this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
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Despite the massive amount of comments here, I still don't see anyone talking about my personal issue with PvP here.
It's ranked matchmaking. In order to keep things working at all, you have to pair players with players of a similar skill. And this means that fundamentally you don't get a sense of progression besides an MMR ranking. Your win rate will always be roughly 50%, unless you either smurf, or become the literal best in the world. Compare that to tough PvE games, like Doom Eternal, or a brutal platformer, where you can raise your difficulty, beat stuff you could've never beaten before, and generally see your progression. Heck, if you want to relax, just put the difficulty back or crush some earlier levels. I love to go back and learn to speedrun some of my favourite platformers, and that feels awesome. Games like Souls are also great at this, when you have to explore an earlier area and the enemies are just... so easy and satisfying to roll through. Or moments like in Sekiro, when you go into NG+ or just start a new playthrough and crush Genichiro on the first encounter.
And this whole thing is just.. so fundamentally necessary for PvP to work, you can't let new players get utterly crushed by veterans, so it's not something anyone is going to "fix". But I'm not hopping onto an endless treadmill that's never going to give me a sense of mastery. Especially not with so many other fantastic games out there I want to check out.
The only time I've had fun in PVP games is if they're in beta and for a few weeks after release. When everyone is new and no one has memorized everything about the mechanics. But after those few weeks you get matched against people who know every trick in the game by playing for hundreds of hours and it's no longer fun.
To play a bit of devil's advocate, the sense of progression for PvP comes from just getting better at the game and going from Silver to Gold, for instance. You can better learn the maps, new combos, where/when to engage the enemy, and improve muscle memory, all to fight for a better shiny badge (and probably loot drops).
Fair, you definitely become more skilled (I put 500 or so hours into DotA 2 years ago), and you can somewhat measure that, but I find it's not nearly as potent.
My additional issue, if you take a long break like I did, is that the MMR somewhat traps you. When I came back, not only was it extremely frustrating to have the head knowledge about what I needed to do (I.E. denying creeps and stealing last hits for optimal farming) while not having the skill to execute it anymore, but I was also trapped in matches with only players who had the skill to capitalize on those mistakes and destroy me. Add to that the pressure of letting down a whole team of 5 players, and my attempts to get back into the game later were miserable.
By comparison, I'm returning to Celeste right now, and checking out the strawberry jam mod. It's been incredibly satisfying to see how quickly I pick up and relearn those mechanics, and I'm just crushing the base game levels that gave me so much trouble the first time, while giving me an enjoyable de-rust. It's been a pleasure to dive back in, and I'm excited to see what heights I can reach, eager to beat the Farewell DLC that I gave up on before and to push myself to even harder modded content.
Maybe I could get a similar experience in DotA, by playing hours of bot matches to relearn fundamentals, and watching lots of YouTube content to learn how the meta is shifted in my absence, but that's a much different grind than I'm having in Celeste, just enjoying the nostalgia of the game and revelling in how much quicker relearning is than the initial learning. And I never have to cope with any social pressures of letting my team down, or watching my hard earned MMR crumble away as the game repeatedly reminds me how much worse I've gotten.
100%, I hate matchmaking. Give me old school server selections. Some of the best times I had in PvP was in Gears of War 1, where I'd get my teeth repeatedly kicked in by the same group of people and LEARN from what they did.
"If I dodge this way instead of this way its more effective." "They never use this specific weapon I like, maybe it actually sucks."
You don't get that in matchmaking because you never see the same people again, you can't learn from those more skilled at the game because of this. Unless I go watch youtube videos of people playing it that are better than me, I don't get that sense of immersion. I hate watching videos of other people playing, I'd rather jump in, and study my enemy in a live environment.
That seems like an easily solvable feature that could be added. "Match me with a better team of possible." "Match me with a worse team if possible."
This is why games with truly social matchmaking are great, like Halo 3, but in modern gaming having first time players get dicked on in their first ever by sweatiest with 10,000 hours played just means they will quit the game and go play something else.
Yeah, personally I've always enjoyed playing IRL with people who are better than me. Having a real person gives me that constant measuring stick I'm looking for, and playing with someone better gives me someone to watch and learn from, which helps me improve way more quickly. But that's... not what gets you the big sales numbers and a smooth player onboarding.
For PvP stuff, the experience I enjoyed the most was playing Smash with dorm mates in college. Getting my ass handed to me in 1v1 matches for months by the guy who owned the console, but learning, grinding, letting that guy I wanted to beat motivate me to use the training room, to watch YouTube videos, study techniques, and try to really master my character, learning how to be unpredictable and perform mix ups that needed to fool an experienced player who knew my weaknesses better than anyone, it was so satisfying. And by the end of the year we were on even footing, and I was maybe even a little better, which just felt incredible and so well earned.
That experience is what ranked PvP just completely lacks. Every time you win they just swap in new players who are that little step better than you until you're perfectly even again. Which is great on a game-to-game scale, each battle is hard fought, but just offers nothing on that wider timescale that I need to really care.
I dispute the premise that SBMM is a fundamental requirement for PVP to work, though obviously it's become intertwibed with the genre that a game choosing not to use it is going to have a more difficult go of it to onboard folks.
There was a time before SBMM after all. A time of server browsers, admins with chips on their shoulders, GameSpy, and "unofficial" map rotations and rules.
Now, for about a billion different reasons, this model is not going to make a comeback and become king again. But, I just wanted to mention that MM is not as "fundamental" as your comment indicated.
Yeah, very fair. I do think it's essential for the modern scale, and to be constantly on boarding new players, so I don't think it's going anywhere, but there was certainly a time where we could live without it. I used to love playing unreal tournament with the same friends regularly, and that was much closer to what I enjoy, as I could see myself getting better, even if the skill gap between us was obvious and I never really had a "fair" game.
The games I honestly think have the best chance of beating this are battle royales, where you could probably throw caution to the wind and matchmake fully randomly, or by throwing a set percentage of each MMR bracket into the same lobby, and still have players who can achieve a reasonable amount of success due to luck and who they find to fight and when.