3 ms·
> half the posts are just frustration in dealing with the drudgery of playing so many matches to even climb This has nothing to do with skill floors or ceiling
by munmaek 7y ago
> half the posts are just frustration in dealing with the drudgery of playing so many matches to even climb
This has nothing to do with skill floors or ceilings.
Then play newer or different games. Overwatch has been out for a while by now. Chess has been out for a rather long time by now.
> The issue is that when you play chess, all you can play against are wanna-be grandmasters who drive the skill floor up to the point where you need to make a heroic effort just to be mediocre.
On chess.com you start at 800 ELO, on lichess.org you start at 1500(?) ELO and rapidly decline if you lose many games, until you get around where you should be. You do not need to make "heroic effort" in order to start gaining ELO. You do need to learn basic chess theory like how much the pieces are worth, and some strategy, etc, but it's really not that bad if you genuinely like chess.
> It doesn't work that way; what happens over time is the better people raise the skill floor by driving weaker players out.
Alternatively, people who play push the game forward and make exciting breakthroughs, keeping the game fresh. No one is forcing you to play a game that you don't like. There's no point in shaking our fists at the sky because we didn't start playing a game right when it came out.
Games are fascinating when they -don't- explicitly cater to new players. TF2 is a hard game, yet it's one of my most played games at ~1700 hours. Why? Because I was able to improve and because it has a high skill ceiling (and floor) for certain playstyles.
Pressing Shift to rocket up as Pharah is totally boring compared to learning how to Rocket Jump as the soldier. Learning how to do that took me weeks, yet it's now one of my favorite aspects of TF2. I have hundreds of hours in tf2 just on jump maps- something that wouldn't be possible if TF2 were designed to have as little skill floor as possible (like overwatch).
- beaconstudios 7y agoI would think the ideal to aim for would be an "easy to learn, hard to master" type game. Chess fits this model well, especially with the ELO system matching you with players of similar skill levels so you can improve incrementally. CS:GO, which I used to play, had a similar thing (though it was plagued with other issues). TF2 doesn't seem to have this option and thus new players don't get much of a chance to learn because they're immediately thrown in with people with 1700 hours of gameplay and don't get a chance to learn the necessary skillset incrementally by climbing a ladder.
- munmaek 7y agoOf course. Matchmaking is another issue. Even the new call of duty has had issues with its Super Balanced Matchmaking (SBMM). However I disagree that people don't get a chance to learn. Unlike chess, tf2 is a team game, so even if the teams aren't super balanced it's still possible to play. Unless one team is absolutely stomping the other, which happens more frequently ever since tf2 made some matchmaking changes in the Meet Your Match update- that's a different can of worms.