In response to Tobold's: Why there are no morons in World of Warcraft

Tobold has just put up an interesting post, in which he claims that intelligence and WOW ability are not related.

It is one of the few posts of Tobold’s that I strongly disagree with. Not only do I think there is an undeniable correlation between intelligence and playing ability, but I also fail to comprehend how anyone could argue otherwise.

One of his main points was that, with hard work and training, a player of low intelligence could easily improve and become an accomplished raider. And I am not disagreeing for a second. But just because players of low intelligence CAN work hard to become better players, it doesn’t mean that they do. I firmly believe that players of high intelligence can pick up new concepts and skills far quicker than those of low intelligence. This makes learning the game, class, rotation etc far less painful (and less work) than for low intelligence players.

For some, the task ahead seem insurmountable, and so they are satisfied with doing 20% of the DPS that they could do given their gear level. When kicked from groups, this leads to cries of “Elitism” and “No-lifer” because they feel they are being ‘punished’ for not spending enough time on the game. That is not the case. They are being rejected because they are unwilling to put in the required work and effort to become even average. Time spent in game has become a crutch of poor players, when really their issues are far deeper than that. Note that I say ‘work’ and ‘effort’ here because it appears as such to those of lower intelligence, whereas to most of higher intelligence these are just common sense measures that are taken on board and added to the repertoire as a matter of course.

If you were to take the IQs of all players in WOW, I think that you would find, in general, that the better players have higher IQs. I am not saying that players of low intelligence cannot become accomplished raiders. I’m sure we all know some very good players who would perform poorly in any IQ test! However, I think it is far less likely for one of the 2k DPS “lolkids” to turn out to be, in real life, a highly intelligent person.