Comment by ndriscoll
1 month ago
Competitive gaming cannot possibly be huge. Like literally it is impossible for 99% of gamers to be competitive in any meaningful sense (if you play a game with 1M players and are in the top 1%, congrats, there are 10,000 people who are better than you. You are still unremarkable). It never was huge; it was just a niche you were in. There's massively more people that are just playing the game too blow off steam.
"Competitive football cannot possibly be huge"
"Competitive tennis cannot possibly be huge"
"Competitive coding cannot possibly be huge"
People play competition sports. They except no, or minimal amounts of cheating. Your personal feelings about it don't matter. The kid that plays basketball with 12 years olds on saturday mornings has the right to not have to deal with cheaters, and it doesn't matter if he's in the top .0001% or a shitty player that cannot distinguish his hands from his ears.
Have a quick look at the ladder on Counter Strike, or Faceit, or ranked play on League of Legends/Valorant/Whatever: it's not a niche. These games requiring kernel AC no matter the type of play is another subject, but people play to compare themselves to other, massively.
The kid that plays basketball with 12 year olds on Saturday mornings has the right to just go use the court at the park without being strip searched and drug tested because it's just a game and he's there to have fun. He actually does not have some right to demand no one else cheat, or even that they use the court to specifically play with some established rules. If other people are there playing HORSE or "what time is it Mr Fox", that's fine.
People who get intensely serious about 12 year olds playing basketball because their kid will be in the NBA some day so everyone needs to take the game very seriously so their kid can practice have rightly always been mocked. The entire point is to have fun.
I've played in Friday night sports leagues where people were drinking during the tournaments (and sometimes that's the point, c.f. sloshball). There are absolutely tons of people that do not take even the "competitions" seriously, and even more that aren't even serious enough to join a league.
Video games being something people play at home, I'd probably be surprised if there weren't more people that regularly play any given esports title under the influence of marijuana or alcohol than there are those who take it as a serious thing[0].
On competitive coding, Advent of Code removed the global leaderboard exactly because "people took things too seriously, going way outside the spirit of the contest".
[0] A quick search turns up this poll in the competitive halo subreddit where 40% say they play high. I doubt that's a good sample, but I'm sure the true number is not insignificant: https://www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveHalo/comments/10mvihq/we...
Congratulations on living in a country that doesn't take playing sports with integrity I guess. I've been playing handball, soccer, swimming, from age 8+ on, in a club. Every single saturday game was taken seriously by players. Yes, we fucked around on other games, but competition has always been on every player's mind. If you don't want the pressure of competition, you just tell the coach, and you're not put in for those games.
And no, it's not "parents who think their kid will be in the NBA", it's that children who register in a club want to play competitively. On a country of 70 million, we have about 5 million registered players in different sports, the majority of which take integrity to heart.
[0] A poll on a subreddit, on a dead game with absolutely zero serious competitive scene does not count as "serious research". Yes, players play shitfaced also. The vast majority do not queue for competitive games and just fuck around in normals. Whether that's on modern games with dedicated queues for comp play, or games with dedicated leagues like ETF2L, Faceit and others.
> in any meaningful sense
Who said anything about meaning? People being shit at the game invalidates that the game ruleset is competitive?
It invalidates the idea that we need to take it seriously and have locked down computers with remote attestation to play games. People who take games seriously are a very small niche. You are in a bubble if you think otherwise.
This is like saying we need to institute drug testing at all parks to play football. Cheating in sports is a problem that very few players are concerned with. Caring about who wins isn't even common. Most are just kicking a ball around with their mates.
People who even know what remote attestation is are an even smaller niche.
> You are in a bubble if you think otherwise.
Yeah I'm the one in a bubble because I think players that play competitive games expect competitive integrity, regardless of their skill level.
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