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Comment by avsteele | Hacker News Reader

Online communities do this to many games. As soon as you have thousands upon thousands looking to optimize the thing, it isn't the same game you might play with your friends. Creativity goes right out the window in favor of tested strategies. Applies especially to M:TG, or other CCG's IMO, as well as many strategy computer games.

I personally hate it. Though I can see many do not mind.

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This is one of the primary reasons I tend to prefer retro games, or games which are similar to retro games. They tend not to be optimized in these sorts of ways, and are often called "janky." But, they're more fun in a lot of cases. The player is often more free to develop their own strategies, and this often feels like you're "breaking the game," or at least not playing in the intended way.

The first time I experienced this was playing the original Demon's Souls, and then later playing Dark Souls. I wasn't actually any good at playing Demon's Souls, and during my first playthrough I stumbled onto all sorts now-well-known ways of abusing the game's mechanics:

- Baiting individual enemies with arrows so you can fight them one at a time.

- Killing enemies from afar with arrows by standing outside of their agro range.

- Physically turning off the console to avoid a death being recorded. (at the time I didn't know exiting the game would work better)

There are more examples than just this, but I distinctly remember when first playing these games that I often didn't feel like I was playing the game "correctly." By 2009, most games had pretty lengthy tutorials, and would often have a "live" tutorial every time you encountered some new type of enemy. They'd tell you "proper" way to find the enemy's weak point, often of a voice-over. Demon's Souls obviously did none of this, and you were left to figure out how to make it past each enemy. Often the best solution (from a difficulty perspective) was the jankiest. Take the Ornstein and Smough fight in Dark Souls. Is there anyone who doesn't use the pillars to get cover from Smough's hammer attack?

In any case, the point I'm making is that the less optimized games can be much more rewarding, and often demand much more player creativity.

I'm not sure I agree with your takeaway. It sounds to me like you were searching for optimal paths. Baiting individuals into 1 vs. 1 is more optimal than fighting a crowd. Killing enemies out of aggro range is more optimal is you're looking to preserve health.

I don't think there's anything about the game that is giving you that joy. It's the fact that you are discovering strategies yourself. When games have large online communities, it's like setting off an AI. You have so many people trying different strategies and sharing them with others that you don't get the joy of solving it yourself.

I agree in regards to Magic. Arena especially is hyper optimized. I decided to just netdeck a mono red aggro that did well in ranked, and have been racking up Ws. Sooner or later that strategy will fall apart and I'll probably just give up on Arena, I don't personally enjoy the idea of the MTG hivemind making a deck for me if I want to win.

That said, I have a weekly group that plays pretty low level paper commander, and it's a blast. We live in different states now but play on Spelltable and get together every few months to do a draft. It's the only way to play, IMO. Plenty of room for creativity within the confines of our personal meta.

I played mmos back in the day and they were a ton of fun. Then Thottbot came along, and it make the questing too easy... no one needed to talk and work together, everyone focused on getting to the next quest.

I hope future games will use more randomization to keep players guessing and building community.

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