Better, Best, Bestest

First - blatent plug - the SURVEY is still active and will be for another day or three.  Responses have been good so far, and fairly interesting.  I do intend to share the results (figured out that I can export it from the Free version of the survey tool).  Please participate if you haven't already.

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Have seen a few conversations lately where the word BEST has been thrown around.  I see it, and I generally roll my eyes.

"Better is the Enemy of Good Enough" was a favorite quote of one of my early mentors.  It really aggravated me when he said it, but now that I'm older I find myself echoing him.

We players sometimes get trapped into the mindset of "X is better than Y when I'm doing Z."  The best hauler.  The best ship hull.  The best fit.  The best weapon type.  I could go on.  We're nerds, so we argue and fight and debate and at the end of it, there's no great insight, just a lot of scrolling text in a chat channel.

But somewhere, as a nerd culture, we transition from a whole slew of potential solutions into a mode where "X is the only acceptable way to do Z."  From there, it's a short trip to ridiculing anything other than X, as in "omg ur duing it rong, dude."



Said another way:  We become sheep.  One of the herd.  Groupthink and conformist behavior rules the day.

Now, I'm not saying we should flounder.  We should be effective with the time we have each night.  We should earn isk and be effective in Fleets and roams.  But sometimes Good Enough is pretty darn good.  Sometimes we ought to measure things not on isk per hour, but on fun.  Or how a ship looks.  Or that it fights the way YOU want to fight and not the way that someone else thinks you oughtta fight.

So, ask me what ship I use and why, and I'll tell you.  You might disagree. You might have a better way.  I might agree with you and change my approach.  Or not.  In a game with as much diversity as EVE, narrowing our choices to only the "accepted" list seems a pretty boring way to play.

Better is the enemy of good enough.

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I also want to plug a good article from a few days back.  Neville Smit wrote an article entitled 'What High-Sec Could Be.'  He reference's one of Sugar's recent posts about NPC hirelings but expands on some of the ideas.  The entire article is worth reading, but regarding Circ Seekers, he says:

The most fun I've had in PvE lately has been while hunting Circadian Seekers, which use improved artificial intelligence routines and are far more variable in their responses - you never quite know what they are going to do. They warp away, warp back, re-engage, follow you to stations and camp you there. And while wrestling with Seekers, one has to keep an watchful eye on the overview for any Drifter Battleships, lest they drop on top of you and blat you to smithereens. More people should know how much fun the Seeker/Drifter AI can be - why CCP Games hasn't publicized this more prominently mystifies me. 

In my opinion, they can't port this new non-player character (NPC) AI system to regular mission rats fast enough. It would make mission running much more fun.

Can I get an Amen?