Player skill level classifications

[MoroMurasaki]

I feel like at a glance I may hold the (apparently unpopular) opinion of agreeing more our less with your distinctions. I never really attributed these terms to playtime invested like I guess a lot of other people do. My boyfriend has more playtime than I do by a fair bit still but he is scared or disinterested in EX primals and will likely never touch Savage even if someone paid him. I would think of him as more casual than myself.

I do wonder if you'd humor a question that is not necessarily 100% the topic of this thread, if you don't want to it's cool I'm just curious. In all my interactions with you on the forums (both direct and just reading your posts) I've definitely paid attention and formulated certain assumptions about your opinions. I would assume you would be diametrically opposed to these sorts of classifications as they would (at least passively) reinforce a raider culture that you seem to dislike. Why makes this list at all when you seem more invested in this "everyone play this game for the fun of it and leave each other alone" mentality?

If you'd really like I could scope out some specific examples of things you've said that would make me question this but in general I'm refering to your expressed views on parsing/fflogs, unsolicited advice and an apparent inherent elitism in raider culture.

This isn't meant to invite discussion on any of those topics, I'd wager you'd agree they get discussed enough around here. I just enjoy understanding motivations and I'd like to know yours.

I agree the words would be more useful if given a standard definition that worked across the playerbase. The two overarching themes they seem to relate to are time and effort invested but if they refered to one or the other specifically it would likely avoid some misunderstandings.

[RiyahArp]

I would assume you would be diametrically opposed to these sorts of classifications.

I'm not against classifications as descriptive. The problem is that people assign moral worth to social classes way too often, and tend to give a pass or be blind to the negative aspects of the higher classes. Elitism is more or less arguing that the difference classifications also have different value and different importance in themselves. This is very common in life...not just the game, and people tend to not realize how much they do it. There are always rich people, but you can really dislike what they do as a class. You have to realize the social classes exist before you can be angry at what they do.

It's impossible to classify millions of players into such few boxes. How would you classify a player that could definitely do all 'hardcore' content but they don't want to deal with the stress or can't ever find the time to do it? Would you call them casual? Midcore? It's way more complex than that.

Idk, people have made the point of intention, but this is more based on what players would actually do. I mean more about what aspects of the game you try. I couldn't classify based on how people see themselves; i mean what started this was hearing someone describe themselves as a casual ultimate raider.

These aren't set in stone though, they were just an attempt at trying to view different kinds of players as they exist. TBH i thought it might be good to have a little more positive content from me than i usually do.

[MoroMurasaki]

I'm not against classifications as descriptive. The problem is that people assign moral worth to social classes way too often, and tend to give a pass or be blind to the negative aspects of the higher classes. Elitism is more or less arguing that the difference classifications also have different value and different importance in themselves. This is very common in life...not just the game, and people tend to not realize how much they do it. There are always rich people, but you can really dislike what they do as a class. You have to realize the social classes exist before you can be angry at what they do.



Idk, people have made the point of intention, but this is more based on what players would actually do. I mean more about what aspects of the game you try. I couldn't classify based on how people see themselves; i mean what started this was hearing someone describe themselves as a casual ultimate raider.

These aren't set in stone though, they were just an attempt at trying to view different kinds of players as they exist. TBH i thought it might be good to have a little more positive content from me than i usually do.

Fair enough. For what it's worth I very much agree - skill does not make someone inherently to more valuable in the setting of a video game and I think this is why I've used casual/hardcore to refer to skill levels more than something like "good/bad" as Driavna suggests.

Going to be blunt: stop mixing player skill (good-bad) with time played (casual-hardcore). All of those categories are more about feeling good because something is below you than anything else.

I mentioned my boyfriend before. He is objectively less skilled than the rest of the people I play with but I would never describe him as "bad". He knows the content he can participate in with his current level of effort and stays within those realms. I feel like people who are so ready to call other players bad probably don't have many friends across different levels of play.

Also I just think the subjectivity of using good or bad is really suspect. To my boyfriend I'm good, to someone like Elia Sand I am awful. Arbitrary skill assignments (especially with inherent value attached to them) are just silly and a way to stroke people's own ego imo. If you (general you) need to call a huge number of people bad in a public forum just to feel better about yourself perhaps you need to work on you a bit.