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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   2446 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 9, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Anybody here play WoW classic?

There was a time just about when Burning Crusade came out that I played WoW. My god that game kept me out of trouble (albeit my soon-to-be wife despised that I played it.) I loved it. It's the only game I ever really got into, and I was well into my 30s at the time. I thought about doing the WoW Classic when it was released but I simply don't have the time now, as a husband/dad.

Why didn’t she like it? My lady plays with me hehehe

I don't know. My first reaction would be that it's because she's female, but I suppose girls and women do take to games. Just not her thing, I guess, and the vision of me sitting there gazing at a screen for hours was sufficiently far from the man I guess she thought she was involved with that she balked.

Wow is about half women, although the raiding scene used to be more like 25% (I haven't raided since 2016, no idea about now).

Interesting. The study I have seen said more than 80% were male but may be dated, to say nothing of the methodological issues. Personally I've never known IRL a woman who regularly played video games. Or maybe they've just never told me. Many years ago I saw my fiercely competitive wife on Mario Kart, and it's probably just as well that she doesn't have much interest in turning on the PlayStation .

My partner runs circles around me in Mario Kart, and probably has spent more time playing games in the last couple years than I have. She's sunk in probably >20x the time I have in BG3, last I checked, and is enough of a gamer that she started talking mad shit about my brother's unoptimised strats while he and I were playing co-op (note: my first run, 0 familiarity with any mechanics) despite him having completed a couple runs already -- though he's more of a Timmy while she's more of a Spike.

She also used to beat me in WC3 more than 50% of the time when that was relevant. (I did kind of self gimp myself by being interested in relatively high execution strategies that I couldn't perform, and she would just huntress rush me to death)

She is quite competitive and plays to win, though, so now she doesn't play competitive games because she doesn't feel like she could compete at a satisfactory level anymore without putting in enough effort that it would derail other commitments. I can't really disagree -- I've stopped for largely the same reason (though I loosely still play a bit of MTG).

n=1, but they do exist.

First time hearing about the Timmy-Johnny-Spike classification. I'm not super familiar with MTG, but I don't really get the distinction between Timmy and Johnny, since it sounds like both prefer flashy plays to purely optimizing for the highest win probability. Is Timmy optimizing for largest point differential over win probability (e.g., rather win by 10 with 51% probability than win by 1 with 55% probability) while Johnny wants to play unorthodox or off-meta sets?

I tend to think of it this way -- a Timmy is drawn to cool stuff represented by the playing of the game (whether it be through roleplaying, through big fat numbers, the social aspect of the game, etc.), while a Johnny is drawn to cool interactions created by the game mechanics, up to and including bizarre 5 card combos relying on arcane rules minutiae that doesn't work out 9/10 of the time but that one time it works it looks really impressive...

A Timmy would be happy winning conventionally but in a "cool" way (think more "would look cool on a movie screen" rather than "would impress other players"), while a Johnny is more interested in doing unconventional stuff.

On the other hand Spikes just want to win at all costs within the rules of the game -- and if the most effective deck is utterly braindead and uninteresting otherwise, so be it.

In an RPG you could maybe translate it thus:

  • Timmies would try to spec their character to feel the most badass
  • Johnnies would be more interested in weird builds or challenge runs
  • Spikes would minmax the shit out of the game (though TBH I think in a solo context even Spike-y people tend to loosen up a bit)

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