The old-style design set down a challenge – here’s a giant demon, X many hit points, damage output Y, farts a fireball every 45 seconds, summons adds every five minutes or whenever he incinerates a rogue. It was then up to the players how they solved that problem. The fight might take longer some ways, but if the players had more tanks and less DPS than expected at least there was a trade-off that the adds were easier to cope with.

The new style is more like cooking from a recipe book – for a Downed Dragon (Avec Loot Coulis) you need TWO tanks with THIS much mitigation and three healers with THAT much throughput and FIVE DPS who together should add up to THIS MUCH on their epeen meter while not standing in the fire. There’s no room for flexibility there. You do the encounter as intended or not at all.

What I can’t figure out for the life of me is why anyone thinks the new approach is so much better than the old way.

This is what makes me sad when developers write off talent trees because the choices weren’t interesting enough for players. The “utility” talents were routinely ignored because raw throughput solved practically any problem a raid group came across. It wasn’t that the talents were bad by default, they were simply superfluous for the content.

And as you say, this all leads to one destination:

The relentless pursuit of more damage, accompanied by a complete disregard for everything else.

And it’s ended up with a playerbase who are convinced that dps throughput is the only relevant stat in deciding if someone is a good player, which I do find problematic.

If the only way to beat a boss is via throughput (Cataclysm), min-maxing happens. If there are multiple ways to beat it (The Burning Crusade), you can be more free-wheeling with your choices.

More ways to solve problems is cool and adds depth; taking options away to “optimize” removes it.

eg. in WoW, you don’t need a perfectly optimised group to knock out hard mode instances. You just don’t. You need a reasonable range of roles and people who know how to play. There’s no need of talk about how the minmaxers have to make up for someone’s shortcomings when the group would do fine without a minmaxer in it.

In a single player game, it doesn’t matter. Because you’re doing your own thing. It ain’t hurting anyone.

In a multi-player game, espeically one where you are performing in groups to achieve a shared goal, it does matter if you aren’t optimised, since you’re making other people trying to achieve the same goal lives harder, since they have to make up for your shortcomings. It’s not min-maxing. It’s part of the social contract to pretend yours isn’t the only fun that matters in much they shouldn’t yell at you for being crap, you shouldn’t be crap.

Though, on Skyrim, I have issues with that game in so far as once it got easy, it got really, really easy, even without any character planning beyond ‘I want a guy with a big axe and maybe that hat you have in the previews for the game’

http://insomnia.ac/commentary/on_role-playing_games/ for the long version.