Nobody wants competitive. Stop trying to force it.

Insurgency will never be competitive. The idea that it could ever compete with other competitive shooters is a bad joke.

Just ditch competitive matchmaking and put resources into something the community actually wants. Stop trying to force an e-sports scene to happen. All you'll be met with is failure and a disappointed community. The Quake Champions developers tried desperately to force a competitive scene into existence and all it resulted in was the game being publicly ridiculed by the entire FPS community and subsequently dying off.

QC just had a $50k tournament and anyone who ridicules the game is dumb. Why are you so sad?

@quadsword
I want competitive. Pretty sure everyone in the competitive scene from source wants competitive.

I believe that NWI is giving a "shot in the dark" by changing the style of the game to adapt to the competitive with the base of players is very small and few are interested in the competitive. This was made clear in the insurgency source and was pretty obvious in the sandstorm beta where it is impossible to get a competitive matchmaking match.

@eyeofhorus which is like how many people though...

There's literally only ever 4 people playing it at most at any given time on SS and this is happening while people know that their performance in ranked isn't even affecting their stats because its beta.

@thehappybub
@Skynet
It’s a lot more on the weekends. People (including me) don’t queue for it because it’s bugged. After waiting in the queue and finally getting a match, if one of the ten players disconnects or doesn’t make it into the server in time (which happens like 70% of the time) everyone else has to sit there for 3 minutes waiting for the timer to count down before they can even requeue. And when this happens several times in a row, it’s infuriating. I love the comp mode. It’s the best mode in my opinion. And I bet a lot of the casual players would agree if they were able to give it a chance. There’s a lot more tension and you have so much more control over what’s happening in the game because there’s only 5 of you so what you do matters a lot more.

You also get very little xp from comp at the moment because you get a lot less kills and objectives.

Have you played comp? Here or in source? It’s not really fair of you to say that it’s bad if you haven’t.

Additionally, people don’t play it because their performance is bad, even though like you said stats will be reset.

last edited by EyeofHorus

Trying to make the game competitive will only help to improve the other modes:
Balanced weapons
Balanced armor
Better hit reg
More servers
Reduction of random features
Balanced point cost
Balanced movement

I just don’t see how Co-op or casual suffers from this.

@eyeofhorus Casual players always suffer when a game tries to go competitive. Id Software tried desperately to make Quake Champions an e-sport, failed miserably, got ridiculed by the entire FPS community, and now the Quake name is essentially worthless. All because they chose to listen to the 0.1% of their community demanding competitive instead of the 99.9% that just wanted a good Quake game.

Plus, here's my experience with ranked / competitive matchmaking in other games...

  1. Get stomped because the matchmaker put you up against a full premade team.
  2. Get screamed at over the microphone because you're not carrying the team.
  3. Get team killed / vote kicked for not being a miracle worker.

I tried a few comp servers in INS:Source and absolutely hated it, and it was for all of the above reasons. No fun allowed, treat the game like a job, get kicked because you failed a 1v5 clutch. Nobody wants to take responsibility for their own failures, everyone wants to find one person to gang up on. Not to mention the trolls who would grenade everybody at spawn...

Competitive is a miserable experience in every single game I've played. I don't get why everyone and their brother demands to have it in every single game now.

@eyeofhorus said in Nobody wants competitive. Stop trying to force it.:

Balanced weapons
Balanced armor

I agree with your other points, but these two are my main gripe. The premise of all my arguments is that I want SS to be an fps that isn't a milsim, that is heavily based on realism. Insurgency is actually the only game that remotely satisfies this description. Arma and Squad are milsims. Tarkov highly appeals to me, but its not what I'm looking for because its basically a gambling game. Siege is just a competitive-oriented game that has barely any basis in reality. All the AAA shooters are unrealistic and are only based on historical wars. Other games I can think of are not based on modern warfare, but on Vietnam or WWII.

Ins2, even though it came closest to what I wanted, didn't satisfy it in many ways. The biggest one was the way the game was played. It was too fast, too twitchy, too instagibby. It honestly felt arcade-y to me. Coop felt like I was playing like a mod or something, not an actual game (which I guess is accurate in a way). The unsatisfactory gameplay for me was due to an interplay of many mechanics that I won't get into, and which I honestly haven't fully identified myself.

When I first played SS in the CTA and right now, I felt like I was getting something closer to what I actually wanted. Once again, I won't go into the specifics of why I felt so, but I felt like this was a better game. The main reason is that things behaved more realistically. Bullet damage was based on caliber, calibers behaved better overall, weapons behaved better, etc.

The balancing of weapons and armor for comp, from comments I've been seeing, seem to be wanting to destroy this increased realism I'm seeing and liking. People want, for example, 7.62s to be more lethal than 5.56s... for balance. This is obviously not how bullets behave in reality against armored targets. People want recoil to be always the same and not in any way randomized for the consistency needed for comp, which is also unrealistic. People want armor to get nerfed more, once more to unrealistic levels.

I'm simply saying that what I tend to see when people say "balance for comp" is to take a siege kind of approach and modify things based on how they compare to other things rather than simply looking at how things actually behave and incorporating them in ways that make sense.

last edited by thehappybub

@thehappybub
I’ve seen your posts about realistic weapon damage and armor, and for the most part I’ve agreed. I see no problem with 5.56 having better armor pen, it’ll just need to be balanced by being worth more. Don’t see why the game can’t be both balanced for comp and realistic. The realism aspect is why I love Insurgency too. I love that it fits that middle ground between arcade shooter and milsim, which is why I think it’s the only game that could possibly pull off being both immersive and competitive.

@eyeofhorus said in Nobody wants competitive. Stop trying to force it.:

Don’t see why the game can’t be both balanced for comp and realistic.

I guess I actually agree with you then, @EyeofHorus , though personally I am more pessimistic about this. I'd love for what you're saying to come true, I'm just saying that I don't think that will happen. I think the easier thing to do is to tweak things unrealistically to satisfy balance, and people tend to do what's easier, not necessarily better.

I'm simply scared of that. The way SS was in the CTA was great imo, it just needed optimization, better AI, minor tweaks and point balancing, and a slew of QoL features. After the last patch, I don't like the way its going... or at least the way it seems to be going.

last edited by thehappybub

@quadsword
I’m sorry your competitive experience has been that awful. The reasons you listed are why I want NWI to put effort into comp MM so that stuff like that is kept to a minimum. NWI isn’t desperately trying to make SS an e-sport game, they just want to give the competitive community a chance to grow and be successful.

@quadsword this honestly sums up siege comp for me, and siege comp has like an actual scene that's successful.

@quadsword said in Nobody wants competitive. Stop trying to force it.:

I don't get why everyone and their brother demands to have it in every single game now.

I think it's because people see the success of comp games like CS:GO, Siege, and Overwatch and the hype around it and want it for a more niche community where all the superhuman trained-from-birth gamers aren't all that prevalent.

last edited by thehappybub

@quadsword said in Nobody wants competitive. Stop trying to force it.:

@eyeofhorus Casual players always suffer when a game tries to go competitive. Id Software tried desperately to make Quake Champions an e-sport, failed miserably, got ridiculed by the entire FPS community, and now the Quake name is essentially worthless.

You say casual players always suffer and provide exactly ONE example to support you. How about this...

CS:GO
League of Legends
Starcraft
Dota2

Need I go on?

Competitive doesn't mean unfun. The very nature of competitive games is simply 'balanced and interesting'. I think what you really mean is you don't want the game balanced around a professional gaming scene. And that's fine to hold that opinion, but don't give one example and then lord your opinion over the rest of us because you've anecdotally found more trolls than the rest of us.

The focus should be for Sustained combat first then coop/competitive second.

@slazenger said in Nobody wants competitive. Stop trying to force it.:

The focus should be for Sustained combat first then coop/competitive second.

Couldn't have said it better. I feel like @Slazenger captures it pretty concisely right here.

@slazenger said in Nobody wants competitive. Stop trying to force it.:

The focus should be for Sustained combat first then coop/competitive second.

So what exactly stops NWI from working on sustained while adding comp mode?
The things NWI is working on is core mechanics, performance and other stuff. Everything related to sustained only is something that is done within 1 update, such as roundtime, winconditions etc.

I dont understand OP either, only because he had bad experience in source comp mode, there should not be a comp mode at all?
It can be hard to hop on comp servers and have to deal with 5on5 firefight, actually people communicating and doing planned, non chaotic things. But why is the other people bad than?
To be honest, when this experience stopped you from playing comp instead of pushing you to do it better next time (maybe at another server, with mates)... the problems is not the gamemode/toxic players but you lacking ambitions to do it better.

A good Competitive mode is what a niche multiplayer game keeps alive (not those coop-salebuyers that you find in source-ins). Source comp had several temporarily successful teams/leagues. The scene did not grow because devs stopped development for comp after a while.
Noone needs another cs:go, siege or whatever comp successor, what we need is a working system for competitive (ranked matchmaking etc) and the rest will grow after a while.

Personally I find it much more irritating to spend hours of development on improving an AI which is still boring to play against and will never replace the feeling of playing multiplayer. But I wont start a topic and rant about it.

Fortunately devs know the comp scene of ins source very well and how much potential it had and (hopefully) wont listen to one guy and his - bad experience based - opinion.

last edited by mr.pink

@mr-pink said in Nobody wants competitive. Stop trying to force it.:

only because he had bad experience in source comp mode, there should not be a comp mode at all?

I don't think he's arguing for removal of comp altogether.

My argument is simply that comp shouldn't be the focus, and I think OP is saying that too.

@thehappybub

I don't think he's arguing for removal of comp altogether.

He is.

Just ditch competitive matchmaking and put resources into something the community actually wants.

Also as some others have mentioned, they dont want comp being the development focus, there is no way it is. A lot of the aspects of competitive need to be refined, especially the maps.

@mr-pink Alright then. What if I told this was my experience with comp in literally every game I've ever tried? (Rocket League, CS:GO, Siege, etc.). It usually wasn't a one time thing either... it was every match. I'm not thin skinned, but having to listen to people bark insults in your ear constantly while you're just trying to play the game gets really friggin' old after a while.

Competitive players ruined Quake Champions, which was one of my most anticipated games last year. They would literally tell the developers to remove all other modes besides duel so that everyone would be forced to play it. They'd literally compile lists of people they didn't like (a.k.a anyone that didn't play duel) and tell the developers to never listen to these people. They'd push back against the inclusion of popular casual modes like clan arena (a.k.a things that would have helped the game grow) because that meant taking resources away from their precious duel mode. And sadly, the devs gave into their demands and pretty much left their casual audience out in the cold. Sure, the competitive players got exactly what they wanted... but the game and franchise is basically dead in the water.

Now, I apologize if I came off as unnecessarily abrasive or accusatory in the OP, but the whole QC debacle left a very sour taste in my mouth. I and a lot of other people basically got forced out of a game we were excited to play because Id Software decided that the vocal 0.1% of the community was more important than everyone else (Ironic, considering they've now pretty much abandoned the game and are now making the Doom sequel, which isn't even going to have multiplayer...).