Again, if it's beneath you to play a game with anything less than the very best equipment and the very best aids then that's your choice. My choice is to pick my equipment based on what kind of challenge I want, and obviously it gives me a better experience than what you're getting.
Except that you apparently get as much entertainment from beating a child when you started with no queen, as you do from a straight battle with a chess master.
Which is great for you, but do you seriously not see how that might not be true for everyone?
Do you not see that while both of these games might be fun, one is played under conditions that are purely designed to ensure an enjoyable game between unequal opponents where both players have a real chance at winning, while the other is a straight up measure of relative skill?
You're starting to argue against things that I haven't said. I said that you can't get the same satisfaction of winning through skill from a game that lets you win. You're turning this into some elitist nonsense.
See what I said earlier:
The only way to get satisfaction is not to be aware of how easy it is. Or be deriving your satisfaction from some source that is not related to the "skill" involved to play the game.
Note that I'm not using satisfaction as a synonym for "fun" or anything like that, I'm purely using it as that warm fuzzy feeling you get when you perform at or beyond what you thought was your skill level, and achieve something that shows you that you are
this good.
I'm not the world's greatest racer, but I manage to maintain an iRating on iRacing of about 2000. I'm proud of that as I feel that I've earned it through my hard work and skill. When I beat racers who are much lower ranked than me I don't see that as something I should feel especially good about, but when I beat people who are equal or higher then I think that I
should feel good about myself.
Maybe people get proud of beating the B Spec AI. I don't see why they should be, and I don't see how any rational person could be if they were aware of how the B Spec AI works. You can make your own little challenges, but then you're really only beating yourself. You're not playing the same game, just as a game of chess where one player starts with no queen isn't the same as a real chess game.
People can get their jollies however they want, hence the popularity of things like Farmville. But Farmville and things like B Spec do not provide satisfaction based on skill, because it's not there. If you had a chance to lose, you had it because
you put it there, not because the computer was actually capable of beating you.
I'm not saying that B Spec isn't fun to you and people like you, because it obviously is. I'm saying that the enjoyment is not the satisfaction of skill triumphing over the competition. It's something else, like skill triumphing even though you tried really, really hard to make it not.
You may want to read up on the AI threads, where the same discussion goes on. But competitions between unequal drivers in unequal machinery are not the same as competitions where all non-driver aspects are as near to equal as possible. They can produce similar outcomes, sometimes, but they are not the same and the majority of the time they do not play out the same.
I'm not sure why I bother. You've clearly put a reasonable amount of time into designing B Spec challenges for yourself, and so your sense of self-worth in the game is directly related to you believing that those challenges are equivalent to a real test of skill.
You're not going to admit otherwise, because to do so would be to admit that actually you're just doing it for fun, and that it's not really a true test of your skill at all. Which is funny, because doing things for fun is just fine. But the cupcake generation has to feel like they're achieving something and that they're special and skilled at the same time. It's not true, and it doesn't need to be.
Play for fun, and don't be afraid to admit that it's not a test of skill. It's OK.
