User blog comment:ClariS/The Fallacies of Item Efficiency/@comment-5266525-20130302154019/@comment-5088437-20130303025729

Shaw,

I'm not quite sure where you're getting that this post, originating from RoG, is insinuating that the wiki is guilty of something. I might have missed something though.

- NT

On topic, however, its a very common human trait to use as many simple metrics as possible to judge value and performance. Businesses in the real world, for example, are horribly guilty of this in so many terrible ways.

Many businesses continue to use horridly outdated systems and don't upgrade where and when they should because it costs money in the immediate, completely failing to understand the value gained over time. They have also decreased labor costs by leaving places short handed, which has a side effect of decreasing the performance and efficiency of a location. However, in the short term it looks good, and that's the metric they're focused on.

Any large organization when it hits a certain size begins to fall into the trap of oversimplification, generally because granularity isn't something that's favorable to bullet points. Additionally, critical thinking isn't a skill we as human beings are very fond of. Its certainly about as common as common sense.

Since the article mentioned WoW, I can remember the spite fomulated around meters when they were adopted en masse. Those meters, while a useful tool, soon became the holy grail of quantifiable skill, and if you could put up massive DPS or HPS, then you were lauded regardless of many other important traits.

Sure, you could slam out massive numbers at the beginning of a fight, but then you (pardon the internetism) 'went down like a cheap hooker' when you blew past the tank's threat threshold and got insta-gibbed. Naturally, it was the tanks fault. Also you could be a jerk and grab items because 'those numbers, he carried' supposedily.

Anyway, TL;DR, this informative post only highlights a problem that humanity as a whole has had and will continue to have for the foreseeable future.