Comment by xemdetia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xemdetia | Hacker News Reader

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Do any of those actually have a competitive scene? I think the thing I have missed most in the recent RTS was the lack of place to bump into people like you used to be able to. It's the same criticism I give to most of the modern FPS which have replaced the tools to allow a community to be born (lobby mostly) with matchmaking. While I follow SCR/SC2 fairly closely I haven't heard of any ladder/informal competitive arrangements for any of those other games.

The problem with many RTS games from a longevity standpoint is that most RTS fans do find them at some point, they play through the single player campaign, and multiplayer is either stagnant/busted/a mere shadow of the actual singleplayer campaign/has lousy game cycle/no useful replay system. I feel like too many of the recent generation of RTS games have fallen down these paths. People always need to keep in mind when thinking about SCR/BW one of the tricks to making it competitive was running the game on the fastest speed to make it interesting and fix the game cycle. Most of the newer RTS's often do not expose such interesting knobs to help find the competitive mode in the stock game, or are missing map editors and other tools to help create new content for a game and fix perceived problems for multiplayer within the confines of the shipped game.

The actual problem with RTS games from a longevity standpoint are actually the same problems fighting games have: 1. It's a 1v1 game, so you either are playing alone, or if you want to play with a friend, you have to fight each other. That's fun for awhile, but typically one person will be better, and the other person will get tired of losing. 2. They are really hard to be good at. On paper, RTS games are really hard because you are managing a lot of things at once (simplified by saying macro and micro game), and you need to be good at everything. The difficulty of a game is magnified when it's 1v1 because you only have yourself to rely on. So if you are having an off day, you are going to keep losing.

The reason MOBA games are popular is because they fix these issues by being a team game (very easy to play with a group of friends, and if you are not good or having a bad day, you can lean on your teammates to pick up the slack), and reducing your general focus to managing 1 hero (obviously, MOBAs have many layers and systems that make them more complicated, but at anytime you just need to focus on one hero).

Well this is why I point out the community prospects. Most of these new RTS do a really bad job of finding people to play with and especially when you are new and figuring out how to play competitively in a new game you can have extremely high variance of success. If you are just playing with a small group, sure eventually a few will rise to the top but that's not the criticism I have. In older RTS like BW or Homeworld there was chat/clans/reasons to bump into new people for casual or ladder play. In newer ones that sort of community building tool rarely exists at the peak of interest. The competitive community creates other resources to play against other than known friends (the friend aspect for me was always the compare notes/develop new strategies/test things against each other sort of thing).

You comment that in RTS 1v1 and if you are having an off day you are going to keep losing. That's true, but I find MOBA worse in overall enjoyment if you keep losing. I don't mind losing 1v1 and can stop anytime because it's just me. With a MOBA one player playing exceptionally rarely pulls the odds in your favour where one player playing exceptionally poorly swings the game entirely in the other direction. You are actively incentivized to not abandon the game (socially and mechanically) so even if a game starts going south you can't just reset the pieces on the board and start again. If I am playing an RTS I can just gg out at any time without causing a problem, with a MOBA I'm stuck with one or more player's bad decisions for the entirety of the game which could stretch to 50 minutes or more. I also find that unless you 5-man it's really a terrible experience for hours in/enjoyment out. This is more a criticism of the current generation of MOBAs than anything. As a team game there are other kinds of games others can carry the game harder in competition and make up for a player's skill/bad streak (MMO, FPS). MOBAs also don't really have any lack of complexity in being successful it just is mostly an exchange of active skills for passive/booklearned skills so it is my opinion that it is not a good defining line between the two since if you take the net skill(active+passive) from both I find most RTS and MOBAs to be comparably equivalent levels of complexity.

I would rather lose a 100 times and be responsible for 100% of it than lose 5 times and be responsible for 15% of it but be hitched to the burning wagon the entire time it falls off the cliff (and have little agency in stopping it). I do agree that there is a certain kind of player that can't handle losing 100 times in a row and learning from their mistakes, and that's probably why there are less RTS games recently than there used to be.

I think that this is because MOBAs are (unintentionally?) more like a sport with positions, teamwork, etc. I think that leads to MOBAs being more exciting for a mainstream audience and we see huge hits[1], where RTS is more for the niche audience that you saw for PC games 20 years ago-people who are more excited with honing computer skills than communication skills. I fall firmly in the latter camp, but I see why the market favors the former.

I totally agree about the 'being able to play again at will' part. That's what drove me away from LoL when I tried it-it was my very first game, I wanted to walk away, and the interface told me I was hurting the community by leaving early. I took the hint and decided to quit playing entirely. I don't want that kind of responsibility-the whole point of a hobby is that there aren't consequences for failure (or at least I've seen it formulated as such.)

[1] Well, one huge hit

I honestly think that the biggest problem with launching an RTS is that BW already exists. People aren't clamoring for something better, it's just plain good enough. That takes the air out of any possibilty of a competitive RTS and I believe the 'not enough people to play with' is a symptom of this. If there is a remedy I would suggest that an engaging singleplayer campaign can at least sell the title without the promise of PVP-I bought DOW3, for example, knowing I'd probably just play the campaign. Grey Goo's (great) campaign was (according to the devs iirc) an afterthought and as a result some of it's huge potential was squandered.

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