Quote:
Originally Posted by Ricey
You do not need to split, but a seamless transition between the two.
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Basically this. Of the 1000+ hours of pickups I've played in the past, the most common occurrence I would see with someone new would be they'd play for a week or so and finally get tired of getting yelled at every single game and leave. This happened time and time again. It honestly frustrated me so much because these are the people who could have been future hardcore players had people had some patience, but I soon realized this is just the nature of a competitive community. Especially in FF; people who are so competitive that they have to win at a game with 20 players are going to want to win even if it slowly destroys their own community. You can't fix the personality, you have to work around it.
What there needs to be is a middle ground, some way to build the skill of a public player to at least being good enough that they don't constantly incite the rage of the more competitive players and make it so unfun that they leave. Also a place for people who want more than a pub but don't want to invest time to compete with the best and don't want to deal with the BS that comes with that. That describes every clan I played with in FF, the most common reason I got from people for lack of interest other than "ded" was no clans at our level (either way lower or way higher) or not wanting to deal with the top level assholes who nolife the game (like me, but I'm usually pretty nice
). TFC accomplished this with league divisions and ovd clan style servers. CS has matchmaking. MMOs have grind. These are all working ideas, but for it to fundamentally work you need a player base; you can't do any of these with 20 players.
What this comes down to is the incentive for new players to become part of the community at the low end of the skill/involvement spectrum has to be there first to build the foundation of the community; comp play and the stepping stones involved in sustaining it are built on top of that. FF, Quakelive, Warsow, and probably others all tried putting their focus on comp play, and comp play failed as a result. Same problem, skill gap from here to the moon, comp players actually made it worse, not enough players in general to form the mid level.
Giant tangent and tldr, yea, that's how I roll.