Howdy folks!
Over the years, I have railed against what I call “metasheep” and how they negatively impact the game. Classic Era and SoD have calmed down on this significantly (as I anticipated - you can’t be as choosy on who plays if there aren’t that many players to choose from,) which is great. People should be allowed to play as they like, so long as the bosses die. Anyone who’s holding a raid group or a dungeon group back should take it upon themselves to get up to snuff so they can participate meaningfully. You don’t need a full raid of “purple parsing” or “max gear score” players to clear content (MC was cleared right away in Classic by raiders who were in quest greens, and not all were 60!)
At any rate, this article summarizes this beautifully:
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/fallout-designer-tim-cain-thinks-influencers-have-changed-how-people-make-and-play-games-more-people-seem-to-be-abdicating-their-own-judgement-to-that-of-people-they-see-online/\
The upshot - we’d be better off if people learned how to think for themselves.
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I skimmed the article but this definitely aligns with my own observations. Players have always put too much stalk in what “celebrities” think and do, but the internet and gaming has amplified this a lot more.
Unfortunately…
While true, hundreds of years of human society suggests this is unlikely haha.
The best we can do is find or create communities where we promote this kind of culture. They will always be niche because of “grass is greener” syndrome but you can often attract enough people to have a successful community, at least in WoW.
I suggest Legacy on Grobbulus, but know these squads exist on every server 
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I think the world buff/parsing/minmax culture wouldn’t have been as extreme without the streamers almost willing it to be so prior to the 2019 release. Instead of there being a handful of super tryhard guilds, it definitely influenced people into thinking that was normal and required.
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Agreed, the parsing minmax culture wouldn’t be upfront because it wasn’t historically upfront until streamers learned about it.
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I’m sure AI will help a lot with this and definitely won’t be weaponized to strip the public of their critical thinking capacities.
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That’s an entirely different topic, and not necessarily related to WoW at the moment. However, I do have quite a few concerns about AI and our future.
Don’t blame me – I’ll be voting for Kodos
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its been this way in every vector of human existence since the dawn of civilization
anyone really surprised? i took it for common sense observation. people have been talking about this for forever
players are largely tools so they follow tools and they create an environment no one with a brain or a soul wants to play in
life aint fair though
minmaxing classic wow with full world buffs etc was a big thing on nost and nost had almost 0 streamers of any description (mostly because it was against twitch tos to stream nost), this was 10 years ago
there were 25 minute bwls in 2015 and they count from razorgore pull rather than our wcl which only starts as soon as razorgore dies iirc, so these are 20 minute bwls from a decade ago
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Building games that guides cannot help you autopilot are actually a passion project on mine.
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This is that Wildstar guy again isn’t it (Searches name) Yep, he played a significant role in killing that MMO and accepts none of the responsibility despite being a lead game designer. Uploaded a years old video about how there was constant infighting and points the finger at other members of staff
Don’t know why people refer to him as some poignant fountain of knowledge
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What role did he play in its failure?
My opinion of WS is that it was that the designers took away the wrong lessons from Wow and used them on WS.
This is death by thousands of self inflicted injuries, and not specifically one thing or one person.
If was was mechanically worse, Tom Chilton would have scuttled wow also with his bad designs.
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In summary:
Humans need to be lead. Because they cannot lead themselves.
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