MLG: Not interested. Not even as a spectator.

saying all people considered mlg players are eating cheetos and smack talking all night long is a prejudice/generalization no matter how you put it

You're probably right, there. No, really, you are.

I'll go with what you're saying and ride the rails back if I can. I wandered into the "I HAS TEH LOGIC!!!!1" rabbithole for a bit too long there.

It is true that SOE ultimately decides what they decide their game mechanics upon. Even the word "balance" may not be terribly accurate since many of the game's systems are deliberately asymmetrical. An infiltrator has very few choices against a tank. A tank has very few choices against a properly-flown ESF or a high-altitude Dalton Liberator. I find this to be a strength, not a weakness, because it adds more chemistry and volatility and ultimately fun for people like me than a tidy little arena tournament with 1-2 allowed weapons, no vehicles, and so on.

I don't doubt that some of these guys have insights, experience, and ideas that could help the game improve. My issue is with knee-jerk, blind assertions that people above a certain abstract mark of K/D ratio, points/hour, or whatnot are automatically holding wise opinions that would benefit the entire playerbase.

Also, when people say "REAL pros dont embrace cheesey tactics and act in a selfish way when demanding balance changes" all that begs is the idea that any person with those same high abstract stats, that is obnoxious and selfish and demands things cater specifically to him at everyone else's expense, is not a "real" pro after all.

It's a loose and slippery assertion that lacks validity to me. If I was SOE I'd certainly want to hear what the major outfits and their leaders had to say, but I wouldn't kiss their toes and base my own decisions entirely on their opinions word for word. I'd want as many players to be happy as possible, even if it means that the elite don't get all the things they want all the time.

completely agree with this, the similar weapons are pretty much balanced by default, most of the ''imba'' problems are about faction specific ones, common ones are ZOE, VULCAN, etc. But you're right about the bug fixes, there are still many bugs making weapons more powerful than they should be or the opposite

To some extent faction weapons ought to be different, strictly from an atmosphere perspective.

Many of us are here for the MMO aspect, the setting, the feeling of being in a fantasy/futuristic war on a distant planet, even if not all of us read too deeply into the lore. We want weird alien tech over there, big clunky blasty things there, and rapid fire combined arms over there.

One of MLG's many problems here is its demand for utter symmetry among weapons. I suppose if their future tournaments were based on some universal NS line (with new NS weapons to fill the gaps) it would be a fair compromise, but unfortunately, far too often in the name of "balance" there's always demands to make everything the same with different color muzzle flashes.

That is unfit for this game.

I agree with what you say, I remember games that were about to go around this problem, for example, Dragon Nest (MMORPG) that made their weapon and skill stats change depending if you are doing pvp or pve, making people keep the same things they loved even after pvp was implimented.

Also there's starcraft which i believe is a good examply of non-symetrical pvp competitive game. Ofcourse there is a huge budget to do balance and pay many people just to focus on this compared to PS2.

As a suggestion, even thought it's probably a huge piece of work like you said about ns, they could make weapons in the game that would be only usable (idk if this word exists) in a isolated ''MLG server'' which would leave the current public servers' balance as it is.

A bit like how all weapons become available in VR

Just so there's not too much seperation, it'd probably be fine to make a full line of NS weapons which are also available to the general population.

Most of them have a longer time to kill, which was an issue of complaint during previous Nexus events if I recall.

Did I mention anything about MLG players when I posted that? No. It's a general statement of the typical smacking talking kid who plays games. They claim to be "pro" "athletes" but aren't Olympians (which takes years of dedicated training...with coaches. No athlete got to where they got without a team of support, and a coach).

I'm all for longer ttk, considering it rewards more people who can keep a steady aim for a longer time.

NS weapons already have that.

I know that especially among MLG people they see it as a sacred tradition for sniper rifles to always kill on headshots, so to sort of nudge things that way, perhaps the yet-uncreated NS sniper rifle could do, say, 850 damage but have a single-shot-per-reload limitation or something like that. If these are really "skilled" people that we're talking about I assume they wouldn't mind considering the payoff for a 1700 damage total damage hit.

PS2 in MLG?
Ask yourself one question, is 48v48 on battle island interesting to spectate for general MLG audience? The answer is "Not really". Without spectators there would be no MLG. I mean SOE could try to force their way into MLG scene but most probably will fail.

What i think would be a problem with this is that in planetside you spawn with all the class' weapons all the time. In Halo for example, you have to control the ''power weapons'' which have the OHK on headshot but there's only 1 at the same time on the map. I don't know if having 48 snipers that can OHK on headshot or 48 esfs with lolpods would be a good idea. That's why earlier i suggested doing separate competitions for infantry, ground vehicles and aircrafts. I think there's too much ''spam'' possible to make it really fair.

Unfortunately devs don't do this because that would mean rewriting the game for 2 aspects of play. This is why WoW will never be balanced, since PvP was introduced later (why PvP gear in WoW is 2 tier levels behind PvE gear). Since PvP wasn't made into the game from the ground up, the game could not meet MLG requirements and would cost too much to make it balanced (and Ghostcrawler recently said that balance is too boring, so they'll continue with the FoTM patches).

Biggest mistake is trying to force a game played by 10% at the expense of 90%. The resentment it brings fractures the community, causing them to fight among each other more than ingame. -_-

SOE also understands the fallout of EQII, and that's a history that never needs to be repeated. I despise the warring groups trying to via for game control, because it's not their role to tell 90% of the players to play. All I'm really concerned about is bug fixes and faction balances, as from WoW when Horde dominated realms players couldn't raid nor PvP.

Personally i'd love to see 48vs48 amazing players compete against eachother. Especially if it's infantry only fights. That's just my preference though. But it would be a pioneer in such big scale fights in MLG so it could attract curious viewers for a while at least

I'm sorry to dissapoint you but i don't know about WOW and EQII, PS2 is the first FPS i play (i know WOW is not FPS lol) i was in a soccer team before starting video games so i don't have that long of a video game experience

One distinct problem is in the very 48 vs 48 format. If people are supposedly expected to live off of prize money (which I still think is a short-term and unstable way to make a living, with South Korean's finest often burning out in less than a decade), it would have to be split 48 ways!

It's fine that you admitted inexperience from previous games, even if those games are not FPSes.

The experiences in those games are valid, all the same, because many developer decisions made to cater to so-called esports in World of Warcraft and other similar games have backfired in ugly ways, where the developers themselves stated regret and wished they didn't go those directions, even if their games recovered.

Would require proper reporting and neutral explanation and observation - something that current MLG lacks apparently. A community run solution would be best - trial it by having impartial commentary over the course of an alert for a start and see if it gathers any wider interest.

MLG plays or this drama for entertainment value?



MLG and league play dies on the vine as every so-called "elite" player now streams. Some of the craziest streaming goes on in WoW, and that sodapoppin dude tops the charts!

Most competitive play occurs naturally. MLG is often a forced-feed of this aspect on games it touches and that is why I oppose it.

If there's room for it in PS2 it'd occur over time due to the playerbase, not due to top-down top-heavy pandering.

i meant ''legit'' competition. I've never seen 96 competitive players in the same map yet.