I think one major cause of the decline of arena shooters is those who are very good can expect to never die versus new players, causing a very high Dropout rate. In Battle Royales like Fortnite where a player will eventually get the drop on a better player thanks to the element of surprise, picking off two players already fighting, or better gear.
Titanfall 2 is a somewhat recent example of a way to balance around this, with the more fun to use guns (Kraber, Cold War, Mozambique) but less effective than a hitscan bullet hose like the CAR. This video is a good example of what I mean, giving good players something to do other than racking up kills with meta weapons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5szruNvGT5c
Double Action: Boogaloo, an action movie themed source mod, takes this a step further with score being earned based largely on the weapon being used, which makes running around punching people more effective than say sitting in a corner with a powerful weapon.
one major cause of the decline of arena shooters is those who are very good can expect to never die versus new players, causing a very high Dropout rate
I remember there was an interesting twist on this when, IIRC, Fortnite changed its matching algorithm to more likely place better players together with each other.
A bunch of those players were frustrate-to-outraged over the change. The reason that at least some gave? They were losing too much, and sometimes they don't want all the high adrenaline & stress of competitive matches and just want to relax and have it easy. (Yes, I know there have been more issues and complaints about the details of SBMM in Fortnite, this is just one of them)
It struck me as a uniquely selfish view, as though the entire ecosystem should be structured to their own enjoyment rather than that of typical players. Like if Gary Kasporov wanted to play in the local High School chess leagues and threw a fit when he was told he couldn't.
It's a videogame. It should be structured for enjoyment. If you're not enjoying it, why are you spending your time playing?
There's a whole problem around "people want to beat other actual humans", but in 1:1 competitive games, the average winrate is tautologically always 50%. In Battle Royale, the average winrate is more like 5% - But it's unevenly distributed, so some players are getting 20-30% winrates while others are getting 1%. The game is fun enough to play that people are willing to take 1% winrates, but at some level you want to win - That's where the real fun is. If you never win, the game is not fun. If you win occasionally, against skilled opponents, it feels like a great victory. If you win often, it's relaxing.
(There exist some exceptions to "average winrate" - Asymetric games can have a per-player average winrate above 1, though can just as easily drop below - Dead By Daylight, for example, lists 1.5B "escapes" to 1.8B "sacrifices"[1] - Did the survivor "win" when they escaped? or did the killer "win" when they killed a player? It might make more sense to view it as a set of 1:1s, since each survivor might escape individually, at which case we're back to square 1)
Creating ways for multiple players to win in one given match seems like it could be a way to balance out this issue. For example my team winning, top scoring, having the highest number of kills, the highest KD, scoring the most meta-XP or completing an achievement could all be different win conditions for different players. For example in Team Fortress 2 my team could lose and I could be bottom of the scoreboard and still feel like I won after getting a couple market gardener kills.
Yes, you're right that it's selfish, but that's also fundamental to competition. Winners take the glory that losers don't get. People enjoy winning more than hard work. So do groups of people: sports teams, governments, LLCs, etc.
Gamers often abuse the matchmaking systems to get this result themselves. They make "smurf" accounts in the competitive games they like, underrated for their skill level either from being new accounts or by intentional losing, because it let's them bully less skilled players and avoid being bullied themselves.
I believe there was similar complaints over SBMM in CoD Cold War. I'm mildly sympathetic to the view as playing players of different skill levels can be fun in some some situations, like learning tricks from better players or having a underdog comeback against a better team. Not quite the same highs or lows, if that makes sense. Some implementations seem more like they wind up targeting a 50/50 win rate, resulting in games that seem like the system expects them to be a loss. Overwatch felt closer to this for me.
Overall I think the best solution is probably the old fashioned dedicated server, where people can find a group with a roughly similar playstyle and skill level, but still enough variety to not be overly same-ey per game. I have fond memories of going up against and cursing better server regulars, and then having it flipped around when on their team.
I like the movement in Titanfall 2 a lot. It feels like an evolution of the wall-jumping in UT2k4.
I definitely believe that there's a high dropout rate for areas shooters. My experience was dying a lot until I got better - kind of like Dark Souls for multiplayer. But I'm still surprised that they're not popular anymore given how well single player Dark Souls sells.
Idunno I feel like most of the arena games did a decent job of holding your hand and providing a single player campaign that is good enough to level up skills with a bit. Also back in the day there were a lot more LAN parties, and with the dominance of server browsers it was easier to get into a community that was at a suitable skill level.
But that does mirror my experience with newer games... the matchmaker usually isn't very good and I'm always put into games with players greatly better than me until I git gud.
In Dark Souls, other than a couple bosses which require playing reasonably well the whole way through, most enemies only have a couple gimmicks. You die to that gimmick once, go recover your souls, and then beat the enemy. There's a concrete sense of progress. Humans more likely have a pretty big bag of tricks, or just better fundamentals and map knowledge. I mean over the course of a game in an arena shooter, you'd probably just get incrementally better, right? It is unlikely that the top scorer of the leaderboard only had a couple gimmicks that you have to figure out and then win, haha.
> one major cause of the decline of arena shooters is those who are very good can expect to never die versus new players
Keeping track of MMR/ELO and trying to match players against others of similar skill is online matchmaking 100 (not even 101). What reason could a game possibly have to not implement it, except for possibly "lack of resources" (e.g. someone's indie project)?
It's probably worth tracking and considering as a metric for matchmaking, but a couple potential downsides could be lowering the player pool where other parameters like latency have to be expanded, it having the potential for reverse boosting/smurfing in order to grantee stomping worse players, and at least some people not finding it enjoyable depending on implementation/complaining about "forced" 50:50 winrates.[1][2] Not to say it's necessarily worse than the alternative, but there's at least some discontent with at least some of the implementations.
Overwatch for example doesn't seem to try and fill in say 6 players of a range of 2500-2600 ELO, but will pull something like 2 higher ELO player and 4 low ELO players, partially due to there only being so many higher than average players to matchmake.[3] "Good" players get "bad" players to bring down their winrate and "bad" players get "good" players to bring theirs up. This miss-match might contribute to why some people become so toxic, especially when having fun relies on your teammates so heavily and everyone wants to be the DPS.
Also personally I enjoy playing against better players (within reason) in order to improve my own gameplay via imitation.
Titanfall 2 is a somewhat recent example of a way to balance around this, with the more fun to use guns (Kraber, Cold War, Mozambique) but less effective than a hitscan bullet hose like the CAR. This video is a good example of what I mean, giving good players something to do other than racking up kills with meta weapons. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5szruNvGT5c
Double Action: Boogaloo, an action movie themed source mod, takes this a step further with score being earned based largely on the weapon being used, which makes running around punching people more effective than say sitting in a corner with a powerful weapon.