Re: Hate Thread
I hate being frustrated by bullshit..
About a year or so ago, I always used to play TF2, it was just the game I'd always frequent to whenever I was bored. Sure, it had its faults, but it was one of its kind, so its what I stuck to.
But, much like what happened to skype after microsoft took over, things just started going downhill, specifically in the form of updates..
At first it wasn't so bad.. Cosmetic-only crates? Meh, I never used crates anyway, just more clutter for my inventory.
Then came the CS:GO style re-skins.. That was an immediate blaring alarm in my head. TF2 was fucking up..
THEN came the final nail in the coffin.. Competitive mode.. At first, I welcomed it. "Oh great, now all the cancerous tryhard soldier/sniper mains finally have their own little private club house to roost in, and pub servers will be free of their menace." I thought aloud.
But oh, how naive I was to think that.. It actually had the opposite effect. Now there were twice as many tryhards roaming around, and at night when the comp servers cooled down, they'd all pile into the pub servers like drunken roided-up ex-marines just trashing the place and just destroying anyone who dared get in their way, while everyone else just watched helplessly.
But, since I was so attached to TF2, I tolerated it all.. I'd come to the conclusion TF2 had officially died, and these updates were essentially the corpse collecting a few flies, but it was still just one-of-a-kind, so it's what I had.
That was, until overwatch came along.. At first, I instantly hated it. I follow the logic that if something is hyped to an insane degree, it MUST be bad unless proven otherwise, because something inherently good would not need hype in the first place, all you'd have to do is advertise it, and let the customer reviews speak for the game, not your bloated marketing campaign.
I begrudgingly played the game when pressured to by my friends, and slowly but surely warmed up to it. I kept discovering small little details that made it just increments almost-as-good as TF2.. But those increments just kept piling up until it was just as good as TF2.. And then eventually, better..
Crates that don't require money to open, that you get every level? Well, there's no new weapons in this game so meh.
A level system that unintentionally counts more so just to measure how long someone's been playing the game, as opposed to how good they are? That's kinda nifty and well-spirited.
Quick concise matches strictly limited to 3v3 or 6v6, where genuine teamwork is not only encouraged, but is almost REQUIRED to achieve victory? I'm officially sold. Count me in.
A balanced system where no matter what kind of attempt you make at game-breakingly OP tactics, there's always a character that can counter it regardless of skill level? Well, TF2 definitely doesn't have that, there's abusive tactics out the ass in there that can only be countered by an equally frothy-mouthed tryhard..
And there I was, happily playing overwatch, with TF2 just being a fleeting memory in my head.
That is, until one of my older friends convinced me to try and play TF2 with them again.. At first, it was nostalgic.. All the weapon variety, the basic but decent controls, the cartooney but simplistic graphic design, I was almost starting to have fun.
And then we entered a server with a tryhard soldier in it, and I visibly bunched over in my desk, my heart sank, and I groaned.. Because the second I saw that motherfucker twitching his mouse around to rocket jump so tediously perfectly to maximize his movement speed, flawlessly blowing up players, I knew, right then and there, "Yup.. This was why I stopped playing TF2."
It doesn't matter what class you are, how good you are, where you are, or how many other people are attacking it, if there's a tryhard soldier on EITHER team, the entire server gets the fun sucked out of it like a massive mosquito just pinned you down and stuck its needle right in your neck.
And if he has a pocket, it's just compounded. There's a threshold in gaming where getting unnaturally good with a single class can enable you to use tactics which give you an advantage.. And then, there's a specific class becoming an unfairly powerful juggernaut who puts all other classes to shame because they are imbalanced. The soldier from TF2 is the latter, and everyone knows it.. There are other tryhard classes, but the most popular by far is the soldier.
In overwatch, the exact same situation, you've got a tryhard pharah with a mercy pocket. Sure, if your team sucks, that pocket-pharah will just sit there in the sky and completely obliterate them, but there's many ways to counter it without having to be a tryhard. You can go rein and prevent her from damaging your team, you can go widow and snipe her out of the sky, or you can go zenyatta and chaos-orb her to make her a more enticing target to any hitscan users in your team. The point being, in overwatch, a tryhard can always be bested with tactics, it's not a matter of who's got a twitchier mouse or bigger FOV, it's a matter of who's smarter, and who can use what to their advantage to oppose the enemy. You can say overwatch takes the general FPS mold and "dumbs it down" a bit with the MMO-ish balancing qualities, and you'd be right, overwatch is dumbed down a bit, but that makes it all the more fun.
If you're really the kind of person who genuinely can only gain fun solely from winning, and not having an entertaining and fair match, well, there's always the call of duty series. And maybe halo if you want to be a hipster.
There, I feel better getting that off my chest.