Issues with competitive gaming

[Admin]

Competitive gaming is challenging in ways single-player games typically are not due to pitting players against each others instead of very easy boss fights or pushing a button to move a log forward.

The popular competitive skill-based titles will typically not have pay to win mechanics, they might however sell cosmetics.

Progression in competitive games is not about getting new weapons or unlocking new abilities, it's about improving your skills.

This does sound good but as you probably know: if it sounds to good to be true it probably is.

 

[Admin]

Competitive games pushes people to spend loads of time playing them
If you just occasionally play a game as a hobby you will have a very hard time keeping up with the best players even if you are extremely talented.

Because there isn't any time-limit for how much someone can play there will be people who basically play the game all day making it very hard for people who have other things to focus on to win at the highest level.

This will push people without the talent required to become a top player to spend all their free time on some competitive game thinking they have a chance of making it when they don't. This can be very much detrimental since all the time spent on that game could have been better spent elsewhere.

 

[Admin]

Toxic communities
People who play games 6 to 16 hours a day tend to not exactly be socially well adjusted. This results in people often behaving very badly when interacting with other player. This is especially a problem in team-based strategy games where one bad player on your team can weigh down the entire team (it's harder/impossible to carry in team-based strategy games).

Leage of Legends is especially insidious since it is ranked so losing actually has consequences. It's basically made to cause people to behave really badly blaming their team-mates even when they themselves didn't actually play any better.

Scoundrelbeard wrote:

As someone who played it for nearly a decade I can tell you, from the bottom of my heart, that whatever the design intent was they succeeded in creating the most toxic environment I have been in.

I can't count anymore how many people want me to commit suicide in that game.

I have gotten "friend"-requested to get harassed by people that were not even on my team (lol).

It's just the worst. And no matter how theoretically "good" the game might be the reality is that the community destroyed it, whether by design or other means does not matter to me.

 

[Admin]

Cheating and the efforts to combat it
A big problem with competitive games is that there will be a lot of people desperate to get some unfair advantage, since they cannot buy it from the developers of the game they will try to use software to get an unfair advantage even with the risk of getting banned.

This of course annoys people a lot pushing developers to take very aggressive action against it, the issue here is that even those aggressive actions will miss some cheaters while also banning people who didn't actually cheat, false positives happen all the time. Imagine spending thousands of our to hone your skills in a game only to later get unfairly banned, must feel awful.

Ironically with shooters you are probably less likely to upset people if you play poorly than if you play good since a lot of people (including me) like being the carry, being the hero who kills everyone after being alone left against 5+ players.

 

[Admin]

Playing at the higher level can require expensive hardware
Higher framerate in particular will be advantagous in shooters but it often takes a lot of effort maximizing that. You want at least 240hz and you also need good enough CPU, GPU, motherboard, ram to be able to reach those framerates. Tweaking and stabalizing ddr5 at high frequency isn't exactly easy, especially not on worse hardware.

https://vintologi.com/threads/ddr5-overclocking-nightmare.1229/

There is however dominishing returns from higher framerate and in high level competition you will often play on computers configured by the tournament organizers rather than your own hardware.

A lot of good gaming hardware (such as 4090, 13900KS) is also very good for productivity but that is not always the case (such as with the 7800x3d, dual rank 32GiB ddr5).

 

[Admin]

The elo treadmill
Competitive games often have rating systems where higher rating means that you are more likely to meat a tough opponent, if you get a lower rating opponent you will gain less from a win and pay more for a loss.

This can be very frustrating, you might play once more "just one more win to get the elo a bit higher" only to then lose and never be able to reach that elo again.

If you reach very high elo for your skill you have an incentive to switch account for a while, this however will be frustrating for lower rated players who will then face someone with much better skills than what their rating indicates.

Switching to a lower rated account (such as starting over) can also be fun since then you get too se how much you have actually improved and you can finally dominate (something you cannot really do when it's skill-based matchmaking), this however make some people upset and games sometimes ban "smurfing" outright (even though you might need to do that to play with your friends).

 

[Mr.Andrews]

the problem i see is that said games arent "competitive"

for example call of duty or valorant are not competitive, because the characters can only carry 2 weapons. In call of duty the characters have health self regenerating

in competitive games there are no SJWs and no "toxicity"... games like league of legends are what causes the popularity of people like destiny... in non SJW games like street fighter the amoutn of hostile antisocial SJWs is less than 5%

Games like call of duty or battlefield or halo, since they are easier to understand and more egalitarian, they tend to be infested by SJWs.

The SJWs are toxic manbabies who scream at each other and cant make a funcional society, they are simply driven by the will to "dominate" others or humiliate each other. if left alone with each other, they start the most toxic environments ever.

In a real competitive game like quake and UT, there is obviously some toxicity, but its not even close to what you see in SJW games like halo or call of duty or league of legends. Games that are easy to play and do not require skills, like valorant or counter strike, tend to be used by morons. Youtube legends and commentators are born from said easy games like league of legends or halo.