Skill Ceiling

Dota (itself and not the clones) is hard because you need to know how to do several things well in order to succeed.

Define skill ceiling by how hard a game is to master and Data is at the very top. It's probably impossible to master, so much so that during every TI the meta changes while the top players are under heavy pressure. One established meta before TI and an entirely different meta after TI. That's only a week and the way everyone plays changes.

They are all literally "One Hero Unit Only" Warcraft 3 for spastics.

smash brothers, no doubt

hey i know that starcraft mod!

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please tell us your story of playing a specific shmup game and how you came to the conclusion that all shmups are easy and require no skill.

At least try.

I never said they were easy.
Can you not read?
I said they're trial and error / Memory based.

This doesnt even LOOK fun.

we could dissect fighting games as a quick game of evaluation rather than some real strategy.

Basically for each state of X you could do Y and be safe about it. You keep inputing the right move in reaction to what X does and you win the game. The only caveat is that you need to memorize all moves and then be quick to react, this is why asians rule all these "high skill ceiling games" they are quick.

do you faggots know what bullet hell means??

a hell of bullets?

And now you have to prove how they require no skill as that is another part you said or implied shmups did not contain, and is the basis of the topic of the thread. Just because you know the pattern doesn't mean that it takes no skill to get by them.

It would take skill if it was random, and not preset.

Answer me, is THIS skill? or is it just a guy who's autistic enough to remember what to do. I mean, if the game wasnt completely the same at all times, he wouldnt be able to react to random enemies without seeing it, right??

The ever present fags on any vidya discussion board confuse skill with liking a game. So if they don't like a particular genre, to them it requires no skill to play those games.

Memorisation is a skill, yes. How can you even think the opposite?

good fuckin lord neo-Holla Forums is terrible. did christmas break already start?

Then I would ask you to beat a Raizing game made after Battle Garegga without dying once since everything is preset and you are able to dodge anything.

Shmups have patterns where the enemy will spawn and move but not at where they will shoot. It varies where your position is so there can be a slight difference how you weave through bullets each playthrough.

Are you saying acting in a theatre requires no skill?

I really wish being a moron was against the rules.

literally anyone can learn to act.

Improvisation is actual skill.

Do you know what the difference between Knowledge and Wisdom is?

Ultimately unless the game's winner is decided by RNG like CS:GO or pokemon, the skill ceiling is so high it's irrelevant.
I want to see anyone who can do something flawleslly

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Lmao how old are you

Nowhere did I imply that, simply that memorising entire scripts is a required skill for acting in a theatre.

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20 feet

Has anyone ever considered that "skill ceiling" is just a way that players managed to get more bang for their buck, not necessarily something good or fun?

In arcade games, you usually died from very few hits, often a single one and yet you were expected to survive for long periods of time to reach the end. This was an effort by the devs to get more cash from the players, "buy a new life, keep playing the game". Difficulty was placed not to make the game better but to extort more money.
You could make up for it by actually being good at the game but that doesn't change the initial idea.

Similarly, cartridge games often were very difficult because the amount of data you could place in one of those things was fairly short. So in order to extend the longevity of the game, devs would make them as hard as possible, forcing you to play it multiple times, especially to unlock secrets in them just to artificially lengthen them.
Again, you could make up for it by being good at the game but that doesn't change the initial idea.

So what if it's the same for all the classics people laudle as the most "skill-ceiling demanding games", but instead of the Devs, it was done by the players?
What if people simply had a very short library of games back then, prices were still high and piracy wasn't yet a thing like it is today, what if you bought Quake and you knew very well you're not gonna play a new game until next year?

It would make perfect sense to play it to death and some more, extracting as much as you could from it not because it's necessarily fun or good but because you had no alternative for a long time. The exploitation of glitches and the incorporation of them into regular gameplay, making them not only accepted but demanded from new games would be no different than increasing difficulty to extend longevity or extract more credits.

It's just an artifical way to further lengthen the game that barely makes any sense when there's alternatives to the same game now. It's something that expects you to play the same game for hundreds of hours, as if you had nothing else to play. Why would anyone consider that this makes sense today?

Despite its' status as a meme: Battletoads takes a lot of skill.

We're mostly talking about multiplayer games here, and to Quake I say that it was the first game to support TCP IP, paving the road for modern multiplayer meaning that playing it for a year wouldn't be hard since multiplayer games never get boring, and the only skill ceiling in them is the skill of the best in the world.

do you have a specific example of a game that takes out skill and is still good and retains a quality or a high status as a game with skill or depth?

Also why should we lessen skill ceilings when said skills and depth made games of the past as good as they were, hard or not. Just because we have more options now doesn't mean they need to be dumbed down because there is a market need that we have to play(BUY) them all.

As a videogame enthusiast what benefit is there buying and playing breaddead games that require no thought?

But every single level is about memory. There is a trick to each stage, not th ewarp gates, and it's pretty easy if you know the pattern. it's not like it throws you curve balls or any thing. exact same thing can be said about ninja gaiden NES.

Timing is at least as important as memorization in both of them. So it's not just memory.

My pick for top skill game goes to iRacing. The only difference between winning and losing is your technique, skill, and focus. Usually the only difference in the car is your setup.

keep in mind for this vid THERE IS NO EBRAKE. every drift is braking or shift lock drifting. the hardest types. youtube.com/watch?v=CcHXjiew28I

Can you seriously play the same game for years and years and never get bored out of it? Really?
You never have your curiosity picked by a newer one that might not be as good but does something new?
How and why would you subject yourself to play the same thing year after year?
And why would you criticize CoD for doing what you're willing to accept anyway

My point is that they didn't. The players forced the games to be good by pure autism, finding depth were none existed. Bunnyhopping and rocketjumping were not coded in on purpose in the first implementations, they were quirks of the engine that players learned to exploit.
Older games actually went out of their way to include those things but it doesn't change their birth.

The games weren't good, they just were the only thing people had available and they had to make do with what they had. It's a pretty impressive work considering just how much depth they managed to extract from those games but it doesn't change the fact that those elements were only discovered and exploited by the players because the base game was very lackluster.

Except that's what "skill ceiling" actually does. Instead of promoting innovation and games trying new things to improve on the formula, apaprently everyone is happy if you just copy Quake or C&C and include it's mechanics 1:1
It stiffles game design no less than CoD players complaining about Red Orchestra "not being CoD".

Let me ask you that question but loaded in a differen way:
As a videogame enthusiast what benefit is there buying and playing a game that requires hundreds of hours to learn how to play it versus buying several different games that are fun from 10 minutes in?

True enough. Reaction time is important and can be considered a skill. How do you train reaction time though?

Mmm, Good question young Grasshoppah. When you can grasp the pebble from my hand you will know.

Could one argue that a game does not have a high skill level if the best player could lose to an average player?

Do games with elements of luck and probability reduce the skill ceiling?

Personally I would say not but I wonder if there could be some sore of mathematical formula to apply to games based on top players losing to average players to calculate the inherent skill of playing a given game.

I'm asking that so you have an actual point to prove with your post. What game in a genre takes out the depth of it and still is regarded as much as another game in the genre with quality. If you can't answer you defeat the argument in your original post

Those games were good without the game exploits as well. The atmosphere and work of the engine made quake great. Even without combos Street Fighter 2 still had a cast of multiple characters you could play as with varied moves which wasn't widespread at the time. Without wave dashing Melee is a game with multiple modes and more characters than before. Even though they were available they managed to be better than their predecessors, which is more than what we can say about videogames today.

As a videogame enthusiast what benefit is there buying and playing a game that requires hundreds of hours to learn how to play it versus buying several different games that are fun from 10 minutes in?

Humans think and continue to question. For video games we want to engage and master the extent of our engagement. We want to climb the next mountain, exceed our next challenge. We want to see how far interaction goes in a game, We want to know how our interactions will work with between gameplay and music or gameplay and story, we want to see how well with a set of rules we can bend and manipulate them, we want to see how well we compete against one another. Why would we be enamored and continually praise something that we can grasp the concept of 10 minutes in. It's like asking "why can't we be amazed with michael bay movies" every single time an explosion happens or "Why can't we rate Lays chips 10/10 cuisine" even though we eat too many of them. There are people who ask more from movies than bright lights and explosions and there are people who will ask more from video games, they want to learn different mechanics and ways of interacting. If it takes a while, if mechanics aren't explicitly told, than so be it that is part of the process. Good or bad video games shouldn't be casualized and I haven't seen a good argument for it from you

What the fuck even is the basis for this argument? Or this just some shitty meme?

You seem to be arguing from the position that because something happened by accident, or the original intent for its creation was based on reasons other than a genuine pursuit of quality, that it invalidates everyone who might have such a preference. But look at it this way, if difficult games were meant to be unworkable and their systems made no sense, that means they wouldn't be enjoyable to play in the first place, so one would feel compelled to keep wasting quarters on arcades and such, not to mention people still praising these experiences several years after the fact.

That sounds like an opinion I would read from some retarded game's blogger making excuses for casual shit in modern gaming. No offense, user.

So you have no arguments?

LEAGUE OF LEGENDS

I'm more of a CS player than a Quake player, but I know that's bullshit. In Quake, even a small difference in skill can lead to completely one sided games. The entire philosophy of how the game is set up is to deny your opponent any chance to fight back. What's more, there's been RNG in CS since 1.3. It's offset by the fact that it's a team game and the better team will win most of the time, but that's not going to stop someone from firing a random awp shot while moving and having it fly through a wall and hit someone in the head. Even you could have accidentally'd NEO back in 1.6.

Have to agree, they're 2 completely different games. In cs you could just hide in a cheeky corner, hope the opponent decides to check the other side instead and bam, free kill, that doesn't happen in quack, ever.

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Some of this discussion is complicated by the issue of individual vs team skill. Dota has a very high skill cap, but individual skill is less obvious and less important than in a game where 1 on 1 is the default

Yeah the urge to do a school shooting while you're playing that shit game is very hard to fight.

Just checking.

I didn't know where this thread would go when I made it. Any more experience or discussion on Dota 2? I am just curious about how this game is so popular. As for CS vs Quake, CS is suppose to be a Tactical/more realistic shooter.

Now THIS is autism. Did this guy have a stroke?

Yeah, CSGo is just RNG argument is pretty flat.

Have to go with Guild Wars 1. For those who haven't played it its sort of DOTA-like except:

It is a shooter, cause you shoot things. This argument is retarded.

Okay, so he does admit it is a shooter in the end, my autism was flaring.

I've been playing Touhou for years and haven't come close to reaching a "skill ceiling". No matter how much I play, there's always a way to get better.

Those are some great noises.

nyaa.se/?page=view&tid=788435

Chess

What about VS SHMUPs like TH09? It has random patterns, except for character-specific spellcards, and the goal is to fill the enemy's screen with bullshit quicker than he can react or bomb through it.

You ever heard that you need hundreds of hours to be good at dota? That's the amount of time required to climb to the skill floor. Only after acquiring all the information about heroes and items and basic game mechanics can you begin to take steps to being good.

Dota is not like other games. It wasn't conceived to be what it is, it is truly a clusterfuck, but in the end it worked. The design is simply too fucked up to be copied right, but this is what gives it it's high skill ceiling. How can anyone master chaos?

You implied it when you said "Are you saying acting in a theatre requires no skill?" as a response to someone saying memorization is not a skill.

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That's just a wrong assumption. Learn some communication skills.

It takes hundreds of hours to be bare-minimum decent at any competitive game. In SC2 literally around 95% of people don't understand basic RTS fundamentals of how to play the game and you don't even need any sort of build order or knowledge of unit counters.

I have never heard that no, sorry.

Speed running is the worlds biggest meme and needs to die. Zoasty is cool in my books though.

perhaps you should stop to question why this is important to you, and if it should be important

Do you understand what an implication is?

Not when it's a game specifically designed for speedruns. It's a meme when it's exploitation of glitches or other meta autism applied to a game like Goldeneye, Sivade's run is an incredibly impressive display of skill

I never said it is important, just curious for a discussion on it. git gud.

StarCraft is not nearly as complex as doto.

Thank god you aren't going to breed.

rts requires you to do more and pay attention to more while you still need to react fast with precision and do the mind games.
that gets my vote.

I already did with your mother

did you actually or are you engaging in the bantere?

hhhiiyyyyoooo, just dont touch my Gatebox.

No, its far more complex.

Yes, I actually did

Are you playing with your chinese girl cartoon holograms again, son?

de_stroyed

Nice digits, I wonder if you can program it sexually yet.

but muh meta

Deathmatch 2.0 was a mistake.

I would definitely put cs into that list. Probably not cs:go, but the original one is one hardcore game. You got a shitload of strategies and movement is very tricky too thanks to bhopping.

Other than that I would put UT into that list. Movement is very simple, but the fact that it is so simple makes it so hard to master it.

And another insanely hard game is Left 4 Dead. You need at least 600 hours in this game to be somewhat decent. Not kidding, go to some l4d communities and try to get into a game with people who seriously play it, you will get absolutely destroyed.

What was left 4 dead a mod of again?

So how exactly is a 90s RTS more complex than dota?

Counter-Strike: Source, I think. Four dudes with guns against an army of bots with knives.

skill ceiling, not boner ceiling

L4D is the worst game I've played. How can anyone stand it?

Ask Korea.

There is a chart floating around somewhere that all Valve games are mods of other games, and not original games. That is what I was referring too.

ai is retarded in that game, but go into multiplayer and you will get destroyed, especially in Left 4 Dead 2 because the game got a bunch of new glitches. Trust me, you will get killed within the first minute without even realizing what happened.

No I am asking you. Even mentioning Korea makes you look bad here because their dota scene is pitiful and they prefer the baby tier League.

League of legends is better then Dota 2.

Ah I see you were just pretending to be retarded for (17)

The first one was pretty exploitable due to infinite melee, but the new special zombies in L4D2 added a lot more play to the asymmetry of the multiplayer. It's really satisfying and fun to experience the differences in playstyle; the director AI gives a lot of replay value to the somewhat linear levels.

The thing which can put off new players is the somewhat "solved" meta due to the game's age, given that everyone knows what the best kill spots for chargers are, etc. But if you aren't getting destroyed, the hectic nature of the gameplay is satsifying to master. The clenched-teeth co-op on both sides is great, too, and playing as the zombies lets you view each level in a new way. Coming together to form something greater than the sum of your parts through movement and co-operation since each special zombie dies in about half a second of gunfire.

What is the current state of dota actually? I stopped playing it after they added all those comeback mechanics and shit like that.

a year a go I would have said that dota is a game that requires skill, but with every patch they nerf farming and buff mindless fights.

If you guys have Left 4 Dead 2 installed I can try to start a lobby, if you are interested to see how insanely skilled some of those guys are. Follow the liter, no mercy rooftop. It's just not very easy to find players because the left 4 dead 2 community is extreeeeemly cancer. This game beats dota and everything else out there.

league of legends has better porn than dota 2

Dude what the fuck are you smoking? Once you play through the game once, there is literally no reason to ever launch it again. It's repetitive as hell.

There was actually a major update, biggest update yet for Dota, like a few days ago. A lot of people seem pretty upset about it and are saying it's like League now. I haven't played it yet.

Oh, don't talk dirty to me like that. I'd love to, but I uninstalled it a couple years ago after every pub turned into Griefs & Hacks: The Game.

You strike me as a man who plays through Street Fighter's arcade mode and then puts the game away.
And yet there's always room for some new bullshit or strategy to work due to the dense map geometry, director AI, and semi-coordinated actions of 8 random players. It's a great time, user.

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man I am going through my archievements right now, and the last one I unlocked was march 2013. I haven't played this game in ages. And even a week long break takes ages to get back into it because of the unusual movement settings that game has.

I'm a man who puts the game away far, far before finishing arcade mode because fighting games are one of the most boring genres.

L4D competitive ended with both teams surviving and the tiebreaker going to which team only lost 5 HP throughout the map vs. the other team's 10. It was basically impossible for Infected to win once Survivors got pretty decent.

That said L4D1 maps weren't balanced for L4D2 infected so I'm sure there's a bunch of cheese that's easy for infected to do. The helipad in your video is basically a charger's wet dream.

Hello? Farming is low tier in dota.

I can't tell you how it is right now because 7.0 was released this week and it's almost a revolution. From what I can tell from the patch notes, support heroes are now more fluid in their role (treant can even be carry tier but he's a special case) and overall it seems confrontations are more encouraged, but only time can tell. The meta has been obliterated instead of a slow change into a new meta so it's almost like learning dota all over again. You would not be any less informed if you started playing again today.

The skill ceiling is still there of course, it's nothing like league or hots, those are knee jerk opinions to the huge change brought by 7.00.

u mad?

Go back to your hole.

Don't bring up facts to dotatards and steamdrones. They hate em.
PRAISE TRUMP KEK KEK XD XD

Go back to reddit.

It was dying for a long time. I think I last played it in early 2013, too, and Dark Carnival was the only campaign you could reliably fill. Good campaign, but sometimes I just got the itch only Swamp Fever could scratch and there wasn't anything I could do about it. Once people discovered how to pseudo-bunnyhop consistently and became more interested in camping on top of a fence than completing the level, interest in L4D2 petered out. I think Cold Stream burnt a lot of people, too, since it was kind of gimmicky and very easy to bum rush.

oooooh_i'm_laffin'.webm

So Dota would be equally as hard if it was played at 1/3rd speed? Because that's what it would take for them to be making decisions as fast as SC players have to in real time.

To put it simply, dota is not an RTS. You're comparing games that require different skill sets. You can't measure skill in dota by some because it's a meaningless metric outside a handful of heroes in a roster of over a hundred.

Measure skill by apm, fucking autocorrect.

All my videos are shit actually, I am currently searching for a good one on youtube but I can't find one. I attached one but even that one is REALLY shit. Those guys are worse than bots, I would instantly kill them and rather play solo than have them on my team.

And that helipad is seriously not as dangerous as those people make it look like. Against a good team of survivers you stand no chance there. A single katana hit to the head kills a charger, you just need to time it right, and a shotgun can one shot a charger too if you are close enough.

There are a lot of skills in l4d2 like that, you can for example also cut a smokers tongue with your katana or a canister.

you can give it a try here steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=150461076 not as easy as it sounds like.

This. The argument is obviously flawed and comes from the same line of thinking of any 16 year old leftist just starting to form a basic set of ideals - any thing self interested in nature is inherently PHONY! Regardless of the origins of the brutal difficulty in videogames (and it's not true. Games like AD&D, which was undeniably heavily influential to the industry, already specialized in no nonsense difficulty to force high level play before arcades ever existed. IF's like Zork too) it doesn't point to proof that the enjoyment and value of punishing difficulty is purely out of some Stockholm syndrome and not just because it's a good fucking mechanic - not to mention good hygiene, casualcuck.

This is entirely true. What the fuck do you mean no offense? He doesn't belong here and neither do you, redditor scum.

Yeah I know, the problem of L4D is that a good survivor can completely dominate infected unless the infected get lucky. Most of the infected were designed with the assumption that they should win in a 1v1 fight but in reality the skill cap is way higher for survivors and against a good survivor your infected are basically praying for the 5% of the time that lag messes them up.

Valve should really have taken out deadstopping hunters and being able to cut the smoker's tongue yourself back in L4D1. I thought they were bugs back in the previews, but apparently they were "features".

clickclickclickclick

bad games

It is real time strategy though, just dumbed down.

Are the hitboxes still garbage? Because sliding off of survivors as a charger is the worst thing in the world.

If apm is a measure of skill and koreans are the kings of apm, why are they dogshit at dota?

Let's not get into semantics. Dota only shares the control scheme/pov, in every other way it's different than RTS games. No it's not a dumbed down RTS, it's something else entirely.

its source, the hitboxes can't be fixed.

They managed it in csgo.

Didn't Koreans make to the finals of Dota 2 2016?

Just short of the finals and it's the only team WITH south Koreans.

Can someone please define "skill" in a context suitable for this thread? I feel a solid definition would make for more effective arguing.

Is it the ability to effectively probe a system, gather information and detect trends/patterns? (a skill made largely irrelevant due to datamining, wikis, GameFAQs, etc)

Is it the ability to utilize the information on hand to develop strategies and plans to deal with the task at hand? (a skill required of most world firsters in mmos as these strategies and plans give them and edge over their opponents)

Is it the ability to manage and mitigate risk? (a skill more tailored towards luck based games such as traditional rougelikes and cardgames like MTG or Hearthstone)

Is it the ability to effectively execute on a strategy or plan? (a skill required in shooters, MOBAs, Bullet Hells, IWBTG type games. A skill typically involving memory, muscle memory and/or reflexes)

Is it all of the above in some strange mixture?

There are several different skills. Different genres require different skill sets.

D) All of the above.

Different games test different skills, naturally. The best games can combine several of these categories and test the player's skill sets, ideally in such a way that the skills cross over. Catherine is a puzzle game and a dating sim, but to my knowledge there is no intersection of these elements of the game. I'm glad you brought this point up, and that you recognize execution and muscle memory as skills - there are a surprising number of people in this thread who seem to think technical skill and memory aren't interesting, or aren't even valid.

Depth, things to learn, shit to master and that kind of shit. In cs 1.6/hl you got complicated movement. Bunnyhop is hard to pull off and other shit like silent jumps or that duck run thing where you move fast but make no sound is also a bitch to pull off. Then you got a bunch of spray patterns you got to learn and the maps have a shitload of grenade spots.

There is just a shitload of crap to learn. Compare this to games like CoD or Battlefield. In those games you just shot shit, there is nothing to learn about movement or weapons. Early CoD games had some glitches that added skill but they removed those with mw2.

Because Dota is a low skill cap game where your APM doesn't matter. If you have a potential APM of 180 then you still have no advantage in a game where there is no more than 30 actions per minute worth making.

I'm not particularly big on battlefield, but after having seen some of Ravic's videos I think Battlefield is more about placement and mindgames. That being said, it takes incredibly good aim, prediction skills, and a knowledge of bullet drop and optimal vehicle operation to be great at Battlefield.

This.
Then you have the various subgenres that delve into more specific subsets

Anything that requires practice to improve upon is a skill. Masturbating is a skill.

As for a skill ceiling in games? Tough call. I would steer away from E-sports games because you always see 20-year-olds playing them; if you can max out the skill ceiling by that age, it must not be that high. On the other hand, you see that the best players of chess and go are quite older; if it takes a lifetime to get that good, the skill ceiling is obviously much higher.

It's ironic, but the simpler a game is, the more complex the skills required can be. Any time you get an incredibly complex game, the players will very quickly find a game-breaking technique (like rushing in Starcraft) that makes all that complexity moot. But in a simple game, you can't do that because there is no complexity — all prowess is pure skill, not just bending the rules or exploiting the mechanics.

Because of this, technically speaking any arcade game where the difficulty is based upon nothing but speed could be this. For example, Tetris has a nearly infinite skill ceiling because the pieces can always move faster. The limit would be the human's capabilities, and then the screen's refresh rate, and then the computer's processing speed, and eventually just the speed of light. But until that point, more speed just requires more skill.

That's quite a reach. For one, some games have more dependence than others on physical aspects of skill. I'm old enough to see myself slow down in terms of being able to execute in fighting games, for example. That doesn't mean they require less skill than say, 4x, so much as it means that the parts of my central nervous system that each engage haven't aged the same.
There's an interesting study from a while back that I'm trying to find again that looked at the average age at which people found their peak success in different fields. In mathematics, it was often in their early twenties, whereas authors, I believe, peaked in their fifties. I don't think that really indicates that one has a higher skill ceiling than the other. And we know for a fact that ALL skills degrade after ageing long enough.
Second, there's an obvious generational gap in e-sports to begin with that makes comparing ages statistically a bit disingenuous to begin with. You can't actually demonstrate for sure that the average age of players in E-sports games isn't young simply because E-sports are young.
Also, the definition of E-sports game doesn't really have anything to do with the content of the game but the community surrounding it.

Is this 2007 youtube again?

chivalry is better than warband when multiplayer is concerned
the 4 way blocking in warband is a fucking awful mechanic and the lack of gore

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That would be great.

Yeah, look the this noskill fggot who thinks he's good

while memorization isn't necessarily a skill, the ability to identify and react to situations that throw you off is a skill. Perfection is also impossibly difficult to pull off in the first place. minimizing risk and loss is also a skill.

This tbh fam
arena shootan is 90% map control

I was gonna mention a rhythm game but I realize that even the rhythm game communities have shitfits determining which has the highest skill ceiling.
Here's some play of LR2, emulator of IIDX.

Nobody does.

Christ if I was that dexterous I'd be a fucking pianist or something rather than just playing loli vidya all day.

You're so obviously ignorant about high level playing. Age matters, a lot.

The skill to micromanage in dota is useless outside a few heroes. You are comparing apples and oranges.

There's a fair amount of people who do both.

Can games be hard, but have a low skill ceiling? And can games have a high skill ceiling, but be easy?

I didn't say it wasn't shit, just that it requires quite a lot of practice to be good at it

To be fair, there's different categories for speedruns. Sometimes it's fun to watch and see what kinds of glitches exist in games. The most impressive ones are a combination of longplay and speedruns where the player has to complete each section as fast as possible without breaking the game.

Yo battlefield 2 had a decently high skill ceiling, especially with the air and vehicle combat

Get real, there are shooters with way more depth and challenge than Jamestown or fucking Touhou.

And especially fucking SFII.

It absolutely is. The word you're conflating with skill is "reflex". Skill is the ability to apply something learned effectively and memorizing is 100% a part of that.

How isn't it?
DOTA as it is and was constitutes a simplified derivative of RTS. The year made doesn't discount this, and I can think of a few games from the 90s that dwarf modern counterparts in intrigue and complexity. Fuck, I know quite a few UMS maps within Starcraft that were more interesting than DOTA or AOS.

Fucking hell, that's just bad sound design.

That dragshot was filthy

To be fair, the existence of harder games doesn't necessarily mean that that game isn't hard. I haven't played any of the games mentioned, so it could turn out that Touhou is piss easy. I'm just saying that it wouldn't necessarily be piss easy because of the existence of a harder game.

People don't marry video games. Nobody thinks "Now that I'm regularly playing this game, I am forbidden from regularly playing other games on the side." It's very possible to play plenty of other games and enjoy yourself, but keep coming back to one because of various reasons. Maybe it has a community you like. Maybe the core gameplay is solid. Maybe you still have a lot of room for improvement and want to better yourself at said game. user has a slight hyperbole in saying that multiplayer games never get boring, but he's right in the fact that multiplayer where you play against other people is generally a lot more lasting than a single player experience. You can constantly be caught off-guard and put into new and different situations in a multiplayer game. In a single player one, the AI is only so good. As a result, multiplayer games tend to have more replayability.

The games were good on their own. If they weren't, people likely wouldn't have bothered putting the autism in to FIND those exploits in the first game. These were solid games in their own right, even when people weren't trying to find exploits to make them more mobile or whatever-you-may. Hell, the original Quake had a fully-fledged singleplayer campaign, the multiplayer was more of an addon in the first place. It wasn't until Quake 3 Arena that you had a multiplayer-focused Quake. On top of it all, bunnyhopping and rocketjumping is more like, to put it in cooking terms, a spice. It adds to the dish and makes it better, but it's not the core of the dish. Unless you're a defragger in quake that races to get the fastest times on some maps, movement exploits is only a small part of what you're concerned about. The bulk of Quake's "metagame" and skillcap-ness comes partly from aim, and to a large extent from item pickups and map control.

Apparently not everyone is happy if you just copy Quake or C&C, considering the state of FPS and RTS right now. To be honest, I think the "games need to have higher skillcaps like Quake/C&C/whatever" isn't really done honestly out of the interest in having more "skilled" games. Those two games in particular haven't really had any big-time success with their respective formulas in a while, so if I had to guess its probably just anons wanting more variety. So in a sense, I agree with you, and if the FPS market was filled with pickup-based deathmatchy style games, then people would be hungering for a class-based objective style game, and vice-versa.

There is no game that requires hundreds of hours to learn how to play it. If it does, it's a bad game. You can learn to play most any game on a basic level within a few hours MAXIMUM. Even games that are lauded for their supposed "high skill ceilings" like Quake (be it QW, Q3A, CPMA or any of its derivatives, the list goes on) can be picked up and played pretty easily; it doesn't take much to learn the basic mechanics. Left click shoots. Right click might do a different kind of shoot if you're playing UT, Xonotic, or some other game that includes an alt-fire. Here are the movement keys, here's how you switch weapons. Grab the weapons, grab the pickups fodr health and armor on the map, go kill people. Your average layman who played Quake back when Quake was massively popular didn't need to know much more than that to have fun. Higher skilled players could start trying to learn and discover the item pickup and map control based metagame, but it didn't hurt the average layman except for the fact that there are more higher skilled players and not as much average joes. By the time that this had got to be a serious issue, it was so many years past the game's initial release that most people had gotten their money's worth. People can still play quake like that and enjoy themselves in the exact same way, too, provided they play with similarly low-skilled players or that the high skilled handicap themselves in some way.

I've been playing this game for over two years and I still can't bring lava up a z level or get my head around the more gamey things.

Melee, or if you don't count that probably MVC. Possibly USFIV because of the level of relevant matchups.

As for games with the highest skill caps of all time, it's probably tetris, or chess.

Oh good god fuck off with this idiocy already. There were puzzle games released after Tetris you fucking child.

Of course. Hardly anyone would say the original Super Mario Bros. had a high skill ceiling, and yet I would wager more than half the people who played it never actually beat it, because it's fairly hard (or at least unforgiving) compared to modern games; Super Mario 3 was even harder. As for the other side, chess is so easy that you can teach a ten-year-old the basic rules in a half-hour, but it takes a lifetime to master because the skill ceiling is so high.

Nah.

Holy shit this is a vastly underrated post I'm fucking dying

I agree with the other user, many people have been complaining about current Dota but I'd imagine that most of them are either just afraid of change or are jumping on the bandwagon. Many, many heroes now have more roles due to the talent system which means that they're more like Naga Siren or Alch where you can play them as a carry, support, mid, or even jungler depending on how you go about it. It's almost like doubling the amount of heroes and so far it has been pretty interesting. Also Wukong isn't nearly as broken as many people claim, you just need to stun him and bring something that can cut trees.

The only major change I'm not sold on is the change to bounty runes in the jungle. I like the idea of them, but now there's less level 1 skirmishes than there were before which are always interesting when they happen due to their rarity which might as well not exist now.

I don't think you can consider a skill ceiling to be anything higher than what has been achieved by people that play the game.
It also matters whether or not you try to measure the height of the skill ceiling relative to the skill ceilings of other games (difficult and arbitrary) or relative to their skill floors. I'd lean towards the latter and say that Melee and Chess are probably the games with the highest skill ceilings due to how ludicrously high above the skill floor high level play gets.

...

It's so easy to learn yet so hard to master. You go from learning how to use momentum effectively to performing frame perfect moves after a while. There's an awful lot of complexity for such a simple concept.

bump for thread interest

Already mentioned earlier

Some advanced techniques like spikejumping, or dashjumping, or mantling, or ledge-canceling, or groundboosting are a lot less useful to rising on the leaderboard than just executing moves precisely and never losing momentum

Well just because two platformers have double-jumping and dashing doesn't mean they're equal

Yea but it's always quicker if you do both. There are plenty of levels where the routes are so contrived yet necessary just to get in the top 50s.

piracy has always been a thing

starting from exchanging physical copies of shit to spread torrents, it's always been there

I'd aim your sights a little lower for now

I really like the Devil May Cry games

Oh I've been playing for over a year and I still have no intention of ever beating the difficults. Or even getting to them

That being said I probably have over 800 hours in the game. I don't run it in Steam so I don't actually have an amount played though I'm sure after a while I could get in the 100's or something. I'm in the 300's for a few levels.

Okay maybe aim a little higher than that, from what I've seen it takes about 40-50 hours to complete the main nexus for the first time. I'm hoping to have Mega Difficult wrapped up by tonight. What gold levels are still giving you trouble?

The obvious ones. I'm closest to SS'ing Night Temple or Hideout. but levels like Core Temple and Abyss are going to take a while. I don't play the game with intense focus though and usually play it more casually.

Mah nigs. I have about 400 hours. Got the S ranks in every level but Yotta Difficult in the first 100h and have been trying to SS Yotta for the last year. Doesnt help that i only boot the game once a week or so. Have you tried the community maps?

The community maps are about what you would expect from a community. That being said, given the relatively small size of the community the maps are a lot better than what I expected. Otherwise they do what most community maps do and instead of work with the games mechanics they take the open map as an empty canvas to do whatever they want.

Night Temple's great, Core Temple's great, Hideout was the one I saved for last. The vast majority of the level isn't too bad unless you're going for a good time, but the bottlenecks at the beginning and end can be daunting.

Haven't personally, no, I have a hard time believing they're as good as the Hitbox levels. Maybe after I get more of the Difficults down and start looking for more to do besides the leaderboards. Doesn't Yotta only have like a hundred SS clears?

How high can the skill ceiling be on a Stealth game like Thief?

The only maps I hate in the game are the combat maps for obvious reasons. Even the maps I've played hundreds of times I don't dislike.

It's more subjective since Thief doesn't have a comprehensive ranking system or anything, but you could just gauge different hard-mode ghost runs by time. I think just playing the game casually it could take me thirty minutes to an hour for the first run of a mission, and I'm sure it could be completed in a fraction of the time. I know The Dark Mod has a very rigorous scoring system at the end of each mission

Isn't one of the main strengths and appeals of stealth games immersion and atmosphere? A scoring system is inherently artificial so how could their be a in universe explanation for a scoring system? Some spirit-like creature or character following you around watching how well you complete the mission, then giving awards by how well you did?

quake 3. a master is a completely unkillable god of war who may as well be a Jedi. i had a buddy in high school who used to spend like seven hours a day, even on school days, just playing quake 3. when i finally played against him he was on another fucking plane of existence. map knowledge, rocket jumping, juggling, dominating powerups, i think i winged him once out of a two hour game and naturally never played him again

ez
ez but knowing when to use it to a greater advantage less ez
ez just aim harder
more ez

you're just bad

Not really, just Thief specifically. Biggest appeal for stealth gaming is speedy ghost runs, as far as I'm aware. It doesn't have to be a non-diegetic ranking system like that, Hitman: Blood Money has it framed as a newspaper article about the last assignment.

also

High skill ceiling for singleplayer games gives gigantic replay value, so I think that's pretty important

No because I'm having fun climbing that skill ceiling and it I did not find it enjoyable I wouldn't attempt to in the first place, not reading anymore of the shit comment since the opening question is so fucking simple.

That's nice to see.

And how is it playing? Fluently?

I think I played with the same people. Things were… okay, until I entered their discord to find a few insufferable, meme-spouting kids. Every second word was some sort of indecipherable, high-pitched utterance of a meme. 100% Cancer.

underage detected

bui here

please erp with me as klonoa with stinky paws and i'll stop :3

my discord is Bui#3468
steam steamcommunity.com/id/furrets
you must have a cute klonoa avatar or i won't add you~

bui here

please erp with me as klonoa with stinky paws and i'll stop :3

my discord is Bui#3468
steam steamcommunity.com/id/furrets
you must have a cute klonoa avatar or i won't add you~

don't die on me yet

bui here

please erp with me as klonoa with stinky paws and i'll stop :3

my discord is Bui#3468
steam steamcommunity.com/id/furrets
you must have a cute klonoa avatar or i won't add you~

good
maybe now the country will be finally rid of fucking nintendrones
that's one less cancer to deal with

bui here

please erp with me as klonoa with stinky paws and i'll stop :3

my discord is Bui#3468
steam steamcommunity.com/id/furrets
you must have a cute klonoa avatar or i won't add you~

Tristram
Beregost
Mid city New York from the Division
Or vice city
The citadel

bui here

please erp with me as klonoa with stinky paws and i'll stop :3

my discord is Bui#3468
steam steamcommunity.com/id/furrets
you must have a cute klonoa avatar or i won't add you~

REMINDER THAT THE FIRE SERPENT WON THE LATEST JERMA RUMBLE

bui here

please erp with me as klonoa with stinky paws and i'll stop :3

my discord is Bui#3468
steam steamcommunity.com/id/furrets
you must have a cute klonoa avatar or i won't add you~

Hitman is a great game, but i wish it had co op or co op vs .

bui here

please erp with me as klonoa with stinky paws and i'll stop :3

my discord is Bui#3468
steam steamcommunity.com/id/furrets
you must have a cute klonoa avatar or i won't add you~

fuck, my analog stick is moving itself when I select up, what the shit is that?

Nothing better to do.

a learning curve is not the same as a skill ceiling.

feels good man

Took three days of practice but it finally paid off

I tried playing with a keyboard for a while but just couldn't get used to it. Isn't there a stigma against pinky dashing?

Thats a really good time. Congrats

I did like 59 in my Mega SS

In the forums several people are fine with the keyboard, the layout feel unintuitive at first but as i progressed i could see why it was implemented like that, i tried using a gamepad but using only my thumbs wasn't enough for the crazy speed of inputs, that is why i use the KB.

This is what makes skill different from memorization. When you face a situation you had not expected but you are prepared to pull through.

It's like none of you have patrician taste

see

Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance has the highest skill ceiling of any game. Certainly it's beyond human limits; no human can actually master the game, or even come remotely close.