Twitch!
Many online games reward quick reflexes. This is natural enough, given that some are glorified video games, direct descendants of Pac-Man and Battle Zone, but quick reflexes can be an asset even in slower, nominally strategic games. Even massive turn-based spreadsheet games like Civilization have spawned incarnations wherein the units all move at once, and faster players can kill or protect weak units before opponents do likewise. Games that place a premium on reflexes, and the players who excel at them, are often called “twitchy.”
World of Warcraft is not an especially twitchy game; the pace of combat is evened considerably by pauses of a second or more between attacks. Still, timing is important, especially against other players (PvP), but also against the more passive computer-run foes (PvE). No player can be considered great until and unless he masters the art of finessing countermoves, such as launching a speedy kick to interrupt an enemy’s spell before it gets cast. Old and slow players like me, or those whose machines can’t quite keep up with the streaming data (also like me), can never be more than adequate at PvP play, or fairly good at the more forgiving PvE.
On the other hand, the degree of reflex conditioning that goes into good twitch play can be counterproductive. Not long ago, I was playing in a group of five, fighting our way through one of the many strongholds of evil known as instances. Also in the group was a hunter renowned (at least in my circles) as a great player. I’ve heard tales of how he used hit-and-run tactics to down a powerful “boss” monster by himself, and other tales of how he could simultaneously take on more monsters than is normally thought healthy.
And yet we, as a team, were having a difficult time of what should have been an easy run. It took me a while to realize that our problem was the hot-shot player, the one who could nearly handle the whole instance himself. And his problem was the way he continued using tactics that would be effective, even necessary, at fighting through the instance alone. For example, one of my jobs was to transform monsters temporarily into harmless sheep, allowing us to defeat the rest individually. Another player was the tank; his job was to hold the attention of hostiles, forcing them to attack his considerable defenses, rather than allowing them to run rough-shod over our more fragile party members. The hot-shot made these critical tasks extremely difficult by spreading his attacks around, disrupting the sheeping enchantment and distracting monsters from the tank.
Had he let us perform our roles, everything would have worked easily. Perhaps, had he done it all himself, the rest of us would have been perfectly safe, too. But by mixing it up, using same tactics that gave him his reputation for solo performance in a group setting, the hot-shot caused severe problems. Spreading his attacks around like this might have made him 20% more effective than he would have been with a more conservative strategy, at the expense of making three of his four teammates far less effective. We suffered needless deaths (thankfully only a temporary problem in the World of Warcraft) and even more tight squeezes because his methods disrupted the expected flow of play.
And he couldn’t stop! Because he had worked so hard to make play as reflexive as possible, all in the interest of speed, he couldn’t—or, possibly, wouldn’t, but I give him the benefit of the doubt—stop following attacks A and B with his usual attack C, even after he was asked not to.
That was an eye-opening experience for me. I’ll never perform well in PvP. Never, no matter how long I practice. But, despite my very ordinary reflexes and computer, I was still vastly better than the hot-shot in the group PvE environment. Some players excel in multiple situations, and I can still envy them. But I’ve stopped feeling like a second-rate player simply because I’m slow.