Narrative Warfare: Gaslighting You To Surrender Your Advantage

"If you don't like flight, don't use it."

That fallacious argument comes up a lot in World of Warcraft threads regarding player-controlled flight and competitive advantage. Nevermind what the object is, or the context; focus on the "competitive advantage" part because that's the one with real-world applications here.

The reason for why not using flight in WOW is not an option is because those who use it utterly dominate those that do not. It's that big of a competitive advantage. The same principle applies to everything else; if you don't do a thing that the other side is using to screw you, then you lose and you get no other outcome. It doesn't matter if you can't do it or you won't do it; you still lose to those who can and do.

There are only two useful responses to such an advantage: adoption or negation. The reason is that only these two responses actually address the issue of the advantage by either zeroing it out, much like you're doing one of those "Solve for X" problems in Algebra, via taking up the same thing (adoption) or changing the situation to remove its utility (negation). Flight is fantastic, but useless when you're underwater or in confined spaces. Firearms are great so long as you can feed them ammo, you're able to ignite the primers, or you're not armored past their ability to penetrate. You get the idea.

So when someone demands that you (a) surrender your access to a competitive advantage you can bet that they are trying to (b) negate yours while (c) keeping theirs. It's an old trick, but effective more often than not, until you see how the wizard pulls off his trick and then it never works again.