Just because you claim it is “fact” doesn’t make it so. just speaking from personal experience I can say I’m probably not as good a player today as I was 20 years ago. My eyesight is worse, my reaction times are probably slower, and my digital dexterity is definitely not as good as it used to be.
That said I can do things in game today a player would never have dreamed of 20 years ago. Take the example above. The game is just designed and tuned differently today than it was then. It is faster and makes the character more powerful in relation to content by design. Not because everyone just became better players.
You might be worse after having played 20 years, but the average player who started more recently began at a level above what we all had back then, and likely learns and thinks about games in a way that leads them to improve faster than we ever did.
I’m not. I have literally stated it over and over again: gaming literacy.
Just because you don’t understand I have been referring to a field of study this entire time doesn’t make what I’m saying any less true. It just means that you don’t get that I’ve been referring to the field that literally studies what I’ve been talking about this entire time.
What I’m referring to is common knowledge that has been substantiated repeatedly. Not some random ethereal unicorn. And there’s tons of research on this:
These are just the three first links on Google Scholar covering it, providing a basic understanding of it: the more you engage with games it becomes a skill akin to that of reading, eye-hand-coordination, writing, or other practiced skills.
It is an entire field of study, and yes - players getting better with more available information that people engage with will make players better.
Your premise is wrong. All you did is admit to that your literacy skills have gotten worse, which is the same thing as anyone who decides to not read or write for years. If you stop riding a bicycle it’ll take you a few attempts to get back into it, but you’ll still be able to do it. All of it is still there.
Your eyesight and reaction speed getting worse isnt completely relevant, the reason being that WoW isnt a highly “mechanical skill” dependent game.
The most “mechanical” skill you are going to find in WoW is rated pvp, followed my M+ followed by raid.
That isnt to say these forms of content require less skill than PvP, just that there are different types of skill, like knowledge based skill and pattern recognition among others that take precedence here
Part of the reason LFR exists is because raiding, among other things is objectively harder, it is infinitely more accessible than in the past but also harder.
The other guy is right, gaming literacy is a thing, and becomes especially apparent for any game that breaches the 5 year mark or so.
This is especially true for knowledge based skill. Players are just so much more used to expecting/anticipating certain things, tracking others, and applying mitigating strategies to others. This makes all the pillar content significantly harder than it used to be because blizzard accounts for this.
That is to say if you time machined a player from say 2006 from now, and they were in peak form they would absolutely fail/brick and wipe on everything for a sizable amount of time. Comparatively if you took the average pillar content player from the modern era and had them do classic content, they clear it in a fraction of the time and effort even world firsters were doing at the time.
The game is objectively harder, no amount of acting like thats untrue doesn’t make it so.
I honestly couldn’t tell you, especially since its a physical sport. Players are def going to get better, but basketball has been around alot longer so players are closer to the ceiling already. Sports also have rule changes, but they don’t have patches and expansions that fundamentally change the difficulty of the game at a base level, the basic game more or less stays the same.
Also considering were talking vanilla/wrath era to modern, a more apt comparison would be “how many points would wilt chamberlain avg?” If we even should compare at all.
If you didn’t CC in the older content it was similar. The difference now is that it’s possible to not CC and still AOE/cleave groups down. You just have to dance around now.
I would like your post, but I’m all out of hearts for today and I probably won’t ever get a higher trust level… because I also keep getting shadowbanned every other day, so… we’ll just have to live with a bad cooldown on hearts
Players are just as bad today as they have always been.
