Hitzel
Smash Ace
I think you guys may be interested in a thread I wrote a while back at Bungie.net. The competitive vs casual scenario isn't just limited to Smash, it's a normal thing for all videogames. This message I wrote was meant to make the casual crowd *understand* how competitive players think and why they favor the first Halo to H2 and H3:
"Hello, Bungie.net forum community. My name’s Hitzel. I’m a gamer, a forum moderator, a Microsoft Core Group beta tester, and a die-hard Halo fan, and I’ve decided to write something for you. I don’t know weather or not you should consider this a present or watnot, but this is for you. I’m explaining to you an opinion… or a whole bunch of opinions that I think some of the more intelligent members here would like to read.
How long has it been now? 7 years since Halo first came out? Either way, Halo’s following has grown a ton since 2001. From my perspective, the community is now split into two groups: “MLG jerks” and “Bungie kids.” I, obviously, am an MLG jerk. Sometimes, when I stop by these forums, I take a few minutes to make a few posts defending Halo 1 or explaining something about competitive Halo. The problem is, these forums move so fast that it feels like whatever I have to say is lost in the massive wave of new replies. That’s why I’m making a new thread, that way more people will be reading this wall ‘o text and hopefully have a good conversation with me.
To start off, let’s talk about the term “competitive gamer.” What exactly does that mean? There are at least hundreds of thousands of people who call themselves competitive gamers (aka, MLG players), but only a few thousand people show up for every MLG event… so “competitive gamer” can’t mean “participates in tournaments.”
Some people may disagree with me, but I feel that being a “competitive gamer” means you like playing games where trying your hardest results in the most fun. Generally, this means that the game has to be consistent for me to truly enjoy it. No randomness… I don’t like randomness… I want to know why I win or why I lose. Everything that happens has to make sense, that way I can immerse myself into the game’s rules and experience a good mental workout.
Let’s look at an example of that in Halo.
Players controlled virtually everything in Halo 1. They even had great control of where other players respawned. By standing at certain locations as your teammate spawned, you could dictate the exact spot he respawned at. That’s called a force spawn. Other areas caused your teammate to randomly spawn anywhere on the map. That’s called a random spawn, and it’s used to stop your teammate from spawning into the enemy’s fire. On the flip side, it’s also possible to make your enemies spawn in certain places in special situations.
There’s more to the Halo 1 spawn system than that, but that’s not the point. In Halo 1, when someone spawned behind you and backsmacked you, you thought to yourself, “Wow, that was smart.” If the same thing happens to you in Halo 2 or 3, you think to yourself, “Wow, could he get any luckier?” For a player like me who has to know why I just died, this happening in Halo 2 or 3 is very frustrating. It wasn’t my fault; there was no force spawn I should have been defending. It wasn’t him outsmarting me, either. So why’d I get assassinated? Whose fault was it? The game’s fault? I don’t like that…
There are other things in Halo 2 and 3 that competitive gamers like me don’t like. A good example is the H3 BR. The BR isn’t perfectly accurate, so sometimes random bullets hit or miss when they shouldn’t. It’s most noticeable when going for headshots. MLG players obviously use BR start, so that becomes a problem for us when two people with BR’s fight. The person who had better aim needs to have his bullets hit more, and the amount of bullets it takes to kill someone needs to be consistent so that players can make decisions based on how much time they have to attack.
Can you guys see where I’m coming from? We love to play games where we can try and have fun doing it. We have the most fun when everything makes sense. If we could randomly win or loose for reasons players can’t control, our efforts become meaningless inside the game… and that’s the opposite of what we want.
This mindset is why us MLG jerks praise Halo 1. It’s why we use such rigid settings to play Halo by. It’s also why some of us seem to ignore your better logic. We just don’t think that way and can’t understand where you’re coming from sometimes.
I hope I made sense with this post. I tried. =) Maybe some of you will be able to walk away from this and be able to have a good conversation with someone you normally wouldn’t understand. That’d make my day. I took longer to write this than I thought I would, so something good had better come out of it.
To anyone who’s still reading by this point; Thanks for your time."
*original*
I think that people from this community can read that and see some similarities between the way people play SSB and Halo. Interesting stuff.
"Hello, Bungie.net forum community. My name’s Hitzel. I’m a gamer, a forum moderator, a Microsoft Core Group beta tester, and a die-hard Halo fan, and I’ve decided to write something for you. I don’t know weather or not you should consider this a present or watnot, but this is for you. I’m explaining to you an opinion… or a whole bunch of opinions that I think some of the more intelligent members here would like to read.
How long has it been now? 7 years since Halo first came out? Either way, Halo’s following has grown a ton since 2001. From my perspective, the community is now split into two groups: “MLG jerks” and “Bungie kids.” I, obviously, am an MLG jerk. Sometimes, when I stop by these forums, I take a few minutes to make a few posts defending Halo 1 or explaining something about competitive Halo. The problem is, these forums move so fast that it feels like whatever I have to say is lost in the massive wave of new replies. That’s why I’m making a new thread, that way more people will be reading this wall ‘o text and hopefully have a good conversation with me.
To start off, let’s talk about the term “competitive gamer.” What exactly does that mean? There are at least hundreds of thousands of people who call themselves competitive gamers (aka, MLG players), but only a few thousand people show up for every MLG event… so “competitive gamer” can’t mean “participates in tournaments.”
Some people may disagree with me, but I feel that being a “competitive gamer” means you like playing games where trying your hardest results in the most fun. Generally, this means that the game has to be consistent for me to truly enjoy it. No randomness… I don’t like randomness… I want to know why I win or why I lose. Everything that happens has to make sense, that way I can immerse myself into the game’s rules and experience a good mental workout.
Let’s look at an example of that in Halo.
Players controlled virtually everything in Halo 1. They even had great control of where other players respawned. By standing at certain locations as your teammate spawned, you could dictate the exact spot he respawned at. That’s called a force spawn. Other areas caused your teammate to randomly spawn anywhere on the map. That’s called a random spawn, and it’s used to stop your teammate from spawning into the enemy’s fire. On the flip side, it’s also possible to make your enemies spawn in certain places in special situations.
There’s more to the Halo 1 spawn system than that, but that’s not the point. In Halo 1, when someone spawned behind you and backsmacked you, you thought to yourself, “Wow, that was smart.” If the same thing happens to you in Halo 2 or 3, you think to yourself, “Wow, could he get any luckier?” For a player like me who has to know why I just died, this happening in Halo 2 or 3 is very frustrating. It wasn’t my fault; there was no force spawn I should have been defending. It wasn’t him outsmarting me, either. So why’d I get assassinated? Whose fault was it? The game’s fault? I don’t like that…
There are other things in Halo 2 and 3 that competitive gamers like me don’t like. A good example is the H3 BR. The BR isn’t perfectly accurate, so sometimes random bullets hit or miss when they shouldn’t. It’s most noticeable when going for headshots. MLG players obviously use BR start, so that becomes a problem for us when two people with BR’s fight. The person who had better aim needs to have his bullets hit more, and the amount of bullets it takes to kill someone needs to be consistent so that players can make decisions based on how much time they have to attack.
Can you guys see where I’m coming from? We love to play games where we can try and have fun doing it. We have the most fun when everything makes sense. If we could randomly win or loose for reasons players can’t control, our efforts become meaningless inside the game… and that’s the opposite of what we want.
This mindset is why us MLG jerks praise Halo 1. It’s why we use such rigid settings to play Halo by. It’s also why some of us seem to ignore your better logic. We just don’t think that way and can’t understand where you’re coming from sometimes.
I hope I made sense with this post. I tried. =) Maybe some of you will be able to walk away from this and be able to have a good conversation with someone you normally wouldn’t understand. That’d make my day. I took longer to write this than I thought I would, so something good had better come out of it.
To anyone who’s still reading by this point; Thanks for your time."
*original*
I think that people from this community can read that and see some similarities between the way people play SSB and Halo. Interesting stuff.
And yes, I do like my items on high, thank you.
