EPTCustom Games current Top 10 List.
When you look at top 10 at any give moment you might notice how there is a prevalence of various hero defenses, grinding games, and castle fight mods. What makes these games popular?
The number is inflated because in order to play through such a game a person has to spend a lot of (at least more) time. A half of an hour? An hour? 2 hours? Because the gameplay is relatively slow, it’s to be expected to have more people simultaneously playing such a game in comparison to 10-20 minute games.
Currently playing: #number.
Let’s say I want to play a custom game. I open a custom game page and obviously what I see affects my decision will I play this game or not.
12 Current players - “Well, this game is obviously shit, I won’t try it”.
1200 Current players - “Well, this game is obviously good, I should try it”.
We are quick to judge the value of something based on facebook likes, reddit upvotes or stars on your product. Which means, before a person actually interacts with a product / content he is already biased towards “bad / good” and there is rarely a middle ground, as there is nothing between "Yes" and "No".
Therefore when you get a high number of current players, the number will snowball even further simply off that number rather than the quality of the game. It’s called a “trend” and I’ll come back to this later.
Off the sinking ship we go.
Once people see something like rating / viewership / player count go down they abandon the ship and hop onto the one that doesn’t have this dynamic. It might be a much worse ship, but it is not the sinking one which is the point. And they look through the window of their cabin and watch how their previous ship goes down. They loved it, hell, still do, but unfortunately it’s sinking. “Sinking” is now a label that will stay.
This is a metaphor for “ded gaem” if you somehow didn’t catch that.
It feels much better to play a game that a lot of people play and to know as a fact that this game is growing, rather than playing a game that is decent, but is gradually deding. Which further snowballs the decision of “Do I play this game or not?”.
A casual player will more likely to play games that are popular and trending, not the games that are actually good. It also relates to stuff like trending youtube videos, memes, pop-music, TV shows and pretty much all entertainment. We want to be “yeah, I do / watch / like it too!” because humans are social animals and not nerdy weirdos. There are like bazillion of great TV movies and music and games already, but is that what people want - great stuff?
No. People want NEW.
NEW is never sinking, because it’s new. NEW is trending and popular because it’s, well, just came out and you hop on the trend and feel “in theme” because there are a lot of people riding it as well.
5 Stars rating system.
Is shit. But, again, it’s not because the system itself is that bad as it is, but because people collectively misuse it all the damn time and there is no way to make them use it properly without revamping it completely, at which point it will stop being a 5 Stars system.
No solution will stop snowballing opinions unless you just conceal the rating of a game (hat/video/profile) completely. But that completely destroys the purpose of a rating system.
Because we already “rate” custom games in Dota by how many people are playing them, the rating is rather superfluous. And because they both snowball like crazy, having two such rating systems next to each other magnifies the snowballiness of people’s opinion.
Because think about it: if you liked the game and gave it 5 stars, you most likely will play it again, and vice versa. That will snowball the popularity of the game and other people will come and play along with you as a newcomer.
I mean there is a reason why this “9/10, shit game” joke exists. People can’t really evaluate beyond
“I love it”
“It’s okay” towards good
“It’s okay” towards bad
“It’s shit”.
The entire gradation from 0 to 10 or from 1 star to 5 stars or from 0% to 100% is there for us to ask a user the question: “How good is it?”
What really happens with a game that is anywhere from 0 to 8: “It’s bad.”
Aka “It’s not great”.
This binary approach to thinking like “not good = bad” is much more prevalent that one might think at first, and it’s clear with rating systems that have a lot of notches on their gradation (like 0 to 10).
What happened with this person’s decision making is: “I didn’t like the game that much to have an unbiased and well researched opinion on how shit this game truly is.”
Because imagine: this person, who hated the game, somehow played it for an extensive amount of time to collect all the data points to evaluate the game properly and to logically conclude that this game is 3.5/10 or 6/10 or 64%/100%...
This doesn't happen. Ever. Because if you don’t like the game you won’t continue playing it. Therefore bottom 75% are literally meaningless because they a) represent pretty much the same thing b) don’t represent it correctly
The other point is that the rating with time becomes less and less representative of the quality.
Because of the competitive nature of any market, the product (content/game/hat/technology) improves with time. In dota you can see how much better cosmetic items have become. The same thing will happen with custom games (if there will be a way to make money from it, thus creating a market).
But leave alone custom games in Dota and think about regular games like Dota itself or Starcraft or Battlefield or whatever. These games look and actually ARE much better than they were 2 years ago. And these 2 years old versions are better than their 4 years old versions.
Therefore, throughout your life you see content improving with time and EVERY SINGLE iteration is the best ever. And it gets ratings of 10/10 or 9/10 Every Single Time. Because at this time it’s literally the best to date and deserves that rating.
However this creates an interesting situation where the rating doesn’t reflect the quality, because the standard is constantly rising up and these 6 years old 9/10 games are 9/10 for a 6 years old game, but not 9/10 for today. But typically rating systems do not reflect that, and moreover they retain their 9/10 legacy forever.
Okay, there is counterpoint to that: “Well, if this old thing is bad, no one will use (play) it anymore.” Which is true. But this only further solidifies how pointless such a rating system is.
There is another counterpoint: “The rating represents how good a thing respectively to today’s standards”. Which is also true, but go back 2 paragraphs and you’ll see that a new thing will in 99% of times be better than what already exists, because it is specifically, on purpose created TO BE better in the first place. And it will get 8+/10 ratings, where 8 = mediocre, 9=good, 10=great. Because it’s actually good.
Deep Player v Player gameplay in custom games.
Can’t really exist unless the game is absolutely huge to have its own community to manage their own matchmaking / player rating system.
Right now, you can’t have a game with a lot of depth and high skill ceiling, because there is no matchmaking for custom games.
Imagine in Sc2 / Dota there would be no MM whatsoever, how fun it would be to play against people who are absolutely incomparable to your skill level? In BOTH directions.
Inb4 “That’s already my pub game experience.”
When a Grandmaster player literally shits on 99.9% of the player base do you think there is any fun in it? Neither of those 2 players can’t improve because the good one won’t learn anything from that game and the bad one won’t learn anything because he just got brutally destroyed.
Therefore, once Noya will have finished his Warcraft 3 TFT recreation in Dota 2, even tho it will be undeniably number one custom game, don’t expect to have a lot of fun because there is no matchmaking for custom games and you WILL have to rely on Valve’s future implementation of it, or outgame match-making clients similar to how IXDL, Faceit or Starbow handles it.
Happy 6.86, looking forward to your comments.
by etofok
Q: I don't get it why there is no conclusions
+ Show Spoiler +
because it will influence your own opinion
+ Show Spoiler [ -=personal notes=-:] +
I haven't done articles/youtube stuff for a long time (aside from the "apm spectrum" one )because I was working on my sc2 masters for like 2 months and a dota custom game for another 3, but I have a pile of notes for like 5 articles and one day I'll organize them into coherent stuff for you to enjoy. Thanks.
