Around a year ago now, Folding Ideas’ Dan Olson put out a video titled “Why It’s Rude to Suck at Warcraft.” It’s a long video essay, clocking in at just under an hour and a half of runtime, but I highly recommend anyone that enjoys playing MMOs to give it a watch. Obviously, I’m not going to require you to watch something that long to engage with this article, though, so I’ll give you a quick rundown of what ideas Dan laid out that I want to respond to.

The specific point I want to write in conversation with requires some background: the difference between free and instrumental play. 

These are terms rooted in academia, but put simply, free play is the type of play experienced when goals, or for our purposes, “endgames,” are not systematically and socially reinforced upon a player. Instrumental play is the opposite – it is a largely competitive type of play that focuses on completing goals in the most streamlined and efficient way possible.

These types of play aren’t mutually exclusive, as Olson himself points out. In his example, World of Warcraft, players may have the instrumental goal of leveling their character up, acquiring the best-in-slot gear, and toppling the current expansion’s hardest raid bosses. But they may also engage in role-playing exercises in tandem with their leveling, chatting with other people in character, or participating in random events that crop up across the expansive world of Azeroth.

The issue arises when a community of MMO players optimizes the fun out of the game, edging the predominantly “free players” out – Olson refers to these people as “MMO tourists.” 

Both types of players inhabit Azeroth, but increasingly, they are playing two different Worlds of Warcraft. This results in the free players being pushed out because they don’t optimize their skill usage, because they don’t hunt down every single piece of best-in-slot gear, and because they don’t choose the best racial passives for their class of choice.

Watching this video struck me deeply because my own time playing World of Warcraft was, I think, very unorthodox when compared to that of other players. As a 23-year-old, I wasn’t raised on WoW or any other massive MMO. The genre always appealed to me because I loved the idea of entering a virtual world full of people, defined by teamwork and role play and the ability to carve out a whole and complete existence separated from reality.

That said, I subbed to the game at a point many people consider the worst era of WoW. I played the tail end of Battle for Azeroth and then the first half of Shadowlands. I rolled up a character I liked and learned everything from scratch, exploring zones that most retail players probably haven’t bothered looking at in years. 

My character was a human Demonology Warlock, which I later found out is one of the worst combinations of characteristics for an instrumental player. The Alliance was pretty dead for true endgame raiding, and the Demonology subclass was ranking in at some of the lowest DPS in the game. But I cared not, for I was Tempestos, a grizzled old codger, well-versed in bending the fel to my will!

I think the image above plainly illustrates that I’m not still living in Tempestos’ world. This is partially because I was not looking to renew my subscription after the Activision-Blizzard scandal bubbled over into the public eye, but it was also because I grew to feel as though World of Warcraft was not for me.

When I first started playing WoW during the COVID-19 worldwide shutdown, I was looking to escape my own life and find a place in another world. I guess I was looking to pseudo-isekai myself, in a sense. I wanted to explore, pick up professions, and meaningfully interact with other players. 

Tempestos collected cloth and wove his own robes. He pledged himself to Maldraxxus in the war for the Shadowlands. He collected mounts and pets because he loved the act of collecting. That was my World of Warcraft, my Azeroth.

But it wasn’t the acceptable World of Warcraft experience. I didn’t raid, except a handful of times using the raid finder. I didn’t do Mythic+ dungeons. My DPS was low, my skill rotation was basic and unoptimized, and I didn’t use any addons to make the game easier. I was never directly made fun of; I avoided the most toxic populations of players. But I was ostracized from the community at large. As pandemic restrictions loosened and I returned to school, my love affair with WoW ended.

I was content with being an MMO tourist, but I didn’t feel like WoW was the right fit for me. Luckily, I found that right fit, even if it’s a pretty unorthodox title.

Trove is a small, unpolished MMO. It was released nearly a decade ago. I played it with a few friends on some crappy laptop when I was a smelly shit-eating middle schooler, and then I dropped it after a couple months of intensive play. Within the last few months, however, I picked the game back up; I discovered the perfect outlet for my free play, MMO tourist playstyle.

Describing Trove is difficult. It’s a weird mix between generic MMO grinding gameplay and voxel-based building. Adventuring is necessary to grind out materials for any creative endeavors, though, so both parts of the game work in tandem. It’s a product of its time, and you can feel Minecraft’s influence on this particular title.

Amongst the dwindling playerbase, many people criticize Trove for lacking a real, discernible combat-based endgame. Dungeon crawling is very generic and same-y, and reaching higher-difficulty worlds is largely based on the tedious process of collecting and powering up RNG-based gems for hours and hours. My main character, the Gunslinger, is at 14,000 power rank; many endgame players are somewhere between 35,000-40,000 power.

But where I’m at in the game is serviceable to me because Trove’s real appeal to me is in its player-driven marketplace and collectables. Don’t get me wrong – the game’s economy is totally inflated, and everything costs an insane amount of Flux, the game’s main currency. But collectables such as mounts, allies, boats, and wings are all attainable with some grind and elbow grease, and I love spending my time doing mundane tasks to build up a wealth of resources.

I never feel pressed into doing repetitive dungeons or grinding enemy kills. I spend most of my time visiting different worlds and mining rare materials instead. I plunge into the soot and magma of the Dragonfire Peaks to rip Primordial Flame from the earth, I freeze in the caverns of the Permafrost as I collect Glacial Shards, and I sink beneath the sands of the Desert Frontier as I dig for golden Infinium.

I immerse myself into this blocky world in my own way. I’m sure it’s a way many people would find boring. I mine, I sell my excess ore, and I invest in cool new shiny toys to play with. I explore the world freely, with little to no objective. It’s a massively multiplayer world where I can choose my path and define my own success.

Most importantly, because of the nature of Trove’s gameplay, I haven’t experienced toxicity and isolation from players who have more instrumental playstyles. I can coexist with them; I sell them resources that they need to progress their objectives, in fact. I think that’s a beautiful symbiosis, and I wish more MMOs would let me embrace this “tourist-y” approach and still feel valuable to a community.

Are you an MMO player? Which titles do you play – and are you more of a free player or instrumental player? Let us know in the comments below!