WoW is life
No I don’t mean in a literal sense although for some people this may be nervously close to the truth. Thankfully WoW consumes a drastically smaller percentage of my free time than it once did. Anyway I was referring to a figurative sense, specifically the roles people play in the game and how they go about those roles.
In a typical team situation in WoW you have three jobs, a tank, a healer and dps. A tank’s job is to attract the attention of all bad guys so they focus their attacks on him. By doing so he makes the job of the healer much easier since he only has to focus on healing the tank primarily.
DPS (damage per second) is an acronym that represents everyone else. Their primary job is to do as much damage as possible to the enemies as quickly as possible. Sometimes they will have secondary CC (crowd control) responsibilities where they temporarily incapacitate an enemy so the overall fight is more manageable.
I almost exclusively play the role of a tank or a healer since those are the two most crucial roles. Since I am overall a pretty responsible individual, that carries over well to these roles in game.
It is amazing that just as in real life, the amount of effort that a person puts into his virtual job dramatically affects the outcome of the experience. As in all walks of life you have people that are responsible, intelligent and skilled in how they perform their job duties and others that just plain suck at it.
When you have all three aspects of a group filled with quality people running a dungeon things go smoothly and you accomplish your objective quickly and with minimal problems. However if you have dummies that don’t know the fight, do dumb things like stand in fire without realizing it burns, or have not taken any time to figure out how their class is best played you wind up with just a miserable experience where virtual death abounds and the frustration meter is off the charts.
Sometimes I just try to grin and bear it and not point out when a player does something overtly stupid. However if my patience has already been worn thin, often times I will point out to people that their stupid play affects everyone else. Sometimes players actually will change their behavior after being called out for it but more often than not all it does is generate more bad behavior.