performance-anxiety
Latest
Breakfast Topic: Performance anxiety
I know it's just a game. Sometimes, though, I feel the pressure of having to perform well. It's obvious during Arena matches, where the pressure to win gets to the point where it frays nerves and leads to nerdrage, frustration, and sometimes just plain exasperation. When our GM announced that he would be holding tryouts for Ulduar based on our raid performance, I felt pressured to perform a little more. Even though we have all content on farm, I would respec to a PvE spec for Naxxramas of all things, just to perform well enough to justify getting into our Ulduar core group.Mind you, I'm a founding officer of this guild, but the tryouts apply to me just the same. I respect that a lot, as it means that our GM looks at everything from a performance persective and not just because this or that person is a friend or this or that person has been with the guild a long time. This gives me a lot of confidence for Ulduar. While most of the game now is pretty casual, I guess there are still a precious few aspects that put butterflies in our stomach. Would you agree? Let's say, being the healer in a PUG. Do you feel the pressure to perform? Do you feel like you're under the microscope? Or being the new recruit in an Arena team, do you feel like you have to come up with the numbers to keep your slot? Or how about when your guild is going after Immortal or Undying? As easy as the game seems now, what situations give you some form of stage fright?
The Daily Grind: Do you get raid performance anxiety?
In yesterday's meaty comment discussion that followed the news about Blizzard president Mike Morhaime's admission that Age of Conan stole away some World of Warcraft users, one Massively reader (Heraclea) brought up a very valid reason for leaving WoW -- "performance anxiety" in the endgame.WoW is obviously not the only game with this problem; pretty much any MMO with a big raid focus (and maybe some others too) can be a bit too intimidating and demanding for folks who just want to play games to relax. This might be one essence of the hardcore/casual divide. Maybe hardcore types play to excel in competition, while casual players play just to unwind. Or maybe the problem is more complicated than that.Let's get to the bottom of this! Are you turned off by raids because you get performance anxiety? If so, why do you think it happens to you? And for extra points (cause we totally keep track; okay, not really!): is there a way games can be designed differently so the endgame isn't so draining?
