pwnface, on 30 October 2015 - 11:42 AM, said:
While I agree the OP is being abrasive and egotistical, I don't think his core point is wrong.
I'm not sure what you are trying to accomplish by pointing out someone needs the best mech to be the best pilot. I mean unless you are beating top comp teams/players with an intentionally "inferior" loadout it doesn't really give you room to speak. Maybe people aren't happy with being in the top 10% with a sh*tty build. Maybe people would rather strive for the top 1% in an optimized build.
I really don't understand the mindset of "bring a sh*ttier mech to prove you are a real man". You are literally trying to prove that other people aren't better than you in a fight since you tied your own arm behind your back and the other guy didn't.
Really is kind of the gist of it.
I do analytics for a really big company. Many thousands of employees. While I massage magic numbers for all sorts of stuff a big chunk of my time is agent/employee metrics and telemetry. Bonus structures, performance metrics, essentially breaking down what is going well, what isn't, how to change payouts to motivate behaviors the business is focusing on, where areas of opportunity are, that sort of stuff.
A really big chunk of that is identifying who is successful and who isn't and
why. The why bit is what so many people miss. Computer games, driving a car, taking tech support phone calls, selling widgets, participating in an Iron Man event, being an athlete, it doesn't matter. It's all the same stuff in that context. There are successful and unsuccessful behaviors, there are good tools and bad tools, there are good processes and bad processes.
People hate and fear change and people are generally pretty risk-averse. So they fear success - success is a byproduct of risk most the time. You put in effort, you put yourself forward and you risk failing. So people tend to gravitate to path of least resistance and if they're in a competitive environment most people will take the 'I don't complete/people who are competitive suck' approach. They develop their own behaviors, their own processes and select their own tools based on faulty logic or minimal experience and they stick to them even when better options are provided because it feels safe and familiar.
People play bad builds because if they played good builds and still sucked they would have to admit they are making poor choices. Statistically I can say that people who say 'I play for fun, I don't care if I win' are lying. They are lying to protect their ego. Winning is more fun than losing. We are wired that way, it's how we function as social creatures. Anyone who absolutely doesn't care in any way shape or form if they win or lose is, quite literally, a sociopath and divorced from normal human motivations.
When someone says 'I only play what's fun' is saying is 'I fear change, if I do something different and still fail then I have nobody to blame but myself and that's uncomfortable'. We all do it. We do it all the time. It's normal and healthy, it's a survival tactic. Moving beyond it though in safe environments is a big part of what makes some people more successful than others.
Learning to be good at something is about learning behaviors, the right tools and the right process to be successful. You take any gold medal athlete and put him in crappy shoes, no trainer giving him advice and a bad situation (like a crappy race environment and bad shoes) and he'll still excel. He'll excel because he has learned by practicing with the best tools using the best habits in the company of excellent and challenging experts in the field (teammates, opponents and coaches) how to do this well. If you took him before he was a gold medal athlete and gave him bad shoes, no help, no support, didn't teach him the right habits and processes
he would never have become a gold medalist.
That's the crux of all this drama. If people learned what worked and why, learned how to use it (and thus how to work against it), played with and against the best people they could, put their egos aside to learn how to get better, then they could run their favorite Orion build and still do alright. They'd know why the Timber Wolf was better and why lasers are better and that knowledge would make them better across the whole spectrum of the game.
Game balance is ****** up. Needs fixed. Hating 'the meta' and refusing to adapt to changes, to incorporate what is successful in any given situation, that's just people being scared and refusing to better themselves. The two are not directly related. Fixing game balance won't make bad people better. It won't make people who refuse to do what wins win more often.
That's the uncomfortable truth that the OP put forward so aggressively. It is true though.
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