Challenged by Wats

[ryusei117]

Challenge accepted, Wats! Unfortunately, I'm away from cable Internet access until Monday (but I still have my phone's LTE). After that, though, you can pretty much name your preferred time and your time zone.

(I was wondering when someone would come after my ill-gotten rank. Entropy played me in a level of his choice that included Omega Cannons, but learned to hate that level as we spawn-camp-insta-fried each other. For anyone wondering, .)

[Wats]

Sweet, man! Let's see if we can get a game going one of these weeknights, say after 6pm PST? If that doesn't work out then the weekend would be better.

[ryusei117]

Sounds great; I should be online around 7:00 PM after dinner on Monday. That, Wednesday, and the weekend work best for me, but I can play on the other days if none of those work. We happen to be in the same time zone, so that makes things easier.

[Wats]

I am rescinding this challenge; it made sense when top bronze hadn't been played for all season, but I don't think it makes sense with both(!) of us now going through the promotion challenge.

And on that note, congrats and good luck to you, ryu!

[LotharBot]

Wats, if you make silver while Ryusei's promotion challenge is still pending, I'll release my spot so you can take it

[ryusei117]

Thanks, Wats; best of luck to you too!

Ah - Lothar, your promotion match comment says you've never beaten me in 1v1, but I think you got me recently . Probably the first of many, too. A good indicator of my skill discrepancy between 1v1 and free-for-all is that I've frequently been four-star Elite in the Rangers in recent seasons, but I'm only just making silver here.

[Sirius]

Yeah, it's a lot easier to figure out FFA games... and it matters a lot less if you're not super pro at K/D. The best pilots there tend to have a juggernaut switch where they'll just start bulldozing everyone in front of them - which is a nice skill to have in 1v1 but far from all you need.

[ryusei117]

Ah yeah, good point about K/D, Sirius: I often see FFA games in which the first-place pilot got tons of kills quickly, but died more than he fragged. But I have noticed that FFA rewards certain skills that are completely irrelevant in 1v1. The obvious one is that you need to track multiple opponents at once and don't let any of them get behind you (although they're usually less stealthy than in 1v1, since they're fighting each other too). While 1v1 demands intricate, chess-like strategy against one opponent, FFA often requires quick tactics to avoid being sammiched between two opponents in a narrow tunnel - or to partake in such sammiching yourself, of course. Patience is the way of 1v1, where advancing at the wrong moment results in untimely death by ambush, but FFA will have you dodging incoming shots from multiple directions and encourages you to navigate the level super fast for kills and powerups.

So I'd argue that 1v1 and FFA differ more in their gameplay style than in difficulty (I have speed, dodging ability, and almost no patience). Or maybe I'm just desperate to convince myself that I actually have skills.

And then there are team games ... Efficient communication is irrelevant to both FFA and 1v1.

[Sirius]

...yeah.

Team games have never really been "nailed" by Descent, in my opinion - D3 CTF is the closest but it is let down a little by the maps and balance (UT is probably the best experience I've had with CTF). Team games in D1 and D2 usually don't have much "team" in them because you just don't have an opportunity to co-ordinate. They're basically FFAs where you have to practice fire discipline. That's probably mostly the fault of the maps, but random spawns and weapon hoarding also make it tougher to make a good map even if you try.

FFA is a lot more random and uncontrolled than 1v1, which means you can more easily win without being the best player there. It doesn't mean it's not useful to be good, and there are some skills unique to the game type, but the returns start to diminish faster past a certain point. You might be twice as hard to kill as the next best pilot in the game, but they still get 50 kills to your 60 because they just respawn and keep shooting the other guys.

(Edit: Little elaboration on the team thing.)
At least a few people will likely think "hey what are you talking about, there's teamwork in Descent!" And sure there is, it's just that after a few other games I played I realized it's pretty shallow in comparison to what can be achieved elsewhere.
The first game I played much after D1/2 started to go quiet in the early 2000s was Mechwarrior 4. As the name suggests, you were controlling a mech; some of the notable characteristics of these were that they were usually pretty slow. Too slow to reliably dodge stuff, especially since the weapons were all much faster. Because of this, there was only so much you could do to mitigate damage to yourself while in an open shoot-out (the most effective was sideways jumping movement, since it's harder to lead shots on that); most of what you had to work with was cover.
One of the important consequences of that was that positioning was absolutely critical. If you got caught in a bad place with a lot of guns in line-of-sight, you pretty much had to just pray the other guys couldn't shoot straight. But you also always had teammates, and they can shoot back with you.
So, what the game usually turned into was maneuver warfare; various people would take different roles (long-range ballistic/missile support, sniper, short-range high DPS, recon, etc) and they would try to get into terrain that favored their setup, and force the opposing team into a bad situation. You wanted to get as many of your mechs set up to fire at as few of theirs as possible. They might still do some damage, but when it's 8 vs 3, it's not going to be much. And you'd focus fire on the same target at a time, since that way they have no more than 2 mechs for 2/3 of the fight, and no more than 1 for 1/3.
Getting all that stuff right needed a lot of teamwork. You usually had to have a commander calling targets and strategy, and the other guys needed to move together as a group.

I don't play MOBAs, but I have watched them and they appear to have many of the same ingredients. Situational awareness is crucial - you need to have a good idea where your teammates are and what they're doing. When you encounter trouble you need to communicate that quickly and efficiently, and you need to know how to support each other. You can't get away with just running around aimlessly bashing on whatever enemies you see - it doesn't work that way.
I did play a bit of PvP in the original Guild Wars - was never good at it - but it seemed to play out pretty similarly, just that things got mind-numbingly complex at times. Builds could be fantastically elaborate and you might bring along this one skill to counter a certain situation that might arise, but you had to make sure you were in position to use it if you saw that coming... and so on. Though on thinking about it, that really doesn't sound very different from the likes of DOTA

Descent sometimes does get strategic - especially in bigger maps where people have a chance to regroup and figure out how to attack enemy positions before they're already doing it. But for most of the team games I've played, things move too fast to really work on that.

[ryusei117]

Sounds like there are some really deep teamwork-focused games out there! I just mentioned team games mostly as an aside. I guess I've had better luck communicating in Descent team games - but yeah, it's generally simple stuff like, "Bandit in the big room heading toward reactor. Cut him off!" or "He's down; free weapons in the upper tunnel," or the common "No shield, cover me!" Although there was one D2 CTF game recently (Rangers game ID 34113 ... yep, egg hunt CTF ) where Skywarp and I did some good communication and managed to block our opponents from scoring quite often, as well as ambushing them when they approached our flag.