People are downvoting you, but this is actually a ridiculously common thing in games.
The entire game industry is pretty bad in general compared to tech or otherwise: one huge concept is that you have to "love the game"; you're willing to take low pay, low benefits, deal with overrun unpaid overtime hours, etc. because you "love the game". Most game companies freely tell you about how disposable you are because they have hordes of players, many willing to work for free.
Riot has serious problems with this. The C-level that was repeatedly reported (for years) for grabbing testicles, dryhumping employees or farting on them is still in their role and hasn't been removed - they were just suspended for a month or two and reinstated. The gender-discrimination forced new legal counsel just a few months ago due to possible collusion.
In 2011 I interviewed for a Mobile position at Riot to make an accessory app for players. I was literally hazed like old school college hazings. At the end they asked me when I wanted to start. I told the lead dev to get lost and he begged me to "not be like that" but said if I was going to "be like that" then I wasn't a good fit anyway.
It is still to this day one of the worst experiences I've encountered.
> Why don't game engineers demand better? Start a company with decent work hours and comp and refuse to work elsewhere.
Some do! I would imagine many indie game companies are not like this. There's kind of a split, where you have "strictly-business" companies - many Asian MMORPG publishers that have a subsidiary in the US are like this. There is no gaming culture, it's just a standard workday. You might get some plushies at the office or a poster or two.
The "cool" companies, like Riot and Blizzard, complete with campus statues of game characters and a culture to match, conference rooms named after game characters or items, are what gamers seem to want to look up to, though.
If you've played any MMORPG long enough, you'll see a lot of recurring themes, kids gleefully willing to "answer support tickets for free" and "I'll be a GM they don't even need to pay me" -- this probably is part of the reason that produces toxic culture, along with the fact that if you strictly hire only gamers, you're already going to almost certainly have a higher toxicity demographic in the first place, depending on the game. If we're talking something like Harvest Moon or similar, of course there's going to be close to no toxic players.
Riot's primary product involves matchmaking you into 4 other random people that you have to cooperate with for anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour or more, where one person can lose the game for everyone by repeatedly dying to the enemy and making the enemy stronger. If you leave, you get banned or penalised for abandoning your team; this includes virtually unwinnable dragged-out hour long matches. You can kind of see how this playerbase would differ from, say, the usual singleplayer or co-op indie or puzzle game.
It's very difficult to boycott a game you've spent tens of thousands of hours on - a game that you're good at, that you have friends on, that you've spent heaps of cash shop currency on lootboxes for. Even if you desperately dislike the developer. This happens for many companies - look at all the loudmouthed people on reddit et al screaming about how no one should support EA or Blizzard, and then a month later go buy the new expansion pack for something and buy lootboxes and forget about it.
> You can kind of see how this playerbase would differ from, say, the usual singleplayer or co-op indie or puzzle game.
Oh yes. I must say, these days I hate playing multiplayer game modes with leaderboards attached.
Relevant to this thread: I used to play Heroes of the Storm (Blizzard's LoL clone) causally with friends. Then one day a colleague dragged me into his team, full of people dozens of levels above me (and otherwise experienced progamers). That was one stressful evening where I could tell everyone hated the noob that was me. My reflexes were OK, but my "meta" wasn't.
I never played a game of HotS with that colleague again.
I mean, seriously, I want to play games where one can excel in out-thinking the opponent. But HotS progaming feels more like an exercise in memorizing obscure game mechanics and a (constantly changing) Excel sheet full of character stats.
Well, the history is a bit different. LoL was created as a clone from Dota (Defense of the Ancients) mod for Warcraft 3. So, DOTA 2 is a continuation of that story and Blizzard basically recreated the mod into a standalone game and called it DOTA 2.
I do agree with the sentiment though. The community is definitively not n00b friendly and I gave up soon as well :S
Blizzard did not do that. Valve (the company behind Steam) did that. Much salt was sown around the Blizzard offices during the lawsuits that followed. Valve won.
Blizzard went on to release a remake of the game that spawned DOTA which was universally reviled, a large part of which was due to them killing incentives to build custom maps with their new IP rules designed to avoid another DOTA incident.
Armchair analysis with no expertise or special access to information, accuracy of statements may vary.
I know the beginning of the story, I played the ur-original DotA the UMS map for W3 (and even earlier UMS variants of the concept for vanilla StarCraft/SCBW) :). But I somehow missed the existence of DOTA 2.
The community has probably never been noob friendly. A common meme shared in the Dota 1 days (before LoL and Heroes of Newerth) was "Welcome to DOTA, you suck."
> I mean, seriously, I want to play games where one can excel in out-thinking the opponent. But HotS progaming feels more like an exercise in memorizing obscure game mechanics and a (constantly changing) Excel sheet full of character stats
Just for the record:
obscure game mechanics and a (constantly changing) Excel sheet full of character stats
Is exactly out-thinking the opponent, and we are not even talking of a game where execution enters into play as Heroes is no Dota2, let alone SC2 or Broodwar
What you want isn't real outthinking, you want to feel rewarded for feeling like you out-thought your opponent, be it true or not
I was a quite good SC/SCBW player back in the day though, and I was up to date with obscure game mechanics and unit stats and "current meta" (way before it was ever called that). Yet with all that, the game still felt like it had much bigger possibility space. Something I never felt about MOBA games.
(Come to think of it, maybe I just don't like the "team sports with strangers!" aspect of the currently popular multiplayer games - MOBAs, Battle Royales, whatever the genre it is Overwatch falls into, etc.)
It's not really your fault. Pro gamers have enough experience to be able to know that dragging a noob into an expert-level match is going to be a bad outcome.
You'll see this in almost every MMORPG (I segment out RPG because it's the most likely to get these - a MMOFPS like Destiny 2 generally just gets by with a few support tickets; people get isolated into clusters or small parties so it doesn't end up as obvious or exposed).
It's a demand problem, there's a huge number of young engineers who desperately want to get into games. They get burnt out after a few years and replaced with new ones.
That being said, things are slowly starting to change, and employees of game studios are starting to demand better. It's still bad in most places, but the discussion is happening.
There is a massive gaming industry in Poland. From discussions with engineers/Devs/designers in that field, they are overworked, management doesn't know what they want, objectives/deliverables/requirements change on the fly (while schedule/cost stays the same). Then fast-tracking happens (no crashing - no extra funds).
For most of the issues they made me believe that it's a halo effect. People that were great designers/devs/other became managers (and bad project managers) and then confusion ensues.
Anyone from Polish game scene can please give better insight?
That sounds about the same as what I've heard from game developers I've talked to in the States as well.
Games are massively difficult to develop, and because of that there's this idea that insane crunch is inevitable for all projects. But every single story I've heard is that project management for just about every game is horrible, even in comparison to badly managed software in general.
In this case because they are positioned to become a form of role model of these students. Who will eventually find out that their favorite company can be horrible to negligible consequence.
You could justify almost any such attack like this. Can you not just appreciate what you’re given here for free, for once? The effort people have put into this? Just imagine pouring months into something like this and getting your post as a thanks.
The entire game industry is pretty bad in general compared to tech or otherwise: one huge concept is that you have to "love the game"; you're willing to take low pay, low benefits, deal with overrun unpaid overtime hours, etc. because you "love the game". Most game companies freely tell you about how disposable you are because they have hordes of players, many willing to work for free.
Riot has serious problems with this. The C-level that was repeatedly reported (for years) for grabbing testicles, dryhumping employees or farting on them is still in their role and hasn't been removed - they were just suspended for a month or two and reinstated. The gender-discrimination forced new legal counsel just a few months ago due to possible collusion.