User:Quizzical/Random Thoughts

Random thoughts on the passing scene:

If you play as class A, but use tactics built for class B, it won’t work as well as if you were class B. This says very little about class balance.

People ask whether doing this or that is “worth it”. There is a simple way to answer this: if you wouldn’t do it except for the drops or titles you get from it, then the answer is no. Playing a game that you fundamentally dislike for the sake of rewards that do not exist outside the game cannot be “worth it” in any sane sense.

There is no such thing as the "good of the guild" apart from precisely the good of the players in the guild. Guilds are created for the benefit of players, and not the other way around. A guild which serves to make its members worse off should cease to exist.

If the goal of a mission is to meet the challenge laid out by ArenaNet, then to use various cheats to evade the challenge is to fail.

The only way anyone ever runs out of things to do in the game is when he decides that he dislikes everything that he hasn’t done.

Suppose that you could instantly complete any mission, quest, dungeon, or title by typing “iwin”. Would you do so? Would it not be more rational to quit the game?

There are no bad classes, but only bad players. The concentration of bad players does vary by profession, however, which can leave the illusion that some classes are worse than others.

A good player adapts his build to the situation at hand. A bad player adapts his situation to his preferred build. This is how the latter ends up farming a few small areas so much.

Begging for materials that are readily bought and sold for gold at a vendor is equivalent to begging for gold. If a guild wants to encourage its members to beg for gold in guild chat, that's its business, but it makes little sense to ban begging for gold outright while encouraging players to ask for materials.

Some players buy gold on Ebay or hire a power leveler. If you dislike a game so much that you not only don’t want to play it yourself, but are willing to pay someone else to play it for you so that you don’t have to, it is cheaper to quit.

Mindless leveling is for players with more free time than skill. You can learn a lot about a game by asserting that on the game's forum and seeing what reactions you get.

Why is it that when one player congratulates another in the game, it is usually for getting a lucky drop? Is there nothing more meaningful to accomplish than having some dumb luck?

There is no such thing as a "fair" price in any meaningful sense apart from market equilibrium. The price at which goods are commonly bought and sold is by definition what the goods are worth. The players who complain that a particular price on something they want to buy is unfairly high would typically complain that the same price on the same goods was unfairly low if they were trying to sell.

Players start games, and players quit games. That is the natural order of things, and if it were not so, veteran gamers would be far too busy to ever start a new game. To blame this on ArenaNet is absurd.

Contrary to popular belief, online gold sellers provide an important service. Listing how much they charge to power level characters tells you a lot about how much grinding the game has. That is useful information to know when deciding on a game to pick up--and you don't have to give them a dime to check their prices.

MMORPGs become less interesting as you get higher level. This is not an observation about content quality; rather, what was once new and exciting becomes old and mundane as you play the game more. Therefore, the level cap should be low.

A PUG is only as bad as the player organizing it. The problem is that often, this is no one. A group of eight players from the same guild that all try to solo a mission simultaneously could produce horror stories to rival those of any PUG.

If skimpy armor looks like it would provide inadequate protection to ride a bike safely, then it looks rather dumb to go to war in it.

It is better to rely on the Strong Law of Large Numbers than on the results of any particular attempt.

Anyone doing any content by consumables or heavy reliance on pve-only skills has no moral right to refer to it as "hard mode".

The game is PvE and the forums are PvP. This is why some PvPers go to the forums to declare that PvP is the only thing that matters, rather than playing the game.

Why do so many companies want to make a bad clone of WoW? If they want to make a mediocre knock-off, why not at least duplicate a better game, like Guild Wars?

The first rule of seasonal content is that it is stupid. If it were good, there would be no need to restrict it to particular times of year to make it seem new and get people to try it. Instead, it would be part of the core game itself and available year-round.

It seems that the most expensive games are advertised as "free to play".

Why are so many games referred to as "WoW-clones", but WoW itself rarely is? WoW is the ultimate WoW-clone.

Most of what I've seen about Guild Wars 2 makes me think it will be a lot like Eye of the North: kind of similar to Guild Wars, and perhaps decent in its own right, but not nearly as good as the campaigns of Guild Wars.

The probability that a player will bring Rebirth is directly proportional to the probability that, in the event of a partial wipe, that player will be dead and need someone else to resurrect him. This isn't Murphy's law. Rather, players who frequently cause partial wipes get into more situations where Rebirth could be useful, and thus, are more likely to insist on bringing it.

Farming is doomed to fail because it is an attempt at an income solution to an expenditure problem. If you always spend everything you get as soon as you get it, you'll always be broke. It works like that in real life, too.

When someone asks you to evaluate his build, often the best reply is, "You should do the attribute quests."

Killing can be murder, or it can be justice. The difference is the storyline.

Why do people commonly talk of an alliance discount when trading within an alliance? Why should the buyer benefit at the expense of the seller, rather than the other way around? Is buying items or materials somehow a morally superior activity to selling them, as though it is possible to have one without the other?

I believe in the Donald Rumsfeld approach to grouping: you go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had. Going far out of your way to insist on some particular group composition that intentionally excludes most classes entirely is silly.

(Yeah, I stole the title from Thomas Sowell. I might add more later.)