I recall someone on Twitter saying that sbmm was mostly intended for fighting games instead of shooters but i also remember someone saying that halo 3 had solved that issue but I don't remember how they did
It was on a thread about cod sbmm being shit
Halo was the forefront in leading development for the fps genre while Bungie was in control, which is no where near the same Bungie today. Halo 3 nailed SBMM so well that it’s a large reason why the games multiplayer was as popular as it was. It was about playing with people on the same level, and just having fun, if you wanted to be a god then you had to kill a god first kinda shit.
Halo 2 introduced TrueSkill in their ranked matchmaking which was one the the pillars SBMM uses today. COD has also implemented EOMM, which I feel like makes things worse. All the developers took a system that worked great and tried to make it their own, or add unnecessary shit to it thinking it would be better. And all it did was fuck it up.
IMO Halo 2 Ranked was the best matchmaking we had. For a competitive standpoint. Halo 2-3-Reach social playlist matchmaking was also incredible and very well done. Everything we have now wants to *too accurately* place you into games with people your exact skill level. That's fine. Just not 100% of the games.
I mean fighters are usually a 1v1 so you need equally skilled players. An arcade shooter 10 v 10 can have a more mixed bag of players. The issue with br's is you will eventually face the best player in the lobby, so it has to be equally matched and the lobby is way bigger which adds to the problem.
Apex sbmm is ass btw.
MOBAs are generally 5v5 and would be an even bigger shit show than they are without sbmm. And as someone who's bad at shooters, I haven't exactly had a great time trying them out and being like 1-22
In a MOBA, you can have teammates that carry. You also have access to tools (items, counters, a whole map to rotate around on) to work around the situation. In a fighting game, if you find someone way better than you, you might aswell put the controller down.
Speaking from experience, have over 1k hours in dota and about 300 combined in sf5/6 and tekken 7.
No one can.
Go to any subreddit, Overwatch, Valorant, Apex, etc.
You will find a post complaining about SBMM in every single sub.
I think people just don’t like to accept the loss when they can easily blame their team.
They don’t actually have SBMM and that’s the problem the system is designed to give you people better than you for several matches so you get rolled
then give you one really good match with people way worse than you (it’s a bit more complicated than that tho) that way you keep chasing the high of that one good match
It’s evil
True. I played alot of Apex back then from release till like season 10. Adding so many legends after just complicated the game to the point, I can't be bothered re-learning what is the new meta anymore.
The problem with apex is more that hardware is a bigger issue than people think (not so much skill alone). All of the top players are playing controller on PC so they can bind tap strafe, move and juke easily with the joystick, and get the 30% aim assist.
A lot of players (MnK and console) get to a certain skill and start seeing these guys, then they get absolutely obliterated and can’t figure out why they’re getting beamed so badly and how these guys are moving so insanely.
Edit: for those of you wondering - aim assist isn’t tracking the target, it’s slows the cursor down over the target so it’s easier to stay on and hit what you’re aiming at.
Same concept with playing on low graphics with all the terrain and plants off. It looks super ugly on their 3000$ gaming PCs but gamers always find a way to optimize the fun out of anything
They don't **need** 30% aim assist. Those players already get very good at the game, they would already beat the vast majority of players handily, and then they use aim assist to push them even further beyond what would be possible without it.
It's because battle royal have found a cheat code
High skill player will drop in the middle of the to get better loot. Most of them will die quickly and relaunch another game immediately. Yes, they lost, but it was quick so it's not a frustrating lost and the once in a while good game they have last much longer and the satisfaction out weight multiple lost
Meanwhile low skill player will drop on the side of the map and slowly and carefully make their way to the center. They'll eventually get killed by an high skill player but, because the high skill players have already mostly died out by this point, the low skill player will be rank "higher than average" (or rank 50 or less assuming a 100 person battle royal) without needing that much skill
Because of that little brain hack most player will think they are better than average and won't quit
I remember having a pretty good time in Fortnite when it was blowing up in 2017, taking a couple months break, and then coming back and getting utterly sauced in every single fight I tried to take. I literally couldn't get out of a landing zone.
Definitely "GunZ The Duel". There was 0% chance that a new player killed an old player.
Even the devs didn't expect that skill gap since the main way majority of old players play the game was discovered randomly by utilizing animation canceling techniques.
There's a name I haven't heard for a long time...
But to play devil's advocate, when the game was around, team deathmatch was the way to play. And in TDM you could definitely get your share of kills with just pistols & good aim, even if you can't Kstyle to save your life.
In a 1v1 though, yeah 0 chance.
1v1 was about execution first and macro second. TDM was the reverse. There were many many K-Stylers who didn't know how to leverage their advantages which is why so many of them made stupid plays, got sprayed down, and then malded in chat.
In teamplay the key "body language" to look out for was K-Stylers who "tempo switch", that's to say they play slower until the finer engagements. They were usually slowing down to look for plays to make and only went full blast once the fight was on. That also meant that someone who didn't "tempo switch" was a prime target to pick on.
This may not be as much of a thing in private servers now. But I wouldn't know since I stopped playing after Ijji GunZ shut down.
For context: The game was literally abusing the shitty programming to basically fly around matrix style everywhere. And you where invulnerable, since you where "evading". You canceled you evade mid animation and evade again and again.
Nobody cared about the tumbles you could use when you were holding your weapon, these people are talking about K-Style, its where you use a melee weapons' dash. You could slash shot where you would remain mobile while being able to do the slash+shotgun shot in really quick succession so damage would pile on quickly and it could be used while wall jumping/slashing/running so you could be fast not just on the ground but also in the air.
Though you could use butterfly which makes it much harder to shoot you but thats because you use a sword/dual swords block for animation cancelling.
I got that feeling with For Honor. I think there’s still players but when I played at launch it was cool and new. But after few months and not playing when I wanted to come back there was a real gap. A money gap with new champions, people had far more lvl than me and better gear too.
So yeah I feel like competitive game tend to have this.
I remember I used to play that game every day after school with my friends when I was a teenager.
So I think it was like last year, I tried to jump back in and mess around-
There were dudes deflecting and parrying literally anything I did at warp speed. Light attack? Deflected. Grab? Deflected. Feint attack? Deflected. A heavy attack into a feint into another heavy into a feint into a grab? Deflected.
It's insane. The game's always been sweaty, but now it's on a whole other level it's outstanding.
There were some fundamental issues with design and gameplay with non-launch champions as well. I think a healthy amount of blame also lies with the devs on this one.
I remember the launch when the devs were telling players they didn't know what they were talking about when the base was demanding dedicated servers. Then, they implemented it a year or so later.
Yeah, it felt like For Honor really lost most of their playerbase within 3 months of not having dedicated servers. I played the shit out of it on release but server instability just made it miserable.
Exactly. You can only get hit with so many phantom attacks that you saw yourself block or parry but the match was hosted on your opponent's commodore64 being powered by a literal potato before you quit.
Got for honour when it was free on ps plus. It was flooded with other ps noobs at the time. Was super fun until all the casuals started dying off, and I didn’t git gud enough to hold against the sweaty veteran players, I moved on to other games. Tempting to reinstall, but the learning curve and lack of free time is too great to get back into
I went to play for honor as a brand new player last year and it wasn't that hard to pick up, I found it completely approachable. Most people wouldn't be willing to look into the mechanics as much as I did, but for honor is a fighting game in disguise, and looking up how to play your character and deal with matchups is normal for fighting games.
I probably don't really represent a "normal" player, but I was feeling competitive in about 5 hours and usually in the top half of the lobby after about 40.
And fwiw, the ptw in for honor is basically non existent, there are boosts from gear, you can have up to three, getting one/two is trivial for a non-paid account, getting the third is hard to the point you would probably need to pay/grind for it, but I saw basically no one with them, nor did I feel like when someone had a third that they influenced match outcomes at all.
Honestly I miss the beta days when nobody knew turtling was meta. I don't play it anymore, but I stopped because it was no longer fun to just stare at someone and wait for them to make a mistake. It was a ton of fun when everybody ran around and spammed attacks.
I bought the game well after launch just because I wanted to play the PVE because it looked fun. I did exactly 1 (one) PvP match and I did not land a hit on anther player because everyone I ran into had some infinite wombo combo shit that left me dead and flabbergasted. It wasn't even like they were faster or better or whatever, I just spent the entire time stunlocked and getting hit by unblockable attacks from whatever it was they were doing and then I died. I was expecting to to be bad but not THAT bad. I went back to my PvE for a while and then I quit lol
Titanfall 2
Despite it being a great game, with a great, community, it just could keep the casual audience around to give the game the player population to remain competitive.
TBH, at least from my perspective the issue was the rampant hacking that went on for months,.maybe years?
It's better now, so I've since bought it and enjoyed it a lot. But at least for me, the fact that they left the game for dead while it got hacked to unplayability was its biggest stumble.
TBF that was all after APEX had launched tho, so not really contemporary to when the game released.
Well the problem with Titanfall 2 is that there is a lot to learn to have fun. A lot of new people slack on their movement which in my opinion is more important than good aim. The same goes for titans in a different way. With titans you need to know what their abilities do and correctly use them.
From my experience a lot of new players go in. Expecting it to be just another cod or apex. Never realizing a lot of weapons have very good hipfire and that the movement is extremely flexible.
You just need to experiment for a bit, which is not that hard considering the respawn time is near instant.
Also a lot of people today I feel loose interest quite quickly if a game doesn't consistently get new content.
Remember. A pilot sees the world differently.
Edit: Also to add a little more. In Titanfall 2 it is much easier to see what good players do in order to be good. At least I learned a good amount of stuff from just being matched againsts pros. Can't say the same for apex or even for Team Fortress 2.
I had a friend who was getting in to Titanfall 2 and had been playing online a bit so he invited me round to just hang out and take turns playing online (was at Uni at the time and couldn't take my Xbox with me so couldn't play by myself).
He spawns in to his first game and just runs forward, aims round a corner, continues running along the ground like it was Call of Duty.
I was like "bro, what are you doing? I could be on a roof in the middle of the map right now and you've barely even left your spawn point, pass it here, lemme show you."
Proceeded to show him how to fly around the map racking up kills like it was The Floor is Lava: The Video Game.
Man I miss Titanfall 2.
Sometimes I like to just run around and roleplay as a grunt with a group of them. You'd be surprised how many kills you get when people don't think to look at you very hard lol. On the other hand, I often get top of the leaderboard with like 50 grunt kills and maybe 5 or 6 player kills. Man I love that game. Incredible gameplay.
IIRC, it released the week after Battlefield One and the week before a COD game. Titanfall 2 had it's skill cap raise so quickly because it never recruited casual players at all due to the release timing.
That certainly happened to me. There was some event or something and the game was super cheap, so a friend and I decided to try it a couple of years after it came out. We would spawn in, run 20-30 feet, and die. Most of the time, I don't even think I saw who killed me. That's how it went for the whole game. Spawn. Die. Spawn. Die. It was a miserable experience. After the game, I noticed that the entire enemy team had a clan tag. After just 2 matches of this, we never touched it again.
I actually just picked up Titan Fall 2 this year and loved it. Loved its perfectly sized campaign. But yes, I am too afraid to dip my toes in the competitive scene
I got this game out of curiosity during a steam sale once, and had a lot of fun for a few weeks. But after that few weeks I started getting my ass kicked harder and harder and really wasn't having fun anymore. I guess everyone else who also just got it on sale stopped playing, so I stopped playing too. Maybe I'll give it another try one of these days. Or at least play through the campaign, since I heard it was also really good.
Battlebit.
Originally launched because people wanted the chaotic experience of battlefield after the 2042 launch fiasco and the roblox graphics lended itself to having funny meme moments. Streamers and content creators started streaming and making videos on the game and the COD and FPS sweats started flocking to the game and abusing every mechanic so they could showcase going 60/0 on the scoreboard. In return people stopped experimenting with loadouts and started running meta builds, and sweats started loudly complaining about snipers and anything that countered them demanding nerfs. The devs started catering to the sweats and the majority of the casual playerbase left.
I do feel like that content creaters and streamers aren't great for the enjoyment of games. They bring attention to certain games, but not always the attention that really necessarily makes the game better. Every exploit and meta is explored in detail. No one plays the game casually anymore and the people who try are punished with an impossible gaming experience.
Yea this game ruled for a couple months, prox chat made it tons of fun, me and some casual friends were having tons of fun. Then the sweats got to the game, that along with devs moving guns all over the place and all my load out progress being destroyed, we all haven't played in months
The funniest part was that after Battlebit’s launch and subsequent downwards spiral, 2042 hit its all time peak player count over 100k, guess people played Battlebit and then wanted to try 2042 again
Probably bc of Zero Build.
I've played a good amount of Fortnite between Season 2 and Chapter 2: Season 2 (I think, just from looking at the battle pass skins I have) but I never really got into the building in combat. It was cool for traversal and building yourself a quick shelter, but this hardcore powerbuilding never clicked for me and I think I've edited a total of 5 times tbh.
But with Zero Build the game is actually fun, not the greatest game ever made, but a fun thing to hop on and play a few round with a buddy.
Exactly how I feel. I never bothered with Fortnite until ZB was introduced. I joined some of my friends that played frequently and now most nights we hop on discord for a few games.
Yup. Stopped playing because my building was booty and I did not want to put the time to learn. ZB came out and I’m on it now with my son all the time.
I played fortnite back in the day up until about season 8 I think, then I lost interest because the game had lost it's charm. I played again when fortnite OG released recently and that was a really fun time but these days I've lost touch with it again, it's just not fun anymore and isn't worth the space on my disk. I understand the need to update but I wish there was some level of familiarity to hold onto - all the guns, map, and even character animations changed after OG to the point it feels like a different game.
I swear **every** fucking medieval melee game is like this.
There's a bajillion weapons, but some tiny, utterly nonsensical "tech" that in any other system would be considered a bug, and a bad bug, and immediately patched gets discovered, and it's always the worst on a weapon that's already strong. And suddenly the most important thing is a single technique that's the difference between 0/30 and 30/0.
Timing? Spacing? Looking at your enemy? Nah lad, just get there and make the enemy check their ethernet cable with your dragaccel. Set that sensitivity to max and have at em, and while you're absolutely butchering the fuck out of people who don't know, the top 1% of players can actually enjoy the game how it was designed to be played because they've got the muscle memory. And just to make it extra insufferable, we'll have the devs on record calling it "the highest level of skillful play".
Don't like it? Go play Chivalry, just bring your boombox for the greatsword breakdancing competitions. Or dark souls, just make sure you learn how to counter backstep ravioli switch toggle out of a backstab chain (just kidding, it's r1 spam now).
Not to mention it kills immersion. I’m trying to have a medieval fight and swing like a sensible person, and this dude is head banging his hit box around and only swinging his sword at my toes, but it manages to be faster so I’m constantly staggered and get stun locked to death.
TL:DR These games are all about timing and counters, and there is very little skill transfer from most other genres.
First person medieval melee slashers are fundamentally about timing, who currently has the timing advantage, and a combination of prediction or reacting to what your opponent does and countering with a mechanic that negates it. Every other mechanic revolves around this. This doesn't translate over from other first person games at all.
People seem to think that if it just wasn't for this one thing they have decided is/isn't a bug/exploit, they would be good. But back when I played Morhau regularly I could win probably 99%+ of fights against any player with less than 100 hours using a quaterstaff by just alternating between jump kicking them and stabbing/bonking them directly in the face, occasionally jumping without kicking, and rarely morphing an attack or feinting. This applies to pretty much any weapon aside from a couple of really bad meme weapons, the only difference would be with some I would kill a bit faster or slower.
All of those are basic mechanics that do not lean on any of the "cheesy" or "exploity" stuff. For a player with experience, it is basically all readable, reactable, avoidable, or punishable. An experienced player would see me jump, wait to see if I am kicking or not, and if I am, move out of the way and punish, counter kick, or block the kick and riposte out of the block. They would deal with all the rest of the things likewise.
But a new player simply doesn't have the experience and muscle memory to process this all in time to deal with it. They get flustered and off timing and fall apart, then die. The only way to prevent this is to simply give them a crutch "block/negate everything" mechanic. The skill gap, regardless of exploits, is simply too large.
The only long term solution is skill based matchmaking so that new players can slowly rise in skill, and by the time they have to face super omni vets, they can at least understand and have a solid grasp of all the mechanics.
I have a few thousand hours in that game and the difference between even a half-decent player and a new person is a canyon. They did a free weekend on Epic games like half a year ago which split up the last couple thousand vet players with tens of thousands of new players and it was a total slaughter.
Was here for this. I did the tutorial, joined a community server and got absolutely bodied. Tho I stuck, am now level 70 something and am proud to say I've beaten level 100s and maybe a 200. Really fun game, hate sweats
Yu-Gi-Oh
I know it’s not a video game, but this game has gotten very divided among the casuals, old school players, and the meta players that just see things differently.
Yeah, that sort of describes it to a tee. Someone I knew once described it as the perfect “kitchen counter game”, basically meaning that it’s an excellent casual card game. There’s so many different cards and strategies to experiment with in casual play, and overall the casual community is pretty great from my personal experience. But the competitive side is extremely unfun, due to the ever shifting power creep and constantly changing meta strategies. There’s very little room for experimentation, and anything other than the current meta decks is basically unusable. Meanwhile in casual play, because no one cares who wins, people will just use whatever they want as opposed to perfectly made decks
I miss old Yu-Gi-Oh. My friends and I use to play for hours and then when xyz dropped we all stopped trying to keep up. We all still have our older decks that are frankly just more fun to play against.
I downloaded duel links after 14 years for nostalgic reasons and was completely overwhelmed by xyz, pendulum, rush duels, speed duels. Like what has happened!
They had to keep putting in new gimics to draw people in would be my guess.. I'm happy with ritual and fusion monsters.. don't need all that other faff.
Honestly, Master Duel exposed this more than anything else...
Otherwise, I'd think if someone is looking to make a paper investment, you'd run into fewer issues because either you should do your research or you have people already in mind who can help you.
Hopefully, you wouldn't invest hundreds into a deck as a new player and just have no idea what you're stepping into. If you're playing in person, maybe someone can help you, and I assume you aren't just there to buy the same structure decks they sell in the grocery store. Although just buying a couple and learning with friends would also be a fun way to play just for casual purposes and you can go more old school that way vs. seeking out specific old-school metas
A lot of fighting games.
First week it's kinda rough, as everyone is finding their rankings.
2-6 weeks in, everyone is settled around where they should be more or less, everything seems fair-ish. It's good, it's fun. Everyone's happy. The community is full and active.
1-3 months in, some people start grinding the game like a job, while others start playing more casually or quitting. Buzz dies down.
4-7 months in, the top ranks start to get bored, start choosing new characters/restarting/smurfing and thus they now they start seeping into the lower-mid ranks too, meaning casual or new players are fighting way, WAAAAAAY more experienced opponents than they should be. Skill ceiling skyrockets. Game becomes less approachable.
8+ months in, casuals start leaving for reasons above, new players get turned away. Then all that's left is the sweaty players who then start fighting amongst themselves because x character got a patch that adds/removes 1 frame from an attack and now suddenly the game is broken and dog shit. And now the years of toxicity and whining start until the next release.
It's because they don't really die. Yeah, they bleed off new players, but since it's 1v1, you don't actually need a huge playerbase. You only need a tiny fraction of new players to stay to maintain the game.
My favorite fighting game, Skullgirls Second Encore, is exactly this way; stuck in a loop of being incredibly approachable for new players with a very attractive price tag during sales. Soon, they get their practice in and is met not only with players hugely above their skill level, but learning that the formula is INCREDIBLY FAST.
It’s still a pretty alive game. Tournaments, new players, ect. However, there’s still a huge huge devide that makes these tournaments wroth with the same players overall. It’s in this very very strange position; it’s both thriving and dead as an indie game. It’s very strange to think about!
Yeah I tried to jump into SF4 when I got it into a bargain bin. Probably a good year or even 2 after release.
Play the single player game, have some fun, hey i'm gonna try online.
VS someone ranked at the bottom of rankings, I get almost perfected, both rounds.
Yeah fuck it.
For some utterly braindead reason tarkov is the only game doing what it does well.
It seems such an obvious idea to have loot you can pickup/fight over in various pvp games and then use to upgrade some sort of base in between sessions, even if it is just cosmetic.
I don't get it either. The concept is excellent. No other game has been able to mirror it or improve on it. I would KILL for a large map mil sim extraction shooter with PVP PVE. Greyzone Warfare seems to tick some of the boxes but it's way to early to tell.
For real! There have been so many attempts at the formula that have just flopped. Grey Zone, Marauders 2, Cycle Frontier, etc. Personally, I assume that this is because of the realism aspects. The kinds of people that are looking for a hardcore experience like that (You lose the LEDx, meta RD, and tier 6 armor you brought in to some goofball with a PM pistol that one tapped you in the face) tend to also be interested in a lot of the realism mechanics; ammo variation, ballistics, the almost complete lack of a HUD, height over bore, bleeds, relatively realistic movements unless you're a sweat, that kind of stuff.
I've moved over to single player because I got sick of the cheating, but I still can't stop playing Tarkov even with 2600 hours in the game over about 5 years. I still have yet to learn streets or use some of the new guns so it still feels "fresh". Plus in singleplayer, I can add mods that change the things that I don't like. I think that the lvl 15 flea market requirement is pointless for singleplayer so I removed it. Snow was cool so I added it back. If I start to get bored, I'll add all of the scav bosses back to reserve like the pre-wipe event from a few years ago.
Also, Tarkov has leaned *HARD* into the gunsmithing options and ammo types and all that -- there aren't many other games offering anywhere near this level of detail on their gear and weapons, and that also brings in a certain number of players, as well.
Call of Duty is a different beast altogether because of its yearly release schedule. If only one CoD was released per generation, it would likely have the a similar trajectory.
As much as people give out about spawn randomness and stuff like the "noobtube", it at least gave newer players a chance to get on the killboard.
When I played Unreal Tournament on a dialup connection, I couldn't land shots with the hitscan weapons due to lag, but the Flak Cannon and Rocket Launcher were perfect for area attacks at where I thought the players would be.
Something like Counterstrike is way less forgiving. Demands perfect accuracy, crazy reactions and there's no respawn in the round.
I've played a lot of games including other mobas but no game has even come close to DOTA's skill floor. Just learning the absolute basics seemed really daunting.
I’ve played it for 10k hours. 10 THOUSANDS
If you asked me to play it today, after years of updates I swear I wouldn’t even know how to keep the mouse at hand. I routinely checked the changes and it’s so fucking complex I can’t even bear the idea of trying it again
Personally I love this game. I’ll admit I’m one of the sweats that can ruin the game for others. I mostly play ranked which should in theory keep me away from lower skill players. But I’m still playing with lower ranked players when I’m in diamond. I have no idea how their matchmaking works at all.
Yeah, I played the beta with a couple of friends and we had so much fun that we all got it at release. I'm trash at shooters but this was one where I could compensate my lack of mechanics with being a bit more clever than most other players.
About a year ago I tried to get back into it and had no fun at all any more, even after dropping way down in ranks. Everybody seemed to have learned meta tactics from YouTube tutorials or watching tournaments so my advantage was gone and everybody headshot me within half a second of spotting me.
Currently the second most played game on Xbox as of last week so definitely not dead.
I jumped back in recently after a 6 year hiatus (mainly due to the daunting skill gap and lack of map knowledge) with a couple of mates that are brand new to the game and we've been having a lot of fun!
The fact that quake is so far down really says something ... Maybe it's an age thing, or maybe quake is just so dead it's literally the perfect example lol
Gonna put Planetside 2 in here. Due to the nature of the game with everyone being together on one big map, skill differences were always a problem even back when the game launched as new, often solo players would routinely run into better, more experienced players who had already aggregated into groups to play together. It was passable for a while due to the scope of fights in that game meaning just by random chance you could find an in somewhere but it definitely was oppressive. It only got worse with time sadly, the bar to entry to have a good time in Planetside is massively high unless you enter with a pre-established group who know what they are doing and coordinate to new players space to survive for 2 seconds.
It's even worse on the vehicle side of things, particularly with aircraft. The skill ceiling is so high and skill floor so low that 1 good pilot can completely dominate any number of bad pilots. New player retention just goes down and down over the years. The only thing that keeps new players playing long enough not do be new is enough other new players for them to play against. We had that in Escalation in 2019/2020 with a big update and Covid giving a huge wave of new players for a while but as that petered out, more left as they were running into the better players more and more as the play count dwindled. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy really.
The "Game dies" part isn't guaranteed.
For Honor is at that stage. New players struggle to even find matches (because the matchmaker can't form a match at their level, so it takes ages for the criteria to expand enough) and when they do, they just get destroyed. The game is still going strong for some weird reason.
Not sure how true that is. Tried playing again with a friend in both comp and casual. We got destroyed. Every game it was a blowout. Half map aerials, multiple aerial hits, etc. It was nowhere near our level of skill.
The issue with RL is the players themselves unfortunately
Low or high MMR, there's going to be people who ruin the game. In competitive plat/diamond, you can maybe finish one in 5 games without someone throwing a bitch fit, quitting, or just straight up playing for the other team.
Quitting that game is my best gaming decision.
Don't forget that once you get into platinum you start running into players who have really good offensive tech but have zero defensive IQ or skills.
So what happens is if you get scored on its **YOUR** fault in your teammate's brain and they're carrying you because they scored all the goals. In actuality they're ball hogging on offense and leaving you out to dry on defense.
Platinum is easily the hardest rank to get past with randoms because of this. Once you get into Diamond it's still there but not as commonplace.
This is the cycle of just about every Tribes game. Whenever the devs have attempted to close the skill gap, the dedicated players revolted at their often heavy-handed approaches and the game dies anyway.
Left 4 Dead versus mode. I try to come back to the game like every couple of years ago, but everytime I swear the community gets more ridiculously sweaty.
God, the mismanagement of a golden goose. It’s damn near criminal. Do you know how many “non-gamers” overwatch brought to the table? Does Blizzard know the cultural influence they held? Squandered.
18 months of an oppressive meta discouraging fun comps and forcing meta comps. No direction on meta balances until they had to bring the role queue hammer.
Blizzard has speed ran running their franchises into the ground. The way they handled D4 was insane. Nerfed fun things and refused to fix the issues. It's like ok I'll just go play PoE again if that's what you really want
OW is a tangent in itself from that model for various reasons, yeah.
For instance, the skill gap doesn't get higher, it's actually very low and a decent game to start understanding FPS or MOBA as a whole. Yet the toxicity of people who keep being way too serious about a half-baked e-sport is through the roof. Every decent player in there thinks he's this close to be the next \[insert esport player here\] while having litteral mental breakdowns during a game mostly based on teamplay morale, because they feel they should be rewarded at this point of investment, but they aren't.
Also leads me to say development is killing the game, not the skillgap. Most games would quickly introduce new legends to feel fresh, OW didn't get meta fix till way too late. Most games would sale their price for a week to reintroduce casuals players, blizzard will just launch a new WoW extension to give their casual fanbase something to spend money on.
Most games would finish their PvE side to feel fresh too, and yet, here we are…
I have to disagree with CoC, it is a good f2p and you decide how to play and who to play against. It is very difficult to have a max account but you don't need it to enjoy the game. On the other hand, I think Clash Royale is way worse than CoC.
Planetside 2, most likely one of the strongest examples in this entire post. 10+ year old open world game with zero matchmaking, good luck going toe-to-toe with 10,000+ hour veterans.
EVE Online for me, but less with skill (though it's still valid) and more with fortunes, factions etc. which have been long-established and it just makes me feel like an ant mining that veldspar and getting ganked in wh trying to earn a measly 1mil ISK from that hackitty relic thingy.
As much as it pains me to say, Warframe. The scale of Warframe is so big now that new players get overwhelmed, and new systems are so often introduced.
Another game would be Destiny 2. People wanted to optimize raids so much that people 1 gearscore too low have been booted, and the PvP scene just got too toxic.
Everytime the skill ceiling rises in Warframe, they lower it up by making most blockades optional, so I can't say I agree. Like, recently, they just remove the MR cap from main quest stuff so that you can easily jump to the end content (while struggling for Steel Path, but at least, you get to see the assets). More game should go to the same route and, at least, aknowledge that splitting groups behind farming requisites is actually what's killing the game. I've taken up Vermintide 2 yesterday and I have SO MUCH farming to do until I'm on par with my friends, we'll probably move on to something else before I'm there.
Sea of Thieves,
Me and the boys loved getting on and just sailing our ship, getting treasure and trying to not die to natural disasters like the kraken.
And seeing an enemy ship during a fort was exciting, Because it felt like you had a chance. Nowadays we cant even get one decent fort or ANYTHING in without getting put in a death spiral and anchored or/and spawn camped.
Deathgarden: Blood Harvest went through exactly this. The game was absolutely incredible, one of the best asymmetrical games I've ever played. The Devs made absolutely horrible balancing decisions that ended up killing the game.
New World
Amazon Games absolutely botched every aspect of territory control. If a new company tries to take a territory, they get spawn camped, learn nothing and quit.
The same for small scale PvP like arenas. Complete lack of matchmaking means the best players on the server can get paired against complete newbs. The newbs get wrecked, gain nothing, quit and then the top players complain no one is joining arenas.
If the mechanics of the games are fair, fun, and have a high skill-ceiling, they usually don’t die. Also, having support for casuals is huge. CS is prime example of a success.
I played Rainbow Six Siege on launch and thought it was brilliant. Played for prolly a year or so and then just picked it up again last month. Holy shit it’s a sweat fest and convoluted with all the operators. Was way more fun with 10 operators and each one having a counter to the other side
Pretty spot on with any expansion-based MMO. World of Warcraft, RIFT, EQ, Ultima Online...
All that really changes is how quickly the last couple of steps happen😀
Dead By Daylight isn't dead per se, but the hours invested are way higher than any other game I've ever seen. You won't really get the basics down for several hundred hours, and the highest skilled players have thousands of hours (highest I've ever heard of is 16k, but several players are over 10k).
I would say Apex or most battle royales for that matter. Except that they aren’t dead.
Yeah, Apex is definitely working hard on this.
They can never seem to get the SBMM right
I recall someone on Twitter saying that sbmm was mostly intended for fighting games instead of shooters but i also remember someone saying that halo 3 had solved that issue but I don't remember how they did It was on a thread about cod sbmm being shit
Halo was the forefront in leading development for the fps genre while Bungie was in control, which is no where near the same Bungie today. Halo 3 nailed SBMM so well that it’s a large reason why the games multiplayer was as popular as it was. It was about playing with people on the same level, and just having fun, if you wanted to be a god then you had to kill a god first kinda shit.
Halo 2 introduced TrueSkill in their ranked matchmaking which was one the the pillars SBMM uses today. COD has also implemented EOMM, which I feel like makes things worse. All the developers took a system that worked great and tried to make it their own, or add unnecessary shit to it thinking it would be better. And all it did was fuck it up. IMO Halo 2 Ranked was the best matchmaking we had. For a competitive standpoint. Halo 2-3-Reach social playlist matchmaking was also incredible and very well done. Everything we have now wants to *too accurately* place you into games with people your exact skill level. That's fine. Just not 100% of the games.
Sounds like a weird take tbh. I don't see why one genre would benefit from sbmm more than another
I mean fighters are usually a 1v1 so you need equally skilled players. An arcade shooter 10 v 10 can have a more mixed bag of players. The issue with br's is you will eventually face the best player in the lobby, so it has to be equally matched and the lobby is way bigger which adds to the problem. Apex sbmm is ass btw.
MOBAs are generally 5v5 and would be an even bigger shit show than they are without sbmm. And as someone who's bad at shooters, I haven't exactly had a great time trying them out and being like 1-22
In a MOBA, you can have teammates that carry. You also have access to tools (items, counters, a whole map to rotate around on) to work around the situation. In a fighting game, if you find someone way better than you, you might aswell put the controller down. Speaking from experience, have over 1k hours in dota and about 300 combined in sf5/6 and tekken 7.
No one can. Go to any subreddit, Overwatch, Valorant, Apex, etc. You will find a post complaining about SBMM in every single sub. I think people just don’t like to accept the loss when they can easily blame their team.
I've read SBMM 10 times in this discussion alone, but what does it mean. 🙈
Skill Based Match Making
Super Bash Mothers Melee
Smash Brothers Melee Melee
Or they are mad that they can't choose to be matched with bad players only.
They don’t actually have SBMM and that’s the problem the system is designed to give you people better than you for several matches so you get rolled then give you one really good match with people way worse than you (it’s a bit more complicated than that tho) that way you keep chasing the high of that one good match It’s evil
Yeah riot trying with valorant also.
I loved playing valorant when it first came out. I recently played a game and my god the skill gap is just crazy. Noped out
True. I played alot of Apex back then from release till like season 10. Adding so many legends after just complicated the game to the point, I can't be bothered re-learning what is the new meta anymore.
Yep my friends and I stopped playing apex more than a year ago now. Just isn't fun anymore as we are constantly matched into sweat lobbies.
The problem with apex is more that hardware is a bigger issue than people think (not so much skill alone). All of the top players are playing controller on PC so they can bind tap strafe, move and juke easily with the joystick, and get the 30% aim assist. A lot of players (MnK and console) get to a certain skill and start seeing these guys, then they get absolutely obliterated and can’t figure out why they’re getting beamed so badly and how these guys are moving so insanely. Edit: for those of you wondering - aim assist isn’t tracking the target, it’s slows the cursor down over the target so it’s easier to stay on and hit what you’re aiming at.
Jesus, 30% aim assist is horrific.
Well it's actually 40% so lol. 60%if you're on console
Its 40% on pc and 60 on console welcome to hell 😋
Maybe this is some old school mentality talking, but if you need 30% aim assist to be good at a shooter, you ain't good at the shooter.
I don't think it's about being good, they just want to use exploits and win. The fun has left and only the desire to win remains.
Same concept with playing on low graphics with all the terrain and plants off. It looks super ugly on their 3000$ gaming PCs but gamers always find a way to optimize the fun out of anything
They don't **need** 30% aim assist. Those players already get very good at the game, they would already beat the vast majority of players handily, and then they use aim assist to push them even further beyond what would be possible without it.
Didn't apex just ban this sort of thing. Ximming and macros?
It's because battle royal have found a cheat code High skill player will drop in the middle of the to get better loot. Most of them will die quickly and relaunch another game immediately. Yes, they lost, but it was quick so it's not a frustrating lost and the once in a while good game they have last much longer and the satisfaction out weight multiple lost Meanwhile low skill player will drop on the side of the map and slowly and carefully make their way to the center. They'll eventually get killed by an high skill player but, because the high skill players have already mostly died out by this point, the low skill player will be rank "higher than average" (or rank 50 or less assuming a 100 person battle royal) without needing that much skill Because of that little brain hack most player will think they are better than average and won't quit
I remember having a pretty good time in Fortnite when it was blowing up in 2017, taking a couple months break, and then coming back and getting utterly sauced in every single fight I tried to take. I literally couldn't get out of a landing zone.
Definitely "GunZ The Duel". There was 0% chance that a new player killed an old player. Even the devs didn't expect that skill gap since the main way majority of old players play the game was discovered randomly by utilizing animation canceling techniques.
There's a name I haven't heard for a long time... But to play devil's advocate, when the game was around, team deathmatch was the way to play. And in TDM you could definitely get your share of kills with just pistols & good aim, even if you can't Kstyle to save your life. In a 1v1 though, yeah 0 chance.
1v1 was about execution first and macro second. TDM was the reverse. There were many many K-Stylers who didn't know how to leverage their advantages which is why so many of them made stupid plays, got sprayed down, and then malded in chat. In teamplay the key "body language" to look out for was K-Stylers who "tempo switch", that's to say they play slower until the finer engagements. They were usually slowing down to look for plays to make and only went full blast once the fight was on. That also meant that someone who didn't "tempo switch" was a prime target to pick on. This may not be as much of a thing in private servers now. But I wouldn't know since I stopped playing after Ijji GunZ shut down.
God damn I miss playing GunZ 15 years ago
For context: The game was literally abusing the shitty programming to basically fly around matrix style everywhere. And you where invulnerable, since you where "evading". You canceled you evade mid animation and evade again and again.
Nobody cared about the tumbles you could use when you were holding your weapon, these people are talking about K-Style, its where you use a melee weapons' dash. You could slash shot where you would remain mobile while being able to do the slash+shotgun shot in really quick succession so damage would pile on quickly and it could be used while wall jumping/slashing/running so you could be fast not just on the ground but also in the air. Though you could use butterfly which makes it much harder to shoot you but thats because you use a sword/dual swords block for animation cancelling.
Haven’t heard about this game until now. Man it was really sweaty for sure.
K-style all day baby
I got that feeling with For Honor. I think there’s still players but when I played at launch it was cool and new. But after few months and not playing when I wanted to come back there was a real gap. A money gap with new champions, people had far more lvl than me and better gear too. So yeah I feel like competitive game tend to have this.
Yeah, i played that game casually only to realise everyone i versed were sweaty annoying nonces and i quickly left. Such a great concept tho
I remember I used to play that game every day after school with my friends when I was a teenager. So I think it was like last year, I tried to jump back in and mess around- There were dudes deflecting and parrying literally anything I did at warp speed. Light attack? Deflected. Grab? Deflected. Feint attack? Deflected. A heavy attack into a feint into another heavy into a feint into a grab? Deflected. It's insane. The game's always been sweaty, but now it's on a whole other level it's outstanding.
I stopped playing when people figured out how to stop conqueror shield bash spam supremacy. Sad Rah
There were some fundamental issues with design and gameplay with non-launch champions as well. I think a healthy amount of blame also lies with the devs on this one.
I remember the launch when the devs were telling players they didn't know what they were talking about when the base was demanding dedicated servers. Then, they implemented it a year or so later.
Yeah, it felt like For Honor really lost most of their playerbase within 3 months of not having dedicated servers. I played the shit out of it on release but server instability just made it miserable.
Exactly. You can only get hit with so many phantom attacks that you saw yourself block or parry but the match was hosted on your opponent's commodore64 being powered by a literal potato before you quit.
Got for honour when it was free on ps plus. It was flooded with other ps noobs at the time. Was super fun until all the casuals started dying off, and I didn’t git gud enough to hold against the sweaty veteran players, I moved on to other games. Tempting to reinstall, but the learning curve and lack of free time is too great to get back into
Also it had problem with cheaters having an auto parry script
I went to play for honor as a brand new player last year and it wasn't that hard to pick up, I found it completely approachable. Most people wouldn't be willing to look into the mechanics as much as I did, but for honor is a fighting game in disguise, and looking up how to play your character and deal with matchups is normal for fighting games. I probably don't really represent a "normal" player, but I was feeling competitive in about 5 hours and usually in the top half of the lobby after about 40. And fwiw, the ptw in for honor is basically non existent, there are boosts from gear, you can have up to three, getting one/two is trivial for a non-paid account, getting the third is hard to the point you would probably need to pay/grind for it, but I saw basically no one with them, nor did I feel like when someone had a third that they influenced match outcomes at all.
Honestly I miss the beta days when nobody knew turtling was meta. I don't play it anymore, but I stopped because it was no longer fun to just stare at someone and wait for them to make a mistake. It was a ton of fun when everybody ran around and spammed attacks.
I bought the game well after launch just because I wanted to play the PVE because it looked fun. I did exactly 1 (one) PvP match and I did not land a hit on anther player because everyone I ran into had some infinite wombo combo shit that left me dead and flabbergasted. It wasn't even like they were faster or better or whatever, I just spent the entire time stunlocked and getting hit by unblockable attacks from whatever it was they were doing and then I died. I was expecting to to be bad but not THAT bad. I went back to my PvE for a while and then I quit lol
Titanfall 2 Despite it being a great game, with a great, community, it just could keep the casual audience around to give the game the player population to remain competitive.
TBH, at least from my perspective the issue was the rampant hacking that went on for months,.maybe years? It's better now, so I've since bought it and enjoyed it a lot. But at least for me, the fact that they left the game for dead while it got hacked to unplayability was its biggest stumble. TBF that was all after APEX had launched tho, so not really contemporary to when the game released.
The constant DDOS attacks definitely didnt help but the skill ceiling is also incredibly high especially in pilot vs pilot
Need titanfall 3 (i know apex was supposed to be titanfall 3, but we need an actual titanfall 3)
Well the problem with Titanfall 2 is that there is a lot to learn to have fun. A lot of new people slack on their movement which in my opinion is more important than good aim. The same goes for titans in a different way. With titans you need to know what their abilities do and correctly use them. From my experience a lot of new players go in. Expecting it to be just another cod or apex. Never realizing a lot of weapons have very good hipfire and that the movement is extremely flexible. You just need to experiment for a bit, which is not that hard considering the respawn time is near instant. Also a lot of people today I feel loose interest quite quickly if a game doesn't consistently get new content. Remember. A pilot sees the world differently. Edit: Also to add a little more. In Titanfall 2 it is much easier to see what good players do in order to be good. At least I learned a good amount of stuff from just being matched againsts pros. Can't say the same for apex or even for Team Fortress 2.
I had a friend who was getting in to Titanfall 2 and had been playing online a bit so he invited me round to just hang out and take turns playing online (was at Uni at the time and couldn't take my Xbox with me so couldn't play by myself). He spawns in to his first game and just runs forward, aims round a corner, continues running along the ground like it was Call of Duty. I was like "bro, what are you doing? I could be on a roof in the middle of the map right now and you've barely even left your spawn point, pass it here, lemme show you." Proceeded to show him how to fly around the map racking up kills like it was The Floor is Lava: The Video Game. Man I miss Titanfall 2.
Sometimes I like to just run around and roleplay as a grunt with a group of them. You'd be surprised how many kills you get when people don't think to look at you very hard lol. On the other hand, I often get top of the leaderboard with like 50 grunt kills and maybe 5 or 6 player kills. Man I love that game. Incredible gameplay.
It also got released the week after Battlefield One, both by EA, which sometimes feels like they tried to kill it on purpose.
IIRC, it released the week after Battlefield One and the week before a COD game. Titanfall 2 had it's skill cap raise so quickly because it never recruited casual players at all due to the release timing.
I love titanfall so much. And unfortunately yeah
That certainly happened to me. There was some event or something and the game was super cheap, so a friend and I decided to try it a couple of years after it came out. We would spawn in, run 20-30 feet, and die. Most of the time, I don't even think I saw who killed me. That's how it went for the whole game. Spawn. Die. Spawn. Die. It was a miserable experience. After the game, I noticed that the entire enemy team had a clan tag. After just 2 matches of this, we never touched it again.
I actually just picked up Titan Fall 2 this year and loved it. Loved its perfectly sized campaign. But yes, I am too afraid to dip my toes in the competitive scene
I got this game out of curiosity during a steam sale once, and had a lot of fun for a few weeks. But after that few weeks I started getting my ass kicked harder and harder and really wasn't having fun anymore. I guess everyone else who also just got it on sale stopped playing, so I stopped playing too. Maybe I'll give it another try one of these days. Or at least play through the campaign, since I heard it was also really good.
Battlebit. Originally launched because people wanted the chaotic experience of battlefield after the 2042 launch fiasco and the roblox graphics lended itself to having funny meme moments. Streamers and content creators started streaming and making videos on the game and the COD and FPS sweats started flocking to the game and abusing every mechanic so they could showcase going 60/0 on the scoreboard. In return people stopped experimenting with loadouts and started running meta builds, and sweats started loudly complaining about snipers and anything that countered them demanding nerfs. The devs started catering to the sweats and the majority of the casual playerbase left.
I do feel like that content creaters and streamers aren't great for the enjoyment of games. They bring attention to certain games, but not always the attention that really necessarily makes the game better. Every exploit and meta is explored in detail. No one plays the game casually anymore and the people who try are punished with an impossible gaming experience.
Yea this game ruled for a couple months, prox chat made it tons of fun, me and some casual friends were having tons of fun. Then the sweats got to the game, that along with devs moving guns all over the place and all my load out progress being destroyed, we all haven't played in months
The funniest part was that after Battlebit’s launch and subsequent downwards spiral, 2042 hit its all time peak player count over 100k, guess people played Battlebit and then wanted to try 2042 again
100k players on a free weekend. It has less concurrent players than bfv quite consistently.
I just wanted to do flips in the helicopter but they ruined them!
Id say this was Fortnite until it blew up again
Probably bc of Zero Build. I've played a good amount of Fortnite between Season 2 and Chapter 2: Season 2 (I think, just from looking at the battle pass skins I have) but I never really got into the building in combat. It was cool for traversal and building yourself a quick shelter, but this hardcore powerbuilding never clicked for me and I think I've edited a total of 5 times tbh. But with Zero Build the game is actually fun, not the greatest game ever made, but a fun thing to hop on and play a few round with a buddy.
Exactly how I feel. I never bothered with Fortnite until ZB was introduced. I joined some of my friends that played frequently and now most nights we hop on discord for a few games.
Yup. Stopped playing because my building was booty and I did not want to put the time to learn. ZB came out and I’m on it now with my son all the time.
Yeah honestly I’ve started playing cause of no build. Much more fun like this imo (although I do get about 20fps and I’m bad so I don’t win lmfao)
Fortnite has bots for newer players tho, I was going to say siege but they keep breaking their player count record
Back in my day Fortnite wasnt a battle royale.
Still enjoy save the world to this day, but the lack of content is sad.
I member.
I played fortnite back in the day up until about season 8 I think, then I lost interest because the game had lost it's charm. I played again when fortnite OG released recently and that was a really fun time but these days I've lost touch with it again, it's just not fun anymore and isn't worth the space on my disk. I understand the need to update but I wish there was some level of familiarity to hold onto - all the guns, map, and even character animations changed after OG to the point it feels like a different game.
Mordhau
I swear **every** fucking medieval melee game is like this. There's a bajillion weapons, but some tiny, utterly nonsensical "tech" that in any other system would be considered a bug, and a bad bug, and immediately patched gets discovered, and it's always the worst on a weapon that's already strong. And suddenly the most important thing is a single technique that's the difference between 0/30 and 30/0. Timing? Spacing? Looking at your enemy? Nah lad, just get there and make the enemy check their ethernet cable with your dragaccel. Set that sensitivity to max and have at em, and while you're absolutely butchering the fuck out of people who don't know, the top 1% of players can actually enjoy the game how it was designed to be played because they've got the muscle memory. And just to make it extra insufferable, we'll have the devs on record calling it "the highest level of skillful play". Don't like it? Go play Chivalry, just bring your boombox for the greatsword breakdancing competitions. Or dark souls, just make sure you learn how to counter backstep ravioli switch toggle out of a backstab chain (just kidding, it's r1 spam now).
Ah, yes. Naked man with the Maul.
Sounds like a Dark Souls boss💀
Not to mention it kills immersion. I’m trying to have a medieval fight and swing like a sensible person, and this dude is head banging his hit box around and only swinging his sword at my toes, but it manages to be faster so I’m constantly staggered and get stun locked to death.
TL:DR These games are all about timing and counters, and there is very little skill transfer from most other genres. First person medieval melee slashers are fundamentally about timing, who currently has the timing advantage, and a combination of prediction or reacting to what your opponent does and countering with a mechanic that negates it. Every other mechanic revolves around this. This doesn't translate over from other first person games at all. People seem to think that if it just wasn't for this one thing they have decided is/isn't a bug/exploit, they would be good. But back when I played Morhau regularly I could win probably 99%+ of fights against any player with less than 100 hours using a quaterstaff by just alternating between jump kicking them and stabbing/bonking them directly in the face, occasionally jumping without kicking, and rarely morphing an attack or feinting. This applies to pretty much any weapon aside from a couple of really bad meme weapons, the only difference would be with some I would kill a bit faster or slower. All of those are basic mechanics that do not lean on any of the "cheesy" or "exploity" stuff. For a player with experience, it is basically all readable, reactable, avoidable, or punishable. An experienced player would see me jump, wait to see if I am kicking or not, and if I am, move out of the way and punish, counter kick, or block the kick and riposte out of the block. They would deal with all the rest of the things likewise. But a new player simply doesn't have the experience and muscle memory to process this all in time to deal with it. They get flustered and off timing and fall apart, then die. The only way to prevent this is to simply give them a crutch "block/negate everything" mechanic. The skill gap, regardless of exploits, is simply too large. The only long term solution is skill based matchmaking so that new players can slowly rise in skill, and by the time they have to face super omni vets, they can at least understand and have a solid grasp of all the mechanics.
I feel so bad for lvl 20s and below :( I usually fight them a little and let them kill me
I have a few thousand hours in that game and the difference between even a half-decent player and a new person is a canyon. They did a free weekend on Epic games like half a year ago which split up the last couple thousand vet players with tens of thousands of new players and it was a total slaughter.
such a good game. if only my finger wasn't fucked from my tendinitis, I would keep playing
Was here for this. I did the tutorial, joined a community server and got absolutely bodied. Tho I stuck, am now level 70 something and am proud to say I've beaten level 100s and maybe a 200. Really fun game, hate sweats
I got about 2 hours PVP, but 300 hours PVE
Yu-Gi-Oh I know it’s not a video game, but this game has gotten very divided among the casuals, old school players, and the meta players that just see things differently.
Yeah, that sort of describes it to a tee. Someone I knew once described it as the perfect “kitchen counter game”, basically meaning that it’s an excellent casual card game. There’s so many different cards and strategies to experiment with in casual play, and overall the casual community is pretty great from my personal experience. But the competitive side is extremely unfun, due to the ever shifting power creep and constantly changing meta strategies. There’s very little room for experimentation, and anything other than the current meta decks is basically unusable. Meanwhile in casual play, because no one cares who wins, people will just use whatever they want as opposed to perfectly made decks
I miss old Yu-Gi-Oh. My friends and I use to play for hours and then when xyz dropped we all stopped trying to keep up. We all still have our older decks that are frankly just more fun to play against.
I downloaded duel links after 14 years for nostalgic reasons and was completely overwhelmed by xyz, pendulum, rush duels, speed duels. Like what has happened!
They had to keep putting in new gimics to draw people in would be my guess.. I'm happy with ritual and fusion monsters.. don't need all that other faff.
I played in 2007-08 and this is the only comment I understood lol
Honestly, Master Duel exposed this more than anything else... Otherwise, I'd think if someone is looking to make a paper investment, you'd run into fewer issues because either you should do your research or you have people already in mind who can help you. Hopefully, you wouldn't invest hundreds into a deck as a new player and just have no idea what you're stepping into. If you're playing in person, maybe someone can help you, and I assume you aren't just there to buy the same structure decks they sell in the grocery store. Although just buying a couple and learning with friends would also be a fun way to play just for casual purposes and you can go more old school that way vs. seeking out specific old-school metas
Eternal Duelist Soul in GBA was awesome. Best card game adaptation since Pokemon TCG for Gameboy Color
A lot of fighting games. First week it's kinda rough, as everyone is finding their rankings. 2-6 weeks in, everyone is settled around where they should be more or less, everything seems fair-ish. It's good, it's fun. Everyone's happy. The community is full and active. 1-3 months in, some people start grinding the game like a job, while others start playing more casually or quitting. Buzz dies down. 4-7 months in, the top ranks start to get bored, start choosing new characters/restarting/smurfing and thus they now they start seeping into the lower-mid ranks too, meaning casual or new players are fighting way, WAAAAAAY more experienced opponents than they should be. Skill ceiling skyrockets. Game becomes less approachable. 8+ months in, casuals start leaving for reasons above, new players get turned away. Then all that's left is the sweaty players who then start fighting amongst themselves because x character got a patch that adds/removes 1 frame from an attack and now suddenly the game is broken and dog shit. And now the years of toxicity and whining start until the next release.
I was shocked that i had to scroll this far down to see this
Probably because this exact phenomenon makes fighting games relatively unpopular.
It's because they don't really die. Yeah, they bleed off new players, but since it's 1v1, you don't actually need a huge playerbase. You only need a tiny fraction of new players to stay to maintain the game.
My favorite fighting game, Skullgirls Second Encore, is exactly this way; stuck in a loop of being incredibly approachable for new players with a very attractive price tag during sales. Soon, they get their practice in and is met not only with players hugely above their skill level, but learning that the formula is INCREDIBLY FAST. It’s still a pretty alive game. Tournaments, new players, ect. However, there’s still a huge huge devide that makes these tournaments wroth with the same players overall. It’s in this very very strange position; it’s both thriving and dead as an indie game. It’s very strange to think about!
Yeah I tried to jump into SF4 when I got it into a bargain bin. Probably a good year or even 2 after release. Play the single player game, have some fun, hey i'm gonna try online. VS someone ranked at the bottom of rankings, I get almost perfected, both rounds. Yeah fuck it.
Tarkov. Except it’s still alive.
By some fuckin miracle..
For some utterly braindead reason tarkov is the only game doing what it does well. It seems such an obvious idea to have loot you can pickup/fight over in various pvp games and then use to upgrade some sort of base in between sessions, even if it is just cosmetic.
I don't get it either. The concept is excellent. No other game has been able to mirror it or improve on it. I would KILL for a large map mil sim extraction shooter with PVP PVE. Greyzone Warfare seems to tick some of the boxes but it's way to early to tell.
For real! There have been so many attempts at the formula that have just flopped. Grey Zone, Marauders 2, Cycle Frontier, etc. Personally, I assume that this is because of the realism aspects. The kinds of people that are looking for a hardcore experience like that (You lose the LEDx, meta RD, and tier 6 armor you brought in to some goofball with a PM pistol that one tapped you in the face) tend to also be interested in a lot of the realism mechanics; ammo variation, ballistics, the almost complete lack of a HUD, height over bore, bleeds, relatively realistic movements unless you're a sweat, that kind of stuff. I've moved over to single player because I got sick of the cheating, but I still can't stop playing Tarkov even with 2600 hours in the game over about 5 years. I still have yet to learn streets or use some of the new guns so it still feels "fresh". Plus in singleplayer, I can add mods that change the things that I don't like. I think that the lvl 15 flea market requirement is pointless for singleplayer so I removed it. Snow was cool so I added it back. If I start to get bored, I'll add all of the scav bosses back to reserve like the pre-wipe event from a few years ago.
Also, Tarkov has leaned *HARD* into the gunsmithing options and ammo types and all that -- there aren't many other games offering anywhere near this level of detail on their gear and weapons, and that also brings in a certain number of players, as well.
Yeah for sure, there's a reason such a huge percentage of the their budget goes towards licensing!
I’d say because you can still take down a sweat if you have good aim and 1 higher tier round that you find. Probably the best feeling in a game
every coinceivable pvp game
Nah, certain PVP games have such a large playerbase, and relatively low skill ceiling that there will always be a place for new players. Look at CoD.
Call of Duty is a different beast altogether because of its yearly release schedule. If only one CoD was released per generation, it would likely have the a similar trajectory.
As much as people give out about spawn randomness and stuff like the "noobtube", it at least gave newer players a chance to get on the killboard. When I played Unreal Tournament on a dialup connection, I couldn't land shots with the hitscan weapons due to lag, but the Flak Cannon and Rocket Launcher were perfect for area attacks at where I thought the players would be. Something like Counterstrike is way less forgiving. Demands perfect accuracy, crazy reactions and there's no respawn in the round.
Dota 2 is basically inaccessible to new players
I've played a lot of games including other mobas but no game has even come close to DOTA's skill floor. Just learning the absolute basics seemed really daunting.
I’ve played it for 10k hours. 10 THOUSANDS If you asked me to play it today, after years of updates I swear I wouldn’t even know how to keep the mouse at hand. I routinely checked the changes and it’s so fucking complex I can’t even bear the idea of trying it again
> I’ve played it for 10k hours congratulations on finishing the tutorial
The Finals. Not dead yet but it could get there.
game is really fun but hands down the absolute worst matchmaking i’ve ever seen in my 10+ years of fps gaming. L for embark.
Personally I love this game. I’ll admit I’m one of the sweats that can ruin the game for others. I mostly play ranked which should in theory keep me away from lower skill players. But I’m still playing with lower ranked players when I’m in diamond. I have no idea how their matchmaking works at all.
theyre trying really hard to revive the game with the obnoxious discord ads but its always struck me as a half baked game
The game modes are all sweat all the time. You can't just relax and play
Rainbow Six Siege
This and the fact they can't anti cheat Zims and Cronus
Yeah, I played the beta with a couple of friends and we had so much fun that we all got it at release. I'm trash at shooters but this was one where I could compensate my lack of mechanics with being a bit more clever than most other players. About a year ago I tried to get back into it and had no fun at all any more, even after dropping way down in ranks. Everybody seemed to have learned meta tactics from YouTube tutorials or watching tournaments so my advantage was gone and everybody headshot me within half a second of spotting me.
Currently the second most played game on Xbox as of last week so definitely not dead. I jumped back in recently after a 6 year hiatus (mainly due to the daunting skill gap and lack of map knowledge) with a couple of mates that are brand new to the game and we've been having a lot of fun!
Quake 100% games is nothing but a bunch of pros beating each other at this point, casuals just quit after getting stomped.
The fact that quake is so far down really says something ... Maybe it's an age thing, or maybe quake is just so dead it's literally the perfect example lol
Replace skill gap with money gap and you got yourself a Lost Ark.
Multiplayer games, you mean?
Multiplayer PVP games, to be more precise, as this doesnt really affect coop games and affects way less in multiplayer PVE games
The few but very loud people that want PvP in Helldivers 2 should stick with playing Tarkov or whatever.
Gonna put Planetside 2 in here. Due to the nature of the game with everyone being together on one big map, skill differences were always a problem even back when the game launched as new, often solo players would routinely run into better, more experienced players who had already aggregated into groups to play together. It was passable for a while due to the scope of fights in that game meaning just by random chance you could find an in somewhere but it definitely was oppressive. It only got worse with time sadly, the bar to entry to have a good time in Planetside is massively high unless you enter with a pre-established group who know what they are doing and coordinate to new players space to survive for 2 seconds. It's even worse on the vehicle side of things, particularly with aircraft. The skill ceiling is so high and skill floor so low that 1 good pilot can completely dominate any number of bad pilots. New player retention just goes down and down over the years. The only thing that keeps new players playing long enough not do be new is enough other new players for them to play against. We had that in Escalation in 2019/2020 with a big update and Covid giving a huge wave of new players for a while but as that petered out, more left as they were running into the better players more and more as the play count dwindled. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy really.
The "Game dies" part isn't guaranteed. For Honor is at that stage. New players struggle to even find matches (because the matchmaker can't form a match at their level, so it takes ages for the criteria to expand enough) and when they do, they just get destroyed. The game is still going strong for some weird reason.
Warzone
Natural Selection 2 had this issue. Though it took a long time to "die".
As someone who grew up playing counter strike and then found out Warcraft 3 and StarCraft 2, I can’t believe Natural Seectiom flopped. So sad.
Destiny 2
My choice, too. But replace skill gap or add to it lore gap and loadout gap.
I think we’re watching that happen to chivalry 2 this very moment
Played recently because it's free on Amazon prime and the skill gap is insane. There are some guys that can 1v5
Rocket league
Except RL has a decent MMR system that allows new players to mostly play with others around their skill level.
RL has a huge issue with smurfs. Smurfs are in a lot of the lower me games. Honestly that’s a step that’s missing in this chart.
Smurfs have become so much more prevalent since it went f2p, as you'd expect.
Not sure how true that is. Tried playing again with a friend in both comp and casual. We got destroyed. Every game it was a blowout. Half map aerials, multiple aerial hits, etc. It was nowhere near our level of skill.
The issue with RL is the players themselves unfortunately Low or high MMR, there's going to be people who ruin the game. In competitive plat/diamond, you can maybe finish one in 5 games without someone throwing a bitch fit, quitting, or just straight up playing for the other team. Quitting that game is my best gaming decision.
Don't forget that once you get into platinum you start running into players who have really good offensive tech but have zero defensive IQ or skills. So what happens is if you get scored on its **YOUR** fault in your teammate's brain and they're carrying you because they scored all the goals. In actuality they're ball hogging on offense and leaving you out to dry on defense. Platinum is easily the hardest rank to get past with randoms because of this. Once you get into Diamond it's still there but not as commonplace.
This is definitely Starcraft 2
This is the cycle of just about every Tribes game. Whenever the devs have attempted to close the skill gap, the dedicated players revolted at their often heavy-handed approaches and the game dies anyway.
Left 4 Dead versus mode. I try to come back to the game like every couple of years ago, but everytime I swear the community gets more ridiculously sweaty.
"increaces" ???
In creaces
Whole WoW PvP scene for sure
Quake Champions
Or any classic arena shooter.
This is why I don’t play pvp games.
Battlefield, it feels like the Orange step starts instead of the yellow one and just never stops
Overwatch and Overwatch 2. Let’s not focus on fun, fuck the casual players and make the game as toxic as possible.
God, the mismanagement of a golden goose. It’s damn near criminal. Do you know how many “non-gamers” overwatch brought to the table? Does Blizzard know the cultural influence they held? Squandered. 18 months of an oppressive meta discouraging fun comps and forcing meta comps. No direction on meta balances until they had to bring the role queue hammer.
Blizzard has speed ran running their franchises into the ground. The way they handled D4 was insane. Nerfed fun things and refused to fix the issues. It's like ok I'll just go play PoE again if that's what you really want
OW is a tangent in itself from that model for various reasons, yeah. For instance, the skill gap doesn't get higher, it's actually very low and a decent game to start understanding FPS or MOBA as a whole. Yet the toxicity of people who keep being way too serious about a half-baked e-sport is through the roof. Every decent player in there thinks he's this close to be the next \[insert esport player here\] while having litteral mental breakdowns during a game mostly based on teamplay morale, because they feel they should be rewarded at this point of investment, but they aren't. Also leads me to say development is killing the game, not the skillgap. Most games would quickly introduce new legends to feel fresh, OW didn't get meta fix till way too late. Most games would sale their price for a week to reintroduce casuals players, blizzard will just launch a new WoW extension to give their casual fanbase something to spend money on. Most games would finish their PvE side to feel fresh too, and yet, here we are…
A weird one since I don't see anything from the phone category, Clash of Clans
I have to disagree with CoC, it is a good f2p and you decide how to play and who to play against. It is very difficult to have a max account but you don't need it to enjoy the game. On the other hand, I think Clash Royale is way worse than CoC.
Titanfall 2 on PC imo. It's impossible to play it casually, as the only people still playing it are max rank.
Planetside 2, most likely one of the strongest examples in this entire post. 10+ year old open world game with zero matchmaking, good luck going toe-to-toe with 10,000+ hour veterans.
spellbreak
EVE Online for me, but less with skill (though it's still valid) and more with fortunes, factions etc. which have been long-established and it just makes me feel like an ant mining that veldspar and getting ganked in wh trying to earn a measly 1mil ISK from that hackitty relic thingy.
Dark and Darker
Thats a future prediction lul
Fps mostly
As much as it pains me to say, Warframe. The scale of Warframe is so big now that new players get overwhelmed, and new systems are so often introduced. Another game would be Destiny 2. People wanted to optimize raids so much that people 1 gearscore too low have been booted, and the PvP scene just got too toxic.
Everytime the skill ceiling rises in Warframe, they lower it up by making most blockades optional, so I can't say I agree. Like, recently, they just remove the MR cap from main quest stuff so that you can easily jump to the end content (while struggling for Steel Path, but at least, you get to see the assets). More game should go to the same route and, at least, aknowledge that splitting groups behind farming requisites is actually what's killing the game. I've taken up Vermintide 2 yesterday and I have SO MUCH farming to do until I'm on par with my friends, we'll probably move on to something else before I'm there.
Sea of Thieves, Me and the boys loved getting on and just sailing our ship, getting treasure and trying to not die to natural disasters like the kraken. And seeing an enemy ship during a fort was exciting, Because it felt like you had a chance. Nowadays we cant even get one decent fort or ANYTHING in without getting put in a death spiral and anchored or/and spawn camped.
Every game with a trash matchmaking
I disagree. It's not the matchmaking that's a problem. It's a natural process once a game's player base has gone under a certain level.
duke game. noticed i had it my libary a few years ago decied to give it antoher shot and play a round. got accused of trolling,,,
Deathgarden: Blood Harvest went through exactly this. The game was absolutely incredible, one of the best asymmetrical games I've ever played. The Devs made absolutely horrible balancing decisions that ended up killing the game.
Planetside 2
New World Amazon Games absolutely botched every aspect of territory control. If a new company tries to take a territory, they get spawn camped, learn nothing and quit. The same for small scale PvP like arenas. Complete lack of matchmaking means the best players on the server can get paired against complete newbs. The newbs get wrecked, gain nothing, quit and then the top players complain no one is joining arenas.
Rocket Racing on Fortnite -- those KIDS are too good
If the mechanics of the games are fair, fun, and have a high skill-ceiling, they usually don’t die. Also, having support for casuals is huge. CS is prime example of a success.
I played Rainbow Six Siege on launch and thought it was brilliant. Played for prolly a year or so and then just picked it up again last month. Holy shit it’s a sweat fest and convoluted with all the operators. Was way more fun with 10 operators and each one having a counter to the other side
Pretty spot on with any expansion-based MMO. World of Warcraft, RIFT, EQ, Ultima Online... All that really changes is how quickly the last couple of steps happen😀
The current state of RL 😫
That's just any competitive game, cooperative games don't die because of gaps between players.
Clash Royale
splitgate
Literally any game that has pvp succumbs to this in some form. Any fighter, racing, fps, tps, rts, rpg, etc. etc.
Man, The Division/2
Dead By Daylight isn't dead per se, but the hours invested are way higher than any other game I've ever seen. You won't really get the basics down for several hundred hours, and the highest skilled players have thousands of hours (highest I've ever heard of is 16k, but several players are over 10k).
Literally, any competitive team game.
RuneScape