You can go the distance...do it for your name...be a champion...on the walls of the hall of fame

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk48xRzuNvA

It's a good song, if you need something to get you going.

So, this morning's thought was sparked from a conversation going on at MMOC about how, at four months out from the start of SoO, how less than a quarter percent of the major raiding player base have killed heroic Garrosh.  http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1436187-0-23-of-Players-Defeated-Heroic-Garrosh

A low number.  Sure.  So what?

Some people want to make issues out of it.  Things like 'the game is in decline, less people even caring to raid', 'not enough incentive for people to try', 'it's too hard if only 0.23% of the players can finish it on the hardest difficulty'.

For me, being a heroic progression raider, I say all that is total bullshit.  People whining, making up excuses, crying, wanting things handed down to them.

My wife takes pride in having played almost all the Halo games through the campaigns on the hardest difficulty levels.  All of them.  I can't do that.  Sure, I'm pretty decent in pvp on that game, not great, but my wife, Cillie, our guild leader, in the campaign, she makes me look absolutely stupid.  She's good.  Zen-fucking-zone good.  She memorizes the games subconsciously.  She knows the stories, all the characters, everything.  She gets into that entire series like nobody else I know.

And that is bad ass on a level most people never experience.  My wife is amazing at that game, and I take ridiculous pride in that.  My guy coworkers brag about gaming, and I get to knock them all way down by telling them that my WIFE can smoke all of those games.

Now if she and I were to play something like WC3 or SC2, yeah, I'd roflstomp her like crazy.  Love you honey, but yeah, I own RTS's.

But back to the point.  Game difficulty.

Let's go back, old school.  You idiots today think you know game difficulty and beating a game completely?  Oh man, kids these days.  I'm like...giddy!

May 22, 1980.  Pakkuman gets released to the public in Japan by Namco.  October it finally hits the US, as Pac-Man.  Now, Pac-Man isn't hard, by today's game standards.  Not hard at all.  Little yellow guy, move in four different directions, up, down, left, right.  Eat pellets, dodge ghosts, get power up pellets to go apeshit on the ghosts for a brief time.

Easy concept.  Sure.  It has a finite amount of levels, and a maximum score.  Three million, three hundred thirty three thousand, three hundred sixty points.  3,333,360.  THE perfect score that all old school gamers know.

From when it was released, to the year 2009, only six confirmed people have "beaten" that game.  TWENTY NINE YEARS PEOPLE.  You want to talk about game difficulty, you start there.  Complaining about how somewhere between 5,000 to 17,000 players have been able to beat heroic Garrosh in four months, oh come on.  Grow a pair.  By Pac-Man's standards, we're all a bunch of mouth breathing idiots spending our time running into padded walls without the full use of all our limbs trying to play WoW, and still "winning".

And don't even start on me about differences in how people and gamers think today versus 1980, or any nonsense like that.  Records, and achievements in human history, are there for a reason.

So only a tiny fraction of the player base have "beaten" the raid content for this expansion so far.  So what?  It's funny, people's opinions and perspectives.  If that number had been ten times higher, people, probably the exact same people bitching about it being "too hard" or "a waste of game resources on something only a tiny amount of people get to do", would be bitching that the devs made the game too easy that anyone can finish.

Get your head out of your asses.  One of the other posters in the thread said my same thoughts quite well, and quite simply.  "I don't feel like I'm entitled to the kill.  If we get it we earned it."

I really feel like more and more people are starting to lose the inherent value of earning something.  Of working your ass off, a long time, with a lot of failure along the way, to finally get to a goal.  I really do feel like a lot of gamers, and expound this beyond gaming into the "general world", that more and more people fully expect certain things they do, or want to achieve, to be really easy for them.  That the idea of failing, over and over, for a very long time, at the same thing, be it a game, their job, a hobby, and working your ass off to finally get it right, is lost on a lot of people.  Like it's been chemically bred out of people by the government through our water supply, or it's in the air we breath, the meat/cheese/bread we eat.  You are all turning into a bunch of crying little whiny bitches, and it's gross.

Six people in twenty nine years share the hallowed spot of completely beating Pac-Man.  Six, out of BILLIONS.  Those are some fucking gamers right there.  The rest of us are just the spectators, eating our cheetos and drinking our beers while we watch the gladiators perform.

Just like major league sports, or entertainers, or doctors, lawyers, politicians, a very small fraction of the human race is able to perform at that level, and an even smaller fraction of that percent are going to be considered "the best".  It's how our entire race has been since the beginning of time.  Work for it, trust me, whatever it is you are really looking at and thinking, "man, that's so cool, so hard, I wish I could do that", work for it.  Struggle with it, fight for it, have the fucking will to fail over and over and still keep trying and learning and adapting and working new ideas and thinking about it constantly, every day, until you get it right.  Because when you do get it right, and see yourself at the top, with very few people around you, they'll know, and you'll know just what it takes.


And it will feel glorious.

New years is a horrible time sometimes.

A wonderful family member died around four in the morning on New Years day.  My father-in-law's nephew's eighteen year old daughter was shot by another college student, presumably on accident, as a party was winding down.  My cousin, her daughter, they both were the happiest of people, able to lift a room up just by showing up.  They are the type of people that always have a great story, a fun life-loving approach to the world, people that you want to be around and have in your life.  The thought that this has happened, that such a bright, energetic, fun person is gone, that she won't get to add any more to this world is horrible.

I won't go into any details here, it's not the place for stuff like that.  If I get around to telling, I'll come to you personally and tell you.

I have all these thoughts in my head, like how will the judge actually sentence this guy, the killer.  I wonder how the town will react to everything as they hear and learn about it.  I wonder if people will use the situation for political reasons.  I wonder what my own views about gun laws and stuff like that will change.  How does the saying go?  Something like "it's always different until it happens to you"?  I'm missing the actual wording of the saying, but it gets close to how I'm feeling right now.

This isn't the first time I've lost a family member.  I've lived through one of my grandparents dying to old age and Alzheimer's  and my mother having to travel across the whole country and Canada to take care of things.  I've had to live with my wife losing her grandmother just a day after New Years to cancer.  I had to live with a close friend in my high school band dying in a traffic accident.

But this, someone dying to another person's hands, this is new to me.  I see so many people come together because of this, all of us heartbroken, some of the people that were actually there unable to speak because they are so distraught that all they can do is cry when they came to visit the family, and it tears me up.  She had a big impact on a lot of people's lives, and that won't ever happen again.  Ever.

And then I think about how I would feel if that were my mother, father, my wife's parents, any of my brothers and their families.

My wife.

I have to force my brain to think of anything else, do anything else, because if I let that thought stay, I break down.  And it's just a thought.  I can't handle the thought of this happening.

But my cousin, his wife, his two other kids, both boys, they have to deal with this right now.  This impossible thing.  It isn't a thought.  It's now their lives.  They have to deal with this unimaginable pain.  There isn't any way we can take this pain away.  It stays, it washes over all of us, them most of all, in ways we never thought could happen.

This changes lives.

Forever.

That's something that I hate most of all.  Will my cousin no longer be the wonderful, happy, life loving man he always has been?  Will I ever be able to joke around with them?  Or will we just see each other and know that the brightest of us isn't around anymore?

And this is just my side of things.  The kid that shot her, his family, they have their own level of pain and suffering to deal with.  To know for the rest of your life that you took something that can never be replaced out of this world, how does that change a person?  To know you've caused so much pain and suffering in the world for so many people, how does that eat away at you from the inside, out?

I don't know what else to say or do, so I'm just going to stop here.