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.
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.