The tragedy of the noob

Some of you might remember I did a series of posts on theorycrafting(part 1 part 2) and how people would get the wrong impressions and messages out of it. For those who weren’t there the general idea was that a lot of players are following guides and websites like Elitist Jerks like they’re holy gospel. Two days ago I was witness to how these websites can completely screw up a new player experience and expectations. I want to apologize first for not screenshotting the entire conversations. I don’t seem to have that reflex others have to screenshot funny bits of texts so I’ll have to relate this from memory.

So it’s monday night and myself and two friends are doing chain heroics. Them as the healer/tank combo and me as a 3.5-4k dps. We got all our bases covered and we are downing heroic after heroics.  As time and heroics passes we start doing weird things and the chat becomes ever so crazier. After all once your on your tenth heroic in a row you need a little something not to go completely crazy. Toward the end of the night we got Utgarde Pinnacle and got teamed with two low geared dps. We told ourselves that it was only Pinnacle so my 3,5k dps should be enough not to make it drag too long and we started chain pulling the place.

Now this is where it gets a bit funny, our hunter in blues and green who was putting out a brave 1k dps said in party chat that our 44k hp tank should remove its christmas hat and put on his real helm or we could have a stupid wipe since he was obviously not defense capped with his red hat. To say I was a bit suprised would be an understatement. Normally this is the kind of stuff I hear from overgeared kids who keeps whining about how we all suck. The tank told him that if he could steal agro from him he’d put on a real helm and we kept pulling. We get to the first boss fast enough and the hunter once again speaks up to tell us how to beat the encounter… we told him that we were overgeared enough just to rush the boss but he insisted he read on Tankspot the best way to kill it. By the time he was finished typing however the boss was already dead. That’s when I realized there was more to this hunter than an elitist kid. I started to talk to him in tells to figure out what was going on.

The tragedy of the noob

Once upon a time, HunterDeath, our hunter began playing a game called World of Warcraft. He had read about it before and knew it was a good game but paying monthly for a game seemed odd to him and he wasn’t convinced. One day he saw a movie called Zombieland and when one guy in the theater screamed Colombus was playing WoW he tought that if the game had made it into a movie he was missing something out so when he got home he bought the game and started playing. From day one he was hooked and he spent all of his free time together with the new love of his life. As he got up the levels, decked out in all kind of weird, mismatched gear he started running instances and he was told in no uncertain terms that he sucked, that his spec was wrong and that he did no dps. L2Play Noob!

So our hunter took the comment to heart and figured he might really learn to play after all. So he hoped on the internet to learn about all those new strange words like tanks, dps, damage meters, rotations and all the others. He found the websites and the guides everyone refered to and he started studying them like their would be an exam once he got to level 80.

Fast forward to last monday and our hunter was on his second day as a brand new 80 and it was also his third heroic only.  Since he had read that hunters could pull 5k dps in blues he was expecting to be able to do the same and he was really depressed not to get the same results. He admitted to me he tought about rerolling, that maybe hunter was not the best class for him. He did not understand yet that Elitist jerks is called elitists jerks for a reason and that the 5k dps in blues might be exaggerating a little, hell! he was probably lying.

I spent the run explaining to him that 1k dps in greens and blues in a heroic when you’ve been 80 for only two days was rather good. That I’ve seen people in epics pull less so there was no need to worry. I told him to enjoy the heroics instead of watching a dps meter.

The moral of the story? Try to remember it’s a game and that we don’t need to take it so seriously.