Yep, I am quite familiar with the argument of knowledge hoarding as a means to effective online play.
Two of my three guides were directly the result of online play and focused upon it. Besides not joining clubs, I also avoided participating in "official" competitions that generated pecking orders. Yet, while being among the best, I managed to always share how I got the kills. That led to a lot more fun by everyone. Myself (who learned and got better and could not fall back on the same old tired bag of tricks) and the students who rather than getting their egos bruised found new subtle aspects to their hobby that had previously alluded them.
I looked at the materials at the SOAC site and thought "what a shame", I would have loved to read most of it. Also, I thought about how frequently you hear forum participants lament on this site how small the player community is and how the few developers of such games can barely generate enough sales from one game to produce the next. Every game has among its customers an abandonment rate. One of the factors involved is how approachable the games is to novice players. For games such as SC/DW, there are some who will buy the game ... struggle with complexity of concepts and rather limited training materials and give up. I saw many flight simmers who fell into that category who just needed some help to get going. So, instead of hoarding knowledge to score the next kill, more proficient players could be helping to reduce the abandonment rate. That leads to more online players, more interesting competition, and a larger customer base for the developers. (since many offline players benefit from materials produced by the online players)
Well, enough "ranting", I am off to the my sonar room to reinvent the wheel.
