User:Quizzical/Normal Mode

The game has a "hard mode". Everyone and his neighbor's dog knows that. And if there is a hard mode and one other option, then shouldn't the other logically be "easy mode" or "soft mode" or something else that makes one think, well, that certainly isn't hard mode? Why then do people insist on calling it "normal" mode?

The propensity to slant things toward being described as "hard" is absurd. It is much like biased media sources trying to spin their favored party as "moderate" and the other as "extreme". Or imagine going to a fast food place and trying to order a "small" fries, only to be denied on the basis that the choices of size are large, huge, and enormous.

And what is so normal about "normal" mode anyway? I could understand not wanting to refer to Raisu Palace with just henchmen as "easy", but with both Nightfall and GWEN out, doesn't nearly everyone have heroes? How many missions are there that are a meaningful challenge in "normal" mode with henchmen and heroes? Give heroes decent builds, let them and henchmen run around and do their thing, and then you win. And that's "normal"? No, that's easy.

Don't get me wrong here. I'm not against the existence of easy mode. It is a useful way for players to learn the game, even if they do pick up bad habits because nearly everything works, and then end up thinking that an six damage spells and a couple energy management skills is anything other than a flagrantly stupid build for most PvE purposes. They can learn better once they wipe a few times in hard mode.

But why can't we just call it what it is? Do the current labels really make any more sense than it would to refer to hard mode as "normal" and the other option as "easy mode"? Of course not.

If there is to be a normal mode and something else, then shouldn't the something else be opposite to normal? Call it strange mode or unusual mode or whatever, but "hard" mode doesn't cut it. And yet, what currently goes by the name of "hard mode" is surely a better name for it than most antonyms to normal.

The other important rule of names is that they must be short to stick. This is why, for example, most racial slurs and other vulgar words are very short. The only reasons that long words like "symplectomorphism" can hang around is that they are sufficiently obscure to not be worth replacing with some other name, and sound so absurd as for people to think they're surely a made up word, and not to be taken seriously.

The words "easy" and "hard" are both shorter than "normal", and hence superior if there is not some other reason to avoid it. This being the Internet with so many people unable to type in complete sentences, surely length matters if a word is to be typed.

As such, it is not hard mode that is misnamed. It is normal mode that is misnamed. If you take the easy mode and call it normal, that doesn't make it so, any more than naming your pet dog "tiger" turns it into a tiger.

That is why there is no normal mode, whether ArenaNet likes it or not. So, anyone up for Imperial Sanctum easy mode?