Terminally Online
This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer’s very own MMO column. Every other week, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we’ve all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice.
Terminally Online, the column you are currently reading, is typically a place where I put forward either interviews or opinion pieces on the current state of MMOs—however, I don’t do that every week. I like to give myself a break by opening discussions or starting polls to find out more about you, my dear reader.
Thanks to several of those polls, I now have a somewhat-accurate understanding of how my readership actually conducts themselves. The result? You’re all really fashionable healers. Well, the majority of you are. Here’s the first Terminally Online roundup, a deeply unofficial and unscientific census that I am, nonetheless, interested in.
In this questionnaire from February of this year, I asked you all what role you tend to play in MMOs. At the time of writing, I’ve discovered that 32% of you are healers—a clean 5% above DPS, and 7% ahead of tanks. 10% of you are like me, playing any role you’ll get, while around 6% of you play Guild Wars 2 and have thus hit escape velocity from the holy trinity. Good for you!
In this poll from April, I asked how many of you are interested in fashion, and the majority of you—36%—answered that “fashion is the true endgame”. 16% of you will occasionally go out of your way to get a vital piece of glamour, 17% are only occasional outfit collectors, and 7% of you keep up appearances at a basic level.
That makes 24% of you who don’t care at all, and just huck any old bit of gear on. Perhaps the real fashion isn’t caring what other people think of you? Much to think about.
You’re also all decently patient. In the poll I just linked, 70% of you told me that you don’t care if a dungeon run is a little slow—that it’s only a problem if things are grinding to a near halt. The remaining 30% were cleanly split between folks chanting “gogogo” and those who don’t care at all, 16% to the former, 15% to the latter (our poll software does some rounding up).
In other words, Terminally Online readers are, on average, fashion-forward healers with a medium amount of patience. Honestly, not the worst demographic to have reading my column, thank you for being here.
The most interesting poll result, however, was from this article, wherein I asked you how many people thought classic MMOs (tab target, lots of keybinds) were going out of style. I sort of did a twofer here, also asking how you felt about it.
The majority of you think that those kinds of MMOs are going out of style—but among those of you with strong feelings about that, you’re completely split. And I mean a clean split, right down the middle: 28% of you answered “Yes, it’s about time”, while 27% of you answered “Yes, and I yearn for the olden days.”
If we take the yes/no out of the equation, things are a little less even stevens:
- 35% of you gave anti tab-target answers (“I wish they would/It’s about time”).
- 42% of you gave pro tab-target answers (“If they go anywhere I’ll be very upset/I yearn for the olden days”).
- 23% of you were ambivalent (“I couldn’t care less/If they did I wouldn’t be upset”).
As a pro tab-target, keyboard turning MMO player myself, I am at least glad to know I’m not just some old fogey that’s resistant to change and ambivalent at best to having dodge rolls in my MMOs. But what about you? Does the profile of fashionista healer with a dose of tab-target nostalgia align to you, or are you a maverick in the minority? Feel free to let me know in the comments!
Read the full article here
