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It's amazing the degree to which streaming/online communities around video games have destroyed the games themselves. Every update to every game launches a larg
by estearum 4mo ago
It's amazing the degree to which streaming/online communities around video games have destroyed the games themselves. Every update to every game launches a large scale effort to find the "meta" which is then instantly disseminated to the most try-hard assholes on the Internet. Anyone who dares to develop their own strategy/style/loadout is up against hordes of people (a growing proportion every day) who just copy whatever the Youtubers figured out.
- negergreger 4mo agoI wish LLMs played games, I'd never need to see a human again.
- nnevatie 4mo agoThey do, to a degree. See e.g. PUBG's latest AI teammate addition.
- kridsdale1 4mo agoAI players in games go back all the way to the dawn of computers. But I still prefer them in Quake and Starcraft to humans. Humans are awful.
- nnevatie 4mo agoYes, naturally. However the PUBG AI feature is based on generative AI, at least partly: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/pubg-ally-ai-teammate-beta-available-now/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/pubg-ally-ai-teamm...
- rvba 4mo agoThat's called a single player game, or playing against bots.
- TrueSlacker0 4mo agoWatch the videos of alphastar as it challenged the top starcraft 2 players to win. This was back in 2019 and was amazing to watch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaStar_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaStar_(software)
- embedding-shape 4mo ago> It's amazing the degree to which streaming/online communities around video games have destroyed the games themselves 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.
- estearum 4mo agoI don't see how your comment makes sense. You're not part of any "community" but you also never play with random strangers? 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.
- falcor84 4mo agoWell, while every group of people is definitionally "a community", you can absolutely have your friend group not be part of "the community" of the game. Just like you can have a LAN and not be "on the net", watch implies the internet.
- estearum 4mo agoUhh if you are playing games consistently with your friends, then they are a community that you're playing with. 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.
- kridsdale1 4mo agoHe could be playing with his real friends.
- bob1029 4mo agoI think Overwatch and League of Legends are the best examples of this effect. Both games are entirely unrecognizable today compared to 2016. Somehow Starcraft 2 emerged from the other side of esports mostly unscathed, despite being arguably the most significant progenitor of the entire genre.
- Otp333 4mo agoYou and the parent comment just described academia in a nutshell
- bheadmaster 4mo agoMeta-gaming is a natural progression in all human games. Chess players find "metas" like openings. It's just that video games are too simple and have very restricted meta set.
- fluoridation 4mo agoThe point is not that games have meta, it's the attitude of players.
- irishcoffee 4mo agoVideo games have a lot more entropy than chess, I think you have that backwards.
- bheadmaster 4mo agoMaybe superficially, but most of them are unbalanced, leading to a handful of meta builds being overpowered.
- Insanity 4mo agoAgreed on “finding meta” as just being part of any game. But thinking games are more restrictive than chess might just be a lack of exposure to competitive gaming.
- rpdillon 4mo agoWait, are you suggesting BAR or StarCraft are simpler than chess? I can't imagine that's true.
- zemvpferreira 4mo agoSimple is definitely the wrong term. Chess's simplicity is where its inherent difficulty comes from. It's paradoxically much more difficult to optimize than more complex games like SC.
- annasnna 4mo agoI don’t know but I can imagine many of the levers in games cancel each other out or don’t turn out to be useful while in chess every variable is orthogonal. It’s all important. Complicated versus complex, like how untangling Christmas lights is time-consuming and gnarly but it is not complex fundamentally. That said, I don’t know if it is true in those cases.
- StopTencent 4mo ago[flagged]
- paulmist 4mo agoI think that's a normal evolution of these games? In the end they are cooperative so your teammates depend on you. Although you'll find plenty of people at the top of the ladder spamming werid strategies and being successful.
- estearum 4mo agoNormal evolution yet somehow wasn't really a visible force on video games until streaming and is now the predominant force on pretty much every single online competitive game. (Unless you play with cloistered private communities)
- paulmist 4mo agoI think you're confounding streaming with the rise of solo-queue but cooperative (CS:GO, LoL...) games around 2010. Both were enabled by cheaper computing and alllowed competitive ladders to scale to millions of players. Games where you have to queue with a pre-made team (or pro teams for that matter) are considerably less toxic. Toxic streamers are more of a consequence of an already toxic community.
- estearum 4mo agoNo, you are confounding what I'm talking about (fast discovery and dissemination of meta-optimal strategies) with toxicity. You could have 0 toxicity at all and still have a game totally ruined by the behavior I'm pointing out.
- Bratmon 4mo agoEven in cloistered private communities, "not playing the online meta" is an unstable equilibrium. As soon as someone loses a bunch of games in a row and decides to Google "$GameName strategy", the community's unique meta disappears.
- mannanj 4mo agoSeems people in general have started to project their lifes disappointments, stresses, and greater human needs onto a digital dimension like video games. Growing up they used to be about fun. I have endless memories as a child playing Mario N64 and it not needing to be about playing a particular way; only as a I got older and competition and disappointments being human as an adult added up did I notice this shift you mention in online game communities. 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.
- goodmythical 4mo agoI don't know, I won a friendly Super Smash Bros tournament circa ~2011 with kirby spamming down b with what was it, the c-stick? Whatever it was where you could do the super move or whatever automatically instead of having to choose how much power you wanted and just generally clicking random buttons. 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.
- mannanj 4mo agoyeah I could have left politics out of this, I didn't think much before writing that. /insert joke about token limits being reached or reasoning effort being too low I personally can feel that analogy about you winning in a way that made others feel wronged or offended or have their models about the game broken, and see it connect to the theme of the thread. Which is that people forget and mistake games for serious ventures. I don't know when exactly that happened, if it was a bigger cultural shift, a shift in incentives and behavior by game producers, and also by players I suppose, and or if its just how adults shift in their playing of games as they grow in age. Either way I think thats fun, and cool that you made it so far with a strategy like that! One of my favorite ways of playing games is uncovering strategies like that =)
- wafflemaker 4mo agoI remember playing Malzahar support before it was meta, because that was the only character I could play well in League of Legends. 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.
- ipsi 4mo agoOverwatch has similar issues - common advice for playing Competitive is to just completely disable text chat and voice chat. Yeah, you'll miss genuine, helpful suggestions, but they're a tiny, tiny minority of messages at the lower ranks. Not that it necessarily improves a lot at the higher ranks, as I understand it, but is less awful. 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.
- snerbles 4mo agoEVE to me is an odd duck because it's an explicitly cutthroat universe - many people log on expecting monsters. There are a lot of supportive players out there among the trolls; where the knives of betrayal really come out is in the politics of player-controlled space. What's weird is that I love EVE for that sort of nullsec drama and sociopathic players eating each other in crazed gambits, but a couple of matches in Overwatch competitive a decade ago put me off the idea of matchmaking lobbies altogether.
- SkepticalWhale 4mo agoYes and the worst part of that is that I really enjoy working out my own strategies. My best RTS memories are on StarCraft 1, playing with friends in the early 2000s, and we all just were figuring it out for ourselves.
- stouset 4mo agoI think M:tG was ruined by this too. 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.
- samhclark 4mo agoI think that's why I like prerelease (and sealed, generally) the most of any format. For day 1 prerelease, a lot of the players are reading the cards for the first time. For sealed later on, even if you know the meta for that set, it's more about playing the best deck with the cards you've got. Knowing the meta doesn't change your pool. (As opposed to draft, where if you don't know the meta you might inadvertently pass excellent cards and miss signposts other players will catch)
- gesis 4mo agoThis is why I primarily play Old School 93/94 and other non-rotating, niche formats. The player bases are a lot more "chill" overall, despite still being attracted to playing their best.
- calvinmorrison 4mo agoWell playing Fortnite is the opposite. If you suck you get into crappy pools. Every once and a while it someone resets and you spend a few matches getting victory royale until the competition gets better. Way more fun for everyone this way.
- crassus_ed 4mo agoI’ve had the same experience getting into MTGA recently. If you don’t play the meta its very unlikely you’ll win the higher ranked you become. But this must be the case for all competitive games right? At some point the meta has been figured out and there is no real way to deviate from that.
- tm-guimaraes 4mo agoI think more than meta chasing, the problem comes from laxk of actual community due to the crazy effectiveness of online matchmaking. When all you had where community servers and rooms, toxicity was more manageable. With other players all being nameless folks you will never play with again, the worst side of people can more easily come out.
- v3ss0n 4mo agoNope , you haven't been in this community. The most fun i had been in gaming . They teach each other and help each other , share unit , share economy. Its not like COD or LOL communities.
- TrueSlacker0 4mo agoI agree. It is crazy how much sharing units is a major part of bar. T2 cons, transports, even units to micro by the front line. Simply typing im low on energy will often result in teammates sending a few windmills or tidals. Its a great change in rts games. Plus when i play vs bots with my kids i can send them more metal production so the can be the one marching in titans or dropping nukes and destroying all the bots without realizing the extra componding econ i sent them. They have a blast.
- ecshafer 4mo agoI agree. streaming has ruined gaming communities. My idea is that every instance of a game should have randomized variables that make it impossible to find the optimal position generally.