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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
There are many things about this video I have a gripe with, and here are some of them(as a yugioh and tekken player)(didn't expect to write that much, but it happened anyway): 1. Inroducing randomness(especially post-determined rng) in 1v1 games, that don't play well with it: these would be competetive-oriented fighting games, sometimes RTS games(these have damage roll ranges on units, but that's about it, can't think of any more genres which fit this description right now). Losing to pure RNG fells bad, no matter how good or bad you are at a game. And if you lost against someone in these games you can usually go back to the replay, see what went wrong, learn and become better, so it doesn't happen or happens less frequently. Losing is part of learning and if your learning gets undone by rng, this is where controllers, or other stuff break. 2. You say that if going from one skill bucket to another is difficult it pushes players away. It pushes away those who don't like/enjoy the gameplay loop, shattering these barriers when you know what you did right, what you improved upon, noticing what your opponent did wrong and exploiting it to get there feels amazing, as it should, if it's not difficult enough you don't feel like you have achieved anything or improved in any substantial matter. You will be playing against many different opponents, not only the same guy who mopped the floor with you last match. 3. When you do your combo in a fighting game it is many times not the same button combination every single time. You learn that when you attempt to do it and: there isn't enough stage left for you to finish your combo, you hit a wall and your combo is cut short, or you are on a stage with a breakable floor, part of your combo breaks the floor, and your next attack can't reach, making you miss out on advantage. Or when your development route in an RTS game doesn't work out, you see what you can change about it, where are the points where you can do stuff faster, or completly differently increase efficiency. That's when you get creative, explore your options and experiment, see what other avenues you can explore(these include, but aren't limited to: how can i increase wall travel, how do I get a "high wall splat", how do I get two heroes at 2:30 of a game while having x,y,z structures built), these are instances of "honing vs innovation"(which is a very important concept in these games), and if you only use simplified options you are limiting yourself and your growth as a player, while if developer is actively removing options from players' repetoir(assuming that option isn't unhealthy for the game, and doesn't limit game design for other moves/characters/nations/races/units), then that's removing choises, and having chances to make poor choices matters. The simplified approach is perfectly reasonable for casual couch gaming, when people just want to see some characters beat up some other characters, or when you just want to see some wars happen, but not for competetive, some games are complicated, should stay that way from some level onwards, and you move on, when you are ready to take off the training wheels. 4.When you talk about newer player getting to play against a more experienced player and getting their teeth kicked in is the fact that the new player got to fight the experienced player, because they defeated some other new players first, they experience their first game loss, they get to play someone who is a bit worse at the game than the last player they played against. If they go on a lose streak and don't attempt to figure out what mistakes got them there in these genres, that's on them, they refuse to improve, they lose to players who do their homework, as it should be. 5. It's perfectly fine to be a casual couch gamer and play someone more experienced in these games, but some ground rules need to be set, we put some arbitrary rules for the experienced player to level the playing field. Think of it as not allowing a begginer(a few games under their belt that has some understanding of how mechanics work) with an out of the box commander precon to play against a fully tuned competetive commander deck piloted by an experienced player(a person who knows every card in their decks by heart and understands most of possible interactions which their cards can cause), Usually the experienced player will get one of their weaker decks and play the begginer with one of those. The experienced player still has the advantage, but it's not as insurmountable as it was before. This should be applied in casual enviroment if possible. 6. It's perfectly fine to take breaks and/or quit games if playing, improving and learning about how it is/should be played doesn't bring you enjoyment/satisfaction. Not every game is for you, and you won't enjoy every single game. There are games you will have natural affinity for, and there are games you won't ever be good enough at, because you are not meant to be together(me and RTS games, tried to get into the genre 3 or 4 different times and I was garbage at every single one). Focus on the things that bring you joy and/or sense of fulfillment, other games or entirely different stuff and put effort there. But don't be mad that people want their games and other hobbies to stay the way they are, because that iteration of a hobby is the one that brings them the most joy, just like your favourite one does for you now.
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 😅
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.
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.
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.
0:20 And it sounds like you are about to explain why making the experience of all players worse at the game than you is a good thing and they should feel bad for not being as good as you already
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.
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.
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.
This discussion is interesting. Kinda experienced it myself in a weird way. I loved Yu-Gi-Oh, when I learned there was a higher level, I tried to reach it. Learning to get good and play at that high level ruined the game for me and my friends. It stopped being fun. It is indeed a case of competitive players ruining the game or even learning to play competitively ruining the game for someone. It also reminds me of an argument I have had with several (often more competitive) people Putting a newer player in a series of games and proceeding to beat them over and over again until they work out the rules is NOT a good, effective or appropriate teaching method. Yet, at least in my area when it comes to Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic that is the preferred method, and I get called stupid for saying this isn't a good method. It's gonna push way more people away than it will bring in.
Those people are not good card game teachers. They are not thinking from the perspective of a new player, they are so attached to winning that they can't even give their students the fun experiences required to develop a lasting interest in the game.
Opposite happened for me. As an ignorant kid I used to love the idea of Yugioh but didn't enjoy playing it very much because I could never get those satisfying anime combos. When I started to play it separately from the anime, I found that the more skilled I got, the more fun I had, in significant part because the higher skill level transferred down to the bad decks and made them playable.
@@yurisei6732Dude same for me, i loved HERO cuz they were a bit more complex because of fusion but after a 10 year hiatus i go back to yugioh and see its more complex and the game became so much more fun with all the combos i could do and trying to figure out where to break and oponent combo
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A good counter argument to the claim that just ruthlessly beating the shit out of a new player will make them get good is pulling up statistics on how people learn and also the statistics on the effects physical discipline (aka spanking and such) have on children’s behavior. Spoiler: it’s not positive.
Magic is balanced by the variance in deck order. Thats all we have to make casual players win against skilled players, luck varience. Also chess is extremely popular and is also extremely skill determined as there are no unknowns. Still super popular, the only thing that needs to be done is pitting players of similar skill level together. (This means you might literally be too good or too bad for the rest of your pod. Not just your deck, YOU, might not be a 7) Also luck is generally BAD in games. It removes the motivation to be skilled. Generally the most popular games are very low luck while the goofiest games are all luck. (Drawing for highcard vs playing cribbage). Randomness is needed to break up the game flow so it isnt like chess with standard openings. But thats it, the further you go the less rewarding the game is to play
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
Text on YGO cards could certainly be present better, but I don't think keywords would work in that game. YGO has very nuanced rules, where every type of card effect has about a dozen small variations, some with very significant implications. (Like targeting vs non-targeting effects) Keywords would have to be multi-layered or there'd have to be about a hundred of them, both serving only to make the game even more obtuse, imo.
Yep. I've been trying to keyword as much as possible in my homebrew spin-off and the best approach has still left almost everything written out, it just additionally keywords "return from field to hand" and "place on bottom of deck" as "bounce" and "bury" respectively (which is done because there's a lot more return to deck effects, as part of making costs actually costs instead of graveyard filling and sent-to-grave procing), and reworks excavate to include automatic coverage of what to do with the excavated cards that aren't moved elsewhere. And even these few extra keywords aren't transferrable to Yugioh, because they're still homogenising and homogenisation of effects in this way can only be done from a fresh sistart.
Too many keywords is worse than no keywords. Its both annoying to read and prevents subtle things like "increase original attack by 500" vs "increase attack by 500" vs "increase attack by how many cards are banished".
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.
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.
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.
This might be heresy, but I think an inverted reward structure is something to consider. Losing games is, in a certain aspect, a service. This doesn't need to go all the way to the top. But in the lower 50% I think there is merit for providing a reward for giving the winner a chance to win their game. That said, something that games NEED is a way to play without it affecting your standing. Not every game needs to be a serious, go big or go home fest. Sometimes you wanna do something goofy. Games need to allow room for that.
Games have tried a lot of different ways to improve this experience via digital rules and rewards, and none have yet succeeded to my knowledge. Yugioh especially has a problem, because Master Duel heavily punishes surrendering, while Yugioh at the meta level is best experienced by surrendering early against obvious loss cases.
If you give people rewards for losing, you can 100% expect people to intentionally throw games for the better rewards, which will lead to bad experiences for everyone.
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.
Keep in mind it's not just "skill". Any factor can become (be designed to be) a breaking point for outcome: time, money, networking, popularity, personality type, height, age, cheating, etc. Hand in hand with that, is the lobbying different player factions (skill players, money players, etc.) will do to push the game in their "direction" of choice. For many, this means to arrive at a game that provides the use and ability of their specific skill with corresponding greater standing and greater success. But it can be any number of directions, including directions that then can split a faction into opposing camps. Other directions can include a challenge, a consistent experience, actually something that is balanced to not favor them, etc. Some game communities that are facing very high "valley of effort" will face it in different ways. Some celebrate it and delight in the struggling of new players. Some actually create extensive volumes of content to try to help new players to shortcut or accelerate through the "valley of effort". Often the different community approaches to the valley deal with if a community "needs" new players and the manners in which they need them. For an older game like Super Street Fighter II Turbo, they need players to build out a player community that can participate in public player pools, sometimes peer socialization, and (for many players in the community) provide high levels of competitive gameplay. Changing how a new player affects the existing community can change how that community responds toward efforts to improve new player onboarding, retention, and development.
18:50 the problem with MTG example thou - you can't really play around not getting lands or getting too many lands, you just lose because of it. Like yes, it creates situations where you can win just because opp was unlucky, but it is not meaningfull in any way for both players. So there are def layers to that. I think Pokemon Pocket does it the best, where you can actually play around being lucky/unlucky and need to think about both situations.
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.
I think what Magic does that YGO doesn’t is that it has multiple formats. Players that get bored in one format can switch to another. In YGO you suffer or you quit. I think though you need a level of success to be able to support that and trying too early can really hurt a new card game by splitting the community up.
Formats can cut both ways. Segmenting your player base can make it harder to find games, but as you said, you have other places to go if you can’t find meaningful games in one format.
Reminder that yugioh has a ton of formats, its just that they are niche. Ex: Edison which uses the Yugioh GX rules or Speed Duel which have some cards not available in the regular format.
@@Temperans I know YGO players often use the word ‘format’ differently to magic players, like ‘the current format’ often means ‘the current ban list and card pool’. I wouldn’t consider Edison a different format in the Magic sense, like Modern is a different format to Standard. PreDH is still Commander, it’s just a historic variant of it. I was also under the impression Speed Duels was basically a different game? Am I mistaken in that?
@@Azeria No, when yugioh players say different format it means different rules, ban lists, and/or car pool. Its MTG that says "different format" and yet the rules are basically the same outside of how you build your deck or whether there is a command zone. When they say "the current format" they are quite literally saying "using the current rules of the game" since the game changes rules every so often when new extra deck monsters are released. Edison format for example uses the 2010 rules, its ban list, and car pool. So both players start with 6 cards, there is one 1 field spell, there are no monster zones, and a bunch of other rules are different. Meanwhile, Goat format uses the 2005 rules, ban list, and cardpool. So players start with 6 cards, the extra deck can have an unlimited number of monsters, only 1 field spell, and a bunch of other rules. Then there are the formats like Rush duels that make it so there are only 3 monster and spell zones, unlike the regular 5.
I like funny synergies that aren't expected and other people doing them is fun because then I have new things to try and poke at For example, someone using a Haymaker brawl deck with a card that gave its tokens double strike gave me the idea to chuck Roxanne and Mother of Machines into a deck for 4x meteor shots on entry, so now I have a token gen and burn setup I'm working on with that that's been doing really well, and it's awesome to see it grow, have my friends help improve the decklist, and build setups that allow it to really shine.
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.
The advantage Magic - specifically Commander - has over video games is that you're actually at a table with other players that actually have to sit at that table, and you all can discuss things that concern you. The proverbial Rule 0, which has gotten many negative connotations over the last few years, but just being able to say "Hey, we have a deck budget over under 200 dollars" or "no infinite combos" or "we prefer to play and play against creature heavy decks" does a lot to mitigate the problem of "noobs" being stomped by experienced players. Unfortunately such a thing rarely exists in video games.
Doom Eterna is a terrific PVE game. I have gotten extremely proficient at it. I exploit quick swapping, enemy stun and melee to the point that I see it in my sleep. Yet the AI is so well coded and the enemy variety so distinct that I die consistently. No matter how skilled at the game I become, I am always on my toes.
Street fighter 6 bridges this Valley of Effort by using two different control schemes. Classic, it's what you know and has been used since day 1. And Modern, this uses the simple button system. The bridge is that Classic does more damage and in Modern you can still use the full motion for moves to do full damage with your specials. As someone who has been playing SF for years (but not competitively) I love this move. I can use the modern controls and still utilize my old knowledge to do the right motion if I choose to get a benefit. The full motion can still use each level of that attack (Light, Med, Heavy sometimes this will change duration or range, Modern one button special gives you only one of those) to full effect, and isn't reduced damage. It also allows people who know nothing get the easy controls and throw in learning into it with full motions.
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.
TCG Yu-Gi-Oh has God awful structuring of card text. OCG does a far better job of formatting card text even with the limited space. For starters OCG prefaces the box with which abilities have once per turn clauses, and abilities are numbered. This allows for faster tracking of what's going on by declaring which ability you are using and quick checking for any additional claises the card may have with it.
OCG yugioh has some formatting problems exclusive to the Japanese language though, particularly the use of kanji, which not all kids know, accompanied by furigana text that's like a quarter of the already small font size.
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.
The final monster in monster hunter world is Fatalis. They make you do a solo duty to repel it before allowing you to go online to fight it with others to kill it. This is so you don't instantly die and waste one of your 3 deaths allowed in the mission by being unprepared.
I have a somewhat novel idea. Why not, instead of assuming every game is for every player, we make games with an actual target audience in mind? Design a game to be harder, OR design a game to be easier? That way 100% of the people who buy your game are likely to be happy and you wont have to contend with this so called "paradox". Competitive games are for competitive people. If youre bad at the game, get good, or stop playing and become a spectator. Just like with any other sport. If im bad at football, i dont play it, instead, i just buy a ticket to watch the players who are actually good at it.
Your example is not as good as you think. There are many, many football leagues for players of very different skill levels (even for people with disabilities) so everyone can enjoy football without "getting good". If people are bad at football but want to play it, they... go and play it. And rules of football make it fun for people of all skill levels.
As one of those super casual Magic players, that just this month returned after a decade of absence, I think Wizards have a good thing going on. The Arena of today is an incredible platform, compared to what it was, and the pathway from tutorial to ranked is smooth. It's a really good experience.
So I have managed to almost be completely undefeated in tsuro and century. I have a consistent group of skilled board game players and for some reason I have only lost both games once. Tsuro seems like a game without much strategy, but I do have high end strategy for it. Century is an engine builder that requires being flexible and adapting, which maybe it's the adapting part that trips people up.
As a fighting game person, I think smash's big revelation is getting players to the "meaningful decision" section of the game faster than, say, Guilty Gear. They're both complex, but understanding smash is "faster"
Marvel snap use of variance is what makes games different every time but can also be so frustrating when they for some reason didn’t account for variance locking both players of playing the game at all (getting 3 locations that limit the amount of cards played)
The most important thing a company (or an LGS) can do, is clearly segregate pro players (or pro hopefuls) from the general public. Just like how skill based matchmaking makes video games tolerable, not having to deal with pro-tour grinders when I want to play kitchen table magic will allow for everyone to have the game they want.
Chess has this problem at in insane level. The top players in the world are all lifelong devotees with IQs in the high 100s and photographic memories that allow them to memorize thousands of opening variations. Most grandmasters don't even stand a chance against the top super grandmasters.
But it is NOT a problem. Chess is still popular and people have meaningfull games because of proper matchmaking. And it is still fun to play against a player who is 200 elo rating above you. Yes, you won't win against a player who is 300+ points above you (you may in games with randomness) but why would you play against them?
@Strongpoint_S yeah that is true if you play on the internet. But if you play against people over the board it is still an issue, especially since knowledge is a crucial part of modern chess. You could also say the same thing about playing on Arena since they have different ranks on the ladder
@@Mississippi_Jack Nah, official offline chess is also mostly fine. They have tournaments for all elo ranges and even if it is a wide range like "up to 1000 FIDE elo" in a Swiss you will play players of your strength soon enough. New magic players have no such option. A "700 elo" MTG player can't easily find a place to play with players of the roughly same level.
This happened to me in an MMO I played years ago. I got to the end of content which was available to me. Summer started, I had 2 months to do nothing but improve in the game… but I did not know how. I wanted to access the special gear and high level raids and I was already better than the majority of my guild… but I just did not know how to continue that progression.
i know we're talking about magic, but this is pretty much the issue that TF2 has had for most of its life cycle with the Sniper class. Once a certain percentage of the playerbase reaches a certain skill threshold with the class, the only reliable and accessible counter-play is to ALSO have a sniper that's of the same skill level, completely undermining the class-counter system baked into the core of the game
On the fighting game discussion: you're totally on point in identifying that learning motion inputs and learning long combo strings are both things that keep people from engaging fully with those games. But I think you're consistently conflating those two things. Like, you talk here about how memorizing combo strings takes effort, which is true, and then connect that to how Smash Bros style simple inputs can help bring players in. That's also true, but it's not really related to the combo discussion. These are two separate design questions that need to be approached in separate ways. Simplified control schemes like SF6's modern controls have come up here already, but that only addresses input complexity for individual moves. I think it's also important to bring up auto combos. Lots of anime fighters have a system where you can mash one button a lot and get a preset combo. It's far from optimal, but it makes sure a new player can get respectable damage out of the openings they find.
There's definitely a choice going on regarding how much you want your game to be a "mind game" vs. a "twitch game". By mind game, I mean an archetypal game where execution is a non-factor, but decision making is important, like most TCGs or Chess. By twitch game, I mean the archetypal game where execution is the only factor, like a sprint (depending on who you ask, that might not count as a game, but let's assume it is). All games exist somewhere between the two, and fighting games have, by and large, been moving more towards being mind games than they used to be, via lowering (some) execution barriers. The almost universal adoption of input buffering being a big one that applies to players of all skill levels. Granted there are other reasons why that started to become more common, but lowering execution barriers is definitely one. Fighting games are definitely still further to the twitch side than the mind side, but the mind side is still very involved. Like most traditional sports, execution skills are necessary, but far from sufficient. Your decision making and game awareness is what makes you the better player, at least past a certain baseline execution level.
Thanks for the insight. We need to do a deep dive into fighting games, there’s a deep well of knowledge that could likely inform our perspective on other genres.
these seems like somethign that has the opposite effect of bridging the valley. You're basically teaching new players to settle into either being a casual who uses auto-combos or do the uphill battle of learning the combo strings properly. So there's no transition; new players can fight mid players but those mid people are still going to hit a wall against any pro player.
@@thetable7660 It's totally true that when new players actually want to play against strong players, they have to do the actual work of learning combos for real. There's no getting around that. What auto combos hopefully do is let new players develop intentional thinking about the neutral game without worrying too much about combo practice. That's a skill that will hold even after they drop the auto combos. I didn't learn on auto combos, but my hope is that for the people who do, the limit of the auto combo they feel first is that they don't let you select for oki/corner carry/etc. Like, as their play becomes more intentional, they become more aware of the utility they're losing out on by not being deliberate about their combos as well. Viscerally feeling what you have to gain from learning a specific combo both helps you understand what you should learn first and provides a lot of motivation!
I think you have omitted one of serious problems - there are many toxic players who like "demolishing stupid noobs", it warms their ego. They will create smurf accounts, they will artificially lower their rating, they will look for ways to play against weak players to get their domination dopamine.
I've lost some friendships over people taking games too seriously. I wasnt bad, in fact i was better than a lot of people in the group (if i do say so myself). But when you make jokes (about random stuff not even game related), some pro/semipro people get unessescarily sweaty and be mad that you don't look as serious as them. Imagine playing games to have fun.
I come primarily from both smash and fighting games and I coach a high school street fighter team. The new input system called modern (lol) makes certain things easier but does come with drawbacks. What I've seen in my players is that they start with modern and get hooked on the gameplay. Now they are starting to want to play the traditional input method because of the upsides it adds and the added complexity starts to make more sense. Started playing magic a few years ago and so many of the situational awareness, pressure, advantage, risk and reward evaluation skills transfer over well.
What do you guys think about the kind of player who will invariably blame anyone and anything but themselves for every loss? These are the kinds of people that typically are very vocal about hating Magic because of mana screw or flood. I often find myself in a position where I can’t really argue against any of their points because they simply don’t understand my arguments because I’m coming at the conversation from a game design sense whereas they’re always coming to the conversation with a player’s perspective of “I should always get to do the cool thing 100% of the time!” Basically what I’m asking is how do you instruct players about a game when they can’t recognize the systems at play and want the game to do their bidding rather than simply follow the rules and play the game?
Great question and it is a constant struggle. If the game is designed for competitive audiences you have to find what the player base is willing to accept, (usually input randomness like drawing cards from a deck). Your starting point affects the life expectancy of your game, so the more randomness at the start the better. Over time, the player base will accept less and less randomness. As for that particular person, it’s hard to know if this is a strategy problem for them or if they just don’t like the game. Accepting randomness does take a particular point of view that some players don’t like and that’s ok. Just know that the system with randomness should theoretically attract more players in the long run than one with none, but marketing and target audience matters a lot.
As a YGO player who randomly got recommended this video, I dont play MTG for this reason. I already hate dealing with Garnets in YGO as it is, I dont want to deal with 10+ of them
@@BussiDestroyer I'm vaguely familiar with yugioh but not enough to have known that term without looking it up. What are you referring to there? The lands in the deck once you have all of them you need? An average game of magic lasts orders of magnitude longer than the average game of yugioh, so it does a good job of self-regulating in that regard. Sure, drawing a land for turn in a critical moment can be devastating to your chances of winning, but I feel like that's worth it to make the rest of the game work the way it does.
@@alexspeedwagon3701 more like the high impact spells that cost too much mana that you play a few of in some decks but for some ungodly reason stay glued to start hands. and the odd deadraw land midgame.
@@BussiDestroyer This is why good MTG decks all revolve around drawing cards and cheating on mana costs. Step one in winning the game is figuring out how to play around its archaic implementation of luck.
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.
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
"Long chain of memorized inputs to get a move out" sounds insane to anyone who has tried a fighting game. You legit roll the stick or dpad from down to right/left and thats 90% of special inputs.
Very interesting conversation about mtg. I’ve noticed more about luck since I’m mainly a competitive modern player. So that limits the amount of frustration from the losing. Skill helps but luck seems to be more valuable.
You can also separate players by skill level. Have levels or tiers and players of similar level play each other. Arena kind of does this where you mostly play people ranked close to you so you don't have new players playing pros.
Matchmaking helps a lot, but it doesn’t prevent this from occurring over a long period of time as the entirety of your player base becomes more skilled.
Personally i've done the switch to less complex games for the sole reason of getting to play more often. A good multiplayer game basically needs meaningful interaction. That's it. king of tokyo with its forced progression and pvp interaction, bohnanza with its bartering politics, queendomino with its simple yet elegant probablility calculations etc. The lower the threshold to learn the basics of a game in a few rounds will by far give you more different games with different kind of players and in so more meaninful social situations. you can still enjoy the optimisations with less investment in time and effort and focus more on the social aspect. Don't get me wrong i love competitive mtg, complex big strategy board games, d&d, role playing games and skill based fighting games etc but it is just super rare to get a quality play group with a balanced skill base so that everyone has fun at the table. Weirdly me and my brother absolutely love playing t'zolkin because no one else wants to play with us and the discusting amount of complexity in the game tickles our fancy just in the right way that we can exhaust our cognitive capasity with a few games 😂 i have yet to find a better resource management game that works so well in a 1v1 setting. I highly recommend getting in to it and giving it a bit time cause it will not open up on the first playthroughs. I also highly recommend your content to almost all of my friends. I love how you have given me deeper understanding and insight into the wonderful world of game mechanics. I had an idea of you could do some game analysis while playing the games. Practical examples of game mechanics through games would be a good way to illustrate a lot of your points.
One thing i hate about many competetive situation are meta related things Sure, there will always be something that is better than something else, but as soon as you reach the point where you need to know every single possible move every opponent can do at any point, in my oppinion that oversteps the welcome Some examples: In pokemon its absolutely legit to have a rest/sleeptalk set, but as soon as you put sleeptalk on random pokemon without anything like rest because that pokemon happens to be a good target for sleep, then you have gotten too far Or in yugioh, you can run any deck you want, but if your entire side deck is just random "silver bullet" cards used against other decks which are popular, or cards which can be uses only as the first/second player which you side in after round 1 (if you loose a duell in a match you are the person who beginns next duell), then you are playing at a really disgusting level which is less about skill and more about learning stuff by heart
In single player games, Ive gotten heavily into modding and cheating via stuff like cheat engine due to this. Id call myself a rather skilled player in most single player games I play - but that also leads me to optimizing the fun out of the game quite often. To alleviate that, I use whatever's available: Well-made mods, sometimes I even mod games myself, cheat engine and other cheat-like stuff and a set of self-imposed rules. Its actually a good chunk of work to get everything set up properly in many games - but its definitely worth it considering the length of the games I tend to play. To give an example, in RPGs, I like to cheat my levels or raw stats down, but get more "ability points" or whatever the equivalent is. Basically: Less raw power, more options, cause options are fun and skill-expressive.
There's aspects in some board games and video games that allow a player to take a setback to even the playing field against less skilled players. It's awesome. Feel like you are crushing the opponent? Give yourself one or more setbacks/limitations, and overcome the challenge now. Or give the opponent boons that increase their odds of success. If a person is l33tist to devalue another person because of their play method, they aren't worth engaging with. It is sad to pander to these kinds of people.
Now do how casual players ruin games and marketing departments are to blame. I'm by no means competitive at any of the games I play. I'm not quick-witted enough to consistently make the best plays, I choose game pieces I like the art of over game pieces that have the strongest rules, and I prefer to play a wide range of games rather than to become very practiced in any of them. But I still try to play well. Finding the synergy points, noticing the weak points of an opponent, thinking through the actions I take, these are what it means to play a game. If you're not doing these things, you may as well be a random-button-pressing CPU. And quite a few of these CPU players will demand that no one else plays the game either. I'd rather lose to a sweaty tryhard than be held hostage by a whiny noob. And this problem is exactly where the "why yugioh no keyword?" thing comes from. People take one step into Yugioh, get offended by the barrier to entry and think they're spotted an obvious solution no one else must have seen. I challenge you to actually try keywording Yugioh cards. Take the most recent mainline set, and keyword it in a way that doesn't change what any of the cards do. You won't be able to do it. You won't be able to do it because Yugioh is a precision-effect game, every word has meaning and there are many slight but critical variants on most types of game action, which cannot be homogenised.
Would you guys be upset if I did reaction content to your stuff framed toward the yugioh community? I love the topics you guys dig into and would love to start bringing up more of these discussions in our community.
Fighting games definitely ARENT reducing the emphasis on complex inputs Very few games that have simplified inputs dont actively handicap that input mode And for games that ONLY have simplified inputs, like the upcoming 2xko have extremely long combos with tight input restrictions
With mtg I play with friends but my new member started to go hard with making more challenging and difficult and OP decks just to win and I only come for the experience but to keep getting a brick wall of people wanting to be better and better make it less fun for me to play knowing I’ll lose; not playing to win but playing for fun
About clarity of information: in Magic, if I have a creature removal spell and want to reduce my opponent's ongoing effects, I have to either remember which cards have ongoing effects or ask to read all of them. In Bandai's card games, they use keywords in colored boxes to mark whether an effect is ongoing or only procs once, which is easy to see from the other side of the table. This speeds up play a lot because I can tell which cards have ongoing effects at a glance
Fun is subjective. What would have been awesome is if I didn't require to study and train for a skill set to derive what I want from a game. That's not saying learning can't be fun, and that isn't to say that there can't be fun in succeeding a challenge, but to make those the only options is very forced. Take for example Demon's Souls on PS3. I bought it because it was said to be a difficult game by mainstream opinion. {Side note don't listen to mainstream opinion, as they can be full of crap as I learned through my life time.} I played it and learned to be generally ok with the mechanics. I did discover many issues arise from how it was designed. While you aren't expected to play a specific way, you are expect to play a specific way to succeed by incentivizing you to utilize specific aspects in the game. I will go onto more detail. You could run around hacking and slashing away at opponents. You are rewarded faster (and in some ways better) if you learn to parry, and back stab. You can grind souls to over level, but that will cost you time, and possibly interest in the game before you get to a specific strength you want to play the game with so you are incentivized to "get gud". It's how incentiviztion functions with microtransactions in mmos. It will provide you with methods to do something in the least optimal way, straining your patience, so you will pay up for a boon to circumvent the tedious/unfun struggle. Demon's Souls is not a hard game if you utilize what is provided to the fullest extent, but that does mean having to waste time repeating content in a manner that may feel like work. You may not even begin to grasp how trivial everything in the game becomes if you max out magic sniping everything that bars your way, even bosses. After having engaged with the dev desired way of playing (that is fighting in specific way) for a few days and not making progress, I found a way to cut down the time to grind souls through a glitch. When I removed this monotonous combat element that I grew bored of, I was able to explore the world, and enjoy the lore that was spread throughout the game. Had I quit all because the devs decided how I should engage with the game, I would have lost out on all the other aspects that also were part of the game. The "getting good aspect is only one aspect of Demon's Souls, not the entire game. The devs could have allowed for a less forced approach to experiencing the game. Allowing a player to get through without resorting to grind, like starting out as a powerful character. Designing their encounters smarter i.e. the following examples are opinions of what I conisder poor design >NPCs clipping and attacking through terrain when the player can't >narrow dodge/parry windows against opponents especially when visuals don't match the connection point >janky hitboxes that sometimes accept hits and sometimes don't to both player and opponent >damage sponge enemies >elevation causes floating >targeting larger opponents focuses on their mid section rather than parts you can attack. >invasions when only wanting to co-op. Just as there can be difficulty settings, there ways to implement toggles to customize the expereince. This can make things more challenging when challenge is desired, as well as make things less challenging when it is desired. The whole point of games is to be entertaining. It is really dumb to force hard difficulty, just like it is dumb to force super easy. Customization is key. It excludes no-one.
Yeah, that's one of my problems with YGO. There's a lot, but the sheer amount of cards, and card types, is daunting to deal with if you haven't kept up with it annually. Also why I prefer drafting as well. It minimizes memorization and metaplay and adds randomness to it.
Games and politics can be very interesting and have a lot of different variety! The issue is that MtG was just never designed with politics in mind. Politics in Magic is like "dexterity matters" cards - they're not something the game was designed for, and if you use them the fact the game has no design for them becomes readily apparent. Games like Chinatown, Sidereal Confluence, Bohnanza, Diplomacy/GOT, Tammany Hall, and New Angeles are all great examples of different sorts of 'political' games where all sorts of different negotiations arise as the result of the gameplay itself. Games like Magic, in contrast, basically give you a choice of "bonk Alice or Bob?" (or sometimes "give Alice or Bob a cookie"). Of course you don't have to like political games, but that doesn't make them all similar, any more than ping pong and soccer are similar because they're both physical activities that involve moving a ball around on a court.
"well youre just bad" is petulant and brain dead. rich people when hearing anyone criticise them about their ruining of stuff is the same with them saying "well you just say that because you dont have money"
Now I understand why yugioh has such a lack of new players. The game is very very refined, with pretty much every player that plays regularly playing at the top of their game (at least compared to newer player, the difference is immense).
It's also prohibitively expensive to play in person. You have to get invested first. That's why the digital scene and video games are so important tbh. I'd love to have an easy way to do progression series with friends to help them get in.
I love randomness when it changes things up. (Random events) I hate randomness when it IS the difficulty or worse, stops me from playing. (When you can't succeed the simplest of actions in DnD, when you get the 'youre dead' event combos in Nemesis, when you're mana flooded or dry in MTG). RNG is a good tool, but often misused. I like using RNG to tell a different story (I like roling how NPCs are feeling a particular morning and then interpret, for exemple), but I hate when all my skills and decision making are voided by spirits hating me this day (In Middara act 1, I would systematically roll crit fails (lowest value on all my dices). To the point I stopped rolling. Then a boss appeared and we were concerned, and I went 'nah, I got this.' and rolled for the boss. It crit failed. The boss wasn't able to act. At all. All combat. RNG can also remove all difficulty.)
I like how the dice in 40K can make a perfect list on paper perform like ass. Been playing for 2 years and been liking that aspect. Used to play Yugi. My commander pod scales to each other or we just jump the guy who is going nuts.
I always play with the same guy at home, we play 60 card, hes alot newer than me at playing and a lot of the time what we do to try to make it more fair is I always point out his Missed triggers as well as have him use one of my well built decks against me to rapaidly increase his game knowledge and ability
A good way to connect with new players would be to periodically release a basic set of core cards that would be useful to most players, but would not include cards with heavy mechanical overhead 😏
Awesome that you both played and enjoyed SoulCalibur, that game was insanely fun and kept me and my friends sane (and expense-free, played others for money) for years at University. On memorization...ok but Lantern Control.
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
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
There are many things about this video I have a gripe with, and here are some of them(as a yugioh and tekken player)(didn't expect to write that much, but it happened anyway):
1. Inroducing randomness(especially post-determined rng) in 1v1 games, that don't play well with it: these would be competetive-oriented fighting games, sometimes RTS games(these have damage roll ranges on units, but that's about it, can't think of any more genres which fit this description right now). Losing to pure RNG fells bad, no matter how good or bad you are at a game. And if you lost against someone in these games you can usually go back to the replay, see what went wrong, learn and become better, so it doesn't happen or happens less frequently. Losing is part of learning and if your learning gets undone by rng, this is where controllers, or other stuff break.
2. You say that if going from one skill bucket to another is difficult it pushes players away. It pushes away those who don't like/enjoy the gameplay loop, shattering these barriers when you know what you did right, what you improved upon, noticing what your opponent did wrong and exploiting it to get there feels amazing, as it should, if it's not difficult enough you don't feel like you have achieved anything or improved in any substantial matter. You will be playing against many different opponents, not only the same guy who mopped the floor with you last match.
3. When you do your combo in a fighting game it is many times not the same button combination every single time. You learn that when you attempt to do it and: there isn't enough stage left for you to finish your combo, you hit a wall and your combo is cut short, or you are on a stage with a breakable floor, part of your combo breaks the floor, and your next attack can't reach, making you miss out on advantage. Or when your development route in an RTS game doesn't work out, you see what you can change about it, where are the points where you can do stuff faster, or completly differently increase efficiency. That's when you get creative, explore your options and experiment, see what other avenues you can explore(these include, but aren't limited to: how can i increase wall travel, how do I get a "high wall splat", how do I get two heroes at 2:30 of a game while having x,y,z structures built), these are instances of "honing vs innovation"(which is a very important concept in these games), and if you only use simplified options you are limiting yourself and your growth as a player, while if developer is actively removing options from players' repetoir(assuming that option isn't unhealthy for the game, and doesn't limit game design for other moves/characters/nations/races/units), then that's removing choises, and having chances to make poor choices matters. The simplified approach is perfectly reasonable for casual couch gaming, when people just want to see some characters beat up some other characters, or when you just want to see some wars happen, but not for competetive, some games are complicated, should stay that way from some level onwards, and you move on, when you are ready to take off the training wheels.
4.When you talk about newer player getting to play against a more experienced player and getting their teeth kicked in is the fact that the new player got to fight the experienced player, because they defeated some other new players first, they experience their first game loss, they get to play someone who is a bit worse at the game than the last player they played against. If they go on a lose streak and don't attempt to figure out what mistakes got them there in these genres, that's on them, they refuse to improve, they lose to players who do their homework, as it should be.
5. It's perfectly fine to be a casual couch gamer and play someone more experienced in these games, but some ground rules need to be set, we put some arbitrary rules for the experienced player to level the playing field. Think of it as not allowing a begginer(a few games under their belt that has some understanding of how mechanics work) with an out of the box commander precon to play against a fully tuned competetive commander deck piloted by an experienced player(a person who knows every card in their decks by heart and understands most of possible interactions which their cards can cause), Usually the experienced player will get one of their weaker decks and play the begginer with one of those. The experienced player still has the advantage, but it's not as insurmountable as it was before. This should be applied in casual enviroment if possible.
6. It's perfectly fine to take breaks and/or quit games if playing, improving and learning about how it is/should be played doesn't bring you enjoyment/satisfaction. Not every game is for you, and you won't enjoy every single game. There are games you will have natural affinity for, and there are games you won't ever be good enough at, because you are not meant to be together(me and RTS games, tried to get into the genre 3 or 4 different times and I was garbage at every single one). Focus on the things that bring you joy and/or sense of fulfillment, other games or entirely different stuff and put effort there. But don't be mad that people want their games and other hobbies to stay the way they are, because that iteration of a hobby is the one that brings them the most joy, just like your favourite one does for you now.
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 😅
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.
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.
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.
0:20 And it sounds like you are about to explain why making the experience of all players worse at the game than you is a good thing and they should feel bad for not being as good as you already
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.
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.
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.
This discussion is interesting. Kinda experienced it myself in a weird way. I loved Yu-Gi-Oh, when I learned there was a higher level, I tried to reach it.
Learning to get good and play at that high level ruined the game for me and my friends. It stopped being fun. It is indeed a case of competitive players ruining the game or even learning to play competitively ruining the game for someone.
It also reminds me of an argument I have had with several (often more competitive) people
Putting a newer player in a series of games and proceeding to beat them over and over again until they work out the rules is NOT a good, effective or appropriate teaching method. Yet, at least in my area when it comes to Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic that is the preferred method, and I get called stupid for saying this isn't a good method. It's gonna push way more people away than it will bring in.
@@tristanalain9239 They should learn YGO via a Progression method. Start with GOAT then move on. Modern YGO as a 1st card game is too much.
Those people are not good card game teachers. They are not thinking from the perspective of a new player, they are so attached to winning that they can't even give their students the fun experiences required to develop a lasting interest in the game.
Opposite happened for me. As an ignorant kid I used to love the idea of Yugioh but didn't enjoy playing it very much because I could never get those satisfying anime combos. When I started to play it separately from the anime, I found that the more skilled I got, the more fun I had, in significant part because the higher skill level transferred down to the bad decks and made them playable.
@@yurisei6732Dude same for me, i loved HERO cuz they were a bit more complex because of fusion but after a 10 year hiatus i go back to yugioh and see its more complex and the game became so much more fun with all the combos i could do and trying to figure out where to break and oponent combo
A good counter argument to the claim that just ruthlessly beating the shit out of a new player will make them get good is pulling up statistics on how people learn and also the statistics on the effects physical discipline (aka spanking and such) have on children’s behavior. Spoiler: it’s not positive.
Your channel have halped me a lot on the last year creating my own game, thank you so much!
Magic is balanced by the variance in deck order.
Thats all we have to make casual players win against skilled players, luck varience.
Also chess is extremely popular and is also extremely skill determined as there are no unknowns. Still super popular, the only thing that needs to be done is pitting players of similar skill level together.
(This means you might literally be too good or too bad for the rest of your pod. Not just your deck, YOU, might not be a 7)
Also luck is generally BAD in games. It removes the motivation to be skilled. Generally the most popular games are very low luck while the goofiest games are all luck. (Drawing for highcard vs playing cribbage).
Randomness is needed to break up the game flow so it isnt like chess with standard openings. But thats it, the further you go the less rewarding the game is to play
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!
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
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.
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.
God this topic is just so interesting. Really translates game mechanics into experiences. Great video would love to hear more on the topic.
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...
"Did you use the mimic tear?" Is the most polite "f#$%ing scrub" ive ever heard 😂😂
Text on YGO cards could certainly be present better, but I don't think keywords would work in that game. YGO has very nuanced rules, where every type of card effect has about a dozen small variations, some with very significant implications. (Like targeting vs non-targeting effects)
Keywords would have to be multi-layered or there'd have to be about a hundred of them, both serving only to make the game even more obtuse, imo.
Yep. I've been trying to keyword as much as possible in my homebrew spin-off and the best approach has still left almost everything written out, it just additionally keywords "return from field to hand" and "place on bottom of deck" as "bounce" and "bury" respectively (which is done because there's a lot more return to deck effects, as part of making costs actually costs instead of graveyard filling and sent-to-grave procing), and reworks excavate to include automatic coverage of what to do with the excavated cards that aren't moved elsewhere.
And even these few extra keywords aren't transferrable to Yugioh, because they're still homogenising and homogenisation of effects in this way can only be done from a fresh sistart.
Too many keywords is worse than no keywords. Its both annoying to read and prevents subtle things like "increase original attack by 500" vs "increase attack by 500" vs "increase attack by how many cards are banished".
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
They have a point.
@@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.
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.
This is literally the "too many sweats" meme
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.
This might be heresy, but I think an inverted reward structure is something to consider. Losing games is, in a certain aspect, a service.
This doesn't need to go all the way to the top. But in the lower 50% I think there is merit for providing a reward for giving the winner a chance to win their game.
That said, something that games NEED is a way to play without it affecting your standing. Not every game needs to be a serious, go big or go home fest. Sometimes you wanna do something goofy. Games need to allow room for that.
Games have tried a lot of different ways to improve this experience via digital rules and rewards, and none have yet succeeded to my knowledge. Yugioh especially has a problem, because Master Duel heavily punishes surrendering, while Yugioh at the meta level is best experienced by surrendering early against obvious loss cases.
If you give people rewards for losing, you can 100% expect people to intentionally throw games for the better rewards, which will lead to bad experiences for everyone.
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.
Keep in mind it's not just "skill". Any factor can become (be designed to be) a breaking point for outcome: time, money, networking, popularity, personality type, height, age, cheating, etc.
Hand in hand with that, is the lobbying different player factions (skill players, money players, etc.) will do to push the game in their "direction" of choice. For many, this means to arrive at a game that provides the use and ability of their specific skill with corresponding greater standing and greater success. But it can be any number of directions, including directions that then can split a faction into opposing camps. Other directions can include a challenge, a consistent experience, actually something that is balanced to not favor them, etc.
Some game communities that are facing very high "valley of effort" will face it in different ways. Some celebrate it and delight in the struggling of new players. Some actually create extensive volumes of content to try to help new players to shortcut or accelerate through the "valley of effort". Often the different community approaches to the valley deal with if a community "needs" new players and the manners in which they need them. For an older game like Super Street Fighter II Turbo, they need players to build out a player community that can participate in public player pools, sometimes peer socialization, and (for many players in the community) provide high levels of competitive gameplay. Changing how a new player affects the existing community can change how that community responds toward efforts to improve new player onboarding, retention, and development.
18:50 the problem with MTG example thou - you can't really play around not getting lands or getting too many lands, you just lose because of it. Like yes, it creates situations where you can win just because opp was unlucky, but it is not meaningfull in any way for both players. So there are def layers to that. I think Pokemon Pocket does it the best, where you can actually play around being lucky/unlucky and need to think about both situations.
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.
I think what Magic does that YGO doesn’t is that it has multiple formats. Players that get bored in one format can switch to another. In YGO you suffer or you quit. I think though you need a level of success to be able to support that and trying too early can really hurt a new card game by splitting the community up.
Formats can cut both ways. Segmenting your player base can make it harder to find games, but as you said, you have other places to go if you can’t find meaningful games in one format.
@@distractionmakers Yeah that’s a far more eloquent way of putting it 😂
Reminder that yugioh has a ton of formats, its just that they are niche. Ex: Edison which uses the Yugioh GX rules or Speed Duel which have some cards not available in the regular format.
@@Temperans I know YGO players often use the word ‘format’ differently to magic players, like ‘the current format’ often means ‘the current ban list and card pool’. I wouldn’t consider Edison a different format in the Magic sense, like Modern is a different format to Standard. PreDH is still Commander, it’s just a historic variant of it. I was also under the impression Speed Duels was basically a different game? Am I mistaken in that?
@@Azeria No, when yugioh players say different format it means different rules, ban lists, and/or car pool. Its MTG that says "different format" and yet the rules are basically the same outside of how you build your deck or whether there is a command zone. When they say "the current format" they are quite literally saying "using the current rules of the game" since the game changes rules every so often when new extra deck monsters are released.
Edison format for example uses the 2010 rules, its ban list, and car pool. So both players start with 6 cards, there is one 1 field spell, there are no monster zones, and a bunch of other rules are different.
Meanwhile, Goat format uses the 2005 rules, ban list, and cardpool. So players start with 6 cards, the extra deck can have an unlimited number of monsters, only 1 field spell, and a bunch of other rules.
Then there are the formats like Rush duels that make it so there are only 3 monster and spell zones, unlike the regular 5.
Magic player here. If your not playing to make your opponent miserable, you ARE miserable. Welcome to card games.
Found the blue player.
I can confirm that your statement is entirely false.
I like funny synergies that aren't expected and other people doing them is fun because then I have new things to try and poke at
For example, someone using a Haymaker brawl deck with a card that gave its tokens double strike gave me the idea to chuck Roxanne and Mother of Machines into a deck for 4x meteor shots on entry, so now I have a token gen and burn setup I'm working on with that that's been doing really well, and it's awesome to see it grow, have my friends help improve the decklist, and build setups that allow it to really shine.
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.
a game that i could get good at for five years would own, yall are too short sighted
I go out of my way to avoid learning metas in board games to avoid making it stale. Cant really patch a board game to keep it fresh
The advantage Magic - specifically Commander - has over video games is that you're actually at a table with other players that actually have to sit at that table, and you all can discuss things that concern you. The proverbial Rule 0, which has gotten many negative connotations over the last few years, but just being able to say "Hey, we have a deck budget over under 200 dollars" or "no infinite combos" or "we prefer to play and play against creature heavy decks" does a lot to mitigate the problem of "noobs" being stomped by experienced players. Unfortunately such a thing rarely exists in video games.
Honestly, it feels like fighting games could take inspiration from that idea and people could make fight clubs, analogous to guilds in MMOs.
Doom Eterna is a terrific PVE game. I have gotten extremely proficient at it. I exploit quick swapping, enemy stun and melee to the point that I see it in my sleep. Yet the AI is so well coded and the enemy variety so distinct that I die consistently. No matter how skilled at the game I become, I am always on my toes.
Nice to see you guys talk about game design in general again rather than just magic.
Street fighter 6 bridges this Valley of Effort by using two different control schemes. Classic, it's what you know and has been used since day 1. And Modern, this uses the simple button system. The bridge is that Classic does more damage and in Modern you can still use the full motion for moves to do full damage with your specials.
As someone who has been playing SF for years (but not competitively) I love this move. I can use the modern controls and still utilize my old knowledge to do the right motion if I choose to get a benefit.
The full motion can still use each level of that attack (Light, Med, Heavy sometimes this will change duration or range, Modern one button special gives you only one of those) to full effect, and isn't reduced damage. It also allows people who know nothing get the easy controls and throw in learning into it with full motions.
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.
Whats the percentage loss to variance in games like Poker?
TCG Yu-Gi-Oh has God awful structuring of card text. OCG does a far better job of formatting card text even with the limited space. For starters OCG prefaces the box with which abilities have once per turn clauses, and abilities are numbered. This allows for faster tracking of what's going on by declaring which ability you are using and quick checking for any additional claises the card may have with it.
OCG yugioh has some formatting problems exclusive to the Japanese language though, particularly the use of kanji, which not all kids know, accompanied by furigana text that's like a quarter of the already small font size.
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.
The final monster in monster hunter world is Fatalis. They make you do a solo duty to repel it before allowing you to go online to fight it with others to kill it. This is so you don't instantly die and waste one of your 3 deaths allowed in the mission by being unprepared.
I have a somewhat novel idea. Why not, instead of assuming every game is for every player, we make games with an actual target audience in mind? Design a game to be harder, OR design a game to be easier? That way 100% of the people who buy your game are likely to be happy and you wont have to contend with this so called "paradox". Competitive games are for competitive people. If youre bad at the game, get good, or stop playing and become a spectator.
Just like with any other sport. If im bad at football, i dont play it, instead, i just buy a ticket to watch the players who are actually good at it.
Your example is not as good as you think.
There are many, many football leagues for players of very different skill levels (even for people with disabilities) so everyone can enjoy football without "getting good". If people are bad at football but want to play it, they... go and play it. And rules of football make it fun for people of all skill levels.
As one of those super casual Magic players, that just this month returned after a decade of absence, I think Wizards have a good thing going on.
The Arena of today is an incredible platform, compared to what it was, and the pathway from tutorial to ranked is smooth. It's a really good experience.
So I have managed to almost be completely undefeated in tsuro and century. I have a consistent group of skilled board game players and for some reason I have only lost both games once. Tsuro seems like a game without much strategy, but I do have high end strategy for it. Century is an engine builder that requires being flexible and adapting, which maybe it's the adapting part that trips people up.
As a fighting game person, I think smash's big revelation is getting players to the "meaningful decision" section of the game faster than, say, Guilty Gear. They're both complex, but understanding smash is "faster"
I love Soul Caliber!
Marvel snap use of variance is what makes games different every time but can also be so frustrating when they for some reason didn’t account for variance locking both players of playing the game at all (getting 3 locations that limit the amount of cards played)
Marvel snap is super interesting. We will be doing an episode on it in the future.
@ nice! Looking forward for it
"Did you use the mimic tear in Elden Ring..." So perfect :)
Made me think of the im not a rapper “ohhhhh” sound
The most important thing a company (or an LGS) can do, is clearly segregate pro players (or pro hopefuls) from the general public.
Just like how skill based matchmaking makes video games tolerable, not having to deal with pro-tour grinders when I want to play kitchen table magic will allow for everyone to have the game they want.
As long as the skill based matchmaking isntbthe kind like in call of duty where the game handholds new players while restricting experienced players
@bwahchannel9746 that's exactly what it needs to do though. Show the new players a good time by keeping the grinders out of the playpen
As a FG player your FG part was painful
Chess has this problem at in insane level. The top players in the world are all lifelong devotees with IQs in the high 100s and photographic memories that allow them to memorize thousands of opening variations. Most grandmasters don't even stand a chance against the top super grandmasters.
But it is NOT a problem. Chess is still popular and people have meaningfull games because of proper matchmaking. And it is still fun to play against a player who is 200 elo rating above you.
Yes, you won't win against a player who is 300+ points above you (you may in games with randomness) but why would you play against them?
@Strongpoint_S yeah that is true if you play on the internet. But if you play against people over the board it is still an issue, especially since knowledge is a crucial part of modern chess. You could also say the same thing about playing on Arena since they have different ranks on the ladder
@@Mississippi_Jack Nah, official offline chess is also mostly fine. They have tournaments for all elo ranges and even if it is a wide range like "up to 1000 FIDE elo" in a Swiss you will play players of your strength soon enough.
New magic players have no such option. A "700 elo" MTG player can't easily find a place to play with players of the roughly same level.
This happened to me in an MMO I played years ago. I got to the end of content which was available to me. Summer started, I had 2 months to do nothing but improve in the game… but I did not know how. I wanted to access the special gear and high level raids and I was already better than the majority of my guild… but I just did not know how to continue that progression.
i know we're talking about magic, but this is pretty much the issue that TF2 has had for most of its life cycle with the Sniper class. Once a certain percentage of the playerbase reaches a certain skill threshold with the class, the only reliable and accessible counter-play is to ALSO have a sniper that's of the same skill level, completely undermining the class-counter system baked into the core of the game
On the fighting game discussion: you're totally on point in identifying that learning motion inputs and learning long combo strings are both things that keep people from engaging fully with those games. But I think you're consistently conflating those two things. Like, you talk here about how memorizing combo strings takes effort, which is true, and then connect that to how Smash Bros style simple inputs can help bring players in. That's also true, but it's not really related to the combo discussion. These are two separate design questions that need to be approached in separate ways.
Simplified control schemes like SF6's modern controls have come up here already, but that only addresses input complexity for individual moves. I think it's also important to bring up auto combos. Lots of anime fighters have a system where you can mash one button a lot and get a preset combo. It's far from optimal, but it makes sure a new player can get respectable damage out of the openings they find.
There's definitely a choice going on regarding how much you want your game to be a "mind game" vs. a "twitch game".
By mind game, I mean an archetypal game where execution is a non-factor, but decision making is important, like most TCGs or Chess. By twitch game, I mean the archetypal game where execution is the only factor, like a sprint (depending on who you ask, that might not count as a game, but let's assume it is).
All games exist somewhere between the two, and fighting games have, by and large, been moving more towards being mind games than they used to be, via lowering (some) execution barriers. The almost universal adoption of input buffering being a big one that applies to players of all skill levels. Granted there are other reasons why that started to become more common, but lowering execution barriers is definitely one.
Fighting games are definitely still further to the twitch side than the mind side, but the mind side is still very involved. Like most traditional sports, execution skills are necessary, but far from sufficient. Your decision making and game awareness is what makes you the better player, at least past a certain baseline execution level.
Thanks for the insight. We need to do a deep dive into fighting games, there’s a deep well of knowledge that could likely inform our perspective on other genres.
these seems like somethign that has the opposite effect of bridging the valley. You're basically teaching new players to settle into either being a casual who uses auto-combos or do the uphill battle of learning the combo strings properly. So there's no transition; new players can fight mid players but those mid people are still going to hit a wall against any pro player.
@@thetable7660 It's totally true that when new players actually want to play against strong players, they have to do the actual work of learning combos for real. There's no getting around that. What auto combos hopefully do is let new players develop intentional thinking about the neutral game without worrying too much about combo practice. That's a skill that will hold even after they drop the auto combos.
I didn't learn on auto combos, but my hope is that for the people who do, the limit of the auto combo they feel first is that they don't let you select for oki/corner carry/etc. Like, as their play becomes more intentional, they become more aware of the utility they're losing out on by not being deliberate about their combos as well. Viscerally feeling what you have to gain from learning a specific combo both helps you understand what you should learn first and provides a lot of motivation!
I think you have omitted one of serious problems - there are many toxic players who like "demolishing stupid noobs", it warms their ego.
They will create smurf accounts, they will artificially lower their rating, they will look for ways to play against weak players to get their domination dopamine.
I've lost some friendships over people taking games too seriously. I wasnt bad, in fact i was better than a lot of people in the group (if i do say so myself).
But when you make jokes (about random stuff not even game related), some pro/semipro people get unessescarily sweaty and be mad that you don't look as serious as them.
Imagine playing games to have fun.
I come primarily from both smash and fighting games and I coach a high school street fighter team. The new input system called modern (lol) makes certain things easier but does come with drawbacks. What I've seen in my players is that they start with modern and get hooked on the gameplay. Now they are starting to want to play the traditional input method because of the upsides it adds and the added complexity starts to make more sense.
Started playing magic a few years ago and so many of the situational awareness, pressure, advantage, risk and reward evaluation skills transfer over well.
That’s awesome! It seems the change has done its job of helping get players to the later stages of skill.
It’s an easy fix. Any game can have Players vs AI in a generated campaign or story line. And a player vs player area / story line.
What do you guys think about the kind of player who will invariably blame anyone and anything but themselves for every loss? These are the kinds of people that typically are very vocal about hating Magic because of mana screw or flood. I often find myself in a position where I can’t really argue against any of their points because they simply don’t understand my arguments because I’m coming at the conversation from a game design sense whereas they’re always coming to the conversation with a player’s perspective of “I should always get to do the cool thing 100% of the time!”
Basically what I’m asking is how do you instruct players about a game when they can’t recognize the systems at play and want the game to do their bidding rather than simply follow the rules and play the game?
Great question and it is a constant struggle. If the game is designed for competitive audiences you have to find what the player base is willing to accept, (usually input randomness like drawing cards from a deck). Your starting point affects the life expectancy of your game, so the more randomness at the start the better. Over time, the player base will accept less and less randomness.
As for that particular person, it’s hard to know if this is a strategy problem for them or if they just don’t like the game. Accepting randomness does take a particular point of view that some players don’t like and that’s ok. Just know that the system with randomness should theoretically attract more players in the long run than one with none, but marketing and target audience matters a lot.
As a YGO player who randomly got recommended this video, I dont play MTG for this reason. I already hate dealing with Garnets in YGO as it is, I dont want to deal with 10+ of them
@@BussiDestroyer I'm vaguely familiar with yugioh but not enough to have known that term without looking it up. What are you referring to there? The lands in the deck once you have all of them you need? An average game of magic lasts orders of magnitude longer than the average game of yugioh, so it does a good job of self-regulating in that regard. Sure, drawing a land for turn in a critical moment can be devastating to your chances of winning, but I feel like that's worth it to make the rest of the game work the way it does.
@@alexspeedwagon3701 more like the high impact spells that cost too much mana that you play a few of in some decks but for some ungodly reason stay glued to start hands. and the odd deadraw land midgame.
@@BussiDestroyer This is why good MTG decks all revolve around drawing cards and cheating on mana costs. Step one in winning the game is figuring out how to play around its archaic implementation of luck.
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.
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
"Long chain of memorized inputs to get a move out" sounds insane to anyone who has tried a fighting game. You legit roll the stick or dpad from down to right/left and thats 90% of special inputs.
'You will only win like 65% of your matches'
How about you're wrong? - Yugi Muto
Very interesting conversation about mtg. I’ve noticed more about luck since I’m mainly a competitive modern player. So that limits the amount of frustration from the losing. Skill helps but luck seems to be more valuable.
You can also separate players by skill level. Have levels or tiers and players of similar level play each other. Arena kind of does this where you mostly play people ranked close to you so you don't have new players playing pros.
Matchmaking helps a lot, but it doesn’t prevent this from occurring over a long period of time as the entirety of your player base becomes more skilled.
The issue with that is if the players deck does most of the work and the player skill input is minimal or the deck snowballs.
Personally i've done the switch to less complex games for the sole reason of getting to play more often. A good multiplayer game basically needs meaningful interaction. That's it. king of tokyo with its forced progression and pvp interaction, bohnanza with its bartering politics, queendomino with its simple yet elegant probablility calculations etc. The lower the threshold to learn the basics of a game in a few rounds will by far give you more different games with different kind of players and in so more meaninful social situations. you can still enjoy the optimisations with less investment in time and effort and focus more on the social aspect.
Don't get me wrong i love competitive mtg, complex big strategy board games, d&d, role playing games and skill based fighting games etc but it is just super rare to get a quality play group with a balanced skill base so that everyone has fun at the table.
Weirdly me and my brother absolutely love playing t'zolkin because no one else wants to play with us and the discusting amount of complexity in the game tickles our fancy just in the right way that we can exhaust our cognitive capasity with a few games 😂 i have yet to find a better resource management game that works so well in a 1v1 setting. I highly recommend getting in to it and giving it a bit time cause it will not open up on the first playthroughs.
I also highly recommend your content to almost all of my friends. I love how you have given me deeper understanding and insight into the wonderful world of game mechanics.
I had an idea of you could do some game analysis while playing the games. Practical examples of game mechanics through games would be a good way to illustrate a lot of your points.
Great ideas and thanks for sharing your insights!
One thing i hate about many competetive situation are meta related things
Sure, there will always be something that is better than something else, but as soon as you reach the point where you need to know every single possible move every opponent can do at any point, in my oppinion that oversteps the welcome
Some examples:
In pokemon its absolutely legit to have a rest/sleeptalk set, but as soon as you put sleeptalk on random pokemon without anything like rest because that pokemon happens to be a good target for sleep, then you have gotten too far
Or in yugioh, you can run any deck you want, but if your entire side deck is just random "silver bullet" cards used against other decks which are popular, or cards which can be uses only as the first/second player which you side in after round 1 (if you loose a duell in a match you are the person who beginns next duell), then you are playing at a really disgusting level which is less about skill and more about learning stuff by heart
In single player games, Ive gotten heavily into modding and cheating via stuff like cheat engine due to this.
Id call myself a rather skilled player in most single player games I play - but that also leads me to optimizing the fun out of the game quite often.
To alleviate that, I use whatever's available: Well-made mods, sometimes I even mod games myself, cheat engine and other cheat-like stuff and a set of self-imposed rules.
Its actually a good chunk of work to get everything set up properly in many games - but its definitely worth it considering the length of the games I tend to play.
To give an example, in RPGs, I like to cheat my levels or raw stats down, but get more "ability points" or whatever the equivalent is. Basically: Less raw power, more options, cause options are fun and skill-expressive.
There's aspects in some board games and video games that allow a player to take a setback to even the playing field against less skilled players. It's awesome. Feel like you are crushing the opponent? Give yourself one or more setbacks/limitations, and overcome the challenge now. Or give the opponent boons that increase their odds of success. If a person is l33tist to devalue another person because of their play method, they aren't worth engaging with. It is sad to pander to these kinds of people.
Half of my problem isn’t being beaten by a better player… it’s when I see a blatant cheater that I get annoyed like lag switchers, hackers, etc
Now do how casual players ruin games and marketing departments are to blame.
I'm by no means competitive at any of the games I play. I'm not quick-witted enough to consistently make the best plays, I choose game pieces I like the art of over game pieces that have the strongest rules, and I prefer to play a wide range of games rather than to become very practiced in any of them. But I still try to play well. Finding the synergy points, noticing the weak points of an opponent, thinking through the actions I take, these are what it means to play a game. If you're not doing these things, you may as well be a random-button-pressing CPU. And quite a few of these CPU players will demand that no one else plays the game either. I'd rather lose to a sweaty tryhard than be held hostage by a whiny noob.
And this problem is exactly where the "why yugioh no keyword?" thing comes from. People take one step into Yugioh, get offended by the barrier to entry and think they're spotted an obvious solution no one else must have seen. I challenge you to actually try keywording Yugioh cards. Take the most recent mainline set, and keyword it in a way that doesn't change what any of the cards do. You won't be able to do it. You won't be able to do it because Yugioh is a precision-effect game, every word has meaning and there are many slight but critical variants on most types of game action, which cannot be homogenised.
I think they can be formatted better but otherwise I agree with everything you say.
Would you guys be upset if I did reaction content to your stuff framed toward the yugioh community? I love the topics you guys dig into and would love to start bringing up more of these discussions in our community.
Go for it! We’d love that.
It’s really just the internet’s fault
The internet has definitely increased the speed of this.
Fighting games definitely ARENT reducing the emphasis on complex inputs
Very few games that have simplified inputs dont actively handicap that input mode
And for games that ONLY have simplified inputs, like the upcoming 2xko have extremely long combos with tight input restrictions
With mtg I play with friends but my new member started to go hard with making more challenging and difficult and OP decks just to win and I only come for the experience but to keep getting a brick wall of people wanting to be better and better make it less fun for me to play knowing I’ll lose; not playing to win but playing for fun
About clarity of information: in Magic, if I have a creature removal spell and want to reduce my opponent's ongoing effects, I have to either remember which cards have ongoing effects or ask to read all of them. In Bandai's card games, they use keywords in colored boxes to mark whether an effect is ongoing or only procs once, which is easy to see from the other side of the table. This speeds up play a lot because I can tell which cards have ongoing effects at a glance
I like this!
Gamers gonna Game.
Fun is subjective. What would have been awesome is if I didn't require to study and train for a skill set to derive what I want from a game. That's not saying learning can't be fun, and that isn't to say that there can't be fun in succeeding a challenge, but to make those the only options is very forced.
Take for example Demon's Souls on PS3.
I bought it because it was said to be a difficult game by mainstream opinion. {Side note don't listen to mainstream opinion, as they can be full of crap as I learned through my life time.} I played it and learned to be generally ok with the mechanics. I did discover many issues arise from how it was designed. While you aren't expected to play a specific way, you are expect to play a specific way to succeed by incentivizing you to utilize specific aspects in the game. I will go onto more detail. You could run around hacking and slashing away at opponents. You are rewarded faster (and in some ways better) if you learn to parry, and back stab. You can grind souls to over level, but that will cost you time, and possibly interest in the game before you get to a specific strength you want to play the game with so you are incentivized to "get gud". It's how incentiviztion functions with microtransactions in mmos. It will provide you with methods to do something in the least optimal way, straining your patience, so you will pay up for a boon to circumvent the tedious/unfun struggle. Demon's Souls is not a hard game if you utilize what is provided to the fullest extent, but that does mean having to waste time repeating content in a manner that may feel like work. You may not even begin to grasp how trivial everything in the game becomes if you max out magic sniping everything that bars your way, even bosses.
After having engaged with the dev desired way of playing (that is fighting in specific way) for a few days and not making progress, I found a way to cut down the time to grind souls through a glitch. When I removed this monotonous combat element that I grew bored of, I was able to explore the world, and enjoy the lore that was spread throughout the game. Had I quit all because the devs decided how I should engage with the game, I would have lost out on all the other aspects that also were part of the game.
The "getting good aspect is only one aspect of Demon's Souls, not the entire game. The devs could have allowed for a less forced approach to experiencing the game. Allowing a player to get through without resorting to grind, like starting out as a powerful character. Designing their encounters smarter i.e. the following examples are opinions of what I conisder poor design
>NPCs clipping and attacking through terrain when the player can't
>narrow dodge/parry windows against opponents especially when visuals don't match the connection point
>janky hitboxes that sometimes accept hits and sometimes don't to both player and opponent
>damage sponge enemies
>elevation causes floating
>targeting larger opponents focuses on their mid section rather than parts you can attack.
>invasions when only wanting to co-op.
Just as there can be difficulty settings, there ways to implement toggles to customize the expereince. This can make things more challenging when challenge is desired, as well as make things less challenging when it is desired. The whole point of games is to be entertaining. It is really dumb to force hard difficulty, just like it is dumb to force super easy. Customization is key. It excludes no-one.
It happened to Starcraft, Everquest, wow, Arena shooters and so many more.
Yeah, that's one of my problems with YGO. There's a lot, but the sheer amount of cards, and card types, is daunting to deal with if you haven't kept up with it annually.
Also why I prefer drafting as well. It minimizes memorization and metaplay and adds randomness to it.
Yugioh's complexity is deceptive. There are actually only four card types: Monster, Extra Deck Monster, Spell, Quick-play Spell.
Games and politics can be very interesting and have a lot of different variety! The issue is that MtG was just never designed with politics in mind. Politics in Magic is like "dexterity matters" cards - they're not something the game was designed for, and if you use them the fact the game has no design for them becomes readily apparent.
Games like Chinatown, Sidereal Confluence, Bohnanza, Diplomacy/GOT, Tammany Hall, and New Angeles are all great examples of different sorts of 'political' games where all sorts of different negotiations arise as the result of the gameplay itself. Games like Magic, in contrast, basically give you a choice of "bonk Alice or Bob?" (or sometimes "give Alice or Bob a cookie").
Of course you don't have to like political games, but that doesn't make them all similar, any more than ping pong and soccer are similar because they're both physical activities that involve moving a ball around on a court.
"well youre just bad" is petulant and brain dead. rich people when hearing anyone criticise them about their ruining of stuff is the same with them saying "well you just say that because you dont have money"
Now I understand why yugioh has such a lack of new players. The game is very very refined, with pretty much every player that plays regularly playing at the top of their game (at least compared to newer player, the difference is immense).
It's also prohibitively expensive to play in person. You have to get invested first. That's why the digital scene and video games are so important tbh.
I'd love to have an easy way to do progression series with friends to help them get in.
I love randomness when it changes things up. (Random events) I hate randomness when it IS the difficulty or worse, stops me from playing. (When you can't succeed the simplest of actions in DnD, when you get the 'youre dead' event combos in Nemesis, when you're mana flooded or dry in MTG). RNG is a good tool, but often misused. I like using RNG to tell a different story (I like roling how NPCs are feeling a particular morning and then interpret, for exemple), but I hate when all my skills and decision making are voided by spirits hating me this day (In Middara act 1, I would systematically roll crit fails (lowest value on all my dices). To the point I stopped rolling. Then a boss appeared and we were concerned, and I went 'nah, I got this.' and rolled for the boss. It crit failed. The boss wasn't able to act. At all. All combat. RNG can also remove all difficulty.)
I like how the dice in 40K can make a perfect list on paper perform like ass. Been playing for 2 years and been liking that aspect. Used to play Yugi. My commander pod scales to each other or we just jump the guy who is going nuts.
I always play with the same guy at home, we play 60 card, hes alot newer than me at playing and a lot of the time what we do to try to make it more fair is I always point out his Missed triggers as well as have him use one of my well built decks against me to rapaidly increase his game knowledge and ability
A good way to connect with new players would be to periodically release a basic set of core cards that would be useful to most players, but would not include cards with heavy mechanical overhead 😏
Awesome that you both played and enjoyed SoulCalibur, that game was insanely fun and kept me and my friends sane (and expense-free, played others for money) for years at University.
On memorization...ok but Lantern Control.
I don't think any discussion of this issue is complete without discussing chess and go.