"Fun" is not an argument

General Discussion
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I see a common thing on the forum. Whenever somebody comes face to face with the harsh reality of what is fundamentally a competitive game, they make what I like to call the “appeal to fun” argument.

If you tell them that they died to roadhog not because he’s OP but because they 1v6’d into a hook, they’ll tell you that “dying to hook isn’t fun”

if a healer keeps dying to dva/winston/genji diving them, they’ll say that “dying isn’t fun” or “x hero is unfun to play against”

But here is the thing. Dying isn’t supposed to be fun. Dying is supposed to kill you. It sends you back to spawn for a couple of seconds and makes you think about your life. Not every single thing in this game is supposed to be fun. Losing the match and seeing the defeat screen isn’t fun. There will always be some aspect of the game that is fundamentally unfun, dying, losing, getting outplayed. Nothing can be done to mitigate this, unless you got rid of competition and said “everyone’s a winner”

Saying that heroes are “unfun to play against” is a slippery slope into making the game a nerf pillow fight. If the devs nerfed everybody who ‘wasn’t fun to play against’, then nobody would be fun to play either.

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I was thinking fun is more something that everyone have differend definition of.

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Thiisss.
Something that is frustrating is different than unfun, and people seem to mix up those two words a lot.
Being punished for your mistakes is one of the games fundamental core points. Dying is a mistake you make, ideally you dont make mistakes, so you dont die.

For example, Tracer is frustrating to play against. But not ‘unfun’. If you die to a Tracer, you were either outplayed, or punished for your mistakes. (Or the entire team is dead)…

Fun is subjective, and therefore cannot be a valid argument that holds any value

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Fun is an imbalance of power. Be it hero abilities, mechanical skill, or something else. What is fun to somebody on one end, is usually unfun for the receiving end. This will never change. Even if every hero was S76, it would be unfun to lose because somebody can aim better. We just don’t like to acknowledge the hard truth that being overpowered is fun. The best way we can make the game “fun” is to make everyone powerful as they can be without making the game ludicrous.

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I mean i had fun games when i lose also.
And die is not fun but to be honest most important is how you die.
For me the wors death is when you have full hp, and someone jump in front of you, you see him, but you know you cant do anything because you are dead because he is in your face, and it was not you who go near him, he just show up there from other side of map.

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NO.

Its the game designer’s job to minimise the impact of non-fun things, even if they need to exist.

Just because non-fun things exist, doesnt mean you need to add more of them!

Games are meant to be fun.

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The devs already been nerfing characters based on “unfun to play against” many times, though.

Yes, it’s ridiculous. But it’s a fact that they already done that many times, some times resulting in disasters of a rework.

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games are meant to be fun of course but my point is that you can never get around the fact that there will always be fundamentally unfun things like dying and losing because if something is to be fun, somebody has to ‘lose’ or at least outplayed

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Depends on the context. Yes, fun is not a relative argument when it comes to playing against because its not fun to be on the receiving end of such stuff. Example, its fun to freeze people as Mei and headshot them, but its not fun to be on the receiving end of it.

Counterplay is why these ‘unfun to play against’ gets subverted because you can turn the tide on them with your hero.

However, the closest its best used is towards playing as said hero. If players dont enjoy playing their hero anymore because of a certain change, it needs to be looked at. Why make a hero bland or unfun to play as especially if its in a video game.

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What nonsense. It’s a video game, fun is the only thing that matters.

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Correct, that’s part of the experience. Game designers who know their jobs try to minimise the impact of those things. Dieing isnt fun, but seeing a replay of your death, having a relatively short respawn time and a clear indication where you need to go on your way back minimises that.

Just because unfun things exist, doesnt mean they should be encouraged or that new unfun things should be added.

Personally, i find the least fun thing in the game at the moment is being killed without being able to fight back - 1 shots and being stunned to death. They ARE unfun, so we dont need any more of that.

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Think that some heroes were badly reworked because “Unfun to play against” :scream:

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You dont Design a Game with the notion is This hero fun to play against? What’s more important is if a hero is fun to play as. What’s the point if nobody is unfun to play against but don’t offer any fun to the player anymore who plays them? The game would be boring.

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Again, no.

You design the game to be fun for everyone. Game designers have a high level view of the game, and want to avoid massive balance issues. It might be fun for one guy to run in and 1 shot everyone, but its not for everyone else, so you balance that hero appropriately. Mercy/mass res is a good example of this.

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The funny thing about “appealing to fun” is that it can’t be proven wrong because fun is inherently subjective. This is why I’m always skeptical when the fun argument comes up in discussion. It just seems like a bit of a cop-out when somebody is proven wrong or confronted about other aspects of their arguments.

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And you do that by making everyone powerful. Not by nerfing everyone. The valve way of balancing is the correct one.

That old comic was correct. The blizzard “taking turns” method is stupid. Games where everything (or at least the majority) of things are OP is the best way.

Empowerment, not disempowerment, is the way to design games.

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True, its hard to identify fun, which is why game designers get paid to make things fun :slight_smile: They sometimes completely ignore statistics if something doesnt feel right. If a game isnt fun, people dont play it at all :stuck_out_tongue:

3 minute mages in Wow used to be able to 1 shot people in a statistically minimal percent of the time, but they got fixed because it felt bad when it happened to you.

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“unfun” can never be objective reason for changes, so it shouldn’t be reason for any change.

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Agree, because its fun to feel powerful. Feeling weak sucks, and is not fun. So, if an unfun thing that makes you feel weak happens, that’s bad for you.

You’re arguing the case for fun here :stuck_out_tongue:

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They did design it to be fun on the beginning, up until season 2-3. But in the process they seem to forgot that while balancing a character, it still important that character must be fun to play as, not just only fun to play against. They don’t take advice from the players that play the character the most. That what makes the current overwatch as we are now.

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