[MUD-Dev2] Specialization

[Roger Hicks]

On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 2:56 PM, Sean Howard <squidi at squidi.net> wrote:
> "cruise" <cruise at casual-tempest.net> wrote:
>
>  > It's not success if everyone has it all.
>
>  I had a teacher who believed the same thing, such that test scores were
>  given relative to other students. If five students got a perfect score and
>  one student missed one question of hundreds, he would automatically get a
>  B by virtue of not being in the top 10% scorers. There were students who
>  literally failed his class with work that would've been consider B-quality
>  work. How well you did in the class was entirely dependent on who else was
>  in your class. Needless to say, he wasn't a particularly favored teacher.
>  He caused people to drop out of computer science. He caused people to drop
>  out of COLLEGE.
>
>  Competition for something so universally required as success is not just
>  detrimental, it's cruel.
>
Not cruel....realistic. Thirty applicants apply for a job but only one
gets it. The company doesn't expand its offer of a job to the top ten
(or twenty, or thirty) simply because they all "did good" on their
interview. Of course, that doesn't mean you want this kind of realism
in a game, but most "professional" level games do require this level
of realism:
* Only one NFL team can win the superbowl
* WOW Arena teams can only get a good rating by defeating a certain
quantity/quality of other teams
* Any MMO PvP environment demonstrates this on a small scale

BobTHJ