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[Goddard]

*HEAR ME OUT BEFORE POSTING PLEASE*

I'm not talking about community, I'm talking about the whole game, at it's highest level. This can include things like:

• How solid the mechanics of the game are, e.g. balance, exploitable mechanics, glitches, etc.
  
• How good the developers are for maintaining, debugging, and updating the game.
  
• How big the scene is, e.g. size of tournaments, prize pool in tournaments, frequency and amount of tournaments, viewer counts of tournaments, etc.
  
• How stagnant the metagame is. A lot of games that aren't maintained well stagnate hardcore where a few strategies are so good that you almost have to use them to win.
  
• Possibly some other factors that didn't cross my mind.

IMHO, from what I've seen, Team Fortress 2 has easily one of the worst competitive scenes I have ever seen in a video game. I love the game in general, it is flashy, fun, well balanced, and most importantly has a ton of variety in mechanics, the amount of choices for loadouts is amazing. However, in the competitive scene, the kill everything that resembles fun. The mode that is taken the most seriously is 6v6, where almost all weapons in the game are blacklisted so that only the most basic default loadouts can be used, they generally play the same few maps over and over again, they generally always use the same team composition, which is something like medic, demoman, 2 scouts, a soldier, and something else like a heavy, and if you actually watch the games, they always play out almost exactly the same way, with little to no variance between matches.

The game is updated all the time, but because the default loadouts of tf2 never change, and by extension the metagame of competitive tf2 never changes, it is extremely stagnant and extremely boring. Also there are very few tournaments and when there are they generally don't have many viewers.

By contrast, you can take pretty much any currently thriving competitive game, like LoL, Dota 2, or CS:GO, and things are updated frequently (at least relatively speaking,) there are lots of big tournaments, lots of money being passed around, a very, very high level of competition, tons of variety, and in general everything is just so much better.

honorable mentions to Starcraft II, Third Strike, and UMVC3 for some bad stagnation.

What do you guys think?

 

[ViewtifulJC]

Skull girls cuz its scene doesn't exist

 

[Silky]

Honestly, and I might have disagreers, but I feel that P4A might be that game. Mecahnics are solid but id say it doesnt get as much support from Arc as BB/GG

 

[RoboPlato]

Competitive Smash. I had a friend who insisted we play by tourney rules. If I ever play a no items match on final destination again, I'll scream.

 

[Holy Order Sol]

Does that mean you're looking for a buggy and/or degenerate game abandoned by its developers, that hardly anyone plays anymore?

That's probably a thing but it'd be weird to call that having the "worst competitive scene".

 

[oneida]

I have had my hands in the VF scene for about a year and a half now, and it can be really frustrating to get people to show up to non-VF-centric events. SCR2014 had VF on the main lineup and even though the event itself had an enormous turnout, VF attendance was much lower than it was at SEGA Cup two months later. NYG9 had even better attendance this year than last year, which is uncommon for smaller scenes like VF, but I'm trying to round up people from VFDC to attend this Buffalo tournament later this month and it's been really hard. Not showing up to any events is bad, but only showing up to events specific to your game is a great way to limit exposure to high level VF.

That said, the game is balanced extremely well: there's a "tier list" out there but really every character is very strong. The skill ceiling practically doesn't exist, while the entry level stuff is really easy. There's fertile ground for new players... except for the fucking attendance problem.

 

[bearythebear]

Hearthstone is interesting. It's fun to watch competitive play, but at the end of the day there is a low skill ceiling. The top 100 players probably have the same level of skill, and winning tournaments largely comes down to deck building and luck. On top of that, pretty much only the big streamers play in tournaments, so they don't necessarily always have the best players in tournaments.

 

[Shun]

Metagame-wise, Tekken Tag Tournament 2 is nowhere near close to stagnating.

The fact that less and less people are playing it and not giving it a chance means that that there is stagnation and deflation of the community as evident in the shrinking and cancellation of tournaments.

Tekken Tag Tournament 2 could definitely span a much longer life, but it's been weeded out prematurely. At least in America.

 

[kirblar]

Skull girls cuz its scene doesn't exist

Still gets more patches than Marvel.

 

[Rivitur]

Skull girls cuz its scene doesn't exist

Well now that's a lie.

 

[morpix]

Have you seen competitive Call of Duty? Trashtalk and just being dicks in real life. Yeah...

*Edit* Didn't read OP, focus was on the game not the community. Ignore.

 

[N30RYU]

I must say Naruto Storm 2, 3 and revolution (the ones with online) are amazingly unbalanced and broken for some characters... And I can't recall any balancing patch.

 

[Pappasman]

Competitive Smash. I had a friend who insisted we play by tourney rules. If I ever play a no items match on final destination again, I'll scream.

Just because you didn't like it doesn't mean its bad. The smash scene is usually really nice and open to newcomers. Melee is a pretty well balanced game and is constantly evolving. I'd say its one of the better, albeit smaller and with no developer support, scenes out there.

 

[Goddard]

Metagame-wise, Tekken Tag Tournament 2 is nowhere near close to stagnating.

The fact that less and less people are playing it and not giving it a chance means that that there is stagnation and deflation of the community as evident in the shrinking and cancellation of tournaments.

Tekken Tag Tournament 2 could definitely span a much longer life, but it's been weeded out prematurely. At least in America.

I find this depressing. Despite not actively playing fighting games anymore, I still love the FGC with all my heart, especially Tekken, and it's sad to see it die. Not only does it have the highest skill cap of any of the popular fighting games, it is also more entertaining to watch IMO (except marvel, marvel is always the most entertaining.)

That's just the sad nature of games with a very high barrier to entry though.

Just because you didn't like it doesn't mean its bad. The smash scene is usually really nice and open to newcomers. Melee is a pretty well balanced game and is constantly evolving. I'd say its one of the better, albeit smaller and with no developer support, scenes out there.

This. The fact that more than 12 years after the game was released, the tournaments are still hype as fuck and the player base is growing even now, speaks volumes about the scene for that game. I think it has a phenomenal scene. Melee that is.

 

[GrantDaNasty]

This is going slightly OT here OP, but MAN I miss vanilla TF2. Played well over 300 hours of it with friends, and while I welcomed the class updates, in its current form that game does not resemble the one I once loved. I know most prefer it but I'd love a convenient way of playing Vanilla-ass TF2.

 

[Wynnebeck]

Just because you didn't like it doesn't mean its bad. The smash scene is usually really nice and open to newcomers. Melee is a pretty well balanced game and is constantly evolving. I'd say its one of the better, albeit smaller and with no developer support, scenes out there.

I would disagree. I was hardcore into the competitive Smash scene and it's filled with some of the most elitist acting people I've ever met. The metagame for Melee is pretty much set with the random person bringing in a rogue character and doing well. It does tell the viability of a game when people have to create a modded version of the game, just to "fix" perceived slights against the game and characters in it.

 

[Dr. Buni]

Super Smash Bros.

Specially Melee players, those are the worst.

 

[Heroman]

Op, why did you make two thread?

 

[Goddard]

This is going slightly OT here OP, but MAN I miss vanilla TF2. Played well over 300 hours of it with friends, and while I welcomed the class updates, in its current form that game does not resemble the one I once loved. I know most prefer it but I'd love a convenient way of playing Vanilla-ass TF2.

I hated vanilla TF2 actually. I think the game peaked with the engineer update, and was still great before the F2P update, but as soon as it went F2P the quality of the game and the community to a steep nose dive.

Op, why did you make two thread?

oops. this one is the main one.

 

[kinaesthete]

OP, are you implying that there's a correlation between lack of major ruleset changes and metagame stagnation? I can't speak for TF2's scene so it might just not be a well balanced competitive game to begin with, but plenty of games that have undergone little to no changes still have decent sized scenes with an evolving metagame, like Melee. Hell, look at professional sports or poker, they've been going for decades and nobody deeply familiar with them would accuse them of being stagnant. I'm not intimately familiar with MOBAs but they appear from the outside to have rulesets orders of magnitude more complex than the games I mentioned, so it makes sense for them to be frequently rebalanced, not so much with other games.

 

[jeffers]

This is going slightly OT here OP, but MAN I miss vanilla TF2. Played well over 300 hours of it with friends, and while I welcomed the class updates, in its current form that game does not resemble the one I once loved. I know most prefer it but I'd love a convenient way of playing Vanilla-ass TF2.

for me its more can we have the updates up to the demoknight one, and not including that.

 

[RoboPlato]

Just because you didn't like it doesn't mean its bad. The smash scene is usually really nice and open to newcomers. Melee is a pretty well balanced game and is constantly evolving. I'd say its one of the better, albeit smaller and with no developer support, scenes out there.

This isn't about the community, it's about the gameplay and like with the TF2 example in the OP, everything that's fun about the game is forgotten and replaced with exploits and mind numbing rule sets.

 

[Shun]

I find this depressing. Despite not actively playing fighting games anymore, I still love the FGC with all my heart, especially Tekken, and it's sad to see it die. Not only does it have the highest skill cap of any of the popular fighting games, it is also more entertaining to watch IMO (except marvel, marvel is always the most entertaining.)

That's just the sad nature of games with a very high barrier to entry though.

Arguably, Tekken doesn't have as high of an entry barrier as one would think. Linking bounds and getting off some bread and combos are no more difficult than learning how to FADC in Street Fighter 4 or launcher and aerial rave combos in Vs. Capcom games.

I think the biggest turnoff comes from bad publicity and word of mouth as seen in the online Tekken Zaibatsu community where many users have expressed discontent over "not being able to do anything when hit by a juggle". That feeling of helplessness, whether the argument is warranted or not, is partly why TTT2 especially has a bad rep.

Another game that has faced slight stagnation in the Arcade scene is competitive Initial D. Though there are consistent updates from Sega, the scene itself has shrunk and events are not as frequent as they have been in the past. I found less people playing Initial D from my experience over the years compared to a flourishing arcade presence in say Extreme Vs. Full Boost and other games.

Gunslinger Stratos itself, another arcade game, has potential to be a competitive game but neither Square Enix nor those who play it competitively has taken advantage of it.

 

[Teknopathetic]

"Arguably, Tekken doesn't have as high of an entry barrier as one would think. Linking bounds and getting off some bread and combos are no more difficult than learning how to FADC in Street Fighter 4 or launcher and aerial rave combos in Vs. Capcom games."


I strongly disagree, combo execution is only one aspect of barrier to entry. Tekken has a very significant barrier when it comes to movement, learning how to get up, and learning the matchups for all bajillion characters. Tekken has an extremely high entry barrier.

 

[Daouzin]

If Smash Bros Brawl even counts, it's waaaay up there. Mechanics are awful (tripping), a major step down from the previous game, scene basically does not exist (in favor of Melee tournaments), zero developer support, Metagame was basically Metaknight until he was banned, not that it really matters because no one plays it.

Someone posted this is the last thread and I agree completely, but meta knight is typically allowed now, only double meta knight in teams is banned regularly.

 

[El Sloth]

Skull girls cuz its scene doesn't exist

Mechanics are solid, Lab Zero supports the hell out of the game by contributing pot bonuses, regularly updating the game with bug fixes and patches, and even holding a weekly tournament for it in their neck of Cali. And the metagame is still changing partly in thanks to IndieGoGo funded DLC characters popping in every few months. Not to mention custom assists allowing for good variety still.

Its only black mark is the competitive scene is small so tournaments and payouts are small. But it still exists.

 

[Daouzin]

Just because you didn't like it doesn't mean its bad. The smash scene is usually really nice and open to newcomers. Melee is a pretty well balanced game and is constantly evolving. I'd say its one of the better, albeit smaller and with no developer support, scenes out there.

This

This. The fact that more than 12 years after the game was released, the tournaments are still hype as fuck and the player base is growing even now, speaks volumes about the scene for that game. I think it has a phenomenal scene. Melee that is.

And this, melee scene is awesome, some bad apples in the community are elitist, but that's gonna happen in any scene where players have to be very dedicated to break out of the bottom 20% of competitive players.

I would disagree. I was hardcore into the competitive Smash scene and it's filled with some of the most elitist acting people I've ever met. The metagame for Melee is pretty much set with the random person bringing in a rogue character and doing well. It does tell the viability of a game when people have to create a modded version of the game, just to "fix" perceived slights against the game and characters in it.

What are you talking about? You're thinking of brawl, PM is amazing and Melee is amazing.

 

[impact]

TF2 has a competitive scene? lol

TF2 I guess. That game is the shooter made for people who don't like/aren't good at shooters.

"Arguably, Tekken doesn't have as high of an entry barrier as one would think. Linking bounds and getting off some bread and combos are no more difficult than learning how to FADC in Street Fighter 4 or launcher and aerial rave combos in Vs. Capcom games."


I strongly disagree, combo execution is only one aspect of barrier to entry. Tekken has a very significant barrier when it comes to movement, learning how to get up, and learning the matchups for all bajillion characters. Tekken has an extremely high entry barrier.

Wakeup options in Tekken alone make it far more in depth than say, Babby Fighter 4. Learning to block lows = death

 

[Goddard]

TF2 has a competitive scene? lol

TF2 I guess. That game is the shooter made for people who don't like/aren't good at shooters.

Wakeup options in Tekken alone make it far more in depth than say, Babby Fighter 4. Learning to block lows = death

TF2 at its core actually has some really advanced mechanics that could make the game have some serious depth and skill involved, but nobody uses them properly either in pubs or in the competitive scene. If you took out random crits, took out bullet spread, and perhaps removed some silly weapons, it is a very solid game. The problem in competitive is that they take out everything that even remotely resembles fun or entertainment.

Also I have to agree on the Tekken point. Coming from capcom fighters something as simple as blocking in Tekken is very difficult to learn, never mind the 3d space and wakeup options. Whenever I would play against bots I just mashed out 10 hit combos over and over with king and steve because if I were to actually just exchange hits with bots they always block and I always get hit, I have no idea how the blocking works in that game.

 

[jblank83]

MOBA players are the worst.

 

[vocab]

MOBA players are the worst.

Its not the players, its the genre that makes the players that way.

 

[Markitron]

TF2 at its core actually has some really advanced mechanics that could make the game have some serious depth and skill involved, but nobody uses them properly either in pubs or in the competitive scene. If you took out random crits, took out bullet spread, and perhaps removed some silly weapons, it is a very solid game. The problem in competitive is that they take out everything that even remotely resembles fun or entertainment.

Also I have to agree on the Tekken point. Coming from capcom fighters something as simple as blocking in Tekken is very difficult to learn, never mind the 3d space and wakeup options. Whenever I would play against bots I just mashed out 10 hit combos over and over with king and steve because if I were to actually just exchange hits with bots they always block and I always get hit, I have no idea how the blocking works in that game.

Imo Starcraft 2 is awful outside of 1v1. Blizzard don't seem to care about anything other than 1v1 and I don't play that mode because keeping up with the meta game was too stressful. Always had a lot of fun playing group games with friends but stopped about a year ago because it was so imbalanced. There are just so many cheap ways to win and eventually it became impossible to have a good game that lasted longer than 8 mins.

 

[piratethingy]

Definitely definitely Madden, if it counts. There are tournaments but I'm not sure how seriously it's taken amongst the "core" demographic. Regardless, Madden is absolutely unwatchable once you get to a certain skill level, it doesn't resemble football at all and it's extremely repetitive/cheesy.

Although it's possible this has been improved with the most recent addition.

Anytime I watch high level Dota, LoL, ANY shooter, etc I think "Man, that's badass, these guys are on a whole other level."

Never thought that watching Madden.

 

[Goddard]

Its not the players, its the genre that makes the players that way.

It is. If you watch pretty much any soft spoken internet personality try out Dota 2 for a while, the devolve into the cancer they hate very very quickly. It is just the nature of team games.

Imo Starcraft 2 is awful outside of 1v1. Blizzard don't seem to care about anything other than 1v1 and I don't play that mode because keeping up with the meta game was too stressful. Always had a lot of fun playing group games with friends but stopped about a year ago because it was so imbalanced. There are just so many cheap ways to win and eventually it became impossible to have a good game that lasted longer than 8 mins.

No one cares about anything else than 1v1 though, so I'm totally okay with that. It's just that the meta is like one big stagnant rock. Same shit every single fucking game, it either works or it doesn't.

 

[saska]

If your competitive game needs constant updating and more features to stay interesting it probably isn't a very good game to begin with. If tf2 players have played for years with same rules it's a sign of good rules instead of something op is trying to argue.

 

[vocab]

It is just the nature of team games.

.

No, just dota. When I played CS or even raid in wow I never hated the people I played with like I did when I'm playing Dota. I hate them because it makes them down right retarded. I played CS with the same group of people for 7 years, and played dota/hon with them for maybe 2-4 years. Losing streak after losing streak those same people never want to be in the same mumble with each other ever again, even to play other games. Problem with Moba, or dota in general is that theres a lot of stalemating, and kind of waiting around doing nothing. You start thinking a lot. It's like spending too much time by your self, and you start thinking bad things.

 

[Apt101]

I agree with TF2. When you take a higher view of the breadth of what's possible, the team sizes and weaponry, maps and sheer customization of it all, that no unique competitive modes are used and it's always distilled down to the smallest and most common denominator, it's a shame. This is no fault of Valve's but rather the competitive scene itself.

 

[Silvawuff]

WoW PvP has my pick. Except for World PvP (which is spur-of-the-moment fun fun times depending on who you are), organized PvP has been a mess for years and years. Every attempt to balance it or make the battlegrounds more interesting just doesn't seem to work.

I haven't touched it in a while, so it may have improved since then.

 

[Gonzo The Great]

Mario Kart

 

[Omega]

Definitely definitely Madden, if it counts. There are tournaments but I'm not sure how seriously it's taken amongst the "core" demographic. Regardless, Madden is absolutely unwatchable once you get to a certain skill level, it doesn't resemble football at all and it's extremely repetitive/cheesy.

Although it's possible this has been improved with the most recent addition.

Anytime I watch high level Dota, LoL, ANY shooter, etc I think "Man, that's badass, these guys are on a whole other level."

Never thought that watching Madden.

Yep. Madden comes down to who can abuse the broken plays the most.

 

[VICI0US]

league of legends/mobas in general

 

[Toxi]

TF2 at its core actually has some really advanced mechanics that could make the game have some serious depth and skill involved, but nobody uses them properly either in pubs or in the competitive scene. If you took out random crits, took out bullet spread, and perhaps removed some silly weapons, it is a very solid game. The problem in competitive is that they take out everything that even remotely resembles fun or entertainment.

People wouldn't play by those rules if they didn't have fun with them. Your definition of fun isn't the same as everybody else's.

That's something a lot of people need to recognize: The people who play by competitive rules sets generally do so because it's fun for them. Playing with no items on Battlefield might not be fun for the average Super Smash Bros Melee player, but it is fun for the ones who are entering tournaments.

 

[MrCookiepants]

Also I have to agree on the Tekken point. Coming from capcom fighters something as simple as blocking in Tekken is very difficult to learn, never mind the 3d space and wakeup options. Whenever I would play against bots I just mashed out 10 hit combos over and over with king and steve because if I were to actually just exchange hits with bots they always block and I always get hit, I have no idea how the blocking works in that game.

Standing still or holding back blocks highs and mids, gets hit by lows. Ducking blocks lows, evades highs and gets hit by mids. It's one of the few things in Tekken that are straight forward and logical. What's not to understand?

The real problem is the wake up game. I was watching Bronson Tran stream the other day. He would just juggle online players infinitely with Baek because nobody would ever tech roll after they hit the ground. These were players with hundreds of matches under their belts, and they had no idea what to do.

I wonder how of those people quit the game that night, lol.

 

[PedroLumpy]

TF2s 'stagnation' could be argued as the result of its success and staying power. Judging it negatively for that seems harsh. Although I always preferred Highlander.

 

[Casanova]

Well, I love League of Legends but it's entire community is awful, which destroys the competetive scene. The game is taken too seriously, and every game is full of people with a horrible case of toxicity and narcassism. An absolute drag to play online, as of early 2013.

 

[Pappasman]

I would disagree. I was hardcore into the competitive Smash scene and it's filled with some of the most elitist acting people I've ever met.

I'm sorry you had a bad experience, but I've never seen anything like that in person.

The metagame for Melee is pretty much set with the random person bringing in a rogue character and doing well. It does tell the viability of a game when people have to create a modded version of the game, just to "fix" perceived slights against the game and characters in it.

Ya the meta game is pretty set for the most part, but players are constantly innovating their characters and making new discoveries. That's why you see players like Amsa come out and do amazing things. I think a game that has so much depth over 13 years is pretty amazing. Also, why are you bringing up Project M and Brawl? That's not what I was talking about at all. The viability of Melee has nothing to do with either PM or Brawl.

This isn't about the community, it's about the gameplay and like with the TF2 example in the OP, everything that's fun about the game is forgotten and replaced with exploits and mind numbing rule sets.

Exploits? Sure wavedashing isn't intended, but I don't see how using the games mechanics to your advantage is a bad thing (its also really easy to do). If exploits make you angry I don't think you'd like many competitive games.

And 4 stock matches with a time limit is mind numbing? okay...

 

[viewtiful_dru]

so basically this is the thread to complain about players playing their competitive game competitively

because you know random factors make for a game that can be determined by skill huh

 

[Anura]

Super smash bros. brawl is possibly the worst offender. People always seem to complain about Melee's "exploits" but Brawl is even worse and STILL isn't a good competitive game because of them. Brawl had the Ice Climber's grab, laser locks, DACUS and plenty more... It's crazy how people always say "oh, Melee is only good because Glitches" and ignore the unbalanced, glitchy mess that is Brawl!

It's almost like those people have a grudge with Melee/PM players...

 

[jblank83]

Its not the players, its the genre that makes the players that way.

Awful people. Awful games.

 

[Daouzin]

Awful people. Awful games.

I don't care for MOBAs, but I suspect this is unfair.

Super smash bros. brawl is possibly the worst offender. People always seem to complain about Melee's "exploits" but Brawl is even worse and STILL isn't a good competitive game because of them. Brawl had the Ice Climber's grab, laser locks, DACUS and plenty more... It's crazy how people always say "oh, Melee is only good because Glitches" and ignore the unbalanced, glitchy mess that is Brawl!

It's almost like those people have a grudge with Melee/PM players...

I agree, I've met people that hate melee and PM in person and they seem to have had some terrible experience getting destroyed by a competitive player, but still talk a big game about how "good" they would be if there weren't "glitches." I think these people are just super salty and can't respect players that have invested thousands of hours.

I only pre-judge because I've run into 5 or 6 of them and they all say super similar things. Some like Brawl more, but have no negative feelings towards melee or PM, which is totally cool.