My instinctive response is: weight classes are for controlled competitions where fairness is what we actually want. For social status games, if you want to enforce weight classes, you need a governing body who gets to define the classes and define the rules of the game, but the rules of social status games frequently include being not fully expressible in precise terms. This isn’t necessarily a showstopper, but it necessarily includes admitting what range of the hierarchy you’re in and cannot rise above. As I understand it, the reason the self-sorting works today is that when people compete in the wrong weight classes, it’s not fun for either side. A Jupiter Brain might theoretically be amenable to playing a social game with me on my level, but at best it would be like me playing tic-tac-toe with a little kid, where the kid is old enough to realize I’m throwing the game but not old enough to have solved the game.
Personally I’d much rather not spend my time on such games when it is possible to manage that. But I don’t always have that choice now, and probably still won’t at least sometimes in the future.
My instinctive response is: weight classes are for controlled competitions where fairness is what we actually want. For social status games, if you want to enforce weight classes, you need a governing body who gets to define the classes and define the rules of the game, but the rules of social status games frequently include being not fully expressible in precise terms. This isn’t necessarily a showstopper, but it necessarily includes admitting what range of the hierarchy you’re in and cannot rise above. As I understand it, the reason the self-sorting works today is that when people compete in the wrong weight classes, it’s not fun for either side. A Jupiter Brain might theoretically be amenable to playing a social game with me on my level, but at best it would be like me playing tic-tac-toe with a little kid, where the kid is old enough to realize I’m throwing the game but not old enough to have solved the game.
Personally I’d much rather not spend my time on such games when it is possible to manage that. But I don’t always have that choice now, and probably still won’t at least sometimes in the future.