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A little while ago someone posted asking if it was credible that Musk had achieved a world record in Diablo 4.
In a follow up to that, recently Musk has been streaming another ARPG, Path of Exile 2. For those not in the know PoE is what the true rarified ARPG gamers play. It's the Salty Spitoon. Diablo is Weenie Hut Jrs. Much like in D4, Elon's PoE2 character is absolutely decked out, the work of hundreds of hours. But not his. He also zero grasp of the game. He doesn't understand itemisation, he fumbles with interfaces, doesn't know how to play the build properly. I would bet against him having even having completed the campaign once. I have little doubt that his total misunderstanding of the significance of an item's character level requirement will be a meme in the community for years to come.
It's bizarre if true. He can't be clueless enough to not understand that this is extremely transparent. It's tempting to declare in the best traditions of armchair psychoanalysis that this is just how top management warps your brain, to truly believe that you get credit for playing your games the same way you run your companies - paying other people to do all the grunt work.
This is bog standard rich dude stuff in many traditional rich guy meatspace sports. Amateur to semipro SCCA motorsports is full of rich guys who are mediocre drivers and spend a ton of money to try to get the car to carry them to wins. Hell, the entire sport of Polo allows the Patron to take one roster spot and the handicap system is designed to make it competitively practical to field him, resulting in last year's US Open where a team owner in his late 50s suffered an accident that left him in a coma. Rich guys hire hunting and fishing guides who line things up for them to take trophies, they get the best gear to help them compete, anything for an edge to claim glory.
We only find this shocking because we're not used to people using videogames as a status flex.
Devil's advocate: people being able to buy the best gear also advances the sport. Competitive shooting does this all the time in its Open divisions, where you can run basically anything you want; if you've discovered a kind of setup that gives you a leg up over the other shooters then it's perfectly valid to use it (and if it came out of your garage you'll probably have people wanting to commercialize it).
Of course, not all divisions are Open (so if you don't have 5000 dollars to spend on the best gear, you can still be competitive with everyone else), and you still need to actually make the shots so if you're bad you'll get beaten by people in lower divisions much less your own... but having a division where you can just push the envelope however you like advances the sport.
I agree!
Spending money on the sport also supports events, a lot of pros in minor sports support themselves coaching or training amateurs.
I'm just saying that buying the appearance of competitive talent is a super-normal thing that rich guys do all the time.
Even things like travel, highbrow art consumption, wine collecting, often resemble trying to spend a lot of money to appear interesting.
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