The Art of Competitive Gaming

I'd like to assume that the majority of the ATC readers consider themselves competitive gamers. This interesting article on Competitve Gaming takes an analytical approach to the concept of balances within MMORPGs. The author really nails some of the points that compose the LoD4Life mentality. Now, if this article came from Adventurine, we would all be in great shape.

A game is enjoyable if there's strategic depth and variety that encourages experimentation, and every new dominant strategy discovered is met with an effective counterstrategy. A game is broken or unbalanced if it becomes clear that spamming a particular move, taking over a particular location, or employing a particular tactic makes everything else in the game irrelevant.

Perhaps the biggest difference between a casual player and a hardcore player is that a casual player wants to be able to pick up a game and have fun with it without putting hundreds of hours into it, and a hardcore player wants the hundreds of hours invested into the game to mean something

www.strangehorizons.com/2009/20090309/newheiser-a.shtml