I think the original BioShock did a good job of forcing you to mix up your playstyle by periodically rendering different weapons or tactics invalid, often by ammo limitations. It did feel a bit artificial at times, but knowing twelve different ways to kill a big daddy eventually comes in handy.
@Titanium Dragon
The fact of the matter is, the dichotomy occurs because of the single truth that all players will gravitate towards the one most effective strategy. When people find that strategy they are likely to get bored after a while of pulverising every other player. If new players can jump straight into the strategy, then the game is likely to continue drawing new players in as the old players get bored and exit. Otherwise the new players will be smashed into the ground unless they can find someone of a similar skill level to play against. I also think that Magic is the worst game with regards to this issue.
Namely, at a low skill level, skill is completely disconnected from effectiveness. Instead the optimal strategy is to hit up the internet for a deck list and to play that instead of trying to understand how the game actually works. Instead of trying to understand power curves and land balance and card synergy, you can just pull down some high level player's deck, build that and then just roll every other low skill player's deck. Even when the low skill player hits a higher skilled player who also uses a "viable" deck, he still only needs to understand how to not forecast his moves and how to react to the other player's plays to have a fighting chance at winning. As he gets more skilled more opportunities open up in sideboarding and understanding how the other players' decks work and how to counter them, but chances are the answers are already built into his deck, and he just needs to learn to use them, instead of figuring out how to combat them in the first place.
Of course, you can just play limited formats of the game so everyone is forced to build their decks on the spot, and is forced to exercise these skills to win. But I got a bit sick of paying to play the game each time and amassing thousands of cards for no purpose. So unless you find a group of players who try to get better together and understand the game from the ground up, you're either forced to use the best decks and have no idea what makes these decks good because you can't experiment or you just lose over and over to similarly skilled players because your deck is so inferior to theirs.
Also, in an FPS, getting a kill is not the same as being effective. As a general rule in a deathmatch style FPS, you're not being effective until your K:D is 1. Killing the occasional person does not make you effective, because it means, at best, you have eliminated one guy before dying, most likely one of the individuals closest to or below your skill level on the opposing team, keeping the teams even. However a significant proportion of the time, you have just been dying instead, leaving your team a man down and outgunned. Not that the team might not be able to cope, what with likely <1 K:D ratio players on the other team as well, doing the same thing, but you can only be called effective when you can hold your own in the fight.
This changes depending on the FPS of course. Tickets or limited respawns or any feeding mechanic stresses the need for a good K:D. Objective based game-modes where you need to protect or attack something specific may take the importance off the K:D and onto what you do to progress the objective instead.
So yes, while a new player can get a lucky kill in a lot of FPSes and do something useful, it doesn't mean that it outweighs the amount of times they haven't done anything useful, and it won't necessarily be enough to prevent them being smashed into the ground like in any other type of skill dependent game. If they can do this consistently, then the game itself is likely to be poor at affording opportunities for skill to shine. And if they can't do this consistently, then they still have a sizeable skill gap to cross before they can start to compete and have fun with the skilled players.
the thing about the grenade launcher in CoD is, it allows you to cheese kills but it has travel time + minimum distance to arm and limited ammo. Learning how to aim properly is way more better and you can't get good scores by tubing all the time.
The fact of the matter is, the dichotomy occurs because of the single truth that all players will gravitate towards the one most effective strategy. When people find that strategy they are likely to get bored after a while of pulverising every other player. If new players can jump straight into the strategy, then the game is likely to continue drawing new players in as the old players get bored and exit. Otherwise the new players will be smashed into the ground unless they can find someone of a similar skill level to play against. I also think that Magic is the worst game with regards to this issue.
This only happens if there is only a single FOO strategy, or only a small number of them. Fighting games tend to be less prone to this because of the nature of having a broader cast and the fact that a lot of players WILL play a character who "feels right" to them, over just tier whoring - and in most games where people ARE actually good, tier whoring is mostly useless anyway. A beginner SSBM player, even a beginner tournament player, will have a much easier time mastering Sheik than Falco or Fox, even though the space animals are better.
Really if this sort of thing happens, it was a badly designed game with too big of a gap.
Namely, at a low skill level, skill is completely disconnected from effectiveness. Instead the optimal strategy is to hit up the internet for a deck list and to play that instead of trying to understand how the game actually works. Instead of trying to understand power curves and land balance and card synergy, you can just pull down some high level player's deck, build that and then just roll every other low skill player's deck. Even when the low skill player hits a higher skilled player who also uses a "viable" deck, he still only needs to understand how to not forecast his moves and how to react to the other player's plays to have a fighting chance at winning. As he gets more skilled more opportunities open up in sideboarding and understanding how the other players' decks work and how to counter them, but chances are the answers are already built into his deck, and he just needs to learn to use them, instead of figuring out how to combat them in the first place.
It depends really. The truth is that this isn't really the case. Playskill makes an enormous difference, and while yes, you will beat REALLY bad players if you play a top-tier deck, people who are decent at the game, both playskill and deckskill wise, will still beat you with homebrew decks in most environments (it also partially depends on the deck's nature; aggro decks tend to be easier to beat face with as a newbie, especially very fast ones). Additionally, the ability to understand why decks are good is actually fairly essential to netdecking; while you can just take recommendations from people online, if you're actually bad you'll have a hard time discriminating between good advice and bad advice - I can't count how many people trusted Flores to give them great decks only to fail, and to end up with decks no better than a lot of homebrew decks.
Now admittedly I was a pretty good player, with a lot of deckbuilding talent - by the end of everything I was building the decks to within a few cards of what "the pros" did, and anticipated faeries back when everyone was going on about everything else - of course, faeries were completely nuts, and also (ironically) why I quit Magic - I saw the direction the game was going in, saw how much inflation was happening to card values, and despite my ever increasing skill and my general FUN in playing the game, I realized that spending $300 on cards was nuts - I could get more fun off of spending that money on computers/video games. Admittedly I also moved into a smaller town where I was at the apex of player skill in town, as opposed to being a good player in a big city where there were great players who had pro points and beat me.
But the truth is that netdecking isn't the be-all, end-all, and you actually become a lot better at netdecking when you actually learn how to build decks properly, because you can see which decks -are- the good ones.
This changes depending on the FPS of course. Tickets or limited respawns or any feeding mechanic stresses the need for a good K:D. Objective based game-modes where you need to protect or attack something specific may take the importance off the K:D and onto what you do to progress the objective instead.
Honestly I think that objectives based games are a lot better for that very reason - newbies CAN actually contribute effectively, if as nothing more than a warm body/distraction, as well as something to stand on points or cap them while you fight.
@Titanium Dragon
I still don't see how multiple FOO strategies help the new guy. I mean, at the top level you definitely do want multiple viable FOOs just so there is constant back and forth between the dominant strategies. But all of these strategies are going to annihilate an unskilled player until he learns to adopt one. Until he does that, he'll be constantly countered by someone who lives by a FOO strat, and unable to do much.
I suppose you can counter the dissatisfaction of the new player here by making all the things he can do flashy, so he enjoys his time in the game enough that he keeps playing until he figures out the FOOs and hits that peak effectiveness. And I think that, obliquely, this stands by the episode. If you make the big, flashy, highly broadcast, high damaging moves easy to pull off, then the skilled players learn to counter them but the unskilled players feel great playing them.
But still, if countering them didn't confer a significant advantage on the skilled player, he wouldn't do it, and the game would degenerate into a player generated light show. Fun to play for a while, but repetitive. A casual game. But if countering them does confer an advantage, then a player that refuses to learn how to counter is going to be turned away from the game eventually fed up, no matter how little damage the counter does. Put enough layers of this in, and players start to see real returns for practise, and you get a hardcore game which requires time investment to play well.
So, I probably misunderstood the episode a bit, and they're talking about power balance for skill levels instead of effectiveness balance for skill levels. A person at a higher skill level is always going to be more effective or as effective (but know about more stuff that they shouldn't use) as a player at a lower skill level. You're not going to change that through balancing the game.
But if you don't want your skilled players to tear through your game in a swathe of destruction, then you can't give them more efficient tools to win as they get better. Like various people have been saying (but I've been missing), it's not that the skilled player can win, but that he doesn't just bulldoze the new guy with superior abilities.
So, I may have been missing the point here. You have 3 cases, not 2. You have the two reasonable games, the casuals where the FOOs never leaves the station and anyone can jump in and out and the harder core games where the player level slowly increases down the track but players can still work and catch up if they want. But then you have the last demon train from Back to the Future 3 which just annihilates everything in front of it and simply plunges off a cliff when it runs out of track. No-ones catching that thing, and no-ones having fun. So don't have skill locked speed boosts hidden inside your train.
Some of the discussion on this topic makes me think it'd be cool for them to do an episode on player retention/turnover. Some balancing strategies, monetezation methods, reward systems and other techniques the EC crew has talked about seem aimed more at filling the void left by new players than keeping old ones. Now obviously you don't want a game that just caters to the old players and has a huge barrier of entry for new ones. And in a business sense I guess as long as you replace every player who gets frustrated and leaves with a new one, you're solid. But is this good for the industry? I can see pros and cons to both sides. Can you entice new players and satisfy the old ones?
Maybe the biggest joy I take from a game is when I feel like I've beaten the *developer*, i.e. when I find a FOO strategy I feel was unintended. In every Elder Scrolls game, I've tried to find a broken mechanic and exploit the hell out of it, whether it's floating in Morrowind, permainvis in Oblivion, or enchant/potion/smith synergy in Skyrim.
Yeah, I do typically lose interest after I've gotten my jollies, but doesn't that happen with every game, whether you're competing against the game or the designer?
probably a new record for not knowing what the hell you're talking about.
E. Honda's BnB combo, his whiff punish combo, his frame punish combo, his poke combo, his jump in combo, and his meter-burning combo, all include hand slaps, even more so in SFIV.
@BemaniAK
I think the point was that E. Honda's hand slapping is an easy to pull off but high damaging move, so it can be used by everyone. This is highly preferable to a hard to pull off but high damaging move that pros can use to completely lock out new players. So, when balancing the game, you want to give skilled players ways to counter the hand slapping and ways to incorporate hand slapping, but you don't want to give them high damaging alternatives that just cause a cascade of wins.
But tbh I have no idea about SFIV either, so I'm just guessing from the context that slapping is a high damage move.
MFW people think honda slaps are good, or powerful, or even useful (in ww, not sf4). A severe lack of understanding of street fighter works in this video. It would be nice to see you guys talk about a STRATEGY instead of talking about a move. Also the EC guys are making the classic mistake of assuming that Physical dexterity to execute a specific moves or combos is the skill required to win at a fighting game. I like the idea of a First Order Optimal Strategy, but you need to apply that to strategies (something you failed to do throughout the video) and
-->VIABLE OPTIONS<-- (the real factor to what makes a character good or bad in anything). For example, the fireball/uppercut trap is a strategy. It takes skills like spacing and mind games. Those things are skills. Special moves and combos are just learning to press buttons in order. Seriously guys, you have no idea what your talking about.
@BemaiAK, in Street fighter 2 (the game he was talking about, not SF4) slaps where just a heavy hitting high priority attack with disjointed hit boxes. You couldn't combo them and there was no piano method (you had to hit the same button 4 times under 15 frames). It was... ok but not as gdlk as they think it was.
"The ratio of power to skill should be higher the lower the amount of skill required to do something. Which is very different than saying that the power of something that requires low skill should be ..."
Which is different from what? I wanted to hear him finish the second sentence, or at least return to this once he was done with the examples, but no. So now I'm left wondering, what was he going to say?
Was it just that saying that power should increase more slowly is not the same as saying that power should decrease? Or what? I'm left in a bind because he said it's counter-intuitive, so if I can intuit what he what he was going to say, does that mean I'm wrong?
I like the discussion on skill level but it is such a subjective concept that what you're really discussing seems to be the learning curve of different strategies/abilities. Starcraft is a good representation of what could be considered skill but SFII falls into a questionable area where wrote memory combined with dexterity are skill but may never be attained by simple will power. Not to say that if a player didn't sit there for hours working on their button pressing it wouldn't get better but fighting game moves are a bad representation in my view.
Overall I get it, I like what you're describing but what power does as skill increases is control. Usually in games like CoD or Starcraft is that the control is dramatically increased so that damage output or whatever is called upon to benefit isn't a tremendous boost in general but a tactical one. The greater the skill the greater the tactical benefit. Which is probably what this post is really about, as ability/skill increases tactical benefit increases at a far faster or atleast linear progression than sheer power.
Reminds me of the heavy in team fortress 2.
He's really easy to use and really powerful, but you can't really do much better with him(mainly because he is so slow) So pro players who know how to counter it can easily beat you as a heavy,while you can't do much about it
@Xeranar I see this opinion floating around a lot about fighting games, but it really couldn't be more wrong. The dexterity of stick motions and the timing/dexterity of hitting buttons properly are very much trainable skills. I used to think that it was something natural or born in, but then I decided to give the games a real try. I started playing about a year ago, and while I'm no where near as good as the pros, I've seen my personal skill increase by leaps and bounds. It's amazing what an hour or two in training mode a day and weekly face to face sessions can do.
@rrh If you think of any tactic as a machine that takes skill and converts it to power, what he's saying is that the tactics which require less skill to use should be more efficient machines, but should be more powerful overall. So your "power increases more slowly" conception was right: if your skill increases from 5 to 6 (arbitrary units), you will see a greater increase in power than if it increases from 6 to 7.
I f you want a graph, try y=log(x) where y is power and x is skill. For a game with an absolute power ceiling, y=(-1/x)+20 where 20 is the skill ceiling.
Of course these are crazy rough and you can't really represent skill numerically most of the time, but conceptually that should help.
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fearsomepirateI ate a pickle once.Registered Userregular
You're overanalyzing his point about COD. The point isn't that you can win by just using the GL all the time, the point is that new players can have fun because they'll be able to get a few kills, rather than going 0-43 in every match. Killing is fun, and players who can't get any kills aren't having any fun. Players who don't have fun don't buy your games.
This is, incidentally, why Treyarch/IW are right to ignore skilled players who demand everything that new players use should be nerfed to the point that a skilled players simply never get killed by new players.
Nobody makes me bleed my own blood...nobody.
PSN ID: fearsomepirate
Personally, I would have used CoD as an example of what not to do.
You don't give all your experienced players silenced P90s that do more damage, have more ammo and have more utility than anything that a new player can get his hands on.
This was in CoD:Modern Warfare though, so the unlocks might be more balanced now, and the wiki appears to say that it only deals more damage at midrange, although that's generally where you're trying to engage an enemy with an automatic rifle.
I think a good example of a whole genre that seems to INTENTIONALLY neglect this important step is the MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) sometimes called "tower defense" games. Titles like Super Monday Night Combat, Defense of the Ancients, and the like. The problem is, they depend so heavily upon teamwork while simultaneously weighting their gameplay balance VERY heavily towards early game mistakes, and because of this combination, the sort of mistakes which, for a first-timer, are almost impossible to avoid making are looked upon by regulars as so unforgivable that longtime veterans will rage LOUDLY at first-timers for making mistakes that no newcomer could POSSIBLY know to avoid, let-alone HOW to avoid, that the only time one can get into the game without getting angrily mobbed out is when the game is first released. The whole genre's gameplay mechanic only serves to amplify the tendency to suffer newbies poorly.
I think another important topic related to this is the skill ceiling. In some games things become unbalanced simply because there is no way to apply more skill to them. For example, in Planetside 2 you have AA missiles vs. Fighters. The AA missile just locks on and goes after the fighter, so it's very easy to use, and very effective against unskilled fighter pilots. However, fighter pilots can employ various strategies and equipment to defeat missiles, and they can get so good at it that they can avoid pretty much all missiles fired on them.
That's a case where an item with a very low skill ceiling is gimpy because of it. The players on the ground simply can't do anything to match a more skilled opponent, since their weapon simply doesn't allow them to take a better shot. Even if the guy with the AA launcher is just as good at the game as the fighter pilot, he can't do anything to leverage his skill with a weapon like that.
Makes me think of the PKP combo in Bayonetta, super easy to execute and does huge damage but has very little style or follow up. It's good at finishing things off but not much more. Once you get used to the game you start using the more complex combos things get more interesting. Players start using longer combos and eventually even start using the Dodge Offset combos to be more effective in the end while taking more skill to pull off.
This is definitely why I quit Starcraft Multiplayer after 2 or 3 tries. The veteran players destroyed me, insulted me, and then violated my corpse afterwards. How the hell does anyone consider that fun?
The inclusion of a Noob Tube isn't the only way to fix that problem, or even the best, in my opinion. A ranking system that properly compensates for skill level does far more to balance who is playing who than a cheap kill weapon ever could. Maybe it's good enough as a stop gap solution until we can create a ranking system that works right, but as long as we keep counting on it it'll never go away. It's a crutch at best.
@iamgregor: Starcraft 2 has very good matchmaking. After your placement matches you should find yourself playing against people who are roughly your own level, which gives you a good opportunity to learn the game and improve.
I play starcraft 2 i and i believe it is this exactly, you have really easy strategies to execute and still win but if you can execute them better or incorporate new things into them for different situations then you become slightly more powerful the extra skill involved. I also play League of Legends and that did a great job of character skill-power. it shows character difficulty before you purchase a character and although all characters a balanced the higher difficulty ones usually have some pretty cool chains or abilities to work with, helping progression that, just my views.
I disagree with you on Starcraft 2. The strategies are relatively easy to execute but often require a certain condition for your opponent to be in. This means that in order for these simple strategies to be good, you need information on your opponent or they might pull something completely out of left field and take you out (stuff like rushing Void Rays and the like). So while some of the strategies are easy, they require something difficult (scouting) in order to be effective. That's also not taking in to account that you have to consider expansions and the like.
I really had two issues with this video but it was otherwise pretty great as usual:
1)I don't really understand why the M203 was a positive example while the SC1 zerg rush was a poor example.
The M203 is a FOO strategy with no skills that transfer over to using anything else. It does not help new players get better at the rest of the game and it does not lead in to other strategies that are harder to pull off but more powerful. It's the very epitome of the example negative example given where there's no reason to stop using it.
Likewise, the 4 pool in SC1 (which was nerfed extremely early in the game's life cycle) was impossible to stop unless the zerg player messed it up or the other play over-invested in stopping it which would put them further behind. 4 pooling does not lead to better micromanagement, decision making, or multitasking. Just like the M203, it's a dead end in terms of skill.
2) The implied holy grail of these games is player numbers but what happens when these FOO strategies are so cheap, they drive more dedicated players away? I've seen many games go this direction in an effort to appease the masses and while initially successful, the game dies of quickly because of how frustrating it is that anyone is as good as anyone else unless they're top tier.
CS:GO Lake level has a strategy like this. If you can get inside and to the top of the stairs before the other team (it's a tied race if you're both going for it) then it's the best place to camp out. There are enough places at the top of the stairs to hide that it's hard for an enemy to ascend and be able to look all the places you could be.
An example of how this is done right at least to some extent would be Alien Swarm. Most new players pick up the ever so easy flamethrower that melts thru anything at normal or easy, has almost limitless ammo and makes you almost invulnerable. On hard or brutal the flamethrower does not kill the aliens nearly as fast as it does on the easier difficulties so it suddenly turns into a terrible weapon and almost any of the other options is better than the flamethrower. It's still useful as low ammo cost area clearing weapon but it can't be your only option unless you are a skilled player. It encourages people to either keep playing with the flamer and become good with it or try some of the other gear out and become better at the game
Shame that this game has no sequel, the guys who made it were obviously good at what they were doing. Valve hired them years ago but I guess they are working with some other projects
COD is an awful example to use for this topic. For one there is next to no skill gap in the gun play. Headshots only deal an additional 40 percent more damage, you only need 3-5 shots to the torso and limbs depending on weapon and range to kill, there is no recoil, and the movement speeds are very slow. Not to say there is no skill gap in the game it self however when it comes to the gun play there is no reward for good marksmanship snipers included.
Secondly the noob tube is an awful example as well, with how easy it is to use any of the auto rifles, a noob is far better off spraying at 900 rounds per minute with 30 round mags while only needing 3-5 of them to hit anywhere on body. Than using something that has travel time and could potentially kill the user. The grenade launcher is not what the devs use to appeal to noobs and scrubs, it's the entire game.
A good example of how a shoot could balance for skill in the gun play would be BF3 or BF:P4Fs recoil mechanics. Granted there are some major issues with both those games however, just with the recoil mechanics they really give a class of novice level weapons and advanced level weapons. There are some guns that have very little recoil however it's completely unpredictable. So if you're not such a good shot you could use these rather effectively, however there are some weapon with a lot kick however it's very predicable so you could account for it and intentionally keep the sight on target.
Thank you so much for this video. There's some deep loathing about such a concept as a FOO in many fighting game circles, under the impression that a beginner to the game ought to go through hell-training and get as good as the pros (or those pretending to be pros). That line of thinking is selfish and elitist.
Indeed, game series like Guilty Gear have become, as is said in the video, "a small community of veterans churning through new players at an alarming rate." The worst part is that I'm sure many of these guys actually WANT it like that. They WANT the newcomers to quit (in other words, stay away from their turf). This doesn't bode well for the game developers, who need to pay the bills.
As much criticism as Capcom gets, this is something they consistently get right with their fighting games. They always put in something that attracts newcomers and keeps them playing, and thus, Capcom almost always turns a profit each time they release a fighting game.
As for stopping a FOO strategy from becoming overpowering, I don't really know how game designers do it. I'd imagine studying Mario Kart would work, as the series, throughout its history, has had FOOs done right and done wrong.
the game I remember the most as having a FOO Strategy was a fighting game called "One Must Fall". All you ever really needed to do was sweep to high kick and you could beat all AI opponents.
@ZombieAladdin
Games like Guilty Gear are doing fine, they offer players an experience they cannot get anywhere else, which is doing stylish combos and intense combat.
Fighting games are doing a great job providing people with a challenge and a depth that reward mastery, some people might not like being push into have to master things, but guess what, those people are NOT the target audience! They do not want what fighting games offer best!
A good fighting game will thrive on a competitive scene and reward people that do the effort with intense emotions, that's worth something and it's one of the things that make it non-important for fighting games to be noob-friendly. A great example is SFxT, despite all the noob-friendliness of SFxT, it tanked hard, why? Because the community saw that the Gem System would make the game a bad competitive game.
tl;dr: Fighting Games are fine, stop hating on the commitment and (I never thought I would that sentence one day...) learn to... play (or leave)?
Re: Honda Handslap controversy: I think they were talking about "that first time" you discovered it was effective (and how it had diminishing returns, ie, got boring); I don't think they were referring to its effectiveness in a tournament ten years+ later
I think the original BioShock did a good job of forcing you to mix up your playstyle by periodically rendering different weapons or tactics invalid, often by ammo limitations. It did feel a bit artificial at times, but knowing twelve different ways to kill a big daddy eventually comes in handy.
Absolutely! I have been playing it for the first time (I know, weird) the last couple of weeks and in a way it, along with the Plasmids, lends to that feeling you don't really know "who you are," at least, at the beginning of the game. I also liked the fact you can just ignore killing Big Daddies, but it will cost you later.
The camera, I think, is a genius way to skirt the issue of xp/levelling, too, in a way (along with the vendors, too, of course). Rather than having skills you tick off a list you get better at "knowing your enemy" in a visceral sense.
A good fighting game will thrive on a competitive scene and reward people that do the effort with intense emotions, that's worth something and it's one of the things that make it non-important for fighting games to be noob-friendly. A great example is SFxT, despite all the noob-friendliness of SFxT, it tanked hard, why? Because the community saw that the Gem System would make the game a bad competitive game.
Well, that and the system seemed bolted-on to begin with. They didn't even "feel" right in the game world. It made me want to play Puzzle/Gem Fighter instead.
@ZombieAladdin, I could not possibly disagree more with you when you suggest that the upper echelon of players within the fighting game community (the pros out there who actually make real money playing these games) actually want newcomers to become frustrated and quit. While I can't speak to the Guilty Gear community specifically (my interest has always solely been the Street Fighter series), there is a considerable amount of overlap within the player bases of almost the entirety of the 2D Fighter genre, so I do have a fair degree of exposure to that same community of players.
For starters, there is simply no economic reason for any high-level player to want a smaller community of players. None. Think of the situation from the perspective of an extremely dominant tournament player: more people playing the game you dominate means bigger tournament turnout, which in turn translates to bigger cash prizes (for you to win), increased exposure (more tournaments to win money at), a higher probability of high-profile players being offered corporate sponsorship (a steady supply of paychecks and more opportunities to travel to faraway tournaments), and longevity for your game (more years of making money winning tournaments and of sponsors signing your paychecks). None of these things are even remotely possible without a large community of low-to-mid-level players paying entry fees and buying sponsors' merchandise like arcade sticks and fightpads.
All of this might suggest that the world-class players DO, in fact, want tons of weak competition to feed off of, but would prefer to drive off anyone with the potential to be good. Again, there is no good economic incentive to do that--quite the opposite, in fact! Dominant tourney players reap the benefits of those newcomers eventually becoming good enough to contend for the throne: high-profile matches mean more people dropping the $5-$10 to watch the premium stream, resulting in more money being pumped into the game, and besides, sponsors usually want to field TEAMS of high-profile players, so you want more high-level players within the community, because it increases the odds that you will one day find yourself on a team that can compete against international competition. The big tournaments out there--the so-called "majors" that end up drawing scores of the best international players--are where the big bucks start getting thrown around.
Additionally, there is no historical basis for your statement. Look at the miserable reception Street Fighter x Tekken received in 2012: in less than a year, the XBL and PSN communities for SFxT had all but dried up. There were still a handful of elite SFxT players out there but there was very little interest in the game outside of a few die-hard believers. If the reality of the situation were anything like you suggested, that "many of these guys actually WANT it like that. They WANT the newcomers to quit (in other words, stay away from their turf)," this would have been an ideal opportunity to prune the stragglers and make SFxT their own private little gated community. Rather than antagonize new players, however, many of these elite players continued to spend a great deal of time and effort championing the SFxT to the community at large online, fought tooth and nail to get SFxT a spot at any tournament they could find, and worked their butts off in the training room on the game trying to find the "spark" that would reignite interest in the flagging title. Simply put: the few world-class SFxT players out there had a perfect opportunity to behave like the elitists you claim them to be, and THEY DID THE EXACT OPPOSITE.
Finally, my own experiences and interactions with the FGC are nothing like you claim. I have played every version of Street Fighter there is in both the United States and Japan, I have played in local tournaments with only 22 people and at Evolution, the biggest fighting game tournament in the world with an amazing 2000+ players turning out from every state in the US and 40 countries to compete, I have posted results ranging from being mauled 0-2 and being knocked out of the tournament in under 10 minutes to reaching the semifinals, and I can say with absolute certainty that I have never witnessed the sort of negativity and elitism you seem to believe exists within the FGC. I've met and spoken with some of the most accomplished, highly respected players in the world (Daigo Umehara, Alex Valle) and some of the biggest names within the community (Gootecks, James Chen), and every interaction has been friendly and courteous. I've seen guys talk some of the most brutal, ruthless trash during a match, only to shake hands and hug after the final KO before going and grabbing a drink and shooting the breeze like old war buddies.
Does this mean that every single member of the FGC is a good person? Absolutely not. I've definitely gotten my share of mean-spirited hatemail on PSN from people I've played (that I have beaten and that have beaten me), but that particular blight upon the landscape of the gaming community certainly isn't unique to 2D Fighters. And, yes, the FGC has had a number of recent embarrassments (Aris' misogynistic outburst and a large portion of the community defending him, for instance, is a black eye that likely won't fade for a long while, nor should it, because it exposed the worst of us), but those misdeeds, reprehensible though they were, comprise only a very minute portion of what the community is about and its role in the lives and relationships of its members.
Lol, the 'noob tube' may be targeted towards new players, but as in all cases, a very, VERY few new players will try and find ways as they become experienced to take that 'noob' strategy and use it in new and inventive ways.
No one who isn't completely deranged can say that perfecting your use of the noob tube to the point where you're regularly shooting grenades across map through the windows of a building and making precision shots takes 'no skill'.
After all, no amount of claims of 'no skill' are valid if you're able to use this highly refined talent to get a nuke every 10 or so games.
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The fact of the matter is, the dichotomy occurs because of the single truth that all players will gravitate towards the one most effective strategy. When people find that strategy they are likely to get bored after a while of pulverising every other player. If new players can jump straight into the strategy, then the game is likely to continue drawing new players in as the old players get bored and exit. Otherwise the new players will be smashed into the ground unless they can find someone of a similar skill level to play against. I also think that Magic is the worst game with regards to this issue.
Namely, at a low skill level, skill is completely disconnected from effectiveness. Instead the optimal strategy is to hit up the internet for a deck list and to play that instead of trying to understand how the game actually works. Instead of trying to understand power curves and land balance and card synergy, you can just pull down some high level player's deck, build that and then just roll every other low skill player's deck. Even when the low skill player hits a higher skilled player who also uses a "viable" deck, he still only needs to understand how to not forecast his moves and how to react to the other player's plays to have a fighting chance at winning. As he gets more skilled more opportunities open up in sideboarding and understanding how the other players' decks work and how to counter them, but chances are the answers are already built into his deck, and he just needs to learn to use them, instead of figuring out how to combat them in the first place.
Of course, you can just play limited formats of the game so everyone is forced to build their decks on the spot, and is forced to exercise these skills to win. But I got a bit sick of paying to play the game each time and amassing thousands of cards for no purpose. So unless you find a group of players who try to get better together and understand the game from the ground up, you're either forced to use the best decks and have no idea what makes these decks good because you can't experiment or you just lose over and over to similarly skilled players because your deck is so inferior to theirs.
Also, in an FPS, getting a kill is not the same as being effective. As a general rule in a deathmatch style FPS, you're not being effective until your K:D is 1. Killing the occasional person does not make you effective, because it means, at best, you have eliminated one guy before dying, most likely one of the individuals closest to or below your skill level on the opposing team, keeping the teams even. However a significant proportion of the time, you have just been dying instead, leaving your team a man down and outgunned. Not that the team might not be able to cope, what with likely <1 K:D ratio players on the other team as well, doing the same thing, but you can only be called effective when you can hold your own in the fight.
This changes depending on the FPS of course. Tickets or limited respawns or any feeding mechanic stresses the need for a good K:D. Objective based game-modes where you need to protect or attack something specific may take the importance off the K:D and onto what you do to progress the objective instead.
So yes, while a new player can get a lucky kill in a lot of FPSes and do something useful, it doesn't mean that it outweighs the amount of times they haven't done anything useful, and it won't necessarily be enough to prevent them being smashed into the ground like in any other type of skill dependent game. If they can do this consistently, then the game itself is likely to be poor at affording opportunities for skill to shine. And if they can't do this consistently, then they still have a sizeable skill gap to cross before they can start to compete and have fun with the skilled players.
the thing about the grenade launcher in CoD is, it allows you to cheese kills but it has travel time + minimum distance to arm and limited ammo. Learning how to aim properly is way more better and you can't get good scores by tubing all the time.
This only happens if there is only a single FOO strategy, or only a small number of them. Fighting games tend to be less prone to this because of the nature of having a broader cast and the fact that a lot of players WILL play a character who "feels right" to them, over just tier whoring - and in most games where people ARE actually good, tier whoring is mostly useless anyway. A beginner SSBM player, even a beginner tournament player, will have a much easier time mastering Sheik than Falco or Fox, even though the space animals are better.
Really if this sort of thing happens, it was a badly designed game with too big of a gap.
It depends really. The truth is that this isn't really the case. Playskill makes an enormous difference, and while yes, you will beat REALLY bad players if you play a top-tier deck, people who are decent at the game, both playskill and deckskill wise, will still beat you with homebrew decks in most environments (it also partially depends on the deck's nature; aggro decks tend to be easier to beat face with as a newbie, especially very fast ones). Additionally, the ability to understand why decks are good is actually fairly essential to netdecking; while you can just take recommendations from people online, if you're actually bad you'll have a hard time discriminating between good advice and bad advice - I can't count how many people trusted Flores to give them great decks only to fail, and to end up with decks no better than a lot of homebrew decks.
Now admittedly I was a pretty good player, with a lot of deckbuilding talent - by the end of everything I was building the decks to within a few cards of what "the pros" did, and anticipated faeries back when everyone was going on about everything else - of course, faeries were completely nuts, and also (ironically) why I quit Magic - I saw the direction the game was going in, saw how much inflation was happening to card values, and despite my ever increasing skill and my general FUN in playing the game, I realized that spending $300 on cards was nuts - I could get more fun off of spending that money on computers/video games. Admittedly I also moved into a smaller town where I was at the apex of player skill in town, as opposed to being a good player in a big city where there were great players who had pro points and beat me.
But the truth is that netdecking isn't the be-all, end-all, and you actually become a lot better at netdecking when you actually learn how to build decks properly, because you can see which decks -are- the good ones.
Honestly I think that objectives based games are a lot better for that very reason - newbies CAN actually contribute effectively, if as nothing more than a warm body/distraction, as well as something to stand on points or cap them while you fight.
I still don't see how multiple FOO strategies help the new guy. I mean, at the top level you definitely do want multiple viable FOOs just so there is constant back and forth between the dominant strategies. But all of these strategies are going to annihilate an unskilled player until he learns to adopt one. Until he does that, he'll be constantly countered by someone who lives by a FOO strat, and unable to do much.
I suppose you can counter the dissatisfaction of the new player here by making all the things he can do flashy, so he enjoys his time in the game enough that he keeps playing until he figures out the FOOs and hits that peak effectiveness. And I think that, obliquely, this stands by the episode. If you make the big, flashy, highly broadcast, high damaging moves easy to pull off, then the skilled players learn to counter them but the unskilled players feel great playing them.
But still, if countering them didn't confer a significant advantage on the skilled player, he wouldn't do it, and the game would degenerate into a player generated light show. Fun to play for a while, but repetitive. A casual game. But if countering them does confer an advantage, then a player that refuses to learn how to counter is going to be turned away from the game eventually fed up, no matter how little damage the counter does. Put enough layers of this in, and players start to see real returns for practise, and you get a hardcore game which requires time investment to play well.
So, I probably misunderstood the episode a bit, and they're talking about power balance for skill levels instead of effectiveness balance for skill levels. A person at a higher skill level is always going to be more effective or as effective (but know about more stuff that they shouldn't use) as a player at a lower skill level. You're not going to change that through balancing the game.
But if you don't want your skilled players to tear through your game in a swathe of destruction, then you can't give them more efficient tools to win as they get better. Like various people have been saying (but I've been missing), it's not that the skilled player can win, but that he doesn't just bulldoze the new guy with superior abilities.
So, I may have been missing the point here. You have 3 cases, not 2. You have the two reasonable games, the casuals where the FOOs never leaves the station and anyone can jump in and out and the harder core games where the player level slowly increases down the track but players can still work and catch up if they want. But then you have the last demon train from Back to the Future 3 which just annihilates everything in front of it and simply plunges off a cliff when it runs out of track. No-ones catching that thing, and no-ones having fun. So don't have skill locked speed boosts hidden inside your train.
Yeah, I do typically lose interest after I've gotten my jollies, but doesn't that happen with every game, whether you're competing against the game or the designer?
E. Honda's BnB combo, his whiff punish combo, his frame punish combo, his poke combo, his jump in combo, and his meter-burning combo, all include hand slaps, even more so in SFIV.
I think the point was that E. Honda's hand slapping is an easy to pull off but high damaging move, so it can be used by everyone. This is highly preferable to a hard to pull off but high damaging move that pros can use to completely lock out new players. So, when balancing the game, you want to give skilled players ways to counter the hand slapping and ways to incorporate hand slapping, but you don't want to give them high damaging alternatives that just cause a cascade of wins.
But tbh I have no idea about SFIV either, so I'm just guessing from the context that slapping is a high damage move.
-->VIABLE OPTIONS<-- (the real factor to what makes a character good or bad in anything). For example, the fireball/uppercut trap is a strategy. It takes skills like spacing and mind games. Those things are skills. Special moves and combos are just learning to press buttons in order. Seriously guys, you have no idea what your talking about.
@BemaiAK, in Street fighter 2 (the game he was talking about, not SF4) slaps where just a heavy hitting high priority attack with disjointed hit boxes. You couldn't combo them and there was no piano method (you had to hit the same button 4 times under 15 frames). It was... ok but not as gdlk as they think it was.
"The ratio of power to skill should be higher the lower the amount of skill required to do something. Which is very different than saying that the power of something that requires low skill should be ..."
Which is different from what? I wanted to hear him finish the second sentence, or at least return to this once he was done with the examples, but no. So now I'm left wondering, what was he going to say?
Was it just that saying that power should increase more slowly is not the same as saying that power should decrease? Or what? I'm left in a bind because he said it's counter-intuitive, so if I can intuit what he what he was going to say, does that mean I'm wrong?
Overall I get it, I like what you're describing but what power does as skill increases is control. Usually in games like CoD or Starcraft is that the control is dramatically increased so that damage output or whatever is called upon to benefit isn't a tremendous boost in general but a tactical one. The greater the skill the greater the tactical benefit. Which is probably what this post is really about, as ability/skill increases tactical benefit increases at a far faster or atleast linear progression than sheer power.
He's really easy to use and really powerful, but you can't really do much better with him(mainly because he is so slow) So pro players who know how to counter it can easily beat you as a heavy,while you can't do much about it
I f you want a graph, try y=log(x) where y is power and x is skill. For a game with an absolute power ceiling, y=(-1/x)+20 where 20 is the skill ceiling.
Of course these are crazy rough and you can't really represent skill numerically most of the time, but conceptually that should help.
This is, incidentally, why Treyarch/IW are right to ignore skilled players who demand everything that new players use should be nerfed to the point that a skilled players simply never get killed by new players.
PSN ID: fearsomepirate
You don't give all your experienced players silenced P90s that do more damage, have more ammo and have more utility than anything that a new player can get his hands on.
This was in CoD:Modern Warfare though, so the unlocks might be more balanced now, and the wiki appears to say that it only deals more damage at midrange, although that's generally where you're trying to engage an enemy with an automatic rifle.
That's a case where an item with a very low skill ceiling is gimpy because of it. The players on the ground simply can't do anything to match a more skilled opponent, since their weapon simply doesn't allow them to take a better shot. Even if the guy with the AA launcher is just as good at the game as the fighter pilot, he can't do anything to leverage his skill with a weapon like that.
I disagree with you on Starcraft 2. The strategies are relatively easy to execute but often require a certain condition for your opponent to be in. This means that in order for these simple strategies to be good, you need information on your opponent or they might pull something completely out of left field and take you out (stuff like rushing Void Rays and the like). So while some of the strategies are easy, they require something difficult (scouting) in order to be effective. That's also not taking in to account that you have to consider expansions and the like.
1)I don't really understand why the M203 was a positive example while the SC1 zerg rush was a poor example.
The M203 is a FOO strategy with no skills that transfer over to using anything else. It does not help new players get better at the rest of the game and it does not lead in to other strategies that are harder to pull off but more powerful. It's the very epitome of the example negative example given where there's no reason to stop using it.
Likewise, the 4 pool in SC1 (which was nerfed extremely early in the game's life cycle) was impossible to stop unless the zerg player messed it up or the other play over-invested in stopping it which would put them further behind. 4 pooling does not lead to better micromanagement, decision making, or multitasking. Just like the M203, it's a dead end in terms of skill.
2) The implied holy grail of these games is player numbers but what happens when these FOO strategies are so cheap, they drive more dedicated players away? I've seen many games go this direction in an effort to appease the masses and while initially successful, the game dies of quickly because of how frustrating it is that anyone is as good as anyone else unless they're top tier.
Shame that this game has no sequel, the guys who made it were obviously good at what they were doing. Valve hired them years ago but I guess they are working with some other projects
Secondly the noob tube is an awful example as well, with how easy it is to use any of the auto rifles, a noob is far better off spraying at 900 rounds per minute with 30 round mags while only needing 3-5 of them to hit anywhere on body. Than using something that has travel time and could potentially kill the user. The grenade launcher is not what the devs use to appeal to noobs and scrubs, it's the entire game.
A good example of how a shoot could balance for skill in the gun play would be BF3 or BF:P4Fs recoil mechanics. Granted there are some major issues with both those games however, just with the recoil mechanics they really give a class of novice level weapons and advanced level weapons. There are some guns that have very little recoil however it's completely unpredictable. So if you're not such a good shot you could use these rather effectively, however there are some weapon with a lot kick however it's very predicable so you could account for it and intentionally keep the sight on target.
Indeed, game series like Guilty Gear have become, as is said in the video, "a small community of veterans churning through new players at an alarming rate." The worst part is that I'm sure many of these guys actually WANT it like that. They WANT the newcomers to quit (in other words, stay away from their turf). This doesn't bode well for the game developers, who need to pay the bills.
As much criticism as Capcom gets, this is something they consistently get right with their fighting games. They always put in something that attracts newcomers and keeps them playing, and thus, Capcom almost always turns a profit each time they release a fighting game.
As for stopping a FOO strategy from becoming overpowering, I don't really know how game designers do it. I'd imagine studying Mario Kart would work, as the series, throughout its history, has had FOOs done right and done wrong.
Games like Guilty Gear are doing fine, they offer players an experience they cannot get anywhere else, which is doing stylish combos and intense combat.
Fighting games are doing a great job providing people with a challenge and a depth that reward mastery, some people might not like being push into have to master things, but guess what, those people are NOT the target audience! They do not want what fighting games offer best!
A good fighting game will thrive on a competitive scene and reward people that do the effort with intense emotions, that's worth something and it's one of the things that make it non-important for fighting games to be noob-friendly. A great example is SFxT, despite all the noob-friendliness of SFxT, it tanked hard, why? Because the community saw that the Gem System would make the game a bad competitive game.
tl;dr: Fighting Games are fine, stop hating on the commitment and (I never thought I would that sentence one day...) learn to... play (or leave)?
Absolutely! I have been playing it for the first time (I know, weird) the last couple of weeks and in a way it, along with the Plasmids, lends to that feeling you don't really know "who you are," at least, at the beginning of the game. I also liked the fact you can just ignore killing Big Daddies, but it will cost you later.
The camera, I think, is a genius way to skirt the issue of xp/levelling, too, in a way (along with the vendors, too, of course). Rather than having skills you tick off a list you get better at "knowing your enemy" in a visceral sense.
Well, that and the system seemed bolted-on to begin with. They didn't even "feel" right in the game world. It made me want to play Puzzle/Gem Fighter instead.
For starters, there is simply no economic reason for any high-level player to want a smaller community of players. None. Think of the situation from the perspective of an extremely dominant tournament player: more people playing the game you dominate means bigger tournament turnout, which in turn translates to bigger cash prizes (for you to win), increased exposure (more tournaments to win money at), a higher probability of high-profile players being offered corporate sponsorship (a steady supply of paychecks and more opportunities to travel to faraway tournaments), and longevity for your game (more years of making money winning tournaments and of sponsors signing your paychecks). None of these things are even remotely possible without a large community of low-to-mid-level players paying entry fees and buying sponsors' merchandise like arcade sticks and fightpads.
All of this might suggest that the world-class players DO, in fact, want tons of weak competition to feed off of, but would prefer to drive off anyone with the potential to be good. Again, there is no good economic incentive to do that--quite the opposite, in fact! Dominant tourney players reap the benefits of those newcomers eventually becoming good enough to contend for the throne: high-profile matches mean more people dropping the $5-$10 to watch the premium stream, resulting in more money being pumped into the game, and besides, sponsors usually want to field TEAMS of high-profile players, so you want more high-level players within the community, because it increases the odds that you will one day find yourself on a team that can compete against international competition. The big tournaments out there--the so-called "majors" that end up drawing scores of the best international players--are where the big bucks start getting thrown around.
Additionally, there is no historical basis for your statement. Look at the miserable reception Street Fighter x Tekken received in 2012: in less than a year, the XBL and PSN communities for SFxT had all but dried up. There were still a handful of elite SFxT players out there but there was very little interest in the game outside of a few die-hard believers. If the reality of the situation were anything like you suggested, that "many of these guys actually WANT it like that. They WANT the newcomers to quit (in other words, stay away from their turf)," this would have been an ideal opportunity to prune the stragglers and make SFxT their own private little gated community. Rather than antagonize new players, however, many of these elite players continued to spend a great deal of time and effort championing the SFxT to the community at large online, fought tooth and nail to get SFxT a spot at any tournament they could find, and worked their butts off in the training room on the game trying to find the "spark" that would reignite interest in the flagging title. Simply put: the few world-class SFxT players out there had a perfect opportunity to behave like the elitists you claim them to be, and THEY DID THE EXACT OPPOSITE.
Finally, my own experiences and interactions with the FGC are nothing like you claim. I have played every version of Street Fighter there is in both the United States and Japan, I have played in local tournaments with only 22 people and at Evolution, the biggest fighting game tournament in the world with an amazing 2000+ players turning out from every state in the US and 40 countries to compete, I have posted results ranging from being mauled 0-2 and being knocked out of the tournament in under 10 minutes to reaching the semifinals, and I can say with absolute certainty that I have never witnessed the sort of negativity and elitism you seem to believe exists within the FGC. I've met and spoken with some of the most accomplished, highly respected players in the world (Daigo Umehara, Alex Valle) and some of the biggest names within the community (Gootecks, James Chen), and every interaction has been friendly and courteous. I've seen guys talk some of the most brutal, ruthless trash during a match, only to shake hands and hug after the final KO before going and grabbing a drink and shooting the breeze like old war buddies.
Does this mean that every single member of the FGC is a good person? Absolutely not. I've definitely gotten my share of mean-spirited hatemail on PSN from people I've played (that I have beaten and that have beaten me), but that particular blight upon the landscape of the gaming community certainly isn't unique to 2D Fighters. And, yes, the FGC has had a number of recent embarrassments (Aris' misogynistic outburst and a large portion of the community defending him, for instance, is a black eye that likely won't fade for a long while, nor should it, because it exposed the worst of us), but those misdeeds, reprehensible though they were, comprise only a very minute portion of what the community is about and its role in the lives and relationships of its members.
No one who isn't completely deranged can say that perfecting your use of the noob tube to the point where you're regularly shooting grenades across map through the windows of a building and making precision shots takes 'no skill'.
After all, no amount of claims of 'no skill' are valid if you're able to use this highly refined talent to get a nuke every 10 or so games.