We all want Brink to succeed.

H0RSE is out there in the trenches, busting his butt on a level that I can only hope to ever come close to. Vaporman is out there making contests. JJ is winning them. Shadowrun is... well, actually, he probably wants Shadowrun to succeed. But that just goes to show he's got experience with what happens when things don't come together.

It's easy to sit around and say that it'll become a success on its own, as long as we vote with our dollars. That's the American way, and PytoX will just have to go with it for the sake of argument. But it doesn't really work that way, not in the grand scheme of things. Sure, the developers need to make a game that is worth playing. But what about all the series' out there that got canceled despite their relative popularity?

What about Skate, widely regarded as much better than THPS, which last I checked is still going on, not getting another title? What about Guilty Gear, which was sold off and canceled despite being one of the few real remaining competitors to Street Fighter, and one of the coolest fighters out to boot? What about Last Blade, one of the most innovative fighters out of SNK? Didn't they make a great game? What about Project Gotham Racing? What about Guitar Hero? Didn't they have a decent-enough reception, where the fans voted with their dollars? But in the end, their publishers felt it wasn't a good investment, and all those series' were ended. Except Project Gotham, they actually had to close their doors.

On the other hand, other games are incredible successes that last for dozens of years on the competitive scene, a fate I'm certain Splash Damage aims towards for Brink. Why is Starcraft 2 the biggest eSport on the planet right now, and Warcraft 3 barely even has leagues? Why is it that Counter Strike Source is still one of the most prestigious games on the planet, while Call of Duty, a massive financial giant, has only a tenuous place in the eSport community?

I'll tell you a bit of what I know.

1. Any game with a sufficiently large mainstream community will develop a competitive community if it is at all possible.
2. Any game with a sufficiently large competitive community will maintain a mainstream community, though it may be quite small.
3. Any game with a static meta-game will see a slowly decreasing competitive community.
4. Any game with easy access to its meta-game will see a slowly increasing competitive community.


For example...

#1 - World of Warcraft is arguably the biggest commercial success in the world right now. After a year, Blizzard introduced the concept of Battlegrounds, which introduced a distinct and structured stage for competition, and it didn't take long for "premades" to begin appearing—preset teams of players who wished to compete at a higher level than their opponents. A few years later, Blizzard decided they wanted a true MLG-style competitive field, so they introduced Arenas. In any example where there is room for competition, out of a sufficiently large group a sizable portion will want to excel in that field of competition. Tetris, Geometry Wars, Nazi Zombies, Contra... all single-player games which later developed competition simply because there were players who wished for it to be there.

#2 - The prime example has to be Counter Strike. Released in 1999, it maintains popularity on college campuses around the country, simply because it is the primary game of MLG, the most popular tournament holder for competitive games in the United States. They also own Gamebattles, in case you didn't know.

#3 - This is exactly what happens with Call of Duty games. Eventually, people figure out that the ACR, the FAMAS, or the M16, depending on the game, are the most effective weapon possible and the metagame stalls. There is no reason to play competitively when there is no changing strategy or trump. On the other hand, dynamic meta-games seem to last forever—Starcraft, for instance, still has debates between 10rax and 11rax for Terran. Admittedly, 11rax is very much the standard, but the point is that there are still debates despite it being one of the most popular eSports on the planet, and a 13 year old game. (Note: this means that you have 10 or 11 SCVs before you build your first barracks)

#4 - Starcraft has to be pointed out here, as it is one of the few eSports with true access to its meta-game for anyone who wants it. Street Fighter is a close second, thanks to the open community and willingness to give out advice on the meta-game, and it is easily the second most popular eSport.

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What does this mean for us? It means that we need to encourage a community where the good things are encouraged: An accessible meta-game and a strong competitive community. We need to discourage the negative things, like a static meta-game.

But I'm still talking gibberish on a certain level.

As players, we need to spend time experimenting with different team makeups. We need to try different ability builds on our characters. We need to test the various guns both in private matches and in the "field" online, and try to keep Splash Damage abriast of what could use a boost, or what is too powerful, so that the ball remains in their court. We need to have debates and discussions, like we have been doing, with a constant eye not for deciding what is best, but for deciding how to beat the best.

On the other hand, we need a competitive community, and the easiest way to do that is tournaments and leagues. We need to encourage players who perhaps would not play in leagues because they feel they're not good enough with rookie leagues, because the only way to get great players who aren't just imported from Call of Duty or Counter-Strike: Source is to bring them up ourselves. We need to encourage players who prefer other games with prestigious tournaments and/or great prizes

We need access to this competition, otherwise we risk going the way of Gears of War, which has an active competitive scene full of people you've never heard of and never seen play. To do this, we need access to replays and we need commentators—not Hutch, WingsOfRedemption, and WoodysGamertag, even though they're great for the community, but we need John Madden or Hastr0 (who, to the best of my knowledge, commentates every shooter under the sun at various tournaments... I've seen one or two but I can't find the video now). And what's more, these have to be immediately present and constantly changing—not hidden somewhere in an unlisted YouTube video. Which means building a fanbase, which is hard.

But of course, games have gotten successful with less than all this. Look at Diablo 2. It was a huge success, and had a tiny competitive community of PKers, had no real metagame—Assassin was best—and YouTube didn't even exist when it came out. But who wants to risk it?

User-created topics with foreign-site content don't get stickies.

And this reads like too high science for me; I just want to play the game and have fun after it came out, really. Sounds like Linsolv wants to start beta-testing after release.

Sounds like Linsolv wants to start beta-testing after release.

Bravo.

Linsolv http://www.thebrinkforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=290 that could make or break Brink.

It's a nice kick in the pants for those of us hoping to contribute somehow to make this a success, not just for SD and Bethesda, but for US.

Dang. Horse is well known!

'Course he's well known. It's a Brink forum. Who wouldn't know a guy like H0RSE on a Brink forum?

'Course he's well known. It's a Brink forum. Who wouldn't know a guy like H0RSE on a Brink forum?

What's a horse?