SPOILER I'm not really feeling the Fruma story line.

The weakly blessed ones are the possessions of the lowest ranking type of guard (below the constabulary)

 

Ah hell nah

 

bait used to be believable

 

Even obvious bait can be baiting. Like this. Or when my friend calls Pride and Prejudice a pedophile book.

 

I'm not sure there's a single MMORPG that has a mostly linear relationship between canonical strength and statistical/in-game strength, due to the nature of plot arcs and expansion updates. It's also rather common place, especially in games with little to no meaningful player impact on the plot, for the player character to be a blank slate the player can project their own motivations and explanations onto. It's pretty clear that there isn't meant to be a definitive reading of a character beyond what the game tells you.

It's astounding that in your two big threads, you've hard-focused on parts of the game that aren't fully immersive, while completely ignoring the practical reasons for why these mechanics/design choices are the way they are, and how those parts are commonplace in most other games of the same genre, for similar practical reasons. In other threads, there have been plenty of critiques of parts of Fruma and Wynncraft more broadly that many people, including myself, would agree with. Obviously you have a right to your opinions, but stop assuming people disagree with you simply because they aren't reading your posts, and maybe consider accepting that your ideas (and combativeness) aren't winners in the eyes of most.

 

Let's try something different:


I don't think “people disagree with you” and “people are responding to things you didn't say” are the same complaint.

There have been people in this thread who disagreed with me while actually addressing what I wrote. Status, for example, raised questions about the rewrite that I explicitly admitted I hadn't considered. Selvut has made arguments about the consequences of the changes I'm proposing that I've spent quite a lot of time responding to. I obviously don't think disagreement itself means somebody hasn't read what I said.

What I've objected to are things like:

• I say I knocked the parasite off Orphion; somebody responds that I couldn't defeat Orphion.
  
  
• I say giving Sui a focus would make her more powerful; somebody responds that she doesn't need a focus to cast magic.
  
  
• I propose fighting Soosu's golem army; somebody responds by explaining why fighting Soosu herself wouldn't work.
  
  
• I say Tasim appears briefly near the beginning and then disappears for almost the entire game; somebody responds that he technically appears in five quests.
  

Those aren't examples of “people disagreeing with me.” They're examples of the response changing the proposition before arguing against it.

And yes, saying there has been no constructive criticism in this thread was too broad. There has been. What I should have said is that a very large amount of the criticism I've been arguing with hasn't addressed the point I was making.

As for the Player being a blank slate: I understand that this is the intent. My argument is that a protagonist can be open to player interpretation while still accumulating characterization through the things the game itself forces them to do. “There isn't meant to be a definitive reading beyond what the game tells you” doesn't really answer that, because I'm specifically talking about what the game has spent hundreds of quests telling us through the Player's actions.

Likewise, I am not arguing that MMO statistics constitute a canonical power level. I'm arguing from canonical events. If the story repeatedly establishes that this character has survived and defeated extraordinary threats, and then wants ordinary soldiers to successfully coerce them, I think the story needs to establish why those soldiers are capable of doing that. Poison, magical suppression, some Fruman ability we haven't encountered before—any of those would work. “MMOs have weird scaling” explains why the writing problem exists; it doesn't make the scene internally coherent.

You can think my interpretation of the Player is wrong. You can think my rewrite is worse. You can think the compromises I'm asking for would be impractical in an MMO. Those are all arguments I'm perfectly capable of disagreeing with without claiming you didn't read the post.

But if the response to “X” is repeatedly an argument against “Y,” pointing that out isn't refusing to accept criticism. It's asking for criticism of X.