My complaint with Smash Bros. Brawl online is not the lag or the limited options but rather when I do play online everyone always turns off items and ALWAYS wants to play Final Destination to remove the “luck” elements from the game, however I argue that this also removes the fun. The wacky items and unique stages of SSBB is what makes the game FUN! To which he went into a long diatribe about how the spawning of items or stage setup allows for too much winning through luck and how games like SSBB are fine if you play for fun but not if you play to WIN.
This is yet another thing the industry and hardcores don’t seem to think about. Playing games is about having FUN. Winning is part of gaming too but I think some have become so obsessed with winning that it’s getting in the way of being fun. It’s boring to play 15 SSBB matches in a row in the same DAMN stage with no items.
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This is an excellent email and dovetails into something I’ve been long thinking.
Aside from RTS games, I do not play games online competitively (though I have played all types of games online over the decades). I am the person who doesn’t like playing online most of the time especially on consoles.
Online gaming is broken. It is not just broken on the Wii. It is broken on the PS3 and Xbox 360. It is even broken on PC. It didn’t use to be this way.
The best experience of online gaming I recall was over Kali. This was before Starcraft and Battle.net. This was at least a decade and a half ago (Kali is nothing like it was before).
Here is the scoop on Kali: a guy named Jay Cotton wanted to play Doom over the Internet. However, Doom was a network game. There was no such thing as online games back then. However, there was ‘modem play’ (I am showing my age here). Jay Cotton wrote a program (that became Kali) which basically tricked the game to think it was playing network but it was sending the packets through the Internet. Kali kept growing and growing on DOS and really began to explode when it went to Windows. It costed $20 for a one time fee and it worked with almost every game. Blizzard really took notice of it and included a trial version of Kali with Warcraft 2. Kali would be the inspiration behind Battle.Net, the most popular online gaming at the moment (still more popular than WoW).
Think back in those times. While people were stuck playing modem games or, at most, 2vs2 games, I was playing 8 player games online with Red Alert, Warcraft 2 and other games hosted from my T1 connection. It was a fantastic experience.
Here is a great article from 1999 talking about how amazing Kali is. I did have some dealings with Jay Cotton, and he was always wonderful to deal with.
The above is an image of how Kali was. At first, it may look complicated, but it is simply a game browser and is as simple as an IRC channel. On the top left is the list of all the servers (some with better pings depending on where you live). While there were dedicated servers to games, such as a Quake server, you could play any game on any of the servers. Clubs and friends who want to play alone would hang out on one of the other servers of their choice. You could even pay Kali for the rights to make your own server I believe and invite anyone you wanted.
Like any good chat browser, it had all the typical options. You could screen out bad words. You could private message friends. You could send messages to one another. You could make your own chat rooms and all. And when you were ready to play, you just hit the icon at the bottom and the game would start up automatically and go directly to the game. It was that simple.
As I said before, Blizzard was very impressed with Kali and included it with their game. Battle.Net was based off of Kali.
However, Battle.Net was inferior to Kali. While I wasn’t a Diablo player, I did notice something very off with the original Starcraft. No matter how you played Starcraft on Bnet, it would either record your game as a win, a loss, or as a disconnect. This one element totally altered online gaming… for the worse.
To my horror, games were being made that consisted of nothing but seven people on a team versus a lone computer player. Killing the poor computer with such a lopsided team would result in a *win* for these seven people. And since no one likes to lose, there were countless games like this. They just wanted the number of ‘wins’ to go up!
As time went on, other problems occurred. When people got more losses then they thought they deserved, they would just flat out make a new account. Some people were running around with multiple accounts. All of this was caused by Bnet tracking every win and loss. None of that happened on Kali (because no score was kept).
Later, online gaming became more ‘matched’. The idea was that the player would press a button and the service would find a match for all the players. However, it would base the match on the players’ record. So higher records would be playing more together and a lower record would be matched with a lower record. Sounds good, right? But in practice, again, it became a train wreck.
People who got high scores got tired of every game they played being with someone at their skill. There was no variety. So they would make a new account and “smurf” and play the lower levels for a change. This happens constantly.
Worse, people with high scores never got consistently paired up with people who had high scores anyway. In team games, it is easy to get a high score because the team wins rather than an individual person. So high level team games often ends up with someone on the team being an absolute loser and brings the team down.
The problem is reversed on the lower level side. High level people would somehow get thrown into the match. Also, many low level people had high level accounts.
A very big problem that still occurs all the time in games like Warcraft 3 is griefing. Imagine a 3vs3 or 4 vs 4 game and someone decides to attack their teammate and throw off the entire game. Why do griefers exist? It is because every game has a win and loss. If games did not have a win and loss, griefers would only be wasting their time and wouldn’t cause anyone any grief.
By this reason is why leaderboards inspire cheating. Most online games are being ruined by cheating, Warcraft 3 was no exception. Cheating is nothing new and has always been around. At some points, it did occur on Kali but only in a very limited way. But it is so widespread precisely because of the leaderboard. Cheaters are cheating just to boost their ’score’. They aren’t really playing the game.
Take Super Mario Strikers Charged. The online had many problems. First of all, any online game you did was a ladder game. It would rank you, record your wins and losses. You only had once choice of online gaming: competitively.
Issues arose with people disconnecting. Why did they disconnect? It is because of the scoring. If there was no score, would they have disconnected? Much less likely.
As said above, cheating becomes inspired to break the ladder.
But most important of all, the ladder inspires a type of ‘military exercise’ gameplay from certain individuals. All they do is play the silly game and master it. Normally, this is fine. But they treat it beyond its amusement capabilities. Why? It is because of the scoring.
And it goes beyond the scoring. By using the Gamespy tracing feature, it throws people together before they have a conversation. On Kali, there were jerks as there are jerks everywhere. But you met people first. One of the great joys of online gaming is meeting new people.
Game developers are obsessed with numbers and so they love ‘leaderboards’ and ’systems’. Unfortunately, consumers don’t want to be grind up into a ’system’. When you play multiplayer offline, you can set up ground rules with other people. With current online gaming, that is impossible.
Back in the Kali days, there was ladder. It was Case’s Ladder which I see is still around. If you take a look at it, you will see that it is filled with New Generation games and type of ‘flash games’ like Hearts and all. In other words, this type of ladder system is working for the Expanded Audience. It worked on Kali too.
But the key here is that the online gaming is de-centralized. If people want to play Ladder, they can easily participate in Case’s Ladder. Gamers are very resourceful and if they want to join leagues and competitive gaming, they do it on their own. They do not need the game company to program it into the game (worse, this system never truly ‘fits’ the customers’ needs).
For some damn reason, every game company is forcing their customers to play ladder. There is only one way to play online: ladder. Even with Nintendo games, it is the same problem. Not everyone wants to play ladder. I don’t play online in most games precisely because I don’t want to play ladder. I want to play a friendly game, not engage in a military exercise.
If you look at the flash games on the Internet, the Expanded Audience already understands online gaming and is participating. But they are not with the game consoles likely because of the same complaints you and I have.
Rip out the leaderboards. De-centralize online gaming! When in doubt, give more power and control to the customer. Let gamers decide how they want to play games online.
Nintendo views online under three principles: simple, safe, and free. The problem is that the consumer has no control over their experience. It is because of that which makes Nintendo’s online service into complex (because they are trying to figure out how to do something the game won’t let them do), frustrating (because they have no control), and very annoying.
A type of ‘game browser’ could easily be made on the Wii. Half the Wii audience is women. They love chat rooms so it would work well for them. I mean, just look at all the different ways consumers play WoW and their complaints when Blizzard tries to force everyone to play raids (which many people do not want to play the game that way).
Entertainment is about surprise, it is about spontaneity. Nothing is more surprising than playing online and meeting new people. This is why the Internet is so surprising because people meet new people all the time. By the way Nintendo has set up their online as well as other game companies, they have made the ’surprise’ go away. It is impossible to meet people. It is even impossible to communicate with the people you want to play with.
Game companies should stop inflicting their ladder systems onto the poor customers and let the customers decide how they want to play. Many don’t want to participate in a ladder at all! And with a de-centralized service, people can make their own groups and get away from the junk.
Protecting people from ugly people online is not done with filters and fences. It is done by allowing the person to RUN AWAY. Any type of content imaginable is available on the Internet. But everyone has the option of going away.
With the current matching and one-ladder-treadmill-for-everyone, no one has the option of getting away from the trouble makers. This is why online gaming is failing. Game companies, including Nintendo, think customers are so dumb they can’t manage their own online experience. Yet, they can manage their Internet experience just fine. Even the Expanded Audience is online.
There are many premises of ‘online gaming’ that need to be seriously looked over and (hopefully) overturned.
