We’re in agreement, so long as we’re talking about Vanilla’s combat/objective oriented gameplay, and not it’s broken systems that players are abusing for the purposes of acquiring reward, resulting in frequent instances of gameplay which feels inauthentic and unfair.
Quality, here, is universal as defined by game theory.
In a competitive game mode, fairness is mandated by circumstance.
Can you imagine a starcraft II tournament where one player’s units were just inherently stronger than the other player’s?
In some cases, a really great player would be able to overcome a handicap, which is, at least to some extent, what Vanilla PvP was all about: utilizing teamwork to overcome gear discrepancies and the strengths and weaknesses of the various classes to complete objectives.
That said, matchmaking pugs and premades together is like providing 1 player with more basic tech buildings to start the match. He’s getting marines out more quickly, because he doesn’t have to invest the time it takes the other player to construct his barracks.
He wins every time, because he can rush the enemy base before the other player’s barracks has even finished construction, and the game feels broken as a result.
This is the point, in development, when we suggest that changes are absolutely necessary to the system which is causing an inequity in the number of barracks’ each player starts with, because it has a profoundly negative impact on the gameplay, resulting in a meta where most of the finer points of the match are never played out.
It’s just 1 player sending his marines to kill the other player before he can even get a single military unit out onto the playing field, and that does’t make for a very interesting game.
If both players are provided a barracks at the start, then the game is still fair, and the competition isn’t invalidated; it’s just relying upon a different ruleset, where the players are inherently provided a barracks in addition to a command center at the start of the game, which ultimately changes the way the match plays out.
In WoW, there are two separate rulesets which determine how a Battleground team is selected, one allows players to hand pick their own players, the other provides random teams.
Premades facing pugs aren’t playing the game utilizing the same set of rules, which frequently results in situations very much like the Starcraft player being unable to cope with early marines when, despite every effort, all he has is SCVs.
Is it possible your randomly generated team will have a druid, a priest, a paladin/shaman, a warrior, a rogue, a hunter, a warlock and a mage or two?
Absolutely.
It’s also possible you’re going to get 8 warriors and 2 warlocks, and in the random teams rulset, the objective is to still win the game despite not having access to every single one of the class mechanics which would make completing the objective of capturing the flag easier.
When your team composition is random, you have to be more creative in terms of how you intend to complete various objectives. When your class composition has been meticulously constructed to feature every tool you could possibly need, and puts them easily at your disposal, you’re playing an entirely different game.
So yes. You won, because your team was hand picked, while the other team was randomly generated. That doesn’t make you a better or more competitive player, it just means that the premises of the match were built upon circumstances which were inherently unfair to the other team.
1 Like