Jinx Jinx

Misinformation and disinformation on the forums

Misinformation and disinformation on the forums

I played a game last night where someone was completely convinced that LRMs now are trash and that even disciples can easily beat them. When I tried to tell him otherwise, that LRMs are still very very good, he proceeded to make wild claims about various things he'd read on the forums.

The fact is, the forums have a heck of a lot of posts that are completely untrue. A lot of people are claiming various things to be completely unbalanced/unbalanced when in reality, it's closer to the opposite. The reason for this is multiple.
1 - Newcomers. There are those who are still learning how to play and don't quite know the various strategies and counters yet and when they encounter something seemingly insurmountable, they immidately think it's imbalanced.
2 - Spreadsheet theorycrafters. These people will look at just the numbers and imagine their effects in game. The problem with this is that there's many other factors that they often fail to take into account such as ships turning, accel, max speed; range; unit combinations; player skill; etc.
3 - Bandwagon jumpers. These people usually view themselves as one part of a community that they often believe is "polarized". Once attached, they'll relentlessly agree and argue for their position even if they're completely wrong. Often, I've found, these people use ad hominem attacks in leiu of an actual argument that they don't have.
4 - "Elite" normal players. These people have gotten a false sense of their ability. They've been mainly playing against people who are new and completely crushing them. They then draw conclusions that would otherwise be untrue had the played against tougher opponents or people who really knew what they were doing.

I'm not providing a solution for any of this but I want people to be more aware and actually TEST the stuff they read. If someone says light frigs can now beat LRMs 1v1, don't take their word for it - try it out first. This actually goes for everything you read and learn. Critical thinking is the key.  The proliferation of this misinformation REALLY needs to stop.
52,232 views 26 replies
Reply #26 Top
Disiformation in the game is the most serious problem, as there are many gamers who brought this game, barely read the manual, don't read the forums and thus prolly don't really know about the fundamental mechanics of the game. They might think a flak frig is more powerful than a LRM simply because of its "average damage".

Still to this day I wonder why the devs never really made public the different damage and armor types (anti-light, medium, etc). I myself became aware of it reading the forums and seeing some beta testers talk about it, and later seeing a user-made chart that was posted. No where on the manual or in-game does it say anything about light frigs being anti-heavy with LRM having light armor.

And I find it amusing seeing the same handful of players posting on this forum about "balance". I wonder how will the percents look if we took the total number of copies of the game sold versus the number of these players, or hell, a comparison of number of good reviews vs the number of these players.

Can we please stop the discussions about "elite" and "competitive" and "casual" players???

We are all noobs until the day we start playing another game, ok?? :)