Do We Even Want A Skill-Based Game?

Often the complaints come in - WoW is not a skill-based game. We want a skill-based game. Larisa, I think, has as good a reply as any the other day, pointing out that only a fraction of one percent of the playerbase has completed all the available raids.

WoW is more skill-based than people give it credit for -- it's just also very repetitive, so if it takes ten tries to become skilled at something, you probably end up doing it fifty or sixty times. You then conclude that no skill is involved, because you can't remember the first ten tries when you were awful.

But let's imagine WoW is skill based, and imagine it is like another skill-based game that I like: Pinball. I recently bought the annoyingly titled Pinball Hall of Fame : The Williams Collection, and it's great. It has some great tables and it's well made, and I love pinball.

One little wrinkle though -- I've found I'm not as good at the game late at night. I get drowsy, and it takes me fraction of a second longer to hit the flippers when I want to, and as a result I'll miss a lot of shots. Well, I already miss a lot, but I miss more shots when I'm tired. But it's probably good in a way, or I'd stay up until 2 AM every morning playing pinball, because I find it way more addictive than WoW.

So do we really want a skill-based MMO that we can't play when we're tired?