If there was favorable placing in the next game based on 3 sided team placement, would that help, or make the next game feel even harsher(/too harsh?)
No. What would help is no “vote who loses” rounds.
The other three team games are things like a race pushing a ball, who can jump through the most hoops, etc.
But two of the games are “the team with the least things loses” and the other teams make them have less things by taking them away.
If the least things is just jumping through fewer hoops, everyone is incentivized to jump through more hoops, regardless of team or colors.
If the game is push the ball to the finish line and get first or second, to be sure to win you want to be across the line first, and when that happens your entire team is removed from the mini-game. The two two teams that are left then have a one-on-one race. First is best, then second is needed.
It’s a pure game design/game theory thing. In society we don’t want a majority of people voting against the continued existence of a minority of the population. It feels wrong, and we design democracies to stop that happening.
I was a citizen of a country where part of the population voted to take away the rights and liberties of other people. That was the Brexit vote. To fix it I had to become a citizen of a different country.
Why does playing the “vote who loses” mini-games in Fall Guys make me feel the same emotions as the morning after Brexit results?
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What you’re saying about some of the games in Fall Guys is absolutely correct. The team based rounds make for a very political situation where player skill and input doesn’t matter much.
What’ you’re missing is that Fall Guys isn’t supposed to be a serious competitive game. You’re not supposed to care about winning or losing it, just like you wouldn’t care about winning or losing at Mario Party. Yes, the games technically have winners and losers, but they are primarily just silly.
For example, the ball pushing game. Two other teams gang up to push your ball backwards and your team loses, that feels bad. But as a player you are supposed to be out there trolling the other teams. It’s your chance to have fun being the bad guy sabotaging the other teams. And since nobody cares who wins, since it is such a silly game, you can have a good laugh whether you win or lose.
Fuck me.
How many times do I have to tell you: “Stop telling me I’m feeling emotions wrong.”
I can’t “just make myself feel a different way about something” just because I know that’s what I should feel so I don’t feel bad. That’s not the way emotions work!
I’m not missing anything about Fall Guys. I know how it is meant to be played, and how I’m meant to enjoy it, and how it’s not serious and everything else. That’s why I said in my earlier post: “Super fun game! I love the looseness of the controls and the randomness.”
But there’s nothing I can do to stop myself feeling bummed out by the “vote to lose” games. Nothing. I can’t tell myself “THIS FEELS GOOD” because it just doesn’t. I’m not a robot who can program emotional responses out of myself.
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you need to remove your emotions like Scott here.
… utterly fails to find a good Robot emotion gif.
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If you can’t change yourself and are not capable of taking the game as seriously as it’s meant to be taken (not at all), that’s ok. Work on that, or don’t. That’s up to you.
But if you at least recognize that the game isn’t meant to be taken seriously, don’t go and suggest that they should change the whole game just because of how it makes you, one person, feel. It works perfectly well as the silly party game that it is. If it was a serious competitive game, I would agree that the team round mechanics are inappropriate. Given what the game is clearly trying to achieve, I actually think the team rounds are necessary to give it a little shake up, as all solo rounds would get kind of samey.
I don’t remove my emotions. I simply judge things without taking my own emotions into consideration in that judgement.
Honest question: how did you get what you write from what I’ve expressed so far?
Me:
“Super fun game! I love the looseness of the controls and the randomness.”
You:
“What’ you’re missing is that Fall Guys isn’t supposed to be a serious competitive game.”
Me:
“So while losing in every other mini-game, level, race and team event feels fun, losing at a “vote who loses” game just feels bad. It’s not enjoyable.”
You:
“Given what the game is clearly trying to achieve, I actually think the team rounds are necessary to give it a little shake up, as all solo rounds would get kind of samey.”
In summary, what I’m not saying:
I never said the game should be taken seriously. I never said there should be no team rounds. I never even said they should change it just to suit my feelings.
What I am saying:
There is one specific type of three-team mini-game that makes me feel bummed out. I have analysed why, and am now sharing that reason with the forum.
Also, just for Scott: FEELINGS are REAL.
Speaking as a robot, what the fuck is this shit.
Here’s how art and games and all kinds of entertainment works: it makes your emotions change from one state to another.
If you judge something “without taking your own emotions into consideration” then how exactly are you judging it?
Are you only considering how you think it should change the emotions of other people?!?!?
I’m literally at a loss. How the hell does your brain work?
Just so you know, you are the weird one here. I’m pretty sure everyone else in the forum acknowledges their emotions and feelings are real to themselves, and have value.
That part I totally get. Like lets say we want to get a morale judgement. I can see how you arrive at several different culturally relative morale judgments. I can also see how you can arrive at different philosophical judgments based on different philosophical systems. And obviously further that a legal judgement is based on a different set of rules than all those other ones. I don’t have to consider in any way how I feel about something for all that.
So Scott is appealing to something external to his feelings. I’m not sure if that thing though is documented specifically outside of Scott-law though. I understand that in like king-making and orthogames and blah blah that “kingmaking bad” in a certain competitive landscape, but in another competitive landscape it’s literally the game in itself sometimes.
Like I grasp that mario party when you get to the end of the game and it just RNG starts handing out extra stars, I don’t really feel anything about that anymore, though I did at a time. Because I’m aware it’s irrelevant now. You probably shouldn’t, in some sense, let yourself feel too much about stupid RNG at the end of the game. I don’t have a codex though that tells me that to appeal to.
I get all that, but in this case the entire thrust of my analysis of the game was “why does this make me feel this emotion?” There just no response to this that can begin “first, you should work to not feel emotions” or “first, let’s not consider emotions”.
I’m talking about emotions! They are real! And why do I feel this specific emotion after this one specific mini-game?
Because it’s kinda bullshit.
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Right. It’s a different kind of bullshit from a random bit of fruit landing on your head and knocking you away from the finish line. When that randomness happens, it’s a crazy moment and you laugh.
One source of randomness is inside the game engine, and another source is enough players on two teams randomly picking the third to lose. One feels like a true part of the game, and the other feels bullshit.
Fortnite got less play and was less popular when they made it slightly more fair and competitive. Those metrics returned to normal and then grew when they made it less fair/competitive, and more random.
I do think Fall Guys would die overnight if they implemented anything that gave players significant skill input beyond randomness and direct politics. Like it or not, politics is what most people are seeking in their games =( Especially in high-player-count games.
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Yeah… pursuit of a more perfect “theoretical” game has backfired on a lot of developers in the past. You guys don’t particularly care for the game, but WoW has had tons of theoretical “fixes” to try to push the game to be more of an esport or to put everyone on a level playing field… and it’s just not the game for that. Could there be a game more in that genre that was still possibly an e-sport? I honestly still think it’s possible. But not wow. Not the playerbase of that game. Not the people that are still at 15 years choosing to play that game.
This game could never be an esport. If there was any way to be reliably excellent at it, most players would be permanently driven away.
Spectation could be, at best, equivalent to a Game Show. They were also often lacking in significant skill input for a variety of reasons.
I don’t think there’s a huge politics element in Fall Guys. It’s only a factor in three of the seven team mini-games, and only totally broken in one. And that’s why it sticks out for me when that broken game pops up.
Three Team Modes
- Egg Scramble: Your team’s basket must have the most eggs. - Vote who loses. There’s literally nothing the losing team can do except WAIT FOR 90 SECONDS until it is confirmed
- Rock ‘N’ Roll: Push a giant ball through a hindered course. - starts as a straight race, with only a minor vote who loses factor at the end
- Hoopsey Daisy: Jump and dive through the hoops to get more points for your team in the given time. - no politics at all, everyone is just trying to dive through hoops
- Hoarders: Make sure that when the time runs out, the ball is in your team’s zone. - some vote who loses factor, but with much more randomness than Egg Scramble as it’s played with highly bouncy balls*
The “politics” of the other non-team mini-games is much more about “follow the crowd and the doors will open for you and not others” or “the half of players on this side of the seesaw obstacle are more likely to fall”.
They tried to make world of warcraft an esport briefly back when I was in highschool. They had what is effectively 2v2, 3v3 and 5v5 arena modes which, iirc was on espn2. It went about as well as you would expect. No spectator knew was was going on and any player who knew the game found it boring because the optimal way to play the game is boring.
The political aspect makes you feel that way because you are a nice person. Ruthlessly voting for another team to lose is enjoyed by sadists. The same part of human nature that enjoys trolling and griefing enjoys that game mechanic.
For most games and most developers, the design decisions that allow that behavior to proliferate were unintentional. These games usually employ external measures, like moderation and reporting, to curtail it.
In games like Fall Guys that behavior is explicitly permitted, and even condoned. You can tell from the game that they want to allow players to behave in this nasty way. Because it’s not a serious competitive game the expectation is that there are no hard feelings. Players are free to explore and enjoy their darker tendencies in a lighthearted place where nobody is actually hurt. Just like how FPS games give people a place to explore and enjoy guns and murder even if they would never touch a gun or hurt a soul IRL.
There’s a Japanese guy I watch on Twitch during lunch sometimes named ggseppuku. I’ve mentioned him before, he plays Mario Maker 2 on endless expert mode. He has beaten well over 33,000 levels in a row without game over. And most of the time when he dies, even if it’s to a very poorly designed bullshit level, he laughs. When most people would throw the controller in anger, he laughs, skips the level and moves on. He’s obviously good at platforming, but I’ve seen plenty of speedrunners with more skills. It’s not his skill, but his attitude that has allowed him to carry on and complete so many levels. I know I would be throwing the controller well before 1000 levels, so I really admire his approach. It’s exactly the kind of person you need to be to get full enjoyment out of a game like Fall Guys if you don’t enjoy participating in the mean spirited behavior.
If you can’t bring yourself to not care about winning and losing, or if you don’t enjoy being the greifer who is mean to others, then games like Fall Guys are not going to be a good time.