In esports media, layoff season is in full swing
digiday.com
digiday.com
I believe Starcraft 2 and LoL evolved into some of the top offenders in this arena. Overwatch also had a scary phase with mandatory meta queues. These days, SC2 feels like you are playing an organ with 1 hand tied behind your back. LoL lost all of the wacky energy when you couldn't stack items anymore.
Competitive multiplayer gaming is effectively dead for me, and not because I don't like to get sweaty anymore. I will still periodically fire up something like TF2, just so I can remember how good it all could have been. I can play [insert role] all day on 1 server with other humans and no one will give me shit about it. Try playing off-meta in LoL and see how long your account stays active.
All of that just because my Dota skills are hobbyist level. And apparently, that's not acceptable to the online community anymore.
> All of that just because my Dota skills are hobbyist level. And apparently, that's not acceptable to the online community anymore.
In my view, the problem here is that somehow the expectation has come to be that you play your multiplayer games with strangers. (This also causes other problems such as invasive anti-cheating software.)
I see very little benefit and quite a lot of damage resulting from this idea. Who cares about playing with strangers?
It's not a job. If I want to play, I want to fire up my gaming PC, start the game, press a "Match" / "Play" button, wait 1-2 minutes and start playing.
If I have to do organized events then I might as well not have sat on the gaming PC at all.
But I'll concede that there's a class of games in which this mindset means you're basically pissing against the wind and you'll have a very bad time. Hence I am avoiding them entirely but still wanted to give you my perspective.
If you suddenly quit a rated match, Valve will punish you with time-wasting purgatory. Some people pay money to have others help them leave purgatory.
The difference is when it does happens, it drags out longer, but it is less common.
My experiences in overwatch weren't any good either. I remember the match that made me stop playing very well too. We lost, but I had gold in every category with my two friends taking silver and bronze. Essentially, the other two people weren't playing well at all and started spouting the most toxic shit I had heard in a long while. I guess fuck us because we were just playing for fun and still managed to do better than them? Like it wasn't a blowout or anything either.
I just don't understand some people I guess. Your post managed to bring that memory and reminded me why I don't play competitive games anymore lol. There are plenty of toxic players out there, but in my experience, a lot of them are pretty bad and are most likely projecting.
No, but there is a term for that too, "smurfing".
There is a reason for MMR system, so you can land at your skill cap. Also dota is not a game you relax to. Its like saying racing is something you do when you are sleepy and high.
As in example of something you wouldn't considered doing as it not fun or dangerous if you do.
What about drunk? https://gamerules.com/rules/beerio-kart/
As a founder of a competitive gaming startup, I can tell you that every single game publisher lives and dies on the casual players.
Most of these players have never seen a single pro match in their life, so the notion that popular games were built for PPV is misguided.
What these publishers realized is that giving people a rank makes them more dedicated to playing more and beating others, as well as a sense of progress. sprinkle some repetitiveness, awards, vanity stuff and the hook is even stronger.
It’s probably some intrinsic human behavior (monkey brain stuff), but it works well for their bottom line.
Do I miss the good ol’ Warcraft 3 dota days? Hell yeah. But I remember one times I set up a “community” match against several of my countrymen. My friends and I were demolished. It was obvious they knew something we didn’t.
We only discovered it when we moved to HoN - the meta.
The real fun was always custom maps - we kept playing those into our 30s.
But I do agree that wacky is fun. There’s still competitive mini games in Dota 2 that are super fun and wacky. Missed opportunity if you ask me.
And if you have time to devote to playing a game just in organizing such a community, you have to ask yourself if you'd rather not spend that time just playing the game itself and catching up?
I think these kinds of middling communities are groups of friends who enjoy a variety of games together at which point, you need to make sure you have the right equipment to play 80% of what the rest of the group is playing online or you'll be left behind. I am in a position where I can only play about 30% or less of the games my online friends choose to play with my current setup.
And you offered no explanation how these experiences could be much better.
So you must be referring to how other players got better at winning, or the aggressive strategies players employ to win. Or maybe you don’t like some specific units that were added that you consider anti-fun. Whatever the case, unranked, co-op, custom games didn’t solve these problems for you as a player.
I’m curious what specific evolution you think SC2 went through that was undesirable.
When did you do that last time? TF2 got destroyed due to matchmaking killing of community servers and is a void of hat farming bots by now. Valve did too little too late for TF2.
>TF2 got destroyed due to matchmaking killing of community servers
Community servers are still there. I can still pretty much always find a full server on whatever map I feel like playing on at the time.
The custom maps and community servers are as strong as ever, IMO. Check out the player statistics on steam.
Those are very misleading. The teamwork.tf stats show a lot fewer players (still a decent number) actually playing on servers, and you can verify those by adding up the player counts on servers manually.
I don't think necessarily you have to follow the meta. But it's like best practices. Better stay within them when you are playing with a completely new team.
There's other game modes in all those games to try wacky stuff and/or play just for fun it's unranked/casual and custom game modes.
You wouldn't sign up for a ranked league in real life to just mess around. It would be disrespectful to your teammates and you would rightly get kicked.
People want to win every match and disallow experimentation to not endanger their record.
Natural result: a certain kind of people leave and find alternatives and never come back. Like yours truly here.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=21251...
This I agree with
> Starcraft 2 and LoL evolved into some of the top offenders in this
This I couldn't disagree more. Especially Starcraft 2 is the worst example you could have picked. The game has such a high skill ceiling that you can get away many playstyles until you hit the uppermost ranks. As a master player myself (the rank, I'm far from being a "master" at Starcraft 2) I can comfortably hold myself in Diamond league without microing or even looking at my units or even with only building/using a single unit type and crazy compositions. I got pretty low apm, and my playing looks nothing like that of a pro player (which does resemble your description of one handed organ/piano playing [1]).
"Meta" in a game like that only applies to people in upper Grandmaster and Pro territory, and in a Game like Starcraft 2, a low Grandmaster player and a pro player are very far apart from each other. It's not something the devs force upon you, it's what you have to familiarize yourself with to reach a certain level of gameplay. Now where that level lies is something the devs can influence.
What I just described applies to many 1v1 competitive games, take a look at fighting games too.
You basically imply that Starcraft 2 went wrong somewhere to please e-sports, but are you familiar with high level Starcraft 1? It's way more ridiculous in every aspect of the game and on top of the high skill ceiling you have to familiarize yourself with many quirks of the game to become a decent player, which makes it harder and less accessible in general, but the skill ceiling was just as high or even higher than that of Starcraft 2.
> League of Legends
This is a more appropriate example, because here you are getting forced into certain meta compositions and picks very early on. However this is as much a community problem as it is a dev problem. At no point is there any need for mid level LoL players to follow "the meta", but the community is very obsessed with following what "the pros" do, whether or not that makes sense.
> I can play [insert role] all day on 1 server with other humans and no one will give me shit about it.
Honestly I believe one of the main problems you are describing is matchmaking rather than game balancing. With modern style MMR/Elo ratings in team based multiplayer games, playing online is in general way less relaxed than the "good old" joining a server and chilling there with players of vastly different skill levels, which is part of what enables many unconventional playstyles.
The development of meta in general is inevitable if you match players based on their skill and give them access to forums and the ability to share knowledge. However as I said initially, I generally agree that quite a few multiplayer games were ruined by devs chasing "e-sport" status.
And I absolutely agree that multiplayer games that allow for many different playstyles are more fun, but they are also way harder to create and balance, and the community will find optimal strategies and overpowered characters even if you as the dev do not.
eSports and eCelebs have driven metas in almost every single gamr by popularizing the tactics THEY like. Depending on the genre, certain subsets are gravitated towards (hitscan and/or speed).
"meta play" often represents less than 10% of all the game has to offer. Significant amount of maps, items, game mode, and characters are never played for being rules inferior. "top players" perform the exsxt same plays and counterplays over and over and over again. The moment someone with any talent comes in and uses something non meta, tbey clean house because the "top players" are conditioned to only respond to their bubble. An "objectively inferior" character by numbers can still win if the opponent lacks the know how on how to respond to that character.
The worst part is, the moment something like this happens? The in group at the top doesn't adapt like a "top player" should. They whine and moan and move to ban the character or thing that bested them.
I used to be a top level competitive player back in the day. The character had some crazy tanky stall mechanics that nobody used because it wasn't popular. In one season, I did a showcase match prep. Every match they kept bamming my weapon sets. After banning every weapon, I was still able to pull off the tactics - - the coordinators got so frustrated they ended up changing the map and game modes themselves. That I understand, that particular game has since been retired and has not beem played to this day in any league
Aren't there objective advantages and disadvantages to certain characters even as a top player? For example, if two top players were playing SSBM, the most optimal choice is playing Fox or Wolf. I understand that some will use "meta play" as storytelling/marketing, but there does come a point where skill can't make up the cost of choosing a disadvantageous character when fighting against other pros.
I find it 10x better then current tf2 also community is more chill
Overwatch 1 os a team of 6. At launch, there were no restrictions. You could be and switch to any hero or role at anytime. That includes duplicates. Want to have 6 of the same tank? Go for it.
Eventually duplicate heroes was decided too hard to balance. They stopped duplicate heroes. Now you could switch to any hero or role at any time, but it must not be a hero already on your team.
As they added more shield tanks, it became harder to balance around. "GOATS" (I have no idea what the acronym means) became "meta" which was 3 tanks, 3 supports.
Eventually Blizzard gave up on balancing GOATS and forced role queue. 2 tanks, 2 dps, 2 supports. The role you start with is the role you had to stay in. You could switch to any hero in that role at any time so long as it wasn't what the other person was on.
Games were still sluggish, and Blizzard, with Overwatch 2 is making a lot of changes to speed the game up. Particularly, they're reducing a lot of CC abilities and eliminating 1 tank role. Games are now 5v5 with 1 tank, 2 dps, and 2 support
I identified a bunch of other co-op games we could try but then covid restrictions ended and spring had started, so I haven't got round to them yet but at least I have something to look forward to when winter returns :)
Are you sure those weren't bots? The game has a real issue with them in the official servers.
For example, if someone figures out a very advantageous early attack, other people will start to copy them. In response people will play defensively early on expecting the early attack. Then eventually people might not attack, and instead gather more resources early, since they expect their opponent to be defensive, etc etc.
so as you play a lot, you learn the current meta strategies, and can adjust your strategy to give you a better chance of winning the game. that's "playing the meta" and why the meta shifts over time.
Having a good desk, chair, monitor, keyboard, computer is generally useful, the premium to turn that into a gaming-capable setup is not that high.
I'm sure the kids posting their setups on Tiktok are probably the most spoilt and if 90s rich kids could do the same you'd see kids showing off their entire AES and SNES collection and their brand new pentium.
You could build an entire esports machine, with monitor (and RGB!) for less than 1000USD. I have done it many times.
Gaming chairs are usually cheap chinese vinyl, <$90 even if they look fancy. It's not remotely close to a typical mesh aeron, for example. A TKL mech kb is $20-30 on amazon.
A 3060 is $400, a 1TB SSD is $50-80.
After not playing for a year I've had a couple of games and quickly lost interest as it was just not fun to learn this adjacent stuff. It's even worse when they have a complete rework of a character you enjoy playing. Since then I'm unwilling to invest any time into playing these quick changing games.
I think, esports is mainly driven by advertisement or behemoth companies that push their own games. I am not supprised that expenses got cut.
Riot Games (LoL) and Valve (Dota2) reliably compete with each other over the most price pool contributions in these large tournaments. I wanted to say, "this is $Corp pushing their product" but i have to correct it a little to " fostering their market".
Compare this with traditional soccer leagues and fan clubs and you wont find a big company hunting short term profits with short lifed products that threatens the whole scene.
game design - how high is skill ceiling observer mode - how well it is to spectate the game
Overwatch is terrible as spectator experience vs CS which is probably the cleanest and easiest to watch and understand what is going on
Which isn't too different from normal sports with a large following. It's all entertainment industry in the end.
If anything, the people situated over there are far more "in tune" with what is happening, and by the time we find out in the Western hemisphere, it has already occurred.