Which is why it’s so fragile, and currently shattered. “Most people are not very good at video games and nothing demonstrates that like an arena shooter.” There’s barely a surviving niche because it’s multiplayer-only, high-speed, and low-latency, which means it can only be overflowing with players or stone dead. There is no middle ground. With the ridiculous skill gradient, bots don’t even work, because they’ll either feel like morons or hackers.

I think it could be softened without fucking it up. Step one is to stop calling death, death. Say you got zorched to the nether-realm for a bit. It works the same as teleporters, because shut up. Shut up is why. You eat a rocket and magically appear in a big empty room sprinkled with weapons. You’ve got about two seconds to unfuck yourself and grab maybe half of that loadout before you spoink back into reality, unarmored and ammo-scarce. But you’d not slapped in the teeth, made to sit on your thumbs, and tossed back to the wolves with a gun that tickles.

Step two is rewarding hits instead of just kills. Games should be fun even if you get utterly destroyed. They’re better if you win, but they should be mechanically satisfying every time you do a little thing right. That way it’s not a forced hyperfixation on some all-or-nothing zero-sum toxicity fountain. If you chip 99 health off of someone, and they hit you for 100, the score should not be 0-1. Surely more like 99-110. If you do 99 damage to someone, and a kill-stealing fucknugget does 1, the only thing that makes them a kill-stealing fucknugget is an asinine scoring system that gives them one point and gives you zilch. He can still be a complete bastard by sniping away all your weakened victims for efficient points, but he’ll have to do more than that to outpace the total of your hard work.

Step three is outright heresy: regenerating health. But screwy. Health is not some to-the-last-drop resource. Health is a failsafe for when you’re getting your ass kicked so hard that you’re a pinata for someone else’s score. Getting bipped out of existence is a defense mechanism. Constant chip damage isn’t the same as a sudden massive beating, either, so it’s fine if your oh-shit-o-meter decays back toward “100 HP.” And since scoring is about damage dealt, some third party barging in is not the same kind of threat as whoever’s currently feeding you your own ass. So your “health” can be per-opponent… ish. Taking a kicking from several people at once is not much different from fighting one of them, except for the implication you’ve entered a target range for carnival ducks and morons. If a dozen players are peppering you with distant shotguns, none of them are running up the score at a very high rate, so fuck it, let 'em. Only your precious armor will reflect the embarrassing DPS you’re allowing.

None of this makes the skill gradient lower. An embodied purgatory full of pickups directly rewards bunny-hopping maniacs by letting them respawn with more stuff. Map control isn’t changed in the slightest. Rocket duels can become rocket five-way clusterfucks with rapidly shifting incentives between ganging up and backstabbing distracted gangers-uppers. But if a complete newbie 1v1s the world champ, the score will be two thousand versus a couple hundred, not ten to zip. You can still compare with your noob friends who also got flattened by that guy. Oh wow, three-forty? That was a good railgun hit, before he turned you inside-out.

Nobody sticks around to git gud if only being gud feels gud.