Dont be a scrub. Play to win!

I recently found myself being labeled an "exploiter" on korgath realm forums (a video was posted of me /sit /stand macroing in season 1). The thread in summary eventuated in me putting forward a bunch of arguements for the "playing to win" mentality and a bunch of repetitive arguements about cheating kept coming back. I felt my points were being wasted on a bunch of forums trolls who simply couldn't comprehend the logic behind playing to win.

I know alot of bg9'ers share the "play to win" attitude. This blog goes slightly deeper than serennia's blog regarding playing to win and goes more into into the mindset of wow players and why they dont share the beliefs competitive gamers from other games do. To those who dont play to win, I ask that whilst you might not agree with the logic, atleast do your best to understand it before posting a reply, thats if anyone even reads this.

E-sports vs Real sport.

Every competitive game has a set of rules, and similar to regular sports players must abide by them in order to win. There are 2 types of rules in both real sports and e-sports, the rules that define how the tournament is played out, and the rules that define how the matches in the tournament is played out.

Lets start with real sports since they are simple, Basketball for example. If a team loses a match, they lose a certain number of ladder points, and at the end of a season, X number of teams progress to the finals, this is a "tournament rule". A "game rule" is along the lines of when you take more than 2 steps without dribbling the ball its a foul called travel and the opposing team gets a side ball. There may be anywhere between 50-1000 total game rules in the official rule books of most sports.

Competitive esports on the other hand are slightly more advanced. Unfortunately the complexity of competitive games is what stems the "play to win" attitude in expert gamers. The key difference being that computer games unlike real sports have thousands upon thousands of programming rules that define how we can and can't play the game. Having such a large ruleset means it becomes harder to stop just one of these rules from slightly contradicting another, or opening up a window for a new style of play that might be "overpowered" and bring imbalance to the game. These contradictions and programming oversights ultimately lead to the discovery of bugs and design flaws.

Getting back to tournament rules and how they tie in with game rules in an e-sport. In wow for example, some simple tournament rules for dreamhack were that teams were allowed to bring 3 team members play any class and any composition provided they write it down on a piece of paper before every match and stick to what they wrote down. At this point they enter the arena and the rules they must abide by are now limited only by the rules programmed into the game its self. Any expert player will then use anything within the realms of the game to win.

The "play to win" mentality is common sense to most e-sport professionals. CS teams mastered the money system in early cs to the point it could almost be considered exploiting. SK most notably were able to manipulate the money system so perfectly that they would deliberately lose rounds in certain ways as to prevent their opponents from being able to afford weapons. This was later fixed in a patch, but it didnt change the fact that they won because they knew about it. and  doing or knowing something your opponent can't do or doesnt know about is theoretically what exploiting is all about.

What is a bug? A design flaw? They are both very similar, they are ultimately a just set of programming rules that eventuate to play style that differs from the play style the developers had in mind when they wrote the code. Should professional gamers exploit these bugs or design flaws? Ofcourse, if they didnt delve into the deepest parts of the game they would never be perfecting their play style. Generally anything that doesnt degenerate the skill aspect of the game or remove the competitive aspect completely is considered "fair game" for pro gamers. IE abusing a bug that d/c's your opponents would be considered unacceptable even by the non-scrub community, as it completely removing the competitive aspect.

Wow scrubs vs esports professionals

Why is it agreed apon in wow that wall jumping or heal drinking is "wrong", when it literally takes a written rule in counterstrike leagues to stop players from abusing bugs like crouch bobbing is (moving faster than walk speed without making a sound) If it isn't written in either the league rules or the games programming, then pro cs players will crouch bob at any given opportunity as you see in alot of the european leagues that still havent outlawed it. What is it that encourages wow scrubs to take the moral highground that no other competitive gamers seem to care about?

This brings us to the general attitude of a "scrub". Your average scrub whether he realises it or not is never going to be a competitive gamer, he is destined to lose as he is bound by a mental ruleset that either he himself creates, or in wow's case, the general public create, which stop him from doing everything within the realms of the game to win. For more on "scrubs" read this.

So where did this scrub attitude come from? Wow was never intended to be a competitive esport. Blizzard on release day impliminented a vague undefined moral ruleset that is non existant in almost every other esport. They did this through the "Game policies". It is this ruleset that contradict the rules of the game itself that trap wow players into being scrubs forever. Let me explain in more detail.

Abuse of Game Mechanics

Bug Exploitation

What the rules in these sections are effectively saying is, we forbid you to use all the programming rules in the game to your advantage. We forbid you from delving into aspects of the game that create meta games and play styles which we never initially fathomed. We forbid you from figuring out things we overlooked and using them as part of the game itself despite the fact they are infact part of our game. We forbid you from playing the game as a competitive esport.

Who draws the line between right and wrong? Is it "wrong" to jump 4 hops up a wall in nagrand? Effectively all you are doing is using a terrain design flaw to make it harder and take longer for melee to hit you, how is that any different to a druid kiting you around a pole? The game doesnt know of right or wrong only true or false. Unless every aspect of the game has been completely explored no 1 developer can make a moral judgement on each aspect and either allow or disallow it. All they can simply fix it as they go.

When it comes to balance blizzard has the experts to thank for abusing overpowered skills, exploiting terrain design, discovering bugs and using bugs with complete disregard for these policies. The "play to win" mentality is effectively pushing wow into the esports scene. Wow is a far more complex game than any of the current esports and thus it's going to take alot longer before it is ready to really take off as a competitive esport.

Wow, the game for scrubs.

All competitive games have tournament rules and game rules. In any competitive game besides wow, there is no 3rd ruleset that asks you to use your better judgement to determine whether a play style is "right" or "wrong". Whats unfortunate is that this ruleset is trapping even the top wow players in the "scrub" state of mind. No game will succeed competitively living under these vague loosely enforced policies about functions of the game that the rule makers themselves dont even know exist. Until people start realising that in order to stop being a "scrub" in wow you have to literally ignore these guidelines (not rules) and let nothing but well defined written rules and rules of the game itself limit how you play the game. Doing so might help refine probably the most complex game on the shelves from its current messy imbalanced state to a game that could succeed in a competitive environment.

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