Everything is not as bad as we think

“The fact that we did not live up to your expectations is your problem. We lost because we didn’t score, but the Greeks scored. These conversations won’t change anything anyway.”

Have you ever thought that games that many players hate and spit at the mention of them are not so bad?? You yourself can name the names of your friends who, having played enough of one game, begin to despise it, go to another and tell you in every possible way how much better the new game is than the previous one, and then a year later the cycle repeats again. And then again. So maybe the problem is not in the games?

I really really want to figure this out, so I want to share my thoughts on this matter with the readers of the site. As examples, I will only give those games that I myself understand and have spent a lot of time playing.

Part one – toxic community.

I want to start with the most global and simple problem.

There isn’t a single game that doesn’t have toxic players. This is a given. If you hate a game because of its community, then congratulations. You won’t like any online game. Toxicity isn’t just about how players communicate with each other in chat. The fact that your teammate utters a million new, hitherto unknown, curses at you is just one of the ways of a toxic relationship. There are more perverted forms of this behavior. Killing teammates, using champion/hero/operator mechanics to deliberately harm the team, exploiting game opportunities, etc. Are the game developers to blame for this?? The clear answer is no. The developers are introducing the ability for Mei from Overwatch to build ice walls not so that she will block the exit from the spawn point for her team. And they also didn’t intend Symetra’s teleport from the same game as a fun way to make fun of allies, watching as guys who were hoping to quickly move to the battle point cheerfully fly into a cliff.

Naturally, developers are trying to combat this problem. If you are annoyed by this particular ally, almost all games provide the ability to mute this player. In Call of Duty, you can use one button to mute all players or each one individually. League of Legends has the ability to mute individual player chat or stop map pins from appearing if a player is trying to deliberately mislead you. CS GO has a separate page in the settings section, where you can flexibly configure everything from start to finish. Who to jam, members of which team (allied or enemy), whether to hide player avatars. Everything for your convenience. If a player is silent, but harms you with some game mechanics, then the developers have an answer for this too. Rainbow six has a fire inversion system. If a player kills an ally, then next time all damage will be applied to him. If killing an ally was accidental, the killed player can disable this inversion himself. Recently, players who often engage in such sabotage have had fire inversion turned on by default. There are two versions of this principle in CS GO. If a player kills an ally at the very beginning of the round, he immediately receives a ban. This blocking is also provided separately if the player inflicts a total of 300 units of damage to allies. Players who often receive complaints for toxic relationships are muted at the beginning of the round, and you always have the opportunity to unban the player. Call Of Duty has an avoidance system. You can ask the game to match you with matches in which this particular player will not be present. PayDay 2 has options for kicking and banning players. If a player is just stupid, you can kick him. Then he will leave the lobby with the option to reconnect. If a player bothers you, he can be banned, which ensures that he will not be in your lobby forever, until you unban him.

Developers guys are not stupid. They are always interested in their project, are always aware of problems and will always try to solve them in any way possible. This is their job, this is what they get paid for.

Part two – lack of updates.

Everything is a little more complicated here.

Yes, indeed, there are projects that have been abandoned by developers for a long time. This happens for various reasons. However, by lack of updates I understand and I urge you to understand precisely their absence. Complete. And there are actually very few such games. Even the old Left 4 Dead 2 recently received a new campaign, as well as new dialogues for the characters.

It’s understandable when players complain about the lack of changes, but it becomes strange when the players themselves want changes, at least some, and then complain that these changes have happened.

I honestly don’t understand the players. And it seems to me that the players themselves don’t know what they want and I’ll explain why.

Until recently, the developers of Rainbow six were attacked by players. They say they haven’t been given new cards for a long time. The developers decided to fix the situation. But players don’t play on the new maps. It’s not that they are bad. You won’t believe it, but the problem is that they are just new. Let me explain.

Players are fundamentally unwilling to learn new things. The cards in this game have always been and remain multi-level and complex. On top of that, the game itself encourages you to experiment. Any room can be destroyed to the ground, completely changing the geometry of the map, creating new vantage points. Players in normal modes are literally forced to play on this map because they are randomly selected. And in ranked mode, players can decide for themselves which map to play on. Due to the fact that the maps are difficult, they are not sure that they will be able to demonstrate a decent level of play on the new map, so they block it. And this creates a new problem, because the person begins to avoid the new card at all costs. He will only play it if he comes across it by chance. Therefore, studying the map by an individual player can take months. And if cards are added in batches every month, this will lead to an even longer study. As a result, no one will play on the new maps anyway.

It turns out they are not needed? Needed. And they are definitely needed. It’s just that if they are constantly introduced it will create a huge problem for both players and developers. In my opinion, the CS GO developers came up with the most successful model in this regard. Map rotation. New cards are added at once in quantities of several pieces for different modes and for a long time. This allows, firstly, to give players the opportunity to learn how to play these maps normally, and secondly, it gives developers the opportunity to relieve themselves. Supporting three or four cards for six months is not such a difficult task and allows you to quickly respond to problems. If you read the update news, you will see that most of the efforts are always aimed at correcting and improving the maps. But it’s still not enough for players. They will foam at the mouth to argue that the game is dying because there is little variety in it. And as soon as diversity appears, they will complain about its appearance.

New weapons and new heroes are always difficult. There are two variants of the M4 rifle in CS GO. One without a silencer, with a higher rate of fire and a larger magazine. The second one is with a muffler. Less rapid fire, smaller magazine. But it was silent and hid the location of the shot, in addition it was more accurate. The developers always thought this was the perfect balance, but it wasn’t. The version without a silencer was more popular precisely because of the rate of fire. TTK (time to kill) was higher. In one of the updates, the developers decided to fix this by slightly increasing the damage of the version with a silencer. Because of this, the TTK became higher just for the version with a muffler. And eventually everyone stopped playing with the unsilenced version. While trying to save one weapon, the developers accidentally killed another. The number of weapons in the game has not changed, players still only use one weapon. People just always strive to use the best. When the revolver was added to the game it was too strong and players complained about it. As a result, it was made weaker, and players forgot about it because there was a better analogue. Now they are complaining that the developers added the revolver in vain. And what did the players themselves want in this case?? Now, due to such a reaction from the community, the developer is afraid to release something new, because it could lead to balance changes and complaints from players. But players still complain. They complain about the lack of updates, although their own actions forced the development not to release such things.

Part three – cheaters.

Have you ever thought how many cheaters there really are?? No one knows the exact quantity, the ratio, but everyone agrees on the same opinion. There are many of them.

They exist in every game. They are a cancerous tumor. And they try to fight them. And they do it, in my opinion, successfully.

Let me start, perhaps, with the fact that there are no and cannot be ideal anti-cheats. It’s an arms race. But for some reason players always forget about this. They also firmly believe that no one is fighting with them and no one wants to fight. It’s like they don’t even notice it. Every day hundreds and thousands of cheaters are sent to ban. On the website of many anti-cheats there is a way to contact the creators, where you can send the cheats you discover. And they are sent and searched for. Both the players and the developers themselves. Many thanks to people for this.

Denying that they are trying to https://sportsbettingmedia.co.uk/latest-news/live-betting-esports-counter-strike-2 fight them is stupid. It’s like proving that the earth is flat. No one is interested in the presence of this kind of contingent in the game.

In League of Legend, for example, there are practically no cheaters. And people using scripts and bugs are quickly identified and blocked by the developers themselves. Raven software, one of the Call of Duty developers report almost every month about thousands of people banned, introducing systems that disable damage to cheaters. During the helicopter glitch, when players using this vehicle became invulnerable or invisible, without finding an immediate solution to the problem, helicopters were completely removed from the battle royale. The VALVE company has statistics on VAC bans and internal anti-cheat bans that are generally open. Anyone can view the number of players who were banned per day.

But I want to look at this situation from the other side.

The other day we were playing cs with friends. During the match, one of the players from the enemy team played like a god, unmistakably. Just in case, the whole team sent a report on this player. Naturally, no one bothered to report this in the chat. Switch sides and the game has changed. By biting into each round in the end, we were able to win by a minimal margin. It is noteworthy that the “god” brought almost no benefit to his team in the second half. And after the game, this person, whom we as a team initially suspected of cheating, left me a note in my Steam profile – “-rep wh”. funny. It’s also funny that my brother, with whom we played for some time in the same room and in whom I am 100% sure that he never used cheats in his second Steam profile, collects comments of this kind. His entire 5 page wall is littered with similar comments. And this person has never used the software.

People are not machines, and they make their conclusions based on their emotions. They don’t like to admit defeat in a fair game. Any misfire can be explained simply – he has software. It doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. Have you ever wondered how many people you have wrongly accused?? How many people have complaints been sent to just like that?? Because they were simply really better than you or they were lucky. Chances are that the vast majority of players you accuse of gaining an advantage through dishonest means are not malicious offenders at all, but players like my brother. Sometimes they are simply incredibly lucky, or they come across an opponent whose game they can adapt to. I also had a case in Call of Duty when on one map a player destroys my entire team because he knows and knows how to play on it, but on a new map he trails at the bottom of the table.

Personally, after these incidents, I promised myself. Only call people cheaters that I am sure are cheaters. And I advise you so. The number of cheaters in your skating rinks will decrease sharply. I’ll add a plus. Some of my friends played with cheats. Just for fun, I played with them in a party. As a result, all my friends were successfully banned, and my rank was removed. It turns out the system still works.

The CS also has a system of trust, the so-called trust factor. Try to somehow play on a new profile, without prime status and with a low trust system. This is where you really understand what a game that is choked by cheaters looks like.

Part four – donut dumps.

I know one game that perfectly fits the definition of pay 2 win. This is Warface. There were times when I poured all my money there simply because I liked the game as a whole, but it was almost impossible to play without pouring in money at high ranks. Or another example from Call of Duty. In one of the battle passes to the last level, a black skin was added for the Rose operative, which completely blends into the environment, making it almost invisible in some cases. A game can only be considered a donation dump when your level of play is directly related to the amount of money spent. Or when there is nothing in them other than donations.

In modern games, donations, with rare exceptions, are cosmetic. Moreover, games always leave the opportunity to get cosmetics in-game, although in Rainbow, for example, the most beautiful skins can be obtained exclusively for real money. In League of Legends, skins appear to you literally by themselves, with the ability to purchase them for in-game currency. For your good play or the play of your teammates, you will be given chests, and for your personal success – keys to these chests. During various events, players can receive chests with skins simply by playing. The same system is in Overwatch, where chests are given either once a week or for leveling up. In Payday 2, skins are given simply for completing contracts. What I like most is the system in CS GO. It allows you to sell all the items you have dropped after a match, and then use the proceeds to buy games or other skins for weapons with real money. A bonus to everything is that weapon skins are an activity not so much of VALVE as of the game community. And if the coloring makes it into the game, VALVE pays the creator very generously. Almost everyone benefits from such a system.

So why, then, do players despise games so much for such methods of monetization?? This system has virtually no effect on the gameplay; it exists only as a separate system. That a Kalash in coloring costs 5 thousand rubles, that the default one will kill the enemy with one hit to the head. The bastion from overwatch will transform into a turret regardless of the skin, and plenty of heroes from League of Legend will still one-shot everyone and everything in one cast, albeit not so colorfully. But players will stubbornly call CS GO, which allows you to really make money on your mined skins, or Overwatch, in which skins do not affect anything as donation dumpsters, and go to some conditional Valorant, which has an absolutely identical monetization system.

Epilogue, or “the bottom line”.

If a player is really tired of a certain game, why can’t he just quietly get up and leave?? Probably because it’s too boring. It’s much more fun to tell everyone around you what a bad game it is. That all the people who play it are shitheads, that they don’t understand anything and leave the game with exactly the same problems.

This will be the first and most likely only blog written by me. The idea to write a blog came to me by accident and it probably turned out very chaotic and unclear, but I tried to convey the idea to the readers. Convey as best I can.

Everything I described above is modern games. They also try in every possible way to make our experience of staying there as comfortable as possible. Stay optimistic and enjoy the positive aspects of the project. There are no definitely bad games. Don’t dwell on the bad. And it’s true, in fact, everything is not as bad as we think? Or not?

Best comments

I immediately remember a video from one gentleman “from above” that evil toxic players who do not support the industry, with their negative reviews and refusal to buy skins in the game for full price, upset the unfortunate developers from Bioware, and they abandoned support for Anthem out of grief. But it’s been bad manners to throw around his last name for a long time, so I won’t

But seriously speaking, you can only accept the first argument. Further, the degree of actual victim-blaming against players is only increasing

Players criticizing a game for its lack of new content and players criticizing a game for its innovations are, surprisingly, not always the same players. This happens sometimes when something has a large enough audience. People are different and may play for different reasons. Some tryhiders from the top of matchmaking will clearly prefer old maps that have undergone many edits to some new and unrefined ones. At the same time, casual (someday people will stop considering this word an insult) players will be interested in the maximum variety of cards, weapons, heroes, etc. You shouldn’t perceive the gaming community as a single organism and, based on this, accuse it of inconsistency

The story with the revolver and the M4 is a pure example of poor balance on the part of the developers (at least as described by the author). If a change causes some aspect of the game to be completely ignored by players, then you’ve done something wrong. Ways to force players to use certain weapons often go beyond moving the damage/recoil slider. Creation of new gameplay situations that encourage the choice of certain equipment; setting the difficulty of obtaining weapons and many other parameters, sometimes not even related to the gameplay (see attached news, I didn’t understand how to insert a link into a word)

With anti-cheat it’s even less controversial. ESPECIALLY if we are talking about Warzone. The fact that some of the cheaters are punished is not a reason to ignore the part that remains in the game. Damage-cutting measures only work as a nice news headline. But in fact, instead of completely disconnecting a person who is dangerous for the comfortable process from the game, for some reason they leave him there, creating the risk that he will bypass this part of the code in the same way as he bypassed the previous ones. I don’t even see the point in commenting on a take about CS:GO. The author himself says that if a new player creates an account and tries to find a match, he will end up in a lobby “choked by cheaters”. In what terrible world is this considered the norm and, moreover, I can’t even imagine an argument in defense of the developers.

And if you can somehow agree with the previous points, then standing up for microtransactions is already critical. Almost half of the text says that games provide the opportunity to get skins through gameplay. I don’t understand how this should justify an in-game store in a game that, in the case of Overwatch or CoD, is sold for money. The problem is not the availability of cosmetics as such. The problem is that cosmetics often, at a minimum, do not look authentic, but at most provide real gameplay advantages (noted by the author, however). But an even more significant problem is that they are trying to sell it for money in a game for which they have already taken money. There can be no discourse. Providing a way to obtain items in-game is the responsibility of the developers, not a concession. They got enough the moment the game was purchased. Behind them, by the way, there is a price tag. If they want to monetize a game-service, the old Battlefields showed with their premium how. Yes, players are disconnected, but at least their money is being spent justifiably. I won’t talk about loot boxes, this is too obvious an evil, and I don’t need another sheet

Separately, I want to talk about criticism. If you start doing at least something for people, and even more so in the creative field (which gamedev definitely is) and are not ready for criticism (from people who, by the way, paid you money), then you have clearly chosen the wrong profession for yourself. It’s very strange to read about developers who are “offended” by players and stop supporting them

Epic Games has affected the frequency of use of shotguns in Fortnite without even touching their parameters

If you play single-player games, you most likely won’t encounter any of the problems listed above.

For some reason I don’t see this post on the blog page, but it shows up in the replies tab. Strange, but not the point. And for the review please, I usually don’t comment on anything on blogs, but this got me motivated

Statistics on bans bring us back to that same disclaimer about the audience. Ban cards as a concept only exist in the realities of ranked play. A place where that same abstract casual audience doesn’t exactly often live. At the same time, it is she who often pushes developers to the maximum level of content support, albeit for the sake of balance. At the same time, that core audience, which has been memorizing previous maps for a long time, sits in rank matches. Statistics do not reflect the full picture, because essentially only a portion of the players were surveyed

Why the M4 and Revolver rebalance is unsuccessful? Because I doubt that the developers set out to completely destroy some types of weapons. The rebalance would be successful if the audience, albeit along a curve, not in equal shares, was distributed among the entire arsenal. Accordingly, I didn’t evaluate the example because I think in this case the players’ criticism was justified, since the changes to the balance really didn’t make it any better.

Speaking about the creation of new gameplay situations to increase interest in a certain type of weapon, I did not mean the implementation of new game mechanics, but the design of new maps with the original goal: to push the player to use a specific weapon. Not at the AWP Lego level of course, but with such a task. Even a banal change in the location of items in a store could already spur some people to run around with something unusual. Although in my head I certainly understand that CS:GO is much more interesting to be an e-sports discipline than an exciting game. And all this, of course, can interfere with being an eSports discipline. But then the question of the causality of the presence of all these weapons there, in which even the developers are not particularly interested, really cannot help but arise

There’s really nothing to say about cheaters within the framework of the original thesis. Although in itself such a model of p2p disguised as f2p is as disgusting as possible. But, of course, it allows you to report on record online traffic over the past year. Moreover, given the absence of shareholders, it is not even clear to whom to report

When discussing microtransactions, I will again emphasize that the problem with them (personally in my eyes, of course) appears exclusively at the moment when they start asking for money for the game. I have an absolutely normal attitude towards the monetization of LoL and I even paid for cosmetics in the window/genshin a couple of times. But these are free games, when you install them, you initially understand that people really have to get money from somewhere and sign an abstract agreement to coexist with the in-game store. But the moment they put a price tag on the original game, and even more so if this price tag is 60 (or even 70) dollars, then all these skins suddenly cease to be legitimate for me. I think these coloring pages are worth the money. But the money should be included in the price for which the game is sold. Character customization is an important aspect of any competitive game where the avatar comes closest to becoming a reflection of the player. It greatly influences the experience. And what’s more, it has always existed in these competitive games. And locking it under a lock that can be opened for a donation means cutting out part of the content from the original product. That’s why I find it unacceptable

Damn, I was thinking about existential discussions about life, but here they are again discussing their toys.

Thank you very much for your feedback.

In fact, yes, I agree that the players are all different, but I tried to focus on some kind of average value.

Let’s say for your interest, I can give an example with the statistics of cards in the bath for 2020 from R6S. The Outback card was added a year before these statistics appeared, and despite the fact that the card has been in the game for a long time, it is still the least favorite among players and is banned at any opportunity. The redesigned amusement park also goes there, which underwent changes six months before the release of these statistics, which generally confirms my words about the fact that the players themselves do not like to play on the new maps.

About M4 with a revolver. I don’t think it’s a bad example. In the context of a post about Fortnite, in the context of another game, probably yes, but not with CS GO. The fact that the game has few mechanics is neither good nor bad, the game is like that. And the players themselves choose whether to play it like this or not. But the limited mechanics create a strict attachment to the weapon. That is why absolutely everything in the game is tied to damage and recoil numbers, and the balance there is corrected only this way. And honestly, I have little idea what you mean. If you can give an example of games where weapons are balanced not by changing recoil or damage numbers, I’ll be happy to read it. Fortnite, although a good example, does not fit here, because the visual design of weapons serves as a guide for players, and this is absent in cs. Even in the purchasing menu there are only dry numbers and a bunch of information about players who teach the community what to play with and what not to play with. Additionally, you can view statistics on the HLTV org website. The change occurred sometime in September 2021. Just compare the stats for the two weapons before and after. And you will see for yourself that the version without a muffler simply disappeared from the scene literally because of a one-second difference in the TTK. Moreover, the developers worked specifically on the damage multiplier, so as not to create an imbalance between the attacking and defending sides. Therefore, I don’t quite understand why this is an example of unsuccessful weapon rebalancing.

Regarding the point about cheaters. The example with non-prime was just cited as successful by the developers. In the context of new players – yes, they will have to go through hell if they decide to play in the f2p model, or they can pay the full price of the game and avoid this hell. But the blog was not dedicated to such players, but rather to those who have been in the game for a long time and want to leave due to the fact that there are a lot of cheaters SPECIFICALLY IN THEIR matches. Again, I repeat my thought, if a player thinks that he is playing with cheaters, then let him go there and see what it’s really like to play with such guys. This is heaven and earth. And the developers have really debugged the model for sorting honest and dishonest players. Regarding Call of Duty, yes, I agree. But I still want to note that such a damage reduction system works for those players whose guilt the anti-cheat is not sure. If there is sufficient evidence, the player is banned. This is a measure, say, for the duration of the inspection. I don’t know why she is like this, but what she is.

Point about skins. I wrote about p2w and all sorts of things that break the game. I don’t support this either. But! I really wonder why people shouldn’t get paid for their work? I understand that no one wants to spend their hard-earned money on some skins that don’t give anything, but what’s stopping you from simply not buying them?? About authenticity, yes, you are right, but the problem was not considered from this context either. I’ve been playing League of Legends for a year. All the characters I play have skins. And I didn’t donate to any of them. Yes, maybe not exactly the ones I wanted, but is it really important if the game is not in the skins themselves?? Another example. I play Overwatch. At some point I wanted to collect skins for myself so that absolutely all the characters would have a white skin. I managed to get all these skins in about two months playing for fun, not a ruble of money spent. And yes, returning to the topic “they are trying to sell cosmetics for money in a game for which they have already taken money”. They took money from us for the game, we sit and play. Cosmetics come out separately as other work. If you really need it, either pay for the work in cash or with time spent in the game. If she doesn’t interest you, pass by. Everything is like in the market. Why then is it bad? Maybe you think that these coloring books are not worth the money??

There is such a picture, “Orange, red, yellow”. As for me, it’s just a set of colors for a crooked ruler, but the picture is estimated at more than 85 million. dollars. Whoever wants it, buys it for that price, if it’s really important to him. The rest will pass by. The presence or absence of such a picture in your home will not radically transform your life. Yes, even anyone else. If you built a house, then the paintings only create comfort in the house, and you decide whether it is needed or not. But if there is no home, and they are trying to sell you paintings, then this is really a problem.