Deconstructing Populist Nonsense

I'm currently in the Star Trek Online Open Beta Test; Santa Claus was nice enough to see fit to throw a Collectors Edition pre-order my way Christmas this year.  Overall the game is fun enough.  I still feel the ground combat is shallow, but it is far less tedious now that I have completed the Starbase 24 Fleet Action and upgraded my entire away team's kit simultaneously.  While the game is "fun enough" by my own words, I a still considering telling Santa to cancel the pre-order and get his money back.  "Why," you ask?

The community; more appropriately, populists in the community trying to infect STO with the same silliness that infected, and subsequently annihilated any ambition to play World of Warcraft.  One particularly annoying populist troll on the forums goes by the name of Slarus.  Slarus believes argument to be chain posting the exact same logic devoid, false assumption laden paragraphs over and over again.  So, I figured the best way to lead off the third attempt at Post-it Notes from the Void would be to deconstruct the nonsense.

Premises:
First, STO is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG).  As such, the environment is competitive amongst members of the player base.  The goal is, of course, to obtain the maximum "reward", which could be alot of things: gear, levels, raid progression, credits, in the least amount of time possible.  There is another obvious type of competition among players, PvP, but the populist falsely believes this to be the only source of competition between players.  What's disregarded is the importance of more skill and dedication leading to greater rewards; conversely, incompetence and casualness leading to inferior rewards.  Naturally, writing the latter out of the thought process is an entirely self-serving means of "leveling the playing field" by demotivating the players above the populist on the skill and dedication curve, and giving entitlements to everyone below an arbitrary and too high threshold.

Second, kamikaze play styles cannot be allowed to yield progression in any manner.  The kamikaze play style by its very nature precludes the possibility of requiring all players to learn and understand how their ships, weapons, shields, consoles, and bridge officers work in practice.  The concept has been thrown around to give buffs to players for not dieing in combat actions; unfortunately, this does not work for 2 reasons.  First, it turns group combat actions into tests of wills to see which player will get most bored first, and initiate combat, which removes the team aspect of the game in favor of retaining personal gains.  Second,  a reward system does not sufficiently penalize the kamikaze play style; nor does a reward system provide sufficient motivation for players to get better.  Now that premises are complete, let's deconstruct!

• Assertion: "A Death Penalty will make players actually think about what they are doing and use tactics"
•  its a time sink a waste of time, it teaches nothing, it provides ZERO insight into winning it mearly makes you wait to overcome the penalty and continue, a death penalty only makes a mission longer. 

It is not the game's responsibility to hand every answer to every challenge on a silver platter.  The first 'x' levels (MMO standard is 10) should teach the player the basics.  In STO terms, that means power management, shield balancing, weapons configurations and firing patterns (e.g. don't fire your photon torpedoes until shields are down), bridge officer abilities (Emergency Power to Shields), etc.  After that, the player should have the ability to craft their own ship, tactics, and skills to their own personal play style to be successful.  The responsibility of the game at that point is to provide opportunities for the player to put themselves to the test.  The so-called "refutation" of the notion that a death penalty will make players think ignores the concept that the time sink is a part of the death penalty.  Players will certainly not want to have a multiple minute or hour long extension put on the piece of content they are attempting to progress at any moment, so it seems that this is the perfect means to motivate players to learn how to play, and deter kamikaze play styles.

• Assertion: "A Death Penalty makes the game more challenging"
• If you wish to increase/improve the challenge level of the game, the appropriate way is by improving the content...Likewise, handicaps from DPs are not challenging, just a waste of time to fix them

If you have had your head out of the clouds over the past 5 years, you know that this assertion is absurd on its face.  Content cannot just be made harder, for that very notion violates the populist, bleeding heart's belief that we all need to be the same.  Besides, "challenge", "better", "improve" the content are all subjective terms.  What's better to the populist is rarely better to the elitist, and so on.  Once again, the notion that the time sink is a part of the death penalty is ignored.

• there is an obsession with punishing and hurting players.

Naturally, it is in the populist thinking to ignore concepts like "good", "bad", "exceptional", "terrible", etc. because the goal is to make everyone the same; it should come as no surprise then that the word "bad" is missing from this sentence.  Yeah, I am hellbent on making the STO experience such that bad players have no possibility of ruining the experiences of good players in fleet actions.  The question is what's wrong with that.  To the populist, everything; in reality, nothing.

• No nothing I do affects you except if we are teamed, and the simply answer is boot me if I don't play the way you like and put me on ignore and it will NEVER bother you again.

If we've learned anything from recent World of Warcraft, it is that putting the onus on the player base to self-limit an oversupply of players for content doesn't work.  The idea of just throwing everyone a person doesn't like on a (falsely) assumed infinite ignore list is quaint, but useless.  Part of the point of the online game is to develop community.  Ignore lists full of people exploiting a lack of death penalty to obtain progression they did not earn will ultimately work contrary to the concept of community building.  I do have to concede, however, that in a lone case of one player playing exclusively solo, the ability for that player to adversely affect my play experience is reduced, but it is still well within the realm of possibility.

• Yes I repeated myself cause you aren't reading. and Kamakaze players ARE A MINORITY

For now.  If it comes to pass that the kamikaze play style is more efficient than doing combat right, and in the absence of a death penalty to deter such degenerate play, then players will adopt the kamikaze play style more and more as time goes on.  Using a death penalty to make traditional combat the most efficient way to progress ones character is the proper way to address both death penalty and degenerate play.

• Your fixated in penalties and not just playing the game, I am motivated to do my best all the time because I want to do my best.

 Maybe your best isn't good enough.  Maybe you have flawed reasoning about disruptors, phasers, torpedoes, or bridge officer abilities.  Maybe you used kamikaze tactics through level 10 because there was very little death penalty, and are now a half-wit bounding across the galaxy.  Penalties at least force the player on an individual basis to make the choice.  Rewards still allow progression for bad players, which is bad.

Well, that's all for now.  I'm seriously considering telling Santa to cancel the pre-order and get his money back, because the game Slarus wants will unquestioningly suck balls.