That's my biggest issue with computer games. It's just so hard to convince people that the computer is now in the garbage can, and that it was completely an accident the way that it could just happen with a tabletop game.
This so much this Also people who pull a comeback on me and my team are all dirty cheaters, while if it's me and my team who pulled off a comeback we did it with our hard earned capital G gamer sweat
I think that examples of well designed comebacks in games are ones that leave an avenue to win if your opponent misplays their lead. For instance having multiple layers of towers in moba games means that even when you get behind or lose lane there is a prolonged period of time between loosing lane, and having your fountains destroyed, during this time your opponent might make misplays that will allow you to come back, or your team synergy might kickin asymmetrically giving you an avenue to win if you drag the game out. Another good example is split map situation in rts games. Its very possible in rts games to be unlucky in the opening game and get behind due to an unfortunate build order matchup or missing peice of critical scouting intel. However often rts games have a decent deffenders advantage that might let a player drag the game out. If their opponent is unable to finish them off they can sometimes split the map in very late stages of the game and finaly equalize on economy and tech from their its anyone's game to win. I think other types of comeback mechanics are kind of bad though. For instance coin flip comebacks like making dark templars after a failed early game in starcraft. or fighting game characters with annoying one shot 50/50 situations. Or like the video mentioned mechanics that reward the losing team with free resources. Comebacks mechanics should allow matches to be decided by multiple skill checks instead of just the earliest ones always resulting in a win or a loss. Bad comeback mechanics are ones that instead feal like they have reasonable potential to rob the far more clearly skilled player of victory.
this reminds me of an observed behavior in rats, they like to play fighting eachother, in which the bigger rat could always win, but if they do so the smaller rat just leaves altogether, so a percentage of the time the bigger rat will let the other win, ensuring long lasting fun for both
That is called self handicapping and it happens in all mammals, from humans, dogs, cats, horses. The thing is its supposed to be a social contract between those parties, typically unspoken. Its not meant to be an involuntary ingame mechanic.
Comeback mechanics often exist to remove snowball effect When slight wins at the start (that are usually quite random) lead to advantage that leads to bigger wins and so on So comeback mechanics actually do the opposite - allow stronger players to win more often, as they're less dependent on random events at the start The most obvious examples are dota and cs In dota gold advantage leads to more gold advantage, so comeback mechanic is must-have to compensate it. In cs losing rounds means you have no money to buy on the next round, meaning you're losing next round too. Therefore you must have losing money bonus, or otherwise every lost round mean that you lost not this round, but next also next two, what is very unfair.
The irony here is that in this video they talk about player perception of skill and strength and how those things might not necessarily be accurate to the reality of whats actually happening, while then later talking about comeback mechanics from an angle that I personally can't help but read as essentially the same thing in terms of how players perceive them I feel like i hear people complain about comeback mechanics a lot more if they haven't gotten a full grasp on how these mechanics actually end up working out in practice, which they only get a feel for over time. kinda like the axl and pot example that was earlier in the video A lot of the time comeback mechanics do a lot more than just reward mistakes and punish advantages, but if youre a player on the receiving end of a comeback mechanic and you end up in the losing position, that probably wont matter to you in the moment. To a lot of people it doesnt matter whether mario kart's spiny shell exists to break through the insane advantage that comes with first place or to even the skill gap or what else, what matters to people is that they were in first place, a position that is supposed to be earned through skill, only for that to be taken away in a matter which you could not do much about. So of course it feels frustrating and possibly unfair to people a lot of the time to get hit by one, and yet if the spiny shell were to simply not exist, the game would ironically end up more frustrating and unfair for everybody except the person who entered first place the fastest. Or in other words like you said, snowballing. Unless a comeback mechanic is implemented horribly, they need to exist to avoid snowballing, which would otherwise just destroy a lot of the fun when it becomes obvious 10% through a match that the remaining 90% are gonna be a slow slog to get even again at best, or entirely pointless because theres no way for you to actually win at worst.
This is a great point, comeback mechanics may bring the chance of winning closer to 50/50 but A) almost never past it and B) this is highly desirable to prevent early variance from compounding.
@@nettalie4435 Just to add about Mario Kart: existing in first place would be extremely easy without the blue/spiny shell because the majority of other items will be affecting the middle of the pack more. For example, if someone in last place gets a Bullet Bill or a Star, who are the racers most likely to get directly hit? Certainly not first place: they're the furthest possible away. It's everyone starting from 11th place up to the middle of the pack. The back is where all the chaos is that first place doesn't have to deal with. If blue shells are removed, then whoever lucks out in the first lap (or even just the first half of the first lap) getting hit the least by items and/or gets an early lucky item can just ride that momentum all the way to the end without contest.
@@TheAmberFang And this only gets more interesting if you factor in items like the super horn, which would make 1st almost entirely uncontestable if coins weren't something introduced in the very same game (One might even speculate that one of these items only exists in the first place item pool because of the other...)
I know it's only tangentially related to the topic, but I want to kill the "Zoners are Snipers" analogy. The only thing they have in common is range, and the way they frustrate players is completely different. Snipers are robbery characters. They are frustrating because they instantly kill you for the slightest mistake, the range is only part of the frustration. Zoners, in my mind, are 'constructor' characters, the ones that build sentry guns that lock down angles. The entire purpose of the class is to reduce the number of options the enemy player has at their disposal, which a lot of players find extremely frustrating to play against. The sentry gun is no danger to you if you don't approach, but the act of trying to approach and enforce your own game plan is often shut down by it, much like a zoner and their wall of projectiles. Funny enough, the constructor type character is another one that tends to be intentionally underpowered, both because they slow the game down significantly by existing and also because they tend to be better the worse the players are.
It's actually in the name: "zoner" refers to how they create "zones" that the opponent doesn't want to be in. You don't want to be in the space a projectile is approaching. You don't want to be where long normals can hit you. The "constructor" characters, as you put them, similarly function through area-denial: creating spaces that you do not want to exist in. Edit: Though, I suppose one could argue that the threat of a sniper has a similar effect of area denial, since the main way to play around a sniper is to simply not be in the sight line. A main point of frustration with snipers is that this is often the ONLY form of counterplay.
When I win, I'm simply better and my opponent is trash. When I lose, I'm a normal human being and my opponent is a nerd who spends all his time playing the game.
Comeback mechanics are more than just a counter to loss aversion, the real reason they need to exist is as a balance to natural Win More states. Mario Kart has a win more mechanic built in: A lot of it's offensive options have a range limit. So someone who drives away from the pack is pretty immune from most of the tools, and therefore can easily compound their win by not having to focus on dodging attacks. To counter this, there are attacks that target the front player, and the rear players get more wide reaching attacks to pull them back into a competitive gamesate. Win more situations are problematic because they worsen all the emotions of losing, but also they're just not fun in general. The competition has left the game and the rest is just a formality. So comeback mechanics' primary purpose is to prevent a player from getting into a invincible state.
yes, this reminds me of an article about rts games about why defenders advantage needs to exist to counterbalance the inherent snowball nature of those games i think the underlying philosophy is very similar and can also be relevant in other games which tend to compound the advantage of the winning player
The main time it's a problem is if it's an unavoidable hazard or hazards that are used as you near the finish line, and you were having a really good run in 1st half the match or the whole match. If things like this happened early in the race, but not near the end where the unavoidable usually pushes you to 4th or 5th, it would much less obnoxious. You might got a higher rank if you stayed in 2nd, or 3rd. It's obvious the result is the game choosing to make you lose, and since it happens at the end there's not a chance to make it up. If they'd done some of these things I wouldn't complain. The combination makes it obnoxious, and badly designed.
My one argument to this was the inclusion of these mechanisms in some form to GT Sport - Gran turismo prides itself on being a realism focused "racing sim" (they don't even call their game a game, it's specifically a "sim"), so for them to have a rubber-banding mechanic made absolutely no sense to me in that context. Like... yeah, it's a realistic sim so if I drive my car significantly faster, I expect to dominate that race - it's my reward for taming the driving physics and practising laps again and again just like IRL. Any other racing "game" it wouldn't bother me. But if you're going to make a big deal about how realistic you are, don't include features that are unrealistic. I don't care why you think it's beneficial or helpful, if it's not realistic then remove it or call yourself a game and stop blabbing about how true to life you are. Anyway didn't mean this to sound like I'm having a go at anyone here, sorry. Clearly still very salty about my experiences with GT Sport 😅
If you want a perfect example of a game that doesnt effectively counter the "win more" scenario… Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart. Basically the same game as MK, with one core change: the blue shell can be outpaced. If youre good enough, you can have it chasing you from lap 1 turn 1 all the way to the end and still win convincingly. Go into any lobby and see how one guy will usually just speed away and become untouchable. It'd be hilarious if it wasnt so deeply frustrating, *especially* since at a certain point the game basically just gives everyone the big comeback items all the time and the race grinds to a halt in terms of action. Its genuinely gamebreaking
In my opinion, a zoner is much more similar to a machine gunner instead of a sniper. A sniper is more similar to Slayer. A machine gun locks down a position for a really, really long time. And when you think you caught him out, he's moved and is now shooting you in the back.
I feel like you're constantly playing against something like a Heavy, while a Sniper usually jumpscares you by shooting you. Imagine if something like Samus' Missile was as unsafe as a Mario Forward Smash, with the same amount of reward. That's more similar to a Sniper.
I think if you imagine a spectrum of skill from the absolute worst to the absolute best, literally no one is interested in a game where the bottom 10% is a threat to the top 10%. But also, if tournaments never waver from the same top few people in the same order, that's also pretty uninspiring. So these kinds of design elements become an element of noise that shakes up the outcome in people of similar skill. Done well, this makes the game more engaging for everyone involved, players and spectators alike - as long as the perception is that they don't erase an obvious skill gap.
Uninspiring maybe, but consider being a challenger rank in league of legends. The turnover in that rank is there, but season after season you find the same players working to the top and playing against each other constantly. And like... what's the alternative? You can't put in any lower ranks than master or at most high diamond to "shake things up", those players will lose 999 games out of 1000 against these players. So it's lame in some ways, but that's also the nature of competing at the absolute top or bottom of the spectrum.
@Loctorak Yeah, I'm mostly arguing that non-"best player wins"/-hyperdeterministic elements should be present enough that there should be surprises for who beats who within a set of top players, but not TOO much that you lose track of who is actually in that set. The 2nd best player has got to be able to beat the best player some of the time. Or the 4th best player beating the 2nd best. How far should that extend? I dunno. Probably not far, but a little of it needs to be there to keep things fresh.
Best way to incorporate that isn't to add rubber banding or comeback mechanics, but design a game where making a mistake is punishable by good players. That way the best player will usually win, but they can lose if they have an off match
At the same time, pretty much no game puts the bottom 10% against the top 10%. Big tournaments are pretty much the top 0.1% against the top 0.1% and any well done matchmaking will put you in a match with people roughly your level. Not exactly your level, because the game can't factor everyone in for it. There might be a player with a perfectly equal rating, but they aren't playing right now. Or they live on the other side of the world and one of you would have to deal with 300 ping. So the system has to compromise. Like having players within a certain skill range, within the same region. And it only gets worse in team games, because suddenly it's not your and the opponents rating, but to find 10 people that can be put into two almost equally skilled teams. And there is a difference between being mechanically skilled at the game and being skilled at the teamplay. A team of friends with voice chat can beat a team of random but better players without issues. They won't be able to 1v1 engagements, but they'd have the coordination to never get into a 1v1 situation.
What's funny about Mario Kart in regards to comeback mechanics is that depending on the track, it can be more competitively viable at a top level to hang back and collect some powerful items first and then use them to make a comeback, rather than just try to go as fast as you can the whole time. The eternal battle of bagging vs frontrunning. Tracks with lots of spots where you can get a shortcut by going over off-road while ignoring the speed debuff by using a speed item generally reward bagging more, but there are some stages where frontrunning is preferred
I think Luigi Circuit Wii is a good example of where having a Mushroom would allow you to win way more easily than if you didn't have one, thanks to it's big shortcut.
@@a_commenter no. Because bagging vs front running is a very good balance. Mainly that they kinda even eachother out. The more people are bagging the worse it gets, for example if at the start of the race 3 people frontrun and the other 9 bag your odds of getting the item you want goes down a lot because most of the items have caps. For example there can only be 2 bullets and one shock at a time, so as soon as people pick them up the rest of the baggers will only get mushrooms which are significantly worse.
@@a_commenterNo, because Mario Kart 8 actually bases item distribution off of distance from the frontrunner instead of rank (so, like, instead of “these items are possible if you are in 10th place or lower”, it’s “these items are possible if you are 8000 units or more away from the player in first”). So, like, even if you’re technically in last place, if everyone’s bunched up together you won’t get good items because the actual distance gap isn’t big enough. Only if there is a substantial number of units between you and the first place player will you get better items. This means that hanging back to get better items is only works as a strategy if there is at least one person moving forward.
I'd say that a well-designed comeback mechanic is most important to counterbalance positive feedback loops. If the game's mechanics allow a player's initial victories to spiral - for example, a MOBA player winning a fight with an opponent means they can level up and buy items while their opponent is waiting to respawn and be more likely to win the next fight - then a comeback mechanic can let those initial victories still matter (since the advantaged player has still made progress towards their final win state that the disadvantaged player hasn't) without them disproportionately influencing future contests. For such a mechanic to function, of course, it needs to have an impact equal to or smaller than the recurring advantage gained from the positive feedback loop, so that falling behind is never comparatively advantageous. Basically, it is a bold and dangerous design choice to incentivise a player to fall behind at the start of a game deliberately so you can ride the comeback mechanic to victory. Sandbagging in Mario Kart to get better items is probably the best-known example of this. I still remember when playing with my friends on the DS version that everyone wanted to be one of the last to get an item box from the first group on Cheep Cheep Beach because getting mushrooms or a star would let you drive through the water around the S-shaped sandbar and cut off a massive section of track; the result is that we would stop right before those item boxes and essentially play a game of chicken there, sometimes for minutes. Fun in its own way, perhaps, but probably not the developers' intention! Incidentally, I think this might be why competitive fighting game communities dislike comeback mechanics - fighting game design typically does not confer any lasting advantage for making progress towards their final win state beyond locking an opponent into a combo for the duration of your next few strikes, so there aren't any major positive feedback loops to counterbalance.
In fighting games, if you manage to get a knockdown, you can push a mix-up on the opponent. If they win enough interactions, they could get their opponent in the corner. The opponent needs good defensive options in order to counterract this.
yo not a competitive 2d fighter or shooter player or whatever here, this may seem weird but i have some analogy that perfectly represents this balancing act of positive feedback loops and comeback mechanics. Its like when riding a bike and controlling your tilt to keep your balance. Its much easier to sway left and right then to try to be dead on with your balance. also like, wearing thicker clothes in a colder or aircon place. you wear something that keeps your warmth more but someone who gets hot easily just need to wear less, instead of expecting the room to be fine tuned to a temperature to please as many people as possible. oh maybe bowling falls into this analogy too. combining applying spin to the ball and having oil on the lanes ultimately helps mitigate inaccuracy by making it easier to be precise. Likewise, it is easier for game developers to tune a game to be fair and balanced if they have competing mechanics like those mentioned. anyway hope u have a good day or night thank you for coming to my ted talk
persona 4 arena was a weird 2-touch game because people stopped their combos right before awakening to make sure you don't get free meter and guts and i know people used to get upset about vtrigger, but i feel like ultras were way more controversial in their day because of how much damage they did my favorite comeback mechanic is in guilty gear missing link because you can just so supers for free Forever.
Even in a perfectly balanced game the best player doesn't always win, assuming the skill gap between players isn't too overwhelming. The best players make mistakes too, which can be just enough to allow the second best to take a win. On the other hand even the most over tuned comeback mechanics can either be played around or abused by the best players, meaning they won' do much good in helping the worst. However these are extreme examples, the reality is most people fall somewhere in the middle where these mechanics do make a difference for better or worse. Just try to keep them subtle and maybe don't intentionally make certain archetypes weaker than others.
This is a misunderstanding of the phrase. It should more accurately be said as the better player in the moment always wins. When you make more mistakes you are the worse player in that moment and that's all game's should be about those snap shots of decision making.
This is why I think that multiple shorter rounds are better for competitive integrity without sabotaging the casual appeal of stealing a round off of a player that is better than you from time to time. Strive players all know the "Nago Round" happens from time to time. Sometimes you guess wrong and die, it happens. As long as the better player wins more consistently than the weaker one then it should level out with enough rounds.
From memory, though, it wasn't necessarily always equally split in terms of how many rounds you'd get to attack and defend. I think it depended obviously on how many rounds you wanted to play, but any odd number is impossible to split evenly I remember a casual tournament I played in and we lost the final match. In that match, I remember they ended up with one more round on attacking while we had an extra defending round. Not saying that's why we lost, i think they were just the better team but just to illustrate it didn't always shake out perfectly 50/50
on mario kart, you are actually rewarded for keeping an item that allows you to dodge a blue shell, and the majority of items you get as first are items that allow you to break a red shell. the skill also comes from knowing when to sandbag (actually wait for other people to get in front) so you can exploit the better items that you get and get back in first for just the last quarter of the last lap, as it's the only one that matters. that also protects you from most of the hate (items thrown at them) that the first player gets.
"is it intentionally kneecapping certain frustrating playstyles so that better players playing them dont frustrate worse ones?" bro, I got a league of legends advert right after you said that. THE UNIVERSE IS LISTENING, WHY WONT YOU RIOT!?
Pot/reaper main here. Even though potemkin struggles against axl, his toolkit consists of abilities that are designed to help alleviate those issues. Those options aren't as good as other characters, but they are good enough to help pot out. Even though the matchup may seem unfair, I wouldn't have it any other way. I probably wouldn't play pot if he didn't have the weaknesses he does. The game maintains competitive integrity by saying "even though your character may struggle greatly against certain others, we'll give you some ways to make up for it so that the match isn't helpless". Knowing that there IS something you can do, even if it is difficult or worse than another character's option, helps that feeling of "this matchup SUCKS and this game is unfair". I feel the same applies to Reaper in overwatch. The difference, however, is that in a game like overwatch, when a match is just not in your favor, the game doesn't give certain characters ways to make up for that bad matchup. No matter what you do as reaper, if you're up against an all-poke composition, you will not be able to do anything to the enemy team unless your team carries. Reaper cannot even exist at long range, whereas pot can use his armor/lengthy normals to try and get in. This is because overwatch expects you to swap characters to deal with bad matchups, rather than simply force your character to overcome the obstacles presented. This is why personally, I'm more a fan of the marvel rivals hero shooter balance philosophy moreso than overwatch's. I think both can do well as competitive games, but I don't like overwatch's approach to the topic you presented in this video. Does the better player win? Yeah, if they can accurately play the counterswap game. You can be the best reaper in the world, but you're not touching ana, mercy, pharah, widow.
@@DestroyerOfDoom when the game was just coming out, the roles were in a much more balanced state than they are now. due to power creep and the live service model of game design some characters are significantly more powerful than they probably should be. this leads to a more rock paper scissors style of counter swapping versus the risk management style of counter swapping that was intended. Additionally, the ability to swap your character mid match is kind of what made overwatch the phenomenon that it is now, it was a concept that hadn't really been done very well yet at the time and so it felt very fresh. however how that the game has been out for almost a decade, that freshness is now gone.
@@saftoguy2133 can you elaborate on the risk management part. I don't see how it is skillful to swap to reaper/bastion when they play monkey or go full beams against diva. it feels just cheap and unfun to face.
@@DestroyerOfDoom counter swapping was imo the most fun part of the game and the core design behind the game which is why when they enforced role queue it made me quit
@@DestroyerOfDoom Moba players. One of the worst aspect of MOBA is that you are stuck in a bad gameplay loop due to the snowballing and are persistently in a bad gameplay loop. Before you dunk on swapping, remember that all class based shooters do this. The classes are designed to be limited so teamwork is necessary and enforced OR you swap and deal with it yourself. It's actually a good design philosophy
One thing that got left out of the video is the influence of mechanics that don't necessarily favor either side, but instead introduce chaos. Something we've seen come into fashion in a BIG way in fighting games are things like higher damage interactions and weakened defensive options. This tends to favor the weaker player indirectly by increasing the role of luck - lowering the impact of strategy and care while increasing dramatic blowups and swings.
@mogalixir That's kind of the opposite of a chaos mechanic... Any intended chaos mechanic that has that effect has been completely fumbled in the implementation.
@@Ukyoprime it’s the nature of humans especially in competitive environments i knew one game where there chaos mechanic “worked” at first until people noticed little things like the way a character’s animation changed mid mechanic at first no one noticed until someone who’s really really invested pretty much picked it apart n made strategies So even the most random chaos mechanics would be mastered by the competition nature of someone simply wanting to be better
11:30 this perfectly describes sniping/quickscoping in cod and how devs have nerfed them terribly over the years because even though they are objectively a more difficult choice, it gives that player full agency over the gunfight
They arent even difficult anymore, from all the customization options for tailoring your quickscoping to the rise in player skill since it began makes quickscoping no longer the "high risk high reward" playstyle
They have never been a more difficult choice, they decrease fov which makes it easier to hit people, dont have to worry about recoil, barely have to worry about ammo, and dont have to worry about range. The only factor is flinch which is also already relevant to other guns, quickscoping has always been strong
also, if "the better player always won" then if player A was only slightly better than player B, say 5% difference in skill, then player A would win 100% of the time, which is vastly different from the 55/45 skill ratio.
or you could just say the rate at which a player is better than the other is fluctuating and that player A is better than player B 55% of the time, which imo is also closer to how human performance works
Underrated comment! The premise of "Should the better players always win" is easy to grasp and flashy, but not really solid. Of course I don't want a game where 2 players playing each other always gives the same result. There's no game that works like that.
@symptomofsouls Isn't that their point? A better player should win _more,_ but never 100% of the time, being more true the closer the opponent is in skill.
I will say that some comeback mechanics are necessary as "anti-snowball" mechanics. Imagine you're running a 100 meter dash, but when the first runner crosses the 33 meter threshold the trailing runner loses a leg and has to make up the deficit with only one leg left. That's team fighters like Marvel vs Capcom. Sure, a comeback from that position is a truly aspirational thing that can set a crowd on fire, but more often than not if you were already losing with a full team chances are you're going to continue losing when you're a man down. Sometimes the advantage gained from winning early is to great and needs something in play to counterbalance it... even though something like X-factor and Sparking are probably several steps too far.
Yeah so long as the comeback mechanic doesnt suddenly flip the power dynamic of the match on its head, they absolutely need to exist to counteract snowballing. Because if snowballing goes unchecked, then the losing player is gonna be playing sisyphus catchup simulator for the majority of the match whilst the winning party basically has a free victory just because they happened to enter advantage state first, which depending on the game either feels like its up to luck or is... literally up to luck in cases such as mario kart.
@@kevingriffith6011 imagine if the runners behind in the pack suddenly became 20% faster for no explicable reason That's a better description of comeback mechanics
@@symptomofsouls I think you missed my point entirely. I wasn't describing comeback mechanics, I was describing a snowball mechanic that should probably have a mechanic to counteract it. Losing a character in a team game like Marvel vs Capcom or Dragonball FighterZ is a *massive* disadvantage without some compensation. (Like losing a leg in a 100 meter dash). Sparking and X-Factor are absolutely too much, but some mechanic is necessary to keep the last 66% of the round worth playing.
@@kevingriffith6011 you missed my point, you are looking at it completely backwards. Comebacks do not make things more fair, they give an unfair boost to the worse player Round 1 is played at an even. If you lose, you deserve to be at a disadvantage in round 2. If you are better but lost in round 1, you will still have the skill to flip it back to even
@@symptomofsouls No, I got your point. I 100% get what a comeback mechanic is, and I agree that they are pointless in a 1v1 fighting game. That isn't what I'm talking about. In a normal fighting game, you lose round 1, then you start round 2 with full health and all your tools in tact. In a team fighting game, you start round 2 with one less assist and one less DHC super, meaning that coming back from that is *much harder* than it is in a traditional fighting game where the only thing you have to bring back is a life deficit... and often in those games the reason you lost early is because you *guessed wrong one time*.
Comeback mechanics exist in MOBAs too, the two types that come to mind are resource bonuses (losing teams/players get more xp/gold for doing things), and big objectives near the end of a match that can completely turn the tides if your team gets it In theory I like these mechanics, especially in longer games it's a nice bit of motivation to keep fighting, but in practice neither of these mechanics stop people giving up 60 seconds into a match lol
I don't think neutral map objectives are intended mainly as comback mechanics. I think the main purpose of eg. Baron and Dragons in LoL is to combat stalemates. If there was no incentive for the losing team to get out on the map, they'd just turtle up in their base. Even when ahead, it's extremely difficult to siege without baron or numbers advantage.
4:00 just want to note on the chess thing, you can really only notice an advantage with white over black unless you are around the IM level, or around top several thousand in the world. Even very good players rated around 2100-2200 FIDE (99.9 percentile) the white black advantage is negligible (as shown in games won drawn and lost)
as 2160 fide after my last tournament the white black advantage is not much visible even in high level games most of my games against equal opponent ends with a draw no matter what colour i get in my tournament i ended up having 5 draws in a row
I clicked on this video prepared to make a paragraph long counter-argument about skill-expression in competitive games, but I was neatly surprised by a very thoughtful breakdown about competitive game design in ways I hadn't considered myself. Keep doing what you're doing, man
Intresting explanation on perceived skill and player feelings particularly on certain archetypes. Part of me wants developers to stop putting in these archetypes without significantly changing them. Most of the time it feels more like checking a box then thoughtfully adding to the gameplay. I feel like you can still give those player fantasy without the frustration or at least significantly reducing it. For example people generally have no issue with "Marksman rifles" despite them having similar ranges to snipers because they lack a one shot. There is also things you can do to help feel like that power is more earned like fighting for it when the sniper spawns on the map like Halo or when it takes teamwork like Ashe w/dmg boost in Overwatch. On a similar note my casual friends had less frustration when fighting grapplers that do not do a lot of damage but get a combo off the grab or the grab is apart of the combo; big bodies with small but damaging combos also were less frustrating than the classic grappler.
sniper rifles are less of an issue when every gun is a 1 or 2 shot to begin with, especially if you headshot, but these games are not as approachable to begin with
Great question. In most games, I think the room for a good player to lose should be their gap of understanding of frivolous yet learnable aspects (zone rotation in FN, random damage reasoning in Ranked PKMN, etc).
I love mechanics like spark and burst. they add a lot to think about in combat and open up the game for interesting strategies, and baiting and punishing bursts and DPs and invulnerable supers is such a rewarding feeling. I am loving dbfz right now, so much to think about during pressure with guard cancels, reflect, spark, supers, DPs. anti-reflect tactics are so interesting to me and spark baits and punishing a guard cancel tag always feels soo devious 😈
Another thing to add for context is that the system of "How far away You are from first place" system of Mario Kart was only introduced in Mario Kart 8 and carry foward to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Meanwhile in Mario Kart 7 and before the system of Items only took into account the player's placement in the race What this translates to is that in Mario Kart 8 You could theoretically get Triple Red Shells in 2nd place if the distance between 1st and 2nd players is big enough Where as in Mario Kart 7 and before 2nd would never have access to Triple Red Shells in His Item Rotation With exception being Mario Kart 64 where for some reason getting Stars and Triple Red Shells in 2nd and 3rd place are not a rare event...
It depends… cause a lot of come back mechanics straight up ruin a game. Like the way items work in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe turns it into a toxic dumpster fire of a game where a lot of time the best option is to drive slower like a jackass in a RACING GAME to get better items for lap 3. X Factor in Marvel 3 getting progressively more powerful the less characters on a players team isn’t nearly as trash as bagging in MK8D. Both players are given the same options.
About X-Factor, theoretically at the highest level of UMvC3 the first person to lose a character loses the game. You not only lose an assist that could've helped you mount a comeback but you often times have to take an incredibly disgusting mix on incoming. Couple that with everyone their having a ToD or a TAC making any hit a kill and a single character death can snowball really easily into a loss. X-Factor is just there so you don't put down your controller after your point character dies. If there's one comeback mechanic that deserves hate in that game though it's anchor Phoenix. That character actively encourages playing the bare minimum and then sandbagging once you secure 5 bars.
Funnily enough competitive Mario kart often revolves around deciding to either try to outspeed everyone or sitting back to collect powerful items to speed ahead. Imo, very healthy way to handle it, especially since a good enough player can dodge alot of the more powerful items.
The most fair and balanced competitive games, are games where there are little to no differences in the playing field. Rocket League is an example, it's just a 3v3 on the same exact playing field with the exact same "characters". Another good example are the FPS Arena of old, where the only difference was that one player spawned closer to the mega armour and the other closer to the mega health each round. The latter were abandoned by developers and the more casual public because the skill ceiling is extremely high, you NEED to be good at it to play competitive, unlike stuff like Valorant, Overwatch or Apex, where no matter your skill level you will win games eventually due to many factors (meta, teammates, maps and so on)
ouggg quake 3 arena is so good. as a kid I played so much open arena, an open source fork of it with some changes, played for so long before I even knew what quake was 😂
@@H4VOK_YT Not really, you can outplay your enemies in so many ways in Overwatch. That being said it's heavily team-work based and a team that plays well together will likely beat another team that has individually better players but worse teamwork
@@tappajaav nah there are lower skill characters in the game that are basically crutch characters in the game the game is designed to give people an even playing field like playing tracer into Moira is fucking annoying
@@tappajaav but yeah it is a more team orientated game you can have the best aim in the world or really good gamesense but half the time it doesn't matter its reliant on u working together as a team which is basically impossible with randoms in overwatch I've had better teamwork with csgo players
I find it interesting that comeback mechanics are called out a lot more than snowball mechanics. MOBAs are one of the most snowbally genres in existence, but when Heroes of the Storm dipped its toe into serious comeback mechanics to counteract that, it became a huge point of conversation around that game. Meritocracy is a very strong lens we view this stuff through.
Thank you for the informative video! I know videos like these are likely more intended for people who are IN the fighting games scene, and i dont deny i was in that scene minorly for a long time, and considering going back. This is actually an amazing video tutorial for aspiring game developers as well! Give yourself a pat on the back, friend, you earned a subscriber out of me today! Thank you again!
I think there's a case to be made that in games there is more than the win and the loss. And those are levers you can pull that don't break competitive integrity. Something as simple as changing "You lost" to "Nice Try" can put the brakes on loss aversion at least a little. Also rewarding winning games does the opposite and makes the problem more extreme, especially if you start rewarding rank achievements, which will leave a large part of the playerbase feel left out. Dual ranked systems, which have both a matchmaking rank and a displayed rank which are only loosely related, can also be immensely frustrating, as you get matchmade against players who are higher than your displayed rank (or atleast it feels that way). And finally, most matchmaking systems come with the assumption that an unknown player is going to be of average skill, which really only works if there is a significant portion of casual games. With games always funneling people into competitive, this assumption breaks.
Before finishing the video: With the Blue Turtle Shell, part of what I think makes it not-so-great as a comeback mechanic is that it's rarely a benefit to the player throwing it, it only punishes the player in front.
I love you eddy. Can you start leaving names of the songs you use in your vids in the descriptions or comments please. Too many bangers I cant find (especially one startin at 2:11)
Amazing work on this one Edd! Your editing is improving as always and you actually managed to make something that pisses everyone off sound reasonable, which it is. Well done
It depends on what the comeback mechanic is and how it's used. I like comeback mechanics that encourage decision-making and that don't influence the outcome too much. I think Mario Kart's item system is really well-designed. The way it works is that the lower your current place in the race is, the better the items you get are. This lends itself to a whole playstyle called "sandbagging", where you hang back to collect items and try to take the win at the end. The Blue Shell is an important part of ensuring that sandbagging is viable. If the guy in 1st is able to zoom way ahead of everyone, then sandbagging is jist kneecapping yourself by letting them further their lead. With Blue Shells, their lead becomes limited, letting sandbagging players overtake them at the finish line. A somewhat similar system I like is how meter works in Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, specifically the fact that meter carries over between rounds. This gives the losing player a choice: do you use your meter to try and take back the round, or do you bring it into the next round to give yourself an advantage there? In both of these, the comeback mechanic has value at a higher level because they aren't too impactful but they can still be used strategically by skilled players to take the advantage. Conversely, X-Facter from MvC3 is the worst I've ever seen. It's a power-up sort of like Sparking from Dragonball FighterZ, but it gets stronger the more characters you've lost. This sounds like good game design, but the way it's set up encourages you to ONLY use it on your anchor, and mechanic is so powerful that it can sometimes be bad to take out your opponent's characters, especially if Vergil is involved. Rage from Smash (and the similar Aura mechanic exclusive to Lucario) is another bad comeback mechanic, but this is less due to the power and more because you don't ever have to make a decision. It just happens, and that makes it less interactive and more frustrating to be on the receiving end of.
Consider a game of tag or 'it'. In a game of tag, the rules are that you must avoid the person who is 'it' and if you become 'it', you must tag someone else so that they become 'it' before the game ends. These rules encourage players to run away from and maintain distance from whoever is 'it'. The one who is 'it' chases someone who is slow enough to be easily tagged. Eventually, the slowest player becomes 'it' and struggles to tag any of the much faster players and loses the game. The longer a player struggles to tag another player while being 'it', the more frustrated, exhausted and upset they may become. Players who are only playing to win may even bully the losing player in order to secure their victory. Players who want everyone to keep having fun playing the game for longer however, may allow the slower players to tag them. Knowing that the game will last longer if players don't bully weaker players, can lead to more players having a fair chance of becoming 'it'. The moral of this story is that when players play a game too competatively, they become so focused on winning that they forget to have fun or spoil the fun of other players. By allowing more players a chance at success, the game can more easily be played for longer.
@@SavageJarJar I think your comment is more useless, considering that the original commenter at least had some insights to share. Maybe you are indeed worse at finding suitable playmates (in real life) than rats, considering that even in dominance relationships, a pair of rats playfighting results in at most a 70% win rate for the more dominant rat (i.e. "the better player"), and the submissive rat (i.e. "the worse player") gets to win their game at least 30% of the time (Panksepp, 1981). It's fine, though. We (referring to humanity, not you specifically) are smarter than this, as we have built functional matchmaking systems for most multiplayer video games. That way, you can play to your heart's content online, against an onslaught of players as competent (or incompetent, if you happen to be bad at video games) as you are. References Panksepp, J. (1981). The ontogeny of play in rats. Developmental Psychobiology, 14(4), 327-332. [doi redacted to avoid spam filter trigger]
What about in fighting games? If a player who is objectively less skilled picks a character who hard counters the character the better player picked, it’s unlikely but possible that the less skilled player wins just based on their character choice. Should all fighting games tool their fighters so that they have an exactly 50/50 win rate with every other fighter, with no counterpicking possible? How do you do that without every option feeling the same? There are also games like Mario Party where there isn’t really a way to take out the luck-based aspect without re-working the game entirely.
Good video bro, I do however think that 9/10 times the better player will win. I feel that there is a lot of mental involved in being the better player that just cannot be analysed in a video on mechanics. From an objective mechanical and decision making based view point, then yes the numbers will show that the better player won't always win, but there are more complex things to consider if you actually want a more thorough answer. I'm not trying to say that you are wrong, just that I think there is a lot more to discuss. I think this was a very good exploration of the topic, and would for sure watch another video exploring topics like this, I think talking about how the factors discussed in this video vary from player to player. To go back to fighting games, a player could be cracked at a bad match up and win it far more than they lose it, does this mean that it is a good or bad match up? Or is the player simply very good at compensating for their weaknesses? Maybe the player with the perceived really good match up is personally just bad at fighting that character regardless of community opinion. Obviously in majority of cases your videos points hold true, but there are other factors that create exceptions like play styles. That's all I have to add to the discussion, wasn't sure how to convey what I wanted to say and sorry if I misinterpreted anything! Great video overall!!
Before video: Haven't finished the video, but I just came down to compliment your editing style. It's not flashy, but not bare bones. It's clean, stylish, and engaging. Good job. 👏👏👏 After video: Yeah this shi is fire. Video was well formatted, and I agree with a lot of the points here. You just got yourself a new subscriber.
Long term, and over a large enough sample size? Yes. Fairness is the only state where two competitors are able to compete in any meaningful sense. And although winning an unfair game several times may still be fun, losing unfair games is up there with one of my most detested gaming experiences. I'll quit a game because of sloppy balancing or easily/commonly used exploits. Got better things to do with my time than tolerate sh*tty game design.
@@LoctorakThis is just your own opinion. If everything in a game was fair nothing would be unexpected, since unexpected things give less time to react everything, and giving less time to react and figure things out is harder than just figuring it out on sight. Everything would be roughly the same and simple so that no one could have a significant advantage in any area, everything would have an easily available but not very punishing counter. Range is superior to CQ power, there is no way around this unless you specifically try to add measures to stop it. Spamming projectiles will always be superior to whatever measures of skill and reaction times you have, that's just how it Is. But counters diminish the ability of a play style to be effective, lowering the enjoyment of any play style. Someone always gets the short end of the stick. Something can be unfair and still fun, that's another issue that can't be fixed. Either for you or your enemy. Morrigan projectile spam still gives me nightmares from MvC. Balance and fairness are impossible in most games, the better player would always win and if winning is the only way to have fun then it's even worse.
@@BygoneT its a fact my boy. Fairness keeps everything fresh. Any game with an unfair advantage on one side is completely hated and boring. Hence, why most of these fps "esports games" are dying. Cope, it helps bro.
@@FrostDrift69 Esports games are the ones obsessed with keeping things fair and balanced. Games like TF2 and old CoDs are a lot more unfair, but also fun for a lot of people. Not everyone is obsessed with winning or losing in every game they play.
Great video. Your educated opinion is appreciated and the examples are interesting. I would personally separate "Rubberbanding" from "Comeback" mechanics. For example, getting a blue shell in Mario Kart is Rubberbanding because you are given exclusive tools for lagging behind. Whereas gaining more XP for killing an enemy on a killing streak is a Comeback mechanic. You weren't given anything more than your opponent, but you are more greatly rewarded if you are behind. I think the distinction is very important for competitive gaming.
One thing I think is very important in terms of comeback mechanics is: it should make the worse player feel stronger, not the better player feel weaker. Something like the star in mario kart feels a lot more fair to 1st place because, while it definitely gives an opportunity to last place to comeback and steal a win, it doesn't affect them or how they play in any way, while something like the thunder cloud feels much more frustrating because it works to make everyone else inherently worse, it forces them to slow down with no counterplay.
I believe that just because a player does perform on average better than most of the people they face off against, that doesn't mean they can't slip up or encounter someone who plays a character that counters theirs when it comes to fighting games, or someone who plays in a way they're not familiar with. Even a player who might not seem as good on the average can suddenly lock in and clutch it out. In that moment, they are the better player. Maybe not on average, but in that moment they performed better. Of course, I'm applying this to fighting games more than other competitive games. I do know in some cases that there are games that have systems in place that try to "balance" the playing field in artificial ways as to not isolate or "offend" casual players in an attempt to keep player numbers up. Comeback mechanics are definitely a point of contention. The Blue Shell as you showed in Mario Kart is one of the most obvious examples of something that actively punishes a player for being too good. Other comeback mechanics can vary in how powerful they are in decided on who wins or loses. X Factor in Marvel vs Capcom 3 is a mechanic that can turn the tide of the game in an instant. Level 3 X-Factor turns many characters into beasts, and characters like Vergil can benefit the most from X-Factors increased damage and speed. I feel that usually the better player does win, though there are mechanics in some games that skew the line between skill and luck.
Eddventure: _As many different games across multiple genres-_ Me: *CAN YOU FEEL LIFE, MOVING THROUGH YOUR MIND. OHHHHH LOOKS LIKE IT CAME BACK FOR MORE*
I think the skill based matchmaking part was kinda glossed over, but I’m definitely one of those people who really dislike it in casual modes. If the games are too even, it just feels like I’m playing a second ranked mode. That’s not very fun. Ranked modes can be extremely draining because they’re balanced in a way where you generally need to give it your best shot to win if you’re at the appropriate rank for your skill. In a casual game, I don’t mind if it’s horribly imbalanced, and I also kinda miss the way lobbies used to handle this type of imbalance. Sometimes you’d load in a CoD lobby and the first match would place the two best players in the entire lobby on the same side. You’d get destroyed that round, but it didn’t feel so bad when you see two dudes are like 10 and 0. If you stay in the lobby, the lobby would more than likely switch the two players onto different teams and balance things more accordingly. I found that became pretty fun because you sorta have this option of knowing, “well, we got stomped this round, but let’s see if we can win next round with the players being balanced out.” Even when losing, you’re given something to look forward to next match if everybody stays in the lobby. Alternatively, the introduction of SBMM seemed to coincide with the removal of lobbies altogether. You play one match with random people and then you’re forced to queue again getting completely random people. The games feel a lot closer, but they feel exactly like a ranked match just without the flashy rank up or down stuff. I much prefer the old style of, “we’re not really going to arrange this lobby so it’s fair using any reasonable metric until we get data from the first match” to SBMM which tries to arrange matches to be balanced from the start before booting you out and making you find a whole new group of people to play.
On the one hand I agree that the better player should always win, but on the other hand I could see arguments against it, since it would disincentivize a lot of lesser skilled players to play games . There’s already a lot of controversy in games nowadays , with players saying that gaming is too hard or has too many sweats , and that’s with most games currently having plenty of items to help worse players beat good players. If games were made to be perfectly ballanced ( or as balanced as possible ) to where better players were guaranteed to win , then it would hurt or maybe even kill gaming
Makes me remember the behemoths from battlefield 1, that is the proper way to make a comeback mechanic, give the losing team a literal airship or super tank and no one will complain
In the case of comeback mechanics in fighting games they usually add a lot of depth to the gameplay, the existence of the possibility of the opponent making a comeback because of low health adds a lot pf decision making as you mentioned in the video. My problem personally is that this decision aren’t fun to make, ending my combos early is a smart decision but not a fun one, I worked for my opening and I want to get the most of it. In the case of Tekken in particular having a lot of my movelist locked behind the unfavorable risk/reward against rage art is not fun. All this decision make the game deeper but less fun for me, that’s why I don’t like them. Then there is other factor, that while other videogames have comeback mechanics that are given to both players, in a lot of fighting games you can die without having the opportunity of using your comeback mechanic because your opponent used their own first.
I disagree. Intentionally dropping, or more specifically getting a read on a burst in CF is one of the most high skilled, hardest reads, most hyped things you can do in a match. It becomes unfun when players don't have the capability of factoring that possibility into their offense or defense in real time. It's essentially a completely skill expressive comeback mechanic. It's the mark of high skilled players; which is what I think a comeback mechanic should be. It should be skill-expressive, it shouldn't be automatic, and most importantly it should be able to be countered. That's a good comeback mechanic imo. If you get read, you get bodied for even trying to make a comeback. And if you get the read, you out-skilled them, period. Simple, fair, non-intrusive, but potentially game-changing.
@@BlahBlahFreeman Dropping a combo to bait a burst is completely different than dropping or finishing your combo early to locked them out of a comeback mechanic, in Tekken and P4AU you do that to not deal with the threat of them getting a resource that can shift the momentum, but you really don’t get any benefit from doing this, you only safe yourself from having to deal with a scary situation. In Blazblue or Guilty Gear the punishment for not doing this is returning to neutral, which in theory isn’t bad, because as the name suggests the game returns to a “neutral state”, but your reward from reading it is a full combo. Also burst can’t be a comeback mechanic because it’s at the beginning of the game, both players have access to it from the start and there is no way to stop someone from using them, like it happens in Tekken and P4AU, games in which you can kill your opponent without them having the opportunity to use their comeback mechanic because you used yours first. Yes, you can still bait the burst but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t use it. It’s true that the burst fills with getting hit but the same applies for your opponent, if you used burst twice in a round that doesn’t mean the opponent can’t use it twice in a round, there is characters like Tager that can take more punishment and kill with less hits, therefore being able to use burst more and not letting their opponent use it a lot, but that’s part of the balance of the game, he pays a high price for being able to do that.
@Pink_Mara Except hitting or getting hit by a burst doesn't always return the game to neutral. There's plenty of scenarios where characters can skip neutral and take their turn back in either situation. Either way, the point of reading a burst being skill expressive is that you're essentially accomplishing the same goal of keeping someone out of Rage for example. Skilled players wont burst if they know you don't have the damage to kill. So you drop intentionally to adjust the kill range. That's essentially the same core thought process of dropping in Tekken to keep someone out of rage activation. You're still adjusting the kill range on the fly. CF just has another layer of player skill added to it as opposed to the automatic activation of rage. Claiming neither of those are fun, is just kind of silly to me. Both of those scenarios highlight what fighting games are about. It's on the fly reactions, mind-gaming, and showing a fundamental mastery of the systems at work.
@@BlahBlahFreeman Of course there is characters and situations in which a character will be in a more advantageous position post-burst, but again, that’s part of the balance of the game, in theory they should be sacrificing something else. And I still don’t see where you are going with this, if you know the combo is not going to kill and because of that they are not going to burst then what's the point of ending it faster. I really like burst, I consider that it allows for very interesting decision making in all the game it exist but that’s because I don’t consider it nothing like a comeback mechanic. Also like I mentioned before, I do think Rage adds a lot of depth and decision making, I just don’t think any of the decisions I make or depth it adds it’s fun to play around with
I've never played or even been interested in playing these types of games... but game theory is mathematics, and this video puts it into an interesting perspective, even if the maths being explicitly used in this video is very, very, very light.
This is exactly the problem with complex games which are very snowbally. Such an example being league of legends. If you dont understand an unfavorable matchup and end up getting killed a few times that may just loose you and your team the whole game. This is specially frustrating because of the long duration of matches where you may be 30-40 minutes trying to claw back but failing because of their better economy. That shit aint fun for casual players. I dont want to have a bachelor and master to just enjoy the game.
Every economy is inherently snowbally but other games like overwatch arent as snowbally because you literally cant do anything with excess cash (ult points). If you have your ult you hve your ult and thats it. And ults arent that hard to get so teams may be just 30-60 seconds apart in economy instead of tens of minutes like in league. Strategic saving can just end up with you having the advantage. That just aint it in league
Why would you bring up economy in League? Economic manipulation is quite literally one of League's most egregious comeback mechanics specifically focused on evening out the game for the less skilled team. The fact that bad League players still don't understand how much the game is willing to gift you when the system even *thinks* you're behind is kind of crazy considering how old the game is now. The problem isn't comeback mechanics in League. It's the mental fortitude of players, the intentionally constantly changing power discrepancies, and the completely uneven match-making that they just got exposed for.
Should the better player ALWAYS win? Yes. If you don't care about being better, then you shouldn't care about losing to someone that's better. And if you do care, then you'll have fun earning your skill improvements and your eventual victories. The misconception with the general question is the assumption that X player is, at all times, the "best player" in the environment and will therefore never lose. This is a false pretense. The status of "better player" can literally change dynamically and within any given moment. In the span of a best of 3 set, the "better player" status might swap around a few times between the same two players going against each other. This is generally going to happen if the two players are very close to begin with, but that's how it SHOULD be. Should Justin Wong beat me every time? Yes - unless I were to eventually improve enough to finally be able to start pulling some wins. That's the whole point of ANYHING.
Comeback mechanics are definitely a weird balance imo cuz they never satisfy EVERYBODY...I think comeback mechanics on defense are better. The guts system in itself could be a comeback mechanic
Offensive comeback mechanics are kinda stupid. Why would you reward a player for losing, especially if it doesn't help if they're already getting bodied?
23:54 notably, in competitive Mario kart, a common strategy is to hold back just the right amount, to get the comeback mechanic to work exclusively in your favor
Good video but I feel like league of legends would a better reference for comeback mechanics There is the obvious stuff such as bounties but also less obvious stuff such as spilt pushing/open nexus back door
@@Someguy_245 For me a lot of it was just experimenting and always trying an idea even if I don’t know how to do it yet. If I think of an edit I try my best to make it work, and sometimes it doesn’t look great, but it gets me familiar with new tools. For example, I had never used green screens much before, but in the GGST Heavyweight video I used them as many ways as I could think of!
The better player should win but having the ability to play around the unexpected is a skill in its own right. And not just unexpectedness coming from other players, like say someone unexpectedly using an off-META strat, but unexpectedness from other things as well. and I think a lot of "Competitive" games are afraid to test that skill to push a false narrative of "Balance". It's like... playing only Fox in Smash Bros: Melee with no items. Are you truly good at Smash Bros: Melee or are you just good at Fox? Maybe you can try a few games with items on, learn all the items, learn strategy's to counter or avoid said items? Get get out of your comfort zone a bit and try new things, not just sticking to the META even though it might feel bad to lose a few games while you're learning new strategy's. I think that's what separates the "Pros" vs the "Masters". It's actually why in General I dislike E-Sports, and think developers using "Trickle down balance" strategys (I.E using feedback from the E-Sports pros) is a foolish endeavor, and in many games a lot of the best players aren't actually the E-sports "Pros", because most Pros use and plays against primarily what's in the best in the game, due to the fact that there's actual stakes to losing, like losing a large prize pool for instance.
Really enjoying your videos that cover game mechanics in detail Keep it up, maybe one thing you can cover is the death of casual online gaming, everything lately has become competitive and everyone tries to take it too seriously. Competitive games tend to cause more rage than joy, and i dont understand why the gaming landscape has changed this way
most comeback mechanics exist to account for the difference in peoples decision making and ability to learn. sometimes you do have to even the playing field so the rich don't always stay rich. the blue shell doesn't just make is so the newer players have a better chance at winning, it forces the player in first to make good decisions the entire race and keep participating in the race, it'd get boring if the person in first controlled the race the entire time.
I like to make the parallel to gambling a lot when talking about player skill and video games. Gambling doesn't require any effort and it's basically just luck, and we like gambling. It's fun. Lots of modern PvP games have gambling in one way or another - Fortnite, Call of Duty, CS/Valorant, etc. That way, we can blame losses on luck and wins on skill, even if they're likely the other way around.
You were almost at greatness. I actually think that comback mechanics are the most inportant barrier a competative player should play around. For casual players, it can act to create the uncertanty that makes games fun at low levels. For people who want to upgrade to competative, it becomes the ultimate worthyness test to see if that player is willing to learn the hard way.
I think this question depends on whether or not the game in question is team based or individual based. In team based games, like Valorant, there are games that will be lost no matter how hard you try to win, it's simply out of your control. Occasionally, you might even be the contributing factor to a loss despite your teammate playing significantly better than you. As a result, the "better" player in this case does not win, he loses for being better. So in a team based game, a mechanic involving a comeback system where the worse team has a chance seems more balanced. E.g. Spectre Divide's economy system is designed in a way in which losing doesn't mean you are screwed. You get a buff to help bring you back into the game, shields or extra money depending on the round. Now if we are talking about individual based, such as fighting games, then there should be no comeback mechanic in anyway. First of all, fighting games already do a good job and dividing skill through the neutral game, which 60%, if not more, of the player base doesn't understand. If someone is being poked over and over because they are making small mistakes, then they either need to adapt, or lose. Allowing a mechanic that allows the player losing to comeback and potentially win is going against the entire point of making a 1v1 multiplayer game. It might as well be Mario Kart at that point, or Smash with items turned on. Fighting games should be about who understands the neutral game, who has better combo routes and who can make better reads on their opponents. It shouldn't be about getting shit on the entire game, only to press one button and suddenly have a chance of winning the game because you force 50/50 mixups which your opponent guessed wrong. 50/50 are fine, because you can make a read, he will do this attack, I will block it and punish. Having a button or mechanic that removes the forcing guess to reverse the attacking and defending dynamic of the game creates more of a casual, arcade style environment rather than a competitive environment. Ultimately, regardless of the opinions of everyone, the ultimate decision of said mechanic in question is up the developers of the game, not the player base. As said in the video, if you removed half of the cast from Guilty Gear, you are left with a stale cast, and lose a lot of players who would've played those removed characters. This goes with all games. At the end of the day, gaming is a business and thus the intent behind a game is usually to sell copies of it (or skins in free games usually). Thus, if they dont have these certain features, the revenue from the game would decrease and the player base will be reduced to less than ideal, hindering future dlc sales or other microtransactions that will be added. Personally, I long for the day there is a good, high quality game that is strictly skill based and does not involve some weird gimmick, or comeback mechanic that allows for someone of less skill to have a chance at winning. That day will be a glorious day for those who truly enjoy the competitive experience, but just cant find it in modern games with their lame gimmicks that give advantage to players of less skill by being so easy to use, a toddler could do it. Until that day, however, the question is not, should the better player always win? It's should losing feel more rewarding?
I take issue with the framing of "Unorthodox playstyles are nerfed for the sake of weaker players". The grappler promise is doing stupid damage without having to learn a combo, so devs crank the damage up specifically FOR the casual player, and then have to bring them back down to earth with problems that only appear at mid to high levels of play, like no okizeme, low strike damage, or high resource demands. Saying Zoners are low tier really seems like a stretch, however. Guile, Pre-strive Faust, xx testament, Ramlethal, Two years of Happy Chaos, Venom, JP, even Akuma in SF6 will spend long periods in a match throwing fireballs. Those characters are naturally weaker at lower levels as people who just try to win from fullscreen will inevitably get sloppy and get jumped in for half their health. As a counterpoint, when melee banned the Ice Climbers infinite, it wasn't because it made them too strong, it was because it made for gameplay that the tournament organizers didn't want to incentivize, seemingly the same as the story of banning Gon in T3
Yes... But people need to understand that the better player IS the one who uses and abuses the system mechanics in place. This includes comeback mechanics. If you win because of a comeback mechanic, you were the better player.
I agree. I understand the video and what it's trying to communicate, but yeah, the question "should the better player win?" is technically a contradiction of terms, since the player who wins is, by definition, better (or at least played better in that game).
That was a question I was going to pose: "regardless of the mechanics, if you win, doesn't that always make you the better player?" But then I realized that question kind of misses the point. Fairness and integrity is a real concern when constructing the rules for a game, and if winning was all that mattered, none of these things such as balance, competitive integrity, and all of those other things wouldn't be addressed? "Being the better player" has no set definition; is it winning? Or is it winning a certain way under certain conditions? We don't really know, and I believe the answer to this evolves. Game developers are figuring out the answer to that based about what we whine, bitch, and moan about in competitive fighting games so we don't whine, bitch, and moan about it anymore.
@@AnthanKrufix no and thats a very stupid thing to say, seriously thats a terrible take And that not being true is actually a really good thing for sports (and esports)
You touched on the difference between precirved and actually skill for frustrating mechanics. The thing i find most interesting about the "Better player" is that sometimes there is a disconnect between what the devs think is skill and the players think is skill. Often leads to the community complaining that the better player doesn't doesn't win more than any of the deliberately unfair mechanics in the game
there's definitely a need for these comeback mechanics but there's also a need to keep them in check for games with a high viewership for the competitive scene a game that is 100% fair is boring but if a player's win doesn't feel deserved it really hurts competitive integrity
![SUPER LUIGI GALAXY | Super Mario Galaxy [Ep. 1L]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/2X-wu-bv6k8/mqdefault.jpg)
All my wins are deserved and
I never lose my opponent just cheated
- Waluigi
Wah. This guy's onto something.
Based
Delita grindset
The cheese is just too strong
I think comeback mechanics should exist in games I'm bad at and not exist in games I'm good at
That's my biggest issue with computer games. It's just so hard to convince people that the computer is now in the garbage can, and that it was completely an accident the way that it could just happen with a tabletop game.
Actual legit comebacks are more epic when there is no game assist doe....
But it certainly would be great to have it as an option for casual play.
This so much this
Also people who pull a comeback on me and my team are all dirty cheaters, while if it's me and my team who pulled off a comeback we did it with our hard earned capital G gamer sweat
What happens when you get better at a game
I think that examples of well designed comebacks in games are ones that leave an avenue to win if your opponent misplays their lead. For instance having multiple layers of towers in moba games means that even when you get behind or lose lane there is a prolonged period of time between loosing lane, and having your fountains destroyed, during this time your opponent might make misplays that will allow you to come back, or your team synergy might kickin asymmetrically giving you an avenue to win if you drag the game out. Another good example is split map situation in rts games. Its very possible in rts games to be unlucky in the opening game and get behind due to an unfortunate build order matchup or missing peice of critical scouting intel. However often rts games have a decent deffenders advantage that might let a player drag the game out. If their opponent is unable to finish them off they can sometimes split the map in very late stages of the game and finaly equalize on economy and tech from their its anyone's game to win.
I think other types of comeback mechanics are kind of bad though. For instance coin flip comebacks like making dark templars after a failed early game in starcraft. or fighting game characters with annoying one shot 50/50 situations. Or like the video mentioned mechanics that reward the losing team with free resources.
Comebacks mechanics should allow matches to be decided by multiple skill checks instead of just the earliest ones always resulting in a win or a loss. Bad comeback mechanics are ones that instead feal like they have reasonable potential to rob the far more clearly skilled player of victory.
No because i would never loose and thats lame
Oh shit the good gamer I guess I have no choice to believe you
@@eddventure6214THE LIVING LEGEND GOODGAMER1419 IS HERE!!!!
Lmao
You already lost at spelling.
Lololol
this reminds me of an observed behavior in rats, they like to play fighting eachother, in which the bigger rat could always win, but if they do so the smaller rat just leaves altogether, so a percentage of the time the bigger rat will let the other win, ensuring long lasting fun for both
that’s adorable
`so when your younger sibling 'wins' 1/20 matches
That is called self handicapping and it happens in all mammals, from humans, dogs, cats, horses.
The thing is its supposed to be a social contract between those parties, typically unspoken. Its not meant to be an involuntary ingame mechanic.
This is what I do with my younger brother a lot during our Smash bros matches. But when I tried it in Pokemon I underestimated confuse ray.
Comeback mechanics often exist to remove snowball effect
When slight wins at the start (that are usually quite random) lead to advantage that leads to bigger wins and so on
So comeback mechanics actually do the opposite - allow stronger players to win more often, as they're less dependent on random events at the start
The most obvious examples are dota and cs
In dota gold advantage leads to more gold advantage, so comeback mechanic is must-have to compensate it.
In cs losing rounds means you have no money to buy on the next round, meaning you're losing next round too. Therefore you must have losing money bonus, or otherwise every lost round mean that you lost not this round, but next also next two, what is very unfair.
The irony here is that in this video they talk about player perception of skill and strength and how those things might not necessarily be accurate to the reality of whats actually happening, while then later talking about comeback mechanics from an angle that I personally can't help but read as essentially the same thing in terms of how players perceive them
I feel like i hear people complain about comeback mechanics a lot more if they haven't gotten a full grasp on how these mechanics actually end up working out in practice, which they only get a feel for over time. kinda like the axl and pot example that was earlier in the video
A lot of the time comeback mechanics do a lot more than just reward mistakes and punish advantages, but if youre a player on the receiving end of a comeback mechanic and you end up in the losing position, that probably wont matter to you in the moment. To a lot of people it doesnt matter whether mario kart's spiny shell exists to break through the insane advantage that comes with first place or to even the skill gap or what else, what matters to people is that they were in first place, a position that is supposed to be earned through skill, only for that to be taken away in a matter which you could not do much about. So of course it feels frustrating and possibly unfair to people a lot of the time to get hit by one, and yet if the spiny shell were to simply not exist, the game would ironically end up more frustrating and unfair for everybody except the person who entered first place the fastest. Or in other words like you said, snowballing.
Unless a comeback mechanic is implemented horribly, they need to exist to avoid snowballing, which would otherwise just destroy a lot of the fun when it becomes obvious 10% through a match that the remaining 90% are gonna be a slow slog to get even again at best, or entirely pointless because theres no way for you to actually win at worst.
This is a great point, comeback mechanics may bring the chance of winning closer to 50/50 but A) almost never past it and B) this is highly desirable to prevent early variance from compounding.
@@nettalie4435 Just to add about Mario Kart: existing in first place would be extremely easy without the blue/spiny shell because the majority of other items will be affecting the middle of the pack more. For example, if someone in last place gets a Bullet Bill or a Star, who are the racers most likely to get directly hit? Certainly not first place: they're the furthest possible away. It's everyone starting from 11th place up to the middle of the pack. The back is where all the chaos is that first place doesn't have to deal with. If blue shells are removed, then whoever lucks out in the first lap (or even just the first half of the first lap) getting hit the least by items and/or gets an early lucky item can just ride that momentum all the way to the end without contest.
@@TheAmberFang And this only gets more interesting if you factor in items like the super horn, which would make 1st almost entirely uncontestable if coins weren't something introduced in the very same game (One might even speculate that one of these items only exists in the first place item pool because of the other...)
Is anyone under the age of 25 capable of spelling the words “lose” and “losing” correctly?
Core-A gaming and you releasing a video today? What a comeback mechanic.
I know it's only tangentially related to the topic, but I want to kill the "Zoners are Snipers" analogy. The only thing they have in common is range, and the way they frustrate players is completely different. Snipers are robbery characters. They are frustrating because they instantly kill you for the slightest mistake, the range is only part of the frustration.
Zoners, in my mind, are 'constructor' characters, the ones that build sentry guns that lock down angles. The entire purpose of the class is to reduce the number of options the enemy player has at their disposal, which a lot of players find extremely frustrating to play against. The sentry gun is no danger to you if you don't approach, but the act of trying to approach and enforce your own game plan is often shut down by it, much like a zoner and their wall of projectiles.
Funny enough, the constructor type character is another one that tends to be intentionally underpowered, both because they slow the game down significantly by existing and also because they tend to be better the worse the players are.
👍
As a setplay zoner main who always plays engineer classes in shooters... yeah, you get it
Wow you really suck at respecting sight lines & wanna pretend it’s everyone else’s fault not yours.
It's actually in the name: "zoner" refers to how they create "zones" that the opponent doesn't want to be in. You don't want to be in the space a projectile is approaching. You don't want to be where long normals can hit you. The "constructor" characters, as you put them, similarly function through area-denial: creating spaces that you do not want to exist in.
Edit: Though, I suppose one could argue that the threat of a sniper has a similar effect of area denial, since the main way to play around a sniper is to simply not be in the sight line. A main point of frustration with snipers is that this is often the ONLY form of counterplay.
My sonics are booming my kicks are flashing and my Axls are lowing and you gotta deal with all of it. Signed zoner lover ❤️
When I win, I'm simply better and my opponent is trash. When I lose, I'm a normal human being and my opponent is a nerd who spends all his time playing the game.
Real
Okay, Low tier god.
Comeback mechanics are more than just a counter to loss aversion, the real reason they need to exist is as a balance to natural Win More states. Mario Kart has a win more mechanic built in: A lot of it's offensive options have a range limit. So someone who drives away from the pack is pretty immune from most of the tools, and therefore can easily compound their win by not having to focus on dodging attacks. To counter this, there are attacks that target the front player, and the rear players get more wide reaching attacks to pull them back into a competitive gamesate.
Win more situations are problematic because they worsen all the emotions of losing, but also they're just not fun in general. The competition has left the game and the rest is just a formality. So comeback mechanics' primary purpose is to prevent a player from getting into a invincible state.
yes, this reminds me of an article about rts games about why defenders advantage needs to exist to counterbalance the inherent snowball nature of those games
i think the underlying philosophy is very similar and can also be relevant in other games which tend to compound the advantage of the winning player
The main time it's a problem is if it's an unavoidable hazard or hazards that are used as you near the finish line, and you were having a really good run in 1st half the match or the whole match. If things like this happened early in the race, but not near the end where the unavoidable usually pushes you to 4th or 5th, it would much less obnoxious. You might got a higher rank if you stayed in 2nd, or 3rd. It's obvious the result is the game choosing to make you lose, and since it happens at the end there's not a chance to make it up. If they'd done some of these things I wouldn't complain. The combination makes it obnoxious, and badly designed.
My one argument to this was the inclusion of these mechanisms in some form to GT Sport - Gran turismo prides itself on being a realism focused "racing sim" (they don't even call their game a game, it's specifically a "sim"), so for them to have a rubber-banding mechanic made absolutely no sense to me in that context. Like... yeah, it's a realistic sim so if I drive my car significantly faster, I expect to dominate that race - it's my reward for taming the driving physics and practising laps again and again just like IRL.
Any other racing "game" it wouldn't bother me. But if you're going to make a big deal about how realistic you are, don't include features that are unrealistic. I don't care why you think it's beneficial or helpful, if it's not realistic then remove it or call yourself a game and stop blabbing about how true to life you are.
Anyway didn't mean this to sound like I'm having a go at anyone here, sorry. Clearly still very salty about my experiences with GT Sport 😅
@@Loctorak In fairness, that is a very lazy way of implementing that.
If you want a perfect example of a game that doesnt effectively counter the "win more" scenario… Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart.
Basically the same game as MK, with one core change: the blue shell can be outpaced. If youre good enough, you can have it chasing you from lap 1 turn 1 all the way to the end and still win convincingly.
Go into any lobby and see how one guy will usually just speed away and become untouchable. It'd be hilarious if it wasnt so deeply frustrating, *especially* since at a certain point the game basically just gives everyone the big comeback items all the time and the race grinds to a halt in terms of action. Its genuinely gamebreaking
In my opinion, a zoner is much more similar to a machine gunner instead of a sniper. A sniper is more similar to Slayer.
A machine gun locks down a position for a really, really long time. And when you think you caught him out, he's moved and is now shooting you in the back.
Absolutely. A zoner has to keep winning neutral in order to win. A sniper often only needs to win it once.
I feel like you're constantly playing against something like a Heavy, while a Sniper usually jumpscares you by shooting you.
Imagine if something like Samus' Missile was as unsafe as a Mario Forward Smash, with the same amount of reward. That's more similar to a Sniper.
back shots🤨
prob just cause snipers are more common in shooting games
I'll take what another commenter said that they're a bit closer to the Engineer archetype, with their heavy focus on area denial
I think if you imagine a spectrum of skill from the absolute worst to the absolute best, literally no one is interested in a game where the bottom 10% is a threat to the top 10%.
But also, if tournaments never waver from the same top few people in the same order, that's also pretty uninspiring.
So these kinds of design elements become an element of noise that shakes up the outcome in people of similar skill. Done well, this makes the game more engaging for everyone involved, players and spectators alike - as long as the perception is that they don't erase an obvious skill gap.
Uninspiring maybe, but consider being a challenger rank in league of legends. The turnover in that rank is there, but season after season you find the same players working to the top and playing against each other constantly. And like... what's the alternative? You can't put in any lower ranks than master or at most high diamond to "shake things up", those players will lose 999 games out of 1000 against these players.
So it's lame in some ways, but that's also the nature of competing at the absolute top or bottom of the spectrum.
@Loctorak Yeah, I'm mostly arguing that non-"best player wins"/-hyperdeterministic elements should be present enough that there should be surprises for who beats who within a set of top players, but not TOO much that you lose track of who is actually in that set.
The 2nd best player has got to be able to beat the best player some of the time. Or the 4th best player beating the 2nd best. How far should that extend? I dunno. Probably not far, but a little of it needs to be there to keep things fresh.
Best way to incorporate that isn't to add rubber banding or comeback mechanics, but design a game where making a mistake is punishable by good players. That way the best player will usually win, but they can lose if they have an off match
At the same time, pretty much no game puts the bottom 10% against the top 10%. Big tournaments are pretty much the top 0.1% against the top 0.1% and any well done matchmaking will put you in a match with people roughly your level.
Not exactly your level, because the game can't factor everyone in for it. There might be a player with a perfectly equal rating, but they aren't playing right now. Or they live on the other side of the world and one of you would have to deal with 300 ping. So the system has to compromise. Like having players within a certain skill range, within the same region.
And it only gets worse in team games, because suddenly it's not your and the opponents rating, but to find 10 people that can be put into two almost equally skilled teams. And there is a difference between being mechanically skilled at the game and being skilled at the teamplay. A team of friends with voice chat can beat a team of random but better players without issues. They won't be able to 1v1 engagements, but they'd have the coordination to never get into a 1v1 situation.
What's funny about Mario Kart in regards to comeback mechanics is that depending on the track, it can be more competitively viable at a top level to hang back and collect some powerful items first and then use them to make a comeback, rather than just try to go as fast as you can the whole time. The eternal battle of bagging vs frontrunning. Tracks with lots of spots where you can get a shortcut by going over off-road while ignoring the speed debuff by using a speed item generally reward bagging more, but there are some stages where frontrunning is preferred
I think Luigi Circuit Wii is a good example of where having a Mushroom would allow you to win way more easily than if you didn't have one, thanks to it's big shortcut.
does that ever lead to situations where nobody wants to be in front and you just get a stalemate with nobody moving?
@@a_commenter no. Because bagging vs front running is a very good balance. Mainly that they kinda even eachother out. The more people are bagging the worse it gets, for example if at the start of the race 3 people frontrun and the other 9 bag your odds of getting the item you want goes down a lot because most of the items have caps. For example there can only be 2 bullets and one shock at a time, so as soon as people pick them up the rest of the baggers will only get mushrooms which are significantly worse.
@@a_commenterNo, because Mario Kart 8 actually bases item distribution off of distance from the frontrunner instead of rank (so, like, instead of “these items are possible if you are in 10th place or lower”, it’s “these items are possible if you are 8000 units or more away from the player in first”). So, like, even if you’re technically in last place, if everyone’s bunched up together you won’t get good items because the actual distance gap isn’t big enough. Only if there is a substantial number of units between you and the first place player will you get better items. This means that hanging back to get better items is only works as a strategy if there is at least one person moving forward.
It’s called sandbagging
I'd say that a well-designed comeback mechanic is most important to counterbalance positive feedback loops. If the game's mechanics allow a player's initial victories to spiral - for example, a MOBA player winning a fight with an opponent means they can level up and buy items while their opponent is waiting to respawn and be more likely to win the next fight - then a comeback mechanic can let those initial victories still matter (since the advantaged player has still made progress towards their final win state that the disadvantaged player hasn't) without them disproportionately influencing future contests.
For such a mechanic to function, of course, it needs to have an impact equal to or smaller than the recurring advantage gained from the positive feedback loop, so that falling behind is never comparatively advantageous. Basically, it is a bold and dangerous design choice to incentivise a player to fall behind at the start of a game deliberately so you can ride the comeback mechanic to victory. Sandbagging in Mario Kart to get better items is probably the best-known example of this. I still remember when playing with my friends on the DS version that everyone wanted to be one of the last to get an item box from the first group on Cheep Cheep Beach because getting mushrooms or a star would let you drive through the water around the S-shaped sandbar and cut off a massive section of track; the result is that we would stop right before those item boxes and essentially play a game of chicken there, sometimes for minutes. Fun in its own way, perhaps, but probably not the developers' intention!
Incidentally, I think this might be why competitive fighting game communities dislike comeback mechanics - fighting game design typically does not confer any lasting advantage for making progress towards their final win state beyond locking an opponent into a combo for the duration of your next few strikes, so there aren't any major positive feedback loops to counterbalance.
In fighting games, if you manage to get a knockdown, you can push a mix-up on the opponent. If they win enough interactions, they could get their opponent in the corner. The opponent needs good defensive options in order to counterract this.
yo not a competitive 2d fighter or shooter player or whatever here, this may seem weird but i have some analogy that perfectly represents this balancing act of positive feedback loops and comeback mechanics. Its like when riding a bike and controlling your tilt to keep your balance. Its much easier to sway left and right then to try to be dead on with your balance. also like, wearing thicker clothes in a colder or aircon place. you wear something that keeps your warmth more but someone who gets hot easily just need to wear less, instead of expecting the room to be fine tuned to a temperature to please as many people as possible. oh maybe bowling falls into this analogy too. combining applying spin to the ball and having oil on the lanes ultimately helps mitigate inaccuracy by making it easier to be precise.
Likewise, it is easier for game developers to tune a game to be fair and balanced if they have competing mechanics like those mentioned. anyway hope u have a good day or night thank you for coming to my ted talk
persona 4 arena was a weird 2-touch game because people stopped their combos right before awakening to make sure you don't get free meter and guts
and i know people used to get upset about vtrigger, but i feel like ultras were way more controversial in their day because of how much damage they did
my favorite comeback mechanic is in guilty gear missing link because you can just so supers for free Forever.
Even in a perfectly balanced game the best player doesn't always win, assuming the skill gap between players isn't too overwhelming. The best players make mistakes too, which can be just enough to allow the second best to take a win. On the other hand even the most over tuned comeback mechanics can either be played around or abused by the best players, meaning they won' do much good in helping the worst. However these are extreme examples, the reality is most people fall somewhere in the middle where these mechanics do make a difference for better or worse. Just try to keep them subtle and maybe don't intentionally make certain archetypes weaker than others.
This is a misunderstanding of the phrase. It should more accurately be said as the better player in the moment always wins. When you make more mistakes you are the worse player in that moment and that's all game's should be about those snap shots of decision making.
@@lordmew5 Yeah, not skill as "the better player overall", but skill as "the one who plays better this match"
This is why I think that multiple shorter rounds are better for competitive integrity without sabotaging the casual appeal of stealing a round off of a player that is better than you from time to time. Strive players all know the "Nago Round" happens from time to time. Sometimes you guess wrong and die, it happens. As long as the better player wins more consistently than the weaker one then it should level out with enough rounds.
4:35 not entirely correct. TF2 switches sides in asymetrical gamemodes.
From memory, though, it wasn't necessarily always equally split in terms of how many rounds you'd get to attack and defend. I think it depended obviously on how many rounds you wanted to play, but any odd number is impossible to split evenly
I remember a casual tournament I played in and we lost the final match. In that match, I remember they ended up with one more round on attacking while we had an extra defending round. Not saying that's why we lost, i think they were just the better team but just to illustrate it didn't always shake out perfectly 50/50
@@Loctorak This is not how default Valve casual works and you played a weird game lol
@@Loctorak You played on a custom ruleset.
on mario kart, you are actually rewarded for keeping an item that allows you to dodge a blue shell, and the majority of items you get as first are items that allow you to break a red shell.
the skill also comes from knowing when to sandbag (actually wait for other people to get in front) so you can exploit the better items that you get and get back in first for just the last quarter of the last lap, as it's the only one that matters. that also protects you from most of the hate (items thrown at them) that the first player gets.
"is it intentionally kneecapping certain frustrating playstyles so that better players playing them dont frustrate worse ones?" bro, I got a league of legends advert right after you said that. THE UNIVERSE IS LISTENING, WHY WONT YOU RIOT!?
Eddventure killed my dad
@@King-vo7qu Allegedly
Well duh your dad wasn't the better player
Bro is Dan
Hi son, it's dad and I can confirm: am deceased.
Well maybe he should get better
Pot/reaper main here.
Even though potemkin struggles against axl, his toolkit consists of abilities that are designed to help alleviate those issues. Those options aren't as good as other characters, but they are good enough to help pot out. Even though the matchup may seem unfair, I wouldn't have it any other way. I probably wouldn't play pot if he didn't have the weaknesses he does. The game maintains competitive integrity by saying "even though your character may struggle greatly against certain others, we'll give you some ways to make up for it so that the match isn't helpless". Knowing that there IS something you can do, even if it is difficult or worse than another character's option, helps that feeling of "this matchup SUCKS and this game is unfair".
I feel the same applies to Reaper in overwatch. The difference, however, is that in a game like overwatch, when a match is just not in your favor, the game doesn't give certain characters ways to make up for that bad matchup. No matter what you do as reaper, if you're up against an all-poke composition, you will not be able to do anything to the enemy team unless your team carries. Reaper cannot even exist at long range, whereas pot can use his armor/lengthy normals to try and get in. This is because overwatch expects you to swap characters to deal with bad matchups, rather than simply force your character to overcome the obstacles presented. This is why personally, I'm more a fan of the marvel rivals hero shooter balance philosophy moreso than overwatch's. I think both can do well as competitive games, but I don't like overwatch's approach to the topic you presented in this video. Does the better player win? Yeah, if they can accurately play the counterswap game. You can be the best reaper in the world, but you're not touching ana, mercy, pharah, widow.
Stopped ow just because of this. Who thought counter swapping was fun
@@DestroyerOfDoom when the game was just coming out, the roles were in a much more balanced state than they are now. due to power creep and the live service model of game design some characters are significantly more powerful than they probably should be. this leads to a more rock paper scissors style of counter swapping versus the risk management style of counter swapping that was intended.
Additionally, the ability to swap your character mid match is kind of what made overwatch the phenomenon that it is now, it was a concept that hadn't really been done very well yet at the time and so it felt very fresh. however how that the game has been out for almost a decade, that freshness is now gone.
@@saftoguy2133 can you elaborate on the risk management part. I don't see how it is skillful to swap to reaper/bastion when they play monkey or go full beams against diva. it feels just cheap and unfun to face.
@@DestroyerOfDoom counter swapping was imo the most fun part of the game and the core design behind the game which is why when they enforced role queue it made me quit
@@DestroyerOfDoom Moba players. One of the worst aspect of MOBA is that you are stuck in a bad gameplay loop due to the snowballing and are persistently in a bad gameplay loop.
Before you dunk on swapping, remember that all class based shooters do this. The classes are designed to be limited so teamwork is necessary and enforced OR you swap and deal with it yourself. It's actually a good design philosophy
One thing that got left out of the video is the influence of mechanics that don't necessarily favor either side, but instead introduce chaos.
Something we've seen come into fashion in a BIG way in fighting games are things like higher damage interactions and weakened defensive options. This tends to favor the weaker player indirectly by increasing the role of luck - lowering the impact of strategy and care while increasing dramatic blowups and swings.
The issue with chaos mechanics is they can make the top player undefeatable to the point where everyone else is just wasting their time.
@mogalixir That's kind of the opposite of a chaos mechanic... Any intended chaos mechanic that has that effect has been completely fumbled in the implementation.
@@Ukyoprime not really it could simply be mastered with time and understanding of the mechanics
@@AYAKXSHI ...then it's not a "chaos" mechanic, by definition.
@@Ukyoprime it’s the nature of humans especially in competitive environments i knew one game where there chaos mechanic “worked” at first until people noticed little things like the way a character’s animation changed mid mechanic at first no one noticed until someone who’s really really invested pretty much picked it apart n made strategies
So even the most random chaos mechanics would be mastered by the competition nature of someone simply wanting to be better
Great video! I might just send this to my Game Design teacher to implement in his curriculum, it's that good.
im honestly debating whether i should switch to evil and scary mario after watching this vid
Are you truly the better player, if you can't beat the comeback mechanic?
if you're just slightly better... you'll still lose to the slightly worse player.
@@erx3197 I think that just falls into the margin of error and overall wont gatekeep you from your deserved rank.
If you're not also given that comeback mechanic you're quite literally fighting an unfair battle so in most case yes you are the better player still.
Are you truly the better player, if you can't win due to the other guy coming to your house and cutting your hands off in your sleep?
Yes. Just not much better.
11:30 this perfectly describes sniping/quickscoping in cod and how devs have nerfed them terribly over the years because even though they are objectively a more difficult choice, it gives that player full agency over the gunfight
They arent even difficult anymore, from all the customization options for tailoring your quickscoping to the rise in player skill since it began makes quickscoping no longer the "high risk high reward" playstyle
quickscoping hasn't been that hard since black ops 2 but it's definetly easier in games with the new gunsmith system
They have never been a more difficult choice, they decrease fov which makes it easier to hit people, dont have to worry about recoil, barely have to worry about ammo, and dont have to worry about range. The only factor is flinch which is also already relevant to other guns, quickscoping has always been strong
Not always winning a matchup despite being a better player is a bit akin to a skinner box, so i think it inherently makes a game more addictive.
also, if "the better player always won" then if player A was only slightly better than player B, say 5% difference in skill, then player A would win 100% of the time, which is vastly different from the 55/45 skill ratio.
or you could just say the rate at which a player is better than the other is fluctuating and that player A is better than player B 55% of the time, which imo is also closer to how human performance works
Underrated comment! The premise of "Should the better players always win" is easy to grasp and flashy, but not really solid. Of course I don't want a game where 2 players playing each other always gives the same result. There's no game that works like that.
Not true, even the best players make mistakes that a worse player can capitalize on
@symptomofsouls Isn't that their point? A better player should win _more,_ but never 100% of the time, being more true the closer the opponent is in skill.
@@symptomofsoulsthe question is should the better player always win so yes, even I minor skill difference would be a 100% win or lose rate
I will say that some comeback mechanics are necessary as "anti-snowball" mechanics. Imagine you're running a 100 meter dash, but when the first runner crosses the 33 meter threshold the trailing runner loses a leg and has to make up the deficit with only one leg left. That's team fighters like Marvel vs Capcom. Sure, a comeback from that position is a truly aspirational thing that can set a crowd on fire, but more often than not if you were already losing with a full team chances are you're going to continue losing when you're a man down. Sometimes the advantage gained from winning early is to great and needs something in play to counterbalance it... even though something like X-factor and Sparking are probably several steps too far.
Yeah so long as the comeback mechanic doesnt suddenly flip the power dynamic of the match on its head, they absolutely need to exist to counteract snowballing.
Because if snowballing goes unchecked, then the losing player is gonna be playing sisyphus catchup simulator for the majority of the match whilst the winning party basically has a free victory just because they happened to enter advantage state first, which depending on the game either feels like its up to luck or is... literally up to luck in cases such as mario kart.
@@kevingriffith6011 imagine if the runners behind in the pack suddenly became 20% faster for no explicable reason
That's a better description of comeback mechanics
@@symptomofsouls I think you missed my point entirely. I wasn't describing comeback mechanics, I was describing a snowball mechanic that should probably have a mechanic to counteract it.
Losing a character in a team game like Marvel vs Capcom or Dragonball FighterZ is a *massive* disadvantage without some compensation. (Like losing a leg in a 100 meter dash). Sparking and X-Factor are absolutely too much, but some mechanic is necessary to keep the last 66% of the round worth playing.
@@kevingriffith6011 you missed my point, you are looking at it completely backwards. Comebacks do not make things more fair, they give an unfair boost to the worse player
Round 1 is played at an even. If you lose, you deserve to be at a disadvantage in round 2. If you are better but lost in round 1, you will still have the skill to flip it back to even
@@symptomofsouls No, I got your point. I 100% get what a comeback mechanic is, and I agree that they are pointless in a 1v1 fighting game. That isn't what I'm talking about.
In a normal fighting game, you lose round 1, then you start round 2 with full health and all your tools in tact. In a team fighting game, you start round 2 with one less assist and one less DHC super, meaning that coming back from that is *much harder* than it is in a traditional fighting game where the only thing you have to bring back is a life deficit... and often in those games the reason you lost early is because you *guessed wrong one time*.
Comeback mechanics exist in MOBAs too, the two types that come to mind are resource bonuses (losing teams/players get more xp/gold for doing things), and big objectives near the end of a match that can completely turn the tides if your team gets it
In theory I like these mechanics, especially in longer games it's a nice bit of motivation to keep fighting, but in practice neither of these mechanics stop people giving up 60 seconds into a match lol
I don't think neutral map objectives are intended mainly as comback mechanics. I think the main purpose of eg. Baron and Dragons in LoL is to combat stalemates. If there was no incentive for the losing team to get out on the map, they'd just turtle up in their base. Even when ahead, it's extremely difficult to siege without baron or numbers advantage.
games shouldnt have to be accountable for peoples gaming attitudes unless theyre p2w microtransaction brothels
Fantastic video! Love the depth. Expected to let it play in the background, but it held my focus entirely.
4:00 just want to note on the chess thing, you can really only notice an advantage with white over black unless you are around the IM level, or around top several thousand in the world. Even very good players rated around 2100-2200 FIDE (99.9 percentile) the white black advantage is negligible (as shown in games won drawn and lost)
as 2160 fide after my last tournament
the white black advantage is not much visible even in high level games
most of my games against equal opponent ends with a draw no matter what colour i get
in my tournament i ended up having 5 draws in a row
@@randomguy-dky yeah I said for even players rated 2100+ the advantage is negligible, or doesn’t really have an effect on the outcomes of games.
I clicked on this video prepared to make a paragraph long counter-argument about skill-expression in competitive games, but I was neatly surprised by a very thoughtful breakdown about competitive game design in ways I hadn't considered myself. Keep doing what you're doing, man
Intresting explanation on perceived skill and player feelings particularly on certain archetypes. Part of me wants developers to stop putting in these archetypes without significantly changing them. Most of the time it feels more like checking a box then thoughtfully adding to the gameplay. I feel like you can still give those player fantasy without the frustration or at least significantly reducing it.
For example people generally have no issue with "Marksman rifles" despite them having similar ranges to snipers because they lack a one shot. There is also things you can do to help feel like that power is more earned like fighting for it when the sniper spawns on the map like Halo or when it takes teamwork like Ashe w/dmg boost in Overwatch. On a similar note my casual friends had less frustration when fighting grapplers that do not do a lot of damage but get a combo off the grab or the grab is apart of the combo; big bodies with small but damaging combos also were less frustrating than the classic grappler.
sniper rifles are less of an issue when every gun is a 1 or 2 shot to begin with, especially if you headshot, but these games are not as approachable to begin with
Great question. In most games, I think the room for a good player to lose should be their gap of understanding of frivolous yet learnable aspects (zone rotation in FN, random damage reasoning in Ranked PKMN, etc).
I love mechanics like spark and burst. they add a lot to think about in combat and open up the game for interesting strategies, and baiting and punishing bursts and DPs and invulnerable supers is such a rewarding feeling. I am loving dbfz right now, so much to think about during pressure with guard cancels, reflect, spark, supers, DPs. anti-reflect tactics are so interesting to me and spark baits and punishing a guard cancel tag always feels soo devious 😈
Another thing to add for context is that the system of "How far away You are from first place" system of Mario Kart was only introduced in Mario Kart 8 and carry foward to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
Meanwhile in Mario Kart 7 and before the system of Items only took into account the player's placement in the race
What this translates to is that in Mario Kart 8 You could theoretically get Triple Red Shells in 2nd place if the distance between 1st and 2nd players is big enough
Where as in Mario Kart 7 and before 2nd would never have access to Triple Red Shells in His Item Rotation
With exception being Mario Kart 64 where for some reason getting Stars and Triple Red Shells in 2nd and 3rd place are not a rare event...
It depends… cause a lot of come back mechanics straight up ruin a game. Like the way items work in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe turns it into a toxic dumpster fire of a game where a lot of time the best option is to drive slower like a jackass in a RACING GAME to get better items for lap 3.
X Factor in Marvel 3 getting progressively more powerful the less characters on a players team isn’t nearly as trash as bagging in MK8D. Both players are given the same options.
About X-Factor, theoretically at the highest level of UMvC3 the first person to lose a character loses the game. You not only lose an assist that could've helped you mount a comeback but you often times have to take an incredibly disgusting mix on incoming. Couple that with everyone their having a ToD or a TAC making any hit a kill and a single character death can snowball really easily into a loss. X-Factor is just there so you don't put down your controller after your point character dies.
If there's one comeback mechanic that deserves hate in that game though it's anchor Phoenix. That character actively encourages playing the bare minimum and then sandbagging once you secure 5 bars.
Can't let Stevie Blunder fly under the radar like that, god tier pun
I was so proud of it
@@eddventure6214 Just wait till Stevie sees that, oh wait. Never mind.
Funnily enough competitive Mario kart often revolves around deciding to either try to outspeed everyone or sitting back to collect powerful items to speed ahead. Imo, very healthy way to handle it, especially since a good enough player can dodge alot of the more powerful items.
The most fair and balanced competitive games, are games where there are little to no differences in the playing field. Rocket League is an example, it's just a 3v3 on the same exact playing field with the exact same "characters". Another good example are the FPS Arena of old, where the only difference was that one player spawned closer to the mega armour and the other closer to the mega health each round. The latter were abandoned by developers and the more casual public because the skill ceiling is extremely high, you NEED to be good at it to play competitive, unlike stuff like Valorant, Overwatch or Apex, where no matter your skill level you will win games eventually due to many factors (meta, teammates, maps and so on)
ouggg quake 3 arena is so good. as a kid I played so much open arena, an open source fork of it with some changes, played for so long before I even knew what quake was 😂
Overwatch is ridiculously biased to low skill players it's almost like it punished you for being good at the game.
@@H4VOK_YT Not really, you can outplay your enemies in so many ways in Overwatch.
That being said it's heavily team-work based and a team that plays well together will likely beat another team that has individually better players but worse teamwork
@@tappajaav nah there are lower skill characters in the game that are basically crutch characters in the game the game is designed to give people an even playing field like playing tracer into Moira is fucking annoying
@@tappajaav but yeah it is a more team orientated game you can have the best aim in the world or really good gamesense but half the time it doesn't matter its reliant on u working together as a team which is basically impossible with randoms in overwatch I've had better teamwork with csgo players
I find it interesting that comeback mechanics are called out a lot more than snowball mechanics. MOBAs are one of the most snowbally genres in existence, but when Heroes of the Storm dipped its toe into serious comeback mechanics to counteract that, it became a huge point of conversation around that game. Meritocracy is a very strong lens we view this stuff through.
ok bro ngl being able to arrange your chess pieces however you want sounds sick asf
comeback mechanics are swag, even though Nintendo hand coded it so blue shells can only spawn when i'm in first
2:40 may be the greatest edit i've ever seen you make, that shit had me dying. thank you for another incredible video ed
babe wake up new eddventure just dropped
Thank you for the informative video! I know videos like these are likely more intended for people who are IN the fighting games scene, and i dont deny i was in that scene minorly for a long time, and considering going back. This is actually an amazing video tutorial for aspiring game developers as well! Give yourself a pat on the back, friend, you earned a subscriber out of me today! Thank you again!
I think there's a case to be made that in games there is more than the win and the loss. And those are levers you can pull that don't break competitive integrity. Something as simple as changing "You lost" to "Nice Try" can put the brakes on loss aversion at least a little. Also rewarding winning games does the opposite and makes the problem more extreme, especially if you start rewarding rank achievements, which will leave a large part of the playerbase feel left out. Dual ranked systems, which have both a matchmaking rank and a displayed rank which are only loosely related, can also be immensely frustrating, as you get matchmade against players who are higher than your displayed rank (or atleast it feels that way). And finally, most matchmaking systems come with the assumption that an unknown player is going to be of average skill, which really only works if there is a significant portion of casual games. With games always funneling people into competitive, this assumption breaks.
Before finishing the video: With the Blue Turtle Shell, part of what I think makes it not-so-great as a comeback mechanic is that it's rarely a benefit to the player throwing it, it only punishes the player in front.
7:06 "fights for the SOL goal" while a Sol mirror match occurs
Great video Ed, love the presentation and editing! Some of your best!
I love you eddy. Can you start leaving names of the songs you use in your vids in the descriptions or comments please. Too many bangers I cant find (especially one startin at 2:11)
The one at 2:11 is River Stage from Marvel vs Capcom 2
@@Toxic-PyroThanks man
I’m ngl I judged this video by the thumbnail and title for way too long. Really entertaining game design idea to think about, great vid
yes... always yes. Unless the "worse" Player is a child or a child like person, then they can take a W enough times to keep them engaged.
Amazing work on this one Edd! Your editing is improving as always and you actually managed to make something that pisses everyone off sound reasonable, which it is. Well done
It depends on what the comeback mechanic is and how it's used. I like comeback mechanics that encourage decision-making and that don't influence the outcome too much.
I think Mario Kart's item system is really well-designed. The way it works is that the lower your current place in the race is, the better the items you get are. This lends itself to a whole playstyle called "sandbagging", where you hang back to collect items and try to take the win at the end. The Blue Shell is an important part of ensuring that sandbagging is viable. If the guy in 1st is able to zoom way ahead of everyone, then sandbagging is jist kneecapping yourself by letting them further their lead. With Blue Shells, their lead becomes limited, letting sandbagging players overtake them at the finish line.
A somewhat similar system I like is how meter works in Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, specifically the fact that meter carries over between rounds. This gives the losing player a choice: do you use your meter to try and take back the round, or do you bring it into the next round to give yourself an advantage there?
In both of these, the comeback mechanic has value at a higher level because they aren't too impactful but they can still be used strategically by skilled players to take the advantage.
Conversely, X-Facter from MvC3 is the worst I've ever seen. It's a power-up sort of like Sparking from Dragonball FighterZ, but it gets stronger the more characters you've lost. This sounds like good game design, but the way it's set up encourages you to ONLY use it on your anchor, and mechanic is so powerful that it can sometimes be bad to take out your opponent's characters, especially if Vergil is involved.
Rage from Smash (and the similar Aura mechanic exclusive to Lucario) is another bad comeback mechanic, but this is less due to the power and more because you don't ever have to make a decision. It just happens, and that makes it less interactive and more frustrating to be on the receiving end of.
I Love youre pfp omg
Consider a game of tag or 'it'.
In a game of tag, the rules are that you must avoid the person who is 'it' and if you become 'it', you must tag someone else so that they become 'it' before the game ends.
These rules encourage players to run away from and maintain distance from whoever is 'it'. The one who is 'it' chases someone who is slow enough to be easily tagged. Eventually, the slowest player becomes 'it' and struggles to tag any of the much faster players and loses the game.
The longer a player struggles to tag another player while being 'it', the more frustrated, exhausted and upset they may become. Players who are only playing to win may even bully the losing player in order to secure their victory.
Players who want everyone to keep having fun playing the game for longer however, may allow the slower players to tag them. Knowing that the game will last longer if players don't bully weaker players, can lead to more players having a fair chance of becoming 'it'.
The moral of this story is that when players play a game too competatively, they become so focused on winning that they forget to have fun or spoil the fun of other players. By allowing more players a chance at success, the game can more easily be played for longer.
Useless paragraph that adds no meaning to the video. You're welcome.
@@SavageJarJar I think your comment is more useless, considering that the original commenter at least had some insights to share.
Maybe you are indeed worse at finding suitable playmates (in real life) than rats, considering that even in dominance relationships, a pair of rats playfighting results in at most a 70% win rate for the more dominant rat (i.e. "the better player"), and the submissive rat (i.e. "the worse player") gets to win their game at least 30% of the time (Panksepp, 1981).
It's fine, though. We (referring to humanity, not you specifically) are smarter than this, as we have built functional matchmaking systems for most multiplayer video games. That way, you can play to your heart's content online, against an onslaught of players as competent (or incompetent, if you happen to be bad at video games) as you are.
References
Panksepp, J. (1981). The ontogeny of play in rats. Developmental Psychobiology, 14(4), 327-332. [doi redacted to avoid spam filter trigger]
@@TheOneWhoHasABadName yap didn’t read
So basically- should skilled players be better at a game than people who are not as good as them?
Should we even be asking this question? Seriously...
What about in fighting games? If a player who is objectively less skilled picks a character who hard counters the character the better player picked, it’s unlikely but possible that the less skilled player wins just based on their character choice. Should all fighting games tool their fighters so that they have an exactly 50/50 win rate with every other fighter, with no counterpicking possible? How do you do that without every option feeling the same?
There are also games like Mario Party where there isn’t really a way to take out the luck-based aspect without re-working the game entirely.
@@swaanm Yes lol fighting games constantly try to tweak their characters for balance
Nice video, loved the talking and the editing, made me chuckle several times!
Keep it up
Good video bro, I do however think that 9/10 times the better player will win. I feel that there is a lot of mental involved in being the better player that just cannot be analysed in a video on mechanics.
From an objective mechanical and decision making based view point, then yes the numbers will show that the better player won't always win, but there are more complex things to consider if you actually want a more thorough answer. I'm not trying to say that you are wrong, just that I think there is a lot more to discuss.
I think this was a very good exploration of the topic, and would for sure watch another video exploring topics like this, I think talking about how the factors discussed in this video vary from player to player. To go back to fighting games, a player could be cracked at a bad match up and win it far more than they lose it, does this mean that it is a good or bad match up? Or is the player simply very good at compensating for their weaknesses? Maybe the player with the perceived really good match up is personally just bad at fighting that character regardless of community opinion. Obviously in majority of cases your videos points hold true, but there are other factors that create exceptions like play styles.
That's all I have to add to the discussion, wasn't sure how to convey what I wanted to say and sorry if I misinterpreted anything! Great video overall!!
great example is Snake Eyes in SF4 beating Sanford Kelly's Sagat and then Xians Dhalsim back to back
Before video: Haven't finished the video, but I just came down to compliment your editing style. It's not flashy, but not bare bones. It's clean, stylish, and engaging. Good job. 👏👏👏
After video: Yeah this shi is fire. Video was well formatted, and I agree with a lot of the points here. You just got yourself a new subscriber.
I'm sorry I cannot focus on whatever you're saying at 10:10 Luigi is a fucking MONSTER dude I have replayed this clip 3 times and I cannot do it
This is a perfect explanation of this concept. I wish i could word it the same way you did. Excellent none the less!
Better question:
Is Fairness Fun?
Long term, and over a large enough sample size? Yes. Fairness is the only state where two competitors are able to compete in any meaningful sense. And although winning an unfair game several times may still be fun, losing unfair games is up there with one of my most detested gaming experiences. I'll quit a game because of sloppy balancing or easily/commonly used exploits. Got better things to do with my time than tolerate sh*tty game design.
@@LoctorakThis is just your own opinion. If everything in a game was fair nothing would be unexpected, since unexpected things give less time to react everything, and giving less time to react and figure things out is harder than just figuring it out on sight.
Everything would be roughly the same and simple so that no one could have a significant advantage in any area, everything would have an easily available but not very punishing counter.
Range is superior to CQ power, there is no way around this unless you specifically try to add measures to stop it. Spamming projectiles will always be superior to whatever measures of skill and reaction times you have, that's just how it Is. But counters diminish the ability of a play style to be effective, lowering the enjoyment of any play style.
Someone always gets the short end of the stick.
Something can be unfair and still fun, that's another issue that can't be fixed. Either for you or your enemy.
Morrigan projectile spam still gives me nightmares from MvC.
Balance and fairness are impossible in most games, the better player would always win and if winning is the only way to have fun then it's even worse.
@@BygoneT its a fact my boy. Fairness keeps everything fresh. Any game with an unfair advantage on one side is completely hated and boring. Hence, why most of these fps "esports games" are dying. Cope, it helps bro.
@@FrostDrift69 Esports games are the ones obsessed with keeping things fair and balanced. Games like TF2 and old CoDs are a lot more unfair, but also fun for a lot of people. Not everyone is obsessed with winning or losing in every game they play.
@@FrostDrift69 fps esports are crazy about competitive fairness and they’re dying because its boring.
Great video. Your educated opinion is appreciated and the examples are interesting. I would personally separate "Rubberbanding" from "Comeback" mechanics. For example, getting a blue shell in Mario Kart is Rubberbanding because you are given exclusive tools for lagging behind. Whereas gaining more XP for killing an enemy on a killing streak is a Comeback mechanic. You weren't given anything more than your opponent, but you are more greatly rewarded if you are behind. I think the distinction is very important for competitive gaming.
One thing I think is very important in terms of comeback mechanics is: it should make the worse player feel stronger, not the better player feel weaker.
Something like the star in mario kart feels a lot more fair to 1st place because, while it definitely gives an opportunity to last place to comeback and steal a win, it doesn't affect them or how they play in any way, while something like the thunder cloud feels much more frustrating because it works to make everyone else inherently worse, it forces them to slow down with no counterplay.
I believe that just because a player does perform on average better than most of the people they face off against, that doesn't mean they can't slip up or encounter someone who plays a character that counters theirs when it comes to fighting games, or someone who plays in a way they're not familiar with. Even a player who might not seem as good on the average can suddenly lock in and clutch it out. In that moment, they are the better player. Maybe not on average, but in that moment they performed better.
Of course, I'm applying this to fighting games more than other competitive games. I do know in some cases that there are games that have systems in place that try to "balance" the playing field in artificial ways as to not isolate or "offend" casual players in an attempt to keep player numbers up. Comeback mechanics are definitely a point of contention.
The Blue Shell as you showed in Mario Kart is one of the most obvious examples of something that actively punishes a player for being too good. Other comeback mechanics can vary in how powerful they are in decided on who wins or loses. X Factor in Marvel vs Capcom 3 is a mechanic that can turn the tide of the game in an instant. Level 3 X-Factor turns many characters into beasts, and characters like Vergil can benefit the most from X-Factors increased damage and speed.
I feel that usually the better player does win, though there are mechanics in some games that skew the line between skill and luck.
1:10 Valorant is funny for that.
Eddventure: _As many different games across multiple genres-_
Me: *CAN YOU FEEL LIFE, MOVING THROUGH YOUR MIND. OHHHHH LOOKS LIKE IT CAME BACK FOR MORE*
I think the skill based matchmaking part was kinda glossed over, but I’m definitely one of those people who really dislike it in casual modes.
If the games are too even, it just feels like I’m playing a second ranked mode. That’s not very fun. Ranked modes can be extremely draining because they’re balanced in a way where you generally need to give it your best shot to win if you’re at the appropriate rank for your skill.
In a casual game, I don’t mind if it’s horribly imbalanced, and I also kinda miss the way lobbies used to handle this type of imbalance. Sometimes you’d load in a CoD lobby and the first match would place the two best players in the entire lobby on the same side. You’d get destroyed that round, but it didn’t feel so bad when you see two dudes are like 10 and 0. If you stay in the lobby, the lobby would more than likely switch the two players onto different teams and balance things more accordingly. I found that became pretty fun because you sorta have this option of knowing, “well, we got stomped this round, but let’s see if we can win next round with the players being balanced out.” Even when losing, you’re given something to look forward to next match if everybody stays in the lobby.
Alternatively, the introduction of SBMM seemed to coincide with the removal of lobbies altogether. You play one match with random people and then you’re forced to queue again getting completely random people. The games feel a lot closer, but they feel exactly like a ranked match just without the flashy rank up or down stuff. I much prefer the old style of, “we’re not really going to arrange this lobby so it’s fair using any reasonable metric until we get data from the first match” to SBMM which tries to arrange matches to be balanced from the start before booting you out and making you find a whole new group of people to play.
Great video. Explanation and visuals were well done
On the one hand I agree that the better player should always win, but on the other hand I could see arguments against it, since it would disincentivize a lot of lesser skilled players to play games . There’s already a lot of controversy in games nowadays , with players saying that gaming is too hard or has too many sweats , and that’s with most games currently having plenty of items to help worse players beat good players. If games were made to be perfectly ballanced ( or as balanced as possible ) to where better players were guaranteed to win , then it would hurt or maybe even kill gaming
I mean, not like deathstreaks were a thing in the og modern warfare 2 and 3 for any beginner gamer trying to catch up with the experienced ones.
@@ArjunTheRageGuy true their was death streaks back then, but what does that have to do with my point?
@@Jordanthecool7 Prolly about the skilled and the less skilled players thing
@@Jordanthecool7 bro are you like, dumb? LMAO 🤪
Makes me remember the behemoths from battlefield 1, that is the proper way to make a comeback mechanic, give the losing team a literal airship or super tank and no one will complain
17:27 wait this derfla person is goated
#derfla
What a production, incredible video!
In the case of comeback mechanics in fighting games they usually add a lot of depth to the gameplay, the existence of the possibility of the opponent making a comeback because of low health adds a lot pf decision making as you mentioned in the video. My problem personally is that this decision aren’t fun to make, ending my combos early is a smart decision but not a fun one, I worked for my opening and I want to get the most of it. In the case of Tekken in particular having a lot of my movelist locked behind the unfavorable risk/reward against rage art is not fun. All this decision make the game deeper but less fun for me, that’s why I don’t like them. Then there is other factor, that while other videogames have comeback mechanics that are given to both players, in a lot of fighting games you can die without having the opportunity of using your comeback mechanic because your opponent used their own first.
I disagree.
Intentionally dropping, or more specifically getting a read on a burst in CF is one of the most high skilled, hardest reads, most hyped things you can do in a match. It becomes unfun when players don't have the capability of factoring that possibility into their offense or defense in real time. It's essentially a completely skill expressive comeback mechanic. It's the mark of high skilled players; which is what I think a comeback mechanic should be. It should be skill-expressive, it shouldn't be automatic, and most importantly it should be able to be countered. That's a good comeback mechanic imo.
If you get read, you get bodied for even trying to make a comeback. And if you get the read, you out-skilled them, period.
Simple, fair, non-intrusive, but potentially game-changing.
@@BlahBlahFreeman Dropping a combo to bait a burst is completely different than dropping or finishing your combo early to locked them out of a comeback mechanic, in Tekken and P4AU you do that to not deal with the threat of them getting a resource that can shift the momentum, but you really don’t get any benefit from doing this, you only safe yourself from having to deal with a scary situation. In Blazblue or Guilty Gear the punishment for not doing this is returning to neutral, which in theory isn’t bad, because as the name suggests the game returns to a “neutral state”, but your reward from reading it is a full combo. Also burst can’t be a comeback mechanic because it’s at the beginning of the game, both players have access to it from the start and there is no way to stop someone from using them, like it happens in Tekken and P4AU, games in which you can kill your opponent without them having the opportunity to use their comeback mechanic because you used yours first. Yes, you can still bait the burst but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t use it. It’s true that the burst fills with getting hit but the same applies for your opponent, if you used burst twice in a round that doesn’t mean the opponent can’t use it twice in a round, there is characters like Tager that can take more punishment and kill with less hits, therefore being able to use burst more and not letting their opponent use it a lot, but that’s part of the balance of the game, he pays a high price for being able to do that.
@Pink_Mara Except hitting or getting hit by a burst doesn't always return the game to neutral. There's plenty of scenarios where characters can skip neutral and take their turn back in either situation.
Either way, the point of reading a burst being skill expressive is that you're essentially accomplishing the same goal of keeping someone out of Rage for example. Skilled players wont burst if they know you don't have the damage to kill. So you drop intentionally to adjust the kill range.
That's essentially the same core thought process of dropping in Tekken to keep someone out of rage activation. You're still adjusting the kill range on the fly. CF just has another layer of player skill added to it as opposed to the automatic activation of rage.
Claiming neither of those are fun, is just kind of silly to me. Both of those scenarios highlight what fighting games are about. It's on the fly reactions, mind-gaming, and showing a fundamental mastery of the systems at work.
@@BlahBlahFreeman Of course there is characters and situations in which a character will be in a more advantageous position post-burst, but again, that’s part of the balance of the game, in theory they should be sacrificing something else.
And I still don’t see where you are going with this, if you know the combo is not going to kill and because of that they are not going to burst then what's the point of ending it faster. I really like burst, I consider that it allows for very interesting decision making in all the game it exist but that’s because I don’t consider it nothing like a comeback mechanic. Also like I mentioned before, I do think Rage adds a lot of depth and decision making, I just don’t think any of the decisions I make or depth it adds it’s fun to play around with
I've never played or even been interested in playing these types of games... but game theory is mathematics, and this video puts it into an interesting perspective, even if the maths being explicitly used in this video is very, very, very light.
This is exactly the problem with complex games which are very snowbally. Such an example being league of legends. If you dont understand an unfavorable matchup and end up getting killed a few times that may just loose you and your team the whole game. This is specially frustrating because of the long duration of matches where you may be 30-40 minutes trying to claw back but failing because of their better economy. That shit aint fun for casual players. I dont want to have a bachelor and master to just enjoy the game.
Every economy is inherently snowbally but other games like overwatch arent as snowbally because you literally cant do anything with excess cash (ult points). If you have your ult you hve your ult and thats it. And ults arent that hard to get so teams may be just 30-60 seconds apart in economy instead of tens of minutes like in league. Strategic saving can just end up with you having the advantage. That just aint it in league
Why would you bring up economy in League? Economic manipulation is quite literally one of League's most egregious comeback mechanics specifically focused on evening out the game for the less skilled team. The fact that bad League players still don't understand how much the game is willing to gift you when the system even *thinks* you're behind is kind of crazy considering how old the game is now.
The problem isn't comeback mechanics in League. It's the mental fortitude of players, the intentionally constantly changing power discrepancies, and the completely uneven match-making that they just got exposed for.
Should the better player ALWAYS win?
Yes.
If you don't care about being better, then you shouldn't care about losing to someone that's better. And if you do care, then you'll have fun earning your skill improvements and your eventual victories.
The misconception with the general question is the assumption that X player is, at all times, the "best player" in the environment and will therefore never lose. This is a false pretense. The status of "better player" can literally change dynamically and within any given moment. In the span of a best of 3 set, the "better player" status might swap around a few times between the same two players going against each other. This is generally going to happen if the two players are very close to begin with, but that's how it SHOULD be.
Should Justin Wong beat me every time? Yes - unless I were to eventually improve enough to finally be able to start pulling some wins. That's the whole point of ANYHING.
Comeback mechanics are definitely a weird balance imo cuz they never satisfy EVERYBODY...I think comeback mechanics on defense are better. The guts system in itself could be a comeback mechanic
Offensive comeback mechanics are kinda stupid. Why would you reward a player for losing, especially if it doesn't help if they're already getting bodied?
23:54 notably, in competitive Mario kart, a common strategy is to hold back just the right amount, to get the comeback mechanic to work exclusively in your favor
Good video but I feel like league of legends would a better reference for comeback mechanics
There is the obvious stuff such as bounties but also less obvious stuff such as spilt pushing/open nexus back door
Beautiful editing. Any tips to get better?
@@Someguy_245 For me a lot of it was just experimenting and always trying an idea even if I don’t know how to do it yet. If I think of an edit I try my best to make it work, and sometimes it doesn’t look great, but it gets me familiar with new tools. For example, I had never used green screens much before, but in the GGST Heavyweight video I used them as many ways as I could think of!
@@eddventure6214 Thanks. I'll try to keep that in mind
Damn Edd! Editing was on fire this vid!
The better player should win but having the ability to play around the unexpected is a skill in its own right. And not just unexpectedness coming from other players, like say someone unexpectedly using an off-META strat, but unexpectedness from other things as well. and I think a lot of "Competitive" games are afraid to test that skill to push a false narrative of "Balance". It's like... playing only Fox in Smash Bros: Melee with no items. Are you truly good at Smash Bros: Melee or are you just good at Fox? Maybe you can try a few games with items on, learn all the items, learn strategy's to counter or avoid said items? Get get out of your comfort zone a bit and try new things, not just sticking to the META even though it might feel bad to lose a few games while you're learning new strategy's. I think that's what separates the "Pros" vs the "Masters". It's actually why in General I dislike E-Sports, and think developers using "Trickle down balance" strategys (I.E using feedback from the E-Sports pros) is a foolish endeavor, and in many games a lot of the best players aren't actually the E-sports "Pros", because most Pros use and plays against primarily what's in the best in the game, due to the fact that there's actual stakes to losing, like losing a large prize pool for instance.
Really enjoying your videos that cover game mechanics in detail
Keep it up, maybe one thing you can cover is the death of casual online gaming, everything lately has become competitive and everyone tries to take it too seriously.
Competitive games tend to cause more rage than joy, and i dont understand why the gaming landscape has changed this way
most comeback mechanics exist to account for the difference in peoples decision making and ability to learn. sometimes you do have to even the playing field so the rich don't always stay rich.
the blue shell doesn't just make is so the newer players have a better chance at winning, it forces the player in first to make good decisions the entire race and keep participating in the race, it'd get boring if the person in first controlled the race the entire time.
The better player should always have the best chances of winning. But victory should never be a forgone conclusion.
no because it's funnier if they lose at the last second
I like to make the parallel to gambling a lot when talking about player skill and video games.
Gambling doesn't require any effort and it's basically just luck, and we like gambling. It's fun. Lots of modern PvP games have gambling in one way or another - Fortnite, Call of Duty, CS/Valorant, etc.
That way, we can blame losses on luck and wins on skill, even if they're likely the other way around.
You were almost at greatness. I actually think that comback mechanics are the most inportant barrier a competative player should play around. For casual players, it can act to create the uncertanty that makes games fun at low levels. For people who want to upgrade to competative, it becomes the ultimate worthyness test to see if that player is willing to learn the hard way.
I think this question depends on whether or not the game in question is team based or individual based. In team based games, like Valorant, there are games that will be lost no matter how hard you try to win, it's simply out of your control. Occasionally, you might even be the contributing factor to a loss despite your teammate playing significantly better than you. As a result, the "better" player in this case does not win, he loses for being better. So in a team based game, a mechanic involving a comeback system where the worse team has a chance seems more balanced. E.g. Spectre Divide's economy system is designed in a way in which losing doesn't mean you are screwed. You get a buff to help bring you back into the game, shields or extra money depending on the round. Now if we are talking about individual based, such as fighting games, then there should be no comeback mechanic in anyway. First of all, fighting games already do a good job and dividing skill through the neutral game, which 60%, if not more, of the player base doesn't understand. If someone is being poked over and over because they are making small mistakes, then they either need to adapt, or lose. Allowing a mechanic that allows the player losing to comeback and potentially win is going against the entire point of making a 1v1 multiplayer game. It might as well be Mario Kart at that point, or Smash with items turned on. Fighting games should be about who understands the neutral game, who has better combo routes and who can make better reads on their opponents. It shouldn't be about getting shit on the entire game, only to press one button and suddenly have a chance of winning the game because you force 50/50 mixups which your opponent guessed wrong. 50/50 are fine, because you can make a read, he will do this attack, I will block it and punish. Having a button or mechanic that removes the forcing guess to reverse the attacking and defending dynamic of the game creates more of a casual, arcade style environment rather than a competitive environment.
Ultimately, regardless of the opinions of everyone, the ultimate decision of said mechanic in question is up the developers of the game, not the player base. As said in the video, if you removed half of the cast from Guilty Gear, you are left with a stale cast, and lose a lot of players who would've played those removed characters. This goes with all games. At the end of the day, gaming is a business and thus the intent behind a game is usually to sell copies of it (or skins in free games usually). Thus, if they dont have these certain features, the revenue from the game would decrease and the player base will be reduced to less than ideal, hindering future dlc sales or other microtransactions that will be added.
Personally, I long for the day there is a good, high quality game that is strictly skill based and does not involve some weird gimmick, or comeback mechanic that allows for someone of less skill to have a chance at winning. That day will be a glorious day for those who truly enjoy the competitive experience, but just cant find it in modern games with their lame gimmicks that give advantage to players of less skill by being so easy to use, a toddler could do it.
Until that day, however, the question is not, should the better player always win? It's should losing feel more rewarding?
I take issue with the framing of "Unorthodox playstyles are nerfed for the sake of weaker players".
The grappler promise is doing stupid damage without having to learn a combo, so devs crank the damage up specifically FOR the casual player, and then have to bring them back down to earth with problems that only appear at mid to high levels of play, like no okizeme, low strike damage, or high resource demands.
Saying Zoners are low tier really seems like a stretch, however. Guile, Pre-strive Faust, xx testament, Ramlethal, Two years of Happy Chaos, Venom, JP, even Akuma in SF6 will spend long periods in a match throwing fireballs. Those characters are naturally weaker at lower levels as people who just try to win from fullscreen will inevitably get sloppy and get jumped in for half their health.
As a counterpoint, when melee banned the Ice Climbers infinite, it wasn't because it made them too strong, it was because it made for gameplay that the tournament organizers didn't want to incentivize, seemingly the same as the story of banning Gon in T3
the transition at 3:04 was unbelievable
Yes... But people need to understand that the better player IS the one who uses and abuses the system mechanics in place. This includes comeback mechanics.
If you win because of a comeback mechanic, you were the better player.
Nah, thats bullshit and you are stupid
It isnt like that and thats actually something good for sports (and esports)
I agree. I understand the video and what it's trying to communicate, but yeah, the question "should the better player win?" is technically a contradiction of terms, since the player who wins is, by definition, better (or at least played better in that game).
That was a question I was going to pose: "regardless of the mechanics, if you win, doesn't that always make you the better player?" But then I realized that question kind of misses the point. Fairness and integrity is a real concern when constructing the rules for a game, and if winning was all that mattered, none of these things such as balance, competitive integrity, and all of those other things wouldn't be addressed? "Being the better player" has no set definition; is it winning? Or is it winning a certain way under certain conditions? We don't really know, and I believe the answer to this evolves. Game developers are figuring out the answer to that based about what we whine, bitch, and moan about in competitive fighting games so we don't whine, bitch, and moan about it anymore.
@@AnthanKrufix no and thats a very stupid thing to say, seriously thats a terrible take
And that not being true is actually a really good thing for sports (and esports)
True, but games are meant to be tests of specific skills. At some point certain skills have to be prioritized over others.
You touched on the difference between precirved and actually skill for frustrating mechanics. The thing i find most interesting about the "Better player" is that sometimes there is a disconnect between what the devs think is skill and the players think is skill. Often leads to the community complaining that the better player doesn't doesn't win more than any of the deliberately unfair mechanics in the game
there's definitely a need for these comeback mechanics but there's also a need to keep them in check for games with a high viewership for the competitive scene
a game that is 100% fair is boring but if a player's win doesn't feel deserved it really hurts competitive integrity
This is why I play singleplayer games. I see good arguments for both sides of the question and I simply don't find fun in either.
0:46 No you didnt 😭
I had to pause the video, sigh and question reality at that point
At least he didn't say it begs the question
Shorthand: Yes
Longhand: Yes if it's a 1v1 team v team is a diff story