| So game and metagame are important here. Overall, I agree with your point. This is the reason I don't play those games, or in those ultra-competitive brackets. I don't think we're necessarily contradicting eachother. I choose to play fighting games for the fight, rather than the victory, and thus tailor my choices within that genre to suit me. To offer a couple of 'parallel' examples to your own: Player A is at a significantly higher level than player B, and 'stifles' player B through consistent reads and conditioning. Nothing player B tries works, everything player B does seems to play exactly into player As hands. This is almost a restatement of your example, except it was a highly rewarding experience for me. In the language of cognitive psychology, it brought about a powerful flow state. The two key differences: 1.) that the skill imbalance was not too great - just great enough - and 2.) that the nature of the game's design and the players' choices in tactics/playstyles ommitted the more obnoxious elements of combat. My second parallel example is simply my first, reversed: I am player A, and my opponent is player B. Everything plays out the same. Interesting, that. Because implicit in player A's skill is that they are in control of the fight - they can, usually, make things fairly unpleasant and dirty for the opponent. It doesn't take much to push someone past the mental edge, to knock them off balance and keep them there; to destroy their flow state. Why is player A so restrained? He didn't want to win, he wanted to fight. Players motivations in games are often what makes the difference between a positive and a negative experience. So we nicely return to the beginning: if you're focused on winning, you're not going to have a good time and neither are the people playing with you. |
In example 1, the player often DCs or rage quits, because there's no value in such a matchup. If they see the end of the match, they quickly leave to find one more balanced to their skill. You could have just stayed in training and worked on labbing combos for all the effort you went through.
And labbing is one of the big problems of that genre, where people feel they have to train hard just to have fun.
The second...yeah, no they usually demolish them and move on. A high skilled player also gets little value out of owning someone, and they often smurf in lower ranks for an ego boost. "Watch me stream bronze to grandmaster!"
A lot of this is more people trying to convince people to stick with something despite a lot of negative experiences. Fighting games are seriously at risk of being a dead genre, and a lot of the problems are not easily solvable.