Tailor Game to Elitists

I feel if you want true esports you gotta make the game tailored to elitists as you possibly can the people who would study everything about the game and get exceptionally good and competitive at it with really high skillfloors like gw1 shutdown pd mes you simply cannot spam skills or you are completely useless. Gw1 is the protototype for the ideal mmo esports. I'm not talking about being an asshole just an elitist as someone who knows everything about the game and requiring a high skillfloor separating the good/experienced from the bad/new which goes to an extent in all games theres a learning curve I think the higher that curve the better.

@R E F L H E X.8413 said:I feel if you want true esports you gotta make the game tailored to elitists as you possibly can the people who would study everything about the game and get exceptionally good and competitive at it with really high skillfloors like gw1 shutdown pd mes you simply cannot spam skills or you are completely useless. Gw1 is the protototype for the ideal mmo esports. I'm not talking about being an kitten just an elitist as someone who knows everything about the game and requiring a high skillfloor separating the good/experienced from the bad/new which goes to an extent in all games theres a learning curve I think the higher that curve the better.

Pretty much. No game should tailor around the worst players in it.

I'm not talking about tailoring the game post release with balance as to what the top players think but tailoring it to create elitists by having high skillfloor from the start/release. An elitist can be seen as someone just trying to be overcompetitive which is healthy for competition and sustained esports.

@R E F L H E X.8413 said:I feel if you want true esports you gotta make the game tailored to elitists as you possibly can the people who would study everything about the game and get exceptionally good and competitive at it with really high skillfloors like gw1 shutdown pd mes you simply cannot spam skills or you are completely useless. Gw1 is the protototype for the ideal mmo esports. I'm not talking about being an kitten just an elitist as someone who knows everything about the game and requiring a high skillfloor separating the good/experienced from the bad/new which goes to an extent in all games theres a learning curve I think the higher that curve the better.

You mean like all of the current eSports on the market. Yeah you are somewhat correct. However you are wrong on the point that, it has to be tailored to elitists. Look at Smite, my favorite sPvP game to play. It's not at all tailored to elitists yet it's one of the more successful eSports.

Successful eSports games have huge PvP dev support. They are constantly improving and balancing their game. When things release in a broken state they are quick with hot patches say within 2 or 3 days time. Any eSports title I've played have regular balance patches every 2 to 4 weeks. And it absolutely have to be built and balanced with PvP in mind.

The game also has to be fun and inviting, as well as competitive. When you have a fun and competitive game. The community themselves turns it into a eSports. At this point all the devs have to do, is maintain it. Then players will flock to it like mosquitoes flock to light sources.

DotA2 has managed to be balanced well enough around high level competition while still remaining balanced at non-competitive levels. You have a few hero selections that tend to suck when it isn't used in a team environment: Io, Oracle, but the rest of the game is consistently viable.

By tailored to elitist I mean that it has to have a high skillfloor gw1 can be seen as not an easy game to get into in pvp and be instantly good due to the good skillfloor it has. This creates elitists they have a higher skillfloor to explore and experience they can easily spot the noobs. This means from the start it was kind of tailored for elitists. This is a bad explanation of what im trying to say.

@"Reaper Alim.4176" said:

The game also has to be fun and inviting, as well as competitive. When you have a fun and competitive game. The community themselves turns it into a eSports. At this point all the devs have to do, is maintain it. Then players will flock to it like mosquitoes flock to light sources.

This exactly i played Starcraft BW and other games in past and Community was doing the esport!Gaming Company had NO BUSINESS to do with it.But thx to stupid gaming company like blizzard who wasted millions promoting esports look now where it is.Starcraft 2 a dead game with show matches ( rigged games just to get kids to buy the game)..Was posting about that topic last year with other info you know what happened?Moderators deleted the post right after Hots Launch i wrote about it.

Main complain was that Match Making will never work no mathematical program can calculate human behavior!...Was suggesting to go back old school and use a website like - https://iccup.com for ranked play where anybody can challenge anybody.

I'm sorry but i see this argument pop up in every game i play and it just reeks of narrow-mindness.

Yes a game requires some depth to be competitive i agree but its not the only factor that makes a great game. Look at other E-Sports such as League and CSGO or even Overwatch now. None of them are remotely difficult to pick up or have insanely situational abilities (what a lot of MMO players in particular seem to consider depth).

Yet they're all very succesfull and have a clear skill curve among their playerbase. What's so different from here?

Besides a game needs to be fairly accessible to make money. The amount of dads who work their 40 hours, take care of their families then sit in front of the computer for a few hours far outnumber the number of teenagers/young adults (the vast majority of pretty much any game's "top end" players) who play games 80 hours a week in hope of becoming the next South Korean superstar. Its a fact, and like it or not, game companies are made of people, people who want to make money off their particular skillsets and have families of their own to take care of, so they will try to make as much money as possible, just like anyone else here eventually.

So campaigning to turn the game into something that only the tip-top end of the playerbase will enjoy is nonsensical.

I mean christ, just look at sports, basketball for example. 1 ball, 2 hoops. Yet its an international sport. Is it the case because its absurdly over-complicated? No. It has simple rules that virtually anyone can follow yet some people still manage to outsmart and outskill others. There's still an high end demographic. People still manage to rise above the rest with the tools the game gives them.

Why not do it here? What prevents you to do so? Do you really need a million situational abilities giving you a scripted answer to any situation if you so happen to memorise them to outplay someone. If that's the case, is it truely skill then or just a learnt pattern?

A high skill floor is actually probably detrimental to the long term health of a competitive game. Games need new blood to stay active, and you bring in new blood by being fun and interesting from the get-go. You don't want to make a competitive game's entry point difficult enough that it scares away half your potential players. Let them muck around, learn, get better, and whatever percentage of people wants to try and get better can. Think of it like chess. A lot of people enjoy it without ever learning about opening theory or the like. How many people would learn to play chess if they instead had to read three books on how to be good at it first? What you do want, however, is a high skill ceiling. Also, as far as balance goes, a dev team should be able to keep things relatively well constructed at both ends of the curve given the time and resources. The difference here is that most dedicated pvp games (Overwatch, League, Dota, etc.) have that time and those resources, while GW2 pvp does not. I don't think GW2 will ever be a proper esport. It wasn't built to be. Balance at the high end is still important, but the motivation for making it so should not be to try and rake in all the Twitch dollars (because I doubt they'd succeed were they to try again).

@R E F L H E X.8413 said:I feel if you want true esports you gotta make the game tailored to elitists as you possibly can the people who would study everything about the game and get exceptionally good and competitive at it with really high skillfloors

You are right

@Reaper Alim.4176 said:The community themselves turns it into a eSports. At this point all the devs have to do, is maintain it.

People probably don't realize that Team Fortress 2 still has had an ESEA presence for nearly a decade now. The community made their own league rules, map rotations, and whitelists while crowd funding LANs and international tournaments. Players make esports, and they do so especially when they are given the tools to tailor the game to their playstyles (consider how the entire map pool for comp 6s is comprised of player-made or player-missed maps).

• ArenaNet doesn't let players touch or make any PvP maps.
• Players have no say in what class changes or skills make it into competitive play.
• The game itself is centered around passive hard counters rather than timing or positioning.
• The only way GW2 made it into ESL was because anet bled money in order to shove it in there for the pathetic amount of time that the league existed.

Gw2 was never esports, and it never will be because the players are removed from the equation.