If it was truly about winners and losers, then you’d have some kind of half assed contribution system like Warhammer.

If it was deliberate, then I’d have even LESS confidence in Blizzard as game designers. Because a system that can blatantly screw people over to such an extreme extent and spreading so much misery would have no business calling itself a “game” or “fun.”

And crafting… borderline.

Raiding, PvP, and PvE are it, and non-raiding PvE ends once you get to level cap basically.

There are many “games within the game” in World of Warcraft. Raiding, crafting, and PvP are just the obvious ones. There are other less obvious ones such as economics, guild politics, and loot distribution(which you are observing). They intentionally design the loot system in order to make it competitive, which means there are going to be winners and losers.

Should Blizzard be doing this? Absolutely not. The social games in WoW have nothing to do with skill at the game. But, I guarantee you they are doing this intentionally, especially on the raid level. They could design the system so that everybody gets fair treatment in the loot department. They chose not to.

This is one of the big reasons why I tend to be anti-raid(and somewhat anti-pve in general).

The fact that “carebear” is an insult like “noob” is concerns me. MMOs accept this namecalling behavior because there is never a single situation in which someone saying things like that can suffer any kind of retaliation or retribution. Quit simply there is little to no accountability. Since when has it ever been wrong to care about someone or their feelings? I actually had someone send me abusive /tells in World of Warcraft while I was on my Night Elf Druid alt. Keep in mind I have never seen this person before, they were not one of my friends that would know the alts name, and they were even on an entirely different continent than I was.

Out of the blue this person says to me “Why are you a NE? Don’t you know that they’re Gay? What a gay noob” You can imagine my surprise, but since I genuinely want to understand exactly what motivates a person to do something like that I continued the conversation for about ten or fifteen minutes. They were like a broken record. I would say something like “So if I’m gay why do you care? Why does it matter?” and he would just keep saying, “So you’re gay! See you’re such a noob. NE’s look so gay! Why would you play a NE?” Of course I reported him to blizzard because I know for a fact that a ton of kids play WoW and I am very glad that I was the target of the abuse because that is not something that I would want my own children, or anyone elses children, to experience.

This was an extreme case, I know, and retribution may have been enacted eventually (due to legal issues Blizzard cannot tell me what the end result of my petition was, but they thanked me for helping keep their game “abuse-free”) but most other things slip under the radar. Stealing loot, while it is part of a game and has no actual bearing on real life for most people, can affect people negatively- and yet there is absolutely no means of social regulation. Keep in mind that if someone considers something to be real then the consequences can be real, so when someone takes abusive action against another person in the context of playing a game there can be consequences that feedback into real life. Without any kind social regulation mechanic or lasting consequences for inappropriate behavior everyone in MMOs is basically operating without a safety net and that has a lot of nasty consequences.

I think I got a little off-topic, but after I understand a little more I think I’ll have to write on my own blog about it.

The last thing that is killing me is gear and what people itemize for themselves. Doing the new instance ToC(the 5 man) in regular or heroic, I don’t think I’ve done one without someone taking/ninjaing an item over another player. Most common is dps taking the black heart over tanks. For me on heroic it’s either a ret pally or dk taking marrowstrike over my hunter or feral druid. I’ve lost that polearm 3 times to dks and ret pallies. If it was a warrior I’d be more tolerant or if they were a dk tank, but no… The last night a ret pally and I were in an agreement; the axe was his, the polearm was mine. But he took the polearm anyway and called me a crybaby when I said “We had an agreement =(”(he was a guildie too…)

It’s the players now that are killing me it seems. I can’t even trust another player with gear now. And I constantly fear of losing upgrades that are itemized for my dps classes to dks and ret pallies. DKs take spell power (LOL) or tanking gear over tanks. Ret pallies/dks take agility gear over my enhance shaman, feral druid, or hunter. And I know agility is still good for a dk, pally and warrior, but… I don’t know. Taking an agility ring over a rogue seems pretty low to me when a strength ring drops off the next boss. More so because that rogue won’t take the strength ring and you just screwed him/her over for that run.

I really miss playing with players who play for the game and their guild. Who do their best to help guildies and I don’t need babysitting. I’m the type of person who passes upgrades to other guildies, who helps people level, etc. It seems now the game is a free-for-all. Everyone just downs the boss to get purples and it only matters if they get the purples first to squeeze out another 100 dps on the meter. It doesn’t matter who you step on to get the gear. I’ve only been in two guilds ever that preached “Help your guildies. Pass loot if it’s a minor upgrade!”

Sigh… I guess I’m a carebear. More like an emobear now. But maybe I should just cry more since I’m a noob right? Or quit the game? Sigh.

WoW does have some situations where that is not the case. I have thoroughly enjoyed groups where we have our healer/tank and then a spellcasting Shaman/Druid for dps (I’m a mage, they help my dps a TON, but that’s not the point) because when the healer goes down we have two characters thats gear is very well suited for healing. They may not have the talents or the mana regen that a healer would, but they work in a pinch and in some of the max-level instances there have been some great moments where the healer goes down halfway through the fight and we can muscle our way through. Having a spellcasting druid tank is always fun too (for some reason they get an armor bonus that makes it as if they were wearing plate…) just because it mixes stuff up a bit.

Now having said that, those situations happen far to rarely- and a lot of times when they do the people I’m playing with are too thickheaded to make it work. Doh.

I have also come to grips with the fact that for most people, myself and those that I know personally offline particularly, WoW is an all-consuming beast. We don’t watch our favorite TV shows and play our NUMEROUS other games together anymore. It’s just WoW, WoW, WoW. I’m trying to get them to stop… but I don’t think it’s going to happen.