I agree with you. But I think to my good friend who has a natural inclination to minmaxing. I've found a lot of peace in my life from letting small things go and finding a certain cessation of anxiety for just embracing things I think are cool. He has found himself an adult who has been in therapy who still has a reflex for opening up the spreadsheet. He loves to look at leaderboards and see if he can eek out 2% more damage.
This is not to apologize for poor game design. I think it was the WoW expansion after Legion where you had the pirate humans. You had to get lucky thrice to get best-in-slot gear. Once for the drop, once for item level, and once for perfect modifiers. They had no anti-luck where you accumulated enough tokens to go to a vendor to fix the gear you found to your liking. It was literally just a casino with bosses who ceased to be a challenge.
I'm enough of an old grognard to have played Ultima Online when it first came out and there was none of this and I miss it so much. There was random loot, and even random magic weapons, but almost no one used them bc of the five tiers of magic weapon damage the gear made by grandmaster blacksmith players did equivalent damage to tier 3 magic weapons. If if you found a cool magic weapon you could use it until it broke, but there was none of this stat maxxing bs. There were three meta armor load outs based on whether you were tanking, kiting, or casting. And it was all player made gear. There were no levels - your skills went up when you used them and your skills were capped at a total of like 600pts or something. There were "perks" but instead of picking them off a list it was stuff like being able to rez dead players with bandages if you got your healing skill to 70, or being able to reliably cast Gate from scolls with 70 magecraft so you could move groups of players across the continent rapidly. The classes were defined by what players found best for different roles but since it was all skill based you could go off meta however you wanted.
And there's nothing like it these days because god forbid your motive for exploring and adventuring is fighting challenging monsters in chaotic dungeons that aren't restricted by levels or any other arbitrary means. Brand new players could join in the hardest content in the game bc the difference between a new players hp and maxxed hp was like 45hp compared to 100hp, and even if a newbie sucked at everything they could still let another player tank while they whacked at monsters ineffectually. Even if you sucked at healing the extra healing you would apply when you succeeded was helpful.
Did i mention dungeons weren't instanced and the part system let you have an arbitrary number of party members so sometimes you'd go in alone or with a few buddies, but other times you'd roll in 60 deep and absolutely wreck the dungeon? I guess that's not strictly true bc i think their might have been some kind of queue system limiting the number of players in a dungeon at once, but i don't remember. But it wasn't arbitrarily limited to three or four or six players. You'd be battling skeletons in a relatively safe part of the dungeon when a party of dead and dying adventurers run past you screaming with the most godawful op monster in the dungeon hot on their heels, and suddenly everything erupts in to chaos as people scramble to form a fighting line and take down the monster, only for the line to collapse when it starts dropping people and everyone feels for their life in terror.
I miss it so much. You played the game because it was fun.
I get the impulse for min-maxing. I like min-maxing in a lot of ways. When I played League of Legends, one of the main appeals to me was knowing the math and figuring out optimal item choices on the fly (not that league is a overall a good game). Similarly, I love TTRPGs, and have a tendency to at least theory-craft min-maxing. Or even card games, I like mathing out the cost-benefit analysis of swapping two similar cards.
But, something about the change from "Here's a list of discrete choices you can choose between, with different costs and benefits, individually designed by people", vs. "Here's a pile of randomly generated stats to dig through, 95% of which are garbage", is just soul-crushing boring to me, especially knowing that I have to make that choice again after every level, whereas in other games, I can actually plan out specifically what I want to be buying and speccing into.
I agree with you. But I think to my good friend who has a natural inclination to minmaxing. I've found a lot of peace in my life from letting small things go and finding a certain cessation of anxiety for just embracing things I think are cool. He has found himself an adult who has been in therapy who still has a reflex for opening up the spreadsheet. He loves to look at leaderboards and see if he can eek out 2% more damage.
This is not to apologize for poor game design. I think it was the WoW expansion after Legion where you had the pirate humans. You had to get lucky thrice to get best-in-slot gear. Once for the drop, once for item level, and once for perfect modifiers. They had no anti-luck where you accumulated enough tokens to go to a vendor to fix the gear you found to your liking. It was literally just a casino with bosses who ceased to be a challenge.
I'm enough of an old grognard to have played Ultima Online when it first came out and there was none of this and I miss it so much. There was random loot, and even random magic weapons, but almost no one used them bc of the five tiers of magic weapon damage the gear made by grandmaster blacksmith players did equivalent damage to tier 3 magic weapons. If if you found a cool magic weapon you could use it until it broke, but there was none of this stat maxxing bs. There were three meta armor load outs based on whether you were tanking, kiting, or casting. And it was all player made gear. There were no levels - your skills went up when you used them and your skills were capped at a total of like 600pts or something. There were "perks" but instead of picking them off a list it was stuff like being able to rez dead players with bandages if you got your healing skill to 70, or being able to reliably cast Gate from scolls with 70 magecraft so you could move groups of players across the continent rapidly. The classes were defined by what players found best for different roles but since it was all skill based you could go off meta however you wanted.
And there's nothing like it these days because god forbid your motive for exploring and adventuring is fighting challenging monsters in chaotic dungeons that aren't restricted by levels or any other arbitrary means. Brand new players could join in the hardest content in the game bc the difference between a new players hp and maxxed hp was like 45hp compared to 100hp, and even if a newbie sucked at everything they could still let another player tank while they whacked at monsters ineffectually. Even if you sucked at healing the extra healing you would apply when you succeeded was helpful.
Did i mention dungeons weren't instanced and the part system let you have an arbitrary number of party members so sometimes you'd go in alone or with a few buddies, but other times you'd roll in 60 deep and absolutely wreck the dungeon? I guess that's not strictly true bc i think their might have been some kind of queue system limiting the number of players in a dungeon at once, but i don't remember. But it wasn't arbitrarily limited to three or four or six players. You'd be battling skeletons in a relatively safe part of the dungeon when a party of dead and dying adventurers run past you screaming with the most godawful op monster in the dungeon hot on their heels, and suddenly everything erupts in to chaos as people scramble to form a fighting line and take down the monster, only for the line to collapse when it starts dropping people and everyone feels for their life in terror.
I miss it so much. You played the game because it was fun.
I get the impulse for min-maxing. I like min-maxing in a lot of ways. When I played League of Legends, one of the main appeals to me was knowing the math and figuring out optimal item choices on the fly (not that league is a overall a good game). Similarly, I love TTRPGs, and have a tendency to at least theory-craft min-maxing. Or even card games, I like mathing out the cost-benefit analysis of swapping two similar cards.
But, something about the change from "Here's a list of discrete choices you can choose between, with different costs and benefits, individually designed by people", vs. "Here's a pile of randomly generated stats to dig through, 95% of which are garbage", is just soul-crushing boring to me, especially knowing that I have to make that choice again after every level, whereas in other games, I can actually plan out specifically what I want to be buying and speccing into.