this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
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Despite the massive amount of comments here, I still don't see anyone talking about my personal issue with PvP here.
It's ranked matchmaking. In order to keep things working at all, you have to pair players with players of a similar skill. And this means that fundamentally you don't get a sense of progression besides an MMR ranking. Your win rate will always be roughly 50%, unless you either smurf, or become the literal best in the world. Compare that to tough PvE games, like Doom Eternal, or a brutal platformer, where you can raise your difficulty, beat stuff you could've never beaten before, and generally see your progression. Heck, if you want to relax, just put the difficulty back or crush some earlier levels. I love to go back and learn to speedrun some of my favourite platformers, and that feels awesome. Games like Souls are also great at this, when you have to explore an earlier area and the enemies are just... so easy and satisfying to roll through. Or moments like in Sekiro, when you go into NG+ or just start a new playthrough and crush Genichiro on the first encounter.
And this whole thing is just.. so fundamentally necessary for PvP to work, you can't let new players get utterly crushed by veterans, so it's not something anyone is going to "fix". But I'm not hopping onto an endless treadmill that's never going to give me a sense of mastery. Especially not with so many other fantastic games out there I want to check out.
This is why games with truly social matchmaking are great, like Halo 3, but in modern gaming having first time players get dicked on in their first ever by sweatiest with 10,000 hours played just means they will quit the game and go play something else.
Yeah, personally I've always enjoyed playing IRL with people who are better than me. Having a real person gives me that constant measuring stick I'm looking for, and playing with someone better gives me someone to watch and learn from, which helps me improve way more quickly. But that's... not what gets you the big sales numbers and a smooth player onboarding.
For PvP stuff, the experience I enjoyed the most was playing Smash with dorm mates in college. Getting my ass handed to me in 1v1 matches for months by the guy who owned the console, but learning, grinding, letting that guy I wanted to beat motivate me to use the training room, to watch YouTube videos, study techniques, and try to really master my character, learning how to be unpredictable and perform mix ups that needed to fool an experienced player who knew my weaknesses better than anyone, it was so satisfying. And by the end of the year we were on even footing, and I was maybe even a little better, which just felt incredible and so well earned.
That experience is what ranked PvP just completely lacks. Every time you win they just swap in new players who are that little step better than you until you're perfectly even again. Which is great on a game-to-game scale, each battle is hard fought, but just offers nothing on that wider timescale that I need to really care.