Hypothesis: Once upon a time, the wizarding world had no popular sport of its own, and Quidditch was more akin to aerial dueling, a one-on-one contest of skill. Then, someone realised all the various benefits/opportunities offered by popular sports (perhaps by watching the Muggle world), and added extra rules and a team element to give the crowds something to watch while the Seekers continued their long periods of boredom interspersed with sharp bursts of activity.
Quidditch today generates a massive market in terms of matches, merchandise, contracts, celebrity culture etc. - a market that benefits the economy as a whole and certain key segments of it especially. It also serves various other purposes common to team sports, such as channeling the volatile energy of young people, and creating a harmless outlet for tension between countries (harmless in theory, anyway - we don't have riot statistics for the wizarding workl).
Whoever shaped Quidditch into its modern form didn't need a balanced game - they just needed something to fill the sport-shaped gap in wizard society. Such a hypothesis would explain why Quidditch is so poor in game design terms - unbalanced scoring, disproportionately high risk of injury and matches of unpredictable length don't matter quite so much if your goal is to pander to the audience rather than make a fair test of the competitors' skills.
Canonically the situation was quite reversed, the Snitch (or rather it's predecessor, the Snidget) having been introduced to the already existing Quidditch game by a noble's quirk. I doubt this is different for MoR.
The next discussion thread is here.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 84. The previous thread has passed 500 comments. Comment in the 14th thread until you read chapter 84.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.
As a reminder, it’s often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: