Quote Originally Posted by FoxPaw View Post
I’m speaking more to cohesions, culture and camaraderie. So many of you have challenged the notion that bonds are forged under pressure. I think you’re young and naive.
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Such severe game play allowed for powerful acts of altruism and true feelings of gratitude. The point I’ve been trying to illustrate is that when everything is vanilla you’ve limited the range of possible emotions.
What people have primarily challenged is that pressure is a necessary ingredient, which it most certainly isn't. You're immensely oversimplifying things and projecting your personal feelings on to the entirety of the playerbase though. One of the proudest moments I had in WoW was when my crappy little 10 man guild killed H Deathwing against all odds. Similarly, when my crappy 25 man guild first killed Gruul. Neither of these kills were impressive and no doubt the content was trivial to many players, and it even would have been to me had I just played in a guild that was at my level, but it didn't matter. It didn't change how I felt about it. It's a different type of pride than I felt when I moved on to a much better guild that put me in a position to rank really well, even getting a few rank 1 parses or when top 50 world guilds actively tried to recruit me, and it certainly happened, despite the chorus of despair from the wannabe elitists who fancy themselves experts in game design. Different people enjoy different things and they are quite capable of not only having a diverse array of emotional responses to even seemingly mundane events, but managing their own fun and knowing what they do and don't enjoy, what makes them feel good and feel bad, without some third party to micromanage those things for them, same as you can.