Acceltra Prime from Warframe
What is the Dunning-Kruger Effect?
Imagine this. You start a new hobby. For learning purpose, let’s use an example. Competitive clothes hanging. Knowledge in this field is obviously limited and you’ve not done much research on it, but you saw it on the Internet and decided to give it a whirl. Your hands are dexterious, perhaps you have an advantage due to your height. So you participate in a small competition with your friends. Congratulations! You wiped the floor with them. You now think to yourself that you’re the greatest clothes hanger-er in the world.
You decide to take it to the next level. You’ve already proven yourself to be fantastic, so let’s just participate in a local tournament!
The humbling comes quickly. Your opponents are performing at speeds you thought unfathomable. They utilized techniques you’ve never even see before – one guy kickflips before hanging each article of clothing, another is throwing each shirt until it somehow lands perfectly on each hanger, and yet another is somehow hanging the clothes with his legs while doing a handstand. All of them are outpacing you and finish at relatively similar timings, while you’re at dead last.
You thought yourself the greatest clothes hanger-er in the known universe, if not at least close to it. You feel the scathing disappointment of failure. You believed deep within yourself that you had finally found your calling, only to realise that the way up is far further than you had initially anticipated. All because you did not know that the peak was that different from your knowledge.
In essence, that is the Dunning-Kruger Effect. It is not simply that ignorant people are overconfident – it is that all individuals, regardless of intelligence, have the potential of overestimating themselves simply because they lack the requisite information to know what is the correct estimation of themselves.
Now how does this translate to video games?
You’ve started a new ARPG and you’ve picked up a new weapon around halfway through your run. The God-Slaying Blade of Valor EX++. The name itself strikes awe in your very core. The natural response is to equip it and take it for a spin, so you do. And it does indeed perform much better than your previous weapon. While previously you were taking about 20 strikes to quell a single foe, with your new toy, they fall in about five. You tell your friends about it, or maybe just think it to yourself – this weapon is the objectively correct choice to obtain at this stage of the game, and everyone should use it.
Out of curiousity, you decide to perform some research. You hop on your favoured search engine, and type in “The God-Slaying Blade of Valor EX++”. The first post you bump into is a post in Reddit about one guy saying that it’s the bestest most awesomest weapon in the world. Wonderful! You’re vindicated!
Then you hop into the comment section, and the poor person who posted the post is getting decimated. It’s a mid-weapon at best, if not completely worthless unless you’re running a specific build. For a better weapon, you should have checked behind the castle during a blood moon, done 20 rotations with your joystick, and then perform a very specific combo against a crack on the castle wall to find the weapon Buttpoop. Now THAT’S the objectively superior meta option that slays your foes in one hit.
What can you do about this, really? You don’t know what you don’t know. And if your experience is heightened by going in blind . This isn’t an indictment on your playstyle, rather an observation on behavioural patterns of certain individuals in communities.
Unless you’re one of those people that go onto forums or servers and tell people to use this thing, and when you are politely corrected, you decide to lash out, “WELL, IT WORKS FOR ME!” or “YOU’RE JUST A TRYHARD” and the like. There is nothing wrong with pursuing the objectively strongest option, nor is there anything wrong with playing at your own pace. There IS also the other hand of people who know too much, and demean others who make mistakes and are missing information. Don’t be either of these people! Be nice! Anyway, let’s run through some examples.
Final Fantasy VI
Meet Gau.
Now meet Umaro.
Personality-wise, these two characters aren’t so different. Umaro is a literal Sasquatch you meet in the second half of the game (after beating him up in a fight that’s so hilariously easy you almost feel bad for the poor thing) that can barely communicate, while Gau is a 13-year old boy that was raised by beasts, who also similarly has trouble with the communication aspect.
Umaro is remarkably simple. Every Final Fantasy game has an equipment system. Your weapon, your armor, whatnot. FFVI has an additional system where you equip Magicite on your characters so that they gain the ability to learn Magic.
The intention of me explaining all this is to inform you that Umaro interacts with neither of those systems. You can’t even control him in battle. In exchange, he does very high amounts of damage, along with a funny attack where he literally picks up your party members and throws them at your foe. It’s great. You literally just put him in your party, and he does work.
Gau, on the other hand, joins your party as probably the most confusing character in any Final Fantasy game. He doesn’t have an Attack button and can’t equip weapons. Instead, he comes with a Rage option. Cool.
You hop into a battle with him, select Rage, and are presented with a HUGE list of options, most of which are blank. You see some names of monsters you recognise, so you press one of them. Then, like Umaro, you lose all control of Gau. He starts to randomly switch between a regular, weak attack since he can’t equip weapons, and an attack that you may or may not have seen performed from the enemy that you selected, that also happens to do pitiful damage.
You also see a “Leap” option, and the game tells you that using Leap teaches you the Rage of the monster that you were in battle with in that specific area! Ah, things start to make more sense now. So you’re meant to learn abilities from monsters. So you get into battle again, this time selecting Leap! The battle ends, and Gau rejoins you after a few encounters. Then you try what you just got, and… it also sucks.
You never use Gau ever again. You continue with the game as per normal, find Umaro, realise how much damage he can do compared to the rest of your party, and bring Umaro everywhere.
In the future, your friend asks you about FFVI. It was a great game, fantastic story. You tell them about how fantastic Umaro was, and the disappointment you felt with Gau.
Now let’s look at a tier list for FFVI.
You can use inference to figure out who’s where.
To be completely fair, if you have any experience with video games in general, you would know that characters you can’t control generally don’t tend to be very good, as you wouldn’t be able to adjust to the dynamic events that occur in combat.
And when you think about it, if a character has access to the ENTIRE list of monsters (252 btw), it’s fairly logical that at least a couple of them would be good, if not gamebreaking.
But let’s break it down.
This is the Rafflesia.
When Gau uses the Rage of the Rafflesia, he gains access to Entice. Entice functions identically to the Confusion status, i.e. enemies will constantly hit themselves.
The difference? The first is that Entice isn’t broken by getting hit, so the Confusion is effectively permanent. The second is that whatever resists the Confusion status, doesn’t resist Entice. That means you can essentially break any boss by using the Rafflesia Rage. This is broken, completely trivializes the game, and isn’t even the reason why Gau is S tier, because I don’t want to count this even though it’s completely within the game’s rules. But y’know, you can do that.
For the first half of the game, Gau is your best AoE character. You use Rage, and it’s essentially a 50% chance he clears the random encounter, assuming you’ve diligently Leap’d prior. He gains access to spells that your characters don’t have access to at that stage, which also makes certain bosses much easier.
In the second half of the game, Gau is also one of two characters (the other being Mog) that can attain 255 Defense, meaning he takes 0 damage from physical attacks. One thing I neglected to mention about Rage is that he also gains all the resistances and absorptions of the monster you choose to Rage. So you’d now use the Magic Urn Rage, which gives you absorption to ALL elements. That’s right, you can make Gau immortal. Although the additionally ability you get with Magic Urn is Curaga (a healing spell), so if your team dies, you’re sure to win. It’ll just take some time. A lot of time. Like your opponent is a piece of granite and you’d eventually just die of starvation because you can’t break it.
That’s a lot of words to tell you that Gau is really good. The caveat is that you need to put in effort for him to pay you dividends, as well as actually have the knowledge of what to do with him.
On the other hand, I have absolutely nothing more to tell you about Umaro. You literally already know everything he does, and there’s no variance to it. Well, minimal – he has two pieces of Relics that he CAN equip, but it doesn’t change the fact that if shit hits the fan, Umaro isn’t going to be putting in any effort to clean anything up.
Warframe
Now let’s look at an example from a live service game! That means if I forget this exists, this may no longer be topical due to how things change in games. So for the record, even though you should be able to see it at the bottom, the current date of writing is July 29th, 2026. You can’t call me a liar!
You saw it at the start, but once again:
The Acceltra Prime, everybody.
At the current time of writing, this is the S tier section on Primary Weapons on the community-voted tier list on Overframe.
Until a few months ago, Acceltra Prime was one of the easiest weapons to acquire due to a rotational system. It is no longer available as freely, but the damage dealt to the community as a whole due to misinformation has been done all the same.
In fairness, Warframe is notorious for being not the best (read: very bad) at guiding new players. You WILL need a guide to make it to endgame in Warframe.
And people often want things that are aesthetically pleasing to be good. It’s human nature. We ignore that Edward Cullen is hundreds of years old and Belle Swan is not that because damn that Robert Pattinson certainly is quite a looker.
The Acceltra Prime’s gimmick is that when you shoot a bullet past 5 meters, it becomes a rocket. So it explodes. And to be completely honest, it looks kickass. Coupled together that it was tied with one of the best Warframe trailers to date in terms of sheer hype-ness, and it’s understandable that people would WANT Acceltra Prime to be good.
It is not.
It’s not a situation like Umaro where it’s completely unusable. Quite the opposite, it’s perfectly serviceable. Unfortunately, it’s just serviceable in a game of absolutely bonkers broken weapons.
I’m not going to run through the stats with you. If you play Warframe and do think that the Acceltra Prime is a good weapon (note: fun is not in the equation here, like whatever you want to like), just know that it’s outclassed purely through stats by weapons such as the Burston Prime Incarnon, Coda Hema, Coda Bassocyst. Not to mention abusing certain mechanics of the game that make weapons like the Kuva Sobek absurdly powerful, but this isn’t the avenue for that discussion. You could also just use a Secondary weapon, which are, for some reason, tuned to be far stronger than Primary weapons. It’s like someone forgot that just because the gun is smaller doesn’t mean that you code the numbers into them any differently but give them concessions as if that were the case.
You can’t even argue that there’s any amount of quality of life in the weapon. It has a 48 clip size, and a 96 magazine size. 3 chambers and you’re empty, and it came in the trailer of the Warframe that increases your fire rate, so you’re going to be chewing through that thing faster than a fat kid through a cheddar cheese block.
Can you make it work if you sincerely do like the weapon? Yes of course, absolutely. Mirage and Saryn are some of the best weapon buffers in the game and it does have some synergy with Mirage specifically due to explosions. Would you be better off using another weapon with them?
I mean, yeah.
Closing
If you interpret any of this as “I need knowledge to have fun in games” or “this guy is forcing things onto me”, I would politely request that you find a lima bean, and shove it into your eyelids.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is certainly a thing that happens a lot in games and you could point to it occurring in almost any game that you play at differing levels of extremities. Someone in Terraria might think Tungsten/Silver Armor is fantastic because they haven’t dug deep enough to find Gold/Platinum, or further. Or maybe in Skyrim they find Iron Armor to be broken just because they were running naked the entire time prior.
Just because it exists, doesn’t mean it should change how you play games. Maybe it should change how you treat people when discussing objective situations, because if I see ONE more person talk about how the Acceltra Prime is ackshually a broken weapon, I’ll grab a fork to scrape out my tastebuds so I can’t have a sample of the shit you’re feeding me.
No, what I want you to gather from this is to remember that a lot of games do tend to be solved puzzles, especially at this stage of the Internet. Whether you care enough to want to know the solutions to said puzzles is completely your decision. I don’t even use Gau in majority of my FFVI playthroughs simply due to the aforementioned hassle, but that doesn’t change the truth that he IS the best character in the game.
But it’s a game. So just have fun. And if that means making mistakes, then make them.
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