Saturday, March 28, 2009

The Rage Bar on keystrokes per second

Vads from The Rage Bar asked me what I thought of his blog, and I found it very nice. Clear layout, about 2 posts a week, and a consistent WoW warrior subject. Not that I totally agree with his view that there should be more content which is only accessible for 1% of the player base, but I do agree that WoW is running out of content fast, and Ulduar will only push the bored point back a few weeks.

But the post of him that interested me most was one about Heroic Strike, with a link to a video in which a tank manages to deal 3.3k dps on Patchwerk, doing 10.5 keystrokes per second. 10 keystrokes per second are 600 keystrokes per minute, which translates to 120 words per minute. According to Wikipedia that is the speed of a world class typist, twice as fast as an average professional typist, and 4 times as fast as the average computer user can type. Personally I type at 50 words per minute (you can test your personal typing speed here). No wonder I'm not dealing that much damage with my tank!

I think it is a bad idea to have your damage depending on how fast you can hit your keyboard. Because if your dps depends on your keystrokes per second, the differences between players become even larger. Then either you have content where only world class typists can beat the boss, or you have content which even the slow typers can compete, and the fast typers are bored because it is too easy. Is this what the often discussed "skillz" boil down to, faster button-mashing?

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