Quote:
Originally Posted by CrimsonFox
I'm afraid that's been around for a long long time 
I don't like it either. But some people REALLY get off on streaming their game plays so that other people can see "how fast" they can play.
Or as I like to say how fast they can ruin a game and completely ignore its purpose.
At least now there are achievements that can more satisfy these people.
Heck I remember being excited to play Warcraft 2 onlnie and ran into nothing but asshole kids that did that exact thing...saw how quickly they could kill me through exploits of the game. No long sprawling epic battle...just make as many orcs even peons as possible and rush me. every time. what's the point. oh yeah rankings and ladders. things like that kill the magic of gaming |
As someone who loved Real Time Strategy games and was super ecstatic to get into the online multiplayer scene when I went to College (circa Warcraft III / StarCraft days), I was hugely disappointed that my online skill was not determined by tactics or strategy, but by how quickly I could click around the map, macro building queues, and spit out units. It was my first real experience with both min/maxing and the challenge / interpretation of game balance. There was simply no way to keep up unless I was moving as rapidly as possible, and the learning curve was steep. Combine that with the general (but as of then still relatively tame) toxicity of the online gaming world, and you had a barrier for entry that was maddening for a game style that I absolutely loved.
Though this is a bit of a tangent, this steep learning curve and toxic environment is fully-formed now in the MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) world and is exactly why I do not play them (League of Legends particularly), despite likely enjoying them a lot if I could get through that learning curve.
Back to the topic at hand, I think something like this particular instance (RTS games) begs for a house rule type implementation, but how do you do that without neutering a legitimate strategy (the rush)? And if you are going to handicap against this, how do you compensate for factions that are designed around this type of play style (thinking of the Zerg in StarCraft particularly)? Obviously, it's up to me (and those I play with) to determine what is "legitimate" or "fair" - hence, house rule - but where do you draw the line? It seems awfully arbitrary.
This could even be expanded to game design in general - how much of the onus for customizability is on the game developer versus how much is on us, the player, to implement house rules to make the game play like we want it to? I mean, as much as we might not like it, there is nothing broken or "unfair" about the rush strategy in RTS games - we're just not very good at it, and it reduces
our enjoyment of them. For something like a text-sim, this onus is easy: does the game mirror reality well? For an RTS set in a fantasy world of mythical races, it's far less simple to account for "realism."
As someone who is a long time (literally 15 years now) player of an MMO in World of Warcraft, I am constantly reading opinions about how the devs are "ruining the game" with their choices. It has been fascinating to watch the game evolve - especially trying to determine how design decisions are made. I play in the PvE environment, and am probably in the top 10% or so of players in the world there (/humblebrag); this means there are literally
millions of players who play the game but never see the content I play. A lot of the discussion around these design decisions has to do with the "whales" - the far, far larger portion of the population who play the game, but not at this level, and are almost invariably silent about said design decisions. As designers, how do you level the fact that the majority of your player base (and therefore revenue stream) makes up this silent majority, yet this miniscule portion of your player base is insanely loud, vocal, and opinionated?
Meh, this rambled quite a ways away from the original thought, but you get the idea.