The arrogance of some people

[Niwashi]

If you log in for 2 hours, and you complete 5 dungeons - you get 5 dungeons worth of rewards. If you log in for 2 hours and complete 6 dungeons you get 6 dungeons worth of rewards.

If you log in for 2 hours, and you complete 5 dungeons - you get 5 dungeons worth of rewards.
If you log in for 3 hours, and you complete 5 dungeons - you get 5 dungeons worth of rewards.

The only difference is that in one case you only received 2 hours worth of entertainment from those runs, and in the second, you got 3. This is a game, where the time you can spend enjoying it should be giving value to you. (If it didn't, you wouldn't be enjoying the game enough to be here.) Failing to appreciate this fact just leads to people running out of content and leaving the game because they're bored. Go through everything too fast and its entertainment won't last you very long.

Everything in our capitalist economy is based of productivity. That is, the effectiveness of productive effort, especially in industry, as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input. In this sense the rate of output is tomes and input is time spent.

Tomes/hour (or rewards/time) are just ways of looking at the income/expense ratio I was talking about myself. The problem is that you're treating it like the real world, where time would go on the expense side of that ratio. But the reason it's an expense in real-world scenarios is based on the recurrence patterns of real-world expenses, which keep coming up again and again in time-based intervals. In-game expenses don't follow that pattern, which makes for a very different sort of economy, especially where time is concerned.

There is no scaling whether you succeed it or not, yes/no cannot be scaled.

But it's not the result itself that we're trying to scale. We were trying to scale the effectiveness of actions at being able to lead to that result. If action A will likely lead to success, and action B could possibly lead to success but probably not, then action A is more effective than action B. (It even works if both actions are likely to lead to success, but one slightly more likely to.) In the end you still have a binary success or failure result either way, but that doesn't prevent comparing effectiveness between the two approaches.

I will accept that time is significantly easier to measure than likelihood, though. (In fact, I strongly suspect that's the main reason speed is so popular as a personal goal.)

Long story short, most people prefer faster runs, faster runs provide more reward to someone in the same time-frame, and therefore it can be considered better. Whether you consider it better or not doesn't really matter, what matters is that most people you are playing with consider it better.

Arguing from a false premise doesn't get you anywhere. All we know for sure on this is that there are a lot of players who prefer runs to go faster, a lot of players who prefer runs to go slower, and a lot of players who couldn't care less about how fast they go so long as they end up with their completion rewards and loot by the end and have a fun time along the way. With nothing but anecdotal evidence to go by, I suspect the first group may indeed be somewhat larger than the second, but it's that third group which almost certainly makes up the majority. (The group I myself am in varies with my mood, so it could be any of the three.)

Out of curiosity, why are you trying to promote/advocate people to play terribly?

I'm not really advocating any particular style of play. I'm advocating that if people are going to talk about what makes players "good" or "bad", they should do so more accurately.

You can, on an individual level, be very good at achieving the result you like regardless of whether it's a result other people like or not. For instance, given the goals you yourself have expressed, if you're in fact skilled at achieving them, that would make you a very effective speedrunner. That takes skill and effort, and it's something you can be proud of being good at.

But what makes you good (or bad) at your goals might not make someone else good (or bad) if they have different goals. Finding the absolute optimum skill pattern for ensuring your runs all go smoothly (regardless of time) also takes skill and effort, and is also something that people can be good at.

When you look beyond yourself, and switch from deciding what you personally would like to be good at to what makes players in general (or for the context of this thread, healers in general) good at playing, then you should either base that on the standard goals that the game itself gives us, since those are the ones we have in common, or else accept the fact that there are a wide variety of playstyles that people can be good at.

Most of the toxicity in the game (and all the toxicity in this thread) comes from people saying, essentially: "The ONLY way to be good at the game is if you're good specifically at what I myself want. Having different goals than I do automatically makes you a bad player." That's the attitude I'm arguing against. And the reason I'm arguing against it (and at such length) is because of that toxicity it creates.

There are as many ways to be good as there are goals that people can have. If you're playing in the way that best meets the standard goals of the game, your own personal goals, and your teammates' goals, then you're a good player. If you're playing in a way that doesn't best meet the standard goals of the game, your own personal goals, or your teammates' goals, then you're a bad player.

It's great that they are working in skill, but I would be all for them lowering the DPS meta. I'd prefer to have healers actually be focused on healing the party and providing support. I'd like DPS to be using things like CC/Utility more often, and I'd like to see tanks not worrying more about DPS than staying alive and/or holding hate.

It's nice to see there are at least some things we agree on.