And I thought I was the forum curmudgeon. (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Monday, November 01, 2021, 12:35 (1125 days ago) @ squidnh3

What I think people mean when they say, I want a "competitive" game, is that they want them to work more like sports in real life. Sports in real life are well understood to have variance - the "better" team does not always win, but sometimes this is because the ball bounced weird, or sometimes it's because the better team played worse/worse team played better that day (e.g., the Any Given Sunday effect). The weird thing about this, is that the "competitive" games we are talking about, like FPSs, have behaviors unlike real sports, such as dying and having to respawn somewhere on the arena, which introduces complex design decisions about how much to punish someone for dying, a huge part of the "slippery slope" problem. So, it's a hard problem: how do we incorporate the ebb and flow of a real life sport, while also introducing more complex game elements that can't be replicated easily in real life, which necessarily require more complex solutions to maintain balance?

Is it really that different? The "rules" of sports are just as arbitrary as the "rules" in an FPS. The only difference is that game physics don't need to mimic those in real life, whereas real sports are necessarily all governed by the same physical laws. But the rules are just as constructed. What happens when you get fouled, or cross two blue lines or whatever are just as arbitrary and exploitable as what areas you can spawn in. Spawn trapping is a thing, just like fouling the worst shooter is.