games

WoW is so guilty of this lmao, it's like half the appeal of playing the game for most of the player base - the "i know more than you, so I'm better" types.

The mechanics for each encounter are so opaque that you have to reference a website outside of the game to understand what's going on because the default game is sure as fuck not equipped to tell you anything (and don't bring up the combat log, no one looks at that at mid to low levels, especially if you're new). Some classes can't even be fully utilized without 3rd party add-ons cause it's too difficult to tell what araus are active or when procs happen.

Making it worse, there's a ubiquitous culture of expecting everyone to already know mechanics of each encounter and what you're supposed to do (unless you're playing at CE mythic raiding level ig). There's no trail and error and, in fact, playing that way is considered a huge waste of time and a valid reason to get booted from a group. I CANT EVEN JOIN NORMAL PUG RAIDS IF I DONT HAVE AOTC TO LINK MOST OF THE TEAM FUCK.

I hate it, I wanna like the game so much, maybe for nostalgia, maybe for when it can be fun, but it's such a badly designed game with the worst kind of culture. I felt this for a while, but it really hit me recently when I got a friend to play on a trial account and I was realizing how much information, add-ons, and mechanics they'd have to learn about ON TOP OF THE HOURS IT TAKES TO LEVEL - of course they fucking lost interest, the game's barrier to entry reaches the moon at this point. Even for me, I have trouble getting into groups and I haven't been able to join a guild for years because I've been playing on and off, so I have no "evidence" of my competence in game (like AoTC or high m+ io scores, which are almost impossible to pug your way into anyways).

Why waste time on this when you can just jump into a DRG lobby and actually play the game?