Back in the day, you could try out new things and play 10-20 turn games where both sides had winning chances. The odds that your opponent had anything approaching an optimal meta was zero.
Now, especially online (Arena), you’re just going to get curb stomped if you aren’t playing one of the few optimal metas. And since the games hinge upon either side getting an unstoppable engine going by turn 3 or 4, if you get a drought or flood (or mulligan), you’re basically completely dead in the water. Same for your opponent.
The net result is that it feels like something like only 15%–25% of games are actually competitive, because either you or your opponent gets fucked by too many, too few, or wrong color land draws, or for whatever reason you don’t draw the cards you need within the first few turns.
A game where 80% of matchups are effectively no contest is not fun.
I think they might destroy the streaming/online communities, but I wouldn't say it destroys the game itself. I play BAR, but never with random strangers, the game works fine, but I also don't participate in any "video game" communities or watch/play with streamers, so what you're saying sounds very foreign to me, and is more about the communities than the games themselves.
I only play public matches with random strangers and this is the feeling.
Obviously this wouldn't apply if I had a small community of not-strangers to play with consistently, which you do have but oddly describe as not having a community.
If what GP is saying is "play with people you know personally and then you won't have to play with people you don't know personally," well, sure. Great insight.
Most people don't and can't do that. That's why online matchmaking exists and constitutes 99.999999% of online gameplay.
Ideally, it should allow non-competitive players of similar performance level to play against each other.
Which think about what that feels like: getting semi-consistently beaten by worse players who just all "happen to have" the exact same loadout and exact same strategies and exact same everything.
That's exactly what I'm describing. It's incredibly boring.
Sometimes people would even rage quit. But I could do really well as support, even if it was slightly worse than some other characters. It made for a very fun playthrough.
And I would totally get the people. Sometimes somebody in a bad mood joins your game and just messes everything up because they didn't get to play mid. And I might have looked like someone like that.
But dealing with toxic players is surprisingly easy.
I initially looked down at LoL, but later wanted to learn to play to spend time online with my younger brother that was having a hard time. So I had a friend show me something.
First time I played jungle, I died on the first monster. Before people could finish typing flaming messages, my friend typed into the chat /ignore all
Voila - silence and no flaming.
Later I stopped preemptively ignoring everyone. Just used no second chances tactic. If anybody cursed, was mean or even used the word noob, I instantly ignored them and then kept playing.
Sometimes told a teammate that had a bad steak to do that to the flaming person. Many games I've one because of being nice to my teammates, trying to keep their spirits up. Wasn't super hard - 25 year old at that time and reading some philosophy books and meditating vs regular 13 year olds.
It was still important to ignore people before they could push your buttons and anger you.
I wonder if it's the same in other games. Definitely not the case in Eve online when I played that. But over there you meet the same people again and by having no style and being a bad winner and a bad loser didn't give you any respect.
I don't play a lot of competitive Overwatch, but it's definitely a much nicer experience with chat turned off, even if I'm not the one being flamed, even if we lose because people are typing instead of shooting.
(Unless you play with cloistered private communities)
Somehow Starcraft 2 emerged from the other side of esports mostly unscathed, despite being arguably the most significant progenitor of the entire genre.
and also it's a lot harder
By it's very nature, games are supposed to be fun and bonding experience for a community of humans.
But the modern interpretation is one of direct conflict to show ones superiority for the sake of feeling superior. Which ultimately leads to the imbuing the games with a level of importance or value for the victor.
But chess theory, the human activity of analyzing chess, is hugely more complex than whatever human players have analyzed about the game of starcraft
What I mean is, perhaps the best neural networks that play starcraft are as complex as chess neural networks, and this complexity is irreducible, but starcraft players haven't developed as much theory in comparison
RTSes present continuous, large choice spaces. So it doesn't really feel like as much of a logic puzzle, and perfection does not appear to be within ones grasp at every moment. Whether you'll lose 4 or 6 of the T2 fighter-bombers is not relevant. The strategy of RTSes is strategy of big plans and high level abstraction.
That's not true in all RTSes. Take StarCraft, for example, and there are plenty of games on record that were decided not just by 1 unit, but by 1 attack from 1 unit. There are Zerg players, for example, who have developed a reputation for creating havoc after getting a single zergling (the smallest and cheapest attacking unit) into their opponent's base. A single shot from a Protoss reaver can mean the difference between taking minimal damage and losing half of your workers (and subsequently the game).
Chess surely has a meta, but it's been honed so the meta is a huge number of significantly different paths. It's a balancing issue. Give Starcraft another few centuries of play and maybe it'll be the same.
That said, I don’t know if it is true in those cases.
I like to ask now, "have you heard of playing for fun?" It's surprising how little people seem to remember that games are made for fun & learning ("play" as a human construct).
edit2: taking back this edit on political conjecture to say something shifted that I'm not sure what. edit: in online games I played growing up too, this negativity/anti-fun change came probably around 2004 with bigger changes in the US political climate as well.
Tying this to politics is odd to me.
Online gaming has been toxic since day one. Anything that depersonalizes is going to be toxic and that is inherent in the online space. In the smaller communities you can actually get to know people and have some kind of reputation but as the community size grows, the consequences of bad behavior fade because nobody can remember.
Sorry.
The friends who all played vastly more often than I did and had all their techniques and edge jumps and recoveries and stuff practiced were furious.
Lots of "you can't do that" "that's not fair" "that's not the way you're supposed to play" etc.
edit: oh, I see your edit. Yeah, it's definitely not new.
For a more relaxed experience, I’d recommend trying less established meta maps. Lobbies marked “rotato” rotate maps after every game and are usually among the chillest. Players tend to be less rigid about roles and expected builds there, which generally leads to more positive interactions.
The only way to have actual fun gaming is a private group of friends. Think lan party, and definitely not public.
It does benefit from:
1. Limited coms (nobody seems to use voice chat, perhaps partly because it was completely broken for years), and while you can type, it's too fast paced to write much so mostly people just use quick chats sarcastically (What a save!)
2. Games are really short (about 7 minutes). You're not losing hours of your life if you get stuck with an arsehole.
3. People play a lot of games because they're so short, so the matchmaking is very accurate usually.
But I think that's because you can't really impact other players. Everyone's racing their own lines, just sharing a chat room while doing so.
In magic the gathering I had dozens of decks trying different things. He had a single deck that he kept tweaking to within the millimetre of perfection.
In overwatch, I would play different characters to experience different parts of the game and try different strategies. He played single character for years, with 10 times the hours in that char than I had in all of them combined.
Heck even in real life, he was a Java developer for decades whereas I was a type of fleeting sysadmin specifically so I could play with different toys in the stack :).
Now, this is a bit side Venn diagram, he'd never be rude on an online game (he does have offline opinions on the meta :). But it let me understand people who have fun in a very different way than I do :). He doesn't see boredom in playing same way over and over (and over and over), I think he sees it as professional athlete being focused and honing their specific craft.
I'd even dare to say it's beyond all reason.
All these groups of people sometimes play in the same lobbies, and what the players "gain" from the session can be very different depending on the person. There is no "right or wrong" way to play video games, or the right/wrong motivation for it, it's just different.
Will we be able to play on the "leagues" or whatever they are or will our group just get banned eventually from play? I think we would probably enjoy playing against others, but realistically non of us are sweaty enough to care about being anything beyond good at this (or any) game.
Also, we are all (obviously) older adults. None of us really care if the other team is trash talking or being toxic. We are doing the best we can as a team, we are polite to others, if they have are having a breakdown that is a them problem.
Also, is there a "casual" league? Or do you all just play laddered and end up paired to people who are similar in ELO to you?
Aside: Some of my core memories are setting up "Big Bertha" canons over the entire map to keep my friends at bay. I don't care if it strategically makes sense, it was just fulfilling!
Lots of players mean more chances to get a toxic guy who doesn't recognise their own faults and blames others.
I actually just don't really agree about the assertion on player slots. If anything, the better players get the more likely they are to play a front slot, because they have an outside influence on the chances of their team winning.
Front has zero opportunity or resources available to build any kind of economy, and once the T2 units start coming through from the other side they feel very expendable. As the front player you build the same 1 or 2 units every single game and never really get to strategise.
What also enraged me is that the back players would have the nerve to make the front player “pay” for their T2 constructor units after working so hard to keep everyone alive, despite everyone knowing the front player has zero resources at any given time because it’s all going into units that are being meat grinded.
So the truth is, "Front" is the absolute standard. There are only two other "types" of positions which are tech and air. And a good tech player usually also plays that role more like a front player just with more time in the early game to scale his economy. (with the exception of a few maps like supreme and glitters)
What I'm saying, if you don't like playing front then you should not play the regular 8v8 PvP lobbies on most maps since playing front is the optimal play.
> What also enraged me is that the back players would have the nerve to make the front player “pay” for their T2 constructor units after working so hard to keep everyone alive
Again this is the somewhat optimal play. It is much more efficient to only pay for 1 T2 lab instead of 8. This being said, if you don't "pay" the player giving out t2 you MASSIVELY slow down the production of T2 constructors since the player can't get the economy to comfortably produce 8 of them by 6-7 minutes. Thus not paying leads to the whole team massively losing tempo and upgrading their mexes etc. more slowly which will lose you the game.
> the front player has zero resources at any given time because it’s all going into units that are being meat grinded.
You should be able to save up 400 metal during the 5-6 minutes of early game by building some defenses and playing more passively around that time. You will notice your opponent will too. All-In'ing in T1 is a very risky strategy and 400 metal are usually not the deciding factor if it succeeds or fails. Ofc there are cases were you ARE poor, in those the tech player should understand it and not require payment, but this is usually only the case if you got raided early on for example.
On last thing:
> and never really get to strategise.
Soooo there is a lot of strategy but it's essentially locked behind very high skilllevels. As a 10-15 OS player keeping your units alive and managing your eco is hard enough and what you should be focusing on. Only once that becomes second nature you will notice the more strategic part of BAR.
Source: 37 os with 58% wr playing only in the highest OS rotato lobby.
The OP - which you're replying to - is saying that they're not having fun playing RTSes like that (which I understand - sounds awfully limited). You're just trying to prove them they're wrong for not having fun or something.
What was your goal with this post, really?
Paying for t2 that is usally a noob mistake. High OS play rarely asks, or has a meta for who pay to run specific plays.
One of My favorite 40 OS streamers leaves every losing game asking what they could have done better, which I think is a good mentality.
Or, creating a decent AI opponent and engaging a story might be really hard.
It's a good solo game, especially with the focus on "quality of life" improvements that reduce the need for raw APM to play well.
Or in multiplayer you can arrange a co-operative game with humans against AI opponents, which often has substantially less flaming involved, especially when playing a "survive against an onslaught of enemies" scenario.
Also the account system of course allows for muting, avoiding-being-paired-with, or fully blocking players. For more egregious behavior a player can be reported to moderators and temporarily / permanently suspended if they break the community code-of-conduct.
That being said, there's nothing wrong with that. Just understand that when people are trying to win, they have skin in the game, and are investing time and effort to win every game.
> Also, one particularly aggravating part of the community is that it’s considered courtesy to surrender once the front line is broken instead of playing the game out and letting the back eco players try and recover it.
Yes, it is courtesy not to waste other people's time. Not sure where the controversy is, rather than your misunderstanding. Usually it's quite evident whether the game is lost (again, if you are a somewhat competitive player).
> I stopped playing because I felt like I had a lot of negative interactions in every 2nd or 3rd game.
You need somewhat of a thick skin to play competitive team games. This goes just as well for more popular games like DoTA or CS2. It just seems you didn't, but it's not the game's fault or its community's.
It's just a bad culture fit.
> It’s not the community’s fault for being toxic.
What's toxic to A can be good advice to B. With the person saying it being person C.
How so? You have provided 0 evidence of the BAR community doing it or me doing it.
All we have is the original GP post that is an accusation (without facts).
With all due respect, you have no idea what you are talking about and are trying to silence people by accusing them of being toxic (which is subjective).