In WoW far was when I started training new tanks and healers. One of the most rewarding activities was joining a fresh tank+healer pair as 5th wheel with my hybrid. I was there as training wheels, a mid dps able to jump in at any time in either role. Most of the time it just gave a sense of comfort and someone to go through learning moments as they happen.
See you're missing out by teasing high skill gameplay to your friends. You can put limits on what you use and basically do a challenge run while still being aggressive because you have a better understanding of reading and reacting, positioning and the baiting out openings. I went naked hand to hands helping a spellblade I knew and it was hilarious. Reminded me of my brother and I playing Halo on Legendary with Skulls and going back and forth between who goes crazy aggressive as bait for the other person to flank.
Something that surprised me is that Yugioh in Japanese is extremely keyworded and well organized. Bullet points are used to describe the aspects of cards unlike how the English text is often a paragraph that must be deciphered. The translators didn't seem to be on the same page making cart text incongruent and overly confusing.
Yugioh uses PSCT (Problem Solving card text) which are keywords to know how an effect resolves that unlike magic aren’t obvious unless you know what to look for (;, then, also, if, etc)
Because localizers hate translating japanese into concise easy to understand short sentences. They always have to sound like an american talking out of their ass to make it sound more, well, "local", rather than an actual translation.
That's not entirely true, Yugioh is written in PSCT ( Problem solving card text) in English so you don't have to memorize nearly as many rulings. Because YGO is such a precise game it's important to know what targets/do not target or what bashes or goes to gy. OCG you often times need a lot of bullet points per card because OCG does not use PSCT and thus you might not actually know how cards interact.
One thing competitive players forget about introducing variance is that if the worse player NEVER wins, they're going to quit. I understand that top players are just there to win and aren't there to facilitate promoting whatever game it is, but the longevity of a game is an extremely important factor on the ecosystem. I'm not saying top players have a personal responsibility to make the game accessible for new players, but if their bottom line depends on it in some way, they should be more mindful of it. I'm probably letting my poker experience lead most of this thought process, but I see it when winning players berate "bad players" in any game (mtg, League, anything). It's just bad for business.
Yeah, this is basically the problem with YGO and SC2. YGO has been leaning heavily on designing itself for the more competitive players and has trouble retaining new players. A segment, even if not majority, also talks down on other players for not playing "correctly" or "optimally". Which turns many people away. Sc2 balance patches have been so focused on the pro level for awhile, that the viewership has started to drop because low skill players struggle to enjoy the game and watching the games has become boring and repetitive. However, the casters and pro players are trying to bring attention back in but the recent low skilm friendly and mix-up meta design lately hasn't helped. It's so easy to lose people, it's important to keep these things in mind as a community.
I don't remember the study but I think it was done on dogs and maybe other mammals who play games as a way to learn. They saw that when a dog loses more than 70% of the time, they don't want to play the same game anymore against the same dog. And the reverse is also true with winning, but the threshold is a bit higher if I remember correctly. And I think we all observed the same pattern in humans for exemple when I was younger my friend was always beating me at super smash melee and I ended up hating the game. Until I got older and had the opportunity to play on my own and get better and beat them half of the time. People like to accuse others of being sore losers while in fact they're simply losing the interest for the game being unable to win a meaningful amount of time.
I would say it is in the top players interest to facilitate the experience for new players as competitive players want a big player base. Case in point would be the obsession of Leader Boards.
19:00 I can't believe chess isn't mentionned here. What we're talking about here is just chess. Fun fact the best chess player in the world suffers a bit from this I think. He's so consistently the best that he just doesn't want to compete anymore.
@RTB1400 magnus has played since childhood that fact he doesn't get burnout is extordinary and he's now only getting sad he can't hit 2900 or feels he won't ever
True! It doesn't help that chess MMR is wonky. It might not be the reason why the best doesn't like playing, but a lot of high end Grandmasters will refuse to do tournaments just because one loss vs lower MMR players tank their score so hard that they could win all the other matches and still be behind.
But Magnus plays all the time and said he loves chess. He plays weird openings instead, mostly to nerf himself, and then proceeds to win anyway. I would probably add another game to my repertoire, like Go. Though if I did I would probably also fall off in chess.
I have said it many times: A game that designs for the top 1% cannot support the bottom 70%. When a game is designed because 1% of players can break something and such eveything gets warped to stop those players it necessarily makes it so the bottom 70% cannot play. Banning is a great example where certain mechanics should never be created, but because "you can just ban it" the meta gets warped around those mechanics.
So the devs can choose whether they care about attracting the bottom players to their game or not. No devs owe consideration to anyone. If they want to draw in great numbers of players, that is their choice, if not that is too. You as a player are only entitled to know what you're getting, nothing more or less. It is then up to you whether you're willing to devote the amount of time expected of you in the game or not.
@chukyuniqul but in doing so most often times the kill the game the bottom 70 most often times make up the player base catering to the 1% does nothing for a game unless it's specifically in a competitive setting
@@blackronin848 Not if the game has options to engage in it non-competitively, or needs more than a small, dedicated fanbase. I think there's a bit of poison here from modern ultra-AAA game development where everything needs to be THE MOST. A game only needs to be enough of a success to break even. Not less and while more is definitely welcome, it is not necessary. I mean hell, you never learn that it's 1% of the fanbase keeping most MMOs (and other such f2p server-based games) running? The whole "whale" thing?
@chukyuniqul well mmos are a different story they are destined to be left and almost entirely played by a small player base while other games let's just say apex while it had a large player base over the years it has significantly dropped off while the 1% are not the main reason why they certainly helped shape it's current environment and i in no way is say they need to be in any way responsible but when a game only improves upon one side of the player base neglecting the other it sets the tone and the culture that will continue often times with the top 1 % typically comp player being belligerent to those who aren't. Sorry if I'm talking all over the place I think i went off on a tangent
@@blackronin848 I don't think belligerently elitist competitive players are inherent to a highly competitive game. Chess certainly ain't that way. Thing is, while with an MMO you DO actually need the non-payers so the whales can feel good about themselves, for competitive pvp round-based games there's no need for that because the people playing it do so for their skill. Also not to put too fine a point on it, but this conversation never happens about actually full-competitive, impenetrable to normies games like Your Only Move is Hustle. It's always about a flavor of the month multiplayer game. I can't help but feel VERY cynical about the conversation, it smacks of aggressive conformism. YOMI hustle is a severe case, you hop in there as a normie and you know what happens? Pure, unadulterated frustration. And you know what? Even with that the fanbase is GENERALLY (there's always that one guy) pretty willing to encourage you to try again. I mean I didn't, my experience was so ass I straight refunded the game and refused to play further, but I respect them for it. There, now we both tangentialized so you don't have to feel bad about yourself :P
It’s like brothers who play chess. So long as it’s a struggle of equals they’re fully engaged. However, once it becomes a struggle of unequals their game ends permanently.
The problem isn't just limited to the game becoming too complicated to beginners. It also causes the game to slowly drift away from its original design. There are so many games that started with a nice elegant, simple base system of mechanics, but they keep tacking on more and more mechanics to keep the competitive/hardcore players happy. And after years and years of added mechanics, the game has transformed from a nice elegant system, to a bloated mess too focused on keeping things competitive/hardcore and forgetting what originally made the game fun.
The opposite is true. We remove things that shaped the game’s identity to cater to new players. So, games like Street Fighter end up being more faster like an anime fighter . annime Fighters are trying to be more what Street Fighter was before like being grounded (depends if this Alpha or Not) and slow like molasses. You can see the animation in the air dash in GG now 😂 Tekken was more of a realistic, methodical pace before they ended up putting god damn meter and Final Fantasy Characters. All this shit to appease to scrubs for them to quit anyway and us intermediate to pro players gotta suffer the consequences.
This is incredibly true. Early Hearthstone and Magic from yesteryear were so much simpler and the interesting competitive gameplay arose from the interaction of basic concepts instead of additional complexity on cards. League of Legends and similar games were obviously simpler in early days when characters were designed simpler and there were fewer of them, leading to a much more limited number of interactions between characters that was far easily digestible. As more characters got added, reworks occurred, etc., each individual character got more complex, and more characters increase the complexity multiplicatively. I’ll also say, I don’t think the increased complexity is always something that is appreciated by competitive players, particularly those attempting to grind into the competitive scene. Additional complexity increases the barrier to entry for competitive, but can also increase burnout with the game for players at that level.
That's what happened to Dofus, an Ankama game (French entertainment company), they started Dofus as a DnD-inspired funny pun-rich MMORPG (with way too much grind) where the mechanics were straight forward and the average player was a teenager or young adult, but throughout its' 20-ish years of life, it has become a game where only long time players with a high level guild to play with can even do the content, where rerolls outperform new players not only because of knowledge and skill but also because the devs have purposefully made early game monsters much tougher and stronger to adapt to the enchanted equipment of returning players while new players play with non-enchanted equipment and lower skill and knowledge, leading to the skilled players being able to cruise through the game all the same thanks to all they have access to while newbies give up because they got 2 shot by a monster in the tutorial area or by pigeons from halfway across the screen in the first normal area while losing all their range from debuffs and having to fight these ranged pidgeons in melee. Then we have classes that were about crowd control and debuffs turn into massive mobility creep classes where every skill makes them move clockwise, counterclockwise or from one side to the other of the target, or displaces the target in a similar fashion, requiring a lot of time to get used to every new skill interaction. Another class was a tank made to swap places, pull enemies or allies into melee range, absorb damage and turn it into buffs for themselves and they had a double ratio of life per point compared with other classes but their normal stats had a bad ratio, pushing them to go all vitality over any other stat and using their buffs to be able to deal damage. It was turned into a class that has nothing left to do with the original berserker concept, instead there's a standard short range, mid range and mobility build like most other classes, removing everything that made its' identity (and raising the skill bar compared with the old versions, removing an easy to play class for beginners). The curse/shaman/voodoo class went from mid skill level to high skill level staller that sets up for 10+ turns, completely halting the fight, until they suddenly erase the whole screen in 1 or 2 turns when their setup is successful, ruining PVP to the point that PVP battles battles with that class are constantly dodged by everyone, ally or enemy, just because the fights are unfun and way too long when you're not the one playing that class, feels like spectating someone play one game while everyone else is playing another. And from the original game, the only remaining aspect is the economy and how annoying levelling jobs is even after making them more accessible, due to limited and shared resources (instead of each player having their own instance for resources or enough for everyone, they have to be shared between all players on one server, as you can guess bots and auto clickers and skilled players manage to get a monopoly on rare resources and even on average resources, ruining new players' experience when they want to get money from doing a job after the cost of low level resources has dropped to near 0 from how high the entire community is and how unnecessary low level drops have become compared with early versions of the game). Really, devs that keep pushing the low bar higher and higher basically push new players away, add to that subscription based price rather than a one time buy (after 1 year, it's like buying a standard game, after two years, like 2 games...unless you're making lots of ingame money and converting it to pay your subscription, which again requires to make lots of ingame money in the first place, so old players who know the drill can easily bypass this but newbies need to get past the high entry wall to even realize that) and you get a game that really caters to long time players part of an active community who know everything already rather than drawing in new players and the game population is low except when a big event recalls returning players...for a week or two, until they've completed everything new and go back to their other occupations.
@@MoldMonkey93 If there were enough of you intermediate-pro players to pay the bills you'd have nothing to worry about. You don't create your problem but this attitude does nothing to help it either. Nobody is going to cater to a small insular group, those scrubs you so openly disrespect are the only reason your games get made at all, albeit not to your specifications. And so long as whinging is your play, it's all you'll have to look forward to. As for the original comment, yeah I know a lot of people who've dropped or more slowly abandoned games they used to love because reworks alienated them from old favorites. MMO classes, deck mechanics, game tempo, new assists. These changes are necessary for game health but are definitely risky and especially when compounded on top of each other.
one of the most prime examples of casual vs pro was Overwatch 1 in where Brigitte is super OP in pro play with pros demanding nerfs while she was super weak in casual play with casuals demanding buffs. What a balancing nightmare.
rainbow six siege felt like that all the time. It was even worse when a character felt perfectly balanced at the casual level and broken at pro, so they'd ne forced to nerf popular, seemingly fair characters for no clear reason
It's already like this in Marvel Rivals now. How some characters are blatantly broken like Iron Fist, Scarlet Witch and Jeff the Shark but then the top 1% ranked players will say that they're actually pretty weak once you know how they work or alternately, characters that are pretty weak, like Magneto or Storm will try to tell you that they're actually really powerful at top ranks. Of course they tell you this without taking into account that you have a solid team that communicates, supports and enables you to play these characters. They're otherwise absolutely punishing at lower levels.
I don't think brigitte ever had this problem? Casuals thought she was OP too. The irony with brig is that the casuals whining were tracer and genji players getting bullied for getting too close because they were used to supports being easy prey. Meanwhile the pros complaints were that Brig's shield packs actually made Tracer and Genji in particular way too bulky and allowed flankers to pull off egregiously aggressive plays. A better example might be the GOATS composition as a whole, which Brig was a part of. Tanks were too strong at a high level, with teams running 0 DPS or maybe 1 at most. But anywhere below Esports or top 500, a team of randos would almost never run less than 3 or 4 DPS. The solution was 2-2-2 role queue.
@@charlestonjew7587On the note of Rivals, and since my last comment mentioned role queue, all the content creators are also saying Rivals doesn't need one.. while always playing with their friends, who always communicate and form a balanced team.
@@bld9826yeah my friend and I play together and we're support mains who just flex if one of the roles either needs help or has no one playing it. I'll be honest, we hardly ever have to flex in QP or Competitive and we're playing at a slower pace so we're only in mid silver at the moment, idk where we'll end up, but honestly I'm not having the same issues with team comps on either side - we play support together most games and the ones where we don't it's only ever one of us that has to flex off - but we played solo for the 1 hour per the first 2 days of the streamer event and man if I locked in like I had to lock in on those games I'd be flying up the ranks holy moly I was the only support nearly every game, over 15k healing, somehow the only one capable of shooting flying targets or with half decent target priority, and a lot of those games I didn't even have to ult because I just killed everything because their movement was terrible and I was able to headshot like I was a pro. I'm playing with a G305 that's a year past its' mechanical lifespan - (replacement on the way) and I have no business claiming to be goated lol but holy cranberries do "the people" not play well. I'm halfway between considering solo queue for easy wins and duo queue for consistent team comps. I had to play tank one whole time but otherwise it was just support. I don't want to care about competitive, I'm just into the cosmetic :o and tbh so far comp is just qp but with people who actually want to win and know their characters so it's pretty enjoyable.
As someone who plays fighting games competitively, I dont think you guys butchered it. Another thing to add on memorization is that adding in game queues like "punish" popping up on the screen in newer games makes the learning curve for frame data easier. Also, idk who told you soul calibur is bad, but they are lying to you. Soul calibur 2 is a beloved classic in the fgc.
Bro they need to go back to number three and run that back because to this day it’s so good. The QuickTime events changing the arcade story. The custom character creation AND story. The challenges which mix up the game. Like versing the colossus, navigating around its feet and trying not to get squished. Just a wide range of things to do and enjoy. The stories. It was a great game.
@@ared18t The fgc is great. We all know that fighting games look intimidating, but we all love them and hope that we can spread a little bit of the joy to other people.
So I'm extremely into fighting games and I wanna help supplement that side of the discussion. First, it's true that many fighting games have been moving in the direction of Smash bros and including what we call Simple inputs for many special moves, as opposed to Command inputs (which is what we call when you do several actions on your controller for a single outcome, like tapping down twice and then hitting Kick, for a flying kick move), but this is not to say they're removing the old way. You can see this in how Street Fighter 6 lets you choose between the Modern and Classic controller styles, where Classic is as it has always been and Modern is closer to Smash-style. Specifically for Street Fighter 6, Modern controls also give you some limited auto-combos made through mashing a dedicated combo button rather than hitting specific moves with specific timing. Many non-FG players see the command inputs and complex combos as archaic and I can see that perspective, but when you've been playing for a bit (not even in the order of years, just a couple weeks), input complexity is part of the fun. It helps make the big and important moves feel bigger and more important, and combos of course have a lot of strategic depth. But beyond preference, one point of contention with easy inputs is that they expand the kind of situations where those moves are applicable. Say that you put the flying kick move I mentioned earlier as just a button press. Then it becomes very easy to do that move while advancing or retreating, whereas the original version required some time standing still (because you had to crouch twice). That changes the power level of the move drastically and must be accounted for by the devs when designing. We see this exact thing happen in Street Fighter 6, where you think differently about your opponent's character depending on the controller type they have. Reaction time becomes very powerful cause their moves come out faster than yours, cause even if the move itself is the same, it takes less time to do it. This does not in any way ruin the game but it is a big fundamental change that you see in every level of competition. In terms of accessibility it's also a strange situation. It obviously a success story cause it helps a lot of people get into the game, whether because they can access the fun or because they had some physical disability preventing precise inputs. But there's also the fact that Fighting Games are by design 1v1 competitive experiences with virtually no luck involved (again, not counting Smash), so the skill divide is as strict as you can get. This has ironically produced a very welcoming player culture in my experience, but for sure one based around the struggle and willingness to endure and improve. I'm glad Modern-style inputs can help more people enjoy these games, and future games should have these kinds of considerations going forward, but that last bit seems like the kind of thing that they can never get rid of, because of how the genre works. Edit: Also some thoughts on skill. Its funny, but harder and/or more complex fighting games are (in some ways) easier to get into precisely because of how complex and/or hard things can be. Input complexity is a turn-off, of course, but the simpler the game is, the less likely any player makes a mistake. This genre doesn't have luck as a factor, so a very experienced player may not make any mistakes at all, which makes it basically impossible for even a good player to pose a threat if they haven't attained that level of perfection. Back to the Street Fighter 6 example, one of the ways in which it is more accessible for the mid-level player than the previous game (SF5) was is because SF6 is tremendously more complex. SF5 is a good game but it is lean and compact, and arguably a bare-bones experience compared to SF6. There's less to worry about and less to learn, but this also means it is much harder for a worse player to beat a good one cause there's less avenues of approach, and so there's a *lot* less room for error.
There's also that people look at special moves or combos as a huge part of the skill ceiling when they really aren't. Most high level players could beat a lot of beginner or even middle level players even if they handicap themselves to not use special moves or combos. Though I think that's an issue of conveyance. For the longest time the only guidance a player would be given on, "How do I play this game?" they'd be given a movelist and maybe some combo trials. Historically fighting games haven't had anything telling people, "Okay, learn how to anti-air. Now try and whiff punish this. Now do a safe jump. Here's how you tick throw." Those fundamentals are easier to internalize and also better for long-term success than learning optimal combo routes. The execution difficulty does make getting into a game hard but the thing that really drives it forward is that the only direction the games usually give on how you improve is to dive head-first into that execution barrier, and will likely have inconsistent results in the actual game.
@@Zetact_ You're entirely right, yep. They haven't known how to teach and prioritize what's important to succeed, that's how you get people who have max damage optimal combos but can't whiff-punish. You see this with KoF trials too, where that's the famous part that draws people in and that's the only thing a lot of people know about the series, but you'd never see any of that stuff in tournament.
I am just now switching over from Modern to Classic controls. Finding some stuff easier, and access to the good jabs and kick useful. Missing my one-button DP-Anti-airs though. Forces me to change my entire gameplan. Another nice the about SF6 is Drive Impacts. If you nail your opponent with one, it gives you a small cinematic before resuming the game, giving your brain just a little time to slow down and remember "Oh! The combo I practiced! I can use it here!". And new players *love* Drive Impact.
@@9clawtiger Yeeep. Its also one of those things where it lets you do something that looks cool really easy. Like even getting hit with a DI is visually impressive. Also good luck with the change lol, I can imagine its an entirely different thing.
One thing that does bum me out about modern controls is the fundamental way that charge characters and grapplers have changed. Walk up full circle throws are ridiculous, gone are the days of needing to green hand, light kick or jump to mask the input. Likewise, with modern controls, Charlie and Guile essentially become echo fighters and new modern players might look at Ryu and Guile like classic players look at Ryu and Ken; two defensive projectile and anti-air special characters might seem even more redundant than a defensive version and an offensive version. Why ever pick Dudley over Balrog unless you really like the character? Consider one button input anti-air Blanka ball. It just breaks a system that withstood the test of time for decades in what I'd consider a misguided attempt to bring new players into the scene. Everyone had to start somewhere without platforms, and in the case of Street Fighter 2, competent noobs usually went with a shoto and incompetent noobs went with a mash move character (Chun Li, E. Honda, Blanka) or Vega for the claw's range. There have always been options for noobs in the series, they just failed to properly advertise that fact and instead completely changed the way that characters that have been around for maybe 30 years function as playable characters and as opponents.
It's hard enough to bridge this valley in games where all players have access to all game pieces. It's nothing short of a miracle that some of these card games have enough players in the middle to break through that massive barrier. Love you guys consistently defending randomness for this purpose. Funny thing about old fighting games is that they used to work like this by having very tight windows for inputs, even at high levels of play. As games became "easier" and more consistent, it became easier to crush newer players, not harder. The newest generation has been trying to introduce that variance back into games mostly through information overload and very high damage.
Huh… yeah that is a good point. Making optimal play easier to achieve makes it easier for advanced players to achieve optimal play, but maybe helps bring new players to optimal play sooner? Oof. Yeah, that’s a problem.
The nice thing about games with deep execution checks is that you can sit down and practice said execution checks and consistently find tangible improvement in at least that area. If you strip that away, then you can "play the real game" (loaded phrase alert...) sooner, but the improvements you can make are more difficult to find. We can compromise in many ways to keep that avenue of improvement and expression; most fighting games give you like, 80% of the reward of the "optimal" combo even if you just do a shorter, easier one. You'll compromise on corner carry, damage, resource generation, or maybe something else; but it's extremely playable, and the vast majority of fighting gamers end up using such suboptimal combos and having fun anyway. But you can still grind training mode to juice out that remaining 20% if you really want, with no need to match with another player.
@@emasirik Yeah, modern FG designers are finding some great solutions by introducing more trade-offs between the "optimal" play vs the easier options. Damage vs positional advantage, slower inputs vs easier reaction times, rewarding execution with consistency vs situational awareness. Most of these have always been a thing, but they seem a lot more intentional and universal these days. Biggest one probably being Guilty Gear/BlazBlue-style resource management being everywhere now.
Skilled players who play the same game for years every day multiple hours: "This game is too easy. It's getting so boring, we need more challenge." More than half of the same exact player base: Creates smurf accounts or go after low level/item level players to stomp complete beginners. Complains about how the game is dying because it can't seem to attract beginners in the forums. Keeps asking the devs to make mechanics to cater to their preferences as a cherry on top. Was obsessed with MOBAs and played some MMORPGs back in the day, and managed to reach high rankings along with my friends in some of those. This was basically a summary of most of my friends. My claims about the high amount of smurfing is actually supported by statistical research about these games.
You realize smurfing in games isnt nearly half of any games population right? Its just that theres such an opportunity for repeat offenders and they will continue to do it. As a used to be low rank in Dota 2 now high and playing with friends of all variety, there is a lot of people who misinterpret "obvious" smurfing.
Why not just have open lobbies/servers, no sbmm. That's how old games used to be, play for fun. But nope, today most ppl aren't playing for fun especially the 'casuals' they play to win, they just aren't good and don't want to get good. The true reason for smurfs is because the games have terrible matchmaking, by design aka EOMM, most players don't report even balanced matches which competitive players love, win or lose. This all happened in the end because it's a business. They remove social playlists/server options/party up options/rematches. The game itself is not about fun, it's about manipulating the players to keep playing. It ups their numbers to show shareholders that they are doing a good job, and to gaslight themselves that their game is good.
This is partially the fault of the developer for imbalance in their games. Also, smurfing reduces the challenge, so I think this is a weird thing to say.
@@XFR18 Casuals playing to win is not exactly about being good or bad. It's about having an objective and trying to progress towards it. No SBMM at all is vulnerable to creating rolling situations. Where 1 team just demolishes the other team. No SBMM is actually apart of the issue the video seems to be describing - The valley of skill between new players and veterans. The amount of skill a new player needs to learn and acquire in order to have any kind of positive impact on the outcome in the game - Regardless of the gamemode. Games don't need a complicated SBMM to work. I mean TF2 works more or less fine but can suffer from very unbalanced teams. The community servers attempt to fix this with a more basic SBMM-like system that just tries to track the performance of players that has played in the past and actively balance the teams that way. The most ideal state of a PVP game that requires some degree of skill, is where regardless of the situation you can do something that has meaningful positive impact. To some people that means you get some kills and some deaths. To others, that means you meaningfully contributed to the objective. Manipulating the skill level of the teams is an attempt to land in that ideal state or some wheres sufficiently close to it. SBMM is a more extreme example that finds players to fill a server. Other systems try balance teams with whoever happens to join the server.
You gotta make losing fun, even if someone has no chance to win. It’s why land destruction is viewed badly. If I’m gonna lose, but I get a chance to power out my 6/6 and make a big swing with it, I still feel like I got something exciting done
Weiss Schwarz found a pretty good solution to this. The closer you are to losing, the higher the power of cards you can play, and I've never once had a match that didn't feel close while playing, even if in hindsight it was obvious I was going to lose.
So what about chess? I feel like people say stuff but then chess exists (all skill and memorization) amd basketball exists (pretty much all skill and you have no chance as the underdog) The solution is elo, putting people in equally skilled matches, not penalizing playstyles. Your deck is only half the game, piloting it matters juat as much and same players arent 7s, most are 4s, some are 9s. Those playera probably shouldnt play together.
@@KyleTremblayTitularKtrey I think it does in fact apply to chess and it's one of the reason that chess doesn't appeal to everyone. Some people like more casual games where they don't need to train their skills as much. And this is one of the big barriers to entry to chess, the skill ceiling is so insanely high.
One thing that was not discussed here was introducing strategies that are non-optimal but highly effective relative to their skill requirements. The classic example I'm familiar with is CoD's noob tube. You can't really carry with it, but it still lets just about anyone occasionally get kills. Of course, tuning these sorts of noob friendly strategies is hard. If it's a bit too powerful, you obliterate much of your skill ceiling. Too weak and it's just a useless option.
The lack of attention Keyforge gets is a tragedy. Lack of marketing, maybe? Or are we too caught up in games tied to a preexisting IP that new things don’t attract players?
@@scarfblade5884 I think it's more that Keyforge is so out of the ordinary compared to the booster-based TCG model that its local/competitive scene has struggled to regain the ground lost by FFG. But it's a ton of fun even for people like me who strictly play kitchen table. I'll keep playing it as long as I can! And fingers crossed that things like Candice Harris's TeaForge segment help more people find it.
But what if those groups just find optimization fun? Pushing things to the very limits of what is possible, trying your best to "reinvent" what you think the limits are is, to some folks, the enjoyable aspect of a game, speed runners do it, hell even now scientists are spending time trying to discover elements that will only exist for fractions of seconds just to see what else lies over the horizon of possibility. Some people just find different things fun that's all.
@@pynk_tsuchinoko8806 This only applies IF the whole group finds it fun. Some people find different things fun, but if that "thing" you find fun takes away from the fun of the group, then nobody actually has to respect what you find fun.
This is why I stop playing on ladder in any multiplayer game. Persons at the BOTTOM TIERS are playing "meta" strategies/characters/decks and calling anyone not playing "optimally" greifers. Games were and should be fun, if I'm not having fun in a multiplayer environment because other players have optimised the fun out of the game I leave.
@@Cybertech134 Oh of course! by no means am I suggesting people should do this to complete newbies or force it onto others. personally for me I love playing against strong opponents in MTG or Tekken because i like to learn about myself and others and learn about the game, the first EDH event I went to I was turned off by the idea of playing against people who prolong the experience for a simple gimmick, it just bores me personally, but thats what they find fun so instead of complaining I looked for others who enjoy playing the way I do. this is just one of those quotes I see get thrown around alot and i dont think its that black and white, some people optimize and ruin the experience for themselves, some optimize and ruin it for others, some optimize and have a blast doing it. At the end of the day I think the best thing anyone can do is find like minded groups they can play with instead of banging ones head against randos online in online ranked. Thats just my opinion though. I understand it can be a bit more complex in reality.
The real memorization layer of fighting games isn't even combos. Its frame data. You can dumb this layer down to safe/unsafe but its one of the tallest peaks/walls in the fighting game valley of effort.
"Oh? Memorized frame data of your main? Now do it for the rest 19 characters" God, i used to make tables in notepad with calcs and short descriptions like "+6 on rb, can go with 5a/5b etc"
This is what has kept me from touching fighting games in any serious sense. I can learn input chains and I like tight 1v1 skill tests, but memorizing hitboxes and hitframes is a level of commitment I try to avoid in any game. I do not want to have to analyze what happens on screen the same way the game's engine does.
@@9871ishthis is the best part imo. When you get to that level you're fully understanding what's happening in the game, and that's a very good feeling
@@axellyann5085sure but… gods, is getting to that point such a climb. Been making attempts at it, but to this day I still don’t do theorycrafting for FGs in the same way I do FPS games. To be sure, I have played FPS games for a lot longer, but the process of trying FGs has been both incredibly intimidating and not terribly fruitful. Still can’t quite approach them fully. Would love to. Still have GG and SF6 on my computer, still can’t really find a character I like in GG and can’t use the systems of SF6 very well. Not to mention the other fighting games I’ve tried before then.
@@CurlyHairedRogue i play tekken since i was a kid, started to really learn at tekken tag 2 (2012). Then at tekken 7 (2017) i finally reached a decent level, but yeah, took a while to reach the realm of the good players. That's enough for me, because between the good players and the tournament players there's an abyss in skill, but i can't deny the journey was super satisfying.
Worth noting, Apex Legends has refined its way into a massive valley of effort and its hurting the game at this point. The game has made the right decisions from a mechanical perspective at most points, but the end result is a game that is tight for competitive play but makes bridging the skill gap very daunting.
At the buckets part. Apex is lacking the buckets. The buckets exist as classes, the various kits of the characters and different weapons. but the overall fps game mechanics are lacking buckets. The buckets do exist in various game modes. I supposed the battle royal format is itself a form of buckets, but the removal of much of the randomness in the loot pool is why the skill gap has widen. Good job you guys, very good analysis of the valley of effort :)
Oh. I forgot to mention, they need to solve how to add the buckets into the game play again without just undoing the positive changes they have done while dialing in the game.
Raising max HP to 225 was disastrous for the valley of effort imo. It really felt like they were only listening to the top 1% that just want to run and gun and single-handedly kill the whole lobby.
It's ironic how ofter gamers will hardore gatekeep a community, then as people leave/get bored/die just complain that the game is dead and there's nobody to play with.
@@IntrusiveThot420 As someone who played Destiny from Day 1 to Final shape? Destiny. There are many issues with the game but one of the largest is that the new player experience is opaque and confusing and many vet's are disdainful of "blueberries." If you want to go into Raids and the like without a full kit of on-meta godrolls or you don't know the mechanics you get kicked. Thus you never actually get the good gear or learn those mechanics. So you just quit. Then the player bases for those activities dries up as you naturally lose players to attrition. Trials of Osiris saw that issue hyper-accelerated since you needed to win streaks to get the big rewards, so weaker players would get flamed hard. Thus they stopped playing because it wasn't fun. Thus by the communities own recognition the mode is essentially unplayable/ dead as que times get longer before matches, more people get bored, quit, then it takes even longer and the only people left are the most hardcore so there's no point jumping in when you have almost no chance to even be competitive.
I don't know what you're saying. It seems like you're personalizing the lifespan of any multiplayer videogame into a person, and then blaming this person (who doesn't really exist) for the reality of Mp game lifespans.
@TheAlison1456 You _really_ didn't know what they were saying, then. High skilled/early players gatekeep a game behind skill, then get surprised when the majority of the playerbase - who are less skilled than them at the game - leave. You see this with virtually every fighting game, for example, who are lucky to have even 1/5th of their original playerbase by six months from release and never grow outside of small spikes from DLC/big updates. That's a drop only matched by singleplayer games usually, which are very often only played through once and then never again.
As a person that has been playing MTG about 2 years now, that point about new players being overwhelmed is such a great talking point. I've played card games all my life, so I learn them fast, and one thing I noticed with Magic is that some keywords aren't intuitive for newcomers. Then you get into the nuisances with keyword interactions and it gets even murkier, (for example) trampling over with 1 point of deathtouch. The biggest example for me personally when learning the game was finding out extra combats is what I "thought" double strike was. I understood it if i had a creature battle an opponents and mine survived and killed the other then it could attack again, but it just "technicaly" deals damage a second time so it doesn't interact with attack triggers again. Then didn't realize that it's essentially first strike as well. Protection from "EVERYTHING" is another slippery slope once a new player has a card with that text and then someone plays a board wipe, and now they're confused that their creature died. On top of all of this is similar keywords with nuisanced differences like ward, hexproof, and shroud. Lands producing colors but not being colored permanents.....yea. Getting long winded but I could talk about this topic quite a bit. Great video!
Idk I’ve been playing the game basically continuously for 15 years now and I don’t remember getting this confused about everything. To be fair, the land/mana distinction IS weird at first - and colloquial discussion online and in person does NOT help as it reinforces misconceptions - but a lot of it is, in my opinion, just attention to detail. For example, the confusion about double strike can only come about if you literally never read the rules and/or reminder text. Attacking is and has always been defined as something you declare at combat and is why it’s very similar to first strike (also why would cards bother to refer to “extra combats?”). Everyone will always have confusion with Magic cuz (especially nowadays) it’s a very complex system, but these are growing pains every player will have with practically all but the most basic games (MK8DX added steer and acceleration assist for a reason). Protection has no business being that confusing though, but again protection never mentions being indestructible so I don’t know why that’s a common confusion. I’ve always gotta step through DEBT (damage, equip, block, target) every time it comes up, however! Equip is especially confusing cuz equipment is usually colorless (until it’s not) or if the creature has a very specific kind of non-color protection (some are protected from mana values, for instance). tl;dr: Magic is complex and confusing but reading stuff helps a lot (usually).
@@WMDistractionthe issue with understanding "protection from everything" has nothing to do with "everything", it's all about "protection" being a very clearly defined (but usually not on the card) keyword with a much narrower scope than new players tend to assume.
Really great examples. Coming from Yugioh where “unaffected” MEANS unaffected. And the only way to remove that creature is by targeting the player to force them to remove it with an edict or to sacrifice it using a game state action. Felt like such a rip off first time I wasn’t able to save even a single creature from a Farewell using a protection from white spell. Magic means “Untargettable”….
Yeah... "Wait, why'd my creature get killed by that spell? It had protection from that color?" is a core Magic memory of mine from my very first tournament (that I wasn't even remotely ready for based on already being the punching bag of my personal friend group.) Quite frankly, and yes, it's been explained to me MANY times, I still to this day don't understand the difference between effects that protection (color/everything) applies to and effects that it doesn't. And since I quite playing Magic entirely years and years ago, entirely due to getting tired of always, always losing to my friends who were both just plain better at the game AND vastly outspent me on cards, Protection is like Banding and Flanking and the difference between Instants and Fast Effects and aaaalllllll those other mechanics I never fully precisely understood, and probably never will, because at this point it wouldn't matter anyway. (Back in the day, I always trusted my friends to tell me the appropriate outcomes when they used creatures with abilities or effects over my head.) Anyway, I'm not saying my friends were by any means wrong to play... good, I just never had much of a head for the game and wanted to slug it out with my lame, unoptimized, SIMPLE Green creature deck. But fate didn't think I should ever have any friends who wanted to play on my level and budget, and that made it kind of impossible to enjoy. Be it Magic or literally any other game, having opponents who match your skill and understanding is VITAL to actually enjoying any game, being overwhelmed ruins any and every game for that matter and only becomes a bigger and bigger problem as games develop their complexity and the established player base keeps getting better, and I wouldn't want to even think about jumping into modern Magic's complexity when old Magic was already water that was too deep for me all those years ago. Until there's a shallow end to start in; basically easy mode training wheels Magic Jr for babies to ease me back in gradually, I'm staying retired forever. I don't care about pride, I've just already had enough of losing at Magic for a lifetime.
The thing with fighting games is theres the perception that knowing how to combo or 'memorizing combo strings' is a thing you do once, or is a redundant skill, but I think that does disservice. Core A Gaming has some great videos on the subject, but the TLDR is that both players are often still making meaningful decisions during a combo, depending on the game. How much distance to cover, how much to priorities meter over damage, when and if you go for a reset, how you settup okizeme, how much meter you use and when, are all important decisions and opponents can sometimes have counterplay. Fighting games get worse when the only decision is allways 'do more damage' because its not a choice.
Thanks for your insight. It seems this is a problem with communication of how you get better. Combos are being communicated as how you get better. If that’s not true, then the other parts of the game need to be communicated as the path forward. It makes sense to me that removing combos would help remove this confusion.
@@distractionmakers How to deal with this miscommunication is an ongoing discussion in the FGC. It's like beginners always see Storm turn highlights and twitter threads about convoluted lines of play, but those beginners would do much better by just fixing their curve and playing strong, straightforward cards. How do you get players excited by the efficiency of Tarmogoyf?
this occurs in other games with "combos" too, like TCGs. Yugioh and MtG combos might have different options or subtleties based on matchup or read on what the opponent may have to interact with. Similar to fighting game players picking a combo based on matchup, meter, screen position, hp, etc.
Thanks for posting this. I wanted to say something but you did a better job of fleshing it out. I'm kinda biased tho, I prefer the freedom and flexibility of Xrd to the two-touch thuggery of Strive 😅
@@distractionmakers "It makes sense to me that removing combos would help remove this confusion." is like saying "hey, just remove dribbles from basketball". "Combos are being communicated as how you get better." I'm sorry but that's not true. That's only a perception that people that don't play fighting games have when they see tournament matches. It's communicated directly in most fighting games unless we're talking about an old fighting game.
Titanfall 2's Attrition mode might have one of the best newbie-friendly mechanic I've ever seen - mooks in a pvp mode. Killing another player gets your team +5 points. Killing an enemy NPC gets your team +1 point... but NPCs typically come in groups of 4. So if you can't duel with the no-lifers you can still contribute by sniping the enemy grunts and provide almost as much as if you were killing an opposing player.
There's a meme among fans of modern board games that trad games like chess and go are bad games because the skill gap is so huge. The rules fit on a single sheet of paper, but beginners approach the game totally differently than experienced players
@@DarthSironosthat mechanical depth and complexity are bad? In that case, is tic-tac-toe the best game ever, as it has so little depth or complexity that solving it intuitively is something that 9 year olds manage.
@@Ornithopter470 It isnt the best game ever but in terms of attractability is certainly is the best with how newbie friendly it is and not needing advance materials like chessboards, or chess pieces specialized for that specific game.
I think the distinction between StarCraft II and Brood War in terms of strategic play is a pretty good example of this, at least in terms of the pro scene. Both games have extremely high skill ceilings, but in StarCraft II the engine is so much better than Brood War's (and I'd argue any other RTS game that's been released before or after) that it's both easier to execute certain moves and to do it consistently. As a result, the top pros have gotten so good at mechanical execution that it's begun to stifle build order creativity, combined with some economy and unit/race design that have led to very safe early games that are hard to punish. Before Serral became the best player in the world and before the 12-worker start, weird pushes, all-ins, and specific build order timings were pretty common in tournaments, but now, even very series/opponent-specific all-ins or timings can get stopped by the best players, and they don't even have to sacrifice much in terms of eco, tech, etc. because they've gotten THAT good at playing the game. Brood War's economy is much worse to start (4 workers vs 12 is a *massive* difference) and the insane degree of mechanical execution needed means that there's plenty of room to mess up for even the best players. The map design as well (where they allow for somewhat random starting locations in certain maps) also adds a bit of risk in build order assessment. As a patchless game, you still see old strategies rotate in for one game out of a series, new optimizations get made, in a game that's over 25 years old. Also, the game gets plenty of new pros in Korea, where it outperforms SCII in terms of viewership and playercount. Artosis made a pretty neat video about how consistent SCII players have gotten and why that's not good for their pro scene, and that's the first thing I thought of when I read your video title. I don't think SCII is "ruined" but I haven't watched the past couple GSLs because it's felt kind of samey (and the inconsistent balance philosophy has not helped at all).
Part of the problem with Starcraft 2 is that the game's balance is fragile and does not allow for much map diversity. Any Starcraft 2 map that deviates enough that it changes the timings of key strategies or enables entirely new kinds of strategies wouldn't be possible or viable on a default map is going to create radical and undesirable effects on the game balance. Entire factions might be entirely unviable on those maps. So SC2 maps have to keep to a pretty tight formula and can't really deviate much. Compare this to games like Age of Empires 2 where map diversity is vibrant, and allows for very different spacing between player bases, resource distribution, starting base layout, and general geography. Heck, each map is itself randomized so even two matches on Arabia can have significant map variance. The game balance is more robust against this kind of variance. In fact, it's often regarded as a feature as tournaments will introduce completely new maps and give pro players a couple of weeks to practice in which time they will develop novel strategies that utilize the distinct timings and eccentricities of that map to their advantage. Starcraft 2's balance just couldn't handle that kind of variance, and this naturally leads to a meta without variance. Edit: not saying either game is necessarily better or worse, just that the balance design in SC2 is hostile variance and leads to a meta that cannot tolerate large amounts of variance. AoE2 definitely has its own problems, but a game balance that can robustly tolerate variance is definitely one of its strengths.
once long ago I tried playing Rust. I had a friend who played Rust and really seemed to enjoy it, and so I thought I'd take a shot at it. not knowing what any of the server jargon meant, I loaded into one that had room for extra players, and proceeded to have an awful time; not knowing what "server wipes" were, I'd loaded into one that was approaching time to reset, and what that meant was that most of the players already in that server were long-since established with tools and resources. I, meanwhile, was a fresh Rust player, equipped with nothing but a rock for smacking on random objects to acquire resources. after trying and failing multiple times to reach what I call The Brainiac Threshold (i.e. "how long does it take to find a decent pair of pants") and each time losing what meager resources I could acquire with my humble smackin' rock, and each time to lunatics with full body armor and automatic rifles whereas the most offense I could muster up was a crude spear, I gave up. I have not played a single session of Rust since, and I'm convinced everyone who likes Rust- including that friend- is funny in the head.
As someone who tried to get into fighting games several times and failed everytime: the problem is not even the memorization, it's how hard they usually are to input timing-wise (which doesn't change the point you were making). Some of the advanced but necessary combos for any character in street fighters were so hard to get right in training that most casual players will abandon before they can input it right consistently. And if they don't, they will as soon as they realize that in a real matches they will fumble it everytime for a while. And then just for fun you can add the lag of online matches and I don't even understand how people manage to get successful combos. And combos are just prerequisites ! You need to know them to get a chance at winning but they are not what makes a player good, they represent very little skill expression.
Reminds me of back in the day my friends tried to get me into MtG, and let me tell you, 14 y/os in 2001 were TERRIBLE at explaining how the game plays, so I would routinely lose games and after a point, i had to ask “did you get me to play this game with you so you’d have someone to win against?” I never had a meaningful game and I quickly lost interest in ever finding one.
MtG is very complex (I would say overly complex and bloated these days) and that makes it difficult to fully teach new players. Most of the core concepts aren't that difficult on the surface, but there are a number of deeper layers within the game that often come up. Just explaining the "stack" to a player can be a headache even though at its core it isn't that complicated of a concept (basically boils down to the last action taken is the fist action performed). However, when you start getting into the way different mechanics interact with each other and when who has priority and everything it can become a nightmare that is frequently counter-intuitive sometimes so much so that it sounds like cheating but there is a logic to it when you explain the way it works. When bringing new players in that player either has to be really invested in picking up the game and willing to take a lot of lumps or the playgroup has to be a bit invested in "dumbing" down their play for a bit to bring the player up to speed with a reasonable learning curve.
8:14 Just to add things from a the perspective of someone whose played lots of fighting games at a competitive level, adding simplified inputs to special moves is not as easy as a sell as you'd think. Oddly enough, they can often give even more advantages to the veteran players over the new players your trying to help. A new player will be grateful that they can finally do an uppercut without doing the Z motion + a button, but a veteran will see that they can be immune to any frametrap or throw set up by delay pressing the uppercut button after blocking. This is why every uppercut in Street Fighter 6 has the Simplified input for uppercut set to Forward + Special so you can't do it while blocking. Simplified inputs also can shutdown entire character archtypes unintentionally. For example, in Street Fighter 6, characters with fast moving horizontal attacks like Blanka, Honda and Marisa can use their powerful self-projectiling moves (Blanka ball, Honda's Headbutt, and Marisa's superman punch) as a way to get in and bully their opponents. It is a very hard execution and reaction check with traditional inputs. With 1 button guaranteed anti-airs, they are cake to deal with. I think a lot of characters who rely on this type of attack would either need those moves buffed to be so fast you can't react with anticipation or those types of characters would get destroyed by the input system that favors reactive defense. I'm not saying that having simplified inputs is a mistake. There just needs to be a lot of design decisions behind having that as a system. DNF duel, Street Fighter 6, Granblue fantasy versus and Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid all have one button special systems and are great games. I think the video from Core-A-Gaming "Sidenote: Why Motion inputs Still exist" explains a lot more of the unique things that special move inputs can add that aren't just things to memorize to make life harder for newbs as people keep framing them as.
It's the issue with all new player friendly mechanics added in any game; they help out good players as well. And a good player is far more equipped to take proper advantage of whatever mechanic that may be. Age of Empires 2 has in recent years (last five years I guess) added in various supports for specific resource gathering. It lowers the level of micro actions needed in your base, which helps new players. At the highest level, it means you have more uptime on army micro management, scouting, all of these tiny advantages that actually cause a greater divide between good and bad players. Newbies don't die to getting misplacing or reseeding farms against good players, they die to one archer microing down your entire economy. So yeah. Helping new players in PvP focused games don't work. Only one way to stop getting stomped, and that is getting better at the game. Which... is an issue for sustained playerbases.
long live motion inputs. those that argue against them very rarely understand why they exist in the first place. like you said, the whole game has to be designed around not having them, and those design decisions and implications aren't understood by the people that wanted to remove the motions. forgive them, for they know not what they do
@@PressureCooker69 I don't know if there are public developer notes for Street Fighter 2 about this, but I think that Charge inputs were the first attempt at making a 1 button special if you think about it. After holding a back direction, you just need to press one direction with a button to execute the special. The most famous charge character being Guile, whose entire move set is designed around how his input system works. hold back for sonic boom, and hold down for flash kick. Which means holding down and back charges both moves. Guile's specials were made stronger than their motion contemporaries, but you couldn't have access to them while moving forward. It's a classic to how execution isn't just "making things harder", but actually creates playstyles and strategies from limitations based on those rules.
@@ZhangHe2369 yeah it all makes sense. ease of use (fewer inputs) + better frame data vs availability. the balance of the game is a work of art in many cases. there's a reason that the charge motion for upkicks is down.
I still feel like charge inputs and Shoryuken are the only examples given. Geiger from Fantasy Strike solved the first issue pretty well, and I’m sure there’s creative solutions to make DP easy to trigger on offense combos but not defense.
Another videogame example is the better you are at a game, higher better your weapons are (like the guns in old-school MW2). So, the better players get better guns, and that makes winning easier, which means they get better guns, etc. Middle skill players have a harder time gearing up, because the best players can farm them ever so much easier
To be fair to Yugioh, they *do* have "problem solving card text" (PSCT), the quotes aren't sarcastic, it's just a specific phrase they use and not just a descriptor. The problem with PSCT though is that it has extensive implications on the game and does need to be understood to play properly at a higher level, but it isn't even explained in the rule book. These are key semantics concerning the cards. All this to say, in Yugioh reading the card *does* explain the card... but only if you know how to read it, and the game itself doesn't teach you.
That sounds like the scenes in the anime where player 1 would explain how player 2's card works to player 2. It always made me think there was no text on their cards.
Tbf the only wording things you actually need to learn are missed timing and what types of summon negates work on fusion summons. Everything else either really is explained on the card or isn't explained by PSCT grammar either, only by external ruling.
@@yurisei6732 This is mostly true, but that's also the problem. Timing on its own involves at least 6 things, all the effect conjunctions, although only 4 of those really matter that much, and the impact of chains. Chains are explained fairly well in the rule book, but their interaction with "when" effects isn't. Considering that most effects nowadays include conjuctions, it's pretty important. Hell even the colon and semicolon aren't explained in the rule book, though that's pretty simple to get.
It's not too different than keywords (in fact yugioh has keywords as well), in that it's essentially a second language you have to learn - except the gap of memorization is less (in exchange for being more cumbersome to read). Though unlike magic, yugioh is based on an anime, and a lot of the lawyery type of wording is design to allow not only for every deck to have their own interesting quirks, but to also simulate those big anime combos.
Personally I feel like putting the full details of PSCT in the rule books you get in products would actually be hinder new players than help them. That's not to say that rules aren't helpful, but that it's a matter of onboarding. There is a certain level of rules you can reasonable introduce to a new player before it all fizzles out of their head and becomes mush, so it's often better to keep the more technical stuff for later once the player has a basic understanding of the game and continued interest to go further into the depths
Here in Chile we got a weird meta for commander, since cards are more expensive (based on purchase power and pricier sealed product) and hard to come by (we don't have easy access to CardMakert, CardKingdom or TCG Player equivalent), most players want to make the most of the cards that they have (there is still a stigma against proxing in casual), so metas are casual but tend to be more competitive than metas in USA (and I guess other places). LGS tend to offer a price for wining and there are leagues with standing tracking for retention. Casual players exists, but not at the same level than USA.
In Brasil with my friends we didn't had money so we broxys whole decks. As a friend games night is good. But we don't compete, when a friend compete we land to him what we have so he can represent us.
Tbh while I think keywording would absolutely help yugioh, the bigger problem I ran into when trying to learn it (as an avid CCG enjoyer across all sorts of physical and digital card games) was the complete lack of text formatting/templating. If there were line breaks between effects, colons or symbols to denote cost vs effect, bullet points or numbers for modal effects, etc, then it'd feel a lot better. Even the Master Duel doesn't apply this sort of thing. in fact, Master Duel does something crazier: making flavor text indistinguishable from effect text (which is especially bad on normal pendulum monsters where now one half of the text you're reading is game rules and the other half is lore)
there are actually colons denoting cost vs effect on all but the very oldest cards. As for the others, ygo actually also has all of them... In Japan!!! For some reason they don't bring that over to the west. But that also explains why they're written so densely, because they're designed as cards with actual comprehensive formatting that then just gets ruined by konami of america.
Yes the formatting on YGO's TCG cards is at a break point, it's kinda crazy that Master Duel demands you comprehend Problem Solving Card Text AND also learn to skim through the blocks of text fast enough to find the important effects while not missing any other relevant information and not running out of time. I see no other option but to make the text box bigger to fit bullet points and line breaks, resell the old cards all over again.
The cards do actually have formatting that tells you what is a cost or effect and also some things are bulleted for certain types of effects. The templating of the cards is the part that needs changing though for sure. It's funny cuz the templating issue is mostly fixed in the asian version of the game cuz they number their effects so it doesn't get lost in the paragraph.
There is some of this, but the Problem Solving Card text isn't enough, maybe try OCG English, OCG cards have more formatting than TCG cards do to separate stuff out
For video games specifically on the competitive side, I loathe matchmaking being the norm now. The freedom to associate with a server browser and private servers really allows for players to better self sort to the kind of play they most enjoy instead of getting thrown into an algorithm that everyone hates.
@@matsuringo24 server browsers would be great to see come in as a more prominent feature in plenty of modern games. Skill based matchmaking systems have their place in the ranked competitive modes but a non skill based matchmaking and server browser are perfect for casual, community, or other types of game modes.
So much this. Server Browsers were the best. You can select what map, game mode, player count that you wanted to play. Servers could build communities. Not to mention the players had some control over the time they wanted to wait to get into a match. Forget SBMM EOMM or whatever. Matchmaking is just worse than a server browser
there is also the option of allowing the players to self sort, deadlock has an option that allows players to do this in their queues for "competitive mindset" or "casual mindset"
yes, because pros stomping new players until they get banned from the server, or alternatively seeing the pro on your team absolutely flatten the enemy and carry your team to victory multiple times(they're not getting banned because the server admin is on the same team as them) is definitely soooo much better
One perspective that I've gained from playing chess is that often when people are frustrated at skill barriers, the "real" problem is actually something else. And I think it actually is the lack of community. I'm not trying to deny that games can be more or less hostile to new players, but I've come to believe that in order to get good in any "hard game", being part of a community that guides you through the learning process is absolutely essential. So for example chess, on its face is probably one of the most hostile and hard to learn games there is. And a lot of new players feel put off by the pressure of "oh you have to learn openings and memorize 20-move lines". And I was like that, put a ton of time into openings way too early. And I got some results, but ultimately hit a brick wall. But then I actually joined a chess club and started talking to other players over the board. And what happened was, those people started guiding me away from the wrong things (memorization) towards the right things (fundamentals and concepts). And those "right things" included a lot of stuff I never really could have learnt on my own. For example just seeing the way someone analyzes a position and talks through the process can help you so much. You learn to focus on the relevant parts and filter all the noise. And before long I realized that if you develop your intuition by listening to people who "get it" (at least more than you do) then in the vast majority of cases the "correct move" is the intuitive one. And this applies to fighting games, tcg:s, mobas... you name it. Like yugioh and mtg both, you learn them by playing. Sure yugioh is more wordy, but ultimately both have such complex rules that the average player only knows and understands a fraction of them. But still can play, even quite well perhaps. I've definitely lost horribly to players who don't know that much about the stack and layers and whatnot. And that's because they've learnt socially, that you don't cast your bomb when opponent has 3 blue mana up, while I was reading up on how banding works. And overall I believe it's almost inseparable. A "hard game" necessarily has a bunch of different aspects that you could be working on, some more relevant than others to you at each moment. Some that you can learn on your own with time and effort, and some that you need someone to just point at you: "hey did you know that you seen to be thinking about this completely wrong". And without that community guidance you can grind for months in training mode or whatever, but still come out as a total scrub since you focused on the wrong thing. And in that case you want to blame someone, and it's natural to blame the devs for making the game too hard to get into. Ofc. the devs could and should do what they can to improve conveyance, and avoid unnecessary barriers, but what they can't do anything about is the biggest barrier, and that's yourself, your own mental barriers. Especially the belief that you are able and should be able to do this "on your own". Maybe there are some rare individuals who have the ability to learn by themselves, to find the "essential problem" in their play at each step by self-reflection and intuition alone. But that ain't me and probably ain't you either.
I feel like the fixation on memorizing combos is a trap beginners to fighting games fall into. Even if you are a combo monster, you aren't nessecarily competitive, similar to how you can be a crackshot in fps games and still be low ranked. Combos achieve two things for you. They make you deal more damage, which gets you to your wincon faster, and they put you in a favorable position to continue your offense. These are both good things and worth practicing, however you can't lose sight of how you even get into the combo to begin with. In order to combo, you must hit your opponent. In order to hit your opponent, you must understand your reach and speed as opposed to theirs. And even once you've ended your combo, youve gotta know how to capitalize on your advantage. Then theres knowing how to defend yourself. Combos are the flashy part of fighting games, so they're naturally what draws people in, though I wouldnt say they are a nessecity. Every fighting game ever made has extremrly simple routes that achieve your main goals (deal more damage, get advantage for the next interaction). The extra damage can be miniscule, it only affects how fast you win, but if you know when to cash in on your hits, no matter how small, you will just win more. I think fighting games biggest barrier to entry is just all the meta knowledge you just have to learn to be competitive. Games like granblue have done away with motion inputs and people still find that game too hard. There's no real way of easing a player into it however. Theyve just got to learn.
Similarly in chess, a lot of players spend too much time learning opening theory whilst it has a lower impact on their performance than they think it will.
Chess solved this a hundred years ago. Just use ELO and play other players of a similar skill level. Or use a handicap to make up the difference - like golf or chess do as well. You can also use rubber banding type effects to make the game easy at first and increasingly difficult as one nears victory. Or you can use politics - allow multiple losing players to gang up on the winning player.
In a competitive setting where there's a prize on the line, you can't fault people for doing what they gotta do to win. Designing around said high stakes competetive setting however, is gonna push away people looking for a casual experience one way or enother over time.
This conversation made me remember my journey in GW2 (PC- MMORPG). The elite speedclearing guilds created strategies and builds so powerfull that can allow you to kill bosses even before they start applying their mechanics with hard high Actions per second rotations delivering ludicrous ammounts of dps ( i dont even think devs were aware that the playerbase would manage to get their builds so overpowered). These builds got released and now everyone not only tries to imitate them but also only accepts people who do the same in their raid parties. Ex: The guy who made a ranger because he likes bows , will have an hard time being that ranged dps in a raid because the META buidl requires him to use axes ( for example that might or not be true in the current release) and move to melee range, same applies for spellcasters etc.. those Meta rotations are in an emersive aspect of a fantasy world are just nonsense. Skilled players created builds so weird but powerful that allowed endgame content to be cleared so much easier, the playerbase followed their playstyle... What got me turned off from the game as i got older was exactly that, even though i could perform really really well doing the META procedures it was just infuriating seeing that my adult friends with very limited time to play PC and perfectly geared and skilled to do any content as long as people are able to do mechanics, would not be accepted in a 10 man raid squad because they dont dont try to emulate the top1% elite Guilds.
A bit of a controversial take here, but as a budding designer myself, i truly think the solution to this is making the path to improvement the reward/loop. Games like hades already successfully do this. The issue in my eyes is actually that the perception of initiation difficulty creates negative attitudes towards trying at all. The need to win all the time creates negative association to just playing for external reasons (ie. Fun) regardless of winning. The winning should be the secondary reward to simply exploring the thing you love
I still follow the Starcraft: Broodwar tournaments coming out of South Korea. The "valley of effort" you mentioned seems to be about 10 years of dedication before "new" players can compete with existing top players. It's still hugely popular there though, and young players are being taught Broodwar in semi-formal organisations called 'Universities'. Korean players have always been significantly better than any 'foreign' (non-Korean) players. I will also add that gamers getting too good and breaking games is sometimes a really good thing. Broodwar hasn't had a patch in 20 years, and yet new strategies and tactics are developed all the time. There's no way Blizz designed for this, or ever could have designed for it. There's just some quirks in the engine, leading to exploits which benefit player attention and micromanagement.
Huge fighting game fan and I’ve placed in Blazblue back in the day, been playing since like 2002. You guys did a good job and the other fans helped to bridge the gap. One thing that wasn’t mentioned in those other comments is that special inputs raises the barrier to entry, but does not affect the macro decisions you make in a match. Developers are trying to make that barrier to entry lower but typically at a cost, ie. Reduced damage, limited uses, less normals/overall options, etc. What isn’t talked about is that the skill ceiling in a game like Smash Bros (especially melee) is MUCH higher due to having a ton more movement options. In melee, your APM skyrockets if you consider all of the micro nuances that exist in having analogue coordinates in your control stick and needing to do certain cancels to make your character move faster. Some fighting games like street fighter have a more restrictive system where your combo routing should be planned, and some are like Blazblue where it feels like pretty much anything can combo but you need to have a good feel for the game physics to optimize it. Some games are like Tekken 8 where your inputs have to be SO precise and thoughtful that just being in an unfamiliar situation can shake you and affect your execution. The most important thing to remember when talking about inputs is this; the input itself is a balancing factor in the fighting game. Doing a quarter circle is a common input that will have common outcomes, whereas a charge move or a 360 will reward you in being more efficient or having high damage. If you take those properties and suddenly make them easy to execute in the interest of allowing a player to focus on the macro decisions of a match, other things will always be taken to offset that accessibility.
The goldilocks zone of execution is definitely when even at the top level, players have to weigh the risk of dropping the execution heavy option, though it's a lot harder in practice to make such a system on purpose
@@saevus2686 At the top level it really is about what you have down pat in your muscle memory and if you can access that in the moment. What makes those moments so difficult is being able to evaluate whether or not you have the appropriate resources to pull it off and if it will leave you in an advantageous position. I’m all washed up, so I just take the option that’s 92% of the way there but I know I can do.
When I started MTG, I was told that FNM was casual and I could really make anything I wanted so with a $100 budget i made a cool mono-black deck. The event was full of metadecks mostly mid-range and control which is extremely unfun to play against for a new player who doesn't know how to play around those strategies. I'd travel an hour to FNM only to have all my spells countered, bounced or destroyed. It got so bad I conceded when I saw my opponent lay down a white/blue land. If it wasn't for a friendly EDH table inviting me for a game I would have left magic there and then.
Getting into Magic can be hard, because it invites a lot of toxic people. There’s so many horror stories of people joining a group only to get relentlessly bullied and targeted by all of the friends in the group. To have a good experience with Magic, I think you have to play with people you can trust to try and make the new guy have a good experience with their game, which does basically rule out competitive anything.
I have fallen for this trap and it sucks. I won't go anywhere near Magic anymore and actively detest it. It's not that I don't know how to play, it's that I hate HOW people play.
I only play magic for fun. And we have a rule of not using set cards/multiple copies (except for basic lands) Also cards must be consistent with the theme/motif. It forces us to be creative, work with what you have in your hands instead of focusing on a digging your deck or streamlining it for specific strategy, combo, engine.
I always find it really strange when highly competitive and skilled players complain about skill-based matchmaking, because they're essentially asking to stomp some poor newbie every once in awhile as a treat.
Well, actually not always the case. The issue is really more that with SBMM, when you hit a certain skill level it now mandates that the game's environment changes. You no longer see "bad" or "unique" playstyles, you only see the meta vs. the meta. Everything happens in a vaccuum. Every match is you fighting for your life, whereas before you could breathe a little and experience a decent mix of genuine competition and "stomps". So, I'm sure with some people you're absolutely hitting the nail on the head, but SBMM can present genuine issues for skilled players as well. It's not just that people want to roflstomp new players into quitting the game.
@brad1426 imo, the "fighting for your life every game thing" is not a problem. The meta thing might be, but that's a problem with gaming as a whole, not unique to SBMM.
a lot of the games i've seen people complain about SBMM in are team-based ranked match queue sort of things like league of legends and valorant, where your rank increases largely based on win/loss ratio instead of individual performance and actually figuring out what mmr a player, let alone a team of 5 of them actually is is impossible - i've seen it end up with situations like three silver players, one gold, and a platinum player on a team against four golds and a plat which isn't really fun for anyone involved
@@Dezarc yeah, League was notorious for this when I played. People say it's an unfortunate consequence of people wanting shorter queue times, so they allow larger "skill gaps" on teams. We called it the "jungle coin flip". You would win or lose when your team was assembled based on whose jungle was better lol
@@justincrowe888 and if they shorten the gap, higher rank players just make smurfs so they can actually play, but at the cost of everything else associated with smurf accounts i don't envy being the guy in riot's office trying to sort that whole system out, honestly also, since you seem like an old leaguehead, does metagolem mean anything to you
A common trap you can fall into when discussing the gap between casual and entrenched players is assuming that casual players don't want to deal with execution challenges. If you walked into a super-casual EDH game under the assumption that most of the players would be casting Gigantosaurus or the like, you would be mistaken. People like combos, people like finding options to counter what their opponents are doing, people like having a big complex mess of things going on and resolving it with good execution. The trick is managing the stakes of the execution challenges so people can do that to their taste. As far as fighting games go, Guilty Gear Strive is a good example I think, when it comes to having a low basic execution requirement to just play the game but giving lots of opportunities to flex your execution in flashy ways. You can start out on a character like Ky, a character with a relatively basic game plan and super easy and consistent combos, and then if you feel like showing off, you can move to a character like Johnny, whose combos have a lot of different moving pieces in them and are really stylish and satisfying when you pull them off. The important thing is to balance these options against each other for maximum player expression, so they can engage with the game's challenges in exactly the way they want to.
I genuinely don't understand why this is a point of contention for so many people. The casual argument is that they can't have fun if they don't win but that competitive players are too focused on winning. If losing makes you not want to play the game then you should play a different game or change your mentality on what a game is even doing for you. I did sports and Middle School, I lost a lot but I still kept doing it because I liked it even though losing wasn't fun at all. I enjoyed the process. A lot of casual players just want to turn their brain off and receive the reward of victory when they should just be playing a single player or noncompetitive game with difficulty that is tuned to what they can have fun with. I agree with all the points about consistency and game design and not creating cards or abilities that break previously established logic.
Because you're not understanding there's a threshold, nor the difference between sports and board games. When you're new and inexperienced it helps to have a good introduction to what the game is. People need to see the magic of the game to want to continue. If they immediately get dogged on in something like catan or magic, they're not going to want to play anymore. It's as much a demonstration of the community as it is for the game itself. What you did was Sports, you got to move your body and physically move and work out. So even if you lost, you still got a work out. This is video games and card games. Have you ever been stuck in a 2 hour Euro game because someone told you it was easy to learn and people will play nicely and instead get smoked by people who've been playing for years? I have and it's miserable, made me not want to play that game again.
You forgot to mention price. People want to play competitive but they dont want to spend 400-1k on the best cards available so theyre going to get womped with their budget decks 90% of the time. Its a huge problem when cards are only printed at the highest rarity or dont have other versions to make it cheaper. Im not spending 40-50$ on a card that ill need 4 of to make the deck I want to play work decent. ill just move on to a different game
I love the Mimic Tear, and IDGAF. I was over-leveled and over-powered anyways. 🤷🏿♂️ Turns out when you explore every dungeon you find and actively seek them out in every corner, you're gonna be strong AF
In terms of single player games, this is why players prefer more difficult games nowadays and are being pulled towards Japanese style of difficulty and game design philosophy - and is also why some western games are trying to mimic that same process. These games asks more of the player and so you naturally find the need to be better. The game developers will not punish you for being better, in fact they will reward the skill. In my opinion, I always find the discourse of "players will optimize the fun out of games" to be moot and not very useful because, like... of course they will?? Everyone does it. It's natural and borderline subconscious at this point. I guess some people don't realise they "optimize". So ultimately, if this behavior is a given, is inherent to video game players, and is inevitable (unless cleverly designed to counteract such behavior), then yes, I agree with the video - the devs are to blame.
This is what makes a game like Team Fortress 2 great to me. The amount of players per team, crits, weapon variability and matchmaking system make it feel like a pickup game of basketball where everyone finds a place to fit in the team and enjoy the game at their own pace.
This is super common for non fighting fans, but getting rid of combos in a fighter is like making soccer or basketball a 1v1 game. Which is fine, that can be fun, but we can all agree that it would be more interesting to have more playstyles than just "Goalie"
what a great fucking video. A very rare no fluff game design overview that delves deep enough to get to something actionable across game genres. Instant sub.
The amount of memorization for fighting games has actually gone up since the old days. Memorizing move list has never been a problem in 2D fighters, because characters have usually 3-4 special moves and a couple of command normals on top of that. Tekken and other 3D games have always had a a lot more bloated move lists, which is still the case. Combo systems on the other hand have gotten more elaborate, especially compared to the really early days of the genre were usually the best you could do was jump in > normal > special, or Vampire Savior light > medium > heavy. Now the combos one needs to learn are more intricate in practically every game, so even though there is more leeway in the execution there the memorization part is overall either equal or harder than in the past. Then there is also the question of frame data, which has always been a thing, but with how accessible it is now on internet and with how fighting games are designed mechanically now it is more necessary to memorize it for a lot of the situations so that you can have a chance at fighting back.
yea this is a huge thing that i'm surprised isn't talked about a lot more. the best example i can think of was when i first beat the first Dark Souls and then started playing Elden Ring. I didn't think the difference in difficulty would be too bad despite what i heard, that it'd just be a different way to play where you'd have to pay a bit more attention to enemy's attacks... I can't lie, I think I died almost a dozen times to the Soldier of Godrick fight. Maybe more. If you don't use the stronger tools in the game, the ones that can utterly trivialize the entire experience, it demands *far more* out of you as a player. This is all especially true with Shadow of the Erdtree; I've heard a lot about different people just giving up because they couldn't deal with a boss. They demand that you learn and master their movesets far more than anything else in this FromSoft genre: Malenia, Messmer, Relanna, Godfrey, even Margit the Filter Omen to an extent. All of them and more. Even the build planning aspects of the game are more demanding, despite the more lenient equip loads, stronger light rolls, and lack of a durability system. there's way higher level requirements for a lot of equipment, and leveling Vigor is FAR more pressing than leveling Vitality in Dark Souls. you can get through DS1 just fine with about 30 vitality, but by the second half of Elden Ring 40 vigor is your BOTTOM LINE. there's immensely strong tools that can grant ridiculous reward for almost no commitment, but they demand commitment, and if you don't think through what you're leveling, you may be screwed without a respec.
Some people just don't have the time to put into games, when i was younger i took it seriously and was quite good. Now that I'm older i just wanna have fun and blow some steam after work....nope, sweats everywhere, especially in Apex. I just gave up on competitive games, no one has a chill mode and as a halo vet.....understand...to an extent.
I LOVE your philosophy about complexity. If we define a "moment" in a game as "making a meaningful decision and acting on it," then allowing the players to go from moment to moment as smoothly as possible is all but guaranteed to lead to a better player experience.
This works well in single player games, but in competitive games, it generally results in either very dull play patterns, or in player input becoming irrelevant.
@@Ornithopter470 I partially disagree. The most complex game I have ever put time into is DOTA 2, you have 100s of potential decisions to make every minute, each which impacts the next moment as well as the rest of the match. Dota does have many other problems, particularly with the competitive playerbase that lead me to stop playing consistently, but aside from periods where balance was so poor that the meta only allowed for a very narrow group of heroes and builds to be playable, I still regard it as the best competitive game based on that moment to moment decision making. Rocket league is a similar case. Virtually unchanged in 10 years and even AI has yet to reach the skillcap, there are just too many possible decisions and inputs. Both games do rely on a high degree of complexity and players do still fall into certain patterns so I do take your point generally, but there are definitely ways to keep games interesting at the highest level.
@@9871ish I definitely could have phrased it better. There is not a "dominant strategy" in dota om, mainly because of the constant balance tweaking in Dota, and in rocket League, there is a dominant strategy, it's just that there is only one actual way to play the game. It's the same reason why basketball is 90% 3 point shots. It's just the best way to optimize for winning games. It's still fun.
Nice, I have two points to add. First, on variance, if you go to a non-variant game you end up with something like chess. The game will need to depend on higher decision branching with meaningful decisions to reintroduce game variety. That stops it from being "just going through the motions." Also, another tool I can think of for smoothing the skill buckets are handicaps. A lot of competitive games have forms of handicap and some even let high-level players play competitively with beginners. Games with strategy dominance chains for board states (like weakness/resistance in pokemon) can act as handicap systems when the expert player plays the weaker position. On a small scale, in MtG matches, letting the losing player of a game decide if they want to go first for the next game in the match can also be a meaningful handicap for mismatched decks/players.
I’m so sick of this argument that “we’re gonna make fighting games more accessible by removing memorizing long combos” as if A.) fighting games tend to include super long difficult to remember input strings (they don’t, 5 buttons is usually on the long end even for a game like Tekken and Street Fighter will almost never ask anything more from you than a couple quarter circles.) and B.) players really want to play fast rock paper scissors. I fucking suck at Tekken I can’t do Reina’s tricky ass command grab input reliability to safe my life, but the reward is in getting better and learning the move pool. You’re sanding the edges off of the experience in the worst way by making every move accessible and having zero execution tax, it makes big brawlers and nimble characters feel the same it just removes all that gratifying texture from the experience and I can’t help but think half of the players using modern controls are just robbing themselves of a more fun experience because they don’t understand that just a TINY bit of effort can be so rewarded. It also ruins learning any new fighting game if you have to play against some shithead with easymode controls while you’re trying to learn. There is so much diversity in the fighting game space fuck SF and Tekken addding baby controls when there’s 20 other anime fighters that play that way by default. If it’s not your world then don’t talk about Fighting games unless it’s to bitch about monetization or body oder. We don’t need it, we are more than happy getting sweaty without an influx of people that demand simplicity and luck take over anything with a gratifying skill ceiling. Also Smash Ultimate sucks.
As a fighting game, strategy game, and card game player I value the ability of my brothers and I to learn together and adapt to each other. The biggest skill in any of those games (for us at least) is mind games. Tricking your opponent is always an advantage.
High level play is a different design requirement. Most games dont need to hold up to super high level gameplay. On the other hand, even simpler trading card games have very high skill ceiling due to hidden hand information / playing towards outs.
i will explain about fighting games why you can't really remove motion inputs completely. I am at the top 10 percent so i think i am kinda qualify to tell new folks and gamers from other genre why. MOTION INPUTS are actually not there for you to remember it, its there to BALANCE the characters and supports character playstyle, especially in game where 1 mistake is a gravely mistake opponent can punish. Lets start with DP motion or in easy "almost every rising uppercut moves" it has property to win EVERY SINGLE MOVES IN THE GAME except few things like block, walking backward and super( ultimate). it has a fast start up as well, the only weakness it has is that if you miss it, you die. Dp nowadays has 2 inputs type generally 1. Forward, down, down+forward 2 Down, down+forward, forward notice how there is no back??? because walking back in fighting game is blocking. imagine if you can block and use the most broken move in the game that beat everything out of block frame 1, offense would not be viable anymore. It will also obliterate the purpose of other core gameplay part that you need in order to open opponent guard up like frametrap, overhead, string, spacetrap, jumps in, empty jump, delay buttons, etc. also if you are bloking you have to release your block to DP otherwise you can't really press it also there is 3 input because in moment of high pressure your finger wont even press it right so there is a huge room for error to balance out the most broken move in the game. in conclusion, if you can react to everything with a move that beats everything except super with a single button press out of block, the game will not function Next one is a charge move, example here will be Chun li fireball "kikoken". Fireball in most fighting games are quarter circle forward input but Chun's one is "hold back for 50 frames then press forward and punch", This is because Chun strength and screen presence is different depends on the position you are in. Chun is weak on walking forward and stupidly strong on walking backward because her character was design around making opponent whiff there buttons and punish it. Almost everything in her kit was designed for walking backward. While everyone has to stop walking to do fireball Chun can chuck it out while she is walking back. another thing is Chun's and Guile fireball has better frame data than the rest of the cast. Guess why? cuz it's a conditioning tool to force the opponent to not walk forward because they have FASTEST fireball at their disposal when walking back. The purpose of their fireball is to stop opponent from walking forward, when Chun and guile walk back you have to walk forward to catch them but if they have literally a gun pointing at your leg would you walk?? No, right? so opponents are force to play to Chun's and Guile strength which is midrange game. you see how all of this is coming together?? yeah and that is why it's a core part of fighting games. some games can remove it like anime games cuz they uses different fundamentals but for games that balance around spacing timing you really can't. Hope yall understand a bit more after reading. TY
This is straight up just an ego issue. If you play fighting games you’ll begin to understand that you have to be willing to suck and lose before you get good. If you’re a casual and your time is “ruined” by losing, I’d argue you didn’t actually want to play the game in the first place. You still wanted to win, just without having to try. So in that instance, go play a single player game, or as they say, get good.
I see this very clearly with my beloved game Magic the Gathering. I have played the game for a very long time now and have played both competitively and at very casual low levels as well as all sorts of places in between. One thing I've noticed is that the mindset of the competitive people is not only often completely different than the mindset of the casuals, but is usually directly at odds, especially when it comes to what makes the game fun... There's this idea at high level MTG that says "There is a limited amount of fun to be had, and I am going to do my best to monopolize it." Through a combination of careful deck optimization and skill, they homogenize to a relatively consistent metagame that allows them to win games as much as possible by any means possible -- even if it means their opponents are locked completely out of playing the game. There's very much an attitude of "get good scrub" and "If you aren't following a basic sense of how to interact with the metagame, you're a bad player and you deserve to lose" at that scene... Look, to the extent that the metagame is extremely cutthroat and to the extent that new people want to get in on metagaming at that level and be competitive too, they're absolutely right. You do have to know how to play like a cutthroat bastard to really get good and win more games. But not everyone is looking for that kind of gaming experience. And I don't think I need to tell any of you just how thoroughly TOXIC a mindset and mentality that is to have for the game as a whole. Personally, I disagree with the notion that a person who wants to build a deck with goofy flying hamsters and pirate squirrels, or that a person who wants to play around a janky convoluted combo with 6-8 different pieces to assemble glorious nonsense, is just someone bad at the game who needs to get good and who deserves to lose. A person like this isn't necessarily even unskilled at the game, they're just not looking to play the game for the same kind of experience that the cutthroats are going for. These are the people who believe that there's not a "finite" amount of fun to be had, or that the finite amount that there is is more than enough for everyone to be able to have fun and pull ridiculous shenanigans against each other. Having both kinds of players isn't a bad thing to the health of the game -- I believe that the cutthroats should have their place within the community as a whole and still be catered to periodically despite their toxic mindset, which only really applies to people who want in on that cutthroat action. But we have a big problem when the makers of the game overly cater to the whims of that cutthroat community as opposed to everyone else -- as well as when newer players are ONLY exposed to the cutthroats to play against. The cutthroats have no patience for anything they perceive as weaknesses, and there are significant limits to creativity among their ranks, only looking seriously at what seems to be the most broken thing you could possibly be doing, and dismissing everything else as trash. That's not generally what new players want to be doing. It's a new game to them... They typically want to be inundated with the variety, the endless possibilities that come with having a card pool of hundreds of thousands of cards in existence. So when you pair newbies only with cutthroats... Someone's gonna have a bad time they didn't ask for. The cutthroat is bored because the fight was too easy, and the newbie doesn't want to continue to play after the beating they received or the massive complexity of the game they're trying to learn. It's not a positive game experience for either of them. You need room for the casuals too to help keep the game healthy and fun. You need people who aren't going to play like cutthroats in the long run. You need people who are genuinely friendly and encouraging and welcoming to be playing your game, because these are the people who will be most successful at recruiting new people who will actually stick around.
The fact that you call the competitive mindset cutthroat and toxic is indicative that you don't understand the competitive mindset. If two people sit down to play the game (magic in this case), and one is playing to win, and the other is playing to flex their space hamster tribal deck, *they haven't sat down to play the same game*. Fun is a highly subjective metric to measure. Basically everyone agrees that winning is fun. Losing is only not fun if you yourself felt that you did not have a chance to win. And if that was due to a lack of skill, that can be fixed. If it was because space hamster tribal is just straight up not up to snuff in the meta, maybe you shouldn't play that deck unless it's against other space hamster tribal.
@@Ornithopter470 idk, as I've gotten older being competitive in games doesn't do anything for me anymore. It all becomes so boring and uncreative. Roleplaying is the only experience that stays fun for me. Especially winning competitively while playing a roleplay character build. That actually does allow me to enjoy competitive gaming. Pvp in Dark Souls/Elden ring reminds me of this... I have a blast playing my roleplay builds that are most certainly inefficient, 'mid', or bad. But playing as an in-universe character is so much fun lol.. It just seems so boring to play a perfectly statted and geared character because the gameplay loop becomes the same. When meta becomes so strong, every game is the same. There is a most effective tactic, and if we both know that, we both know how the match will generally go. I also think people who only have fun when they win have a strange mindset. If you only have fun because of a conditional (winning) then do you even truly enjoy the game? Or is it just a vehicle for competitiveness? The ability to have fun even while losing is necessary imo, and my way around it is roleplaying, but many others seem to have no fun if they lose.
@@H41030v3rki110ny0u there is a concept in game design called the "dominant strategy". It's generally speaking something that good games try to reduce or minimize, as dominant strategies result in repetitive, boring play. Elden Ring doesn't have one specific dominant strategy (which is a very good thing). It has many viable strategies, and a healthy meta should have many viable strategies. I agree with you, that winning shouldn't be the only way you have fun. Personally, I treat every game as a puzzle, with winning being the reward for whoever finishes the puzzle first. But most of the fun in a puzzle isn't had by completing it, its had in the search for the next piece. Every game is a learning experience.
The "Valley of Effort" as a concept falls flat when anything FromSoft has made in the past decade is several times easier than just about any game created before 1997. Games got dramatically easier in the 2000s, especially in the late 2000s, and they didn't start to slowly get some bite back in them again until the 2010s. Even then, most of the biggest budget, mass market titles are built distinctly with ease of use and low difficulty levels in mind for their base difficulty levels. A handful of titles targeting niche demographics that desire a higher skill floor and ceiling are not representative of trends for the entire medium. Elden Ring isn't the mainstream norm. Spiderman is. Last of Us is. Assassin's Creed is. Mario is.
@denofpigs2575 That just sounds like the goal is to make people addicted. Dedicated players are people who decide to push the game further and the vast majority of people who play games do not want to put more effort than necessary.
unless the "skilled players" start whining that they no longer have new players to stomp and get their asses handed to them by the other skill players, which makes them leave the game, which makes the queues for remaining players longer and makes matchmaking put even bigger skill differences, which makes more people get destroyed after waiting 15minutes for a match, after which they leave. voila, dead game
I've seen a variant of this in PvE games, like MMOs, where skilled players either get too demanding or more on the game design end, the skilled players can solve an encounter so thoroughly that there isn't an ounce of fun to be had if you're not focused on speedrunning.
First Stike confused me so much when I started. It's essentially changing the Phasing of the Damage Step. That's way more nuanced than players try to make it seem. It's literally changing how the turn order plays out.
The point I believe they were trying to make is that first strike allows you to strike first in a general sense meaning it's a self descriptive phrase like flying. Anything with flying u know can fly and is not grounded. It's self descriptive. Obviously the specifics can go more in depth like in this case.
A feature that was in older fighting games that I miss and don't see in newer fighting games is a handicap system. It had to be done manually, but it would increase / decrease health, damage, etc. I'd like to see that come back more in modern titles.
I honestly think that skill needs to be tested via limitations and restrictions on the skilled instead of them having the advantages of the best stuff. I am not saying they don't earn the best or great stuff, but that using it is not considered by the game as "hard mode". Do not scale the game difficulty up to meet the legendary gear, keep the scale the same, but make it more rewarding to use the least advantages and gear. Some people do this just for fun, but they don't get anything for it but clout and self satisfaction. That is fine, but I think being so badass that you can no hit run something naked with a stick would be far more awesome from a design stand point.
Great podcast ep! Excited for the next one. I haven't yet run into a lot of Magic players that also play fighting games competitively, so it's nice to see you guys compare & contrast the two types of games. The valley of effort is an especially touchy subject in the FGC because new players and experienced players feel so strongly on both sides. The FGC has had a bit of an exodus recently where many top players are quitting their respective games because they believe it's increasingly difficult for a more experienced player to prove their level of skill above a newer one. Daisuke Ishiwatari, the creator of the Guilty Gear franchise said in an interview with Dextero that his intention in creating Guilty Gear Strive was to "destroy Xrd" and "Make Xrd as an example of failure" (xrd being the previous iteration in the series). I think even players that haven't read that article have sensed this sentiment from the game's play patterns and the resulting negative backlash has been intense. I think it also brings up the timeless issue that many competitive games have, especially Magic: it is imperative to sell to casual players for the game's continued growth, but they often don't stick around very long and changes made to appeal to them can often alienate your experienced playerbase. Having your 20-button flashy 30 hit 200-meter combo reduced to a single button press is the fighting game equivalent of printing Nadu in Modern Horizons 3 so Commander players buy the bundles. It's hard to say whether or not motion inputs are healthy for fighting games. To add to the some of the points you guys made in this podcast ep, there was a game called Granblue Fantasy Versus that came out in early 2020. GBVS has a very simplistic input system AND ways to remove motion inputs entirely by then putting that move on a cooldown. The game's playerbase hit rock bottom pretty quickly because covid hit the states almost immediately after its release, but I cite it in conversations w/ my friends as one of the best cases for reducing motion input difficulty or removing them entirely. However in stark contrast to this, the game series Under Night In-Birth has a high execution barrier, and the game's internal systems use this to make skill expression very accessible. There's this concept in fighting games called "Option Selects (OS)" that's too in-depth to explain in an already long youtube comment (lol) but basically because inputs in UNI embrace complexity, skilled players can produce multiple moves in the same instance, having the correct one come out depending on what your opponent does without requiring the player using this OS to have a perfect read on their opponent's behavior. This kind of gameplay adds so many links to the end of that skill chain that even advanced players still have room to explore, and I think that's why UNI is such a beloved game despite its relatively small playerbase. Either way, I don't envy any dev on the decision-making end of this conundrum. It's regrettable that exposure and complexity are sort of at odds re: competitive games sometimes.
UNI mentioned! OSs are an interesting topic here, since they're kind of a hidden mechanic. I spent a while learning the game with a friend with neither of us considering even 1AD. Failed tons of motion inputs though, walking and crouching randomly before getting punched. The temptation of flashy animations...
"If I'm the best player in the world, I want to win every time!" I understand that way of thinking, I'm sure everyone does, we've all been there. Despite the years I've spent gaming, I'm not very "skilled" when it comes to games. However, I've had some games where I've managed to gain skill at, for example Splatoon, and with that chance of getting "good" at a game I've learned the folly in that thought process. If I'm the best in the world, I DON'T want to win every match, if I'm the BEST in the world what I want, MORE THAN ANYTHING, is for EVERY, SINGLE, match to be neck and neck, where the break point is a single moment at the end, that was a culmination of every moment before it. I want to feel like I'm adequately challenged at every moment, until I eventually win, and beat the challenge, or lose and laugh because I had so much fun. Be it a good match of Splatoon, or League of Legends, or my yearly playthroughs of Kingdom Hearts games on max difficulty, that moment that "I beat it" or "Laugh because I had so much fun" is ALWAYS the best moment in competitive gaming.
In my country warhammer is so small that the community is pretty welcoming, I've only seen a couple of bad players (behaviourwise) at the highest spots, and even those are few and far between.
Randomness is indeed the big thing, but used wrongly it can be frustrating. Take battle royale games, randomness is the gear, and static is the map, sure to SOME degree this will be interesting, like someone that got unlucky and got a shotgun is screwed if he has to traverse an open area where someone is waiting and camping. But here's the thing, why not make the MAP RANDOM? A huge thing in those games is map knowledge, that's how pros win, remove that and all of a sudden there's a HUGE gap between pros and beginners, potentially hundreds of hours worth of "grind" until those beginners know the map, that is now removed, that gap no longer exists. Learning abilities of characters? maybe 10-20 hours, learning guns? a few hours, but map knowledge? HUNDREDS of hours. And on the other end there are horrible randomness elements in some fighting or fighting-like games. Take For Honor. At a high level of play every player can parry/dodge every move, so what did they do? They added 50/50 moves into the game, something can chain into something else that you either have to preemptively dodge or block or parry, because those moves come out so fast you have no time to react, so you basically have to guess. THAT ALONE made me quit For Honor the moment I got to around Platinum rank, it felt like bullshit to fight against that. Just have to use randomness in a smart way.
Overwatch was supposed to be accessible to everyone. Then competitive mode and overwatch league tilted the balance to hitscan patch after patch after patch. It was overwatch league and the hundreds of millions dumped into it that killed overwatch, not the development of overwatch 2.
The value of motion inputs and rich diversity of combos are a very ample topic of discussion, certainly. Not angry or offended; I think you guys bring out reasonable points, just giving out my personal opinion on the matter. I think honing your mechanical dexterity is a big part of the fun of video games! As an spectator it's also super cool to see top level players pull off mechanically difficult maneuvers under pressure and if they drop them you -feel- that at a level you just cannot if you know they were doing simpler inputs that even you as an average player can pull off effortlessly. I disagree (on a personal level) with what seems to be a trend in game design discussion circles, which implies that games simplifying or downright removing their mechanical complexity is always a step forward or "evolution" of the genre. I'm more of the vision that for a lot of genres, particularly the ones that lean into the big umbrella of "action" like fighting games, the physical motions involved should be viewed as part of the fun rather than something that gets in the way of the fun. Basically, what you use to interface with the game is also part of the medium itself and not something you to overcome in order to enjoy it "properly". tl;dr: waggling lever (or dpad) fun, learning combos also fun and maybe creative, these elements are not something you need to overcome in order to reach the "real fun" of fighting your opponent, they're part of the fun.
Fighting game clarification incoming: 1. Combos are the dessert, not the veggies - seeing your character do cool shit and deal lots of damage IS the power fantasy. We play the game in order to land combos. Combos feel good. Memorizing is 10% of learning the combo, 90% is not botching the execution. The shift is towards making execution less of a barrier to doing cool combos. 2. Defense is the skill valley - the more rewarding and expressive the offense is, the shittier it feels to get hit by it. Even if they make piloting a character easier, defending against the rest of the cast will always be a knowledge check. 3. Damage is the marriage of luck and skill - High damage games reduce the amount of hits you need to land to win the round. This gives every player a "punchers chance" like in boxing. You can can be outclassed, lose every round, land a lucky punch and still win by KO. Fighting game players literally call these games "random" because the games are already RPS in nature and it takes a ton of effort to get good at defence.
There use to be a middle ground for edh players but we've left the game because the casual players think any type of interaction makes your deck cedh and complain. Sorry, I don't wanna play cedh but I want some sort of challenge and actual understanding of the game
Thank you. In almost every game there's a weird subculture of casual elitism where the players who least engage with the game treat everyone else with contempt or accuse them of ruining the game; of ruining a game they're not even making an honest attempt to play!
@@yurisei6732this has been my biggest issue playing commmander. I like decks that sit around an 8-9 in power level, I want to see combos and powerful interactions, just not coming out the first few turns of the game. Some players think any infinite combo should be reserved to cEDH, even if it involves 30 mana and 5 cards in a deck with little to no tutors. I don’t understand this perspective at all, yet I see it all the time.
Edited for typos @@Krimson51 Here is another perspective to make what you will of. I am a card collector as in I only own cards I've collected from *packs over 10+ years, I don't play draft I just played kitchen table, over the years we learned of commander and it became the preference, I mean your telling me I can actually use the cards I own because I have no 4 of copies and play with others similarly where part of the fun is what the next card will be? great!!! But what we actually get are just net deckers who will *still go and buy every card for a well oiled machine to play against my pile of random. Eventually commander is warped and now it's basically just another competitive scene instead of casual, and ironically more so then cEDH. I think if more of those players moved to cEDH things would improve but right now wizards is pushing commander like it's *a step child being pushed into college making chase cards in products targeted at commander... Maybe they think players like me still buy packs but that era is long gone.
@@xelaranger3880 There's a super simple solution to netdecking: Play cube. Ultimately, complaining about netdecking is just immature, and again elitist. It says that the only good/fair way to play is your way, and accuses anyone who enjoys different facets of gameplay of ruining your experience. It's also a lie, because people who complain about netdeckers also complain about people who play meta archetypes without netdecking them. Someone with a bigger or luckier card collection than you, and who is better at deckbuilding, is no better in an anti-netdecker's eyes than a netdecker is.
@@xelaranger3880 a big part of building my collection has been trading cards I didn’t use for ones that made my decks more cohesive. I agree that they are constantly increasing the power level of the game which makes playing older or more average cards less effective however a huge part of the hobby for me is to find the interesting synergies between janky cards released years apart. This is why a lot of my decks feature rare elaborate combos, it’s like solving a puzzle with pieces people rarely see. There is value to your version of commander, one with extreme variance and relatively low synergy, however most players I know are looking for a slightly more curated experience where our decks have a theme or goal in which we want it to fulfil which is difficult to achieve without searching for some degree of redundancy.
while playing ARAM in League of Legends I regularly saw people angry about losses and I reminded them that pro players lose just over half the time. If they couldn't handle a loss rate similar to pros they should rethink why they are playing.
I promise you that you do not need long combos or even special moves to play fighting games at a beginner level! You can win with only normal moves, no combos or motion inputs needed. If you don't want to do a shoryuken, you can anti-air with crouching Heavy Punch. I know you said you don't want to attract the ire of fighting game players, and I'm not angry or upset, but I think that "fighting games are inherently harder because you need combos and special moves" is a misconception. Sajam has a really good video here ua-cam.com/video/UzNwGP0Ir68/v-deo.html and has talked about this topic a lot
I appreciate your insight. This is a problem in communication then. Combos are the cool things players want to be doing, so making them less accessible gives players the feeling they have to put in lots of effort before they get to do the cool things.
@distractionmakers yeah that's true, doing the coolest things will take work, but if you can have fun playing the game while you take the learning process it helps! It's still really satisfying to say "this guy is jumping a lot, I need to stop it" and then actually doing a successful anti-air - that IS the game! It's a long journey - a new Deadlock player isn't going to be doing all the cool movement techniques in that game right away, but they can still have fun shooting and buying the wrong items, and over time maybe they learn one item build or they learn that they can slide to get infinite ammo during the slide, and over time they incorporate small things like that. Fighting games are the same - but yeah I agree fighting games need better communication and tutorialization. But you can have a lot of fun doing Sheeva stomp in Mortal Kombat in the meantime while you're learning the hard stuff
It's a misconception, but one that comes from both sides. There are plenty of non-Smash FG players who take the "*real* FGs are harder (and thus better) than Smash because Smash babies can't into combos" stance.
My problem with politics in games is twofold: The first is what you mentioned already, that I'm not actually allowing the game itself to inform my decisions, I'm strongarming other players instead, which I think is boring. Secondly is that it immediately takes me out of the game world and into 'arguing with my friends' territory. The game of Catan would be a less spiteful game if you couldn't do open trade for example, and I think this only acts to its detriment - more options doesn't always mean better outcomes. But it's also immersion breaking, and rather than my focus being on the board, and what the game provides as its own world, I'm looking to win over the opinion of an opponent in the real world.
"skill gaps cause one sided dominance" - GBVSR balance team as a reason to slap nerfs onto one of the 3 weakest characters in the game, then buff one of the strongest. I get they wanted to make the game more accessible, but goddamn was that a horrible way to do it that only hurt ppl who invested time. Imo, for fgs, the "randomness" u speak of comes from the other player finding ways to try and read ur mind essentially, u never know exactly what they are gonna do, and thats why its fun. Its probably why most of us want consistent results for micro situations, cos on a macro level, it can be quite random.
Realm of the Mad God is a masterclass in this issue. It’s mind boggling to see the difficulty leaps between dungeon tiers, and each phase of character progression is exponentially worse than the previous. The kicker of it all is the progression is tied to character stats, some of which become largely irrelevant due to the ridiculous stats and abilities of enemies.
As someone from the fighting game community this was an interesting look at what non fgc ppl think of fighting games bcuz inside the community memorization has never been a highly valued skill, while interaction knowledge has always been the king maker of professional players
Very true! I notice new players are always so focused on learning and remembering combos all day long when that's like one piece to a giant puzzle. As you get more in to fighting stuff like frames, match-ups, match-up knowledge, strategies, adjustments, etc, matter more and require more memory than simply knowing combos.
At least 70% of gamers are bad at games and if skilled players usurp a game for themselves and make it toxic for the others - those 70% of people just walk away.
I love what you guys say about variance, because it's something that players try to avoid (deck-building in Magic having 4-ofs to decrease variance), but also have to accept as part of what makes games so great. The question then becomes what kind of variance feels good/adds value to the game. Land-flood and screw are probably the worst kind of variance, but variance in what playable cards you draw is good variance. It's why I like 7pt/singleton formats so much, because you're getting the more fun side of variance.
12:40 Personally, I feel like luck devalues victory just as much as is takes the sting out of losing, so no, not everyone benefits from seeing luck as only counting in the "right" direction. If it makes both losses AND victory feel like they don't count, luck just ruins games. So yeah, I think games shouldn't intentionally inject added randomness. The randomness of individual player choices and performance, for example, how pretty much nobody nails every single parry, and therefore has a personal parry success chance, is all the randomness I want.
@@quintonbackhand2519 If you feel that way, great. All that matters to what's sweet for you is what's sweet for you, and I'm not saying it's an objectively wrong problem for everyone that should never be allowed to exist. Rather, I'm simply pushing back against the idea that luck is an objectively good solution for everyone that should always be intentionally added because it only takes the sting out of losing, because not all people feel that way. Myself, for example. I feel like it takes the good feelings out of winning just as much as it takes the bad feelings out of losing, and therefore is not some perfect solution to the loss of frustration. Luck should be an option in gaming like any other, included in some games for those who like it, and minimized in others for those who feel like it cheapens the experience regardless of outcome. If possible, settings should be included to reduce or increase the impact of luck within a given single game to suit individual preferences. Then everybody has games that fit their idea of what's most fun, and we're all happy.
@@quintonbackhand2519 That is only true for mechanics that are too easy to nail down. For example; if a Parry is only 1 frame (out of 60), and you cannot hold a button to execute the Parry after you did another move, then there is no way that any one person is capable of consistently pulling that off. When only a computer is capable of pulling something off consistently, that is where it is no longer possible for things to be predictable. I bring this up, because this Parry example (which I don't remember if it exists, but it is just an example) is also an example of a type of game changing mechanic, which becomes more boring and predictable, because it was made easier to access, in order to entice newer players (I believe Street Fighter is an example, although I don't remember nor believe that sf3 had only 1 frame to do it in). The reality of the luck vs skill debate is that there is no such thing as "random-chance" as it exists in a video game in real life. Yet real life sports can seem pretty exciting (saying this as a non-sports enjoyer, just not my thing), partly due to points of error that people can make. But video games are also not as complicated as real life, and so a lot of times developers try and rely on RNG, even if it is the one type of randomness that is completely antithetical to the spirit of competitive games. And so, the answer should be obvious that you could just make the game more complex, raising the skill ceiling, and more importantly, make more inputs more meaningful in faster intervals. At a certain point, it is impossible for players to truly be predictable. But this wouldn't ever happen, if all games did have rng injected into them, which is also incredibly boring in a skill-based sense, because it kills the ability and room for improvement as much as easier to accomplish mechanics do. The existence of accountability for your own actions, is incredibly important for skill-based action games, otherwise the excitement and skill has to come from another place than the action-execution aspect, which just means you aren't playing an skill-based action-centric game at that point. So even worse than injecting rng into everything, you would also make every game more gentrified, as introducing rng would kill the "skill-based action games" from skill-based action games. There is a place for every type of mechanic and game, as they provide different benefits for different people. Trying to appeal to everyone is a mistake that makes certain games less desirable by those whom would otherwise enjoy them perfectly fine, all for the sake of trying to appease people whom will still drop the game in a week because it wasn't to their tastes. Either what I wrote above, or I can just giga-mog the fuck out of you by saying "yeah but not for me" to "it makes everything sweeter for everyone" and instantly your entire argument is turned to dust, as that specifically as explained is a subjective issue. Not that I don't believe there isn't objectivity, in fact I might be among the biggest advocates of it. But what does actually piss me off (at this point in the comment I am actually mad) is when someone makes the single most subjective as fuck comment possible, tries to package it as if it is objective, which is then done so badly, that all you have to do to disprove it, is just be pointing out how stupid it is by going "nuh uh". This isn't even a case of "I reject your argument, because", it is a "you made a highly generalized statement which assumes a whole lot of truths about an area, which verifiably is wrong, simply because your argument is even opposed to begin with by me or anyone else". For something to be true it has to be verifiable, and in this case, your entire comment is purely subjective, aside from the statement "pro sports have randomness" (even if it should state "some"), to which I then have an issue with what conclusion is drawn from that statement, as the following statement after that is just verifiably wrong. Anyways, that was my contribution to this comment section, peace.
i feel like skilled players are also generally better at capitalizing on many random elements in games that don't outright force you into a certain winrate; to provide one anecdote, in WoW they started adding a lot of random 'proc' effects to classes starting in... i want to say wrath of the lich king or so, but to me it really came to a head in legion where you had so many little random 5-second buffs or whatever that the gap between lower skill and higher players continued to widen, because someone who times their actual button presses with the buffs from or internal cooldowns on procs gets exponentially more benefit for every extra thing they manage to stack up at a time
Randomness is a big part of why I liked playing Pokemon against my friend. I was a far better player but if he got a meaningful critical hit or one of my moves missed at the worst possible time, he's suddenly in a position where he can win. And being suddenly put on the back foot and having to fight my way back from the deficit was a lot of fun.
I understand where you are coming from but holy hell do I really really despise "Just dumb everything down because the vast majority of players are the lowest common denominator so they should be catered to in order to maximize profits." This kind of thinking is the reason every video game becomes homogonized grey sludge designed for absolute droolers over time.
one thing i've noticed in the comments is many stories like 'i showed up to a new game without doing any research and got destroyed,' feels like a lot of people a. don't want to put personal effort into learning a new game and need to be taught, b. really don't like the outcome being 'loss' regardless of whether a match was fun, and c. come into games with their own preconceived idea of how it should play/what they want to play and don't like when it's not viable in the environment they want to play in
Why do you think "make the game more accessible" means "dumb the game down"? It can mean that if the game designer is unskilled, but unskilled game designers rarely make interesting games to begin with. I'd say instead that there's a problem specific to Western AAA studios in making the "made for droolers mode" the default (and sometimes only) difficulty mode, but Western AAA studios are just trash now anyway.
The idea that a game must cater to all is only one beneficial to shareholders. If you find that a game is not fun for you then sometimes you just have to make a judgement call to play something else. A game for everybody is a game for nobody
It’s genuinely baffling to me how a person can go into a game they knew was “competitive” focused beforehand, and then be mad when they’ve lost without gaining proper information or skill. It’s borderline entitled. Losing is a critical part of the enjoyment that you get from winning, because you had to improve.
I think a lot of people like playing games and want to win at them. Or more precisely, they don't like losing too much. A good, close, hard fought loss feels better than being on either end of a stomp fest, but it's still better to be on the winning side of that stomp fest.
I don't think that's true for competitive games especially since most high ranking players seem to have smurf accounts created to feel better about themselves according to statistical research. Also, no one would like losing constantly until they become experienced. It's against human nature.
@@baryony most of the time smurfs are created due to longer qeue times at the the top in dota immortals would sometimes wait 15-20 minutes to find a game especially the higher up you go
High variance in non-matchmade servers is one of the great things of Counter Strike 1.6 and Source days. There were so few cheaters in good matches not because the tech wasn't there or because of anti cheat was effective (there was 0 anti cheat), but because what's the point. You could jump on one server and get trounced, jump on another and have a rampage, jump on another and everyone was similar skill and every player is chatting in a different language 😅
The curse of being too good to play with friends but not good enough to compete
Give up in being too good is the way to go, at the end of the day the real compete are the friends we make along the way
In WoW far was when I started training new tanks and healers.
One of the most rewarding activities was joining a fresh tank+healer pair as 5th wheel with my hybrid.
I was there as training wheels, a mid dps able to jump in at any time in either role. Most of the time it just gave a sense of comfort and someone to go through learning moments as they happen.
Not really a valid paradox, you're just another fish tbh
See you're missing out by teasing high skill gameplay to your friends. You can put limits on what you use and basically do a challenge run while still being aggressive because you have a better understanding of reading and reacting, positioning and the baiting out openings. I went naked hand to hands helping a spellblade I knew and it was hilarious. Reminded me of my brother and I playing Halo on Legendary with Skulls and going back and forth between who goes crazy aggressive as bait for the other person to flank.
@@sneezyfido i never got into any mmo because I had nobody like you 😢 You're doing good work.
Something that surprised me is that Yugioh in Japanese is extremely keyworded and well organized. Bullet points are used to describe the aspects of cards unlike how the English text is often a paragraph that must be deciphered. The translators didn't seem to be on the same page making cart text incongruent and overly confusing.
Because KoMoney don't give a single f about non-OCG players.
@@HenshinFanatic people still play Konami's games after all those scandals lol?
Yugioh uses PSCT (Problem Solving card text) which are keywords to know how an effect resolves that unlike magic aren’t obvious unless you know what to look for (;, then, also, if, etc)
Because localizers hate translating japanese into concise easy to understand short sentences. They always have to sound like an american talking out of their ass to make it sound more, well, "local", rather than an actual translation.
That's not entirely true, Yugioh is written in PSCT ( Problem solving card text) in English so you don't have to memorize nearly as many rulings. Because YGO is such a precise game it's important to know what targets/do not target or what bashes or goes to gy. OCG you often times need a lot of bullet points per card because OCG does not use PSCT and thus you might not actually know how cards interact.
One thing competitive players forget about introducing variance is that if the worse player NEVER wins, they're going to quit. I understand that top players are just there to win and aren't there to facilitate promoting whatever game it is, but the longevity of a game is an extremely important factor on the ecosystem. I'm not saying top players have a personal responsibility to make the game accessible for new players, but if their bottom line depends on it in some way, they should be more mindful of it. I'm probably letting my poker experience lead most of this thought process, but I see it when winning players berate "bad players" in any game (mtg, League, anything). It's just bad for business.
Yeah, this is basically the problem with YGO and SC2. YGO has been leaning heavily on designing itself for the more competitive players and has trouble retaining new players. A segment, even if not majority, also talks down on other players for not playing "correctly" or "optimally". Which turns many people away.
Sc2 balance patches have been so focused on the pro level for awhile, that the viewership has started to drop because low skill players struggle to enjoy the game and watching the games has become boring and repetitive. However, the casters and pro players are trying to bring attention back in but the recent low skilm friendly and mix-up meta design lately hasn't helped.
It's so easy to lose people, it's important to keep these things in mind as a community.
I don't remember the study but I think it was done on dogs and maybe other mammals who play games as a way to learn.
They saw that when a dog loses more than 70% of the time, they don't want to play the same game anymore against the same dog.
And the reverse is also true with winning, but the threshold is a bit higher if I remember correctly.
And I think we all observed the same pattern in humans for exemple when I was younger my friend was always beating me at super smash melee and I ended up hating the game.
Until I got older and had the opportunity to play on my own and get better and beat them half of the time.
People like to accuse others of being sore losers while in fact they're simply losing the interest for the game being unable to win a meaningful amount of time.
I would say it is in the top players interest to facilitate the experience for new players as competitive players want a big player base. Case in point would be the obsession of Leader Boards.
I genuinely wish I could make Phil Helmuth read this.
@@SenkaZver12 worker start killed sc2 for me. I was a master league player, now I don’t even watch
19:00 I can't believe chess isn't mentionned here. What we're talking about here is just chess. Fun fact the best chess player in the world suffers a bit from this I think. He's so consistently the best that he just doesn't want to compete anymore.
Absolutely. Magnus feels this way, and some historical players had the same problem (Paul Morphy is probably the most notable).
@RTB1400 magnus has played since childhood that fact he doesn't get burnout is extordinary and he's now only getting sad he can't hit 2900 or feels he won't ever
He's One Chess Man
True! It doesn't help that chess MMR is wonky. It might not be the reason why the best doesn't like playing, but a lot of high end Grandmasters will refuse to do tournaments just because one loss vs lower MMR players tank their score so hard that they could win all the other matches and still be behind.
But Magnus plays all the time and said he loves chess. He plays weird openings instead, mostly to nerf himself, and then proceeds to win anyway.
I would probably add another game to my repertoire, like Go. Though if I did I would probably also fall off in chess.
I have said it many times: A game that designs for the top 1% cannot support the bottom 70%.
When a game is designed because 1% of players can break something and such eveything gets warped to stop those players it necessarily makes it so the bottom 70% cannot play. Banning is a great example where certain mechanics should never be created, but because "you can just ban it" the meta gets warped around those mechanics.
So the devs can choose whether they care about attracting the bottom players to their game or not.
No devs owe consideration to anyone. If they want to draw in great numbers of players, that is their choice, if not that is too. You as a player are only entitled to know what you're getting, nothing more or less. It is then up to you whether you're willing to devote the amount of time expected of you in the game or not.
@chukyuniqul but in doing so most often times the kill the game the bottom 70 most often times make up the player base catering to the 1% does nothing for a game unless it's specifically in a competitive setting
@@blackronin848 Not if the game has options to engage in it non-competitively, or needs more than a small, dedicated fanbase.
I think there's a bit of poison here from modern ultra-AAA game development where everything needs to be THE MOST. A game only needs to be enough of a success to break even. Not less and while more is definitely welcome, it is not necessary.
I mean hell, you never learn that it's 1% of the fanbase keeping most MMOs (and other such f2p server-based games) running? The whole "whale" thing?
@chukyuniqul well mmos are a different story they are destined to be left and almost entirely played by a small player base while other games let's just say apex while it had a large player base over the years it has significantly dropped off while the 1% are not the main reason why they certainly helped shape it's current environment and i in no way is say they need to be in any way responsible but when a game only improves upon one side of the player base neglecting the other it sets the tone and the culture that will continue often times with the top 1 % typically comp player being belligerent to those who aren't. Sorry if I'm talking all over the place I think i went off on a tangent
@@blackronin848 I don't think belligerently elitist competitive players are inherent to a highly competitive game. Chess certainly ain't that way.
Thing is, while with an MMO you DO actually need the non-payers so the whales can feel good about themselves, for competitive pvp round-based games there's no need for that because the people playing it do so for their skill.
Also not to put too fine a point on it, but this conversation never happens about actually full-competitive, impenetrable to normies games like Your Only Move is Hustle. It's always about a flavor of the month multiplayer game. I can't help but feel VERY cynical about the conversation, it smacks of aggressive conformism.
YOMI hustle is a severe case, you hop in there as a normie and you know what happens? Pure, unadulterated frustration. And you know what? Even with that the fanbase is GENERALLY (there's always that one guy) pretty willing to encourage you to try again. I mean I didn't, my experience was so ass I straight refunded the game and refused to play further, but I respect them for it.
There, now we both tangentialized so you don't have to feel bad about yourself :P
It’s like brothers who play chess. So long as it’s a struggle of equals they’re fully engaged. However, once it becomes a struggle of unequals their game ends permanently.
The problem isn't just limited to the game becoming too complicated to beginners. It also causes the game to slowly drift away from its original design.
There are so many games that started with a nice elegant, simple base system of mechanics, but they keep tacking on more and more mechanics to keep the competitive/hardcore players happy.
And after years and years of added mechanics, the game has transformed from a nice elegant system, to a bloated mess too focused on keeping things competitive/hardcore and forgetting what originally made the game fun.
The opposite is true. We remove things that shaped the game’s identity to cater to new players. So, games like Street Fighter end up being more faster like an anime fighter . annime Fighters are trying to be more what Street Fighter was before like being grounded (depends if this Alpha or Not) and slow like molasses. You can see the animation in the air dash in GG now 😂 Tekken was more of a realistic, methodical pace before they ended up putting god damn meter and Final Fantasy Characters. All this shit to appease to scrubs for them to quit anyway and us intermediate to pro players gotta suffer the consequences.
@@MoldMonkey93
That's strange, many of my friends who played older street fighter say the newest one is by far the slowest.
This is incredibly true. Early Hearthstone and Magic from yesteryear were so much simpler and the interesting competitive gameplay arose from the interaction of basic concepts instead of additional complexity on cards.
League of Legends and similar games were obviously simpler in early days when characters were designed simpler and there were fewer of them, leading to a much more limited number of interactions between characters that was far easily digestible. As more characters got added, reworks occurred, etc., each individual character got more complex, and more characters increase the complexity multiplicatively.
I’ll also say, I don’t think the increased complexity is always something that is appreciated by competitive players, particularly those attempting to grind into the competitive scene. Additional complexity increases the barrier to entry for competitive, but can also increase burnout with the game for players at that level.
That's what happened to Dofus, an Ankama game (French entertainment company), they started Dofus as a DnD-inspired funny pun-rich MMORPG (with way too much grind) where the mechanics were straight forward and the average player was a teenager or young adult, but throughout its' 20-ish years of life, it has become a game where only long time players with a high level guild to play with can even do the content, where rerolls outperform new players not only because of knowledge and skill but also because the devs have purposefully made early game monsters much tougher and stronger to adapt to the enchanted equipment of returning players while new players play with non-enchanted equipment and lower skill and knowledge, leading to the skilled players being able to cruise through the game all the same thanks to all they have access to while newbies give up because they got 2 shot by a monster in the tutorial area or by pigeons from halfway across the screen in the first normal area while losing all their range from debuffs and having to fight these ranged pidgeons in melee.
Then we have classes that were about crowd control and debuffs turn into massive mobility creep classes where every skill makes them move clockwise, counterclockwise or from one side to the other of the target, or displaces the target in a similar fashion, requiring a lot of time to get used to every new skill interaction.
Another class was a tank made to swap places, pull enemies or allies into melee range, absorb damage and turn it into buffs for themselves and they had a double ratio of life per point compared with other classes but their normal stats had a bad ratio, pushing them to go all vitality over any other stat and using their buffs to be able to deal damage. It was turned into a class that has nothing left to do with the original berserker concept, instead there's a standard short range, mid range and mobility build like most other classes, removing everything that made its' identity (and raising the skill bar compared with the old versions, removing an easy to play class for beginners).
The curse/shaman/voodoo class went from mid skill level to high skill level staller that sets up for 10+ turns, completely halting the fight, until they suddenly erase the whole screen in 1 or 2 turns when their setup is successful, ruining PVP to the point that PVP battles battles with that class are constantly dodged by everyone, ally or enemy, just because the fights are unfun and way too long when you're not the one playing that class, feels like spectating someone play one game while everyone else is playing another.
And from the original game, the only remaining aspect is the economy and how annoying levelling jobs is even after making them more accessible, due to limited and shared resources (instead of each player having their own instance for resources or enough for everyone, they have to be shared between all players on one server, as you can guess bots and auto clickers and skilled players manage to get a monopoly on rare resources and even on average resources, ruining new players' experience when they want to get money from doing a job after the cost of low level resources has dropped to near 0 from how high the entire community is and how unnecessary low level drops have become compared with early versions of the game).
Really, devs that keep pushing the low bar higher and higher basically push new players away, add to that subscription based price rather than a one time buy (after 1 year, it's like buying a standard game, after two years, like 2 games...unless you're making lots of ingame money and converting it to pay your subscription, which again requires to make lots of ingame money in the first place, so old players who know the drill can easily bypass this but newbies need to get past the high entry wall to even realize that) and you get a game that really caters to long time players part of an active community who know everything already rather than drawing in new players and the game population is low except when a big event recalls returning players...for a week or two, until they've completed everything new and go back to their other occupations.
@@MoldMonkey93 If there were enough of you intermediate-pro players to pay the bills you'd have nothing to worry about. You don't create your problem but this attitude does nothing to help it either. Nobody is going to cater to a small insular group, those scrubs you so openly disrespect are the only reason your games get made at all, albeit not to your specifications. And so long as whinging is your play, it's all you'll have to look forward to.
As for the original comment, yeah I know a lot of people who've dropped or more slowly abandoned games they used to love because reworks alienated them from old favorites. MMO classes, deck mechanics, game tempo, new assists. These changes are necessary for game health but are definitely risky and especially when compounded on top of each other.
one of the most prime examples of casual vs pro was Overwatch 1 in where Brigitte is super OP in pro play with pros demanding nerfs while she was super weak in casual play with casuals demanding buffs. What a balancing nightmare.
rainbow six siege felt like that all the time. It was even worse when a character felt perfectly balanced at the casual level and broken at pro, so they'd ne forced to nerf popular, seemingly fair characters for no clear reason
It's already like this in Marvel Rivals now. How some characters are blatantly broken like Iron Fist, Scarlet Witch and Jeff the Shark but then the top 1% ranked players will say that they're actually pretty weak once you know how they work or alternately, characters that are pretty weak, like Magneto or Storm will try to tell you that they're actually really powerful at top ranks. Of course they tell you this without taking into account that you have a solid team that communicates, supports and enables you to play these characters. They're otherwise absolutely punishing at lower levels.
I don't think brigitte ever had this problem? Casuals thought she was OP too. The irony with brig is that the casuals whining were tracer and genji players getting bullied for getting too close because they were used to supports being easy prey. Meanwhile the pros complaints were that Brig's shield packs actually made Tracer and Genji in particular way too bulky and allowed flankers to pull off egregiously aggressive plays.
A better example might be the GOATS composition as a whole, which Brig was a part of. Tanks were too strong at a high level, with teams running 0 DPS or maybe 1 at most. But anywhere below Esports or top 500, a team of randos would almost never run less than 3 or 4 DPS. The solution was 2-2-2 role queue.
@@charlestonjew7587On the note of Rivals, and since my last comment mentioned role queue, all the content creators are also saying Rivals doesn't need one.. while always playing with their friends, who always communicate and form a balanced team.
@@bld9826yeah my friend and I play together and we're support mains who just flex if one of the roles either needs help or has no one playing it.
I'll be honest, we hardly ever have to flex in QP or Competitive and we're playing at a slower pace so we're only in mid silver at the moment, idk where we'll end up, but honestly I'm not having the same issues with team comps on either side - we play support together most games and the ones where we don't it's only ever one of us that has to flex off - but we played solo for the 1 hour per the first 2 days of the streamer event and man if I locked in like I had to lock in on those games I'd be flying up the ranks holy moly I was the only support nearly every game, over 15k healing, somehow the only one capable of shooting flying targets or with half decent target priority, and a lot of those games I didn't even have to ult because I just killed everything because their movement was terrible and I was able to headshot like I was a pro.
I'm playing with a G305 that's a year past its' mechanical lifespan - (replacement on the way) and I have no business claiming to be goated lol but holy cranberries do "the people" not play well. I'm halfway between considering solo queue for easy wins and duo queue for consistent team comps. I had to play tank one whole time but otherwise it was just support.
I don't want to care about competitive, I'm just into the cosmetic :o and tbh so far comp is just qp but with people who actually want to win and know their characters so it's pretty enjoyable.
As someone who plays fighting games competitively, I dont think you guys butchered it. Another thing to add on memorization is that adding in game queues like "punish" popping up on the screen in newer games makes the learning curve for frame data easier. Also, idk who told you soul calibur is bad, but they are lying to you. Soul calibur 2 is a beloved classic in the fgc.
Oh good =D. Also, glad to hear that about soul calibur.
Sc6 still has dedicated tournaments (bigpappachuck) youtuber streams them every Thursday and he functions as a announcer for the game
Bro they need to go back to number three and run that back because to this day it’s so good.
The QuickTime events changing the arcade story.
The custom character creation AND story.
The challenges which mix up the game. Like versing the colossus, navigating around its feet and trying not to get squished.
Just a wide range of things to do and enjoy. The stories. It was a great game.
I like fighting games. When someone is way better they start teaching me mid match.
@@ared18t The fgc is great. We all know that fighting games look intimidating, but we all love them and hope that we can spread a little bit of the joy to other people.
So I'm extremely into fighting games and I wanna help supplement that side of the discussion. First, it's true that many fighting games have been moving in the direction of Smash bros and including what we call Simple inputs for many special moves, as opposed to Command inputs (which is what we call when you do several actions on your controller for a single outcome, like tapping down twice and then hitting Kick, for a flying kick move), but this is not to say they're removing the old way. You can see this in how Street Fighter 6 lets you choose between the Modern and Classic controller styles, where Classic is as it has always been and Modern is closer to Smash-style. Specifically for Street Fighter 6, Modern controls also give you some limited auto-combos made through mashing a dedicated combo button rather than hitting specific moves with specific timing.
Many non-FG players see the command inputs and complex combos as archaic and I can see that perspective, but when you've been playing for a bit (not even in the order of years, just a couple weeks), input complexity is part of the fun. It helps make the big and important moves feel bigger and more important, and combos of course have a lot of strategic depth.
But beyond preference, one point of contention with easy inputs is that they expand the kind of situations where those moves are applicable. Say that you put the flying kick move I mentioned earlier as just a button press. Then it becomes very easy to do that move while advancing or retreating, whereas the original version required some time standing still (because you had to crouch twice). That changes the power level of the move drastically and must be accounted for by the devs when designing. We see this exact thing happen in Street Fighter 6, where you think differently about your opponent's character depending on the controller type they have. Reaction time becomes very powerful cause their moves come out faster than yours, cause even if the move itself is the same, it takes less time to do it.
This does not in any way ruin the game but it is a big fundamental change that you see in every level of competition.
In terms of accessibility it's also a strange situation. It obviously a success story cause it helps a lot of people get into the game, whether because they can access the fun or because they had some physical disability preventing precise inputs. But there's also the fact that Fighting Games are by design 1v1 competitive experiences with virtually no luck involved (again, not counting Smash), so the skill divide is as strict as you can get. This has ironically produced a very welcoming player culture in my experience, but for sure one based around the struggle and willingness to endure and improve.
I'm glad Modern-style inputs can help more people enjoy these games, and future games should have these kinds of considerations going forward, but that last bit seems like the kind of thing that they can never get rid of, because of how the genre works.
Edit: Also some thoughts on skill.
Its funny, but harder and/or more complex fighting games are (in some ways) easier to get into precisely because of how complex and/or hard things can be. Input complexity is a turn-off, of course, but the simpler the game is, the less likely any player makes a mistake. This genre doesn't have luck as a factor, so a very experienced player may not make any mistakes at all, which makes it basically impossible for even a good player to pose a threat if they haven't attained that level of perfection.
Back to the Street Fighter 6 example, one of the ways in which it is more accessible for the mid-level player than the previous game (SF5) was is because SF6 is tremendously more complex. SF5 is a good game but it is lean and compact, and arguably a bare-bones experience compared to SF6. There's less to worry about and less to learn, but this also means it is much harder for a worse player to beat a good one cause there's less avenues of approach, and so there's a *lot* less room for error.
There's also that people look at special moves or combos as a huge part of the skill ceiling when they really aren't. Most high level players could beat a lot of beginner or even middle level players even if they handicap themselves to not use special moves or combos. Though I think that's an issue of conveyance. For the longest time the only guidance a player would be given on, "How do I play this game?" they'd be given a movelist and maybe some combo trials. Historically fighting games haven't had anything telling people, "Okay, learn how to anti-air. Now try and whiff punish this. Now do a safe jump. Here's how you tick throw."
Those fundamentals are easier to internalize and also better for long-term success than learning optimal combo routes. The execution difficulty does make getting into a game hard but the thing that really drives it forward is that the only direction the games usually give on how you improve is to dive head-first into that execution barrier, and will likely have inconsistent results in the actual game.
@@Zetact_ You're entirely right, yep. They haven't known how to teach and prioritize what's important to succeed, that's how you get people who have max damage optimal combos but can't whiff-punish. You see this with KoF trials too, where that's the famous part that draws people in and that's the only thing a lot of people know about the series, but you'd never see any of that stuff in tournament.
I am just now switching over from Modern to Classic controls. Finding some stuff easier, and access to the good jabs and kick useful. Missing my one-button DP-Anti-airs though. Forces me to change my entire gameplan.
Another nice the about SF6 is Drive Impacts. If you nail your opponent with one, it gives you a small cinematic before resuming the game, giving your brain just a little time to slow down and remember "Oh! The combo I practiced! I can use it here!". And new players *love* Drive Impact.
@@9clawtiger Yeeep. Its also one of those things where it lets you do something that looks cool really easy. Like even getting hit with a DI is visually impressive. Also good luck with the change lol, I can imagine its an entirely different thing.
One thing that does bum me out about modern controls is the fundamental way that charge characters and grapplers have changed. Walk up full circle throws are ridiculous, gone are the days of needing to green hand, light kick or jump to mask the input. Likewise, with modern controls, Charlie and Guile essentially become echo fighters and new modern players might look at Ryu and Guile like classic players look at Ryu and Ken; two defensive projectile and anti-air special characters might seem even more redundant than a defensive version and an offensive version. Why ever pick Dudley over Balrog unless you really like the character? Consider one button input anti-air Blanka ball. It just breaks a system that withstood the test of time for decades in what I'd consider a misguided attempt to bring new players into the scene.
Everyone had to start somewhere without platforms, and in the case of Street Fighter 2, competent noobs usually went with a shoto and incompetent noobs went with a mash move character (Chun Li, E. Honda, Blanka) or Vega for the claw's range. There have always been options for noobs in the series, they just failed to properly advertise that fact and instead completely changed the way that characters that have been around for maybe 30 years function as playable characters and as opponents.
It's hard enough to bridge this valley in games where all players have access to all game pieces. It's nothing short of a miracle that some of these card games have enough players in the middle to break through that massive barrier. Love you guys consistently defending randomness for this purpose.
Funny thing about old fighting games is that they used to work like this by having very tight windows for inputs, even at high levels of play. As games became "easier" and more consistent, it became easier to crush newer players, not harder. The newest generation has been trying to introduce that variance back into games mostly through information overload and very high damage.
Huh… yeah that is a good point. Making optimal play easier to achieve makes it easier for advanced players to achieve optimal play, but maybe helps bring new players to optimal play sooner? Oof. Yeah, that’s a problem.
The nice thing about games with deep execution checks is that you can sit down and practice said execution checks and consistently find tangible improvement in at least that area.
If you strip that away, then you can "play the real game" (loaded phrase alert...) sooner, but the improvements you can make are more difficult to find.
We can compromise in many ways to keep that avenue of improvement and expression; most fighting games give you like, 80% of the reward of the "optimal" combo even if you just do a shorter, easier one. You'll compromise on corner carry, damage, resource generation, or maybe something else; but it's extremely playable, and the vast majority of fighting gamers end up using such suboptimal combos and having fun anyway. But you can still grind training mode to juice out that remaining 20% if you really want, with no need to match with another player.
@@emasirik Yeah, modern FG designers are finding some great solutions by introducing more trade-offs between the "optimal" play vs the easier options. Damage vs positional advantage, slower inputs vs easier reaction times, rewarding execution with consistency vs situational awareness.
Most of these have always been a thing, but they seem a lot more intentional and universal these days. Biggest one probably being Guilty Gear/BlazBlue-style resource management being everywhere now.
Skilled players who play the same game for years every day multiple hours: "This game is too easy. It's getting so boring, we need more challenge."
More than half of the same exact player base: Creates smurf accounts or go after low level/item level players to stomp complete beginners. Complains about how the game is dying because it can't seem to attract beginners in the forums. Keeps asking the devs to make mechanics to cater to their preferences as a cherry on top.
Was obsessed with MOBAs and played some MMORPGs back in the day, and managed to reach high rankings along with my friends in some of those. This was basically a summary of most of my friends. My claims about the high amount of smurfing is actually supported by statistical research about these games.
WoW arena in a nutshell
You realize smurfing in games isnt nearly half of any games population right? Its just that theres such an opportunity for repeat offenders and they will continue to do it. As a used to be low rank in Dota 2 now high and playing with friends of all variety, there is a lot of people who misinterpret "obvious" smurfing.
Why not just have open lobbies/servers, no sbmm. That's how old games used to be, play for fun.
But nope, today most ppl aren't playing for fun especially the 'casuals' they play to win, they just aren't good and don't want to get good.
The true reason for smurfs is because the games have terrible matchmaking, by design aka EOMM, most players don't report even balanced matches which competitive players love, win or lose.
This all happened in the end because it's a business. They remove social playlists/server options/party up options/rematches.
The game itself is not about fun, it's about manipulating the players to keep playing. It ups their numbers to show shareholders that they are doing a good job, and to gaslight themselves that their game is good.
This is partially the fault of the developer for imbalance in their games. Also, smurfing reduces the challenge, so I think this is a weird thing to say.
@@XFR18 Casuals playing to win is not exactly about being good or bad. It's about having an objective and trying to progress towards it.
No SBMM at all is vulnerable to creating rolling situations. Where 1 team just demolishes the other team.
No SBMM is actually apart of the issue the video seems to be describing - The valley of skill between new players and veterans. The amount of skill a new player needs to learn and acquire in order to have any kind of positive impact on the outcome in the game - Regardless of the gamemode.
Games don't need a complicated SBMM to work. I mean TF2 works more or less fine but can suffer from very unbalanced teams. The community servers attempt to fix this with a more basic SBMM-like system that just tries to track the performance of players that has played in the past and actively balance the teams that way.
The most ideal state of a PVP game that requires some degree of skill, is where regardless of the situation you can do something that has meaningful positive impact.
To some people that means you get some kills and some deaths.
To others, that means you meaningfully contributed to the objective.
Manipulating the skill level of the teams is an attempt to land in that ideal state or some wheres sufficiently close to it.
SBMM is a more extreme example that finds players to fill a server.
Other systems try balance teams with whoever happens to join the server.
You gotta make losing fun, even if someone has no chance to win. It’s why land destruction is viewed badly. If I’m gonna lose, but I get a chance to power out my 6/6 and make a big swing with it, I still feel like I got something exciting done
In the same way if I lose every match in a game, but I win maybe 2/5 rounds, I'm still going to have some fun.
Exactly. This is why I always say all methods of winning are not equal.
Weiss Schwarz found a pretty good solution to this. The closer you are to losing, the higher the power of cards you can play, and I've never once had a match that didn't feel close while playing, even if in hindsight it was obvious I was going to lose.
So what about chess? I feel like people say stuff but then chess exists (all skill and memorization) amd basketball exists (pretty much all skill and you have no chance as the underdog)
The solution is elo, putting people in equally skilled matches, not penalizing playstyles.
Your deck is only half the game, piloting it matters juat as much and same players arent 7s, most are 4s, some are 9s.
Those playera probably shouldnt play together.
@@KyleTremblayTitularKtrey I think it does in fact apply to chess and it's one of the reason that chess doesn't appeal to everyone. Some people like more casual games where they don't need to train their skills as much. And this is one of the big barriers to entry to chess, the skill ceiling is so insanely high.
One thing that was not discussed here was introducing strategies that are non-optimal but highly effective relative to their skill requirements. The classic example I'm familiar with is CoD's noob tube. You can't really carry with it, but it still lets just about anyone occasionally get kills. Of course, tuning these sorts of noob friendly strategies is hard. If it's a bit too powerful, you obliterate much of your skill ceiling. Too weak and it's just a useless option.
Missed the good times when this kind of balance mentality for
"strats that are effective for a certain skill level" existed for multiplayer games.
When you realize the reason your gaming buddy beats you exactly 65% of the time in Keyforge is because they're one skill tier above you.
Love seeing Keyforge players in the wild.
@@sixwingedasura3059 there are dozens of us! DOZENS! (But for real, same. It's such a fun game.)
The lack of attention Keyforge gets is a tragedy. Lack of marketing, maybe? Or are we too caught up in games tied to a preexisting IP that new things don’t attract players?
@@scarfblade5884 I think it's more that Keyforge is so out of the ordinary compared to the booster-based TCG model that its local/competitive scene has struggled to regain the ground lost by FFG. But it's a ton of fun even for people like me who strictly play kitchen table. I'll keep playing it as long as I can! And fingers crossed that things like Candice Harris's TeaForge segment help more people find it.
Gamers will optimize the fun out of any thing they play
But what if those groups just find optimization fun? Pushing things to the very limits of what is possible, trying your best to "reinvent" what you think the limits are is, to some folks, the enjoyable aspect of a game, speed runners do it, hell even now scientists are spending time trying to discover elements that will only exist for fractions of seconds just to see what else lies over the horizon of possibility. Some people just find different things fun that's all.
@@pynk_tsuchinoko8806 This only applies IF the whole group finds it fun. Some people find different things fun, but if that "thing" you find fun takes away from the fun of the group, then nobody actually has to respect what you find fun.
This is why I stop playing on ladder in any multiplayer game. Persons at the BOTTOM TIERS are playing "meta" strategies/characters/decks and calling anyone not playing "optimally" greifers.
Games were and should be fun, if I'm not having fun in a multiplayer environment because other players have optimised the fun out of the game I leave.
I say: If gamers get an opportunity, they will find their own definition of fun.
It doesn't work if the experience gets micromanaged.
@@Cybertech134 Oh of course! by no means am I suggesting people should do this to complete newbies or force it onto others. personally for me I love playing against strong opponents in MTG or Tekken because i like to learn about myself and others and learn about the game, the first EDH event I went to I was turned off by the idea of playing against people who prolong the experience for a simple gimmick, it just bores me personally, but thats what they find fun so instead of complaining I looked for others who enjoy playing the way I do.
this is just one of those quotes I see get thrown around alot and i dont think its that black and white, some people optimize and ruin the experience for themselves, some optimize and ruin it for others, some optimize and have a blast doing it. At the end of the day I think the best thing anyone can do is find like minded groups they can play with instead of banging ones head against randos online in online ranked.
Thats just my opinion though. I understand it can be a bit more complex in reality.
The real memorization layer of fighting games isn't even combos.
Its frame data. You can dumb this layer down to safe/unsafe but its one of the tallest peaks/walls in the fighting game valley of effort.
"Oh? Memorized frame data of your main? Now do it for the rest 19 characters"
God, i used to make tables in notepad with calcs and short descriptions like "+6 on rb, can go with 5a/5b etc"
This is what has kept me from touching fighting games in any serious sense. I can learn input chains and I like tight 1v1 skill tests, but memorizing hitboxes and hitframes is a level of commitment I try to avoid in any game. I do not want to have to analyze what happens on screen the same way the game's engine does.
@@9871ishthis is the best part imo. When you get to that level you're fully understanding what's happening in the game, and that's a very good feeling
@@axellyann5085sure but… gods, is getting to that point such a climb. Been making attempts at it, but to this day I still don’t do theorycrafting for FGs in the same way I do FPS games.
To be sure, I have played FPS games for a lot longer, but the process of trying FGs has been both incredibly intimidating and not terribly fruitful. Still can’t quite approach them fully.
Would love to. Still have GG and SF6 on my computer, still can’t really find a character I like in GG and can’t use the systems of SF6 very well. Not to mention the other fighting games I’ve tried before then.
@@CurlyHairedRogue i play tekken since i was a kid, started to really learn at tekken tag 2 (2012). Then at tekken 7 (2017) i finally reached a decent level, but yeah, took a while to reach the realm of the good players.
That's enough for me, because between the good players and the tournament players there's an abyss in skill, but i can't deny the journey was super satisfying.
Worth noting, Apex Legends has refined its way into a massive valley of effort and its hurting the game at this point. The game has made the right decisions from a mechanical perspective at most points, but the end result is a game that is tight for competitive play but makes bridging the skill gap very daunting.
At the buckets part. Apex is lacking the buckets. The buckets exist as classes, the various kits of the characters and different weapons. but the overall fps game mechanics are lacking buckets. The buckets do exist in various game modes. I supposed the battle royal format is itself a form of buckets, but the removal of much of the randomness in the loot pool is why the skill gap has widen. Good job you guys, very good analysis of the valley of effort :)
Oh. I forgot to mention, they need to solve how to add the buckets into the game play again without just undoing the positive changes they have done while dialing in the game.
Interesting, I haven’t played Apex in a few years. What changes have they made? It was definitely one of the more complex shooters at the time.
Oh I see. How has the random loot changed?
Raising max HP to 225 was disastrous for the valley of effort imo. It really felt like they were only listening to the top 1% that just want to run and gun and single-handedly kill the whole lobby.
It's ironic how ofter gamers will hardore gatekeep a community, then as people leave/get bored/die just complain that the game is dead and there's nobody to play with.
Right? You gotta welcome people in if you want the game to go on.
What games has this happened to in your opinion?
@@IntrusiveThot420 As someone who played Destiny from Day 1 to Final shape? Destiny.
There are many issues with the game but one of the largest is that the new player experience is opaque and confusing and many vet's are disdainful of "blueberries." If you want to go into Raids and the like without a full kit of on-meta godrolls or you don't know the mechanics you get kicked. Thus you never actually get the good gear or learn those mechanics. So you just quit. Then the player bases for those activities dries up as you naturally lose players to attrition.
Trials of Osiris saw that issue hyper-accelerated since you needed to win streaks to get the big rewards, so weaker players would get flamed hard. Thus they stopped playing because it wasn't fun. Thus by the communities own recognition the mode is essentially unplayable/ dead as que times get longer before matches, more people get bored, quit, then it takes even longer and the only people left are the most hardcore so there's no point jumping in when you have almost no chance to even be competitive.
I don't know what you're saying.
It seems like you're personalizing the lifespan of any multiplayer videogame into a person, and then blaming this person (who doesn't really exist) for the reality of Mp game lifespans.
@TheAlison1456 You _really_ didn't know what they were saying, then.
High skilled/early players gatekeep a game behind skill, then get surprised when the majority of the playerbase - who are less skilled than them at the game - leave.
You see this with virtually every fighting game, for example, who are lucky to have even 1/5th of their original playerbase by six months from release and never grow outside of small spikes from DLC/big updates. That's a drop only matched by singleplayer games usually, which are very often only played through once and then never again.
As a person that has been playing MTG about 2 years now, that point about new players being overwhelmed is such a great talking point. I've played card games all my life, so I learn them fast, and one thing I noticed with Magic is that some keywords aren't intuitive for newcomers. Then you get into the nuisances with keyword interactions and it gets even murkier, (for example) trampling over with 1 point of deathtouch. The biggest example for me personally when learning the game was finding out extra combats is what I "thought" double strike was. I understood it if i had a creature battle an opponents and mine survived and killed the other then it could attack again, but it just "technicaly" deals damage a second time so it doesn't interact with attack triggers again. Then didn't realize that it's essentially first strike as well. Protection from "EVERYTHING" is another slippery slope once a new player has a card with that text and then someone plays a board wipe, and now they're confused that their creature died. On top of all of this is similar keywords with nuisanced differences like ward, hexproof, and shroud. Lands producing colors but not being colored permanents.....yea. Getting long winded but I could talk about this topic quite a bit. Great video!
As someone who stopped playing in 2010 this feels different talking about new players
Idk I’ve been playing the game basically continuously for 15 years now and I don’t remember getting this confused about everything. To be fair, the land/mana distinction IS weird at first - and colloquial discussion online and in person does NOT help as it reinforces misconceptions - but a lot of it is, in my opinion, just attention to detail.
For example, the confusion about double strike can only come about if you literally never read the rules and/or reminder text. Attacking is and has always been defined as something you declare at combat and is why it’s very similar to first strike (also why would cards bother to refer to “extra combats?”).
Everyone will always have confusion with Magic cuz (especially nowadays) it’s a very complex system, but these are growing pains every player will have with practically all but the most basic games (MK8DX added steer and acceleration assist for a reason).
Protection has no business being that confusing though, but again protection never mentions being indestructible so I don’t know why that’s a common confusion. I’ve always gotta step through DEBT (damage, equip, block, target) every time it comes up, however! Equip is especially confusing cuz equipment is usually colorless (until it’s not) or if the creature has a very specific kind of non-color protection (some are protected from mana values, for instance).
tl;dr: Magic is complex and confusing but reading stuff helps a lot (usually).
@@WMDistractionthe issue with understanding "protection from everything" has nothing to do with "everything", it's all about "protection" being a very clearly defined (but usually not on the card) keyword with a much narrower scope than new players tend to assume.
Really great examples.
Coming from Yugioh where “unaffected” MEANS unaffected. And the only way to remove that creature is by targeting the player to force them to remove it with an edict or to sacrifice it using a game state action.
Felt like such a rip off first time I wasn’t able to save even a single creature from a Farewell using a protection from white spell. Magic means “Untargettable”….
Yeah... "Wait, why'd my creature get killed by that spell? It had protection from that color?" is a core Magic memory of mine from my very first tournament (that I wasn't even remotely ready for based on already being the punching bag of my personal friend group.) Quite frankly, and yes, it's been explained to me MANY times, I still to this day don't understand the difference between effects that protection (color/everything) applies to and effects that it doesn't. And since I quite playing Magic entirely years and years ago, entirely due to getting tired of always, always losing to my friends who were both just plain better at the game AND vastly outspent me on cards, Protection is like Banding and Flanking and the difference between Instants and Fast Effects and aaaalllllll those other mechanics I never fully precisely understood, and probably never will, because at this point it wouldn't matter anyway. (Back in the day, I always trusted my friends to tell me the appropriate outcomes when they used creatures with abilities or effects over my head.)
Anyway, I'm not saying my friends were by any means wrong to play... good, I just never had much of a head for the game and wanted to slug it out with my lame, unoptimized, SIMPLE Green creature deck. But fate didn't think I should ever have any friends who wanted to play on my level and budget, and that made it kind of impossible to enjoy. Be it Magic or literally any other game, having opponents who match your skill and understanding is VITAL to actually enjoying any game, being overwhelmed ruins any and every game for that matter and only becomes a bigger and bigger problem as games develop their complexity and the established player base keeps getting better, and I wouldn't want to even think about jumping into modern Magic's complexity when old Magic was already water that was too deep for me all those years ago. Until there's a shallow end to start in; basically easy mode training wheels Magic Jr for babies to ease me back in gradually, I'm staying retired forever. I don't care about pride, I've just already had enough of losing at Magic for a lifetime.
Adding depth requires a certain amount of complexity, but not all complexity adds depth.
skill-based matchmaking with a sufficiently large playerbase solves that "valley of effort" problem most of the time.
The thing with fighting games is theres the perception that knowing how to combo or 'memorizing combo strings' is a thing you do once, or is a redundant skill, but I think that does disservice. Core A Gaming has some great videos on the subject, but the TLDR is that both players are often still making meaningful decisions during a combo, depending on the game. How much distance to cover, how much to priorities meter over damage, when and if you go for a reset, how you settup okizeme, how much meter you use and when, are all important decisions and opponents can sometimes have counterplay. Fighting games get worse when the only decision is allways 'do more damage' because its not a choice.
Thanks for your insight. It seems this is a problem with communication of how you get better. Combos are being communicated as how you get better. If that’s not true, then the other parts of the game need to be communicated as the path forward. It makes sense to me that removing combos would help remove this confusion.
@@distractionmakers How to deal with this miscommunication is an ongoing discussion in the FGC. It's like beginners always see Storm turn highlights and twitter threads about convoluted lines of play, but those beginners would do much better by just fixing their curve and playing strong, straightforward cards. How do you get players excited by the efficiency of Tarmogoyf?
this occurs in other games with "combos" too, like TCGs.
Yugioh and MtG combos might have different options or subtleties based on matchup or read on what the opponent may have to interact with. Similar to fighting game players picking a combo based on matchup, meter, screen position, hp, etc.
Thanks for posting this. I wanted to say something but you did a better job of fleshing it out.
I'm kinda biased tho, I prefer the freedom and flexibility of Xrd to the two-touch thuggery of Strive 😅
@@distractionmakers "It makes sense to me that removing combos would help remove this confusion." is like saying "hey, just remove dribbles from basketball".
"Combos are being communicated as how you get better." I'm sorry but that's not true. That's only a perception that people that don't play fighting games have when they see tournament matches. It's communicated directly in most fighting games unless we're talking about an old fighting game.
Titanfall 2's Attrition mode might have one of the best newbie-friendly mechanic I've ever seen - mooks in a pvp mode. Killing another player gets your team +5 points. Killing an enemy NPC gets your team +1 point... but NPCs typically come in groups of 4. So if you can't duel with the no-lifers you can still contribute by sniping the enemy grunts and provide almost as much as if you were killing an opposing player.
There's a meme among fans of modern board games that trad games like chess and go are bad games because the skill gap is so huge. The rules fit on a single sheet of paper, but beginners approach the game totally differently than experienced players
@@TreetopCanopy The only thing Chess related I know is some guy cheating in tournament with a butt plug
@@DarthSironosthat mechanical depth and complexity are bad? In that case, is tic-tac-toe the best game ever, as it has so little depth or complexity that solving it intuitively is something that 9 year olds manage.
@@Ornithopter470 It isnt the best game ever but in terms of attractability is certainly is the best with how newbie friendly it is and not needing advance materials like chessboards, or chess pieces specialized for that specific game.
@@Dragor33-rg7xj You can always tie in tic-tac-toe, it's the most boring game possible.
@@MySerpentine but is it easy to learn the rules instead of remembering 30+ combos or moves for chess?
I think the distinction between StarCraft II and Brood War in terms of strategic play is a pretty good example of this, at least in terms of the pro scene. Both games have extremely high skill ceilings, but in StarCraft II the engine is so much better than Brood War's (and I'd argue any other RTS game that's been released before or after) that it's both easier to execute certain moves and to do it consistently.
As a result, the top pros have gotten so good at mechanical execution that it's begun to stifle build order creativity, combined with some economy and unit/race design that have led to very safe early games that are hard to punish. Before Serral became the best player in the world and before the 12-worker start, weird pushes, all-ins, and specific build order timings were pretty common in tournaments, but now, even very series/opponent-specific all-ins or timings can get stopped by the best players, and they don't even have to sacrifice much in terms of eco, tech, etc. because they've gotten THAT good at playing the game.
Brood War's economy is much worse to start (4 workers vs 12 is a *massive* difference) and the insane degree of mechanical execution needed means that there's plenty of room to mess up for even the best players. The map design as well (where they allow for somewhat random starting locations in certain maps) also adds a bit of risk in build order assessment. As a patchless game, you still see old strategies rotate in for one game out of a series, new optimizations get made, in a game that's over 25 years old. Also, the game gets plenty of new pros in Korea, where it outperforms SCII in terms of viewership and playercount.
Artosis made a pretty neat video about how consistent SCII players have gotten and why that's not good for their pro scene, and that's the first thing I thought of when I read your video title. I don't think SCII is "ruined" but I haven't watched the past couple GSLs because it's felt kind of samey (and the inconsistent balance philosophy has not helped at all).
So you're saying that those people who claim that the garbage pathfinding in Brood War is actually a good thing were right all along?
Part of the problem with Starcraft 2 is that the game's balance is fragile and does not allow for much map diversity. Any Starcraft 2 map that deviates enough that it changes the timings of key strategies or enables entirely new kinds of strategies wouldn't be possible or viable on a default map is going to create radical and undesirable effects on the game balance. Entire factions might be entirely unviable on those maps. So SC2 maps have to keep to a pretty tight formula and can't really deviate much. Compare this to games like Age of Empires 2 where map diversity is vibrant, and allows for very different spacing between player bases, resource distribution, starting base layout, and general geography. Heck, each map is itself randomized so even two matches on Arabia can have significant map variance. The game balance is more robust against this kind of variance. In fact, it's often regarded as a feature as tournaments will introduce completely new maps and give pro players a couple of weeks to practice in which time they will develop novel strategies that utilize the distinct timings and eccentricities of that map to their advantage. Starcraft 2's balance just couldn't handle that kind of variance, and this naturally leads to a meta without variance.
Edit: not saying either game is necessarily better or worse, just that the balance design in SC2 is hostile variance and leads to a meta that cannot tolerate large amounts of variance. AoE2 definitely has its own problems, but a game balance that can robustly tolerate variance is definitely one of its strengths.
I think Warcraft 3 is the best RTS becasue it has RNG and the movement Engine is less refined as well but not at all crap.
once long ago I tried playing Rust.
I had a friend who played Rust and really seemed to enjoy it, and so I thought I'd take a shot at it. not knowing what any of the server jargon meant, I loaded into one that had room for extra players, and proceeded to have an awful time; not knowing what "server wipes" were, I'd loaded into one that was approaching time to reset, and what that meant was that most of the players already in that server were long-since established with tools and resources. I, meanwhile, was a fresh Rust player, equipped with nothing but a rock for smacking on random objects to acquire resources. after trying and failing multiple times to reach what I call The Brainiac Threshold (i.e. "how long does it take to find a decent pair of pants") and each time losing what meager resources I could acquire with my humble smackin' rock, and each time to lunatics with full body armor and automatic rifles whereas the most offense I could muster up was a crude spear, I gave up.
I have not played a single session of Rust since, and I'm convinced everyone who likes Rust- including that friend- is funny in the head.
As someone who tried to get into fighting games several times and failed everytime: the problem is not even the memorization, it's how hard they usually are to input timing-wise (which doesn't change the point you were making). Some of the advanced but necessary combos for any character in street fighters were so hard to get right in training that most casual players will abandon before they can input it right consistently. And if they don't, they will as soon as they realize that in a real matches they will fumble it everytime for a while. And then just for fun you can add the lag of online matches and I don't even understand how people manage to get successful combos.
And combos are just prerequisites ! You need to know them to get a chance at winning but they are not what makes a player good, they represent very little skill expression.
Reminds me of back in the day my friends tried to get me into MtG, and let me tell you, 14 y/os in 2001 were TERRIBLE at explaining how the game plays, so I would routinely lose games and after a point, i had to ask “did you get me to play this game with you so you’d have someone to win against?” I never had a meaningful game and I quickly lost interest in ever finding one.
MtG is very complex (I would say overly complex and bloated these days) and that makes it difficult to fully teach new players.
Most of the core concepts aren't that difficult on the surface, but there are a number of deeper layers within the game that often come up. Just explaining the "stack" to a player can be a headache even though at its core it isn't that complicated of a concept (basically boils down to the last action taken is the fist action performed). However, when you start getting into the way different mechanics interact with each other and when who has priority and everything it can become a nightmare that is frequently counter-intuitive sometimes so much so that it sounds like cheating but there is a logic to it when you explain the way it works.
When bringing new players in that player either has to be really invested in picking up the game and willing to take a lot of lumps or the playgroup has to be a bit invested in "dumbing" down their play for a bit to bring the player up to speed with a reasonable learning curve.
8:14 Just to add things from a the perspective of someone whose played lots of fighting games at a competitive level, adding simplified inputs to special moves is not as easy as a sell as you'd think. Oddly enough, they can often give even more advantages to the veteran players over the new players your trying to help. A new player will be grateful that they can finally do an uppercut without doing the Z motion + a button, but a veteran will see that they can be immune to any frametrap or throw set up by delay pressing the uppercut button after blocking. This is why every uppercut in Street Fighter 6 has the Simplified input for uppercut set to Forward + Special so you can't do it while blocking.
Simplified inputs also can shutdown entire character archtypes unintentionally. For example, in Street Fighter 6, characters with fast moving horizontal attacks like Blanka, Honda and Marisa can use their powerful self-projectiling moves (Blanka ball, Honda's Headbutt, and Marisa's superman punch) as a way to get in and bully their opponents. It is a very hard execution and reaction check with traditional inputs. With 1 button guaranteed anti-airs, they are cake to deal with. I think a lot of characters who rely on this type of attack would either need those moves buffed to be so fast you can't react with anticipation or those types of characters would get destroyed by the input system that favors reactive defense.
I'm not saying that having simplified inputs is a mistake. There just needs to be a lot of design decisions behind having that as a system. DNF duel, Street Fighter 6, Granblue fantasy versus and Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid all have one button special systems and are great games.
I think the video from Core-A-Gaming "Sidenote: Why Motion inputs Still exist" explains a lot more of the unique things that special move inputs can add that aren't just things to memorize to make life harder for newbs as people keep framing them as.
It's the issue with all new player friendly mechanics added in any game; they help out good players as well. And a good player is far more equipped to take proper advantage of whatever mechanic that may be.
Age of Empires 2 has in recent years (last five years I guess) added in various supports for specific resource gathering. It lowers the level of micro actions needed in your base, which helps new players. At the highest level, it means you have more uptime on army micro management, scouting, all of these tiny advantages that actually cause a greater divide between good and bad players. Newbies don't die to getting misplacing or reseeding farms against good players, they die to one archer microing down your entire economy.
So yeah. Helping new players in PvP focused games don't work. Only one way to stop getting stomped, and that is getting better at the game. Which... is an issue for sustained playerbases.
long live motion inputs. those that argue against them very rarely understand why they exist in the first place. like you said, the whole game has to be designed around not having them, and those design decisions and implications aren't understood by the people that wanted to remove the motions. forgive them, for they know not what they do
@@PressureCooker69 I don't know if there are public developer notes for Street Fighter 2 about this, but I think that Charge inputs were the first attempt at making a 1 button special if you think about it. After holding a back direction, you just need to press one direction with a button to execute the special. The most famous charge character being Guile, whose entire move set is designed around how his input system works. hold back for sonic boom, and hold down for flash kick. Which means holding down and back charges both moves. Guile's specials were made stronger than their motion contemporaries, but you couldn't have access to them while moving forward. It's a classic to how execution isn't just "making things harder", but actually creates playstyles and strategies from limitations based on those rules.
@@ZhangHe2369 yeah it all makes sense. ease of use (fewer inputs) + better frame data vs availability. the balance of the game is a work of art in many cases. there's a reason that the charge motion for upkicks is down.
I still feel like charge inputs and Shoryuken are the only examples given. Geiger from Fantasy Strike solved the first issue pretty well, and I’m sure there’s creative solutions to make DP easy to trigger on offense combos but not defense.
Another videogame example is the better you are at a game, higher better your weapons are (like the guns in old-school MW2). So, the better players get better guns, and that makes winning easier, which means they get better guns, etc. Middle skill players have a harder time gearing up, because the best players can farm them ever so much easier
People gotta stop saying "Good" when they mean "Winningest".
From a design - and player - perspective, Fun is Good, not winning/power.
To be fair to Yugioh, they *do* have "problem solving card text" (PSCT), the quotes aren't sarcastic, it's just a specific phrase they use and not just a descriptor.
The problem with PSCT though is that it has extensive implications on the game and does need to be understood to play properly at a higher level, but it isn't even explained in the rule book. These are key semantics concerning the cards. All this to say, in Yugioh reading the card *does* explain the card... but only if you know how to read it, and the game itself doesn't teach you.
That sounds like the scenes in the anime where player 1 would explain how player 2's card works to player 2. It always made me think there was no text on their cards.
Tbf the only wording things you actually need to learn are missed timing and what types of summon negates work on fusion summons. Everything else either really is explained on the card or isn't explained by PSCT grammar either, only by external ruling.
@@yurisei6732 This is mostly true, but that's also the problem. Timing on its own involves at least 6 things, all the effect conjunctions, although only 4 of those really matter that much, and the impact of chains.
Chains are explained fairly well in the rule book, but their interaction with "when" effects isn't.
Considering that most effects nowadays include conjuctions, it's pretty important. Hell even the colon and semicolon aren't explained in the rule book, though that's pretty simple to get.
It's not too different than keywords (in fact yugioh has keywords as well), in that it's essentially a second language you have to learn - except the gap of memorization is less (in exchange for being more cumbersome to read).
Though unlike magic, yugioh is based on an anime, and a lot of the lawyery type of wording is design to allow not only for every deck to have their own interesting quirks, but to also simulate those big anime combos.
Personally I feel like putting the full details of PSCT in the rule books you get in products would actually be hinder new players than help them. That's not to say that rules aren't helpful, but that it's a matter of onboarding. There is a certain level of rules you can reasonable introduce to a new player before it all fizzles out of their head and becomes mush, so it's often better to keep the more technical stuff for later once the player has a basic understanding of the game and continued interest to go further into the depths
Here in Chile we got a weird meta for commander, since cards are more expensive (based on purchase power and pricier sealed product) and hard to come by (we don't have easy access to CardMakert, CardKingdom or TCG Player equivalent), most players want to make the most of the cards that they have (there is still a stigma against proxing in casual), so metas are casual but tend to be more competitive than metas in USA (and I guess other places). LGS tend to offer a price for wining and there are leagues with standing tracking for retention. Casual players exists, but not at the same level than USA.
Nice!
In Brasil with my friends we didn't had money so we broxys whole decks. As a friend games night is good. But we don't compete, when a friend compete we land to him what we have so he can represent us.
I hope that works out well for you guys, because I really dislike multiplayer magic for prices. Such an easy Petri dish for collusion.
@@JonaxII It is not my preference, I would prefer just to play for fun and get prices/promos at random
Tbh while I think keywording would absolutely help yugioh, the bigger problem I ran into when trying to learn it (as an avid CCG enjoyer across all sorts of physical and digital card games) was the complete lack of text formatting/templating. If there were line breaks between effects, colons or symbols to denote cost vs effect, bullet points or numbers for modal effects, etc, then it'd feel a lot better. Even the Master Duel doesn't apply this sort of thing. in fact, Master Duel does something crazier: making flavor text indistinguishable from effect text (which is especially bad on normal pendulum monsters where now one half of the text you're reading is game rules and the other half is lore)
there are actually colons denoting cost vs effect on all but the very oldest cards. As for the others, ygo actually also has all of them... In Japan!!! For some reason they don't bring that over to the west. But that also explains why they're written so densely, because they're designed as cards with actual comprehensive formatting that then just gets ruined by konami of america.
Yes the formatting on YGO's TCG cards is at a break point, it's kinda crazy that Master Duel demands you comprehend Problem Solving Card Text AND also learn to skim through the blocks of text fast enough to find the important effects while not missing any other relevant information and not running out of time. I see no other option but to make the text box bigger to fit bullet points and line breaks, resell the old cards all over again.
The cards do actually have formatting that tells you what is a cost or effect and also some things are bulleted for certain types of effects. The templating of the cards is the part that needs changing though for sure. It's funny cuz the templating issue is mostly fixed in the asian version of the game cuz they number their effects so it doesn't get lost in the paragraph.
There is some of this, but the Problem Solving Card text isn't enough, maybe try OCG English, OCG cards have more formatting than TCG cards do to separate stuff out
For video games specifically on the competitive side, I loathe matchmaking being the norm now. The freedom to associate with a server browser and private servers really allows for players to better self sort to the kind of play they most enjoy instead of getting thrown into an algorithm that everyone hates.
@@matsuringo24 server browsers would be great to see come in as a more prominent feature in plenty of modern games. Skill based matchmaking systems have their place in the ranked competitive modes but a non skill based matchmaking and server browser are perfect for casual, community, or other types of game modes.
So much this. Server Browsers were the best. You can select what map, game mode, player count that you wanted to play. Servers could build communities. Not to mention the players had some control over the time they wanted to wait to get into a match.
Forget SBMM EOMM or whatever. Matchmaking is just worse than a server browser
pubs were the best
there is also the option of allowing the players to self sort, deadlock has an option that allows players to do this in their queues for "competitive mindset" or "casual mindset"
yes, because pros stomping new players until they get banned from the server, or alternatively seeing the pro on your team absolutely flatten the enemy and carry your team to victory multiple times(they're not getting banned because the server admin is on the same team as them) is definitely soooo much better
One perspective that I've gained from playing chess is that often when people are frustrated at skill barriers, the "real" problem is actually something else. And I think it actually is the lack of community. I'm not trying to deny that games can be more or less hostile to new players, but I've come to believe that in order to get good in any "hard game", being part of a community that guides you through the learning process is absolutely essential.
So for example chess, on its face is probably one of the most hostile and hard to learn games there is. And a lot of new players feel put off by the pressure of "oh you have to learn openings and memorize 20-move lines". And I was like that, put a ton of time into openings way too early. And I got some results, but ultimately hit a brick wall.
But then I actually joined a chess club and started talking to other players over the board. And what happened was, those people started guiding me away from the wrong things (memorization) towards the right things (fundamentals and concepts). And those "right things" included a lot of stuff I never really could have learnt on my own.
For example just seeing the way someone analyzes a position and talks through the process can help you so much. You learn to focus on the relevant parts and filter all the noise. And before long I realized that if you develop your intuition by listening to people who "get it" (at least more than you do) then in the vast majority of cases the "correct move" is the intuitive one.
And this applies to fighting games, tcg:s, mobas... you name it. Like yugioh and mtg both, you learn them by playing. Sure yugioh is more wordy, but ultimately both have such complex rules that the average player only knows and understands a fraction of them. But still can play, even quite well perhaps. I've definitely lost horribly to players who don't know that much about the stack and layers and whatnot. And that's because they've learnt socially, that you don't cast your bomb when opponent has 3 blue mana up, while I was reading up on how banding works.
And overall I believe it's almost inseparable. A "hard game" necessarily has a bunch of different aspects that you could be working on, some more relevant than others to you at each moment. Some that you can learn on your own with time and effort, and some that you need someone to just point at you: "hey did you know that you seen to be thinking about this completely wrong". And without that community guidance you can grind for months in training mode or whatever, but still come out as a total scrub since you focused on the wrong thing. And in that case you want to blame someone, and it's natural to blame the devs for making the game too hard to get into.
Ofc. the devs could and should do what they can to improve conveyance, and avoid unnecessary barriers, but what they can't do anything about is the biggest barrier, and that's yourself, your own mental barriers. Especially the belief that you are able and should be able to do this "on your own".
Maybe there are some rare individuals who have the ability to learn by themselves, to find the "essential problem" in their play at each step by self-reflection and intuition alone. But that ain't me and probably ain't you either.
tldr; The heuristics need to be learnt socially, and a lack of social learning is extremely hard to cover by just individual effort.
I couldnt have said it better myself
100% my experience as well
I feel like the fixation on memorizing combos is a trap beginners to fighting games fall into. Even if you are a combo monster, you aren't nessecarily competitive, similar to how you can be a crackshot in fps games and still be low ranked.
Combos achieve two things for you. They make you deal more damage, which gets you to your wincon faster, and they put you in a favorable position to continue your offense. These are both good things and worth practicing, however you can't lose sight of how you even get into the combo to begin with.
In order to combo, you must hit your opponent. In order to hit your opponent, you must understand your reach and speed as opposed to theirs. And even once you've ended your combo, youve gotta know how to capitalize on your advantage. Then theres knowing how to defend yourself.
Combos are the flashy part of fighting games, so they're naturally what draws people in, though I wouldnt say they are a nessecity. Every fighting game ever made has extremrly simple routes that achieve your main goals (deal more damage, get advantage for the next interaction). The extra damage can be miniscule, it only affects how fast you win, but if you know when to cash in on your hits, no matter how small, you will just win more.
I think fighting games biggest barrier to entry is just all the meta knowledge you just have to learn to be competitive. Games like granblue have done away with motion inputs and people still find that game too hard. There's no real way of easing a player into it however. Theyve just got to learn.
"Good, you have basics. Now you need neutral"
"What is neutral?"
"It's... uh... thats a good question"
@@Монс-й1ь If only there was a glossary for fighting game lingo out there.
Fighting game glossary is nice but it doesnt really teach you how to play
@ you’re right, it doesn’t teach you how to play, but it’s useful when you need to explain a concept to a newer player.
Similarly in chess, a lot of players spend too much time learning opening theory whilst it has a lower impact on their performance than they think it will.
Chess solved this a hundred years ago. Just use ELO and play other players of a similar skill level. Or use a handicap to make up the difference - like golf or chess do as well. You can also use rubber banding type effects to make the game easy at first and increasingly difficult as one nears victory. Or you can use politics - allow multiple losing players to gang up on the winning player.
In a competitive setting where there's a prize on the line, you can't fault people for doing what they gotta do to win.
Designing around said high stakes competetive setting however, is gonna push away people looking for a casual experience one way or enother over time.
This conversation made me remember my journey in GW2 (PC- MMORPG). The elite speedclearing guilds created strategies and builds so powerfull that can allow you to kill bosses even before they start applying their mechanics with hard high Actions per second rotations delivering ludicrous ammounts of dps ( i dont even think devs were aware that the playerbase would manage to get their builds so overpowered). These builds got released and now everyone not only tries to imitate them but also only accepts people who do the same in their raid parties. Ex: The guy who made a ranger because he likes bows , will have an hard time being that ranged dps in a raid because the META buidl requires him to use axes ( for example that might or not be true in the current release) and move to melee range, same applies for spellcasters etc.. those Meta rotations are in an emersive aspect of a fantasy world are just nonsense. Skilled players created builds so weird but powerful that allowed endgame content to be cleared so much easier, the playerbase followed their playstyle... What got me turned off from the game as i got older was exactly that, even though i could perform really really well doing the META procedures it was just infuriating seeing that my adult friends with very limited time to play PC and perfectly geared and skilled to do any content as long as people are able to do mechanics, would not be accepted in a 10 man raid squad because they dont dont try to emulate the top1% elite Guilds.
A bit of a controversial take here, but as a budding designer myself, i truly think the solution to this is making the path to improvement the reward/loop. Games like hades already successfully do this. The issue in my eyes is actually that the perception of initiation difficulty creates negative attitudes towards trying at all. The need to win all the time creates negative association to just playing for external reasons (ie. Fun) regardless of winning. The winning should be the secondary reward to simply exploring the thing you love
Games like hades are single player, not multiplayer.
The algorithm guided me here today and this was a good conversation.
I still follow the Starcraft: Broodwar tournaments coming out of South Korea. The "valley of effort" you mentioned seems to be about 10 years of dedication before "new" players can compete with existing top players. It's still hugely popular there though, and young players are being taught Broodwar in semi-formal organisations called 'Universities'.
Korean players have always been significantly better than any 'foreign' (non-Korean) players.
I will also add that gamers getting too good and breaking games is sometimes a really good thing. Broodwar hasn't had a patch in 20 years, and yet new strategies and tactics are developed all the time. There's no way Blizz designed for this, or ever could have designed for it. There's just some quirks in the engine, leading to exploits which benefit player attention and micromanagement.
Huge fighting game fan and I’ve placed in Blazblue back in the day, been playing since like 2002. You guys did a good job and the other fans helped to bridge the gap.
One thing that wasn’t mentioned in those other comments is that special inputs raises the barrier to entry, but does not affect the macro decisions you make in a match. Developers are trying to make that barrier to entry lower but typically at a cost, ie. Reduced damage, limited uses, less normals/overall options, etc. What isn’t talked about is that the skill ceiling in a game like Smash Bros (especially melee) is MUCH higher due to having a ton more movement options. In melee, your APM skyrockets if you consider all of the micro nuances that exist in having analogue coordinates in your control stick and needing to do certain cancels to make your character move faster. Some fighting games like street fighter have a more restrictive system where your combo routing should be planned, and some are like Blazblue where it feels like pretty much anything can combo but you need to have a good feel for the game physics to optimize it. Some games are like Tekken 8 where your inputs have to be SO precise and thoughtful that just being in an unfamiliar situation can shake you and affect your execution.
The most important thing to remember when talking about inputs is this; the input itself is a balancing factor in the fighting game. Doing a quarter circle is a common input that will have common outcomes, whereas a charge move or a 360 will reward you in being more efficient or having high damage. If you take those properties and suddenly make them easy to execute in the interest of allowing a player to focus on the macro decisions of a match, other things will always be taken to offset that accessibility.
Thanks for your insight!
The goldilocks zone of execution is definitely when even at the top level, players have to weigh the risk of dropping the execution heavy option, though it's a lot harder in practice to make such a system on purpose
@@saevus2686 At the top level it really is about what you have down pat in your muscle memory and if you can access that in the moment. What makes those moments so difficult is being able to evaluate whether or not you have the appropriate resources to pull it off and if it will leave you in an advantageous position. I’m all washed up, so I just take the option that’s 92% of the way there but I know I can do.
When I started MTG, I was told that FNM was casual and I could really make anything I wanted so with a $100 budget i made a cool mono-black deck. The event was full of metadecks mostly mid-range and control which is extremely unfun to play against for a new player who doesn't know how to play around those strategies. I'd travel an hour to FNM only to have all my spells countered, bounced or destroyed. It got so bad I conceded when I saw my opponent lay down a white/blue land. If it wasn't for a friendly EDH table inviting me for a game I would have left magic there and then.
Tryhards in magic are the absolute worst kinds of people.
Getting into Magic can be hard, because it invites a lot of toxic people. There’s so many horror stories of people joining a group only to get relentlessly bullied and targeted by all of the friends in the group. To have a good experience with Magic, I think you have to play with people you can trust to try and make the new guy have a good experience with their game, which does basically rule out competitive anything.
I have fallen for this trap and it sucks. I won't go anywhere near Magic anymore and actively detest it. It's not that I don't know how to play, it's that I hate HOW people play.
I only play magic for fun.
And we have a rule of not using set cards/multiple copies (except for basic lands)
Also cards must be consistent with the theme/motif.
It forces us to be creative, work with what you have in your hands instead of focusing on a digging your deck or streamlining it for specific strategy, combo, engine.
I always find it really strange when highly competitive and skilled players complain about skill-based matchmaking, because they're essentially asking to stomp some poor newbie every once in awhile as a treat.
Well, actually not always the case.
The issue is really more that with SBMM, when you hit a certain skill level it now mandates that the game's environment changes. You no longer see "bad" or "unique" playstyles, you only see the meta vs. the meta. Everything happens in a vaccuum. Every match is you fighting for your life, whereas before you could breathe a little and experience a decent mix of genuine competition and "stomps".
So, I'm sure with some people you're absolutely hitting the nail on the head, but SBMM can present genuine issues for skilled players as well. It's not just that people want to roflstomp new players into quitting the game.
@brad1426 imo, the "fighting for your life every game thing" is not a problem.
The meta thing might be, but that's a problem with gaming as a whole, not unique to SBMM.
a lot of the games i've seen people complain about SBMM in are team-based ranked match queue sort of things like league of legends and valorant, where your rank increases largely based on win/loss ratio instead of individual performance and actually figuring out what mmr a player, let alone a team of 5 of them actually is is impossible - i've seen it end up with situations like three silver players, one gold, and a platinum player on a team against four golds and a plat which isn't really fun for anyone involved
@@Dezarc yeah, League was notorious for this when I played. People say it's an unfortunate consequence of people wanting shorter queue times, so they allow larger "skill gaps" on teams. We called it the "jungle coin flip". You would win or lose when your team was assembled based on whose jungle was better lol
@@justincrowe888 and if they shorten the gap, higher rank players just make smurfs so they can actually play, but at the cost of everything else associated with smurf accounts
i don't envy being the guy in riot's office trying to sort that whole system out, honestly
also, since you seem like an old leaguehead, does metagolem mean anything to you
A common trap you can fall into when discussing the gap between casual and entrenched players is assuming that casual players don't want to deal with execution challenges. If you walked into a super-casual EDH game under the assumption that most of the players would be casting Gigantosaurus or the like, you would be mistaken. People like combos, people like finding options to counter what their opponents are doing, people like having a big complex mess of things going on and resolving it with good execution. The trick is managing the stakes of the execution challenges so people can do that to their taste. As far as fighting games go, Guilty Gear Strive is a good example I think, when it comes to having a low basic execution requirement to just play the game but giving lots of opportunities to flex your execution in flashy ways. You can start out on a character like Ky, a character with a relatively basic game plan and super easy and consistent combos, and then if you feel like showing off, you can move to a character like Johnny, whose combos have a lot of different moving pieces in them and are really stylish and satisfying when you pull them off. The important thing is to balance these options against each other for maximum player expression, so they can engage with the game's challenges in exactly the way they want to.
I genuinely don't understand why this is a point of contention for so many people. The casual argument is that they can't have fun if they don't win but that competitive players are too focused on winning. If losing makes you not want to play the game then you should play a different game or change your mentality on what a game is even doing for you.
I did sports and Middle School, I lost a lot but I still kept doing it because I liked it even though losing wasn't fun at all. I enjoyed the process. A lot of casual players just want to turn their brain off and receive the reward of victory when they should just be playing a single player or noncompetitive game with difficulty that is tuned to what they can have fun with.
I agree with all the points about consistency and game design and not creating cards or abilities that break previously established logic.
Because you're not understanding there's a threshold, nor the difference between sports and board games. When you're new and inexperienced it helps to have a good introduction to what the game is. People need to see the magic of the game to want to continue. If they immediately get dogged on in something like catan or magic, they're not going to want to play anymore. It's as much a demonstration of the community as it is for the game itself. What you did was Sports, you got to move your body and physically move and work out. So even if you lost, you still got a work out. This is video games and card games. Have you ever been stuck in a 2 hour Euro game because someone told you it was easy to learn and people will play nicely and instead get smoked by people who've been playing for years? I have and it's miserable, made me not want to play that game again.
You forgot to mention price. People want to play competitive but they dont want to spend 400-1k on the best cards available so theyre going to get womped with their budget decks 90% of the time. Its a huge problem when cards are only printed at the highest rarity or dont have other versions to make it cheaper. Im not spending 40-50$ on a card that ill need 4 of to make the deck I want to play work decent. ill just move on to a different game
@@CursedPersonz TCG Yugioh is having a severe problem with that for years
this is what got me to drop MtG; playing against a diehard that had a planeswalker and hyper expensive cards vs my dinky starting deck
I love the Mimic Tear, and IDGAF. I was over-leveled and over-powered anyways. 🤷🏿♂️ Turns out when you explore every dungeon you find and actively seek them out in every corner, you're gonna be strong AF
In terms of single player games, this is why players prefer more difficult games nowadays and are being pulled towards Japanese style of difficulty and game design philosophy - and is also why some western games are trying to mimic that same process.
These games asks more of the player and so you naturally find the need to be better.
The game developers will not punish you for being better, in fact they will reward the skill.
In my opinion, I always find the discourse of "players will optimize the fun out of games" to be moot and not very useful because, like... of course they will??
Everyone does it. It's natural and borderline subconscious at this point. I guess some people don't realise they "optimize".
So ultimately, if this behavior is a given, is inherent to video game players, and is inevitable (unless cleverly designed to counteract such behavior), then yes, I agree with the video - the devs are to blame.
This is literally the "too many sweats" meme
This is what makes a game like Team Fortress 2 great to me. The amount of players per team, crits, weapon variability and matchmaking system make it feel like a pickup game of basketball where everyone finds a place to fit in the team and enjoy the game at their own pace.
Still love tf2 for this reason
This is super common for non fighting fans, but getting rid of combos in a fighter is like making soccer or basketball a 1v1 game. Which is fine, that can be fun, but we can all agree that it would be more interesting to have more playstyles than just "Goalie"
what a great fucking video. A very rare no fluff game design overview that delves deep enough to get to something actionable across game genres. Instant sub.
The amount of memorization for fighting games has actually gone up since the old days. Memorizing move list has never been a problem in 2D fighters, because characters have usually 3-4 special moves and a couple of command normals on top of that. Tekken and other 3D games have always had a a lot more bloated move lists, which is still the case.
Combo systems on the other hand have gotten more elaborate, especially compared to the really early days of the genre were usually the best you could do was jump in > normal > special, or Vampire Savior light > medium > heavy. Now the combos one needs to learn are more intricate in practically every game, so even though there is more leeway in the execution there the memorization part is overall either equal or harder than in the past.
Then there is also the question of frame data, which has always been a thing, but with how accessible it is now on internet and with how fighting games are designed mechanically now it is more necessary to memorize it for a lot of the situations so that you can have a chance at fighting back.
yea this is a huge thing that i'm surprised isn't talked about a lot more. the best example i can think of was when i first beat the first Dark Souls and then started playing Elden Ring. I didn't think the difference in difficulty would be too bad despite what i heard, that it'd just be a different way to play where you'd have to pay a bit more attention to enemy's attacks... I can't lie, I think I died almost a dozen times to the Soldier of Godrick fight. Maybe more. If you don't use the stronger tools in the game, the ones that can utterly trivialize the entire experience, it demands *far more* out of you as a player. This is all especially true with Shadow of the Erdtree; I've heard a lot about different people just giving up because they couldn't deal with a boss. They demand that you learn and master their movesets far more than anything else in this FromSoft genre: Malenia, Messmer, Relanna, Godfrey, even Margit the Filter Omen to an extent. All of them and more.
Even the build planning aspects of the game are more demanding, despite the more lenient equip loads, stronger light rolls, and lack of a durability system. there's way higher level requirements for a lot of equipment, and leveling Vigor is FAR more pressing than leveling Vitality in Dark Souls. you can get through DS1 just fine with about 30 vitality, but by the second half of Elden Ring 40 vigor is your BOTTOM LINE. there's immensely strong tools that can grant ridiculous reward for almost no commitment, but they demand commitment, and if you don't think through what you're leveling, you may be screwed without a respec.
Some people just don't have the time to put into games, when i was younger i took it seriously and was quite good. Now that I'm older i just wanna have fun and blow some steam after work....nope, sweats everywhere, especially in Apex. I just gave up on competitive games, no one has a chill mode and as a halo vet.....understand...to an extent.
I LOVE your philosophy about complexity. If we define a "moment" in a game as "making a meaningful decision and acting on it," then allowing the players to go from moment to moment as smoothly as possible is all but guaranteed to lead to a better player experience.
This works well in single player games, but in competitive games, it generally results in either very dull play patterns, or in player input becoming irrelevant.
@@Ornithopter470 I partially disagree. The most complex game I have ever put time into is DOTA 2, you have 100s of potential decisions to make every minute, each which impacts the next moment as well as the rest of the match. Dota does have many other problems, particularly with the competitive playerbase that lead me to stop playing consistently, but aside from periods where balance was so poor that the meta only allowed for a very narrow group of heroes and builds to be playable, I still regard it as the best competitive game based on that moment to moment decision making.
Rocket league is a similar case. Virtually unchanged in 10 years and even AI has yet to reach the skillcap, there are just too many possible decisions and inputs.
Both games do rely on a high degree of complexity and players do still fall into certain patterns so I do take your point generally, but there are definitely ways to keep games interesting at the highest level.
@@9871ish I definitely could have phrased it better. There is not a "dominant strategy" in dota om, mainly because of the constant balance tweaking in Dota, and in rocket League, there is a dominant strategy, it's just that there is only one actual way to play the game. It's the same reason why basketball is 90% 3 point shots. It's just the best way to optimize for winning games. It's still fun.
Nice, I have two points to add.
First, on variance, if you go to a non-variant game you end up with something like chess. The game will need to depend on higher decision branching with meaningful decisions to reintroduce game variety. That stops it from being "just going through the motions."
Also, another tool I can think of for smoothing the skill buckets are handicaps. A lot of competitive games have forms of handicap and some even let high-level players play competitively with beginners. Games with strategy dominance chains for board states (like weakness/resistance in pokemon) can act as handicap systems when the expert player plays the weaker position. On a small scale, in MtG matches, letting the losing player of a game decide if they want to go first for the next game in the match can also be a meaningful handicap for mismatched decks/players.
I’m so sick of this argument that “we’re gonna make fighting games more accessible by removing memorizing long combos” as if A.) fighting games tend to include super long difficult to remember input strings (they don’t, 5 buttons is usually on the long end even for a game like Tekken and Street Fighter will almost never ask anything more from you than a couple quarter circles.) and B.) players really want to play fast rock paper scissors. I fucking suck at Tekken I can’t do Reina’s tricky ass command grab input reliability to safe my life, but the reward is in getting better and learning the move pool. You’re sanding the edges off of the experience in the worst way by making every move accessible and having zero execution tax, it makes big brawlers and nimble characters feel the same it just removes all that gratifying texture from the experience and I can’t help but think half of the players using modern controls are just robbing themselves of a more fun experience because they don’t understand that just a TINY bit of effort can be so rewarded. It also ruins learning any new fighting game if you have to play against some shithead with easymode controls while you’re trying to learn. There is so much diversity in the fighting game space fuck SF and Tekken addding baby controls when there’s 20 other anime fighters that play that way by default. If it’s not your world then don’t talk about Fighting games unless it’s to bitch about monetization or body oder. We don’t need it, we are more than happy getting sweaty without an influx of people that demand simplicity and luck take over anything with a gratifying skill ceiling. Also Smash Ultimate sucks.
"Players will optimize the fun out of your game" -Sid Meier.
As a fighting game, strategy game, and card game player I value the ability of my brothers and I to learn together and adapt to each other.
The biggest skill in any of those games (for us at least) is mind games.
Tricking your opponent is always an advantage.
High level play is a different design requirement.
Most games dont need to hold up to super high level gameplay.
On the other hand, even simpler trading card games have very high skill ceiling due to hidden hand information / playing towards outs.
i will explain about fighting games why you can't really remove motion inputs completely. I am at the top 10 percent so i think i am kinda qualify to tell new folks and gamers from other genre why.
MOTION INPUTS are actually not there for you to remember it, its there to BALANCE the characters and supports character playstyle, especially in game where 1 mistake is a gravely mistake opponent can punish.
Lets start with DP motion or in easy "almost every rising uppercut moves" it has property to win EVERY SINGLE MOVES IN THE GAME except few things like block, walking backward and super( ultimate). it has a fast start up as well, the only weakness it has is that if you miss it, you die.
Dp nowadays has 2 inputs type generally 1. Forward, down, down+forward 2 Down, down+forward, forward notice how there is no back??? because walking back in fighting game is blocking. imagine if you can block and use the most broken move in the game that beat everything out of block frame 1, offense would not be viable anymore. It will also obliterate the purpose of other core gameplay part that you need in order to open opponent guard up like frametrap, overhead, string, spacetrap, jumps in, empty jump, delay buttons, etc. also if you are bloking you have to release your block to DP otherwise you can't really press it
also there is 3 input because in moment of high pressure your finger wont even press it right so there is a huge room for error to balance out the most broken move in the game.
in conclusion, if you can react to everything with a move that beats everything except super with a single button press out of block, the game will not function
Next one is a charge move, example here will be Chun li fireball "kikoken". Fireball in most fighting games are quarter circle forward input but Chun's one is "hold back for 50 frames then press forward and punch", This is because Chun strength and screen presence is different depends on the position you are in. Chun is weak on walking forward and stupidly strong on walking backward because her character was design around making opponent whiff there buttons and punish it. Almost everything in her kit was designed for walking backward. While everyone has to stop walking to do fireball Chun can chuck it out while she is walking back.
another thing is Chun's and Guile fireball has better frame data than the rest of the cast. Guess why? cuz it's a conditioning tool to force the opponent to not walk forward because they have FASTEST fireball at their disposal when walking back. The purpose of their fireball is to stop opponent from walking forward, when Chun and guile walk back you have to walk forward to catch them but if they have literally a gun pointing at your leg would you walk?? No, right? so opponents are force to play to Chun's and Guile strength which is midrange game.
you see how all of this is coming together?? yeah and that is why it's a core part of fighting games. some games can remove it like anime games cuz they uses different fundamentals but for games that balance around spacing timing you really can't.
Hope yall understand a bit more after reading. TY
Your channel have halped me a lot on the last year creating my own game, thank you so much!
This is straight up just an ego issue. If you play fighting games you’ll begin to understand that you have to be willing to suck and lose before you get good. If you’re a casual and your time is “ruined” by losing, I’d argue you didn’t actually want to play the game in the first place. You still wanted to win, just without having to try. So in that instance, go play a single player game, or as they say, get good.
I see this very clearly with my beloved game Magic the Gathering. I have played the game for a very long time now and have played both competitively and at very casual low levels as well as all sorts of places in between. One thing I've noticed is that the mindset of the competitive people is not only often completely different than the mindset of the casuals, but is usually directly at odds, especially when it comes to what makes the game fun...
There's this idea at high level MTG that says "There is a limited amount of fun to be had, and I am going to do my best to monopolize it." Through a combination of careful deck optimization and skill, they homogenize to a relatively consistent metagame that allows them to win games as much as possible by any means possible -- even if it means their opponents are locked completely out of playing the game. There's very much an attitude of "get good scrub" and "If you aren't following a basic sense of how to interact with the metagame, you're a bad player and you deserve to lose" at that scene...
Look, to the extent that the metagame is extremely cutthroat and to the extent that new people want to get in on metagaming at that level and be competitive too, they're absolutely right. You do have to know how to play like a cutthroat bastard to really get good and win more games. But not everyone is looking for that kind of gaming experience. And I don't think I need to tell any of you just how thoroughly TOXIC a mindset and mentality that is to have for the game as a whole. Personally, I disagree with the notion that a person who wants to build a deck with goofy flying hamsters and pirate squirrels, or that a person who wants to play around a janky convoluted combo with 6-8 different pieces to assemble glorious nonsense, is just someone bad at the game who needs to get good and who deserves to lose. A person like this isn't necessarily even unskilled at the game, they're just not looking to play the game for the same kind of experience that the cutthroats are going for. These are the people who believe that there's not a "finite" amount of fun to be had, or that the finite amount that there is is more than enough for everyone to be able to have fun and pull ridiculous shenanigans against each other.
Having both kinds of players isn't a bad thing to the health of the game -- I believe that the cutthroats should have their place within the community as a whole and still be catered to periodically despite their toxic mindset, which only really applies to people who want in on that cutthroat action. But we have a big problem when the makers of the game overly cater to the whims of that cutthroat community as opposed to everyone else -- as well as when newer players are ONLY exposed to the cutthroats to play against. The cutthroats have no patience for anything they perceive as weaknesses, and there are significant limits to creativity among their ranks, only looking seriously at what seems to be the most broken thing you could possibly be doing, and dismissing everything else as trash. That's not generally what new players want to be doing. It's a new game to them... They typically want to be inundated with the variety, the endless possibilities that come with having a card pool of hundreds of thousands of cards in existence.
So when you pair newbies only with cutthroats... Someone's gonna have a bad time they didn't ask for. The cutthroat is bored because the fight was too easy, and the newbie doesn't want to continue to play after the beating they received or the massive complexity of the game they're trying to learn. It's not a positive game experience for either of them. You need room for the casuals too to help keep the game healthy and fun. You need people who aren't going to play like cutthroats in the long run. You need people who are genuinely friendly and encouraging and welcoming to be playing your game, because these are the people who will be most successful at recruiting new people who will actually stick around.
The fact that you call the competitive mindset cutthroat and toxic is indicative that you don't understand the competitive mindset. If two people sit down to play the game (magic in this case), and one is playing to win, and the other is playing to flex their space hamster tribal deck, *they haven't sat down to play the same game*.
Fun is a highly subjective metric to measure. Basically everyone agrees that winning is fun. Losing is only not fun if you yourself felt that you did not have a chance to win. And if that was due to a lack of skill, that can be fixed. If it was because space hamster tribal is just straight up not up to snuff in the meta, maybe you shouldn't play that deck unless it's against other space hamster tribal.
@@Ornithopter470 idk, as I've gotten older being competitive in games doesn't do anything for me anymore. It all becomes so boring and uncreative. Roleplaying is the only experience that stays fun for me. Especially winning competitively while playing a roleplay character build. That actually does allow me to enjoy competitive gaming.
Pvp in Dark Souls/Elden ring reminds me of this... I have a blast playing my roleplay builds that are most certainly inefficient, 'mid', or bad. But playing as an in-universe character is so much fun lol.. It just seems so boring to play a perfectly statted and geared character because the gameplay loop becomes the same. When meta becomes so strong, every game is the same. There is a most effective tactic, and if we both know that, we both know how the match will generally go.
I also think people who only have fun when they win have a strange mindset. If you only have fun because of a conditional (winning) then do you even truly enjoy the game? Or is it just a vehicle for competitiveness? The ability to have fun even while losing is necessary imo, and my way around it is roleplaying, but many others seem to have no fun if they lose.
@@H41030v3rki110ny0u there is a concept in game design called the "dominant strategy". It's generally speaking something that good games try to reduce or minimize, as dominant strategies result in repetitive, boring play. Elden Ring doesn't have one specific dominant strategy (which is a very good thing). It has many viable strategies, and a healthy meta should have many viable strategies.
I agree with you, that winning shouldn't be the only way you have fun. Personally, I treat every game as a puzzle, with winning being the reward for whoever finishes the puzzle first. But most of the fun in a puzzle isn't had by completing it, its had in the search for the next piece. Every game is a learning experience.
The "Valley of Effort" as a concept falls flat when anything FromSoft has made in the past decade is several times easier than just about any game created before 1997. Games got dramatically easier in the 2000s, especially in the late 2000s, and they didn't start to slowly get some bite back in them again until the 2010s. Even then, most of the biggest budget, mass market titles are built distinctly with ease of use and low difficulty levels in mind for their base difficulty levels.
A handful of titles targeting niche demographics that desire a higher skill floor and ceiling are not representative of trends for the entire medium. Elden Ring isn't the mainstream norm. Spiderman is. Last of Us is. Assassin's Creed is. Mario is.
Skilled players ruins games if your focus is keeping the least dedicated player engaged and paying.
The focus should be to make it as easy as possible to make the least dedicated players become more dedicated.
@denofpigs2575 That just sounds like the goal is to make people addicted. Dedicated players are people who decide to push the game further and the vast majority of people who play games do not want to put more effort than necessary.
@@CivilChev You're free to read it however you want.
But then essentially we're asking people to not dedicate time, which is asinine for any designer, as they'd want people to be engaged.
unless the "skilled players" start whining that they no longer have new players to stomp and get their asses handed to them by the other skill players, which makes them leave the game, which makes the queues for remaining players longer and makes matchmaking put even bigger skill differences, which makes more people get destroyed after waiting 15minutes for a match, after which they leave.
voila, dead game
I've seen a variant of this in PvE games, like MMOs, where skilled players either get too demanding or more on the game design end, the skilled players can solve an encounter so thoroughly that there isn't an ounce of fun to be had if you're not focused on speedrunning.
First Stike confused me so much when I started. It's essentially changing the Phasing of the Damage Step. That's way more nuanced than players try to make it seem. It's literally changing how the turn order plays out.
The point I believe they were trying to make is that first strike allows you to strike first in a general sense meaning it's a self descriptive phrase like flying. Anything with flying u know can fly and is not grounded. It's self descriptive. Obviously the specifics can go more in depth like in this case.
A feature that was in older fighting games that I miss and don't see in newer fighting games is a handicap system. It had to be done manually, but it would increase / decrease health, damage, etc. I'd like to see that come back more in modern titles.
This is why games Nuke themselves by ruining skill ceilings
I honestly think that skill needs to be tested via limitations and restrictions on the skilled instead of them having the advantages of the best stuff. I am not saying they don't earn the best or great stuff, but that using it is not considered by the game as "hard mode".
Do not scale the game difficulty up to meet the legendary gear, keep the scale the same, but make it more rewarding to use the least advantages and gear.
Some people do this just for fun, but they don't get anything for it but clout and self satisfaction. That is fine, but I think being so badass that you can no hit run something naked with a stick would be far more awesome from a design stand point.
Great podcast ep! Excited for the next one.
I haven't yet run into a lot of Magic players that also play fighting games competitively, so it's nice to see you guys compare & contrast the two types of games. The valley of effort is an especially touchy subject in the FGC because new players and experienced players feel so strongly on both sides. The FGC has had a bit of an exodus recently where many top players are quitting their respective games because they believe it's increasingly difficult for a more experienced player to prove their level of skill above a newer one. Daisuke Ishiwatari, the creator of the Guilty Gear franchise said in an interview with Dextero that his intention in creating Guilty Gear Strive was to "destroy Xrd" and "Make Xrd as an example of failure" (xrd being the previous iteration in the series). I think even players that haven't read that article have sensed this sentiment from the game's play patterns and the resulting negative backlash has been intense. I think it also brings up the timeless issue that many competitive games have, especially Magic: it is imperative to sell to casual players for the game's continued growth, but they often don't stick around very long and changes made to appeal to them can often alienate your experienced playerbase. Having your 20-button flashy 30 hit 200-meter combo reduced to a single button press is the fighting game equivalent of printing Nadu in Modern Horizons 3 so Commander players buy the bundles.
It's hard to say whether or not motion inputs are healthy for fighting games. To add to the some of the points you guys made in this podcast ep, there was a game called Granblue Fantasy Versus that came out in early 2020. GBVS has a very simplistic input system AND ways to remove motion inputs entirely by then putting that move on a cooldown. The game's playerbase hit rock bottom pretty quickly because covid hit the states almost immediately after its release, but I cite it in conversations w/ my friends as one of the best cases for reducing motion input difficulty or removing them entirely. However in stark contrast to this, the game series Under Night In-Birth has a high execution barrier, and the game's internal systems use this to make skill expression very accessible. There's this concept in fighting games called "Option Selects (OS)" that's too in-depth to explain in an already long youtube comment (lol) but basically because inputs in UNI embrace complexity, skilled players can produce multiple moves in the same instance, having the correct one come out depending on what your opponent does without requiring the player using this OS to have a perfect read on their opponent's behavior. This kind of gameplay adds so many links to the end of that skill chain that even advanced players still have room to explore, and I think that's why UNI is such a beloved game despite its relatively small playerbase.
Either way, I don't envy any dev on the decision-making end of this conundrum. It's regrettable that exposure and complexity are sort of at odds re: competitive games sometimes.
UNI mentioned! OSs are an interesting topic here, since they're kind of a hidden mechanic. I spent a while learning the game with a friend with neither of us considering even 1AD. Failed tons of motion inputs though, walking and crouching randomly before getting punched. The temptation of flashy animations...
"If I'm the best player in the world, I want to win every time!" I understand that way of thinking, I'm sure everyone does, we've all been there.
Despite the years I've spent gaming, I'm not very "skilled" when it comes to games.
However, I've had some games where I've managed to gain skill at, for example Splatoon, and with that chance of getting "good" at a game I've learned the folly in that thought process.
If I'm the best in the world, I DON'T want to win every match, if I'm the BEST in the world what I want, MORE THAN ANYTHING, is for EVERY, SINGLE, match to be neck and neck, where the break point is a single moment at the end, that was a culmination of every moment before it.
I want to feel like I'm adequately challenged at every moment, until I eventually win, and beat the challenge, or lose and laugh because I had so much fun.
Be it a good match of Splatoon, or League of Legends, or my yearly playthroughs of Kingdom Hearts games on max difficulty, that moment that "I beat it" or "Laugh because I had so much fun" is ALWAYS the best moment in competitive gaming.
Absolutely
Never felt more welcome than in competitive warhammer 40k.
It’s such a nice community.
In my country warhammer is so small that the community is pretty welcoming, I've only seen a couple of bad players (behaviourwise) at the highest spots, and even those are few and far between.
Randomness is indeed the big thing, but used wrongly it can be frustrating.
Take battle royale games, randomness is the gear, and static is the map, sure to SOME degree this will be interesting, like someone that got unlucky and got a shotgun is screwed if he has to traverse an open area where someone is waiting and camping.
But here's the thing, why not make the MAP RANDOM? A huge thing in those games is map knowledge, that's how pros win, remove that and all of a sudden there's a HUGE gap between pros and beginners, potentially hundreds of hours worth of "grind" until those beginners know the map, that is now removed, that gap no longer exists. Learning abilities of characters? maybe 10-20 hours, learning guns? a few hours, but map knowledge? HUNDREDS of hours.
And on the other end there are horrible randomness elements in some fighting or fighting-like games. Take For Honor. At a high level of play every player can parry/dodge every move, so what did they do? They added 50/50 moves into the game, something can chain into something else that you either have to preemptively dodge or block or parry, because those moves come out so fast you have no time to react, so you basically have to guess. THAT ALONE made me quit For Honor the moment I got to around Platinum rank, it felt like bullshit to fight against that.
Just have to use randomness in a smart way.
Nice to see you guys talk about game design in general again rather than just magic.
Overwatch was supposed to be accessible to everyone. Then competitive mode and overwatch league tilted the balance to hitscan patch after patch after patch. It was overwatch league and the hundreds of millions dumped into it that killed overwatch, not the development of overwatch 2.
The value of motion inputs and rich diversity of combos are a very ample topic of discussion, certainly.
Not angry or offended; I think you guys bring out reasonable points, just giving out my personal opinion on the matter.
I think honing your mechanical dexterity is a big part of the fun of video games! As an spectator it's also super cool to see top level players pull off mechanically difficult maneuvers under pressure and if they drop them you -feel- that at a level you just cannot if you know they were doing simpler inputs that even you as an average player can pull off effortlessly.
I disagree (on a personal level) with what seems to be a trend in game design discussion circles, which implies that games simplifying or downright removing their mechanical complexity is always a step forward or "evolution" of the genre. I'm more of the vision that for a lot of genres, particularly the ones that lean into the big umbrella of "action" like fighting games, the physical motions involved should be viewed as part of the fun rather than something that gets in the way of the fun. Basically, what you use to interface with the game is also part of the medium itself and not something you to overcome in order to enjoy it "properly".
tl;dr: waggling lever (or dpad) fun, learning combos also fun and maybe creative, these elements are not something you need to overcome in order to reach the "real fun" of fighting your opponent, they're part of the fun.
Fighting game clarification incoming:
1. Combos are the dessert, not the veggies - seeing your character do cool shit and deal lots of damage IS the power fantasy. We play the game in order to land combos. Combos feel good. Memorizing is 10% of learning the combo, 90% is not botching the execution. The shift is towards making execution less of a barrier to doing cool combos.
2. Defense is the skill valley - the more rewarding and expressive the offense is, the shittier it feels to get hit by it. Even if they make piloting a character easier, defending against the rest of the cast will always be a knowledge check.
3. Damage is the marriage of luck and skill - High damage games reduce the amount of hits you need to land to win the round. This gives every player a "punchers chance" like in boxing. You can can be outclassed, lose every round, land a lucky punch and still win by KO. Fighting game players literally call these games "random" because the games are already RPS in nature and it takes a ton of effort to get good at defence.
Thanks for the insight!
There use to be a middle ground for edh players but we've left the game because the casual players think any type of interaction makes your deck cedh and complain. Sorry, I don't wanna play cedh but I want some sort of challenge and actual understanding of the game
Thank you. In almost every game there's a weird subculture of casual elitism where the players who least engage with the game treat everyone else with contempt or accuse them of ruining the game; of ruining a game they're not even making an honest attempt to play!
@@yurisei6732this has been my biggest issue playing commmander. I like decks that sit around an 8-9 in power level, I want to see combos and powerful interactions, just not coming out the first few turns of the game. Some players think any infinite combo should be reserved to cEDH, even if it involves 30 mana and 5 cards in a deck with little to no tutors. I don’t understand this perspective at all, yet I see it all the time.
Edited for typos @@Krimson51 Here is another perspective to make what you will of. I am a card collector as in I only own cards I've collected from *packs over 10+ years, I don't play draft I just played kitchen table, over the years we learned of commander and it became the preference, I mean your telling me I can actually use the cards I own because I have no 4 of copies and play with others similarly where part of the fun is what the next card will be? great!!! But what we actually get are just net deckers who will *still go and buy every card for a well oiled machine to play against my pile of random. Eventually commander is warped and now it's basically just another competitive scene instead of casual, and ironically more so then cEDH. I think if more of those players moved to cEDH things would improve but right now wizards is pushing commander like it's *a step child being pushed into college making chase cards in products targeted at commander... Maybe they think players like me still buy packs but that era is long gone.
@@xelaranger3880 There's a super simple solution to netdecking: Play cube.
Ultimately, complaining about netdecking is just immature, and again elitist. It says that the only good/fair way to play is your way, and accuses anyone who enjoys different facets of gameplay of ruining your experience. It's also a lie, because people who complain about netdeckers also complain about people who play meta archetypes without netdecking them. Someone with a bigger or luckier card collection than you, and who is better at deckbuilding, is no better in an anti-netdecker's eyes than a netdecker is.
@@xelaranger3880 a big part of building my collection has been trading cards I didn’t use for ones that made my decks more cohesive. I agree that they are constantly increasing the power level of the game which makes playing older or more average cards less effective however a huge part of the hobby for me is to find the interesting synergies between janky cards released years apart. This is why a lot of my decks feature rare elaborate combos, it’s like solving a puzzle with pieces people rarely see. There is value to your version of commander, one with extreme variance and relatively low synergy, however most players I know are looking for a slightly more curated experience where our decks have a theme or goal in which we want it to fulfil which is difficult to achieve without searching for some degree of redundancy.
while playing ARAM in League of Legends I regularly saw people angry about losses and I reminded them that pro players lose just over half the time. If they couldn't handle a loss rate similar to pros they should rethink why they are playing.
I promise you that you do not need long combos or even special moves to play fighting games at a beginner level! You can win with only normal moves, no combos or motion inputs needed. If you don't want to do a shoryuken, you can anti-air with crouching Heavy Punch. I know you said you don't want to attract the ire of fighting game players, and I'm not angry or upset, but I think that "fighting games are inherently harder because you need combos and special moves" is a misconception.
Sajam has a really good video here ua-cam.com/video/UzNwGP0Ir68/v-deo.html and has talked about this topic a lot
I appreciate your insight. This is a problem in communication then. Combos are the cool things players want to be doing, so making them less accessible gives players the feeling they have to put in lots of effort before they get to do the cool things.
@distractionmakers yeah that's true, doing the coolest things will take work, but if you can have fun playing the game while you take the learning process it helps! It's still really satisfying to say "this guy is jumping a lot, I need to stop it" and then actually doing a successful anti-air - that IS the game! It's a long journey - a new Deadlock player isn't going to be doing all the cool movement techniques in that game right away, but they can still have fun shooting and buying the wrong items, and over time maybe they learn one item build or they learn that they can slide to get infinite ammo during the slide, and over time they incorporate small things like that. Fighting games are the same - but yeah I agree fighting games need better communication and tutorialization. But you can have a lot of fun doing Sheeva stomp in Mortal Kombat in the meantime while you're learning the hard stuff
It's a misconception, but one that comes from both sides. There are plenty of non-Smash FG players who take the "*real* FGs are harder (and thus better) than Smash because Smash babies can't into combos" stance.
My problem with politics in games is twofold: The first is what you mentioned already, that I'm not actually allowing the game itself to inform my decisions, I'm strongarming other players instead, which I think is boring. Secondly is that it immediately takes me out of the game world and into 'arguing with my friends' territory. The game of Catan would be a less spiteful game if you couldn't do open trade for example, and I think this only acts to its detriment - more options doesn't always mean better outcomes. But it's also immersion breaking, and rather than my focus being on the board, and what the game provides as its own world, I'm looking to win over the opinion of an opponent in the real world.
"skill gaps cause one sided dominance" - GBVSR balance team as a reason to slap nerfs onto one of the 3 weakest characters in the game, then buff one of the strongest.
I get they wanted to make the game more accessible, but goddamn was that a horrible way to do it that only hurt ppl who invested time.
Imo, for fgs, the "randomness" u speak of comes from the other player finding ways to try and read ur mind essentially, u never know exactly what they are gonna do, and thats why its fun. Its probably why most of us want consistent results for micro situations, cos on a macro level, it can be quite random.
Realm of the Mad God is a masterclass in this issue. It’s mind boggling to see the difficulty leaps between dungeon tiers, and each phase of character progression is exponentially worse than the previous.
The kicker of it all is the progression is tied to character stats, some of which become largely irrelevant due to the ridiculous stats and abilities of enemies.
As someone from the fighting game community this was an interesting look at what non fgc ppl think of fighting games bcuz inside the community memorization has never been a highly valued skill, while interaction knowledge has always been the king maker of professional players
Memorization matters in fighting games
But not in the sense that learning the game from studying raw data makes sense in a vacuum
Very true! I notice new players are always so focused on learning and remembering combos all day long when that's like one piece to a giant puzzle. As you get more in to fighting stuff like frames, match-ups, match-up knowledge, strategies, adjustments, etc, matter more and require more memory than simply knowing combos.
design games that encourage extremely diverse play styles. smart players don't get bored they get creative.
At least 70% of gamers are bad at games and if skilled players usurp a game for themselves and make it toxic for the others - those 70% of people just walk away.
I love what you guys say about variance, because it's something that players try to avoid (deck-building in Magic having 4-ofs to decrease variance), but also have to accept as part of what makes games so great. The question then becomes what kind of variance feels good/adds value to the game. Land-flood and screw are probably the worst kind of variance, but variance in what playable cards you draw is good variance. It's why I like 7pt/singleton formats so much, because you're getting the more fun side of variance.
12:40 Personally, I feel like luck devalues victory just as much as is takes the sting out of losing, so no, not everyone benefits from seeing luck as only counting in the "right" direction. If it makes both losses AND victory feel like they don't count, luck just ruins games.
So yeah, I think games shouldn't intentionally inject added randomness. The randomness of individual player choices and performance, for example, how pretty much nobody nails every single parry, and therefore has a personal parry success chance, is all the randomness I want.
that makes games predictable and boring, even pro sports have randomness, it makes everything sweeter for everyone.
@@quintonbackhand2519 If you feel that way, great. All that matters to what's sweet for you is what's sweet for you, and I'm not saying it's an objectively wrong problem for everyone that should never be allowed to exist. Rather, I'm simply pushing back against the idea that luck is an objectively good solution for everyone that should always be intentionally added because it only takes the sting out of losing, because not all people feel that way. Myself, for example. I feel like it takes the good feelings out of winning just as much as it takes the bad feelings out of losing, and therefore is not some perfect solution to the loss of frustration.
Luck should be an option in gaming like any other, included in some games for those who like it, and minimized in others for those who feel like it cheapens the experience regardless of outcome. If possible, settings should be included to reduce or increase the impact of luck within a given single game to suit individual preferences. Then everybody has games that fit their idea of what's most fun, and we're all happy.
@@quintonbackhand2519 That is only true for mechanics that are too easy to nail down.
For example; if a Parry is only 1 frame (out of 60), and you cannot hold a button to execute the Parry after you did another move, then there is no way that any one person is capable of consistently pulling that off.
When only a computer is capable of pulling something off consistently, that is where it is no longer possible for things to be predictable.
I bring this up, because this Parry example (which I don't remember if it exists, but it is just an example) is also an example of a type of game changing mechanic, which becomes more boring and predictable, because it was made easier to access, in order to entice newer players (I believe Street Fighter is an example, although I don't remember nor believe that sf3 had only 1 frame to do it in).
The reality of the luck vs skill debate is that there is no such thing as "random-chance" as it exists in a video game in real life.
Yet real life sports can seem pretty exciting (saying this as a non-sports enjoyer, just not my thing), partly due to points of error that people can make.
But video games are also not as complicated as real life, and so a lot of times developers try and rely on RNG, even if it is the one type of randomness that is completely antithetical to the spirit of competitive games.
And so, the answer should be obvious that you could just make the game more complex, raising the skill ceiling, and more importantly, make more inputs more meaningful in faster intervals. At a certain point, it is impossible for players to truly be predictable.
But this wouldn't ever happen, if all games did have rng injected into them, which is also incredibly boring in a skill-based sense, because it kills the ability and room for improvement as much as easier to accomplish mechanics do.
The existence of accountability for your own actions, is incredibly important for skill-based action games, otherwise the excitement and skill has to come from another place than the action-execution aspect, which just means you aren't playing an skill-based action-centric game at that point.
So even worse than injecting rng into everything, you would also make every game more gentrified, as introducing rng would kill the "skill-based action games" from skill-based action games.
There is a place for every type of mechanic and game, as they provide different benefits for different people. Trying to appeal to everyone is a mistake that makes certain games less desirable by those whom would otherwise enjoy them perfectly fine, all for the sake of trying to appease people whom will still drop the game in a week because it wasn't to their tastes.
Either what I wrote above, or I can just giga-mog the fuck out of you by saying "yeah but not for me" to "it makes everything sweeter for everyone" and instantly your entire argument is turned to dust, as that specifically as explained is a subjective issue.
Not that I don't believe there isn't objectivity, in fact I might be among the biggest advocates of it.
But what does actually piss me off (at this point in the comment I am actually mad) is when someone makes the single most subjective as fuck comment possible, tries to package it as if it is objective, which is then done so badly, that all you have to do to disprove it, is just be pointing out how stupid it is by going "nuh uh".
This isn't even a case of "I reject your argument, because", it is a "you made a highly generalized statement which assumes a whole lot of truths about an area, which verifiably is wrong, simply because your argument is even opposed to begin with by me or anyone else".
For something to be true it has to be verifiable, and in this case, your entire comment is purely subjective, aside from the statement "pro sports have randomness" (even if it should state "some"), to which I then have an issue with what conclusion is drawn from that statement, as the following statement after that is just verifiably wrong.
Anyways, that was my contribution to this comment section, peace.
i feel like skilled players are also generally better at capitalizing on many random elements in games that don't outright force you into a certain winrate; to provide one anecdote, in WoW they started adding a lot of random 'proc' effects to classes starting in... i want to say wrath of the lich king or so, but to me it really came to a head in legion where you had so many little random 5-second buffs or whatever that the gap between lower skill and higher players continued to widen, because someone who times their actual button presses with the buffs from or internal cooldowns on procs gets exponentially more benefit for every extra thing they manage to stack up at a time
Randomness is a big part of why I liked playing Pokemon against my friend. I was a far better player but if he got a meaningful critical hit or one of my moves missed at the worst possible time, he's suddenly in a position where he can win. And being suddenly put on the back foot and having to fight my way back from the deficit was a lot of fun.
I understand where you are coming from but holy hell do I really really despise "Just dumb everything down because the vast majority of players are the lowest common denominator so they should be catered to in order to maximize profits."
This kind of thinking is the reason every video game becomes homogonized grey sludge designed for absolute droolers over time.
Exactly.
based
Disabled people are allowed to have fun, though.
one thing i've noticed in the comments is many stories like 'i showed up to a new game without doing any research and got destroyed,' feels like a lot of people a. don't want to put personal effort into learning a new game and need to be taught, b. really don't like the outcome being 'loss' regardless of whether a match was fun, and c. come into games with their own preconceived idea of how it should play/what they want to play and don't like when it's not viable in the environment they want to play in
Why do you think "make the game more accessible" means "dumb the game down"? It can mean that if the game designer is unskilled, but unskilled game designers rarely make interesting games to begin with. I'd say instead that there's a problem specific to Western AAA studios in making the "made for droolers mode" the default (and sometimes only) difficulty mode, but Western AAA studios are just trash now anyway.
The idea that a game must cater to all is only one beneficial to shareholders. If you find that a game is not fun for you then sometimes you just have to make a judgement call to play something else. A game for everybody is a game for nobody
It’s genuinely baffling to me how a person can go into a game they knew was “competitive” focused beforehand, and then be mad when they’ve lost without gaining proper information or skill. It’s borderline entitled. Losing is a critical part of the enjoyment that you get from winning, because you had to improve.
If you only enjoy games when you win, you don't enjoy gaming, you enjoy winning and generations of easy single player experiences ruined you.
Nah some of enjoy the feeling of having our boot upon the faces of the losers telling them we are better it's why I enjoy competitive games
I think a lot of people like playing games and want to win at them. Or more precisely, they don't like losing too much.
A good, close, hard fought loss feels better than being on either end of a stomp fest, but it's still better to be on the winning side of that stomp fest.
I don't think that's true for competitive games especially since most high ranking players seem to have smurf accounts created to feel better about themselves according to statistical research. Also, no one would like losing constantly until they become experienced. It's against human nature.
@@baryony most of the time smurfs are created due to longer qeue times at the the top in dota immortals would sometimes wait 15-20 minutes to find a game especially the higher up you go
High variance in non-matchmade servers is one of the great things of Counter Strike 1.6 and Source days.
There were so few cheaters in good matches not because the tech wasn't there or because of anti cheat was effective (there was 0 anti cheat), but because what's the point.
You could jump on one server and get trounced, jump on another and have a rampage, jump on another and everyone was similar skill and every player is chatting in a different language 😅