Now, we've all had that moment of glory in our lives when we're dominating a server. Each of our grenades hits two people at once, the enemy offense can't seem to reach the objective, you've churned out ten times as many barracks as your enemey has soldiers, etc, etc. But we have to take a step back once in a while and consider that on the other side of the battlefield, someone is getting their ass kicked.
I thought about this one day in TF2 when our side was getting spawnkilled right at the door. I was thinking about ways that Valve could remedy this, when someone on the other team said "Dude maybe it's just because we're better than you?"
Knowing that there will always be situations where he's right, I decided to accept it. Tonight hadn't really been my night for TF2, and the maps can never be PERFECTLY balanced; in fact, it's often celebrated for how balanced it already is.
But this still presents a problem because I was barely getting any kills, and if you consider that if every kill in a game is one death to another player, and most people don't have much fun until they get a kill/death ratio above 1:1...half of the people who play these games are probably regretting their purchase.
Now maybe a lot of people are good sports and understand they suck at the game, and probably won't play it much after this month. But that still shouldn't happen; I find it a little surprising that we've always yelled at MMOG developers for grinding us through "Kill X of Y" five jillion times, and never criticizing online games for not solving what I think is a very solvable problem. Here are some remedies I see:
Quake-style "Only one can win": I don't play Q3 often, nor do I actually own it (but it shows up at LAN parties often). Basically, when the map ends, it shows the list of people who did well, top to bottom. There's no announcer saying "RedCon HAS WON THE MATCH!!!" or "YOU LOSE." It's just "This is the end of this game, hope you had fun." For all its intensity, this actually works well. Only one person can win, and you weren't really EXPECTED to kick the ass of everyone in the server. Some deathmatch-style games only list your kills and not your deaths, and I think this may be progress as well.
Co-op: Even if Left4Dead is coming soon I'm gonna thwack Valve over the head for not covering this already. Some people just love single-player mode because they hate the competitiveness and extreme difficulty of human players, and there's no reason these people should have to always game in seclusion. Gears of War and even the original Halo have been immensely fun playing with friends. The fun of this mode can, of course, be remedied by placing amazing difficulties on both players, one of which will inevitably be someone who just learned the controls and must be escorted by the other player. But as long as game developers are paying attention, then they should be A. Attempting to put co-op in their games, and B. Keeping it casual. And if you're not paying attention...
Something else: I've already outlined the problem for you, so I know there must be other solutions out there. I'm basically looking for something that puts a little more reward in multiplayer games, and a little less punishment. Obviously, hardcore games should normally be restricted to what already exists, but I'd really like to see this concept elaborated on.
I thought about this one day in TF2 when our side was getting spawnkilled right at the door. I was thinking about ways that Valve could remedy this, when someone on the other team said "Dude maybe it's just because we're better than you?"
Knowing that there will always be situations where he's right, I decided to accept it. Tonight hadn't really been my night for TF2, and the maps can never be PERFECTLY balanced; in fact, it's often celebrated for how balanced it already is.
But this still presents a problem because I was barely getting any kills, and if you consider that if every kill in a game is one death to another player, and most people don't have much fun until they get a kill/death ratio above 1:1...half of the people who play these games are probably regretting their purchase.
Now maybe a lot of people are good sports and understand they suck at the game, and probably won't play it much after this month. But that still shouldn't happen; I find it a little surprising that we've always yelled at MMOG developers for grinding us through "Kill X of Y" five jillion times, and never criticizing online games for not solving what I think is a very solvable problem. Here are some remedies I see:
Quake-style "Only one can win": I don't play Q3 often, nor do I actually own it (but it shows up at LAN parties often). Basically, when the map ends, it shows the list of people who did well, top to bottom. There's no announcer saying "RedCon HAS WON THE MATCH!!!" or "YOU LOSE." It's just "This is the end of this game, hope you had fun." For all its intensity, this actually works well. Only one person can win, and you weren't really EXPECTED to kick the ass of everyone in the server. Some deathmatch-style games only list your kills and not your deaths, and I think this may be progress as well.
Co-op: Even if Left4Dead is coming soon I'm gonna thwack Valve over the head for not covering this already. Some people just love single-player mode because they hate the competitiveness and extreme difficulty of human players, and there's no reason these people should have to always game in seclusion. Gears of War and even the original Halo have been immensely fun playing with friends. The fun of this mode can, of course, be remedied by placing amazing difficulties on both players, one of which will inevitably be someone who just learned the controls and must be escorted by the other player. But as long as game developers are paying attention, then they should be A. Attempting to put co-op in their games, and B. Keeping it casual. And if you're not paying attention...
Something else: I've already outlined the problem for you, so I know there must be other solutions out there. I'm basically looking for something that puts a little more reward in multiplayer games, and a little less punishment. Obviously, hardcore games should normally be restricted to what already exists, but I'd really like to see this concept elaborated on.
