one of the annoying things about games in the... idk, post-wholesome turn? whatever you'd call this era of game analysis, very few people accurately represent "competitive players" or "sweaties" or "tryhards" or whatever.

idk, man, trying is fun. gitting gud is fun. i would argue that the social situation of "it is unclear how much you are expected to try before the rest of the table solemnly agrees that you're trying too hard" is unfun. that's not universal (casual commander, for example, is beloved) but it is firmly my experience. and its not even that im not getting catered to all the time-- theres no shortage of agonistic games with competitive environments, and even if there were theres always chess and go. its that more and more, people (players, designers, whoever) seem to understand "tryharding" as a necessary evil, something that competitive types do to ruin games for their own sake. to which i say, trying is fun.

in my experience you can categorize the gaming public as two broad groups. Those who play games because they get satisfaction from mastery and increasingly perfect play, and those who play the games to play games.

"leveling content" and "endgame raids", if you want an mmo metaphor.

"Casual" and "Hardcore/Enthusiast" doesn't really work for me, because the way I play games casually is through theorycraft (stat spreadsheets strats that may give us an edge, etc) and glitchfinding much more than like, undirected play for the sake of it.

Anyway. I've heard the first of these two groups called "honers", as in honing a skill. Probably from the folding ideas WoW video, but i don't remember the specifics of the video. I'm going to use it as shorthand, as clunky as it feels.

Game devs (justifiably) have a hard time balancing these two, and the communities themselves do. As was noted in the OP, people often accuse honers of "ruining the game". Unfortunately, this is true in a sense, but we'll get back to that.

This tends to mean honers get justifiably defensive. And then as it becomes part of the cultural milieu, they start reviling the "casuals". sound like a familiar spiral?

but here's the thing: they're both ruining the game. Really. Because a complete lack of realizing you need to actually exercise theory of mind here even though you're just playing for fun.

Honers are a problem in games without matchmaking, because they will dominate enough that a new player will just die over and over and over and then give up, even if that's the experience even the best players also have.

The ones playing games to unwind and just ambiently exist, socialize, or whatever, on the other hand, ask for things that, without trying to see where they're coming from, honers say are "unnecessarily making the game too simple". This is just one example, and a recent one, for illustration. The reality is a lot more complex interplay.

but, because neither group see the other as correct, we get the worst of both worlds -- games with a difficulty curve of trivial that immediately reaches a learning cliff immediately once you reach the max level (in the case of MMORPGs) being the most obvious example.

I don't have things to add past that that aren't probably in the dan olson Why It's Bad to Suck at Warcraft video. But I've been chewing on this for a few months as I contemplate a dying game where neither side seems to understand they rely on each other to have a game, since as an FPS, it's PVP only. It also lacks matchmaking.

the experienced honers dominate the new players, who assume this game is more FPS than tactics. It makes it very hard to retain new players, because to avoid the good players you need to play long enough to learn how to read the map and determine who is likely to respond to what. The other side, is trying to get sniping banned because they don't want to take the time or thought to use the counters given to them for big threats, and so instead snipers and helicopter rocket pods should be removed from the game.

but it's a morale issue at heart, and no one wants to admit everyone is doing the opposite of that.

it's a big problem in ffxiv right now, too. i know the wow video was brought up, but like, the game doesn't have quite the same Cultural Things that cause sucking at 14 to be as much of a problem.

i don't think many real people fit firmly into the too casual or too hardcore camp, though i've met a few.

i don't think the game needs to go back to Heavensward rotations and TP and all that. every single dungeon does not need to be 25 intense minutes of pain. i'm saying this and i just got back into playing FF11 on an era server. no one needs that.

but there are so, so many people who believe that if they die at all in any content it's too hard and needs to be nerfed, that relying on people to have to actually press any button is too elitist, that you should just be able to get any reward with little effort and...

it fucking sucks! everyone ends up unhappy! there's fewer onramps for people who do want to sickos.bmp their damage parses, because you've gotta all or nothing it! shit like the new relics end up being just a tomestone grind with nothing to them, and then people complain there's nothing to do!

a few people in the 14 community have brought up "midcore content" being the missing piece. stuff that's hard enough that you need to try, a little bit, but not that you have to optimize like the hardcore stuff.

(coincidentally, that's basically what most of ff11 is. what a weird game.)