Daggone, I shouldn't have waited this long to jump into the fray. I love myself a good culture war! TL;DR in the final paragraph if you don't want to wade through this huge post I made for you.
I don't buy "intention" as part of any judgment about what's constructive and what's scummy with regards to twinking. Blizzard has shown on numerous, successive occasions that they care very much about players who twink,
and that they don't care at all.
Examples of how Blizzard cares: the very existence of Behsten and Slahtz after XP got introduced to instanced PvP. Nerfing the Big Daddy, Bolt Gun, and especially the Embersilk Bandages in Cata, that last one affecting less than 200 active players. Eventual nerfs to a bunch of disproportionate gear in multiple expansions, especially the most current.
Examples of how Blizzard seemingly doesn't care: grandfathered ilvl180 gear. Unnerfed gems. SL rep gear for 49s. Trade window glitching. Re-merging of battlegrounds in BfA. The same %#$^ing scoreboard stat categories since the
first introduction of battlegrounds. Damn, Blizz.
We can argue all we want about the semantics of each of the examples above. Exploit or not exploit? Scummy or smart? Sin of commission or omission? I could make a solid case on both sides for any given example, and plenty of you already have. Instead, let's reframe the question.
Do our actions support the overall well-being and growth of our compatriots, or do they degrade them?
Subscription-capped and expansion-capped players reside at the near end of a bracket. They stack very impressive gear, but knowledgeable levelers can still handily compete with them. Yeah, we'll knock the socks off some ignorant levelers along the way, that's PuG life. Everyone else knows or learns that 20-29 brings a higher grade of PvP as a combination of gear and interest (and sometimes skill). Subscription-capped and expansion-capped players who want a higher intensity of games, they organize their own exclusive opportunities -- wargame parties, guild challenges, and so forth. All of these actions are
constructive. When players do them, more players want to join.
Somebody shows up with 5/6 gems and a host of grandfathered gear on the far end of the bracket for a few last hurrah games? That's like a professional singer showing up at amateur karaoke night. It's shocking, maybe it's funny, and it can even be fun for a couple of games. We get it.
Somebody finds a way to rack up 100 games on that 5/6 toon? Now you're the 12-year-old bullying 10-year olds just from your sheer size. You're the Lamborghini destroying Mustangs and Camaros at the drag strip. Nobody can consistently step up to you. Maybe if the circumstances align perfectly, sure, but that's far from the norm. Rather than deal with you, they're better off leaving. Far from inspiring, your very presence is
degrading to your current bracket.
To be clear, I'm not drawing a line in the sand about "X number of games makes you a degrader", because arguing that line back and forth is pointless. Instead, understand that while we respect people who build their twinks, how we
play those twinks sits on a spectrum of constructive to degradative play that impacts a bracket. Are we playing
with other players, or at the
expense of other players?
It would be easy to assume constructive = good and degradative = bad, but don't make that mistake. Twinks regularly get hung up on this point. The vast majority of us here (myself included) build twinks like model robots to crash into each other. Sure, we love PvP and all that, but we're here to crash robots, and we looooove to crash 'em. That's why we built better robots. PvP inherently brings expense to players in terms of their time and work.
When something gets really disproportionate, using that piece of gear to break a bracket can get Blizzard's attention. Most gear nerfs don't happen right away, but when they do, it's because twinks do Blizzard the "favor" of pushing an edge case way farther than Blizzard anticipates, alerting Blizzard to the issue. Yeah, it would be great if Blizzard fixed that to begin with, or read one of the gazillion bug reports we file, but look, World of Warcraft is
huge in size. It's so big that
years ago, WoWhead gave up on accurately tracking gear stats and now just provides something "close enough" from which to extrapolate the info people need. Some stuff Blizzard fixes, some stuff remains oversights, and the rest Blizzard doesn't care to address.
Sometimes we have to break the game to get things fixed. Sometimes entirely new subcommunities form out of the ways we break WoW. Breaking things is part of the joy of twinking. When our actions make it so that others don't want to play any more, we cross the line to degrading the bracket. It doesn't matter that other players could "step up" and do the same thing we do, for the same reason it doesn't matter what Blizzard intends or doesn't intend. If we play at the expense of people at the bracket, and especially if others joining us would accelerate that degradation, that's what I believe
@Chops means by a scummy action.
For better or for worse, these arguments around twinking go back as far as WoW itself. The 24 vs. 20 debate might make for the best-known example in our history, and if you want to read an eloquently written piece that does a far better job explaining the conflict than I achieved in this massive post, check out
@Cynwise 's
piece. It remains one of my favorites.
We all have been those people. I played 64s for a short time before I realized I was doing more harm than good. I PuG'd in BfA in multiple brackets on my beloved resto shamans, and if you knew resto shamans in BfA...good god. We've all been at least a little scummy at some point.
Forget intentional or unintentional on the part of Blizzard. Forget intentional or unintentional on the part of players. We can (and have) successfully argued both sides, and missed the point in the process. Instead, let's ask ourselves how our actions impact our brackets. While we won't land 100% on constructive or degradative, we can feel the impact we would make if others followed our footsteps, and we can judge accordingly. Huge wrecking ball Fel Reaver twinks are fun to see now and then. Don't look to play those so long that people want to leave because of you.
