I normally agree with you and I see what you are getting at…
But to me this is a pointless discussion because not all heroes in the roles are equally difficult.
There are easy supports and hard supports. Easy tanks and hard tanks. Easy DPS and hard DPS.
Well yeah, but you’re competing only against the people in your role. It might be that the player base of supports is just less skilled in general, allowing people to reach higher ranks for less effort than they would on other roles. Maybe more casual-minded people like to play support while people who invest their whole life into the game gravitate towards, say, DPS.
I don’t know if that’s the case, but it’s certainly possible. Selection bias and all that. So what you’re saying doesn’t really refute the claim. Basically, a GM1 support is better than a GM2 support, but we don’t know if they are better (or worse) than a GM2 DPS or tank.
Oh man. I’m sensing so much veiled cope in this post. The amount of mental gymnastics I see from you lately is getting out of hand.
Support is obviously the easiest role. What’s not easy is when the game matches you with bots which has nothing to do with support being hard to play. EVERY ROLE becomes harder to play when the match difficulty is out of your control due to the crap dice roll matchmaker. Whenever the match isn’t being rigged against you with non-existent matchmaking then support role becomes cruise control once again. Get over yourself, new-support role is for babies. Please stop with this crusade to defend the state of it.
only on the forums think that supports are “just as hard” as the other roles. yall cant be serious now
Support does not use more difficult weapons. Kirikos Kunai are among the largest projectiles in the game and bap has 3 round burst hitscan. Ana is probably the only example of a hero who has an incredibly high skill weapon as she can’t crit and her shots are slow
Still really doesn’t help explain anything OP… you’re literally just stating the obvious. Support can deal high damage, even burst damage, while also having invulnerability abilities.
Even Tanks don’t have the survivability that supports have, all the while they just sit in the back line.
Data driven design is using data to drive design. Its an expansion of the old playtest feedback - it gives you more direct information taken from the game in real time AS WELL AS using feedback forms. As a designer, you don’t have to follow the data, but you have it and can use it.
You’d be better off looking for games that DONT use data analytics to drive their games. Every single company you mentioned previously already uses it because its an industry standard. There’s literally a data analyst jobs going at Bungie, Pubg, Sony, EA and Valve right now. Here’s the page on EA Dice (battlefield) data https://www.datadoghq.com/case-studies/ea-dice/
Ok, so you agree a full list of skills for anything in a game can be defined. That’s Part 1.
Part 2 is figuring how demanding doing things is on your brain - using lots of skills in short periods of time uses more brain power, more Cognitive Load. Tracer and Ball are high cognitive load characters, widow in the most part is not. High cognitive load is more stressful and harder - some people dont like that. Game difficulty is a mixture of accuracy requirement of the given set of skills and the cognitive load intensity of performing actions.
Yeah, but i’m asking YOU want the definition of fun is, not some kid on the street. What’s the purpose of fun?
No, there’s no consultant, because there’s no need - its accepted required tech for development. Some big companies have entire divisions dedicated to writing backend data analytics software they use across multiple projects. We’ve even seen pictures of the one at Blizzard HQ they’ve used to drive their games - its been around for a very long time.
Your attitude here is essentially saying devs should ignore the real, valid data they get from the players and just do whatever they want. That seems a little crazy to me.
Except they dont add anything to their successfull games if anything deter it, apex was successful when EA didnt meddle it and respawn just made it as a spin off titanfall, the moment its succeeded EA started ruining it with data driven policies.
Bungie - Again same what still sells their game despite all the bad stuff due to monetisation and data marketing, is their core gunplay feel from halo generation is still there.
Pubg is a bad game that sold well due to a inspired idea, also tencent is horrible company.
Valve use data for steam not for games, they only playtest, even in recent alyx game.
Its not something you can define or set standards too, i can say something is fun, someone can say something else is.
At the end of the day you can only do and share what you feel is fun and see how it goes.
Except i still dont have one single game that succeeded using these papers that are shorter than your post made by people out of touch with industry, and there are definitely consultants there sweet baby being one of them.
You can also find many consultants on the web with amazon being one of them.
My attitude is simple trying to quantify skill and fun using data points is possibly the worst idea you can implement in game development and often the reason for games with really good devs to feel bad.
Also these are not necessarily though im sure for EA and bungie they are for the reason you mentioned.
But not all studios use data analysis job primarily to get templates.
A lot is used for matchmaking and cosmetics purchase patterns.
But outside that valve has used something called AI powerdirector in l4d2 it adjusts the enemy ai behaviour based on player performance.
So it dynamically switches up the enemy difficulty, i think this was needed cause its coop and different people were matched, im still not sure about this i will dig and get back but basically it changed hp and dmg points i think.
The other area were its used is in witcher 3 like multiple branching stories and have npcs react to that.
Detroit also uses it for some AI conversation.
Then there is also procedural generation which needs data analysis and ML systems.
There is difference between the game systems needing data analytics like this to implement a function.
To claiming that there is template to define skill in all games and fun in all games and the stuff i mentioned certainly dont fall into whatever those ted talkers said.
Also in a lot of cases these data analyst jobs are used to create tools for the developers basically procedural system to make characters or worlds, notable names are inworld ai.
Im not even a fan of these systems as they do deprive unique character creation tools devs can make themselves.
Its the reason you feel samey with a lot of these character creation in different games.
Though i can see how it is cost efficient for most studios.
Procedural systems have their issues too, though what they offer is good too as scale can be achieved easily.
It makes sense to use them on scale projects like No man sky etc im not sure about how i feel it being using in small scale games.
But few use it properly.
obviously their are 3 ladders since you can literally see that in game.
thats not what it means when people say “support is easy”, they mean the role is so powerful it gets free value and it has fewer moments of weakness.
like if im playing dps and im missing shots im now useless until my ult (and even then the ult isnt great alot of the time), but if a support is missing shots they have utility and healing they can use to help the team until they start landing shots.
in the dps’s case they lose that match but the support could easily win that because heal botting gives you a 50/50 chance to win regardless of skill level.
edit: just to be clear support attracts a lesser type of player more often then not. a bad player wont magically climb past the threshold the easy heroes allow them, but if you took a mediocre dps or tank and put them on support they skyrocket upwards because the role is just so easy in comparison to dps and tank (and the average support player is alot worse). you’ll often times see supports that are like masters but then plat on dps or they are GM but barely diamond on dps. but you might then find a GM dps main thats higher rank on support then they are on dps. the skill it takes to hit these ranks on each role matters, and thats what people mean when they call supports ‘boosted’.
sure, the higher skill team will usually win even when leveraging the same heroes
what does this have to do with how easy/hard it is to play support?
if we look at individual heroes there is a lot of variety in terms of skill ceilings and skill floors, there is no such thing as an easiest or hardest role, and there is no baseline metric for measuring skill, all of that is highly subjective
hey stupid back in season 2 all support players where crying’’ we want more impact’’ now you have it all the impact of the entire game but it seems most support players cant handle that pressure. those who can dominate games. those who cant try to convince people that support is hard to play. wake tf up if you lost on support it is 10000% your fault
thats not really how it works…
sure you have to outplay the enemy supports, but the most important part about the difficulty of a role is the effort to value ratio.
for example, to even come close to the value of a single support when playing dps, your effort to value ratio is just extremely unreasonable, think of it like suddenly awakening a GM level of skill inside of you when you are playing in a low masters elo lobby. and before you scoff at this, it literally has become THIS unreasonable, heroes at the max of their skill ceiling in dps dont even come close to the value of support, which is just crazy…
just because you need to outplay someone doesnt mean your effort needs to be really high.
when it comes to support its really just simple decision making to outplay the enemy team, sure there are exceptions like lucio who needs great mechanical skill, good positioning, good timing, good target priority, but hes one support out of like 9-10.
TL;DR: the effort to value ratio when it comes to supports is much much MUCH lower in comparison to dps and tanks.
explain how im gm 3 on support as my least played role and gm 5 on dps struggling to stay afloat after moving to a high ping area?
EA not meddling with games has nothing to do with data analytics. Bad monetisation is just bad designers using data badly. Those were your examples of good games companies, but now you’re saying they’re bad? That makes no sense.
Yes, you can define fun. Fun has a purpose, what is it?
There’s a set list of things that can be fun that can be defined - the “fun is different for everyone” argument goes away when you can just define everything. People like using different skills at different intensities and we’ve already defined both those things, so that’s the first 2 steps taken care of. The next step is Flow Theory, btw. https://www.void1gaming.com/post/flow-theory-in-game-design
What papers? My interesting websites on game design theory? We’re not talking about that. There are 2 topics here. You’re confusing them:
So yes, for any given game you can literally quantify fun.
Procedural generation has nothing to do with what I’m talking about.
the actual answer to this is very silly imo but: its because support attracts lesser skilled players for whatever reason.
so you take a GM 5 dps player and throw em on a role that not only gets more value for less effort but that also is filled with players that are significantly much less skilled and that GM dps shoots up in rank to a new peak.
THIS is why supports are boosted, if they nerfed the role to be less outlandish most support players would derank significantly.
this is also why all the dps/tank players complain about ‘boosted players’, they exist but they are just naturally boosted by playing support or playing a hero when its both broken and boring (such as mauga or OG brig)
this also happens within a role, someone that can one trick genji to GM5 could probably hit GM2 or even GM1 if they swapped to whatever ‘meta’ dps picks were that season.
if you play a more difficult role or hero then swap to something thats easier you have an overall easier time and climb further then you would otherwise.
Every DPS has better and easier weapons. They’re so freaking slow. I’d rather them be small and fast. I’d gladly trade Kunai for any DPS weapon.
Bingo. And this is FACTUAL: At X skill invested on any role, the higher return value is on Support. Period.
thats a very compelling logic at first glance. however it leaves out the factor of impact per role and how easy it is to diff the opposing role.
overwatch is a very complex game. the impact somebody has in a match depends on a lot of factors. one of these factors is how much risk your role or hero needs to take in order to gain impact. and thats where the support role shines: supports dont need to interact with the enemy supports much while having either the highest impact cooldowns or decent damage potential or both (looking at kiriko). supports also need to take fewer risks and have higher margin for error due to support passive and the partly reactive nature of their role.
yeah, there absolutely are supports that can and should play more like a dps, but all of them have self sustaining cooldowns that are better than dps cooldowns because they achieve the same thing plus usually also giving team value on top.
in short you could say it like this:
do you still have to play as good as your elo on your role, even on support? yes. is it as hard as playing tank or dps? no.
its basically similiar to league of legends. you could play a high skillfloor solo- laning assassin and live in pain or you play a tanky jungler that mainly farms. both players are in the same elo. one always has impact and doesnt really need to do much for it and one struggles hard if they cant perform.
This applies to every role in the game so it’s completely irrelevant. Support has the most mechanically easy heroes in the game and the most get out of jail free abilities, that is fact.
ive only now read some other replies and they all basically say the same thing i said: “value to effort ratio”.
yes, this it what it boils down to. and by the way: i am a support main. and i absolutely do aknowledge that in ow2, support has always been the easiest role to climb on.
and if youre still not convinced you can check my profile. im a high master support, low diamond dps (although on my alt i climbed to m5 on dps this season) and mid master tank (tank main in ow1). so basically i am the perfect example of boosted support.