[scottLobster]

A lot of strategy games and RPGs suffer from the same.

Starcraft II for instance was a lot more fun IMO when it was new and the strategies hadn't been refined. I remember wasting a ton of time/resources turtling, building a giant mass of carriers and then steam-rolling the map, just because I could and thought the visual of a dozen carriers sweeping the map would be awesome (it was). Good luck doing that now in a public server.

Too many games have obsessive fans that are hell-bent on discovering the mathematically perfect way to play a game, and once the one or half-dozen working formulae are discovered, that's it. No one else can play any other way and hope to win, and that really takes the creativity and fun out of it. I'm not sure where these people come from, I got into video games as a distraction from math homework, not an extension of it. :P

[seanp2k2]

See also: diablo 3. There are only a handful of combinations of gear that enable actually being able to kill stuff in a reasonable amount of time + survive on the highest torment difficulty. Most of those end-game builds with high enough damage + survivability don't even use the unique play styles of the characters -- necromancer and witch doctor don't use pets.

I guess climbing a top100 ladder (or even top 1000) is, for some, also a game, and maybe just one I don't particularly enjoy. I see this in Overwatch too -- there are particular team compositions which work well in certain scenarios (mostly informed by the pros), and deviating from one of those cookie-cutter strategies will get you a tongue lashing on voice chat. The fixed 6v6 teams and smallish chokepoint-centric maps make it possible for one good player on one team to "carry" that team to victory and subsequently make the game pretty unfun for the other team. If your team comp is poorly-chosen (let's say you're attacking and two players want to play snipers), you likely will not win and your team will be frustrated the whole time. Conversely, the opposing team will have an absolute field day pounding you into a fine mist. The game is way too fun to win lopsided matches in. The teams are too small and inflexible to tolerate average players. The matchmaking, despite having a very large pool of active players, is frequently very wrong at making even matches. There are no mods supported, and a server browser (to browse only official servers, mind) is a recent addition, as others also tired of the small choice of variety in game modes (previously just public "screw around, rage quit, throw a match because someone is revealed to be female" or competitive "ultra salty tryhardathon").

I go back to TF2 and have fun for hours not caring about my win:loss ratio. I also previously had tons of fun and a great community in a Quake 3 mod for class-based, red vs blue CTF with large teams (16vs16). I die laughing messing around in Blackwake. I even grind for hours with friends in Diablo. Nothing makes me rage like Overwatch. I usually just get frustrated and stop playing.

[scottLobster]

Yeah I stopped playing competition-mode overwatch for exactly that reason. I quite enjoy a lot of the Arcade modes (particularly Random Heroes) and occasionally quick-play however. I found that once you hit level 100 the matchmaking seems to only match you with other level 100+ players, which makes it a whole new game even in quick play.

[soylentcola]

This is typically what keeps me from playing/enjoying multiplayer games. This isn't meant to be a "final judgment" on all MP games, but in general, the tendency seems to be toward min/maxing which leaves a lot less room for the experimentation and occasional accidental lucky breaks you catch where everything just falls into place.

I don't mean to suggest that for a lot of people, discovering and testing these min/max strategies isn't fun and satisfying (like solving a puzzle with the "perfect" solution) but it's not really for me.

[nickpeterson]

Yeah, I remember when StarCraft 1 was newer and playing online was always weird experiment. There was an odd satisfaction to being beaten by something you'd never seen before after a hard fought 2 hours on a map draining all the minerals. Never has a 'GG' been so genuine.

[taurath]

At the same time, I've seen almost no PvP games based on randomness that really end up working. Hearthstone has a huge RNG element - which deck you're up against, what cards you get etc. People minmax their decks from rank 20 and below (out of 25), and while there is some difference in decision making it really doesn't fulfill the dream of having many different viable strategies and the ability to use them - usually 3-5 "meta" decks that everyone knows about are more powerful than most.

Thats why I think co-op games end up being far more satisfying, since they don't have to balance out a player vs player arms race.

[scottLobster]

For a physical example of one that does, I found I quite enjoy Magic The Gathering draft games (everyone's given 20 mana of their choice then forced to assemble a deck on the spot from a bunch of sealed, random booster packs that get opened and passed around in an orderly fashion).

In most cases you can still make a viable deck, but everyone will have to deal with largely mediocre cards they wouldn't have picked given the chance. Granted the system isn't perfect, but it seems to effectively level the playing field and encourage creative deck-building. Not sure if Hearthstone has an equivalent mode.

[taurath]

They do, and its called arena - It costs $1.50 to do a round and you're out after 3 losses. Its entirely luck based since the only people winning (its a tournament format) are those that get a lot of really good cards.

[kirkules]

This really just highlights to me that what it means for a game to "end up working" or for a game to be satisfying can be as subjective as what it means for it to be designed "correctly".

It's also interesting to me that the "meta" in Hearthstone not only can, but does change regularly, when people discover deck archetypes that beat the currently dominant ones. Especially when deck types that fell out of favor at some point show up again later because the decks that countered them too hard also fell out of favor (I think variants of Freeze Mage has done this twice?).

This kind of evolution of the meta happens in lots of games, but of course notably in the ones where players themselves refer explicitly to a meta amongst themselves and keep track of it.