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.
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