Almost all multi-player gaming is competitive and involves dealing with occasional (or frequent, depending on the game) jerks. If I want stress and occasional jerks, I can just do things in the real world. Single-player gaming is more comfy.
My wife uses video games to relax and de-stress after having dealt with customers all day. Having to deal with more people in the evening is the last thing she needs.
You can always solo queue fortnight/apex or whatever. The worst case is you die cause you had to deal with the kid/cat/work call, if you focus on the fun of the individual engagements and don't worry about actually winning the match you'll have fun. I do understand what you're saying, multiplayer gaming does require much more intentionality. You have to make distraction free time to get the most out of it, especially if you're playing a team game there's a social contract to have the time to play the match out.
This is the big one to me, time commitment. People spend hours on these, and if you want to "hang" with an in-group, they expect you to put in the time. No thanks. I don't want a lifestyle revolving around maximizing time on a multiplayer game.
If I'm going to commit time every week it might as well be a physical sport. I do like couch co-op or occasional online play with friends but that is off-the-cuff stuff. I'd be willing to do it more frequently if the time were capped.
Not my experience. You are right that it's less of an issue. But I very definitely stressed about individual matches and how it affects the ranking and stats. You hold it in until the match finishes and just don't join the next one right away but you still change your behavior. Or in something like WoW PvP servers you go somewhere safe before logging out etc.
What I dislike is how much more uncommon random matchups are. I find ranked stressful because it incentivizes making the number go up, so I prefer to be an eternal Quick Play player. But a lot of QP systems still use shadow rankings that influence who you get paired with, and they tend to give me very ping-pong results.
One game I'm dominating against the other team, but then the ball hits the other side and get paired with people above my level for the next several. It kinda makes me feel like the agency on how well I can perform is taken away from me, and I just have to hope the matchmaking system takes pity.
At least when matches were more random, sometimes I'd get paired with people above my level, but it was rare that it felt completely rigged against me.
It's not just jerks. Seems like most multiplyer games have some sort of "pay to win" (or pay for an advantage) scheme in them. Then you have lag, solo team pitted against organized teams, ranking systems that arent accurate, etc.
Competition in gaming is fine, but only if the participants think it's fair. It feels to me like it's increasingly unfair.
But in relation it jerks, there seem to be many more same-team jerks than in the past. Teammate blame seems to be at an all time high. It's always someone else fault that we lost, never my own. Oftentimes you read the stats afterwards and the performance was basically equal. I can't help but feel that this same perspective is spilling into real life too.
I played League of Legends and didn’t have any problem with the monetization scheme because you could get a great selection of characters to play paying no money (could have played the starter Sona forever) or a modest amount of money.
What did bother me was (1) games taking too long (I don’t want to tell my family I can’t help with anything for 45 minutes) and (2) jerks. In ranked there were the people who thought they could not get ahead because the players they played with (me) sucked, in unranked there were too many people who couldn’t queue successfully (learned how to play all positions, even jungle, so I wouldn’t be part of the problem of having three people who want to play top)
Anecdotally (n.b. i have like 20x the time in dota vs league) I find the matchmaker in dota does a much better job of taking your behavior metrics into account. If you're nice you'll get nice people in your games. I think it's not uncommon for the 9 other people in the game to be willing to hold a pause for a few minutes if you need to deal with an emergency.
Pay-to-win mechanics used to always mean a game was not taken seriously competitively. Now with several genres of game it's expected you will pay money to unlock "DLC" characters (e.g. Street Fighter) that you can't otherwise play, but need to play against. It's not exactly pay-to-win since the locked characters are supposed to be fairly balanced, but it's arguable since balance is never perfect and developers seem reluctant to err on the weak side for characters they're trying to sell for a profit.
Depends on the market, pay2win is rare in western-developed PC and console games but extremely common in eastern-developed games, and mobile games developed anywhere. Korean MMOs are infamous for being pay2win pretty much without exception. Not that I think western publishers would be above doing P2W if they thought they could get away with it, but their main target markets aren't primed to accept it, though that tide is shifting with the rising global popularity of gacha games.
I still (very) occasionally play WoW, and that's pretty much the only game I ever play.
I'd love to try a new MMO, but they're all "free-to-play" meaning "pay to win". I just want to pay a normal monthly subscription price and explore cool worlds. Maybe interact occasionally with some other people in a guild or pickup group or something.
It's what keeps my WoW subscription active, even though I rarely play it.
Sadly, it's gotten so bad that I spend most of my brain-dead time reading Lit RPG stuff, because at least with that I can recapture some of the sense of wonder and excitement that we had during the golden age of MMOs (UO, EQ, DAOC, AC, SWG, etc...).
You could try Final Fantasy XIV—it's a traditional regular-subscription MMO that's actually picked up a lot of users in recent years. It's much more story-focused than WoW, which is a turn-off to a lot of people coming from that tradition, but it's got a free trial.
there are established good competitive titles without pay2win. look at league, counter-strike for instance.
a lot of the other things mentioned (like a solo guy getting matched with a "team") are to me similar to real-life counterparts. you can play ball in a court against a group of friends that play together regularly. just like you can have a better computer and internet, you can have better sports gear.
this does not take away from the "skill" aspect of the game for me. i am with you in terms of systematic issues with ranking or game mechanics, but it is still much better than annual sports titles and the like. but if chess can be enjoyed despite the player starting first having an advantage, so can these games.
My god, this. In ut99 we found, in the assault mazon fortress map, how attackers could shoot friends on top of the fortress roof from the starting point. It broke the map completely, but nobody cared. In fact, it was so cool, the defenders joined the attackers, landing on top of their own base.
So you can essentially skip half your character's progression arc by entering a credit card number.
Now, you can argue that the best gear is BOP (Bind on Pickup) so this isn't a huge factor, but there's still definitely an aspect of "pay to win", since there are plenty of other things you need gold for that payment skips.
You can also argue that WoW isn't competitive, but all multiplayer games have a light competition of being ahead of others in progression, even if it's not direct competition. (I'm ignoring PvP because actual PvP is a tiny minority interest. )
This description of the pay to win properties of WoW is slightly dated. Gold buys you very little in the way of gear these days. They have de-emphasized the role of gold over time because players kept buying it.
That didn't stop players from figuring out how to pay to win though. They now pay "boosting" and "carry" services - other people who group up with you and then clear dungeons while you just follow along behind them and collect the loot as it drops.
There are advertisers spamming ads for these carry services all over the place inside the game even though they're against ToS. It does still have its charms but on balance WoW really has become a train wreck.
This shows up in fighting games, where DLC (i.e. paid) characters often have increasingly overpowered properties or even entirely new mechanics that the rest of the cast struggles to deal with.
That's only 1/3rd of that list. Any multiplayer game is competitive to some degree. If you see my previous comment, it specifies "pay for advantage". Some games you have to pay to unlock gear or xp boosters to make it really playable.
> Some games you have to pay to unlock gear or xp boosters to make it really playable.
Again, can you provide an example? Also
> Any multiplayer game is competitive to some degree
Is just blatantly incorrect, unless you just mean "One player is further in the game than the other", in which case literally all games are "competitive", including single player.
There are some which are more casual. My partner plays fornite. She's got a group she games with, and half the talking is about the game the other half is basically a catch up session with a game in the background.
there was a game called "Journey" where there where other players in the world, but you couldn't interact directly. They'd help you. I think elden ring did something similar.
Elden Ring has an interesting multiplayer mechanic, and it works quite well.
1. You can sometimes see what other players are doing, they show up as a translucent white phantom looking thing. This is useful because you can sometimes see entrances to hidden locations, etc.
2. There are blood stains on the ground which represent where another player died. If you interact with the blood stain, you see a translucent red phantom in their final moments. This is useful if you want to see if jumping of a particular ledge is fatal or to see potential traps.
3. You can leave messages for other players to see and can read messages that other players have left. This mechanic goes both ways, as some people troll and others try to help. Interacting with the message rewards the player who left the message by refilling their health bar. Many boss fights have been won because someone happened to rate their message at a critical moment. On the trolling side, people leave messages like "Try jumping" by ledges where jumping off would be fatal. Others leave amusing messages, and the community is amazingly creative with the messages they compose, given that the pre-set vocabulary is quite limited.
4. You put your summon sign down on the ground for others to see. When they interact with it, you can enter their game and help them fight bosses / progress through the level. Bosses are rewarded with more health for each player present. Obviously, the opposite works as well and you can summon others into your game.
5. You can put your dueling sign down / interact with the dueling sign. This is for people who wish to participate in player vs player.
6. You can invade other people's worlds / be invaded. This only happens if you have summoned a helper or are using an item which allows this mechanic to be used solo. When you are invaded, other players can automatically be brought in as hunters to help vanquish the invader.
I'm not a fan of twitchy competitive games, but I get a great deal of enjoyment and satisfaction with cooperative ones. Elden Ring and the rest of the "Souls" series very much scratch that itch.
Multiplayer has also been taken over by free2play skinner box design, so if you want games that aren't designed to waste your time with unfun but addictive gameplay loops and/or nickel-and-dime you to death then singleplayer is the last bastion.
I feel like multiplayer gaming was more fun/popular when there were more jerks, especially on the mics. It seemed like half the fun was the shit talking back in the halo 3/cod 4 era, and it really only stopped when they screwed up how lobbies worked in newer titles where you can't go on all talk between games let alone actually party up, or have proxy chat in game. At least on some PC games you can still get on the mics and PC gamers do actually still use their mics. I'm not sure if the new consoles even ship with mics anymore.
So I think there are two things here. First I agree somewhat though I think that there's a difference between good natured shit talking and being a jerk. I feel like as a kid people still could be mean but tonally it was more jovial, now I feel like I run into more miserable assholes (which I think is much worse). Secondly it still wasn't fun for everyone back in the day, especially if you were different people would try to bully you. I never had an issue but I know a lot of people who have never used public voice chat because they don't want to be harassed.
now you have people getting pissed off by "nice save!" messages used ironically in rocket league, or people getting riled up from a random goal celebration in the popular annual football game.
people will continue to get frustrated, thanks in part of the game's shortcomings. but it is no longer possible to let your team know how you feel about it. take it as you may, it was pretty nice while it lasted.
Shit talking or hearing others shit talk was half the fun. IMO, this should be resolved through the creation of moderated vs unmoderated channels. Different strokes for different folks. Instead, all channels are moderated.
I wouldn't say its a dying breed. I think you see more non-competitive co-op games now than competitive multiplayer, especially with the huge success of games like Space Marines 2 and Helldivers 2 and the massive flops of Concord and XDefiant.
Heh. If we're using competitiveness as a measuring stick, Helldivers 2 is absolutely competitive. If you're not geared up with the current meta, you're frequently flamed and kicked. There's a lot of "win or die" mentality there.
If winning is on the line, it doesn't matter who the opponent is.
Competitiveness and zero sum thinking is so bad in the world of video games, that Helldivers 2's entire run has been marred by over-balancing loadouts in an explicitly coop, PvE game, where balance shouldn't even be a priority.
They spent months and months and months nerfing equipment (that was being used because basic game mechanics like armor penetration and damage models were explicitly broken) and making changes that intentionally or otherwise made the game much harder, all while literal employees of the company bullied players asking for an enjoyable game in their public discord, telling players that the BUGS they were suffering from, including weapons not working the way they were supposed to, and including the spawning behavior being utterly broken and spawning many times more enemies than it should was A SKILL ISSUE
ArrowHead's culture itself was so "sweaty" and "tryhard" and destructive that it resulted in a change of the CEO and a restructuring of the department that interacted with players including banning at least one employee from the public discord for his hostile behavior. They had to completely change their development strategy and release cadence to address these issues, with significant public "mea culpa"s promising to make the game more fun for normal people. It even worked, with the game seeing an influx of new and returning players after a year of constant reduction in player count.
This is a game where playing on higher difficulty levels is REQUIRED to unlock most of the content you cannot buy with the "real money" in game currency.
So helldivers 2 is actually a great example of how god awful and toxic the "tryhards" in online gaming are. It was literally corroding one of the best and most refreshing new games to come out in a long time, from a company who has historically done a wonderful job making games that are all about chaotic fun and lighthearted cooperation, like Magika.
They are god awful at programming though. Also don't seem to have reliable and well managed change control, since they seem to have no clue what releases any time they update.
Another great example was the Dark Souls debacle about adding an easy mode. These games are known for being hard (imo often with fake and bullshit difficulty like a dragon's fire breath literally going through a wall to kill you), but the devs wanted the game to be more accesible and there was LOUD outcry about allowing people to play the game easier would "ruin!!!!" the game.... somehow. This was a single player game that was perfectly playable with near zero online interaction. They explicitly were upset that other people may have fun.
Helldivers 2 over-tuned because they wanted to keep things in the difficulty levels they envisioned, and people were simply vocal because they wanted a power fantasy. Space Marines 2 delivered on that desire better than Helldivers 2 did.
I don't think I've ever seen a game company ever manage to put 100% of their changes in a CHANGELOG.
FromSoftware games like to put in cheese border-line bullshit mechanics to make you feel good when you overcome them, even if you have to cheese them yourself. They knew everybody was going to cheese regardless of the difficulty they just made a round-about way of making you feel like it was okay.
Some people like competitiveness in games, and like difficult games, and thats okay if you do or don't. Games need to find a product-market fit just like anything else.
Part of this goes back to skill-based matchmaking (SBMM) systems becoming the standard. It used to be I would just play Counter-Strike on a local server because it had the best ping, by far. The same people were playing there all the time, so there was a sense of community, and I could really see myself improve over time in the stats and match results. With SBMM I get punished for playing better by getting matched against harder and harder opponents so that it feels like treading water, even in "unranked" game modes. SBMM is also an abusable system, as dedicated players will often make several accounts to play on and take advantage of their assumed lack of skill as their matchmaking rank is calibrated, throwing the whole thing out of whack.
They can be as competitive or as casual as you like, are "soft-multiplayer", essentially single player inside a multiplayer economy, and the better ones are non-p2w.
One factor not talked about enough is that multiplayer games are kind of limited in the "experience" you can create. Single player experiences are unbound. The fact that you can narrate "stories" is what allows gamers to "experience" new things.
Nintendo has the right idea with avoiding any kind of group or voice chat in Splatoon and Mario Kart. Those are always fun online multiplayer experiences for me.
Yeah, almost every multiplayer-focused game nowadays seems to be trying to be the next big e-sport. There's always somebody who's fully focused on the meta and being competitive, and lashing out at people who don't. I have too much work , too much social life and too many hobbies, I'm not going to spend even more time gittin gud for internet strangers.
I've mostly stopped playing online games besides more chill/sandboxy ones, like Lethal Company, and those I play exclusively with friends.
