Greedy Goblin

Thursday, October 7, 2010

28th orc feet is so cool!

My post about the fun factor of jobs wasn't accurate. While I pointed out a problem and gave an OK solution I did not find the exact problem. Lot of commenters properly stated that while all jobs contain grind parts, they still differ in how much (un)happiness they provide. One tries to maximize his happiness or philosophical goals (helping people, defending their nation, changing the world). Choosing a job that gives some happiness or goals can be a good choice over a better paying but terribly boring or disgusting job. So one shall count the following factors when choosing his job:
  • happiness gained from 1 hour work
  • happiness gained from 1 hour cheap leasure
  • happiness gained if he consumes 1$ in his leasure time
  • working hours
  • payment
So people are right when they claim that the fun factor of the job is important. However if they would do calculate with "fun", they would be happy or at least content saying "this is the smallest evil". Yet people are complaining about their jobs all the time, claiming they would be better off somewhere else or would deserve better. There are two reasons for that.

One is education: to gain certain jobs, you need formal diploma or informal "experience". One has to start this education 5-8 years before actually getting into the job. People with low patience did not do it (or slacked during education) and now they lack the diploma, so they can't take the job. This is impossible in WoW where all knowledge can be gained in a day.

The second is a hardcore social mistake: saying "fun" but meaning "cool". "Fun" is personal happiness. If something is fun, it would be fun on an isolated island. "Cool" is something that gains peer respect/acceptance/envy. There are many things that "cool" but absolutely not "fun", the best example is the stiletto heel shoes that women wear. It's an absolutely unconfortable and unhealthy footwear, but it makes them look prettier.

Socials are very motivated to "be cool" and the envious/accepting/respecting peer opinions/body language do make them feel happy. So the woman in stiletto heels may actually feel happy despite the serious discomfort because she constantly gets "whoa" looks from men and envious looks from women. So "fun" and "cool" are often the same for socials.

With jobs it does not work. Even if the job is "cool", you get the peer respect from people when you are not working. Being a top lawyer is very cool when you talk about it in a bar. Grinding legal documents alone in your office 10 hours a day on the other hand cannot be cool as there are no peers around. The stiletto heels provide the discomfort and the peer respect in the same time, while jobs provide both real (payment) and social rewards (observed successful) after the job is done. This is very similar to WoW. You can strike e-peen with whatever colored drake in Dalaran, after you grinded it. You cannot stroke anything while grinding.

The reason why socials are making terrible job choices is their "need" for being cool. The reason why they are not satisfied by their choices and feel that they are cheated is that this "need" is false. While being able to tell your ex-college mates in re-union that "I'm a game developer" does provide fun, you are usually not on a re-union. When you are not around peers, you get just the 28th orc feet.

This is very common in WoW. Being top DPS is cool. Being tank or healer is not cool. It is fun (I was always healer and found DPSing boring and repetitive), but there are no meters to get peer respect. So socials go DPS with the hopes of being cool. The price is the long queue, few DPS spots and the boring rotations.

The solution sounds easy: go for your personal "fun" and not "being cool". However this is impossible for a social, who by definition derives happiness from peer respect/acceptance/envy.
----------------------

No moron today as no proper submission was sent.

31 comments:

format said...

Healing can't be cool? You could do what I do and heal heroics as elemental. I am often top dps (which people think is cool) but still do the important job that the morons I beat could never do.

Anonymous said...

I understand what you mean by fun and cool and i can place them into my WoW expierence.

Your difference between dps being cool and tank/healer being not struck me. (healer does have a meter though, but its not really used for epeen afaik.)

I chose tanking because of quality of life. (shortere queue's etc) As a fairly social non-M&S person i'd like to ask all of you reading this:

How am i going to be "cool" and impress/get envy/etc from my peers as a tank?

Gevlon said...

@Anonymous: you can't. Tanking can never be cool as you "pwn" no other player. The top DPS is "cool" because he beat other players.

If you choose based on quality of life, you made the good (although a-social) choice.

Grim said...

Tanking can be cool. It just takes higher skill players to appreciate it.

If I tank a heroic, I might even top the meter while i'm at it and no one will give a flying fuck.

If I successfully tank the caster-prince in hard mode with a warrior after the hunter has failed miserably - the rest of the group then think i'm cool.
If I am the abomination on PP HM and floor is clear and I do good damage on oozes - the rest of the group think i'm cool.

Also the scarcity of good tanks means that just being capable of tanking hard modes makes you kinda cool.

chewy said...

It's ironic that as a healer you're supporting the very people you criticise.

I've seen talented healers keep idiot tanks and dps alive while literally just outlasting a boss. Perhaps that's where your resentment of these people comes from and I can't say I blame you. They're trying to be cool, you're getting the job done.

nonameform said...

I have two level 80 priests. One is my main who was destined to be a healer after reaching level cap, but that never happened and I stayed shadow. I've seen my name at World of Logs top list, so I believe that it wasn't a bad choice.

My other priest is a dedicated healer and has no shadow off-spec. I leveled it as a healer from start and thus had a chance to see the difference between shadow and holy leveling. Even though I've healed in the past on my shadow priest, I didn't have much experience as healer (the "hardest" content I did before picking up shadow PVP spec was Naxx 25), so it was an interesting change.

Even though I agree that being a damage dealer is quiet boring (I do hate the melee part to be honest), shadow priest was not a bad choice and I still plan to play as shadow in Cataclysm. Don't know if the changes that Blizzard makes to the class (and casters in general) will make me want to do something else instead or not, but I've been playing shadow even in TBC, when the spec wasn't as good as it is now at the end of WotLK.

I'm actually really upset by the fact that many healers have a shadow off-spec now, but have no gear or basic idea of how to play the game as a damage dealer. Even though it might seem that doing damage is same old, same old and rolling your face on the keyboard, it's not that hard tell the difference between greatly geared and skilled player and greatly geared, but clueless one.

Ephemeron said...

[i]"Yet people are complaining about their jobs all the time, claiming they would be better off somewhere else or would deserve better."[/i]

People are complaining about everything all the time: their jobs, their relationships, their governments, the weather, etc.. It's simply a part of human nature.

However, not all of these complaints constitute actual negative feedback. A lot of time people are complaining just for the sake of complaining. It is a scientifically confirmed fact that openly venting one's frustrations (be it via complaints, swearing or crying) has a noticable therapeutic and stress/pain-relieving effect.

And for once, being social has nothing to do with it. A person who stubs his toe while stranded on the desert island will feel better if he or she swears afterwards, even though there's no one around to hear them.

Unknown said...

I believe what your comments on the other 28th orc feet post were trying to say is that there is no global definition of what is fun and what isn't, but rather personal. Good clarification in this post, though.

Camiel said...

Tanking can definetely be cool. Especially pre-TBC (when raids had 40 men and every warrior in the raid was tank specced), being the main tank of your guild was something that was boasted about. The people on my server with the largest egos are all tanks.

The good thing about tanking is that it is very easy to be cool. Due to the lack of measureable performance, as long as you have many HP and can keep reasonable aggro, everybody thinks you must be a good tank. Since you are unique in your group (you are the only one taking the hard blows), you immediately get everyone's respect.

The interesting question is why being a healer is not cool. Probably because they are less unique: in any group larger than 5 men there are multiple healers, while many 25-man raid bosses still only require one tank.

Falga said...

Well Gevlon, I cannot fully agree that healing or tanking cannot be "cool", as gaining respect among peers. As well as a mage being "cool" for his DPS.
Just yesterday I did an achievment in Azjol`Nerub where the first boss must be killed with 3 mini bosses still alive.
Mage did a job of kiting the 3 mini boss packs to the entrance where he Ice Cubed/Died. He didn`t do damage but he got respect for actually tanking (mitigating damage, getting aggro while other party did their job). And then when the boss had 50k or so HP left all the team was dead save for me (a tank) and I brought him down giving achievment to everyone (I managed to survive 3 packs+boss and brought down the boss alone).
Everyone cheered for me and mage, so I guess "tanking" and other stuff can be "cool" too.

Anonymous said...

http://www.swiss-miss.com/2010/09/simon-sinek-how-great-leaders-inspire-action.html

You might be interested in this, as all your arguments are about the WHAT, and not about the WHY.

nehunter said...

Doing max dps is an order of magnitude harder then doing tank or heal (in this expansion at least)

tank
- just stand there and be awake at the switch (tank swap, new adds)
- don't worry about doing max threat it doesn't matter (make DPSers nuke the same target if you are in trouble)

heal
- get your raid frames up
- get your top 3 heals mouseover/cliques key-binded
- learn when tank healing (or spot healing (Jaraxus Incinerating flesh - Saurfang Marks) or when raid healing is needed and there you go
- once you learn how to do it, it's fail prove you can be replaced by anyone as long as he's doing the above things
+ if you fail and everyone is doing decent (great is not required) you can get away with a lot of slack)

Doing max DPS :
- every GCD counts
- every CD must be used at the optimal time (procs lined up)
- planning your moves on every fight to avoid loss of DPS as much as you can

madgus said...

This post may look a little off-topic, but what Gevlon is discussing here can be easily linked to some of the previous posts.

Wishing to get fun out of everything you do is just non realistic. You need to set your own goals in your life, and the "fun" part of it is trying to reach those goals. So, it's not what you do that "produces" fun, is the path you decide to follow in order to reach your own set goals that gives you a reason to do what you're doing, thus giving fun. Same thing can be applied to every aspect of our lifes, including WoW.

Those with no goals (read: M&S) will be just wandering entities heading toward no specific destination. And like a truck with no driver, they can easily kill someone on they're way.
But you can stop them by building solid concrete walls around them.
This way they can't see beyond the walls, they can't move that much, they can't disturb anybody, they don't feel any kind of persoanl appreciation, they quit.

I personally find Gevlon ideas on M&S flawless.

Those who act as M&S in game are surely M&S in real life, too.
Superficial people who most probably will never accomplish anything simply because they don't care and don't have specific goals.

"lol its justa game chill" it's the most stupid thing I've ever heard in any game scenario, not only WoW.

Would you like the idea of sitting at a poker table without knowing the game rules? If you want to be a free ATM for everybody else playing I want to be there.

Would you like playing a football match as a goalkeeper and spend the all time attacking and trying to score?
I can tell you that the other 10 players would prefer kicking your sorry ass much more than kicking the ball. And I'm also pretty sure you would get worst reactions from friends more than from 10 "PuGed" football players!!

For this reason I can't understand those socials who defend M&S. I can do that, but only including socials in the M&S category. There's no reason to defend or minimize the impact M&S have on my gaming experience unless I don't have any specific goal in playing WoW, so I can accept everything they do to me (also, I'm a M&S in this case).

I totally agree on what's cool for socials, but that coincides with what's cool for M&S, too. They feel the need to be appreciated.
This is simply confirming that socials tend to be M&S, they just have, sometimes, the will to do something better than normal, but they are not able to keep it up for too long.

As I said at the beginning of the post, this was going to cover different topics Gevlon explained lately, thus confirming the boldness of his ideas, which I concur with totally.

Grim said...

@nehunter
Do you even have a tank? Ever tanked a hardmode? There are more than 2 tanking mechanics.

A dps has to memorize (or even grind down to instinct level) his rotation and then just keep as close to it as possible. All the encounter mechanics that dps have to deal with are just distractions from their rotation and the best dps is the one who has read EJ for the best rotation, learned it and then manages to get distracted the least.

A tank does not need to stick to his max-tps rotation because that would make handling all the extra mechanics impossible. There are just so many random factors. A tank has to be aware of most of the mechanics that dps care about (fire, extra/other targets) and then a bunch of others. Yes there are some ridiculously simple and boring switch-fights (Toravon, Gormok etc), but there are also fights like Saurfang, where the free tank often has to dance all around the place to keep adds as stunned as possible and away from everyone.

Also, a DPS burns his CDs either on CD or at specific moments in the fight where extra dps is needed - moments that are always the same and easily predicted.
A tank burns his CDs when the healer either fucks up himself or tries to keep up the DPS in the fire. You never know when that will happen and in WotLK you don't really have much time to react either.
If a dps makes a mistake, he probably dies, but that generally doesn't mean a wipe.
If a tank makes a mistake, the raid wipes.

So bottom line is - what you say might be true for normal modes that everyone outgears. Where the goal is not killing the boss, but enlarging your e-peen. In progression raiding tanks are way more hard pressed than dps.

I don't have a healer, so I don't know about those, but I doubt that they are any easier off than tanks.

Anonymous said...

If you look at raid chat/listen to Ventrilo after Valitria encounter, you can tell that healing can definitely be "cool".

Derrek said...

The question is: why does "fun" equal "cool" for socials or M&S? I think these are weak people who let themselves be easily influenced by the "arch M&S" (allow me to use this expression). The "arch M&S" are the persons who hide their incompetence and idiocy with good leadership abilities, thus trying to perpetuate their wrong beliefs about what's cool/fun or not.

In an utopic society, "fun" or "right" equals cool among peers.

Squishalot said...

You know, you can't use / get your money while you're grinding for 10 hours over legal documents either.

Your reward from work, whether in cash or in 'cool', is still a reward.

Healer24 said...

For once I'm just going to say "excellent post". You took feedback from a previous post, and modified your argument accordingly. I wouldn't be surprised if the post you made today is very close to what you were trying to get at the other day. You were (properly) deriding what you now label as the "cool" job, but you ignored genuine job satisfaction. With that put in its proper place, I once again say, "excellent post."

Anonymous said...

Picking up from (and trying to complete it, from the healer point of you) Grim: "I don't have a healer, so I don't know about those, but I doubt that they are any easier off than tanks." (and I only play healers main spec, using tank spec as distraction)

Any healer that did Anub HC in the proper tier gear (10 or 25) will tell you that it is the most insane in terms of stress. And to keep with ToC theme... in MOST fights healers actually should be doing very little, healing the tank and healing the random AoE or splash damage. We are not. Why? Because most often the DPS'ers are so focused on their e-peen that they can't even get out of a fire ("Lolz let the healer take care of it")

Michael Young said...

I mostly agree with this, and with your response, but I still say that you're missing a key idea. Any job or activity provides a whole host of intangibles. There's no way to claim that one intangible is objectively better or preferred over the others. Rather this is mostly a matter of taste, an individual choice.

An example. I make six figures sitting in an office all day doing little logic puzzles as part of my project group, doing cancer research. I enjoy the money, the mental stimulation, and the feeling that I'm contributing to the good.

My friend from college makes about what I do, but he spends the whole day alone in his lab, doing experiments and writing papers. He enjoys the money, the solitude, and crows happily at every citation to his work or articles.

Another friend works in local government, makes about half what I do, but spends all her time talking and working with other people. She enjoys the social aspect of her work, as well as knowing that she's part of the process.

So who has the better job? Is money more important than being part of the process? Is enjoying solitude better than enjoying being more social? Does contributing to mankind beat being able to influence the scientific community with your articles?

You don't value social engagement as much as you do game exploration/achievement. Is that because you feel the exploration is objectively better than social engagement? How can you justify that by comparing outcomes, when you can only judge those outcomes by assuming what you're trying to justify?

Or is it all simply a matter of taste, and you have different tastes?

(As an aside: Healing ftw. :P )

Anonymous said...

@nehunter : you are a moron for comparing slacking tanks and slacking healers to MAXIMUM DPS.

Doing max DPS/threat/hps :
- every GCD counts
- every CD must be used at the optimal time (procs lined up)<- according to the mechanics of the fight.
- planning your moves on every fight to avoid loss of DPS/TPS/HPS as much as you can.

Anonymous said...

At worst a healers job is a game where using one single global cooldown wrong will result in somebody dying. You frantically try to wonder if you should cast a heal or remove that debuff first to reduce incoming damage, and if you can actually save the rogue by tossing a heal without killing the tank. You make a wrong choise and if you are playing with randoms, the result is often "wtf healer".

If you manage to save everybody, nobody will usually say anything, because they probably didn't even notice while smashing their dps buttons. Yet, it is oh so satisfying when you managed to keep everybody alive. It's quite a rush really, because you know that failure was looming so close. I am a social and it is cool for me. When I am on a dps and I see a healer pull something like that off, I usually whisper them to say something (wow, so social). If people cared less about what was cool for others and more about what was cool for them, they'd probably be happier.

P.S. I don't mean cool to be the same thing as fun. Some things I consider cool, I probably wouldn't have any fun doing.

Unknown said...

Tanking can have it's cool moments. For example, a tank that makes the jobs of everyone else really easy is often appreciated. A tank that never loses aggro, and has consistant damage mitigation often gets thanked by the others in the party, not making it "cool," maybe, but certainly rewarding.

Anonymous said...

But since the market is created by people, then coolness matters.

Examples: if people think working at Blizzard or EA or ... is cool, then that may be a good reason for choosing to work there, low pay and orc feet included. Say it improves your resume where you can get hired by the startup that gives you the stock options that makes you rich when Zygna buys you out.

Say you rational analysis is that the local government university gives you 105% of the education for 10% of the cost of the "cool" private uni. Choosing the cool option, because it is cool, may be the best long term career choice as the degree will be on your resume forever.

Organizations understand this as well; prestigious hospitals and law firms tend to pay less than their "less cool" competitors because they know the new employees benefit from working for the "cool" (although phrased like "more prestigious" )

A WoW example: you may "know" that linen cloth is much more useful than VanityPet#137, But the fact that others consider it cool may mean it is 10000% more profitable to farm the pet.

Coolness is like gravity; you don't have to like it or even believe in it for it to exert an influence on you.

Bristal said...

@Ephemeron
"And for once, being social has nothing to do with it. A person who stubs his toe while stranded on the desert island will feel better if he or she swears afterwards, even though there's no one around to hear them."

Just because a reaction occurs while you are alone, doesn't mean it wasn't originally influenced by social reasons.

Yelling after getting hurt might make you feel better (even if you are alone), but likely the impulse evolved because it is a selective benefit to call out for help when you get hurt or are in danger. Not only to yourself (as it may be too late to save you), but to your whole social group.

Laughing and crying really have limited benefit when you are alone, but we still do it. The reason we do it, however, is very likely purely social.

BTW, Ephemeron is a killer name.

Bristal said...

Another point about jobs and job satisfaction:

According to my wife, who is a corporate work-a-holic executive type, there are 3 main aspects to an employee's job satisfaction. It strikes me that these are remarkably similar to the triad of MMO combat.

1. An impression of control over your job and how to do it (Tank)

2. A sense of doing something for the greater good (Healer)

3. A sense that your personal skills are valued (DPS w/ epeen meters)

The Standing Dragon said...

Bristal is dead right. Another take on it is the notion that people work for four reasons:

1) Challenge
2) Appreciation
3) Accomplishment
4) Money

If you are challenge-motivated, then you move from odd situation to odd situation, generally trying to overcome them and getting a sense of pride from the individual situation. How it fits into the whole doesn't matter - in a WoW perspective, this is the raider that just wants to down the next boss, but doesn't care about the dungeon as a whole, the lore, or any of the other items that are trappings of it.

In fact, if you just gave that fellow six rooms, with a boss in each, he'd be happy. They wouldn't even have to say anything, and potentially wouldn't even have to have different models.

The 'money' motivator is in it for the end reward; the job is unimportant, just pay him. These are the guys after whatever item gives them the best assigned value - whether that's cash, a car, a girl, whatever. In WoWspeak? The guy that chases loot, the guy that chases gold, or the person after badges to the exclusion of all else... well, that's your money-motivated person.

Appreciation is the one that gets you the hardest worker, if done right. These are the people who do their best work when that work is recognized; give 'em a compliment, and they'll work for hours at any task.

Most of the time, in WoW, I find them in guild volunteers - the guys that put together the Vent server, or build the forums, or even the ones that go out and help newbies just, seemingly, to be nice and help.

Folks that are after Accomplishment, though - now that's something else. They're the ones that have a vision, or a grand plan, or an ideal - and they're working toward it. Individual steps are nice only inasmuch as they add up toward that larger goal.

So. The guy that wants the Kingslayer title may not care about downing Saurfang, save that he knows he must to get the title. The Lore nerd looking to do ICC because he must experience the story... there's another one.

It's all immaterial, though. The trouble you guys have with M&S folks is not invalid, but predicates on something simple: They don't have the same value set they do. They play to accomplish goals based on their motivations, sure, but their goals are not your goals.

Since your goals differ, your methodologies and values differ. The M&S that joins your raid and proceeds to be worthless really wasn't interested in the raid in the same way you guys were interested in the raid.

That doesn't make him stupid, save, perhaps, that he should take a moment and realize he's not competitive and back off.

If you push your value set onto others as a metric of their worth, then you're only measuring their worth based on your goals, not theirs.

if you want good raiders, find the ones whose goals really do match up. But the core assumption of "M&S" for every other person out there (though there are many) is fundamentally flawed.

Wilson said...

@Bristal

Non-social animals cry out when they are injured, even non-mammals which were not nurtured by their parents. There is nothing social about it. As for the comparison to the "three aspects of job satisfaction" matching up to WoW, I could make similar comparisons for the three facets of the Christian Trinity, the Id / Ego / Super-Ego, the three rings given kept by Tolkien's elves, and anything else which can be described as having three elements. You aren't arguing a case, you're just taking pre-conceived notions and cherry-picking facts which happen to be in the same neighborhood.

nonameform said...

@Bristal:

Maybe I'm seeing it wrong, but for me personally there are 3 reasons to be satisfied with the job:

1. Learning something new.
2. Doing something that is interesting for me.
3. Being well-paid for what I do.

If none of those apply, it's hard for me to actually get any satisfaction and it will be a boring grind.

"Doing something for the greater good" sounds like a social reason to me: I'm donating money to WWF and I'm better than the people who don't do that.

It seems to me that the key word in those 3 aspects that you've mentioned is "impression/sense". Instead of asking yourself whether you are interested in what you're doing, whether you're satisfied with the payment or whether you learn something new or not, you rely only on senses. It's like a science vs. faith debate.

And again about "for great justice": I don't understand how that applies to, say, a person working in a marketing department of a company that produces diapers. Wet skin = having bad time, dry skin = having good time, therefore my job is important?

My 3 reasons to be satisfied with the job in real life, apply to WoW as well:

1. Since I'm a rather hardcore player, I prefer to learn from my mistakes and other sources such as EJ. There is no "luck", just my performance, which can be either good or bad. My guild did some Horde first kills on our server and even though there were already videos available, we still had to learn how to perform certain tricks. Believe it or not, but most of the time we also tried to modify tactics offered in videos, if we saw that certain things didn't work well.
My guild is merely a tool for reaching certain goals in game. I can't solo everything therefore I need a group of decent/good/great players to work together. That doesn't mean I treat people like shit for no reason, but if the guild fails to kill boss X for Y amount of time, I simply move on without feeling that I'm ruining some social bonds, as I'm not playing the game for boosting other people and gearing up their alts.
2. Doing new content, beating new bosses, going to some distant place to do an interesting quest no one ever does - all good for me. There are certain things that I don't like about WoW, but that has nothing to do with the flawed game design. I hate when you have to run same dungeons numerous times before you see your cloth upgrade being taken by a paladin. I believe I've done HoR HC around 35 times to get the off-hand from LK, even though my guild was doing ICC 25 HC at that time, but BPC weren't dropping the loot I wanted.
3. Doing current content gives you the best rewards. Even though there is a chance that I'm not the only one who wants certain item from a boss in the raid, overall my gear is pretty good (don't know about my GS as I never bothered to install the addon), so I'm satisfied with the "payment" I get from raiding.

Aljabra said...

@nehunter
"Doing max dps is an order of magnitude harder then doing tank or heal (in this expansion at least)"
First, as it was already mentioned to you, you have no idea what's really is tanking or healing (like in "tanks just need to stand around" - every tank would laugh at you at this point). When you are dd, you need to pay attention to your actions and boss actions, when you tank or heal, you need to know what every other person in a raid is doing in case your interference will be required (and that doesn't exclude paying attention to yourself and to the encounter). It's clearly visible on a fights, where dd need to do that as well, that most of them have no basic idea how to keep track of so many tasks at once, therefore standing in the fire, blowing the raid with explosions and other stuff like that happens.
Second, you exactly proving the point of Gevlon post. No matter, what tank does and how hard it is, no one really notice it. No matter, how much healer did for the victory, no one pays attention (except other healers or tanks). You didn't noticed it, what more proof one may need?

Anonymous said...

As a mainspec healer (who used to be in a social/friendly raiding guild that had problems completing ICC10, let alone 25, and then joined a far better guild that is currently wiping on Halion 25 hc (so yeah, not a top guild)) I have to say healing hardmodes with good players is not as easy as nehunter seems to think. But it's actually not much harder than healing normal modes with bad players either. You go ahead and try healing such a simple thing as Marrowgar 10 when the other healer is a resto druid who thinks that lifebloom is where it's at ("rejuv? no, I don't like the icon!") and five out of the six dpsers are standing in fire.