WoW, to me, is unlike other games where I just want to have some fun and forget reality. No, WoW is a place where I socialised with strangers, similar to the purpose with which my many friends go to clubs and pubs.
In the many guilds I have joined, the best guilds are those that used internet voice chats, aka Ventrilo or Teamspeak. Typing works, but in many ways hearing the actual voice of your online friends is just better.
In terms of cooperation and teamwork, using such chat programs enhances the speed of coordination since the leader can make his commands known as soon as he speaks them. In term of social interaction, there is no way typed conversation can beat the human voice.
For those who have experience in the military or similar organizations, you will understand how it feels when we were in group raids. Every class had a class leader, with a commander above them. Everyone knows roughly what they should do, the class leaders brief their members on what to do before every part of the raids, and the commander is really in charge of the timing of the coordinations. Very much like a military exercise, albeit in a smaller scale.
It felt very good to accomplish something so big that it required all 40-60 of us, and there was pride to be gained when we know what we have achieved is not common in most servers (WoW has more than 50 servers, at least).
So we pushed on, going further and further till we were one of the best guilds in that server. We did not bother to boast about what we did because we know the best guilds above us were far far ahead. Not surprising given that one of the conditions to join some of these guilds was the ability to play non-stop throughout the day, i.e. you cannot have a job or anything. I'm not kidding here.
And on the social side, I met many people and made many friends in the game. Since the guild activities start only at night at 8pm, I spent much time farming for stuff and fooling around in the battlegrounds (places designed for teams of players to kill each other for various objectives).
There I met other people who were generally unable to spend enough time in the game to join the better guilds. These people were the true "casual gamers" who really have jobs or in school or married. By the way I consider myself somewhere between these "casual gamers" and the "hardcore gamers".
But the best times in terms of social interaction must be when I joined the American and Australian guilds. They were much friendlier, and were not there to achieve anything. They just wanted to have fun and talk. They made the game seem like a different sort of pub. They are much more willing to use the mic to chat, and do not hesitate as much as Singaporeans to post their photos in the guild forums.
The most interesting times I remember were the guild raids in which some members were drunk. It was hilarious to hear the crazy stuff they say, and they even sing! Sometimes, when not in the raids, some would even admit they were stoned(i.e. high)! And the enthusiastic ways they spoke of marijuana and cocaine were really an eye-opener for me.
In the end most of the U.S. and Aussie guilds I joined eventually died, when some of the members finally got jobs or were unable to pay for their monthly subscription (some of them were college students who could barely afford their leaky rented rooms). There were many reason why they left but these were the ones I found unique.
Not surprisingly, I find the notion of comparing Aussie guilds and Singaporean guilds irresistable. Singaporeans made the game feel like a job, especially during raids. It felt good to be so far ahead of the others, but they left out the fun factor in the process. In fact, members may get reprimanded for being absent frequently or screwing up the coordination after being there for more than once.
In the Australian guilds, however, raid wipes were more common. The leaders did not expect as much from everyone. Members were allowed to talk on the mic whenever they wished except during the more serious moments, like when fighting bosses. If anyone screwed up anything, saying sorry solved everything, unless the same person had been doing the same frequently.
There was little shouting or scolding there, and anyone who disliked the lax discipline were asked to leave. Finger-pointing was a practice that was frowned upon, and any sort of complaints or negative remarks as "whining", with the whiners being told to "shut the fuck up".
This is undeniably the opposite of Singaporean gamers, who have this unstoppable desire to point out the worst players when anything goes wrong. What Singaporean gamers refer to as whining is distinctly different from the Australian version in the fact that it does not include finger-pointing. Whenever failure occurred in the raids, Singaporean gamers know precisely what went wrong, and will not hesitate for a second to point it out.
Preparations for raids is completely necessary before raiding the more advanced dungeons. Singaporean guilds prepare by assigning each member to prepare what they need, except for the cheaper items or those that are easier to obtain.
In Australian guilds, preparations are made by the leaders in the forums asking for members to donate stuff to a "guild bank". The leaders would dole out the necessary items when they are needed. And amazingly, this worked! The more serious gamers would play all day to farm for stuff while those were did not/could not spend that much time playing would still be able to join the raids.
In this aspect, it is clear how much time each type of guild expects their members to spend online. And how different the people are.
And therein lies a major reason to why I quit WoW. The Singaporean server was fun at first, what with the pride and all. But eventually with all the demands I felt it became a second job to me, a job I paid money to work in.
The last straw came when the leaders decided everyone had to farm for several expensive potions/materials before every raid to the most advanced dungeon we went to. With the huge amount of farming, the "fun" totally vanished, and what was left was "work" and "boredom". The social interaction, pride and joy in receiving the amazing drops from bosses were no longer enough to offset the efforts I have to put in, and I decided to leave the guild.
But next came the reasoning that without the great raids that only the serious guilds have, it gets really boring after a while. It was like playing without a purpose if I quit all those large raids. Yes, social interaction was a major factor, but it was only half the game. The other half is "fun". So no raids = no purpose = no fun.
Plus I was going to quit anyway before school starts, so I quit the game completely. I did not even return to the guild forums after that, for fear that I would get pulled back into the game. You may be wondering why I would fear such a thing. It was because, somehow, the game was very addictive. This is a trait it shares with Lineage 2, and many other good MMORPGs.
In fact, during my time in Lineage 2, the only thing that kept me going was the addiction. I do not pretend to understand why I was addicted. All I know is that, often, I wondered why L2 players would pay money to suffer. It was a kind of suffering, to me, to run around the same area killing the same monsters repeatedly for days just to gain a measly level. Some people like this, but I do not. It was torturous, numbing and pointless.
Yet I went on playing for 2 years, just to hang out online with those guys in the clans and alliance. Perhaps I was interested in knowing people I have no experience with, people I know nothing about.
In the end, I left all that behind me. But months after, I feel the need to socialise with those people online again. People who do not judge you for what you do and do not expect much from each other. In other words, friendly people.
First time we killed Chromaggus, everyone was elated. All 60 of us. The dead included.
Illegal exploration of the unopened areas. Ah.. those were the days...
Scenery from another then unopened area. Could have made a good wallpaper, but alas, I didn't notice the pointer until later... LOL!Pictures above are shrunk during the upload process to this blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment