The sad reality is that BR genre has no set concept of what a skilled player is. The ultimate goal of the game is to be the last one surviving yet most of the community ranks players by how many kills they score. And unfortunately respawn failed or just refused to address this by putting so much highlight on kill counts. If you play to win, scoring a lot of kills means you messed up a lot, it means you played bad, not good, because you took way more risk than you should have. And yet we have these arena-wide announcements of who the new kill leader is. It's a complete mess. It does not have to be this way, BR is capable of providing an awesome competitive experience, but Apex appears to be designed as this casual gambling deathmatch arena where just like in deathmatch everyone's goal is to frag except here we got gambling aspects like hot drops where you can just get frags for free. I don't think there's much point talking about skill-based matchmaking in this kind of situation.
Honestly, at this point I just want them to make a deathmatch shooter out of this game, because combat mechanics are really good. It's like a better Titanfall without the gimmicky mech combat.
@2deski wrote:The sad reality is that BR genre has no set concept of what a skilled player is. The ultimate goal of the game is to be the last one surviving yet most of the community ranks players by how many kills they score. And unfortunately respawn failed or just refused to address this by putting so much highlight on kill counts. If you play to win, scoring a lot of kills means you messed up a lot, it means you played bad, not good, because you took way more risk than you should have. And yet we have these arena-wide announcements of who the new kill leader is. It's a complete mess. It does not have to be this way, BR is capable of providing an awesome competitive experience, but Apex appears to be designed as this casual gambling deathmatch arena where just like in deathmatch everyone's goal is to frag except here we got gambling aspects like hot drops where you can just get frags for free. I don't think there's much point talking about skill-based matchmaking in this kind of situation.
Honestly, at this point I just want them to make a deathmatch shooter out of this game, because combat mechanics are really good. It's like a better Titanfall without the gimmicky mech combat.
I disagree, first of all let me just say titanfall 2 has a much wider skill gap and learning curve then apex, and probably why it was never that popular.
Secondly, Its the players who make the apex what it is. The problem is we are in an impatient generation that play auto chess and not real chess for the same reasons. Does that mean classic chess is not a competitive skill based game.
Even in a gambling game like poker, the pros are the ones who rank high consistently. Consistently being the key phrase.
Kills, damage done, all those stats still mean something because we are talking about MULTIPLE matches. Even if they are hot dropping and going for frags, the better players will be consistent and have higher stats over time.
But I still any game is about winning and not the stats. And if people feel that is too luck based, then they should have multiple matches and the best player will still come out on top almost always in a best of tourney. They keep saying anybody can just hide and survive till the end in a BR. Yet they can't prove that * because then they say its all about luck.
As if hot dropping on random noobs isn't also about luck......Auto Chess is more popular then classic chess among gamers for the same reasons. Its a generation with a short attention span and these pros only care about that twitch money.
There is nothing wrong with BR being competitive at all.
@RichAC wrote:
I disagree
What are you disagreeing on exactly? I mostly agree with what you just said.
@RichAC wrote:
Its the players who make the apex what it is. The problem is we are in an impatient generation that play auto chess and not real chess for the same reasons. Does that mean classic chess is not a competitive skill based game.
Just as I said, most of the community ranks players by how many kills they score. And play accordingly, view the game accordingly. Streamers are definitely part of the reason why. But, PUBG highlighted kill counters in red from the start. Apex goes even further by introducing kill leaders and listing squad's kill counts and damage next to each other after each game. Lets not pretend that when a game pushes people to care about kills and damage like this it's entirely their fault when this is all they care about. In fact, it's extremely wrong to pretend so when kills and damage are literally the only individual metrics the game focuses on (survival time, players revived/respawned are rather meaningless). Imagine if instead of those two numbers the game showed your current win percentage and top 3 percentage, or average placement among the last 3 and 10 games. Imagine if kill counters didn't exist at all.
@RichAC wrote:
Even in a gambling game like poker, the pros are the ones who rank high consistently. Consistently being the key phrase.
Kills, damage done, all those stats still mean something because we are talking about MULTIPLE matches. Even if they are hot dropping and going for frags, the better players will be consistent and have higher stats over time.
You are missing the point. You first mention poker where ranking is very simple based on order of elimination. And then you say that kills and damage should matter. How do you see them mixed with the win-rate (or are you talking off topic)? People that hot drop all the time may have a decent combat rating but they will never have a great average placement. Kills and damage do not have a straightforward correlation with win-rate.
@RichAC wrote:
Kill help you win the game.
Kills help you win the game only up to a point. Technically, a win never requires more than 3 kills. Scoring more than that is often reasonable when opportunities present themselves but again, up to a point. For example, if you killed half the server, you almost certainly played very wrong (assuming your goal is to win). If we're including kills into rating, then your rating should be reduced for that, not raised. But the exact point of how many kills are too many is impossible to determine. It's like rating goalies in hockey by the amount of spectacular saves they made - it's pointless because the best goalies position themselves better and make easy saves instead.
@RichAC wrote:
There is nothing wrong with BR being competitive at all.
I agree, the constantly repeated mantra of "RNG means the game is not competitive" is complete nonsense born out of extremely shortsighted views. But a competitive game requires a clear consensus on what the goal of the game is. The reality is we don't have that.
@RichAC wrote:Society will never respect
You'd be surprised...
@2deski I agree with most of what you said except i'm trying to explain how Skill Rating is diff then a ranking. Especially on a team game. Yes kills partly determine your skill but they don't necessarily determine wins. Especially in a team game. You can't have ELO in a team game unless its dedicated premade teams, imo. A skill rating can be per individual to match players to a team and then used to match teams to a matched game.
IN pro athletic sports you have rankings based on many diff stats. Sure its what makes the game interesting, its fun. Stats are what make sports period. But it doesn't necessarily mean a win, nor should it. Some of these so called pro players have some serious entitlement issues. Then again thats the internet in general.
I stand by what I said about Poker and luck plays a part in any sport. There is a reason its on ESPN and e-sports is not. And in no way do I think Michael Jordan should have been entitled to a win every game just because he had the best stats and considered the best player. Understand?
@RichAC wrote:@2deski I agree with most of what you said except i'm trying to explain how Skill Rating is diff then a ranking. Especially on a team game. Yes kills partly determine your skill but they don't necessarily determine wins. Especially in a team game. You can't have ELO in a team game unless its dedicated premade teams, imo. A skill rating can be per individual to match players to a team and then used to match teams to a matched game.
Ranking is sorting by rating. Ranking by anything but skill rating has no meaning for matchmaking. If a stat does not represent the player's skill it's useless. The question is what constitutes a player's skill. And as I said, there's no consensus on that, nor is the game clear on that. Additionally, if you match people by skill rating and then make a leaderboard by another then that ranking won't make much sense as you'll get low-level players at the top.
Theoretically, I don't see why you can't have ELO here. If you strictly rate players by relative positioning, you should be able to match players by their ability to score high placements. The reason it won't work is not because it's a team-based game but because way too few people actually play for placement.
@RichAC wrote:Further more a rank is based on a single stat to rank on and I would pick wins. That is what any game is about. A skill rating should be based on all stats combined.
As I said before, combining everything just doesn't work because stats about kills do not correlate with stats about wins. The way I see it, there are two options:
The latter seems to be what OP wants. And it seems to be the most fitting to how the game is now. May actually be a really good thing, but the devs would probably need to say goodbye to their top streamers like Shroud and Dizzy. Because it would take minutes if not tens of minutes for them to find a close enough match to then die in a hot drop in 30 seconds (because they are not matched against weak fighters anymore). This will likely almost kill the game on Twitch.
@RichAC wrote:I stand by what I said about Poker and luck plays a part in any sport. There is a reason its on ESPN and e-sports is not. And in no way do I think Michael Jordan should have been entitled to a win every game just because he had the best stats and considered the best player. Understand?
The reason e-sports are not on ESPN is because gamers don't watch ESPN. So e-sports are on Twitch and Youtube. I get what you mean with Michael Jordan but I don't think that's a great example in here because there is no analogy in Battle Royale games. I think most people would say that it's Shroud but it's extremely shortsighted. Macro play is what separates BR from other shooters and AFAIK he never showed any prowess in that. It's like calling Ovechkin the best hockey player because of his goal scoring titles even when his +/- stat was horrible. People that follow competitive PUBG would probably name someone from there but even in the competitive scene there is so little understanding on what actually makes a player valuable that people still mostly fallback to the same basic stats of kills and damage (from the start PUBG awarded points for kills which I find very questionable). That's why focusing on having everyone go for the win and thus master the macro play seems the most attractive option to me since that would allow to actually develop an understanding on what sets the best players apart from the rest. Whereas now it is a total mess of two playstyles with contradicting goals.
