"Competitive" gamers who impede development of a game...

[CrashFu]

First off, I want to ask... why do the majority of people who refer to themselves as "Competitive Gamers" clearly not understand the meaning of the word "Competitive"? Being competitive means you seek competition. As in, a worthy opponent who can give you a tough challenge. Most of the people who call themselves "Competitive gamers" will not enter a match unless their victory is already assured. They like to think of themselves as pro sports players, and they would be, if you can find me a professional sports team that only does exhibition matches against small crippled children.

They're the team-stackers, the hackers, the campers (especially of spawns), the script-abusers, and users of any kind of mod that will give them an unfair advantage. If it's a class-based game, they'll only play the classes that require the least skill and offer the most power (Of course I blame the game developers for not getting that ratio right in the first place. Easy classes should be WEAK, devs, WEAK!). If there are items in the game, they'll only use the very best of the best items (which, humorously always leaves them looking like a colorblind circus clown). If they have a choice of anything in any game, they will only choose the very specific options that are already known to be OP'd. They don't want a competition. They want an easy victory.

And then they go on a holy crusade to ensure they will ALWAYS get an easy victory. Someone in the official forums points out that a class/item/spell is too powerful, and who shows up to argue? Why, it's the "Competitive" gamers! They'll insist that everything is fine, and that anyone who thinks otherwise needs to "GTFO" or "Learn how to counter it", because of course that is the class/item/spell that they exclusively use. Someone else says, "Hey, this class/item/spell is really gimped. Could we get it improved?" and our friends the "Competitive" gamers show up again. "L2P n0b" they will say. "It doesnt need better, you just suck at the game". No, of course we can't have any class/item/spell that they DON'T use getting better, because then someone might have a chance to defeat them in PvP!

Unfortunately, it seems like the developers of these games actually LISTEN to these morons and consider them as credible as the people who are actually making productive criticisms or suggestions. After all, many of these glaring and obvious imbalances in games never get fixed! Why is it so hard to figure out who is more credible when one side of the argument consists of "GTFO if you don't like it"?

Of course, this problem is far worse in the Beta scene. Think of any MMO you know where the PvP content was just plain terrible. You know why that is? "Competitive" gamers and their self-serving, counter-productive ways. I'm in a beta right now and I'm having to put up with this crap (hence my rant), where there are these despicable people, who figured out the most rediculously overpowered builds months ago and instead of doing any productive testing, they just sit around the arena all day waiting for someone who isn't immune to damage, or able to one-shot you, or keep you permanently disabled, so that they can get their kicks ganking them. As you can imagine, that doesn't leave any place for contributing members of the beta community to test out any build that ISN'T rediculously OP'd. How can you test your attacks against someone who takes no damage and heals faster than they can be damaged? How do you test your defense against someone who can do more damage than you have health? The answer is, you can't... so nothing is accomplished, and the PvP of the game remains horribly broken.

Ugh. My dream is to some day be on the development team for a nice game. Let me tell you, if that ever happens, I won't be putting up with that counter-productive nonsense for one minute, because I.... am a TRUE competitive gamer.

... ... >.> ... <.< ... And that's the word.

[Stormcaller3801]

I am reminded of my time playing Warhammer Online.

For folks who are not aware, WAR basically mirrors classes. It's not perfect, but every role exists as both order and destruction, just not necessarily paired races. For the most relevant example, the Dark Elf Sorceress is not mirrored by a High Elf class, but rather the Human Bright Wizard.

In any case, there was a problem in the game. Specifically, droppable AoE DoT's could be stacked. At first this was declared to be a bug in Sorceresses, and there was a constant gnashing and wailing on the forums about how Bright Wizards were underpowered and the only reason that the dark forces were winning was due to this effect. This largely went ignored by folks playing on the side of the Sorceresses, oftimes (at least on my server) pointing out that there was a huge population imbalance that likely accounted for the ratio of wins. That, and the fact the folks on the order side had decided not to play their tier 4 characters because they kept losing.

Then there came a series of patches. The first removed the stackability from Sorceresses. The second altered the droppable AoE DOT for Bright Wizards... and made it stackable.

Within days the forces of order were running roughshod over everything. It was more or less impossible for the forces of destruction to get a toehold. Furthermore, every third character on the order side was a Bright Wizard.

Naturally enough, complains started coming in on the forums about all of this, originating with the destruction players and pointing out that despite still having upwards of a three to one population ratio, they were getting their heinies kicked. Response from the order players? "No, no- nothing wrong here. Everything's balanced, everything's fine. You guys just suck."

[JoesCrabShack]

[Stormcaller3801]

I fail to see how either of those are relevant to the instances described previously.

[iller]

I'll never understand how only using 3 or 4 of the classes in this game carries some kind of prestige. (demo, scouts, a solly & a medic, that's it, that's all they use). If they wanted to prove they had true "game", they'd be playing the OPPOSITE classes and showing everyone how to WIN in epic ways with those "weaker" classes. That would atleast be educational and lead to better matchups on Pubs if they inspired enough people to play those classes that well.

[Sekh765]

[CrashFu]

[JoesCrabShack]

[CrashFu]

Perhaps you are confusing competitive gamers with "competitive" gamers. Look back to the first part of my original post, where I explain that these days most people who claim to be "competitive" gamers are anything but.

A competitive gamer looks for a challenge. A "competitive" gamer is a worthless, stinking coward who won't even play the game unless he can cheat to get an unfair advantage somehow.

And there is a BIG difference between creative moves like the rocket jump and physics exploits like a bunny-hop. Notice that one of those things is a class feature in TF2 and the other thing was specifically prevented after the colossal game-breaking fiasco it caused in TFC. Have you ever seen a Heavy Weapons Guy go rocketing across the level at double the speed of a scout, spamming grenades that are so powerful he never even needs to fire his minigun? I've seen it. I've seen a LOT of it. And as much as the losers who did it like to brag that they're the super-elite video-game champions of the world, the fact remains that they HAD to do it because they didn't have the skill or intelligence to play the class as designed. But you're going to tell me that it's perfectly fair if one guy gets to have a ton of health AND the most powerful weapons, AND be several times faster than the guy who can't survive one rocket and is armed only with a single-barrel shotgun and a needler? NO. That's a terrible idea for a game.


Oh, another good example of "Competitive" gamers screwing everything up for the real competitive gamers. F-Zero GX. They held a world tournament where players would run time trials and then get access to a special code that would contain their vehicle information and how well they did on the track. Green Plant, one of the trickiest tracks to be featured in this contest, is also a very long track. It takes the fastest and most skilled racers several minutes to make ONE out of three laps, yet at the top of the ranking board there were several japanese kids with TOTAL times of... 16 seconds.

What these insufferable little cheaters had done is use a custom craft so unstable that it would glitch out the physics engine and fly up off of the track if they swerved back and forth a lot. So, they began the race, flipped off of the track, and glided in a tight circle to land back on the track BEHIND the starting line to cross it again. Repeat. Repeat. They never even saw 90% of the track. SEGA did NOT disqualify them. For the record, I got about.. 100th place in that and most other tracks, out of like, four hundred (give or take a hundred) contestants, using a custom racer designed for balanced handling and maximum top speed. I was proud of this because 100/400 is still fairly good, and I did it legitimately with no skipping the entire track or exploiting the "snaking" physics glitch. Proud of myself, but very angry at Sega and several random japanese kids.

[JoesCrabShack]