Why are people so eager to share that they're unenthusiastic about something. Isn't it more constructive to talk about the things that we are psyched about?
Because criticism is both good for the critic and pointless if you only talk about the good stuff. Please bear with the following somewhat rambling anecdote.
I was a music major back in undergrad, and we had this thing called studio class, which is a weekly meeting of all the students of a particular professor, in my case the flute professor. In studio class, or studio, we'd hear performances by our peers or perform ourselves and then we'd solicit feedback, not only from our professors but also from each other. This was very helpful as an artist because we got to hear what we sounded like from many different vantage points, both physical and mental, though I quickly learned that some feedback was more helpful than others. Hearing from a range of our peers of varying experience levels gave us an opportunity to understand how effective our choices were. Additionally, we learned the life skill of accepting feedback gracefully. When I received feedback, I was always excited to hear about strong emotional reactions both negative and positive because a) I'd rather be polarizing than bland and b) a reasonable amount of what we hate, especially as musicians, we simply do not yet understand. Negative feedback, however, was much more useful than positive feedback because it let me know which way to correct my actions rather than simply telling me to keep doing something.
However, perhaps even more importantly, we learned a lot--and perhaps more!--through the process of providing feedback, which is what we're doing here.Giving feedback helps us understand what we do and don't like (I was surprised to discover how much I value resonance in mechanics) and it helps us figure out how to fix our own problems (I'd prefer to see Manifest or Morph used as "hidden information" mechanics and I find cost-reduction mechanics dull unless that process of acquiring that reduction represents an interesting puzzle). But sure, we can do this on our own. What we cannot do on our own is to have a conversation about these things, like with Lin Sivvi But Better over in the Low Powered Card Spotlight thread. It's really hard to change your own mind. I'd love to, for example, hear something that addresses my concerns of a lack of resonance with Foretell. Maybe there's something I've missed! By voicing my opinion that Foretell does not appeal to me because I don't find it to be a resonant mechanic, I'm creating an opportunity for others to offer alternatives. Maybe Foretell should be a cube staple because it's just that good as a smoothing mechanic. Maybe, like Morph, it's going to start off a little clunky but will grow into something we love. Maybe I need to be more patient and see what the rest of the spoilers bring. But crucially, we don't have this conversation and therefore this chance to grow if we restrict these sorts of threads to being hype trains.
TL,DR: Having opinions in general is a good thing--don't you hate it when you and your friends can't agree on where to go for dinner because everyone is fine with everything? It's only when these opinions are either universally positive or universally negative that there's a problem, because everything is outside of a useful range.
goblins, so I'd rather have a good goblin than a good changeling.
