My Life as a Gamer: I Hate The Tryhards

There is something about RPGs that drive me nuts, and that something is that too many of them bring on the tryhards. You've seen these guys. They're the theorycrafters who come up with simulations, from which they decree what is Best and what should be Benched. Be it World of Warcraft, Dungeons & Dragons, or Darkest Dungeon or whatever- they suck the fun out of the RPG genre by making it all about math and benchmarks and shit that you would only care about if you were competing at a level where that was worth a damn.

I ran into this in World of Warcraft, again.

The word is that my main character's primary specialization (Fury Warrior) is subpar for raiding. The details that the spergs leave out are:

• The assessment comes from inaccurate simulations.
• The simulations are inaccurate because the assumed conditions, at multiple points, are WRONG.
  • No encounter in the game fulfills the assumed encounter situation.
  • No character in the game fulfills the assume character build or Artifact Weapon build.
  • No player in the game fulfills the assumed performance capability.
• That's FOUR wrong assumptions, and only ONE being wrong busts the validity of the simulation.

Let me put this simply: Bad Inputs Produces Bad Outputs.

And bad inputs are common as catpiss with these sperging tryhards, so of course they get bad outputs and then they make bad conclusions from them. The current suite of character guides at sites like Icy Veins show this, and the play culture that this sperg-driven dynamic creates turns players off from social play modes such as dungeons and raids. Why? Because you are either Best or you are Benched, especially with pick-up groups (who use conformity to the metagame narrative as shorthand for player skill, which is another Bad Conclusion from Bad Data).

This is why I stick to my guild as much as I can. Sounds player fundamentals are far more important than making certain your characters values in a spreadsheet meet some bullshit (and wrong) benchmark; someone who isn't The Right Build who Got Gud at what is expected out of a character of that class and spec in a group is a better pick than someone who shits rainbows out his ass on Warcraftlogs but stands in the fire, doesn't follow the kill order, or otherwise is incompetent at the most basic skills in the game and thus is dumber than advertised.

It's the difference between between putting a pro driver in a souped-up hot hatchback street racer and a kid fresh out of Driver's Ed in a top-tier Formula One car, and then having them do 500 laps around Daytona. The kid's far more likely to fuck up and wreck than the pro is to not perform the best he can with what he's got. Player Skill matters, and that skillset includes habits that go beyond what you do while you're logged into the game and playing.

There's more to Git Gud than how you math a spreadsheet when it comes to RPGs, something that too many spergs forget and thus fall into the trap of thinking that virtual robot fighting is all that there is to playing RPGs (especially those with no tabletop RPG experience, or only with tomes-of-rules sorts like Pathfinder, and not the real thing like the older D&D editions), and there is more to World of Warcraft in particular than raiding in general (and Mythic raiding in particular).

The tryhards need to stop sperging, and that includes those making the games. None of you are helping. NONE of you. Gaming is not a math equation, especially in RPGs, and you ain't going to make it so by stamping your feet and insisting on it. Want proof? Go play Diplomacy.