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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3416 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 17, 2023

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Where Mankrik's wife? will still get a flinch from open-beta or early release players on the Horde side.

This isn't specific to MMOs, notably. Even ignoring the extreme outliers like those with encyclopedic knowledge of Mario 64 glitches, there's probably a pretty sizable subset of Zelda BOTW players who can recognize each of 120 shrines, 14 towers, 80ish quests, yada yada (though I don't think anyway cares about the 'golden seeds'). ARK pretty much requires you to memorize 100-150 creatures by aggressiveness (which isn't just a matter of 'fights me or not', but also what mounts it won't attack), taming approach, diet, and utility; 'note runs' involve optimizing some (usually 100ish) subset of 1000 explorer notes for rapid experience gain; certain resources have important-to-recognize locations dependent on a map, so on. They usually won't get as large a list, but that's mostly a limit of their content and scope. Fallout or The Elder Scrolls players can end up with bizarrely specialized knowledge.

Some of this reflects video games being able to centralize that knowledge. FFXIV has somewhere upward of 500+ gathering items available from probably upwards of 150+ 'locations', but these are all hugely identifiable locations, and even the most generic landscapes (probably Coethas Western Highlands, which was often bashed as a boring snowy plain) has a landmark in sight for each gathering location. And as the memory palace approach attests, the combination of repetition and spatial reasoning may improve recall. Of course, on the flip side, almost nothing in Morrowind was hugely identifiable and there's no reason to every return to most ruins and... there's someone out there that knows where the One Muffin is.

That said, I'd caution that there's a big space between "longterm X players" and most or even many longterm players. I haven't played WoW for a while, but back when I did play the notorious difficulty finding anything in Thunder Bluffs or the Undercity was pretty well-established. For FFXIV, the problem of 'I have no memory of this place' is pretty standard for raids or dungeon roulettes, of which there are far fewer and which players would often repeat day-after-day for months when they were first released. I always end up going to the wrong part of the Gold Saucer trying to find Wild Rose, despite having done so on a weekly basis for the better part of a year.

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