this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
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I've seen "competitive" games turn level-headed friends into seething piles of swears. They aren't having fun, they admit to not having fun, they acknowledge that they hate it... But they keep going because ranks, clout, commitment....
Games should have stakes, but modern ranking systems are designed to addict the exact same way that loot-boxes and other similar mechanics do. They hook and pull in deeper and the only way I've seen friends quit is when it gets so bad they go cold turkey. And only then do they look back at months or even years of playing a game, and see nothing but a waste of time and money.
But it works! These systems pull players into the grind like they're getting paid to play, even when they are hating every second.
I love some of these games, but I only learned to maximise my enjoyment of them once I began playing them casually. And it's such a pity that my friends who haven't learned the trick of not taking it so seriously, burn out on them, while I just keep going and having fun. I run out of people to play with on a regular basis because of this.
Just one factor of the design of these systems is that they have you feeling like you have to consistently win, in order to be worth something. And as that is obviously an impossibility, it leads to every loss taking three times more than what a win is able to give.
I mean yeah, there are always going to be people with problems. But the guy I was responding to was leveling complaints like "playing badly shouldn't impact the outcome", "it's bad that a team loses", and "people should be free to afk whenever". Like at that point, just play different games, these aren't your cup of tea.
And for what it's worth, I personally quite like the stricter competitive nature of many games. I like playing ranked games where everyone is solidly playing to win and competing on skill. Just because some people have a ego problem because of ranks, it doesn't mean the system should be scrapped.
There's a pretty wide gap between playing casually, and grinding to the point of burnout. It's plenty possible to take the game seriously, such that you care about doing your best and continually improving, without just dedicating your entire life to the grind.
I can't imagine anything less fun than playing way better than someone and losing because of trash rubberbanding nonsense to make games more "fun". Or anything more hollow than getting murdered and "winning" anyways for the same reason.
I agree. In that sense that first comment is completely off the rails.
I'd personally like to see changes like not having the ranking system torpedo your evaluation because of a single underperforming team-mate.
A lot of current systems go hard on negative reinforcement, and spread it around like candy on halloween along with gleefully engaging in collective punishment.
I don't really care about ranking (or play the kind of leaderboard stuff that uses it) so I can't comment on implementation. I think it's genuinely hard to do in team competition environments, though.
I know with certainty it's extremely hard to do in heavily team based sports like football and basketball, because that I do pay attention to. Maybe MoBAs are closer to baseball where even though it's a "team" sport, you actually can isolate out parts reliably enough to measure effectively, but I don't play them to know for sure.
I just find any and all rubber banding (an opt in "skill handicap" casual mode is fine; dynamically changing it mid game just makes everything feel like horseshit) a truly nauseating excuse for terrible design.
At least for league, I'd say it's definitely the former. Team play and strategy is a huge component and is extremely difficult to measure. There's no hard tracking for things like "knew when to run the opposite way so the enemy couldn't get multiple kills" or "blocked an important spell so the carry didn't die". Individual skill is so closely intertwined with team results that separating out the two is only possible in the extreme cases.
At least in terms of league, that isn't the case. Yeah, everyone complains about losing due to bad teams, but like, yeah? In a match of 10 people, any given person inherently has a minority of the impact on any given match. But statistically, that balances out over time. Better players will have greater positive impacts, and thus win more game and climb. There's an argument to be made that the old promotion system leaned towards bad games having an outsized impact, but that was kinda the point. They prevented lucky streaks from impacting rank as much and favored consistency. And trust me, I've mained adc since season 5. I know the impact of shitty teams first hand.
The mmr system also more or less completely prevents a bad game or two from tanking your rank. As long as your mmr is higher than your rank, you can climb even with like 40% wins since a win will grant more than a loss takes away.
Likewise in Dota, outside of very niche scenarios, and in the first place, people are chosing to play for MMR. I don't play much league, so I don't know how it works there, but at least in Dota, you can get a pretty complete experience in the unranked modes complete with (hidden) SBMM.
Yeah, league has separate mmr for ranked and normals, so you always get sbmm no matter what. Main difference is that in ranked, you're locked in regards to who you can queue with so there isn't too wide a gap in mmr, whereas norms let's anyone queue together.
League also doesn't do ranks directly based on mmr, but rather indirectly through an elo system, where your mmr decides who you play against do it's always a close to even team, and then the mmr decides how much a win/loss effects your elo. If you're a high rank player skill wise, your mmr will put you against similarly skilled players, even if you're still a lower rank, and it will just give you more upwards ranking.