"Professionalism" in gaming Part 2, or, "How intensely do you play?"

A week or so ago when I first thought to write this entry and claimed I would I had some ideas in mind about how each player is devoting a different level of time to the game and views their responsibility towards other players differently. Then the other night I was reading a thread on the World of Tanks forum about XVM (a mod that displays player stats in game, letting you see who on your team has a high win rate and a calculated "efficiency rating") and spotted a comment in there about playing to win. It dawned upon me that in a sense everyone (with few exceptions) IS in fact playing to win, but their criteria for winning and the INTENSITY in which they try to win differs and is one of the prime causes of friction between players of differing levels.

A "Player" first storyline

I know I promised to do Part 2 of the Professionalism post, focusing on player-to-player interactions, but that post is requiring a lot more detail than expected but is coming! In the meantime, I was reading an article on Joystiq about the "5 Worst Raid Encounters in Cataclysm" and Chase brings up an issue that highlights many of the issues I have with Blizzard's story writing.

"Professionalism" in Gaming Part 1

Today I was reading on Reddit about the first person to kill Diablo in Diablo 3, on inferno difficulty, in hardcore mode. Now that is no small feat...but what overshadowed this, was the conduct of the individual that achieved this and the conduct of Blizzard towards this person over the last few weeks. Suffice to say the two have had a rocky relationship, and it sparked what will become a series of post on "professionalism" and how it might apply to gaming. There are two main topics I aim to address; the conduct of the company towards its players and they to it, and the conduct of one player to another. Today I'll start with company and player interactions.

Putting the Multiplayer back in MMO

Recently I was reading Rohan's defense of the trinity, and while personally I do think it is possible ot have a successful game without the trinity, it got me thinking. I'll save my case for the trinity-less game for another post, but for now I'll dive into the issues Rohan and the comments to the post brought up. Of all the issues with the trinity as implemented in 4-6 man groups there are two big ones I want to highlight: the role of DPS and the role of the "Excess" people. After the break I will tackle these two issues: What turn the third role (DPS) into, and making DPS more of a cooperative activity.

The MMO, where a franchise goes to die

I didn't want to say it, I really didn't. I had hope, I said to myself "Bethesda knows what they are doing, they will deliver an MMO Skyrim and it will be awesome," then they started opening their mouths and I began to feel like someone hit the reverse on the time machine. Welcome back to 2000!

I understand that many players pine for the fjords days of Vanilla WoW or the feel of Everquest, but when take off the nostalgia colored glasses we remember that the memory is primed to remember the good moments and forget the numerous times we wanted to plant our keyboard in the wall or wished for features to be fixed/improved. I loved Final Fantasy XI, I recall it fondly and remember the dozen classes, good looking visuals (for its time)...but I forget having to spend 2+ hours searching for a party just to level, losing hours worth of work because of a bad pull and so on. I don't want to go back to that, as obnoxious as things like LFR can be at times, I'd rather have a bad group in a few minutes than no group at all.

Diablo 3 Musings Part 1 [Minor Spoilers]

It has been almost a week now and I feel as though I have enough of a handle on Diablo 3 to give a fair review of it thus far. Currently my highest level character is 33 and I have finished the game on Normal, played a little on Nightmare. I know Hell and Inferno are a whole new ballgame and I'll address those another time. As is my custom I am not looking to attach some 1-10 score to the game...I am going to point out my opinions of what works, what doesn't work, and what nags at me as I play.

Warning, there are some spoilers ahead but I will try to keep them minimal and vague.

Playing for fun v. Playing for competition

The long hiatus is finally over, finals have come to an end and I've a few weeks to enjoy the beak...how wonderfully convenient that it should happen to be right before Diablo 3 releases and I like much of the world will try extremely hard tomorrow to crash Blizzard's servers. However we have a day to kill before it releases! In the meantime I have taken up World of Tanks again after some rumblings in the blogosphere had refreshed my memory of it. However since I last took up the game I've found some new trends within I find unpleasant to deal with; namely the game's insistence on keeping a permanent record of everything done.