just skimmed this thread and want to pick on a couple points that I think make good examples of what I was talking about before
edit: capitalisation/grammar since this post got longer than I thought it would
I think what you’re meaning to talk about is a skill curve. A skill curve is what separates high level players from low level players. A game with a high skill curve will have you surpassing others exponentially as you get better at it.
The black line is the skill of the player, and the red area is the various possibilities of how exciting the gameplay is, assuming higher skill = More exciting gameplay
(pic)
The graph to the left is a game with techs that are difficult to do. Smash is a good example of this. The low level players are kind of walled off by the techs, but once they can do them, they are only limited by how good they are as a player. As such, the low level gameplay is mostly going to be fairly boring.
After a certain point, the curves are the same. This being the point at which people have a good mastery of their techs. The difference is the area before that, and in a game with easy techs, the low level gameplay would be a lot more interesting because the players would be better. From the very beginning, they would only be limited by how they use the tools in front of them, not whether or not they are able to use the tools in front of them at all.
Just before I begin, some terminology (for others' benefit). Not sure how much high school math we're all comfortable with here, but the skill
curve is how your proficiency in a game (the x axis) relates to the results you get (the y axis). The skill
factor is the gradient of this curve. The skill
ceiling is the upper limit of the curve, and the skill
floor is the lower limit. The skill floor only usually comes into play when you're examining a number of different weapons or strats in relation to each other; for example, it's very hard to use a roller poorly (so you will have a high skill floor there: low skill at game but can still do well), whereas the charger will have a very low skill floor (i.e. where you miss every shot).
EDIT: I should also point out that 'skill floor' sometimes refers to how good you have to be at something in order to use it correctly, but I prefer just using 'skill requirement' for this since that way we aren't using related terms for unrelated phenomena.
I think if we're being pedantic about terms here, skill
barrier would be more correct for what you're talking about at the start of this quote.
While I generally agree with your sentiment about how some skill barriers aren't good (as stated in my original post here), you have to consider that there are more than just technical skill barriers. One such barrier is map knowledge, another is knowing win conditions (that is, knowing how you must play between 'now' and the end of the round in order to win), and so on. These are
extremely important for the development of a competitive game, because they are how a metagame develops. In other words, skill isn't just about individual techs, it's anything that a player can control that gives them a means of gaining an advantage. This is why, for example, despite Mario Kart Wii's enormous luck element, it's still highly skill-based (knowing how to abuse the item roulette & knowing how to use the item you pull are both things that require a lot of experience).
The key difference between this kind of skill barrier and the type one might see in Melee is that Melee skill barriers are tech- and mechanic-related, whereas these skill barriers are to do with game knowledge and strategy. One is a natural process that anyone who pays attention will eventually progress through, whereas the other is something that has to be specifically discovered and learned. It's the difference between not knowing how you lost (which crushes morale and makes you want to quit) and knowing how you lost (which makes you want to improve as a player so that you can eventually win).
We'll take three games as examples: CS:GO, Quake, and Melee. While this comparison isn't ideal since Melee isn't a shooter, hopefully its familiarity to most of you will make up for that.
CS:GO is a team-oriented game, and while there do exist techs such as boosting and bunny hopping that a single person would not necessarily discover, every single skill element in CS:GO develops naturally. Aim, positioning, teamwork, economy management: these are all things that a player who puts enough time into the game
will discover. As such, even though it has some pretty massive skill barriers (handling recoil, learning maps, learning strats, learning what to buy, etc), a player will always be progressing along the skill curve.
Quake is a sort of middle ground between natural skill development and tech knowledge. On one hand, the same kinds of things--aim, map knowledge, timing, and so on--are all natural for a player to learn, but movement techs like bunny hops, strafe jumps, and rocket jumps are not at all intuitive and pose a significant barrier to entry for new players (especially since they're the most vital movement techs in the game). This is part of the reason Quake's died off so much: the barrier to entry is so massive, and the skill factor is so high, that people just get turned off from the game and assume they'll never be that good.
Smash is more like Quake, while Splatoon will ideally be more like CS:GO. Smash has its natural skill barriers--spacing, priority, matchups, setups, combos, mixups, and so on--but if you don't know how to L-cancel or DI, you've got problems that even a novice would be able to take advantage of. Splatoon could go either way (though I doubt it'll have Quake or Smash levels of techniques), but having skill barriers like those you find in CS:GO would be significantly more conducive to an exciting game.
Incidentally, don't take this to imply that CS:GO's skill barriers are at the low end of the curve; things like positioning and the more advanced strats (especially CT side, where you're almost always going to be fighting at a numbers disadvantage) are very difficult to learn.
Regarding the assumption that skill and excitement levels are proportional, I strongly disagree. Excitement and skill are mostly unrelated. from a viewer's perspective, I used to enjoy Melee because it was fast and there was always the potential for a reverse 4-stock. I enjoy CS:GO because it's full of tension and there's so much possibility for clutches, and because even though I know 11-4 on de_nuke is kind of what you'd expect, watching a team come back from that and win is always entertaining. I enjoy Dota when the meta favours action-packed games that don't draw out into farm fests, and lose interest entirely when it doesn't. On the other hand, I find SC2 bores me to sleep, MKX is unwatchable, and LoL fluctuates wildly between decent and awful depending on what Riot's done to screw up the jungle this patch. There's basically no relation between the skill level and how exciting it is to watch.
And then from a player's perspective... well, any game I play where I know a game is lost but can't do anything but continue playing for another fifteen minutes is boring as hell. This is why I played MKW for 6 years and MK8 for 6 months, despite MK8 being a better game in almost every regard (except the ones that mattered in the end).
Finally, what your graphs won't tell you is that distinction I made between natural progression and tech knowledge. You can have an identical jump in skill factor for a natural progression (learning how to use the lightning gun in Quake) and one based on tech knowledge (learning about DI in melee), but the difference is that one allows for someone to progress along it just by playing while the other serves to effectively halt a player's progression. the latter is the one you want to avoid, but it is the one we're likely to see if a massive game-changing tech is found.
But you're forgetting about the other pillars. Specifically the physical feats pillar. [...] Destroying Splatoon's physical feat pillar will change the pace of the game drastically.
At first this seems like a great thing. Now anyone can curve the ball.
Some proof that people like to see complicated techs is in the existence of these clips
Your physical feats 'pillar' is not a matter of skill, it's a matter of accessibility, which is a pretty important distinction. Making a game physically demanding for its own sake is something that needs to be avoided; after all, why not go the other direction and make wavedashing take 6 separate inputs so that the physical 'pillar' is higher?
Part of a well-designed game, and by extension a good competitive game, is accessibility. An expert player should be able to make their character or their army or whatever do exactly what they want it to do. Sure, SC2 requires a high APM to play decently, but that's because an expert player actually
wants to perform 180+ separate actions per minute by controlling individual units, queuing units efficiently, and responding to multiple combat instances, among other things. Hell, even with that being said, after getting my own apm up consistently over 200 at one point in AoE2, I can tell you it wasn't my hands that held me back, it was how quickly I could process what I needed to do and translate that over to muscle memory.
Where we run into problems is where an APM requirement of 300+ translates to only 60 to 100 'real' actions per minute. To be fair, the only reason Smash is on the other side of this debate is because of wavedashing (aside from which, its tech is reasonably efficient). A game can still be fast without requiring high APM. Quake isn't super high in terms of APM requirements but it's probably the single fastest, reasonably-popular, competitive game, for example.
This ties in with the sporting metaphor. Even if this metaphor weren't a false equivalency (sports are distinct from games; a better metaphor would be snooker or chess), throwing a curveball is not a physical limitation, it's a technique that you learn. Realistically, anyone who can pitch a ball can learn how to do it, since it's not about physical strength, it's about what you know (or are told) about the laws of physics and how you can spin the ball to make use of them. I even learned how to do it at some point, though that was in like 2nd grade so I wouldn't be able to do it now lol
Finally, though I think I mostly covered this above, people don't like to see complicated tech, they like to see things that look visually impressive. If you showed that clip to someone without the explanation, they'd probably be impressed... but also not really care about the inputs. To many people who enjoy that clip and the others like it, complexity means nothing, flair means everything.
