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[POLL] Opinions are like....: Informed Opinion in MMOs
Rohn
Member UncommonPosts: 3,730
You know all the sayings about opinions - many of them not suitable for this board.
The question I have is simple: Are all opinions about MMOs equal?
Ignoring partisan extremists (fanboi, hater, etc.), generally speaking, do some opinions carry more weight than others, and if so, who's have the most validity?
Hell hath no fury like an MMORPG player scorned.
Comments
There are billion opinions, but only one right answer.
Most people can not figure out that answer, and instead goes with the majority's opinion (or simply doesn't care). The rest usually get something right, but their opinions are not 'perfect'. 99% of the time there is bias involved.
neither. player's own opinion is all that matters. if game works for you, play it. if it doesn't, don't.
I think this survey is flawed. The answer is supposed to be obvious (Players who also read about it) and I'm sure you worded it this way on purpose to get the answer you want. This is called a "leading" or "spiked" poll.
If I were to answer it (assuming I did not have a long-standing policy of refusing to answer spiked surveys), however, I would pick the first one -- people who JUST play the games and don't read the forums. Why?! you ask. Wouldn't forum readers know more.
About some things, they might. But my regular impression over many years of on and off play in City of Heroes as well as other MMOs is that the amount of uninformed or downright incorrect garbage spewed on the forums so vastly overwhelms the sort of good information you get from the rare mod-stickied guide that you end up wasting too much time wading through what amounts to raw sewage. The sheer number of statistics-impaired posts in the COH scrapper forum alone, just in a short period of a few months, is staggering. Even now 6 years later, when informed people like myself and Arcanaville have repeatedly and definitively proven that DPS is not always king, the majority of supposedly knowledgable forum imbeciles will still tell you that you should focus entirely on DPS when you make a scrapper build. Meanwhile, friends who've played scrappers for years but never read the forums might not even know what "DPS" means, but they know how to build a scrapper better than the idiots who still mistakenly believe that DPS is king.
Thus, someone who has been a careful, deliberative player for a long time is your best source of info, and probably better than someone who has just been a forum jockey who implements the "party line" advice and keeps switching his build every time a new FOTM gets posted to the boards.
C
I find the answer you listed in your second paragraph interesting, even though you yourself appear to fall into the second category on the poll (correct me if I'm wrong).
Though the correct "answer" may appear self-evident, that doesn't mean that everyone will agree (and currently, the responses are varied even now). There are a lot of posters on this very site that will disagree, with the "everyone's opinion is equally valid" mantra often in evidence here.
I agree with the sentiments you have toward the quality of forum information you describe.
Hell hath no fury like an MMORPG player scorned.
As far as enjoying an MMO, I agree. That's completely subjective, and up to the individual, as long as they've actually played the game.
But, plenty of people commonly opine on the quality or enjoyability of games that haven't even been released, based solely on their personal preferences, and not on personal experience.
Hell hath no fury like an MMORPG player scorned.
I used to fall into the second category -- someone who played the game and read the forums and wikis and was "well informed." However, as I started realizing how utterly misguided a lot of the "forum experts" were in COH (which is the game I learned the most about statistically), I started to discount the "conventional wisdom" that gamers were spouting on ALL the various game forums. I've quit and gone back to COH a bunch of times, but never bothered with the forums anymore unless I had a very specific question about something. Then I do a forum search, find out what people are saying, and base my decision off of that -- usually with something I have no (or limited) prior experience with and need to get up to speed quickly, such as when I was promoted to SG Base Editor overnight one time.
Also some topics are more prone to misguided bloviating than others. Character builds are the biggest problem. Topics like how to use the base editor, tend to be less full of dreck.
In other games, frankly, I do not read the forums. I did not really pay attention to the LOTRO forums when I played it. If I had, I wouldn't have chosen to be a Warden, which was a really interesting class, but which everyone at the time insisted was "gimped". You get a lot of that on forums. Sure, sometimes the prevailing opinion is right, but often it's not. I've written a long blog post about that called "Don't look now but your're gimped," which covers my feelings on this in detail.
The bottom line here is that, in my experience, official game forums become so full of chest-beating and wild statements that trying to get anything useful or factual is almost impossible. I have gotten much better milage out of asking questions on my guild forum and having the one other Warden in the guild, or the one other Scrapper in the guild, help me out, rather than asking questions on the o-boards and getting into the middle of some idiotic flame war, when all i wanted to know was where to find my class quest-giver or something.
C