One game that has recently been thrown into the E-sports scene has been Overwatch. I am sure that the majority of people understand how the game works, but I will explain it none the less. Each character has several abilities they can use in the First person shooter. The fatal flaw of the game is that when a team fight takes place all characters are throwing out these abilities that produce these large effects all over the place. Some characters have explosives, shields and even lasers. As a spectator experience it is difficult to determine what exactly is happening without having experienced the game first hand and practiced learning how to discern the clutter from the important things. That being said this is not just a spectator problem as it has also been a problem in game. During team fights it is often common place that several ultimate abilities will be used to win the fight. Ultimate abilities in this game are the worst when it comes to screen clutter. It is a problem when players cannot understand what is happening in the game they are playing. This is not a problem limited to Overwatch as a game like Spellbreak also has this problem. Most games that the abilities produce large visual effects has had to deal with this problem. Overwatch has dealt with this problem through updates to opacity of abilities as well as adding characters that do not have large visual effects of abilities.

In most games there is often two types of people in the community, Those who take the game very competitively and those who just want to chill and play the game casually with their friends. It is often a point of division in games as to where the developers place their main points of balance. One game that happened to suffer from this division nearly a year ago is Sea of Thieves. The game itself splits the play style of player between two aspect, PVP and PVE. About a year ago the game started to gain traction and players off of the back of popular twitch streamer Summit1g who happened to stream the game everyday for over a month as a PVPer who stole from the other players. This caused a large growth in the amount of players that wanted to PVP in the game over PVE and overtime tensions rose between the two groups. It even went so far that the PVE players had their own discord where they would find servers where there were no PVP players and keep it to themselves. Of course this only made the PVP players more hungry as some invaded these servers in order to disrupt the player who were exploiting the small servers to play the game “in an unintended way”
There was a lot of toxicity in the entire thing as smear campaign against Summit and his PVP adventures arose and tried to take him down by insinuating that it was against the “Pirate Code” what he was doing. The Developers were undecided on what to do in the situation and this caused them to make several changes to the game to nerf the PVP players which caused an uproar in the community. That is the last I heard of the situation, but recently the game had a new update and i am interested to see how this issue was dealt with.

This post will be slightly different. This is the story of a League of Legends player that abused an easy to play character to propel two accounts into high rank and show Riot the error of their ways.
In Riot’s game League of legends there is a character that was added called Yuumi. This characters abilities are rather simple… maybe a little to simple. One ability allows the character to merge onto another friendly player and become intangible, another heals the player you are currently attached and the last is a missile that you control. Since this character is a support character they are placed in the bottom lane with the ADC player. All of these mechanics combined allowed a player to launch League on two accounts. one account controlled Yuumi and another controlled the ADC. The player then went on to play Yuumi by using foot pedals while simultaneously playing the ADC as usual. You would think that this would make the team lose a player in a way and be at a disadvantage. Well… this player managed to get the accounts to DIAMOND rank before stopping the experiment. It was posted on reddit and quickly reached the top of the subreddit. Since then Yuumi has received several nerfs to the overall healing output along with other thing. This is a good story of bad balance and its results. It is interesting to see the communities outrage when characters are added to a game that take away from the competitive edge by being almost autopilot. This was also seen in the release version of Torbjorn from Overwatch which would often get Play of the Game by dying and re spawning while the turret would kill everyone.

There is often this concept in gaming that if something is represented in a game that is has to be completely accurate to the real world version. For example every time a new Call of Duty game get released the gun play will play out differently than it would in real life and then someone will post on reddit that “This gun actually shoots faster than it does in game.” While this argument is true it often ignores the fact that the games overall goal is to be a competitive shooter and not a simulator. The developers of these games would rather put a real world object into the game and change it to be balanced in relation to the other objects than put an object in the game that is perfectly realistic and breaks the balance of the game. That being said sometimes the developers seem to forget this themselves and an object will get into the game that is unbalanced because it is trying to hard to be realistic. This is often seen in shotguns since all games represent shotguns as extremely close up and spread-shot weapons when realistically then can shoot pretty far, especially with a slug. In Modern Warfare 2 this was a very large complaint of shotguns. when they killed players from as far away as assault rifles players were upset.
This is just one argument that can be made for Game play Balance over Historical Accuracy.

A new game that has recently entered closed Beta is a tactical shooter by the company that made league of legends, RIOT games. Being as the game has the play style of the popular tactical shooter by Valve, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, it draws a lot of players from this game in. The interesting aspect of Valorant is that it tries to combine the tactical play style of Counter Strike with the ability management of games like Overwatch and Apex Legends. This has resulted in players from both of these games moving over to try their hand at becoming pro players in a game run by the company who made League of Legends into one of the most successful E-sports of all time. Because of the competitive nature of the community as they try to step on top of each other to reach fame and fortune, Toxicity is running rampant in the game. You have players from Overwatch,one of the most toxic communities in gaming, and players from League of Legends, who have toxicity in their middle name, melding together to compete in becoming the best in a game created to foster competition in E-sports.
Did you think players got mad when they lost rank when it was just a title? Well, It is rumored that the top players of Valorant will be paid for having the highest rank. Imagine the rage these players are going to have when they lose a game and lose their chance at the cash reward of being Top 10.
All I am saying is this might be a game that casual players will be ran out of by players producing more toxicity than the smog of LA.

I wanted to make this post because of our recent discussion this week on Alt-Right to Fortnite. It was brought up during the discussion that Pepe the Frog was a symbol from the Alt-Right movement. This is true of its past and I am sure that there are individuals that still view this to be true and use it in a malicious way, but more than often you will see Pepe in a twitch streamers chat or streams. BEcause Pepe has been turned into a popular twitch emote the younger generation is exposed to it on a daily basis through Twitch without the rhetoric of the Alt-Right. The frog is viewed more as a “cute” mascot for twitch, having nearly infinite iterations. Some iterations are animated and some are just Pepe. Some examples include PepePls, MonkaS, Pepega and Pepehands. These are all off of the website BetterTTV which is a plugin most twitch streamers use to add more emotes to there chat. Each of these emotes have their own meanings from simply dancing to music (PepePls) to an emote to be spammed when something producing anxiety or concern happens (MonkaS). The emotes often mirror twitch’s base emotes in one way or another. It is interesting to see the large developments of this small frog from Alt-Right Icon to Twitch Super Star.

In my final project I am making a board game that speaks on RNG. This prior week I have worked to relate this more to the class then just a piece on RNG. RNG has been a large part of every game since the dawn of PONG and it is interesting to see how it affects the gamer and how they play games, but that is not enough to relate this to the class. I need to dive deeper into the communities created through RNG and the relationships between individuals RNG creates.
Well one big aspect of the board game we are creating is the random movement that strongly creates an obstacle to pass. While the movement is RNG the player can still manipulate these numbers through ability cards received during the game. There has always been a divide between players on whether RNG belongs in games to begin with and I want the game we are making to continue this discussion. So in order to create this discussion we want to add abilities to the game that may seem rather unfair if the player is able to roll the right RNG. For example on ability may be “If a player were to fall you may roll a dice. If your roll is x-y then you do not fall and instead choose another player to fall instead” This ability not only causes the player to save themselves but could cause harm to another player. the losing player would call this ability broken or annoying but it worked to save the other player so they would work to argue for it. I want these arguments to be prevalent during the game on whether an ability of RNG is welcome in the game

During our Discussion in class today we discussed how Pay to win games and micro transactions in games are mostly viewed as a negative. These games force players to pay if they want to have any chance at being good at the game. This scheme is very easily seen by players and even while being looked down upon many players still succumb to paying for in game buffs.

Then there are games who’s entire existence is to make money by giving player the chance at unlocking a rare character or item from a random roll. These are known as Gacha Games. The most popular of these games relate to the Japanese Anime industry and allow players to roll for their favorite anime character from shows such as Fate, Dragon Ball or Naruto. The entire game revolves around players having limited time to roll the characters they want from limited time crates during events which gives incentives to the player to purchase more crates. That is not to say that the crates cant be earned through the simple game play that often plays itself. Although earning a crate can take hours of real time game play just for a single crate. A player would much rather spend $10 to roll 10 crates than play for 2 hours to roll a single crate. None the less Gacha game players worship these games under the simple premise that it provides them with unlock-able pixels that they want to collect. I have spent more time playing these games than I would like to admit.

With the recent quarantine and distanced learning requirements that the government has declared everyone is found with a lack of social intercourse. For many individuals, they rely on there schooling and work to provide the social interactions that we as humans require as a species. This has become painfully obvious when having to interact with your family for the next 2 months with no escape.

Now as a gamer, and introvert in most circumstances, this quarantine does not feel as impactful as it may for the extroverted individuals. One aspect that has felt impacted is the constant hovering of family members in my personal circle. Much of my daily life consists of playing games in a discord call or doing work in a discord call, pretty much I am always in a discord call. Normally this is enough socializing to make me feel adequate, but lately it has felt like I spend to much time sitting in my chair just moving my fingers to type or click a mouse.

This is where Virtual Reality comes in. Recently I have gone back to playing VRChat which offers infinitely customizable avatars as long as you can model it in Blender or Unity. For many this is some Anime Cat girl or Popular internet meme made 3D. You can do almost anything in the game from Playing mini games with friends to watching movies or just chilling in front of a mirror. The game offers several different maps made by creators to accommodate any activity from Bars, Dance Clubs and even a Bowling Alley. Playing the game feels like going out and partying with some friends.

Recently some larger streamers such as Chance “Sodapoppin” Morris and Felix “XQC” Lengyel have taken to playing this game on stream making it gain more exposure which has seemed to bring more and more users of the twitch culture to the player base. Even if you don’t have any online friends you could easily enter a lobby in the game and find someone to join within minutes even as a mute if you are using a vr headset.

https://vrchat.com/

With our recent discussion on marketing games and consoles towards specific genders, such as the Nintendo Knitting machine, the question is brought forward of whether any good is brought from marketing to gender specifics. By marketing to one gender you then seclude the other, for example since the knitting machine is viewed as a female gaming machine, a male would be seen as different for wanting to play with it. This works both ways and can even be seen today in gaming culture in general. Most first person shooters are viewed to have predominantly male player bases. When a female is seen on one of these games the initial reaction is that they are somewhere they don’t belong and they are often secluded or bullied for playing what they enjoy. Also sometimes in these games there is a role that the community forces on to the other gender, which can be seen in overwatch where the community has created this identity for female gamers as support players rather than playing the damage or tank role. Overall by creating these stereotypes and marketing for them the issues are only amplified which is a step back from the direction our society should be heading in reference to gender politics and equality. When companies market for gender the create a divide that doesn’t need to exist.