The person I saw on Twitch got a ban until January 2038.

Evenly-matched teams won't need any.

We are not talking about evenly-matched teams. The integrity of dirt-tier matches is ruined by pros on fresh accounts. People so infatuated with a child's view of "competition" that nothing matters besides winning. Teamwork? Sportsmanship? Fun? Fuck that, just win win win win win win win.

Skill-based matchmaking is already a judgement call for how well you're supposed to do. And each long-ass match is rife with ways to judge how well a player is doing - moment to moment - relative to their teammates, their situation, and their character. Measuring and rewarding individual skill is possible even if your team gets utterly destroyed. Or carried by one cheating bastard.

Games can be fun to play for reasons besides 'did you win.' Success and growth can be about more than 'don't lose.' This is a game that takes ten people forty-five minutes to play. Reducing it to a binary outcome, as if that's the only metric for "the integrity of competition," is the root problem.

Zero respect for any form 'you just hate [blank]' in any detailed discussion of [blank].

These are real problems. Valve is making a big show of dealing with them. But over two decades of tweaking and expanding this genre of games, with their absurd number of interconnected systems, nobody seems to have done anything to avert these systemic issues. They just label bad behavior and viciously punish anyone who does it.

It's a video game. Unless someone is outright hacking, they can only do what the developers allow them to do. This specific genre - this competitive multiplayer game, distinct from all others - is a bottomless well of toxicity. That is no accident. It is an unavoidable consequence of the rules these games have chosen.

Modifying the rules is blase. It's not some ruinous event; it happens every month. So modifying the rules to avoid the worst aspects of the community seems eminently desirable. Especially if it only applies to the low-stakes, newbie-friendly games where high-tier assholes want to lurch in and ruin it for everyone.

To be crystal clear:

This does not have to affect high-tier play, at all.

There is no reason whatsoever to handicap pros and wannabes playing at their absolute sweatiest.

This is about dirt-league players getting stomped by people committing bannable offenses. The fact anyone even wants to commit those offenses, is a systemic problem. It is shaped by the developers' decisions, and different decisions would have different outcomes. Every system is perfectly designed to produces its observed results.

If you're not willing to discuss systemic solutions then you're not ready to address systemic problems.

I've seen "competitive" games turn level-headed friends into seething piles of swears. They aren't having fun, they admit to not having fun, they acknowledge that they hate it... But they keep going because ranks, clout, commitment....

Games should have stakes, but modern ranking systems are designed to addict the exact same way that loot-boxes and other similar mechanics do. They hook and pull in deeper and the only way I've seen friends quit is when it gets so bad they go cold turkey. And only then do they look back at months or even years of playing a game, and see nothing but a waste of time and money.

But it works! These systems pull players into the grind like they're getting paid to play, even when they are hating every second.

I love some of these games, but I only learned to maximise my enjoyment of them once I began playing them casually. And it's such a pity that my friends who haven't learned the trick of not taking it so seriously, burn out on them, while I just keep going and having fun. I run out of people to play with on a regular basis because of this.

Just one factor of the design of these systems is that they have you feeling like you have to consistently win, in order to be worth something. And as that is obviously an impossibility, it leads to every loss taking three times more than what a win is able to give.

Thanks for demonstrating the problem.

This design creates toxicity instead of competition, and your hot take is 'so you hate competition?' Yeah sure dude, LeBron dominating a junior-high ballgame is what sportsmanship is all about. His team is winning by a lot so they must be super competitive. What a shame we can't judge individual players. Apparently. Stop measuring assists, all that matters is the almighty W.

If we're talking about people playing badly... on purpose... walk me through how that's exemplifying competitive games. Is opposition to that behavior some kind of betrayal? Because if so, you should be furious at Valve, since they're attacking that behavior in the most blunt-force ways possible.

After all - why should games be enjoyable? Losing should feel bad. It can't just be less fun, it has to be miserable. That's motivation! Shaking hands after a game is for cowards! In fact, if you lose a platinum match? Banned for life. Hardcore permadeath rules.

That system will surely encourage healthy competition without making any player scream their lungs out.

> Low-skill games are where you'd expect

the part everyone's performatively sneering at. We're talking about smurfing. We're talking about matches between newbies. Stop making me underline this. Y'all can read.