Posted by gillispie1 on 10/12/2012 1:47:00 PM (view original):
well, the reality is its not black and white, there are shades of grey. its not so much the multiple thing i object to - if these were two BCS schools, id be on the other side of the coin. ruthless, maybe, but thats about the extent of it. im not a fan of reaching down and battling a school for a single recruit, but it happens, and its tolerable. it sucks, because you have this major advantage being used by a school with a much greater capacity to find good players, and it just doesnt sit well with me. but some people have different opinions and if a recruit looks to be the best you can get, and you have to stomp on a lesser divisional school to do it, so be it. but three? i just don't see it.
i suppose my belief comes from this. as a kid, i was ruthless in strategy games. i wanted to beat every opponent, and even if i was winning, that wasn't enough. i wanted to just crush them utterly. i was taught that was wrong, that the game is supposed to be fun for everyone. you can try to win, but you dont need to be so ruthless. it just ruins the game for others. so in short, i was taught and now believe, if you have the superior position - whether its intellect, board position, whatever - you have a responsibility to use it, well, responsibly. win the game, sure, but dont send the other kid home crying (actually, i was supposed to intentionally lose from time to time, but i never got the hang of that, and think that might go a little too far. but i can appreciate trying to win more gracefully).
anyway, it just doesnt seem like a responsible use of power to me, to so ruthlessly crush a lower divisional school. you can do it, but its still a dick move. sure, its somewhat arbitrary, but so are things like this in EVERY game. when you are playing poker with a drunk friend, where do you draw the line, and stop taking his money. its very situational and somewhat arbitrary. maybe the more smack my drunken idiot friend talks, the more money i can respectfully take. maybe the more money he has, the more i can take. but at SOME POINT, you just have to look at it and agree you went too far. im not going to take a thousand dollars off my poor drunken roomate, even though im pretty sure on a few occasions i could have convinced them to keep playing long enough to do so. wheres the line? what makes 5 dollars ok and 1000 dollars not? surely, two friends enjoying a game of poker where the more drunk one is disadvantaged, and loses 5 dollars, is reasonable, no? but when he loses 1000 dollars its not. and i cant tell you where or why id draw that line, but its pretty clear to me there IS a line, and it falls somewhere between there.
similarly, in HD, id draw the line of using a divisional advantage somewhere between taking 1 recruit, and totally obliterating the other teams' entire class. i cant tell you where id draw that line or why exactly, but its clear to me there is a line there, too.
I also don't think the poker analogy holds water her, simply because you're talking about a friend. You don't take advantage of your friends unless you are a dick. However, if there is a random dunk idiot at a casino you should never feel bad about taking his money. For the most part HD is like that, you don't know the people you are playing against, so I'm really not going to worry about how the feel a situation. If it's people you have friendly conversation with in the CC or on the forums, it's naturally going to be different. In the end you treat strangers and your friends differently.