It makes games more samey because they focus on what pros want, and they like things to be the same. It also tends to drive balance patches to only focus on the top levels of play, so the experience is worse for the majority of players. Features that aren’t directly related to the pro-scene get completely ignored.
Play tends to get more toxic even at low levels, because ladder rank is all that really matters. The increased focus on being competitive increases the stress to play well in each game.
Competitive formats are often one of the least popular game modes. It’s a bit hard to prove this, because companies don’t always release numbers. Blizzard admitted this with SC2, the vast majority of players never queued for a competitive 1v1 match, co-op became by far the most popular format in terms of games played. You saw something similar with complaints about available modes in halo when infinite released.
Esports are actually pretty boring to watch 90% of the time. Most have a major lack of parity so there’s at best a handful of teams/players that are actually competitive, so many matches are one sided.
It makes games more samey because they focus on what pros want, and they like things to be the same. It also tends to drive balance patches to only focus on the top levels of play, so the experience is worse for the majority of players. Features that aren’t directly related to the pro-scene get completely ignored.
Play tends to get more toxic even at low levels, because ladder rank is all that really matters. The increased focus on being competitive increases the stress to play well in each game.
Competitive formats are often one of the least popular game modes. It’s a bit hard to prove this, because companies don’t always release numbers. Blizzard admitted this with SC2, the vast majority of players never queued for a competitive 1v1 match, co-op became by far the most popular format in terms of games played. You saw something similar with complaints about available modes in halo when infinite released.
Esports are actually pretty boring to watch 90% of the time. Most have a major lack of parity so there’s at best a handful of teams/players that are actually competitive, so many matches are one sided.