It’s a zero-sum team project. Half the people playing will lose, and none of them will feel responsible. Even though they need to work together the entire time, to such a degree that any single person can ruin it for everybody… and one player quitting counts as ruining it for everybody. You’re handcuffed to these people for an hour. If this was all silly fun-times then you’d laugh it off, but of course, no, it’s a competitive sweatbox.
This is a formula for a stranger in Nebraska to blow out your headphones screaming obscenities because you clicked NPCs wrong twenty minutes ago.
Compare other hyper-competitive team games like Counter-Strike. One player can clutch a 1v5. Quitting is heavily discouraged, but is roughly balanced through numeric adjustments. And most importantly, games are quick. A round can happen in under a minute. Whole matches can be as long as a MOBA round, but being broken up into multiple phases - each one a separate win or loss - lets people feel that they did okay. Even if they stood no chance. Nobody invents a racial slur, mid-aneurysm, when they lose an aim-duel in silver.
One of the ex-devs for LoL or DotA said people should get kicked just for picking the wrong guy. If you can commit a bannable offense on the character select screen, maybe the game has intrinsic problems.
And you are more than likely to never play with the same people ever again forever. No community building, only community destruction.
… yeah, why the fuck isn’t matchmaking rooted in which character you want to play as / with / against? You shouldn’t be slapfighting randos for who gets to be the newest gimmick. You should be looking to pair your main guy with your favorite other dude, and running across the same other-dude mains week-to-week.
Even just presenting people with two or three lobbies to choose from, instead of dictating “You will play HERE,” should massively reduce how much people blame others.
Makes sense. I played Dota for some time and honestly that was one of the things I enjoyed about it, unreasonable people being furious with me while being totally helpless to do anything about it other than lose their shit. Although it’s a dirty sort of enjoyment and makes things extremely awkward; on an emotional level what you want out of the match is for your teammates to fail, but you’re obliged by the rules and a sense of sportsmanship not to throw, so even if you don’t want to be dishonest about what you’re doing it’s hard to play seriously.
I think it would be cool if there was a moba that somehow formalizes the adversarial relationship you have with your team. Maybe like a Survivor esque battle royale setup; in the beginning it’s 5v5, and you’ll be advantaged by the success of your team, but ultimately you are going to have to betray them to win, and also the losers will have an opportunity to influence the outcome.
Inverting the PVP to be intra-team sounds brilliant. You’re there to be the best on your side, at any cost… and then there’s five other schmucks present. There’d still be a contest between teams, but it wouldn’t really matter. That’s the background noise for trying to steal kills from the other guy in your lane. One player can even be “the albatross,” the worst loser on your side, motivated above-all-else to foist that label onto another player.
The simpler fix is to make rounds so fast and chaotic that people can’t develop narratives about how so-and-so fucked them over. Let people win some rounds and lose some rounds, even if the outcome is a devastating three-and-eight loss. Make their catastrophic fuckups contained. Allow everyone the opportunity to clutch critical moments, by making more moments critical, without creating one continuous hour-long panic attack.
Key to any of this is scoring via bots. The game can snapshot any moment of gameplay, and run it back over and over, with AI substituting any given player. It’s VORP. If you just got your ass handed to you - would any bot have done better? If not, then that failure shouldn’t count against you. If this failure was caused by the game introducing randomness, then your bad karma can be made-up-for with better luck later on. But if you fumbled a fight that 99% of simulations survived, the game is free to laugh at you, and so are the other players.
