Alienation of Dedicated and Skilled players

[zosia]

Your exposition on WoW talents today ignores its not-so-civil history. Back in the day we had real choice in talents. Problem was, it got so complicated that everyone either conformed to a set-list of talents or they didn't get to participate fully in content. That went for a lot of PuGs too.

Since there was a set-list, and everyone was expected to know it and believe it, there was no room for "flavors of choice" if you wanted to do content. That was the 'toxic' part.

The solution? Water talents down to the point where they don't make any difference.

FFXIV doesn't have talent trees. Perhaps that would satisfy the need for 'flavor'? Might be easier to implement than a complete rewrite of the DPS algorithms.

I am not trying to ignore it, I guess I just don't see optimization as toxic. If you want to raid with pugs back in the day, you had to conform to general standards. The rule is pretty much an MMO constant. IN every game, if you pug, you should play by generally accepted guidelines or face public scrutiny,

I don't want to bash people who want to play their own way. I like to play my own way and figure stuff out a bit on my own, so I play with like minded people. If I want to run some crazy build, I would never force it onto a random pug, that's just inconsiderate.

I know things in wow were intense back in the day, but there were still casual guilds who would not scrutinize every last thing you did. It was just a matter of finding like minded people to play with or conform to generally accepted play styles. Ofc my statement here does not apply well to broken specs, but that is another problem entirely.

and every one of those choices matters not, if you're told by the community that you did a bad with your build and should do this instead if you want to be useful. WoW used to be very build heavy in vanilla, but over the years they streamlined a lot.

People still like choice, even if it does not matter in the larger scheme. What if Ninja's had boots of the same ilvl and had to choose between moving 25% faster or using boots like a trinket to ignore knock backs for 10s. Neither of those choices are gaming breaking, but both could be extremely useful in different situations.

There are plenty of decent designs to be had, just because we do have examples of bad choices and cookie cutter builds does not mean that there is no path forwards for great horizontal progression. That's what we pay SE for after all, to design and maintain this game. I will not pretend here that I have all the ideas and solutions, I am sure the game developers at SE could cook up much better ideas.