26/11/2022

Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft

Dan Olson's Folding Ideas channel has become one of my favourite destinations for watching long-form philosophical videos about random subjects, from flat-earthers to online grifts involving audiobooks. He also plays WoW though, and today I found a new video of his in my recommendations that I knew I'd love: Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft.


To be honest, the title alone was kind of enlightening in a way, because as much as I've chafed against some of the modern WoW community's social norms, it had never crossed my mind that their annoyance at people not following every meta is rooted in them perceiving it as "rude" when you don't play the way they expect you to. I mean, the opposite seems obvious, someone saying "you suck" is rude no matter the context. But being offended by others not following certain norms - even if the result has no practical effect on you whatsoever - is something I've always considered strange and off-putting.

Anyway, I won't talk too much about the content of the video itself; just watch it yourself. It approaches the topic from several interesting angles, such as how it's actually quite odd that WoW has become so competitive, considering that it's not really designed for it and allows addons that in most other competitive games would be considered "cheating".

The thing that really hit home for me personally though was when at 2:37 he starts showing screenshots of comments (presumably in response to a previous video) that criticise him clicking on his abilities instead of keybinding them, because this has been a personal bugbear of mine for literal years.

You see, I'm well aware that keybinding your abilities is more "optimal" in the sense that it increases your reaction time and actions per minute. However, it's also objectively more demanding in that it requires setup and memorisation, as opposed to just being able to click whatever button is in front of you. Naturally, the latter is much more appealing to new and casual players, and that's fine. I'm not in an arena or mythic progression team. I play WoW Classic, where even the hardest PvE content only really requires me to press two or three buttons in combat while occasionally taking a few steps to the left or right. Speed and split-second reactions are not really required.

And yet, ever since I started uploading the occasional WoW Classic video to YouTube, I started getting comments that had nothing to do with the actual content of the videos but would instead focus on my UI and mouse cursor, condemning me for clicking instead of keybinding. Even if the video is me on a level fourteen warlock, killing four zhevras. How dare I do that non-optimally?!

Even the Forks weren't immune to this, which was so weird. Here was a guild that was super casual, never talked about dps and happily carried multiple ret paladins through Naxx that (due to the limitations of their class) struggled to out-dps the tanks. Yet I'd post a boss kill video on the guild Discord and people would ask me whether I'd heard of our lord and saviour, keybindings, as if this must be an entirely new concept to me.

No matter how many times I told them that I simply didn't care to keybind, no matter that I was one of our better damage dealers regardless, people would bring it up again and again with an almost religious zeal. It almost makes you feel gaslit after a while, when you know it doesn't matter to the way you play, and yet people keep telling you that it does because even just knowing that someone is questing in the Barrens on a low-level alt without keybindings is somehow strange and offensive to them. It's utterly bizarre.

Dan doesn't come to any real conclusion in his video, merely commenting that all of this has been a natural evolution of things and that trying to fight it (e.g. by removing addons) has its own pitfalls, which is true. However, I would argue that game developers do have an interest in fighting back against the most extreme manifestations of this sort of maths-based elitism. Players who are in favour of it will often argue that everyone's allowed to self-select, and if you don't want to play with people who are too demanding, you can simply create your own group/guild or whatever. Never mind that certain types of gaming prescriptivists will actively hound you day and night with their attempts to make you play their way as mentioned above.

However, the more important thing to keep in mind is that if the whole point is to play casually, to not go beyond a certain kind of effort to appease other players, then saying you should simply work harder to isolate yourself from the rest of the community is missing the point. If the only solution to being "allowed" to continue to play casually (in whatever way) is to work harder on some other aspect of the game, it's much easier to just quit and do something else. If a lot of people are not great at WoW and this mere fact is considered rude and "offensive" by a very vocal subset of players, then a lot of people are going to find some other game to play (even if the gameplay itself would be perfectly accessible to them). Having a community that's constantly raising the bar for what's considered an acceptable minimum and then antagonises its fellow players about this does not make for a healthy game in the long run.

14 comments:

  1. 1000% agree with every word! It won't surprise you to know I'm a clicker and always have been. What might surprise you, though, is that for the first few years I played mmorpgs I genuinely felt that NOT clicking was in some way cheating. I knew keybinding was a permitted option but I had a very hardcore attitude to game settings, which was that the Default was the Real Thing and anything else was somehow wrong - as in morally wrong.

    Eventually I sloughed off most of these innate, instinctive reactions to arrive at a very laissez-faire position, which is do what you want, just don't get in anyone else's way by doing it. Personally, I still hugely prefer to click because I prefer to use my mouse for everything other than movement whenever possible. I don't really differentiate between playing games and web-browsing in that way - the keyboard is for typing, the mouse is for selecting.

    I also think that clicking in a game like WoW is how regular folk do it. Keybinding is a gamer thing (And a coder thing, which is much the same, often as not.) WoW used to be the non-gamer's mmorpg and clicking would certainly have been the norm then. It's just another gamer's game now, sadly.

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    1. I also suspect that the vast majority of WoW players actually click their abilities. You just wouldn't know it from any forums and other places where people discuss these things, because anyone who spends time there knows that not playing like the pros is to be shunned.

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  2. From my perspective, the whole clicking / keybinding thing can also be influenced by non-MMO games. I for one grew up with several games that featured very few things to click on except maybe for targeting things. Indeed, two of my most-played childhood games only featured clicking in the menus; otherwise, it was keyboard-controls only. Of the others, Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy featured keybinds (mainly F1 - F12 of all things...) as the only way of accessing Force powers, and clicking just caused you to swing / throw your lightsaber or access different firing modes for blasters depending on what keys you pressed.

    So that's why I for one keybind stuff - it's just a system that I was well-accustomed to for pretty much every PC game I had played long before MMOs were on my horizon, although MMOs of course tend to allow greater sxtremes (Neverwinter being the exception). I imagine that, had I grown up with more games that featured clickable abilities than keybound ones then I would be happier continuing to do so. I have the utmost respect for people who can fully get behind game systems that I can't, and this is no exception.

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  3. Holy crap do I agree with you on Keybindings!

    I was in a raid team dungeon run the other day with a player on their Ret Pally alt, and they used keybinds to reduce the Ret Pally's attacks down to ONE BUTTON. They had that keybind set up twice: once for Judging for Mana, and once for Judging for Heals.

    I was flabbergasted.

    Ret in Wrath is basically a "whack-a-mole" spec, where you hit whatever ability comes off of cooldown. And some are instant casts based on a proc, so why the hell would you want to keybind all of this?

    Well, this likely explains some of the "talking to" I've gotten over the past couple of years as to why the number of times I cast my main abilities is slower than others: I'm using real live keys rather than keybinds. And here I thought it merely was because I'm in my 50s and I can feel my reaction time slowing down.

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    1. I'm guessing you've never shared a screenshot or video with your UI visible in your guild. I promise if anyone had seen any indication of you not keybinding your spells, it would've been brought up repeatedly.

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    2. I have made it plain since Vanilla Classic that I am a minimalist and only use the minimally necessary addons to raid. Thankfully the biggest WA proponent in the guild also despises ElvUI, so my minimalist approach has some defenders.

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  4. I would generally agree that if you're going to play with other people, especially in random groups, you should put some effort into not being bad. Spoiling the experiences of other because you can't be bothered to learn your class is not cool.

    Beyond that though, get stuffed. As Earl in our group used to say, somebody put in a lot of effort to make that spiffy looking hotbar, who am I to not appreciate their efforts by clicking on it?

    However, if you really want to trigger people in a video, turn in a fight using WASD keys rather than the mouse. That will get normally sane people screaming at you.

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    1. Bu not clicking on it that is. Double negative sentences are always a hazard.

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    2. Ah yes, the infamous keyboard-turning! I do that sometimes too, depending on the situation.

      And yeah, I'm in no way saying that performance never matters. When playing with other people, there's always a certain degree of compromise required that might not exactly be how you'd like to do things by yourself. But as the example with the trinket in the video shows, people can go absolutely crazy with the kind of things they demand. And of course the cases I cited for myself are about complete strangers trying to dictate the gameplay of others they'll never play with, or people finding things to criticise out of game that have no noticeable effect on their grouping experience in game.

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    3. Heh, and the best is to say you couldn't use the mouse to turn because you were using it to click on the action bar for your rotation.

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    4. I definitely prefer keyboard-turning to mouse-turning myself. Both because I'm more used to the former and the latter... well, let's just say that there have been a handful of times when mouse-turning when I was trying to get accustomed to it have led to enemies being pulled via ranged basic attacks when accidentally clicking on them instead of on terrain.

      Not something I'm keen to repeat!

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  5. > You see, I'm well aware that keybinding your abilities is more "optimal" in the sense that it increases your reaction time and actions per minute. However, it's also objectively more demanding in that it requires setup and memorisation

    Respectfully disagreeing here, at least for myself. I'm not one to judge objectivity here, but I am so bad with clicking that you'd confuse me for a day one player instead of a Heroic Raider. To the point that I'm wondering how I ever managed to play shooters with that lack of aiming, but hitting a button with a mouse, fast and precise? While moving even? Nope, can't kite a slow level 5 boar as a hunter :/

    But on the other hand I'm not one to call out people (well except my wife :P) if they're clicking, as long as it works.

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    1. I'm curious, if you default to keybindings, are you saying you just learned to play by hitting 1-0 for your abilities and scrolling back and forth between the numbered action bars? Because if you changed them to any other keys or installed addons to allow you to keybind multiple bars that's still going out of your way to create a special setup.

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    2. I'm pretty sure you could already display multiple bars in Vanilla, but yes - I started using 1-7 and the keys adjacent to WASD right from the beginning, like in FPS/third person games because moving and clicking abilities has always been completely alien to me.

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