Dear Developers, Stop Listening to Pros

"You can't force a game to be an eSport." Blizzard: "I'mma pretend I didn't hear that."

The pros are supposed to be good at the game, not change the game so they can be good at it.

"Calling yourself a good designer because you're good at games. Is like saying a porn addict is good at sex" I feel like a lot of this audience needed to hear that.

This will probably show my age. But I remember that there was a Half-Life 1 mod called "The Specialist". It's really just another Deathmatch/Team Deathmatch game, but the whole gimmick about it is that the game lets you do action movie-esq stunts, complete with the same 80-90's action movie esthetics in map designs and character models. It was super fun seeing everyone doing dives, somersaults, and the signature Matrix dodges during a match. Every update some new interesting features gets added in. Until one day then the top "Pro" players in the community started whining about how the mod has become "too slow paced" and that the mod is now all about looking cool while shooting, instead of "skill" in shooting. And the developer ended up listening to those guys exclusively for the next overhaul update. They massively sped up the TTK, and sped up the movement speed. To the point that doing any stunt just make you more likely to die with no upsides. The mod turned into a railgun arena, where the most optimal way of play is just circle strafing. Community basically died within months of the overhaul. Even after the developer tried to revert most of the changes in the overhaul, the community population never really recovered. And guess what, the "Pro" players also left soon after they stank up the mod with their inputs. I'm still bitter to this day how a bunch of elitists murdered one of the most unique mod that came out of the Half Life 1 era. That other mod Action Half-Life was nowhere near as polished as The Specialist.

Gotta remember that Halo's MP didn't start as this hyper-competitive sweat fest. It started on the couch with split-screen, which is about as casual as you can get. Even down to the screen cheating. Though I never use to do that... Never.

It’s important to remember that a good chunk of FPS players don’t ever even touch competitive multiplayer. Many only dabble in it. Very few actually play competitively.

Is no one old enough to remember quake or UT? Created the entire genre that we know it and had(still to this day) some of the most impressive pros in the world. Don't recall any of them changing the game. Instead, they embraced the game and found out how to work around perceived problems.

The casual scene is much more important than competetive

The worst case of this is when a game was not designed to be competitive, then the developers try all the sudden to engineer it to be competitive.

Anybody else remember that time when halo 3 launched with a bug that caused melele kills to randomly send people flying into orbit? There was a dev post on the forums replying to it that said, if I remember correctly word for word, "This is awsome, we are keeping it in". Within 3 months MLG had cried enough mountain dew tears to get them to fix it... making everybody's lives worse as a result. Remember kids, pro gamers don't want you to have fun, they want to beat your ass on stream for views.

Rainbow Six Siege is a good example of why listening to the pros will just make the general player base loose interest and uninstall the game. It happened to me and many of my friends back in 2019.

You touched on individual focus vs. team focus in Halo, and it reminds me of the Battlefield games. I used to play a lot of Bad Company 2. Healing and giving ammo were hugely important, and the objective based modes had placements that made it virtually impossible to be on your own, thanks to exposure and flanking. The vehicles were powerful, and you were incentivized to protect yours and destroy the hostile ones quickly or your team would suffer. Furthermore, the playerbase was aware of this.  In Battlefield 1, healing and ammo is typically only thrown out by the player when HE needs it. They switched medics to assault and ammo to support, meaning that a support with LMG can now just give himself infinite ammo rather than seek out another player. The medics play medic because they want to rush with shotguns and heal themselves, not because they want to help their team. You can skip revive even though it doesn't hurry respawn, and everyone does it as a knee-jerk reaction out of dying. The maps are designed in a way that cater to pros and sniper campers.  The result is that it sometimes plays more like COD than Battlefield. My friends and I always stuck together in BC2, nowadays you just sprint around.

Being a pro doesn’t make you smarter than an actual game developer

This is my feeling back when TF2 still got updates. The competitive scene demanded nerfs for weapons that really didn't need them and were only a problem at the highest level of optimal play like the Base Jumper (parachute). The nerfs we got completely ruined them in pubs and made them more acceptable for the rather stale tf2 competitive meta. Many good weapons were destroyed because valve for a time was only listening to the top 1% of the playerbase.... We lost the caber's ability to oneshot light classes even though all anyone used it for in pubs was to harass clueless snipers. We lost the fun fast heavy loadout because "heavy shouldn't be allowed to get to mid fast" and that butchered two weapons. We lost the versatility of the cleaver because it made scout too effective in chokepoints. We lost the hijinxs one could do with the base jumper because "Scout can't hit soldier when he uses it" Basically anytime a class had a weapon that threatened the tf2 comp scene meta, it's weapons got nerfed into boring, useless options that no one touch anymore.

The reason pro players are better than the developers is because the developers actually have a real job.

8:15 - AMAZING take, because it's so right and people miss it completely. Some of the most popular competitive games of all time are either completely casual arcade/adventure games, party games, completely broken and unbalanced, unrefined, or all of the above (smash (ESPECIALLY MELEE), older fighting games like tekken, street fighter, etc, minecraft as you pointed out, FORTNITE became competitive with custom box matches players set up for 1v1s - yknow, the exact opposite of how the game works... The esport formula isn't set in stone, and the amount of companies producing the same fkn games just because another one got popular as an esport is annoying. Yes, these often work (like Apex, Valorant, counters to games like hearthstone, dota, starcraft, etc.) but at the end of the day, that's more because of having a huge dev backing, tons of advertisement and support, and a community and developer set on making the game competitive from before the first alpha drops. Nowadays, streamers and pro players will roam to whatever the new fps is, complain about balancing, play it until views go down, then return to react content. The games don't exist to be fun, they exist to be a seasonal competitive kick. You can tell based on the ACTUAL COMPETITIVE SCENE. While scenes like fighting games, minecraft tournaments, smash, league, etc. continue going strong, Overwatch league just died, and countless other "esports" titles lose their entire playerbase the second a new game comes out and takes the streamers attention. Some of the biggest comp games have come from devs that DIRECTLY DISLIKE THE COMPETITIVE SCENE (as annoying as it is on nintendo's part)

Griesemer identified them as "optimizers" in his taxonomy of player types, they are perfectly happy to use only one strategy if it's the most optimal. If they're having "too" much fun, something is probably wrong and needs nerfing or buffing.

Games should have the same motto... "Easy to get good at...but Hard to get great at"

Reminds me of Due Process, not sure if you guys heard about that game. It was a really interesting PvP tactical shooter with randomly generated maps. It was pretty fun! Until they decided to make it so casual matches was only a waiting lobby for ranked matches. If you queued for a ranked match, you'd be put in a casual match while you waited, instead of being two separate lobbies. The average amount of players being 4.1 now speaks for itself.

You're right they should stop listening to pros. But I think we can go further than that. They should stop listening to streamers and youtubers too.