Elnia, who I constantly confuse with Larissa (I should complain less when people confuse me with Tamarind) wrote a post over at Pink Pigtail Inn which talks about this post over at WoWinsider (now WoW.com, although in truth I barely follow it these days because it annoys the hell out of me) in which Adam Holisky tells the WoW community to shut the hell up.
Now to be fair, what Adam is mostly getting at is, well, trolls. And trolls are douchebags, we can all get behind that. Shy – in the comments to Elina’s post – makes the observation that the way trolls choose to communicate is actually unacceptable, and it’s important to recognise that (she points out that if somebody talked to you i real life the way forum trolls talk to Ghostcrawler it would actually be considered mental abuse). The problem is that actually Adam isn’t getting at trolls. He’s using trolls as a straw man (or, since this is WoW, possibly some kind of critter or training dummy) to explain why people in general shouldn’t complain about the game.
If nothing else, he comes across as incredibly smug and patronising:
The vast, the extremely vast, majority of WoW players are quite happy with the direction of the game and the balance that has been struck therein. The majority of players understand that the game is ever changing, that just because you’re at the top today doesn’t mean you’ll be at the top tomorrow. The vast majority of players take this to be a game, and nothing more.
Where to begin.
Firstly, in the words of Randall Munroe’s Wikipedian Protester: Citation Needed. Where exactly are you getting this idea that the majority of players are perfectly happy? Do you have surveys? Have you interviewed all eleven million of us?
And what exactly is the link between “is perfectly happy” and “take this to be a game, and nothing more”? It’s a game, certainly. It’s a game that I paid money for, a game that I continue to pay money for. If I pay money for something, and it does not live up to my expectations, I complain about it. That is my right as a consumer. Why do people persist in pretending that talking about things in a space that is specifically designed for talking about those things is somehow taking things too seriously. To put it another way, Adam, if it’s “just a game and nothing more” why do you give a shit what happens to the community?
Of course actually Adam is perfectly right, the majority of WoW players are quite happy with the game, but guess what, that includes the “vocal minority”. Adam seems to want us to think that the community is split into two groups – the “Vocal Minority” who hate everything about the game, and the “Silent Majority” who love it. This is not true. In fact everybody who plays the game pretty much likes most things about it, that’s why we still play it. But sometimes one thing annoys some of us, and we complain. If I go to a restaurant, and my steak is overcooked, it doesn’t matter how many people there are out there who are perfectly happy with their dinner, nor does it matter how many times I have had perfectly delicious steak at that restaurant, or how good my starter was, I am still paying for a service that is not being delivered to an appropriate standard.
Now of course that doesn’t give me the right to go into the kitchen and punch the chef, or to be rude to my waitress, but that isn’t what Adam is saying. He’s saying that because nobody else had a problem, that I am not allowed to have a problem. That simply isn’t the way it works.
Adam then goes on to explain how he thinks these problems could be solved:
First, the inappropriate commentary needs to either be shot down en masse, or it just needs to be ignored. The vocal minority only responds the way it does because players in general respond well to their tactics. When a person yells “FSCKING GC nerfed paladins again! I’m quitting!” and then sees two dozen affirmations of his sentiments, not only will he continue but he’ll also cause other players to mimic his behavior. Instead, if he saw two dozen replies telling him to grow up and behave, then he would be shamed into behaving.
Again, notice this sentence: “and then sees two dozen affirmations of his sentiments.” Once more, Adam is drawing a direct line between the way in which trolls choose to present themselves and the opinions they express. The syllogism underlying Adam’s argument is this:
- X believes that Y is wrong.
- X expresses his beliefs in a manner which is inappropriate.
- Therefore Y is correct.
To put it in the framework of the restaurant analogy:
- I think my steak is overcooked.
- I shout at the waitress for serving me overcooked steak.
- Therefore my steak is not overcooked.
Or to put it in the context of World of Warcraft:
- I believe that Shadow Priest DPS is too low.
- I QQ at Ghostcrawler on the forums about low Shadow Priest DPS.
- Therefore Shadow Priest DPS is fine.
Or, more simply:
- All trolls criticise the design of the game
- Therefore all people who criticise the design of the game are trolls.
I might also ask how, given that “players in general” respond well to the “vocal minority,” they can still be considered a “minority”.
Adam also seems to want to put the responsibility for moderating the forums on “the community” when that’s actually a job that belongs to the forum moderators (the clue is in the name). It simply isn’t the job of posters on the forum to enforce forum policy. If there even is a forum policy, I have no idea, because I don’t read the forums, because they’re full of morons.
The final thing he says, the thing that really makes me want to punch him in the neck, is this:
Secondly, the community as a whole needs to understand that it doesn’t have a solid grasp on class balance and general game design. The topics are infinitely complex, often times requiring high level education to understand completely; especially in such a huge system like WoW. The people who do understand these systems are employed by Blizzard, and if not, they’re listened to by people like Ghostcrawler. The community is not entitled to run the game. The fact that we all have a unique and valuable opportunity to engage in discussion about its direction is not a blank check to demand change.
This is Ebert’s Fallacy in a different dress. Because you’re not a game designer, you don’t have the insight necessary to criticise game design. This is, in a word, horseshit.
The community has, in fact, frequently been right about stuff. It said DKs were overpowered at release, and they were. It said Ret Pallies were overpowered in PvP, and they were, it said putting Forbearance on Avenging Wrath was too harsh a penalty for PvE, and it was. The community might not have the technical knowhow to do the game developer’s jobs for them, but it understands the game well enough to identify key issues with the current state of play. And hell, Blizzard frequently very specifically balances the game around community perception – look at the comments a few months ago about not wanting to make Warrior tanks too good, because they’re already popular enough as it is. Community perception (and rest assured, that’s what the “vocal minority” is) is something a company cannot afford to overlook.
Of course the community isn’t “entitled” to run the game, but we are entitled to complain about it. Again, that’s part of being a consumer. We’re entitled to bitch, moan and whine all we like. Adam Holisky is entitled to tell the community to STFU and the community is entitled to ignore him. If I pay for a service, and I consider that service not to be worth the money I paid for it, I am entitled to complain. Blizzard is entitled to ignore us, and we are entitled to take our business elsewhere, that’s how capitalism works.
Of course, I wouldn’t necessarily expect Adam to understand all of that since it does, after all, require a high level of education.
It is often difficult to separate the message from the delivery. Who wants to be associated with the obnoxious whiners? I don’t, even if sometimes I agree.
Very true.
One of the plans I regularly make but will never get around to implementing is to put together a political weblog called “Get Off My Side” and invite people from various parts of the political spectrum to find people whose beliefs they share and wish they didn’t.
Hah, I love it! I think I’ll have to write about that sometime.
+1 Internet Win for this post. Adam’s diatribe troubled me, but you have expressed all the reasons why in a much more amusing manner than I ever could.
And why has the world not yet gotten to the point where we actively point and laugh at anyone who uses the term “vocal minority”? I’m pretty sure that phrase needs to be a punchline, not an argument.
Even worse than “Vocal Minority” is “Silent Majority”.
These people haven’t said anything at all, so I will assume that every single one of them agrees with me!
“If there even is a forum policy, I have no idea, because I don’t read the forums, because they’re full of morons.”
That right there was you making an unfounded assertion
Noticed that, huh?
I like the assumption that after a troll was there screaming “ME NO OP NO NERF ME I QUIT!”, every other response that expresses the same opinion but respectfully (i.e. “It’s my opinion that putting forbearance on Avenging Wrath would cause more harm than good for reasons x,y,z, and I hope you guys reconsider it”) is automatically troll food and not a discussion of the “actual topics of interest to the community”.
I’m a pally healer who primarily heals a pally tank. The list of things that trigger forbearance is an actual topic of interest to me. No lie.
Yeah, that was one of the things that really got to me.
Again, if Adam had said “you have to realise that when you express legitimate concerns like a moron, you make those concerns sound foolish” it would have been fine. What he said was that people need to stop whining.
How dare you subject opinionated blithering to logical analysis! Syllogism in blogposts…the love continues to grow. My thanks.
It is also worth noting that, assuming a fairly free market, the opinions of your consumers are ultimately the only things that matter.
The fact that your design is too brilliant for me to comprehend does not make your product better.
The fact that your design is too brilliant for me to comprehend does not make your product better.
This.
I will admit that sometimes consumers do need to stand back and accept that things are a bit more complicated than they think they are, but I think that point comes when you start deciding that you know how to fix something, not when you work out that it’s broken.
Go Chas Go!
I guess I always thought WoW.com leaned too close to the “we love Blizzard” camp to be objective. And I think Adam H did his best to try point out that the Blizzard forums are getting just plain ridiculous.
And I do agree with him in that way too many posters pitch their article at Game Developers like Ghostcrawler.
If you post on the official forums ASSUME that you are only going to be read by other players. You probably will only be read/replied to by other players.
But you’re absolutely right. I play this game. I have opinions (thank god I have my own blog) and sometimes there might be thousands of people who agree with me. Sometimes there might be a handful (ie my post on the new LFG tool which apparently was whiny and negative) who agree.
I have no idea. Nobody polls the community extensively. Perhaps 90% of the player base would say they were “satisfied” with the game but not “very satisfied”. Who knows?
A lot of the stuff and ideas presented on the forums is painful to read through. Doesn’t mean that the ideas aren’t good. Or that the community isn’t right.
Even Blizzard have explained that Dual Specialisation was something requested by players for years and something they were strongly opposed to. Now they admit it was a pretty good idea after all.
Who said your post about the LFG system was too whiny and negative? It seemed a combination of tongue in cheek (you will wind up in one or two dungeons you goddamn hate – although I suppose that’s true if you use it enough) utterly uncontroversial (not all heroics are equally difficult) or genuinely helpful (you can’t trade with people from other servers).
Although you did get pingbacked from WoW.com, and you could say the sky was blue over there and some smug twat would say “aah, but the sky isn’t *always* blue, sometimes it’s grey, or black, or red. noob.”
Adam clearly doesn’t have a clue about what a forum Troll actually is… a troll isnt someone who simply disagrees with Blizzards choices like so “omg paladin nerf again, GC sux i quit!”
A troll is someone who is purposefully sarcastic with intent of making others believe hes being sincere, trying to get as many people as possible to reply sincerely about his topic.
Like currently if someone made a topic named “Epics are too hard to get!!!!!” and the content of the post was:
“hey evry1 i got 80 not long ago but i cant get epics cos its so hard to find them and i think i gonna quit game cos it not fun with no purple”
Thats a troll post thats barely hidden.
Someone who makes a thread named “Ret Paladin in PvP are overpowered” with content of:
“Ret paladins currently faceroll most classes, their damage is very high, they have several stun/incapacitate effects, they can remove snare effects, run faster than most, can bubble and heal, etc etc”
Is not a Troll post, its someone who has concerns.
To be fair, Adam didn’t actually use the word troll, I did. I tend to use “troll” outside of its technical definition to mean “somebody who acts like an arse on the internet in order to get attention”.
Plus I’d kind of argue that anybody who says “I am going to quit over X” is trolling unless they *really are* going to quit over it.
Oops, ahwell, that blows my rant out the water :[
Hi Chas, glad to have you back with us (yes I know this isn’t the first post you’ve done since your hiatus, but hey
)
I’d like to add something in your support of “This is Ebert’s Fallacy in a different dress. Because you’re not a game designer, you don’t have the insight necessary to criticise game design. This is, in a word, horseshit.”
No matter what you might think of the people there, Elitist Jerks has pretty well proven that the community (or at least a section of it, that is certainly not Blizzard!) is extremely capable of providing insight into the game design. They uncover every little aspect of a particular class. It was on EJ that it was determined in 3.2 that epidemic and reaping were pointless for Unholy DKs as the DPS was much higher without due to problems with Scourge Strike – which lead to the redesign in 3.3.
I use EJ as an example, many others can and do figure these sort of things out too.
Yeah, EJ is a good example, it’s a great resource (shame about the name – newsflash guys, “elitist” is not a synonym for “clever”). The truth is that game design is *not* deep magic from the dawn of time. It’s *complicated* certainly, but that isn’t the same thing.
One of the things I find scary about being a grownup with a proper job is the gradually mounting realisation that actually, the world is probably run by people who aren’t any smarter than me, who don’t have much more of an idea about what’s going on than I do. Blizzard isn’t run by infallible game deities, it’s run by dudes who make mistakes.
This is one of those posts that I wish I wrote. +1 Win.
Yay! Go me, thank you.
I basically gave up reading Wow.com as a reader couple of months ago for the reasons expressed by you and the people who have left comments. Now if I want information about the game I turn to the blogs.
All of the blogs that I read are written by people that actually play the class, and because of this it seems they do a better job at breaking down the content and explaining it in ways that are easier to understand. Take Gevlon for instance, love him or what him, he knows what he is talking about when it comes to making gold. With 1 million visits, also 1.6M page views and 220K individual visitors even if only half the people that go there shared his opinons, that doesnt seem to be that small a group. Also if blizzard didn’t like the opinions expressed by bloggers and felt that they were trolls why would they go and immortalize some of them as items ingame or even link their blogs to the main site?
The other thing is that it seems like the writers for wow.com monitor the blogs and don’t seem to mind using what is discussed on the blogs to expand for articles on their site.
In the end I look at blogs being by the people for the people. So I say to you awesome bloggers out there keep doing what your doing. We readers might not always leave comments but we do value the time and effort that you put into bringing us this valuable service.
Michael, I’m exactly the same. I haven’t read wow.com since I discovered the blogosphere, and it has done wonders for my sanity and my satisfaction with the game.
Wow.com isn’t all bad. Allison Roberts does the druid column and tends to be pretty wonderful. Though I would prefer if she had her own blog to produce that content rather than Wow.com
It’s not the content so much as the *comments* that drive me mad. I do enjoy some of the columns but I don’t quite have the discipline not to peak at some of the comments, and then pain follows.
I occasionally pop back because I do like some of their columns – I poke lichborne now and again for DK info, and they tend to have decent patch note stuff.
I was put off months ago when a very general post opened with the line “we all know that the real game begins at 80″.
Well said. Anybody that thniks that only the forum warriors have issues with some parts of the game is desilusional.
Example: I found the Venomspite quests that take you to New Hearthglen over and over again extremely annoying. Do I make a post in the forums about it? No. Do I think that everything is wonderful? No.
Online reviews sites got the same problem, they depend way too much of the companies to be objective.
The thing I found infuriating about the Venomspite quests was that I was doing them at roughly the same time that – well WoWinsider, in fact – was full of wanky posts about how the quest design in Northrend was sooooo much better than in the old world, and how you *never* had to go back and forth to the same goddamned area to kill the same mobs over and over again. Oh no.
Which is a shame, because my inner Forsaken loves the Royal Apothecary Society.
Also, and this is a fail quest design that keeps repeating itself is the: “Let’s make a huge quest chain that at the end have a kill elite mission so everybody is in different parts of it and noone can kill it”
I don’t care so much if it leads to a dungeon, because everybody does them anyways but a single elite that you cannot kill after a buch of solo quests? Fuck that. Note that so far, all this apply to the Venomspite quests.
Maybe if the WoWInsider head honchos weren’t so busy doing fellatio on print they would have noticed it.
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