Quote:
Originally Posted by DeathsSilkyMist
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It is easy to prove this. Just take a look at video game metas. In a game like League of Legends, there are objectively better or worse champions. This is because people can run the numbers and determine which champions have a statistical advantage, after accounting for player skill, latency, etc. Does this mean a lower tier champion cannot compete? No, but you will be at a disadvantage.
The reality is yourself and other posters simply do not understand this concept well enough. This is why you simply keep insisting it is subjective.
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I'm aware you have some sort of professional experience in the games industry, and I'm sure you have far more experience than I do with things like adjusting game mechanics to guide the meta towards whatever you're attempting to accomplish.
But this concept you're talking about is well within my bailiwick. I've built
epsilon-greedy multi-armed bandits for online commerce. I've worked on systems that attempt to correct for the "
banana problem" in collaborative recommendation systems. I've worked through the mathematics of recursive descent, and understand mechanics of and motivation for using something like simulated annealing to avoid local optima. So yes, I'm explicitly arguing from authority here.
The difference between what you're talking about with LoL and what we're talking about with EQ SK attribute starting points is that the cost function is well defined in your LoL example, but there is no well defined cost function here, which is exactly what I mean when I say "best is subjective".
Min-maxing or formal optimization is about using a cost function across some domain of parameters, where you try to choose parameters that minimize the cost function. With LoL, that cost function would be loss percentage, modified by something like an Elo rating system to account for opponent player strength. The parameters would be something like team champion choices, opponent champion choices, map; not really sure because I've never played LoL.
What's the cost function in EQ? I genuinely can't think of any formal cost functions that could apply. The game content is too easy; that's why we all agree that starting point allocations have minimal impact. There's things like solo artist challenges or low-man raids, but that's only relevant within those subsets of the larger game content.
So when I say that the best is subjective, what I mean is that there's no universally applicable cost function. I mostly enjoy leveling minimally-twinked characters through pickup groups, so my cost function is going to overweight attributes like undergeared DPS, carrying capacity, and so on. You seem to mostly enjoy end-game soloing and maybe raiding, so you're going to underweight those attributes.
If we don't share a cost function, we won't agree on "best".