Good ideas that can't be saved by game design due to player interaction.

[ObsidianJones_v1legacy]

There are times where a designer programs something that sounds so good on paper, but the execution can't be helped due to player interaction. Such as the imbalance of Wh40k factions, as everyone just wants to be a Space Marine leading to low populations for the other factions.

I got the switch. So that means I have Splatoon 2. Which also means I just took part in Splatfest: Ketchup vs Mayo.

As you might remember from a previous thread, with my issues with team matching, I've been taking screenshots of all of my matches. Mainly to show how unbalanced the game can be. two level 20's and two teens vs one teen and 3 single digits sort of thing. It's a habit I developed.

As some of you have seen, even though Ketchup had 73% population... But still lost. Mayo just won more versus battles. A fact that is mind blowing. Until you think about it.

I used my own screenshots. I played 16 matches. Seven matches of those were Versus. I won four of those matches for Ketchup.

Now, the following is under the assumption that the team battles I had of Ketchup vs Ketchup is because there were not enough Mayo players to go around.

But that means Nine of those matches that I played didn't even count.

Let's not take it away from Mayo. They still had to win those matches. Give them that. But with such a larger population, we have a lot of players who didn't get to compete as much as the Mayo did. Our time in the game wasn't as important as the lower population team. If this is how it's going to go, the lower population team will always have an advantage, as 56 percent of my matches were meaningless.

It's a great idea to have these little distractions, but I don't know how you can balance these things going forward, but unless the teams are closer to 50% with an acceptable deviation of plus or minus around.. 6?, the larger population will come out with a huge disadvantage as their over all game play will matter less given the smaller number of games actually counted.

What are some of the game play ideas that sounded great to you on paper, but it's execution just fell flat?

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

If the talent pool is evenly distributed, one side fielding more teams shouldn't matter, statistically. Team Mayo would've gotten matched with the bad Ketchup teams just as often as the good Ketchup teams.

I mean, Cake vs Ice Cream had a slightly more lopsided population split, 24%vs76% vs MvK's 27%vs73%, and Ice Cream still won out.

EDIT: On topic, too much randomness in long games. My worst examples come from board games, but it applies to certain video games as well, mario party and dokopon kingdom particularly. It's no fun to get constantly screwed by the game through no fault of your own just to have to sit there and lose for three hours. The swingier the luck goes, the shorter the game has to be.

Or in other words, random setup and extra rules adding randomness managed to have on of my friends sit through 10 hours of a Twilight Imperium game doing nothing of note. The rest of use didn't even have to try and stop his plans, the game board did that for us.

 

[CaitSeith]

One of the major characteristics of games is interaction. If the game fails because of player interactions, the game has bad design and requires patching.

 

[sXeth]

Most things reliant on matchmaking seem to fall apart if the game has any complexity. Versus games can't assess player skill accurately, or don't have enough playerbase (whether entirely, or within the connectivity standards) to keep everyone even. Co-op based games will often have the unpopular roles being deserts or populated by people who try and play them as other roles they do poorly as.