Re: Are my reflexes too lame or are fps games not inclusive for the casual gamer?

@matzesingt

I'm not necessarily sure that I would say that developers go out of their way to make average players feel less than average. They don't have to. It's baked into the very nature of a multiplayer game. And it's made even worse in the case of Apex because of the nature of battle royale as a gametype. Name any endeavor in real life where you would be satisfied with a 5% success rate, assuming again that you're an average individual? Winning aside, even just in engagements the average player will come out on top maybe 50% of the time. I know we all go into these games understanding that this is how they work, and we (sort of) accept that or otherwise wouldn't keep coming back. But there is nothing realistic or satisfying about it, no matter how much the developer may be able to condition us to lowered expectations.

I guess this is a wordy way of saying that zero-sum games are an unforgiving and (to me) unsatisfying form of competition. What if you took a class at school and the teacher/professor said on day one: "I don't care how well you learn the material, I don't care how well you test on the material: at the end of the semester I'm going to fail half the class. If half the class aces the exam and the other half all gets a 99% then the 99%ers will still get a failing grade." It isn't exactly like that, but it's sort of life that.

And yes, compromised matchmaking makes it feel subjectively even worse. And that part is partly on the dev. Honestly, if they're so committed to short wait times that they're willing to divide the player base into only five skill groups for matchmaking... then either your playerbase is too small, or too divided by platform, or your game has a skill curve that's too steep. Or all of the above. I know they say they're going to do better with mm, and my experience this season says that maybe, just maybe, they actually are doing better. But matchmaking is still a Rube Goldberg machine, which is frustrating when there are much simpler solutions at hand.

"If you don’t do that you will have all your big streamers sitting in queue for 15 min and that’s something that cannot happen because it looks very bad."

This is true. It's also what's wrong with modern gaming. Streaming. And people who watch streaming. And people who decide what to play based on streamers. And people who develop all manner of unrealistic expectations based on watching streamers. Cynical old man rant over.