Goonhub
10-06-2021, 10:38 AM
All players are subject to falling prey to "dominant strategies."
And a lot of players just feel awkward or not good about feeling like the game is "solved" and that to have fun they have to purposely select bad strategies or avoid good ones for fear of being called a ppwergamer or whatever.
The mere existence of "best options" is a bad state to be in for the game, and one of the best ways to avoid the existence of best options is to make sure that multiple options are viable.
In many circumstances, the dominant strategy is so extremely dominant that theres no way to add to the possibility space in a way that isn't yu gi oh levels of power creep.
For example, when I made it so all botany mutations were spliceable with every other mutation instead of mutations being unable to splice that broadened the possibility space for botany by a lot but... everyone still found themselves falling into the same strategy of making 100s of exploding tomatoes in the first 15 minutes because it took neither significant time nor significant effort and was also stronger than every other possible option.
And it wasn't even that interesting to begin with. It wasn't fun no matter who was doing it, so you were trapped between either being purposely suboptimal or being perceived by other players as an asshole just for playing the game as designed
Struggling with this doesn't make you an awful player
And a lot of players just feel awkward or not good about feeling like the game is "solved" and that to have fun they have to purposely select bad strategies or avoid good ones for fear of being called a ppwergamer or whatever.
The mere existence of "best options" is a bad state to be in for the game, and one of the best ways to avoid the existence of best options is to make sure that multiple options are viable.
In many circumstances, the dominant strategy is so extremely dominant that theres no way to add to the possibility space in a way that isn't yu gi oh levels of power creep.
For example, when I made it so all botany mutations were spliceable with every other mutation instead of mutations being unable to splice that broadened the possibility space for botany by a lot but... everyone still found themselves falling into the same strategy of making 100s of exploding tomatoes in the first 15 minutes because it took neither significant time nor significant effort and was also stronger than every other possible option.
And it wasn't even that interesting to begin with. It wasn't fun no matter who was doing it, so you were trapped between either being purposely suboptimal or being perceived by other players as an asshole just for playing the game as designed
Struggling with this doesn't make you an awful player