Over the fifteen years or so that I have been part of the competitive gaming community, I have seen no shortage of blatant stupidity which plagues the forums and subreddits for the games I play. Efforts to dispel some of the fallacies and misunderstandings that are often used in these communities has been largely unsuccessful outside of my GuidWarsWiki pages (which nobody visits anymore because that game is dead). Whenever anyone posts anything remotely critical in reddit, it gets immediately deleted because "it doesn't have positive vibes". Therefore, I have decided to collect this information here, where it's not in the sweaty palms of an anti-intellectual hillbilly bandwagon-gamer.

Let's go!

"It's fine because it's in the game"

"If your argument can defend everything, you are therefore an idiot."
-Shard

Whenever you criticize a feature or component of a game, call something overpowered or broken, or say something's designed badly, there is, unfailingly, a group of retards who hop onto the thread and respond with this gem. Some of the more common responses are:

• It's fine because it's in the game.
• (for MOBAs) It's fine because that's his kit.
• (Rocket League) It's fine because your car has a rocket strapped to it.
• If it wasn't fine, the devs wouldn't have put it in.
• A company made it, so it must be good.
• <Company> knows what they're doing.

People who say these things are assuming ALL of the following:

• People who designed the game are perfect and never make mistakes.
• People who programmed the game are perfect and never make mistakes.
• The game has no bugs or exploits.
• The developers thought of literally everything.

Needless to say, if you believe all of those things, you're pretty fucking stupid.

This argument can also be applied to everything. This is a tell-tale sign that your argument sucks:

• It's ok for this champ to be permanently invincible and have 1-hit kills, because that's his kit.
• It's ok to exploit this infinite health bug, because it's in the game.
• It's ok for people to use aimhack/wallhack, because it's in the game.

The reality is, game developers aren't perfect. All of them are human. All of them make mistakes. Some of those mistakes won't get caught before release. Additionally, some game designers are grossly incompetent, and either nobody else at their company is aware of this, or they don't have the power to do anything about it.

Loss Aversion

You'll hear this one when a game update is coming down the pipe, or has just been released:

• The game is bad now because you nerfed something I like.
• The game is good now because you buffed something I like.

This fallacy is caused by Loss Aversion. Basically, people think positively about things that they assiciate with gains, and think badly about things they associate with losses. The reason saying this makes you stupid is because you are assuming that the game's state prior to the update somehow changes the content of the game after the update. It does not. Consider the following thought experiment where a popular MOBA character gets a change:

• Popular Hero's damage increased from 75 to 100.
  or
• Popular Hero's damage decreased from 125 to 100.

The state of the game after the change is identical. The hero does 100 damage today. However, people will priase or criticize the game (not the patch) differently depending on what was in the game last week. They take a change they see as positive or negative and wrongfully apply that feeling to the present state of things.

More succintly, here is the complete list of things that affect the current state of the game:

• The current state of the game

Notice how that list did NOT contain "the state of the game last year" or "Contents of last week's patch notes".

"Learn to Adapt"

This is a combination of the above two fallacies. Often, after a balance update or a new expansion releases, there will be something unfair or broken in the game that should be addressed. Of course, there will always be a few retards that flaunt their no-name Silver League fame and retort with "It's fine. Learn to adapt."

The more astute among you may notice that the above quote has zero elements of an argument. It has no evidence, no logic, and no conclusion. It is merely a claim, which is baseless and usually wrong.

Subconsciously, people who say this have a hidden agenda: "I use this broken strategy to win, because I'm not good enough to win using balanced game components and fair rules. Therefore, I must keep this broken thing in the game as long as possible. Telling people to adapt to the fact that I'm cheating makes me feel superior in a game that I otherwise suck at."

Of course, since people who say this have very low intelligence, their head voice says something more like this: "Me like overpowered thing. I win lots. Must keep winning. Pull words from ass to defend cheating."

Winning, skill, and rank

There seems to be a huge amount of confusion in all competitive communities on this topic. Many people seem to believe that your win rate, or your ability to win, or your rank have any correllation to how good you are. I regret to inform you that this is not the case in most games.

Rank is only an indicator of skill if all of the following conditions are met:

• The game rewards skill-based play and punishes unskilled players / mistakes.
• The game is a 1v1 game, OR your rating window is both very very large (hundreds of games) and you also never play with the same people.
• The game contains no forms of cheating.

It is almost impossible to find a popular online game where all of these are true. That's not a coincidence - games that reward bad players naturally become more popular, as they make newer, inexperienced players feel good by giving them wins they don't deserve. One way to solve this is to have different game modes: One for newer or bad players so their feelings get caressed, and one for players who actually want to compete. No games on the market currently do this.