🔒 You are not playing the same game

You are not playing the same game.

This simple sentence means a few things when we’re talking about World of Warcraft. It refers to the matter of time. Whenever you started playing — be it in the middle of Wrath, back when the game launched, or in the doldrums between Mists of Pandaria and Warlords of Draenor — is unimportant.

The game now isn’t even the game we had a year ago — WoW changes over time. It grows, it adds new systems and new content constantly. The game that people fell in love with in 2004 is a memory. You can’t even go back and do most of the original quests, as a vast majority of them were completely redesigned when Cataclysm came out. You are not playing the same game you did when you started, and it doesn’t matter when that was.

Your game isn’t mine

But you are also not playing the same game as anyone else. If you’re a Mythic raider chasing world firsts, it’s easy to establish that you’re not playing the same game as someone who mainly plays to level new alts or experience the game’s story. But even then, you’re not playing the same game as other people in your raid.

Some of them love toys and pets — or they don’t. Some love to collect mounts — or they don’t. Some are transmog junkies, some couldn’t care less. Others are getting burned out and thinking of quitting raiding or taking a break from WoW. And still others are in love with raiding and having the best time they’ve ever hard in game — and all of that is just in your raid. {PB}

WoW is an enormous game. We’ve seen six expansions, 110 levels — raids and dungeons have come with each. We’ve seen battle pets and pet collecting, mounts, transmog, the farm on Pandaria, and the garrison in Warlords. We have Timewalking dungeons, a Timewalking raid, LFR, Mythic and Mythic+ dungeons, and even World Quests to do in between all that. You can choose what to do — now more than ever — and it is extremely unlikely that any two players approach the game in exactly the same way.

I don’t even know if that’s possible, frankly. The entire game exists as a shared reference point to its players, but there’s a vast amount of different perspectives and playstyles to be had. Some players are deep into the PVP system and Prestige grinding, others do it just enough to get transmog appearances. Still others simply don’t care about PVP at all.

What you see isn’t what I get

We often view the game from a position of personal experience. You see it on forums and sites where it’s discussed — people will complain that they’ve been done with a raid for weeks and ask when’s the next one coming out, while others will reply by saying they haven’t even finished the current one on Normal yet. Adding raid difficulty options like Normal, Heroic, and Mythic only exacerbates these blind spots.

The player who is currently working on Heroic Kil’jaeden to try and get the Ahead of the Curve achievement before Antorus drops isn’t really playing the same game as either the one who cleared Mythic months ago or the one who rarely pugs Normal Tomb of Sargeras. Whatever your level of personal engagement is with any content in the game, I can assure you, all you need to do to find someone with a completely opposite experience is to talk to other players. You’ll find one.

Some of us play an alt of every class — others focus on one or two classes and just play those. Some like a variety of races or even play on both factions, others do not. Someone who raids on different classes and switches based on what the group needs is different than someone who runs multiple alt raids in a week in order to progress faster — and both of those are different than the player who has been healing on a Paladin since 2006 and never plays anything else. All three can be raiding on the same tier of difficulty, but all three will still have wildly varying experiences of the exact same content.

Your game always changes

So WoW isn’t the same game it was, and it’s constantly changing. Moreover, if you’re talking about the game as it currently exists, you’re not playing the same game as people you’re guilded and raiding with, much less other people in different circumstances. The woman who leads a small group of friends and family through Mythic+ 15 dungeons is likely just as skilled of a player as the one who leads her small raid group through Heroic Tomb every week — but after a while comparisons of that sort almost become unmanageable.

The fact that Normal and Heroic raiding are flexible and can go from 10 to 25, while Mythic raids are a hard 20-player count — no flexing up or down — renders them much harder to discuss in relation to each other. Neither deals with the fact that 5-player dungeons vary enormously in difficulty now, and never have had a flex setting of any kind.

You are not playing the same game. At best, the game you are playing overlaps with others. And that’s probably the best design possible — a sprawling, choose-your-own-interests style of MMO where you can be all about questing, mixing it up with dungeons and raids, or focusing wholly on raiding. Where you can make choices and have options that are wholly your own or shared, one that don’t affect others. In the end, the game has to change and grow — if not, it will die. And it’s best that it be as personally variable as it can. It’s just as well that you’re not playing the same game.