mmo-truisms
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Nothing Gold Can Stay: Change and the game's development
There was a time when the following were all known truths, enshrined in the game by its developers and its players. Raids all require 40 people to run. To run a 5-man instance, you have to assemble the group via friends or through people on your realm. The only acceptable warrior is a tanking warrior. The only acceptable tank is a warrior tank. Hybrids heal. If they don't heal, they're not hybrid. More importantly, if they don't heal, you don't bring them to your group. In order to understand how to use a weapon, you must learn how from a trainer and then go out and attack things with it hundreds of times. These are just a few of the sacred cows that WoW inherited from other games and at one time treated as if they were bedrock assumptions, virtually built into the DNA of the MMO genre. And to paraphrase, if you meet the ancient MMO truth on the road, WoW must kill it. I would argue that in nearly every case that the development team has looked at a truism (even one enshrined in their current design paradigm) and decided to change or remove that sacred cow, it has been for the good of the game. Perhaps this has not always been the case, but certainly very often.
