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.
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.