Are you playing video games WRONG?

There really is no wrong way!

Are you ready to geek out this weekend? Join Jesse and Dodger on the Geekenders podcast as they bring you the ultimate dose of geekiness. From their hilarious banter to their in-depth discussions, this is the podcast you've been waiting for. Follow them now and discover why they are the number one geek podcast without a doubt. Subscribe and let the geeking begin!

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Chapters
00:00 - It's the Geekend!
01:12 - Intros!
03:45 - JoshStrifeHayes Man of Many MMOs
13:40 - The Business Of Games
15:43 - MILK
17:30 - Why Do You Buy Games?
30:11 - What is a REAL gamer?
44:33 - Why the Start is so Important
1:00:57 - Expectations vs Reality
1:44:37 - Homework!

[DoubleTrouble-liwi]

This is why I play singleplayer games where I can play suboptimal to my hearts content.

[arellajardin]

Played a Balance Druid in vanilla WoW. It was great, and very versatile, at least before endgame raids. Around lvl 30, I was in a PuG as a healer. Balance Druid meant my gear was speced for casting anyways. Everything was fine. I was even adding DoTs while keeping people healthy. Then the tank lost aggro, and a couple adds ran at the Mage. I shifted to a Bear, off tanked until the Warrior was done with their original enemies, then shifted back and healed everyone. It was great!

Except it wasn't. The Warrior flipped out and ranted in text for 5 minutes about how I was playing my class wrong, how I needed to stick to one role only, and I should respec as a Resto Druid. I was playing a class that is optimal when it does a bit of everything, and people just wanted me to act like a knockoff Priest.

[EaglesQuestions]

I still haven't finished Subnautica because I'm building a pretty base of glass tubes around an utterly incensed reaper.

[hideshisface]

It is not only players optimising - but when all the in-game content sits in the end-game and where NOT being turbo optimised build pretty much kills you - and it gets especially bad when you can't respec and when your mistake in the build starts biting you in the ass 50+ hours in.

[williamwall]

There is also an alternate pure pressure side to these situations of "I don't want to bring the group down and have to rely on the group to make up for my inefficient build". So people ask how do I get up to your level and the meta continues with good intentions.

[SteveNeubauer]

Being told I'm playing a game wrong is one of my worst peeves

[zenketski]

The exact reason why I am now a gaming hermit and exclusively play single player games.

[fowlWarDog]

As someone who's repeatedly failed to "get into" MMO's I just wanted to quickly throw something I cannot appreciate enough: 40k Rogue Trader allows you to *completely rework builds* up to the point of the character's introduction to your party *for free* and *as many times as your curious heart desires.*
want to try something out? want to use an entirely different prestige class? FEEL FREE TO TRY IT WITH LITERALLY ZERO PENALTY.
It was so liberating, even among single player RPGs it was incredibly liberating.

[Hollow-Eyes]

It's the nuclear option. While I was studying game dev that's what they told me it was called anyhow. If you are given a method that handles all problems easily, players will always use it. It's the same concept, just a little different.

The easy solution is to give unique rewards for unique methods.
Think hitman. Go in, snipe target with the silenced pistol and leave. But, it's more fun to feed some guy to his pet hippo.
Another example is a game like HOI4. Pick America and steamroll everyone. But that won't give you the glory that comes with picking Poland and crowning a bear as your king while you destroy german tanks with cavalry.

Unfortunatly competitive games are bound to always have this problem. Losing in a competitive game isn't usually fun. So no one wants to lose and human players are always thinking about how to win. So they'll always pick meta and you either do the same or you fight an uphill battle with no glory or fun reward for doing so.

[NexusVFD]

Not succumbing to unnecessary peer pressure is one of my highest level social skills

[Ice]

This happened to me with Baldurs Gate 3
Then I kinda just went "screw it" and played a character centered on roleplay. It was the most fun I had in a while since I had no plan for the build beyond "I'm good at talking and I'm a warlock" lol

[czproductions]

The main problem with Path Of Exile is that the viewers were actually right, you WILL have to start all over if you mess up a build. It's easily the worst thing about the game because since it's so stingy about allowing players to respec, it makes them follow a build guide online or else they will hit a wall in the game and be unable to progress at all.

[TheGamingWizard]

It starts off like this but then meta becomes important as raid bosses etc are built around the assumption youll be doing certain things, or have a power level equivalent to the best there is

[LastKnight]

my friend was a great theory crafter in WOW. When Death Knights came out and all spec were both viable DPS and Tanks he found an amazing balance of that for Frost Dual Wield. He was a parry and dodge tank that could pull DPS to put him in the middle of the meters and so much threat that he literally had to STOP ATTACKING to prevent himself from passively pulling aggro off of our 2nd tank. We eventually got to a point that we could time when he could start attacking and naturally pull aggro without burning his taunt. Then because people were saying that only Blood was the tanking spec, Blizzard optimized the ability of Blood to be the sole tanking spec.

[bobowon]

I have this issue all the time because i always pick what feels cool rather then whats optimal

[XlightninX]

The issue as well is at this point the game designers are building things with the assumption that someone will optimize it therefore everyone will be optimal. So not only does the metagaming force you into conforming, it makes the game unreasonably difficult if you don't, because the game designers had to react to the metagaming to keep the game challenging because of all the metagaming.

[gacrazy]

As a Titan main who dips his toes in the Warlock pond for my other Titan buddy (who also dips into warlock and Hunter, so I'm try to take turns).... I feel the Born to Nova. Forced to Well. I will not get salty over a Warlock not going Well... I WILL accept we ain't clearing endgame content as fast, but that's the Dev's fault for building content that is balanced around a well

[mrg]

If I played games the same way as other people, I never would have made a space program using jeeps in battlefield 4.

[HistoricMold]

To be fair a lot of dififculty in games boils down to “shoot this bullet sponge boss” so people obviously aren’t gonna find anything that makes that goal take longer to be more fun.

Even single player games like Skyrim have this problem. (Stealth archer is always what your build ends up being, no matter how you started the play through)

[BasketChase]

As a raid lead for my Warcraft guild, I always encourage people to play what they want to play and I make a note to understand every class and talent as much as possible so I can have an idea for what roles we have filled and what buffs we have for our party and what debuffs we have for bosses, and I’ll say one thing I’ve learned is that almost no one plays with 100% accuracy to the sims and people generally play better and pay more attention to mechanics if they actually enjoy their class/spec/talent build, which goes a lot further towards progression on higher difficulty content than the *potential* for an extra 5% damage of using the “meta” build. I am the person people come to after raid to say “hey I wanted to ask you about my class/rotation/talents” and I use my professions to make sure everyone has consumables and uses them, so at the end of the day I believe the extra organization & the sense of community & rapport we’ve built up makes up for being “off-meta” sometimes and because of that relationship we have w/ the game & w/ each other it never feels like pulling teeth or asking too much on the rare occasion we do need to ask someone to swap talents for a specific fight, and because I’ve gone out of my way to understand as many classes & specs as possible, I’m actually able to articulate why we ask instead of just “use this or we’ll bring someone else.”