Timelime of azeroth7/13/2023 With the influx of new people came an influx of new noise. Remember when someone created a log parser that required multiple members of the raid to upload logs, and then it would sort through them to come up with the best approximation? Crazy. Like you'd see that an NPC did damage but you couldn't see who was on the receiving end unless you had that person's log file. Zach Swanson (Malan): The initial in-game logs were completely obtuse and not really helpful to the player. In Vanilla, EJ was the only place that seriously addressed not-being-bad. ![]() I've never felt the need to be 'the best', but not being bad is important to me. EJ forums, on the other hand, were filled with those people who were not only interested, but who had already thought past what I had done myself.ĭavid Anderson (Skyl): I wanted to carry my weight in groups. They'd be interested and sometimes change their playstyle, but without good damage meters at the time, it wasn't always convincing to them, and they weren't terribly interested in participating in the theorycrafting. Matt Norton (Disquette): Back when WoW was first really getting rolling, I'd do some math about how to DPS better and share it with my guildmates. Many of those visitors, unconnected to Elitist Jerks, the guild, became prominent theorycrafters on the forums. Accusations were tossed around and were pretty predictable-Goon Squad players were awful/terrible/trolling the group, our members were being elitist, somebody ninja-looted a hotly contested lvl 55 blue and heads would roll, etc. After a few ill-fated Upper Blackrock Spire runs, complaints started popping up on the forums. With Lordbeef as their leader they formed Hooligan Syndicate, a closed guild separate from Goon Squad.Ĭurtis Vize (Jehu): Knowing how Something Awful goons are though, it wasn't long before there was drama. Because of this, some members of beta Goon Squad wanted to part of a smaller, more serious guild when WoW released. Luk e Sullivan (aka "Chocula" in World of Warcraft ): At the time, Goon Squads in other games had a well-deserved reputation of being huge, disorganized, and abrasive. They got sick of being bad at the game, so they left and formed their own guild. The first members of Elitist Jerks were in Goon Squad, the omnipresent MMO crew from the Something Awful forums. ![]() Through interviews with guild members and theorycrafters, this is the story of Elitist Jerks. People who came through the forums are in prominent positions at Riot, ArenaNet, and Valve. Its success conjured entire companies into existence and changed the way we think about games, from the way we interface socially inside them to how characters progress.Įlitist Jerks illuminated and clarified the game for tens of thousands of players many of those who contributed to that effort never stopped thinking about games, even after WoW's peak. WoW didn't invent the MMO, but it did define it. This is the most important guild in one of the most important games of this century. Most notably, long-time guild leader of Elitist Jerks Ion Hazzikostas (Watcher on the forums) wound up as WoW's game director. With time, some of the most prominent theorycrafters from Elitist Jerks even went on to become designers on WoW itself. They've had academic research papers written about them. Excepting the earliest days of WoW, players didn't have the numbers for that equation (or else bugs and misinformation meant they didn't have the right ones.)Įlitist Jerks aimed to solve that through the art of "theorycrafting," or figuring out the math behind the fights and the monsters and the classes. MMOs are, as described on the Elitist Jerks forums long ago, a math problem: To win you must do X damage in Y time, while a tank is getting hit for N damage which is countered by Z healing. MMOs are notorious for their opacity, blocking off vital information about how the game works behind walls of lore, sketchy user interfaces, and cryptic developer statements. ![]() The site's claim to fame ended up not just being tied to the guild's in-game success, but because it was the place to go for that most precious of MMO resources: knowledge. It was initially just a site for the guild of the same name, but it would eventually grow in size and prestige to hold sway over the discourse of WoW discussion. ![]() At the center of the maelstrom was a small site called Elitist Jerks.
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