And even when you do mean to be a little bit of a jerk, to have them actually listen. That can be hard enough in person when you do have all the extra ‘communications bandwidth’ provided by voice, delivery, facial expression, body language, etc.

The other side of this is learning how to TAKE advice in a good way, and that seems to be a bit harder to learn.

THIS is where the conversation/communication about how to play this game occurs. The blogging community and Forums. The poor communication in-game is why this community exists.

My discovery of and the dedication with which I follow WoW blogs is why I’m the player that I am. It’s also what makes playing WoW so stimulating to a vaguely-intellectual forty-something like me because consequently playing WoW becomes about so much more than playing a video game.

The players that don’t know about the blogosphere, or don’t have the time/energy to read and study about it will progress very slowly.

If I could just make eye contact with the hunter sitting next to me and say “dude, we’re in an instance, turn growl off of your pet”, he’d be able to see my facial expression of ‘don’t you understand?’ instead of ‘you dickwad’.

Then he might say, “what do you mean, ‘turn it off’”?

And I could say, “click the icon so it doesn’t have the little ‘active-ness’ to it. See, you can turn most of them off and on. In some cases you might….blah blah blah.”

You just can’t type all that while trying to keep up with a tank-a-potomus. It’s just not worth the effort most times.

MMO’s continue to improve the Massively and Online portion with great graphics and computer speed, but the Multiplayer aspect just sits there. Even vent or voice chat (which only very experienced players use, anyway) disallows private communication between players.