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Why Online Gaming Isn't As Fun As It Should Be
Thanks to GameSpot for their 'GameSpotting' editorial discussing why online gaming can often be more frustrating than fun. The columnist finds two main reasons for frustration - firstly: "I don't like getting trounced by someone who is either flat-out, hands-down better at a game than I am or has simply invested many more hours in getting good at the game than I have." He also has issues with impolite players: "I think online gaming brings out some really despicable behavior in people, which I don't particularly mind but that I certainly don't like." Some possible solutions are mentioned, such as "effective player-matching services", but what can and should be done to make playing online a delight?
That's ok I like them too and always read all the Gamespotting columns. Check out Alex Navaro's column this week...he is just learning the ways of Microsoft it seems.
But I trendily digress, the article is very true. I picked up Unreal Tournament back in early 2000 and it was my first foray in the online world. It was fun being a newbie playing on Heat.net but soon that went belly up and I had to switch to the in-game server browser. Boy was I in for a surprise with the raw talent at playing UT those guys had! You would think playing everyday for hours on end for many years and you might be able to compete.
Nope. After playing for 3 years I finally gave the game up because I still couldn't compete with the 'elite' guys. Those guys are so insane and rightly called freaks.
Well, you're always going to have jerks, whether online or in real life - there isn't much you can do about that except find a group of polite people with whom you have a good game. Hopefully that group of people will also have a comparable level of play and one won't get trounced by the opposition. If they are much better hopefully they'll teach you a trick or two and help you improve your game. Those people may be few and far between, but they're out there.
Futher, if the main point of playing is merely to enjoy the game, does it really matter if you occasionally run into people who are very good at the game? One can't win every time they play, can they? And if everybody is beating you then maybe you just need to practice more. To me the point of playing online is for the comraderie and the competition - the competition adds another level of excitement to the game. It's fun when I do well and when I don't do well it compels me to try harder.
By "you" I mean you in the general sense.
2. Every game needs to have anti-cheating devices that are updated regularly. This not only helps stop cheating, but shuts people up who think they're really good, get their butts kicked and then accuse others of cheating.
3. Easy muting. Many of us have little to no interest in seeing strings of expletives rendered in leetspeak OR plain English. It should take no more than two keystrokes to set someone to /ignore.
3.5. Easy kicking. It should be easy in any game to vote someone off the server, and said vote should result in at least a two-hour ban on that IP returning to the game.
4. Display of average ping rates at server select. In other words, if I'm pinging a game at 80 ms, I'd rather not go into a game where the average ping of the players is 300 or 10. There could even be a feature (server-optional) that only allows people to join whose pings are within a certain percentage of the current average. While I'm sure there are some people who enjoy being the LPB, others get bored if the game's design allows that person to more easily dominate.
Those are the top 4-1/2 off the top of my head.
(Today I lost 1/2 my credits in Vendetta attempting to get to hidden sector 18.)
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I used to play games online on a regular basis, starting with QuakeWorld. Hell, I remember when GameSpy was JUST for Quake. Now I'll rarely play anything online if it's not a game with ONLY friends.
Back then, it was FUN. A little less fun when you lost, but then, losing BADLY in the team-based mods (mostly Team Fortress, for me) wasn't TERRIBLY common, because people would even up the teams either on their own, or with only a little bit of prodding. Even when you DID lose, the winner was usually very gracious about it. The amount of trash talking was generally pretty low. A little bit of boasting and bragging at times, but not with every kill, or even every win.... and almost no cheating accusations.
The same could be said of Half-Life at first. It wasn't until CounterStrike became huge that things REALLY started to go down hill.
As for strategy games, the last time I seriously played any of them online with the public at large (and not just with friends) was the early days of Starcraft, before everyone stopped playing any map that wasn't either "Big Game Hunters" or one of it's variants.
Warcraft 3 does a pretty good job with skill matching (my record is somewhere around 60% wins, and unless you're at the very top or very bottom of the rankings should level out around 50% for each ideally), but the trash talking and insults are still FAR too prevalent for it to be enjoyable.
Skill matching like in Warcraft 3 can work for some, but not all games, but until there's a consistant and reliable way to keep the level of trash talking morons out of the game (don't say server admins - they can't be there ALL the time, and with many games can't monitor everything) online gaming will just keep getting worse and worse.
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
The first online game I played was Doom (with a hack called, I think, Doomgate). It was amazing to us at the time. Can you imagine - playing online with people in other countries!
It was a special experience, and those that played treated it with respect. Some of the first custom maps people made for Doom online play had built-in "typing rooms". If you wanted to talk to your opponents, you popped in there. The walls had a custom texture that said something like "TYPING ROOM - NO KILL ZONE", and it was considered cheating if you hurt anyone in there.
I picture the first propeller-driven biplane aircraft pilots waving at each other in a gentlemanly fashion - when they only dropped bombs on enemy troops, before they strapped a machinegun on the front and started shooting at each other.
For me, online play has gone horribly wrong since then. The floodgates opened, the masses want a jet-fighter with guided nuclear missiles to smash into the bleeding skulls of their enemies. Death-In-A-Box, internet play assumed. Sign Up And Kill Shit. If you're not typing to taunt, go play on IRC. I hate it. I can't play Quake3, Unreal Tournament or Battlefield 1942 online anymore.
Planetside is the closest yet in getting back to that early sensation of getting to know the people I was playing with. Unfortunately it's also a complete failure due to the masses of bugs, faction inbalance (should have 2 sides, not 3), broken rewards system (there's no incentive to defend). There's also a tremendous difficulty in finding other players due to Star Wars Galaxies sucking out the population (and I'm not following them because I prefer my games to not be turn-based, thanks).
Here's hoping that someone at id Software has played Planetside, finds inspiration, can see the problems - and decides they want to blow them out of the water.
if the only people you play against are approximately equal in skill level with you, how are any of you going to ever get better?
Pet peeve: people who think that the amount of fun you have in a game must be directly proportional to how good you are at the game. Why should I have to devote myself to getting better at a game in order to have fun?
I'm a moderately good chess player. I enjoy playing chess. It's fun. I could be a hell of a lot better if I were to take the game more seriously, but I want the game to be fun, not a job.
I'm a poor Q3 player. But I enjoy playing regardless, even if I usually do wind up in the lower half of the scores at local LANfests.
Nobody should have to get better at a game as a prerequisite for having fun.
Period.
And people who don't understand this simply don't understand the most important thing about game design. Namely--it's not whether you win or lose, or how skilled or unskilled you are. It's about fun. Everything else is just candy.
This guy needs to grow a backbone; if he wants a game where completely new players have a fair shot against experienced ones, he should go into the alley behind where he works and shoot dice. Games of skill and strategy are always going to reward those who have spent more time studying the game. A ranking system works nicely when communities are small and individuals know one another, but in the largely anonymous online communities that form around your average game, the ranking system breaks down as griefers enter the system.
A prime example of griefing in this fashion is the latest batch of RTS's: C&C Generals and Warcraft 3. Both games have a tiering system, and both systems are liberally abused by individuals who prop up their egos by tearing down the newbies. Just sit down, find a game you won't get sick of in a month, and play.
My personal recommendation for this is Go. Simple rules, simple play, a polite online community and nobody's marketing department is promoting it.
Weapons of Mass Analysis
You'd think this same spirit of competition would draw me right into competitive online games like Counter-Strike or Warcraft III. And, to some extent, it does. But for all the hours I've spent playing shooters and real-time strategy games over the years, and despite how authoritative I try to be about these types of games, I know full well that I'm simply nowhere near as good at them as a lot of people are out there. It would be easy for me to make excuses about how I don't have as much time as some people to play Counter-Strike for eight hours a day, or whatever. But I'll admit it straight-up: Even if I did do nothing but play Counter-Strike (or insert_game_here), I'm quite sure I'd never have the skills to be considered a truly competitive player. Which is fine.
This isn't so much a problem with online games as it is with the types of games that are played online. Awhile ago I used to play Garou: Mark of the Wolves, a fighting game for the NeoGeo, on MAME w/Kaillera online. Yeah, I got my ass kicked a lot, but in about a month I was as good as most of the better players on the servers from North America, Europe, and Asia. They kicked my ass, but I learned from the ass kicking that I got. When some guy started really stomping on me with Hotaru Futaba, I picked Hotaru and kept playing against him until I knew the character roughly as well as he did, and my next opponent got royally stomped by my Hotaru.
Warcraft III does not play like this. Warcraft III obscures what the enemy is doing, encourages absolute silence aside from "gl hf" and "gg", and only shows you the absolute crux of the enemy's larger strategy. The only way to learn the game is to either observe games, watch replays, or spend hours being taught by someone. In other words, the absolute WORST way to learn the game is by actually playing it. That's the worst type of online game for anyone but dedicated fans of the genre, but it seems to be the prevailing trend in online games. Counter-Strike, Tribes, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein work pretty much the same way. When someone shoots you in the head from two hundred feet away, you haven't learned anything. You've gotten your ass kicked, but haven't learned from it, and that means you will probably get your ass kicked again in the same way a couple minutes from now because you don't understand the mechanics of your ass-kicking. Again, the game encourages learning the tricks of the game by reading websites and FAQs, observing games, etcetera... everything but playing the game.
These styles of play are completely contrary to the refined genres of multiplayer arcade games. Arcades have fighting games that let you learn from your opponent and dancing games that allow you to see your opponent's physical technique as he kicks your ass, but explicitly restricts games like light gun shooters and four player brawlers (like TMNT or X-Men) to cooperative human vs. computer play. This is because they simply realized that everything that can be multiplayer should be, but that not every type of game is cut out for it. The PC industry hasn't really caught onto that yet, but you can't really blame them when most of the games that are really conducive to competitive multiplayer would require peripherals like gamepads, dance pads, and other things that guarantee that you won't sell more than five copies of your PC game.
I don't understand his point about people acting like assholes online, though. If some thirteen year old typing "0WN3D!!!!!" in Counter-Strike really bothers you that much, I suggest that you find a cave in the woods to hide in, because someone honking their horn at you on the freeway just might give you a heart attack. It's true that there's a certain detachment from natural social behavior when you're online, but for most of us it works both ways. Someone mocking you online isn't like a real person standing next to you harassing you. It's just background noise. It's no different than the sound of cars and people passing by as you play a game of basketball outside. There
The most important thing, however, is to find a handfull of servers and stick with them. Back in the Quake 1 days, there was a server called quake.nye.net that ran a DeathMatch + Mod that added a whole bunch of crazy things to the game like grappling hooks and homing missles. However, I stuck around, and I soon came to be friends with a lot of the other server regulars, such as people from the DMPC clan (I stil don't know how BattleCruiser got so good...), and almost every time I joined that server, I knew I was in for a good time. (And by the way, my nickname was KiLlJoY, if anyone was on that server too).
Most in game server browsers have a favorites list. Gamespy does too. Shop around, and find a server that contians people that you like playing with. Then hang onto that server for dear life. Your online experience will get much better if you become a regular at a server.
Also, Xbox Live has a number of awesome features that can halp you weed out the bad players. When you first get the game, shop around on different servers. Once you find a game that you enjoy playing in, send friend requests to all the cool and kickass players that you have fun playing with (since servers are rarely around for more than a few hours at a time), and whenever you see them online, join them or invite them. The friends list is a gift from god, and in my opinion is one of the best features of Xbox Live.
Hopefully, my few rambling paragraphs has some insight. May your games be happier and more fun.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion