Originally Posted by
roookey1
@Mike may I kindly remind that it wasn't me who said that stripping is 'awful and soulless'. I wrote it tongue in cheek as someone on the forum said that I would come up with this quote (just read a few posts above mine where I posted that). So I wrote exactly that. :) What I really think is that stripping is stupid, pitiable, obviously gives a delusional feeling of 'greatness' to most of the involved, that it ridicules the actual idea of the game (armor / battle competitions) and that people who 'strip' to win and on top of that, seriously think that win-buying is something they can be proud of, must have an interesting psychological setup.
The thing with now occasionally 'stripping' myself happens after very long and complex analysis of game mechanics, weeks of strategic planning in our guild and a consultation of Stephen Hawking. Basically it follows the principle that behaving smart in a group of monkeys doesn't help anyone. The monkeys will still do what they want and probably even laugh about the smartass among them. To gradually start changing things, the intelligent person has to adapt to the primitive, and behave the same way that feels familiar to them. The funny thing is, if the intelligent person adapts, everything feels more smoothly, it costs less of his precious time and attention, and the opponent/the monkeys go on doing what they always did anyway, they probably won't even realize that their odd behavioral patterns have become even more 'costly'. They may think 'see, now he's doing the same as us, so we were right', missing to realize that the smartass doesn't even seriously participate, but only keeps his investment as small as possible. Also, it's fun playing Circus, to jump around like crazy and do funny things once in a while. But don't worry, most of the time we're still playing 'serious' and will try to make you fail as much as possible so you can only make 4x20 per purchased life extension. ;)
@Scabs priceless reaction, and a great illustration of what I said above, thanks! :D