I think, for this topic, single player is always going to be what you make of it. If you play Pokemon, for example, to get the best team for beauty contests and never beat the main story, you get what you put in. If you cheat through a game with noclip and god mode on, and that's how you like it, power to you. I'd get bored with that, but then again, I'll watch someone else play games I'd rather not bother with just to see the story, which I feel is the same idea (I just don't have to pay attention during the combat).
teqrevisited said:
Multiplayer is an entirely different animal. If you play it wrong in a co-operative environment you're wasting other peoples' time. Playing it wrong here kind of makes you an inconsiderate, ignorant sod.
(I don't mean to call you out, teqrevisited, I just think this is a good jumping off point for something that's bothered me for awhile.)
This is where things start to get hairy in terms of discussion. I won't lie, if you deliberately feed in a MOBA, or offer yourself as a Hunter-Salad Sandwich in Left 4 Dead, just to get your teammates to rage quit, you are playing the damn game wrong. This is along the same lines as: if you deliberately harass someone you don't know (online or offline) just to get a reaction out of them (because you're bored, and for no other reason), you are living life wrong.
But trolling aside, this idea really makes me wonder: is it ok to play a game you're not good at? Say you have no idea how to tank in [insert Class Trifecta-based MMO here]. The game has been out since Forever (which, in computer years, is like, 8 years or so), but you weren't here on launch day, didn't read the 800 guides on tanking, and start a group for a dungeon. All's going well until you hit the first mob and die. Your group rages, says you stink, should uninstall, and you're wasting their $15 a month. Maybe you should have read more guides, or gone with just friends, or something. Maybe your group was just being a pile of jerks. But there are plenty of people who don't want to teach and just do. And there are plenty of people who try and fail to learn how to play. Should the people who want to play, but aren't learning, give up because it wastes everyone else's time? Should people spend their leisure time teaching, even if they just want to grind dungeons for hours, in the off chance someone will actually learn how to be a better tank, despite the fact they will never meet again?
To add more anecdote to this already massive post: I play League of Legends. I am not very good, thus I don't trouble people who want to play Ranked games. One evening, all I really wanted to do was play League, but my brain was so dead from work I couldn't do anything useful. I tried, a lot, but kept losing dominion matches. So, on a whim, I picked Fiddlesticks, a character I had never played before, for another dominion match (I'd seen him do fairly well in dominion before, especially when the other team is made up of AD/AP carries). I'd always wanted to try him, and I figured "what could go wrong, that hasn't gone wrong already?" Well, we lost. Bad. I got third on my team, but was told I was the worst Fiddlesticks ever and instructed to uninstall. I technically wasted their time. I could have been playing one of my better characters, but I wasn't doing well at all that evening and wanted to do something silly out of frustration. I could have simply stopped for the night and not played, seeing as I knew it was just a bad night. But this was all I wanted to do, and I was having fun despite doing poorly. Was actually playing at that point playing the game wrong? I know I could have simply played a bot game, but bots only teach me bad habits at this point (to be fair, I didn't know they implemented dominion bots at this point, but to be REALLY fair, I bet they would have been just as easy to taunt into a trap).
I guess, out of all of this, is it wrong to play multiplayer games if you're bad at them? Because the sad truth is: you will never truly know if that Left 4 Dead player who decides to run off for the pills from 5 rooms ago is just bad or deliberately trolling. To be technical, it doesn't even matter which is true: either way you waste someone else's time. Yeah, supposedly you can learn to be better, but are you playing wrong if you're not doing good now?