Recently, a couple of fellow fresh graduates and myself observed that applying for jobs is similar to applying for a place in a raiding guild in World of Warcraft. This made me reflect on how this can be taken further and that there is a similarity in the experienced frustrations when it comes to making a game in a group VS the frustrations of raiding in WoW.
Back in 2013 Blizzard claimed (source) that they have reached the number of 100.000.000 created accounts. This doesn’t necessarily mean that so many people actually played the game (an account ≠ a player) but it is likely that the person reading this blog post has at some point played WoW (also, a WoW player ≠ a WoW raider), but has never developed any kind of game. And if the reader falls into all the needed demographics they will probably have a laugh from reading this.
So, allow me to name some all the things I can remember, that made me roll my eyes in a WoW raid. All of these frustrations can be translated into the frustrations of a game dev. Let’s go!
- people aren’t on time
- people don’t notify their absence
- people have no consumables
- people have no gold for repairs
- people stand in fire (an old classic)
- people can’t aggro packs properly
- people don’t grasp the concept of “ready check”
- people don’t understand that you can’t summon the repair mount inside
- accidental pet aggro
- accidental bloodlust
- nobody brought a feast for the people without their own food
- multiple butlers spawned at once
- all butlers on cooldown
- someone hearthstones to the bank before checking for a warlock in the raid
- warlock doesn’t give out healthstones
- rouges wasting time by refusing to die
- your internet dies
- the power is out at your place
- the power is out in your town
- the power is out at your entire island
- the subscription runs out
- water/coffee/tea/alcohol spills onto the keyboard
- someone’s wife goes into labour (true story)
- you didn’t manage to finish the content before it became outdated
And a Dark Legacy page on the subject of “need the exp for a job, but need a job for the exp”.
lostingame.design 