Skill and MMORPGs: An Unhappy Marriage

ActionTrip has published an editorial called “Skill and MMORPGs: An Unhappy Marriage”, in which they express their concern over the lack of skill needed to succeed in MMORPG PvP combat. A snip:

This takes me back to the problem of MMORPGs. It is in the competitive nature of our race to glorify people with skills and humble the people without them. The way this happens in MMORPGs is horribly wrong, however. Again, this has somewhat to do with human vanity and that desire to stand out at all costs. In MMORPGs, this gets to the point where people start justifying the blatantly obvious deficiencies of MMORPGs in terms of skill-based playing just so that they could artificially categorize players by skill (because it’s in their human nature to categorize other humans by skill). So myths are created about good players and bad players.