The post in which I bitch, not about a lack of help, but an excess of it, and wonder why some folks believe Hand-Holding others is more beneficial than Pointing In The Right Direction. Note, I’m discussing the excessive offering of “help” and not the excessive requesting of it, although unsurprisingly the player receiving the former can easily lead to that player doing the latter.
To use a reference from yesterday’s post, I don’t need a gold star every time I wipe my ass properly, and I certainly don’t need help wiping my ass. For a three year old or someone with two broken arms, both a gold star and assistance are appropriate, but not for a fully capable adult. What would most benefit the fully capable adult is pointing them in the direction of the bathroom, or in a more dire situation passing them a roll of toilet paper under the stall.
Now, I’m the type of player that likes to get somewhat immersed in the game world and wants to know why I’m doing this or that ridiculous quest. At the same time, I don’t look down upon players who prefer to skim the quest text and just go kill the seventy billion quest mobs needed or collect the twenty hojillion quest items. For me, knowing why I’m doing something is usually enough to overcome the tedium of most inane quests. To that end, I HATE spoilers. Hate. Hate. Hate.
For example. Someone letting me know I need to do X quest in order to open up Y quest chain is good helpful. Someone letting me know I need to do X in order to open up Y quest chain which will lead me to super cool Z which I totally have to do because [detailed description of what happens during/after Z] and then asking me periodically if I’ve gotten to the part where [detailed description of something I'd only know if I've done that part] is bad helpful.
Back in Unemployed, there was a sort of unspoken “no spoilers” rule (except for certain situations such as specific books, movies or TV shows and quest lines such as The Wrathgate, in which cases it was very clearly spoken). While I’m not advocating every guild have a rule of this nature, I am advocating that people take a moment to consider whether their “helpful” statements or advice to a fellow player regarding special ingame stuff could diminish that fellow player’s fun.
Not surprisingly, I hold a similar opinion when it comes to excessive running of people through quests and dungeons. However, I want to make it clear that I distinguish between receiving assistance from a higher level player in an instance or quest if it’s a situation where previous attempts doing it the prescribed way have failed, and situations where it’s a straight run-through of content. The line also blurs a bit for me in cases where friends want to play together but don’t have characters in similar level ranges, because while it’s possible to maintain communication via text or voice chat, there’s something extra fun about hanging out in the ingame world with your buddies.
Over the years, I’ve found that players who received the most hand-holding through lower level content were also those least capable of being successful at maximum level. In many cases, it was due to max level rep and gear grind, which one can only receive so much help with, being too much work. In other cases, it was due to max level content requiring a different skillset than the player had learned and used during their leveling process, and the player becoming frustrated. This is also sometimes found with players that leveled virtually solo, only entering a handful of instances during the process. Either way, they fail to learn the dynamics of their class in a group setting.
And this is where the major failure of Cataclysm comes into play. The leveling experience was already made simple and lackluster enough without a player having their hand held through lower level content. It doesn’t prepare a new player at all for endgame. Not that leveling has ever been great preparation for raiding, but it was once at the very least preparation for the max level grind. The broadening gap between the 1-85 experience and the endgame experience required a reduction in the skill level needed for beginning endgame content and a homogenization of the classes. As much as I don’t want my ass wiped by another player, I definitely don’t want it wiped by the game, too.
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