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"I was able to show them that they simply were not the demographic for which these computers were built."

You sound like a teacher who is proud of himself for finally getting his student to realize why he is still isn't quite ready to compete in the Special Olympics.

Actually, I was referring to the Special Olympics, hence the use of the politically incorrect term "retards" rather than the politically incorrect term "cripples". (Sorry if I've offended anyone, you're welcome to use the term "asshole" to describe me -- it fits.)

Virtual Case File sure makes them seem Special as in Olympics

Oh, so you got to level 100 in 419 hours online. And it took me 552, so you must be better at this than I am.

That's not nonsense. That's the truth. If I earned $100 in 80% of the time it took you, I'd be a better worker (according to the principles of capitalism).

Except...how much of your time was spent chatting, crafting, exploring, questing, fighting other players?

Many hobbies, from bicycling to basketweaving to RPGs, derive a great portion (majority?) of their enjoyability by peripheral activities like the pleasure of chatting with friends.

But, outside of the Special Olympics, there are other measures of ability beyond how much fun you had trying. We can conduct simple contests to tell who is the best player at a game. For PVP games (including reallife things such as football) a simple head-to-head contest is all that's needed. For a PVE game (including real quasi-sports like track&field) you set some metric of achievement and see who scores the highest. As Jack already explained, the best availble metric to quantify MMORPG ability is XP/hour.

you would be good enough to explain how levelling provides any useful and demonstrable distinction between one player and another.

When people play the game, what are they trying to do? (Aside from the worthlessly abstract "Have fun"). They want to either defeat computer challenges, view content, or collect power... all of which comes down to levelling. If the game weren't a level-grind like all other popular MMORPGs, then it would be valid to use another standard. But as long as the gameplay is about leveling, the fastest levellers will be the best players, by definition.

Consider if you were asked to objectively pick which of a set of players of a solo game (like Doom 3) was the best. You'd have to count how long it takes them to complete the game, or how many times they loaded a save, or something else quantifiable with a hard linkage to skill. The amount of time they spend admiring the scenary or toying with physics doesn't make them better players, even though they may be having more fun, which is the ostensible objective of games.

Well, Microsoft can at least claim credit for running the show over at the special olympics. The reboot frequency seems to be hovering around 9 days on average. But please don't call IIS unstable, it's simply uptime challenged.

My desktop machine is faster than a Cray 1, and it'll never be labelled "Supercomputer" by any rational being.

Unless their architecture actually hits the Top Ten, I'm not going to be impressed that it's overcoming its handicap. Unless you're running a Special Olympics for computers and "everyone's a winner."

You sure are, considering you're this kind of special.