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The real scars of Korean gaming

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Re: The real scars of Korean gaming

#71

Post by frik »

izacus wrote: post #58
frik wrote: post #26

I wonder why real-time-strategy (RTS) is dead outside of the StarCraft 2 e-sport niche. RTS used to be the best selling game category around 2000.

Mostly because designing for e-Sports has a massive effect on options and creativity of an RTS - keeping the game balanced and fair for competitive play comes with a massive tradeoffs in creativity, faction diversity and player options (especially if the developer does not have large amounts of time for balance testing). And since for some reason everyone wants a piece of that pie the RTSes have become a bit... bland…

Thanks for the insight.

I play from time to time 10-15 year old RTS games like Age of Mythology and C&C Generals against bots in SP on random maps. For me it's a lot more rewarding playing a real RTS than going from bottom left to top right in e.g. League of Legends.

RTS is great as it is about planning economy (buildings, resources) and planning war strategies. RTS aren't that hard to grabs', a new player can learn it in 10-15min, but a game can last up to about two hours or more - and one cannot watch TV while playing or something else aside with a real RTS.

For some reason it seems a newer wave of players favor repetitive gameplay with instant rewards that may have familiarity with gambling mechanics (getting hooked) over freedom and choice.

I would pay premium for a new RTS game that delivers the old gameplay mechanics and has a more realistic theme (like C&C, Age of Empire - and no aliens) with a good highend graphics and physics game engine.

Re: The real scars of Korean gaming

#72

Post by frik »

forthefuture wrote: post #48
braun_st wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to what the other guys here said (EA and stuff) I would add lack of RTS games on consoles and FPS taking over those platforms I remember there were plenty of RTS games for the Genesis and SNES, but by the time of the PS2 hardly any strategy games launched on consoles. PC-only titles are scarce these days because profitability is too low to justify an AAA budget

This is misleading. The most popular competitive games: League of Legends, Dota 2, CSGO, and SC2, are all PC exclusives. The problem with RTS games isn't that they don't work on consoles, it's that they aren't that fun to play for most people. It takes a long to play a single game, and there's no progression. With the push to make strategy games more like RPGs (heck look at all of the FPS games with "loadouts" and RP…

> it's that they aren't that fun to play for most people

I question if repetitive games like MOBAs are really more fun, or just have an greedy and addicted game mechanics that has been pioneered with the old Diablo 1 (1996). Is it only me that playing MOBA is to let your off steam, clear your mind like playing a simple ego-shooter or passively watching a TV series on your sofa after you come home from hard work. Or is it really fun to play like traditional non-repetitive games?

Example: I remember Farmville, and for me the fun part was very short and it quickly got a lot of repetitive greedy work and the game tried a lot to get me hooked.

Re: The real scars of Korean gaming

#73

Post by jamornh »

JonoBB wrote: post #34
panorama wrote: post #2

Sometimes you pay a price to be able to do the things you love. However, the plight isn't necessarily with Lee Young Ho (aka "FlaSh"), who was winning $50,000 tournaments multiple times a year while on a 200-300k per year salary (I stopped following after the end of professional Brood War, not sure what it's like now). The plight lies with those who aren't among the top 1% in their already elite field who are subject…

Lest anyone thinks that this is not big business, the largest prize pool in gaming is the Dota International (held once a year). It's currently sitting at > $12m (split between 5 players on a team, their manager, and who knows who else). It will probably rise to over $15m by the time the tournament is on. Of interest is that the prize pool comes from the "normal" players playing the game - you buy in game items, and…

> And, of course, valve takes the other 75%.

Not disagreeing, but they probably use a large portion of that money to actually pay for the organization, venue, designs of the compendium, the staffs, and everything else involved with the International. All that can't be cheap so I'm not sure which portion of that 75% is valve's profit. Does anybody have any ideas?

Re: The real scars of Korean gaming

#74

Post by jsnell »

frik wrote: post #26

I wonder why real-time-strategy (RTS) is dead outside of the StarCraft 2 e-sport niche. RTS used to be the best selling game category around 2000.

So, first of all clearly the RTS in the generic sense isn't actually dead (e.g. MOBAs, tactical wargames, tower defense games). Even the classic C&C-style base building RTS isn't quite dead, a few still get released every year. For example last year there was Planetary Annihilation and Grey Goo. It's just that even the nostalgia factor can't make those games succeed any more.

The problem is that the classic RTS isn't actually very fun to play. There's too much cognitive overload, too much micro-management, and perhaps a bit too many genre conventions that need to be crammed into the game making it actually feel like the same game I played 20 years ago. Every time I try one of them these days it's like one hour before I give up realizing I don't actually want to play it. In contrast to that I could obsess for weeks over a non-traditional RTS like Offworld Trading Company.

Re: The real scars of Korean gaming

#75

Post by tzs »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #49

For context, Flash, with the large scar on his arm had an elo rating in brood war that may have made him the best player of any game -ever-. I think I've seen it noted somewhere that his highest elo was higher than even famous chess grandmasters. This implies that after over a decade of hardcore professional broodwar around the world, he was more dominant at his peak than anyone else has ever been in a game with elo…

> I think I've seen it noted somewhere that his highest elo was higher than even famous chess grandmasters.

Elo ratings are not comparable across games (or across different player pools in the same game). All an Elo rating (or a rating in a similar system) measures is how you perform compared to others in that same rating pool. Each group that runs an Elo rating pool has parameters they choose when setting up and when maintaining the pool that affect the average and the spread of ratings.

Re: The real scars of Korean gaming

#76

Post by mcguire »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #53
relic wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're exactly right about the lack of a players union being the reason for disproportionately low salaries in minor league baseball. The reason they don't have one is because the minor league clubs have no incentive to allow one, and the major league clubs that feed from the minor league systems have no incentive to help either. When there are so many guys willing to play for basically nothing but a shot at the bigs…

Plausible. Yet, Hollywood is almost exactly the same scene (so many willing to play for nothing but a shot). Yet they are organized.

I believe that is a historical anomaly caused by the way the studio system treated stars and minor-league wanna-bes similarly for many years. When they did organize, they were unable to establish a clear line, major-league/minor-league, differentiation.

Re: The real scars of Korean gaming

#77

Post by sgnelson »

frik wrote: post #26

I wonder why real-time-strategy (RTS) is dead outside of the StarCraft 2 e-sport niche. RTS used to be the best selling game category around 2000.

To add even more, I'm going to throw out a hypothesis (and fair warning, this is all speculation on my part.)

I think what others have said is correct, but I also have to wonder how access to broadband and the internet affected the games. Back in the day, most RTS were single player games with a nice multiplayer addition. But you would have problems playing it without going to a friends house/LAN party. There, you were playing against friends and people you were effectively face to face with. It was competitive, but you were there for fun.

Once the games became focused towards multiplayer, with a single player as the side, the games were mostly about competing against other people, people you didn't know, had very little social connection too, and it was all about how fast you could click. I think (at least for me, this was true) made the games much less fun. To have any chance of actually winning, you had to be very good. When you're playing people you don't really know, only to lose the game over and over again online, it doesn't quite become as much fun.

Re: The real scars of Korean gaming

#78

Post by plorkyeran »

jamornh wrote: post #73
JonoBB wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lest anyone thinks that this is not big business, the largest prize pool in gaming is the Dota International (held once a year). It's currently sitting at > $12m (split between 5 players on a team, their manager, and who knows who else). It will probably rise to over $15m by the time the tournament is on. Of interest is that the prize pool comes from the "normal" players playing the game - you buy in game items, and…

> And, of course, valve takes the other 75%. Not disagreeing, but they probably use a large portion of that money to actually pay for the organization, venue, designs of the compendium, the staffs, and everything else involved with the International. All that can't be cheap so I'm not sure which portion of that 75% is valve's profit. Does anybody have any ideas?

I don't think it's really meaningful to look at it like that. The tournament isn't funded specifically by sales of the items which contribute to the prize pool; it's just a general marketing expense to increase the number of players. Even if everyone decided to boycott compendiums for some reason, the whole thing could be a net profit if they spent the same amount of money in the dota store on other things (actually, it'd be more profitable...).

Re: The real scars of Korean gaming

#79

Post by zo1 »

ghostDancer wrote: post #44
panorama wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While true, it's not adults getting into pro-gaming, it's usually teenagers. Kids who would rather play Starcraft than study, and, despite being very good, lack the foresight of knowing what kind of hole they're digging themselves into.

I can show you a lot of teenagers doing the same but playing football(soccer), less hours at least, and even pushed by their parents with the hope that some of them will be the next Messi, Xavi or Ronaldo.

Exactly, and because it's part of the "normal culture", then no-one bats an eye (I exaggerate a bit there).

If we were to look at football and basketball sports' effect on children, and how pervasive and time-consuming it is to normal teens/young-adults the same way we do when it comes to "e-sports", then we'd be positively disgusted (a bit of extrapolation there).

Re: The real scars of Korean gaming

#80

Post by plorkyeran »

sgnelson wrote: post #77
frik wrote: post #26

I wonder why real-time-strategy (RTS) is dead outside of the StarCraft 2 e-sport niche. RTS used to be the best selling game category around 2000.

To add even more, I'm going to throw out a hypothesis (and fair warning, this is all speculation on my part.) I think what others have said is correct, but I also have to wonder how access to broadband and the internet affected the games. Back in the day, most RTS were single player games with a nice multiplayer addition. But you would have problems playing it without going to a friends house/LAN party. There, you we…

> To have any chance of actually winning, you had to be very good.

This is a relatively solved problem. With SC2, unless you're in the top or bottom 1% of players, your win rate over a sufficiently large number of games will be 50%. You'll have losing streaks (and they can be pretty stressful), but you don't get thrown into game after game where you have no hope of winning.

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