Inverting the PVP to be intra-team sounds brilliant. You’re there to be the best on your side, at any cost… and then there’s five other schmucks present. There’d still be a contest between teams, but it wouldn’t really matter. That’s the background noise for trying to steal kills from the other guy in your lane. One player can even be “the albatross,” the worst loser on your side, motivated above-all-else to foist that label onto another player.
The simpler fix is to make rounds so fast and chaotic that people can’t develop narratives about how so-and-so fucked them over. Let people win some rounds and lose some rounds, even if the outcome is a devastating three-and-eight loss. Make their catastrophic fuckups contained. Allow everyone the opportunity to clutch critical moments, by making more moments critical, without creating one continuous hour-long panic attack.
Key to any of this is scoring via bots. The game can snapshot any moment of gameplay, and run it back over and over, with AI substituting any given player. It’s VORP. If you just got your ass handed to you - would any bot have done better? If not, then that failure shouldn’t count against you. If this failure was caused by the game introducing randomness, then your bad karma can be made-up-for with better luck later on. But if you fumbled a fight that 99% of simulations survived, the game is free to laugh at you, and so are the other players.
Inverting the PVP to be intra-team sounds brilliant. You’re there to be the best on your side, at any cost… and then there’s five other schmucks present. There’d still be a contest between teams, but it wouldn’t really matter. That’s the background noise for trying to steal kills from the other guy in your lane. One player can even be “the albatross,” the worst loser on your side, motivated above-all-else to foist that label onto another player.
The simpler fix is to make rounds so fast and chaotic that people can’t develop narratives about how so-and-so fucked them over. Let people win some rounds and lose some rounds, even if the outcome is a devastating three-and-eight loss. Make their catastrophic fuckups contained. Allow everyone the opportunity to clutch critical moments, by making more moments critical, without creating one continuous hour-long panic attack.
Key to any of this is scoring via bots. The game can snapshot any moment of gameplay, and run it back over and over, with AI substituting any given player. It’s VORP. If you just got your ass handed to you - would any bot have done better? If not, then that failure shouldn’t count against you. If this failure was caused by the game introducing randomness, then your bad karma can be made-up-for with better luck later on. But if you fumbled a fight that 99% of simulations survived, the game is free to laugh at you, and so are the other players.