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Comment by p1necone | Hacker News Reader

This is only a problem because businesses are trying to prop up competitive scenes for arbitrary games from nothing, which is a silly way to go about this.

They're games, people play them for fun. Let the competitive scene develop organically and then go in with investor money for better broadcast equipment and sponsors and shit and draft a team to compete in the existing competitive scene.

Trying to just create a competitive scene for random games out of thin air when players haven't even shown they're going to stick around for it is insane.

The default approach for any unproven competitive game should at most be "hey we're hosting an official tournament with a modest prize pool in the hope to drive adoption of our game, if it works we might do it again next year" not "we're investing millions into regional teams and stadiums out of thin air like we're bootstrapping the fucking NFL, and don't you dare host your own tournaments.".

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This comment would've made sense 10 years ago, but it doesn't today. The modern gaming landscape is generally incompatible with organic competitive scene development, and really anything else that might be considered "organic". The developers want to have full control over the game, how it's played, when it's played, and who plays it. They don't want anything to develop "organically" without them having a hand in it so they can extract as much profit from it.

> They're games, people play them for fun.

There's another big problem right there: this isn't really true anymore for most multiplayer games. Most that released in the past few years (and some games that were older but were updated) come with dozens of "features" designed to force people to play them even when they don't want to: battle passes, limited time events, endless grinds, etc, this is done to maximize engagement and profit and effectively turns the games into chores rather than something you do for fun. Doesn't help that most of these games weren't really fun in the first place.

Stuff like this is why people overestimate "market effects" and under estimate just group think in industries. Sure it is "more profitable" in some sense to do it this way, but you'd imagine someone somewhere will make a small fps that doesn't have this overly controlled crap and then win big, taking a share of the big guys' profits, and then the cycle churns into a new area of phase space.

The reason that hasn't happened yet is because a) gamers are just too dumb or lead by hype to try small non-triple A titles (which isn't quite true) or b) the groupthink in the industry is too thick for anyone to even try it. I feel like it's a combination of these two, probably more of b) but enough of a) justifies developer's collective illusions about what is proftable (that is, b))

New gamers with disposable income and generally little education or world experience are produced cyclically. Middle and high school students have the time to no life games long enough to become truly great at them in ways that no adult with only a few free hours every week can compete with. So the adults with jobs and families and kids drop out of the AAA games using FOMO as a crutch to prop up sales and engagement metrics. The kids, lacking fully developed PFCs get enamored by these exploitative tactics and every now and then one of these games get this perfect and print billions. With a declining population, incoming generations who grew up with modern video games and their tactics, and increasing scrutiny of psychological manipulation of children by video game companies I expect these companies to maliciously double down on their tactics instead of increasing investment into original content and novel games that present too much risk for the boring and greedy money men running the companies and investment funds.

>There's another big problem right there: this isn't really true anymore for most multiplayer games.

I was recently introduced to the game Rust. In chat within a server a player asked "How do I keep my base from being destroyed when i'm offline?", the answer that the crowd provided him was "Set your mobile to alert you when your base detects people near it.".

It then dawned on me that there are probably quite a few players who will wake up out of a sound sleep, dash to their computers and rush to defend a virtual base from players in distant lands -- sacrificing their personal lives and sleep health not due to the enjoyment of the game, but simply because someone somewhere antagonized them in an environment they were disconnected from entirely.

I can understand pulling late/all hour sessions due to a personal obsession ; game/coding/hobbies/etc. I've done that way too many times throughout my life; but the marathon represents to me a stream of enjoyment and fascination.

It's tough for me to consider pulling late sessions and deriving myself from sleep as a constant response to antagonism in an always-on persistent world.

I guess what i'm trying to say is that I totally agree with you; games aren't only played for fun now -- they're played sometimes in an entirely reactionary form to either gain from the current limited time event, a fear of missing out, or a fear of loss of competitive advantage -- and all of these concepts are being orchestrated by the game developers and the industry at large.

I have absolutely no idea what to do about it, but I recognize the problem and absolutely agree. The move from pastimes being an entertainment value to a constant worry surely plants more asses in seats, but it feels entirely unhealthy and psychologically damaging.

> I was recently introduced to the game Rust. In chat within a server a player asked "How do I keep my base from being destroyed when i'm offline?", the answer that the crowd provided him was "Set your mobile to alert you when your base detects people near it.".

About twenty years ago there was this german browser game "Ogame" (It's still around, but I have no idea how it works nowadays). I was looking for my scifi gaming fix, found "Ogame", decided to try it out and encountered the o so usual game mechanics for the first time: Timers, timers timers. Everything took time. from minutes, to hours to days. I noticed on my first day, that even to have modest progress I would have to set my alarm clock at arbitrary times to start the next "process".

But it gets even worse. You build your fleet and the only mechanic to not have it destroyed by random other players while you are not around is to send it travelling from one star system to another. So you had to set an additional timer/alarm clock. Not just to progress, but to avoid having all your progress taken from you.

That sounds like a browser version of Eve Online.

Oh man, I remember that “game”! Ironically, I lost my fleet while I was on a plane to Germany to visit a friend doing a semester abroad over there. I logged into a computer lab at his school, bore witness to the destruction of my fleet and shrugged my shoulders and logged off that game for the last time.

It sounds like you just dont find that fun. Theres been a pretty popular online game called Utopia which is a 24/7 kingdom management game. Its been out for over 20 years and even won some Game of the Year awards [1]! You have cooldowns on things like attacking other kingdoms that are, e.g. 3 hours long. The most dedicated kingdoms used to set their alarms to get up in the middle of the night to attack other kingdoms if in a war. This was fun as a teenager / young adult. I wouldn't find this fun now. You just arent the target market, I dont think theres anything deeper needed in the analysis.

[1] - https://mud.fandom.com/wiki/Utopia_(online_game)

Long time utopia fan here. Nice to see it represented.

I havent played in quite a while. Like I said, my life now is not as conducive to that style of game. But also, the game lost a lot of appeal for me in the current day of browser automation, data aggregation, etc. That 24/7, data analysis heavy style of play is really charming/addicting if everyone is _actually_ playing and _actually_ analyzing data. But when so much of the game loop has been taken over by computers, it doesnt have the same draw.

Unfortunate, but Utopia really was a great game for a group of friends back in the day. We would have to find ways to get into the library at school during the day so we could tend to our kingdoms. I still receive their "new age announcement" emails. Its an inside joke to forward them to a group chat and ask if anyone else is going to play.

Reminds me of several "html4 games" before smart phones went nuclear. The only one I can remember the name of was "hobowars". There was a colonize planets/solar systems and a medieval variant.

It was little bit fun as a novelty, plus getting top ranked in some of them promised a prize like money or xboxes.

It's a lot less fun when every game does it and wants you to pay to win, and when you win you get nothing but the credit card bill.

Hobowars was great. It was pretty funny, and random things about it pop into my mind every so often. Timehunter was another favorite of mine.

The day I quit playing WoW Classic was the day the guild I was in started implementing a system to wake up people using Discord alerts on their phone for world bosses spawning.

Maybe the sports model doesn't apply at all, and it's arguably pretty unimaginative to try to force the proven sports model onto computer games.

Is there another way to play as a collective experience, and to monetize it (not that I care to monetize it, but obviously some do)? Or another way of approaching the issue, do we need more than what's already in multiplayer online games? Should we just add something to those that is more of a mass collective interaction?

The regional model definitely doesn't make sense for video games given their non physical nature. At a continent/country level it does (because people too far away wouldn't be playing together because of latency).

Fighting games are a bit of an exception because historically they've been in person only, again because of latency. Modern rollback netcode has made this less of an issue though.

My first thought is that online communities should have their own teams, what game would HN play competitively?

Ha. Game of Life? Nethack? Crypto puzzles? Obsfucated code competition?

Dwarf fortress. ascii of course.

Dwarf Fortress hot potato is fun. Each player takes care of the fort for N hours, and then passes it on to the next player. Every time someone manages to lose the fort to FUN! they're eliminated and the remaining players start up a new one.

Sounds like strategic seat-ordering and sabotage is the name of the game. Five minutes before the end of your slot, destroy everything, unleash the kracken, etc.

Ye it would quickly devolve to some no-counter strats

I wonder if you could fix the incentives by giving everyone multiple "lives", and half penalizing players who went right before the one who lost the fort.

I’ve done it in the past, and it’s much more dependent on the group of people than the rule set. If you have a group trying to game the system, then there’s only so much that the system can do to correct it. If you have a group trying to one-up each other on megaprojects, captive beasts, and over engineered defense mechanisms, then the extrinsic motivation becomes unimportant.

How about this... you take a break every few minutes and flip a coin. Heads, you keep playing. Tails, you pass it to someone else.

Factorio, TIS-100, and Bike Shed Painting Simulator.

I’m not sure I like the name “Bike Shed Painting Simulator”. Let’s spend some time coming up with something more succinct. Should we schedule a meeting to discuss?

> try to force the proven sports model onto computer games.

Yeah, trying a bit too hard there - every single person in that industry that i've met goes out of their way to use sports jargon to desperately try to make that model work (ie "esports athletes" when referring to the players )

Yeah it's mighty annoying. It's even worse when they take some "pro" with "actual sport" experience and they start throwing jargon around, ye, good job talking about baseball or handegg to international viewership that don't have clue what those terms mean.

Pretty much. Just looking at biggest titles, they are all designed to appeal to any skill level of play and "just" be fun PvP game

Games "designed for esports" are trying to push horse before the cart. Game needs to get the playerbase first, be interesting and competitive in the long run second and then you can scoop people on top, put them in funny named teams and make them duke out to the public you get from having a big playerbase

> Game needs to get the playerbase first, be interesting and competitive in the long run second and then...

Ain't nobody got time for dat. Push the new game out, organize two tournaments, recycle the game into the next iteration... Rinse and repeat.

While I'm inclined to agree, when it comes to developers with a strong reputation for making fun competitive games, I can understand how it could make sense to just jump in immediately with lots of money.

The goal is obviously that if you make a big investment into a competitive scene, that may attract top tier talent from other games, and that talent will itself bring in more regular players and viewers.

Yeah this is a fair take too. Riot seems to have been largely successful in this approach with Valorant. Blizzard tried with Overwatch but imo they tried to push an overly structured approach with too much top down control way too far.

Maybe, but from what I heard, Overwatch was also left in the lurch when it comes to content for a long while.

Gaming is the reddest of the red oceans. People only have so many hours in a day so if they are playing X they are not playing Y. Huge first mover and network effects to be the popular game.

I agree. It seems like if companies are pulling out its probably best for the scene. I think people still want to have fun and compete against each other, and it will be more interesting to see organic competitions instead of the large corporate sponsored ones.

Its a chicken-egg situation. You need talent to attract attention, and you need attention to attract talent. You have to bootstrap prize pools etc IMO to hit critical mass until it becomes a "self fulfilling prophecy" and keeps the players invested. Otherwise, the next thing that offers a more legit prize pools and sponsorships is the "correct" choice if they are trying to make this their living.

I don't think it really is a chicken and egg problem though - hardly any of the competitive scenes for the biggest games historically got bootrapped like this:

Counterstrike: Organic community, Valve only started putting effort/money into it after it had already proved itself.

Starcraft: ditto

DoTA: ditto

AoE2: ditto

Smash: Nintendo is practically actively hostile to the competitive community, it persists regardless.

DoTA 2 and LoL arguably weren't bootstrapped either - they relied on players jumping ship from the already existing and proven OG DoTA scene.

It seems you are arguing that the _competitive scene_ exists, which I dont dispute. I was under the impression we were discussing the _ability for a player to play the game as their career_. i.e. The equivalent of a pro sports athlete but for a video game. The players are for the most part going to move to where the money is (and esports are unique in that way, where skillsets are more transferable between games).

That said, DOTA 2 is a large part of the current "esports" wave of payout-driven hype trains. The International was an unabashed marketing play to drive interest ("It drew attention due to its staggering $1.6 million USD prize pool, the highest prize pool of any single esports tournament at that time." [1]).

[1] - https://liquipedia.net/dota2/The_International

If you let it develop organically before investing, there’ll be more money chasing from more people who recognize the potential by the time you invest, so you’ll get smaller upside, having to pay more for a similar share.

The few scenes I've followed (so two) have died because funding disappeared and the games stopped getting updates, with one ladder being taken off the internet entirely.

I am hesitant to bother getting into any new esport.

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