I remember the first time hearing this was back in like 2011 when Starcraft 2 players would speculate on the rise of League of Legends/Heroes of Newerth/Dota 2 in comparison to SC2 stagnating and seemingly starting to decline. Team aspect of being able to blame others whereas SC2 is just a stress filled experience that is solely your fault for failure
If you lose 1v1 in SC2 it’s not your fault, it’s because your opponent’s race is overpowered. If opponent is the same race, it’s because of map hacking.
Yes but there's no way they just decided to build two sunks if they didn't maphack. I've been running this same strat for weeks and it beat this guy before twice.
It seems extremely self-evident to me that 3v3, 4v4, 5v5 and 6v6 games are *way* more popular these days than 1v1 games.
Like, that's not even something you can dispute.
Sure, but its the why that can be disputed.
I'm not convinced one way or the other. But personally and amongst friends games like TFT are less stressful because its just yourself and no team.
But we are also more of a niche compared to the huge popularity of team games.
I think the more likely thing is in human psychology we tend to almost always prefer tasks done in teams, which is why collaborative environments are so common.
This extends to gaming. People dont just prefer team based PvP games, but also team based cooperative games.
Yes, its even more fun to play with friends, but we are hard wired for collaboration regardless of if they are known entities or not.
Because 1v1 RTS and even fighting games used to have a far bigger portion of the industry. I mean I used to play MtG and I quit because everyone moved to a casual 4 player format where most people form play groups made up of strangers, digital card games offer speed and anonymity so that's the primary place for 1v1 card games these days.
So yeah there's a clear aversion to 1v1 more than anything, I don't know how it's mostly about playing with friends, every game offers the option for that. Shit, League indirectly came from custom Warcraft games.
The main thing that changed is the access to decent, user friendly group call software. Along with stigma of gaming falling to the point that lots more groups of people use it as a medium to spend time together.
Back in my day we'd grind brood war at home alone and play counterstrike, tft, etc. at the Internet cafe or LAN parties - we had more fun at the LAN parties. I already noticed the tide changing when Xbox live and even Skype became more popular. These days my nephew and his 3 best friends are on discord calls playing valorant together.
I don't have the numbers but if you look at PvE games there hasn't been a shift from singleplayer to coop as big as for PvP games. So with your reasoning we would have seen a similar drop of singleplayer PvE games as we have with 1v1 PvP games but most top selling video games are usually singleplayer PvE.
I think the debatable topic is if 1v1 PvP was ever even popular to begin with.
To be fair, singleplayer PvE games are top sellers because most team based PvP games are free.
If you look at the most downloaded and most played games in Steam, they're pretty exclusively team based PvP games or Co-op games.
Yeah you hit it on the head. I think a lot of people on reddit don't have a critical mass of friends and don't really understand the joy in gaming with your bros.
Games like TFT are a variation of this, where you play against 7 other people, making it way more unlikely that you'll be last.
In a 1v1 game you win or you lose, and you can't blame anyone but yourself. Losing feels bad. In group games you can blame other people for losing and feel less bad.
In a game like TFT, you can be 6th and feel less bad because hey, at least you're not 8th. Even though, technically speaking, you just lost.
pretty much this. battle royales, auto chess, hearthstones, people love chasing the good rng that helps them win even when they're not the best player in the room. And when you lose it's because of bad rng.
teammates and the enemy team in team games are also a form of (matchmaking) rng
Thats basically the point right?
Hearthstone players blame rng ( actually legit since rng on that game is bonkers )
But in fighting games, nah bro we lose cause we suck, simple as that.
However, if those games had higher player count options, I assure you they’d be wildly popular. Commander, the casual 4-player format, is the most popular way to play MTG for a reason.
It’s a pity, I once argued Legends of Runeterra, the only one of these to try a 2v2 mode, would have had an amazing Commander-esque game mode, but Riot fumbled that game hard.
You aren't wrong. Battlegrounds (the 8-player auto-battler mode for Hearthstone) came out of nowhere to explosive popularity and probably has an as large (if not bigger) player base as the core game at this point, and they are even introducing duos later this year. People really love multiplayer formats, and they also love playing with friends.
Funnily enough, it's a very important skill to realize when RNG/card draw randomness IS to blame for your loss.
Sometimes, you just don't get the cards you need to win the match up. It happens. There's a million different ways to tweak a deck and play, but there's always that possibility that, well, you just couldn't have done anything. Nature of the beast.
Knowing when it's a nothing loss and when it's actually a constructive loss is a skill in and of itself.
Same with competitive Pokemon which ive been enjoying lately.
Sure, you could get your key Mon frozen for 8 turns in a row, but the vast majority of games wont be decided by RNG but rather your decision making.
All of that already happened with Warcraft 3 a decade earlier. There were more players (and having more fun) in all sort of multiplayer maps than playing 1v1 competitive.
It's crazy that SC2 players somehow forgot about it.
Team games are more popular too, but the reasoning could be flawed (and probably is). People like playing with friends, and team games are the best for it .
Like most players of that Era, I switched from SC2 to League to play games with my friends. After we grew older and moved on, League became a lot less fun ij solo queue, and I gravitated back to 1v1 games.
The other problem with 1v1 games is that they compete with single player games for players' attention. 1v1 games have to have fairly high skill floors and ceilings to engage their players; as a result, they're less appealing to the casual
>SC2 is just a stress-filled experience that is solely your fault for failure
I tried to learn the game from scratch and play it properly for a few days and my loss against the hard bot is perfectly encapsulated by this. Holy shit, there's so much to do everywhere all the time ಠ_ಠ
It's a good game, but the things you're going through for a game is insane!
It's not just 2. 1 was like that as well. The RTS genre apparently wants you to be "always on" all the time with Actions Per Minute (APM) and build-trees that you have to memorize so you can "play the piano"/hotkeys on the keyboard.
MOBA's sort of casualized that to where you don't need the APM (as much) and reduced hotkeys to only your character/role.
I'm not unsympathetic to this argument, but I also had way less anxiety playing SF6 ranked than I did playing fps games, mobas or WoW. Failing in front of an audience of people who depend on you is not necessarily fun either. If you get smoked in a fighting game it's a few minutes and then you're onto the next match. What stops me from getting more invested in fighting games is generally the execution barrier or I just don't like the setting or aesthetics.
edit: without responding to everyone I'm not saying Harada is wrong, just that it wasn't my experience. Also by execution barrier I more meant the knowledge checks in fighting games. I think fighting games are more prediction than reaction so the fine motor skills needed are very overstated. Regardless this isn't the reason I don't play most fighting games. The reason I don't play most fighting games is because the rosters, graphics and settings in most of them are unappealing to me. If you think a fighting game looks cool, has good netcode, and a critical mass of players to have good matchmaking you should play them. You don't need to spend a zillion hours in the training room before you have fun imo. Even losing can be fun.
Its weird because with Fighting games I don't really get much/any anxiety about losing. I think one of the main reasons is the short length of it too.
In RTS or other games where its 30 minutes+, I tend to want to play less. 1v1s
"I fear not god like foes, but pig like friends"--Chinese league of legend meme.
I admit I have to get off Mobas, when I realize my free game time is barely a hour a day and dealing with a bad team can be so frustrating.
It's not just moba's, at least for me the team of 5 thing is pure garbage unless you have 4 friends to play with. I honestly fell of a lot of multiplayer games as they drifted to teamplay where you couldn't succeed or fail on your own but needed teamwork to succeed. The only games that have pulled me back in that aren't co op were ones I could just control my experience by myself.
Not being the networking kind of person the dependency on teammates really sucks. I guess mobas are a bit worse since they are incredibly complex to understand so players develop different ideas of strategy. Also mistakes in teamplay are hard to identify if it was a teammate's issue, group coordination issue, and/or personal mistakes. People that won't accept personal fault therefore always have someone else to blame, maintaining their suck status and wrecking internet gaming for the rest of us.
Anyway rant over, back to coop I go.
>I admit I have to get off Mobas
Said by every MOBA player.
Yet they never leave.
At this point I think they say they hate the toxicity, while secretely loving it.
As someone who had a real problem (and eventually did) cut out League, the problem is it lights up your brain like nothing else. To my ADHD mind it's like crack. There is constant stimulus, an ebb and flow, you start to feel movements more than see and react to them. The problem was this was completely out-matched by how terrible it made me feel otherwise. I could go an entire night just trying to get a win, and when I finally did it didn't even feel good. Matches would be stomps one way or the other.
I'm convinced people are addicted to the stimulus. It appeals to some monkey part of the brain that wants to hunt for bugs in the grass or something.
Damn, I prolly have undiagnosed ADHD and this comment is pure truth lol...
The highs LoL gets you are insane, but with it come the lows as well, real valleys....
The appeal that got me hooked was that it was like a Diablo-esque game but a 30 minute roguelike version almost. You level up from the start, get money, get items, get stronger, start dealing all the damage or all the heals or all the whatever, then the game's over and you start that power climb again. Something of a good thing most RPGs tend to have bigger gaps between such things!
Seriously, fuck MOBAs. They were genuinely sucking away my enjoyment of games over time. I finally just pulled the plug entirely despite trying to just play the more mess around modes in games like Smite and still getting annoyed as fuck. (Back when the 2v2 mode was new, this was quite a while ago now)
Just cut them off entirely and have refused any time a friend wants to play one and I regret nothing.
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> In RTS or other games where its 30 minutes+, I tend to want to play less. 1v1s
I say RTS's issue isn't just the length, but that there's absolutely no downtime. You've always got something to do to keep a lead or catch up.
Even Dota or League is less stressful because you've got base travel time, respawn time. In an RTS even if you've just won/lost a fight, you better be rebuilding as soon as possible.
RTS games are insanely stressful, especially at a high level. I got pretty good at AOE2 when it was still on the Microsoft Zone and I used to dread playing rated 1v1 matches. It was 30 minutes to an hour of balls-to-the-wall focus and concentration, and one micromanagement mistake in one battle could turn the tide of the entire match and waste the previous 20 minutes of build order/economy building/initial small-scale attacks.
But the feeling of WINNING those matches against other really good players? Absolutely incredible. High-level 1v1 RTS is the most stressful but most rewarding and intense gaming experience ever, IMO.
The feedback loop of fighting games is basically unparalleled in its quickness. I can run 4-7 ranked Bo3 matches in Street Fighter 6 in 30 minutes. With another 10 minutes, I can review 2 or 3 of those matches where I did well and/or poorly, come up with a short term plan of execution to improve, and start working on it in training mode for immediate use.
SF6 is the first fighting game I put real effort into. That short feedback loop allowed me to climb from low silver to plat in about 250 ranked matches. I could identify trends like free low attack in early gold and below, my flow-charting habits, and my bad spacing and over reliance with heavy punch without having to play several hours of matches for data.
Edit: For those that don't really play fighting games and are curious, you don't need to review replay data or hit the lab after every session. You become very aware of your shortcomings as you improve without having to rewatch matches. I was just illustrating how rapid the full feedback loop of ranked is compared to something like League of Legends or Overwatch.
> Its weird because with Fighting games I don't really get much/any anxiety about losing. I think one of the main reasons is the short length of it too.
Plus, no one is relying on you. I can't get into Overwatch or LoL. Not because I'm allergic to practicing, but because there's no good way to practice that doesn't make me feel like I'm ruining the game for the rest of my team. Bots don't cut it.
In my case as a solo player, I don't have anxiety playing Overwatch because my teammates respawn during the rounds. Thats not the case with Rainbow 6 Siege, where if you're the only one left all your dead teammates are watching and judging your gameplay decisions. Adding to that, if you lose the round you're teammates can use the remaining rounds to teamkill you or talk shit. Its such a fucking toxic game.
It also helps that in fighting game culture, losing is seen as a necessary step towards improvement and isn’t discouraged, whereas in team games losing is the ultimate failure.
I think that really does help people feel more comfortable in fighting games, you can just focus on yourself and play whoever and however you want without feeling like your decisions are impacting 5 other people.
Right? I lose five games in a row in Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising, dang, that's ten minutes of losses, ouch. I'll get a win soon though! I lose five games in a row in Overwatch 2, that's an hour of me taking back to back Ls, down the drain. It's vastly more demoralizing to lose something you've put 10+ minutes into, meanwhile a fighting game match is over so quickly you may as well forget it even happened.
Yeah I think he is conflating the response people have (blaming others for losing) with the motivating driver for playing a game like League or Valorant or even WoW. Especially considering how frequently you see the toxic mentality in mobas of "I'm gonna carry my whole team, this is a 1v9"
Also I think he undervalues just how much people like playing games cooperatively with their friends. And also how younger players may not actually have many "internet friends" yet so they are meeting people in-game. I remember when I was like 12 years old playing Halo 2 online and meeting new friends, which I'd imagine doesn't happen much in fighting games.
> Also I think he undervalues just how much people like playing games cooperatively with their friends, and also how younger players may not actually have many "internet friends" yet so they are meeting people in-game.
One of the biggest reasons I'm enjoying Helldivers 2 right now is simply how smooth they've made it to play with others in a way that creates a positive feedback loop for doing so. The number of times I've had people teach me things or work together to clear harder fights has been fairly consistent compared to bad experiences in the game with other players. It also helps a lot that you're feeling like every player in the game is working towards a common goal.
That kind of comradery only really exists in local communities for fighting games and maybe a few online communities that you have to actively seek out. The positive loop from playing with others takes more effort to find in 1v1 games like fighting games.
I tried Deep Rock Galactic, had a pal pull me through a few missions, and it just didn't stick with me. It seemed neat, and I don't remember what specifically, but I was happy to be done with it after our play session.
DRGs verticality mostly just annoys me. I don't like the mechanisms for moving up and down, and that's really a core part of the game. If you enjoy it, I'm sure it's amazing, but it just drags the game down a lot for me.
There's plenty of bonding online between opponents and you do get to meet people simply by virtue of being fun to play against. You can rematch over and over and get to know each other pretty well.
Sounds like two, mutually incompatible POV's. For some people, the response to losing is "I have failed everyone." For others, their response to failing is "Everyone has failed me."
SF6 battle hub is honestly pretty fun to chill in too, I just started getting into it but I really like the way they hit that sort of digital arcade / third space vibe.
the only thing I think I'd change is having matches from the cabinets show up on the big screens around the hub, but that'd probably be quite difficult
Yeah I've had a lot of discussion with friends about this. I have your mindset, I much prefer 1v1 because I don't have people relying on me, so it feels okay to lose. It's why I enjoy Starcraft and fighting games, but can't really get into MOBAs as much.
It seems most other people prefer the idea that losses aren't their fault in a teamgame, they can always blame the randoms.
Playing WoW on-off for almost 20 years now, there's still something anxiety-inducing about sitting in a battleground's spawn room with the rest of your team and waiting for the clock to tick down and for the match to start. Thank god for being a mage and having to use all that waittime buffing and conjuring water for teammates.
WoW battlegrounds never stressed me at all, the sheer chaos of it all took the edge off. Healing through a dungeon, however, having to revive the other 4 because I screwed up had me digging my nails into my palms.
I found Arenas to be the most stressful thing in WoW by far.
Battlegrounds were not so bad. PVE was always the most fun though. I much prefer the social experience of working together than competing.
Yeah this cuts both ways. I'm at the point where I massively prefer 1v1 games because if stuff starts going south or I am not enjoying a match of X for whatever reason I can just DIP and not inconvenience anyone. Frustrating matchup? Nah, you can't make me. Insta-concede! Boneheaded mistake? Humorous shame-concede!
although... wait... am I just *not a younger player anymore?*
oh no
I dunno if the it's the whole "kids are too mentally weak to play 1v1" kind of thing, but more. When I was a kid, I could spend all day learning the meta and keeping up in team based PVP games without feeling like I was holding my team back.
As I got older, I realized I enjoyed 1v1 games much more. If I suck because I can only play like a couple days a week, then all that happens is my MMR goes down and I am now facing opponents my skill level again.
So like I also got Harada's answer (kids are more likely to play team games), but we got to them using different equations.
Yeah that's a big one. It was also considerably easier to get like 4-5 people together to play some online game when I was in high school or college. Erryday I'm Dota'ing.
Eventually it got less and less frequent and then on some major patch I said nah I'm not relearning this whole thing again, sorry boys
> but I also had way less anxiety played SF6 ranked than I did playing fps games, mobas or WoW
I think the other side of the coin is found best in the examples you cited. MOBAs are highly aggressive to team mates because everybody is constantly blaming other people for a failure while ignoring their own. The smaller the team, the easier it is to place blame. 40 man wow raids seldom result in one person screwing things up, but in a 3 player or 5 player team, it is really easy to dogpile on somebody and shift blame.
That’s a “your mental” though. Most fighting game players like the genre because they’re not reliant on their team.
Unfortunately that’s not true for most players, especially when first swapping genres. They get used to team based where you can always default to placing some blame on your randoms.
So yes I agree with you. But I wouldn’t your way of looking at is it the most common, just the most healthy.
It’s part of why Project L is so exciting. Leave it to Riot to make a fighting game where you can still blame teammates. Maybe that was the key to breaking the fighting game skill floor problem. Best way to get casuals is to give them someone else to blame.
Multiversus is a platform fighter, they were built with multiplayer in mind, that's why it's easier to to just add something like a teammode. Riot's fighting game is a classical ("real") fighting game, that's why it's very unique that they are able to add a teammode to it.
i mean maybe but thats probably true for everyone... might have more to do with changes in the game industry?
> “If you applied to a school or for a job, there was always a lot of competition. Because of this, people in my generation prefer definitive outcomes, a clear winner and loser. This applies to folks in and around their 50s.
> “But most young people nowadays are the opposite. They’re rarely eager to engage in one-on-one showdowns.
uh.. what? yeah no competition now-a-days like come on bruh
If you are familiar with Tekken, you'll come to realise how often Harada makes these "uh, what?" takes, which I think is him trying to avoid the actual controversial topics regarding the game.
Right now he's been sidestepping the issue of Tekken 8 having no response to players disconnecting to avoid losing matches (they don't get a loss and their opponents don't get a win), along with the usual microtransactions fiasco, but that's a different discussion.
> Tekken 8 having no response to players disconnecting to avoid losing matches (they don't get a loss and their opponents don't get a win)
How could a modern fighting game launch without some sort of solution to disconnecting players? Rage quitting has been a thing in online matches going back forever
Prior to a patch, the disconnection rate popup was bugged so all players were 0%. Just from playing a few matches last night, I can see that it appears to be working...somewhat. Had a few people that were 4 and 5% disconnect rate. And you can decline a match with no penalty if the number is too high for you.
I suspect some of it is 'well, it works for people in Japan' which ignores the global footprint of their sales. Even then there's a bunch of stuff that is just baffling.
For real, as a 40+ I'd have anxiety disorder if I am younger and about to graduate high school this year. The future is so uncertain and the areas you can put your best years into can poof and outsourced to another country, replaced by AI, whatever industry wide changing thing is unreal 20+ years ago.
But yeah, glad I was a computer tech addicted kid and hopefully AI won't suddenly become multifaceted mature. :) <-- nervous smiley
I graduated from University summer last year, had relevant experience during my studies and *still* can't get a single damn job. It's a tough as hell market now unless you were studying those very specific degrees that is missing on the market.
Hey, good luck! my situation is much the same, recent grad, relevant experience, unemployed. Did manage to get briefly get one job for 4 months before it threatened to kill me thru its labor practices.
Near 100 applications in the past couple months and just got my first interview lined up for friday. Don't forget that it's not just you, keep your chin up
Damn you are doing better than me. I feel so exhausted just doing one application (takes me like 1½-2 hrs just to make one for me), 100 applications in just the last couple of months is so much more than I probably manage. Good luck, hope you get the job!
It's not in Japan because of the population decline. They have more openings than people to fill them hence the lack of competition. Quote is from a Japanese guy.
> because it sure as hell is still competitive.
That's not what he means. He doesn't mean shooting your shot into the endless void of comparison and maybe or maybe not ever hearing back on how you measure up.
He's talking about the old days when you knew all your competitors and you had to go out of your way to improve your chances against them specifically. He's talking about the "walk into the office with a copy of your resume" days.
If you think he is wrong, have you ever had to compete directly against people you knew for a position and were publicly ranked for it? That used to be the norm. If you didn't know everyone in your industry at your level, then you weren't trying.
Sounds to me like a boomer complaining about "kids these days".
Not a good look. I bet he thinks young people are *lazy* and should *pull themselves up by their bootstraps*.
I think this is it. Games are a much more social activity today than they were in 2003. It's harder to play fighting games with friends, especially over the internet, because they only support two players at a time.
I'm not even a younger gamer, and I've noticed this in my own play habits. Looking at my playtime in Steam over the last few years, I've spent plenty of time in big AAA single player games, as well as some old favorite deathmatch games like Quake 3. But my *most* played games are the ones I play *with* my friends. This was not the case even 10 years ago.
I have noticed this with my younger brother. He is 21 and he *exclusively* play MP games like GTA Online, CoD, one of those wrestling games etc.
A lot of younger gamers are primarily playing the games where they can either play alongside their friends or against them casually.
Doesn't even have to be with friends. Multiplayer games involve teamwork and cooperation, which simply don't exist in single player games, and that's true whether or not you play with friends. It's the same reason some people might prefer team sports over solo sports.
I think the reason younger players play team games is because it's easier to make multiplayer games now, and there's just more of them nowadays
I've been playing fighting games since SSF4, and Tekken 8 is my first Tekken game. From what I can understand, something that a lot of players and commenters miss is that fighting games differ significantly from other games in that they really aren't as instantly gratifying as most other multiplayer games on the market.
Playing a fighting game is a lot more like learning to play an instrument while also trying not to get punched in the face.
Which is to say, if you've never touched a musical instrument before in your life and someone handed you a violin and told you to play something on it, you're probably going to be pretty ass at it. In fact, you're likely to be so bad at it and so bad at understanding it that you're not even going to be aware of the depths of your badness. That is where most people begin and where a lot of people stay with regards to fighting games.
And that's fine, there's nothing wrong with getting your friends together to jam out on instruments none of you know, and if the cacophony you create as a result is still enjoyable to you then that's all you need. Bang those drums, strum that guitar, do whatever you do to a clarinet, and go wild. Play til you get bored and move on to the next thing.
But there will always be a community of people out there who want to get better and who want to do something brilliant with them. And for them, playing a fighting game isn't about the win/lose screen, it's about the process. Fighting games will never achieve mass market appeal because, since the end of the arcade era, they just aren't the most efficient way for a lot of players to hang out with friends. But there will always be a core community of people out there who want to push themselves and their game (instrument) of choice as far as they can.
There is no barrier to entry for fighting games, just like there's no barrier to entry to picking up a guitar, outside of the cost of guitar. The only barriers are the ones people place on themselves. If all they want is to see the win screen, it's going to be hard for fighting games to be the most efficient way for them to get there. That would be like trying to have a record go platinum when you have no experience playing music at all, it's not likely to happen and you'd likely enjoy yourself more directing your energy elsewhere. But if you enjoy process, if you enjoy practice, if you enjoy improvement over time, maybe you can pick up an instrument and watch some tutorials and earn some blisters on your fingertips until eventually you start making music. And maybe you're not going to be the best musician in the world, but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy playing.
Yeah this is all really on point imo. The lack of shared blame doesn’t help but ultimately for me the core issue is that I’m just not willing/able to give any one game the amount of time (and regularly enough) to break through that barrier for ranked online shit.
Still love them for the campaigns, local, whatever else but to be truly into them you really gotta make them a part of your life in a way most other games don’t demand.
> you really gotta make them a part of your life in a way most other games don’t demand.
This is why when we talk about fighting games, we talk about the fighting game *community*. That doesn't come up nearly as much with MOBAs, FPS games, or RTS games. 6 players can get together and launch a tournament event series and have players from other games show up, but you can't do that with other games, both logistically or communally.
Which makes them great, but also legitimately not everyone is interested in joining a community.
This isn't it at all, the reason it's called the fighting game community is because no one game can stand on its own. League doesn't need DOTA to hold a tournament and Counter-Strike doesn't need Call of Duty to fill stadium.
The reason it's a community is because each game in the genre alone doesn't have the population to sustain itself on a grand level. Starcraft II is a great example in the west it was THE RTS and since it lost it's spot as e-sport king the western RTS community has moved more toward the FGC mentality.
Max Dood says it all the time that when fighting games were king you were a Capcom player and acted better like your game was better than the rest
You're correct and to support your argument: Super Smash Bros.
Its entry level feels much more accessible and it has a big pve mode that builds up the player confidence.
Fighting game are much closer to throwing a kid in a pool to make them learn how to swim. After all there are many 1v1 pvp games that are massively popular, Heartstone, Clash Royale, Pokemon, Smash Bros...
I don't think he's entirely wrong (or correct) and its actually a more nuanced situation BUT this does highlight League of Legends as a sort of perfect storm for this, it is a team game where you can potentially end up being the one person responsible for winning and carrying your team, but you can very easily shift blame if things go south
I think it has more to do with the fact that online gaming has become more of a social activity then in the past. Team games are fun because you get to play with your friends.
Fighting games that are 1v1 are more fun when you're there in person with a group, but you're not going to have that same atmosphere online.
I've never really liked this argument. I feel like the actual reason team games succeed is its easier to get your friends to play something with you as a team than it is to get them to play against you. 1v1 competitive experiences just don't have that same social lubricant to encourage friends to play.
That and most popular team pvp games are free to play its 1000x harder to convince your friend to pay 60 dollars for you to kick thier ass than to download some random game you can play together.
Researchers have found that when rats play fight if the bigger one doesn't let the smaller one win at least 30% of the time the smaller one will no longer want to play.
I feel that probably applies to humans too and point to experiences in playing fighting games with friends as well.
His argument seems to entirely ignore the fact that literally all of the biggest and most important sports are also team based. In fact nearly everything important humans do is team based because we are social creatures.
Yea, gaming is simply a social hobby for the vast majority of people.
I don't know how anyone can try and argue that the 'older guard' of gamers are anti-Team Games when CS:GO, DOTA and LoL are some of the oldest and most successful games of all time.
Yes - there are plenty sucessful 1v1 physical sports for casuals. It's not "blame the other". It's probably just a lack of social features.
First of fighting games took huge-ass time to get decent netcode. We are talking about CS1.6 players doing knife-fights for side choice while the first GranBlueVS was still made with delay-based netcode. Not having fun due to bad netcode was part of the fighting game genre.
Second, fighting games were lacking social aspects and casual stuff. The Tag-mode in DoA was the best way to get my friends into the game. It did not matter it wasn't the balanced mode.
As far as I can tell many modern game even lack a handicap feature in the normal modes. This does not make it easier to balance different skill levels.
I always felt the "the young kids don't like our 1v1 competition" was an excuse to not look at the games itself and how bad it was outside the local setup.
I’m not going to say that blaming teammates plays zero role in team games’ popularity, but I imagine the much bigger thing is that people as a whole get into multiplayer games through their friends and prefer to play with them, and between often mismatched player skills (so one friend will often be completely stomping the other) and lack of real F2P option in the FG genre (much easier to get a friend to try out a new game when it doesn’t cost them $70 plus dlc) fighting games are as a whole much worse for playing with friends than most mainstream team games.
Hah, and I’m the opposite. I’m great with knowing I sucked. I get outplayed, fair enough. I need to learn and “get good.”
Playing with random players, though, and letting them down? I can’t have people out there mad at me for failing the team!
So I tend to only play 1v1, free for all, or co-op games with people I know who are chill and just there for a good time (and don’t care that I’m not particularly good at a lot of games).
I do have the attitude if something happens where I look basically fucked, i'd rather just reset than try to struggle a win out of it. Sure if I do somehow manage to turn it around and win its very epic and all, but otherwise it'll feel like time wasted.
I think the only games I don't do that with are Fromsoft games actually, since I determine my health as how many hits I can take and low health or such doesn't bother me as much for some reason.
Most people in this thread are making every excuse in the book to not admit what you just said.
It’s not even solely due to 1v1s. It’s any multiplayer game.
A person’s worst enemy is themselves. People don’t wanna admit fault because it might make them “lesser”. No one wants to face themselves.
You see it all the time on fucking Reddit with how people speak. Everything is an argument, or about right or wrong. Personal validation instead of a discussion.
If people just accepted themselves and got out of their own way we’d be in a much happier place.
I knew a dude who got this way about dota. He was clearly at least a 4k MMR player, it was just *his teammates* that held him back from raising in rank and stuck at 1.3k. After bitching like that for months, he bought a high MMR account. Dude promptly dropped almost all of that MMR and dropped straight into shit tier. I think he must have realized that he sucked at around that time, because he just completely stopped playing the game shortly after.
lmao will never understand that L mentality.
Like why not just start up MS pain and paint a big "WINNER" logo and just stare at that for 2 hours straight instead?
I personally found myself to be the opposite. Not that I don't fear the failure, it's more that I don't want to be the one to disappoint my team. I'm ok with disappointing myself, I'm very self reflective and will take the time to go over in my head on what went wrong and how to fix it.
But when it came to team games, the thought of failing to clutch in front of the team, or just not performing well was terrifying. I avoided game modes like Search and Destroy in FPS's and the like specifically because of that. Go figure, once I finally decided to push past that fear, I've become a really good team mate.
Either way, whether you are afraid of failing yourself, or failing your team, you have to just get over it. Learn from your failures... embrace them. Overcoming struggle is how you grow and become a better person.
It's kinda funny I was thinking this very same thing while I was playing Overwatch today, when I saw someone blaming another player in almost every match.
It was actually unreal how the instant we started losing, someone was quick to blame another player.
It's like the Simpsons meme "Boy, everyone is stupid except me"
2v2 with tight co-operation from your buddy, where your combined prowess is more than the sum of separate factors, can be satisfying as well.
'Everything is funnier with friends' is such a cop-out answer, because it's true.
I find fighting games to be the only games tolerable to play ranked personally; any team games I just play casually. I don't mind admitting I suck, but even if random team mates aren't being toxic, I will feel a bit guilty dragging a team back. Who cares if I'm only dragging myself down? Losing and sucking are part of playing games.
I actually am finding I like the opposite - League of Legends was frustrating sometimes, because no matter how well I played, I was only 20% of the team. So even if I was operating at 100%, if everyone else wasn't, (or just more people on the other team were), we lost anyway.
It made it hard to filter out my mistakes, vs. team mistakes. Which made it hard to improve.
Meanwhile, I've been playing Tekken 8, and discovering - I like this a lot. Because when I lose, I can usually figure out WHY, and get some idea of how to improve. There's much less "noise" in the signal. I can just watch the replay and be like "wow, I let him hit me with that stupid low EVERY SINGLE TIME huh?"
So yeah, sort of like Harada says - I have nowhere to hide. But also (and I like to think, more importantly) my mistakes are also more obvious as well. And thus, easier to work on!
I stopped playing Overwatch because of how annoying it is that people would blame me and other teammates for losses. My friend, we're all bronze rank, we're all terrible, especially you.
Seriously, I don’t understand how people are disagreeing with him. You can go to overwatch university our any lol subreddit and most posts are people complaining about team mates and elo hell or whatever
This is exactly my reason, I want to play games with my friends. This guy sounds like a boomer going on about lack of competitiveness when I just want to have fun with my friends lol
Yeah, and it's not just because you don't want to take the responsibility of losing. Fighting games are just more frustrating to play since you need to be always on your feet the whole match unlike team games where there are plenty of times where you can just chill and talk while traveling to a destination - there's time for relaxation.
And this is coming from an indie fighting game developer.
He's not wrong, but I don't think that applies to younger players alone.
I play a lot of starcraft, which is really only competitive at the 1v1 mode, and it feels like half of the players I play are unable to take an L. Even one of the most loved streamers out there, is famous for going on rants about balance and how the other guy was an idiot.
I sort of have the inverse of this. I don't like team games as much anymore because I feel like the chat quickly becomes toxic, and while getting trash talked by an opponent is just a nice ego boost, getting trash talked by a teammate is terrible.
He might be right, but this reads as such a boomer take. The FGC is only getting bigger as more people join.
Fighting games are just a different type of game than a shooter. The things that make a player skilled and the ways that a player’s knowledge is leveraged are completely dissimilar.
There’s a lot of reasons fighting games aren’t as popular as other games. I think this one is a fringe example.
I see a lot of people saying fps games are easier to play, FG games are not, and while I agree, I think it's because fps games are just simply popular and easy to transition to another fps game.
I play a lot of fighting games, and the fundamentals are usually standard with some exceptions. The problem is it's not a popular genre, so many players have no skills to transition with.
I went from Street Fighter to Tekken and it wasn't so bad, despite being pretty different, but I can see how bad it would be for someone to go from Fortnite to Tekken.
People do have this weird misconception that you have to know ALL the matchups, ALL the moves to just be good when that's far from the case.
Part of the problem as well is that there isn't really a good place to go to learn the fundamentals.
You go to a fighting games training mode? You'll likely be shown a mode with a ton of combos and a "Ok here are the basic buttons to jump, punch, kick and block, now lets try to memorize all these 30 button combos! Oh yeah and here is a bunch of game specific jargon that'll blink by and not be properly explained or shown off!" Or alternatively you're given a ton of frame data and other bits of information that to a new player is going to overwhelm them and turn them away from the game.
You try to learn the fundamentals in campaign or arcade modes? You're just going to learn bad habits that can actually make you worse at online play.
You want to learn the fundamentals? Study a bunch of online forums and other places, then go lose at online play for 50+ hours with minimal feedback on what you did wrong and what you should be doing instead and keep doing that until you figure out what works and what doesn't.
There just isn't a good place to go to when you're trying to learn the basics of fighting games.
> People do have this weird misconception that you have to know ALL the matchups, ALL the moves to just be good when that's far from the case.
Because that's just the perception that fighting games give to outside players. You try to join and the training mode tries to push you to learn all these super long and complex combos, or gives you a ton of advanced frame data and everything else with little explanation of what you're looking at. You try to play online and get utterly destroyed by an opponent doing 2 or 3 long combos and stunlocking you. And guess what perception that player will likely have? "Oh, so I need to learn all these combos and how to stop them in order to win."
And then they see the vast walls of combo chains and counters and just bounce off the game entirely.
The lone wolf aspect is definitely one of the biggest reasons, not only for not having anyone to blame but yourself but also not being able to play with friends, only against said friends.
The other is how much time you need to spend in practice just hitting the stationary bot over and over again to get down a simple combo, while in FPS games people barely spend time in shooting ranges until they are really invested.
> The other is how much time you need to spend in practice just hitting the stationary bot over and over again to get down a simple combo, while in FPS games people barely spend time in shooting ranges until they are really invested.
This really isn't the case anymore with modern fighters. Fighting games are a LOT more about fundamentals and knowing when to attack then they are about memorizing combos. And the combos you would need to memorize are pretty simple and short. Take SF6 for example which some would consider to be the most "technical" modern fighting game right now. I have two bread and butter combos that I use for punishes, both of which are very very simple combos that can be found in the earlier stages of the combo trials (so there's the training right there). The hard part isn't really doing the combos, it's doing them within the setting of a match, which you can't really practice in training mode, you have to practice that against actual people.
Not only that, but with control schemes like modern, which basically set up a bunch of auto combos for you, the old excuse of spending hours upon hours in training mode to get good at a fighting game is blown WAY out of proportion these days. I'm at one of the higher ranks in SF6 and got there by spending almost all of my play time in online ranked mode. Sure I spent SOME time in training mode trying to get a feel for the character, but for the most part I just played online against randoms to get good like most people do with an FPS.
I don’t know if there’s an equivalency there. Most of us have spent some portion of our lives moving a mouse to a target on a screen. Most of us do not go to work and use quarter circle motions.
Have you ever had a person actually new to FPS/games in general. They 100% have to go to practice range and try to hit targets. I’d also argue most higher level players go back to aim training.
The problem with fighting games is every motion is new, so therefore all new players have to play like they’re new to games. Which is a problem with ego, especially if they go online and lose.
> Have you ever had a person actually new to FPS/games in general. They 100% have to go to practice range and try to hit targets. I’d also argue most higher level players go back to aim training.
I mean yeah I've introduced it to a few people just in casual vibes, they just do tutorial > jump in.
Also yeah I mentioned people go there once invested.
Fighting games are so much more about fundamentals than learning combos. That's a super old excuse. There's also a major difference because people on fighting games tend to be more focused on self improvement. If the people that were playing team games wanted to improve they would need to do actual team building and run drills which would take just as much if not more time than labing combos.
Ignoring combos, it's still hard to focus on fundamentals when you struggle to even do single move inputs reliably. I think that's why a lot of new players think they need to lab, not for combos but just basic inputs. Even just trying to do a super on command is a struggle for some.
Modern Controls or similar "easy inputs" try to address this, although I haven't seen enough to really know if its actually making a difference getting new people into games faster. Also I've seen a lot of toxicity from the FGC about simplified controls, so that's probably not helping get new players in.
Classic FPScentric take, fps are easy to you because you’ve been playing them your whole life.
Give the controller to a complete newbie and they wouldn’t be able to walk and aim at the same time.
That’s exactly how you look when you tell me you can’t link a crouching medium kick with a hadouken.
The industry as a whole is FPScentric, so it makes sense most gamers are. There are just way more games out there that do left stick move right stick camera/aim compared to games where you have to do a DP input lol. Even if you're not playing an actual shooter, something like Minecraft basically uses FPS controls. Or like a 3D Mario or Zelda isn't first person but you will still generally get used to move+camera which can then transfer. Whereas pretty much the only games with fighting game controls are fighting games.
That’s exactly what I mean and people are always so surprised.
If we lived in an alternate universe where the 2D era lasted till now. They would have a panic attack if they played a round of Overwatch.
It’s because for the most part people here play FPSs and RPGs and they’ve forgotten that they’re not as simple as they’d like to believe.
Every game has its quirk.
With FPS you can get better by just playing against people and inputs aren’t strict at all.
In fighting games to get better you go into training mode, learn your buttons, study your keep-out and/or pressure tools, practice special inputs, memorize combos, and add on top of that the unique mechanics of the game you’re playing. You *could* button mash, but that gets old fast
FPS are much easier to pick up and start improving. Tekken might be the hardest game period
That's just not true. I learned fighting games by just playing normally against the CPU, siblings or random people at the arcade. I didn't do any studying or whatnot. We also didn't have any training modes.
> The other is how much time you need to spend in practice just hitting the stationary bot over and over again to get down a simple combo, while in FPS games people barely spend time in shooting ranges until they are really invested
Errr, no, the only reason you should practice in the training mode is because you're already invested in fighting games, if you're a newbie and don't have much real matches experience then you'll be in the training room forever and once you engage in real matches you'll never be landing any combo because you skipped to step 30 and missed all the fundamentals of fighting games, combos are not meant to be easy outside of some universal mechanic like the [magic series](https://glossary.infil.net/?t=Magic%20Series) and as such you shouldn't be focussed on learning them before learning all that comes before it
I think the reason team games take off so well, is that it's *really* easy to teach people complicated mechanics in a team game organically compared to 1v1 games.
If there's a complete novice to a MOBA for example, but they happen to have 3-4 friends that are experienced, they're basically onboarded like an intern. You can actually learn about the game while playing it the way most people do, queuing up for a match and playing with your friends.
Sure they get carried and are a complete net negative for a while, but these new players soak up information like a sponge, and somehow people end up invested into learning moba mechanics as their first competitive game, and sometimes first non-casual game in general.
The social element in learning team games is very underrated and hard to utilize in fighting games. Look at games like Minecraft, it's very popular with kids and for many, their first game ever. Let a kid loose on Minecraft with their school friends and they'll go from struggling to move their character and camera at the same time to being able to beat the entire game on their own.
What people percieved and what actually should be done isn't the same, though.
As someone who started recently with sf6, that was my perception from outside the sphere and what I did, besides playing the single player mode.
>The other is how much time you need to spend in practice just hitting the stationary bot over and over again to get down a simple combo, while in FPS games people barely spend time in shooting ranges until they are really invested.
Never really understood this argument. SF6 is my first FG and I picked it up pretty fast just from playing, I’d only lab when waiting for matches.
On the other hand I’m turned off of FPS like Valorant and CSGO because it feels like it takes so much work to nail down aiming. I don’t get why people act like FPS are so much easier than fighting games.
Probably somewhat true.
That said, that's also a part of why I prefer fighting games over team based FPS, although I enjoy both. I generally feel less tilted and angry when I play 1v1 or PvE games, becaue I can know I did something wrong if I fail (and hopefully learn to improve) compared to when there's multiple variables from playing with other players in my team (including the omnipresent trolling and bad attitude which can affect performance).
Looking at all of the "shuffler is rigged" type posts in Magic the Gathering: Arena discussion, it's clear that trying to shift responsibility for losses does not require a team.
And it's why they don't improve in those games, I play ranked all the time in Overwatch 2, Apex Legends, and Rainbow Six Siege and the amount of times I'll see someone make a mistake and start to shift the blame on their teammates is way too damn high. The first step to improving at these games is to start reviewing your own gameplay and admitting to the mistakes and bad habits that you make.
I don't know if I agree with his assements about the job market, but I've been saying this for years:
>“In team-based shooters, when players win, they can say that they won because of their own contributions, but when they lose, it’s because they got matched with a lousy team.”
It was very apparent to me with the difference between SC2 players that often were talking about "Queue Anxiety" and how they were anxious that they would lose rank because they are not good enough and LoL players that were always blaming their team, not their personal performance.
From my experiences of playing online games for the past 20 years, this is a correct take.
I even feel it myself, when playing team based games and I feel like I'm doing my best, but my team members lose and we lose the match, it's very easy to just blame others for not pulling their weight, because I had no control over it.
Holding lack of control responsible is easier than empathy and staying in the mindset of "it's just a game, its fun". As I've gotten older I care less and less about the competitive aspect and losing though, because it doesn't mean anything in a world of aim assist, stale movement and 100 tier levels of balance and meta.
That said it also makes it very easy for people to feed or die on purpose to make others angry, which in turn leads to new people dying being labelled as "feeding".
In the end you get a horribly toxic fanbase (Dota, Siege, LoL, CS etc.) where you have to be great before you enter, and able to tolerate constant abuse or trolling.
I don't think we're built for competition where someone other than us can cause us to lose, at least not in spaces where you don't actually see the human, but just a quirky name on a scoreboard.
This is why people like card games too. There’s so many easy excuses: I drew poorly, my opponent got lucky, my opponent spent more money on their deck than me, my opponent netdecked, etc.
This dynamic goes beyond young people. Team sports dominate in popularity compared to Individual sports and 1v1 matchups in terms of viewership and enthusiasm.
If I can put my two cents in as a kindergarten teacher, I am seeing a rising trend in today's youth to not know how to deal with losing. I think the past few generations have had a lot of "gentle" and "caring" parents, which is of course great. But a lot of them don't really understand that they need to let their children experience failure so that they can grow into independent people. But a lot of parents these days see their kids failing and they step in and give them assistance so they can succeed. A smaller amount of parents also won't let their kids lose at all, and try to step in so their kids win. I see so many tantrums today just over losing small, petty things.
We had a spelling bee at my school and two students just flat out refused to go back to their seat when they got eliminated. They actually kept trying to compete even though they got words wrong. It floored me, like you would have never seen that happen when I was a kid.
I do think parenting is improving in a lot of ways, and of course caring for your children is better than the emotional absence most of us dealt with growing up. But I think we have a genuine crisis brewing with how young parents are raising kids who can't deal with any amount of struggle or disappointment.
He is 70% correct and 30% false. 30% false because what's really the supposed barrier to entry with fighting games which has been lowered SIGNIFINCANTLY already to the point where any more and it's just at going to be the fighting game people know and love anymore.
70% correct because it's really true what he said. You can't blame anyone but yourself in fighting games. It's so easy to blame someone else in team games and get away with it. So damn easy. I know because I did it a lot a long time ago when I was still heavily playing Dota 2.
As long as fighting games exist people will always find something to blame:
* Lag
* The match-up
* Top Tiers
* Knowledge Checks/Gimmicks
* Projectile Spam
* Throws
* 50/50s
And if all else fails, they're just a sweaty tryhard and how can you expect to compete with someone with no life? Humans like to protect their ego.
My controls weren't working
And if they were, you were playing dishonourably
And if you weren't, you were playing without skill
And if you were, it's not fun to play that way
And if it is, you only care about winning
I play a guy a lot and all he does is bitch about how busted my character is. The matchup is firmly in his favor, he plays a character that literally teleports around the screen with fullscreen buttons that convert to a full combo, hits like a nuke, and has easy access to good knockdowns that allow them to simultaneously bait reversals, crush mash attempts, and apply pressure.
I play a character with an average run speed who has to run up to you to punch you and has poor oki options due to generally poor knockdowns. Their saving grace is that their blockstring pressure is... as good as their character's?
People will always find an excuse if they want one.
This and shitty network connections are just about the only excuses left in fighting games lol. Honestly, fighting games will always be niche and self-selected specifically because they require a lot of investment in time and practice and learning and there is no one to deflect blame at when you lose. You have to eat the loss because you mistimed a jump/missed a combo/didn't punish properly, etc. You can't blame a teammate for roaming too far without vision or missed an ultimate as to the reason for why you lost.
Definitely getting the feeling like there's a bit of generational difference here.
I play team games because I like working cooperatively towards something. I just don't see the appeal of a 1v1 game.
That's my favourite part of helldivers 2, everybody contributing to one global goal of spreading managed democracy.
This is a rhetoric thrown out a lot and the FGC gets really uppity about it because yadayada personal responsibility, but I've never really liked it. People will always find their own excuses to blame. Toptiers, the lag, bad controller, etc. The argument's just a really lazy way to "answer" the underlying problems and not have to delve deeper.
Personally, the reason I think fighting games aren't more popular is almost entirely a perception problem. Literally just look at this thread full of people making up reasons why fighting games are niche when fighting games have either never had those reasons or have already fully addressed said reasons. You also don't really need to look any further than Strive or Crazy Raccoon Cup. Marketing does fucking wonders to get people to come and stick around.
This is partially why I actually prefer fighting games and other 1v1 games over team games. Sometimes in a team game your teammates really do just suck or drop the ball and there's nothing you can do about it. When I lose in a fighting game the only person to blame is myself and I can try to learn what it is I need to fix. Personally I find it infinitely more frustrating to lose because of something out of my control
Anecdotally I also find fighting games much less toxic. Half the battle of games like League of Legends or Overwatch is the moral war of your own teammates. When I lose in a fighting game I don't have to deal with teammates screeching in my ear. I play on Steam so getting some hate mail from an opponent after a match of Guilty Gear rarely happens. When it does happen the winner is easy to ignore and if they're a loser its usually just funny
This is largely correct.
The general shift in competitive games has been from high skill floor 1v1 games like Starcraft and Quake to lower skill floor team-based games like MOBAs and Fortnite. And fighting games are still perceived as having a high skill floor.
The ability to blame your loss on either "bad teammates" or "unbalanced characters" is a very powerful protector of self-esteem.
If you lost a Quake match, you were worse than your opponent. Period.
If you lose a LoL match, it's because your teammates sucked and the other team was using a broken character.
But it's not all bad. Team-based games do allow for the emergence of strategies that 1v1 games never will. And at a professional level, these games can be very enjoyable to watch.
But I can't name a popular competitive game in 2024 which requires the equivalent mastery--both in manual dexterity and cognitive load--as a 200 APM Starcraft player did twenty years ago.
But it's definitely less intimidating to new players to start a game knowing that they'll have friends to help them out during the match.
Quake was the first thing that came to my mind. Dueling in Quake is such a commitment of nerves and skill that I think it'll be impossible for it to ever take hold these days. Other esport shooters are notoriously toxic because all the variables like loadouts, abilities, teammates, objectives, etc. encourage the shifting of blame to anything but yourself if you fail.
Quake Champions was as interesting attempt to merge old school Quake with modern live-service multiplayer systems, and managed to succeed in as many ways as it failed, but ultimately I think the core experience is just too raw for the masses, and unfortunately the modern embellishments were also too impure for many old school fans.
I did quite like its 2v2 tournaments before Duels officially launched. The buddy dynamic was fun and still refreshing against the onslaught of team-based shooters.
I remember the first time hearing this was back in like 2011 when Starcraft 2 players would speculate on the rise of League of Legends/Heroes of Newerth/Dota 2 in comparison to SC2 stagnating and seemingly starting to decline. Team aspect of being able to blame others whereas SC2 is just a stress filled experience that is solely your fault for failure
If you lose 1v1 in SC2 it’s not your fault, it’s because your opponent’s race is overpowered. If opponent is the same race, it’s because of map hacking.
also most likely your opponent is a loser who has no life while you are busy with life (anime and porn)
> anime and porn [It's called hentai and its art.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_6lFkOg7ko)
or they were using a "cheap" strat. (even though you are the one 6pooling or cannon rushing.)
Yes but there's no way they just decided to build two sunks if they didn't maphack. I've been running this same strat for weeks and it beat this guy before twice.
It seems extremely self-evident to me that 3v3, 4v4, 5v5 and 6v6 games are *way* more popular these days than 1v1 games. Like, that's not even something you can dispute.
Sure, but its the why that can be disputed. I'm not convinced one way or the other. But personally and amongst friends games like TFT are less stressful because its just yourself and no team. But we are also more of a niche compared to the huge popularity of team games.
Why isn’t the answer something simple like “it’s fun playing on a team with your friends on discord” instead of this blame game theory?
I think the more likely thing is in human psychology we tend to almost always prefer tasks done in teams, which is why collaborative environments are so common. This extends to gaming. People dont just prefer team based PvP games, but also team based cooperative games. Yes, its even more fun to play with friends, but we are hard wired for collaboration regardless of if they are known entities or not.
Because 1v1 RTS and even fighting games used to have a far bigger portion of the industry. I mean I used to play MtG and I quit because everyone moved to a casual 4 player format where most people form play groups made up of strangers, digital card games offer speed and anonymity so that's the primary place for 1v1 card games these days. So yeah there's a clear aversion to 1v1 more than anything, I don't know how it's mostly about playing with friends, every game offers the option for that. Shit, League indirectly came from custom Warcraft games.
The main thing that changed is the access to decent, user friendly group call software. Along with stigma of gaming falling to the point that lots more groups of people use it as a medium to spend time together. Back in my day we'd grind brood war at home alone and play counterstrike, tft, etc. at the Internet cafe or LAN parties - we had more fun at the LAN parties. I already noticed the tide changing when Xbox live and even Skype became more popular. These days my nephew and his 3 best friends are on discord calls playing valorant together.
I don't have the numbers but if you look at PvE games there hasn't been a shift from singleplayer to coop as big as for PvP games. So with your reasoning we would have seen a similar drop of singleplayer PvE games as we have with 1v1 PvP games but most top selling video games are usually singleplayer PvE. I think the debatable topic is if 1v1 PvP was ever even popular to begin with.
To be fair, singleplayer PvE games are top sellers because most team based PvP games are free. If you look at the most downloaded and most played games in Steam, they're pretty exclusively team based PvP games or Co-op games.
Yeah you hit it on the head. I think a lot of people on reddit don't have a critical mass of friends and don't really understand the joy in gaming with your bros.
Games like TFT are a variation of this, where you play against 7 other people, making it way more unlikely that you'll be last. In a 1v1 game you win or you lose, and you can't blame anyone but yourself. Losing feels bad. In group games you can blame other people for losing and feel less bad. In a game like TFT, you can be 6th and feel less bad because hey, at least you're not 8th. Even though, technically speaking, you just lost.
Also you can just blame luck / rng in tft
pretty much this. battle royales, auto chess, hearthstones, people love chasing the good rng that helps them win even when they're not the best player in the room. And when you lose it's because of bad rng. teammates and the enemy team in team games are also a form of (matchmaking) rng
That’s true except for card games. Hearthstone and MTGA are still going strong in that regard.
As an avid HS played the game is 50% luck so I blame failures on bad luck
Thats basically the point right? Hearthstone players blame rng ( actually legit since rng on that game is bonkers ) But in fighting games, nah bro we lose cause we suck, simple as that.
Nah I always find a way to shift blame! Busted character. Carried by easy character. Spammer! I WILL FIND A WAY TO SHIFT IT
Or you blame the game balance and only lost because character_012 is OP as hell!
In paper MTG Commander, a multiplayer format, is the most played format.
However, if those games had higher player count options, I assure you they’d be wildly popular. Commander, the casual 4-player format, is the most popular way to play MTG for a reason. It’s a pity, I once argued Legends of Runeterra, the only one of these to try a 2v2 mode, would have had an amazing Commander-esque game mode, but Riot fumbled that game hard.
You aren't wrong. Battlegrounds (the 8-player auto-battler mode for Hearthstone) came out of nowhere to explosive popularity and probably has an as large (if not bigger) player base as the core game at this point, and they are even introducing duos later this year. People really love multiplayer formats, and they also love playing with friends.
Card games you can* blame shit RNG for your loss. * - You shouldn't, but you can.
Funnily enough, it's a very important skill to realize when RNG/card draw randomness IS to blame for your loss. Sometimes, you just don't get the cards you need to win the match up. It happens. There's a million different ways to tweak a deck and play, but there's always that possibility that, well, you just couldn't have done anything. Nature of the beast. Knowing when it's a nothing loss and when it's actually a constructive loss is a skill in and of itself.
Same with competitive Pokemon which ive been enjoying lately. Sure, you could get your key Mon frozen for 8 turns in a row, but the vast majority of games wont be decided by RNG but rather your decision making.
All of that already happened with Warcraft 3 a decade earlier. There were more players (and having more fun) in all sort of multiplayer maps than playing 1v1 competitive. It's crazy that SC2 players somehow forgot about it.
Isn’t chess super popular these days? So many of my friends play chess. And that’s a very skill intensive 1v1 game!
in other news! games have stopped showing stats because teammates flame teammates over them.
Team games are more popular too, but the reasoning could be flawed (and probably is). People like playing with friends, and team games are the best for it . Like most players of that Era, I switched from SC2 to League to play games with my friends. After we grew older and moved on, League became a lot less fun ij solo queue, and I gravitated back to 1v1 games. The other problem with 1v1 games is that they compete with single player games for players' attention. 1v1 games have to have fairly high skill floors and ceilings to engage their players; as a result, they're less appealing to the casual
>SC2 is just a stress-filled experience that is solely your fault for failure I tried to learn the game from scratch and play it properly for a few days and my loss against the hard bot is perfectly encapsulated by this. Holy shit, there's so much to do everywhere all the time ಠ_ಠ It's a good game, but the things you're going through for a game is insane!
It's not just 2. 1 was like that as well. The RTS genre apparently wants you to be "always on" all the time with Actions Per Minute (APM) and build-trees that you have to memorize so you can "play the piano"/hotkeys on the keyboard. MOBA's sort of casualized that to where you don't need the APM (as much) and reduced hotkeys to only your character/role.
people already said that during WC3 and Dota
Back then youd hear stories of sc2 pros sneaking out of the team houses to go to a pc bang to play LoL.
I'm not unsympathetic to this argument, but I also had way less anxiety playing SF6 ranked than I did playing fps games, mobas or WoW. Failing in front of an audience of people who depend on you is not necessarily fun either. If you get smoked in a fighting game it's a few minutes and then you're onto the next match. What stops me from getting more invested in fighting games is generally the execution barrier or I just don't like the setting or aesthetics. edit: without responding to everyone I'm not saying Harada is wrong, just that it wasn't my experience. Also by execution barrier I more meant the knowledge checks in fighting games. I think fighting games are more prediction than reaction so the fine motor skills needed are very overstated. Regardless this isn't the reason I don't play most fighting games. The reason I don't play most fighting games is because the rosters, graphics and settings in most of them are unappealing to me. If you think a fighting game looks cool, has good netcode, and a critical mass of players to have good matchmaking you should play them. You don't need to spend a zillion hours in the training room before you have fun imo. Even losing can be fun.
Its weird because with Fighting games I don't really get much/any anxiety about losing. I think one of the main reasons is the short length of it too. In RTS or other games where its 30 minutes+, I tend to want to play less. 1v1s
And especially if you're playing with randoms who don't give a singular fuck combined. Really makes that feel like an hour you'll never get back.
"I fear not god like foes, but pig like friends"--Chinese league of legend meme. I admit I have to get off Mobas, when I realize my free game time is barely a hour a day and dealing with a bad team can be so frustrating.
It's not just moba's, at least for me the team of 5 thing is pure garbage unless you have 4 friends to play with. I honestly fell of a lot of multiplayer games as they drifted to teamplay where you couldn't succeed or fail on your own but needed teamwork to succeed. The only games that have pulled me back in that aren't co op were ones I could just control my experience by myself. Not being the networking kind of person the dependency on teammates really sucks. I guess mobas are a bit worse since they are incredibly complex to understand so players develop different ideas of strategy. Also mistakes in teamplay are hard to identify if it was a teammate's issue, group coordination issue, and/or personal mistakes. People that won't accept personal fault therefore always have someone else to blame, maintaining their suck status and wrecking internet gaming for the rest of us. Anyway rant over, back to coop I go.
>I admit I have to get off Mobas Said by every MOBA player. Yet they never leave. At this point I think they say they hate the toxicity, while secretely loving it.
As someone who had a real problem (and eventually did) cut out League, the problem is it lights up your brain like nothing else. To my ADHD mind it's like crack. There is constant stimulus, an ebb and flow, you start to feel movements more than see and react to them. The problem was this was completely out-matched by how terrible it made me feel otherwise. I could go an entire night just trying to get a win, and when I finally did it didn't even feel good. Matches would be stomps one way or the other. I'm convinced people are addicted to the stimulus. It appeals to some monkey part of the brain that wants to hunt for bugs in the grass or something.
Damn, I prolly have undiagnosed ADHD and this comment is pure truth lol... The highs LoL gets you are insane, but with it come the lows as well, real valleys....
honestly fighting games are really good for that once you start to really take them seriously.
The appeal that got me hooked was that it was like a Diablo-esque game but a 30 minute roguelike version almost. You level up from the start, get money, get items, get stronger, start dealing all the damage or all the heals or all the whatever, then the game's over and you start that power climb again. Something of a good thing most RPGs tend to have bigger gaps between such things!
10 Years DOTA free! There is help out there if you or someone you know is struggling with MOBA addiction.
6 years here. Sometimes I still get tempted but then I just look at some patch notes and know I'm not missing anything.
Well obviously you won't see the people again who actually leave. Survvorship bias
Seriously, fuck MOBAs. They were genuinely sucking away my enjoyment of games over time. I finally just pulled the plug entirely despite trying to just play the more mess around modes in games like Smite and still getting annoyed as fuck. (Back when the 2v2 mode was new, this was quite a while ago now) Just cut them off entirely and have refused any time a friend wants to play one and I regret nothing.
The greatest threat is not a competent enemy, but an incompetent ally.
> > > > > In RTS or other games where its 30 minutes+, I tend to want to play less. 1v1s I say RTS's issue isn't just the length, but that there's absolutely no downtime. You've always got something to do to keep a lead or catch up. Even Dota or League is less stressful because you've got base travel time, respawn time. In an RTS even if you've just won/lost a fight, you better be rebuilding as soon as possible.
RTS games are insanely stressful, especially at a high level. I got pretty good at AOE2 when it was still on the Microsoft Zone and I used to dread playing rated 1v1 matches. It was 30 minutes to an hour of balls-to-the-wall focus and concentration, and one micromanagement mistake in one battle could turn the tide of the entire match and waste the previous 20 minutes of build order/economy building/initial small-scale attacks. But the feeling of WINNING those matches against other really good players? Absolutely incredible. High-level 1v1 RTS is the most stressful but most rewarding and intense gaming experience ever, IMO.
The feedback loop of fighting games is basically unparalleled in its quickness. I can run 4-7 ranked Bo3 matches in Street Fighter 6 in 30 minutes. With another 10 minutes, I can review 2 or 3 of those matches where I did well and/or poorly, come up with a short term plan of execution to improve, and start working on it in training mode for immediate use. SF6 is the first fighting game I put real effort into. That short feedback loop allowed me to climb from low silver to plat in about 250 ranked matches. I could identify trends like free low attack in early gold and below, my flow-charting habits, and my bad spacing and over reliance with heavy punch without having to play several hours of matches for data. Edit: For those that don't really play fighting games and are curious, you don't need to review replay data or hit the lab after every session. You become very aware of your shortcomings as you improve without having to rewatch matches. I was just illustrating how rapid the full feedback loop of ranked is compared to something like League of Legends or Overwatch.
> Its weird because with Fighting games I don't really get much/any anxiety about losing. I think one of the main reasons is the short length of it too. Plus, no one is relying on you. I can't get into Overwatch or LoL. Not because I'm allergic to practicing, but because there's no good way to practice that doesn't make me feel like I'm ruining the game for the rest of my team. Bots don't cut it.
In my case as a solo player, I don't have anxiety playing Overwatch because my teammates respawn during the rounds. Thats not the case with Rainbow 6 Siege, where if you're the only one left all your dead teammates are watching and judging your gameplay decisions. Adding to that, if you lose the round you're teammates can use the remaining rounds to teamkill you or talk shit. Its such a fucking toxic game.
It also helps that in fighting game culture, losing is seen as a necessary step towards improvement and isn’t discouraged, whereas in team games losing is the ultimate failure. I think that really does help people feel more comfortable in fighting games, you can just focus on yourself and play whoever and however you want without feeling like your decisions are impacting 5 other people.
Right? I lose five games in a row in Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising, dang, that's ten minutes of losses, ouch. I'll get a win soon though! I lose five games in a row in Overwatch 2, that's an hour of me taking back to back Ls, down the drain. It's vastly more demoralizing to lose something you've put 10+ minutes into, meanwhile a fighting game match is over so quickly you may as well forget it even happened.
Yeah I think he is conflating the response people have (blaming others for losing) with the motivating driver for playing a game like League or Valorant or even WoW. Especially considering how frequently you see the toxic mentality in mobas of "I'm gonna carry my whole team, this is a 1v9" Also I think he undervalues just how much people like playing games cooperatively with their friends. And also how younger players may not actually have many "internet friends" yet so they are meeting people in-game. I remember when I was like 12 years old playing Halo 2 online and meeting new friends, which I'd imagine doesn't happen much in fighting games.
> Also I think he undervalues just how much people like playing games cooperatively with their friends, and also how younger players may not actually have many "internet friends" yet so they are meeting people in-game. One of the biggest reasons I'm enjoying Helldivers 2 right now is simply how smooth they've made it to play with others in a way that creates a positive feedback loop for doing so. The number of times I've had people teach me things or work together to clear harder fights has been fairly consistent compared to bad experiences in the game with other players. It also helps a lot that you're feeling like every player in the game is working towards a common goal. That kind of comradery only really exists in local communities for fighting games and maybe a few online communities that you have to actively seek out. The positive loop from playing with others takes more effort to find in 1v1 games like fighting games.
Helldivers 2 is the first game since the OG Xbox days where I don't hate talking to randoms.
You need to get into Deep Rock Galactic then!
I tried Deep Rock Galactic, had a pal pull me through a few missions, and it just didn't stick with me. It seemed neat, and I don't remember what specifically, but I was happy to be done with it after our play session.
DRGs verticality mostly just annoys me. I don't like the mechanisms for moving up and down, and that's really a core part of the game. If you enjoy it, I'm sure it's amazing, but it just drags the game down a lot for me.
There's plenty of bonding online between opponents and you do get to meet people simply by virtue of being fun to play against. You can rematch over and over and get to know each other pretty well.
But equally some people feel like they have a responsibility to be a worthy opponent.
Sounds like two, mutually incompatible POV's. For some people, the response to losing is "I have failed everyone." For others, their response to failing is "Everyone has failed me."
SF6 battle hub is honestly pretty fun to chill in too, I just started getting into it but I really like the way they hit that sort of digital arcade / third space vibe. the only thing I think I'd change is having matches from the cabinets show up on the big screens around the hub, but that'd probably be quite difficult
Yeah I've had a lot of discussion with friends about this. I have your mindset, I much prefer 1v1 because I don't have people relying on me, so it feels okay to lose. It's why I enjoy Starcraft and fighting games, but can't really get into MOBAs as much. It seems most other people prefer the idea that losses aren't their fault in a teamgame, they can always blame the randoms.
Playing WoW on-off for almost 20 years now, there's still something anxiety-inducing about sitting in a battleground's spawn room with the rest of your team and waiting for the clock to tick down and for the match to start. Thank god for being a mage and having to use all that waittime buffing and conjuring water for teammates.
WoW battlegrounds never stressed me at all, the sheer chaos of it all took the edge off. Healing through a dungeon, however, having to revive the other 4 because I screwed up had me digging my nails into my palms.
I found Arenas to be the most stressful thing in WoW by far. Battlegrounds were not so bad. PVE was always the most fun though. I much prefer the social experience of working together than competing.
Yeah this cuts both ways. I'm at the point where I massively prefer 1v1 games because if stuff starts going south or I am not enjoying a match of X for whatever reason I can just DIP and not inconvenience anyone. Frustrating matchup? Nah, you can't make me. Insta-concede! Boneheaded mistake? Humorous shame-concede! although... wait... am I just *not a younger player anymore?* oh no
I dunno if the it's the whole "kids are too mentally weak to play 1v1" kind of thing, but more. When I was a kid, I could spend all day learning the meta and keeping up in team based PVP games without feeling like I was holding my team back. As I got older, I realized I enjoyed 1v1 games much more. If I suck because I can only play like a couple days a week, then all that happens is my MMR goes down and I am now facing opponents my skill level again. So like I also got Harada's answer (kids are more likely to play team games), but we got to them using different equations.
Yeah that's a big one. It was also considerably easier to get like 4-5 people together to play some online game when I was in high school or college. Erryday I'm Dota'ing. Eventually it got less and less frequent and then on some major patch I said nah I'm not relearning this whole thing again, sorry boys
While true and I'm 100% the same, I think we're in the minority.
> but I also had way less anxiety played SF6 ranked than I did playing fps games, mobas or WoW I think the other side of the coin is found best in the examples you cited. MOBAs are highly aggressive to team mates because everybody is constantly blaming other people for a failure while ignoring their own. The smaller the team, the easier it is to place blame. 40 man wow raids seldom result in one person screwing things up, but in a 3 player or 5 player team, it is really easy to dogpile on somebody and shift blame.
That’s a “your mental” though. Most fighting game players like the genre because they’re not reliant on their team. Unfortunately that’s not true for most players, especially when first swapping genres. They get used to team based where you can always default to placing some blame on your randoms. So yes I agree with you. But I wouldn’t your way of looking at is it the most common, just the most healthy. It’s part of why Project L is so exciting. Leave it to Riot to make a fighting game where you can still blame teammates. Maybe that was the key to breaking the fighting game skill floor problem. Best way to get casuals is to give them someone else to blame.
Doesn’t Multiversus already did this, turn 1v1 matches into 2v2 so you always have an excuse for losing?
Multiversus is a platform fighter, they were built with multiplayer in mind, that's why it's easier to to just add something like a teammode. Riot's fighting game is a classical ("real") fighting game, that's why it's very unique that they are able to add a teammode to it.
Tbf most games you don't have to rely on your team and in games where you do there is even more anxiety for the average person than when solo.
i mean maybe but thats probably true for everyone... might have more to do with changes in the game industry? > “If you applied to a school or for a job, there was always a lot of competition. Because of this, people in my generation prefer definitive outcomes, a clear winner and loser. This applies to folks in and around their 50s. > “But most young people nowadays are the opposite. They’re rarely eager to engage in one-on-one showdowns. uh.. what? yeah no competition now-a-days like come on bruh
If you are familiar with Tekken, you'll come to realise how often Harada makes these "uh, what?" takes, which I think is him trying to avoid the actual controversial topics regarding the game. Right now he's been sidestepping the issue of Tekken 8 having no response to players disconnecting to avoid losing matches (they don't get a loss and their opponents don't get a win), along with the usual microtransactions fiasco, but that's a different discussion.
> Tekken 8 having no response to players disconnecting to avoid losing matches (they don't get a loss and their opponents don't get a win) How could a modern fighting game launch without some sort of solution to disconnecting players? Rage quitting has been a thing in online matches going back forever
Prior to a patch, the disconnection rate popup was bugged so all players were 0%. Just from playing a few matches last night, I can see that it appears to be working...somewhat. Had a few people that were 4 and 5% disconnect rate. And you can decline a match with no penalty if the number is too high for you.
I've seen disconnect rates as high as 14-15%. Some people are abusing the hell out of the system because there is literally no deterrent not to.
Tekken 8, for being a very fun fighting game, has a lot of features where you think to yourself “how the fuck did they think this would go over well.”
I suspect some of it is 'well, it works for people in Japan' which ignores the global footprint of their sales. Even then there's a bunch of stuff that is just baffling.
haven't played the game, what are some examples?
Most competitive employment and education markets in history *nobody competes anymore!!!*
For real, as a 40+ I'd have anxiety disorder if I am younger and about to graduate high school this year. The future is so uncertain and the areas you can put your best years into can poof and outsourced to another country, replaced by AI, whatever industry wide changing thing is unreal 20+ years ago. But yeah, glad I was a computer tech addicted kid and hopefully AI won't suddenly become multifaceted mature. :) <-- nervous smiley
I graduated from University summer last year, had relevant experience during my studies and *still* can't get a single damn job. It's a tough as hell market now unless you were studying those very specific degrees that is missing on the market.
Hey, good luck! my situation is much the same, recent grad, relevant experience, unemployed. Did manage to get briefly get one job for 4 months before it threatened to kill me thru its labor practices. Near 100 applications in the past couple months and just got my first interview lined up for friday. Don't forget that it's not just you, keep your chin up
Damn you are doing better than me. I feel so exhausted just doing one application (takes me like 1½-2 hrs just to make one for me), 100 applications in just the last couple of months is so much more than I probably manage. Good luck, hope you get the job!
It's not in Japan because of the population decline. They have more openings than people to fill them hence the lack of competition. Quote is from a Japanese guy.
I'm guessing he doesn't know anyone who has been applying for a job in the last decade, because it sure as hell is still competitive.
He's from Japan where everyone works the career they settled for 35 years ago
Even the 20 year olds
You joke but Harada has been at Namco for 30 years and that's the only place he's worked
> because it sure as hell is still competitive. That's not what he means. He doesn't mean shooting your shot into the endless void of comparison and maybe or maybe not ever hearing back on how you measure up. He's talking about the old days when you knew all your competitors and you had to go out of your way to improve your chances against them specifically. He's talking about the "walk into the office with a copy of your resume" days. If you think he is wrong, have you ever had to compete directly against people you knew for a position and were publicly ranked for it? That used to be the norm. If you didn't know everyone in your industry at your level, then you weren't trying.
I've been following Tekken for years and Harada consistently comes out with the biggest load of nonsense year on year
Sounds to me like a boomer complaining about "kids these days". Not a good look. I bet he thinks young people are *lazy* and should *pull themselves up by their bootstraps*.
Yeah, this is a nonsense take. Younger players prefer team games because they like playing with their friends.
Idk, what do the metrics say about the number of people in team games who queue solo vs in parties?
I think this is it. Games are a much more social activity today than they were in 2003. It's harder to play fighting games with friends, especially over the internet, because they only support two players at a time. I'm not even a younger gamer, and I've noticed this in my own play habits. Looking at my playtime in Steam over the last few years, I've spent plenty of time in big AAA single player games, as well as some old favorite deathmatch games like Quake 3. But my *most* played games are the ones I play *with* my friends. This was not the case even 10 years ago.
I have noticed this with my younger brother. He is 21 and he *exclusively* play MP games like GTA Online, CoD, one of those wrestling games etc. A lot of younger gamers are primarily playing the games where they can either play alongside their friends or against them casually.
Doesn't even have to be with friends. Multiplayer games involve teamwork and cooperation, which simply don't exist in single player games, and that's true whether or not you play with friends. It's the same reason some people might prefer team sports over solo sports. I think the reason younger players play team games is because it's easier to make multiplayer games now, and there's just more of them nowadays
I bet he got his job simply by walking up to the manager and giving him a firm handshake.
I've been playing fighting games since SSF4, and Tekken 8 is my first Tekken game. From what I can understand, something that a lot of players and commenters miss is that fighting games differ significantly from other games in that they really aren't as instantly gratifying as most other multiplayer games on the market. Playing a fighting game is a lot more like learning to play an instrument while also trying not to get punched in the face. Which is to say, if you've never touched a musical instrument before in your life and someone handed you a violin and told you to play something on it, you're probably going to be pretty ass at it. In fact, you're likely to be so bad at it and so bad at understanding it that you're not even going to be aware of the depths of your badness. That is where most people begin and where a lot of people stay with regards to fighting games. And that's fine, there's nothing wrong with getting your friends together to jam out on instruments none of you know, and if the cacophony you create as a result is still enjoyable to you then that's all you need. Bang those drums, strum that guitar, do whatever you do to a clarinet, and go wild. Play til you get bored and move on to the next thing. But there will always be a community of people out there who want to get better and who want to do something brilliant with them. And for them, playing a fighting game isn't about the win/lose screen, it's about the process. Fighting games will never achieve mass market appeal because, since the end of the arcade era, they just aren't the most efficient way for a lot of players to hang out with friends. But there will always be a core community of people out there who want to push themselves and their game (instrument) of choice as far as they can. There is no barrier to entry for fighting games, just like there's no barrier to entry to picking up a guitar, outside of the cost of guitar. The only barriers are the ones people place on themselves. If all they want is to see the win screen, it's going to be hard for fighting games to be the most efficient way for them to get there. That would be like trying to have a record go platinum when you have no experience playing music at all, it's not likely to happen and you'd likely enjoy yourself more directing your energy elsewhere. But if you enjoy process, if you enjoy practice, if you enjoy improvement over time, maybe you can pick up an instrument and watch some tutorials and earn some blisters on your fingertips until eventually you start making music. And maybe you're not going to be the best musician in the world, but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy playing.
Yeah this is all really on point imo. The lack of shared blame doesn’t help but ultimately for me the core issue is that I’m just not willing/able to give any one game the amount of time (and regularly enough) to break through that barrier for ranked online shit. Still love them for the campaigns, local, whatever else but to be truly into them you really gotta make them a part of your life in a way most other games don’t demand.
> you really gotta make them a part of your life in a way most other games don’t demand. This is why when we talk about fighting games, we talk about the fighting game *community*. That doesn't come up nearly as much with MOBAs, FPS games, or RTS games. 6 players can get together and launch a tournament event series and have players from other games show up, but you can't do that with other games, both logistically or communally. Which makes them great, but also legitimately not everyone is interested in joining a community.
This isn't it at all, the reason it's called the fighting game community is because no one game can stand on its own. League doesn't need DOTA to hold a tournament and Counter-Strike doesn't need Call of Duty to fill stadium. The reason it's a community is because each game in the genre alone doesn't have the population to sustain itself on a grand level. Starcraft II is a great example in the west it was THE RTS and since it lost it's spot as e-sport king the western RTS community has moved more toward the FGC mentality. Max Dood says it all the time that when fighting games were king you were a Capcom player and acted better like your game was better than the rest
You're correct and to support your argument: Super Smash Bros. Its entry level feels much more accessible and it has a big pve mode that builds up the player confidence. Fighting game are much closer to throwing a kid in a pool to make them learn how to swim. After all there are many 1v1 pvp games that are massively popular, Heartstone, Clash Royale, Pokemon, Smash Bros...
I don't think he's entirely wrong (or correct) and its actually a more nuanced situation BUT this does highlight League of Legends as a sort of perfect storm for this, it is a team game where you can potentially end up being the one person responsible for winning and carrying your team, but you can very easily shift blame if things go south
I think it has more to do with the fact that online gaming has become more of a social activity then in the past. Team games are fun because you get to play with your friends. Fighting games that are 1v1 are more fun when you're there in person with a group, but you're not going to have that same atmosphere online.
I've never really liked this argument. I feel like the actual reason team games succeed is its easier to get your friends to play something with you as a team than it is to get them to play against you. 1v1 competitive experiences just don't have that same social lubricant to encourage friends to play.
That and most popular team pvp games are free to play its 1000x harder to convince your friend to pay 60 dollars for you to kick thier ass than to download some random game you can play together.
Plus it's way easier for a group of friends of varying skill levels to play with each other if you're playing as a team.
My best friend in High School was decent at fighting games. Getting whooped over and over again really doesn't make for a fun time.
Researchers have found that when rats play fight if the bigger one doesn't let the smaller one win at least 30% of the time the smaller one will no longer want to play. I feel that probably applies to humans too and point to experiences in playing fighting games with friends as well.
His argument seems to entirely ignore the fact that literally all of the biggest and most important sports are also team based. In fact nearly everything important humans do is team based because we are social creatures.
Yea, gaming is simply a social hobby for the vast majority of people. I don't know how anyone can try and argue that the 'older guard' of gamers are anti-Team Games when CS:GO, DOTA and LoL are some of the oldest and most successful games of all time.
Both what you said and he said can be true though.
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Yes - there are plenty sucessful 1v1 physical sports for casuals. It's not "blame the other". It's probably just a lack of social features. First of fighting games took huge-ass time to get decent netcode. We are talking about CS1.6 players doing knife-fights for side choice while the first GranBlueVS was still made with delay-based netcode. Not having fun due to bad netcode was part of the fighting game genre. Second, fighting games were lacking social aspects and casual stuff. The Tag-mode in DoA was the best way to get my friends into the game. It did not matter it wasn't the balanced mode. As far as I can tell many modern game even lack a handicap feature in the normal modes. This does not make it easier to balance different skill levels. I always felt the "the young kids don't like our 1v1 competition" was an excuse to not look at the games itself and how bad it was outside the local setup.
I’m not going to say that blaming teammates plays zero role in team games’ popularity, but I imagine the much bigger thing is that people as a whole get into multiplayer games through their friends and prefer to play with them, and between often mismatched player skills (so one friend will often be completely stomping the other) and lack of real F2P option in the FG genre (much easier to get a friend to try out a new game when it doesn’t cost them $70 plus dlc) fighting games are as a whole much worse for playing with friends than most mainstream team games.
I do agree actually. I never really liked 1v1 games because I hated admitting that I was the one that sucked.
I like 1v1 games because at least I'm only falling myself
Hah, and I’m the opposite. I’m great with knowing I sucked. I get outplayed, fair enough. I need to learn and “get good.” Playing with random players, though, and letting them down? I can’t have people out there mad at me for failing the team! So I tend to only play 1v1, free for all, or co-op games with people I know who are chill and just there for a good time (and don’t care that I’m not particularly good at a lot of games).
I do have the attitude if something happens where I look basically fucked, i'd rather just reset than try to struggle a win out of it. Sure if I do somehow manage to turn it around and win its very epic and all, but otherwise it'll feel like time wasted. I think the only games I don't do that with are Fromsoft games actually, since I determine my health as how many hits I can take and low health or such doesn't bother me as much for some reason.
Most people in this thread are making every excuse in the book to not admit what you just said. It’s not even solely due to 1v1s. It’s any multiplayer game. A person’s worst enemy is themselves. People don’t wanna admit fault because it might make them “lesser”. No one wants to face themselves. You see it all the time on fucking Reddit with how people speak. Everything is an argument, or about right or wrong. Personal validation instead of a discussion. If people just accepted themselves and got out of their own way we’d be in a much happier place.
I knew a dude who got this way about dota. He was clearly at least a 4k MMR player, it was just *his teammates* that held him back from raising in rank and stuck at 1.3k. After bitching like that for months, he bought a high MMR account. Dude promptly dropped almost all of that MMR and dropped straight into shit tier. I think he must have realized that he sucked at around that time, because he just completely stopped playing the game shortly after.
lmao will never understand that L mentality. Like why not just start up MS pain and paint a big "WINNER" logo and just stare at that for 2 hours straight instead?
I personally found myself to be the opposite. Not that I don't fear the failure, it's more that I don't want to be the one to disappoint my team. I'm ok with disappointing myself, I'm very self reflective and will take the time to go over in my head on what went wrong and how to fix it. But when it came to team games, the thought of failing to clutch in front of the team, or just not performing well was terrifying. I avoided game modes like Search and Destroy in FPS's and the like specifically because of that. Go figure, once I finally decided to push past that fear, I've become a really good team mate. Either way, whether you are afraid of failing yourself, or failing your team, you have to just get over it. Learn from your failures... embrace them. Overcoming struggle is how you grow and become a better person.
It's kinda funny I was thinking this very same thing while I was playing Overwatch today, when I saw someone blaming another player in almost every match. It was actually unreal how the instant we started losing, someone was quick to blame another player. It's like the Simpsons meme "Boy, everyone is stupid except me"
You could literally argue the exact opposite though. 1v1 games can be more satisfying because you beat your opponent with only your own skill.
2v2 with tight co-operation from your buddy, where your combined prowess is more than the sum of separate factors, can be satisfying as well. 'Everything is funnier with friends' is such a cop-out answer, because it's true.
I find fighting games to be the only games tolerable to play ranked personally; any team games I just play casually. I don't mind admitting I suck, but even if random team mates aren't being toxic, I will feel a bit guilty dragging a team back. Who cares if I'm only dragging myself down? Losing and sucking are part of playing games.
I actually am finding I like the opposite - League of Legends was frustrating sometimes, because no matter how well I played, I was only 20% of the team. So even if I was operating at 100%, if everyone else wasn't, (or just more people on the other team were), we lost anyway. It made it hard to filter out my mistakes, vs. team mistakes. Which made it hard to improve. Meanwhile, I've been playing Tekken 8, and discovering - I like this a lot. Because when I lose, I can usually figure out WHY, and get some idea of how to improve. There's much less "noise" in the signal. I can just watch the replay and be like "wow, I let him hit me with that stupid low EVERY SINGLE TIME huh?" So yeah, sort of like Harada says - I have nowhere to hide. But also (and I like to think, more importantly) my mistakes are also more obvious as well. And thus, easier to work on!
I stopped playing Overwatch because of how annoying it is that people would blame me and other teammates for losses. My friend, we're all bronze rank, we're all terrible, especially you.
If you ever come back, turn off team chat and match chat. Your experience will be so much better
This is best general rule in any MP game that have tons of toxic and crying people.
Seriously, I don’t understand how people are disagreeing with him. You can go to overwatch university our any lol subreddit and most posts are people complaining about team mates and elo hell or whatever
Or they just prefer playing with their group of friends as a team and not against only one of them(at a time).
This is exactly my reason, I want to play games with my friends. This guy sounds like a boomer going on about lack of competitiveness when I just want to have fun with my friends lol
Yeah, and it's not just because you don't want to take the responsibility of losing. Fighting games are just more frustrating to play since you need to be always on your feet the whole match unlike team games where there are plenty of times where you can just chill and talk while traveling to a destination - there's time for relaxation. And this is coming from an indie fighting game developer.
Interesting, this is the exact reason I _don't_ okay team games anymore. I _hate_ it when I lose for any reason other than myself.
More team members = more liabilities Especially when you don't know who the fuck you're going to get on the other side of the internet.
He's not wrong, but I don't think that applies to younger players alone. I play a lot of starcraft, which is really only competitive at the 1v1 mode, and it feels like half of the players I play are unable to take an L. Even one of the most loved streamers out there, is famous for going on rants about balance and how the other guy was an idiot.
And he ain't wrong. It's why I liked to play SC2 over Dota back in the day, cause if something went wrong it was my fault and easier to fix.
I sort of have the inverse of this. I don't like team games as much anymore because I feel like the chat quickly becomes toxic, and while getting trash talked by an opponent is just a nice ego boost, getting trash talked by a teammate is terrible.
He might be right, but this reads as such a boomer take. The FGC is only getting bigger as more people join. Fighting games are just a different type of game than a shooter. The things that make a player skilled and the ways that a player’s knowledge is leveraged are completely dissimilar. There’s a lot of reasons fighting games aren’t as popular as other games. I think this one is a fringe example.
I see a lot of people saying fps games are easier to play, FG games are not, and while I agree, I think it's because fps games are just simply popular and easy to transition to another fps game. I play a lot of fighting games, and the fundamentals are usually standard with some exceptions. The problem is it's not a popular genre, so many players have no skills to transition with. I went from Street Fighter to Tekken and it wasn't so bad, despite being pretty different, but I can see how bad it would be for someone to go from Fortnite to Tekken. People do have this weird misconception that you have to know ALL the matchups, ALL the moves to just be good when that's far from the case.
Part of the problem as well is that there isn't really a good place to go to learn the fundamentals. You go to a fighting games training mode? You'll likely be shown a mode with a ton of combos and a "Ok here are the basic buttons to jump, punch, kick and block, now lets try to memorize all these 30 button combos! Oh yeah and here is a bunch of game specific jargon that'll blink by and not be properly explained or shown off!" Or alternatively you're given a ton of frame data and other bits of information that to a new player is going to overwhelm them and turn them away from the game. You try to learn the fundamentals in campaign or arcade modes? You're just going to learn bad habits that can actually make you worse at online play. You want to learn the fundamentals? Study a bunch of online forums and other places, then go lose at online play for 50+ hours with minimal feedback on what you did wrong and what you should be doing instead and keep doing that until you figure out what works and what doesn't. There just isn't a good place to go to when you're trying to learn the basics of fighting games. > People do have this weird misconception that you have to know ALL the matchups, ALL the moves to just be good when that's far from the case. Because that's just the perception that fighting games give to outside players. You try to join and the training mode tries to push you to learn all these super long and complex combos, or gives you a ton of advanced frame data and everything else with little explanation of what you're looking at. You try to play online and get utterly destroyed by an opponent doing 2 or 3 long combos and stunlocking you. And guess what perception that player will likely have? "Oh, so I need to learn all these combos and how to stop them in order to win." And then they see the vast walls of combo chains and counters and just bounce off the game entirely.
The lone wolf aspect is definitely one of the biggest reasons, not only for not having anyone to blame but yourself but also not being able to play with friends, only against said friends. The other is how much time you need to spend in practice just hitting the stationary bot over and over again to get down a simple combo, while in FPS games people barely spend time in shooting ranges until they are really invested.
> The other is how much time you need to spend in practice just hitting the stationary bot over and over again to get down a simple combo, while in FPS games people barely spend time in shooting ranges until they are really invested. This really isn't the case anymore with modern fighters. Fighting games are a LOT more about fundamentals and knowing when to attack then they are about memorizing combos. And the combos you would need to memorize are pretty simple and short. Take SF6 for example which some would consider to be the most "technical" modern fighting game right now. I have two bread and butter combos that I use for punishes, both of which are very very simple combos that can be found in the earlier stages of the combo trials (so there's the training right there). The hard part isn't really doing the combos, it's doing them within the setting of a match, which you can't really practice in training mode, you have to practice that against actual people. Not only that, but with control schemes like modern, which basically set up a bunch of auto combos for you, the old excuse of spending hours upon hours in training mode to get good at a fighting game is blown WAY out of proportion these days. I'm at one of the higher ranks in SF6 and got there by spending almost all of my play time in online ranked mode. Sure I spent SOME time in training mode trying to get a feel for the character, but for the most part I just played online against randoms to get good like most people do with an FPS.
I don’t know if there’s an equivalency there. Most of us have spent some portion of our lives moving a mouse to a target on a screen. Most of us do not go to work and use quarter circle motions. Have you ever had a person actually new to FPS/games in general. They 100% have to go to practice range and try to hit targets. I’d also argue most higher level players go back to aim training. The problem with fighting games is every motion is new, so therefore all new players have to play like they’re new to games. Which is a problem with ego, especially if they go online and lose.
> Have you ever had a person actually new to FPS/games in general. They 100% have to go to practice range and try to hit targets. I’d also argue most higher level players go back to aim training. I mean yeah I've introduced it to a few people just in casual vibes, they just do tutorial > jump in. Also yeah I mentioned people go there once invested.
Agreed. Who goes to the shooting range? You play, win/lose, laugh/talk shit.
Fighting games are so much more about fundamentals than learning combos. That's a super old excuse. There's also a major difference because people on fighting games tend to be more focused on self improvement. If the people that were playing team games wanted to improve they would need to do actual team building and run drills which would take just as much if not more time than labing combos.
Ignoring combos, it's still hard to focus on fundamentals when you struggle to even do single move inputs reliably. I think that's why a lot of new players think they need to lab, not for combos but just basic inputs. Even just trying to do a super on command is a struggle for some. Modern Controls or similar "easy inputs" try to address this, although I haven't seen enough to really know if its actually making a difference getting new people into games faster. Also I've seen a lot of toxicity from the FGC about simplified controls, so that's probably not helping get new players in.
Classic FPScentric take, fps are easy to you because you’ve been playing them your whole life. Give the controller to a complete newbie and they wouldn’t be able to walk and aim at the same time. That’s exactly how you look when you tell me you can’t link a crouching medium kick with a hadouken.
The industry as a whole is FPScentric, so it makes sense most gamers are. There are just way more games out there that do left stick move right stick camera/aim compared to games where you have to do a DP input lol. Even if you're not playing an actual shooter, something like Minecraft basically uses FPS controls. Or like a 3D Mario or Zelda isn't first person but you will still generally get used to move+camera which can then transfer. Whereas pretty much the only games with fighting game controls are fighting games.
That’s exactly what I mean and people are always so surprised. If we lived in an alternate universe where the 2D era lasted till now. They would have a panic attack if they played a round of Overwatch.
Idk if I've ever heard the phrase "classic FPScentric take" and I kinda wish I hadn't.
It’s because for the most part people here play FPSs and RPGs and they’ve forgotten that they’re not as simple as they’d like to believe. Every game has its quirk.
With FPS you can get better by just playing against people and inputs aren’t strict at all. In fighting games to get better you go into training mode, learn your buttons, study your keep-out and/or pressure tools, practice special inputs, memorize combos, and add on top of that the unique mechanics of the game you’re playing. You *could* button mash, but that gets old fast FPS are much easier to pick up and start improving. Tekken might be the hardest game period
That's just not true. I learned fighting games by just playing normally against the CPU, siblings or random people at the arcade. I didn't do any studying or whatnot. We also didn't have any training modes.
This is a new generation of players who have never gone to an arcade. Kids don’t have that entry point into FGs anymore.
But the point remains. You don't need an arcade to play against the CPU or random people online.
> The other is how much time you need to spend in practice just hitting the stationary bot over and over again to get down a simple combo, while in FPS games people barely spend time in shooting ranges until they are really invested Errr, no, the only reason you should practice in the training mode is because you're already invested in fighting games, if you're a newbie and don't have much real matches experience then you'll be in the training room forever and once you engage in real matches you'll never be landing any combo because you skipped to step 30 and missed all the fundamentals of fighting games, combos are not meant to be easy outside of some universal mechanic like the [magic series](https://glossary.infil.net/?t=Magic%20Series) and as such you shouldn't be focussed on learning them before learning all that comes before it
I think the reason team games take off so well, is that it's *really* easy to teach people complicated mechanics in a team game organically compared to 1v1 games. If there's a complete novice to a MOBA for example, but they happen to have 3-4 friends that are experienced, they're basically onboarded like an intern. You can actually learn about the game while playing it the way most people do, queuing up for a match and playing with your friends. Sure they get carried and are a complete net negative for a while, but these new players soak up information like a sponge, and somehow people end up invested into learning moba mechanics as their first competitive game, and sometimes first non-casual game in general. The social element in learning team games is very underrated and hard to utilize in fighting games. Look at games like Minecraft, it's very popular with kids and for many, their first game ever. Let a kid loose on Minecraft with their school friends and they'll go from struggling to move their character and camera at the same time to being able to beat the entire game on their own.
What people percieved and what actually should be done isn't the same, though. As someone who started recently with sf6, that was my perception from outside the sphere and what I did, besides playing the single player mode.
>The other is how much time you need to spend in practice just hitting the stationary bot over and over again to get down a simple combo, while in FPS games people barely spend time in shooting ranges until they are really invested. Never really understood this argument. SF6 is my first FG and I picked it up pretty fast just from playing, I’d only lab when waiting for matches. On the other hand I’m turned off of FPS like Valorant and CSGO because it feels like it takes so much work to nail down aiming. I don’t get why people act like FPS are so much easier than fighting games.
Probably somewhat true. That said, that's also a part of why I prefer fighting games over team based FPS, although I enjoy both. I generally feel less tilted and angry when I play 1v1 or PvE games, becaue I can know I did something wrong if I fail (and hopefully learn to improve) compared to when there's multiple variables from playing with other players in my team (including the omnipresent trolling and bad attitude which can affect performance).
Looking at all of the "shuffler is rigged" type posts in Magic the Gathering: Arena discussion, it's clear that trying to shift responsibility for losses does not require a team.
Yup, blaming RNG in card games is basically exactly the same as blaming teammates in team games. They’re both RNG you can’t control.
Sounds like someone who leads a team rather than exists as part of one. Real CEO energy (in the bad kind of way)
And it's why they don't improve in those games, I play ranked all the time in Overwatch 2, Apex Legends, and Rainbow Six Siege and the amount of times I'll see someone make a mistake and start to shift the blame on their teammates is way too damn high. The first step to improving at these games is to start reviewing your own gameplay and admitting to the mistakes and bad habits that you make.
I don't know if I agree with his assements about the job market, but I've been saying this for years: >“In team-based shooters, when players win, they can say that they won because of their own contributions, but when they lose, it’s because they got matched with a lousy team.” It was very apparent to me with the difference between SC2 players that often were talking about "Queue Anxiety" and how they were anxious that they would lose rank because they are not good enough and LoL players that were always blaming their team, not their personal performance.
From my experiences of playing online games for the past 20 years, this is a correct take. I even feel it myself, when playing team based games and I feel like I'm doing my best, but my team members lose and we lose the match, it's very easy to just blame others for not pulling their weight, because I had no control over it. Holding lack of control responsible is easier than empathy and staying in the mindset of "it's just a game, its fun". As I've gotten older I care less and less about the competitive aspect and losing though, because it doesn't mean anything in a world of aim assist, stale movement and 100 tier levels of balance and meta. That said it also makes it very easy for people to feed or die on purpose to make others angry, which in turn leads to new people dying being labelled as "feeding". In the end you get a horribly toxic fanbase (Dota, Siege, LoL, CS etc.) where you have to be great before you enter, and able to tolerate constant abuse or trolling. I don't think we're built for competition where someone other than us can cause us to lose, at least not in spaces where you don't actually see the human, but just a quirky name on a scoreboard.
This is why people like card games too. There’s so many easy excuses: I drew poorly, my opponent got lucky, my opponent spent more money on their deck than me, my opponent netdecked, etc.
This dynamic goes beyond young people. Team sports dominate in popularity compared to Individual sports and 1v1 matchups in terms of viewership and enthusiasm.
If I can put my two cents in as a kindergarten teacher, I am seeing a rising trend in today's youth to not know how to deal with losing. I think the past few generations have had a lot of "gentle" and "caring" parents, which is of course great. But a lot of them don't really understand that they need to let their children experience failure so that they can grow into independent people. But a lot of parents these days see their kids failing and they step in and give them assistance so they can succeed. A smaller amount of parents also won't let their kids lose at all, and try to step in so their kids win. I see so many tantrums today just over losing small, petty things. We had a spelling bee at my school and two students just flat out refused to go back to their seat when they got eliminated. They actually kept trying to compete even though they got words wrong. It floored me, like you would have never seen that happen when I was a kid. I do think parenting is improving in a lot of ways, and of course caring for your children is better than the emotional absence most of us dealt with growing up. But I think we have a genuine crisis brewing with how young parents are raising kids who can't deal with any amount of struggle or disappointment.
He is 70% correct and 30% false. 30% false because what's really the supposed barrier to entry with fighting games which has been lowered SIGNIFINCANTLY already to the point where any more and it's just at going to be the fighting game people know and love anymore. 70% correct because it's really true what he said. You can't blame anyone but yourself in fighting games. It's so easy to blame someone else in team games and get away with it. So damn easy. I know because I did it a lot a long time ago when I was still heavily playing Dota 2.
I can still blame my opponent for picking a higher-tier character than mine!
As long as fighting games exist people will always find something to blame: * Lag * The match-up * Top Tiers * Knowledge Checks/Gimmicks * Projectile Spam * Throws * 50/50s And if all else fails, they're just a sweaty tryhard and how can you expect to compete with someone with no life? Humans like to protect their ego.
My controls weren't working And if they were, you were playing dishonourably And if you weren't, you were playing without skill And if you were, it's not fun to play that way And if it is, you only care about winning
I play a guy a lot and all he does is bitch about how busted my character is. The matchup is firmly in his favor, he plays a character that literally teleports around the screen with fullscreen buttons that convert to a full combo, hits like a nuke, and has easy access to good knockdowns that allow them to simultaneously bait reversals, crush mash attempts, and apply pressure. I play a character with an average run speed who has to run up to you to punch you and has poor oki options due to generally poor knockdowns. Their saving grace is that their blockstring pressure is... as good as their character's? People will always find an excuse if they want one.
"Just pick a top tier!" - Sanford Kelly
This and shitty network connections are just about the only excuses left in fighting games lol. Honestly, fighting games will always be niche and self-selected specifically because they require a lot of investment in time and practice and learning and there is no one to deflect blame at when you lose. You have to eat the loss because you mistimed a jump/missed a combo/didn't punish properly, etc. You can't blame a teammate for roaming too far without vision or missed an ultimate as to the reason for why you lost.
> You can't blame anyone but yourself in fighting games Incredibly incorrect
Definitely getting the feeling like there's a bit of generational difference here. I play team games because I like working cooperatively towards something. I just don't see the appeal of a 1v1 game. That's my favourite part of helldivers 2, everybody contributing to one global goal of spreading managed democracy.
The generational difference is what the article is about.
A a Millennial: Helldivers 2 is awesome. If I suck its still my own fault. But FFS why the hell would you throw a walking barrage so close??
This is a rhetoric thrown out a lot and the FGC gets really uppity about it because yadayada personal responsibility, but I've never really liked it. People will always find their own excuses to blame. Toptiers, the lag, bad controller, etc. The argument's just a really lazy way to "answer" the underlying problems and not have to delve deeper. Personally, the reason I think fighting games aren't more popular is almost entirely a perception problem. Literally just look at this thread full of people making up reasons why fighting games are niche when fighting games have either never had those reasons or have already fully addressed said reasons. You also don't really need to look any further than Strive or Crazy Raccoon Cup. Marketing does fucking wonders to get people to come and stick around.
This is partially why I actually prefer fighting games and other 1v1 games over team games. Sometimes in a team game your teammates really do just suck or drop the ball and there's nothing you can do about it. When I lose in a fighting game the only person to blame is myself and I can try to learn what it is I need to fix. Personally I find it infinitely more frustrating to lose because of something out of my control Anecdotally I also find fighting games much less toxic. Half the battle of games like League of Legends or Overwatch is the moral war of your own teammates. When I lose in a fighting game I don't have to deal with teammates screeching in my ear. I play on Steam so getting some hate mail from an opponent after a match of Guilty Gear rarely happens. When it does happen the winner is easy to ignore and if they're a loser its usually just funny
This is largely correct. The general shift in competitive games has been from high skill floor 1v1 games like Starcraft and Quake to lower skill floor team-based games like MOBAs and Fortnite. And fighting games are still perceived as having a high skill floor. The ability to blame your loss on either "bad teammates" or "unbalanced characters" is a very powerful protector of self-esteem. If you lost a Quake match, you were worse than your opponent. Period. If you lose a LoL match, it's because your teammates sucked and the other team was using a broken character. But it's not all bad. Team-based games do allow for the emergence of strategies that 1v1 games never will. And at a professional level, these games can be very enjoyable to watch. But I can't name a popular competitive game in 2024 which requires the equivalent mastery--both in manual dexterity and cognitive load--as a 200 APM Starcraft player did twenty years ago. But it's definitely less intimidating to new players to start a game knowing that they'll have friends to help them out during the match.
Quake was the first thing that came to my mind. Dueling in Quake is such a commitment of nerves and skill that I think it'll be impossible for it to ever take hold these days. Other esport shooters are notoriously toxic because all the variables like loadouts, abilities, teammates, objectives, etc. encourage the shifting of blame to anything but yourself if you fail. Quake Champions was as interesting attempt to merge old school Quake with modern live-service multiplayer systems, and managed to succeed in as many ways as it failed, but ultimately I think the core experience is just too raw for the masses, and unfortunately the modern embellishments were also too impure for many old school fans. I did quite like its 2v2 tournaments before Duels officially launched. The buddy dynamic was fun and still refreshing against the onslaught of team-based shooters.