Group commitment

I both love and hate World of Warcraft with the passionate level of enthusiasm one can expect from myself. It is brilliant from a basic game design perspective. There is a generic grind which is painful, but offers enough rewards and quests along the way to keep interest. There's a decent amount of classes to offer gameplay variety. There's end-game content in the form of player vs. player combat or player vs. environment (cooperative) raiding. The game can be played on relatively outdated hardware with a satisfactory frame rate. There's a good amount of grinding to entice power players, yet not alienate casual gamers. Excuse the overused phrase, but it really delivers to a good range of MMO gamers.

However, there are problems.

First, some background. I have played WoW somewhat casually to seriously for awhile now. I raided up to Twin Emperors in vanilla WoW and also raided up to the Eredar Twins in the Burning Crusade before my recent burnout. My main was a mage. I always liked playing ranged classes and I enjoy gameplay with a lot of mobility. That's what the mage offered and I enjoyed it.

The problem is that I had to play with 39 and then 24 other people, respectively. It was both a blessing and a curse. Raids, in general, are a social, yet stressful construct. People want to have fun although in different ways. Some people love the chat room aspect in terms of typing in-game chat (via guild, raid chat, or private messages) while others are more into plowing through content. There are various additional subdivisions within each of these two main areas.

Raiding is extremely challenging from an organizational aspect. You need to get committment from other people to attend the raid and commit yourself. You need to work as a group to down boss encounters which is amazingly fun.

It can also be amazingly frustrating. Some of the major factors in my burnout have been dealing with players who don't play for the same reasons I do. I raid to dominate content. I don't care much about loot other than as a tool to make dominating the game more simple. I understand that it's difficult finding 24 other people with the same mindset and there's no doubt that some diversity is a good thing. However, when the commitment varies to reach individual goals, I had some resentment build up since I was feeling I was contributing more and held down under the thumb of players who didn't want to contribute as much for very valid reasons of their own.

The obvious response to such a situation is to find a new group of players who share the same mindset and goals. The catch-22 is that I enjoy playing with my existing group of gamer buddies so I relegate myself to enjoying the social aspects while cringing from a gameplay standpoint.

The game has become a chore in a sense and I have decided to stop playing except on a very casual basis. This is where Blizzard has failed in my opinion. They have designed an excellent infrastructure for end-game, but have failed from a difficulty standpoint. Power gamers love difficulty. I am one of those people. The problem is that most players aren't that type of gamer. The difficulty bar is set too high for your average player. They have dangled the carrot a bit too far away and people are losing interest. I have seen longtime players get burned out on the grind and artificial difficulty implemented.

I'm rambling now and I realize my perspective is slightly anecdotal so I will grant that. However, in the end, people just want to play with friends, even if they are bad players. Move on, suffer through it, or quit. I've decided to sanely quit, but keep the friends.