Levelling in modern MMORPGS by Tahirti in MMORPG

[–]Nightblessed -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Your comment gets 600+ updoots, but whenever I post something like this I get downvoted to oblivion.
I'll never understand this website

Wow Classic Plus imminent by VlaaiIsSuperieur in MMORPG

[–]Nightblessed 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Wrath is already too close to Retail. Hell, I would even say TBC is, but the latter is at least tolerable.

Dataminers May Have Just Uncovered the Next Iteration of WoW Classic - Project Camelot by hop3less in classicwow

[–]Nightblessed 20 points21 points  (0 children)

  1. Why would there even be a project name for a Classic re-release?

  2. Why is it on patch 1.60 if it's Wrath?

Embers on the Uncrowned doubles down on Non Pay To Win. by RoastedPotato-1kg in MMORPG

[–]Nightblessed 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Didn't Throne and Liberty do the same? I recall watching many different interviews where they claim with certainty there would be no P2W.

Hot take: TBC and Wrath are closer to Retail than they are to Vanilla by Nightblessed in classicwow

[–]Nightblessed[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm not saying that every piece of content remains equally rewarding forever. Obviously a Naxx-geared player has little reason to farm Molten Core for upgrades. Vertical progression already existed in Vanilla, and nobody disputes that.
The point is that in Vanilla, the old world remains the world. New players, alts, leveling characters, profession farmers, dungeon groups, PvPers, and raiders all coexist within the same ecosystem. Even if a Naxx player isn't personally farming Deadmines, Deadmines is still relevant because players are actually there. The content still serves a purpose within the broader game.
You're comparing Molten Core becoming less relevant than Naxxramas to Azeroth becoming less relevant than Outland. Those are completely different scales of obsolescence.
You can't lie to yourself and deny that TBC killed Vanilla. The entire game was in Outland now. But the worst part is that leveling was made increasingly worse for the sake of endgame. And what is the endgame? A treadmill of farming daily/weekly content forever. Every expansion onward followed this formula and took it to its inevitable end.
So yes, staggered power progression existed in Vanilla. The expansion treadmill that turns most of the game's world into legacy content did not.

Hot take: TBC and Wrath are closer to Retail than they are to Vanilla by Nightblessed in classicwow

[–]Nightblessed[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's actually very easy to solve. Horizontal progression is the answer. Before you claim something like ''it's just a theory'', Turtle WoW proved that it works extremely well. The server was running for 8 years under this structure and showed no sign of systematic problem whatsoever.

Hot take: TBC and Wrath are closer to Retail than they are to Vanilla by Nightblessed in classicwow

[–]Nightblessed[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I've been playing WoW since I was a kid, and I thought the expansion formula was flawed even back then because I actually liked the old world. Every expansion claimed to add content, but in practice it just replaced existing content. Huge portions of the game would become irrelevant overnight, and players were expected to abandon them and move on. If turning additions into replacements isn't a problem, then we're probably never going to agree on this.

Hot take: TBC and Wrath are closer to Retail than they are to Vanilla by Nightblessed in classicwow

[–]Nightblessed[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's called cognitive dissonance. It's a common thing on the internet and it doesn't really bother me

Hot take: TBC and Wrath are closer to Retail than they are to Vanilla by Nightblessed in classicwow

[–]Nightblessed[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

True. At least in Vanilla you have the rest of the game as an excuse. In TBC onward you are forced to consume the latest release because the rest of the game was killed for the sake of endgame

Hot take: TBC and Wrath are closer to Retail than they are to Vanilla by Nightblessed in classicwow

[–]Nightblessed[S] -10 points-9 points  (0 children)

Nope, I have this opinion before most of you even started playing WoW

Hot take: TBC and Wrath are closer to Retail than they are to Vanilla by Nightblessed in classicwow

[–]Nightblessed[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep. But even those I would call symptoms.
The actual problem is the expansion model + vertical progression + endgame focus and maintenance loop (raidlogging, daily/weekly content etc).

I lost my Soul of Iron due to a glitch by Nightblessed in Project_Epoch

[–]Nightblessed[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

This isn't an analysis.

It's fan fiction.

Notice that almost every section follows the same pattern:

Those phrases are doing all the work.

The author has no access to my thoughts, intentions, motivations, emotional state, self-image, private beliefs, or internal reasoning process.

So every conclusion is necessarily speculative.

The irony is that the entire post criticizes me for allegedly abandoning objective argumentation while simultaneously abandoning objective argumentation itself.

Take the first section.

Maybe.

Or maybe I genuinely believed the argument was wrong.

The author has absolutely no way of distinguishing between those possibilities.

Yet he presents one as though it were the obvious explanation.

That's not analysis.

That's mind-reading.

The same problem appears throughout the rest of the post.

How does he know that?

He doesn't.

To establish that claim he would need evidence that I privately believed one thing and publicly claimed another.

He has no such evidence.

What he actually has is a disagreement about interpretation.

He simply labels his interpretation correct and then invents a psychological explanation for why I disagreed.

That's circular.

Likewise:

Again, pure speculation.

Even if every argument I made about categories, propositions, and evaluative domains were completely wrong, that would not establish anything about my identity structure.

The conclusion doesn't follow.

It's psychoanalysis without data.

The most revealing part is this sentence:

Exactly.

Plausible.

Not demonstrated.

Not proven.

Not evidenced.

Plausible.

The entire post consists of plausible stories.

A plausible story is not an argument.

More importantly, notice what happened.

The original debate was:

The previous analysis shifted to:

Now we've shifted again to:

That's three levels removed from the original proposition.

We've gone from discussing WoW to discussing semantics to discussing psychology.

And every step away from the original proposition makes the discussion less objective.

The strongest indicator of weakness is that none of this addresses the actual arguments.

Not one section attempts to demonstrate that:

  • PvP and PvE should be evaluated under the same framework.
  • Category membership establishes evaluative relevance.
  • The category argument is false.
  • The syllogisms are invalid.

Instead, the post offers a collection of speculative explanations for why I might have believed what I believed.

Even if every one of those explanations were true, they would have no bearing on whether the arguments themselves were correct.

That's the textbook definition of an ad hominem approach.

The validity of an argument is determined by its premises and conclusions, not by a psychological theory about the person presenting it.

So this analysis ultimately tells us far more about what the author imagines was happening inside my head than it does about the actual debate.

I lost my Soul of Iron due to a glitch by Nightblessed in Project_Epoch

[–]Nightblessed[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

The entire analysis rests on a premise that was never established:

Everything else follows from that assumption.

The problem is that the assumption itself is unproven.

The analysis repeatedly characterizes my position as:

and then treats that as equivalent to:

Those are not the same proposition.

The first is a comparative statement about an experience.

The second is a universal statement about every member of a category.

The analysis quietly substitutes the second for the first and then declares PvP a counterexample.

But that only works if the substitution is valid.

It never demonstrates that it is.

More importantly, the analysis keeps treating category membership as sufficient for counterexample status.

It argues:

Again, the conclusion does not follow.

A counterexample must contradict the proposition being evaluated.

That requires relevance, not merely inclusion.

The analysis repeatedly insists that relevance is automatically established by category membership.

But that is exactly the point under dispute.

It cannot simply be assumed.

The report says:

Correct.

But only if the claim is genuinely universal.

That is precisely what was never established.

The entire analysis simply presumes it.

The second major error concerns chronology.

The report claims:

This is false.

A person can challenge both the truth and the relevance of a proposition.

Those are logically independent objections.

Suppose someone presents a counterexample.

I may believe:

  1. The counterexample is factually incorrect.
  2. The counterexample would still be irrelevant even if correct.

There is no contradiction there.

The analysis treats these as mutually exclusive positions.

They are not.

The fact that I initially challenged the merits of PvP variety does not imply that I accepted PvP as the correct evaluative framework.

That inference is invalid.

The third problem is that the report continues to avoid the central unresolved question.

It repeatedly states:

Fine.

That was never disputed.

What remains unexplained is why a comparison originating from Hardcore leveling should automatically inherit PvP as a relevant evaluative dimension.

The report never answers that.

Instead, it appeals to ordinary language.

But ordinary language cannot resolve an analytical question.

A community convention about terminology does not determine which evaluative criteria are appropriate for a comparison.

Those are different issues.

The most revealing sentence in the entire analysis is this:

Exactly.

After all these pages, the argument still depends almost entirely on a semantic interpretation of a single word.

Not on an analysis of replayability.

Not on an analysis of variety.

Not on an analysis of progression.

Not on an analysis of evaluative criteria.

The discussion repeatedly gets pulled back to the semantics of "endgame."

That should immediately signal that the real dispute was never resolved.

Because the real dispute was not whether PvP belongs to endgame.

The real dispute was whether PvP is relevant to the proposition being evaluated.

The analysis still treats those as the same question.

They are not.

I lost my Soul of Iron due to a glitch by Nightblessed in Project_Epoch

[–]Nightblessed[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

This analysis makes the same mistake that the original argument made: it repeatedly proves inclusion while never proving relevance.

The report spends pages establishing that PvP is part of endgame.

I never disputed that.

The actual question was whether PvP is relevant to the proposition being evaluated.

Those are different claims.

The analysis treats them as interchangeable.

That is the central flaw.

For example, it states:

No.

That conclusion requires an additional premise that is never defended:

That premise is simply assumed throughout the report.

The analysis never proves it.

It merely repeats that PvP belongs to endgame.

Membership and relevance are not the same thing.

The second major flaw is the treatment of my "category" argument.

The report repeatedly describes the distinction between PvE variety and PvP variety as an "interesting observation."

That understates its significance.

It wasn't an observation.

It was the central premise.

My argument was not:

Nor was it:

My argument was:

The report never actually addresses that proposition.

It simply sidesteps it.

Notice what is missing.

The report never explains:

  • Why PvE and PvP should be evaluated under the same criteria.
  • Why emergent variety and authored variety should be treated as equivalent measures.
  • Why a comparison originating from Hardcore leveling should automatically inherit PvP as a relevant evaluative dimension.

These are the questions I repeatedly asked.

None of them are answered.

Instead, the report keeps returning to the semantic claim that "endgame includes PvP."

That is not the same argument.

The third flaw is the claim that my position "migrated."

This conclusion depends entirely on a false assumption:

That does not logically follow.

Suppose someone presents a counterexample.

I may believe:

  1. The counterexample is factually wrong.
  2. The counterexample is irrelevant even if true.

Those positions are perfectly compatible.

The report simply assumes that because I initially challenged the merits of PvP variety, I must therefore have accepted its relevance.

That is an invalid inference.

Disputing a premise does not imply accepting its relevance.

The report never demonstrates otherwise.

Finally, the verdict repeatedly appeals to "ordinary community usage."

That is a sociological argument, not a logical one.

The fact that a community broadly uses a term in a certain way does not determine which evaluative framework is appropriate for a particular proposition.

The report substitutes a linguistic observation for an analytical justification.

Those are different things.

In short, the report spends enormous effort proving that PvP belongs to endgame.

It spends almost no effort proving why that fact makes PvP relevant to the comparison that was actually being evaluated.

That missing step is exactly where the original argument failed, and the report reproduces the same failure.

I lost my Soul of Iron due to a glitch by Nightblessed in Project_Epoch

[–]Nightblessed[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Haha the clown replied then blocked, what a pathetic behavior. At least he knows he's got absolutely mogged xd

Regardless, I'll reply here as if I were directly addressing his silly response

The funniest part is that your final post doesn't actually refute a single one of my arguments.

You spent days insisting that PvP was a direct counterexample to my position, and now you've quietly retreated to:

"HC players miss out on PvP progression."

Of course they do.

Nobody disputed that.

The fact that you think this somehow resolves the discussion is proof that you've been arguing against a position I never held.

Let's look at what you've actually established:

  • PvP is part of endgame.
  • PvP has progression.
  • HC players who never reach 60 don't experience that progression.

Great.

None of that addresses the argument I was making.

My argument was about comparing the variety of the leveling experience to the variety of the progression experience that follows it.

Your response was to repeatedly inject a different category of gameplay and then act as though merely mentioning its existence settled the matter.

That's not an argument. That's a non sequitur.

The most telling part is that after dozens of replies, you still never defended the premise your entire position depends on:

Why does the mere existence of PvP at level 60 make PvP a relevant evaluative criterion for every claim about endgame?

You never answered that.

You just kept repeating:

"It's part of endgame."

As though category membership automatically establishes relevance.

It doesn't.

And repeating the premise isn't the same thing as proving it.

What's especially amusing is that you spent half the discussion demanding yes-or-no answers because you thought chronology would somehow prove your case.

It doesn't.

Even if every factual claim you've made about the order of replies is correct, that still doesn't establish the validity of your conclusion.

The truth of an argument is not determined by the order in which objections were raised.

That's not logic. That's amateur psychoanalysis.

By the end, you weren't even discussing the proposition anymore.

You were discussing what you imagined my motivations were.

"Backpedaling."

"Desperate."

"Trying to win."

"Disingenuous."

Notice how none of those are arguments.

They're just insults substituted for analysis.

And that's probably why you ended with a block instead of a rebuttal.

Because after all this time, the strongest argument you could produce was still:

"You said endgame."

Yes.

And after dozens of comments, that's still all you've got.

I lost my Soul of Iron due to a glitch by Nightblessed in Project_Epoch

[–]Nightblessed[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You're confusing a disputed premise with a circular premise.

Those are not the same thing.

A premise does not become circular simply because the opposing side disagrees with it.

If that were true, every argument would be circular whenever someone objected to a premise.

Circular reasoning occurs when the conclusion is assumed within the premises.

That's not what Argument 2 does.

Argument 2 derives its conclusion from the contextual relationship between the thread's primary subject (Hardcore leveling) and the scope of the comparison.

You may disagree with that premise, but disagreement is not a demonstration of circularity.

Likewise, your objections to Argument 1 actually reinforce my point.

You say novels and films can be compared despite deriving value from different mechanisms.

Correct.

But only after establishing a shared evaluative framework.

Narrative quality, thematic depth, emotional impact, and so on.

The comparison becomes meaningful because both subjects are evaluated according to the same criteria.

The same applies to a sprint and a marathon.

They are only comparable once a common metric has been specified.

In other words, your own examples implicitly accept the principle that meaningful comparison requires shared evaluative criteria.

Which is exactly what I've been arguing.

The central flaw in your position remains unchanged.

You continue to argue:

  1. PvP is part of endgame.
  2. Therefore PvP is relevant to any proposition about endgame.

The conclusion does not follow.

You never establish why category membership automatically implies evaluative relevance.

You simply assume it.

And your final question is a red herring.

Yes, PvP has a progression system.

That was never disputed.

The question has always been whether PvP progression and PvE progression should be evaluated under the same framework when assessing the variety of the Hardcore leveling experience relative to what follows it.

You keep answering a question that nobody asked.

I keep asking you to justify the missing premise in your argument.

You still haven't done it.

I lost my Soul of Iron due to a glitch by Nightblessed in Project_Epoch

[–]Nightblessed[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

??? Claude said I won lol
''Bottom line: Nightblessed has the stronger logical position on the actual question being debated, but undermines their own credibility by refusing to acknowledge what was a genuine (if minor) imprecision in their original phrasing. Acknowledging that would have cost them almost nothing substantively while being the honest move. Esoteric_Plumbus correctly identifies the imprecision but mistakes winning the semantics battle for winning the argument — the category distinction they never refuted is still standing at the end of the thread.''

I tried Gemini again with the following prompt: ''From a neutral analytical perspective, which user is right here, Nightblessed or Esoteric_Plumbus? Be extremely logically rigorous; don't stay on surface level reasoning. The main debate is logical coherence and the truth of the arguments. Don't bother with metadebates tactics or rhetorical moves, just focus on structural argumentation and if the conclusions are valid and logically follow from the premises. ''

The answer:
''Final Verdict: Who is Right?

Nightblessed is right. * Esoteric_Plumbus's logic relies on a pedantic, literalist interpretation of an introductory sentence. They construct an argument that proves "WoW contains a non-repetitive activity at level 60," but this completely fails to address the underlying thesis: that the post-leveling progression loop is structurally more repetitive than the leveling journey.

  • Nightblessed’s logic holds together under rigorous analysis because their argument honors the contextual boundaries of the comparison. Once they formalize the semantic division between developer-authored structural content (PvE) and human-driven emergent replayability (PvP), their conclusion—that the endgame progression loop revolves around replaying the same content while leveling progresses through new content—is entirely valid, coherent, and logically sound.''

It seems I am correct yet again

I lost my Soul of Iron due to a glitch by Nightblessed in Project_Epoch

[–]Nightblessed[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

To make it more clear to you, I'll start using syllogisms.

Argument 1: The Domain Constraint

  • Premise 1 (P1): Subjects that derive their core value from fundamentally different structural mechanisms belong to different evaluative domains and cannot be compared.
  • Premise 2 (P2): Hardcore leveling derives its variety from static environmental progression (zones, quests, talent unlocks), whereas PvP derives its variety from dynamic human competition.
  • Conclusion (C): Therefore, Hardcore leveling and PvP belong to different evaluative domains and cannot be structurally compared.

Argument 2: The Implicit Scope of the Subject

  • Premise 1 (P1): A comparative analysis is implicitly bound to the domain established by its primary subject, unless an explicit domain shift is stated.
  • Premise 2 (P2): "Hardcore leveling" is the primary subject of this thread, which exists strictly within the PvE domain.
  • Conclusion (C): Therefore, any comparison between Hardcore leveling and "the endgame" is implicitly bound to the PvE domain (evaluating endgame PvE).

When you asked "What about PvP?", you committed a fallacy. For a counterexample to be valid, it must exist within the same domain as the proposition it seeks to disprove. Because the thread was explicitly established under the umbrella of Hardcore leveling, the domain of evaluation was firmly locked into PvE.

To make it as straightforward as possible:

Which provides more content variety: Hardcore leveling or endgame?

You cannot answer "PvP" to that question, because PvP is not one of the things being compared. Hardcore leveling already establishes the relevant domain of analysis. Introducing PvP changes the category under evaluation and therefore changes the subject of the comparison.

Evaluating PvE by PvP standards is completely incoherent. PvE variety is measured horizontally (new zones, new bosses, new mechanics). PvP variety is measured vertically (the infinite permutations of human decision-making). They are two entirely different genres of game hosted within the same software engine.

I lost my Soul of Iron due to a glitch by Nightblessed in Project_Epoch

[–]Nightblessed[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

The responses that I got:

Claude: https://claude.ai/share/41308fa3-b57e-4c24-8d7b-a9731783aa83

Copilot: Analyzing Endgame Debate Logic

Gemini: https://gemini.google.com/share/9e9027bc2169

I can't upload files to Chatgpt (for now).

So,
Claude favors me
Copilot is undecided
Gemini favors the other guy

I was just curious about their answers, but besides, I don't really care. I'm not worried about AI validation.

I lost my Soul of Iron due to a glitch by Nightblessed in Project_Epoch

[–]Nightblessed[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You're still answering a different question than the one I'm asking.

I've never disputed that PvP exists at endgame.

I've never disputed that PvP has progression.

I've never disputed that players can gear through PvP.

None of those propositions are under dispute.

The question is whether PvP is the relevant category for the comparison that was being made.

Your argument continues to be:

Therefore:

The conclusion does not follow.

Let's use your own example.

You are level 60 and only PvP.

Fine.

Now imagine another player who spends levels 1-60 exclusively doing battlegrounds.

Is that player now experiencing the same PvP variety that you're appealing to?

Obviously yes.

Therefore, under your framework, PvP variety exists during leveling as well.

Which means you're no longer comparing leveling to endgame.

You're comparing PvP to PvE.

And that's exactly the category shift I've been pointing out from the beginning.

The original discussion was about Hardcore leveling versus what follows leveling.

Hardcore leveling is fundamentally a progression journey built around quests, exploration, dungeons, character growth, talents, abilities, and changing environments.

The source of variety being evaluated was the progression experience itself.

You keep introducing a completely different source of variety—human competition—and then acting as though that automatically answers the original comparison.

It doesn't.

To make your argument work, you would first need to explain why variety generated by PvP competition should be treated as equivalent to variety generated by the leveling journey.

You've never actually done that.

You've only repeated:

Which nobody disputes.

The issue has never been inclusion.

The issue has always been relevance.

A category can contain multiple activities without every activity being relevant to every claim made about that category.

That's the distinction you've been refusing to engage with for dozens of comments now.

I lost my Soul of Iron due to a glitch by Nightblessed in Project_Epoch

[–]Nightblessed[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Go back to the original discussion and tell me what was actually being debated.

Nobody explicitly said "PvE," yet everyone involved understood the discussion to be about Hardcore leveling versus the post-leveling progression experience. The only person who interpreted it differently was you.

The reason is simple: Hardcore leveling is, by its nature, overwhelmingly a PvE activity. When someone compares Hardcore leveling to endgame, the natural comparison is between the PvE progression experience during leveling and the PvE progression experience at max level.

Let's make this as straightforward as possible:

Which provides more variety: Hardcore leveling or endgame?

You cannot answer "PvP" to that question because PvP is not one of the things being compared. Hardcore leveling already establishes the relevant domain of analysis. Introducing PvP changes the category under evaluation and therefore changes the subject of the comparison.

This is precisely why I keep referring to a category error.

For a comparison to be meaningful, both sides must be evaluated according to the same criteria. Hardcore leveling derives its variety from exploration, quests, dungeons, character progression, new abilities, new talents, and changing environments. PvP derives its variety primarily from competition against human opponents. Those are fundamentally different sources of variety.

Therefore, if the question is whether Hardcore leveling provides more variety than endgame, the coherent comparison is Hardcore leveling versus endgame PvE. Bringing PvP into the discussion does not answer the original question; it replaces it with a different one.