Use of the term "Casual" (No inflammatory thread titles please)

I don't want anyone to "teach me strategies"! I want to devise them on my own! I don't want to chat with anyone! I want to play the frigging game! The casual/competitive dichotomy is utterly useless to me, on top of being offensive into the bargain.

Garat spoke of empathy, implying that I am deficient in that area.

But consider things from my perspective, for a second, which Garat implied that he is good at.

Not only are the new labels not helping me find people at my skill level, but they practically FORCE me to self-identify as "casual", if I want any chance of doing so, which is a movement that I have been fighting on a professional basis for the last 6 years!

You don't need a lot of empathy to realize why this would make me hit the roof.

Meanwhile, I understand that as far as Garat and Uber are concerned, these words are just labels that could very easily be changed without negative consequences. So please consider changing them at your earliest possible convenience, regardless of whether a ladder is implemented in 1.0.

Oh my goodness.

Dude if your so hardcore you should come on irc, we play some teamgames with you and your friends and we help you improve that way. If your really really bad i can probably help you a whole lot. There is a 2v2 tournament soon and everyone there wants to win i assume. You should join in with your friends even tough your chances might be low and you get a chance to fight with the best. This is how you get better, not play against new guys all the time and after 10 games doing that you can only make 3 more dox, believe me. People might win casually or they go totally insane, it doesn't matter you do what wins.

The drama NEVER ends here!!

Please stop assuming that the word casual is offensive, it hasn't been an offensive term for years. The fact that you consider casual gamers as "not real gamers" is the truly offensive statement here. I am a game developer, I've devoted most of my life to learn the craft and production of video games. I am also a casual gamer and play games for fun less than 3 hours a week usually. So to consider me not a "real" gamer is extremely offensive and would actually be quite incorrect.

Also what we've been saying this whole time is that the label system is not for skill level or how the player feels about how good they are. It is about the attitude of the instance of the game. So you are not self-identifying as casual. You are identifying that match as being a casual match, as in "just for fun". Casual is just the most appropriate term for these types of match-ups. So to say that just because this is not useful for you does not mean that we should make it so. If you wish to not label your matches as Casual, then we can point you toward our modding system, with which you can easily change the term by just changing it.

Sc2 is more of a tactics game.

If casual players play "for fun", what do competitive players play for? For sadness? Your implication that good players do not play for fun is offensive to good players, whether they understand this or not. It is precisely because they have more fun playing in this way that they play the way that they play.

As I have spent several hundred words explaining in this thread, I beg to differ.

But everyone else would still see me self-identifying as Casual, and it would still draw the wrong kinds of people into matches with me. Nothing is solved by this solution than the "ego" problem which I have told you that I don't have.

Hardcore players play to win. To be the best.

this, also.

(side note : UBER, this is the "silent majority community" you cater to? .... :> looks like that backfired, wanna come back and sit on our bench with us, "the competitive ladder-guys"?? :> )

Everyone plays "to win". I have an entire essay about that, it's called "On Difficulty, Fun and the Impossibility of Playing to Lose".

There's no such thing as "winning", the way people understand it. Winning is merely an abstraction, it's a different objective in every game -- all "winning" means is trying to achieve the game's objective. If you are not trying to achieve the game's objective, YOU ARE NOT PLAYING THE GAME. If you are sitting on a basketball court watching the birds fly you are not playing basketball. If you are trying to put the ball into the basket, you are "playing to win" aka PLAYING.

Everyone plays "to win" or they are not playing. Garat too is trying to blow up his opponent's commander, ergo he is trying to win. It's just that some people are better at this than others, and these are called "good players".

Once again your assumption that "casual" players are the wrong kinds of people to be playing with is frankly quite offensive. Also please not that I used the term "just for fun" not "for fun" competitive games are just as fun as casual games, but tend to draw a different style of play that not all players wish to take part in.

Competitive games are for players that are there to COMPETE and win. Casual games are for players that just want to play the game, perhaps NOT JUST to win. These are different methods of play. Yes the games objective is to kill the other commander, but some people aren't there for the competition of it, they just want to make a big army and see them fight across planets and possibly make a planet smash into another planet.

No one plays to lose, but there are lots of people who play just to play.

It's not my fault that people who self-identify as casual tend to be bad players. It's just how things are.

Everyone "plays to play". How can you NOT "play to play"? Could you "play to not play"? The phrase is meaningless.

Everyone plays "to win" because "winning" in PA's context is destroying the opponent's commander, and everyone's trying to do that otherwise they are not playing the game. The "I play for fun" phrase was coined by bad losers, by people who could not take a loss without rancor, and who had to invent a phrase to demean the fun that the winners were having in order to feel good about themselves. You might be a game designer but I am a theorist and philosopher, and we are in my turf now.

Apologies to anyone who played this game for fun and didn't put too much emotion into losing. You're not allowed to do that anymore.

Strawman post.

There is no reason to try to imply that good players are not having fun. EVERYONE is having fun, otherwise they wouldn't be playing the game. And since good players are playing the game MORE than bad players, it can even be scientifically proved that they are having MORE fun. (Aka brain studies.)

"You're in my turf now," he said to an Uber employee while on Uber's forums.

You can't just call something a strawman and think you've won. You have to prove the flaw in the argument.

"I'm a philosopher. I have so much wealth with my way of thinking."
*Spreads this 'wealth' to a forum about a single video game.*

I promise, there are a lot of bigger problems in the world than being called casual. Once you've tackled the bigger issues, we can talk about petty ones like these.

I love how the OP claims to be a philosopher but then blindly rejects all ways of thinking that differ from his own. Actually, that does sort of sound like a philosopher, doesn't it?

I meant the turf of IDEAS, of CONCEPTS and IDEOLOGIES. Not the domain name under which this discussion is taking place. What difference does that make?