World of Warcraft | Superior Realities

I think nuance is important in life. It’s always good to remind yourself nothing is entirely good or bad, to see the flaws even in things you enjoy. Blind devotion is never a positive trait.

To that end, I have compiled a list of things I truly hate about things I truly love. None of these things are enough to turn me off my passions, but that doesn’t mean they don’t really get under my skin.

This is by no means a comprehensive list; it’s just the things that stood out to me as I was writing.

And just so you know, to continue the theme of balance and nuance, I will also be doing a post on things I love about things I hate.

World of Warcraft: Mandatory subscription

There’s no shortage of things I could have picked where WoW is concerned. It’s a game with much that I love, but also much that I would gladly purge with cleansing fire.

I settled on the subscription. I’ve said it all before; I don’t like subscriptions and the psychological pressure they create.

In WoW’s case, I find the subscription is having an increasingly toxic impact on the game’s design. More and more the overriding thought behind Blizzard’s decisions seems to not be “How can we make this more fun?” but “How can we make this take longer?”

Star Trek: Enterprise: Gratuitous T&A

Enterprise’s infamous decon scenes and other acts of shameless fan service have received much criticism, and while I think it’s a bit unfair to act as if this was something new to the Star Trek franchise (mini-skirts — just sayin’), it does deserve to be criticized.

Yeah, it’s sexist. It’s also silly, ridiculous, and unnecessary, and it cheapened what was otherwise a fantastic piece of intellectual science fiction.

I mean, I was going through puberty when Enterprise was on the air, and even so, I still didn’t enjoy the decon scenes.

Much.

Seriously, though, even then I was like, “This is dumb. Why are they doing this? I mean, I like seeing Linda Park in her underpants and all, but really, this is dumb. Get back to the plot.”

At least they made some small effort toward being equal opportunity. Trip did spend an awful lot of time in his underwear and/or sweaty and covered in dirt.

Fun fact: TrekUnited’s “let’s drool over Connor Trinneer” thread was roughly ten to twenty times longer than the equivalent threads for Jolene Blalock and Linda Park combined.

This is not an exaggeration.

Battlestar Galactica: Season four

I have a lot of love for Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica reboot. My autographed photos of Katee Sackhoff and Aaron Douglas sit proudly next to my computer desk. My pilot’s wings pin occupies a place of honour on the headboard above my bed. One of my first major writing projects was a massive BSG fan fic up that ended being nearly novel length. BSG produced three of the best seasons of television ever made.

And then season four happened.

Sigh.

I mean, there was still some really great stuff in season four. I loved the mutiny arc. The acting and character arcs were fantastic until the end. “Revelations” was possibly the best episode of the series.

But most of season four was defined by random drama and shock value for the sake of drama and shock value. It killed off beloved characters for no apparent reason.

Worse still, it became clear that, despite what the opening credits said, they did not have a plan. The writers were clearly making it up as they went along, and in the end, the show “collapsed under its own weight,” as an old friend of mine aptly put it. The ending was a nonsensical mess that boiled down to two hours of “a wizard did it.”

The first three seasons of BSG were so brilliant that season four cannot diminish what they accomplished. But that’s not for lack of effort.

These days I mostly try to pretend season four ever happened. Though not as hard as I try to pretend Blood and Chrome never happened.

Stargate: Universe: Montages

I loved SG:U. After its shaky first few episodes, it evolved into one of the great sci-fi shows of all time. But there’s one nasty habit it never quite shook off.

Those damn musical montages.

Nearly every episode had to conclude with five minutes of the cast staring off into space and looking depressed while some crappy song plays in the background. It never stopped being irritating.

Take that time and come up with some proper opening credits instead. Would be as useful.

Mass Effect: Asari

With a few notable exceptions, I’m not fond of the alien races in the Mass Effect franchise. It feels like very little effort was put into them — they’re almost entirely bland archetypes the likes of which you could find in any generic sci-fi story.

The Asari stand out as the worst, though. They’re basically an entire species of adolescent sexual fantasies — gorgeous, bisexual alien girls. Considering how progressive Bioware tends to be, shameless fan service such as the Asari sticks out like a sore thumb.

I find it ironic that the games try to make it this offensive stereotype that Asari are defined by sex, but the games spend more time stereotyping them than any of the characters. There’s next to nothing unique or noteworthy about the Asari culture or temperament other than their sexuality, nearly all Asari plots revolve sex or relationships in some way, and Asari strippers are utterly ubiquitous.

Admittedly, my view has perhaps been skewed by the fact Liara is the most prominent Asari in the franchise. Her entire personality boils down to, “Gee, Shepard, you’re so awesome; wanna feel my boobs?”

In fairness, Samara is pretty cool.

Heroes of the Storm: Dragon Shire

I was going to mention the amount of filler in Bioware games, but then I remembered how much I hate Dragon Shire, and there wasn’t room for both.

Heroes of the Storm’s map variety is one of its great strengths… unless you get Dragon Shire.

I hate this map so very, very much. It’s just endless back and forth — you can easily go ten to fifteen minutes into a match without either team winning the map objective. It’s so slow, and so tedious. It’s also really easy to get screwed over by your team composition in quick matches because you need a very specific set of heroes and roles to hold all three shrines effectively.

It also seems very snowbally compared to other maps. Winning the dragon is such a massive advantage, and there’s no “consolation prize” for the team who doesn’t capture it. It’s agonizing to spend half a match fighting over the damn thing, only to have the enemy team cap it and wreck half your forts because your team made one mistake.

Oh, and it has the most boring visuals and the dullest announcer of all the maps.

I have my highest win rate on Dragon Shire, but even that does nothing to quell my hate for this awful, terrible, no good map. I have at times (briefly) considered quitting Heroes because of Dragon Shire — I’m not kidding.

Fantasy in general: Lack of diversity

This isn’t necessarily something I hate, but it confuses and disappointments me.

Science fiction has a pretty rich tradition of showing a future where humanity is more united and giving us diverse casts composed of a good balance of sexes, races, and even sexual orientations.

Fantasy, for whatever reason, isn’t like that. The vast majority of fantasy novels are about straight white guys. If an author is feeling really daring and progressive, it might be about a straight white woman.

There are a few exceptions. Ian Irvine and Glen Cook have made at least some effort toward racial diversity in their casts, Mercedes Lackey gives good representation to LGBT characters, and… that’s all I got.

I guess Dragon Age could merit a mention, too. Good balance of sexes and sexual orientations, at least.

StarCraft II: Too much macro

StarCraft II is one of the great RTS games of all time, and the countless hours I’ve sunk into prove my love for it. But it always bothers me how much of the game boils down to macro, to economy.

If you run your economy well, you can all but ignore what happens on the battlefield, at least until you reach the highest levels of play. I remember hearing a guy saying he made it from silver to platinum league by giving up on commanding his army and just devoting all his attention to macro.

That’s pretty messed up.

And it’s just boring. Way too much of every game is spent churning out workers, and pylons, and overlords, and so forth. “YOU MUST CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYLONS” is a meme for a reason, but it’s not necessarily a good reason.

Everything: The fans

“It’s not the band I hate. It’s their fans.”

The sad truth is I have yet to find anything that can’t have the fun sucked out of it by its fans. The worst part of playing WoW is the other WoW players. The worst part of being a Trek fan is the Trekkies. And so on and so forth.

That’s not to say you won’t encounter nice people in fandom. Some of the best friends I have were made through fan communities. But on the whole, I’ve found my every attempt to engage in the fan community for any game, TV series, movie franchise, etcetera has ultimately proven frustrating and lessened my enjoyment of the original product.

We come now to part two of my trinity trinity, a trio of posts on the tank, healer, DPS triad of MMORPG group rules and how I’d really like to see the genre break free of it. Catch up on part one if you missed it.

Today I’d like to highlight some of the best experiences I’ve had without the trinity, or at least with a modified version of it. Interestingly nearly all of these are from games that theoretically do subscribe to a rigid trinity, though I imagine that’s just a coincidence.

I hope to accomplish two things by doing this. First, it offers more insight into where I’m coming from when I talk about alternatives to the traditional trinity, and second, it further debunks the notion that a rigid trinity is necessary for interesting group content.

Two Sith walk into a ~~bar~~ flashpoint:

Star Wars: The Old Republic’s tactical flashpoints are a fascinating ground for experimentation with MMO group roles. The game builds a full group for these, but it does so agnostic of roles, and the content is tuned accordingly. Usually this means you end up with full DPS, or three DPS and a single tank or healer, but sometimes stranger things happen.

Such was the case a few weeks ago, when I had one of the most fun group experiences of my MMO career.

I queued for my first dungeon on my Sith inquisitor, who I’m building as a tank. I fully expected to be the only tank in a group of damage dealers, but I wound up matched with another tank of the same class alongside two ranged DPS. The responsibility usually placed on a single individual became spread between half the group.

It was glorious.

All that social pressure, all that fear of failure, melted away. I had all the fun of tanking and none of the downsides. I waded into combat fearlessly, imposing my will on my enemies, without fear that a wrong move would doom the group. The other tank and I worked together, taunting mobs off each if one of us ever became overwhelmed.

The trinity is often held up as a shining example of team work, but really, everyone is kind of doing their own thing. My fellow Sith and I felt more like a team — in a random PUG with minimal communication — than most hard trinity groups I’ve been a part of.

Even aesthetically, it was a major improvement. My comrade and I formed a wall of armour and blazing lightsabers, holding back the enemies from our softer team mates. There was no breaking of immersion here; it looked and felt like a real battle.

I cannot overstate how fun this run was. I long for a time when experiences such as this might be commonplace in MMOs. This is how it ought to be.

Never say Neverwinter:

Neverwinter does have a traditional trinity, but of all the games I’ve played, it has the best take on it, at least if you ask me.

Neverwinter may have the trinity, but if you’ll pardon the pun, it’s not religious about it. I’ve done high-end dungeons with no tank and done fine, and the roles are a bit softer. Tanks generally don’t hold aggro on everything all the time, and DPS can survive a few hits. Both tanks and healers still do decent damage, though less than their damage-oriented comrades. Heavy use of healing potions helps balance the responsibility of player survival.

The most fun I’ve had as a healer in an MMO — at least in terms of core mechanics — was as a devoted cleric in Neverwinter.

In Neverwinter, healers aren’t just slaves to HP bars. They’re more like Swiss army knives, utility characters adapting on a moment to moment basis. Sometimes you’ll be healing, but other times you’ll be throwing out buffs, and if nothing else is needed at the moment, you can put out some respectable damage.

I like this because it’s not forcing you into a narrow box the way the trinity does. I get to experience a broader wedge of combat without having to change character or specialization. To borrow the metaphor from my first post, it might not quite be a peanut butter sandwich yet, but it is at least toast with peanut butter.

…Hopefully I won’t get in trouble with the Hague for torturing that metaphor so much.

Old school oddness:

There isn’t much I miss about life before dungeon finders, but one thing that I do have some nostalgia for is being forced to come up with odd, random group compositions out of sheer desperation.

The tank left? The warlock is pulling out his voidwalker. Healer ragequit? Well, the shadow priest is gonna throw out some heals, and the rogue has some bandages, and the mage is praying to every deity in the book that we finish this.

It didn’t always work. It often failed miserably. And it wasn’t sustainable. We were able to bluff our way through some leveling dungeons, but you couldn’t do challenging, endgame content that way.

But it was interesting to stretch your toolkit that way. It required a lot more thought than a rigid trinity does, and again, you weren’t being forced into some narrow role. That voidwalker wasn’t going to hold aggro on everything all the time. That shadow priest wasn’t going to save you if you didn’t make good use of your own survival tools.

It offered respite from the stifling order and choreography of the trinity.

Double D:

I was always surprised by how much I’ve enjoyed instanced group content in MMO shooters like Defiance and to a lesser extent The Division.

Now, I’ll be honest. It’s pretty mindless. It’s not exactly every man, woman, and rogue Castithan for themselves, but teamwork is much less than you’d find with a hard trinity.

But it’s fun. There’s a joyful chaos to running in, guns blazing, and watching the bodies hit the floor.

Games are meant to be fun. They don’t always have to be super serious, or intellectually stimulating, or brutally challenging.

I wouldn’t want all games to devolve into mindless anarchy with little team play and no roles, but there is a place for that. Again, I want variety. Mindless slaughterfests should be part of a balanced MMO diet.

* * *

Next time, in my final post on the MMO trinity, I will outline my plan for how I would “fix” the trinity.

Superior Realities

Tag Archives: World of Warcraft

Things I Hate About Things I Love

Tyler Versus the MMO Trinity, Part Two: Life Outside the Trinity

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