Stardew Valley.
[quote=“Silverleigh-drakthul, post:177, topic:555766”]
Also, FF14, WoW, Runescape, and every single Elder Scrolls game would like to point out that you absolutely can get leveled using only “farming” type skills.
‘bad’ is what we get when some of these ‘real’ raiders come into lowbie runs and think they cant die or cause a wipe.
I LOVE it when they pull their ‘muh fazerollz’ crap in one of those runs where pretty much all the tightly packed mobs have fear.
The chain fear nearly always gets them to cause a wipe when they pull the entire room for the tank, LOL.
I love being the one who initiates the vote kick and the pleasing feeling of ‘youre fired’ as it passes.
Bad in this particular sort of case is just bad, lol
Said very well by one who thinks everyone else feels the same in their head. That’s naive, short-sighted, and nearly everything that’s wrong with the world at the moment.
“This makes ME feel bad, so how the hell can that person enjoy it?”
Dunno. Do you like every food?
[quote=“Zareem-rexxar, post:202, topic:555766”]
I think the harder question is what RPG doesn’t allow you to kill the final boss in starter equipment. Cause I’ve played most JRPG releases up to the PS2 era and can’t think of a single one where you can’t.
Outside of gimmicks (usually with a story sword) where the boss is immune without the plot weapon. Like DYNA in Crystalis or Zaygos from Paladin’s Quest.
I think more and more that’s the key. Even the hardest boss I can think of in a JRPG (Unlimited Indalecio universe mode in Star Ocean 2) can be beaten without min maxing. The bar doesn’t need to be set so high as to require one single solution even for the hardest boss to have a fun game. We need a return to mythic Emerald Nightmare imo.
Haven’t fought Demifiend in SMT but I hear he’s the only other JRPG boss that can give Indalecio a run for his money.
1 Like
just everyone start shaming min/maxers. problem solved 
But if someone still has fun clunkily playing a character, keeps logging in every day to spend hours being clunky…
…who am I to knock that? I respect that person and their subjective fun.
I’ve made quite close friends with numerous people in this game that play clunkily. Been friends with them for ten years or more, some of them.
Why would I sit here and preach about the way they want to play? Obviously, they have fun. More power to them.
When my mom was very, very ill, she would log in and herb or mine. That’s about all she was capable of. You’d look at her toon and laugh out loud with the build choices she made.
Make ya feel good?
1 Like
Which is the opposite of what we both know I’m talking about.
How many people would choose to play in a way that was clunky and un-fun? How many people on finding their character is clunky and un-fun would just quit the game and go look that a game that actually is fun, since you’ve trained them not to min max, because optimizing your character is a bad thing? Without ever realizing that they made some basic mistakes in setup that the game let them make.
I mean, isn’t that kind of all the point for speed runners and hardcore players and lvl 1 no exp runs and naked raid runs and I mean I can keep going.
I mean the sheer amount of options like this kind of point to just how replayable some of these games are.
That’s the thing, fellow human.
Clunky =/= Un-fun
Also:
Clunky to you =/= Clunky to the next person.
Respect the subjective choices of others! Some people just choose to play playground basketball with a half-flat ball, and not go pro.
Every damned evening when the sky still has a sliver of light in it.
But, wait, this is clunky ball! Look at those old shoes!
I’ve answered this question somewhat differently in the past, but the simplest answer is probably that an RPG is a game that acknowledges the player playing the role of the game’s character more than simply controlling and changing the character’s appearance.
The easiest way for an RPG to do this is by letting the player change the character’s name. So Cloud from Final Fantasy 7 could actually be a character with a different name in a player’s game that is essentially the player’s own character.
This definition allows for distinctions from other games that may have a story to tell and some kind of character progression and even character customization, but might be better classified as a platformer or fighting or action or adventure or shooter game because the character is still their own and not the player’s even with customization options.
Of course, it’s not a clear distinction with many elements that were found in RPG now found in other games as well. There are exceptions and such and I don’t play every game, so I can’t know what those exceptions may look like.
Okay. I’m through, since you’re working so hard to convince us that stupid players can’t tell whether they’re having fun or not. Enjoy your agenda, secure in the knowledge that if you kept even 1 noob from setting up his character in a more easily played way, you’ve completed your task. It is “respecting choices” to encourage people to make random talent selections after you withheld info on what would work best for their content. Like, whatever.
You won’t be happy until nobody’s happy.
1 Like
Was that what they were saying? That’s not how I read it.
If they are suggesting that the people that enjoy min maxing do not RP, that is complete nonsense.
1 Like
Min/maxing isn’t the problem. It exists in every RPG all the way back to D&D.
The problem is that Blizzard started removing any and all barriers to being able to become optimal for every situation on a whim.
Which hurts the RPG elements of the game because RPGs usually include not being able to easily switch around your entire character setup 50 times a day. It means that the choices you make actually matter because they can’t easily be undone.
and because it’s so easy to switch everything around even if you want to “just not do it if you don’t like it”, it can make pugging rather toxic because it’s become the standard to insist that everybody min/max their character for the content.
It’s not that min/maxing is a thing, it’s that Blizzard has designed the entire modern game around those people(or at least had been until Covenants in Shadowlands).
Wow, a whole lot of assumptions in here.
- Just because a character is not optimized does not mean is it clunky.
- Just because a character is not optimized does not mean is it not still fun to play.
- Just because a character is not optimized does not mean mistakes, basic or otherwise, have been made.
- Just because a character is clunky does not mean it is not still fun to play. (A person could being enjoy a role-playing scenario or the animations or something else.)
- And just because a character is optimized does not mean it is fun to play.
I play nine characters. None of them are optimized. All of them are fun to play. Some of them, like my Human Hunter and Night Elf Druid, had to be deleted and recreated several times for me to get the character right for my enjoyment but I did and it did not include optimization for either of them.
Yeah it’s a classic example of the adage about the road to hell being paved with good intentions.
The original talent trees provided a lot of options, but in reality, from a math point of view (and RPGs, from table-top on, are about math in terms of their mechanics … math and probalities), there was only ever one best choice, and perhaps in some cases 1 or 2 “borderline viable” choices, and everything else was “wrong”/bad. In other words, the plethora of choices served as a “noob-check”, in allowing some people to mess up their character’s performance due to ignorance and not be able to fix it cheaply, while allowing others who were meticulous about their research (at the time when info was less easy to find than today) to really “create distance” between themselves and the “average baddie player” even when picking talents. This wasn’t ideal.
What happened next is that as it became more widely known what were the “good” specs and what were the “bad” ones, the playerbase as a whole migrated towards the good ones and away from the bad ones. As a practical matter, the talent trees stopped acting as a “noob-check” for the most part, and were being min/maxed anyway, because information was becoming easier to come by, and players were optimizing their choices. The addition of transparency mechanisms like the armory, and then later out of game systems to verify a player’s choices added to the effect of most players more or less stampeding into certain specs and away from other ones.
That’s the context in which Blizzard simplified the talents – the old talent trees were mostly pro forma anyway in that most people were picking cookie cutter specs from Icy Veins and so on anyway. So they were simplified.
In tandem with that, the content was adjusted around the idea that most people were, as a practical matter, min/maxed anyway in terms of spec – because they were, and so in order to provide something of a challenge to the majority of the players, the content was adjusted around the assumption of the majority of the players min/maxing. As a result, however, if you were not min/maxed, well … the content became a lot harder for you.
No step along the way was made maliciously. However, it all added up to a system that now is centered around min/max. To be fair to Blizzard, the players got there before they did, in that it was the players who made the original talent trees mostly irrelevant by creating things like “meme specs” and by crowding into a narrow band of “viable” specs anyway.
You have four different difficulties with which to experience raid content, at the very least three different difficulties for dungeons.
How have they not provided endgame content for players playing suboptimally?
1 Like
Some people like to think it’s the class/talents fault for why they are wiping in heroic.
For their argument sake, let’s say that’s the case. Then why go into Heroic?
If Normal is the perceived limit for playing without “min/maxing” then why not just stay in Normal? Obviously the fun factor runs out after Normal. These difficulties are there to cater to the player’s ability.
(Humor): I mean…
Speedrunners: “Hold my beer.”
1 Like