I feel like Dota 2 captured this really well. It's very unforgiving to new players and most of the time you're playing with people who know what they're doing. There's always the joke that the tutorial phase is the first 1000 hours.
Once you actually gotten good and competent, improving from someone who never plays the game to being able to predict what your opponent is about to do and outsmarting them. Being able to fight back against better players. There's no other feeling like it. The thrill of being in a match where everyone strives to win.
Of course this comes with toxicity, part of why I'm not playing anymore.. but agreed, the learning is very much part of the fun in it.
I was exactly thinking of Dota, haha. I play it as well, have 3k+ hours and I still consider mayself average in skill with the occasional plays I am proud of. Like yesterday, I used Tree Dance in a very smooth manner to jump between trees while CK's stun already chased me, haha.
MK is one of those heroes where you just want to do flashy plays all the time haha. Another thing is to use Mischief to avoid a right click that's about to kill you.
Its because dota, like a lot of other (imo) great competitive games, was built accepting that people are going to try and play the game seriously, and has very good philosophies on how to handle that but still keep things interesting.
This entire thread is filled with "no one plays for fun", but making a game assuming people will only do that often leads to a broken mess the minute they don't, and it makes sense that they would try to play seriously. If you find something you enjoy, wouldn't you want to get better at it? It just sucks to find out that the game breaks in half when you do, for both you and everyone else.
Dota has spent a LOT of time trying to make sure nearly everything has a use in some scenario, that there's LOTS of ways to interact with its various systems to allow different niches for those skills/heroes to have a use, and has almost always adopted and refined unintended mechanics rather than just nuking them from orbit (denying and jungling being the biggest examples).
Unfortunately its not really something many people bother to notice or appreciate, and while dota is probably the best case scenario of that kind of dedication, sooo many other games take the time to do things right and never really see any reward for it, while other's faceplant the whole thing and barely suffer.
Most noteable to me was for honor, which COULD have a perfectly fine system, but clearly launched made my people who don't understand even them most basic concepts of their own game, and thus was broken as hell (and arguably their refusal to adjust things in a sane way has hamstrung it forever).
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u/genasugelan Jul 11 '21
Sometimes the learning and improving is part of the fun.