MLG: Not interested. Not even as a spectator.

You're a shining example of every negative stereotype that people have about MLG and its fans and participants.

With that being said, if you want to put more passive-aggressive smilies in your attempt at a last word game, do so. Otherwise I'm waiting for a more intelligent and mature response.

That's that scary sharp wit. The thing that hit me hardest was confirming to negative MLG-stereotypes, especially when I'm not a MLG fan.

I can not match those crazy smarts

And so sorry I can't provide a satisfying level of discourse for your flamebait thread.

I'm confused by what you mean with this. Are you saying that there needs to be skill limiters so the new players aren't subjected to getting beaten down by higher level players?

I can see one way this might work. Maybe.

Leave the "no skill" weapons exactly where they are. If the "skilled" are so "skilled" then they are an equalizer of sorts. If someone can bunnyhop around hipfiring with with a battle rifle at point blank range then he's all but asking for a grenade from the guy 30 meters away.

Okay, so you want to water down the game...that's an interesting point of view.

Since you're strawmanning me and telling me what I want, I can do the same and show you how absurd it is.

Okay, so you want everyone to have one weapon only that takes lots of skill and is probably a sniper rifle. Everyone should have sniper rifles and only sniper rifles. Oh, maybe a pistol but that might take some careful balancing.

Not true? Well, how does it feel?

You seem to enjoy using the term strawman.

What I want is for the individual's skill and experience to determine that player's success. I don't want a new player to be given tools that circumvent skill and experience in exchange to hopefully ease them into the game to the point they can graduate to using skill based weapons. It concerns me that there's an apparent trend to mitigate skill under the guise of "leveling the play field".

I don't enjoy it so much as I see the tactic being used quite a bit. Unless you can find a quote from me saying "water down this game" you are creating opinions of mine that do not exist.

Your favorite word seems to be "skill". It's well and good to prefer weapons that require "skill" as you put it, but demanding that only those weapons be used, applied, or even exist is just petty and selfish.

So much for watering down. I see more richness in the game if there's many weapons, even if not all of them require the exact same motor memory and twitch practice as a sniper rifle. AKA, some are "not skilled".

It seems to "water down" the game a lot more when there's only one or two allowed weapons. That was the exact problem with ShootMania, for example: it was so "skill" obsessed that it lacked variety or tactical choices and was so dull that it faded into obscurity and early.

As a fan of competitive Planetside (both Community Clash and MLG) I fully support lockons. The "lobby" you're talking about is the "I'm uber-pro and want the skill ceiling for everything to be sky high, so I can dominate n00bs" group. Some of those are competitive players, but frankly most are not.

Competitive Planetside isn't hurting public Planetside in any way. The Nexus which will be used for competition will also be used for continental links on public servers. Observer tools designed for competition will also be useful for "outfit spotlights" and showing off public play.

At the worst, you should see competitive Planetside the way you might see Planetside on PS4. It won't directly interact with you, but the added publicity might bring some additional people into the game, spurring further development and higher populations.

I assumed from the very beginning that MLG wouldn't pan out in this game, and so far, my assumption has been correct. The casters aren't exactly good, to put it nicely, and the battles in the game just aren't that fun to watch, especially with the horrid inbalance in a lot of the current available weapons, and limited base design that doesn't match the scale of the game.

I'll take reading AARs any day. At least with those, I can briefly convince myself that the game is still alive and without any significant immersion-breaking issues.

Thank you for posting. Even if I don't share your interests in this game, you're still a breath of fresh air here.

The added publicity so far has been negative, unfortunately. The Jax guy talking about "wreckin kidz" and congratulating people for farming a warpgate was a turn-off for a number of people on other sites, including some of my own real-life friends who I have been trying to carefully persuade into playing this game. "I saw this thing the other night, and it looks like this game is full of obnoxious kiddies. I'll pass".

I'm not calling all competitive players obnoxious, though there is a cultural leaning here, even expressed by people in this thread such as the "one time dis guy stole a GF in tournament lol u jelly " crap a page ago. I suppose it's like how professional football has extraordinarily stupid and obnoxious fans, like the kind that start riots after games.

I'm not entirely sold on the Nexus being a good thing, and assume I'll never really get to play in it anyway, with the preordained way it lets people in. I tolerate and learn to accept things that are not my thing, all the same.

Wish I could say the same about some other people.

That has less to do with MLG, and more to do with FPS players in general.

The nexus/battle islands are going to be gameplay features when the appropriate content is added. You'll probably be forced to play on them eventually, if the developers get around to continent locking any time soon. Check the continent locking roadmap thread. They were in planetside 1, and from what I've read here, they were well received, so in theory, they should work well here.

Once again, nothing man-made is perfect. There will always be cheaters, people who only care about themselves, and people why try to abuse systems. I'm not promising you anything, i'm expressing my opinion that if you let the most skilled players (mlg or not) balance the game, it will be more fair than giving them as low weight as the casual players or players with no interest of improving themselves.

Not alot of people have the will to make themselves work hundreds if not thousands of hours to reach competitive levels. Also, people who only want to win no matter which means it takes, are not competitive players, they are greedy (attracted by a prize or a reward and not attracted by competition). People cheating in MLG or abusing unbalanced combinations or mechanics are not skilled players in my book.

Someone with high skill can use weapons to their full potential, and can easily judge if something is unfairly strong or weak.

WTF is MLG?

I disagree. It has a lot to do with a group of gamers who are self-professed professionals and demand skill for everything skill skill skill and everything must take doing headstands while getting your feet tickled to shoot it.

It's all about shutting things out and making country clubs out of game communities, like what happened to League of Legends and its forum, which was originally marketed as the "new player friendly" version of DOTA.

Yeah, if you want to get into a semantics debate, I don't have much interest.

Watering down refers to decreasing the viability of a player with superior skill in order to increase the viability of a player with inferior skill, which was my question posed in my original post. You indicated you could see that working, hence my following statement. I'm not talking about giving people a sniper rifle and he who headshots wins.

Luckily, there are relatively few things in PS2 that I consider under this category, in my opinion. But I'm not going to support giving people easier ways to kill skilled players because I'm afraid they might quit the game.

There's that trickle-down theory again.

I'm not saying that the self-declared elite can't have good opinions on game balance. Far from it. What I am saying is that a knee-jerk statement/declaration of "this guy has these statistics his opinion is automatically better than yours" is going too far.

The obnoxious people that won the most recent Nexus events? I'd rather not have their idea of "balance" which apparently believes warpgate camping and farming is awesome and skilled and A-OK and nothing needs to be fixed there.

I would quite like to watch organised, well produced, competitive play - I find it is always interesting to watch skilled individuals at work regardless of if its a game, or some other human pursuit. Even more so if there are skilled commentators with a good overall understanding of the people and tactics being employed. I've not really watched any MLG stuff, so can't comment on how good or otherwise their commentators are in this regard.

I also think that balancing weapons so that there is a reward for skilled use benefits both non-competitive and competitive players. This needs be be balanced by giving people with zero FPS experience, or those coming in from a long absence, ease of use weapons that reduce the cognitive load that comes from a new game, with multiple objectives, base layouts, and interacting systems. For example: a number of people believe that the NC6 Gauss Saw is not ideal as the default heavy assault LMG as it is less forgiving than some of the other NC LMGs.

It could certainly go too far - but if SOE want the entire thing to be successful, they need to take care of the general player base first. In much the same way as professional sports are successful because of the host of individuals that partake in the activity for fun. While I wouldn't be interested in playing competitively, I would be interested in "business house" (read: social) style competitions. Something along the lines of a couple of grading matches to get similarly skilled teams in the same competition and then some round robin matches over a set period of time. Could be (and probably should be) completely separate from the MLG stuff.

It will be interesting to see how the nexus/battle islands play out. I have great hopes that the lessons learned from Indar, Esamir, Hossin, and Amerish, combined with the MLG influence will mean that they become very well laid out combat zones.