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Blaine

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There's been exactly one (competitive) nushooter worth playing, in my view, and that was Tribes: Ascend. It wasn't without its faults, but it had heavily defined and differentiated team roles, a fairly high skill and experience ceiling, majestically non-hitscan projectiles, and most importantly: it was fast. Oh yeah, it was fun, too.

Tribes (in various iterations, not just T:A) can still be played of course, and if I get the itch for a competitive team shooter, I might fire one up again. Someone call me when they release a nushooter where you can actually go fast; otherwise, they just go right into the rubbish bin where they belong.

 

DDZ

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Codex 2013 Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015


I also loved Tribes: Ascend, shame Hi-Rez are a bunch of cunts and that MOBAS ruined everything.
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikka...depressing-way-to-kick-off-2019/#10df5d796ab6

Of course, the moral of the story is to be excrement to each other, it couldn't possibly be that people who share Erik's cursed profession should stop being shit at their job.
Just, like, be cool, guys, lol!

but remember, women are oppressed or something which is why they're not represented in e-sports
ignore the fact that esports teams were so desperate to sign any woman at all even if it was really a man
 

Blaine

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It seems as though Midair failed for a variety of reasons (the specific reasons probably differ from person to person), but what's indisputable is that they did absolutely no marketing of any kind whatsoever. That can't have helped.

I've watched several very promising competitive games wither on the vine because they just couldn't get a critical mass of players in. Case in point: https://store.steampowered.com/app/570460/Laser_League/

They apparently couldn't/didn't want to afford the manpower and resources to implement private matches, meaning you're left with a near-useless brick if you buy it at this point.
 
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unfairlight

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Marketing is difficult if you have practically no budget. How would you market it anyway? Pay streamers? That audience won't care and it isn't particularly large either unless you manage to get a top 10 streamer with >10k viewers.
Marketing doesn't work for more hardcore FPS games, either. Quake Champions was on E3 multiple times and it's hovering at ~1k players, probably dropping to the 800-1.2k player range within a few months and after that it's 2 years tops before all the new players quit, all the old ones go back to QL and Bethesda pulls the plug.
Midair primarily failed because the largest "audience" of FPS-Z games played Tribes Ascend for a short period and they thought that Midair was a T:A clone instead of a T2-like, so they thought that the movement was too hard and quit. The weak state of launch also didn't help. I wrote a post on a imageboard a few days ago. Copy paste of that.
People were turned off by the artstyle and the misunderstood monetization system that started you off with nearly nothing. It was basically "play for 60 hours and unlock everything or just pay $30 and get everything, present and future."
The issue with the system was that you started off with just a laser pistol, chaingun and fusor with light armor. The last two weapons are mainstay weapons that anyone should always have equipped, and the third mainstay weapon, the grenade launcher, can be unlocked after your first game. After that you need to unlock kinetic boost which is around 1 to 3 more games, and you are now with the best Light armor loadout in the game that pretty much every skilled player uses.
Issue is, you still had to unlock heavy armor, vehicles, grenades beyond frags, medium armor, all the energy kits (i.e. energy shields, teleportation) and weapons. So, you started off with nothing which makes you feel like shit and gives the assumption that the game is P2W, but the total grind required to unlock everything was pretty minimal in reality.
The launch also had bugs, poor server performance and the unlocks were busted for a week, and the game quickly died.
There's Novakin that's currently being made, but that's probably not even coming out. Radio silence from the devs for about half a year and the website is dead.
 

Blaine

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Chad J. Thundercock Competitive FPS games with very high skill ceilings have suffered from that phenomenon for many years now: They eventually end up with a player base consisting of a few hundred hardcore, extremely high-skill veterans. Everyone else will have drifted off to other games in the meantime (including high-skill players who'd simply had enough and were ready to move on); you sure as shit won't get more than a precious few greenhorns sticking around, because not only do they start off astonishingly far behind the hardcore veterans, but (the real killer) it's also much more difficult for greenhorns to learn such a game at all—players learn best when their opponents are neither too high above nor too far below their own level of expertise.

That's the biggest problem, really. When you're new, you need some newbies, some almost-newbies, and a few intermediate players to play with. If you're new and you just spend your time being helplessly obliterated by supercharged Terminators with photographic memories of every level layout, power-up location, and mortar/ambush spot, it's an uphill battle to say the least.

It's the built-in self-destruct of every high-skill shooter, and the big red button always gets pushed sooner or later.

Absolutely every single super-successful competitive game that's been released in the past decade or so shares a particular trait: They're designed, quite on purpose, so that unskilled idiots can play and enjoy them for prolonged periods of time. This applies to TF2 and OW, all dotas, all survival sandbox games, all battle royale games, etc.
 
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unfairlight

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Poor excuse. Majority of the playerbase of Quake Champions is new players and it's still bleeding. CS:GO also is pure skill and it's doing excellent. I don't think that there will ever be a market for any sort of arena FPS at this point. They will just keep dying and dying. I expect to see more Reflex: Arenas, more Toxikks and more Midairs in the next 10 years and they'll keep going down.
This applies to TF2
No, it doesn't.
In TF2 you will still get shit all over by high skill players. TF2 just happens to have more low skill players than high skill players.
 

Blaine

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I thought of CS:GO, but it's a bit of a singularity... also, Russia.

No, it doesn't.
In TF2 you will still get shit all over by high skill players. TF2 just happens to have more low skill players than high skill players.

Seems you utterly missed the point I was making. Here it is again:

Absolutely every single super-successful competitive game that's been released in the past decade or so shares a particular trait: They're designed, quite on purpose, so that unskilled idiots can play and enjoy them for prolonged periods of time.

TF2 "happens to have" a lot of low-skill players eleven years after its release because it's designed in such a way that unskilled idiots can still enjoy it long-term, as I've said. If it weren't, those low-skill players wouldn't be around anymore.

The doesn't preclude the existence of high-skill players or even a very high skill ceiling. That's an erroneous conclusion.
 

TheHeroOfTime

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CSGO has no marketing at all, and since almost a year is not receiving any content of value. Valve should thank god every day for CSGO not dying yet. They don't deserve the community that their games have.
 

Blaine

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Valve does the have advantage of a large and dedicated following, both of their company and their games—and of course, they own the world's most successful digital distribution platform. I think it also helps that TF2 and the various CS iterations run very smoothly on most people's computers, netcode included. Blizzard is able to leverage a similar collection of advantages.

Funnily enough, I played TF2 when it was released, but was less interested in the team play aspect and more so in running around in deathmatch mode or whatever bonking my British online gaming pals with the Scout's baseball bat. Once the hat retardation came, I never touched it again.
 

luj1

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CSGO has no marketing at all, and since almost a year is not receiving any content of value. Valve should thank god every day for CSGO not dying yet. They don't deserve the community that their games have.

CSGO got a huge update last month. Purged cheaters + many new modes + prime + went F2P
 

TheHeroOfTime

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CSGO has no marketing at all, and since almost a year is not receiving any content of value. Valve should thank god every day for CSGO not dying yet. They don't deserve the community that their games have.

CSGO got a huge update last month. Purged cheaters + many new modes + prime + went F2P

Purge cheaters and free to play can't go in the same phrase



And a battle royale mode is the last thing i expected for CSGO.
 

luj1

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Didn't expect it either but it was a good choice

as for cheaters, they are practically extinct once you have prime status (unlike that guy)
 

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