ontoclasm wrote:Ceann wrote:So can you please elaborate more on what these other choices are? If what I stated was wrong, explain why it is wrong.
Suppose there are five weapon types in a game. One weapon type, rifles, is vastly better than the others in every way; the others are all pretty well balanced. It may at first glance seem like this provides a choice, but it absolutely does not; there is one correct choice and the others are all traps, placed there to distract you or to confuse those who lack the skill or knowledge to make the decision correctly. The term for this is "the illusion of choice,"* and humans are very, very bad at recognizing it; we will feel better about "choosing" rifles when we see that there are other "choices," even though we didn't really have any meaningful freedom at all.
Now suppose we remove rifles wholesale. This decreases the number of choices, in a sense, but in fact you've gone from one real choice to four. Rebalancing the stand-out choice is also an option, of course, but may not be possible for whatever reason.
*this can also occur when two or more effectively-identical choices are offered under different names; we feel like we've made a decision, when it fact it didn't matter.
The premise here seems to be that there is an ignorance about choices. I understand the idea that you are trying to impart but I don't feel that it is applicable across the board. I feel as though some races and strategies can require kiting or luring early in the game, because really once you get a bit stronger the need to do this is lessened.
So anyone playing stealth should have to wade into a room with 4 or 5 enemies and just duke it out? Why bother playing stealth in the first place.
If a caster runs out of magic and has to run, he should just die instead? Or have the entire dungeon chase him? As a melee you can just run to a choke point and hold the tab key.
How does this prevent stair dancing from becoming the "new" optimal way or a difference way from becoming the best way? It doesn't.
If the game was based on everyone playing one race and a particular skill set then sure this would make sense.
Your argument makes no sense, you do not actually list what these other options are, I am sure out of the other options you can list, one of those will be the optimal one as well, everyone will just do that. If you have a rifle, a sword, a knife, a stick or your fists and you take away the rifle, then everyone just uses the sword.
You are thinking about the problem and not the solution.
The other options need to be more appealing but the problem is that unless you are going for score the entire point of the game is to stay alive. People are going to do the most optimal thing to stay alive, no matter which way it is done. So it really seems that the argument is really that "luring keeps you alive too well". But the solution of negating stealth or speed advantages of a particular race means nothing to a MiBE who just berserk and kills everything anyway.