Originally Posted by
Banjotron
I hear that question often. Why didn't they give us a combat log? It must be an oversight. Wrong. They did it for a reason, and that reason is easy enough to understand.
The first part of it is simply aesthetics. Modern ARPG's often try to avoid screen clutter. They want more to be happening on screen. The less of your screen that is HUD, the more lively the action looks, and the more you see of the scenery. But they could have given us an option to have a combat log, you might think. This gets to what is probably an equally important reason to them.
They didn't give us a combat log _precisely so people like us wouldn't have a combat log_.
Say it with me now, "Casual ARPG." The people who toy and tinker with this garbage are the first actors in an unavoidable chain of events which runs counter to their design philosophy. First we poke and prod. We try to look for something simple: numeric optimization. How does a person, we ask, fiddle with the numbers such that they are the "best" for a specific, objective goal? DPS is often the biggest one. We do it mostly out of curiosity, not because we have some great determination to be uber.
But then everybody else picks it up. And this includes the endgame grinders. These people are after tokens or gold or whatever carrot-and-stick nonsense is dangled in front of them by the developers to keep them playing after they've done all the y'know, actual content. And first they get bored because they're repeating the same garbage, and then that boredom makes them want speed, so they can get more carrots with less tedium. And when they've optimized themselves, they look for the next source of speed: everybody playing with them. They do what they do in the name of the greater good, they say. But really, they just want more carrots. And in the name of more carrots, they will mock, exclude, and trivialize any player who does not fit precisely into what the theorycrafters say is the "best".
They don't want that. They want you to log on, jump into a map, and have people to play with who simply want to _play_ with you. Our glorious, optimized "utopia" is not a part of that.
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