Games That Close The Skill Gap Artificially?

[Male Nerdity]

So I was having a discussion today with a friend about how games now in a lot of cases close the skill gap for new / bad players.

The first one to come to mind was Call of Duty when they added "Death Streaks". Another is the limited time game modes in League of Legends that give boosts to teams falling far behind.

I personally feel stuff like that is a detriment to gaming because it doesn't teach people to get better. It teaches them that the game will make up for what they can't or won't learn to do.

What are some other examples? Is this an annoyance to you?

 

[zacharinolongpants]

The obvious choices are things like the distribution of items in Mario Kart depending on how far behind you are and some of the Mario Party games just randomly giving you stars for absolutely no reason lol. But those games are kinda meant to just be chaotic and casually picked up.

I don't play too many competitive multiplayer games, but rubberbanding AI in general for racing games is a thing I find annoying lol.

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

I think it all started with the Game Genie, or when Sierra games had the phone number to order the cluebook on the very first page of the manual.

Or maybe it was the coin chute dipswitch setting that would allow the arcade owner's son to have infinite continues.

 

[goregoregoregoregoregore]

In competitive games i've seen many people claiming that this kind of stuff is good but in my opinion it only is good for the casual people that will lose interest in the game over a short period of time. If once someone starts losing they instantly get OP then the person that was winning before and made more effort to be better will feel like being treated unfairly.
If everyone will be a winner then the effort of getting better and improving will be meaningless, and while this is ok for more casual fun games like Mario Kart, in games that are supposed to be competitive this feels more like putting artificial weights in the legs of the people that grinded to get good.
A better alternative for this i guess is just having more ways to match people with their skill levels and make the game more easy to learn with better tutorials and intuitive mechanics.

I play a ton of Quake and when people complain about the difficulty of playing multiplayer i think the worst problems is how there is almost zero effort to explain and teach things to make someone win or to simply have a place to learn and match with players of the same skill(Quake Champions kinda have something like this with the practice mode but there could be lots of improvements on actually having a good tutorial or learning section). And this a problem for almost every high skill ceiling competitive game

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

Online pub games is a training ground for everyone tho. Having veterans punching down on noobs isnt true competition. It's even kind of pathetic in my opinion.

Obviously, it should be time for you guys to invest in a game with private servers, a real competitive community and do some good old scrimmage. Because the devs wont cater to the 1%. They never did and never will. Their model is based on casino, they want their games accessible to all and get the most whales possible. If you're too good and win too much you're bad for business.

 

[RanmyakuIchi's icon RanmyakuIchi RanmyakuIchi]

Comeback mechanics in Fighting Games come to mind for me, such as SF4's revenge meter or UMvC3's X-Factor, both of which reward losing health or characters. Granted, both players get access to them.

 

[MasterEn]

The obvious choices are things like the distribution of items in Mario Kart depending on how far behind you are and some of the Mario Party games just randomly giving you stars for absolutely no reason lol. But those games are kinda meant to just be chaotic and casually picked up.

I don't play too many competitive multiplayer games, but rubberbanding AI in general for racing games is a thing I find annoying lol.

mario kart and mario party try to strike a balance between skill and luck. skilled players can usually win pretty consistently in both games. and since these are meant to be multiplayer games, that can be a extreme detriment to people who want to play together. one person might play too much and get vastly over-skilled in comparison to their friends or online players. which would cause the other player to not want to play, since they don't see the point since they can't beat the better player.
having items that can help you climb the rankings in the game helps balance that out. but if the items were given out in true random fashion, you could and would get unfair or weird cases; such as whoever is in first getting a blue shell. an item designed to go after whoever is in first. you use it and it hurts you. kind of defeats the purpose of it. you either keep it for the rest of the race, or drop back to second, use it and hope that you can regain your first place position.
on the other hand, a player in last place may only get bananas or a single green shell. somewhat helpful, but not enough to consistently climb higher and higher towards first place unless the track is very simple in design layout for shells or has lots of turns in the track, perfect for banana ambushes.
having the items drop depending on position helps prevent that from happening. and considering how i've seen games go with rng being a major factor, i am fully supportive of there being some rules for it.
fuck rubberbanding. the ai should be programed to play alright or okay on lower difficulties and be fairly decent to great on the hard ones. it helps the player get better and feel more accomplished upon winning the race if they have to actually try to win without needing to be super lucky.
as for mario party, i could go over some of the pros and cons of the randomness of bonus starts and hidden blocks, but a better idea is for me to recommend the party crashers. a group of youtubers who have extensively played many of the mario party games. [to the point that they can get the outcomes that they want in chance time] king of skill, tcnick3, vernias and sophist and their shared channel, party crashers have a ton of mario party content and some very bizarre and crazy gimmicks for some of them as well as some regular standard sessions of playing the game.

 

[fake-kun]

It makes The Gamers™ angry, so it's cool and based.

 

[zacharinolongpants]

mario kart and mario party try to strike a balance between skill and luck. skilled players can usually win pretty consistently in both games. and since these are meant to be multiplayer games, that can be a extreme detriment to people who want to play together. one person might play too much and get vastly over-skilled in comparison to their friends or online players. which would cause the other player to not want to play, since they don't see the point since they can't beat the better player.
having items that can help you climb the rankings in the game helps balance that out. but if the items were given out in true random fashion, you could and would get unfair or weird cases; such as whoever is in first getting a blue shell. an item designed to go after whoever is in first. you use it and it hurts you. kind of defeats the purpose of it. you either keep it for the rest of the race, or drop back to second, use it and hope that you can regain your first place position.
on the other hand, a player in last place may only get bananas or a single green shell. somewhat helpful, but not enough to consistently climb higher and higher towards first place unless the track is very simple in design layout for shells or has lots of turns in the track, perfect for banana ambushes.
having the items drop depending on position helps prevent that from happening. and considering how i've seen games go with rng being a major factor, i am fully supportive of there being some rules for it.
fuck rubberbanding. the ai should be programed to play alright or okay on lower difficulties and be fairly decent to great on the hard ones. it helps the player get better and feel more accomplished upon winning the race if they have to actually try to win without needing to be super lucky.
as for mario party, i could go over some of the pros and cons of the randomness of bonus starts and hidden blocks, but a better idea is for me to recommend the party crashers. a group of youtubers who have extensively played many of the mario party games. [to the point that they can get the outcomes that they want in chance time] king of skill, tcnick3, vernias and sophist and their shared channel, party crashers have a ton of mario party content and some very bizarre and crazy gimmicks for some of them as well as some regular standard sessions of playing the game.

Yeah you're right skill is still definitely a major factor winning and usually keeps you ahead in both of those games.

That channel sounds super interesting! I'm gonna check that out.

 

[goregoregoregoregoregore]

Online pub games is a training ground for everyone tho. Having veterans punching down on noobs isnt true competition. It's even kind of pathetic in my opinion.

Obviously, it should be time for you guys to invest in a game with private servers, a real competitive community and do some good old scrimmage. Because the devs wont cater to the 1%. They never did and never will. Their model is based on casino, they want their games accessible to all and get the most whales possible. If you're too good and win too much you're bad for business.

But what if the skill between players differentiate so much that there won't be such things as "the 1% being the veterans that punch noobs"? It's very common to see in games with very steep learning curves that players with slightly more experience will annihilate the ones with less experience. In games like these it would be impossible to isolate the "pros" vs "casuals".
Using Quake as example again, it's simply part of the reality that you will still lose a lot even if you put a good amount of hours on it, but even these people that are losing frequently will still seem totally godlike for someone just getting into the game for their first 50 hours. The game in itself is hard, it's not just the players being too good, so the only solution to reduce this gap in skill i can see here is making it more accessible to learn the game and practice.
Also when people in these steep learning curve games are really godlike and dominating they are almost always sufficiently invested in the game to be part of training groups and be seriously competitive. You almost won't be matched with them because they are more concerned with more efficient ways to improve than stomping noobs in pubs

 

[MasterEn]

Yeah you're right skill is still definitely a major factor winning and usually keeps you ahead in both of those games.

That channel sounds super interesting! I'm gonna check that out.

yeah. the rng dose add a bit of chaos and thrill in some cases; which helps keeps the excitement levels high.
the party crashers have also played mario kart, smash ultimate and plenty of other games like liar's bar, repo, uno, a tamagaich game i think it was that played like an unfair mario party game; the entirety of dokapon kingdom and a lot more.

 

[gwardojones]

I wish there was a better way to detect when skilled players enter casual lobbies. There are games I want to sweat over and there are games I just want to chill and play some matches in. Problem is people who've played far, FAR more than me end up in places that are supposedly meant for players who just want to chill and not take things too seriously. When those people show up, the fun and chill immediately evaporate.

 

[Octopus]

I'm against it, but just because a well designed game doesn't need some arbitrary mechanic or tool or gimmick or whatever to let new players compete with higher skill players. Also I agree on them usually not really teaching the player anything to improve. It's definitely something that's become more common, though, particularly in more competitive genres likes fighting games. There was the really dumb reversal edge thing in Soul Calibur 6; it was a legit 'get out of jail free' card that then forced both players into rock-paper-scissors, which was quite dumb. Even Street Fighter 6, as much as I like it, is kinda toe-ing the line a bit with its over reliance on general system mechanics; the game is designed to rely on them so much that you can get pretty far just using drive impacts and knowing how to do basic drive cancel chains. It's less about knowing specific character stuff and combos, and more about just using drive cancels which everyone can do.

 

[MasterEn]

I'm against it, but just because a well designed game doesn't need some arbitrary mechanic or tool or gimmick or whatever to let new players compete with higher skill players. Also I agree on them usually not really teaching the player anything to improve. It's definitely something that's become more common, though, particularly in more competitive genres likes fighting games. There was the really dumb reversal edge thing in Soul Calibur 6; it was a legit 'get out of jail free' card that then forced both players into rock-paper-scissors, which was quite dumb. Even Street Fighter 6, as much as I like it, is kinda toe-ing the line a bit with its over reliance on general system mechanics; the game is designed to rely on them so much that you can get pretty far just using drive impacts and knowing how to do basic drive cancel chains. It's less about knowing specific character stuff and combos, and more about just using drive cancels which everyone can do.

didn't one of the dbz budokai games have a rock-paper-scissors mechanic? i think it was on the xbox 360.
it seems like, going by comments that i've seen about fighting games and the competitive players who play them, that they might be the weakest players ever. i've heard of several somewhat recent games have this 'get out of jail free' card as you perfectly labeled it; and only the competitive players seem to like it. it seems perfectly fine for single player modes on the hard difficulty when the computer can cheat with no regard on limits; but it should have some limits for multiplayer.
the older fighting games that i've played expected you to play the tutorial a lot and play the hard modes and missions to get good at the game. made it feel very good to defeat night-terror in soulcalibur 3.

 

[Octopus]

didn't one of the dbz budokai games have a rock-paper-scissors mechanic? i think it was on the xbox 360.

Could be, I've never played a whole lot of the DBZ games outside of the very first one but that kind of mechanic was pretty popular in that era of anime fighters.
I'm not sure about other games, but with SC6 at least you never really saw any reversal edges in high level play meaning it was a pretty bad mechanic. It was dominating on the lower skill end, then was entirely pointless past that; pretty bad design to me.

 

[MasterEn]

Could be, I've never played a whole lot of the DBZ games outside of the very first one but that kind of mechanic was pretty popular in that era of anime fighters.
I'm not sure about other games, but with SC6 at least you never really saw any reversal edges in high level play meaning it was a pretty bad mechanic. It was dominating on the lower skill end, then was entirely pointless past that; pretty bad design to me.

i played budokai 1, 2, five minutes of 3, 6 minutes of one of the later games with over a hundred characters in it, fighterz and the card game one for the switch. budokai 1, 2 and the card one are my favorites.
yeah, if the high level players aren't using it, than it was probably a massive waste of time to work on and include. kind of like the tripping mechanic in brawl. designed to make players calm down, only to be permanently removed for the rest of the series.

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

But what if the skill between players differentiate so much that there won't be such things as "the 1% being the veterans that punch noobs"? It's very common to see in games with very steep learning curves that players with slightly more experience will annihilate the ones with less experience. In games like these it would be impossible to isolate the "pros" vs "casuals".
Using Quake as example again, it's simply part of the reality that you will still lose a lot even if you put a good amount of hours on it, but even these people that are losing frequently will still seem totally godlike for someone just getting into the game for their first 50 hours. The game in itself is hard, it's not just the players being too good, so the only solution to reduce this gap in skill i can see here is making it more accessible to learn the game and practice.
Also when people in these steep learning curve games are really godlike and dominating they are almost always sufficiently invested in the game to be part of training groups and be seriously competitive. You almost won't be matched with them because they are more concerned with more efficient ways to improve than stomping noobs in pubs

Quake Champions and the other arena shooters are completely dead. It never mattered anyway, team deathmatch was always the more popular mode and MMR ranking never worked.

For matchmaker to work you need to get a lot more players than those games ever had, and even then, veterans would still create smurf accounts to still access the low rank pubs. It's a parody of competition.

Games aren't created to be competitive, it's always a happy accident and constant iterations around balance. The game must always be popular to begin with. And the competition must always be fed by fresh blood. Niche online games cant be competitive in the pubs.

 

[LaserMoose]

As I can really only speak for fighting games, I will say that mechanics like X-Factor, revenge, rage, V Trigger, and sparking all reward players for losing, which I disagree with.

Comebacks in games like Super Turbo, 3rd Strike, and Marvel 2 are more of a rarity as they lack such a mechanic, which I personally find to be more enjoyable as both a player and a spectator.

 

[goregoregoregoregoregore]

Quake Champions and the other arena shooters are completely dead. It never mattered anyway, team deathmatch was always the more popular mode and MMR ranking never worked.

For matchmaker to work you need to get a lot more players than those games ever had, and even then, veterans would still create smurf accounts to still access the low rank pubs. It's a parody of competition.

Games aren't created to be competitive, it's always a happy accident and constant iterations around balance. The game must always be popular to begin with. And the competition must always be fed by fresh blood. Niche online games cant be competitive in the pubs.

But proper functional matchmaking is not the only solution to the skill gap problem, i still stay on the same hill that proper places to learn and practice are what makes a difficult or competitive game more enjoyable for all skill levels and that's the problem with Quake or any arenaFPS nowadays.
You make it seem like popularity and success of an online game dictate how enjoyable it will be or how accessible it will be for beginners. You literally have tons of way smaller communities of many games and genres that are not only way more accessible for beginners but almost completely focused on the competitive side, because competitiveness can be the entire point of the fun of the game, and what made these games accessible was always how easy was to learn it and find ways to help you improve rather than artificially making you win. Don't confuse competitive scenes with Esports

Also no one plays pubs in Quake as in only wanting to be competitive, if they really want to be competitive they will play duel or 2v2, people just accept that it's part of the game for it to be difficult and that if you are less experienced than the other players you will get stomped, i get stomped all the time in many matches and i have over 1000 hours, i just think it's unfair how beginners have to get out of their way just to learn movement, there isn't a single strafejump/bhop practice map built into the game, feels too archaic, and this problem is similar to many other games like these, even if different genres.

Also Quake has low playerbase but we will never be dead, smaller tournaments in all countries happen all the time and people play every single day online, updates are still being made and the game is very fun.

Feel free to hit the arena any day if you want to have some fun online and see it for yourself, people is almost never rude and plenty of people like to guide new players, you can add me on QC as "goregoregore" too although our pings will probably be too high but even then i can be fun to just mess around in a 1v1

 

[Yousef Yousef]

So I was having a discussion today with a friend about how games now in a lot of cases close the skill gap for new / bad players.

The first one to come to mind was Call of Duty when they added "Death Streaks". Another is the limited time game modes in League of Legends that give boosts to teams falling far behind.

I personally feel stuff like that is a detriment to gaming because it doesn't teach people to get better. It teaches them that the game will make up for what they can't or won't learn to do.

What are some other examples? Is this an annoyance to you?

Good CoD example. I also wanna add SFV. The game not only heavily lowered execution, but it had a bit of “randomness” to it. Sometimes it felt like people won due to errors in coding. The infamous “Dan-infinite” comes to mind lol.

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

But proper functional matchmaking is not the only solution to the skill gap problem, i still stay on the same hill that proper places to learn and practice are what makes a difficult or competitive game more enjoyable for all skill levels and that's the problem with Quake or any arenaFPS nowadays.
You make it seem like popularity and success of an online game dictate how enjoyable it will be or how accessible it will be for beginners. You literally have tons of way smaller communities of many games and genres that are not only way more accessible for beginners but almost completely focused on the competitive side, because competitiveness can be the entire point of the fun of the game, and what made these games accessible was always how easy was to learn it and find ways to help you improve rather than artificially making you win. Don't confuse competitive scenes with Esports

Also no one plays pubs in Quake as in only wanting to be competitive, if they really want to be competitive they will play duel or 2v2, people just accept that it's part of the game for it to be difficult and that if you are less experienced than the other players you will get stomped, i get stomped all the time in many matches and i have over 1000 hours, i just think it's unfair how beginners have to get out of their way just to learn movement, there isn't a single strafejump/bhop practice map built into the game, feels too archaic, and this problem is similar to many other games like these, even if different genres.

Also Quake has low playerbase but we will never be dead, smaller tournaments in all countries happen all the time and people play every single day online, updates are still being made and the game is very fun.

Feel free to hit the arena any day if you want to have some fun online and see it for yourself, people is almost never rude and plenty of people like to guide new players, you can add me on QC as "goregoregore" too although our pings will probably be too high but even then i can be fun to just mess around in a 1v1

Oh boy you write a lot don't you... I don't even think we're disagreeing to begin with. Sure people need a proper place to learn and practice. That's what public servers are for.

Quake Champions I would say don't even qualify as a competitive arena shooter. They've bastardized the concept with cheat skills, so good players could have a shot against plain cheaters. It's more of a hero shooter.

I like some competition, but trying hard in public servers of broken games with barely a few hundred active players isn't it. Been there, done that. Also I'd rather avoid polluting my offline Windows install with kernel access malware like EAC or whatever stuff Bethesda is using nowadays to protect their microtransactions.

 

[Octopus]

I also wanna add SFV.

Oh SFV, that poor cursed game. Yeah I would say it qualifies here, and was also terrible. V-Triggers were so dumb but also were an attempt to streamline a lot of character stuff, the execution was lowered pretty significantly like you said, crush counters were way too spammable but easy 'I win' buttons, I could go on.

 

[goregoregoregoregoregore]

Oh boy you write a lot don't you... I don't even think we're disagreeing to begin with. Sure people need a proper place to learn and practice. That's what public servers are for.

Quake Champions I would say don't even qualify as a competitive arena shooter. They've bastardized the concept with cheat skills, so good players could have a shot against plain cheaters. It's more of a hero shooter.

I like some competition, but trying hard in public servers of broken games with barely a few hundred active players isn't it. Been there, done that. Also I'd rather avoid polluting my offline Windows install with kernel access malware like EAC or whatever stuff Bethesda is using nowadays to protect their microtransactions.

Well it's in my "about" section in my profile how i can be too invested while shilling talking about stuff that i like lmao so i'm probably acting on brand. I'm a compulsive yapper.

I saw many people using this argument for Quake Champions but the skills are far from being overpowered. There is an actual meta but they are more related to what champion is better in certain stages. Quake Champions can't really be compared to any hero shooter, it's much more complex than people think and even people that criticize it are only based in the admittedly horrible first few seasons of the game that were the real reason of what killed all the potential it had. Quake Champions has way more people assuming things about how it plays than actually playing it, it's the curse of the game. I can't begin to explain how the game has achieved a much much better balancing in general without making a even bigger wall of text than what i am already doing all this time so let's just keep at that lmao.