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None of this is a problem in actually competitive games like CS or Dota.
I disagree very strongly actually. CS2 and Dota2 are great examples of how exactly multiplayer went wrong. 20 years ago, there was no MMR system punishing you for getting better at the game, there was very little (if any) moderation and most people played with small groups of friends.
Whereas now? You go play dota, here are some random people who will flame you for not magically knowing the game. You will probably never see any of them ever again so you don't have any motivation to behave with kindness towards them either. You worked hard, learned the game and got better? Well now your MMR is higher, which means the people in your games are even sweatier tryhards, even angrier at the game. And you'll have to work even harder if you want to keep winning. This will continue until you burnout and stop playing or become the #1 top player on the planet (hope you don't mind playing for tens of thousands of hours because that's what it takes).
I agree with all of this. Maybe it's just age, but it's amazing how much nostalgia I have for old battle.net. Not so much the games themselves, but the whole system. (And yes I can technically still use it but it's nothing without the whole community)
One thing I'd add is that having such a finely tuned MMR system puts a weird stress on the game, by getting me an opponent of exactly my level (unless he's smurfing). If I want to try something new, play a new map for the first time, or just relax a little, I'll lose. To win, I have to be 100% pushing at max effort the entire time. And either way, it effects my "score."
Games used to be... well, games. Now they're just sports in a different package.
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What stops you from playing with your small group of friends now?
What's "punishing" about having to play with better players as you become a better player? Is it your desire to instead stomp lobbies 1v5 (or 1v9 if your teammates are bad enough)? Unfortunately, that would likely not be the desire of 5-9 people playing against you.
It's really, really hard! If you'll allow me to put on my tinfoil hat, I almost feel like publishers are intentionally making it hard. We went from "just download this torrent and install hamachi" to "you have to buy this game, install all 100GBs of it, make sure it's the correct version, you have to play it through steam or similar, the servers might brick at any point. And games are just not made for small groups of friends anymore. Compare Heroes of Might and Magic 3 or Age of Empires 2 or Diablo 2 or even Dota 1 to any of the million Call of Duty Clones, which are blatantly made so you'll click "soloqueue". A lot of the time there isn't even an option for party play. If there is, you might have to wait 30min or longer because the game forces groups of players to only play against other groups of players. Oh, and there's censorship, of course. Even innocent, casual-friendly games like Minecraft have to make sure you can't say any naughty words anymore.
Honestly? Yeah, I do want to stomp newbies. As long as it takes me dozens of hours to learn a game or map, I should be rewarded with a vastly increased win chance. Otherwise, what's the point? Why am I learning and trying to get better if the game will just become harder and harder up until I give up? This is just the Moloch problem again, btw.
There's nothing stopping them from playing for a few dozen hours, getting better at the game and stomping newbies too. This is how WC3 works and it's great. This is how the natural world and evolution work too.
Dota 2 and CS have party play, last time I checked.
Then find 5 more people to lobby with? Was it quicker than 30 minutes to go to your local LAN club back in the day so you could play within your own small community?
Presumably you have your own voice chat app so you don't have to speak ingame at all.
You have the choice to find a group of noob friends who don't mind getting stomped. That's how any even slightly organized competition works. You want to have fun? So does everyone else. Want to have easy fun? Play vs. bots. You don't want sweaty tryhards? Don't be sweaty and sink to the rating where people who don't try as hard are. Or, again, find likeminded people. Moloch is about sweatier systems outcompeting unsweatier ones, but I don't see how public queue is "outcompeting" premades, except in games that don't have premades in the first place (and CS/Dota 2 do).
"Game gets harder as I get better" is a selling point for many, many people in many, many games, it shouldn't be unfathomable to you.
It's not fun unless you're a complete masochist, and even you don't seem to be a masochist. Instead you seem to think that newbies don't deserve fun. While also thinking that the game shouldn't be sweaty.
Also, in nature and evolution you don't get better, you just eat shit and die if you're bad. You want to appeal to evolution? The MMR model of gaming flooded out your preferred model of gaming because it's more appealing. Therefore, it's better. That's evolution for you.
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I think that's a mixture of inertia, popularity among non-Western audiences (CS is probably second only to soccer among European and LatAm pastimes, and the Russian playerbase of Dota 2 is infamous), and the sort of "purity" of those games as contests of skill. Girls are probably more likely to play Overwatch, Valorant, or League.
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You can't police CS or Dota as well as a loxal game store.
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