gaming Casual And Competitive Segregation

[stripper 252]

A lot of games these days have casual and competitive modes to appeal to both sides of gamers, often with changes in rules to fit each side better. But from a social standpoint, it's not a perfectly good idea. It segregates players into 2 groups, sometimes leading to disdain for the opposite side. The most notable example of this is the Smash Bros community. The games have novels of rule sets used in competitive play. The more changes a game has from 1 side to the other, the stronger the divide. It simply makes the transition more difficult and discouraging, creating more in group vs out group bias. No community has a more infamous divide than this series. There's even a famous joke about casuals hating 'tourneyfags'. "No items, Fox only, Final Destination" 

When games have more similar rules between the 2 sides, there's simply less divide. Traditional fighting games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat use the game's default rules for competitive play, leading to much less hate. Both sides can understand why they like how they play more easily. Several other games fit my suggested correlation too, including COD (significant rule changes, lots of hate) and Counter-Strike (small rule changes, less hate) 

Communities would be much more cohesive if there was only 1 set of rules for competitive and casual play. Competitive players have high demands for how fun a game is for them. They need to be fun for them to dump excessive hours into the game for them to enjoy getting good. Otherwise, they'll just quit. Imagine if Smash Bros didn't have the ability to disable items. Competitive play would have been an even bigger joke that it was during its 1st 11 years. It wouldn't attract nor retain anyone 

This would also hurt the casual side because less potential new players would hear about the game. Esports is growing in popularity at an alarming rate. It's great marketing to help bring in new players. More people will simply learn about it and some will be curious enough to try it. The more who express interest in the game publicly, the more new players will conform to try it too. Twitch's and Youtube's stream/video recommendation systems are powerful marketing tools 

Making a game fit for casual play while still appealing to the competitive side would be really easy. All it takes is making the game simple to learn. It's more daunting to try and get into a game with more mechanics. Just look at fighting games that aren't Smash Bros. Even Street Fighter is difficult and it's the most basic of traditional FGs. Counter-Strike is famous for being 1 of the biggest esports and it's surprisingly simple to learn. It's an FPS, which is a genre everyone's familiar with. The most important things in these games are aiming, moving, and shooting. The only things beyond them for this game are buying weapons, controlling recoil, planting bombs, and defusing them, basically. Meanwhile COD has a plethora of class customization and mechanics in comparison. In the former, players can just jump into a game and see what happens, whereas in COD, players have to choose their classes, customize them later, and then see what happens with limited access to the tools they could use. The game requires them to play the game for hours to simply unlock access to every mechanic. Worse players will unlock them slowing because they won't progress as fast 

CSGO doesn't perfectly use the same rules for both competitive and casual mode. Competitive isn't even played using hostage nor death match modes. Then there are little changes like autobought armor and defuse kits, 50% kill rewards, no friendly fire, no player collisions, and up to 10 players per team. These things are great for players who want to jump in and out of without worry of stress. Casual modes don't even have strong quit penalties. Reversing these changes would make the game deeper and more exciting for competitive players. It's really a matter of subjectivity towards rules. Making game mechanics and rules that appeal to both sides with minimal changes between them is really easy

[Kyoshi Frost Wolf 40,285]

This is why I think the competitive mode in Overwatch is completely pointless. Human beings are a competetive species by nature, so people will be that way regardless, but activiely having a competetive mode fuels this notion and can lead to elitism as well as splitting the player base down the middle and that sucks. I am not against someene play competitively, unless that same notion is getting in the way of what gaming is suppose to be: Fun. Competitive or not, gaming is supposed to be fun and with an immense focus on competiton, it can hurt that.

[KatonRyu 1,026]

I actually prefer the separation between competitive and casual to games where that separation doesn't exist. Looking from an online standpoint, if the game has just one multiplayer mode, the tryharders and casuals will get lumped into one game. The tryharders will rage at the casuals because they're not using optimal strategies, while the casuals will rage at the tryharders for being, well, tryharders.

 

If the rules are vastly different between modes, well, so what? If a game has a ranked system you begin in a low tier anyway, so you'll have more than enough time to get used to the different rules. In the case of SSB, it's quite easy to practice using tournament rules so it's not like you're thrown into the deep end immediately.

 

A game with complex mechanics isn't always bad either because it can be a lot of fun trying to figure out what the strengths and weaknesses of different classes are. Again, there's probably a distinction between ranked and unranked so it should be possible to learn the mechanics long before they actually become relevant.

 

Splitting up people who want to play casually or those who really want to play well is a way to make both groups have more fun. If the two groups don't get along then that's just an unfortunate side effect but IMO still better than not having the distinction.

[Heavenly Inexplicit 309]

Getting mad at other players for playing differently, or not being as good is well... it's ridiculous.

It's a game, a game meant to be played for fun, not for personal gain.

I don't know why. It seems silly, but that's just my personal opinion.

 

I don't see any problems in splitting them up, just to appease the competitive types since

they're into that kind of thing. The casual players will get to play with other casual

players. Both sides get what they want, right?

Edited October 3, 2016 by Heavenly Sun

[gamecubeguy214 2,511]

I am a competitive Smash player myself and I respect casual players for going through all the hate they get for just playing the game. I even turn items on myself when I play Smash 3DS at school. It's a lot of fun. I don't like this conflict between casual and competitive and I can't stop it. Just play the game.

Edited October 3, 2016 by gamecubeguy214

[Once In A Blue Moon 894]

Making a game fit for casual play while still appealing to the competitive side would be really easy. All it takes is making the game simple to learn.

 

Making game mechanics and rules that appeal to both sides with minimal changes between them is really easy

  

No, it really isn't easy - being 'simple to learn' alone is more than many games manage, despite being something that every game should aspire to (the sheer number of games available means that if a game isn't engaging from the start then its sales will suffer for it.) Achieving this whilst also including a lot of mechanical depth - well, one need only look at the Paradox grand strategy games to see just how tricky that is. Making advanced play beneficial but also optional is the key, so far as I understand it - Extra Credits gives a good example in one of their videos for an RPG.

 

In competitive multiplayer games, that become even more challenging as the designer doesn't have as much control over the challenge - if one player is making full use of all of the finesse and advanced play of the game, then the opponent has to do so as well or, all else being equal, they are going to lose - probably quite badly, and possibly without even knowing why. To give an example, in most RTS games (such as Starcraft) the better player will steamroller their opponent through having a better economy and having more units - that isn't going to be apparent to their opponent when an army bulldozes through their defences with  far greater number of units. The same goes for DOTA and the like - better play results in an advantage, which then snowballs into a game-winning advantage. That's what competitive play is all about, after all - gaining advantage and then winning with it, but as a result those who don't push for advantage at every opportunity are punished for it (thus rendering it non-optional.)

 

So whilst I agree that it would be ideal if a game (all games, for that matter) could be simple to learn whilst also having enough depth to satisfy the more competitive players, this is not easy to achieve.

 

 

If the rules are vastly different between modes, well, so what?

 

The question I have about that is why should the rules be different? If the objective to competitive play is to play in the optimal manner then changing the rules either:

 

1. Changes the optimal play in a significant way, which means that the optimal play that players have been taught by the game, and are striving towards, is no longer optimal. 

 

2. Doesn't change the optimal play, which begs the question of why it was done.

 

1. is bad and 2. seems pointless.

 

Random chance is often cited, but that isn't actually a reason to change gameplay just for the more competitive players - if it has an actual detrimental effect on the game, then that should be adjusted for all players rather than just the competitive players*. There is a really good Extra Credits episode on this, which covers randomness in epsorts, which gives a good example of adjusting how tournaments are run rather than the gameplay itself deals with the randomness without removing it.

Edited October 3, 2016 by Once In A Blue Moon