Posted by Soren(VIP) on October 19, 2000 at 14:07:29:
In Reply to: A few random comments posted by Nepenthe(IMM) on October 19, 2000 at 12:24:44:
> > I'm taking the logs I see on the board over the past days/weeks to be some semblance of a cross-section of what the current CF populace is like. If it's not, then my argument is baseless, but I'm assuming that's not the case given the sample size. > I don't think the elite tend to post logs very often. Even when playing something I'm terrible at, I find it grating to read PK advice from players who are so far below my ability that I couldn't even begin to explain to them why they're wrong. Granted, that doesn't apply to all of the posters (I'm damn sure I'd learn something if you nitpicked my warrior logs) but it applies to most. > I'm additionally generally unwilling to wave hi to the forum VIPs and say "Hi! This is me!" No offense. > > How the hell are people being consistently summoned and then withered before they can react, to the point where what should be a shot in the dark becomes a reliable strategy that enables someone to suck less than should be the case? > I'd noticed the same thing. Do people just not react as fast as they used to? Are they too busy glancing at the IRC window to play the game? I don't get it. > Playing Istendil I used to mentally break players down into a few categories by summon: > 1) Those I could summon and then try to sleep. > 2) Those who had a trigger for summon that I could use to get them killed. > 3) Those who I could summon, but would 95% of the time be someplace else by the time I could try to do something to them afterwards. > 4) Those I was afraid to summon under most circumstances because I didn't want to give them that free time to start on me. > I might be mistaken, but I think #4's might be getting rarer. > > That's the simple reality of things, and it's to the detriment of the game. So, where have all the elitists gone, and why have they left (and why aren't new people filling their shoes)? That's something I have to ponder some more, because I don't have an answer. Any thoughts? > In your particular case, I think you always had the makings of a skilled player. For a time, sorta-good people could compensate against that by virtue of the fact that they had a lot more static experience/knowledge of the game. Once they didn't, it was all over. > Eliteness breeds eliteness. You don't really get better fighting people who will let you get away with little or even glaring mistakes. In a sense it's a snowballing problem. > As for first cause, in part (if not completely) I want to blame the increasing OOC channels to discuss the game. It's a stone I'm throwing from my glass house, in this case, since this very post is an example. > The forum is kind of like training wheels on your bike as a kid. Man, did I love me some training wheels when I was learning to ride. I sure did bleed a lot less when those went on. In similar fashion, I think the forum and being able to see other people's logs is a huge help when you're starting out. However, like keeping training wheels on your bike until you're thirty years old, there comes a point where it becomes detrimental to future growth if you're not careful. In part it's because there's a large amount of misinformation handed out here under the guise of truth. Once someone accepts it as truth, they're going to tend to see reality (if you can call CF that) in such a way that conforms to that truth, retaining the experiences that support it and ignoring the ones that refute it. In part, it's because I think there's a tendency to copy what you see without understanding why the person who kicked ass with it on the log board did it. There's really no substitute for being able to think fast and come up with a good choice of action on the fly. > The growth of the game, area-wise, may have made it somewhat harder to tend towards elitedom. When I started playing, you could realistically check every area in the game for another player in 15 minutes. You just can't pull that off now. It makes it harder to find characters in your range in esoteric locations, leaving a lot of disgruntled relative newbies stuck with the good old Eastern road and environs. Naturally, this means that they tend to fight more than their fair share of the clueless or mediocre, thus not getting any better. > That's all I have for the moment.