Yeonne Greene, on 13 March 2017 - 09:15 PM, said:
You physically cannot limit min-maxing like that. Min-maxing is not a single thing you can achieve, it's anything that gives you the best possible result for a set of conditions.
What you can do is make it such that min-maxing has to be more situational, i.e. a min-maxed long-range poke build can't brawl in a pinch (cERPPC+cGauss can currently do this) even a little bit.
Having read a bit about this as part of my studies, I think it's useful to look at the distinction between paidia and ludus as concepts to describe gameplay. Paidia is sometimes described as fun and carefree play, like when you're decorating your home in Skyrim, whereas ludus is described as playing a game to win it, according to a certain number of explicit or implicit rules. Paidia has no objective except the fun play in itself, whereas ludus has a clear objective that is supposed to stimulate fun indirectly (e.g. trying to score a goal). Now, almost every game has elements of both. But almost every game can be played differently. I can play a game of soccer by doing my utmost to win the match, or I can try to have a bit of fun and do some fancy things, just for the sheer pleasure of playing.
I think a lot of the min-max debate is simply confused about the idea that in any game, people are going to fall in different places on the paidia-ludus continuum, and they're going to play the game differently. The only way to completely remove the min-max mentality is to create a game where there are no commonly accepted objectives, like a sandbox game. Even then, people may try to game-ify and create various objectives for themselves (e.g. getting the biggest Sim City populations or making the longest Rollercoaster Tycoon rollercoaster ride), so ludus will still be an element to some degree, even if it's not encouraged by the game itself.
On the flip side, any game with a lot of rules and objectives that conforms more the ludus-type of play is still going to have elements of paidia. In the case of MWO, you'll see people do a lot of non-optimal things, just for fun. Like playing stock mechs. There's no external reward for stock mechs, people just have an impulse to do that sort of stuff for fun. Which may be annoying to certain players, for the opposite reasons of min-maxing.
Judging other people for how they have fun with games is just.... well, it's not particularly constructive. I read about a case about the first person to reach the gold cap in WoW. A german player called Tyram. He just decided that trading was the most enjoyable part of WoW for him, so he managed to accumulate the max amount of gold possible in the game, which the devs supposedly did not think would happen so soon, because it didn't occur to them that anyone would play the game like that.
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