What’s the point of doing something if you’re not going to put forward the effort to be good at it? Doing a little background research feels really *good* when it pays off by helping you avoid stupid mistakes.

It also helps you recognize what went wrong when the inevitable mistakes occur. I agree that solving a problem yourself can be satisfying, but that only works if you have enough background knowledge to understand the problem.

Bumbling into things without doing a bit of research first is neither smart nor fun. It’s just a waste of time. I’d rather do my reading first.

It’s just important to remind myself every now and then, that, no, I don’t need to have the perfect keybind-layout for the ideal raid-performance just yet. Some things will come with time, it’s just not always easy to calm yourself down and let them.

Off-topic:
Yes, enjoying the warrior very much. Not yet decided if my ultimate focus will be on Prot or Arms. Intended to go Prot at 51, but am 50 now and Arms is so much fun…
Also, took two days to reply to this, because a) didn’t want to do it from work and b) when home and done with duties, actually playing WoW took preference. You see, I really DO enjoy the game
Caved in and posted this from work now!

2 is dead on. As someone who has wasted time with gimped classes, you get very wary of spending months of your life wasted on a class no one wants. A lot of times your first character may even be a training one, spending 6 months just learning to then roll an alt of what you really want to do.

3 is because a noob can waste hours of your life in some games. When the raid is once per week, and a noob shows up and forces an unrecoverable wipe, it’s really hurting a lot of people. In a party, a noob tank going afk during a pull means you have to spend an hour of your time replacing the buffer exp he lost for you, maybe even solo if the party disbanded and no tanks were lfg.

Usually the death penalties and wasted time being out of proportion is what causes noob hatred. You need to have spent three hours in a frustrating party only to end up minus exp, and losing progress, to understand why.

Here’s the most applicable quote:

If the stadium in which the NFL Pro Bowl was played was filled with pro football players as its only spectators, imagine the psychological impact upon the players on the field. Now imagine that every new football player had to play in front of this audience from the moment they first played football. Imagine that every beginning football player had to take to this field and play amongst these players.

I think that’s one major part of it: looking stupid in front of other people, period. Even if it’s people who won’t remember us, or people know understand, people still have to show some lack of knowledge. When you’re in a world full of pros, it can be uncomfortable to be the scrub.

The proper answer here, I think, is for players to just relax and have fun. Most games make it damn near impossible to permanently screw up your character these days, so don’t worry about it. Easier said than done, of course.

Longasc wrote:
Asking questions in [LotRO's] help/newbie channel also seems to be a bit frowned upon!

That’s the opposite of my experience. I’ve found that people have been super friendly, in general. You’ll still find the occasional asshole who tells you to “go google it”, but for the most part people will answer questions and be kind about it.

And when you explain like this, you can see what a big wrench it can be going from a game where you’re basically an expert to … being back on the bottom of the knowledge totem pole again. I’ve had a similar feeling switching jobs, even when I knew it was the right thing to do.

I hope there are some fun parts about being back in a game where there’s still so much to explore too?

It is the sort of information that you feel there should be a way to convey. I remember quite liking the way the looking for guild interface worked in Warhammer, because it let you specify this type of stuff about your guild.

She was, in a word, *terrible.* I was very tempted to boot her out several times, early on. But as we talked to her as we progressed through the dungeon we found out why she was so bad: it was due to the fact that she was a true newbie — it was her 1st character, she didn’t know a lot of the game mechanics still, had crappy gear, her special attacks were all of poorest quality, etc. She didn’t know what all her buffs did or anything either.

Since I have a dirge myself, I was able to ask her to put up the buffs that (IMO) would be most helpful to our little group. It took her a while to find them in her spellbook, but once she did we were good to go. Even with her “bad” spells and “pathetic” dps…. she still was buffing the group and adding dps. The only thing she did to really screw us up was that she kept casting her fear spell, in spite of repeated requests to not do so. She eventually just took it off her hotbar so she wouldn’t keep “accidentally” hitting it.

We cleared the dungeon. Probably would have even as a duo, but the trio made it that much easier. She noticeably improved as we played too. As we were teleporting back home she said this: “Thanks for keeping me in your group. I know I’m bad at this game still, but everyone just keeps kicking me out of groups so I haven’t been able to learn how to be better. I learned a lot tonight!”

I gotta admit, I got warm fuzzies from that.

All my characters are at least T5 now, though, so I don’t get much opportunity to be where a lowbie might need help anymore. I did get to help a 1st time in T8 tank with some solo quests a week or so ago, which was nice, but mostly…. seems like it’s a solo game or a full (more or less well equipped) group in a TSO instance looking for shards.

I played LotRO for quite a while. Maybe not THAT long in WoW-terms, but a span of something like 20 months is not a short time, no matter how you look at it. I started “slow”, it was my first MMO, I was having fun with doing this and that, never pushed my levelling too much, roleplayed, spent time just running around, whatever. I read forums and gathered hints here and there, but when the talk came to endgame, I hardly understood a word and just read them as some sort of fantastic stories. One day I’d do that too, or not, I wasn’t really bothered. At some point I hit the level cap. I still remember how, and it was nice (funny, I don’t remember how I hit the expansion-raised level cap. Go figure…).

Time went on and I was learning. From the game experience itself, from the slowly but constantly accumulating hints on the forums, from everyone I met and played with, I tried to learn something. I got together with a nice group of people who introduced me to the high level group instances, and I kept learning. I got into a really fine raid alliance, and, well, went raiding, and kept learning. I was learning and learning, over the course of many months and countless encounters.

At some point I turned into “that guy who knows stuff” myself. I would sit down with pen and paper and make mathematical calculations on how much impact weapon speed really had on damage output; would run practice tests on different subjects, leading to stuff like “Rem, why the hell are you naked in Dol Dinen!?” – “I’m testing diminishing returns, doh!”. I came to know many aspects of the game inside out, not because I set myself the goal to do it, but because I went through a gradual learning process.

Why I quit LotRO anyway, is a subject for its own rant, and totally unrelated. But quit it I did, and now I’m here. A noob, a newbie, whatever you wanna call it, the hat probably fits. And it’s not that I’m afraid of making mistakes, I’m not. If I make mistakes, I learn from them, and there’s virtually nothing I can do now that would somehow screw me up later in any relevant way, beyond class selection (and there never was a doubt that I want to play warrior. That was a no-brainer).

The problem, for me, is a purely emotional one, namely going straight from “and as soon as phase 3 starts, you best should take five steps to the right” to “hey, what’s that tree thing over there?”. Seriously, you don’t need to be an elitist pro for it to feel weird to go from being pretty good at what you do to not having an effin’ clue. You can say that’s one of the key points of discovering a new game, but that doesn’t make it feel less weird.

It’s made worse by the fact, that WoW carries such a HUGE legacy. For the newcomer (me) it feels like everyone has been raiding for the last 5 years straight, earning their lumps in a thousand different dungeons, amassing infinite experience and Oh My God How Can I Ever Hope To Catch Up With That!? I often need to stop myself, take a deep breath and just go back to enjoying the game (and WoW is a highly enjoyable game!), without worrying about what will be and what won’t be. It’ll all be okay somehow, after all, it worked out in LotRO before, as well. *takes deep breath*

So, I read a lot. Can’t help it. First I was reading the official forums, both EU and NA, and learned a lot of what I needed to know from there. But the incredibly high QQ levels are bad for the morale, and the incredibly poor language usually used didn’t satisfy the part of me that likes reading just for the sake of reading. So, I cut that out (only going back for blue posts), and am now rather feeding on community sites and blogs. Like yours. Hi. My name is Rem* and I’m a Night-Elf Warrior. What’s your game?

*not my actual character-name