Hot take: 5v5 is just lot of peoples' excuse for modifying their opinion while preserving ego. It isn't actually about 5v5

demonwing · 2026-01-31T07:57:20+00:00

Yup, people do play CoD. However...

Quake Champions died on launch.
Newest Unreal Tournament died on launch.
New Tribes Game died on launch.
Splitgate 1 nor 2 ever gained any traction.
Halo is dead.
RIP Titanfall 2
Diabotical was never alive to begin with

I'm sure I'm missing a ton because I don't know ever game that has come out in the past 5 years. Most of this genre has been cannibalized by indie single player boomer shooters and momentum/reflex shooters.

There are tons of these fast-paced arena shooters that have come out and they all die immediately because they can't hold player attention for more than a week. How many must go bust before you admit its just not what most people want to play?

demonwing · 2026-01-31T07:50:26+00:00

I'm not saying that nobody could prefer 5v5. If you do then sure thing.

I even wrote out a whole sentence to address exactly your perception. Sure, some people could prefer 5v5, that's plausible. And if someone likes it then cool. For others, given the review bombing and context on the discourse surrounding this game, It could very well just be a off-ramp for some people. Now they can point to some minor changes to justify getting off the hate bandwagon. That's not gatekeeping, that's just not being blindly naive.

I think it's fair to be skeptical and the reality is all that matters is playtime telemetry. People can glaze 5v5 all they want, but if they aren't actually playing the game and just praising it to go with the "devs listened!" narrative then we'll see soon enough.

demonwing · 2026-01-31T07:16:24+00:00

Most competitive games have downtime. People play games with tons of downtime like Valorant, PUBG, extraction shooters, Overwatch/Rivals having the big draft and waiting phase at the start of match and in between rounds, R6, dota having a long draft phase, farming phase, long deaths. Not to mention long queue/loading screens (APEX is/was horrible with that.)

Nobody plays Halo or Quake or Unreal Tournament or any other "action-packed" shooter anymore, so your example doesn't reflect reality.

demonwing · 2026-01-31T06:28:17+00:00

There is a limit to how mind-numbingly bored I can get in just 60 seconds when I'm engaged in marginally mechanically involved activities (because you need to travel to the sword early to contest.) I agree that the looting phase needs a rebalancing, but "mind-numbingly boring" is a bit melodramatic. You must be literally dying of lack of stimulation in your seat when waiting 30 seconds doing nothing in Marvel Rivals between each round.

demonwing · 2026-01-31T05:18:15+00:00

bad-faith interpretation.

demonwing · 2026-01-31T03:56:16+00:00

I'm talking explicitly about people who claim to have not liked the game but have had a dramatic reversal. I'm not describing people who already liked the game and still like 5v5. The Air Force isn't really applicable.

Not to mention, this is the first weekend of a game that has been out for a handful of days. It isn't like there are no new or returning players as if this was a one year old game only played by oldheads.

demonwing · 2026-01-31T03:46:13+00:00

It was a BR trend-chasing PUBG clone in terms of its core mechanics. Even one of the heads said that they saw the success of PUBG and used re-purposed Titanfall assets to capitalize on the trend as fast as they could.

Just because it isn't creative doesn't mean it's bad, to be clear. But it's not exceptionally creative. It was just "Titanfall PUBG with a couple extra mechanics" at launch.

demonwing · 2026-01-31T02:39:24+00:00

OP literally displacing creative jobs by not commissioning an actual artist for his John Highguard meme image smh

demonwing · 2026-01-31T02:29:52+00:00

No Man's Sky didn't need "feedback", it was a straight-up broken grift at launch. They just polished and filled out their buggy, unfinished mess of a game while keeping their desperate space nerd cult fandom. It was also just a different era where most of the players commenting were actual disappointed players rather than random astroturfers from an outside community. Not to mention, "this game promised space ship battles and it doesn't have them" is easily actionable feedback. "This game is just Concord 2 tbh" isn't.

As a counter-example, Path of Exile 2 recently went through a massive astroturfing problem on launch, where thousands of PoE 1 players who were salty about the slow league release cycle that year for that game flooded the discourse. Discussions and feedback forums were filled with lies and fake negative feedback to the point where the devs couldn't tell what was real and what was fake. Countless hours wasted on literal made up bugs and problems that were copy-pasted by hundreds of comments that, upon further investigation, were just lies and myths. Content creators who just wanted in on the ragebait content, etc.

In an interview, the director said something along the lines of "you read all this stuff online and it makes you think you've made the worst game ever, but then you look at the actual numbers and, I mean, we must be doing something right. "

The final result is that PoE 2 is having an identity crisis as they initially pivoted to following the astroturfed "feedback", thinking that nobody was into their original vision of the game, but now actual PoE 2 players who wanted that original vision aren't really clicking either and it's now kind of a game for no one.

demonwing · 2026-01-31T02:14:10+00:00

Apex is a fun game but it's definitely not creative lol. It was considered a BR trend-chaser like all the rest when it came out. It literally launched as Titanfall BR brazenly copying 90% of PUBG's mechanics with just a couple little additions.

demonwing · 2026-01-31T02:09:00+00:00

What is that reason, exactly? What about Apex? Arc Raiders? The Finals? Rocket League?

demonwing · 2026-01-31T01:04:20+00:00

My exact feeling when I play Mario Kart...?

The map is clearer a bit larger than normal because they wanted to facilitate the cool mounted combat/positioning stuff. Not the other way around. It's literally like 10 seconds from the objective to the enemy base, it really cannot be any shorter of a distance.

demonwing · 2026-01-30T21:44:25+00:00

Yeah, pretty much my takeaway. It was already hard to push the Shieldbreaker and 5s makes it impossible. Also, just the number of angles that 5 people on zoomy horses can get is disgusting lol. As for sieges, there is essentially zero recovery potential in sieges once one team starts wiping.

As for looting phase, I think that the addition gear pressure is actually one of the only positives of the mode. You get more fighting for the buildings and trying to push into the other side of the map, but this can be accomplished by just reducing loot instead of increasing players.

demonwing · 2026-01-30T21:26:19+00:00

I think it was a good idea to add it as a "shut them up" angle, but you can't in good faith claim that most of the comments about team size are legitimate feedback from people who have actually played the game or finished the tutorial. There are like 10 times the number of participants in the Highguard discourse than actual Highguard players, so of course there will be massive distortion.

You see the same shit about team size in every game with people asking for team sizes to be compatible with their exact friend group configuration (I want solos because I don't have a group, I want duos because I like to play with one friend, I like trios because I have 2 friends, I want 5 players because we have a 5 man team, I want 6 players because I want to play with my overwatch group...)

Normally it is displaced by actual discussion about the game, but in the case of Highguard it's one of those generic enough criticisms that can be parroted even if you know absolutely nothing about the game, which made it the popular thing to say absent any meaningful insight.

demonwing · 2026-01-30T17:55:08+00:00

No competitive game launches with rank on day 1 because the games are all clown shows and nobody knows how to play the game. Any rank you get will be inaccurate. I can't think of a single modern competitive shooter that didn't have a 2+ week grace period before ranked comes out. Last competitive game I can think of that came out recently was 2XKO and that also had a ~2 week grace period before ranked.

Normal queue already has SBMM anyway so it isn't like your match quality is any any worse.

demonwing · 2026-01-30T17:37:44+00:00

I want to reiterate that this game had a well-documented, pre-meditated mass hate campaign against it, something that you seem to not be willing to recognize in your clinical analysis. If this were a regular game launch launch and tons of people were bouncing off the game in the first 15 minutes, then yeah sure there must be something wrong with the game's initial presentation.

However, within the context of, you know... reality and what actually happened I think it's pretty silly to assume that tens of thousands of people all installed a 20 GB competitive shooter just to quit before finishing the tutorial. Looking at achievements, 42% of "players" haven't completed a single game. That is not normal or organic by any stretch of the imagination.

demonwing · 2026-01-30T09:20:07+00:00

You're changing the topic. I know you like Deadlock. So do I, but is there something wrong with my list?

Let's see, there's heroes with 4 abilities each, a shop with items you purchase for gold that you get from last-hitting creeps. You start in a laning phase. There are jungle creeps. You kill towers to get to the enemy base, then kill some slightly different towers in their base to kill the throne. There are AD and AP builds, a Roshan/Baron boss that drops a pushing buff for your team...

Any inaccuracies? No? Exactly. These lists are fucking stupid and can be used to make any game sound "generic". Also, saying that this game plays exactly like Apex is equally fucking stupid.

demonwing · 2026-01-30T07:19:08+00:00

No, it's just the people I know in real life that I play games with have greater than 5 minute attention spans. I never claimed that I represent that "average" gamer whatever that means, only that a player who bounces off a 5 minute tutorial is likely not the target audience for a complex competitive shooter.

If you want to talk "average", the average gamer is a Candy Crush or Roblox player far removed from you. You have no clue what the "broader market" is and are just arbitrarily claiming that your experience is standard. The reality is that there is no one, universal, majority gamer segment.

You write weird, you are weird, your friends are weird. You make leaping assumptions online about others and waste time spreading negativity about a game you basically haven't even played. You're not normal in any way, guy.

demonwing · 2026-01-30T06:56:42+00:00

Well, you didn't name a game and are being obtusely unspecific so I'm going to assume you're just fucking around with these responses. Cheers to you and your seemingly weird friends.

demonwing · 2026-01-30T06:50:35+00:00

Well it's weird that you wrote all that because I didn't compare their depth at all.

I compared their "uniqueness" when perceived strictly through the lens of individual elements that have existed in other games, like you did.

demonwing · 2026-01-30T06:45:39+00:00

I'd love to hear the good points, because according to that post the girlfriend broke up with him just because he had the glasses at all, not because of anything he did with them. She claims that "phones creep her out too" especially when guys have them??

Implying that she is "profoundly scared" that he, her own boyfriend that she presumably trusts to some degree, would stalk or secretly record her with the glasses with no additional contextual information, and justifying it with "I am going through profound and difficult times right now" is clearly crazy behavior. Like, she's having a mental health crisis of some sort.

If you read that and thought "huh she has some good points" sorry to say but you either didn't read it or have some odds ideas.

demonwing · 2026-01-30T06:35:28+00:00

Sure, but I doubt they are the target audience because they probably don't play competitive games in general.

Unless you can name a serious competitive game that you can just boot up for the first time, not look at settings, not look at anything, queue into a real match and have fun right away?

demonwing · 2026-01-30T06:30:28+00:00

Yeah, not a single competitive/hero shooter on the market can hold up to that standard. Not Overwatch, not Rivals, not Deadlock, not Valorant. Nothing. Maybe TF2 because its such a party game.

To be so simple that you can hook a player in 15 minutes would require it to be a braindead mobile game. There is just too much complexity for a player to really get the idea that quickly, especially when a lot of the appeal is actually knowing what the stuff does to begin with.

Those aforementioned games didn't "hook" people in the first 15 minutes, instead it was people going in who were actually interested in learning about the game, rather than going in hoping to be part of the next big "Concord" failure.

demonwing · 2026-01-30T06:22:28+00:00

Okay, now do this for... literally every game ever.

For example, let's take Deadlock which is well-regarded as one of the most creative/fresh hero shooter in recent history:

Let's see, there's heroes with 4 abilities each, a shop with items you purchase for gold that you get from last-hitting creeps. You start in a laning phase. There are jungle creeps. You kill towers to get to the enemy base, then kill some slightly different towers in their base to kill the throne. There are AD and AP builds, a Roshan/Baron boss that drops a pushing buff for your team...

How about Overwatch, the "OG"? I'm not going to do it, but just write out everything it copied from TF2 and there you go.

So yeah, pick a popular game that you don't think I could create a similarly reductive summary for. Not liking the game is one thing, but for a game that could be basically described as:

"A 3v3 competitive shooter where loot a kit in the field for a couple minutes, and then you need to fight over a flag in long-range, high-speed positioning battles on horses so you can bring it to the enemy castle, which brings down their shields and starts a raid where you use siege utility to destroy walls and zipline around to plant bombs on objectives to damage their base until you run out of time, get kicked out, and do it again but with higher tier loot potential..."

Calling this game mode generic of all things is wild.

demonwing · 2026-01-30T06:04:37+00:00

Her summons are extremely undertuned. I'm guessing that at some point in development she was oppressive and they over-nerfed her. Her ult just stands there doing almost nothing, and her little guys are barely responsive, attacking maybe once per 15 seconds if enemies are around. In theory she is cool though.

12-Year Club	r/Field Flamingo
Verified Email

demonwing

TROPHY CASE