Why do players do this??

>>714015519 (OP)
>make game competitive
>why are gamers trying to be better than their peers?
a mystery

>>714015519 (OP)
Because people have an innate predisposition to make stuff more efficient. And its more efficient to make things either do themselves or be easy to do

>>714015519 (OP)
Autism

They just want the dopamine from winning, it's all about the destination and not the journey.

>>714015519 (OP)
probably because your dumbass devs thought it was a good idea to implement an unfun and tedious grind or minigame standing in the way between some reward needed to progress or some such, i'm already not having fun with that shit so i may as well get it over with as fast as possible

>>714015519 (OP)
Design your games better so it can't be done

>>714015519 (OP)
If this can happen then your game sucks.

>>714015519 (OP)
You mean why zoomers are like that
Back in the old days people weren't obsessed with min maxing every little thing or datamining every game

>>714015756
Example of this: imagine a game where you are supoosed to gain currency as you go along. And you get on average, say, 100 currency per hour of gameplay.
All ot takes is some autistic fuck to make a guide saying that if instead of naturally getting your 100 currency per hour, if you just stand in this place and press x to kill the same monster over and over again without having to move or do anything except press X every 20 seconds, but this will net you 117 currency per hour. Suddenly you will have tons of fuckers doing this over and over (extremely unfun activity) because its more efficient. They literally made the game worse and unfun for themselves to optimize efficiency

>>714016350
back in the old days if GameFAQs didn't spoonfeed you, you were left to fend for yourself
now every fucking game has a dedicated community willing to autistically reduce your game to raw numbers

>>714016350
I would argue that's only because it was MUCH harder to back in the day. The impulse to figure out patterns and solve problems is innately built into the human psyche. The only thing that's different now is that the turbo-autists who really get off on that shit are able to more easily share the results of their 'tism.

Which, in turn, gets other 'tists interested, and so on and so on...

Won't happen if the difference between fun and optimal is 2-3%
Take Zelda. Running on foot is twice as fast as building some machine that will fall apart in no time, not counting the batteries required. Or building some basic bike/glider with a rocket is better and faster than building an elaborate vehicle
Or the game is designed around the optimal builds so fun builds end up gimping you and become unfun

>>714015519 (OP)
People have real lives, and time constraints that limit their ability to "fuck around" and have fun

>>714015519 (OP)
The discovery and process of optimization in and of itself is fun. What's important is designing a system robust enough that doing so leads to more fun.

>>714016991
Pretty much this yeah
"Don't waste my time" is very important nowadays when you are more often with your colleagues than your family.

>>714016410
Nobody would do this unless it's some RMT genre

>>714017347
This but usually the difference isn't 17 extra currency per hour but 170 or more than the usual 100

>>714015519 (OP)
>make a game with rules
>the rules are very simple and badly designed so also exploitable
>this is the player's fault

>>714017836
>Hate the game, not the player.

>>714015519 (OP)
Mario Kart players are notorious for this.
Wheelies, drifting, bagging, and random track picks basically caused design changes.

If you game is trash the only fun that can be extracted from it is optimizing it.

I played Hotline Miami as a slow creeping stealth game cause I optimized for staying alive, not for going crazy and getting a high score

>>714015519 (OP)
game devs dont know how to make games fun anymore

>>714015519 (OP)
Because optimization is fun. People enjoy feeling like theyre progressing, both by lrveling up and by leveling up faster. But once you've optimized, there's no more optimization to do, so it stops being fun. So you've optimized the fun out of the game.

Actually, it's even funnier because people are so used to "optimal" activities being unfun that they'll intentionally cut fun things out because they assume they aren't optimal. This sort of thing is really easy to back up with math because it's usually a lot harder to calculate your gains from fun activities than unfun ones. Most people who like to optimize aren't actually very good at math, so they'll take a simple, easy to calculate grind (stand in place killing this one thing over and over) over a more complex grind (idk, for example, go chat with friends to set up future social connections that will be useful when grinding).

The funny thing that comes out of this is that optimizers usually aren't actually playing optimally. They're just attracted to the optimal "aesthetic" of the unfun playstyle they've created for themselves.

>>714016410
Solution: bump up average gains to 150 currency an hour and reduce the amount of currency needed to advance.

>>714015519 (OP)
It's absurd cope from developers and their fanboy Internet defense forces when the devs make games that aren't fun. The quote is meant to be shitting on people who are bored and are playing a game "incorrectly" to find their own fun. In reality, the "opportunity" in the quote refers to when the gameplay itself isn't interesting.

The idea that players are solely motived by results/winning is simply false and easily disproven, go look at most objective PvP team games and watch how many people would rather DPS/snipe/kill shit than just play support or do the objective, even if its more "efficient"

The true answer is that people gravitate towards what's fun and satisfying, and for a lot of people winning/being efficent IS fun and satisfying, but it's not the whole picture. There are times when winning is boring, and where playing suboptimially is fun. Fighting games are extremely competititve yet there are still games where the playerbase have unoffically decided to ban characters for being too broken, simply because they're bad for the health of the game and make it unfun. Speedrunners will create new catagories when a strat is too powerful and ruins the fun. Players will self-regulate themselves up to a certain point if "efficiency" is boring enough, the threshold is just much higher

we optimized all the fun out of the internet too

>>714017836
This.

Let's look at Arkanoid. It's an arcade game, so it directly grades your play by score and wants you to go for high scores.
Catching capsules gives you way more score than anything else, so if you're doing even the most basic optimization for the goal the game directly presents you with, you want to maximize capsules.

Getting the ball bouncing up top is fun! But only one capsule can be falling at a time, so doing it kills your score by breaking too many blocks too quickly.
Juggling the multiball is fun! But when you have more than one ball up, capsules don't drop AT ALL, so it completely kills your score output.
Getting the laser and blasting through levels is fun! But just like getting the ball bouncing above the bricks, it'll clear too fast and you'll get far fewer capsule drops, so you can't really use it for anything but getting enemies out of the way and clearing the last brick.

Everything that's inherently fun about the game not only doesn't give you score, but actively neuters your score potential. Genuinely awful game, but still not as bad as Space Invaders where the bottom row invulnerability bug totally bullies the way you have to play the game to even have a hope of getting far in it yet Taito chose to leave it in on future PCBs even after it was discovered almost immediately.

>>714015519 (OP)
Because contrary to what disingenuous grifters try to convince you, trying your best and still failing isn't fun or enjoyable, and you don't actually "learn" or "grow" from constantly doing it.
This goes for anything in life.
It's best to plan and be as efficient as possible and do not just "try" when the chance of failure is greater than 0%.

Honestly don't agree with this in my experience. In reality it's the opposite, give players enough time and they'll find a way to hyperfocus on the wrong thing and make their gameplay exceptionally inefficient and unfun by only using that solution over and over again.

>>714015756
SPBP people like solving problems.

>>714016350
>Back in the old days
lol
lmao
You're delusional if you don't think that people in the pre-zoomer era weren't the sweatiest motherfuckers ever.

>>714025721
runespace and MMOs perpetually prove this point.
It's so bad in OSRS, jagex are now designing bosses around the majority of players using a client plugin to highlight tiles. And only now are the retards waking up to the fact that tile highlighting ruins the experience

>>714015519 (OP)
By the time you've finished the game you should have already mastered most of the mechanics, and the ending should require a culmination of all your knowledge to beat it. Otherwise it's a shit game.

>>714023747
Nah, that was just money infecting hobbies.

>>714016350
Have you never been to an arcade in your youth?

>>714015519 (OP)
Videogames are an optimization problem that you have to solve. You can half-ass it and not optimize but that's just doing it halfway.

If you're playing a cooperative game, it's rude to not play efficiently

>>714016350
Yes we were you dumbfuck zoomer, it was just harder to do as finding the info wasn't as easy back then as you had to shift through dozens of forums and actually play the game to find these things instead of just going on yt and search "[vidya] most efficient [thing] farming strategy".

>>714016350
It was already mindset long before this infamous series of articles/books came out
https://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/introduction

There's also the counterperspective on the concept if Scrubs discussed (i.e. people think there is only a few correct way to play)

>>714016350
Ah yes. It was zoomers (who were little children) that turned WoW into a gearscore simulator. Definitely not the old crusty fucks still playing it even today.