Take a game like WoW. Everything in WoW is basically know-able. You kill a level 70 Greater Bear and it gives you 250 XP. If you get a stopwatch out and decided it took you 20 seconds to kill the Greater Bear, you can reasonly extrapolate that killing Greater Bears will net you about 30000 XP per hour (adding 10 seconds per downtime per mob), and chances are this number will be pretty close to the real thing if you actually looked at the start of your XP bar versus 1 hour later.
If you cast an offensive spell in WoW, you know the range of damage is will fall in. With the help of some easily available mods you can easily determine what your DPS while doing action XYZ is versus action ABC and see which is better. When you put on a new piece of armor it tells you that your mitigation is now 35.28% and your dodge is now 15.25% and you can determine that this is always better than having a dodge of 17.21% and mitigation of 30.92% with the help of some basic math.
Now compared to a game like EQ, where practically nothing is know-able. People don't even know how much XP they gain per hour because 1 hour in EQ is roughly defined as a period you play before you pass out from boredom. People often quote XP gain rates faster than being able to kill every mob in the zone instantly, probably because if you sat down with a stopwatch you'll find the number to be depressingly low (I suppose this case is more of denial than a lack of information as a stopwatch can easily tell you what the rate is). If your armor rating is 5302, it tells you absolutely nothing because the hit distribution is on some kind of weird Gaussian distribution that you don't know any of the parameters or coefficients. EQ sort of has damage meters, but so far it has proved to be quite ineffective at telling people they're playing the game the wrong way when they're only doing 1/3rd the damage compared to someone of the same class/gear.
Now my question is, which way is the right way to play a game? Obviously WoW's method is better if you're trying to win, but EQ's method might be better if you just want to have fun: until you start losing and have that cut into your fun, anyway. Cookie cutters occur because they're usually the most efficient way to cut a cookie. Take Diablo 2, a closely related cousin of WoW. Again you've a game that is totally know-able. The min-max strategies are well known, but the game also won't stop you from trying to make a throwing barb or any of the whacky combinations of talent trees, though you might have a very hard time getting anywhere in Hell difficulty if you don't take one of the tried and true boring methods.
As a person that strongly believes in mathematics, I usually go with the method that is most likely going to win a game, but you can only play through so many Hammerdins or your overpowered class of the month before it gets old. In an ideal world, I'd like a game where you can just mess around and still win, but that's probably not possible. I suppose if you can only pick one, then I'd rather win than having fun, but not necessarily at all costs. What about you?
If you cast an offensive spell in WoW, you know the range of damage is will fall in. With the help of some easily available mods you can easily determine what your DPS while doing action XYZ is versus action ABC and see which is better. When you put on a new piece of armor it tells you that your mitigation is now 35.28% and your dodge is now 15.25% and you can determine that this is always better than having a dodge of 17.21% and mitigation of 30.92% with the help of some basic math.
Now compared to a game like EQ, where practically nothing is know-able. People don't even know how much XP they gain per hour because 1 hour in EQ is roughly defined as a period you play before you pass out from boredom. People often quote XP gain rates faster than being able to kill every mob in the zone instantly, probably because if you sat down with a stopwatch you'll find the number to be depressingly low (I suppose this case is more of denial than a lack of information as a stopwatch can easily tell you what the rate is). If your armor rating is 5302, it tells you absolutely nothing because the hit distribution is on some kind of weird Gaussian distribution that you don't know any of the parameters or coefficients. EQ sort of has damage meters, but so far it has proved to be quite ineffective at telling people they're playing the game the wrong way when they're only doing 1/3rd the damage compared to someone of the same class/gear.
Now my question is, which way is the right way to play a game? Obviously WoW's method is better if you're trying to win, but EQ's method might be better if you just want to have fun: until you start losing and have that cut into your fun, anyway. Cookie cutters occur because they're usually the most efficient way to cut a cookie. Take Diablo 2, a closely related cousin of WoW. Again you've a game that is totally know-able. The min-max strategies are well known, but the game also won't stop you from trying to make a throwing barb or any of the whacky combinations of talent trees, though you might have a very hard time getting anywhere in Hell difficulty if you don't take one of the tried and true boring methods.
As a person that strongly believes in mathematics, I usually go with the method that is most likely going to win a game, but you can only play through so many Hammerdins or your overpowered class of the month before it gets old. In an ideal world, I'd like a game where you can just mess around and still win, but that's probably not possible. I suppose if you can only pick one, then I'd rather win than having fun, but not necessarily at all costs. What about you?