Originally Posted by
Premier
It's really simple.
Also, regarding the ubiquitous "It's unintuitive!" complaint: No it isn't. You're misusing the word. "Unintuitive" would mean that humans are inherently built to equate "higher number" with "better quality". However, this is plain simply not true. 1 is a lower number than 2, and yet, nobody ever says that "1st class train tickets being better than 2nd class ones is unintuitive!" Nobody ever whines "Why do they call excellent actors (or any other professionals) "1st rate" and bad ones "3rd rate"? Higher numbers should mean better! It doesn't make sense!" A Petty Officer 4th Class and a Petty Officer 2nd Class on a Navy ship never get confused about who's superiour to whom. Heck, even spaceships are launched on a countdown, not on a countup from zero to ten, and nobody ever criticizes the technique on grounds of descending numbers being unintuitive.
Why? Because "higher number is better" is NOT, I repeat, NOT some inherent, biologically or mentally determined principle, and therefore it's not something you can properly call "intuitive".
I mean no disrespect to anyone in specific, but over time I've become convinced that whenever someone complains of THAC0 being unintuitive, they in fact mean one of two things. The first is "I find subtracting a small number from another small number, let alone a single-digit negative number, to be too hard, or at least significantly harder than an addition of numbers, because my primary school math education sucked. However, I'm too narcisstic to admit to sucking at math, and too lazy to fix it with practice; so I'll just criticize the game instead."
And the other is "I want to belong to the cool kids, and the cool kids are all hissing and spitting and booing at descending AC, so I'll just mimic them without thinking about whether they're actually right or not."