Stop designing for peoples' "obligation."

I'd be happy to agree with you, but in a game where a key component is the inter-reliance on each other to tackle difficult challenges, it in some ways requires players to at least consider what is optimal to ensure they're not letting other people down--or even just to keep from looking bad. Fear of judgment and self doubt are powerful social motivators. It's not as simple as personal choice, because in most cases its not, you're also making your choices based on how they'll impact everyone else you're playing with.

06/19/2015 06:46 PMPosted by Wolfar

That in no way addresses the point of the OP.

Maybe I was speaking a bit beyond the specific issues the OP was bringing up. I wasn't intending to be so esoteric. My point was really just that suggesting people not care whether they're optimal or not--or that being suboptimal is more fun than being optimal--isn't as simple as personal choice; and that's even completely ignoring that first every player would need to have a realistic view of their own knowledge and skill.

Man, the old talent trees were the worst. The sheer number of people that would complain about class balance, about high end progression tuning, about this or that, and when we'd look into it... it'd turn out they just didn't know what they were doing. They had gone for the ultra rare 16/16/19 build, or whatever, and the reason they absolutely hated the game is because, ultimately, we let them make the wrong choices. I think the cynical response is that it's their fault and they should just know to be better if they care, but it's the game that allowed it.

It'd be real easy if everyone understood when they were making the suboptimal choices and were ok with it. That's just not how it works in practice.

Personally, I'm right there with you. I play the classes I want to because they're fun, not because they're high on someone's list. I make the fun choices I want to make. And I know that I'm only going to be able to see a certain level of difficulty because I make choices for my personal enjoyment rather than my desire to be optimal. I realize all of these things and I enjoy the game the way I want to enjoy it within the confines of the rules as they're defined by its design.

But I am an individual. And millions of other individuals also play this game, and make their own choices, and have their own desires, and realizations.

06/20/2015 01:32 AMPosted by Valentius

So the game literally cannot allow someone to fail on their choices?

Actually that's a good point, and of course you can fail, but those failure/learning/growth opportunities are focused on actually playing your character, and not so much on reading a guide to know which powerups you have to choose.

As much as we'd like to reward you for your Googling skillz. ;)

06/20/2015 01:41 AMPosted by Kiwiani

You say this yet with the implementation of crz and lfd, people have gone the downward slope of treating everyone like crap, and there is no recourse. Seems too me you failed at what you just said.

I think you're referring to random people being mean to other random people on the internet, where I was more referring to situations like guild groups, or even PUGs, where people want to ensure the collective success of their group, if not their friends.

Connecting strangers together to tackle group content is, I would think, always going to be subject to some amount of internet asshattery regardless of what that system is. The benefit of connecting people is by and large very positive, so if there any improvements you could recommend to help ease social tensions or ideas to make people nicer to each other, I think we'd be happy to hear them. But that's really a topic for a different thread.