How do you think Apex should be played?
Another question because I see some disagreement over this in quite a few comment sections on the internet. To me, I think the game is geared towards aggressive play, and placement is a reward for s...
Forum Discussion
@Unitee01
"...aggressive does not have to mean dumb or reckless."
Yup, we're very close to being on the same page.
You're right that aggressive play doesn't always mean reckless... but in my lobbies it usually does. And it's largely the kids you're describing. They're not trying to be dumb, they're just trying to get some experience. They're throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. And I can appreciate that, but this is a "not on my time" situation.
"But in order to progress a person HAS to start taking more fights eventually."
Right again, but it is a question of easing into fights at one's own pace, not at the pace of the diamond-level double stack I just got paired with for no good reason. Not that this bothers me now, but it sure did back in season five. And this IS the way this game so often works.
"Maybe someone can have a decent win rate, for now, but eventually they will be surpassed by people who has more experience in fights."
Here I have to say again, this is rank-think. This is only true IF you play ranked and IF you genuinely believe that anyone can make it to predator if they just want it bad enough or work hard enough or buy the right strike pack or whichever. I can't. I won't. And I'm not interested in trying. I'll take my sbmm matches and play it cool and win way more than my gun skills should allow, because this game has sbmm. Whatever others may claim to the contrary.
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The problem with the idea of constant improvement, as I see it, is twofold. First: there is a performance ceiling for each and every one of us. Do I really want to bleed out my eyeballs to get to my true potential just to discover that it's low platinum? And Second: Wherever that ceiling may turn out to be, once you get there sbmm is designed to make sure that you don't have even one minute to feel satisfied or proud. It will, with great haste and assuredness, find many many players who can wipe the floor with you no matter how good you get. So where is the incentive to grind ever upward knowing that you'll never reach the top, and that the higher you go the harder you'll have work for every single inch of ground and every single bullet you fire? My daddy always said, "Work harder, not smarter." No! Wait! He never once said that in his life and neither has any smart person I know!
"...aggressive does not have to mean dumb or reckless."
Yup, we're very close to being on the same page.
You're right that aggressive play doesn't always mean reckless... but in my lobbies it usually does. And it's largely the kids you're describing. They're not trying to be dumb, they're just trying to get some experience. They're throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. And I can appreciate that, but this is a "not on my time" situation.
"But in order to progress a person HAS to start taking more fights eventually."
Right again, but it is a question of easing into fights at one's own pace, not at the pace of the diamond-level double stack I just got paired with for no good reason. Not that this bothers me now, but it sure did back in season five. And this IS the way this game so often works.
"Maybe someone can have a decent win rate, for now, but eventually they will be surpassed by people who has more experience in fights."
Here I have to say again, this is rank-think. This is only true IF you play ranked and IF you genuinely believe that anyone can make it to predator if they just want it bad enough or work hard enough or buy the right strike pack or whichever. I can't. I won't. And I'm not interested in trying. I'll take my sbmm matches and play it cool and win way more than my gun skills should allow, because this game has sbmm. Whatever others may claim to the contrary.
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The problem with the idea of constant improvement, as I see it, is twofold. First: there is a performance ceiling for each and every one of us. Do I really want to bleed out my eyeballs to get to my true potential just to discover that it's low platinum? And Second: Wherever that ceiling may turn out to be, once you get there sbmm is designed to make sure that you don't have even one minute to feel satisfied or proud. It will, with great haste and assuredness, find many many players who can wipe the floor with you no matter how good you get. So where is the incentive to grind ever upward knowing that you'll never reach the top, and that the higher you go the harder you'll have work for every single inch of ground and every single bullet you fire? My daddy always said, "Work harder, not smarter." No! Wait! He never once said that in his life and neither has any smart person I know!
@reconzero So you're basically saying you are worried that if you play differently or improve the mm will ruin the game for you because you'll get harder lobbies? Theoretically that should already be the case if you've been playing this long. Either way, both scenarios sound kinda equally bad for me tbh :/ What's the point of playing if you're only interested in getting easy wins the easy way in the easy lobbies? The pride or enjoyment you speak of is gained by beating the odds which aren't in your favor, that's the point, at least for me anyway. I played very passively back in season 3 but it eventually just made the game feel dead to me and it always bothered me to know I couldn't really take fights head on. And if you think about it all the game really is is a series of 1v1's, in a way. But hey, I'm not here to judge you or tell you what to do or how to play, it's not really the point of the discussion. It's just my perspective. You do you 🙂
- @Unitee01
There's nothing here that I can disagree with... even if I wouldn't necessarily characterize my decisions in exactly those words. But yes, I'm not interested in striving to achieve mediocrity. I'd rather relax and let the chips fall where they may. A good part of that is just my personality, but I think the lion's share has to do with being a solo player in a team game. So much of what qualifies as "good" in this game is based in team work, and that is, I think, one aspect of the game that the solo player just plain has to discount to almost nothing. Not because I won't sometimes get good teammates, but because you never know from one match to the next, and because by the time you find out what you have for teammates, it's often too late.
But in the end, no, I don't want harder lobbies. I won't complain about them if they come, but I won't actively seek them out. I'll let the game decide what it thinks I can handle and once in a while it will expose me to something that I can't, and that's okay as long as it doesn't become 70% of my matches. But I don't need this game to be a job. I already have one of those.- @reconzero Amen.
@reconzeroFor a casual player like me my lobbies are already 90% how you don't want it to be. Every once in a while I'll get a decent match, but all the frustration in between just to get to that one single match, isn't worth it.
On top of that the new ranked system made things much worse, because now all the competitive players who are pissed at the new system are now in pubs.
Every arena game I played yesterday had at least 1 smurf in it and someone that was diamond.
@reconzero Since you mentioned achieving things, I realized something not too long ago that I think many many people do not take into consideration.
When people look at a player's win rates, kills, badges etc it's so easy to take all that at face value but those values are, when seeking to compare apples to apples, completely meaningless.
People go, look at this guy, he's got 50k kills but a win rate of like 3% - he must be terrible at the game! He does not know how to win! But often this is the furthest thing from the truth, especially if he's high rank.
If someone is exclusively playing bronze lobbies 70% of the time naturally they will have a higher win rate.
If someone is exclusively playing masters or higher lobbies 70% of the time there's a good chance his win rate would be lower, at least until he becomes extremely good at playing in those lobbies, which will take a lot of time.
To me, a win rate of 3% in masters lobbies means 100x more than getting 15% in bronze level lobbies as those wins carry a lot more weight. He's still 100% the better player although it might not look like it on paper. But unfortunately, how someone's being matched is an invisible stat and might be a little unfair to the better players out there who are judged on stats at face value.
Difficulty "tiers" were discussed recently in another thread which ties into this.
So in a way, mediocrity, as you say, can depend on many things including what info is or isn't available to us and how we perceive it. Low numbers on paper does not have to mean bad and vice versa. But I understand that not everyone want's to sweat 24/7 too, including me many times, it's just that most of us don't really seem to have a choice in the matter.
- @Unitee01
I agree with you 100% that statistics and badges and trackers, taken out of context, have virtually no meaning or value whatsoever.
"If someone is exclusively playing bronze lobbies 70% of the time naturally they will have a higher win rate."
This is not true at all. If a player is playing in bronze lobbies 70% of the time then they are not a very good player and will win, even against other bronze players, at a rate reflective of their skill. If they start to win more over time then they probably won't remain in bronze for very long. This is just the nature of mmr and sbmm, even in this game where they seem to be lax and elastic.
"To me, a win rate of 3% in masters lobbies means 100x more than getting 15% in bronze level lobbies as those wins carry a lot more weight."
This is problematic for me, especially as we've already said that these statistics, taken out of context, have no real meaning. But beyond that I feel as if the implication here is that shooting and aiming are the real skills in this game, and people who are best at those skills, even if they don't win the most, are still the best players. If that isn't what you're implying then I'm just reading too much into what you've said, but if it is what you're implying then we'll just have to agree to disagree. Winning matters, and it matters at every skill level. If the game is designed in such a way that a player can play in the highest ranks of the game, and not have a respectable win rate to show for it, then the mmr alogrithm is flawed. But I'm sure we already knew that it was flawed in a huge number of ways....
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