Skill curve

(stealth6) #1

So late last night we had a little debate to what skill in games actually is and why old games felt better than new games.

My argument is that newer games are less skillful, because everything is explained and documented. Older games were more skillful since they were just undocumented, there was no guide or sometimes even HUD elements to explain what was going on around you.

Let’s take trickjumping as an example. I think the reason it was so hard to do and considered a hard skill is because there was so little documentation. 1 player would understand how it worked and a hundred would proceed to copy the movements without understanding what was happening.
Nowadays trickjump mods come with cgaz and you can show your speed in the middle of your screen, does this make them less skillful? I think it does and cgaz is often looked down on in the tj community.

So basically new games will never capture the same effect old games had since they need to be accessible for everybody. The only way is by adding “features” into the game and not telling anybody about them (“Moving your mouse up while jumping gives you a slight speed increase”), problem with that is what do you do when people find out? Patch it out?

tl;dr DB will never have the same skill curve as older games, since the reason older games had a higher skill curve was due to lack of accessibility.

(Anti) #2

I really dislike the idea that ‘skill’ in a game comes only from mastering things that have not been made usable, and I’m not even sure that is true. MOBA games and MMOs with good PvP explain everything and there is still a lot of skill involved with them.

Similarly a lot of FPS games that you folks might consider unskilled and accessible actually have a lot of skill involved, they differ from the ‘old school’ games in that the primary skill mechanics are quite different to those in classic FPS games.

To me skill is the mastery of the game’s mechanics, moving your crosshair, moving your character, controlling spread or recoil, manipulating map flow and objectives. If each of these mechanics has a reasonable range of values to them, and if the mechanics all relate and react to each other in different ways, then the depth of the game and the overall skill curve should be long and fun…even if those mechanics are being explained to the player.

(stealth6) #3

[QUOTE=Anti;413465]I really dislike the idea that ‘skill’ in a game comes only from mastering things that have not been made usable, and I’m not even sure that is true. MOBA games and MMOs with good PvP explain everything and there is still a lot of skill involved with them.
[/quote]

I tend to call these knowledge games. The skill is just knowing all the characters and items in the game. It’s in sense a way of increasing the skill curve, but not one I really like. (that’s why I play FPS - KISS :))

[QUOTE=Anti;413465]
Similarly a lot of FPS games that you folks might consider unskilled and accessible actually have a lot of skill involved, they differ from the ‘old school’ games in that the primary skill mechanics are quite different to those in classic FPS games.

To me skill is the mastery of the game’s mechanics, moving your crosshair, moving your character, controlling spread or recoil, manipulating map flow and objectives. If each of these mechanics has a reasonable range of values to them, and if the mechanics all relate and react to each other in different ways, then the depth of the game and the overall skill curve should be long and fun…even if those mechanics are being explained to the player.[/QUOTE]

Could you give an example of such an FPS title?
I agree that skill is what you describe, I was trying to pinpoint the difference between games though since most games have these factors, what makes one more fun than the other.

(DarkangelUK) #4

I think the cgaz HUD is a poor example, it was looked down by the TJ community when it came to pro vs pro racing through a defrag map and shaving 100th’s of a second off the time. Even so, having it show you where to put your mouse for the optimum angle meant to you could get a decent speed in a straight line and that was about it. There were many threads and video tutorials on strafe jumping, dedicated websites and also practice servers with people willing to help. There was a massive amount of info on Q3 tricking in its hayday yet the skill curve was and still is incredibly high.

I’m not in agreement that its lack info that makes something skillfull, it’s the varying degree of success and gain you can derive from an activity that measures skill imo. Everyone can shoot a gun in the general direction of the enemy, there are varying degrees of how well you can hit the head while doing this from person to person, the more skillfull the player the more headshots they’ll get. I’d argue that modern games with aim assist are shortening that skill gap. Same comes with situational awareness and the ability to predict the enemy. Pre-empting how the enemy are going to react to the current situation and adapting to suit is a skill, again to varying degrees of success and gain.

(tokamak) #5

What I dislike is that everything a player can do is documented, institutionalised and accounted for. To stick with the MMO stuff, what’s so jading about dungeon content is that the bosses all require figuring out complicated plans that have been conceived by the developers rather than the gamers themselves.

Not including the knowledge on how to crack the puzzle is not the solution. Blizzard doesn’t give a step by step guide on how to beat the boss but before the patch goes life the most hardcore guilds have cracked it and what’s left is teams having to replicate that. Basically all the fun intended for millions of players goes to a handful of clever dudes on the test servers.

Same for DB, anything that SD doesn’t provide will be give by fan-made wikis (an official wiki for DB is something to put on the agenda btw).

Instead you want gameplay that is so divergent that there’s no way any developer can ever know all the possible scenarios that can happen. ET was perfect in this regard. It was a directed scenario set in a sandbox. The goal was clear and absolute but how to reach it was completely up to the player. All SD did was supply enough fun toys to create imaginative and sometimes downright insane ploys with.

An example would be Fuel Dump where players found out that rather than using the mortar’s indirect arc of fire, they could also use it to fire mortar shells directly into the Axis fortress windows, completely obliterating entire spawns of enemies. Hard to execute but incredibly rewarding once done right.

DB currently doesn’t have the map geometry or the funky tools that are required for this kind of gameplay and that’s that ‘ET essence’ I sorely miss in the game.

@Stealth6: Without putting words in your mouth, this is what I sort of think you were trying to say because it’s been a prevalent sentiment in many discussions we had on the forums. You don´t want preconceived content period. Whether it´s hidden or not. You want content that players can invent themselves.

(zenstar) #6

Accessibility doesn’t replace skill.

Explaining how to perform a trick-jump is not the same as having a trick-jump button. I think this is what annoyed a lot of people with the SMART button.
I don’t want to be more “skillful” than someone because they don’t know how to play. I want to be more skillful because I have more skill. Likewise I don’t want to be beaten by someone because they know some secret that I don’t.

(Anti) #7

[QUOTE=stealth6;413466]
Could you give an example of such an FPS title?
I agree that skill is what you describe, I was trying to pinpoint the difference between games though since most games have these factors, what makes one more fun than the other.[/QUOTE]

I prefer not to talk about specific titles beyond our own, don’t want to say something that gets misunderstood and looks like I’m badmouthing somebodies hard work :slight_smile:

I’d agree with you that those mechanics are the ones behind skill in all FPS games, the only difference is how much value each of those games gives to individual mechanics, in some fluid movement and high accuracy are the main skills, in others is positioning, or use of grenades, or use of melee etc. Technically neither of these makes a game more fun than any other, that’s just down to the personal taste of the player :slight_smile:

(murka) #8

Like i said last night, you can’t learn trickjumping in a day or even a week, even with cgaz. Back in the day people were helping on servers, describing how to do it and whatnot, but people couldn’t get it in a blink of an eye. I even tried to teach a friend at one lanparty, but that took ages. I gave him the basic set of stuff he needs to know, frequent feedback on mouse movement, but it does take too much practice and barely makes a difference if you give that feedback or not as it’s already in the game. Also the reason why i don’t use cgaz is that the feedback is already in the 3d view and it will just make it harder because i have to focus on the game AND a 2d hud element at the same time.

You can maximize speed on a straight gamma with cgaz, but really how many jumps do you know that allow you such freedom. Jumps usually have a varying height difference between platforms, some platforms are very small and you need to know beforehand how to curve your path, etc. You can not forget all the small details. Every little thing can either make or break your jump. Just recently i found that my sitting position in the chair is vital for a good jump.

There is a reason why jumping isn’t that common in matches either. You can be very good at jumps, but there is a risk factor because you can fail or you just panic or aren’t concentrated enough to make it. There are a lot more variables to skillful elements which remain constant most of the time, but if you assume so and something changes, you fail.

(ailmanki) #9

//youtu.be/W1ZtBCpo0eU

The longer a game exists, the better some players are. So the skills of each will vary, I guess the common approach is to nerf the game to the point, where the difference does not matter much. Counting kills seems to be the most simplest form I guess, but there should be many more advanced methods.

(INF3RN0) #10

Skill in a game is measured by the difficulty in achieving consistency among players. Although every game requires some amount of skill, it is much more rewarding to master multiple learning curves in game mechanics that effectively create large skill gaps. Old school vs new games comes down to removing almost all the required practice/learning and instead making everything more accessible to the general populace. LoL is a less complex game in comparison to Dota for example, and is in fact viewed as being much less skillful for that reason. It is successful due to its match making system and ability to be played regardless of skill. This is where the misconception comes from, as a game does not necessarily have to try and put everyone on an equal playing field by shortening the curve- but really just has to make newbies feel comfortable by allowing them to slowly boost their abilities through gradual progression.

(ailmanki) #11

[video]http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/6492-Medal-of-Honor-Warfighter-Doom-3-BFG-Edition[/video]

make it a shooter please :smiley:

(warbie) #12

[QUOTE=ailmanki;414896][video]http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/6492-Medal-of-Honor-Warfighter-Doom-3-BFG-Edition[/video]

make it a shooter please :D[/QUOTE]

That was great :slight_smile:

(tokamak) #13

This is what W:ET did great. I was a huge noob and wasn’t aware of the scope of the game but simply following the other guys and shooting at the nazis was straight forward.

(kamikazee) #14

And how’s that different from DB? The only problem seems to be quick deaths and low spawntimes meaning half your team ran off without you.

(tokamak) #15

DB’s combat situations are far less understandable. In W:ET you could exactly see what your opponents and your team-mates are doing.