and it made everything harder but more satisfying. After a couple months we got good at it. We started "solving" dungeons and bosses faster. We felt good. Then we noticed that Brian was always the first one to "remember" a boss' big attack and "anticipate" a movement or a mob spawn. He was always the first to crack a strategy. Once we started looking for it, we saw that Loren almost always had the right element enchanted on his weapon the first time we fought a boss, and Jon was exact to the tenth of a second with his threat generation. I got called out for my Tankadin's rotation being a macro when someone heard my bag of chips crinkling over VoIP. We were all lying.

i will never forget putting this on as bed time noise and getting woken up by 21:36 with a genuine feeling of being confused and under attack

You verbalised and researched a feeling I've had for a long time that has caused me problems in multiplayer games; I don't want to spend time calculating the mathematically optimal way for me to walk in a straight line, I don't want to practice my mousework every day to the point I give myself hand tremors, I just want to enjoy the game and enjoy getting better. That's part of the reason why I enjoy games like TF2 and Overwatch because the casual modes enable goofy behaviour and I can just stay there. You get people who take it too seriously, but it doesn't really matter in the game.

hbomberguy, jenny, defuctland, and now folding ideas giving us hours long videos about stuff most of us weren't previously interested in but the execution is so good that it makes us invested. i cant wait to watch this!

I played WoW for 10 years, starting with the end of BC/beginning of Wrath. I'd found a great community of friends, people I thought I'd want to experience the game with for the rest of its life. It's a bit sad and maybe pathetic to say now but I found someone I had loved through WoW. I'd started and built a raiding guild with my friends and my girlfriend, I'd been one of the raid leaders and the main tank for our raids for years. Then when my job meant I couldn't play as much as the others, I get ONE item level behind some other guy and I'm replaced as tank, told I don't have enough gear to join as DPS, and that I could come back when I had better gear. How? When my one source of improving in the "numbers" game, playing with my friends, had been taken from me? I would eventually stop talking to all of them over time and decided to just play the game for myself, leaving the guild I had helped build from the ground up and experiencing what content I could on my own. It was really sad for me, having spent about ten years playing this game and all these characters and helping shape a small community. It worsened the depression I had already suffered from to play like this, knowing what I was leaving behind (or rather, what I felt had been stripped from me) and playing alone, and I eventually stopped playing altogether at some point during BFA. I know some people like the numbers part of the game, making sure everything is completely and 100% optimized to make the most of each click. But, for me, this video puts into words everything wrong with the game I've never been able to put into words myself. It's a combination of nostalgic, cathartic, sad, and reassuring to watch this video. Thank you, Dan.

The irony of being called a tourist in a game you’ve played since 2005 because you didn’t take classic seriously is rich

I work as an agricultural extension officer and holy shit, the similarity between the problems outlined here and the problems surrounding adoption of best practice in the agricultural industry are mind blowing. Truly, this video is just shining a light on human nature

Literally just finished the contrapaneur video and was like 'ah well. 4 months until the next one' and then this came up!! My excitement is immeasurable

Thank you for verbalising why I never got into WoW. You get absolute freedom to run around in an interesting fantasy world and players made it an office job with spreadsheets.

I have 16000 hours played in this game. Having that entire portion of my life so expertly outlined, rationalized, discussed, contemplated, and articulated by someone else like this is... fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable.

I feel like a lot of people are missing the point here. The point isn't that instrumental play or number crunchy min max players are bad, but that the way many multiplayer game communities force less crunchy players into this way of play sucks ass

"Each video represents a brick in an echo chamber that carries a subtle yet deafening resonance" is a hell of a line

I think there is another idioculture that is often overlooked - and it's the one I belong to: The solo background players. People just doing some quests and maybe some random dungeons. We are basically the player-controlled "NPCs" you see questing in the overworld, roaming the old world, or filling out the heroic dungeon queue

In Disney's Toontown Online, the playerbase developed a very specific strategy for getting through high-level Cog facilities as fast as possible, mostly based around the Sound Gag Track; Sound Gags are low-damage Gags (weapons) that hit all enemies, and you get a pretty substantial damage boost if multiple Toons use Sound on the same turn. Now, I was a very young child (like, 5 or 6 when I started out) when I created my main Toon, and I built her without the Sound Track (Toons could have all but one Gag Track; I think most people went without Trap, it has the highest damage but needs to be used in conjunction with Lure, so most considered it too risky to be worth it). All this culminated in me regularly being denied entrance to HQ Boss Battles (raids) for being "Soundless", despite having almost maxed out Gags and Laff (health, but also basically equivalent to character level) otherwise. It's funny to think about it now, but back then as a little kid, it really felt like I was being bullied by everyone, especially since I named my Toon after myself.

The “stand here and do what you are told” aspect of raids is what made me stay away from them. I mean, why would I trade the freedom of doing what I want on Friday evenings to get, over a period of months, slightly better items where I would get to stand somewhere different and do what I was told.

Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.

In Mario Kart, while I was hugging curves and defending my lead my son decided to ram his kart in front of a stage full of Koompas dancing, throw down the controller, jump up, shake his ass shouting "Woo Hoo! Yeah! Let's Party!". I've never been more pwnd in my whole life. Not only was I playing THIS game incorrectly, I was playing EVERY game incorrectly. GG son.

As an anthropologist who's been trying to convince academia of the relevance and importance of 'virtual' worlds this video is so cool. It's satisfying but also a little bit sad how we all have only a handful of references that we circle around.

I think this might be one of the best video explanations of how “toxic” behavior and development of gameplay changes over the years. Amazing knowledge bomb

I once saw someone(a much worse player at the game in question than me, if that matters) say, "if you're this terrible at the game then you're obviously not ready to play online." My immediate impulse was to turn it around on him. If someone is unprepared or unwilling to encounter a playerbase full of all levels of skill, all sorts of priorities and playstyles, etc, then they are mentally and emotionally unprepared for online play. My belief is that, in a very real way, someone who can't cope with another player not equipping boots is a far worse player than the no-boots guy could ever be. EDIT: To be clear I'm mostly just talking about people who get, like, ANGRY angry or pitch a fit and make their frustration everyone's problem. I'm pointing more to a lack of social skills and emotional regulation, rather than simple disapproval and exclusion

That story about Moistrainbow getting shit for not maxing out his keys hits home as someone who raided somewhat seriously for years when I was younger. I was in guilds where me and friends would be much higher on meters than other players, but we would get shit for not min-maxing our gear, or using a different set of talents than what the “meta” was from the top rated guilds or not playing as much or whatever. It always bothered me that the other members seemed to care more about following what the big boys were doing and following some “meta” or “rules”, and less than the actual results. Yes, I did not run dungeons every hour of every week, and sometimes I would forget flasks or food buffs and sometimes I would prefer non-meta talents or non-BiS gear pieces or whatever. But if I’m #3 on the DPS meter and everyone below me didn’t forget that stuff, is me not following the “meta” or the “rules” really the problem here? It really bothered some officers than I just did not care to sim craft every piece of gear I got. I knew what stats I needed, and had enough of an understanding of the mechanics to know which piece would generally be better. If it was something like a side grade that might give me an extra 0.5% more dps, I didn’t care. I’d just use whatever I think would be better. Always pissed me off that they would give me shit for this when I would kick their ass on meters without doing any of the simcraft bullshit. Famously, one of my friends, Jelly did not use a boss mod. He literally refused to tell anyone in the guild this, because he assumed they would just boot him. Jelly was a fucking savant at his class. This man was parsing like 98 percentile *consistently* but he just didn’t need a boss mod and didn’t want one. Eventually one of the officers learned that he didn’t have one and gave him shit, but he was #1 on the meters in every single fight, so they couldn’t exactly just boot him. Hope he’s still out there kicking ass and not giving a shit.

I was one of those in 2004/5 who stuck to my pirate aesthetic and refused to wear any helm other than an eye patch or any shoulder armor at all. And I was one of those who put that beloved character on the shelf for the next 5 years I played to instead play a character with no fixed aesthetic so I wouldn't feel like I was holding back my friends when I spent time with them in dungeons and raids. Thank you for the video. It brought back a lot of feelings, and a whole new wave of gratitude that I got out when I did.

Nothing says "death to fun" quite like turning an adventure game into an office job. I joined a guild 6 months into WoW, and quit the entire genre about 3 months later. Sorry, i just wanted to have fun.

When I first played WoW - with the 2 week free trial - you want to know what I did in that second week, once the limitation began to press in? I ran. I ran from Dun Morogh to Booty Bay, then from Ratchet to Thousand Needles, a mid-teens Dwarf Hunter dying over and over and over and over just to see what was over the next hill. I knew my time was limited and I wanted to see as much of the world as I could. And I fell in love with wow through that experience, but after I had the game the deeper I got and the more I played with others the less welcome I felt until I eventually left.

I remember when I specced endless rage on my warrior even though 'the math was bad' as far as using up a talent point on something that on paper didn't pay off for the cost. Thing is, I was using it to make other players panic and make mistakes with all that coming down on them. It wasn't anything you could point to on a spread sheet, it was a psychological terror tactic. I was eventually justified learning that some Korean arena players certainly DID spec ER for the same purpose.

I stopped playing WoW because I like being bad at it. Everyone was always harassing me to get my character to max level so I could raid with them, but I was enjoying exploring and soloing dungeons and collecting pets. I tried playing fully solo without a guild, but that was lonely.

My friend and I were listening to this and when we got to the discussion about object-oriented ontology my friend stopped the video and said; "Do you think that 'cognitive load' is what mindflayers call it when they nut?" I am completely speechless.

"Worlds become real when we care about them, not when they look similar to our own." That's a line that's going to stick with me for years to come. Thank you for this fantastic analysis; I really value the clear love you have for the game despite and sometimes even BECAUSE of all the messiness of optimization it pushes us to. I think there's genuinely a lot of value in WoW's community, but it's crucial to take a step back and identify when the numbers get warped into being an end in and of themselves, rather than a tool along the way.

this truly has been a blessed month for long-form content

A lot of this articulated my fundamental problem with MMORPGs. Their primary, unique selling point is their persistent shared worlds, but the most hardcore players-the ones who often have the most influence with the developers-play by blowing past all of that as fast as possible so they can get to repetitive instanced content. What the community of nearly every MMO tells new players is, essentially, “all of that open world stuff is a chore you have to get through as fast as possible so you can reach the *real* game, which is nothing like an MMORPG.”

Imagine turning a videogame into a workflow

there is an adage in skateboarding that the best skater at a park is the one having the most fun. I play Old School RuneScape and this quote helped me stop worrying so much about efficiency and achievements but focus on actually enjoying the time I spend logged in.

This really nails how much I loved MMOs as a 12 year old kid getting lost in EverQuest, not having a clue about anything. I remember my best friend and I hearing about another place and actually asking for directions. We set off from kelethin, a tiny piece of the game. But all we ever knew to they point and made our way across the butcherblock mountains. Past a dwarf city and an ocean by boat to Freeport. Which blew our minds. Then how I was ok with it as a teenager playing EQ, while being aware of things like Alakazam. But the magic was gone. I wasn't discovering things anymore, I was looking up known information. The mystical world of EverQuest turned into perfect maps. The wonder of the monsters found turned into timed and patterned spawn points. The thrill of getting that sudden rare drop off that one creature that's got a different name or skin than the others, replaced by a probability table. There was still fun to be had, we crossed the entire game world with level 1 characters one time. My fun no longer came from the explicit systems of the game, I had to make my own. By the time I migrated to WoW with my friends, this was how virtually everyone we knew played. There never was the thrill of discovery, just the satisfaction of efficiency. I enjoyed wow, but never in the way 12 year old me was enthralled by ew, at no fault of Blizzard, it was all how I interacted with their great game world. I am unsure if I chose to kill the magic or of games moved past it and I was long for the ride. But this is the reason I never really went back to MMOs after a while despite trying many of them. It's the constant engineering the fun out of the amazing virtual worlds. When all the magic is data and I am conscious of all of this knowable data. I will inevitably choose to know the data, instead of feel the magic. Single player games don't have the same social pressure of optimisation and it's easy for me to do a "discovery run" before choosing to optimize the crap out of a game. I think I would love an MMO style game that would be effectively uncatalogable. Something that "cataclysm-ed" itself in short intervals, but the degree of content generation needed for they would likely have a lot of knock on effects and might not result in the best game.

1:17:53 "And with all of this established, we can finally say the quiet part out loud: players make world of warcraft look fucking ugly." GOD JESUS YES THANK YOU

This is something that actually puts me off games, but not for the reason you'd expect. I'm a very instrumental player, I have a long term goal and I like to optimise for it as much as possible. However that actually puts me off playing a lot of games that encourage that behaviour, because I find it super overwhelming. Instead I'd much rather do that in smaller games not designed for that optimisation, where the act of optimising feels like a departure from the game, and a whole new horizon, not the intended result. I think of this when me and my friend play PlateUp. I love to optimise the placement and automation, being very careful about making the most of the least number of items, ensuring to prep things in advance to get the best number of conveyors, desks etc. However he is very much the opposite, he loves when the cosmetic rounds come about because he can plan how he wants the restaurant to look, he spends time at the beginning coming up with a fun name. One obvious example is the meat fridge: it has roughly a 2/3rds hitbox, whereas most items have a 1 square hitbox. What this means is that when the fridge is facing the correct "aesthetic" way i.e. the door is towards the player, there's a common risk of getting caught on the object next to it when walking away with the item, which could genuinely end a run later on. The optimal solution is one I do without question: reverse the fridge. Due to it's orientation, the back of the fridge is perfectly aligned with the border, meaning that this issue doesn't happen. However he would prefer to having it the door round, because even though it can actively hinder the ability to cook the meal, it looks better, and immerses more as it fits his aesthetic. And I've actually come to realise that us being opposed like this is why we love playing games together so much. If we play a game together, he love to handle the aesthetic stuff that I don't care for, and I love to optimise the technological stuff he doesn't care for. Another example is in Modded Minecraft, when we played a server of mods I put together, I built a nuclear reactor, I put together all the machines to power the base, create items, further "progression" etc. He put together a cool looking base for us, plus handled all the food requirements and had an amazing time working with magic, bees and farms. It worked together perfectly, cause I could show him what I've been working on and give him something that makes his life easier, then he can show me his ideas for our space base, for our warehouse etc, and I can work my functional parts around the cool designs he has. It's just a perfect synergy between our opposing play styles!

I would prefer not to get called out like that.

Folding Ideas turning into Secret Base. The crossover I was always hoping for, but never knew I needed it

My girlfriend is actually the sole SIMC dev for the warlock class, and the first thing she said when I linked the video was "oh man, I hope my work isn't pilloried in here" and its funny because you explicitely used the warlock sims, and when I brought that up she was really worried. I'm glad you didn't lambast the people who do spend the time to work on the functionality that everyone uses, and instead focused on the people who focus so much *on* those things, because the people who actually dev for stuff like SIMC are very often the ones chased down with pitchforks and torches when discussion on these sorts of topics are done.

The interesting problem here is not people that optimize the game. The problem is when it becomes part of the Zeitgeist, and is then enforced on the players through shame, yelling, etc.

I have had two main experiences with WoW. The first was as a young kid who couldn't get a subscription, so I could only try out the free demo, and the second was in college trying to play with friends who were veteran players. When I was young, I wasn't any good at the demo, but I still felt a huge amount of wonder at all of the cool stuff you could get and explore, and I wished I could have played more. In college when I tried to play with my friends, they told me to use the max level boost, pick a healer since it would let us get into dungeons easier, and had me run through the first quests needed to play the first dungeon. I felt like I couldn't even stop to read the quest giver's text, and I only ended up playing a couple of days.

This is vidicating to watch. I played WoW a bunch in highschool. I was "bad" at it, but enjoyed it well enough. I ended up questing solo most of the time since most group play had this dynamic, which does seem antithetical to the whole MMO concept, so, felt like kinda a shame. The most fun I had was self-directed. Sneaking as a Horde rogue into Alliance early zones and steathily helping low-level Alliance players meet their questing goals. They cannot talk to me, so they couldn't tell me my DPS sucked.

I forgot the name of your channel and was trying at some point to find it back by searching phrases like "angry man critics suicide squad editing while drinking booze" with no success. I am so happy that the algorithm brought you to me once again with an astounding work about my favorite game. cheers

I love that first quote. It's kind of sad that developers set out to create deep interlocking systems that are beautifully hidden under the art and graphics of a game, and then players take that and reduce it back down into numbers and code.

HONEY THE NEW FOLDING IDEAS DROPPED!

I think another aspect about paratext in WoW is that it's made WoW exceptionally hard for anyone to get into. It's decades of systems and hundreds of thousands of videos and guides built upon each other where each iteration makes the previous version entirely absolute. For example, I started WoW on Legion after my friend encouraged me to try it. In fact, it was my first MMO. And at the time, Legion had a level cap of 120 and when you make a new character it just throws you into the deep end. Suddenly, I had dozens of options on my rogue and none of them made sense. My only tutorial was on how to auto-attack. I tried to look at a guide but they all assumed you were familiar with the previous system in Warlords and you mostly just needed a refresher. And wherever I tried to turn to for advice... people just had a hard time explaining it because they've engaged with the system for a decade. It took months for anyone to even think of explaining keybindings to me, let alone proper rotations and raid load outs. This even happens in the same expansion. I had to quit at the beginning of Legion since I was moving and when I came back at the end of the expansion I had to tredge through so many old systems that I had to wonder what the point of any them was. Like I had to spend a good week getting mana for the Nightbournes before getting supplies for the Lightforge then getting materials for my Artifact weapons or spending gold on my Order Hall. I was just doing them because I had to. This also goes for the narrative too. Legion was the culmination of a lot of storylines in Legion and Legion refuses to really explain any of it. It was only after I played Warcraft 3 some 5 years later that any of it really made sense to me. Who was Varian? Sylvannas? Sargeras? Archimonde? The Burning Legion? WoW just assumes you know. And even if you don't know, WoW just assumes you'll find out eventually through the community. And the resources the community points you to are exasperating long videos by people like Nobbel who, imo, gets the story together but has a hard time contexualizing the importance of any it, at least compared to likes of Platinium WoW. It was even worse in Shadowlands where it felt like the story demanded you watch lore videos to understand anything happening.

As a "Wallace" type WoW player, I really appreciated this. I'm perfectly content to just play the game solo, at my own pace, working on achievements that sound fun, exploring and casually leveling through zones, and just sort of "vibing" throughout Azeroth. Thanks, Dan!

This video expresses something I've been feeling for years. The competitive nature of games and most players' numerical approach to them removes all the joy from entering a new world and discovering it on my own or other players. The unimaginative and dry way the majority of gamers interact with games has turned me of gaming almost completely. And I used to love it.

Well we now know why there was such a long time between "Line Goes Up" and "Contrepreneurs" Dan was working on at least two major videos at the same time.

I was playing SWTOR years ago and stepped away to refill my drink while a cut scene played during what was effectively a dungeon raid and came back to the others screaming at me for not skipping the cut scene. That was my breaking point where I was like "This isn't fun anymore. I'm done." Went back to just single-player games and never looked back.

This is why I love tf2 so much. Once a game is effectively dead everyone changes their focus onto emotional success rather than clinical success and I fucking love it.

I bumble about in FFXIV just enjoying the music and scenery. Multiplayer dungeon thingies seemed scary but I found them really enjoyable once I realized there was a lot of room for mistakes and most people were accomodating of sprouts like me who like watching cutscenes for the first time.

I still remember the first time I realized that the community was going to kill Classic WoW. I was playing some AV on the Alliance side, and for once, we were winning. People in chat were complaining about this, actively encouraging us to lose and do worse so they could continue farming honor. When we got pushed back towards Dun Baldar, the people in the chat were celebrating the game going into an unfun, endless grind between the two armies. They weren't playing for fun. They weren't playing to win. They were playing to lose in a slow, unfun, unengaging way, simply because it was the ideal way to farm honor. I unironically, genuinely, cannot understand why'd you want to waste your time on Earth doing that. Deliberately losing at a game over the course of hours, just to get marginally more honor than you would by playing seriously and actually having fun.

I think the coming together of people online reminded us all very quickly why we didn't want to interact with people at all.

I only played WoW on-and-off for a little over one year circa 2005/2006. At that time everyone I interacted with who also played WoW was rushing to the end-game content with an incredible fervor. They *all* powerleveled to maximum immediately. They left me in the dust. I explored the world, played through various minor quest chains, enjoyed the little stories, and eventually got stuck and bored because there was nobody at my level to play with and the quests became too difficult in many places for me to play solo. Basically, I had no one to play with because I played the game "wrong" in their eyes. I've never come back. WoW Classic tempted me, but I wasn't about to pay a subscription and then join a guild that would push me to powerlevel. Instead I spent the intervening years/decades playing all up and down the gamut of strategy, shooter, single-player RPG, and casual indie "whatever-genre" games. Sounds like I made the right choice for my fun.

Looking back on this video a year later, it's a testament to Dan's skill as a filmmaker and his well-earned good faith with his audience that something this profoundly niche, technical, and outside the usual purview performed so well. Truly out of left field, but just a great watch.

This has unlocked ancient memories. Our guild/raid leader would run Molten Core in first-person mode, we'd laugh and ask how he could see anything happening, but didn't get mad at him. Kind of wild in hindsight.

What cemented the breakup of me and WoW was the bleed of the "elitism" into every facet of the game. Servers I joined with allegedly open and welcoming RP communities still demanded a number of times you could be on for events, a portfolio proving you knew how to RP, and needing to have Discord on as well so you could be coaxed into socializing there as well. I can't claim to have a pair of nostalgia goggles to slip on and gaze back on the good old days, but it was definitely a time before the game needed to completely absorb all my spare time. The vocal community (Trade Chat) has also reached a degree of immature cesspoolishness that it just wasn't worth logging onto anymore.

That end quote is one to remember. The discussion of free versus instrumental play has given new words to something I've struggled with for a while: I'm bad at games like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing, and I think my problem can be explained with these concepts. The games appear to focus on free play, where you just chill out, grow some beans or collect fossils, and I generally like playing games in that way. However, behind this wholesome veneer I can _feel_ all sorts of systems, timers and progression gates that lend themselves to optimization, and through optimization, more desirable outcomes. I get the urge to aggressively min-max to achieve these most desirable outcomes, but I know that if I do that I'll end up playing the game in a way the designers didn't want me to and I ultimately won't enjoy; too instrumentally. My FarmVille farm was just a big field of soy. I also just really suck at the fishing minigame in Stardew Valley, and I hate it.

_Why_ shouldn't you stand facing a wall on the far side of Bloodmyst Isle and contemplate the nature of the Draenei... forever?

Something that often gets overlooked regarding paratext and the worship of skilled players: players can be absolutely brutal about any deviations in play from the expected standard, including ones which are objectively superior to the instrumental goals. There is an implicit assumption among most players that they are at the end of history, and that no further innovations in playing the game will be forthcoming, and even that all the relevant tricks of the patch that landed 10 days ago have already been completely figured out by the broader community; new strategies are perpetually impossible for anyone to discover, because surely someone would have thought of it by now. Anyone who is not at the absolute top of the recognized hierarchy is absolutely excoriated by allies if they attempt anything outside the "meta", regardless of lack of evidence that the unusual tactic won't work. This includes strategies so powerful that, should the "experts" discover them later, they become standard practice overnight, often requiring developer intervention to limit their dominance. But it doesn't matter how overpowered the strategy is; if it's not yet adopted by the elites and the community at large, it's is utterly unacceptable to attempt, even in relatively low-stakes situations; you are "throwing" if you dare to use something unfamiliar, unless you've earned the esteem of the entire community by being a truly top player. I suffered through this several times when I played League of Legends, where Gold-level players were utterly intolerant of any unorthodox tactics, and consistently threatened to report me to game administrators to be banned; only to have top players discover and adopt the same strategies weeks later. The worship of orthodoxy even at the expense of instrumental results is strange and fascinating to me... I'm sure it bears some psychological relationship to "that's the way we've always done it" thinking.

I had a realization. In a recent philosophytube video, Abigail talks about the bias toward measurability and how this leads us to discount or even blinds us to possibilities that are hard to measure. This is almost the essence of the issue that Dan is talking about around the seven minute mark. Free play is inherently unmeasurable. How do you quantify how much fun a person is having?

I find the editing in this absolutely facinating, no cuts, just one massive timeline with all the elements already laid out, almost letting you get sneak peaks at future parts of the videos as the camera smoothly transitions between sections. Really cool!!!

This would be like if speed runners bullied casual video game players into using their strats. Like speedrunning is fun for some people same with min maxing but as soon as you expect that from another person who is not obligated to help you it’s ass

This video was shocking for me because it made me realize that I constantly idealized "free play"...I used to sit around in awe of other people doing it, having more fun with that than actually playing the game. I also sucked at instrumental play and never had a guild, but I ONLY did instrumental play solely because I was too afraid to do any free play. I grew up like this. It's wild to me that anyone would actually hate someone that just wanted to play their own way. Edit: I kiiiind of got around it in singleplayer games that let the player have a degree of freedom. But, yeah, not the same.

Your videos have really been on another level the past few years, Dan.

The part about Wallace reminded me of an Orc warrior on our server - Doomhammer EU - called Ick who used to absolutely dominate the server Battlegrounds whilst dressed as a farmer. The items he used were almost exclusively grey, notably a low-level pitchfork. There was something about the weapon speed being 3.70 that meant it was possible to do a good amount of damage to someone using such a low-level weapon. Stuff like that seems to be missing from the game now.

My friend last year described modern raiding to me as a "space race between Blizzard and third party software" and I thought that was exactly right.

I was pretty well into WoW up until shortly after Cataclysm, and when I was asked why I stopped playing by my guildmates, I told them I didn't want another job. All this boils down to you having to be geared well enough to even participate, do enough research to know what to do, and ultimately deal with the stress of not effing up your role to the point where you're not invited any more. Each one of those is a huge time sink and seemed more like work than a thing I did to have fun in my off time, and as I grew older, I had less disposable time. I'm glad I watched this video, as it breaks down essentially what caused this new work, and was just a result of the circumstances of the era it came out in, the technology involved, and just plain people. Thanks Dan and everyone else involved in this great piece.

Noticing the "race to the world first, presented by FTX" logo in some of the footage made me connect two concepts. It's the financialization of everything all over again.

As someone apart of the DS3 Speedrunning community I am happy you mentioned that your enjoyment can coexist with the speedrunning strategies regardless of how insane True Any% runs are. You would be surprised at how many people insult speedrunners and the runs due to us using extreme strategies and glitches. It is a running joke that we make fun of when people tell us that "Glitched runs aren't real speedruns".

This kind of makes me want to see a video by you talking about how normalized hostility and verbal violence is in competitive spheres of video games and sports, when in other types of environments those behaviors would be seen as abhorrent or morally wrong.

It's so wild just having everything that is said in this video permanently internalized in your BONES because you've been playing and experiencing it all for over a decade playing WoW then having it described effectively with words. The battle between free play and instrumental play in chapter 1 is just so engrained in your blood that you don't even realize it happening but you feel it happening. The weird psychological effect of the vault on guild dynamics and the overall strange takes on loot (As well as the weirdness of low end players roleplaying as elite players.) is so incredibly relatable. The two identical hallways example is present in an endless number of video games, the first of which that pops up in my mind being the Wintertodt boss in old school runescape, where 90% of any given bossing group picks the east side of the boss (by default the "right" side) and there are funny micro meme about "right gang" etc. The feeling of the "squeeze" of paratext pushing all the players to play more efficiently and not just the players interested in optimizations, because of the social pressure. I have a theory that this is also a source of some of the toxicity in the playerbase, because they are simply so familiar with the expert play patterns and a deviation from that is seen as that person wasting their time. Also the wow classic discussion being initially about difficulty, and then players just kind of realizing en masse that classic was being "run" by the optimal play, top tier raider bros.. This whole video almost feel cathartic with how much it resonates as true to anyone who's been playing or even been paying close attention to wow over the years, and how it's been shaped by all these factors.

Learning that there is an actual field of study around the exploration of video games as a medium for interaction and storytelling: priceless

Dan you're one of the only creators where upon watching a new video in it's entirety, I will immediately or as soon as I can later, rewatch the entire video over from the start. Your videos are so information dense and thought provoking they warrant multiple views. Thank you for your work.

A role playing game actively beating the role playing out of the player in order to become a machine made of meat is honestly pretty demented and I’m glad I never fell down this path in life.

Worlds become real because we care about them. That's gonna stick with me for a while. I can tell this was a labour of love, not only highly informative but created with alot of care. Beautiful

This some high quality guild drama where a famous RU-vidr brought receipts, love it

As someone who has played WoW sporadically for the last 12 years, a lot of this really struck with me. Whenever I come back from a break I just feel lost, like I've never played the game before. Dungeon strategies are already solved and everyone but me knows them. Not strategies like "don't stand in the fire" or "interrupt the heal" but how to skip entire bosses, and exactly which trash pulls the rogue should cloak through. I've just launched the game for the first time in 3 years, I don't know this, and if I ask I'm called out for it. When I played a bit more seriously around Cata, we always asked if people knew strats and marked locations and mobs before pulls, now I only see that happen with organized raid groups. Groups I can't even join because I don't have the required experience. Also, I found your mention of the Sepulcher hallway very interesting, because every group I have ever been in has gone left. Is this what separates NA from Europe?

"Someone calls Wallace a bad player. No one disagrees." Why do I find that line so brutally poetic and beautiful and sad? I'm not even past the intro and already I've paused the video just to have this deep moment of contemplation and reflection with myself and my relationship to games and even more broadly play and art... Dan, you're more than a brilliant video essayist. You're a brilliant mind. Period.

The entire time I was, for some reason, waiting for this to then become a perfect analogue of the systematization of our society and then drawing a caparison to how agents use instrumental play in our own society, and how WoW becomes a wonderful microcosm of the dynamic of "ruining the experience" and this "cultural division" we experience between those trying to "game the system" and those of us trying to, effectively, get health care and live an enjoyable life from a qualitative perspective.

"Even the social elements of the game, things seemingly free of numbers, become vessels for the propagation of numbers." 47:30 - brought to mind the way 'numbers' become omnipresent in even the most intimate parts of our personal lives; our time, food, family, through the vein of Capital. We have to grind, and because that is the way the 'game' has been shaped by social consensus, we watch the macros of ourselves and our relation to labor even when we're not being observed by a superior. We feel the pressure at all times, work, sleep, or play, to keep an eye on our cooldowns.

So glad, first of all, to see that jon bois' animating with google earth style is spreading. the recognition may not be public per se, but the real ones know. Can't wait to see what dan and bobby come up with for it as time goes on.

The most fun ive had playing wow was helping randoms level. Being stuck in raids for hours was something that ill never do again. Being ex-military, the power trips based on a video game never sat right with me.