World of Warcraft Can Boost Your Career 272
Hugh Pickens writes "Forbes reports that although videogames have long been thought of as distractions to work and education rather than aids, there is a growing school of thought that says game-playing in moderation, and in your free time, can make you more successful in your career. 'We're finding that the younger people coming into the teams who have had experience playing online games are the highest-level performers because they are constantly motivated to seek out the next challenge and grab on to performance metrics,' says John Hagel III, co-chairman of a tech-oriented strategy center for Deloitte. Elliot Noss, chief executive of domain name provider Tucows, spends six to seven hours a week playing online games and believes World of Warcraft trains him to become a better leader."
It stands to reason (Score:4, Insightful)
It stands to reason that you're learning something when playing a game. It's only a question of how useful that something is in the rest of your life.
Re:It stands to reason (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
"JESUS CHRIST! JOHNSON! GET OUT OF THE FIRE!"
Headlines: Area man saved by the Mimiron fight.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Meeting chairman: Let's give these negotiations a break, for a while.
[Executives leave the room]
Sales team leader: Look guys, we haven't convinced them that we're the best guys for their production line. I think they recognize that our services are best of breed, but we still need to get it in the bag. They're in there, deliberating right now, about whether to go with us or the competition. Does anyone have any ideas how we can close the deal?
Sales team member 1: Well, I think we could highlight that we hav
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
the fire = needlessly pissing off your customers with poor service
See what I did there?
Re:It stands to reason (Score:5, Funny)
The hours passed in Slashdot are also very productive. /. removed my upper bound on the douchebaggery and reasoning logic purity I'm capable of displaying.
If extending the discussion enough to win it by attrition doesn't work, I can switch to "that argument is falacious and I'll explain you why, in excruciatingly verbose detail" mode.
Now I just need to spend some time in 4chan and I'll be able to discuss on level even with a partially retarded frog.
Re: (Score:2)
OK, so you are gradually working up to taking on the Pointy-Haired-Boss?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Bah I can survive logic, it's the people that don't use logic that bother me. To take an example with my mother, she often refuses to recognize to forward motion of time. More often than not, she insists I "should have known" things that are obvious in hindsight but were impossible to predict in advance and even when I point out that I'm not clairvoyant she still keeps repeating arguments that I couldn't possibly have known at the time I made the decision.
Likewise, I have a friend who sees everything in ext
Re: (Score:2)
Fallacious, asshat.
QED
As you can see here, the specimen at hand has mastered the simultaneous application of both /. and 4chan discussion techniques.
As an additional example, one could reply with:
You should've quoted "Fallacious", cumdump.
It's left as an exercise for the reader to further correct the reply with progressively grosser garniture.
Re: (Score:2)
It's only a question of how useful that something is in the rest of your life.
A few years ago, I read a story [wired.com] about a man who saved someones life with skills he learned from playing America's Army. I've played that game a few times, and it actually requires you watch videos about CPR and such to become a medic.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:It stands to reason (Score:4, Funny)
"The Rest Of Your Life" is like a MMORPG but it's really boring and repetitive, leveling up takes way too long, people steal the really good drops, you can never get enough gold, and there are too many n00bs.
If you like WoW, you'll LOVE TRoYL
Re:It stands to reason (Score:5, Funny)
TroYL won't get a subscription from me till they fix the respawn bug. Seriously, it seems once you die in TRoYL you just get stuck in the graveyard, no spirit healers or anything - I know some people who have been waiting to respawn their chars for years now and the developers simply don't seem to care about fixing this glaringly obvious bug that really hampers gameplay. Nobody is prepared to take even the slightest risks in bossfights because of it.
Having said that, one thing I do miss about TRoYL - it had the best implementation of /fucking I have EVER played.
Re: (Score:2)
TroYL won't get a subscription from me till they fix the respawn bug.
I'm a buddhist you insensitive clod!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
So you mean every time you die you roll a new character ? What a grind !
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Nothing like family in the company to get you QQ's taken seriously !
Trains him to become a better leader? (Score:5, Funny)
Elliot Noss, chief executive of domain name provider Tucows, spends six to seven hours a week playing online games and believes World of Warcraft trains him to become a better leader."
Six to seven hours a week? There's a term for someone who plays such an excessive amount of online games. Let me see if I can think what it is... Oh yeah. I remember now.
That term is "NOOB".
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, the term for playing an excessive amount of online games is "no-lifer". Noob is for people that are new or bad at the game. Casual is the term for people that play a few hours a week. On that note, 6-7 hours is nothing considering some guilds in WoW raid at least 4 hours a day, up to 7 days a week.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, the term for playing an excessive amount of online games is "no-lifer". Noob is for people that are new or bad at the game. Casual is the term for people that play a few hours a week. On that note, 6-7 hours is nothing considering some guilds in WoW raid at least 4 hours a day, up to 7 days a week.
*WHOOSH*
Re: (Score:2)
woosh
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There are actually plenty of high end guilds that raid no more than 2 hours a day 2-3 days a week. In my time playing wow - I found that the mark of a good raiding guild is one that is prepared in game and mentally ready for the task at hand, not one that spends tons of time on a particular task. Now - 90% of the people who play WoW have no gumption to learn how to play and expect to be carried from boss to boss (or in real life - task to task) - much like real life. Good raiding guilds analyze combat logs
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Trains him to become a better leader? (Score:5, Insightful)
Please start the quest again.
Running a guild for a couple years (Score:5, Insightful)
makes running a mere business department almost child's play.
politics.
prima donnas.
80% of people are users.
sexual harrassment.
achieving short and long term goals.
managing the sheer logistics of a well balanced guild.
learning to delegate to staff.
etc.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Everything except faily sharing the profits of a raid.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
When was the last time you worked for a business that fairly shared the profits of a sale with you?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
all of them. I work, and they pay me for my labor, and if I want, I can voluntarily buy stock in the company just like everyone else. That's fair.
Re: (Score:2)
Guilds pay you raid points, DKP, lager points, etc.
You use these points to buy equipment with.
The senior workers get the better offices and so on.
If you dislike the conditions, you leave and found a new guild where you are senior.
Other than some kind of point system, there is no fair way to distribute rare items.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
And even if you are not the leader, you learn a bit about working in groups to get stuff done.
A pity that if you have an addictive personality, the cost of playing outweighs the benefits.
Incredibly useful human group dynamics experience (Score:5, Insightful)
Running (or trying to run) a significant guild in WoW can teach you more about human group dynamics and people management than you could ever want to know :)
This time I spent playing WoW was *incredibly* valuable to me in this regard, and I don't consider that time wasted at all.
G.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I would absolutely agree.
I tend to be the follower type, happy to do as I am told rather than the leader type coming up with the big plan, so to get some experience in a leadership role, I started a guild in another game (not WoW, but one that tends to attract more players in the 30+ age group) specifically for this purpose. It was an interesting experience, and I was surprised at how willing people are to take direction from a leader and have the burden of decision making taken off their shoulders. I als
Re:Incredibly useful human group dynamics experien (Score:5, Interesting)
I definitely agree. I learned a lot about social dynamics and the power of leadership through the various guilds and whatnot I have been involved with leading.
And World of Warcraft also now promotes working with essentially random groups of people. Recognize the weakest link, and ducking out before you've wasted too much time in a losing proposition.
However, that part about them being heavily concerned about gaming performance gauges concerns me... when people are gaming the measurements, you're not getting a true representation of the criteria that you really care about...
Perhaps though, this also means that people will be better able to recognize when someone is clearly overrated... Sure, your gearscore may be epic, but you're playing like a noob.
Re:Incredibly useful human group dynamics experien (Score:5, Insightful)
The "weakest link" in a group is actually often going to be the person who looks at the group and quickly comes to the judgment that it will fail and then leaves based on metrics like Gear Score or "LOL Pally only has 25khp!" Or quitting because not everyone has the achievement for whatever it is that's about to be done.
That person is basically saying that they are incapable of running a dungeon without everyone being INSANELY overgeared for it and they are not willing to take any risks in an environment where the absolute worst thing you're risking is about 10-15 minutes of your time. Further, they're also poor judges of risk/reward: if you drop out of a random group before a certain amount of time is up, you can't join another random group for a bit, so they traded being in a group that might or might not be good (and losing 10-15 minutes of their time) for DEFINITELY not being in a group (and losing 10-15 minutes of their time).
Finally, though this is not always the case it seems to often be the case, these people are the ones who, when they are on a team they will behave like prima donnas. If it's a tank, anyone who doesn't behave exactly as the tank wants will be votekicked or the tank will just drop group because they can get an instant queue (once their timeout is over). If it's a healer, they'll bitch and moan and possibly drop group, but in any case it's not so great for team cohesion. If it's a DPS role, well, they'll just call people scrubs, and behave like they're incredibly important despite the fact that they can be instantly replaced.
So, if you want a bunch of people who will quit at the first sign of adversity, are lousy at assessing risk vs. reward, are unwilling to take on new challenges or risks, are deadly to team morale and cohesion, and who generally rely on expending VASTLY more resources on a project than the goals of the project merit in order for it to have any "success" then yes, by all means, pick people who's judgment has been "honed" by the random group tool in WoW.
Mind you, I personally like the tool because I'm 99.9% of the time playing a tank, so I have instant queues. I also know how to play tanks well, and can adapt my tanking style to handle teammates who are poorly geared or overgeared (which has its own problems) and of whatever skill level. The only time it gets dicey is if I have a bad (read: does not know how or is unwilling to manage their heals effectively so minimize the windows where a string of unlucky numbers can cause a wipe) healer, but even then I'll take a minute to ask them if they want advice to make things go more smoothly.
I will say that in general, guilds in WoW are not really my favorite thing, BUT I have learned some valuable lessons from being guilded and having to manage that:
- Don't have preconceived ideas of how people might behave or how mature they might be based on demographics. I've had remarkably mature teenagers in guilds where the 45 year olds behaved like colicky infants most of the time.
- Many people say things quickly that *can* be taken in a bad way and lead to an argument. Instead, take a moment before getting angered and ask them what they REALLY meant, because most people aren't actually hostile dickbags - they're just poor communicators.
- Any reward allocation system, regardless of how fair it seems on paper, regardless of people agreeing to bide by its rules, will be complained about the first time those rules work against one person's favor and towards another.
- In a performance based environment, it helps to have concrete displays of performance metrics and to provide small incentives to encourage competition between people who are in the same role. Do not make the incentives TOO big because then you will have people screwing others to get their win.
- People who are inflexible are almost always going to drag your team down. The inability to adapt to new situations or take failure as a learning experience is a HORRIBLE trait, and unless there is some kind of massive and nearly impossible to replace positive that kind of person brings to your team, dump them if they can't change their ways after getting feedback.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I've never related tanks directing every aspect of a fight to micromanaging before, but your post really brought out that sort of idea to me.
I've really only played DPS through the random queue, and as such, I knew that I was instantly replaceable. But then I practiced on Anarchy Online, that provided actual loss for a death, (originally especially.) Wipes seriously sucked, you lost experience, and your stats were diminished by some 75% for ten minutes. You learned your role, and you did it well, and if
Re:Incredibly useful human group dynamics experien (Score:5, Interesting)
However, that part about them being heavily concerned about gaming performance gauges concerns me... when people are gaming the measurements, you're not getting a true representation of the criteria that you really care about...
In many companies that IS important. I've worked a few places where it was far more important to appear successful than it is to actually be successful.
The most relevant example I can think of is way back in my phone support days. We had a ton of metrics - Average calls/day, Average calls/hr, first call resolution rate, % time spent on hold between calls, etc. That last one almost got me fired. I averaged about 70 calls/day with a 5-6 minute average call length and something like 70% first call resolution (this was before every call center had remote control capabilities, so it was support based purely on what the user was describing, and that was really high).
The call center average was something like 45 calls/day and a 10-12 minute per call average. While I was spending the same amount of time per call on hold in between calls finishing up filling out the tickets, the same amount of time per call multiplied by more calls = higher percentage of time on hold.
Some people in management didn't quite get the math and overall picture and wanted me fired. I wasn't meeting all of the metrics that were set and that's what mattered. Fortunately others managers did get it and fought to keep me employed while warning of me the numbers game and working with me to present the numbers that people wanted to see.
Re:Incredibly useful human group dynamics experien (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Incredibly useful human group dynamics experien (Score:4, Insightful)
know from personal experience 99.999% of WoW players are morons and whiners who stand in fire and cry about gearscore and dps charts, so statistically you would probably be a terrible employee.
Congratulations. You are statistically a terrible employee.
Re:Incredibly useful human group dynamics experien (Score:4, Insightful)
I know from personal experience 99.999% of WoW players are morons and whiners who stand in fire and cry about gearscore and dps charts, so statistically you would probably be a terrible employee.
You're contradicting yourself to the point of making your estimates accurate. You've combined the noobs (stand in fire) with the leets (gearscore/recount). With the oblivious and the uppity all together in one group, I'm less than surprised that there's no one left.
I'm also underwhelmed to find that you can point to a group as large and diverse as 'WoW players' and find extreme examples of bad behavior.
What does mildly surprise me is that you're both oblivious to the fact that this applies to any large group AND you're allowed to hire people. That contradiction is a bit hard to swallow, but I guess that's probably not too strange in the corporate world, is it?
Re: (Score:2)
See and I have a problem with this. In my law within social dynamics classes I was the only person in 8 years to get 100%(4.0gpa) in the course. Why? Because I've run a guild, learned how to balance everything, use the cores required for being a good leader, and knowing how to delegate tasks. And when asked by the professor who used to be a police inspector, and has more 1:1 person time then most people will ever see in their lives why I did so well, I pointed it to the freaking game.
The people who laug
Re: (Score:2)
On a smaller level, running raids is training in team leadership.
You have to know the weaknesses and strenghts of (potential) members while assembling the group and during the fight, you need to "know your enemy", do some tactical planning and serve as a guide before the encounters and you (often) need to give in-encounter commands.
There's also a low level of personality management (especially in Pick-UP Groups) involved and sometimes you have to take hard decisions (like kicking a very underperforming memb
Re: (Score:2)
Old style pen-and-paper roleplaying works for this too. You have fewer people to deal with but you get to see their faces and body language. I would venture that online RPGs may build management skills and pen-and-paper, face-to-face games may build "soft" interpersonal skills.
It makes sense. First heard this in December 1995 (Score:5, Informative)
There's definitely some truth in that. One thing that especially strategy games can teach is to deal with resource constraints and to strike a balance between the different objectives that must be pursued, especially a balance between short-term defensive action and the pursuit of mid-term to long-term strategic goals.
I first heard a manager say this in December 1995. He was one of my business contacts and around that time became VP Sales & Marketing of Germany's largest publisher of dictionaries and language-learning materials. I had done some work on the German version of Warcraft II - Tides of Darkness (PR, marketing, sales, and translation; got listed twice in the game's credits [mobygames.com]) and I gave copies to business partners like the person I just mentioned. He became addicted to it and told me that when his wife criticized him for spending so much time on the thing, he explained to her that this was basically like management training :-)
At the time computer games weren't online, so except for those who went to "LAN parties" with other gamers, gameplay was a solo mission. Now one can actually practice leadership and diplomacy. But even just the virtual resource management challenge of a game like Warcraft II has value in itself.
When I was running the NoSoftwarePatents campaign years ago, it also felt like real-time strategy in many respects :-) And lots of Orcs to fight against.
Re: (Score:2)
VP Sales & Marketing of Germany's largest publisher of dictionaries and language-learning materials
This is clearly either Duden, or Berlitz. Because of the language-learning side, I'm leaning towards Berlitz, but it's not the first one that came to mind.
Re: (Score:2)
>When I was running the NoSoftwarePatents campaign years ago, it also felt like real-time strategy in many respects :-) And lots of Orcs to fight against.
Not to mention all the trolls...
Out of balance at times. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I play WoW for a number of reasons, one subtle one being that I'm uh, "chronologically privileged". I get puffed taking out the rubbish, but my Hunter can run all day and kick serious butt.
Anyone thinking there's no value to the organisation training provided by WoW has never tried to take down any of the Ice Crown Cathedral bosses in a 10-man raid. These things are intense, people, and
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Ice Crown Cathedral
Are you sure that it's WoW that you're playing?
Yea, ask any Blizzard employee. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm pretty sure they've all had better careers because of WoW, and of course the majority of the WoW team HAS a career because of it, so its certainly made their careers better.
I would like to point out however, the rest of us have know that 'games boost your career' for years.
Why do you think people play golf? Its not about liking golf, its a awesome way to get someone drunk and talk about business while in a relaxed setting. You get far more accomplished in this setting than you do in a conference room or office. People let their guard down and feel they can trust someone more in that environment, makes deals far more likely to happen.
Real business happens on the golf course. WoW is just another golf course.
Re: (Score:2)
How much leadership ability is required... (Score:4, Insightful)
...to run a domain name provider? Let's face it, they're not exactly curing cancer. People who spend half their lives playing WoW are probably well suited to sitting at computers for hour after hour, pushing buttons that are wired to produce reward or punishment at just the right intervals to keep people pushing buttons. Not that different from a lot of dead-end IT jobs, actually. But I wouldn't equate that with WoW being excellent training for anything else.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Have you tried a leadership role in a company? Didn't think so.
No, they are nothing alike. Leading large raids doesn't in any way prepare you for poring over reports and time sheets, doing per
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Congrats Bob, you've made Shitkicker leve (Score:2)
I wonder if this is true for nethack? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've probably spent most of my gaming time playing nethack. I wonder if that counts for anything. I've learned not to steal from shopkeepers, you should always know where the stairs are, and that eating cats is a bad idea. Sadly, writing "Elbereth" on your desk won't keep you from getting fired. It does seem to keep the giant ants away, though.
Correction! (Score:5, Informative)
It can help your career skills! If anyone actaully finds out that you play, it can seriously harm your career. Regardless of what real-life benefits it might confer, it still comes with a huge stigma. This is the main reason why Blizzard recent efforts with RealID were uniformly rejected by the community. Many gamers, especially MMO-gamers, are still in the "closet" to their friends and co-workers.
Is this slashdot? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Is this slashdot? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Is this slashdot? (Score:4, Interesting)
Using the words "playing", "boost" and "career", what data would you suggest? It's a subjective view about subjective things. Saying "Using brighter colors can make art prettier." requires as much empirical evidence.
I happened to have gotten an awesome job because most of my interview consisted of me talking about my leadership role in a WoW guild (and I think the part where I said I didn't play anymore gave me some points). I thought it was strange at the time.
I now believe that it's very difficult to quantify a person's experience in social group management. The number of people who have participated in leadership of a virtual (mixed age) group greatly outnumbers those who have participated in leadership of real life adults.
YMMV
Re: (Score:2)
Helped get me a job (Score:2)
Part of the reason I got my current job was because I was a gamer. It was something they were looking for, but only because they all were as well :)
There's a simpler explanation (Score:3, Insightful)
For everyone else NOT making 6-7 figures (Score:2)
It's something for your bosses to worry about as something that takes attention away from your job.
It's something that, if they know about it, can cause prospective employers to be biased against you and accept another applicant in your place, even with lesser credentials than you have.
And the employment experience funny?
Harnessing The Boundless Source (Score:3, Insightful)
If you can harness the boundless source of energy that is the Gold Farmer to do mundane corporate tasks, you can rule the world.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually IIRC some company kinda did do that, Cha Cha maybe?
Basically an employee gets a question and then they go to google and find the answer, they get paid for each question they answer. On their monitor there is a little scrolling line chart that shows how much money they are making, it caused productivity to soar.
Correlation, not causation... (Score:2)
It is as useful as army training (Score:4, Insightful)
Management skills and combat skills have both the same difficulty, hard to train without doing it for real and the risk are often just to big for it to be done for real.
How do you gain leadership experience when no business in their right mind is going to give a kid a chance? Oh we got this project that the future of the company depends on, lets give it to the new guy. See if he got what it takes.
That is why things like taking part in school activities, running the school newspaper COUNT during a job interview. Shows you did more then just sit on your arse, that you can do something. Lead, take charge.
MMO raid leaders and guild leaders are just the new coach of the highschool soccer team.
If you never played these games, or suck at it, it might not be clear, so allow me to illustrate with Lord of the Rings Online, my own waste of time.
Situation: Minstrels are the primary healing class and you can't find any. What do you do?
Answer 1: I sit there for hour after hour spamming the chat channels asking, demanding no screaming for a minstrel.
Answer 2: I look at the classes I have got and adjust the strategy to handle the situation, for instance by relying on captains for healing and asking the DPS classes to trade some DPS for survivability.
Who would you hire? NO, the point is NOT that knowing that captains can very effective healers or that good champions (dps class that dies a lot) can adjust their style to be less squishy makes you a good manager. The trick is that the second answer showed you can be flexible. Work around a problem rather then beat yourself to death against it.
Situation: Level 65, the discussion on whether the game should be more solo friendly.
Person A: Yes, I am a champ and never can find anyone for the very hard stuff I can't just DPS my way through and I am not a member of a kin because they all suck and expect constant hand holding.
Person B: No, I am a captain and finding a fellowship is easy enough, I start by asking in chat channel if someone else needs it, and if I need to I ask for help from my kin and friend list, since I am a captain, I can always summon someone to my side, a really useful skill. And a captain is always welcome since we give nice boosts to everyone else.
Who do you hire for your team? The DPS who can only DPS because everyone is working their ass of the keep him alive? The prima dona? Or the team player, the guy who knows he is best when he works with others to offset his own shortcoming and augment other peoples strong points?
It makes no real difference if it is a MMO, a knitting club or the rugby team. You can tell what kind of person they are by their role in their team. And if you find a person who doesn't play a team sport, doesn't play group games... well smile a lot and get the interview over as quickly as possible because you got yourself a psycho.
Being a successful raid leader means you can make over a dozen people work together who all have their own agenda and who can't be fired. Compared to that, running a multi-national is a piece of cake. Not because leading a raid is the same as leading a business team but because the essential skills have a lot in common. It is what the obstacle course is to real combat. Not the same at all, but the best you can get without actually going to war to train your soldiers. How else is a 16 year old going to get leadership experience? I am perfectly willing to raid with a young kid in charge even if they never done it before. That is how you learn, but have the same kid lead a project at work? No thanks.
Re: (Score:2)
Dang. I was with you until you decided to dump the loner. You're making a mistake that you yourself are saying you don't make: Forgetting to be flexible.
For some jobs, loners are the best workers. And some loners have skills that you just won't find in a team player. You can't judge a person just on one facet of their personality.
Re: (Score:2)
It makes no real difference if it is a MMO, a knitting club or the rugby team. You can tell what kind of person they are by their role in their team. And if you find a person who doesn't play a team sport, doesn't play group games... well smile a lot and get the interview over as quickly as possible because you got yourself a psycho.
Wow, I guess there's plenty psychos in my bunch of friends then. I did use to play a team sport for quite a few years, but eventually grew tired that every weekend for 3/4ths of the year there was one to two matches. Yeah we all played some form of team sport while 15-25, but we're 30+ now and none of us do. Likewise we had an FPS clan, we did play Guild Wars together but today it's only for the social fun of it like the Wii night we had yesterday. We used to have two WoWers, one got told by the wife to pay
TUCOWS (Score:2)
chief executive of domain name provider Tucows
How things change. When I see "Tucows", I still think of "The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software". But then they started listing software that didn't use winsock... and then people stopped using the term "winsock" at all... and then they created the OpenSRS domain registration service... and now they are known as "domain name provider Tucows".
SSH: The Tunneling (Score:2)
is the game I've been playing lately, although I have been suckered into the expansion: VPN: Peerstone of the Kingdom. The odd thing? Not only has it boosted my career, my employers actively support my playing it!
For anyone that thinks WOW and the ilk are nothing more than task missions and time sinks, I laugh at your assessment. You do not know grinding until you've played the entire 12 hour bug hunting mission in one sitting and then jumped straight into the chaotic and twist riddled OD: The Binding c
OR (Score:2)
My strong belief (Score:2)
Yeah, sort of (Score:2)
Played Ultima Online, Everquest, Anarchy Online, Dark Ages of Camelot, World of Warcraft and Eve Online. EQ & WoW definitely return what you put into them - if you want to treat it as a second job you'll be rewarded. That means show up prepared for rigidly scheduled raids; have all your materials, know all the fights, be at the staging point on time, etc, etc then there's a good chance if you or your guild has some strong leaders and perfectly co-ordinated guildies you'll have the phattest lewt in th
What, I have an Intern? (Score:2)
Eff that, I'm not handholding some n00b that doesn't know the quest. We shouldn't be letting n00bs in the guild in the first place. I'm busy farming l00ts biatch.
Not the best choice, just the most popular (Score:2)
FFXI is probably be a much better choice than WoW. WoW is pretty casual compared to FFXI, though FFXI has slowly been adding things to make it require a little less hardcore. In WoW, "raids" are the reason to get people together, but a signifcant amount of FFXI content still requires a group of 6 or more to get anything done, and if it's "old" content, you have to rely on what you can get in a pick-up group.
However, the recent update just nerfed the worst offender, the Chains of Promathia missions, where a
Job Listings Now Say... (Score:2)
LFM 10-man C#/.NET project. Need 2 devs, 1 QA. Must have 5k GS. PST with achieves.
Re: (Score:2)
Clique?
Re:if that's true... (Score:5, Insightful)
Having played something like 5 different MMORPGs over the years, with the exception of the teenagers I have yet to come across any unemployed team member in any of the guilds I've been with. For those that have pictures, none is fat. (I myself make about 5x the average income in where I live and am not fat)
I can only think of a couple explanations for the disconnect between what you are saying and what I see:
- You are lying, probably for shock reasons - i.e. you're trolling.
- I'm in the EU zone and you are in another area and the demographics of players is different.
- You yourself are unemployed and usually play at core work hours when anybody with a job will not be online, so everybody you cross paths with is either unemployed or an below work age.
- Personal self-selection: maybe the type of person you get well enough and for long enough with to be told what they do is the kind of people that tend to be fat and unemployed.
I currently live in the UK and I'm sure that if I frequented the local pubs during work days at the core working hours, I pretty much would only come across (fat) unemployed people.
Re: (Score:2)
Out of curiosity, which EU country do you live in where it's possible to be employed and earn 5 times as much as the average (which statistically means that there are eight people living on half the average to compensate)?
In the country where I hail from, even the prime minister doesn't make more than 3 times the average.
Re: (Score:2)
A country that teaches you that the UK comprises four countries?
Re: (Score:2)
For those that have pictures, none is fat
- Personal self-selection: maybe the type of person you get well enough and for long enough with to be told what they do is the kind of people that tend to be fat and unemployed.
I'm not saying the original post is true or fair, but have you considered that the people who post pictures of themselves online are those that are happiest with how they look which is more often people that aren't fat? That's self-selection in action
Re: (Score:2)
I have a job, you insensitive clod!
Re: (Score:2)
If you're having trouble with that concept, just put it down to "safety in numbers" and forget all about it. They're not missing out on much.
Re: (Score:2)
If that's true, then why is everybody I know of who plays WoW or other similar games an overweight unemployed loser?
Success at WoW depends partly on having plenty of time (which unemployed people will have), and requires lots of time sitting in front of a PC (which may mean less time exercising, leading to weight gain).
So it seems quite possible that being overweight and unemployed is correlated with playing WoW - but if so, I would expect the causation is in the opposite direction to what you imply, and does not disprove the assertion that managing a guild can help your people management skills.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm guessing because "the people you know" is not a sufficiently large sample size to give statistical validity ?
Or else, based on your tone... perhaps it's because everybody you know is an overweight, unemployed loser anyway regardless of wheter or not they also play WoW. Birds of a feather and all that...
Re: (Score:2)
I'm guessing because "the people you know" is not a sufficiently large sample size to give statistical validity ?
There's probably some truth to that. I don't actually know anyone who has ever played WoW, I just know of them (FOAF etc). There is probably a huge selection bias in that as I'm far more likely to hear "my loser brother/flatmate/son spends all his f-ing time on WoW" than "my brother/flatmate/son is up to some level in WoW" around the water cooler.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Presumably that says more about your social circle than WoW players in general.
Re: (Score:2)
Hehe... yes that we all hate people who waste their time playing WoW instead of getting a job? :)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If that's true, then why is everybody I know of who plays WoW or other similar games an overweight unemployed loser?
And this right here, is exactly why you should NOT attempt to put this on your resume. This stereotype still exists quite strongly today, and to be honest, given the insanely addictive nature of online gaming, as a potential employer, I would be far more concerned to find out if you were still actively playing rather than looking at experience you may have gathered while playing.
Re: (Score:2)
I think this is maybe more telling about the people you know, than the people that play WoW
Know _of_. I don't know any one personally who plays WoW (or similar). Or at least they don't admit to it.
Re: (Score:2)
But please do go on reinforcing stereotypes and refusing to actually give effort to your /. posts.
sure thing Mr Anonymous Coward.
Re:Useless hype... (Score:4, Insightful)
... the only thing WoW teaches anybody is to learn how to waste money on a game that's less of a game then single player RPG's of years past.
I don't think it matters quite what you're doing (WoW or otherwise). As long as it's a people- and team-oriented, competitive experience, you're going to get something valuable from it.
Don't forget that the infamous intarwebs anonymity occasionally has benefits: like allowing people to try out a leadership role (yeah, with other actual human beings following them!) that they might never get in real life.
Useless hype ... it's not that trite. (Score:2, Insightful)
You can have a brilliantly scripted game, but it will always be just that, a scripted game.
Humans add an element of unpredictability that will keep you on your toes.
After you master the "game", you start to learn what really makes the game tick, the variability of human interaction.
I think that human interaction is what the original article is referring to, and what elevates an MMORPG above a standard RPG.
This is obviously debatable, b
Re: (Score:2)