thegreekdog wrote:I am a relatively new player... love the game, etc. If I receive an email from someone asking me to play a game, I'll say yes, no matter who it is or where it is. I'm not really caring that they are better at this game than I am and that I have a 90% chance to lose. I can learn something from the game and I'm fairly sure I'll have fun.
With that being said, I didn't know what farmers were until a week ago, which happened to coincide with me getting a random message to join a game (I didn't join because it was 3 AM EST and I was a drunk). Anyway my point is that Newbie farmers are only "hurting" people who are not newbie farmers (i.e. the people posting here who think their low ranking comparatively to newbie farmers are because of newbie farming). I don't think newbie farmers are hurting newbies. I got drilled in my first few games, and I get destroyed anytime I change settings or maps to something unfamiliar to me. Yet, I'm still playing. In an effort to anger everyone, I will say that :
(1) People who try to win games against newbies just to increase their point total are hurting themselves because it cannot be fun to beat up on someone who has no clue what they're doing... that's like a 300 pound man beating up a 100 pound guy. Sure, the little guy is hurting, but the 300 pound guy should be ashamed of himself. But, to each their own.
(2) The supposed purpose of banning newbie farming is to get newbies to stay on the site. However, I think the people supporting the ban of newbie farming are not concerned with that so much as they are concerned about eliminating the newbie farmers from the game. The point is that the supports of the newbie farming ban are more concerned with their own advancement than whether or not newbies stay with the site. Newbies are going to stay on this site because playing is fun and distracting and because the maps are really well-done. They are not going to stay just because they win some games.
At any rate, that's the view from the bottom.
The second point is absolutely right. I've found few people in life who give a shit about the little guy, yet I have met many who pretend to when it fits in with an argument they are having. Considering most people in my generation are intolerably self-centred (I'm in my late twenties) and those in the next generation even worse, this idea of players here saying "think of the poor new player, think of his enjoyment!" has always been, in the main, utter tosh. "Think of MY ranking, think of MY points!" is a far more likely sentiment to come from Thatcher and Reagan's children. However, I would say that the number of people who have written about the 'poor player's enjoyment' while figuratively swigging back the champagne of a high rank can only have come from the Blair/Clinton/Bush era.
King_H cold attain ten thousand points in any way he so chooses and it wouldn't effect my sense of self-worth one little bit. I know I am a good player. I could be number 500, number 300 or number 1,000 and it wouldn't effect the fact that I know I'm a bastard to beat on a Risk board. I can imagine chaps like porkenbeans and farangdemon going through the leaderboard counting up those they consider farmers and saying to themselves "I would be in the top 250 (or whatever) if all these farmers weren't farming." That's pretty sad, but understandable. What's so infuriating is that they then pretend they write 'for the good of the site'. Highly unlikely. Like most people in our decadent Western societies, they write for their own good and their own interest always.
Change the rules by all means Lack, for it might well make the site better...and hence be in your self-interest to do so. I would hope you're not fooled by the bleating of a bunch of pampered little babies that are prime examples of the 'me, me, me!' generation, with a bit of champagne socialism thrown in just to be sadly fitting of the times we live in.