I never understood this mindset. This bizarre idea that wanting to improve yourself and play to the best of your ability is inherently “not fun” and therefor bad and wrong and playing the game incorrectly.
Almost every time I see someone whining and posting anti-minmax sentiment, they use this wording, or something similar. “Sucking the fun out of the game”, “minmaxing the fun out of the game”, etc. etc…who are you to define what is and is not “fun” ? People are allowed to play however they want. If you don’t want to play that way, find a group of likeminded people and play with them. Problem solved.
If you were expecting to play a 15 year old game and NOT have everyone using the best strategies, you were setting yourself up for disappointment. It’s not 2004 anymore. We’re not clueless keyboard turning ability clicking idiots anymore. People want to actually complete the content in a reasonable amount of time instead of flailing around like clueless noobs.
Of course, at this point the argument usually shifts to “b-b-b-but EVERYONE minmaxes, you can’t avoid it!”, to which I reply, “BS”. Throughout the past 1.5 years, I was in 4 different guilds and none of them were “minmax” guilds. They were all relatively casual dad guilds that had “bad” raid comps and openly stated that world buffs were 100% optional. And I still cleared all the raid content despite being in “dad guilds”.
It’s just mindboggling that there are still so many people just crying and whining and moaning about “muh minmaxers”. Nobody is forcing you to play that way. Nothing is stopping you from joining a casual guild and “having fun” as you put it. Stop whining.
The point I was making is that minmaxers do not “force it on everyone they see”. Just pointing out the hypocrisy in anti-minmaxers that they constantly proclaim that minmaxing is wrong and bad and playing the game incorrectly. They whine about being “forced to minmax”, yet turn right around and try to force their own playstyle on others.
You’re the one strawmanning and now, because I dared to disagree with you in some way, you are putting a label on me and refusing to have a proper discussion with me because you labeled me as “person I disagree with”.
I suspect it has something to do with ability, which could include experience, time, or other resources.
It may be some peoples’ way of expressing that they would like to play with others, but are unable to because of the rule set.
Something similar to the idea described here about rats play fighting. Where, “When two rats fight it’s not always the biggest rat that wins. The biggest rat could win pretty much 100 percent of the time, if it wanted to. But that doesn’t happen. If the bigger rat chooses to win all the fights, then there will be no more playing. This fighting is a form of playing.”
My friend would min-Max in Vampire the Masquerade all the time! City Gangrel with celerity/Potence , then specialize in agile reflexes and strong grip!
But eventually the ST had him go against a pack of Black Spirals… unfortunately the poor vampire never had a chance.
Damage meters, gear scores, elitist attitudes and the like have all been used to deny people opportunities they otherwise would have had access too if people didnt adhere to these philosophies like theyre unquestionable truths with a capital T.
I guess you werent around for the arguments in support of taking away talent trees with the Cata patch in Wrath.
The min/max mentality is forever trying to push Blizz into changing the game - dual spec and the changes to world buff are the latest examples. Lots of us enjoy what the world has to offer and have no interest in worrying about being mathematically optimal for anything. A different style of play. But seems it’s the min/maxers who are always whining about what the rest of us do and are always demanding changes to enhance min/max life.
Here is the raid comp you should have!
Here is the spec you should have!
Here is the gear you should wear!
Here are the world buffs you must obtain!
Here is the fun we are now having by trivializing the content and facerolling through the raids!
I don’t relate to the retail mindset that many of you have adopted to apply it to Classic. Classic wasn’t built to guard against this abuse. Yep, 15 years later, everything is known but what fun is there to minmax it to death to faceroll content?
Look, you do you. I just think you retailers just cheat yourselves out of a better experience.
It’s just an old school thing for me. Didn’t see this crap when I was playing retail tbc and I definitely did not get ridiculed, micro managed, or outright denied from doing content that is completly face roll and will be inferior within a year.
All that min maxing ppl did during p1-p4 feels like it was in vane. I focused on ranking instead but players made that into a p2w thing. I even did speed runs in p5 and that definitely wasn’t fun it was a job.
My question is who the hell fondly looks back on their performance in previous phases and imagine how much fun they had buying gold and raid logging to do it?
The min max attitude is not a sustainable one IMO it’s hyper consumerism and has no place on official servers with finite resources. Even black lotus had to be patched. Now blotus 36g in p6 lol.
This idea is not inherently un-fun, but it is in the context of WoW Classic raiding.
I think there are a lot of games where trying to improve is the whole point. Fighting games, RTS, WoW Pvp to an extent.
However these games have different skill ceilings. There’s only so far you can get in WoW before it becomes boring.
There’s also the issue in WoW and other team based games where you can be handicapped by the players around you, and there aren’t too many spots available in top end guilds so it ends up looking like a futile exercise.
Some of it is just anti-intellectualism. I’ve seen people on class Discords theorycrafting channels complain about “too much math” - which is a bit like picking up Vogue and whining they focus too much on fashion. No one wants to treat playing a game like school work. Except, of course, for the many, many people who do like approach it that way.
Some of it is an inability to compete. LeBron James isn’t better than me at basketball. He’s just doing all those shady ‘meta’ things to pump up his parses.
Some of it is lack of socialization. It’s a game and - even though other, real people are contributing their time and effort - it should be all about me and my fun.
