⌛ Min/Maxing Culture is Ruining Classic

Tipsout just released this video talking about the negative effects “Min/Maxing” has on Classic and gaming in general.

And he made some great points which I will summarize:

  1. When Raiding feels like a Job, you’re not having fun.

  2. Min/Maxing optimizes the Fun out of the game.

  3. Efficiency =/= Fun.

  4. If you run around and collect World Buffs and log out of the game until a Raid. Are you still playing the game?
    Logging out =/= Playing the game.

  5. Speedrunning Molten Core is not a social experience.
    If you rush through the game, you spend less time with the people you play with.
    Speedrunning is Anti-social.

  6. Min/Maxing is Frustrating…so why do you do it?

And his points really reminded me of this great post that Asmongold reacted to called “Method is Ruining the Game” which basically talk about the same thing.
How this “E-sports” culture of knowing the heck out of the game, and optimizing it under a microscope ruins the experience.

I think it’s time to start this discussion and talk about what the player base and Blizzard can do about it.

I would suggest the following:

What Blizzard can do:

  1. Release F R E S H realms, with no Layering, and 4 months per phase minimum. So no pressure to speed-level and grind SM all day.

  2. Ban all addons. When you spend more time looking at numbers than in Maths class…you’re doing something wrong.

  3. Progressive Talents and Itemization.
    One reason everything is easy is because patch 1.12 has basically buffed talents and items. Go back to releasing each patch EXACTTLY how they were before.

  4. Faction-Balanced servers. Enforce a 50/50 Ratio by having Faction queues, and telling Horde players to go roll alliance.

  5. Blizzard Communication. Tell the playerbase MONTHS in advance what you’re going to do, not like Diremaul and Phase 2 which were literally last minute announcements and people had barely any time to prepare.
    Have a Phase content plan and STICK TO IT.

  6. Better Servers. Stop using Amazon web services and go back to actual server blades. Literally your servers were melting down.

  7. Delete Skeram, Stalagg, Flamelash, and other ridiculously imbalanced servers.

What the Playerbase can do:

  1. Not everything has to be a race…stop this Min/Maxing E-sports mindset of “GOGOGO WORLD FIRST EVERYTHING”.

  2. Ret Paladins, Shadow Priests, Boomkins…just let people play what they want, you’ll still clear the raid.

  3. Stop rolling more Horde on Horde dominated servers.

  4. Stop treating the game like it’s a Job…the Streamers did it, and it literally IS their Job…and they hated it.

  5. People didn’t play World of Warcraft because it was “Efficient”.

Sidenote: You see what E-sports have done to Gaming?
Everyone thinks they’re the next Usain Bolt Gold-Medal Olympian, and everything gets turned into a World First Race.

I can’t wait for Darkmoon Faire World First…probably won by Method.

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you dont think these private server players like tipsout and esfand dont know this?

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This just in - being good at the game is ruining the game.

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I am 100% going to listen to some random guy give a dear diary about a video game

Thank you OP

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such “RETribution” arguments.

Minmaxing isn’t ruining anything. Some players want the optimized path and break records, others want to relive the days when they didn’t had a mortgage to pay, and one thing doesn’t affect the other.

If someone being better at the game bothers you, the problem isn’t the game.

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Vanilla raids ate up tremendously more time than Classic raids and you were subjected to Guild politics like crazy. You had to literally apply to a raiding guild like it was a damned job, complete with a resume of accomplishments, proof of progression/itemization/effort, screenshots of your UI, and probation periods. So if his opening point is an issue that was objectively worse in Vanilla then I’m not sure why I should care.

For a subset of people that don’t like being told how to play… which hasn’t changed in 15 years.

This is flagrant nonsense. People have more fun with smoother/cleaner kills and runs, particularly when they’ve worked to achieve said smoother/cleaner kills and runs. But as with everything, there are limits to which people don’t want to push… but this isn’t new and hasn’t been new for 15 years.

Collecting a world buff the morning of or the night before a raid is hardly logging off. Let’s not be hyperbolic while already behind trying to make any reasonable points.

Just… making things up now? Okay.

It isn’t.

Soooooo TLDR:

His points suck and his opinions are pretty terrible.

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Given the choice of grouping up with OP or grouping with people who care about their performance, ill group with the latter every single day of the week.

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I don’t care what any Streamer is saying about the game. His Opinions mean nothing to me.

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Agreed. And I’ll add, jmho, the streamers are a part of what ruins games.

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Min/Max culture only ruins the game if Blizzard pays attention to it and designs the game around it. You can see it in retail with things like Mythic+ and titanforging. Classic is fine. Because people can min/max all they want, but it’s not necessary to conquer most content.

The only places it has a negative effect are Pvp where a grenade can mean the difference between death and victory. Which, honestly, doesn’t get solved until way later. Not even in BC does it get really solved. And the only solution to it is a changes solution so no thanks. If Blizz does do changes though then they should just add JC and give it some consumes and items that share CDs with engineering so it’s an alternative to engineering that others can use because taking away from engineering is taking away from the game.

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Mix maxing isn’t ruining anything it actually makes vanilla fun for someone who was originally in a Naxx 40 guild stuck at Four Horsemen

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None of this will change min/max culture. In fact, it just creates a whole lot of other weird behaviors, like players picking up all the bad items and keeping them in the bank for when they magically become best in slot later.

Progressive patching will make the raids a little more appropriately tuned, but it won’t have much/any effect on the speed at which guilds consume the content.

Addons aren’t what allow people to min/max. They do make things like healing far, FAR less frustrating than the in game UI, which only shows half of what you need to know.

Faction queues will always be a bad idea. Can find servers unplayable because a side decided to stop playing more than the other, or you build your character on a realm that ends up lopsided after you have put in tons of time into it.

Even without the pressure to speed to 60… people will do it anyway. That’s how people are.

You can’t unlearn how to best play classic. There is nothing that blizzard can do to reasonably enforce your preferred style of WoW. You just don’t like the way people are choosing to play. There will ALWAYS be a most optimal way to play, and people will ALWAYS trend toward that when it is known.

Every game when it is out long enough trends toward this “best” way to play idea.

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I don’t personally consider being over-geared and over-buffed just so you can speed through content as fast as possible as being “good at the game” necessarily.

While you also said:

I would much rather run with someone like the OP who remembers that a game is meant to be about fun instead of feeling like a job. Been there, done that, and don’t intend to ever go back.

Now, I’m sure for some people min/max’ing is fun. That’s great because the point of game is to have fun. But way too many people in WoW (retail and Classic both) take the game way too seriously and just suck the fun out of the game. I could care less if you or everyone in the game wants to min/max, as long as it doesn’t effect me.

But it does end up effecting many people because min/maxing has become a culture in games and it’s getting to the point where the majority expect everyone to do it. If you don’t, you won’t get accepted to groups, guilds, etc. Thankfully there are some laid-back people still around and guilds who remember that games are meant to be for fun. But this min/maxing culture is becoming way too prevalent and too many expect everyone to follow their lead or be left in the dust. It’s ruining games in my opinion.

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People have always min/maxed going back to the very first single person Rpg’s.

Information is a little easier to come by for the masses, but even then… it was always there for people that knew where to look.

As other people mentioned, I remember having to submit resumes to raiding guilds like it was a damn job… We have better gear and more readily available information, but min/maxing has always been a thing

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The problem is that min / max is all figured out so not doing so is by choice.

Find a guild that suits you then. I have 2 characters in 2 different raid teams. One is super serious and requires consumables, asks for specific respecs depending on content etc… The other is much more laid back. Just because SOME people ask for specific specs/consumes etc doesnt “ruin the game!!” or really affect you at all if you’re not interested in clearing content at the same rate.

TLDR: Do your own thing and dont worry about other people so much. What they do really doesnt affect you

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Being good at the game =/= stacking world buffs and raid logging to preserve those buffs…

The content just isn’t hard enough to require the use of the world buffs and consumables that everyone claims are “required”…

If you’re decent you can clear the content with out them, just takes a little longer and your E-peen meter does not look as impressive.

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Nobody is claiming its required. If you don’t want to clear content at that pace, dont. No one is forcing you to and, once again, what speed other people raid at has no bearing on you whatsoever

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Ok y’all caught the bait OP started a controversial topic and jumped ship.

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