Mylene Klass
It should be obvious by now that I have considerable disdain for "hardcore" MMO players. They are a minority of MMO populations, but usually a very vocal minority and their bleating can be heard on pretty much any game forum you care to mention. These are people who often started out in PnP roleplaying, usually have a long resume of past MMOs under their belt and who have subsequently developed an inflated sense of their own importance within the MMO community.
There are any number of reasons why these pathetic idiots disgust me. There's the blinkered, close-minded attitude to any suggestion of change to game mechanics. There's the tedious compulsion to demonstrate how knowledgable they are, or how competent they are at a given game, especially if it involves belittling another player. You can guarantee that any time someone dares to suggest they find a particular quest, mission or encounter difficult on a game forum, their post will be followed by a dozen idiots proclaiming "I did it easily", "I beat it first time" or "it's the easiest encounter in the game". More often than not they will provide no constructive advice on how to beat it because they're secretly terrified of other players catching up with them.
Another forum favourite is the "why can't I find a PUG that doesn't suck?" comment. The intended implication is that the player is some sort of elite pro gamer whose skills are so advanced that they are unable to find other players on the same level. What's interesting about this sort of comment is that there are a couple of unintended, and probably more accurate implications. Firstly if you're playing with PUGs all the time it means you're not part of an active guild. You could argue that's because there aren't any guilds that cater for such an advanced player as yourself, but it's much more likely that you're not actually competent enough to join one of the (many) advanced-level guilds that undoubtedly exist. Secondly, if you play with a large number of PUGs and you claim they all suck, remember that the common factor in all those PUGs was YOU. Of course a PUG will never rival a well-organised guild group in terms of efficiency, but on the other hand it takes more able players to operate effectively in a random group and obviously you're not up to the job.
In fact "skill" is an odd term when it comes to MMOs. The fact is most MMOs don't actually require much in the way of skill. Mostly it just comes down to statistics, and balancing the books so that the numbers in your column (armour, damage output, healing capacity etc) are bigger than the numbers in the enemy's column. MMO combat is still little more than a turn-based card game. I've mentioned before how hardcore gamers commonly confuse difficulty with grind, and the same applies to skill. Being willing to spend thousands of hours grinding to level up your stats is just an extension of "balancing the books". There's little skill involved, and trying to discredit players who complain about things like pointless death penalty mechanics is laughable. Reaching a level cap doesn't require actual skill as much as it requires an obsessive compulsive disorder and a large amount of spare time. Neither of which are anything to brag about. There are plenty of games out there that require genuine skill if you're going to achieve above-average ability, whether it's first person shooters, or real time strategy games, or even sports games or beat-em-ups. The closest to MMOs is obviously RTS, although we're yet to see an MMO include any genuine RTS mechanics. Rather we're stuck with lame zombie-style AI and artificially boosted stats in place of any genuine challenge. Network latency issues generally prohibit MMOs from demanding the same dexterity as something like a FPS.
So what skills does an MMO player require? Advancement comes through experience, from learning how the game mechanics operate (although they're all fundamentally identical) and usually from learning the specific weaknesses or exploits that you can use to beat an encounter. In that sense it hasn't really made any progress from the original PnP games. Sadly, as developers fall over themselves to grab a piece of the WoW market we're actually seeing less and less progress in terms of game mechanics. It's obviously better business to give players more of the same, when the same has been so successful in the past, rather than explore new systems and evolve the genre.
But at least that means the hardcore crowd won't have to develop any actual skills for the foreseeable future, and can continue to pretend they're somehow special.
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