Engagement Era gameplay
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Overwatch is the worst for this.
Game one: We absolutely steamroll and as tank I do more than both DPS players put together. Yay.
Game two: We get our asses kicked and some Ana who doesn't know to switch or group up when they're getting dived spends the whole endgame screaming how awful our tank is.
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No, it's complaining about how some games are so swingy that even with skill-based matchmaking the game always seems to be a landslide in one direction or the other.
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I hear people say this but I’ve yet to see it, usually just toxic people calling the losing team bots
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The spread of "skill-based" matchmaking and ranked competitive ladders largely took away a valuable communal aspect of online multiplayer games, IMO. Getting dropped into a match with a bunch of random people you'll probably never see again just makes things so impersonal, which can cultivate a lot of toxicity.
Some of the best times I've ever had with online gaming were from finding a dedicated server with settings I liked, hanging out there often, and gradually getting to know the regulars and becoming part of a community. I've never had that kind of feeling from a game with automated matchmaking.
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100% agree! Sure, it might be disappointing if you spend 15 minutes in an intense back and forth before eventually losing, but it feels good! If one side is going to absolutely dominate the other, though, at least let it be over quickly.
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Shhhh, its just the lazy devs who also work super hard to make it terrible. /s
Everyone thinks their game of choice has bad match making, but it's just salt most of the time and doesn't pan out when actually tested and measured objectively. If match making was perfect they would win 50% of the time, but perfection is impossible because the system can only work with the players online right now. Those players aren't equally good every day, either, nor are they equally good against all other players, or on all maps. It's a moving target.
That doesn't even touch on cross play, or premade teams, which further complicate it.
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Absolutely. If all you care about is the win at the end then maybe you don't actually enjoy the game, you just enjoy dopamine.
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Games don't use catch-up mechanics anymore, because those take time. In the old days, if you played CTF or objective-push maps, there would be an automatic catch-up in that the side losing would get closer to their spawn. Now, that's all gone.
And MOBA is even worse, because it has escalation mechanics. If you lose a small edge at the start, you lose big later.
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This is why I quit PvP after call of duty mw2 (reboot,)
I knew I was being manipulated. It's why I completely have quit PvP and stick with PvE or single player.
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Yeah I dont play these games anymore. Catch me on the Space Station 14, where we pretend to work for an evil corporation while having none (except Valve) involved.
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When I tried BO6s MP for a while after launch (main zombies usually but the MP historically was worth some time investment) and while it absolutely felt the worst in terms of EOMM on a personal level I noticed the game was almost always close for whatever that game mode counted, so I started paying attention
Very VERY quickly noticed what was happening: EOMM pulling it's bullshit so people on whatever team was getting stomped would dip (no notif people leave and who looks at the scoreboard that regularly unless you notice something like I did) and then after maybe 25% of the match of one side being seriously down suddenly they'd get filled with a team either way over-skilled or blatantly cheating, managing to pull the score back in time to make it look "close' even though it was a stomp one direction for 25-50% of the match followed by a stomp the other fucking direction
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Yes. I caught on to this waaaaaaaayyyy back when League just starting getting traction, esports weren't really a thing, and I also played some Yu Gi Oh.
Both has the same sort of design, as ilæustrated nicely by this meme; the match is nearly always decided early, and for the rest of the game you're either just styling on the opponents, or you are getting styles on.
Victories didn't feel good, losses felt even worse, and I began to understand why people rage and break their keyboard. Games like these fuel such behaviour.
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There are steam forum posts about this.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/2767030/discussions/0/591757960657544586/ this is a great example. Not sure if it's still the same tho
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I play OpenRA.
Late in the evening, I sometimes get a training session with a "pro".
We know who they are. No ranking, no skins, just the registered name. It's enough to inflict terror...
Good stuff.
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Not really sure how one sided battles is related to microtransactions tbh. All the WW1 game series games (Verdun, Tannenberg, Isonzo) and Enlisted are games I have played lately. Both to some extent have this issue at times and yet have very different pricing models. Verdun and Tannenberg is a single game to buy and that is it, Isonzo added a few premium cosmetic packs. While Enlisted is apparently really bad for grind premium stuff although tbh I haven't really noticed because you start with a rifle and a rifle kills people. Not really noticed a difference with any of the other rifles, they all kill people.
Some teams are just useless.
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I don't mind losing if it was a fun battle and that is generally the bit you remember. I have gone 15+ kills to no deaths in war thunder and lost before but its still one of the more memorable games. The enemy just keep on coming as they stomp over your entire team and you stand alone (likely due to a little bit of skill and huge amount of luck) and hold back the tide but in the end they still manage to capture the objective and you lose.
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This is why I've never really gotten into either League, Dota, or, lately, Deadlock. The matches are just too long and most of the length is padding.
Overwatch has its issues, but at least even the worst match is over after 15-20 minutes. And the stomps are even faster, reducing the amount of time you spend not having fun on either side.
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As you say, it goes back even further that SBMM, to the large scale abandonment of the dedi server paradigm in favor of auto match making.
Nearly no online games even have actual server browsers now.
Back in the late 90s through the 2000s to early to mid 2010s...
Nearly every online game was a dedicated server, or at least you throwing open a temporary server with your own custom control over maps and gamemodes.
Many dedicated servers were run by a person or community... and this enabled communities to form around them, enabled lasting relationships to be made, hell, probably most mods or clans for most of those kinds of games arose from that, and a lot of those went on to later become massively more expansive, start their own game studio and put out their own games.
Now thats almost all gone.
You... used to be able to get onto a Battlefield server and know the regulars, like a bar.
That promotes at least a baseline of basic manners and etiquette.
Now all you can do is look at a general conception of an entire game's community, because the player has no agency to actually choose to associate or not associate with certain people or groups.
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I've never once had to wait more than 5 seconds to start loading in to a match no matter what time of day or night it is. Literally no other game has ever done this. They're prioritizing their time-to-game over having actual players in your match, and this definitely means filling slots with bots. How egregious it is will depend on the time and day and current online player count. But when I'm instantly loading a full game of 10 people at 3am on a Tuesday I know something's fucky.
Other people have done actual research into the matter but I had my suspicions, just from playing the game, by the third day or so after release.
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Seems to be more complaining about the lack of it. The better the skill based matchmaking is the larger those yellow slices would be. But a lot of gaming companies know about the gambling mindset of players who want to roll the dice and hope they get in the lobby where they stomp the other team so they'll make the matchmaking not as good and make it a coin flip on whether your on the stomping team, so the yellow slice becomes smaller.
