Folding Ideas
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2023–2025
1:24:15 · 3.9M views · Nov 25, 2022
Folding Ideas' long essay on why playing poorly in World of Warcraft feels rude. It traces how raiding culture shifted from relaxed fun to optimization, theorycrafting and wikis.
Recommended as a thoughtful, research-heavy dive into game culture and the social pressure of competitive play.
5 comments from Hacker News
You've had several replies talking about how Molten Core will be cleared easily by modern WoW players, and as someone who plays retail WoW (and has been playing continuously since Burning Crusade) I'll vouch for that take. Molten Core's mechanics are trivially easy compared to the things retail players are up against even in simple dungeons. That said, the type of player who plays WoW now has also changed since the original raiders entered Molten Core so many years ago. People still raid for fun, but like many things in modern society¹, you're also there to raid "efficiently." This documentary that I watched recently called "Why it's rude to suck at World of Warcraft" is worth the watch. It talks about how raiding has changed from a fun thing that people used to do in vanilla WoW, where a guild of 40 people would put up with the weird gnome in the guild who wouldn't wear boots, to a hyper competitive pseudo-esport where players stopped tolerating that gnome player over a decade ago. this video ¹ trying not to sound too preachy, I personally love the "get good and keep improving yourself" aspect about WoW, and it's why I push in the game's rated arena brackets each season.
You might enjoy this citizen science dive into the relationship between WoW and wikis, titled "Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft". One of the premises is that wikis are required reading; because if you aren't min/maxing, you're breaking the social contract with your guildmates. It's a totally emergent and novel way for a game to become 'unplayable'! this video
I am unsure why you are curious about documentary recommendations from me, haha, but here's one I enjoyed quite a bit recently: this video
I remember this... "Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft" and I feel like a lot of people want to be good so they cheat... they want to not be seen as bad, or a drag on their team. But yeah... DotA, and League of Legends... some of the most toxic games out there. No community to speak of, just a bunch of sweaty try-hards who probably don't get out around humans enough since they're too busy playing these games. It's rough. this video
One of the things that drove me nuts about Overwatch 1 was the common demand from other players that you employ the pro-league meta when playing even at the lowest levels. A lot of players seem to imagine themselves as the next Ninja (or the Overwatch equivalent) in training and playing multiplayer in that environment is not much fun. See also this video about why it's considered rude to suck at WoW: this video