Improving your gameplay!

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I discuss the way how World of Warcraft players are monitoring their performance and how these tools can encourage players to try to improve their gameplay.

World of Warcraft (WoW) players who are participating in raids often need to play their role in a perfect way. They have to master their class and know everything about it. This also includes the practice of the best skill rotation and the enhancement of the own equipment. These informations are mostly available in various guides published on well known community web pages. However, these guides can’t provide a guidance to every boss fight in the game. Players do have to adapt their gameplay by learning the fight. This allows them to time the use of skills with a long cooldown and thus taking the most benefit out of them. Furthermore, the performance can be also improved by doing some minor changes to the gameplay that are unique to the playstyle of each player. The constant change of the own gameplay is often a difficult task for players because they need to monitor their improvement over a long period of time.

There’re many ways of monitoring the own performance, but I want to talk about one website in particular: worldoflogs.com. Users can take advantage of this website by uploading combat logs created by the game. After the upload is finished, the website creates a statistical evaluation of the combat log. Players then can analyze their gameplay in detail, compare their own performance with the performance of their teammates and also compare their statistics over a longer period of time by comparing different logs. However, players have to keep in mind, if they’ve done some major changes to their equipment. After equpping a new weapon, the performance of the player can be increased by a high degree. On ther other hand, players can track the changes they’ve made to their gear and decide whether an itemstat is useful or not.

The motivation to improve the own gameplay by analyzing the statistics can have two origins. On the one hand, players like to master their class and thus they want to achieve a perfect gameplay. If a player has made a great performance increase over several game sessions, the player might get motivated to try even harder to beat the best performance. It can result in the same motivation as in sports, when a runner tries to beat the own personal record for a specific distance.
On the other hand, many WoW players are interested in comparing their own achievements with the achievements of other players. Comparing the performances can lead to a competition between the players: players want to outperform the teammates and thus are comparing the gameplay analysis.

Analyzing the own gameplay adds another dimension to the gameplay of WoW. Players are now able to track their performance and compare it. They can see their own contribution to the overall goal of beating the raid instance boss. It also enhances the idea, that players are participating in something big. They need to form a group, because they can’t beat the evil monster without other players. Everyone has the same goal and now they can also trace their own contribution to the great goal. This makes the own performance even more meaningful, because it can be connected with the overall goal of the group.

I like to end this weeks article with an idea: what if we can analyze some other parts of our daily life as well? Would it be more motivating, if I can track my writing skills by having an analysis about the words I wrote in a certain amount of time? Doing sports greatly benefits from comparing the own performances and trying to beat the personal records. Does this also applies to other things, like beating my personal time record in vacuum cleaning my room or washing the dishes?