CNN.com – More colleges offer gaming theory courses — Two catches that I can see with getting your degree in game theory or design: 1. you cannot convert your playing time to college credit and 2. YOU WILL HAVE TO GRADUATE.
Here’s how I’ve seen it.
A new game goes live, everyone rushes in, and we all pick the class that either sounds good or that we’ve typically enjoyed in other games. Bottom line, this means there’s a whole lot of rangers/hunters, monks/martial artist-types, rogues, paladins (unless the word is out that they are the suck beyond suck), wizards/mages and necromancers/warlocks/the life suckers.
Everybody likes to do big damage and everybody likes to keep their solo’ing options open. There’s always a few diehards that choose warriors or priests/clerics/doctors/whateverthehell they call the badass healers in the game. I mean, they choose tank or healer because they WANT to play that class. *boggle* The game may be tuned so that tanks and healers can solo, but CMON, a defense class takes longer to kill stuff because that’s the way of the world, ERGO, the tanks and healers take longer to max out.
Naturally, there’s situations where a guild will … let’s say, encourage … some of its members to make tanks and healers in the new game, but for the most part, in the initial rush of the new game, most of us are choosing the hardcore DPS or solo classes.
We all race through the levels and the zones, sometimes there’s a few bad levels when the living isn’t so easy anymore, but most will work through the rough levels to arrive at better skills, better equipment and better spells.
A week or three after the first max levels start appearing in game, it’s reality time. For a myriad of reasons, we’ll have to group up to advance further: either the best spells or equipment are hidden away in group/raid dungeons, tougher quests require a group or more, the mobs start hitting like a truck or AE’ing the shit out of anyone that approaches, or, in a PVP situation, players need to group for everyone’s mutual protection, e t c.
Enter the first wave of the character remakes. Some will recognize the necessity earlier than others, some later — we all arrive at the same realization that we’re going to need more tanks and A LOT more healers. Deja vu is never so bitter than at this point.
Yahoo! Groups : WoW Widows — Not entirely unexpected, World of Warcraft has an internet support group for those abandoned and neglected by their Warcraft-playing loved ones. Unless you have a similar issue at home, you should only read and reflect. You don’t go to the circus, jump into the center ring and start doing tricks with the lions, fcs.
