Playstyles

Something a lot of people take for granted is that everyone else who you see in the game have the same obstacles to overcome as you do yourself. It’s not easy to imagine the guy who has no money for a new computer so has to play on his 6 year old Acer laptop and his mouse is broken so he is using the laptop’s built-in trackpad.

There are people who play on multiple screens over multiple game accounts who operate their own army of a ‘multi-boxing’ team. There are actually people RAIDING heroic end-game content who are completely blind and rely on their guildmates to help them negotiate each encounter but do a brilliant job!

Whatever your playstyle is, if you enjoy the game then that’s what matters most. Of course some people’s setup can make the game more difficult than it needs to be and there are ways to adjust the game interface to assist with allowing you to get the most of of your own game. Finding your own unique way of playing the class you love the most can be as intricate and interesting as the depth of the game itself can be. The fact that no two people have the very same user interface, hardware layout and preferences for how to play classes makes the whole thing all the more mind-boggling to me.

A recent chat I had with my pal Gav at work, who has just started playing the game himself, had him produce
a few possible subjects for my blog which included:-
‘the benefits of using a voice communication system’
‘the pro’s and con’s of keybinding and the fact I personally play an unorthodox keybind system’

I’ve kind of amalgamated these into one by discussing playstyles overall although actually each subject could easily get it’s own blog post. When you consider how your own interface and playstyle actually holds you back and you begin to learn how it can be adjusted to suit your needs, then the game really can take off. When you start being able to set your user interface (UI) up and become proficient with your class, you can then start to homogenise your UI to appear similar between multiple alt characters. As we know, all the eleven classes feel different but when you get deep into altoholism then it helps to have certain similar abilities in familiar action bar (or keybind) locations to help you memorise your characters’ abilities more easily while greatly aiding your ability to speed along the muscle memory building process.

The game is incredibly complex. To assume the guy next to you, in any given raid group you happen to be part of, is playing his Affliction Warlock the very same way as you are playing yours…with the very same computer hardware, graphics settings and key layout…would be very naive. Hell, it’s highly possible he could be listening to deafening heavy metal music while his mother is constantly shouting at him to tidy up his disgusting mess of a basement bedroom!

His playstyle, UI, personal attention span and overall setup could be wildly different to yours even tho he is playing the very same class and spec as you. He might not be a he, could be a 10 year old girl playing under the supervision of her single dad. It’s amazing how diverse the game can be when you think of the minute details that go into making up how a given player will operate their class.

Voice communications like Mumble, TeamSpeak or Ventrilo are very important to the cause of bringing a band of total gaming strangers together to form a collective and let’s face it, otherwise unimaginable failure waiting to happen. Using a VOIP like this for group activity can multiply the chances of a team’s ability to actually succeed in killing a boss or winning a match against another team in a PvP encounter. To have so many roles and playstyles come together for one goal as a team is truly an amazing achievement and to an outsider looking in on teams playing this game, must be a bewildering sight.

These teams will likely have practiced for a long time on their individual characters so that when they have come together to form a team, they actually make it look so easy and it’s actually something an experienced WoW player will take for granted because after putting I so much time and effort to learn their ‘craft’ it becomes natural to carry out your role and be able to operate as part of an effective group which is led by an individual or partnership of leaders.

Having the ability to talk in real-time vastly increases the team’s decision making process and allows them to overcome difficulties on an ad-hoc basis which is crucial in raid boss progression, PvP target calling, and general alerting of any situation a team member needs to know about quickly. Additional uses of voice comms could include pre-encounter discussion and strategy, meetings about what members of the team are best suited to which roles (if they show up) and countless other facets of the game. I could go on for hours..

Understanding that everybody is different and will react differently to certain situations allows us to grasp how to pull together a team while being able to empathise with each member’s own potential set of hurdles to overcome in their process of becoming the perfect member of the group. Helping people through their obstacles wherever possible helps us to build strong bonds within a team (or guild) which is the whole idea after all.

I find that by learning to play as many classes as possible, even tho I don’t always focus on completely mastering just one, gives me a good overall rounding so that I basically know what each class is capable of. This helps me because I can understand what abilities a team mate can bring to the group but also because I know what an enemy player has at their disposal if I need to be able to counter it.

I do tend to focus on a particular class but during times of repetition, often the tail end of a content patch then I will usually veer onto my alt characters and that’s just my own play style. Everyone plays a different way and has different desires they want from playing. What is your play style?

/Salute