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mkenyon

Highly Polished Competitive Games

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Sean was talking about highly polished competitive games on the ruination cast, so I thought I would create a thread about some titles that I've played in this vein. My group of buddies primarily plays competitive games, been this way for 10+ years starting with Tribes and Q3A. One of the things that has always been the difficult part about getting into these games is that dropping in a random public server leads to inherently unbalanced gameplay. Between stacked teams, players dropping in and out constantly, and a system that is designed for a smaller amount of players in comp (5v5 CS for example) is filled with 15+ players.

Adding in the ELO/ranking system for matchmaking really helped bring competitive play to folks that otherwise wouldn't organize with a group of players to play set matches. This one characteristic is what makes Lords Managements so successful, in my opinion. Every game you step into is a scrim, which is pretty awesome. That rush, that excitement, that huge play that changed the tide of the game is what makes comp play so exciting. When you jump into a 16 man game of CoD, CS, or whatever, that never really exists because of the chaotic nature of it.

As much as CoD gets crapped on by the Idle Thumbs community, I am truly excited for the inclusion of an ELO/ranking system in BLOPS 2. Really, is the core gameplay any good in Lords Management? Would you consider jumping into a random public game that is 10v9, then 8v10, and 9v9 throughout the game? Are the mechanics and system of interaction good enough to make that enjoyable? Of course not. The joy of playing those games is entirely about the competition. Even the system of interacting with the game world and your 'Lord' is extremely obtuse; it's something that you're always fighting against.

So, just throwing out my recent favorites in terms of competitive games that are in this vein.

Tribes: Ascend

QuakeLive (of course)

Warsow

Smite (Lords Management with nothing but skill shots, love it just on that premise alone - this is the one you need to try out Sean)

Firefall (if they follow through on the matchmaking/ranking promises)

Dota 2

CS:GO

APB Reloaded

I was also quite into Company of Heroes and Dawn of War 2. The fact that SC2 came out and crapped all over the communities of both of those games is a travesty. They were such an advancement in RTS design. DoW2 was almost like Dota meets Company of Heroes. Pretty rad game.

*edit*

Totally posted this in the wrong forum. I'm ashamed. Can a mod move it?

Also, #ESPORTS

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I think this is probably the right forum for this, what do you mean?

Anyways, whenever Evo time rolls around i inevitably end up watching like a week's worth of streams. (The KoF13 finals from this year i would highly recommend.)

I really enjoy the more competitive scenes as an observer, and i try to push the groups i play with towards more technical and demanding standards of play, but i generally hate playing with randoms just because the crowds for most games online are totally toxic. (This is a problem, and i think it's something developers and community organizers need to start thinking about, just how to get people to treat eachother in a sportsmanship-like manner. I think some of the cultural trickle-down isn't helping, i cringe whenever i see an official Halo advert that has somebody getting teabagged.)

I'll probably end up playing a ton of Halo 4 online though. The Halo community has by an average been pretty decent for a good long time now, I think CoD kind of magnetized the assholes away.

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I think this is probably the right forum for this, what do you mean?

I moved it

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I'll probably end up playing a ton of Halo 4 online though. The Halo community has by an average been pretty decent for a good long time now, I think CoD kind of magnetized the assholes away.

Dota/HoN/Dota 2 did that for PC! (as did the 360)

I think ultimately, when you have a group of players come together, and their level of fun is entirely dependent upon the group of guys that they are playing with, you're going to get assholes and emotional flaring. Competition just brings that out of people, definitely a double edged sword.

Smite made one of the most brilliant choices I've seen. There is no ability to chat to your team in game. You can use a very comprehensive global chat menu born out of the Tribes VGS system to alert players to what is going on and organize. As a result, there's not a ton of hate. The most you can do is ping spam.

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Dota/HoN/Dota 2 did that for PC! (as did the 360)

You forgot LoL.

Smite made one of the most brilliant choices I've seen. There is no ability to chat to your team in game. You can use a very comprehensive global chat menu born out of the Tribes VGS system to alert players to what is going on and organize. As a result, there's not a ton of hate. The most you can do is ping spam.

That sounds utterly awful... I'd rather suffer the few assholes I encounter than not be able to communicate in a reasonable manner.

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It might be reasonable to you. It's crippling to me.

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It might be reasonable to you. It's crippling to me.

Why would you say this without knowing what the system entails?

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You played online games before voicechat became ubiquitous, didn't you?

Actually, no, I didn't! I didn't get into online gaming until my mid-teens-ish, when I first played Day of Defeat and The Specialists. I could and did and can and do play non-team-based games without voice chat, obviously. For team-based games - especially a LoMa, where coordination is paramount to success - I would never want to play without voice chat, or at the very least text chat.

Why would you say this without knowing what the system entails?

Because of what I said above. There is no system that can perfectly replace the complete freedom of saying what you want when you want to say it. I understand that you don't care as much about that complete freedom, but it's very important to me to be able to express myself to the best of my ability.

The best systems are actually those that have stuff like what you're talking about ALONGSIDE voice/text chat. It is when they work in tandem that video games become Video Games! Whatever that means.

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Uh, except you can chat to your team in SMITE? Are you thinking of LoL, where you have to enable that option? The community for both games is, hilariously, now worse than the one in DotA 2.

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I don't have anywhere near the free time it takes to play things competitively but I very much enjoy watching competitive Starcraft II and Natural Selection 2. I used to shoutcast for competitive Company of Heroes and briefly Dawn of War II, also. That was fun.

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Is planet side 2 one? its kinda in the middle, with hardcore clans that can just wreck fools. But there is also solo foot troops that are more casual. But everyone is contributing to the war effort.

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I think ultimately, when you have a group of players come together, and their level of fun is entirely dependent upon the group of guys that they are playing with, you're going to get assholes and emotional flaring. Competition just brings that out of people, definitely a double edged sword.

I think what really gets to people is when the victory condition is very binary, either two teams or two players. If the match-making is doing its job, no matter how well you're doing, you're losing half the time. You can't have that string of third place finishes that you can feel mostly okay about, you can't really settle into your comfort zone, it's always one extreme or the other.

The experiences i've had playing fighting games online? People just get murderously incensed when they lose, unbelievably toxic environment.

Like, i don't really recall people ever getting like that over ffa deathmatches, and i've been playing shooters online since Quake.

Is planet side 2 one? its kinda in the middle, with hardcore clans that can just wreck fools. But there is also solo foot troops that are more casual. But everyone is contributing to the war effort.

My personal belief is that for a game to be considered competitive, there needs to not just be balanced mechanics and a high skill ceiling, but also a level playing field. If you can grind out an advantageous position by investing a lot of time into the game, you have an unfair advantage beyond your own skill and the tools immediately before you.

So i would not consider any of the persistent online games to be competitive, or any games with progression mechanics for that matter, personally speaking.

I thought it was wonderful that Bungie drew a line in the sand with Halo Reach, gave people their exp drip, but only in the form of cosmetic rewards.

I am unhappy that 343 has bowed to industry trends.

Now i'm just going to rant for a bit, but I really hate progression mechanics in competitive multiplayer games, I also feel they have absolutely ruined a number of promising online games. If your game is not Call of Duty, there will be maybe five people who will play it enough to unlock anything, and those people will proceed to ruin the game for anybody else who might try to play. Just the idea that i am going to jump into this game that i understand and could potentially play well, but other people are going to have this artificial advantage that i can't compare with until i invest another twenty hours? How much worse will it be for people who aren't as experienced in multiplayer gaming? Ridiculous!

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