Quote Originally Posted by Jynx View Post
So firstly I'd like to adress your "Everyone" definition. Do you mean people who didn't want to go outside of the box or do you think everyone always did those?

Last I checked one of the most popular blogs was Campsitarus (Knew the person who made it personally best guy ever) let's have a look at some of the out of the way camps thousands of players who hit the blog took their parties just to spice it up.
*yawn* You're trying to cling to semantics in order to try to prove a point. Fair enough. Should I have said "the majority"? It doesn't retract from what I said either way. There were specific places where people camped, and the rest of the game world went down the toilet either because of mob design, the camp being way out of what was reasonable travel and so on. If you tried to stray from those accepted trends, you found resistance. It was even worse when the princess jobs like Red Mages were involved, because you were stuck to their whims due to anyone with an MP bar being shackled to them.

For the last part about me hiding behind a sheild of my friends, many of them I made in the game itself. I go out into my community and I am rarely "Mocked" people may find me a bit quirky but I guess it's the fact like in life I could give two ****s what someone thinks about how I play the game. If I go to a promyvion I do it with people who will play with me the way I play. When I play with strangers I don't "Fear" them, the game shouldn't have to compromise mechanics so people can never make a oddball choice that someone might say? RDM solo? You must be crazy....what an idiot never play with him.
As someone who relies on pugging more than anything else, I'd prefer to not have hurdles to jump through to prove I know how to play. This means playstyles and chosen roles being viable. This always ends up going back to the Red Mage debate, as I am a proponent for the melee camp that got urinated on since the day we were given Refresh. So yes, I want game mechanics to make my choices acceptable in the eyes of the masses so that I am able to play as I choose in the content that matters.
People being unique and finding crazy things about the game should be part of it and encouraged.
Which often have unintended consequences, which can lead to bigger trouble as the game ages. There is such a thing known as balance, you know.

The developers should never streamline the game just becasue of social pressure that's a community problem not a development problem. How about you ostrasize people who try and belittle people for your playstyle and choices.

Tollerance is the worst solution, never ever suggest that you make the game streamlined so people can tollerate you and your playstyle. The community can take care of itself, we don't need the developers to play big-brother with game mechanics.
And so we come full circle. Here's the part that seems to somehow elude you over and over again:

Game mechanics dictate how the community reacts and behaves. FFXI and WoW have easily proven that "the community" cannot keep itself in check without crapping all over someone. FFXI was left to its devices, with such glorious examples as black mages soloing their levels, summoners being relegated to cure-bitching because Tanaka & Co were scared to death of them, melee RDM simply not working in a party setting due to design, thief becoming obsolete after lv60 pre-Abyssea (then reduced to TH-whore after), RDM ousting WHM as a healer, Ninja ousting paladin as tank, and much much more.

WoW's developers realized that "the community" needs hard-coded checks and balances to keep it from doing stupid things. Hence the hybrid redesign, rebalancing of content and group dynamics, spreading of buffs and debuffs, the nerfing of evasion tanking and so on. This was after close to four years of anyone with mana and healing spells being forced to be healbots (sound familiar?). Just like it wasn't fun to try to melee on RDM and being told you couldn't, it certainly wasn't fun being a Paladin and getting pigeonholed into healing.

So in short, no the community cannot take care of itself and needs something to regulate it because it has proven time and again capable of great stupidity. I lose a lot more allowing such stupidity to come about, so I'm not going to support anything that tries to make the game lean in that direction.