Quote Originally Posted by dragonseth07 View Post
Like it or not, customization has very little place in a modern MMO. Back in the early days when everyone sucked, and the genre was new, customization was great. It meant you got to have your own build, and it feels awesome. But nowadays, we are better. We are more informed. We would like our allies to be GOOD, not just present. Customization is a trap because it competes with optimization.

It would be very cool to have a customized PLD. But, I would NEVER want a customized WHM healing me anymore. My ability to feel special is worth less than the knowledge my allies can't be actively screwing theirs up.

I have very grim memories of DRK's showing up without Provoke back in HW, and frantically Power Slashing to try and tank swap. We, collectively, can't handle the responsibility of customization.
Customization has little place, I'll agree, but many systems are misunderstood as customization alone when their emphasis is elsewhere. Pre-streamlined WoW's (i.e. WotLK) talents represented customization far less than simply progression. They gave something to look forward to, level by level, and changed your approach to varying content, as the choices made could not simply be swapped out for every fight. It mattered a whole lot less than not every configuration was viable than that ever level offered something to leveling -- an altogether different context. In that light, the system worked well. It could have been better even then, but it offered a lot to character and world attachment and sense of progress.

Stupidity and negligence, on the other hand, is not something for which you can directly blame customization. And I'd rather not be included in your "we" the people who cannot even manage to look swap to the other tanks at least once at level 1 to read through the coming auto-acquired skills for something useful and cross-class-able. I suspect most others would rather not be assumed as so stupid or negligent either. DRKs showing up without Provoke was the minority, not the norm. And even that could have been greatly and easily mitigated by the devs simply adding the same greyed out actions one would find in their respective sources' Actions list to the Additional Actions sub-menu along with a recommendation to fill your Additional Actions when another slot is opened to you.

That's not to say that I liked the cross-class system -- in that implementation, I certainly didn't. Nor do I necessarily think customization has much of a place in MMOs -- I don't. But you're caricaturing an entire playerbase over issues the devs could have very, very easily mitigated if not wholly solved, or could have even done away with without limiting customization. Extent of Customization and Extent/Chance of Non-optimal Choice are not actually directly proportional. Good design will offer far more variance in gameplay than in performance, still keeping the emphasis on how well you play, just as poor design offers more variance in performance than in gameplay, emphasizing sub-menu interactions over actual gameplay. What you are describing, or at least making inference from, is middling to poor design.