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[RCIX]

Specifically, in games that are supposed to be e-sports (Starcraft II, fighting games, etc.). Why does the competitive side have to be so twitchy and fast, vs. the just for fun's relaxed pace? I'd do pretty great in starcraft if the pacing and such wasn't so intense in the ladder games.

[Pineapple]

I think the key (in multiplayer non-co-op games) is a balance of the two.

For example, I got MAG for the PS3 a month or two back. I played it for a couple weeks before becoming completely fed up. The problem is that its focus is on competitiveness rather than enjoying the game. A lot of mainstream multiplayer FPS games are like this, the most notable probably being CoD. Essentially, the only reward in the game is an increased kill count/score/skill points and so a lot of the players become hell-bent on having the biggest numbers instead of playing the game normally. This is totally understandable in a single player game where the opponents are just AI bots, but when the same players repeatedly fall victim to cheap kills (which is what these stat-mongers typically use) the game just isn't fun anymore. This issue is compounded in MAG because of the absurdly powerful sniper rifles people can get. There have been times when a single sniper made it impossible for my team to exit the spawn point for the entirety of a match while the sniper's own allies couldn't get any kills because we couldn't even get to them.

One game I praise all the time is the Source mod Hidden: Source 4b. It's incredibly fun. There's one team of up to eight players who have the typical guns and support, while the other team is comprised of a single player, almost completely invisible and with no effective way to attack at a range (the player is armed with a knife). The competition is twofold - the team of IRIS players versus the single hidden, and also between the IRIS players because the player who contributes most to the hidden's death is most likely to be hidden the next round. Instead of stats, of which there are none, the reward for skillful play is getting to enjoy a round as an invisible guy with a ton of abilities geared toward scaring the IRIS players out of their minds.

[Fallsburg]

I guess the easy answer is that Starcraft II was designed to reward twitchy gameplay and memorization of build orders.  It's not how I would design a multiplayer system, but I guess it has its fans.

On the larger scale, I think the biggest problem is that the competitive vs. casual debate is so subjective.  I used to play a fair amount of Magic: The Gathering online, and the debate there for casual vs. competitive is on the order of a holy war.  My stance is that what is fun and casual to one person is ruthless and cutthroat to another person, so if you don't agree with your opponent you just say, "Good Day" and move on.  Now, this is harder to do in some games.  It is probably very hard to find a game of Starcraft II that takes place at the speed that you want it to.  I don't know what the answer to this is, but I think it's best if games allow for a full spectrum of competitiveness (at least in unsanctioned matches).

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Specifically, in games that are supposed to be e-sports (Starcraft II, fighting games, etc.). Why does the competitive side have to be so twitchy and fast, vs. the just for fun's relaxed pace? I'd do pretty great in starcraft if the pacing and such wasn't so intense in the ladder games.

think about this: so would everyone else.

in order for something to be competitive, it has to be something that takes hundreds of hours of training and hard work to do. if anyone could do it, it wouldn't be that competitive, now would it? that's like saying 'why do powerlifting competitions have to lift such heavy weights! what's this 800 lbs stuff! if they were lifting 200 lbs then i could do it too!'

the strategy part of sc2, or of any game, is the easy part. making hotkeys so second-nature that you dream about them is the hard part.

[J-Snake]

All the skill-sets like timing, reaction-speed and similar can be advertised but I think it is stupid to reward the gamer who has just quicker thumbs but the game has to be competitive or challenging to be interesting. I think the key is to design mechanics that create a lot of depth but still don't reward the player too much just for having quick fingers.
That is why Street Fighter is a bad game if I complain on a high level. I am even wondering someone else besides me is aware about what I am talking about. Since I repeatedly see design-decisions completely ignoring this aspect.

Regarding Fighters at this point, Tekken does it best.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

you speak as if quickness isn't evidence of skill. the better you are at something, the more practiced you are at it, the faster you become at it. people who type 200 wpm at 100% accuracy are more skilled at typing than people who have to look at the keyboard and type with two fingers and still make spelling errors. the former don't just have "faster hands" by birth or whatever, they put in the hours of practice it takes to achieve that level of skill. similarly, if you train yourself at starcraft to be fast, you can be fast with a few hundred hours of practice. so it's not really rewarding anything except time spent practicing, it's not like some people are "just faster" than other people.

that said, if you want a competitive sport that does not reward quickness of fingers, why would you look at fighting games or *real-time* strategy games? why not turn-based strategy games, or games like chess and go and shogi or even checkers? skill in those games doesn't involve quick fingers (unless it's speed chess), although there's a lot of memorization involved in those too.

basically what i'm saying is that "depth" isn't as important or as interesting as repetitive skills such as memorization and speed when it comes to competition. everyone likes to think 'oh, if skill didn't require so much practice and effort i'd be good at it; i could compete with gary kasparov in chess if chess didn't require so much memorization; i could compete with boxer in starcraft if starcraft wasn't just about hand speed!', which is a human tendency to feel, but irrational.

[Blue]

I don't see any problems with rewarding quickness with the fingers either. As Paul Eres has said, it's a way to reward training, being more or less the same thing as, say, using combos on a fighting game. You need to actually train their timing, memorize when they are possible and know the inputs. It, too, is similar to chess. No one is born knowing how to predict your oponent's moves and stuff like that.

Although I'm all for the playing just for fun (for that matter, I don't play anything competitively), I think those games need to put in things to differenciate those who just casually play the game to those that actually take time and effort to learn and master the game's mechanics, because after all, a lot of those games with a strong competitive scene have tourneys that have money as prizes, and they don't want a person who has picked the game up a few minutes ago to get it.

[J-Snake]

It is a bit of an aesthetical value. Visual gaming is not meant to enhance your physical body-acting (execept kinect  and such stuff). It is about making input as elegant and direct as possible.

It is perfectly possible to design a fighter that challenges all the decent MENTAL skills without rewarding the player too much just because he is only fast in physical input. Quick mental reaction/decisions, timing,  and the actually interesting level above: mind-games, all those can be challenged.

I perfectly understand why a Hadoken in street-fighter is not performed by a single button-press. You would have all the time to perform it whenever someone is jumping on you. So the decision was to give it an input-overhead, so it takes more time to be executed.
The thing is that a Hadoken can still be designed with a similar level of depth by a single button-press, and more elegantly at the same time. As a designer just add a time-span to charge. That way you would make the game more indipendent from the more primitive skills like quick-body motion and you would support and reward the more interesting skills like mind-gaming.
I think that is why Fighters are considered stupid by some people who don't know much about them. You often see people who spend too much time learning combos and fast-paced actions (which is just stupid) rather  then diving into mind gaming and decide when to perform them, which in the end is the real deal.

In Tekken for example there is no value in being able to perform an action alone, it is taken for granted that you can perform all the moves. Tekken dives directly into the more interesting thing like mind-gaming, it is actually about what and when to use them that brings a valuable depth to the game.

[Fallsburg]

Yeah, I'm really not with you on the being against games that reward speed.  If that's not your thing, fine, don't play them, but don't act like it's a design failure that you don't like them.  Chess requires mental acuity but doesn't require physical capability, the 100m dash vice-versa.  That doesn't make 1 a valid competition and not the other. 

Different competitive games reward different skills/abilities so you should play/make the ones you like.

[J-Snake]

I am actually very sportive and very quick in physical input. Some philosophy is just indipendent from the skill-set I have. I think I need to say that it is a bit of a personal aesthetical issue and objectively I cannot say the way games are usually designed is a bad thing.
But I am not even sure my post was understood. I hope some still see a point in it.
It just about reducing unnecessary overheads and reward the decent skill-sets more, not the primitive ones.

So the point we can argue about is what can be considered a decent skill and what is not a decent skill. Can also be a matter of taste. I cannot claim to be objective here all the time.

[iffi]

Specifically, in games that are supposed to be e-sports (Starcraft II, fighting games, etc.). Why does the competitive side have to be so twitchy and fast, vs. the just for fun's relaxed pace? I'd do pretty great in starcraft if the pacing and such wasn't so intense in the ladder games.

Because as people get better at a game, they come up with new ways to give themselves an edge above the competition, leading to a sort of arms race. This gives rise to things such as build orders and memorized combos. Even chess has this to a certain extent, with its opening strategies.

I believe that applies to the Quake series, which, if you don't know, can get very competitive. Originally strafe-jumping was frowned upon, but eventually it became such an integral part of competitive play that it was intentionally left in later games. People also memorize maps to time the powerups so they can get them right as they spawn, and they do all sorts of things with the console to modify the FOV, keybindings, enemy models, and things like that. Of course, you don't have to do any of this to enjoy the game, but that's the way competitive gameplay came to be in Quake, and (in my opinion at least) it's actually more fun that way, albeit more difficult to get into.

[RCIX]

Specifically, in games that are supposed to be e-sports (Starcraft II, fighting games, etc.). Why does the competitive side have to be so twitchy and fast, vs. the just for fun's relaxed pace? I'd do pretty great in starcraft if the pacing and such wasn't so intense in the ladder games.

think about this: so would everyone else.

in order for something to be competitive, it has to be something that takes hundreds of hours of training and hard work to do. if anyone could do it, it wouldn't be that competitive, now would it? that's like saying 'why do powerlifting competitions have to lift such heavy weights! what's this 800 lbs stuff! if they were lifting 200 lbs then i could do it too!'

the strategy part of sc2, or of any game, is the easy part. making hotkeys so second-nature that you dream about them is the hard part.

In the specific case of starcraft, it feels like they bulked up their relatively small strategic landscape with a lot of scrambling to issue orders, whereas a game like Supreme Commander manages to take the emphasis almost completely off of spamming commands as fast as you can, and pushes it onto actual strategic manipulation. Yet in starcraft, knowing the strategies is 90% of the battle; so it ends up feeling like an artificial barrier if i'm penalized for not shooting commands like a machine gun, even if I know what i'm doing. My question is why did they do this? Is it because the strategy space is small, so it would get boring fast if there wasn't another element? Was it to slow the advancement of the metagame? Or is it just there "because"?

[J-Snake]

Even in UT-classic you can reduce rewarding quick fingers by not designing strafing by double-tapping the direction, but it can go directly with one press. Personally it is shall be about reducing input-overhead and making input more direct, if possible. It will reduce the demand to exaggerately train "primitive" skills.

[iffi]

In the specific case of starcraft, it feels like they bulked up their relatively small strategic landscape with a lot of scrambling to issue orders, whereas a game like Supreme Commander manages to take the emphasis almost completely off of spamming commands as fast as you can, and pushes it onto actual strategic manipulation. Yet in starcraft, knowing the strategies is 90% of the battle; so it ends up feeling like an artificial barrier if i'm penalized for not shooting commands like a machine gun, even if I know what i'm doing. My question is why did they do this? Is it because the strategy space is small, so it would get boring fast if there wasn't another element? Was it to slow the advancement of the metagame? Or is it just there "because"?

I understand what you mean - I'm not very familiar with Starcraft or any other RTS, but from what I've played it felt like the emphasis in Starcraft isn't on the actual strategy as much as one would expect from a "Real-time Strategy Game." I don't know if it's because it's become so popular that the most effective strategies have already been exhausted, or if there just wasn't that much strategic depth to begin with, but it seems as if Starcraft focuses more on how quickly you can pull off those strategies rather than actually coming up with strategies. I never really got into Starcraft largely because of this.
Disclaimer: I probably haven't played enough Starcraft to talk about it accurately.

@J-Snake: That's a good point - things like that allow the game to remain focused on mastering the gameplay mechanics, rather than the interface through which one interacts with these mechanics.

[s0]

My favorite competitive games are shmups.

[TheSpaceMan]

I love building in RTS games, often to the point where i relize, oh there is a enemy, and he is kicking my ass, be this, Starcraft, warcarft, AOE etc.

The more you can build the more I loose the focus of warfare.
I think these games would be more interesting if you, based on your building could leak ideals/ideas/religions/ways of life. The simple effect would be that it spreads, so if you have a really strong focus on freedom and peace, that would infect the enemy cities close by so that attacking units etc cost more, build limts, civil unrest etc. And the only way to counter it is to build "iron curtains" and using "media blockout techniques". That would make a diffrent kind of gameplay as well. Warfare would be more like real life, focused on taking out tvstations, newpapers and stuff.

That would be more fun.

Competitive is really focused on one type of gameplay to victory.
When you have more choices, things get more complexed.

[Core Xii]

that said, if you want a competitive sport that does not reward quickness of fingers, why would you look at fighting games or *real-time* strategy games? why not turn-based strategy games, or games like chess and go and shogi or even checkers?

Real-time strategy does not imply twitch-based gameplay; Rather, the ability to strategize fast and on a fine-grained space (whereas turn-based games are slow and often take place on a heavily quantized grid, where decisions have obvious consequences. In real-time, the effects are more subtle).

The appeal of real-time vs turn-based strategy for me is quick thinking, not quick fingers. In the future when we're controlling games with our thoughts, I wonder what the twitch-gamers have to say with all the time they've sunk into digit dexterity.

By my standards, StarCraft is not, in fact, real-time strategy at all; It's action strategy, because your ability to strategize comes second to your ability to mash keys.

[J-Snake]

In the future when we're controlling games with our thoughts

won't happen (not if relyability, precision and fast input is required) because a human has in general better control over his body than over his thoughts
Technology can likely change but a human will not.

[RCIX]

In the future when we're controlling games with our thoughts

won't happen (not if relyability, precision and fast input is required) because a human has in general better control over his body than over his thoughts
Technology can likely change but a human will not.

One could have said the same thing 10-20 years ago with touch screens; there just needs to be more work invested in processing brain data to figure out what the user actually wants and filtering out the parts that we don't mean (much like touch data needs a lot of processing to understand what we're doing with our fingers). Look at http://www.emotiv.com/ . I hear it works pretty well, if tough to put on.

The advantages for RTS games is that you can distinguish from "move over to that group of units" and "attack that unit" whereas that's hard to do with conventional cursor-based input. You could even specify more detailed commands like "go that direction, if you see a target engage it till at 40 percent health then retreat to nearest base while returning fire".

[J-Snake]

"Touch data" doesn't understand what you are doing, you are supposed to understand it. It works on a logical level, a human does not. Just because people learned to fly doesn't mean everything will be possible:P

The emotiv-thing you see here is core-technically the same thing what kinect is. It is just interpreting some signals, not your mind. Kinect will never be used for relyable and fast input. It is working with too much overhead and insecurity by nature.