MLG: Not interested. Not even as a spectator.

I really don't see the current War Reports as reflecting what competition is going to be. It's absolutely horrible now, both to watch and to participate in. Trust me, getting all pumped up for a show match and then ghost capping bases is even worse than ghost capping on live.

But all this is to work out the problems of the competitive system. Honestly, it would have been better if this was done privately without any viewership whatsoever, since people tend to get so worked up about it, despite it being a meaningless "competition beta test".

I'd be fine with competitive matches being organized by interested outfits. I may not watch them but they'd certainly be a natural extension of the will of the playerbase instead of a thumb-fingered, ham-fisted attempt by MLG to MAKE us give a damn.

But what have they done in that regard? The most influence I've seen MLG have on the game are those stupid little decals they hand out for free. There will be ladders and tournaments and prizes and egos later on, but atm it's a poorly run beta (sound familiar?) of something that isn't nearly ready to go live. You could ignore MLG completely and it would have no effect on you. And when the "War Report beta" ends, maybe real competition will bring in some more people.

I can't help but suspect you're being dense or willfully looking the other way regarding MLG's influence.

So many cries of "X takes no skill remove X"? "Balance Y it's not fit for competitive esports?" The very fact that we even have a War Report that is basically MLG's sock puppet and it continues to embarass this game with shoddy presentation and terrible mouthpieces?

So much for "no effect on me". Say that all you like, but just like in World of Warcraft, when the esports people (devs included) get excited about what needs to be changed/nerfed/buffed for their e-arenas, everyone else outside of it has to put up with the changes too.

I can assure you that the "uber leet noob farmers" who want to get rid of things like lockons are a very different group of people than those interested in competition. There may be some overlap, but for the most part they are very different people. The "noob stompers" want only high skill cap weapons in the game so they can farm average players more easily. Competitive players are fine with low skill-floor, low skill-ceiling weapons like lockons, so long as there are also high skill-floor, high skill-ceiling weapons (and there certainly are already). Please don't lump me in with those idiots.

Everyone I know of that's interested in competitive play is in full agreement with this glorious video:


And like I said, War Report is -bad- But that's mostly because no effort is put into it. When SOE begins devoting resources to competitive game functions (and as I detailed above, they haven't yet) it will greatly improve. Things like "all players show up on map", first person cams,

If you're asking which player is better, stats come in handy.
A player with 30% accuracy would be better than a player with 20% accuracy, comparing identical tools of course.

As for the whole "professional players are nice" stuff you seem to be replying to, I think expecting a human range of human-ness from humans is reasonable - there may well be a selection bias one way or the other, but I won't pretend to know which way such a thing leans.

In any case, I'm still not sure what position you are occupying here, so please answer this one question;
Being unable to answer otherwise, which of the following do you think is better for game weapon design?

1. Hard to use and hard to master.
2. Easy to use, but hard to master.
3. Easy to use and easy to master.

I've never really been into the MLG scene, the social aspect and the player and all that. Why not look into some fights every now and again played by and against the (supposed, no way of knowing till you fight them yourself and all) best of the best? Seems like it should be pretty great. That being said, I give it a year or two to actually get to that point.

I'm glad that some people that are otherwise supporters of organized "esport" stuff aren't joining the choir. A few weeks ago especially this forum was drowning in "NO LOCK ON WEAPONS NO SKILL" chanting, largely from lolpodders who simutaneously claimed how rare and special their lolpodding skills were.

I'm actually fine with difficult to master weapons having a good payoff, and for the easier weapons being mostly there for deterrence (float around podfarming and risk getting locked on to, for example).

The lancer is in my opinion a good example of the kind of weapon you're looking at when it comes to effective yet difficult to use. It has no lock-on and fires straight, and is sort of like an antivehicle sniper rifle with a very poor scope. Still, I've shot down aircraft with it, especially Liberators.

You're wandering kind of close to "no true Scotsman" in reference to the video, but otherwise its a nice video. Lots of self-declared "skilled" players pollute this forum with their "everyone should have a sniper rifle and a pistol because skill skill skill skill skill" talk, but again I'm glad you're not going there.

I'd say there was effort put into the War Report, but effort of the wrong kind: lots of excessive congratulations to the winners well before they won, lots of ego stroking, even apparently tipping them off in-game. I'd call that unprofessional, not effortless.

A good number of Youtube videos put forward by the self-declared elite look downright suspicious, with instant robot-like motions and zero overcompensation with aim (as in, dead on, over and over again).

I guess it might entertain some people, but for me, it looks dull and rote-reflex at best and at worst looks genuinely script-laden.

Now there ARE exceptions. I've seen some killstreaks with close calls and near-deaths and some rather fascinating ways of using lift pads to confuse people in close quarters that were actually fun to watch. It looked clever and crafty instead of NOSCOPEYOLO420.

See I'm a bit fascinated by how quickly some people can react to things, and it eggs me on further to watch and see what they can do compared to what I can. Reaction time isn't the only thing you will be seeing in these matches I'm sure. It's what they do once they realize they're in danger that's the most fun to watch. At higher levels of FPS play it's almost like a TCG for lack of a better metaphor, and the kit you use are like the cards you were dealt. For instance:

you catch a light assault off guard and fire at him, you know he must be near death, you saw his shields go down a few moments ago. You know there is a very good chance he has med kits, and charging him seems like a good idea before his shields go back up, but what if he has a pump action shotgun? You'd be dead before you fired two shots. So instead you play it more cautiously and reposition yourself, and the light assault throws a smoke grenade and probably prepares to rush out. You don't know when he will jump out but you're confident enough that he is still hurt, after all not much time has passed at all and his shields should still be down. You choose to turn around a corner and wait for the guy to show up. What you didn't know was the light assault had the IR scope on and saw you turn that corner. He jumpjets up a bit with his pump action shotgun and is 12 feet in the air by the time you see him. He had advanced shield capacitor on and med kits, so you are finished because you didn't think he would be at full health already. You fire at him, damaging him slightly into his health, and he headshots you with his pump action.

To me that's the equivalent of an Ace on LoL as far as excitement goes. Then again, I don't like LoL

Also, once MLG gets rolling I'm sure there will be no need to worry about hacks in the play.

It's a fine thing and sounds lovely the way you see it.

You have to remember though that not everyone may necessarily share that point of view, nor be interested in the same things.

It reminds me of those people in old fashioned WoW clones that freak out if they find out someone is a "clicker". They will move heaven and earth to tell people how inefficient and horrible it is and how it should somehow be forbidden or even punished. It's a cousin of the infamous "STOP LIKING WHAT I DONT LIKE" statement which goes instead like "STOP PLAYING THE WAY I DONT PLAY".

I play games for fun, for temporary immersion into fictional settings, and generally to shoot things and blow things up. Likewise, when I played the Street Fighter series and its clones, I was getting too far into Guile beating the crap out of Vega to worry about how many frames each attack animation took or to compartmentalize what my opponent was doing beyond "aha! Caught you in midair! Enjoy a shoulder drop!"

If that's 'casual' so be it. I don't want it any other way.

One additional thought. I'm very skeptical about cheats magically disappearing if MLG "gets rolling". I'd argue with nothing else to enforce the rules people'd go out of their way even more than now because they'd want to attention and prizes.

Starcraft 2 tournaments of all things have had cheaters in them. Why would it not happen here, like it already is? Seems blissfully wishful thinking.

I by no means have plans to compete in MLG lol. It sounds like way too much work, even if it is fun work. I'm not saying you're wrong in your opinion of MLG either, you're right there will probably be a ton of cheesing and it may bleed into our game, but I'll still play and still watch for the moments like the one I said above. They are simply satisfying.

Edit: for your second post I'm not really all that aware of how cheats are handled in MLG or how they would be able to still be used in such an open setting. As far as I knew MLG provided the PC's and whatnot for the matches, so downloading or installing a hack would be pretty damn difficult, as well as setting up macros, but that may not be the case.

I've watched a few Planetside videos that I found entertaining, often for tactical cleverness more than twitch spectacles.

Then again I usually prefer videos like this:



Or this:



For sanctioned matches in a hardware-provided setting, the chances of cheating go down but don't completely vanish. Its crazy, but cheaters can and do find a way, using tricks as simple as spying on other people's monitors all the way down to bringing their own smuggled scripts by stick memory.

It's not an insurmountable issue, but then again, if the only means to (mostly) ensure people don't cheat is to provide them equipment and a place to play, what exactly am I supposed to do in the meantime sitting right here, playing where I'm playing, dealing with others doing the same and riding bullet-speed Galaxies and other blantantly obvious script kiddie behavior? In short, I don't think the problem would go away just because of some event showing up and ceasing to suck so much.

It wouldn't, of course not. I'm not saying it will, I was just saying that I myself won't be too worried about cheats getting through into the big MLG matches that I slightly look forward to.

I would be.

The "win at any cost" culture is already there. The need for attention and praise is there. The prize incentives are on their way and will only heighten the first two conditions.

If it happens anywhere outside of an event where the players are gathered and using computers and equipment assigned to them (which is a standard for just about all athletic sports by the way), cheating will happen.

MLG can't possibly provide 96 (plus spares) computers (not to mention paying for travel/accommodation/food). At best they'll provide computers for 10 people (squad leads + platoon lead), like in MOBA tournaments, which leaves the board wide open for cheating for the rest.

As for the comments on "prize money will make things more interesting", consider the following:
according to http://www.esportsearnings.com/tournaments/largest_team_tournaments , the largest prize pool ever for a team game so far was The International 2013, for Dota 2, with $2,874,407.00 prizepool and 40 players participating (8 teams), which is about 72,000 dollars per player. For an 8 team tournament in PS2 to have 20% of that value per player, the total prize pool would have to be about 5.5M dollars. At 100% that would obviously be 27.5M $.

Also keep in mind that The International 2013 had a peak concurrent viewers count of over one million, while PS2 has a peak concurrent player count of ~11k nowadays, and peak concurrent viewer count on streams of.. 150 or so. On the Steam graph Dota 2 has ~574k players peak for today. To match the PCU, PS2 has to grow 52x as large as now, and 520x as large in order to make that 27.5M prize pool money be in same proportion to player count as the International prizepool was for dota player count.

I don't know anyone who expects to make a living off of Planetside 2 competition... But having -something- on the line definitely adds to the viewing experience. And I'm really hoping they do some cool promotions for the "Top VS/NC/TR" team in the world... If nothing else than to get more NC into this, lol.

I don't want to go into details of the who and when, but cheaters are dealt with pretty harshly... especially outfits who cheat. Fortunately for us, the deep dev involvement in this game makes an outfit's reputation more valuable than a single victory won through dishonest play.
Also, from what I understand, they plan to have some kind of system in place for competition that will do much more in-depth analysis of participants' computers. But that's a long way off.

I didn't think of the numbers before, for either computers required or prize money required.

That's actually worse than I thought!

What is SOE thinking when it comes to this MLG preoccupation anyway! Nothing is preventing cheating in their War Reports. Nothing. And those people that claim "professional gamer" means "make a living by playing" better enjoy sharing an apartment with 8 people and eaten ramen.

This is a tremendous waste of time and resources and only religious-like faith seems to be on the side of the "there's no way True Gamers(tm) will ever cheat!" in it.

I don't trust outfits to self-police. Especially with high stakes and pride on the line.

Look at Band of Brothers on EVE. Their incestuous ties with CCP (the developers) were so twisted and corrupt that any time they found a way to get a cheap advantage (POS bowling, using deployable fighters to lag out a node, killing titans by spying on their corporation and hotdropping on them during the log-out moment where the titan wasn't removed from space yet, getting devs who JOINED THEIR GROUP to spawn them resources), their opponents would do the same and if they got successful the original practice was suddenly bannable (examples: POS bowling suddenly against the rules, coding changes and fighter nerds to prevent lagouts, espionage starting to become against the rules as futile as that was to declare, utter silence from the devs and closing of threads talking about it on the last part).

Cheating happens in Starcraft 2 tournaments. Hell, cheating happens in MOBA-clone tournaments the moment not every computer is physically assigned and placed by the tournament. Saying it isn't happening here and never happening here is an act of faith alone.