Massively Multicomplainer: Player Rage and Team Size

You boot up your game, and see “Oh, I just need to play a few more matches” for one reason or another. You start playing, and you see that some of your teammates are not doing well (but it’s ok). Then the end of the game comes and you get called out; called one thing or another, or your game statistics aren’t nice enough to look at.

I was surprised that this behavior has been around in Heroes of the Storm ever since K/D/A was introduced, but it dawned on me that I rarely get hassled for my kill numbers, but actually for the “Hero Damage” statistics that have always existed in the game. Those who play other games will recognize most of their community behaves this way, and always has. I quickly stopped playing League of Legends and its re-skins for the same reason. Where the Kills/Deaths/Assists hurts is when you factor in characters like Lt. Morales that is supposed to be healing and not focusing on kills. Kills in general are not worth focusing on in a game with a clear objective like a MOBA.

Gamers very rarely see themselves as the problem, which is obvious in the way they word their insults. Terms like “Toxic” and “Troll” imply that the person using the name is some kind of gamer elite capable of passing damning judgement on others. For instance say your team decides to just leave you alone and ignore you the whole game; suddenly you are a noob/troll/whatever for going around alone when it’s their fault for not supporting you. I personally blame the double football-field sized arena that these games occur in with only a part of the team size such a sport typically has. There is always some strange claim that “it just enables mobbing” when that’s the basic strategy to win in MOBAs; just gather in a big wave and strike them down. 

The thought occurs to simply remove all statistics one could use to statshame people, but the underlying assholiness (it’s a word) will still be there. Seeking help on the forums just leaves you prey to the forumites that will swear up and down you are wrong, black is white, and water is grey just to get some personal gratification. In my experience suggesting anything on the forum just leads to somebody telling you in longhand that trying to make changes is wrong, and if you do things a specific way you can do it “right”. I wholeheartedly disagree with that premise.

When I am given a choice in the game, each choice should be worth looking at. Sadly there tends to be an obvious choice when in comes to many of the special abilities I find in recent multiplayer games. Plus the tendency for them to get copied over from other games makes it increasingly difficult to figure out what everybody telepathically demands you choose.

Would cranking up the amount of team-mates help? By itself no, because then the tendency is to crank up the map size to the extent where players are still prone to isolating themselves now with the added problems of players that do understand teamwork. There needs to be a dedicated effort to rewarding team play behavior, or there is simply no reason if solo hunting works so well. I have been doing testing work for some mysterious beta games, and have noticed that even 10v10 leads to rampant lone wolfing. There is simply no mechanical benefit besides winning fights to teamwork; in fact there is potential to lose points with team killing.

I honestly think the main issue is the long list of unwritten rules every forumite will cram down your throat of traits games that they like must have or they are not hardcore enough. I frequently bring up that new multiplayer games are trying their best to only have player characters in play, with no AI present at all. Not only is this easier to code, but the devs save thousands of hours of coding and balancing by only building “half a game”, that is to say only using player input and minimal environmental effects such as instant death pits. The common rebuttal is that killing AI is no fun. (Let’s put it this way, if you derive any fun whatsoever from playing any single player game, you know that’s BS) Blindly turning away the tactical and strategic possibilities.

Planetside 2 is “half a game” in that it only utilizes player soldiers and player operated vehicles with almost no automated systems. There are no legions of AI infantry running from base to base. Since ALL soldiers are players, the standard player methods are used to organize them: Clans and Squads. It should come to no surprise then that the forumites will tell you the only way to play with teamwork all the time is to join a clan and offer no alternative for those that want a real war experience. Never-mind that any “real” intergalactic army would likely have better ways to organize their troops, or care at all about spreading their armies logically.

Playing Planetside 2 usually results in the same process of leaving a base, getting sniped, leaving base, getting strafed, leaving base, getting shot because our 2 inch thick armor is made out of goddamn paper, logging off. The instant action button just puts you in a place that is being contended. Snipers are most viable when there are few important targets, which is what happens when there are only 10-20 enemies to kill. If there are a hundred soldiers swarming the base, the sniper may have a lot of targets but he can’t kill them all. This issue is going to sound familiar if you play a lot of shooters, since the new trend is for a small 5 versus 5 team size on maps as big as an air carrier.

There is a slight reason to this. The more players you have involved makes the server demand greater and the lag harder to deal with. What players unfortunately don’t understand is that AI don’t have this problem because the information that drives them is client based. Everybody’s game plays them out, and then all ask the server if this is correct changing accordingly; where if the games and server don’t agree then severe lag can occur such as “rubber banding”. It’s only when we have to track thousands of separate open AI questions does this start to tax players. This is why many shooter guns “hitscan” rather than act as a fully scripted bullet with speed and trajectory; It’s easier for the server to just be asked “Do I hit?” than track hundreds of bullets flying around.

There was one MOBA I tested that started out initially as Victory Command, then shifted names a few hundred times until it re-re-re-re-released on Steam as Battle Battalions while changing NOTHING. It’s a 5v5 elimination match where each player has a squad of units that do not respawn. Because the game size is so small most of the game is spent just going from point to point avoiding conflict unless you have allies nearby to fight with you. Such is the fate of essentially every MOBA strategy game I have come across. The designers are so focused on making everything die so easily that having a lot of something makes no real difference if everything has splash damage.

My overall point is that the time of small “competitive” multiplayer games is going to fall out of style sooner rather than later if there is no innovation within it. Heroes of the Storm is fantastic in that there are unique and interesting characters; but failed in balancing these characters to be worth using over the traditional, boring heavy hitter splash damage characters. I remember in All Points Bulletin the AK47 weapon used to be very good, until of course it was nerfed beyond belief so that sniper rifles were better on average. There is a clear design bias against novel, interesting methods that instead favors the same four or five combat roles Gygax invented in the 70’s.

We’re going to see a new wave of larger and more team friendly games with a bigger emphasis on team functionality than kill boards. As fun as it is to eliminate enemies there needs to be a little more to the game than that.