My Life As A Gamer: How Mech Piloting Arose To Dominance

Three weeks ago, Folding Ideas posted this hour-plus video essay regarding Globe of Gankcraft.

To summarize: Gamers playing the game successfully identified what actually matters in the game, then ruthlessly pursued how to beat the game to get to the results that matter and have been refining it ever since as an ongoing regime of Best Practices that have had serious consequences for the game, for the players, and for the brand. The developers, themselves gamers and players of the game in particular, accepted this and incorporated player-generated solutions to past problems into later encounter design forcing an arms race that fueled the refinement of Best Practices into the current circumstance.

That's a nice way of saying "Once the objectives are identified, the skilled player solves the problem of how to get them and then refines the solution until perfection is achieved." This, in turn, becomes "Best Or Benched"; once a problem is solved, that solution becomes the norm and it is not acceptable to deviate from it.

What is not mentioned in the video is that there is something else, something deeper than what they mentioned, that made all of this possible: Build Culture.

This means that you do not merely roll and play a Warrior. You build one, as one does a machine- or a robot.

See the tab above on Mech-Piloting. Build Culture fosters the ability to optimize character performance--something Build Culture fosters as its objective--and Gankcraft does this through Gear and Talents; there are always Best in Slot gear lists and Optimal Talent Builds. That's working on a machine, not on your skill at the game.

The mentality this produces is a brute force mentality. You are expected, with your fine-tuned and optimized character build, to bulldoze everything in your path. These days you rarely see Crowd Control abilities used outside of specific mandated cases, and God forbid you try otherwise or you get shat upon- and likely kicked out of whatever you're doing. Why? Against Best Practices.

You're expected to maximize your damage output regardless of your place in a group. You're expected to max out your healing throughput as a healer, and to maximize your damage resistance as a tank; the tank is also expected to know exactly where to do, what to do, what hostiles to engage, when, where, and how. Failure to conform means you get kicked.

While this is a video specific to Gankcraft, this attitude is commonplace in MMOs--even ones that try to discourage it, like FF14 does--because it is effective. In short, it's the Grade A asshole who nonetheless (a) is always right and (b) gets it done first, best, and isn't shy about it. You can't be it, so you have to join it or you're culled from the game.

Over the last 20 years, starting with D&D3 and its design that's all about character builds, this began creeping into tabletop RPGs also. In any RPG where character abilities and performance can be controlled by the players, a cohort of theorycrafters will identify what the game is about and optimize performance to achieve those objectives. Thanks to the Internet, this information is easily crowd-sourced and disseminated, making the same phenonemon seen with Gankcraft apply to those games.

D&D3 was the first to see this manifest. D&D4 reacted to it by making a game that (a) catered to that cohort by (b) making it impossible to play contra-intention and that turned a lot of people off. Current Game and Pathfinder are a mess because of tensions between this unconquerable force and the mushes masses of poseurs.

Not that it couldn't be detected before that point, but there was not a mass play environment or a social scene where its practitioners couldn't prove their position superior by Actual Play results that others would verify as legitimate. The Internet changed that, first with talk and then with tools--tools that showed proof--and backed up with videos and livestreams demostrating this in action.

In short, once everyone could see the superior performance in action, everyone had the same realization that everyone seeing breach-loaders vs. muzzle-loaders in action did: either conform and catch up or get wrecked and left behind.

Until the publishers and developers are willing and able to do what it takes to put an end to the means that allow this culture, it will persist.

This can be done. There is just insufficient will in nigh-all MMO businesses and too many tabletop businesses to do it.