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[Micro102]

Singed. I play singed, and everything gets easier. Any lane I am in gets pushed and destroyed. Any gank fails, and late game I have 200 cs and am split pushing while continuing to be immortal.

[penguinofhonor]

And... as I type up a response to this, I just have to concede that I am very much i n the minority as far as what kind of experience I want out of a game.  I'm just not a mass appeal kind of person.

I might be wrong here, but reading this makes me think that it's not that you're not into mass appeal, but maybe you're just not into a game that's as competitive as LoL. That's perfectly fine, I feel.

League can be very hostile and makes a lot of sacrifices to ensure that everything's balanced. They could definitely have a dozen maps that are imbalanced and wonky, but that's not what the MOBA crowd wants.

Have you played TF2? I feel like Valve pulls off the mass casual appeal in a PVP game better than anyone else. For instance, one of the problems with achievements in League is that things like "farm 300 minions in one game" lead to people making suboptimal choices to achievement farm. Even something like "win 20 games with X champion" leads to encouraging people to autolock the champion they want the achievement with, and that's something the community doesn't want to deal with.

In TF2, there are hundreds of achievements and I feel like nobody really cares if you're hindering the team a little because you're aiming for one. Yeah, you want to win, but everyone just runs around and does what they want. Yeah, people will yell at you if you're outright being stupid but if you're like 2/6 or something nobody's going to harass you for feeding like they do in League.

Maybe it's the lack of matchmaking and elo, maybe it's the lack of official advertisement for the competitive scene, maybe it's the private servers, maybe it's the fact that you can enter and leave games as you please. I don't know what makes a game like TF2 so casual and easy to get into, but I feel like there's a ton of untapped potential in noncompetitive PVP games that people need to tap into.

I always feel bad telling someone that a game isn't for them because "don't play this game" feels like a pretty mean statement to me, but maybe this scene really isn't the one for you. Honestly, I think a pretty decent chunk of the LoL player base would be better off doing something less competitive. I know I feel that way half the time.

Ah, and I've ended up rambling for a while. That's late night foruming though.

[Heliman]

IMO, that's because the Pro tf2 environment has NOTHING to do with the casual crowd. They stick to their own servers in a game mode that is less than popular (arena).

[Frumple]

There was something new to try every single day.  The vast majority of modders didn't bother trying to make anything very polished.  There was just an explosion of ideas, and people tried to make something for every idea they had, not worrying whether it was great or not.

Heh... you sound like you probably would have (did?) enjoy the actual AoS craze in WC3 that DotA spawned from and LoL and it's ilk are basically the lowest common denominator produce from.

There was a lot of genuinely impressive and innovative stuff that came out of those years, from the latter parts of starcraft till the later years of WC3 where DotA started scrumming up the custom map list. Truly, it's a damn shame that DotA came out on top instead of some of the more interesting stuff, but I guess them's the breaks. Is shame SC2's custom stuff bombed, or you might have some better alternatives to this moba drek.

LoL's good, sure, especially considering its pedigree, but I shed a little tear every once in a while thinking of what could be. Is less game than sport, less skirmish than scrimmage. Aeon of strife, your time still has not come. :waving flag:

[SalmonGod]

I might be wrong here, but reading this makes me think that it's not that you're not into mass appeal, but maybe you're just not into a game that's as competitive as LoL. That's perfectly fine, I feel.

...

You're definitely right about this, and it's something I've been aware of for a long time.  I think overly competitive play does suck the fun out of games.  I was really excited when I was 14 years old and competitive leagues were just taking shape in the pc gaming world.  Oh I had such stars in my eyes when Thresh won that Ferrari at the first Quakecon.  Now I fucking hate professional gaming.  I wish it never became a thing.  I hate being forced to take a game too seriously.  I hate not being able to explore a game on my own terms, because someone else has already crunched the numbers and spread the knowledge so that the entire community knows you have to do precisely _____ or you're doing it wrong period.

And I know that there are places where if I said something like that, dozens of people would pile on me with the term "casual" as some kind of pejorative, but I'm not a damn "casual" gamer.  It's a horrible term.  I've been a gamer all my life.  I love them and I take them seriously.  I'm good enough to hold my own among a veteran crowd in most types of games.  I've been good enough at a couple games in the past that I probably could have played them as a low rank professional.  I am very stubborn about playing every game on the highest difficulty, and I try very hard.

Or rather... I play very hard.  Because there's something about competitive games now that just is not play at all.  There's too much following directions.  Too much adherance to "meta game", which is an idea I've come to deeply loathe.  Too much work involved in preparing oneself to actually be able to play.  It seems like games are specially tailored to the crowd that will sneer at you if you don't like these things.

Like I could never get into the Street Fighter style of fighting game when I was younger.  I didn't want to learn the stupid button combinations.  Why the fuck would anyone consider that good game design?  If you had to sit down and read about all these buttons combinations and combos and spend hundreds of hours ramming them into muscle memory just to be able to eventually enjoy yourself, something was seriously wrong.

But now we've hit a point where there are only two types of multiplayer game -- the type that make you grind for hundreds of hours before you get to the fun part, or the type that makes you hammer down precise muscle memory and study encyclopedias of "meta" lore before you get to the fun part.  The indy scene is finally expanding to provide other options, but most of them provide game designs that truly are "casual" and outside of that there are very, very few exceptions anymore.  There's almost nothing anymore for people who actually like competitive multiplayer and want a challenge, but don't care to deal with something that caters to a professional level of play. 

I want my Quake and Smash Bros style of games back.  Games built on very simple formulas.  There isn't tons of knowledge to study.  No amount of number crunching will give you an edge.  Everything that can be done in the game takes very little practice to do.  Yet the action is dynamic enough that it's never dull.  More importantly, a player does master the game with practice, but that mastery does not punish newer players with an overly harsh barrier to entry.  New players are allowed to jump straight in and play.  You're not punished with instant soul crushing obliteration for exploring on your own terms, even while competing.  Other players have little more on you than a feel for the flow of the game, and a refined ability to react intuitively.

I LOVED TF2 at first.  Played it from the first day of beta.  Oh how I loved it.  Valve was on course to making it even better, but then they diverted and it turned into something weird that doesn't make any sense.  They had a truly wonderful idea, but the gaming community just wasn't mature enough for it.  So Valve just said "Fine.  Fuck it, just.... here.  Hats."

League of Legends really is not a game for me.  The problem is it's been the fallback title that me, my wife, and our gaming friends can all compromise on for the last couple years.  Especially my wife, who suffers motion sickness from any 3d graphics with too much depth or camera motion.  It's addictive as hell and when it's fun (somewhere between 1/4 to 1/3 of the time) it is really fun.  However, it's purely a fluke that I ever bothered to overcome the intense barriers to entry and got involved in this game.  If not for lots of social pressure, I would have left somewhere around the 1000th time that Akali insta-gibbed me before I had any idea what had just happened.  Yeah, I picked up this game the week that Akali was released.  Right after the release of a new assassin type character is not the time to try and pick up this game...

[penguinofhonor]

I feel like there's a place for less competitive games, but right now I think the focus in the gaming market is "Whoa. We have a decent chance of making esports a relatively respectable hobby/sport/ect" so everyone wants in on that boat.

I feel like a more casual MOBA just wouldn't survive in today's market. I'm sure you've seen how HoN and DotA 2 pride themselves on being more exclusive and pro than LoL. I think a casual MOBA can definitely exist, but it's going to have to wait until everyone gets their head out of esports' ass and realizes that some people want to play games to have fun again.

To put it in League terms, PVP gaming right now is in tryhard mode. You can't tolerate a casual game because people will use that as an excuse to not take games seriously. I'm really hoping once esports gets some level of respect we'll actually have casual fun again, and I'm hoping that happens relatively soon.

I'm not going to lie, getting together with my friends to play some Diablo 3 is, on average, more fun than a game of League is going to be. Because I'm not going to be yelling at my allies because they've fed a couple kills. I'm going to play a barbarian even though it's arguably the worst class because I don't really have to care. I don't think this kind of attitude has to exist solely in a PVE setting.

[eerr]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I might be wrong here, but reading this makes me think that it's not that you're not into mass appeal, but maybe you're just not into a game that's as competitive as LoL. That's perfectly fine, I feel.

...

You're definitely right about this, and it's something I've been aware of for a long time.  I think overly competitive play does suck the fun out of games.  I was really excited when I was 14 years old and competitive leagues were just taking shape in the pc gaming world.  Oh I had such stars in my eyes when Thresh won that Ferrari at the first Quakecon.  Now I fucking hate professional gaming.  I wish it never became a thing.  I hate being forced to take a game too seriously.  I hate not being able to explore a game on my own terms, because someone else has already crunched the numbers and spread the knowledge so that the entire community knows you have to do precisely _____ or you're doing it wrong period.

And I know that there are places where if I said something like that, dozens of people would pile on me with the term "casual" as some kind of pejorative, but I'm not a damn "casual" gamer.  It's a horrible term.  I've been a gamer all my life.  I love them and I take them seriously.  I'm good enough to hold my own among a veteran crowd in most types of games.  I've been good enough at a couple games in the past that I probably could have played them as a low rank professional.  I am very stubborn about playing every game on the highest difficulty, and I try very hard.

Or rather... I play very hard.  Because there's something about competitive games now that just is not play at all.  There's too much following directions.  Too much adherance to "meta game", which is an idea I've come to deeply loathe.  Too much work involved in preparing oneself to actually be able to play.  It seems like games are specially tailored to the crowd that will sneer at you if you don't like these things.

Like I could never get into the Street Fighter style of fighting game when I was younger.  I didn't want to learn the stupid button combinations.  Why the fuck would anyone consider that good game design?  If you had to sit down and read about all these buttons combinations and combos and spend hundreds of hours ramming them into muscle memory just to be able to eventually enjoy yourself, something was seriously wrong.

But now we've hit a point where there are only two types of multiplayer game -- the type that make you grind for hundreds of hours before you get to the fun part, or the type that makes you hammer down precise muscle memory and study encyclopedias of "meta" lore before you get to the fun part.  The indy scene is finally expanding to provide other options, but most of them provide game designs that truly are "casual" and outside of that there are very, very few exceptions anymore.  There's almost nothing anymore for people who actually like competitive multiplayer and want a challenge, but don't care to deal with something that caters to a professional level of play. 

I want my Quake and Smash Bros style of games back.  Games built on very simple formulas.  There isn't tons of knowledge to study.  No amount of number crunching will give you an edge.  Everything that can be done in the game takes very little practice to do.  Yet the action is dynamic enough that it's never dull.  More importantly, a player does master the game with practice, but that mastery does not punish newer players with an overly harsh barrier to entry.  New players are allowed to jump straight in and play.  You're not punished with instant soul crushing obliteration for exploring on your own terms, even while competing.  Other players have little more on you than a feel for the flow of the game, and a refined ability to react intuitively.

I LOVED TF2 at first.  Played it from the first day of beta.  Oh how I loved it.  Valve was on course to making it even better, but then they diverted and it turned into something weird that doesn't make any sense.  They had a truly wonderful idea, but the gaming community just wasn't mature enough for it.  So Valve just said "Fine.  Fuck it, just.... here.  Hats."

League of Legends really is not a game for me.  The problem is it's been the fallback title that me, my wife, and our gaming friends can all compromise on for the last couple years.  Especially my wife, who suffers motion sickness from any 3d graphics with too much depth or camera motion.  It's addictive as hell and when it's fun (somewhere between 1/4 to 1/3 of the time) it is really fun.  However, it's purely a fluke that I ever bothered to overcome the intense barriers to entry and got involved in this game.  If not for lots of social pressure, I would have left somewhere around the 1000th time that Akali insta-gibbed me before I had any idea what had just happened.  Yeah, I picked up this game the week that Akali was released.  Right after the release of a new assassin type character is not the time to try and pick up this game...

You don't like playing games anymore. It just hasn't sunk in completely.

[eerr]

On a completely seperate note, I remember that Darius, Draven, and Garen are all characters I saw on some random episode of Daria.


No BS, Darius is exactly the same twitchy-axe swinger animation for animation, armour for armour, I saw on the show. Garen too.

That picture of Draven also looks exactly the same, too.

Also I'm too lazy to research this. I doubt it will be easy to find if google doesn't know.

[Shadowgandor]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I might be wrong here, but reading this makes me think that it's not that you're not into mass appeal, but maybe you're just not into a game that's as competitive as LoL. That's perfectly fine, I feel.

...

You're definitely right about this, and it's something I've been aware of for a long time.  I think overly competitive play does suck the fun out of games.  I was really excited when I was 14 years old and competitive leagues were just taking shape in the pc gaming world.  Oh I had such stars in my eyes when Thresh won that Ferrari at the first Quakecon.  Now I fucking hate professional gaming.  I wish it never became a thing.  I hate being forced to take a game too seriously.  I hate not being able to explore a game on my own terms, because someone else has already crunched the numbers and spread the knowledge so that the entire community knows you have to do precisely _____ or you're doing it wrong period.

And I know that there are places where if I said something like that, dozens of people would pile on me with the term "casual" as some kind of pejorative, but I'm not a damn "casual" gamer.  It's a horrible term.  I've been a gamer all my life.  I love them and I take them seriously.  I'm good enough to hold my own among a veteran crowd in most types of games.  I've been good enough at a couple games in the past that I probably could have played them as a low rank professional.  I am very stubborn about playing every game on the highest difficulty, and I try very hard.

Or rather... I play very hard.  Because there's something about competitive games now that just is not play at all.  There's too much following directions.  Too much adherance to "meta game", which is an idea I've come to deeply loathe.  Too much work involved in preparing oneself to actually be able to play.  It seems like games are specially tailored to the crowd that will sneer at you if you don't like these things.

Like I could never get into the Street Fighter style of fighting game when I was younger.  I didn't want to learn the stupid button combinations.  Why the fuck would anyone consider that good game design?  If you had to sit down and read about all these buttons combinations and combos and spend hundreds of hours ramming them into muscle memory just to be able to eventually enjoy yourself, something was seriously wrong.

But now we've hit a point where there are only two types of multiplayer game -- the type that make you grind for hundreds of hours before you get to the fun part, or the type that makes you hammer down precise muscle memory and study encyclopedias of "meta" lore before you get to the fun part.  The indy scene is finally expanding to provide other options, but most of them provide game designs that truly are "casual" and outside of that there are very, very few exceptions anymore.  There's almost nothing anymore for people who actually like competitive multiplayer and want a challenge, but don't care to deal with something that caters to a professional level of play. 

I want my Quake and Smash Bros style of games back.  Games built on very simple formulas.  There isn't tons of knowledge to study.  No amount of number crunching will give you an edge.  Everything that can be done in the game takes very little practice to do.  Yet the action is dynamic enough that it's never dull.  More importantly, a player does master the game with practice, but that mastery does not punish newer players with an overly harsh barrier to entry.  New players are allowed to jump straight in and play.  You're not punished with instant soul crushing obliteration for exploring on your own terms, even while competing.  Other players have little more on you than a feel for the flow of the game, and a refined ability to react intuitively.

I LOVED TF2 at first.  Played it from the first day of beta.  Oh how I loved it.  Valve was on course to making it even better, but then they diverted and it turned into something weird that doesn't make any sense.  They had a truly wonderful idea, but the gaming community just wasn't mature enough for it.  So Valve just said "Fine.  Fuck it, just.... here.  Hats."

League of Legends really is not a game for me.  The problem is it's been the fallback title that me, my wife, and our gaming friends can all compromise on for the last couple years.  Especially my wife, who suffers motion sickness from any 3d graphics with too much depth or camera motion.  It's addictive as hell and when it's fun (somewhere between 1/4 to 1/3 of the time) it is really fun.  However, it's purely a fluke that I ever bothered to overcome the intense barriers to entry and got involved in this game.  If not for lots of social pressure, I would have left somewhere around the 1000th time that Akali insta-gibbed me before I had any idea what had just happened.  Yeah, I picked up this game the week that Akali was released.  Right after the release of a new assassin type character is not the time to try and pick up this game...

You don't like playing games anymore. It just hasn't sunk in completely.

While this could be true, I don't think it is. I myself feel exactly the same as SalmonGod, which is the exact reason why I'm not a big fan of competitive multiplayer games, but that doesn't mean I don't like playing games!
Tropico 4 for example has drained countless hours of my life and I've played a bit of Saints Row 3 co-op and it's a lot of fun. It's just that games like LoL require the player to read guides before being able to enjoy themselves ingame without getting flamed and reported instead of giving the player the oppurtunity to just play the game and learn the ropes through failing repeatedly. That's how I prefer to get better at a game instead of having to follow the ideas and strategies of others but as I said, LoL for example does not allow you to learn it this way.

[tomas1297]

 Just played Soraka for the first time.
 Why did I never do this earlier? Quick cool-downs, low mana costs, silence for free, heals that are CREDIT TO TEAM.
 Seriously, I'm really damn good at Soraka, compared to how I do with other champions.

[Euld]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I might be wrong here, but reading this makes me think that it's not that you're not into mass appeal, but maybe you're just not into a game that's as competitive as LoL. That's perfectly fine, I feel.

...

You're definitely right about this, and it's something I've been aware of for a long time.  I think overly competitive play does suck the fun out of games.  I was really excited when I was 14 years old and competitive leagues were just taking shape in the pc gaming world.  Oh I had such stars in my eyes when Thresh won that Ferrari at the first Quakecon.  Now I fucking hate professional gaming.  I wish it never became a thing.  I hate being forced to take a game too seriously.  I hate not being able to explore a game on my own terms, because someone else has already crunched the numbers and spread the knowledge so that the entire community knows you have to do precisely _____ or you're doing it wrong period.

And I know that there are places where if I said something like that, dozens of people would pile on me with the term "casual" as some kind of pejorative, but I'm not a damn "casual" gamer.  It's a horrible term.  I've been a gamer all my life.  I love them and I take them seriously.  I'm good enough to hold my own among a veteran crowd in most types of games.  I've been good enough at a couple games in the past that I probably could have played them as a low rank professional.  I am very stubborn about playing every game on the highest difficulty, and I try very hard.

Or rather... I play very hard.  Because there's something about competitive games now that just is not play at all.  There's too much following directions.  Too much adherance to "meta game", which is an idea I've come to deeply loathe.  Too much work involved in preparing oneself to actually be able to play.  It seems like games are specially tailored to the crowd that will sneer at you if you don't like these things.

Like I could never get into the Street Fighter style of fighting game when I was younger.  I didn't want to learn the stupid button combinations.  Why the fuck would anyone consider that good game design?  If you had to sit down and read about all these buttons combinations and combos and spend hundreds of hours ramming them into muscle memory just to be able to eventually enjoy yourself, something was seriously wrong.

But now we've hit a point where there are only two types of multiplayer game -- the type that make you grind for hundreds of hours before you get to the fun part, or the type that makes you hammer down precise muscle memory and study encyclopedias of "meta" lore before you get to the fun part.  The indy scene is finally expanding to provide other options, but most of them provide game designs that truly are "casual" and outside of that there are very, very few exceptions anymore.  There's almost nothing anymore for people who actually like competitive multiplayer and want a challenge, but don't care to deal with something that caters to a professional level of play. 

I want my Quake and Smash Bros style of games back.  Games built on very simple formulas.  There isn't tons of knowledge to study.  No amount of number crunching will give you an edge.  Everything that can be done in the game takes very little practice to do.  Yet the action is dynamic enough that it's never dull.  More importantly, a player does master the game with practice, but that mastery does not punish newer players with an overly harsh barrier to entry.  New players are allowed to jump straight in and play.  You're not punished with instant soul crushing obliteration for exploring on your own terms, even while competing.  Other players have little more on you than a feel for the flow of the game, and a refined ability to react intuitively.

I LOVED TF2 at first.  Played it from the first day of beta.  Oh how I loved it.  Valve was on course to making it even better, but then they diverted and it turned into something weird that doesn't make any sense.  They had a truly wonderful idea, but the gaming community just wasn't mature enough for it.  So Valve just said "Fine.  Fuck it, just.... here.  Hats."

League of Legends really is not a game for me.  The problem is it's been the fallback title that me, my wife, and our gaming friends can all compromise on for the last couple years.  Especially my wife, who suffers motion sickness from any 3d graphics with too much depth or camera motion.  It's addictive as hell and when it's fun (somewhere between 1/4 to 1/3 of the time) it is really fun.  However, it's purely a fluke that I ever bothered to overcome the intense barriers to entry and got involved in this game.  If not for lots of social pressure, I would have left somewhere around the 1000th time that Akali insta-gibbed me before I had any idea what had just happened.  Yeah, I picked up this game the week that Akali was released.  Right after the release of a new assassin type character is not the time to try and pick up this game...

You don't like playing games anymore. It just hasn't sunk in completely.

While this could be true, I don't think it is. I myself feel exactly the same as SalmonGod, which is the exact reason why I'm not a big fan of competitive multiplayer games, but that doesn't mean I don't like playing games!
Tropico 4 for example has drained countless hours of my life and I've played a bit of Saints Row 3 co-op and it's a lot of fun. It's just that games like LoL require the player to read guides before being able to enjoy themselves ingame without getting flamed and reported instead of giving the player the oppurtunity to just play the game and learn the ropes through failing repeatedly. That's how I prefer to get better at a game instead of having to follow the ideas and strategies of others but as I said, LoL for example does not allow you to learn it this way.

You aren't alone, I feel the same way.  I managed to learn LoL on my own just by playing, but I had to figure out a lot of stuff without the game telling me (didn't realize that constantly getting killed by the enemy team was actually a bad thing, as far as I knew, I had unlimited lives!).  Now I hate how everyone flips out when you don't set up the "right" team.  Even worse when me and my friends pick a team we'd like to play and then suddenly we're up against a team that "perfectly counters" ours.  This isn't freaken' Pokemon, how do people even learn to gauge who counters what?  A lot of my friends have stopped playing outright :/

[Bordellimies]

[tomas1297]

 Do the teams get more decent in higher levels? Because I keep having horrible games.

-Kata was underfed and just kind of rushed into danger feeding the enemy team and tried ganking, but couldn't pose a threat and didn't even try to hold a lane.
-Nasus has the worst reflexes and amount of actions per second I've ever seen, plus he was supposed to lane with me, but instead switched lanes and focused too much on survival, becoming useless and underfed.
-Kog'maw switched lanes when Nasus came to his lane, and he was sort of decent, but we were laning against Darius, Gangplank and the ocassional gank from Pantheon and we couldn't do shit.
-Ashe was decent, but played like she was glued to her lane and kept saying typical LoL stuff like 'feeder team report".

 Plus 99% of the time there are also AFKers and DCers.

[micelus]

Welcome to MOBA games! Seriously, they're all like this. My advice is to play with friends, or at least form a team.

[3]

Spoiler: In response to SalmonGod (click to show/hide)

I don't play LoL (I watch it occasionally) but I felt like I should contribute.

Like I could never get into the Street Fighter style of fighting game when I was younger.  I didn't want to learn the stupid button combinations.  Why the fuck would anyone consider that good game design?  If you had to sit down and read about all these buttons combinations and combos and spend hundreds of hours ramming them into muscle memory just to be able to eventually enjoy yourself, something was seriously wrong.

Seeing people talk like this - looking at fighting games and seeing combo vs. combo - makes me feel depressed. What you're seeing as fundamental to the design is in fact the lowest common denominator. Things like combos exist because they're an enhancing factor: They allow you to take better advantage of an opening. Being good at doing combos does not mean you auto-win; by constrast, lots of players who are strong in the fundamentals of play (which, unlike combos and movelists, are often transferrable across similar games) are much more likely to succeed.

LoL and other DOTA-esque MOBAs are a bit of a weird example because they don't follow these rules, at least not at a level which I understand them. They're more the opposite than anything else. LoL is about trading damage and map control; it's a quasi-RTS with one unit (albeit a complicated one) and not much more than that. I'd like to see a MOBA that breaks free of its RTS roots and does something more interesting with its characters (as opposed to "AUTOATTACK EVERYTHING").

I want my Quake and Smash Bros style of games back.  Games built on very simple formulas.  There isn't tons of knowledge to study.  No amount of number crunching will give you an edge.  Everything that can be done in the game takes very little practice to do.  Yet the action is dynamic enough that it's never dull.  More importantly, a player does master the game with practice, but that mastery does not punish newer players with an overly harsh barrier to entry.  New players are allowed to jump straight in and play.  You're not punished with instant soul crushing obliteration for exploring on your own terms, even while competing.  Other players have little more on you than a feel for the flow of the game, and a refined ability to react intuitively.

I obviously don't know how much you've looked into modern play, but I think you'll find that high-level Q3/Live and SB play exactly like the games you mentioned above. People play SSBB like any other fighting game because they've figured out the frame data and the flaws in the engine. People play Quake with standard responses to common situations because they know which weapon is most viable in which situation, and they know exactly how much they can get away with. They know exactly how long it takes for an weapon/powerup to respawn, know every point on the map, and run around in laps timed so as to be as efficient as possible.

Games like those are no different to anything else. What you're seeing is a difference in mentality. Now that mass multiplayer is prevalent, everyone's trying to imitate everyone else. But if you're fundamentally good at the game itself, you'll have something they don't, and there's nothing stopping you from playing it as you like... but being fundamentally good at any game is more elusive than you probably think.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mean to lecture you. It's just that I heard this exact same argument not long ago (except then it was about RTS games).