Can a game be competitive if it's too team-based?

General Discussion
21

Size is not the issue here.
(WoW peak Subs - 12mil. - 1.7mil current)
(FFXIV peak subs - 19mil and climbing)

I mentioned those games because they emulate team scenarios where you are dependent on your team. Your team can’t go anywhere if one of the roles are missing.

I already answer this with:

To further explain: Tom Brady (don’t even know what sport he plays) can possibly perform in a manner that can encompass say, “DPS” and “TANK” - attack and defense in a game. While in HOTS Jaina Proudmore is relegated to ONLY attack. If you compare both these people. Tom is a more valuable person.

If Tom plays better then Jerry, Tom will be put into more positions of success because the coach deems this is the best strategy to win the game, NOT to make Tom carry. The coach is merely doing what works with what he has in the current scenario. Always keep in mind that Tom can never carry a team, because he needs the team to enable him to do his job.

Dota and LOL have carries, but no coach. This puts everyone in a position to vie for power. Seek to be the carry. DOTA and LOL becomes a game of 5 players on each side soloing until they can somehow outplay 1 opponent to gain an upper hand to snowball into a win.

Many times I was bounced around the map in DOTA because EVERYONE wanted a space to themselves to level up. 3 lanes, 1 jungle and 1 other spot that was too high level to solo at the beginning. So I afked at core. Have fun soloing.

I learned this the hard way, when I chose to main Vengeful Spirit. I was playing with my Bro. He was way better at the game than I and I wanted to help him win by setting up engages for him. After a while I learned that the game is a solo grind for gold and power, not team fighting when I was trying to practice without my bro.

22

The game IS competitive if it is team based.
Solo mode is a fiesta for people playing 5v5s.

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23

Terrible teammates in LOL is defined as loosing lane allowing the laner to “Get Fed” or if they are junglers, never being where needed… Having terrible teammates usually means that your chances to feed enough to carry are lesser, you usually need a solid 3 man to carry and play well to have a chance with 1 :potato:

24

Can a game be comptetitive if it’s too team-based?

Yes.

What even is “too team-based”? The way I see it, the more team-oriented something, the more competitive it can get, because you can reach bigger and bigger heights with the better and better teamwork.

(E-)Sports are not really about competitiveness, but visual pleasure. Watching a “god” is more entertaining for the majority than trying to see into the nuances of teamwork.

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25

I wouldn’t like this at all. I wouldn’t want to lose/win the game because 1 player did everything for the team. Although I dislike losing because my team sucks, I like the fact that the enemy team wins because they were better (excusing QM because that’s just… QM). I want to win because we made better plays and had better teamwork.

26

I mean it’s been proven that GM/Masters can carry reliably but anything under is sketchy and unreliable at best.

Tbh I would love to see this bar drastically lowered. You know maybe have silvers carry bronze and so on and so forth.

27

Before I answer the question, here’s something I want to add:

The beauty about DotA and LoL is how you have these individually talented players (who could single-handedly carry a game if they needed to) come together as a team to form an unstoppable team, think of it as a superhero team, individually they are already great, but as a team, the things they can accomplish are so much greater, which is why people enjoy watching them so much. And that’s also why All-star matches are so great to watch!

The way HotS is structured, individually, the player cannot solo carry a game 99% of the time (like you said). So essentially, you have a unit that can only work if all 5 are present. Like a superhero that only works if all the members are present, which is less exciting, and has less depth to the casual player. So HotS already loses with this depth of complexity and character those other games have.

Now to answer your question, I think HotS can definitely be competitive, in fact, because of its design, it can ONLY exist as a competitive game. Which is partly the reason why the game is doing so poorly now. In a competitive match, you know as a team that they will have a healer, a tank, a sustained damage, a burst damage and a solo laner. Because everything was planned out before the match even started. As a casual game, you aren’t guaranteed those things, nor can the devs promise you that all those things will be available when you play. And this is where the whole system breaks down.

If a game is only balanced and fair when conditions are perfect, then every other iteration that isn’t will be unfair, and as a player, people don’t like that, when they don’t like that they don’t want to play anymore.

Whereas in DotA and LoL, the devs understand that things will never be perfect, that’s why they’ve added tools that allow players to make up for what the team lacks. Even when the game isn’t perfect, the game can still be fair and enjoyable, it’s only a matter of how good you are as a player to use all the tools they’ve given you. Because solo carries are possible, and ultimately, people want that (if not, they want to see that). It doesn’t require you to have the perfect team, or specific roles for you to play the game properly, you can grow into those roles as you see fit.

That is the greatest disadvantage HotS has against DotA and LoL, and I find that it’s the greatest mistake the devs made moving the game in this direction. A team game is nice as a concept, but in reality, people want that solo 4 kill you see in CS:GO, or that last person standing in Fortnight, or that lone fed carry going on a 20 person killing spree. And how beautiful it would be to see 5 of those great players come together as a team to see what they could then accomplish.

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28

To rephrase your question:

Why are you trying so hard to change the game (that is not gaining popularity as fast as it is losing players)?

Why do businesses that are losing business go back to the drawing board to see how they can improve their business and keep it afloat?

They are changing the game, to keep things interesting but they are not changing it for the better, which is why we are asking these questions.

29

You’re mixing up two different things. The game is competitive just as much as every other competitor title is claimed to be.

Other games are built more with audience in mind. If I’m into that, I’m not as interested in seeing five players working together towards a same goal by contributing equal amount but am rather paying attention only at one individual that is in a position to make flashy plays.

Many people are simply not interested in one hour performance art and tension building of killing scripted minions or afk jungle monsters until you reach the point of being able to instantly delete your enemies only to have the game end momentarily after.

Play what you like but HOTS is a unique product and players like it because the developers weren’t afraid of trying out something entirely different and new.

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30

In DotA (I don’t know for LoL), the support is traditionally the team captain, because support heroes have the most power at the start of the game with strong burst damage and CC to set up kills for the Carry.

The strength of the Support doesn’t scale well so it’s the carry’s job to get strong by the time supports no longer can deal significant damage. This is also why supports are asked to buy wards and other healing items because they don’t have to buy items to supplement their damage output.

You have midlaner who is somewhat in between the support and carry in terms of power. The jungler is a hero that is very self sufficient in damage and survivability so they can stay in the jungle to kill creeps. And the offlaner has very strong survivability so that they can solo lane.

The lane structure for DotA is 1-1-2 with the last hero in the jungle (hence the name Jungler), this is to maximize income and experience for all heroes individually. The support and carry lane together to make sure the carry can farm safely. It’s a very impressive system that requires depth and game sense, and it’s amazing to watch the gane competitively.

I play HotS because all of that is too complicated for me.

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31

Let’s look at sports and team based competitions throughout all of history…

Yes.

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32

I would actualy have named the issue diffirent.

A teamgame can after all allways be competetive. Even for darts there is a team format (while there is just 1 person throwing at a time). And that is still a format perfectly fine for random matchups. It just takes more time to find out who is better.

And thats the issue. Each player you add, brings more complexity to the algoritm. And its very likely in a state of X to the power N where N is the number of players and X is the number of games required to even check who is better.

For a 1v1, you can do well enough with X
For a 5v5 and diffirent roles, X can on its own already get quite big, and X makes that even more complex. It can easily reach millions of potential combinations.

And sure, algoritms can predict quite well on which side certain results are, but i can still pretty easily name a few seperate skills that all have to be measured seperately for this game:

  • Skill as tanks
  • Skill as bruisers
  • Skill as offlaner
  • Skill as assassin
  • Skill as healer
  • Skill of flexing
  • Skill of coordinating your team

And that already excludes a randomness factor! Randomness makes this far harder to measure as you are down to a few things you cant control:

  • As assassin main, you could get forced to a diffirent role. That doesnt tell anything about your competetive skill. In static team formats you could nearly always play an assassin.
  • Skill to form a team. If there is 1 person in your team that acts as a flamebomb. Your skill doesnt matter anymore here. That person destroys the teamwork anyway.

E-Sports is very well suitable as a competetive team game, after all, it solves the issue that hero/storm league has: random teams

That its entertainment for most people… soccer also is. And its again a format where players are in a generaly fixed position. And thats the issue. People arent measured based on the place in the team, and forced to that position in the team. Thats why in overwatch they did force it, it does improve a lot.

Its just that overwatch allows people to change hero midgame, that on its own allows a lot more adjusting to the situation. In hots you often cant realy do anything against it if your hero format simply doesnt work well.

And i think thats what was ment with “too team based”. You depend on a well formed team too much for measurement of skill.

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33

It’s not complicated for me to understand. It’s arbitrary. I don’t enjoy a system where players are relegated to being the “ward b@#%h”.

I don’t mind it in sports because each players role is essential. They are just as valuable as the guy scoring all the points. We just have to struggle with the idea that people put in those positions don’t get the fame and recognition they deserve. Like the guy who scored the points.

I do understand what you’re saying but that all goes out the window if say a “support” character decides to be MLG pro with their last hits, amass a ton of EXP and gold to buy items that enable them to essentially be the carry also.

Last hits are basically the main thing that separates the pros from the newbs. Last hits decide who becomes the carry. In my example, team fights don’t even occur because the laning phase is what happens first, so early power from a support is pointless. Yet, support will fall behind because they can’t farm exp or gold because everyone is selfish vying for power.

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35

IDK, man.

Can soccer be competitive? Or can basketball, football, baseball or any other competitive game there is that is team-based?

Edit: I derped and clicked delete instead of edit in my previous reply, sorry for that.

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36

There’s a difference between a team-based team game, and an individual-based team game. Another guy already explained why he thinks those sports are more like HOTS philosophy over a LoL philosophy while I view those sports are more of an individual team-based game

When I pointed out I wanted hypercarries, it was explained hypercarries aren’t team-oriented as they require your teammates to suffer and baby you throughout the whole game just to steal the spotlight at the end. If you die, your team loses. HOTS will also never have the early/mid/late game distinction. Leoric and Zeratul are stronger late game, but they aren’t so far ahead of other heroes as they’re kept relatively in-line with other heroes. This cuts the individual impact when you know you’re not gonna have a huge impact. This goes for the same when you don’t have an early game hero to snowball a lane, as first of all, HOTS doesn’t have laning except early on with the bruiser lane.

37

Any example of ‘real’ sports indicates team-based events can be ‘competitive’. People that try to fixate on ‘carries’ in those games generally indicate they aren’t paying attention to the game being played, and simply look to reaffirm a narrow perspective.

There’s 3 key things that set apart those sports from e-sports

  1. Lots of statistics
  2. Tryouts
  3. Coaches and support staff

While points ‘win’ games, the masses of stats tracked in any game allows audiences to celebrate just about any position played. Defensive, all-rounders, special ops, etc etc all have metrics, commentary, replays to spell out the significance of what any player can contribute, and by virtue of that, players and audiences aren’t just drawn to the batter or the quarterback or any other singular position. Similarly, stats apply for ‘assists’ and other supportive elements because a number of spotlighted players need the right elements to make their play and in some cases, it’s a duo/trio gets known more so than just the one.

Tryouts appraise players into particular roles; it has a base expectation for performance and demand a player have to do a certain level to even fill that role. In games like Lol or even mmos like WoW, players tend to fixate on select roles that are ‘less essential’, think more of their impact than they really have, and otherwise neglect all other aspects in favor of appraising themselves, or finding anything else to blame.

Anyone can want to be the ‘hypercarry’ or ‘lead dps’ and try to top charts, but in a game, stuff like positioning, agro control, damage avoidance and a number of other stuff all matter so much more than opportunistically dealing ‘the most damage’ and players that don’t realize how much that other stuff matters tend to be far more terrible at the game than they’d ever bother to realize. Having only a limited set of metrics (damage) fixates their attention onto only thinking a few numbers matter and they tend to otherwise make it harder for anyone else they’re grouped with to deal with their ignorance.

While ‘real’ sports do tote the arrogant showboats than they tote massive contracts and team trading to sell the image of the solo superstar, that tends to be superficial fluff to better performance by other teams that do work together.

Key players are put into specific roles to suit their ‘talents’, but coaches as support staff are there to shore up the weaknesses of those players and (attempt) to prevent them from getting too fixated on just one aspect; they have to do more than be a solo showboat if they want to win because it takes team effort.

That’s part of why some sports fans cheer a team and not just a single player; the more aspects of excellence they can celebrate, the better.

American football can’t let a quarterback shine if his team can’t hold the line; he’ll get sacked. If he doesn’t have anyone to whom he can throw the ball, it’s harder to advance in yards to make first downs and touchdowns. Similarly, having specialteams that can make punts and field goals makes a big difference on the score.

A lot of pressure can be put on a baseball pitcher for striking out (or walking) batters, but a solid line-drive to a baseman or shortstop; catching a field ball, those sort of things lead to double and triple plays and quickly turn an inning around. Homerun sluggers carry some hype, but it takes people on base, pressure from runners trying to steal a base all to be in position to actually score more than just 1 point.

Any person can look into a myriad of stats to find out a whole ton of things they didn’t even consider for ‘real’ sports because having all those stats adds material for them to hype so they can fill air time by having all sorts of stuff to praise, speculate or consider when they talk about on-going play, future match-ups or comparing to the past.

Having a record of previous things, and people to get player/audiences to care about that makes a big difference. Solo showboats in electronic games would pretty much deny the moon exists than look at a replay and consider they personally could have improved, or that someone else did more than they could possibly notice.

People want to fixate on the ‘winning’ numbers, but once the support metrics kick in to show the difference between an awesome tank, or healer compared to a subpar dps that gets to piddle the last hits, then hype can follow more types of roles which then pushes interest in filling those spots and drive more competitive elements than just some solo showboat that doesn’t know how to tie their own laces.

38

I’m very sorry my friend, but if you think those are “individual” based games that just happen to be “team-based”, I can totally tell you have never played any of them seriously (as in actual competition).
There may be always a carry of sorts, or an strictly better player than the others, perhaps more than one, but if the team fails as a team, there is no win, there is no competition. That is how HOTS works, as far as I’m concerned.

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39

But players here are very against hypercarries because they’re not team-friendly. If you’re going to say LoL is a team-oriented team game, then you’d have to admit hypercarries can work in a team-oriented game too. There has to be a difference in individual to team based philosophy between HOTS and LoL, otherwise you wouldn’t have players hating hypercarries to the end of time. I’ll also add the HOTS devs support that thought too

40

Of the 4 major sports, I think Basketball is the only one I would rate as an “Individual-Based Team Game”, and even then only at the Pro League. College Basketball is very much a “Team-Based Team Game”, and it is quite competitive.

Football needs a Great QB, sure, but if he doesn’t also have good receivers, then his team loses. If he doesn’t also have a good Running Back, then the opposing team will know that he is going to pass every down, and be ready for it. If he doesn’t have a good Defense, then the opposing team will simply outscore his team (Remember, in Football, “Defense wins championships”, and one man can’t cover the entire field.)

41

Indeed, LoL is not like HOTS, in LoL there can be hypercarries, which are the epitome of “no team needed”. Any game that allows hypercarries is, in my humble opinion, a badly designed team-based game, where the other members of the team are there just to fill a check-mark space.

However, an hypercarry is not the same as simply being the leading man. A leading man is not only needed, but logical, there will always be one player that is the key factor to victory, or at least the better player than the others, but unlike the hypercarry (that can do absolute everything by his own regardless on how his team performs), the leading man depends on having a good team behind him to achieve victory for them.

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