Does the skill ceiling/pro scene affect how you view a game?

Is that type of skill ceiling important to a lot of people even if you'll probably never hit it?

I'm thinking, CS/Dota/Tetris/SC2/SC:BW type of expertise and mastery that show up in some games.

I've noticed that a lot of the games I get into are ones I'm awful at but still enjoy checking out the pro scene or twitch streamers who are mindbogglingly good.

I think it's important for some games to have these kinds of players. It helps make the balance more obvious for developers and usually leads to a better polished game.

On the other hand I really dislike this for other games where it leads to a more sterile uninteresting game. I enjoy Halo and Smash Bros but the pro scenes for these games tend to limit how these games get developed. More sterile less crazy.

Nope, not even a little. I have an actual job, I don't need to be a professional gamer or compete with those who are. Play a game cause it is fun, not cause I am stupidly good at it and own others or enjoy the "competition" aspects.

I think looking at what some of these 'pros' are capable of is super interesting, especially in games that I never took the time to get good at. People who focus on one game for a very long time gain a certain ability to look at the game differently then the casual player. Same with speedrunners, there is just a different way of seeing their game entirely that allows for some really crazy seeming play to casual players.

I guess the skill ceiling affects my views of the game? I don't think RTS games are fun at all to play at anything but higher level play, and I have no interest in investing the time/practice in reaching that high level, so I checked out of RTS games forever ago. Ditto for fighting games. No thanks. I just have better ways to spend my gaming time than practicing one competitive game enough that I'm good at it.

I've never really gotten into the speed run or super difficulty stuff. I look at something like the hardest modes of Devil May Cry done flawlessly, or read about somebody doing the hardest Metal Gear challenges, and my mind goes a little numb to be honest. It's just a sort of thing I can't fathom doing myself and so watching it I kind of zone out instead of focusing on it for whatever reason.

Kirk Hamilton I think it was recently wrote a really detailed end-game guide for Destiny and - while I've recently been playing 4-5 hours a day in the end-game and many of those tips would probably be very useful and time saving - I just thought why take the initial effort if I wouldn't have figured that out in the first place? That's another gaming hangup of mine, I will follow a guide as a last resort (or if I'm replaying a game like GTA V and missed out on the assassination bonuses before) but for the most part I have this aversion to doing something or learning something in a game that I wouldn't have intuited naturally. Destiny has broken me at times in that respect, but even then I've only looked up good farming routes for the upgrade materials, not boss strategies or what the best guns are or whatever else.

It's probably why I'd be awful at upper level MMO stuff and have never been into strategy games. Those genres are steeped in studying other players and taking advice, I just want to find out what I can find out, a sort of curiosity about my curiosity.

I prefer games with a high skill ceiling, not necessarily a pro scene as they're not all multiplayer games, but I like to be able to do something good and feel like it was due to my skills and not just the game doing things for me. It's what makes a game like Mirror's Edge or Ninja Gaiden fun, you can play through it once and fumble around a lot, but it gets very satisfying when you know what you're doing.

For multiplayer games with a pro scene, I guess it depends on how frustrating facing a 'pro' is. I'm fine with playing Street Fighter against much better players because at the end of the day I'm still playing Street Fighter, but if my skill level limits the amount of time I spend actually playing, for example if I'm always dead in COD because I suck a it, I probably won't like it much.

@karkarov: the competition can be recreation. I got pretty serious into injustice for a while. Never won a local tournament let alone get into top 8, but I kept entering and learning because I found it fun. I even went to a major, knowing I would not make it very far. I competed while losing consistently, had in depth talks about character matchups and learned frame data. For me this was there I had fun with this particular game.

For me it was literally playing a game for fun, with a slight chance that someone will hand me some cash if I played well enough. Key word here is play.

I like playing CSGO, but you don't even have to be in the ballpark of "pro" skill to do decently.

I think some games cater to the pro scene a little too much considering they represent a fraction of the player base. I really love fighting games, but I don't think Street Fighter is very fun until you master all of the systems, and since there aren't very many modes in that game, and the story is paper thin, it doesn't feel like there's enough there for a casual player. Sure Street Fighter is super successful competitively, but I think they'd probably get more sales and please more people if they didn't spend 90% of their attention on high level play.

Well I only get pissed off if the balance the developers do affect the single player portion ie Dark Souls 1 and 2 , fucking hated when they gimped the cool stuff only because of the whinny PvPers crying babies >:( which ends up affecting the PvE portion. So in a way I hate the so called "competitive part" when this happens. But it is awesome to see how cool stuff can get in fighting games , but then again they create tier lists and shit like that , which makes people not really explore other characters and ends up being a small roster in the end and then becmes just a matter of seeing the same fight all the time. As you can see it is a bit of a love/hate thingy with me

I'm half-and-half with this. Like, I like seeing the crazy stuff that is possible in a game at the highest level, whether it's a moba or a fighting game or a speedrun of a game I never considered to have a "skill ceiling" in the first place. Though at this point I've no real desire to reach a level like that, especially in games with a kinda strict meta-game like League of Legends: I'd rather play the game in the way I like rather than what's preferred at the moment. So I guess I like games with a high skill ceiling in theory but when it comes to playing the game I don't care all that much.

I'm terrible at fighting games and love them, so no, it doesn't make a difference.

For the most part E Sports have absolutely no impact on a game's quality, however there's plenty of games that happen to be amazing while also having a high skill ceiling (Brood War, Super Metroid, Street Fighter 2). Hearthstone is well on the way to being one of the biggest E Sports and while I'm sure Kolento is way better than anyone that doesn't stop RNG from being at least 30-40% of the game.

@aetheldod: Dark Souls skill in singleplayer is undeniable but the multiplayer facet doesn't really have the same feeling to it, and it wasn't intended to really; it's just a gankfest with as much abuse of overpowered stuff as is possible.

it's not important to me but it's certainly a plus.
i'm always watching sc2 and it's really impressive the details some developers deal with.
even just looking at how the fog of war works and differences in each unit and structures field of vision alone is really interesting.
this is what's really awesome about games. it can be super artistic like ico, tell great stories like gone home, or be nail biting sport like sc.

I only care so far as it impacts the attitude of the community. I'm never going to be a top-tier player in any game, so I don't really care about what that level of play is like.

But in the case of, say, popular MOBAs, the attitude seems to be that reaching that level of skill is the only goal. In something like CS there are millions of other players at my skill level playing for fun, but in LoL or something similar, other players only seem to care about executing perfect plays and winning matches. I don't want to play with those people, and I don't want to have to deal with a community turned toxic by these attitudes.

I definitely enjoy knowing that that level of skill is possible to obtain, even if I haven't a chance of getting there. Its why I've spent hours attempting to get into Dota and Starcraft.

Although I'm now past trying to reach those levels, thank god.

Not at all. I'll watch pro players and appreciate what they do but I'll never play a game anywhere near their level. The one thing I sometimes dislike is when people with my level of skill assume the attitudes they think pros have. Basically what @laszlokovacs said.

Sure, to a certain extent. People who take things too seriously tend to sap the fun out of things, and not just games. Folks who treat Smash Bros. as a SERIOUS BUSINESS legitimate fighting game instead of the fun party experience it was has ruined that entire scene for me, and any interest in that franchise's future.

Nope. I have no interest in the pro scene and I tackle games based on how much content I see rather then how good I can get at it.

I enjoy watching high level play in fighting games even if I'm not good at them. It's good to know that there is a ton of potential in the game. It makes for great spectating too.

Sure, it affects me, but usually just for the negative. Most of the esports games feel incredibly dull to me, in the aim for perfect competitive balance developers tend to remove the most fun aspects of the games. Quake 3 may be the only exception I can think of, but even then, I don't like it was much as Unreal Tournament, which I thought had much more fun and imaginative weapons.

There's nothing I despise more than "same map 24/7" servers, so MOBA's are a big no-no for me, and most esports focused games seem to have the one map everybody plays over and over, whereas I had the most fun exploring the community maps in old school FPSes, or even the random map generator in the Command & Conquer series..

As far as Dota or LOL are concerned, not really I don't really care, I'm sure that if you get a bunch of people and they are well coordinated they will do well but I don't really care if they make it or not, in many ways an individual player can be made redundant by the choice of heroes of the other team.

However for SC2 I do because I feel its telling as the balance of the game as well as browsing ideas I can personally execute almost at full efficiency. The pro scene lets you see what's possible, things you can work on, such as marine micro, or roach positioning.

I don't tend to play games with super high skill ceilings like DOTA 2 or Starcraft 2. I think it's because I know I'll never reach the skill level of upper tier players and I just feel like i'm bad the whole time. Also their communities tend to be pretty toxic which I don't care for. I think all of those games are great though, just not for me.

I don't care about the 'pro scene,' but I absolutely care about skill ceiling and competitive balance. I'm pretty good at video games, so competitive games with a high skill ceiling and depth/nuance are generally the ones I get really into.

It certainly does. While I've never gotten that great at an RTS or a fighting game (though trust me, I've tried), my line of thinking has always been that on the chance that I do someday get halfway decent at the game, wouldn't I get bored sooner at the game where I hit the skill ceiling early and just chill there, or have a really high skill ceiling where there always seems to be something new to explore?

It's why games like SC: BW, SF2 and SF3 have endured so long, because for the people who really enjoy those games, they're still learning something new about them, new strategies, new metas, new mindgames, even now. And that's not taking the competitive scene into account really at all. But if a game has a high skill ceiling and is fun, you can probably count on it having a good competitive scene for quite a while.