» Sun May 13, 2012 4:53 am Here, have some boring clarifications about the topic and my own story in a spoiler tag, or just skip the spoiler tag and get straight to answering the question, the choice is yours.
Spoiler
I have been playing a game called League of Legends lately, a game where you play a so called "champion" which is basically just a character with 4 abilities (and one passive one) that you control in tower defense maps and depending on how well you play you either win or lose. Now I only needed to search for a little while before I found the champion that what most resembled my favorite playstyle in games like TES, WoW, NWN and other games where you have any control over your playstyle.
Taric is basically a paladin. He can heal himself and others, he deals low melee damage and take a lot of hits, he can buff the damage and armor of himself and other members of his team and then he has a control ability to keep enemies either away or near him (just a stun really). And I went into the game and played Taric for many days and it was (and still is) a lot of fun.
Obviously if your team wins it was the better team but the way the game tracks individual players worth is by counting how many players they land a killing blow on, how often they die and how often they dealt damage to an enemy that then got killed off by another team member. So for a good player at the end of a game he would perhaps have it show up like this "12/2/5" where kills, deaths and assists are in respective order. However my champion Taric that represents my playstyle more often than not ends up with a score that is something more like this "2/0/9". Which as you can see sets him as someone who hardly ever makes a kill but hardly ever dies either.
So what is Taric good for ? Well it goes like this. League of Legends is a tower defense game so an obvious part of that is defending a tower while helping to destroy enemy towers so that you can reach the base of the enemy to destroy a main building that when destroyed ends the game in favor of the opposing team. And for the purposes of defending a tower Taric is really powerful, nothing gets past him and his tower survives. But instead Taric hardly ever presses on to destroy towers. However sometimes when your team is doing well it will go on the offensive and then Taric should go out and help them by healing them and stunning fleeing enemies so that they can kill them or stun pursuers so that they don't catch them when they need to back off again. Which means Taric does not often get in a kill. But there is even more to this story, since any game with Taric in it will have some lane that is really slow. Everyone else is rushing around killing quickly or getting killed quickly but Taric just keeps things in a stasis. Which is equally as good as a fast kill game because while Taric may not kill those attacking him they don't kill him either, and every kill means more XP and gold for the one who made it, so if there are people trying to take down Taric but failing, then their character growth will be stunted and when they go and try to pick off other targets they are met with enemies that are largely superior to them in terms of armor and level, so they become easy pray, while even if Taric is also leveling slower and getting gold slower he is inheritly very tough and will always be found in groups with his allies if not near a tower just staying back to heal and buff them, so he does not mean easy kills for the enemy team either.
So it's all fun and nice to play with my favorite type of character in the game but having also taken a look at other champions I can't say that having my efforts actually recorded feels quite a lot more satisfying than thinking to yourself "hah I did great defending that tower" and then hearing someone say "lol, so few kills!". So there is this inherit lure to go for playstyles that show bigger numbers on the scoreboard at the end of the game despite those playstyles doing no more good at reaching the end goal of not having your base destroyed while destroying the enemy base than the more defensive playstyles.
Taric is basically a paladin. He can heal himself and others, he deals low melee damage and take a lot of hits, he can buff the damage and armor of himself and other members of his team and then he has a control ability to keep enemies either away or near him (just a stun really). And I went into the game and played Taric for many days and it was (and still is) a lot of fun.
Obviously if your team wins it was the better team but the way the game tracks individual players worth is by counting how many players they land a killing blow on, how often they die and how often they dealt damage to an enemy that then got killed off by another team member. So for a good player at the end of a game he would perhaps have it show up like this "12/2/5" where kills, deaths and assists are in respective order. However my champion Taric that represents my playstyle more often than not ends up with a score that is something more like this "2/0/9". Which as you can see sets him as someone who hardly ever makes a kill but hardly ever dies either.
So what is Taric good for ? Well it goes like this. League of Legends is a tower defense game so an obvious part of that is defending a tower while helping to destroy enemy towers so that you can reach the base of the enemy to destroy a main building that when destroyed ends the game in favor of the opposing team. And for the purposes of defending a tower Taric is really powerful, nothing gets past him and his tower survives. But instead Taric hardly ever presses on to destroy towers. However sometimes when your team is doing well it will go on the offensive and then Taric should go out and help them by healing them and stunning fleeing enemies so that they can kill them or stun pursuers so that they don't catch them when they need to back off again. Which means Taric does not often get in a kill. But there is even more to this story, since any game with Taric in it will have some lane that is really slow. Everyone else is rushing around killing quickly or getting killed quickly but Taric just keeps things in a stasis. Which is equally as good as a fast kill game because while Taric may not kill those attacking him they don't kill him either, and every kill means more XP and gold for the one who made it, so if there are people trying to take down Taric but failing, then their character growth will be stunted and when they go and try to pick off other targets they are met with enemies that are largely superior to them in terms of armor and level, so they become easy pray, while even if Taric is also leveling slower and getting gold slower he is inheritly very tough and will always be found in groups with his allies if not near a tower just staying back to heal and buff them, so he does not mean easy kills for the enemy team either.
So it's all fun and nice to play with my favorite type of character in the game but having also taken a look at other champions I can't say that having my efforts actually recorded feels quite a lot more satisfying than thinking to yourself "hah I did great defending that tower" and then hearing someone say "lol, so few kills!". So there is this inherit lure to go for playstyles that show bigger numbers on the scoreboard at the end of the game despite those playstyles doing no more good at reaching the end goal of not having your base destroyed while destroying the enemy base than the more defensive playstyles.
So the catch is that ultimately popular DPS characters tend to be popular quite precisely because they tend to show off their efforts much better than other types of characters at the end of a game but what I wonder is how many of you stick to your favored playstyle in singleplayer games when you get into multiplayer games and how many of you prefer to change over to whatever playstyle records your actual skills better ? Do you tend to be that guy that plays the Bard in D&D inspiring the great warriors to do their deeds or are you that fighter slashing his way to glory or the wizard preparing his ultimate spell of doom that gets known as "the spell that felled the giant". Or perhaps that is the kind of character you play in your lonesome as well ?
I myself stick to my favored playstyles nearly without exception in multiplayer games as well but how is your general attitude in MMO's and other multiplayer scenarios ? Are you that guy behind the scenes making sure everything runs smoothly or are you the seeker of glory that inspires the rest of the team to do better at the end of the game ?
Discuss and don't look for a poll because I'm not making one. Short answers are fine but what would be really cool would be to hear more in depth about your playstyles in both scenarios and how you have reacted in the multiplayer scenario and how others have reacted to you. And perhaps you have some stories to share, it's all good really.
