MLG: Not interested. Not even as a spectator.

I'd like to pick apart one particular thing you said: the old "this is a business and it exists to make money".

You're calling me stupid if you're implying that I wasn't aware of that. If not, I'd like to disagree about one major thing here: MLG often ABSORBS money, instead of making it. And in this game's case, PS2 has spent far more budget trying to cater to these guys than it's seen in return, even from publicity. I'd argue the immaturity and downright toxic attitude of the people involved in the latest battle island debacle did more harm than good for this game's image.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StopHavingFunGuys

Just leaving that here. Have fun getting laughs, and immediately losing your soul to the site.

This isn't directed towards the OP, but if your idea of fun is to encroach on someone else's idea of fun and bash their head in with your idea of fun until they give in, then relax. Not everyone wants to treat video games like srs bizness 24/7.

Also, I get a weird forum bug that might have something to do with this type of forum style. What're they using?

I don't really care about MLG, at least in the way it is presented today. I'm more interested in inter-server competition, which is a much healthier environment.

It caught my attention the discussion you had about balance. From the looks of it, balance today is attempted by gauging the average player. Balance priorities will change considerably when the measurement of it will become the 0.002% of the population.

There's a "bad gamer" version of that too, that's thrown around a lot here, called the "Scrub". I hate that term due to sheer over-use, but it also applies I confess.

It's possible to go too far and say a certain weapon or playstyle is unfair simply because one falls victim to it too much and demands rule changes specifically to prevent its use. A classic example would be a person demanding sniper rifles be removed from the game outright because the person has no ability to counter them. (some have accused me of this and I have never said to remove sniper rifles entirely).

Yet, as a strange paradox, a lot of self-declared "skilled" players here are also scrubs by the same definition. A lock on missile killed their lolpodder? Lockons must be removed from the game! That sort of thing.

A large part of my problem with MLG as a lobbying force is that it is largely a Stop-Having-Fun-Guys club. I suspect, with good evidence, that a lot of the game's balance will be forcibly changed well outside of the little battle islands they dwell in, just to fit their desires and their perception of what should be allowed.

I never said there should be no easy weapons to use. I understand how ease and fair are not the same. But like you say, it'S not because you balance a no-skill weapon to make it fair that it makes it harder for new players to use it. That's what concepts like skill floor and skill ceiling are used. An easier weapon will have a lower skill ceiling also, so yes they can be useful, but when they get better, they will feel the need of finding a new weapon that is harder to master/use but has a chance of getting better performence.

about your 10% vs 90% things. Like i said in the reply of to the other person discussing with me, the chances of corruption are much lower because there is no money made by helping devs to balance, and there are high skill players for all 3 factions. Also, you could use the same argument to compare K/D or even time played, and you'll realize their K/D or time played favors them as decisive power. 1 player with a KD of 5 and played 2000 hours should have a more relevent opinion than 9 players with 0,4kd and 20 hours of play time each.

They would change considerably, yes, and not for the better. That is because of the subjective differences between what we find fun in games. I want to support the team, help a long push toward a capture objective or help hold a base. A lot of those guys want to farm their K/D ratios and draw attention to how elite they are.

I know there's a "your professional gamer gods know best" meme going around. I don't buy into it.

I strongly disagree with the final assessment you made. Saying "this person automatically has a more valid opinion because of video game abstracts" is the path that League of Legends forums made, among many others, and they are infamously toxic pits of eliteness and personal attacks in place of any discussion at all.

I didn't say this to insult you, i actually said this to explain how the dev themselves will not be able to balance the game themselves

It's not hard to find people with horribly surly, disruptive attitudes on these forums, with the entire variety of middle-school namecalling and personal attacks, complete with profanity filter bypassing tricks. A fair number of these guys do have high K/D ratios and other metrics in their favor.

Are you telling me that their opinions are automatically more valid than average?

No. That's absurd.

You are having a prejudice here. The top players in SC2 or LOL or WW3 are all kind people without any arrogance issues except for few exceptions.

I'm pretty sure that if you look at the stats of those high K/D people with toxic attitude have stats showing they're padding their K/D with unfair means. Also, it's not impossible to exclude blatant ******** from the ''balance team'' i suggested

So you say I'm making broad generalizations and answer with a broad and unfounded generalization that almost patronisingly implies that people with super high game stats and a ton of free time to devote to them are somehow my moral superiors?

Perhaps a few of them are. Or maybe even a lot. But that statement is very unlikely to be true, especially with the riff-raff that I've had to endure in my brief foray into "professional gaming" spectation.

People calling each other "garbage" is an instant red flag for me, for one.

This sort of thing is everyday news, by the way:

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/01/21/t...ends-pros-feel-the-weight-of-riots-banhammer/

And in South Korea, there have even been armed assaults over the outcomes of some of these tournaments.

Cherry-picking your favorites and saying they are ALL upstanding people is a bit hard to believe.

The problem with people with good attitude is that they never get seen. Only the toxic ones stand out. I personally never seen someone with a toxic attitude in SC2 competitive play except 1 single kid playing zerg. I don't remember his name though.

However, even if some people have negative attitude and maturity problems, i believe they can still make smart balance desicion. Attitude =/= knowlege/intelligence/ability of decision making

this is my last reply though, i'm going to sleep.

In addition to your most recent post. I don't want to be mean or anything, but League of Legends is a casual game with a very very very low skill ceiling compared to fps or SC2. I myself got Diamond before the elo changes a long time ago (before i started playing PS2) It's not that hard. Considering this, you don't need to practice hard everyday in order to reach a competitive level, which also means that most of the ''proes'' don't have much discipline.

That's fine. Sleep is important.

I'll let you part with this answer to your post: they CAN make smart balance decisions. I don't trust them as an entire group of people, seperated artifically by game statistics, to make those decisions for the good of all players and not just for aggrandizing themselves.

Simple solution. Make MLG only guns that can only be used for MLG. Now they won't destroy all the other guns to balance for their tiny little battlefield

After reading the forums too long I sometimes forget that this game is made for anyone but the MLG people, the way they push their agenda into so many threads and say this is skilled and that is not skilled and that no one should be allowed to use one weapon or another.

I think a lot of socalled casuals are just afraid of being put down by speaking up here.

this is actually a very good idea and I like it a lot!

Why wasn't this suggested before?

It would solve so many problems! I'm all for it!

I'm dreading the possibility that it's not brought up simply because these guys want to strip diversity utterly out of the weapons altogether until we're all, MLG or not, firing different colored bolts of light and nothing more.

I've never really understood how a game like PS2 lends itself to MLG tbh. I just don't get it - surely there are far more suitable games if you want to join competitions?

Having said that, it really doesn't bother me that it's an option - as long as it takes nothing away from PS2 being what it's meant to be - a MMO with a 'bigger picture'. But it does feel a bit like too much attention is given to stuff like that, whereas I personally wanted a truer Planetside evolution. Not what everyone wants though, I do get that.