20-0 is still close
After watching some of the games from the WarSow Fun Cup, I must say, whilst alot of the games seem like blowouts, like score differences of fifteen frags or more, but are they really?
Lets take the game between pod and phrantic as an example, I have the recording of this game if anyone wants it, the score of the first map was 23-0, pod winning ofcourse. Now you look at that score, and you would presume that pod is just uber awesome, or the phrantic sucks.
But if you watch game, expecily from pod’s point of view, you will notice that every time he makes a frag, he is down to less than 25 hp. Also, if you look at the stats, phrantic delt ALOT more damage to pod, than pod did to phrantic, the only difference being that phrantic was reckless in the fights he chose, and ofcourse, this falls back to knowlage of the game and were all the health and armours are.
This must have been hugly anoying for phrantic, i know he was getting frustrated, as he was landing a tone of hits, and his opponent just wasn’t dying. Now obviously this must not have been very fun for phrantic, but it was highly entertianing for me and everyone else who was on GTV (proxy spectating through me) to see.
This has made me wonder, obviously Quake style games amplify the skill difference between players, yes that is me saying that pod and phrantic are just as good as each other, the closer that SMALL percentage in difference, the closer the scores will be, not due to big swings in combacks, but because frags will be traded more often (for example me vs pr0nking in wSw, scores of 3-5), and maby this is the reason why amongst casual gamers the Unreal Tournament series is more popular.
Now, UT, the game is alot more slower, and its alot easier to score a kill because of this. You see, in warsow or quake, when your health gets low, you go bounding off at over 500ups to grab some more health. In UT, because you can’t accelerate quickly, and your maximum speed is alot lower, you don’t have a chance to get to any health, so it all comes down to who deals the maximum amount of damage, insted of the player who has the most skill. This means that the frag count climbs quicker. At GreenTubeLAN in a 1v1, it wasn’t uncommon to see both players with scores in double digits.
You see, it wasn’t the dueling skills of the players, it was how well they could aim, or inother words, the game was only testing 30% of their dueling skills.
Personaly I would like to see at the next GreenTubeLAN Quake3 or Quake4 make a comeback, but I know that wont happen, purly because the game wont stroke all players egos’, its obviously going to be another UT2k4 1v1 event. And the 1v1 competition will most likly remain UT2k4 untill we get larger, and obviously have to apeal to Victoria’s more skillful duelers, inwhich case we really have no choice but to drop back to Q3A or Q4 (all depends on the comunity making a switch this year), which I know sadly means that we are going to see less casual players joining in for fun, as they will get completly mauled by 20 frags, and not want to touch the game again. Not many people want to learn the game. If they arnt good a
t it, they will drop it. Its very rare to owne someone at a LAN event in a game they have only just started in, and then have them come upto you, and ask how to improve their game.
Thats sad, understandable, but sad, personaly, when I’m taking on a “newbie” in a game like q3a or wsw, I will take it easy on them, deliberatly making it close. Give them some confidence, its only when playing someone like phrantic that I will go all out in a first game (mainly ’cause he did that to me when i was learning SoF2).
I guess this post is all over the place, hopefuly I got my thaughts on this accross, even if they are somewhat jumbled. I’m sure Craig will scoure through this looking to pick apart any hipocracies in this he can find.