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[Frocto]

Post here when you are playing an online game against or with someone devastatingly stupid.

I'll kick us off by mentioning the Xin that called Kayle OP tonight. LoL and TF2 are the only online games I really play, so I am unfamiliar with the larger quality of mouth-breathers out there. Please enlighten the class.

[Shinra]

Technically speaking, in high level competitive play, Kayle is considered the best character in the game. She's at the top of Tier 1 and has been there for a long time.

I was in a TF2 game yesterday where a heavy who had spent the first 15-20 minutes of the game spawncamping our team started bitching loudly about me and another engineer setting up sentries at both the entrances to our base on 2fort. Last I checked, setting up sentries at the entrance to our base is kind of the engineer's job.

[Bal]

No, you're only supposed to put sentries where he can edge them and prove how heavy his penis is.

[JDigital]

My brother treats Alien Swarm like his own Personal Glory Fortress. He'll play Officer, then run ahead or lag behind for kills, so nobody gets the leadership bonus. Last night he played tech to try and solo a mission that requires a tech, and was killed because nobody was left alive to defend him while he hacked.

During a setup he switched his weapons to both chainsaws, then forced ready. This was on the mission where you need flamethrower. He also runs around racking up extra kills while everyone else waits in the exit, with the result that half the time everyone is killed and we have to play the mission through again.

In public games, I've seen him weld teammates out and pick grenades for the express purpose of teamkilling.

[Doom]

Technically speaking, in high level competitive play, Kayle is considered the best character in the game. She's at the top of Tier 1 and has been there for a long time.

Yeah, but she requires more finesse and skill than "Charge in, hit R, do your knock-up, did you win? Of course you did, Xin!"

Also if you love TF2 stupids, I hear the competitive guys banned Natascha for the crime of making the Heavy viable against beloved Demo/Soldier/Scout spam.

[teg]

Normally I'm against intentional ignorance, but the less I know about competitive Pokémon, the better.

[JDigital]

Alien Swarm pubbies have a habit of dodging left and right while in my firing arc. No aliens have projectile weapons fast enough to warrant erratic FPS style dodging.

[Bal]

This is less common now just by virtue of how seriously awful and wrong a strategy it is, but back when Bad Company 2 launched you'd have a group of at least five snipers at the back of every base playing Grab the Gilly with each other and matching dicks with the group of snipers on the other team.

[Kayin]

Also if you love TF2 stupids, I hear the competitive guys banned Natascha for the crime of making the Heavy viable against beloved Demo/Soldier/Scout spam.

I dunno, reading some comp forums (though theres some good counter arguments), the reasoning sounds pretty alright. Heavy is good right now even without Natascha and in that format it ends up massively slowing the game down and preventing end caps. They also banned the Wrangler which SO does not surprise me. This isn't like pubs where you can go "Well go get a spy" or something, who will just get killed or some other silly idea that comes from pubbie logic.

Generally speaking, I think caring what a subcommunity does to keep their format from breaking at the seams is really no ones concern, especially since they not only know their format better than us, they probably know the -game- better. It's not like it effects how people play on pubs so whatever.

The mouth breathers will be the guys in pubs who cry whenever someone uses it, even though they don't understand why it's banned. Also, this reminds me, one of my pet peeves in this sense is people who complain about how other people play games even when they're not playing together. The general comp vs casual whining for any game, in any direction (I just got into a big argument on TT about SF4 over this topic too). Or different formats, or whatever. Unless someone is directly ruining your fun, why care?

[Bongo Bill]

Subcommunities like that often have good reasons to tweak the rules the way they do, since the high-level play they exhibit tends to expose dominant strategies which often need to be curtailed in order to keep the game interesting. But the longer they go on and the more they change (and especially when they try to change the game into something it was never meant to be), the more they run the risk of creating an echo chamber mentality where nothing they do makes any sense outside of their own shrinking context, or at all.

[Saturn]

Alien swarm has more than its fair share of brain-dead players.

some dumbshit runs into a room, gets facehumped and RUNS AWAY FROM ME (THE MEDIC), DIES AND GETS MAD AT ME FOR NOT BEING SPEEDY FUCKING GONZALES

[Frocto]

Generally speaking, I think caring what a subcommunity does to keep their format from breaking at the seams is really no ones concern, especially since they not only know their format better than us, they probably know the -game- better. It's not like it effects how people play on pubs so whatever.

I'm not sure if we've argued about this before, but this is why I advocated regular patching and re-releases of games. If there is something in the game that makes the game worse, less balanced, whatever, it's the game designer's duty to fix it. I'm saying, as a game designer, that I expect nothing less than a superhuman level of attention to fixing problems in a game. I've always staunchly and aggressively taken the stance that if something is in the game, it's the player's duty to abuse it as much and as hard as possible, so the game designer can see it's fucked up and fix it. And if the players are better at seeing problems in the game than the designers, then the designers should give them a goddamn job.

Needless to say, this means I can't play a lot of games.

[Pacobird]

Subcommunities like that often have good reasons to tweak the rules the way they do, since the high-level play they exhibit tends to expose dominant strategies which often need to be curtailed in order to keep the game interesting. But the longer they go on and the more they change (and especially when they try to change the game into something it was never meant to be), the more they run the risk of creating an echo chamber mentality where nothing they do makes any sense outside of their own shrinking context, or at all.

This is why people hate WoW. 

Using the word "people" as broadly as possible, natch.

[Büge]

Generally speaking, I think caring what a subcommunity does to keep their format from breaking at the seams is really no ones concern, especially since they not only know their format better than us, they probably know the -game- better. It's not like it effects how people play on pubs so whatever.

I'm not sure if we've argued about this before, but this is why I advocated regular patching and re-releases of games. If there is something in the game that makes the game worse, less balanced, whatever, it's the game designer's duty to fix it. I'm saying, as a game designer, that I expect nothing less than a superhuman level of attention to fixing problems in a game. I've always staunchly and aggressively taken the stance that if something is in the game, it's the player's duty to abuse it as much and as hard as possible, so the game designer can see it's fucked up and fix it. And if the players are better at seeing problems in the game than the designers, then the designers should give them a goddamn job.

Needless to say, this means I can't play a lot of games.

It does make you exemplary at LPing, though. That and your zany sense of comic timing.

[Frocto]

Okay, wow. I just played with a team who pushed as a group twice, got aced both times, then on their third push I pulled back and defended the base after they all got killed again, then they blamed me for them dying.

Fair enough, it was my fault, sure. Then they were getting ready for a new push to which I said we should play be playing defensive, to which all four of them simultaneously surrendered and bitched at me in the chat for costing them the game.

This sort of thing has been griping on me for a while, actually. In late game, you don't need to push. The enemy team will always come up to you and if you just grind them up a few times, you can get a huge advantage. Way too many people go, "Oh, we've aced them, we need to PUSH PUSH PUSH," but it's just horseshit. I'd rather ace the enemy team, go kill Nashor, ace them AGAIN, then push. I just think a lot of people are afraid to do it because it requires a repeat performance of ability, rather than winning because some idiot ran out of the base and got instantly gibbed.

[Kayin]

Subcommunities like that often have good reasons to tweak the rules the way they do, since the high-level play they exhibit tends to expose dominant strategies which often need to be curtailed in order to keep the game interesting. But the longer they go on and the more they change (and especially when they try to change the game into something it was never meant to be), the more they run the risk of creating an echo chamber mentality where nothing they do makes any sense outside of their own shrinking context, or at all.

While this is true, do you think this applies to the TF2 competitive community? I view them as a pretty flexible and understanding community that generally WANTS to see more stuff used. Honestly I actually can't think of an example of the echo chamber. A lot of people would say Smash, but I think thats more on.. philosophical grounds. Their community acts in a way that is ludicrous even if their rules are pretty sensible for what they're trying to do. I DEFINITELY know this happens to the letter of what you said in a lot of smaller games though.

Anyways you didn't seem to have a personal bias, so I'm just wondering.

Generally speaking, I think caring what a subcommunity does to keep their format from breaking at the seams is really no ones concern, especially since they not only know their format better than us, they probably know the -game- better. It's not like it effects how people play on pubs so whatever.

I'm not sure if we've argued about this before, but this is why I advocated regular patching and re-releases of games. If there is something in the game that makes the game worse, less balanced, whatever, it's the game designer's duty to fix it. I'm saying, as a game designer, that I expect nothing less than a superhuman level of attention to fixing problems in a game. I've always staunchly and aggressively taken the stance that if something is in the game, it's the player's duty to abuse it as much and as hard as possible, so the game designer can see it's fucked up and fix it. And if the players are better at seeing problems in the game than the designers, then the designers should give them a goddamn job.

Needless to say, this means I can't play a lot of games.

Oh yeah sure, I don't think this is a bad mentality at ALL, but it gets a bit complex. For example, is Natasha overpowered? Overall, no. But in a 6 vs 6 high skill game, it causes a major headahce with the game pace. In this context it is too good. So what do you do? Nerf it and make it bad for pubs (99.9% of all players), or do you let it go because the competitive community can get over it's exclusion, while the public community can't. Every genre seems a little bit flakier on what the developer can let slide. Generally team based games with loadouts tends to have some competitive restrictions because designing a game to be fun with a bunch of random people with various skills while making it work perfectly competitively is HARD.

Quake or RTSs on the other hand only restrict the game by giving a choice of maps for a season. Fighting games can't let anything slip, but many games on the other hand have a subset of characters that you really cannot play at a competitive level without seriously handicapping your self. Perhaps you could fix this with lots of patches, but then you risk patching out nuance. People like to whine instead of find solutions.

It's all a complex slippery slope. :(

[Bongo Bill]

I don't know much about the professional TF2 community, but they seem to be pretty good-natured about what they do. On the other hand, I don't understand half of what I hear through the grapevine about competitive Pokemon.

I think there's just a few motives underlying it. First of all, people get too comfortable with the banhammer. When that's the only tool you have, everything starts to look like a blatantly overpowered nail. Second, when the game itself (or the community's understanding of it) is constantly evolving, it's easy to discover that something new is overpowered, but would not be overpowered if the previously-existing limitations were amended. When this happens, a decision must be made: make new rules to curtail the power of the new thing, or reduce the existing ones to counter it. Doing the former too much will take you farther and farther into the Twilight Zone.

This is far less often an issue with games designed to be competitive, since if you haven't made any voluntary balance adjustments to make it work better in a competitive context, then obviously there's nothing against which updates can clash.

[Detonator]

I like the way competitive HoN is structured, using the Banning Pick mode, which lets each team "ban" 3 heroes from a given match.  Because of this, the whining about OP heroes is mostly restrained to the pub community and not the competitive one.

[Frocto]

LoL does the same thing.

Nerf it and make it bad for pubs (99.9% of all players), or do you let it go because the competitive community can get over it's exclusion, while the public community can't.

I think that pro games are so incomprehensible to most casuals that this isn't too much of an issue. V-ism 100% combos are a good example of this, since I played SFA3 for like six months and never knew they existed.

At least for fighting games, I don't see anything wrong with solely tailoring to the hardcore, because while it might end up incomprehensible, as long as a casual can still do a shoryuken, they won't care.

[teg]

What makes competitive Pokémon especially stupid is that you're still going to get beaten by the same monsters using the same moves with the same natures every single time.