Re: Why all the elitism?
Playing the game in an arduously repetitive fashion - doing runs - is grinding. Making new builds with their own unique requisite playstyles is clearly not. But this is a purely semantic point.
bahahahaha. Even a bvb wouldn't call 99 a necessary level.
Ah, the desperate excuse of the insecure player who knows that if they were put on an equal footing with other players who spend more time playing and less time grinding their true incompetence would become manifest - or why else would they complain? It's patently untrue that skill = constant*f(time) where the constant is universal to every player no matter how they play the game or their background and the whole idea in bundled with a wealth of flawed assumptions. Why should a gamer who obsessively levels to max and acquires the best gear in the realm via extensive pvm get an autowin vs a high level and well geared player who's spent dozens of hours honing their skills in pvp against the full range of builds and players the realm has to offer?
D2's real endgame was in cultivating epeen, pandering to a item collection, pvp, or self-imposed challenges via self-imposed rules.
WARNING VERY LONG POST I SPENT 30 MINUTES WRITING IT WHILE LISTENING TO BILL MAHER(And No I don't need anyone who says something like OMG BILL MAHER FAN blahblah I probably only agree with 50-80% of what he says, but 100% of what he says is interesting even if some of what he says is very.... different, but as always lots of good stuff said 
, mixing comedy and politic's, Great times
EDIT: Plus 10ish minutes of editing(mainly adding more / changing some words) not fixing comprehension when your typing 120+ wpm I"m to lazy to care about that.
IN B4 WALLOFTEXT!
1. Sure first part is true didn't say it wasn't grinding is part of 95% of games, however 2nd, in order to make that character with a bunch of diff builds etc etc that means they have to level it up. By doing the grindy rush's(unless they played through which i dout) and the grindy baal runs.
2. I didn't say 99 was necessary, read other posts and you would see i talked about what was nice about d2 was a lvl 85 stood a chance against a lvl 99 to where you could make the item difference nothing, and stats by a small amount that a players "skill" could determine the outcome. Who said I have a level 99 because I grinded baal runs manually? Hell no. It's actually my 2nd 99 , as my first 99 was a longer time ago who got banned. Again I didn't spend that time getting him 99, but It wasn't grindy baal runs then either, but GRINDY COW RUNS WEEE! then later on 40 hex + quark bow , or on my barb quark sword. MMM cow 1 shot dead, those were actually fun times, other than the fact that only 2 classes existed since none others stood a chance, bowzon(and of course the java duels!!! WEEE JAB) and barb (which most will say a barb didn't but thats because they were all bad)
3. 1st, how does skill not relate to time? Umm um sorry i forgot that you see people younger than 20 playing pro baseball. Oh wait thats right, thats because usually it takes YEARS to get BETTER. Oh thats right we have doctors with a high school diploma, wait no we don't they do 10 more YEARS after that.
Oh what this is a game and is totally different? No, More time = More knowledge. As you gain knowledge you gain skill. and you gain knowledge over time, not all of a sudden in a 2 week time frame.
Therefor Time = Knowledge = Skill Which in turn again = more knowledge like perhaps moving the mouse not as quickly, strafing instead of running 1 way. Or in other games like perhaps AION, don't use all these fatty nukes on a healer right away(which can be a chanter or cleric both who stand a chance in a pvp perspective), use some medium . low dmg moves. they will think, oh he doesn't do to much dmg and try to deal a lil bit of dmg because you can't heal but they can. Then they will be about 40-50% hp when they start healing, BAM nuke them, stun them, silence them, etc.
ANOTHER EXAMPLE, you don't start playing counterstrike and getting 90% of your kills as headshots (unless your playing source which w/e thats a bad game) it takes TIME. There will never be anything that doesn't take time to reach a higher level of skill or knowledge.
your quote here "where the constant is universal to every player no matter how they play the game or their background and the whole idea in bundled with a wealth of flawed assumptions. "
No one said that, infact it couldn't be more untrue. Theres some people that could spends years on something and just suck no matter what. While some people might be as good as the best players in there game/server within 1/2 the time it took the other people to get there. However its highly unlikly that lets say the best "guild/legion/clan" that have been the best raiding/pvping or w/e they are doing for the past 3 years together. That all of a sudden some random guild/legion/clan made out of a group of people who just turned a plausible level for w/e it is there doing be it pvp or pve, and all of a sudden pass them up.
Sure thats not impossible. But I can guarantee you it would only happen with at least a group of friends on vent who spend alot of TIME, and were the best at there stuff in the other game before coming to this game. Example if Ensidia(which I'm only using this guild as an example because they are the most known guild/clan,etc known world wide by gamers wether they like WoW or not) personally I don't like them cause they don't like USA and have this EU e-peen but at the same time I don't care because they arn't in the USA, anyways. If there whole core raid went to ANY game similar to WoW be it where WoW originated from (Linage , all other MMO's) or what originated from the Idea of WoW and other MMO's with new ideas (AION, Blade and Soul(i think) ) they have a 99% chance of being the best guild/legion/clan in that game they play because of the TIME they spend granted them KNOWLEDGE which in turn granted them SKILL.
Now your quote "Why should a gamer who obsessively levels to max and acquires the best gear in the realm via extensive pvm get an autowin vs a high level and well geared player who's spent dozens of hours honing their skills in pvp against the full range of builds and players the realm has to offer?"
Who said this? I think they should be even, I stated about vanilla wow where pve gear = best pvp gear, yeah sure that was because WoW was made where they couldn't go and offer the same PvP gear as the PvE gear, it wasn't going to work like that.
So in WoW your left with the ridiculous opposite where the person with the best "GEAR" from PvP gets an autowin against the person with the best "GEAR" of PvE. Skill is not played into this factor.
I would love D3 to make these factor into each other, but non MMORPG games that are just ARPG are not usually made into some "Even PvE and even PvP type scenario"
Aion does a pretty amazing job in this catagory(why im gonna play it, at least till d3 which is like 2 years away anyways), essentially the abyss where you PvP (or other places there have been added in now) that have no max amount of people, they arn't instanced its like world PvP but still catagorized within a massive radius so you can't just kill someone at lvl 10 leveling, you get most of BEST gear from abyss. However they also have instances for the PvE lover that some gear is better than what you can obtain from PvP and vice versa, while some gear is virtually the same. So it isn't a nessecity, but by doing both you will be given a "Minuscule" advantage.
"D2's real endgame was in cultivating epeen, pandering to a item collection, pvp, or self-imposed challenges via self-imposed rules"
Well yeah, and guess what, it was obviously considered fun by the majority or D2 wouldn't still have as many people as it does now. Or it wouldn't have so many people wanting a D3.
Perhaps not the e-peen as i think it is used to much, even by me. For instance for me its personally a E-Pride. I could care less about how someone else views me in a game wether they see me as "the person with the most time, the best, the person who uses cheap advantages, the person who cheated to level, the person with no job/life, ETC" it doesn't matter. (which i do have a job/life im not saying all of these relate to me just things people like to say to those who are often times #1)
All that matters is saying "I'm the best at least at what I do and I prove it by having the most points, or kill/death ratio, or high accuracy, or w/e it is the rankings is done by" This is not E-Peen, But E-PRIDE! In the end its just a game so what does it matter to be #1 in a game?
Well sorry to tell you but if that person who is #1 in a game, puts that time into something important in life. they will succeed very far.
For the 95% of people who didn't read this because it was to long all you need to know is, Time = Knowledge = Skill, prove in examples above if you read
Basic Principal of life and everything including things outside of life(for those who consider a game outside of life) is How Much Time And Effort You Put Into Something Is What Your Going To Get Out Of It. Or in layman's words Put TIME into gaining knowledge on the molecular bioscoplicle organisms and you can become a bio engineer (or w/e i don't know) and put TIME into gaining knowledge about a game , how ur skills works, what to do during x to have the outcome be y etc etc I can add but my post is way to long already -_-
