Shooters and learning curves.
Soul_Rider
Mod Bean Join Date: 2004-06-19 Member: 29388Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
Mod Bean Join Date: 2004-06-19 Member: 29388Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
I was just reading the comments on the NS2WC story on PCGamer - http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/11/12/natural-selection-2-world-championship-sees-crowdfunding-success/
I read this post and thought it might be an interesting topic of discussion (relevant part in BOLD)...
So why do you think that typically shooters that have a high learning curve are less successful than games like Starcraft or MOBA's which also have steep learning curve's?
Is it because we just expect shooters in general to be a mindless activity? Does thinking and shooting put a lot of people off? What do you think?
I read this post and thought it might be an interesting topic of discussion (relevant part in BOLD)...
Pec12:46am November 13 2013 wrote:Congratulations on the championship successes. NS2 deserves great esports fame. NS2 is immensely rewarding to play when everyone is past the newbie stages, particularly because of the great strategic depth. It is the best kind of game.
Makes me yet again wonder why essentially mindless action shooters like call of duty, unreal tournament, or quake have always been more popular then games like natural selection, savage, or firearms. If a game genre like MOBA can attract players to complicated games with difficult learning curves, why is it the opposite with shooting games?
I guess Blizzard saw this because they are about to dumb the shit out of the MOBA genre with HotS, CCG's too with Hearthstone.
My guess is its some psychological crap about gratification or feeling of rewards? It sucks though. NS2 has steadily increased its player base, but I honestly thought it would have achieved 10 times the current playerbase when I first played the first feature-rich stable beta build.
So why do you think that typically shooters that have a high learning curve are less successful than games like Starcraft or MOBA's which also have steep learning curve's?
Is it because we just expect shooters in general to be a mindless activity? Does thinking and shooting put a lot of people off? What do you think?
Comments
I dunno, if you suck at LoL you are likely to feed, which is likely to lead to you getting flamed. A 5v5 or 3v3 places much more responsibility on the individual player than 12v12 ns2 pubs. Besides none of the other aspects of the game are important if it does not lead to killing enemy heroes or pushing lanes.
Also I hear quake had a very high skill ceiling, higher than ns2 even.
I find that people complain more when they're on the alien side, rather than the marine side. There seems to be the sentiment that "that skulk dodged my bullets, or I sucked really badly, so I deserved to die" as opposed to the alien equivalent of "Despite a half decent ambush he hopped away and still killed me, or, despite landing several hits his commander kept him alive with meds".
Obviously that isn't to say a lerk or fade cannot be annoying, just that in general that new people tend to be more frustrated as a skulk against the marines. You also have to take into consideration that your lifeforms can be easily killed (you're new) and are not easily replaced, whereas if you lose your shotgun marine, you can often pick someone else's shotgun up etc. Lifeforms are also less counter intuitive than marines (I mean if you've played shooters before you should at least have a basic grasp of how to aim, reload etc) whereas as an alien it could be completely new to you.
To the quote, some evolutionary logic, perhaps:
Why do we play videogames? Why do we play sport? I won't go into too much depth, but to put it a little simplistically, they are proxies of the sorts of things we used to do in the past. Fight...Race...Dance...Whatever - competition to convince the opposite sex that we are worth reproducing with in order to proliferate our genetic material. We evolved these traits and they come under the study of game theory. Interesting pun. But the aforementioned is quite banal, so do I have anything to offer in the means of an original explanation? I think so.
I was watching Bitey's stream and he decided to put on GTA 4. He got incredibly bored and said he hated slow games. I also heard him speaking to Hopsu about RPGs and how boring he found them. Perhaps it is part of his evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) to express certain traits above others; remember that multiple ESS can co-exist in a given environment (for example, think of how some people are much more 'selfish' than others). Anyway, without delving too far and writing a monograph, I would say it might just be that Natural Selection 2 stimulates us in certain ways - with the fast FPS action and the somewhat alternative RTS experience. However it might be that the extent of this stimulation does not exceed a certain threshold such that the game can be enjoyed by a substantial enough portion of human beings that express a sufficiently similar ESS as you and I (people who like NS2). So say for example you take SC2 (hardcore fast-paced, seemingly cocaine-fuelled clusterfuck of an RTS) v the comparatively slower paced in terms of motor movement but distinctively equivalent requirement of cognitive load (now you need to be better at communicating with others, understanding their different personalities and how to lead them; increased chaos in the nuances of your opponents - now you're against 6 people, not, as SC2 is primarily played, 1). Both games may incur a cognitive load, but in strikingly different ways. It might just be that a greater proportion of the population has an ESS that 'identifies' with the demands of SC2 than they do with NS2.
There are obviously a bunch of other nuances to consider, but this comment is long enough as it is. This is quite an interesting topic.
Or for an alternative explanation: WELL GOD DID IT
Maybe we can think of it this way - why are certain sports more mainstream than others? Why is football (soccer) more mainstream than chess? There are many explanations (funding, schools etc) but these are merely symptoms. If chess were the preferred competition of choice it would have come to dominate in terms of its funding and marketing etc etc.
Yet it didn't. Why? As I stated in my previous comment, it could be a function of ESS numbers. Here's a muse - maybe Call of Duty is the gaming analogue of football, and chess is the analogue of NS2. Now, I'm not saying this is a perfect analogy. Both CoD and NS2 appear to have more in common than do chess and football, but that doesn't contradict the analogy - just makes it less potent. Perhaps football and CoD have people of a particular ESS (say for example these people like super fast action wherein more risks are taken - but the risks are punished less because you're thrown straight back into the action). I don't know the statistics, but perhaps chess comebacks are more rare than football ones (for example one of the greatest players of all time, Garry Kasparov once remarked that his computer opponent never had to lament over moves in the past, whereas he as a human was eventually weighed down with too much cognitive load).
Oh god here I go with my convoluted tangents again.
Might as well jump on the bandwagon like the dirty slut I am.
It'd be nice if @Golden could jump in here and explain how the mentalities of gamers works. I know it has something to do with evolution, revolution or Natural Selection or something like that.
Accessibility. These games are available on all major platforms.
Drop in, drop out. You can pretty much join an MMS at any point in the round and do just as well as you would had you been there from the start. Only difference, you might not be able to top the score board until the next round starts (which is usually a matter of minutes). In NS2 you more often than not join a loosing team (because that's the team that tends to have vacant slots) and might end up having to sit through a painful endgame with no pres for dozens of minutes before the round finally ends.
Matchmaking.
Time. MMS games are instant and short. NS2 takes ages to start and can drag out for hours without much actually happening.
Learning curve. NS2 is hard to learn and even harder to master.
At its best, NS2 blows most if not all MMS games Ive had the pleasure or displeasure of playing out of the water, but its not a game you can pick up and play for 5 minutes and get too much enjoyment out of.
Friends who know I love this game have tried it. I can never get them to play more than a day or two though. They never give me decent reason. They honestly had no complaints. They said it was fun. Would they play again. Nope.
Quake had a lot of movement abilities available, but not really depth in the way NS2 has. It tested aim and targetting/tracking/leading while trying to move around using complex movement.
NS2 requires a lot more thinking, and awareness of the meta game, and it is this depth that seems to put people off, as far as I can see.
You can only tag golden when speaking about the skill system. -2 points for you sir.
You said that with poise and skill, my friend. In fact...
It'd be nice if @Golden could jump in here and explain how you skillfully made your point... Well there's always Twitter.
Edit: Actually if he could just explain how I lost two points, rather than more or fewer, then...
I think Maxx makes some decent points. However, NS2 hasn't had a problem selling. It may not have the marketing power of CoD or similar, but given favourable coverage by people like TB (LOTS of it) you would think that marketing hasn't been much of a problem. The major problem is retention.
As for the high learning curve...If you jump into a game and you feel totally out of your depth, you might be inclined (as most are) to just try another game. I'll admit I did the same with DOTA 2 (it has a lot of depth, but more in the "have you spent 12312313132 hours learning stuff" sort of sense). Well life is pretty short and I'll be dead in several decades so I'd rather just play something else. I can empathise, thus, with those who only give NS2 a few hours play and then leave.
In fact, I played NS2 for around 20 hours and then I stopped. I can't remember why I came back, but for some reason I did. It wasn't until I had plowed some more hours into it (I must have been bored of all my other games) that I finally found some traction. Maybe that is the key. It's just all a bit overwhelming in the beginning. I think you feel that way about certain things. You can't improve until you've gotten a basic enough grasp of things. I think back to how boring I found biology when I was in school, but it was mainly because they made us learn through rote revision of boring 1-line facts, as opposed to explaining concepts. It's not until you have enough of a grounding of basic biology that you can really look at some of the beautiful theories and really enjoy and enthrall yourself. NS2 can be pretty overwhelming in a sort of analogous manner. It took me a few dozen hours until I could finally begin to understand the real physics of the engine, and the concepts of double pressure etc. Then I could really enjoy the science of the gameplay.
Of course, to get there, you need to leap the hurdles, of which there are many in NS2. Whether it be the poor performance (since improved from release, but still poor for many) or the fact that rookies often have single figure IQs and go on non-rookie servers, leaving many non-rookies no option but to go on rookie servers, thus leading to crap matches, or even the, perhaps, extra emphasis on teamplay over other MMS, new people are turned away...
Woo so positive!
You'll be matched up with the most equally skilled players possible in LoL because of matchmaking.
For anyone not familiar with Quake dueling, the classic video of Rapha explaining a dm6 match is pretty good insight:
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As for NS2 and player retention, I think the game is demanding a lot, but is unable to provide the setting that most succesful demanding games have. I'll give a couple of examples what for example Dota 2 has and NS2 doesn't.
Stability: NS2 has been going through changes and drastic redesign throughout it's lifespan. While it's good that the game keeps receiving dev support, it really needs to have the key ideas figured out and working smootly before most people consider investing more time to the game. The same goes for things like varying performance depending on the version and all that. Also, halfway there features like babblers aren't exactly helping. If you're supposed to put time and effort into learning a game, it better be looking a whole package all the way.
Tools for learning: The demos are still inexistent, the wiki is probably out of date and in general there's not that much documentation available. You easily get frustrated when the learning process hits dead ends.
Motivation for learning: Most of the more hardcore games have community pushing out quality extra content that both supports the learning process and motivates you to actually get better. SC2 has Day[9], most FPSes have frag movies, in Dota 2 almost every caster has some insight on the finer details of the game. NS2 only has some occassional, very light play by play commentary.
Basically NS2 asks for a lot, but at the same time it doesn't show the similar kind of promise as most other more demanding games.
I think Neoken hit the nail on the head though, there are far too many players that lack the patience and work ethic to be good at complex games these days. Which is a shame, because once you get over the learning curve, complex games are far more rewarding.
While I do think, that you dont need pop ups every 5 seconds I do like to complete challanges and get new weapons, and I think many players do as well.
Maybe a system for usergenerated challanges could do some good(360 a Onos with an Axe?).
Than there is the lack of gamemodes, there is normal and the arena/TDM mode, maybe you can find a hidden server but that´s it. This is a part where NS2 really can and should look up to battlefield, Call of Duty and even Crysis 3, all of them have multiple gamemodes, from "Extraction" over "Kill confirmed" to simple "Capture the flag".
The game has one of the best playable "classes" in gaming but what if I simply dont want to play a game that can take up to one hour and even beyond that.
Get CTF or more in NS2, or even take some mods and make them official.
^ I feel like this has a large part to do with it.
on an off topic note
wow i miss savage..
spoiler - wouldn't happen.
Coincidentally, I've noticed that a decent number of top NS2 players have backgrounds in Quake and/or Counter Strike.
What in the actual fuck did I just read. Really, CoD UT and Quake are all mindless shooters, like, they were compared? Together? For real?
That was a quote I pulled off the PCGamer site as I thought it provoked discussion, please do not edit a quote to make it seem like I said that.
Just because this person doesn't understand Quake or UT, doesn't need to de-rail the general point of the thread.
As alien or marine?
Not doubting the FPS skill of top quake players compared to top NS2 players, but alien is a little bit different.
Yes I know, the video shows this but it doesn't have the same melee combat that alien play does. I'm sure with practice a quake player could become a good alien but from the start it would not be the same as their dominance as a marine.
Lack of mods: this game lack one serius noob favorite mod - DEATHMATCH
Combat mod with kill counter limit for win is needed as gamemode on oficial UW servers
Next is Capture the Flag(res) build all no com needed; all is unlocked and balanced at right res price.
Lot more but im lazy to write
Slow load times, most players hate it , some more some less , but most hate it!
Balance problems, Alien OP in late game, cuz High marine lifeforms Exos are UP- useless
most of time game is turned when u cant kill that onos and gorge camping at hive, and u lose map control for that time
This, This hapends in pubs most of time even if u have good team if area where hive is low, and jets not so usefull.
And lot more, but i think lot of u will not read this so i will not write book here.
Keep in mine that this above dont apply to me, and most of us, i have SSD and i did not come to Deathmatch.
But u asked why rest dont come, and now u know some resons.
Skulks with Shotguns
Combat mod with kill counter limit for win is needed as gamemode on Official UW servers
Official is key world
Too late.