Right way to play? Pt. 1

I'm going to try to address each question as a blog post and be as concise and coherent as possible, and hopefully interesting. Let's look at the first one, where a person new to a game posts on a forum about the game asking for advice on their character. The responses are varied and each one seems to give an idea of a 'right' way to play, or the reactions to said posts. The concept of a right way to play is varied, to some people there is no real wrong way to play but there are ways that are better and worse.

To the people simply giving general advice IE what abilities to pick or offering a build strategy they are simply answering the question and don't seem to offer any judgement on a right or wrong way. But I've heard some gamers condemn 'builds' as wrong or something to be avoided because they felt it detracted from organic character growth or that it took the person outside of the game. Others might counter "the player wants to be good at X, I wrote up how to be good at X" and X could be anything from a fighting style, to a method of using magic, to efficient underwater basketweaving.

To those offering builds there might also be divides, some are far more mechanically intensive where others are bare bones. In here we get the idea that if you're going to do something as a focus you need to go at it full tilt, IE second best isn't good enough. They might even justify it as 'If you're not doing your best the rest of the group is being let down' And then other people argue that he wasn't necessarily even asking for a comprehensive build, just some general information about what to look for, saying that they're trying to force others to play like them.

There are also some who might say that the players decision was a poor one and they should try a different class or set of options in order to do what they want. Now, their commentary is seen by some as simple advice and help to a newbie, IE if they want to play a certain style of character certain classes match the theme better than others or certain power templates offer that ability collection more easily. Or perhaps a certain class or ability template is just bad, at least from their perspective, and they want to warn the player against using it to avoid frustration.

Each of these things and the reactions to them imply concepts of right and wrong ways to play the game, hell a lot of them might even just be seen as tracing from the idea of an 'optimization' vs 'role play' dichotomy. Where there is seen as a sort of scale where you can't do both one and the other and that being good at one necessarily means being bad at another. The idea also that either one is a good or bad way of playing. So I guess the question that should be asked is if any of the people in my example were 'wrong' and if so why? I'll try to address the other questions soon.