the two design priorities I've experienced as the most important for balancing optimal vs fun have been: 1 - lots of rewarding content that average builds can realistically achieve, plus some places to push the limits of your build (especially if both have enough variety to keep players engaged) 2 - little to no effort required to undo build "mistakes", especially with the ability to easily make small adjustments. that is, you can build up your casual build into something stronger instead of needing to start from scratch or pay to reset your skill tree or whatever missing #1 means your game is either all easy (leaving the optimizing players hungry for more) or all hard (chasing away the casual players before they can get invested) missing #2 means your casual players will probably be stuck in their casual builds forever, and discourages players looking to understand optimization from messing around with you mechanics
A very interesting point here and with this in mind Tree of Savior surely violates number 2 but since they did rework the leveling and progression its a bit more easier to start over with a new character just to try out builds
Kosten Sauce TF2, I threw so many sandviches into the statue at Hightower by throwing them at the right angle I can’t wait for next may to bring them back
It didn't seem to me like you offered a solution to the problem in this video. You gave examples of games that are more optimization focused, and games that can be enjoyed either in optimized or non-optimized ways, but It didn't seem like you highlighted the design differences these experiances have. Kinda wished there was more of that in this video.
I think it is ok to have a "superior" build, but the development team should sprinkle some love to fun builds too. I don't even mean to have every build be viable, just to keep an eye for what the players like and help it not get completely squashed facing the meta.
in league I assume there's plenty of improvement in your own gameplay, and builds are to be invented by the players as well, also, you can play aram or normals where winning does not matter as much. Not everything is about competitive, but if you're going to compete and expect to defeat people who don't play poorer than you, don't expect your crappy build to be a big deal just cuz you thought it'd be fun Flies away at ungodly speeds using a full speed zilean build, of course not before making multiple circles around you*
Seemed like the elephant in the room that wasn't well enough addressed. I feel like simulation software has really hurt MMOs. They've nixed creativity and enforced the One True Meta™ that must be followed to be competent at the highest levels. (Mythic raiding in WoW is a great example of this, where most of us are like trained monkeys following the lead of those who had privileged access to beta raid bosses)
I pretty much stopped playing online games because of that. I want to play the way I want to play, not how I have to play. But that's not really viable in online games (and I usually got called names because of that), so in singleplayer games I can fool around with my terrible build as much as I want and usually still get results.
I would also have mentioned Demo and Demoknight. Demo is one of the most "optimal" classes in the game, but his options in weapons, plus demoknight make him both fun to play and optimal for play.
@@junconglin Okay, dude, like you draw all the enemies in the map to one spot, and then get upset when your teammates shoot at that spot. The rest of us are trying to have fun, too, ya know.
"...Astolfo-chan, you made me realize things like power, utility or efficiency don't really matter. Using whoever you think is cute is the most important thing." -Gudao, Learning with FGO
Similarly, Call of Duty Warzone has some mission where you need to "kill X people operating a vehicle". You are supposed to use e.g. a rocket launcher, but I took it as a challenge to remain in my sniper configuration, and ended up hiding C4 on the back of my own quad bike, riding up to another player, jumping off the quad and harassing them, until they decided to "steal my quad", at which point I blew them up :P
Yup. And that’s why I hate scoring systems in games. I just wanted to screw around, but every mission I did I wanted to get the highest grade for as well. You’d think a paramilitary organization would be a bit more open to open conflicts.
@@warmonster12345 It's even worst than that : Time is what gives the most points so you will almost always get the highest possible score by speed running missions. It's pretty lame. To me the real fun was in completing side objectives. Some of them required some creativity!
In a way, stealth and non lethal is always how MGS was aiming to be, so MGSV isn't very different on that, it's the false advertisement and the fact that most tools that you can buy are pretty much useless when you start with the best stuff that are the real problem with that.
Battlefield's territories game mode (forgot it's proper name) was only used to be an extended team death match + helicopters. If you tried to cap the point, you got kicked. XD
Two things: A) One of my biggest frustrations with the Fun/Optimal discussion is a vast majority of it blames the players, which you guys & gals didn't; so thank you! I completely agree that designers need to be aware to make sure there more than one way to have fun playing. B) I would heavily suggest checking out Monster Sanctuary, a pokemon/metroidvania-ish crossover that has a lot of depth and variety with very little complexity.
re: A: yeah, players are expected to beat your game, so if playing the game in the way that you as a dev incentivized them to do isn't fun, that's your fault, not theirs.
Bro they nerf cause most of the time that stuff has TOO MUCH power to begin with. I dont always agree with what they do (and they will backpedal dumb nerfs), but considering the stuff they nerf is still always useful I just have to wonder if you play anything besides Saryn-Mesa.
Practically speaking, if the optimal strategy is too unfun (either to play with or against) it should be nerfed, because players will optimize the fun right out of a game if given the chance. This is especially true if the optimal strategy seriously skews the difficulty, skill ceiling, or accessibility of the game beyond what the designers intended. For example, if a game is designed to be a slow paced game where strategic decisions are way more important than actions per minute, but the optimal strategy actually demands a ton of precise clicking, then that strategy should probably be nerfed. Likewise, if a suboptimal strategy proves to be very fun and engaging, the designers should offer incentives to play it. That doesn't necessarily mean buffing the strategy (especially if part of the fun is the added difficulty), but it could mean offering an achievement, a leaderboard, or some other reward for utilizing the suboptimal strategy.
Once played a party game where you were supposed to fill in word blanks to make jokes. This would be fun, but the way the game scored you is the other players would up or down vote your answer... So if you wanted to win there was no reason to ever not down vote everyone else... Completely ruined.
One thing that I feel was left out of this was availability of information. I tend to be crunchier than most, but I often run into issues while theorycrafting where the wikis and the discord and the speedrunner notes just don't cover the game in and out well enough.
And in some games, part of the intended experience is discovering all the things the game has to offer as an online community, which is also fun and interesting, up until everything has been discovered, and then future players have all the information they need to do builds.
I think this principle also applies to weapon design. I call it, "The Awesomeness Principle", which is that the cooler a weapon is the more powerful it should be. It's why it's awesome in Fallout 3 and New Vegas that the best Melee weapon (for most of the game at least) is a flaming sword, and why it's dissapointing in fallout 4 that the giant ice gun is ineffective. Ratchet and Clank is pretty good at this.
Nuclear Throne is actually really good at this. And in addition, the different weapon categories cater to different play styles without any singular one being more powerful
There's a really good video addressing "Choice vs. Calculation", and for the life of me I thought it was Extra Credits, but it may actually have been one of MauLer's movie critique videos (but I'm not going to go search through them to find out which one.) Point being, the munchkins will calculate and optimize the numbers, but if you want a broad playerbase, it could be good to make the game appeal to RP'ers too. Extra Credits' "Why we RP" is another applicable video here.
"Maces and healing isn't practical for early game dragon smiting" you could say the same about any melee build, but when you're alive and your enemy is dead you'll see that it's still good.
This seems to describe my experience with Robocraft (years ago) and Trailmakers (more recently). Robocraft's only game mode puts you into a battle arena with other players, so there's not a lot of fun to be had if you don't build something fairly strong. Trailmakers provides a single-player campaign which can probably be fun regardless of how 'optimal' (or not) your vehicle is. Also, Robocraft made you grind quite a bit to get credits, in order to buy parts, while in Trailmakers, once you've unlocked a part, you can immediately use as many of that part as you want, which means you're working under much less of a budget constraint.
I'm that player in Warframe where I optimize for... unconventional... stats. Things like "bullets per second", "Aimglide time", "Crit Level", "Move Speed" etc, often end up more used than my more conventional EHP/DPS/etc builds. My most used builds are ones I designed to be fun-optimal; silly builds that are powerful enough to make things easy, but really focus on something silly, like tornado/chaingun Vauban, or my speedy boi Volt. It's worth noting that, last I checked, there was a weapon, that, without rivens, can get a tier 12 crit on heavy attacks. It's far from highest melee damage in a single hit, since getting crit chance that high means base damage and crit damage get tanked, but it's a fun mental exercise to work out, even if it's hard to confirm, since tier 3 crits and above are all the same appearance.
Just, so long as your aren't bringing that hyperspeed Volt into public matches, just to watch your teammates crash into every wall between entry and extraction...
4:24 not sure if you’ll bring it up but since a lot of missions are objective based, there’s also the option of just trying to hit terminal velocity while still completing tasks
Smogon's gotten a lot of crap from people over the years, but its unofficial tiers are a godsend for people like me who like to use "bad" things like Swellow and Absol and Magmortar in serious competitive play. My teams of RUs and NUs probably would have gotten wrecked in official tournament play, but a lot of my favorite Pokémon designs lived in the lower tiers and I like being able to use a team of monsters because I think they look cool instead of because they can be min-max'd better than the other teams of monsters. 2:30 I've got a friend who does that almost every run. He assembles as many followers as the game will allow without breaking and just runs around casting healing spells on them while they do all the fighting. The chaos that unfolds is a sight to behold.
@@BlueAizu_ Something like that. Part of me feels like it'd be better off to just have singleplayer and multiplayer break off into separate games completely, but that's never going to happen.
I love fun and goofy almost always more than optimizing, but I actually gain lots of entertainment watching people who optimize. Their process is fascinating.
You didn't mention this, but RimWorld is a very good example of this, as even if your base has only tribal technologies, you can still defend against a more technologically advanced foe if you build your base right, using choke points, traps, and all sorts of clever tactics
When there is only 1 or 2 optimal ways to play a game- only one or 2 optimal builds or classes what is the point of any other load out or piece of equipment other than to bait noobs into being less efficient and give them a false sense of choice?
Instant classic episode. This is classic Hard Problem with no single answer. I used to try down the path of optimization until I realized the investment involved for a particular game (e.g. chess), or worse, discovering that it is a solved-problem, such that a game has a singular meta, (e.g. a few dozen pocket-billiards variants that are no longer played because it's become too easy to play a "perfect game"). I like fun games. I like casual TF2. It took me literally hundreds of hours to learn to like it. Before then I was just playing it because I wanted to understand the appeal. But I kept at it and it eventually clicked. And I love rocket jumping because it requires practice, and that practice comes with a payoff; it's like learning to play a musical instrument. Other techniques are also tricky, but they can be learned with studying, memorizing techniques and decision trees. Those are important skills, but when I want that, I go to work and earn a paycheck. That's really it: If I'm optimizing, then I should be getting paid to do it. When I get home, I want to do something else. I want to explore and experiment, and be goofy with other people, or to use my gaming to crawl around inside of a particularly creative game developers' brain, by way of their creation.
Really liked this week's episode! Covered a lot of things that I've been thinking about for awhile as well! I think a lot of it comes down to both the player's preference as well as the context of the game taking place that decides how much fun you have. For example, bringing in the funky Tribal Cat to ranked matches against players who are deliberately trying to win at all costs is just asking for a bad time, and the same goes if you're trying to complete the objective in a multiplayer game where every other player is doing otherwise. A lot of games solve the optimal vs fun problem by creating different game modes and ways of solving problems. Monster Hunter World is my favourite example of this for the same reasons given in the video with Warframe. On one hand you can play using the Long Sword, a weapon that allows you to take down behemoths by evading/countering attacks and landing stylish hits, on the other hand, a person using a Bow Gun will be spending time tinkering with their equipment setup and thinking when to use different types of ammo to maximize their damage output.
The closest I can come up with that quantifies how well you do is Gal Metal. Sandbox games like Minecraft don't quantify how well you do, so because of that, in non PvP scenarios, as long as you display baseline competency to survive reliably, that kinda holds true.
I think a lot of people have tried to do just that. it's just that figuring out what those things would be so you can reward them or figuring out how to program the game to recognize the absurdness of things somehow are both hard options. I think the closest is the reward everything mindset of games like goat simulator?
I always find myself dropping a game when players aren't allowed freedom to explore. When you run into people playing fully optimized ways in the bottom of the tier list, something has gone wrong.
What's more pernicious is that games where this happen usually *do* allow tons of exploration. There just isn't any point because you can't win with what you find because the meta is so strong.
I like taking something fun and trying to make it optimal. For example, I play yugioh, and my favorite deck is gladiator beasts. I've been playing it for over 10 years, and while it it may not be the most optimal overall deck, it is very flexible and can be optimized for the meta.
What I think Warframe does really well is present you with a LOT of options (42 Frames, over 100 primary, secondary, and melee weapons, 20ish companions, etc) and generally scales the content you'll be doing most of the time to not require heavily optimized gear. If you just want to have fun, you can grab whatever loadout you enjoy and get stuff done, but if you want to optimize, you will feel the difference with faster killing, less deaths, etc. The modding system also encourages diversity in approaches. For example, I can equip the Grakata smg in my primary slot and the Twin Grakatas dual smg as my secondary, add mods to auto-reload them when holstered, and use a Warframe mod that gives you a brief but large damage bonus when switching weapons, allowing me to constantly switch back and forth, getting boosted damage, and never having to stop to reload! It's definitely more of a 'fun' loadout, but there are options the game gives you to make even goofy builds like this useable in most regular missions.
What wasn't touched on in this episode was the design decisions behind "fun" and how you might shoot yourself in the foot if you're trying to avoid "optimal" play. Simply put "Player Goals" versus "PVP". If the only DESIGNED goal is "victory over your opponent" you hamper yourself. Take MAGIC for instance. You can add more conditions, to win outside of force the opponent's HP to 0, like force them to draw when they have no more cards in their deck, or gain enough HP where it's impossible for them to KO you. But those just *direct* the optimization. "Best Mill", "Best HP-cede". However alternate GOALS, like mentioned with Warframe change the dynamic. Support/Healing can go many MANY ways. Highest single target heal. Greatest total team heal. Team Debuff Duration to Zero. Team Buff Duration Infinite. Or any combination thereof. The main difference though? *The cooperative nature of Warframe*. There would be no point to a deck that makes you immune to all debuffs in Magic, because you aren't *forcing your opponent to lose*. However, the "opponent" in Warframe *is the game*, and as *the game can be played cooperatively* you are afforded more leeway in how you approach the game. Your goal *could* be to be a glass cannon, or make sure the glass cannon survives, or make sure that the drop rates are as high as possible. In other words, instead of having the basis of the game be antagonistic to all other players, a community/cooperative basis fosters the creation of those alternate goals.
Another side of this is also from the player's personal point of view, less what they should expect from design and instead an introspective about themself. A lot of fun I've had in a myriad of different games is finding my niche, then learning what is fun/good about the other options I don't initially find fun. That helps to inspire a lot of creative and critical thinking about how I've decided to tackle the problem, and appreciation for the work others put into their builds, brews, or whatever, in me.
As someone who enjoys optimizing everything i can in games and min maxing my builds I find that games where the meta has been established just aren't very fun. The fun has been "optimized out" of the game. World of Warcraft is a good example for this. Raids are supposed to be these big epic fights but they've been industrialized at this point. The environment is supposedly very harsh for new players trying to figure out what's going on You need rather specific weapons and equipment for the class you want to play for raids to. In contrast if you play Warframe even at high level play you'll know almost any frame and weapon can be optimized for viability at high level play.
Jon Nunn that’s because the AI cheats. You have to play by the rules. The only path to victory is exploits. If the developers actually made the AI more intelligent rather than giving them bonus resources then we wouldn’t have to break the game to win.
My favorite style is the Goals and Stretch Goals theory. When a game is beatable with absurd and non-nonsensical and fun setups, but also has multiplayer or post-game content that requires some degree of optimization, that works really well to me.
The cow cards are based on ProZD's card game video- the Hearthstone-inspired one about games with voiceover lines for each card. They even got the stats right on all of them, and they've been placed down in the order they were played in the video!
I'm definitely in the middle on that regard, and I'm on the Warframe side too :3 I've optimized my weapons pretty high in the manner alluded to in this video...and yet my main-frame (heyo) I take to most everything is Zephyr. Ain't nothing more fun in that game for me than high-jumping and zipping around whilst shooting tornadoes from my hands lol. And unless you're doing specific things with specific requirements, few ppl give you crap about it.
@@Rehteal Too be fair, toxic Eidolon hunters would not have as much ground to stand on if being optimal was not magnitudes more powerful then being sub-optimal. At that point it is a failure in design.
This is why we need an MMORPG that not only gives you a midevil-mythic feel while still being a sci-fi ( that same premise is what has made great shows like StarTreck and StarGate thrive) and is what I personally have been striving for when I work on my own world for Dungeons and Dragons
An easy way to make getting better at a game fun is to add different characters and/or weapon types that are equally balanced. This allows people of any playstyle to get good and have fun simultaneously. Just remember that balance is the most important element here - if any one character is more generally powerful than the others, top-tier players will feel obligated to play as them, which immediately locks away those alternate playstyles.
Great episode! This has been one of my dilema ever since I can remember. I still remember back when the yughioh craze started spending all my time making reallu cool conceptual decks to play with my friends but no one really wanted to play them because the whole point was to win and why would you have a cool dragon deck when you could just have the best combination of cards to always win. I also remember how stubborn I was leveling up my favorite pokemon party and trying to beat the game with them instead of choosing the most powerfull pokemon. And even now when I play darksouls III I only use my favorite complete Armour sets with matching weapons instead of trying to go for a mix that better suits my stats. So I guess I´ve always been a more fun than optimal kinda gamer, but I find most games do I pretty good job of letting you play that way even if you have to grind just a bit more. Except for pvp oriente games like yughioh. You´d really have to find some very like minded people to have fun playing those games in non optimal ways.
Hey that sounds like me. Except that I actually like theory-crafting so I try to optimise a bit within the constraints of "I really like this idea" :p But yeah, some games are really punishing when you try to play them your way, Dark souls III can be ridiculous in difference in difficulty between builds. Then there are live service games that make most equipment obsolete when there's new content to grind.
Hey, to be fair, you can play pokemon with any team you want and you'll be fine unless your favorite pokemon is magikarp or something like that, single-player games are fine because they are usually forgiving enough that you can play them any way you want and still beat them
The fun versus optimal debate reminds me of the Imperius Task Force speed runs in City of Heroes, where teams completed a 2 hour series of content in less then 15 minutes. Early runs insisted on no Peacebringer or Mastermind classes due to knock back effects and minions potentially slowing down the run (I’d jokingly have my minions protest by the start of the task force when they were forming). After a while the challenge got sillier where groups of only defenders (the main healing/buffing class) and managed even faster times. The fact you could do tough content with such clearly suboptimal parties (a favourite moment being a team of 7 tanks and me as the only real damage dealer (a ranged Blaster) taking on a full story arc) was one of my favourite parts of the game.
My idea for fun and optimized content would be (ideally) to have several main goals that aid in completing the game (these goals would generally and loosely define the classes or builds of the game), and then develop several fun and intresting ways to achieve those goals. Ex. One goal would be reducing the damage your team takes. How do you do this? Well, there are several different sets of equipment that all achieve this goal: you could buff your allies to give them damage resistance, you could have good defence and attract all the enemies attack you, you could summon walls to keep the enemies temporarily at bay, you could summon a giant familiar for a short time on cooldown to tank and deal all the damage for you, etc. Even better, there could be multiple sets that attract enemies or summon defenses or familiars or buff allies in slightly different ways, to add a little more variety.
I tried doing that, but quickly realized how incompatible they were together (used restoration glitch too). Reasons why it doesn't work is because if you supplex an enemy in sneak you still get caught unless it's behind a wall. And sometimes you can't even supplex because the ground was off by a pixel. Started having less fun after experimenting.
Me: Ya know I always wanted to play Yugioh. Now that I've found a group that plays it I can play it with other people! :D - (creates deck) hee hee I like these cards -(plays) Me: Okay I'll normal summon thi- Opponent: No you won't. Me: wha? Opponent: Put that card in the graveyard. Me: Oookaaay.. well I'll play this card and special summo- Opponent: No you won't. Put THAT card in the graveyard. Me: I activate a- Opponent: No you don't....go on, put it in the graveyard. ME: Okay, I guess I end my turn, Op: (37 minutes of plays later in a single turn) aaaand all your life points are gone. And like that I never picked up Yugioh again.
one of my friends had a deck that put 2 cards into play. Playing just those 2 cards made it impossible for the opponent to play any cards. Both could be normally played in 1 turn if they drew well, and of course their deck was designed to fish for them. From my understanding, it wasn't even a good competitive deck.
I'm a bit in the middle, the best example for me is my Yu-Gi-Oh deck, I have a dark magician deck, that also uses the fairy tale archetype, while my deck isn't the most powerful it can be, it is extremely versatile, with very little specialization, which is common at the mid to high levels of competitive play
What i like: taking something i enjoy playing and optimizing it as much as possible. What i don't like: being told that i shouldn't optimize because that ruins the fun of the game. Blizzard is starting to get really bad about this in world of warcraft. And it looks like they are going to flip people who optimize to be the best they can be 2 middle fingers in the upcoming expansion shadowlands. Feels like they are banking on the silent majority hating optimizing as much as the devs do.
@@ilovethelegend it's on a daily basis, most PuG look at your iLvl (item level), your class, even your achievements or current progress into account before inviting you down. There are obviously more lenient groups than others but since you cannot judge the players performance beforehand, people stick to measurable values. Groups also often kick some players while raiding if their performance is an issue. It's not a bad thing in top end content but the mentality is used all across the content to justify both elitism ("you should reroll or won't get invited") and failure ("we failed because your spec/items/class are not optimal") when both situation are manageable with proper execution while sticking to your fun build. Edit : I realised I never answered numerically as asked : to create a 2/2/5 raid group, I usually see RL wait for at least 10-15 credible (iLvl wise) applicants to even start handpicking some to his/her liking, chatting with them with questions and asking for achievements and potions/flasks/.... Often taking up to 30 minutes to get a full group (which is to be put in perspective due to the tanks shortage also impacting that time) even with a pre-existing smaller group initiating the raid.
I've always thought that Hearthstone would be "better" if decks were 30+N (e.g. N=4) cards but at the start of each match, N cards were discarded at random to bring the deck back to 30 cards. It would encourage fewer "glass cannon" OTK decks and more flexible decks.
Gotta be careful with random, though. Random can kill fun faster than anything else, because (and this is something that so many programmers still do not get!) random can mean a string of numbers like 74 1 89 22 6 41, but it can also mean 1 1 1 1 1 1. Random means RANDOM, as in any possible result. Most when they think "random" are actually thinking "controlled random", ie. values all fall within a uniform distribution no matter how many iterations are done. That is not how true random works, but that's how our brains process "random" by default.
@@TheSkyRender I get what you're saying, and I've no evidence my idea would work, but something to combat the aggressive meta that's out there now, where everyone just downloads auto-play net-decks would be good for Hearthstone. So yeah, you might get your 5 "best" cards taken out before the game starts, but perhaps that just means the better decks are those which don't rely on combos.
If you don't get the thumbnail, it's a reference to a speedrunning technique in Zelda wind waker in which the player uses a glitch to build up backwards swimming speed resulting in them hillariously zooming through the whole map of the game in an instant while swimming backwards
I'm tempted to say I'm anti-optimization (at least as far as my own playstyle is concerned; it's not my place to tell other people how to enjoy a game), but I don't think my preferences can be adequately summed up by that single word (or those two words, depending on your views on hyphens). I tend to gravitate toward particular styles of play, regardless of whether or not they're optimal. I also like to win, though, so if my preferred style of play is just plain awful, I'll probably tweak it no matter how attached I was to it. In a sense, I seek a balance between a style that I enjoy for its own sake and a style that enables me to win. Because of this, I tend to avoid the absolute highest levels of play--partially because I'm unlikely to continue playing a game in which I get my butt kicked nearly all the time, but also because my inferior playstyle could make the game unpleasant for whatever people I'm playing with. If I'm on a team, I become a liability, and if I'm in a one-on-one game, I won't provide a good challenge.
For me, though it may sound strange, I find that optimisation in games like class-shooters is more fun than in actual strategy games. I remember when I first played Civ 5, I was quite young and didn't understand much of what was going on, but I liked when I would settle cities in spots that were aesthetically pleasing to me. I later went onto multiplayer as I grew older and better at the game, I was horrified with how the game functioned. There was no nation building whatsoever, just build 4 cities close to eachother in a drainage basin and spam specific units. One of my favourite games was with an older brother, I had picked the Romans and had settled three cities early-game before using my ballistae to siege Milan. This allowed me to discover more of the world and continued to conquer outwards and sort of admired how the terrain had made me build roads through narrow mountain passes and made Milan economically important to me; it actually felt like I was carving out an empire and making my own story. I also experienced this in HOI4 where I found that I mostly just played support-role countries such as Hungary or Romania; I didn't really enjoy playing multiplayer much and even single-player could feel like a drag. I, again, had to follow a strict series of protocols to build my nation the best I can to help my faction out the most. I realised that the only part I enjoyed was when I had tank divisions build up to micromanage late-game on The Soviet Front as it was only at that point I had leeway to try out different tactics.
This is a topic that has been brought up in roguelike difficulty design and something called "headroom". A high-headroom game allows for more varied strategy, giving people several ways to play the game, not all of them optimal, while having the playstyle still be viable as a means of victory, but it also means the game is inherently easier by allowing you to win the game despite not playing optimally. Lower headroom on the other hand rewards skillful play more with the game pushing you towards more optimal play, but this also means that fewer strategies is viable and you give players less headroom to explore and play the way they want. Two examples of the different ends of the spectrum is NetHack (high headroom) and DCSS (low headroom). Ignoring NetHack's high demand of player knowledge of game mechanics for a second, once you know how the game works mechanically, the game is actually rather easy. DCSS on the other hand is far more demanding on using certain playstyles to win, especially if you go for an extended victory (getting all 15 runes instead of the 3 you only need to win). I personally prefer NetHack but know maný prefer DCSS
Back in the Escapist days, if there was ANY forum post about a video before the person could have watched the entire thing, they would get a forum ban. They might have been temporary for first time offenders, I never dared test it, but they were consistent in it's enforcement.
So the solution is: Make a game where there is an optimal route, however, each route is valid and being unoptimal will still give you a good chance at victory, like if two people faced off with the same experience but one has the meta and the other is a fun gimmick the chances are roughly 45% for the non-meta to win compared to the 55% of the meta. Thank you, this may help me down the line.
@@jordan89124 Of course, this is largely due to the stupidity of human nature. If the new and shiny isn't better than the comfortable and familiar, then people don't care and stop supporting the game since there's no "compelling" reason to get the new stuff over the old stuff they already know.
also, having several different ways to be optimal would be good. if there is a single 'best way to play' then at the higher levels of game-play it will be a challenge of how well can you adhere to the most optimal path. not give the players any choice in how to proceed.
Thanks for a video! It's a very interesting topic and sometimes a bit annyoing for me. And probably one of the reasons why I prefer single player games usually much more than MMOs. I so don't care about high scores or having the optimal strategy, but many games are designed in a way like "Yeah, we have this optional thing and a few other approaches you can try, but if you want to experience the whole game, you have to compete with these people who spend weeks in calculating and tracking data in excel files for the best possible gear set/card deck/whatever." I do like the gameplay of Magic, but unless I am playing with friends who are on my "level" or are fine with choosing decks that they would consider "bad"... well. I could spend much more time with building optimised decks, playing enough to get better cards etc, but I still have other stuff to do than spending my time on doing something less exciting for me so I get to the fun parts weeks later. :/ There are some games that offer these possibilities and they are a lot of fun though and maybe inspire many other game devs to take these as example for future games. ^^
The Gundam Build Fighters mobile game found an interesting blend to this problem. Late game PVE and PVP were being dominated by the Titular super robot Gundams, but part of the Gunpla Moto is "GunPla is freedom" To bridge this gap between freedom to build and crunchy meta they developed a new "Builder" mini game that pet you unlock parts to further optimize and enhance normally less desirable parts to be in league with the high tier parts
Is the cow deck based on that one Prozd sketch???
I think so
it has to be
BOY I HATE WHEN MY COWS DIE
It is! Happy you caught it
Yes!!
the two design priorities I've experienced as the most important for balancing optimal vs fun have been:
1 - lots of rewarding content that average builds can realistically achieve, plus some places to push the limits of your build (especially if both have enough variety to keep players engaged)
2 - little to no effort required to undo build "mistakes", especially with the ability to easily make small adjustments. that is, you can build up your casual build into something stronger instead of needing to start from scratch or pay to reset your skill tree or whatever
missing #1 means your game is either all easy (leaving the optimizing players hungry for more) or all hard (chasing away the casual players before they can get invested)
missing #2 means your casual players will probably be stuck in their casual builds forever, and discourages players looking to understand optimization from messing around with you mechanics
This deserves more up-votes.
Hell, this deserves to be taught as a lesson in design
*Path of Exile has left the chat*
Every mmorpg ever left the chat 😂
A very interesting point here and with this in mind Tree of Savior surely violates number 2 but since they did rework the leveling and progression its a bit more easier to start over with a new character just to try out builds
@@Aeronor2001
*Warframe entered the chat*
Me: Sees a ProZD deck in an EC video
Also Me: Good taste, you have.
Hey, i'm driving here!
Boy do I love dairy!
Needs more uboxing videos.
Utter fools, I PLAY DARK BREA AND MAKE 3 COLORLESS CHEESE TOKENS
Yessss, now all he needs is black brea
Everyone’s talking about the dairy deck, but these guys *paid respects to rick may*
Where did you learn about him. TF2 or starfox
Kosten Sauce he was good son, real good, maybe even the best...
AMERICA!
Kosten Sauce TF2, I threw so many sandviches into the statue at Hightower by throwing them at the right angle I can’t wait for next may to bring them back
Magnificent
It didn't seem to me like you offered a solution to the problem in this video. You gave examples of games that are more optimization focused, and games that can be enjoyed either in optimized or non-optimized ways, but It didn't seem like you highlighted the design differences these experiances have. Kinda wished there was more of that in this video.
And they didn't really talk about how to balance them.
Boy am I glad someone else typed this so I didn't have to.
Word
(this was a stealth ad for temtem and war frame, but mostly warframe)
@@kahlzun anti ad for temtem
When meta is soo much stronger that make "fun" builds "inviable", is when i drop the game and look for something else.
I think it is ok to have a "superior" build, but the development team should sprinkle some love to fun builds too. I don't even mean to have every build be viable, just to keep an eye for what the players like and help it not get completely squashed facing the meta.
Same here
in league I assume there's plenty of improvement in your own gameplay, and builds are to be invented by the players as well, also, you can play aram or normals where winning does not matter as much. Not everything is about competitive, but if you're going to compete and expect to defeat people who don't play poorer than you, don't expect your crappy build to be a big deal just cuz you thought it'd be fun
Flies away at ungodly speeds using a full speed zilean build, of course not before making multiple circles around you*
Seemed like the elephant in the room that wasn't well enough addressed. I feel like simulation software has really hurt MMOs. They've nixed creativity and enforced the One True Meta™ that must be followed to be competent at the highest levels. (Mythic raiding in WoW is a great example of this, where most of us are like trained monkeys following the lead of those who had privileged access to beta raid bosses)
I pretty much stopped playing online games because of that. I want to play the way I want to play, not how I have to play. But that's not really viable in online games (and I usually got called names because of that), so in singleplayer games I can fool around with my terrible build as much as I want and usually still get results.
"rest in piece rick may"
Thank you for acknowledging his dead and putting a memorieal there, extra credits.
There are statues on some of the maps now,
rest in peace
RIP
F
Kinda surprised that he didnt mentioned the tf2 "trolldier" which is bloody useless in competitive tf2 but A LOT of fun to play in casual
*soundsmith happy noises*
And hoovy 😝
Yes trolldier is a brilliant example
I would also have mentioned Demo and Demoknight. Demo is one of the most "optimal" classes in the game, but his options in weapons, plus demoknight make him both fun to play and optimal for play.
@@Double_D__ have u ever heard of solar Light or *demoknight* *tf2*
TJ "Henry" Yoshi is never going to live his A-press comment down, is he?
"but some choose to be healers, invincible tanks, or damage dealing mage" what do you mean *or*? just be all three as nidus :P
until your idiot teamates kill your ball of grineer
@@junconglin i hate that like why tf
I like Oberon because he's a tanky healer with ridiculous CC and scaling damage
@@junconglin Okay, dude, like you draw all the enemies in the map to one spot, and then get upset when your teammates shoot at that spot. The rest of us are trying to have fun, too, ya know.
You're certainly not wrong. I didn't want to represent the Nidus gang Too hard and make all of the other frames jealous.
"...Astolfo-chan, you made me realize things like power, utility or efficiency don't really matter. Using whoever you think is cute is the most important thing." -Gudao, Learning with FGO
But you haven’t added me to a party yet, Master...
EC: Do you want your playstyle about fun or optimization?
Zachlikes: Yes.
I love zachlikes but i hope for some game to go a bit more into a fun territory. Maybe new shipbreakers game.
Mgsv optimal strat is nonlethal stealth abduction maniac, but I just wanna strap c4 to a car and go for a spin
Similarly, Call of Duty Warzone has some mission where you need to "kill X people operating a vehicle". You are supposed to use e.g. a rocket launcher, but I took it as a challenge to remain in my sniper configuration, and ended up hiding C4 on the back of my own quad bike, riding up to another player, jumping off the quad and harassing them, until they decided to "steal my quad", at which point I blew them up :P
Yup. And that’s why I hate scoring systems in games. I just wanted to screw around, but every mission I did I wanted to get the highest grade for as well. You’d think a paramilitary organization would be a bit more open to open conflicts.
@@warmonster12345 It's even worst than that : Time is what gives the most points so you will almost always get the highest possible score by speed running missions. It's pretty lame. To me the real fun was in completing side objectives. Some of them required some creativity!
In a way, stealth and non lethal is always how MGS was aiming to be, so MGSV isn't very different on that, it's the false advertisement and the fact that most tools that you can buy are pretty much useless when you start with the best stuff that are the real problem with that.
Battlefield's territories game mode (forgot it's proper name) was only used to be an extended team death match + helicopters.
If you tried to cap the point, you got kicked. XD
Clearly, the Tribal Cat deck is superior to any deck we have ever seen.
These videos are good even though I don't do anything with game design
The "people in chairs" deck made me laugh out loud
The “people in chairs” deck is incredible. How do you even search for cards according to art? Going through all cards manually that’s how...
W. S nah man, Combo Squirrels is the best.
*WRONG* Cat tribal deck was missing Lurris o/t Dream Den.
T H E N Cat Tribal is superior deck!
Two things:
A) One of my biggest frustrations with the Fun/Optimal discussion is a vast majority of it blames the players, which you guys & gals didn't; so thank you! I completely agree that designers need to be aware to make sure there more than one way to have fun playing.
B) I would heavily suggest checking out Monster Sanctuary, a pokemon/metroidvania-ish crossover that has a lot of depth and variety with very little complexity.
re: A: yeah, players are expected to beat your game, so if playing the game in the way that you as a dev incentivized them to do isn't fun, that's your fault, not theirs.
5:15 "Players: It's fun to optimize!" Warframe: "...so, then I started nerfing..."
you can still play Mirage 350 strength (damage x25) with a Brama crit corosive.
I mean at its core all nerfing does is change what is optimal, and generally by how much.
Bro they nerf cause most of the time that stuff has TOO MUCH power to begin with. I dont always agree with what they do (and they will backpedal dumb nerfs), but considering the stuff they nerf is still always useful I just have to wonder if you play anything besides Saryn-Mesa.
3:52 RIP Rick May. Rocket jump your way to heaven to kick all sorts of ass
God speed you magnificent bastard!
May he leap to beyond the stars.
May the Maggot and Lead in his brain guide him eternally.
Practically speaking, if the optimal strategy is too unfun (either to play with or against) it should be nerfed, because players will optimize the fun right out of a game if given the chance. This is especially true if the optimal strategy seriously skews the difficulty, skill ceiling, or accessibility of the game beyond what the designers intended. For example, if a game is designed to be a slow paced game where strategic decisions are way more important than actions per minute, but the optimal strategy actually demands a ton of precise clicking, then that strategy should probably be nerfed.
Likewise, if a suboptimal strategy proves to be very fun and engaging, the designers should offer incentives to play it. That doesn't necessarily mean buffing the strategy (especially if part of the fun is the added difficulty), but it could mean offering an achievement, a leaderboard, or some other reward for utilizing the suboptimal strategy.
Once played a party game where you were supposed to fill in word blanks to make jokes. This would be fun, but the way the game scored you is the other players would up or down vote your answer... So if you wanted to win there was no reason to ever not down vote everyone else... Completely ruined.
You mean like "not detected" achivement in every stealth game?
"I dont have a problem, you have a problem" loved that one :'D
My Fallout 4 character was optimized for the task of stealing nearly every coffee cup in Boston to build more robots
Ironicly, you know who's the one buying all your cups? Muggy from New Vegas's DLC, who is also a robot.
One thing that I feel was left out of this was availability of information. I tend to be crunchier than most, but I often run into issues while theorycrafting where the wikis and the discord and the speedrunner notes just don't cover the game in and out well enough.
And in some games, part of the intended experience is discovering all the things the game has to offer as an online community, which is also fun and interesting, up until everything has been discovered, and then future players have all the information they need to do builds.
I think this principle also applies to weapon design. I call it, "The Awesomeness Principle", which is that the cooler a weapon is the more powerful it should be. It's why it's awesome in Fallout 3 and New Vegas that the best Melee weapon (for most of the game at least) is a flaming sword, and why it's dissapointing in fallout 4 that the giant ice gun is ineffective. Ratchet and Clank is pretty good at this.
Nuclear Throne is actually really good at this. And in addition, the different weapon categories cater to different play styles without any singular one being more powerful
There's a really good video addressing "Choice vs. Calculation", and for the life of me I thought it was Extra Credits, but it may actually have been one of MauLer's movie critique videos (but I'm not going to go search through them to find out which one.) Point being, the munchkins will calculate and optimize the numbers, but if you want a broad playerbase, it could be good to make the game appeal to RP'ers too.
Extra Credits' "Why we RP" is another applicable video here.
TJ Henry Yoshi made it to EC
I'm speechless
An A press is an A press, you can't say it's only a half
How do you think I feel?
@@SuperShadowP1ay To answer that we need to talk about parallel universes
@@TJ-Henry-Yoshi Confused to this day, according to that tweet.
Honestly if Warframe wasn't brought up for this topic, I was gonna call shenanigans.
Yes
I think the best part about Extra Credits, is that not only do they know games and how they're made, but also how they're played.
The cast play Mario64:
Red-hair: 80 stars and wants to 100% the game
Pony-tail: YA-hoo YA-hoo YA-hoo YA YA YA YA YA YE YE YE YE
"Maces and healing isn't practical for early game dragon smiting"
you could say the same about any melee build, but when you're alive and your enemy is dead you'll see that it's still good.
Two handed warhammer gang rise up. Nothing more fun than just vaporising an enemy with a satisfying *crunch*
there's also the secret stat that melee builds optimize: all the time you save by not crouch-walking everywhere
0:21 Nice reference to "when you have a REALLY good turn in a card game"
This seems to describe my experience with Robocraft (years ago) and Trailmakers (more recently).
Robocraft's only game mode puts you into a battle arena with other players, so there's not a lot of fun to be had if you don't build something fairly strong. Trailmakers provides a single-player campaign which can probably be fun regardless of how 'optimal' (or not) your vehicle is.
Also, Robocraft made you grind quite a bit to get credits, in order to buy parts, while in Trailmakers, once you've unlocked a part, you can immediately use as many of that part as you want, which means you're working under much less of a budget constraint.
0:17 Great ProZD reference!
I find the most fun in the in-game lore and speculation on what may have led to the situation you find the lore
I'm that player in Warframe where I optimize for... unconventional... stats. Things like "bullets per second", "Aimglide time", "Crit Level", "Move Speed" etc, often end up more used than my more conventional EHP/DPS/etc builds. My most used builds are ones I designed to be fun-optimal; silly builds that are powerful enough to make things easy, but really focus on something silly, like tornado/chaingun Vauban, or my speedy boi Volt.
It's worth noting that, last I checked, there was a weapon, that, without rivens, can get a tier 12 crit on heavy attacks. It's far from highest melee damage in a single hit, since getting crit chance that high means base damage and crit damage get tanked, but it's a fun mental exercise to work out, even if it's hard to confirm, since tier 3 crits and above are all the same appearance.
A warframe player has never truly lived until they've played a max slide, minimum friction Nezha 👌
Just, so long as your aren't bringing that hyperspeed Volt into public matches, just to watch your teammates crash into every wall between entry and extraction...
@@Em0srawk Max slidy boi nezha is a ton of fun. One of my earliest silly builds!
4:24 not sure if you’ll bring it up but since a lot of missions are objective based, there’s also the option of just trying to hit terminal velocity while still completing tasks
Smogon's gotten a lot of crap from people over the years, but its unofficial tiers are a godsend for people like me who like to use "bad" things like Swellow and Absol and Magmortar in serious competitive play. My teams of RUs and NUs probably would have gotten wrecked in official tournament play, but a lot of my favorite Pokémon designs lived in the lower tiers and I like being able to use a team of monsters because I think they look cool instead of because they can be min-max'd better than the other teams of monsters.
2:30 I've got a friend who does that almost every run. He assembles as many followers as the game will allow without breaking and just runs around casting healing spells on them while they do all the fighting. The chaos that unfolds is a sight to behold.
You wrote a comment before it even came out
woah this is crazy, i just watched the video on your channel about your particle lab. what a coincidence
@Daniel Lopez Cardona Magic
One reason I never got interested in Smogon was its focus on Singles instead of the more dynamic Doubles used in official tournament play.
@@BlueAizu_ Something like that. Part of me feels like it'd be better off to just have singleplayer and multiplayer break off into separate games completely, but that's never going to happen.
I love fun and goofy almost always more than optimizing, but I actually gain lots of entertainment watching people who optimize. Their process is fascinating.
"Never underestimate the players' ability to optimize the fun out of the game."
- I forget who, if I ever knew.
You didn't mention this, but RimWorld is a very good example of this, as even if your base has only tribal technologies, you can still defend against a more technologically advanced foe if you build your base right, using choke points, traps, and all sorts of clever tactics
When there is only 1 or 2 optimal ways to play a game- only one or 2 optimal builds or classes what is the point of any other load out or piece of equipment other than to bait noobs into being less efficient and give them a false sense of choice?
Instant classic episode. This is classic Hard Problem with no single answer. I used to try down the path of optimization until I realized the investment involved for a particular game (e.g. chess), or worse, discovering that it is a solved-problem, such that a game has a singular meta, (e.g. a few dozen pocket-billiards variants that are no longer played because it's become too easy to play a "perfect game").
I like fun games. I like casual TF2. It took me literally hundreds of hours to learn to like it. Before then I was just playing it because I wanted to understand the appeal. But I kept at it and it eventually clicked. And I love rocket jumping because it requires practice, and that practice comes with a payoff; it's like learning to play a musical instrument. Other techniques are also tricky, but they can be learned with studying, memorizing techniques and decision trees. Those are important skills, but when I want that, I go to work and earn a paycheck.
That's really it: If I'm optimizing, then I should be getting paid to do it. When I get home, I want to do something else. I want to explore and experiment, and be goofy with other people, or to use my gaming to crawl around inside of a particularly creative game developers' brain, by way of their creation.
My yugioh duel links career is this video. My neospacian deck is fun as hell, but will never win against anything that isn't an ai
Same, i want to play with Howitzers in Men of wars, but the AI always use tanks.
That’s just how Yugioh is in general tbh
Me and my heroes without the pricey degenerate cards
I AM NOT ALONE?!?
Really liked this week's episode! Covered a lot of things that I've been thinking about for awhile as well!
I think a lot of it comes down to both the player's preference as well as the context of the game taking place that decides how much fun you have. For example, bringing in the funky Tribal Cat to ranked matches against players who are deliberately trying to win at all costs is just asking for a bad time, and the same goes if you're trying to complete the objective in a multiplayer game where every other player is doing otherwise.
A lot of games solve the optimal vs fun problem by creating different game modes and ways of solving problems. Monster Hunter World is my favourite example of this for the same reasons given in the video with Warframe. On one hand you can play using the Long Sword, a weapon that allows you to take down behemoths by evading/countering attacks and landing stylish hits, on the other hand, a person using a Bow Gun will be spending time tinkering with their equipment setup and thinking when to use different types of ammo to maximize their damage output.
Perfectly sums up why I dislike Overwatch. What’s fun isn’t optimal, and what’s optimal isn’t fun.
I’d love to see a tribute to Rick May in Extra Credit fashion. I salute you for paying respects.
i think a game solely based around the idea that "the more absurd things you do, the better you do" would appeal to a lot of players!
The closest I can come up with that quantifies how well you do is Gal Metal. Sandbox games like Minecraft don't quantify how well you do, so because of that, in non PvP scenarios, as long as you display baseline competency to survive reliably, that kinda holds true.
I think a lot of people have tried to do just that. it's just that figuring out what those things would be so you can reward them or figuring out how to program the game to recognize the absurdness of things somehow are both hard options. I think the closest is the reward everything mindset of games like goat simulator?
Lovely episode and fire outro, had to go listen to the full version right after.
I always find myself dropping a game when players aren't allowed freedom to explore. When you run into people playing fully optimized ways in the bottom of the tier list, something has gone wrong.
What's more pernicious is that games where this happen usually *do* allow tons of exploration. There just isn't any point because you can't win with what you find because the meta is so strong.
I love the tf2 references like spycrab but also my heart screamed in happiness that they included rick may
I like taking something fun and trying to make it optimal. For example, I play yugioh, and my favorite deck is gladiator beasts. I've been playing it for over 10 years, and while it it may not be the most optimal overall deck, it is very flexible and can be optimized for the meta.
Seeing insane amounts of medium strength troops rush my enemies and overrun them through sheer stupidly high amounts of men brings me joy
"If you're having fun.. then that right there is fun."
This, I like this in the sea of dumbos that tell other people how they should be playing
this series still launching? amazing! I used to watch every single one
3:53
YOU ARE ALL WEAK! YOU ARE ALL BLEEDERS!
Too soon
You were good son, real good; maybe even the best
What I think Warframe does really well is present you with a LOT of options (42 Frames, over 100 primary, secondary, and melee weapons, 20ish companions, etc) and generally scales the content you'll be doing most of the time to not require heavily optimized gear. If you just want to have fun, you can grab whatever loadout you enjoy and get stuff done, but if you want to optimize, you will feel the difference with faster killing, less deaths, etc. The modding system also encourages diversity in approaches. For example, I can equip the Grakata smg in my primary slot and the Twin Grakatas dual smg as my secondary, add mods to auto-reload them when holstered, and use a Warframe mod that gives you a brief but large damage bonus when switching weapons, allowing me to constantly switch back and forth, getting boosted damage, and never having to stop to reload! It's definitely more of a 'fun' loadout, but there are options the game gives you to make even goofy builds like this useable in most regular missions.
What wasn't touched on in this episode was the design decisions behind "fun" and how you might shoot yourself in the foot if you're trying to avoid "optimal" play.
Simply put "Player Goals" versus "PVP".
If the only DESIGNED goal is "victory over your opponent" you hamper yourself.
Take MAGIC for instance. You can add more conditions, to win outside of force the opponent's HP to 0, like force them to draw when they have no more cards in their deck, or gain enough HP where it's impossible for them to KO you.
But those just *direct* the optimization. "Best Mill", "Best HP-cede".
However alternate GOALS, like mentioned with Warframe change the dynamic.
Support/Healing can go many MANY ways. Highest single target heal. Greatest total team heal. Team Debuff Duration to Zero. Team Buff Duration Infinite. Or any combination thereof.
The main difference though? *The cooperative nature of Warframe*.
There would be no point to a deck that makes you immune to all debuffs in Magic, because you aren't *forcing your opponent to lose*.
However, the "opponent" in Warframe *is the game*, and as *the game can be played cooperatively* you are afforded more leeway in how you approach the game. Your goal *could* be to be a glass cannon, or make sure the glass cannon survives, or make sure that the drop rates are as high as possible.
In other words, instead of having the basis of the game be antagonistic to all other players, a community/cooperative basis fosters the creation of those alternate goals.
Another side of this is also from the player's personal point of view, less what they should expect from design and instead an introspective about themself. A lot of fun I've had in a myriad of different games is finding my niche, then learning what is fun/good about the other options I don't initially find fun. That helps to inspire a lot of creative and critical thinking about how I've decided to tackle the problem, and appreciation for the work others put into their builds, brews, or whatever, in me.
the Tribal Cat deck is truly superior.
The TF2 community appreciates the tribute to Rick May.
As someone who enjoys optimizing everything i can in games and min maxing my builds I find that games where the meta has been established just aren't very fun. The fun has been "optimized out" of the game. World of Warcraft is a good example for this. Raids are supposed to be these big epic fights but they've been industrialized at this point. The environment is supposedly very harsh for new players trying to figure out what's going on You need rather specific weapons and equipment for the class you want to play for raids to. In contrast if you play Warframe even at high level play you'll know almost any frame and weapon can be optimized for viability at high level play.
Optimizing out the fun also occurs in Single Player games. Such as the Civilization series on the highest levels.
Jon Nunn that’s because the AI cheats. You have to play by the rules. The only path to victory is exploits. If the developers actually made the AI more intelligent rather than giving them bonus resources then we wouldn’t have to break the game to win.
My favorite style is the Goals and Stretch Goals theory. When a game is beatable with absurd and non-nonsensical and fun setups, but also has multiplayer or post-game content that requires some degree of optimization, that works really well to me.
0:22 And now I am MOOING INFINITE!!!
The cow cards are based on ProZD's card game video- the Hearthstone-inspired one about games with voiceover lines for each card. They even got the stats right on all of them, and they've been placed down in the order they were played in the video!
I'm definitely in the middle on that regard, and I'm on the Warframe side too :3 I've optimized my weapons pretty high in the manner alluded to in this video...and yet my main-frame (heyo) I take to most everything is Zephyr. Ain't nothing more fun in that game for me than high-jumping and zipping around whilst shooting tornadoes from my hands lol.
And unless you're doing specific things with specific requirements, few ppl give you crap about it.
Zephyr, eh? Well, can't say much about that choice given the topic. Though at least she's better than she was like... 3 years ago.
Same I have optimized my build quite a bit, But I will always play with my Frost speced for CC unless I need something very specific
The only problem with this is when people start refusing to allow participation in content because a player isn't using the optimal strategy.
@@ilovethelegend Shoutout to Eidolon hunters more toxic than Saryn.
@@Rehteal Too be fair, toxic Eidolon hunters would not have as much ground to stand on if being optimal was not magnitudes more powerful then being sub-optimal. At that point it is a failure in design.
This is why we need an MMORPG that not only gives you a midevil-mythic feel while still being a sci-fi ( that same premise is what has made great shows like StarTreck and StarGate thrive) and is what I personally have been striving for when I work on my own world for Dungeons and Dragons
00:23
I understood that reference!
An easy way to make getting better at a game fun is to add different characters and/or weapon types that are equally balanced. This allows people of any playstyle to get good and have fun simultaneously.
Just remember that balance is the most important element here - if any one character is more generally powerful than the others, top-tier players will feel obligated to play as them, which immediately locks away those alternate playstyles.
Great episode! This has been one of my dilema ever since I can remember. I still remember back when the yughioh craze started spending all my time making reallu cool conceptual decks to play with my friends but no one really wanted to play them because the whole point was to win and why would you have a cool dragon deck when you could just have the best combination of cards to always win. I also remember how stubborn I was leveling up my favorite pokemon party and trying to beat the game with them instead of choosing the most powerfull pokemon. And even now when I play darksouls III I only use my favorite complete Armour sets with matching weapons instead of trying to go for a mix that better suits my stats. So I guess I´ve always been a more fun than optimal kinda gamer, but I find most games do I pretty good job of letting you play that way even if you have to grind just a bit more. Except for pvp oriente games like yughioh. You´d really have to find some very like minded people to have fun playing those games in non optimal ways.
Hey that sounds like me. Except that I actually like theory-crafting so I try to optimise a bit within the constraints of "I really like this idea" :p
But yeah, some games are really punishing when you try to play them your way, Dark souls III can be ridiculous in difference in difficulty between builds. Then there are live service games that make most equipment obsolete when there's new content to grind.
Hey, to be fair, you can play pokemon with any team you want and you'll be fine unless your favorite pokemon is magikarp or something like that, single-player games are fine because they are usually forgiving enough that you can play them any way you want and still beat them
The fun versus optimal debate reminds me of the Imperius Task Force speed runs in City of Heroes, where teams completed a 2 hour series of content in less then 15 minutes. Early runs insisted on no Peacebringer or Mastermind classes due to knock back effects and minions potentially slowing down the run (I’d jokingly have my minions protest by the start of the task force when they were forming). After a while the challenge got sillier where groups of only defenders (the main healing/buffing class) and managed even faster times. The fact you could do tough content with such clearly suboptimal parties (a favourite moment being a team of 7 tanks and me as the only real damage dealer (a ranged Blaster) taking on a full story arc) was one of my favourite parts of the game.
"What is the game's current meta" is the cringiest question in game forums today
My idea for fun and optimized content would be (ideally) to have several main goals that aid in completing the game (these goals would generally and loosely define the classes or builds of the game), and then develop several fun and intresting ways to achieve those goals. Ex. One goal would be reducing the damage your team takes. How do you do this? Well, there are several different sets of equipment that all achieve this goal: you could buff your allies to give them damage resistance, you could have good defence and attract all the enemies attack you, you could summon walls to keep the enemies temporarily at bay, you could summon a giant familiar for a short time on cooldown to tank and deal all the damage for you, etc. Even better, there could be multiple sets that attract enemies or summon defenses or familiars or buff allies in slightly different ways, to add a little more variety.
I don't play Warframe, but from what I've heard it does something akin to what I described.
The most fun Skyrim run is doing a sneaky unarmed playthrough
I tried doing that, but quickly realized how incompatible they were together (used restoration glitch too). Reasons why it doesn't work is because if you supplex an enemy in sneak you still get caught unless it's behind a wall. And sometimes you can't even supplex because the ground was off by a pixel. Started having less fun after experimenting.
Funny enough a khajiit unarmed build is one of if not the best build for early and mild game and it's not bad for late game to.
Recursively enhance your enchanting to make the Ring of One Punch.
3:45 gosh the windwaker speedruns are crazy and minish cap nostalgia is nice
Me: Ya know I always wanted to play Yugioh. Now that I've found a group that plays it I can play it with other people! :D
- (creates deck) hee hee I like these cards
-(plays)
Me: Okay I'll normal summon thi-
Opponent: No you won't.
Me: wha?
Opponent: Put that card in the graveyard.
Me: Oookaaay.. well I'll play this card and special summo-
Opponent: No you won't. Put THAT card in the graveyard.
Me: I activate a-
Opponent: No you don't....go on, put it in the graveyard.
ME: Okay, I guess I end my turn,
Op: (37 minutes of plays later in a single turn) aaaand all your life points are gone.
And like that I never picked up Yugioh again.
Have you seen ProZD's skit about having a really good turn in a card game? This sounds about like that.
@@edwardnygma8533 Except that is the entire game with every competitive deck. Most games are over by 5 turns.
one of my friends had a deck that put 2 cards into play. Playing just those 2 cards made it impossible for the opponent to play any cards. Both could be normally played in 1 turn if they drew well, and of course their deck was designed to fish for them. From my understanding, it wasn't even a good competitive deck.
@@rogerogue7226 5 very long turns
Yeah this is why I quit myself. Duel Links isn't bad tho
this video has 5.5 seconds of screen time featuring TF2, making 1.389% of the video. This makes me happy.
i've always been someone for optimization. that's why i love games like factorio.
I'm a bit in the middle, the best example for me is my Yu-Gi-Oh deck, I have a dark magician deck, that also uses the fairy tale archetype, while my deck isn't the most powerful it can be, it is extremely versatile, with very little specialization, which is common at the mid to high levels of competitive play
What i like: taking something i enjoy playing and optimizing it as much as possible.
What i don't like: being told that i shouldn't optimize because that ruins the fun of the game.
Blizzard is starting to get really bad about this in world of warcraft. And it looks like they are going to flip people who optimize to be the best they can be 2 middle fingers in the upcoming expansion shadowlands. Feels like they are banking on the silent majority hating optimizing as much as the devs do.
Well, they did say that for some people optimizing can be a big part of the fun. I might have a problem though.
Quick question; how many people have you (or have you seen) turned away from a raid because their gear or build was sub-optimal?
@@ilovethelegend it's on a daily basis, most PuG look at your iLvl (item level), your class, even your achievements or current progress into account before inviting you down. There are obviously more lenient groups than others but since you cannot judge the players performance beforehand, people stick to measurable values.
Groups also often kick some players while raiding if their performance is an issue.
It's not a bad thing in top end content but the mentality is used all across the content to justify both elitism ("you should reroll or won't get invited") and failure ("we failed because your spec/items/class are not optimal") when both situation are manageable with proper execution while sticking to your fun build.
Edit : I realised I never answered numerically as asked : to create a 2/2/5 raid group, I usually see RL wait for at least 10-15 credible (iLvl wise) applicants to even start handpicking some to his/her liking, chatting with them with questions and asking for achievements and potions/flasks/.... Often taking up to 30 minutes to get a full group (which is to be put in perspective due to the tanks shortage also impacting that time) even with a pre-existing smaller group initiating the raid.
Ah yes, the classic trifecta of "Timmy, Johnny, and Spike".
I didn’t know you guys were a fan of Prozd, I love the card reference btw!
4:15 How about me? I am a stealthy "lol room is dead" Ashe Prime which is usaully invisible from second 2 of the mission to the end.
NO MORE GOD DAMN COW DECKS. PLEASE, I'M TIRED OF LOSING TO THEM.
/s
I personally enjoy the kind of games that give you a set of tools, drops you into the world, and then says "have fun."
I've always thought that Hearthstone would be "better" if decks were 30+N (e.g. N=4) cards but at the start of each match, N cards were discarded at random to bring the deck back to 30 cards. It would encourage fewer "glass cannon" OTK decks and more flexible decks.
I think that would help aggro decks that don't care if N cards are removed since they only play a few cards from the deck anyway
Gotta be careful with random, though. Random can kill fun faster than anything else, because (and this is something that so many programmers still do not get!) random can mean a string of numbers like 74 1 89 22 6 41, but it can also mean 1 1 1 1 1 1. Random means RANDOM, as in any possible result. Most when they think "random" are actually thinking "controlled random", ie. values all fall within a uniform distribution no matter how many iterations are done. That is not how true random works, but that's how our brains process "random" by default.
@@TheSkyRender I get what you're saying, and I've no evidence my idea would work, but something to combat the aggressive meta that's out there now, where everyone just downloads auto-play net-decks would be good for Hearthstone.
So yeah, you might get your 5 "best" cards taken out before the game starts, but perhaps that just means the better decks are those which don't rely on combos.
If you don't get the thumbnail, it's a reference to a speedrunning technique in Zelda wind waker in which the player uses a glitch to build up backwards swimming speed resulting in them hillariously zooming through the whole map of the game in an instant while swimming backwards
I'm tempted to say I'm anti-optimization (at least as far as my own playstyle is concerned; it's not my place to tell other people how to enjoy a game), but I don't think my preferences can be adequately summed up by that single word (or those two words, depending on your views on hyphens). I tend to gravitate toward particular styles of play, regardless of whether or not they're optimal. I also like to win, though, so if my preferred style of play is just plain awful, I'll probably tweak it no matter how attached I was to it. In a sense, I seek a balance between a style that I enjoy for its own sake and a style that enables me to win. Because of this, I tend to avoid the absolute highest levels of play--partially because I'm unlikely to continue playing a game in which I get my butt kicked nearly all the time, but also because my inferior playstyle could make the game unpleasant for whatever people I'm playing with. If I'm on a team, I become a liability, and if I'm in a one-on-one game, I won't provide a good challenge.
0:21 Oh my gosh! A Friends of Mineral Town reference?? Heck yeah! Literally all 7 Harvest Moon fans are so happy
People are commenting from a day ago, while the video got out 4 minutes ago.
.
.
*Aliens.*
could just be a time zone problem. youtube should get itself together!
For me, though it may sound strange, I find that optimisation in games like class-shooters is more fun than in actual strategy games. I remember when I first played Civ 5, I was quite young and didn't understand much of what was going on, but I liked when I would settle cities in spots that were aesthetically pleasing to me. I later went onto multiplayer as I grew older and better at the game, I was horrified with how the game functioned. There was no nation building whatsoever, just build 4 cities close to eachother in a drainage basin and spam specific units. One of my favourite games was with an older brother, I had picked the Romans and had settled three cities early-game before using my ballistae to siege Milan. This allowed me to discover more of the world and continued to conquer outwards and sort of admired how the terrain had made me build roads through narrow mountain passes and made Milan economically important to me; it actually felt like I was carving out an empire and making my own story.
I also experienced this in HOI4 where I found that I mostly just played support-role countries such as Hungary or Romania; I didn't really enjoy playing multiplayer much and even single-player could feel like a drag. I, again, had to follow a strict series of protocols to build my nation the best I can to help my faction out the most. I realised that the only part I enjoyed was when I had tank divisions build up to micromanage late-game on The Soviet Front as it was only at that point I had leeway to try out different tactics.
Meta-requirement is why I avoid most online games endgames.
This is a topic that has been brought up in roguelike difficulty design and something called "headroom". A high-headroom game allows for more varied strategy, giving people several ways to play the game, not all of them optimal, while having the playstyle still be viable as a means of victory, but it also means the game is inherently easier by allowing you to win the game despite not playing optimally. Lower headroom on the other hand rewards skillful play more with the game pushing you towards more optimal play, but this also means that fewer strategies is viable and you give players less headroom to explore and play the way they want. Two examples of the different ends of the spectrum is NetHack (high headroom) and DCSS (low headroom). Ignoring NetHack's high demand of player knowledge of game mechanics for a second, once you know how the game works mechanically, the game is actually rather easy. DCSS on the other hand is far more demanding on using certain playstyles to win, especially if you go for an extended victory (getting all 15 runes instead of the 3 you only need to win). I personally prefer NetHack but know maný prefer DCSS
Released 50 seconds ago and someone's already disliked. Troll.
Back in the Escapist days, if there was ANY forum post about a video before the person could have watched the entire thing, they would get a forum ban. They might have been temporary for first time offenders, I never dared test it, but they were consistent in it's enforcement.
I appreciate the references to speedrun tech this video, haha. The ProZD reference is also class.
So the solution is: Make a game where there is an optimal route, however, each route is valid and being unoptimal will still give you a good chance at victory, like if two people faced off with the same experience but one has the meta and the other is a fun gimmick the chances are roughly 45% for the non-meta to win compared to the 55% of the meta. Thank you, this may help me down the line.
Also, 'Power Creep' is the biggest failings of game design there is, there can be no balance if there is always something better coming out.
@@jordan89124 Of course, this is largely due to the stupidity of human nature. If the new and shiny isn't better than the comfortable and familiar, then people don't care and stop supporting the game since there's no "compelling" reason to get the new stuff over the old stuff they already know.
also, having several different ways to be optimal would be good. if there is a single 'best way to play' then at the higher levels of game-play it will be a challenge of how well can you adhere to the most optimal path. not give the players any choice in how to proceed.
Ive been wanting to make a game consisting out of a shmob and a deck builder. This episode is really going to help me
Meow
Thanks for a video! It's a very interesting topic and sometimes a bit annyoing for me. And probably one of the reasons why I prefer single player games usually much more than MMOs. I so don't care about high scores or having the optimal strategy, but many games are designed in a way like "Yeah, we have this optional thing and a few other approaches you can try, but if you want to experience the whole game, you have to compete with these people who spend weeks in calculating and tracking data in excel files for the best possible gear set/card deck/whatever." I do like the gameplay of Magic, but unless I am playing with friends who are on my "level" or are fine with choosing decks that they would consider "bad"... well. I could spend much more time with building optimised decks, playing enough to get better cards etc, but I still have other stuff to do than spending my time on doing something less exciting for me so I get to the fun parts weeks later. :/
There are some games that offer these possibilities and they are a lot of fun though and maybe inspire many other game devs to take these as example for future games. ^^
Thanks for uploading in these sad times
Me: *notices ProZD's deck*
*pauses and scrolls down to see the comments*
Lots of comments on it. Yup. All covered.
I'm so proud of this community.
Two things to keep track of are making sure that there isn't only one path to optimization and that those paths also lead to fun.
The Gundam Build Fighters mobile game found an interesting blend to this problem. Late game PVE and PVP were being dominated by the Titular super robot Gundams, but part of the Gunpla Moto is "GunPla is freedom"
To bridge this gap between freedom to build and crunchy meta they developed a new "Builder" mini game that pet you unlock parts to further optimize and enhance normally less desirable parts to be in league with the high tier parts