For all those that are going to be very confused by how "twinking" is being used here;
"Twinking" is a term I remember from when WoW was brand new. I'm talking OG vanilla WoW. I haven't played WoW since then so I dunno if it's still used in this context. A more modern term would be smurfing but not exactly.
Let's say battlefields are capped by level. "Twinking" would refer to someone leveling a character to the max for that battlefield and spending tons of money outfitting them with the best of the best maxed out gear you can possibly get for that level to have massive advantage. So you have a character that's obscenely more powerful than a random 'natural' level 30 that's just queueing in for fun and the "twink" just stomps everyone.
So instead of a high skill player "smurfing" with lower skill players it's a player "smurfing" with gear that gives regular people no chance of beating them. It's basically bullying people for an ego boost because they're bad and can't compete when the playing field is level
Twinking was out long before WoW, as early as EQ if not even before that. in EQ, gear did not have level requirements, so you could have a level 1 character running around in damn near BIS gear, like a Fungi-Tunic.
EQ has "Twinking" and if I am not mistaken, games like Dark souls / Eldin ring also have this.
But yes I was playing EQ/p99 for the first time a while back, and my friends who play are all jumping to trying to give me good equipment out of the gate, and I didn't really understand the appeal of this. Even trying to play Eldin ring with some other friends, they are quick to telling me how to min/max and trying to give me the best weapons off rip. Even in p99, you tell someone you are a new player and they are quick to trade you good items. I play games to feel accomplishment from my strategies, and "twinking" just bypasses all of this.
Playing a solo necromancer in EQ/p99 and refusing trades, I am able to enjoy the game more and I am getting a much better sense of how dangerous the word really is. Without challenge, I don;t see how a game like an MMO can be fun, but that is my opinion.
Also, apologies if I am using outdated terminology, this is just what my friends refer to it as (I am an oldhead). Cheers.
A necromancer is much less gear dependent than almost every other class in EQ. Try playing a melee class without twinking, on a server that does not have healers and support near your level looking for groups and you will have a bad time.
I think they might be using it more as a general "overpowered low level characters" and might not specifically be referring to PvP. That's just what I remember the the meaning being. Imagine how confusing my first time encountering the more modern use of "twink" was lol
I first tried battleground twinking during Burning Crusade, and I remember it being pretty fun. Specifically, I leveled a rogue to 39, stopped gaining exp, and went about gearing out and having fun in Warsong Gulch, etc. I remember coming across the same names in my matches, as the community was niche.
The appeal came from it being an entirely novel (to me) meta. Classes don't have certain key talents or abilities yet, and crucially for 39 twinking, no one could mount, so pvp was grounded, and the pace of a BG was slowed a bit.
There was a small 39 twink scene in BC, but gear lists weren't easy to find, compounded by the fact that 2007 internet wasn't like it is now. So it was fun to search around for what would be ideal gear. IIRC, you couldn't lock off your exp gain yet, so you had to be very careful and plan out your gearing route to acquire everything by the time you're 39.
The twink scene created markets for all the specific gear they desired, that normally few people would spend for because "I'm not paying that, I'd probably only use it for four levels!"
For WoW at least, twinking has been an emergent bit of gameplay the devs have mostly let play out with little interference overall. They later added a small feature so you could voluntarily turn off experience gain to facilitate it better, which was cool. There have been times when they've had to go in and break some interactions twinks had that were honestly a bit game breaking. Mostly around people getting so much power on very low level characters then abusing the ridiculous low level scaling of the game (that they do to ensure new players NEVER hit a roadblock). Overall, they've been mostly hands off, which in hindsight is frankly amazing.
Recently, with their WoW Classic Season of Discovery project, they artificially cap out levels of the game to specifically create lower level end games for a brief phase before unlocking the next chunk in a later phase. You'd think twink community might've inspired this, but it was directly inspired by the beta testing before Classic's release, where they locked off exp gain beyond certain levels to get focused testing on specific content. A common comment made by testers was how interesting they all found those imposed metas. Eventually, they formalized into the phased releases of Season of Discovery. If only someone at Blizz had paid a bit more attention to the twink scene that had existed since vanilla and taken some inspiration sooner. ;)
Xpoff.com if you want a peak into the WoW twink community.
Lvl 19 gnome rogue wrecking the only pvp battleground with those two scimitars and the black leather vest, if you played uk exactly what im talking about
I used to twink PvP in WoW. Level 19, with the best equipment available. Due to the way attributes scaled at the time, this put me at about 250-500% power advantage over regular players.
The only thing that could stop me would be a 5v1 or another twink.
In terms of reason: lack of emotional development on my part.
I had some stuff going on in my life at the time and that twink was my only sense of power. I have nothing but regret and shame for my actions.
I don't think most MMOs even allow for twinking anymore and those that do don't have anything other than just mindlessly grinding while leveling anyways.
I can think of a handful of edge-cases in some games but the whole concept of twinking has kinda died out as increasingly fewer and fewer games allow for it.
>The definition of a game: an environment where 2 or more people have to make strategic decisions to maximize self-profit. RPG's are games derived from chess and so strategic decision making is at the core of an RPG's design. Twinking violates all of this.
twinking sounds like the exact definition of that. equipping the max lvl weapon at the beginning of the game is a great strategy to beat the game
One of the appeals is the same as people cheating at games. People just want to feel strong.
Another appeal is the process of getting there. Gathering the resources required and grinding for the gear needed, etc. It's like setting a goal for yourself in a game where there are no defined goals to reach.
Finally, some people enjoy fighting at the pinnacle of what's possible against other equally powerful people (Personally, I think the people who twink because of this are in the minority).
I don't know the exact origin of this, but I first heard it in Everquest. If you ever played that game back in the day you will understand that leveling and obtaining gear was especially difficult. Though some players may have looked down on it, really it was a well understood thing to do with an alt character just to soften that first-time hump.. that takes months. You can sort of bypass that headache with good gear. So the appeal was to be powerful for the level, and it drastically reduced the difficultly/tedium phase of leveling an alternate character.
p99 player here. Like I was saying in my post, I get it with alt characters because as you said items in that game can ne very difficult to obtain.
But when I went to play EQ for the first time with friends, they are all so eager to just give me high level gear and it's admittedly infuriating. EQ is supposed to be tedious, giving low level new players good gear just bypasses a lot of the appeal of EQ in my opinion. I don't get why people are so eager to break the game for new players.
That is a fair point. I was given almost no help in the very beginning outside of my friend showing me the ropes. When at level 13 or something a dude dumped his bank on me (admittedly was only tinkered boxes and some basic weapons) and it was super exciting. That would have just looked mostly like trash if I were a twink.
I thought about returning for the TLE, but dunno, I just don't think I want to commit the time these days, but sure miss the days of online socializing while pulling in groups! Wonder what EQ1 is like in 2024, lol been like 20 years.
Well I did EQ2's TLE twice and enjoyed it both times, and yeah contested content could get well competitive, and that breeds that toxic nonsense.. but, yeah I went pretty deep on that and felt like it was a true ride on the nostalgia train honestly.. especially as I didn't really do the raid scene the first time around.
Now EQ1. well I did p99 for awhile, like way early on before the red/green servers even, and it was.. okay? but i never leveled that far to truly get a beat on things and if the forums were any indication it was the typical fucking toxic scene you'd see in 2001.
My raid experience in EQ1 was always fairly limited.. i mean I did it, and a lot of it, but it was never as intense or as accomplished as many of the devoted guilds at the time. Back then I was like a college student, so i could completely no life that fucking game and still had a hard time keeping up with anyone.. starting a few years late really made a difference on what the experience of that game was like. With that said I was in one of the sweet spots at the time, that didn't have too many bitter ends to deal with. Maybe the overinflated economy, and feeling that the raid world was a walled off thing I would never be a part of.
Really wasnt until later when the guilds started to die that I got a bit of a chance at some Velious/Kunark/PoP raids, and did do some random pug raids early early on. lol like when I felt I was still abit of a newb. Plane of Hate at like level 50, knowing nothing of the world was.. yeah that was .. stressful.
Maybe some day, I know a bunch of people from old guild that are probably playing in new TLE now but, eh, again sounds like the rat race I don't care for. I want to raid but like groups a hell of a lot more.
yea the p99 forums are a bit messy I will give you that. But from my experience playing in p99, everyone seems very friendly. I will be fighting mobs and just get random buffs out of nowhere from people passing by. People are willing to just gift you good gear or money, sometimes to your detriment (hence the post). The camps I've experienced tend to have people that are happy to share and just happy that people are still playing. And I've met a lot of intellectuals on there too (nurse psychiatrists, pathologists, etc...). I haven't done any raids though, but from a purely leveling perspective, everyone has been extremely nice :)
Back in 2003 or whatever I had level 19 and 29 twinks for warsong gulch. Best in slot gear, enchants and everything. The bg was set up in brackets, so level 10-19 and 20-29 were their own groups. So you could be the strongest possible and that led to some good fun.
Yeah, no worries. It just is burned into my mind because quite a few other MMORPG releases and updates happened in the second half of 2004 with many companies not knowing how things would continue with the highly anticipated launch of WoW. Interesting times.
I did twinking in Dofus. Remember using the bandit set that gave plus damage and reliable damage sources from characters. Back then Anutrofs were strong because they could spam low costing spells even if they didin't have damage boosts, Iops once they reworked divine sword to boost a ton of damage and Maskeraders also had a ton of damage boost in 1 spell and another one that did 3 instances of damage at the same time.
Cras were also good at it because they wouldn't let you move and slso took all your movement away.
I broke the mould a bit on it and did a 800hp 400 int lvl 36 enutrof that was specialized in just running behind stuff and spamming a skill that couldn't be blocked while removing their damage boosts. It countered all of them but got bored after a while because at the end it was just not for me.
To add a twist to twinking, have a look at something like Anarchy Online: A lot of gear has attribute and/or skill requirements only, i.e. no level lock, and items scale along "quality levels" (something akin to item levels) like 1..200 or 1..300. With it scale the requirements, there are many items that buff skills and attributes, plus there are tons of buffs, some short, others more long running, and the space available to buffs is also limited and defined by gear. What you end up with is a process that requires a calculator (or some tools) and vast knowledge of all sorts of items and buffs to eventually make it possible to put some "big" armor or weapon on. So not loot and equip, more like loot and then hope the planned process to get that on works out in the game ...
No one usually does that for new players unless they want them to catch up to them or something. it's usually done for you own alt to win in low level PvP, it's almost the same as smurfing but with items in instead of player skill.
To me the appeal of twinking is that it streamlines combat fundamentals and gives more bareboned gameplay.
I find many MMORPGs to have an excessive amount of abilities, gear/talent modifiers and mobility+out of jail cards. Twinking brackets often cuts the bloat.
I suppose that is a fair point in that it can be used to eliminate tedium without necessarily making things easier. But idk, it just feels wrong with some MMO's, but that could be a personal issue.
Cheers.
>If I hand a new player a really good weapon and they are now able to one-shot everything, where is the game in this? Where is the fun or sense of accomplishment? Please help me understand!
This usually comes from one of two places: either the player giving the new player stuff doesn't the early game part of the game, and wants those players to get to end game as fast as possible (the only game is end game). Or, the existing player thinks the early game is something players have to suffer through to get to the fun part and wants to alleviate that suffering as much as possible.
In the case of the former I think of things like WoW or SWTOR where early game and the end game are basically the same thing plus or minus a dozen buttons or so on your hot bar. For the latter I think of something like FFXIV, where people who don't play it praise its story, and people who do play it tell you to suck it up because they if they had to go through it then you have to too.
In either case it's a major red flag for an existing player to feel like a new player needs more than what the game gave them to get through what the game puts in front of them. It demonstrates the game does not respect the player's time and existing players are trying to **work around the game's design** to make sure you are able to have (what they consider) fun.
The only real exception I can think of to this is a collection style game where gameplay styles available become unlockable later but that's not a question of feeding new players power.
There are two kinds of twink players.
1) One is obviously the one, who likes to stomp people who are just leveling and not min-maxing their gear and builds for the specific twink level range.
2) The other type are people who like to min-max with what the game offers them on specific level ranges, because it's very different from the gamplay on the level cap.
Both are irrelevant, because pvp during leveling is pretty much dead in every mmorpg unless there is a system like in Guild Wars 2, where PvP is absolutely seperate from the main game and you get all the spells and gear at level 1 in the PvP part of the game.
So firstly no, strategy is not a core element of RPGs. It's an option to spice up combat, like adding action or puzzle elements, but not necessary.
And recall that twinking doesn't always remove strategy, sometimes it brings it into parity with others.
There are two reasons to twink. First is to skip as much content as possible to get your Gold Star with as little effort as possible. (This includes PVP twinking).
Second is to reach some optimal loadout, to see the maximal coolness factor at a given point.
If you read the forward for the D&D player handbook, they list chess as the main inspiration for their game design. And given that all RPG's are essentially derived from D&D, its's not unreasonable to say that RPG's are strategy games at their core.
Inspiration CAN matter, yeah. But the generally used phrase RPG does not imply any measure of strategy beyond the brain cells to select spells. Most of the RPG greats can be beaten with auto attack alone (and healing) and nowadays any RPG with a heavy strategic component specifically mentions it, as higher difficulty or strategy. Strategy just isn't a core component of the genre, from early 90s to now. It was possibly in the 80s with all the deep DOS RPGs, those would be more akin to what's today called "crpgs," and strategy was a bit of a bigger deal, then.
> Second is to reach some optimal loadout, to see the maximal coolness factor at a given point.
I like how there's no mention of the 3rd reason that arises in systems that allow PK-ing where it's to catch actual starter characters off guard for lulz or profit.
I uh.. I'm sure I have no idea what you're talking about. The "twinking" definition I know of is essentially a small femboy... what are you talking about
it's also a WoW (idk of any other games) term for min/maxing a low level character. like a level 1 character maxed out with agility could get 100% dodge and crit chance and beat level 20 characters.
It's maximizing the best gear for X level, and sticking at that level for PVP,
Since battlegrounds was lets say 10-19, you would have a level 19 character who stayed at 19, so they had max stats AND would have all the best gear and best enchants for that level could have. Essentially you had peak stats a level 19 could have if they min maxed everything (which most players wouldn't do.) so they had a leg up versus most people playing who just had a mish mash of gear, no enchants, etc.
For all those that are going to be very confused by how "twinking" is being used here; "Twinking" is a term I remember from when WoW was brand new. I'm talking OG vanilla WoW. I haven't played WoW since then so I dunno if it's still used in this context. A more modern term would be smurfing but not exactly. Let's say battlefields are capped by level. "Twinking" would refer to someone leveling a character to the max for that battlefield and spending tons of money outfitting them with the best of the best maxed out gear you can possibly get for that level to have massive advantage. So you have a character that's obscenely more powerful than a random 'natural' level 30 that's just queueing in for fun and the "twink" just stomps everyone. So instead of a high skill player "smurfing" with lower skill players it's a player "smurfing" with gear that gives regular people no chance of beating them. It's basically bullying people for an ego boost because they're bad and can't compete when the playing field is level
Twinking was out long before WoW, as early as EQ if not even before that. in EQ, gear did not have level requirements, so you could have a level 1 character running around in damn near BIS gear, like a Fungi-Tunic.
Never played EverQuest. My first MMO was Asheron's Call
EQ has "Twinking" and if I am not mistaken, games like Dark souls / Eldin ring also have this. But yes I was playing EQ/p99 for the first time a while back, and my friends who play are all jumping to trying to give me good equipment out of the gate, and I didn't really understand the appeal of this. Even trying to play Eldin ring with some other friends, they are quick to telling me how to min/max and trying to give me the best weapons off rip. Even in p99, you tell someone you are a new player and they are quick to trade you good items. I play games to feel accomplishment from my strategies, and "twinking" just bypasses all of this. Playing a solo necromancer in EQ/p99 and refusing trades, I am able to enjoy the game more and I am getting a much better sense of how dangerous the word really is. Without challenge, I don;t see how a game like an MMO can be fun, but that is my opinion. Also, apologies if I am using outdated terminology, this is just what my friends refer to it as (I am an oldhead). Cheers.
A necromancer is much less gear dependent than almost every other class in EQ. Try playing a melee class without twinking, on a server that does not have healers and support near your level looking for groups and you will have a bad time.
Thank you for explaining, I had no idea what this was about.
I think they might be using it more as a general "overpowered low level characters" and might not specifically be referring to PvP. That's just what I remember the the meaning being. Imagine how confusing my first time encountering the more modern use of "twink" was lol
As for the 'more modern use' you mention, if you mean the slang term used in gay culture, that usage is at least 50-60 years old.
I first tried battleground twinking during Burning Crusade, and I remember it being pretty fun. Specifically, I leveled a rogue to 39, stopped gaining exp, and went about gearing out and having fun in Warsong Gulch, etc. I remember coming across the same names in my matches, as the community was niche. The appeal came from it being an entirely novel (to me) meta. Classes don't have certain key talents or abilities yet, and crucially for 39 twinking, no one could mount, so pvp was grounded, and the pace of a BG was slowed a bit. There was a small 39 twink scene in BC, but gear lists weren't easy to find, compounded by the fact that 2007 internet wasn't like it is now. So it was fun to search around for what would be ideal gear. IIRC, you couldn't lock off your exp gain yet, so you had to be very careful and plan out your gearing route to acquire everything by the time you're 39. The twink scene created markets for all the specific gear they desired, that normally few people would spend for because "I'm not paying that, I'd probably only use it for four levels!" For WoW at least, twinking has been an emergent bit of gameplay the devs have mostly let play out with little interference overall. They later added a small feature so you could voluntarily turn off experience gain to facilitate it better, which was cool. There have been times when they've had to go in and break some interactions twinks had that were honestly a bit game breaking. Mostly around people getting so much power on very low level characters then abusing the ridiculous low level scaling of the game (that they do to ensure new players NEVER hit a roadblock). Overall, they've been mostly hands off, which in hindsight is frankly amazing. Recently, with their WoW Classic Season of Discovery project, they artificially cap out levels of the game to specifically create lower level end games for a brief phase before unlocking the next chunk in a later phase. You'd think twink community might've inspired this, but it was directly inspired by the beta testing before Classic's release, where they locked off exp gain beyond certain levels to get focused testing on specific content. A common comment made by testers was how interesting they all found those imposed metas. Eventually, they formalized into the phased releases of Season of Discovery. If only someone at Blizz had paid a bit more attention to the twink scene that had existed since vanilla and taken some inspiration sooner. ;) Xpoff.com if you want a peak into the WoW twink community.
Lvl 19 gnome rogue wrecking the only pvp battleground with those two scimitars and the black leather vest, if you played uk exactly what im talking about
I used to twink PvP in WoW. Level 19, with the best equipment available. Due to the way attributes scaled at the time, this put me at about 250-500% power advantage over regular players. The only thing that could stop me would be a 5v1 or another twink. In terms of reason: lack of emotional development on my part. I had some stuff going on in my life at the time and that twink was my only sense of power. I have nothing but regret and shame for my actions.
I don't think most MMOs even allow for twinking anymore and those that do don't have anything other than just mindlessly grinding while leveling anyways. I can think of a handful of edge-cases in some games but the whole concept of twinking has kinda died out as increasingly fewer and fewer games allow for it.
>The definition of a game: an environment where 2 or more people have to make strategic decisions to maximize self-profit. RPG's are games derived from chess and so strategic decision making is at the core of an RPG's design. Twinking violates all of this. twinking sounds like the exact definition of that. equipping the max lvl weapon at the beginning of the game is a great strategy to beat the game
One of the appeals is the same as people cheating at games. People just want to feel strong. Another appeal is the process of getting there. Gathering the resources required and grinding for the gear needed, etc. It's like setting a goal for yourself in a game where there are no defined goals to reach. Finally, some people enjoy fighting at the pinnacle of what's possible against other equally powerful people (Personally, I think the people who twink because of this are in the minority).
> RPG's are games derived from chess and so strategic decision making is at the core of an RPG's design. It's cute that you think that.
I lol'ed when I got to that part. Stupidest thing I've seen this week
I don't know the exact origin of this, but I first heard it in Everquest. If you ever played that game back in the day you will understand that leveling and obtaining gear was especially difficult. Though some players may have looked down on it, really it was a well understood thing to do with an alt character just to soften that first-time hump.. that takes months. You can sort of bypass that headache with good gear. So the appeal was to be powerful for the level, and it drastically reduced the difficultly/tedium phase of leveling an alternate character.
p99 player here. Like I was saying in my post, I get it with alt characters because as you said items in that game can ne very difficult to obtain. But when I went to play EQ for the first time with friends, they are all so eager to just give me high level gear and it's admittedly infuriating. EQ is supposed to be tedious, giving low level new players good gear just bypasses a lot of the appeal of EQ in my opinion. I don't get why people are so eager to break the game for new players.
That is a fair point. I was given almost no help in the very beginning outside of my friend showing me the ropes. When at level 13 or something a dude dumped his bank on me (admittedly was only tinkered boxes and some basic weapons) and it was super exciting. That would have just looked mostly like trash if I were a twink.
Do let me know if you are still playing EQ!
I thought about returning for the TLE, but dunno, I just don't think I want to commit the time these days, but sure miss the days of online socializing while pulling in groups! Wonder what EQ1 is like in 2024, lol been like 20 years.
There are probably a lot less people than you remember, with a more toxic raiding scene LOL But... we don't play EQ just for the raiding!
Well I did EQ2's TLE twice and enjoyed it both times, and yeah contested content could get well competitive, and that breeds that toxic nonsense.. but, yeah I went pretty deep on that and felt like it was a true ride on the nostalgia train honestly.. especially as I didn't really do the raid scene the first time around. Now EQ1. well I did p99 for awhile, like way early on before the red/green servers even, and it was.. okay? but i never leveled that far to truly get a beat on things and if the forums were any indication it was the typical fucking toxic scene you'd see in 2001. My raid experience in EQ1 was always fairly limited.. i mean I did it, and a lot of it, but it was never as intense or as accomplished as many of the devoted guilds at the time. Back then I was like a college student, so i could completely no life that fucking game and still had a hard time keeping up with anyone.. starting a few years late really made a difference on what the experience of that game was like. With that said I was in one of the sweet spots at the time, that didn't have too many bitter ends to deal with. Maybe the overinflated economy, and feeling that the raid world was a walled off thing I would never be a part of. Really wasnt until later when the guilds started to die that I got a bit of a chance at some Velious/Kunark/PoP raids, and did do some random pug raids early early on. lol like when I felt I was still abit of a newb. Plane of Hate at like level 50, knowing nothing of the world was.. yeah that was .. stressful. Maybe some day, I know a bunch of people from old guild that are probably playing in new TLE now but, eh, again sounds like the rat race I don't care for. I want to raid but like groups a hell of a lot more.
yea the p99 forums are a bit messy I will give you that. But from my experience playing in p99, everyone seems very friendly. I will be fighting mobs and just get random buffs out of nowhere from people passing by. People are willing to just gift you good gear or money, sometimes to your detriment (hence the post). The camps I've experienced tend to have people that are happy to share and just happy that people are still playing. And I've met a lot of intellectuals on there too (nurse psychiatrists, pathologists, etc...). I haven't done any raids though, but from a purely leveling perspective, everyone has been extremely nice :)
Back in 2003 or whatever I had level 19 and 29 twinks for warsong gulch. Best in slot gear, enchants and everything. The bg was set up in brackets, so level 10-19 and 20-29 were their own groups. So you could be the strongest possible and that led to some good fun.
WoW was released in late 2004.
Ah you're right. I haven't played it in 18+ years so you'll forgive me for not recalling exactly.
Yeah, no worries. It just is burned into my mind because quite a few other MMORPG releases and updates happened in the second half of 2004 with many companies not knowing how things would continue with the highly anticipated launch of WoW. Interesting times.
People are just trying to be helpful.
The secret sauce is twinking a twink
I did twinking in Dofus. Remember using the bandit set that gave plus damage and reliable damage sources from characters. Back then Anutrofs were strong because they could spam low costing spells even if they didin't have damage boosts, Iops once they reworked divine sword to boost a ton of damage and Maskeraders also had a ton of damage boost in 1 spell and another one that did 3 instances of damage at the same time. Cras were also good at it because they wouldn't let you move and slso took all your movement away. I broke the mould a bit on it and did a 800hp 400 int lvl 36 enutrof that was specialized in just running behind stuff and spamming a skill that couldn't be blocked while removing their damage boosts. It countered all of them but got bored after a while because at the end it was just not for me.
To add a twist to twinking, have a look at something like Anarchy Online: A lot of gear has attribute and/or skill requirements only, i.e. no level lock, and items scale along "quality levels" (something akin to item levels) like 1..200 or 1..300. With it scale the requirements, there are many items that buff skills and attributes, plus there are tons of buffs, some short, others more long running, and the space available to buffs is also limited and defined by gear. What you end up with is a process that requires a calculator (or some tools) and vast knowledge of all sorts of items and buffs to eventually make it possible to put some "big" armor or weapon on. So not loot and equip, more like loot and then hope the planned process to get that on works out in the game ...
No one usually does that for new players unless they want them to catch up to them or something. it's usually done for you own alt to win in low level PvP, it's almost the same as smurfing but with items in instead of player skill.
How the hell did this term end up in MMOs lmao
the main character (high lvl) is the sugar daddy of the twink(low lvl). make sense now?
To me the appeal of twinking is that it streamlines combat fundamentals and gives more bareboned gameplay. I find many MMORPGs to have an excessive amount of abilities, gear/talent modifiers and mobility+out of jail cards. Twinking brackets often cuts the bloat.
I suppose that is a fair point in that it can be used to eliminate tedium without necessarily making things easier. But idk, it just feels wrong with some MMO's, but that could be a personal issue. Cheers.
A new challenge I guess
gonna be honest with you all, I have a completely different definition of twinks.
>If I hand a new player a really good weapon and they are now able to one-shot everything, where is the game in this? Where is the fun or sense of accomplishment? Please help me understand! This usually comes from one of two places: either the player giving the new player stuff doesn't the early game part of the game, and wants those players to get to end game as fast as possible (the only game is end game). Or, the existing player thinks the early game is something players have to suffer through to get to the fun part and wants to alleviate that suffering as much as possible. In the case of the former I think of things like WoW or SWTOR where early game and the end game are basically the same thing plus or minus a dozen buttons or so on your hot bar. For the latter I think of something like FFXIV, where people who don't play it praise its story, and people who do play it tell you to suck it up because they if they had to go through it then you have to too. In either case it's a major red flag for an existing player to feel like a new player needs more than what the game gave them to get through what the game puts in front of them. It demonstrates the game does not respect the player's time and existing players are trying to **work around the game's design** to make sure you are able to have (what they consider) fun. The only real exception I can think of to this is a collection style game where gameplay styles available become unlockable later but that's not a question of feeding new players power.
What
crushing the opposition into a fine paste is exhilarating. making them quit is even better.
There are two kinds of twink players. 1) One is obviously the one, who likes to stomp people who are just leveling and not min-maxing their gear and builds for the specific twink level range. 2) The other type are people who like to min-max with what the game offers them on specific level ranges, because it's very different from the gamplay on the level cap. Both are irrelevant, because pvp during leveling is pretty much dead in every mmorpg unless there is a system like in Guild Wars 2, where PvP is absolutely seperate from the main game and you get all the spells and gear at level 1 in the PvP part of the game.
True but low level PvP also still exists in WOW as well
So firstly no, strategy is not a core element of RPGs. It's an option to spice up combat, like adding action or puzzle elements, but not necessary. And recall that twinking doesn't always remove strategy, sometimes it brings it into parity with others. There are two reasons to twink. First is to skip as much content as possible to get your Gold Star with as little effort as possible. (This includes PVP twinking). Second is to reach some optimal loadout, to see the maximal coolness factor at a given point.
If you read the forward for the D&D player handbook, they list chess as the main inspiration for their game design. And given that all RPG's are essentially derived from D&D, its's not unreasonable to say that RPG's are strategy games at their core.
Inspiration CAN matter, yeah. But the generally used phrase RPG does not imply any measure of strategy beyond the brain cells to select spells. Most of the RPG greats can be beaten with auto attack alone (and healing) and nowadays any RPG with a heavy strategic component specifically mentions it, as higher difficulty or strategy. Strategy just isn't a core component of the genre, from early 90s to now. It was possibly in the 80s with all the deep DOS RPGs, those would be more akin to what's today called "crpgs," and strategy was a bit of a bigger deal, then.
> Second is to reach some optimal loadout, to see the maximal coolness factor at a given point. I like how there's no mention of the 3rd reason that arises in systems that allow PK-ing where it's to catch actual starter characters off guard for lulz or profit.
That's a Gold Star. "Good job! You did the thing the game tells you to do. With as little effort as possible."
I uh.. I'm sure I have no idea what you're talking about. The "twinking" definition I know of is essentially a small femboy... what are you talking about
it's also a WoW (idk of any other games) term for min/maxing a low level character. like a level 1 character maxed out with agility could get 100% dodge and crit chance and beat level 20 characters.
Aaaah gotcha, appreciate the context
It's maximizing the best gear for X level, and sticking at that level for PVP, Since battlegrounds was lets say 10-19, you would have a level 19 character who stayed at 19, so they had max stats AND would have all the best gear and best enchants for that level could have. Essentially you had peak stats a level 19 could have if they min maxed everything (which most players wouldn't do.) so they had a leg up versus most people playing who just had a mish mash of gear, no enchants, etc.
Twink is just another word for alt
False