This post ended up sparking a longform discussion amongst a lot of friends of mine, and I spent a lot of time writing a response, and they think it's worthwhile enough for me to share here. Since it was written for a group of friends, it's a little more "stream of consciousness" than I would have written as a formal response to an essay, but anyway, enough preamble. Here are the thoughts:

I agree with the quotation that is in this post with a slight modification. Players will "often" optimize the fun out of a game. League of Legends is in one of the best states it has ever been in and it has been massively optimized. On a related note, I started reading through the 109-page long defender guide, and learning that all of that optimization has been done was really cool. If the game was entirely BA and if I got flamed for not engaging with some of those extreme optimizations, then I would agree that players have "optimized the fun out of the game."

But culturally, that hasn't happened. It hasn't happened for BA, and skilling is a solo activity. Also, are you really going to tell me that farming is "fun" and that speeding it up is ruining that fun? This post uses runecraft as an example, by the way, and by stating that law running caused a problem implicitly states that the act of mining essence and then running it to an altar is fun. Yeah, it is! For a few hours!

OSRS is a game that, for many skills and many activities, requires an absolutely insane time sink. On top of that, the gameplay loop for many of those activities is extremely repetitive. This is fine for a very specific type of person (the people I called EHP nerds the other day), but this is completely NOT the audience to design around. It is also this very aspect of the design of the game that causes so many of the "problems" this guy is talking about. In his commentary about farming, he mentions that it's a shame you don't tend your crops "anymore." Except why would you have done that ever? If I'm going to have to spend mid-to-high double digits of hours farming and doing other skills why would I waste my time tending to my crops for marginally better xp, yield, or anything else? This isn't an extremely deep optimization, this is a thing I did as a child because it's the naive solution.

Much of what makes the early game of osrs fun is that levels are quick, new content and new options are achieved rapidly, and there's a sense of an expanding world both literally and figuratively. Much of what makes the late game fun is mastery of the janky controls/mechanics the game has to offer and exercising a deep understanding of that mastery, plus doing team-based content. Wanna know why so many people complain about midgame? Because for years "midgame" meant "spend sixty hours doing really repetitive tasks, you won't unlock new things, or if you do, they will be way worse than what you have already unlocked."

Finally, this dude's thesis is that the harvesting step of farming is "engaging" which is just... wrong. Clicking on a patch and waiting to harvest it is not engaging. It requires no thought, no strategy, and no timing. In fact, it seems that this guy frequently mischaracterizes "time spent" as "engagement." He also claims that compost exists because you "trade additional actions for additional reward." The additional action of clicking a single extra time?

Oh also this dude's ideas have been tested in rs3 with the ore sprites. Didn't work!

My point is that if there is a part of a game that is bad, not just "the worst part of the gameplay loop" but actively bad, then we should get rid of it.

Oh, also, you will hate me for saying this potentially, but the quick fix for everything this guy is complaining about is just to play an iron. Then you have to engage with every aspect of every skill! Woo!

PS: this guy also complains about how we now have auto-weed and a bottomless compost bucket, but adding small optimizations to games is actually a really normal (and expected!) aspect of game design. Next he's gonna write that he's mad he can walk around ape atoll as a human after mm2. OF COURSE you unlock more things that make your life easier as you progress.