Comments by msironen

In response to Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields

Comment author: CronoDAS 15 February 2011 10:02:01AM 10 points [-]

On "ideologically charged" science producing good results:

Evolutionary biology, in general. Creationism went down really hard and really quickly.

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In response to comment by CronoDAS on Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields

Comment author: msironen 15 February 2011 12:09:18PM 0 points [-]

Just beat me to it.

I thought evo biology pretty obvious, actually. Maybe OP has some reason for disqualifying it?

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In response to comment by mattnewport on Memetic Hazards in Videogames

Comment author: luminosity 11 September 2010 09:32:33AM 3 points [-]

Interestingly, some of the best mathematical analysis I've ever seen happens in WoW, and to a limited extent in other MMOs. When you want to be the top 25, 100 or even 1000 out of 13 million, you need to squeeze out every advantage you can. Often the people testing game mechanics have a better understanding of them than the game designers. Similarly, the first people to defeat new bosses do so because they have a group of people they can depend upon, but also because they have several people capable of analysing boss abilities, and iterating through different stategies until they find one that works.

It's unfortunate that there's so much sharing in the community; players who aren't striving to be the first to finish a fight can just obtain strategies from other people. People who don't care to analyse gameplay changes, or new items, can rely upon those who do to tell them what to wear, what abilities to choose, and what order to use them in. Back when I played one of my biggest frustrations was that nearly everybody in the game out of the few top thousand simply lack the ability to react and strategise on the fly. Throw an unexpect situation at them and maybe 1 in 10 will cope with it.

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In response to comment by luminosity on Memetic Hazards in Videogames

Comment author: msironen 11 September 2010 11:46:51AM 6 points [-]

Seconded. It seems to be a rather unfortunate video game meme in itself that MMOs (WoW particularly since it somewhat defines the genre currently) Massively reward time spent over skill. No amount of grinding low level content will make you capable of taking down say the Lich King in heroic mode (both skill- and gearwise) and to claim otherwise just shows that the extent of the knowledge of the person making the claim is limited to a single South Park episode. The most "celebrated" players are exactly the people who master the most difficult content first without the benefit of shared tactics (and usually with the highest gear handicap), not the the first guy who kills a billion sewer rats (even if there were such an Achievement).

It has been said by WoW developers responsible for generating new high-difficulty content that most of the challenge come from the fact that the best players are much, MUCH better than the average player (even more so that actual player community is aware of) that making content which is not trivial to the top guilds but is also beatable for the average joe has become somewhat impossible without certain gimmicks. Certainly, you can become say the richest player on your server just by investing massive amounts of time (though actually manipulating the Auction House seems nowadays a better strategy than grinding), but that just means that you'll be known as the guy who spent the most time gaming the AH (we actually have just such a player on our realm). If anyone think that's the game rewarding you for time spent instead of skill, I seriously suggest they spent a little more time researching the subject before pontificating on it.

Finally I apologize for the slightly combative tone of my first post, but I hope it's an excusable reaction, especially on this site, to a nearly "accepted wisdom" that doesn't really even survive the slightest scrutiny.