MOBA toxicity is a design problem. These players are like this because these games are like this.
If good players wading in among the noobs is such a huge problem, what have you done in the last twenty years to make it stop being a problem? Stopping it from happening is a naive band-aid. A kneejerk response to the symptoms of systemic issues. This game has one hundred and twenty-four characters. Don’t tell me the devs are unfamiliar with tweaking complex systems for macro-scale results. Low-skill games are where you’d expect handicaps or dynamic difficulty applied to all the numbers on either team. An e-sports demigod and a fresh player using DK bongos should be made similarly effective. If that disconnect between action and results frustrates the guy pushing 400 APM… good.
If you need a whole-ass reputation system just to identify people who play badly on purpose, why the fuck do you allow bad play to matter so much? Maybe lashing strangers together for an hour, when half of them will lose, is a potent source of bitter feelings. Maybe a game that punishes people for leaving when they feel bad isn’t a recipe for positivity! But hey, at least they can keep their head down and mind their business, oops nevermind it’s all interdependent teamwork. Well at least four good teammates can make up for one bastard… oh, did you never fix “feeding?”
Whoops.
Fuck all of this.
Rubber banding shit to make skill mismatches still competitive is a dogshit excuse for game design that completely and utterly destroys the integrity of competition.
Evenly-matched teams won’t need any.
We are not talking about evenly-matched teams. The integrity of dirt-tier matches is ruined by pros on fresh accounts. People so infatuated with a child’s view of “competition” that nothing matters besides winning. Teamwork? Sportsmanship? Fun? Fuck that, just win win win win win win win.
Skill-based matchmaking is already a judgement call for how well you’re supposed to do. And each long-ass match is rife with ways to judge how well a player is doing - moment to moment - relative to their teammates, their situation, and their character. Measuring and rewarding individual skill is possible even if your team gets utterly destroyed. Or carried by one cheating bastard.
Games can be fun to play for reasons besides ‘did you win.’ Success and growth can be about more than ‘don’t lose.’ This is a game that takes ten people forty-five minutes to play. Reducing it to a binary outcome, as if that’s the only metric for “the integrity of competition,” is the root problem.
Games can be fun to play for reasons besides ‘did you win.’
They’re fun when they’re fair. They’re not fun when they’re not fair. Losing fairly is part of the experience. Losing unfairly isn’t. Winning unfairly isn’t.
Rubber banding isn’t unconditionally horse shit game design in every context because of the end result. It’s because it fundamentally breaks the mechanics of the game. A high skill ceiling isn’t a design flaw. It’s the entire purpose of the game.
Smurfed games aren’t fair.
Fair games won’t be affected. Evenly-matched teams do not need this.
Anything can become a flaw when it causes awful results. Every system is perfectly designed to produce its observed outcomes. MOBAs are all toxic as fuck - that’s no accident. The choices shared by these games, cause the problems shared by these games.
These are systemic problems. They cannot be solved by attacking the symptoms. You have to address the cause.
If you could magically identify smurfs, you could just put them at the level they should be or ban them without putting them in a match. There’s no such thing as rubber banding that only affects cheating.
A meaningful skill gap resulting in a rout is the whole point of a competitive game. It’s the definition of a competitive game. It’s why people are playing. Go play a casual game with a low skill ceiling it that’s what you want to play. Don’t play a game with a high one then demand that they break it.
There is no possible scenario where rubber banding can ever be better than dogshit game design. The core concept is incompatible with sound mechanics. The person playing better is supposed to get better results.
If you could magically identify smurfs, you could just put them at the level they should be or ban them without putting them in a match
That’s what league does. If it detects early on that you’re probably a smurf, you get tossed into smurf queue where you’ll face other experienced players, and it’s pretty reliable. Both times I’ve made new accounts, I’ve almost immediately gotten placed with experienced players, usually before the account graduates beyond bot games
An e-sports demigod and a fresh player using DK bongos should be made similarly effective.
So the distance between the skill floor and skill ceiling of every game should be zero? Ought we have fun by playing Chutes and Ladders and nothing else?
Sounds like you just hate the idea of competitive games
I’ve seen “competitive” games turn level-headed friends into seething piles of swears. They aren’t having fun, they admit to not having fun, they acknowledge that they hate it… But they keep going because ranks, clout, commitment…
Games should have stakes, but modern ranking systems are designed to addict the exact same way that loot-boxes and other similar mechanics do. They hook and pull in deeper and the only way I’ve seen friends quit is when it gets so bad they go cold turkey. And only then do they look back at months or even years of playing a game, and see nothing but a waste of time and money.
But it works! These systems pull players into the grind like they’re getting paid to play, even when they are hating every second.
I love some of these games, but I only learned to maximise my enjoyment of them once I began playing them casually. And it’s such a pity that my friends who haven’t learned the trick of not taking it so seriously, burn out on them, while I just keep going and having fun. I run out of people to play with on a regular basis because of this.
Just one factor of the design of these systems is that they have you feeling like you have to consistently win, in order to be worth something. And as that is obviously an impossibility, it leads to every loss taking three times more than what a win is able to give.
I mean yeah, there are always going to be people with problems. But the guy I was responding to was leveling complaints like “playing badly shouldn’t impact the outcome”, “it’s bad that a team loses”, and “people should be free to afk whenever”. Like at that point, just play different games, these aren’t your cup of tea.
And for what it’s worth, I personally quite like the stricter competitive nature of many games. I like playing ranked games where everyone is solidly playing to win and competing on skill. Just because some people have a ego problem because of ranks, it doesn’t mean the system should be scrapped.
I love some of these games, but I only learned to maximise my enjoyment of them once I began playing them casually. And its such a pity that my friends who haven’t learned the trick of not taking it so seriously,
There’s a pretty wide gap between playing casually, and grinding to the point of burnout. It’s plenty possible to take the game seriously, such that you care about doing your best and continually improving, without just dedicating your entire life to the grind.
I don’t think the majority of people find that balance. And I think ranking systems are designed to exploit that. Who doesn’t want to boast that people play their game the most? And wouldn’t more playtime also lead to players to spending more?
I’m not agreeing with everything the original comment said, but the idea that we should be designing games to at least not make it worse, is something I resonate with.
I don’t think they hate competitive games, nor do I. The opposite, people who think about how to make things better, even if their ideas are bad, are the ones who have gotten into things deep enough to start seeing the cracks.
We live in an age of vices, it’s not just games, everything around us is demanding we spend our time on things, and all of it is trying its best to keep us from noticing we’re acting on impulse, and taking back control.
That you and me are able to do it, is not a reason to refrain from helping those who can’t.
The fact is, games exploit people in a myriad of ways, and that only a small minority is able to resists is not proof that nothing needs to be done, it’s reason to do more.
Especially when the biggest demographic, by far, is children.
The opposite, people who think about how to make things better, even if their ideas are bad, are the ones who have gotten into things deep enough to start seeing the cracks.
I disagree. Complaints like those in the initial comment I responded to are the most surface level “I saw people complaining about something once” type suggestions possible that entirely miss the whole reason people play one game as opposed to others. Games like league and Dota are, first and foremost, competitive experiences. To suggest that these games would be improved by rubber banding harder than Mario kart demonstrates a significant lack of either understanding or interest in the genre.
If anything, it’s just a prime example of the dunning kreuger effect. He’s not in deep enough to know how much he doesn’t know about the games. It’s like the bronze players complaining that yi has no counterplay. It says more about their lack of understanding than it does about the game.
That you and me are able to do it, is not a reason to refrain from helping those who can’t.
Not everything needs to be shaved at the edges to cater to the lowest common denominator. Shave off the ranked system and general competitive nature, and a lot of players (such as myself) are going to start going to different games that do offer it. Hell, I know at least a dozen people who already moved from league to Dota entirely because of the increasing casualization and focus on making it simpler and easier for bad players.
I can’t imagine anything less fun than playing way better than someone and losing because of trash rubberbanding nonsense to make games more “fun”. Or anything more hollow than getting murdered and “winning” anyways for the same reason.
I agree. In that sense that first comment is completely off the rails.
I’d personally like to see changes like not having the ranking system torpedo your evaluation because of a single underperforming team-mate.
A lot of current systems go hard on negative reinforcement, and spread it around like candy on halloween along with gleefully engaging in collective punishment.
I’d personally like to see changes like not having the ranking system torpedo your evaluation because of a single underperforming team-mate.
At least in terms of league, that isn’t the case. Yeah, everyone complains about losing due to bad teams, but like, yeah? In a match of 10 people, any given person inherently has a minority of the impact on any given match. But statistically, that balances out over time. Better players will have greater positive impacts, and thus win more game and climb. There’s an argument to be made that the old promotion system leaned towards bad games having an outsized impact, but that was kinda the point. They prevented lucky streaks from impacting rank as much and favored consistency. And trust me, I’ve mained adc since season 5. I know the impact of shitty teams first hand.
The mmr system also more or less completely prevents a bad game or two from tanking your rank. As long as your mmr is higher than your rank, you can climb even with like 40% wins since a win will grant more than a loss takes away.
Likewise in Dota, outside of very niche scenarios, and in the first place, people are chosing to play for MMR. I don’t play much league, so I don’t know how it works there, but at least in Dota, you can get a pretty complete experience in the unranked modes complete with (hidden) SBMM.
I don’t really care about ranking (or play the kind of leaderboard stuff that uses it) so I can’t comment on implementation. I think it’s genuinely hard to do in team competition environments, though.
I know with certainty it’s extremely hard to do in heavily team based sports like football and basketball, because that I do pay attention to. Maybe MoBAs are closer to baseball where even though it’s a “team” sport, you actually can isolate out parts reliably enough to measure effectively, but I don’t play them to know for sure.
I just find any and all rubber banding (an opt in “skill handicap” casual mode is fine; dynamically changing it mid game just makes everything feel like horseshit) a truly nauseating excuse for terrible design.
I know with certainty it’s extremely hard to do in heavily team based sports like football and basketball, because that I do pay attention to. Maybe MoBAs are closer to baseball where even though it’s a “team” sport, you actually can isolate out parts reliably enough to measure effectively, but I don’t play them to know for sure.
At least for league, I’d say it’s definitely the former. Team play and strategy is a huge component and is extremely difficult to measure. There’s no hard tracking for things like “knew when to run the opposite way so the enemy couldn’t get multiple kills” or “blocked an important spell so the carry didn’t die”. Individual skill is so closely intertwined with team results that separating out the two is only possible in the extreme cases.
“playing badly shouldn’t impact the outcome”, “it’s bad that a team loses”, and “people should be free to afk whenever”.
You lead a rich inner life.
Bub, I’m not the one throwing a fit like a toddler because online games can be competitive
Thanks for demonstrating the problem.
This design creates toxicity instead of competition, and your hot take is ‘so you hate competition?’ Yeah sure dude, LeBron dominating a junior-high ballgame is what sportsmanship is all about. His team is winning by a lot so they must be super competitive. What a shame we can’t judge individual players. Apparently. Stop measuring assists, all that matters is the almighty W.
If we’re talking about people playing badly… on purpose… walk me through how that’s exemplifying competitive games. Is opposition to that behavior some kind of betrayal? Because if so, you should be furious at Valve, since they’re attacking that behavior in the most blunt-force ways possible.
After all - why should games be enjoyable? Losing should feel bad. It can’t just be less fun, it has to be miserable. That’s motivation! Shaking hands after a game is for cowards! In fact, if you lose a platinum match? Banned for life. Hardcore permadeath rules.
That system will surely encourage healthy competition without making any player scream their lungs out.
Yeah, figures you’re just incapable of having a decent discussion
How did they get “lured” into the ban? Looks like Valve decided to ban them already, they just had fun with how they presented it.
Full agree. It’s fun how they presented it, but also a one-month ban? Cowards.
The person I saw on Twitch got a ban until January 2038.
Was it 19 January 2038 perchance? Because that’s a funny date, if you ask me
It was the funny Unix time.
Oh fuck yeah. That’s what I call non-cowardice.
