Honestly I haven't liked any competitive multiplayer games in a long time, and a lot of it has to do with the addition of external incentives to them. Most of them serve as negative incentives to...
Honestly I haven't liked any competitive multiplayer games in a long time, and a lot of it has to do with the addition of external incentives to them. Most of them serve as negative incentives to me; leaderboards and rankings are just reminders of how bad you are. You can try to get better if you want but unless you have a crazy amount of time and dedication, approaching the top is an impossible dream. Sometimes those incentives make the games even more unfair by giving slight bonuses to players who play more often - which will always be the more skilled players.
I found things much more rewarding with old fashioned "quake style" gameplay - join a public server with a range of people with different levels of skill, and have the levels with chaotic layouts that will lead to you encountering players randomly. That way there are a bunch of people who you can play against where you'll have a respectable chance of winning, and if you have someone who is better it won't necessarily ruin your game. Heck, it can be fun going on revenge hunts against a skilled player who's managed to kill your character one time too many.
Ranking is only good for matchmaking purposes; to ensure that when you play a game you're not going to be put in with players who can utterly crush you before you even spot them. I played PUBG mobile for a short while and it's a lot more rewarding knowing that becoming the last man standing is an achievable goal.
I was thinking recently and came to this same conclusion. I never had as much fun with multiplayer FPS games as I did when there would just be community servers you could drop in, chat with...
I found things much more rewarding with old fashioned "quake style" gameplay - join a public server with a range of people with different levels of skill, and have the levels with chaotic layouts that will lead to you encountering players randomly.
I was thinking recently and came to this same conclusion. I never had as much fun with multiplayer FPS games as I did when there would just be community servers you could drop in, chat with people, have fun, and come back to.
I've played a good amount of multiplayer FPS games in the last few years (notable Overwatch and Halo: Infinite) but it's just not the same level of enjoyment, I'm missing that community and meeting place. I guess the modern equivalent is joining a discord and meeting with people to play with, but I'd rather just join a public server and recognize the faces and play against them.
Modern ranked multiplayer sometimes feels like a soulless dehumanizing experience. You have a number, you're matched against other numbers, each game is kinda 50/50, and you miss the diversity of random people joining. You can't even chat to the other team in Halo: Infinite, each game of that is purely routine join game, play, win/lose, leave, rinse, repeat. I've never felt so alienated and isolated and lonely playing multiplayer games as I have recently.
More unrelated to that, I also just don't think I like ranked gameplay in general. I did the minimum rounds in Overwatch to get ranked each season for the first 3 or so seasons, and it was just an unpleasant experience when done with unknowns. Everyone is ready to throw around blame and be angry compared to casual. I used to play fighting games and when there were Elo-ish (i.e. in Street Fighter 4 and 5 their weird non-Elo but similar to Elo systems that kinda sucked) rankings on it I would get so angry when my ranking would lower. It was so much more fun to play with people I enjoyed playing with and just play round after round with them, even if they were better than me and beat me routinely.
Between your comment and what @DataWraith brought up, I think that the best of both worlds would be if rankings were recorded but not published. Imagine if you had a slider for how much of a...
Between your comment and what @DataWraith brought up, I think that the best of both worlds would be if rankings were recorded but not published. Imagine if you had a slider for how much of a challenge you want and the matchmaking algorithm would mix in more skilled players based on that.
Or at the very least use categorical rankings instead of absolute so there's still a range of skill within those categories. That's how they handle skill differences in martial arts and board games, so why wouldn't it work for video games?
Discord has definitely been the binding force for the group of people I play OW with. The majority of them I also know IRL, but the private server has picked up random friend-of-friend-of-friend...
Discord has definitely been the binding force for the group of people I play OW with. The majority of them I also know IRL, but the private server has picked up random friend-of-friend-of-friend people who come and play on a fairly regular basis. None of us are great (except for one guy's 15yr old kid, curse his youthful reflexes!), but it's always a good time to chat and play together with a group were nobody really cares about winning or rankings.
I agree that winning a tournament (even if it is just one out of thousands going on) probably feels better than an equivalent win-streak on the ladder, but I think we do need the ladder for when...
I agree that winning a tournament (even if it is just one out of thousands
going on) probably feels better than an equivalent win-streak on the ladder,
but I think we do need the ladder for when players can't conform to a fixed
tournament schedule.
A tournament uses your win-rate as a proxy for skill and matchmaking; if you
think about it, the ladder just scales that concept up by using your skill-rating
as a proxy for skill, because that works better than raw winrate mathematically.
I have very little experience with competitive gaming, but I did play a bit of
Overwatch when it came out. The vast majority of games was either unremarkable
or actively un-fun. I guess that comes with the territory of being in the
bottom 30% of the playerbase skill-wise, but even then there were a few gems of
games as well; just not enough of them to bother continue playing.
The big question I always had was whether it was possible in theory to make
more good games with smarter matchmaking. Interestingly, the article seems to
oppose that idea and says that the less-rigorously fair tournament is better,
because even an underdog has a chance to win the tournament through chance
or clutch performance above their level.
The question is what smarter matchmaking would even look like. Maybe the ladder
should be more random? One idea I like is to make matches based on probable fun
instead of balanced skill.
For example, Ghost Recon Online uses/used/planned to use (?) a neural
network-based matchmaking system (or at least there's a research paper
describing the approach). Instead of just win and loss, the system takes into
account the performance stats and proclivities (weapon/hero use stats, etc.) of
all players before predicting a balance score. The authors planned to let
players vote on whether or not a match was fun, and then train the NN to
predict how much fun any given matchup would be and matchmake on that instead
of skill rating. Microsoft is pursuing a similar approach with their TrueSkill v2 (though they use win/loss instead of fun/unfun).
Blizzard tried to let players rate the matches in Overwatch, but later removed
that and (IIRC) said they didn't learn anything from it other than that winning
is more fun than losing. I always wondered if there really is nothing more to
learn from it than that -- for example, you could ignore win->good and
loss->bad votes and work with the remainder to extract some signal, because in
my experience the "gem" games were the ones where the losing team had fun
despite losing, and the bad ones often had the winning team not having fun
despite winning.
Honestly I haven't liked any competitive multiplayer games in a long time, and a lot of it has to do with the addition of external incentives to them. Most of them serve as negative incentives to me; leaderboards and rankings are just reminders of how bad you are. You can try to get better if you want but unless you have a crazy amount of time and dedication, approaching the top is an impossible dream. Sometimes those incentives make the games even more unfair by giving slight bonuses to players who play more often - which will always be the more skilled players.
I found things much more rewarding with old fashioned "quake style" gameplay - join a public server with a range of people with different levels of skill, and have the levels with chaotic layouts that will lead to you encountering players randomly. That way there are a bunch of people who you can play against where you'll have a respectable chance of winning, and if you have someone who is better it won't necessarily ruin your game. Heck, it can be fun going on revenge hunts against a skilled player who's managed to kill your character one time too many.
Ranking is only good for matchmaking purposes; to ensure that when you play a game you're not going to be put in with players who can utterly crush you before you even spot them. I played PUBG mobile for a short while and it's a lot more rewarding knowing that becoming the last man standing is an achievable goal.
I was thinking recently and came to this same conclusion. I never had as much fun with multiplayer FPS games as I did when there would just be community servers you could drop in, chat with people, have fun, and come back to.
I've played a good amount of multiplayer FPS games in the last few years (notable Overwatch and Halo: Infinite) but it's just not the same level of enjoyment, I'm missing that community and meeting place. I guess the modern equivalent is joining a discord and meeting with people to play with, but I'd rather just join a public server and recognize the faces and play against them.
Modern ranked multiplayer sometimes feels like a soulless dehumanizing experience. You have a number, you're matched against other numbers, each game is kinda 50/50, and you miss the diversity of random people joining. You can't even chat to the other team in Halo: Infinite, each game of that is purely routine join game, play, win/lose, leave, rinse, repeat. I've never felt so alienated and isolated and lonely playing multiplayer games as I have recently.
More unrelated to that, I also just don't think I like ranked gameplay in general. I did the minimum rounds in Overwatch to get ranked each season for the first 3 or so seasons, and it was just an unpleasant experience when done with unknowns. Everyone is ready to throw around blame and be angry compared to casual. I used to play fighting games and when there were Elo-ish (i.e. in Street Fighter 4 and 5 their weird non-Elo but similar to Elo systems that kinda sucked) rankings on it I would get so angry when my ranking would lower. It was so much more fun to play with people I enjoyed playing with and just play round after round with them, even if they were better than me and beat me routinely.
Between your comment and what @DataWraith brought up, I think that the best of both worlds would be if rankings were recorded but not published. Imagine if you had a slider for how much of a challenge you want and the matchmaking algorithm would mix in more skilled players based on that.
Or at the very least use categorical rankings instead of absolute so there's still a range of skill within those categories. That's how they handle skill differences in martial arts and board games, so why wouldn't it work for video games?
Discord has definitely been the binding force for the group of people I play OW with. The majority of them I also know IRL, but the private server has picked up random friend-of-friend-of-friend people who come and play on a fairly regular basis. None of us are great (except for one guy's 15yr old kid, curse his youthful reflexes!), but it's always a good time to chat and play together with a group were nobody really cares about winning or rankings.
I agree that winning a tournament (even if it is just one out of thousands
going on) probably feels better than an equivalent win-streak on the ladder,
but I think we do need the ladder for when players can't conform to a fixed
tournament schedule.
A tournament uses your win-rate as a proxy for skill and matchmaking; if you
think about it, the ladder just scales that concept up by using your skill-rating
as a proxy for skill, because that works better than raw winrate mathematically.
I have very little experience with competitive gaming, but I did play a bit of
Overwatch when it came out. The vast majority of games was either unremarkable
or actively un-fun. I guess that comes with the territory of being in the
bottom 30% of the playerbase skill-wise, but even then there were a few gems of
games as well; just not enough of them to bother continue playing.
The big question I always had was whether it was possible in theory to make
more good games with smarter matchmaking. Interestingly, the article seems to
oppose that idea and says that the less-rigorously fair tournament is better,
because even an underdog has a chance to win the tournament through chance
or clutch performance above their level.
The question is what smarter matchmaking would even look like. Maybe the ladder
should be more random? One idea I like is to make matches based on probable fun
instead of balanced skill.
For example, Ghost Recon Online uses/used/planned to use (?) a neural
network-based matchmaking system (or at least there's a research paper
describing the approach). Instead of just win and loss, the system takes into
account the performance stats and proclivities (weapon/hero use stats, etc.) of
all players before predicting a balance score. The authors planned to let
players vote on whether or not a match was fun, and then train the NN to
predict how much fun any given matchup would be and matchmake on that instead
of skill rating. Microsoft is pursuing a similar approach with their TrueSkill v2 (though they use win/loss instead of fun/unfun).
Blizzard tried to let players rate the matches in Overwatch, but later removed
that and (IIRC) said they didn't learn anything from it other than that winning
is more fun than losing. I always wondered if there really is nothing more to
learn from it than that -- for example, you could ignore win->good and
loss->bad votes and work with the remainder to extract some signal, because in
my experience the "gem" games were the ones where the losing team had fun
despite losing, and the bad ones often had the winning team not having fun
despite winning.