I even find your post borderline toxic
I'm being nice with the above and below; I could be a lot meaner with my words and opinions given my experience in the game, but I'm not going to because I don't like to be mean about it.
Keep in mind that I'm posting from a perspective of 6P HoE at base level. I don't find it unreasonable that, when considering the hardest difficulty the base game has to offer, players are tryng to win to the best of their ability. (I didn't even jump into HoE for at least a hundred hours of running Suicidal games until I thought I was ready because I didn't want to be that guy dragging the team down.)
What I posted above is
the basics of teamwork for a given role in a team-based game when considering the hardest difficulty--a direct response to Serulin's
legitimately good original post--and apparently that's an affront to some because the optimal strategy in the game for being an ideal teammate and winning isn't always "whatever is fun."
KF2 is not a team-based game. Maybe it is advertised as such, but that's all. A game where one player can reliably win no matter what his team is doing can not be called a team-based game.
Just because the majority of this game's playerbase sees it that way doesn't invalidate the core design, which is multiple specialists working hard enough at their roles to win as a team. That is largely a failing of the playerbase and partially a failing of TWI encouraging said behavior in the aforementioned playerbase. But the HoE and CD community actually know what makes the game tick and the aforementioned mechanics I spoke of in my previous post. They recognize the game as something more than "hit zombies with lightsaber while your Medic friend holds M1 with the Healthrower at your feet." There's some brilliant intentional design in KF2's core mechanics with how the perks interact, and it pains me to see that the playerbase at large doesn't care except "whar new weapons."
Want another still-relevant example? Team Fortress 2 is, at its core, a beautifully designed and nuanced first-person shooter with 9 years of intentional forethought given to its classes and their interactions. The competitive community which works on keeping that scene alive, all things considered, speaks to that much. Certainly, there's an unfortunate layer of cosmetics and trading, and there's some weapons with much less consideration put into them (which thankfully better players have spoken out against for various reasons), as well as the numerous servers with people just eating sandwiches in the corner and saying "pootis" rather than actively participating in first-person shooting, but that is simply how the playerbase who doesn't care about the actual game plays it. Such is the fate a developer consigns itself to when one makes the early promises of unlimited content and wackiness above all else.
Want another similar example that isn't based around PvP? Left 4 Dead, both games. They're both PvE zombie games that encourage tight-knit teamwork and that choice is deliberately reflected in the game's base design. There's multiple difficulty levels that will absolutely shred you if you don't know how the game works, and not working as a team will result in your life being cut that much shorter. There's certainly no shortage of people who play it like a solo game with three other stooges at the keyboard, but that doesn't make it not a team-based FPS at heart. There are people who have posted "stealth" solo runs on Realism Expert. But that doesn't make it not a team-based FPS.
Want a more contemporary example? Deep Rock Galactic is based around 4 different classes using their abilities to work together as a team to get through stages of randomized space spiders trying to eat and/or melt your dwarves. It, too, has multiple difficulties to speak of, as well as marathon runs each week called Elite Deep Dives. Some players only run the super-difficult ones, and they don't appreciate people intentionally taking crap builds and/or just not knowing the basics of the game before attempting the super-hard difficulties.
The point is, the ones who enjoy the game for its core mechanics are the ones I care about the opinions of, because they know what makes the game tick and enjoy playing it for what it is. They're not the ones who only sign on when a new update comes on, play for maybe a couple of hours, and then log off with an utterance of "dead game."
And no the goal of the game is not to win, at least, it's not what you should aim at, and I even find your post borderline toxic. The goal of the game is to have fun, and that takes priority over winning.
What if, like someone who comes from boomer shooters and old games, the "having fun" includes learning the ins-and-outs of the game and "gitting gud"? Surely there's a reason that varying difficulties exist, yes? And to take that example to its logical conclusion, why would harder and harder difficulties with alternate enemy stats
and movesets exist otherwise? The point is that it's a challenge to overcome,
non? Otherwise, there would be only one difficulty (Normal, for example) and that's all you get. The game clearly wasn't designed that way, although I will confess that various problematic weapons and perk combos have definitely made accomplishing that easier over the course of the game. (Not that there's a reason such ideas should be encouraged.)
But I'm assuming that one picks harder difficulties to overcome the challenge of playing through said harder difficulties. There is an option for players who just want to goof around or do the whole "power fantasy" thing; it's called "play on lower difficulties," not "ask the devs for more stupid weapons and unnecessary perk buffs."
If a guy wants to pick demo and not play the optimal loadout, why do you even care.
To quote myself:
...in a team-oriented game, your individual actions absolutely contribute to the team's collective well-being, and that's where problems arise: because many, many players often take the point of view that they must have their fun their way, even if it runs counter to the team's interests.
When someone joins a Normal or Hard game and takes the HX-25 to upgrade it to tier 5, nobody cares because the game isn't challenging enough that your choice of loadout really matters that much. At that difficulty, you aren't playing it for the hardest challenges.
When someone joins a Hell on Earth game (or CD) and decides without even asking that they're going to run
an absolutely garbage loadout that doesn't play to their perk's strengths or the team's need for that ability, you might as well be wasting a player slot (and adding unnecessary challenge to the game because you're adding more Zed health and more Zed counts). To continue with the Demo metaphor, most of its weapons are garbage because they don't accomplish Demo's role (which is deleting Scrakes, Fleshpounds, and QPs) as well as the RPG/C4/.500 loadout. The Seeker Six might be the only exception because it can actually get the job done in Hell on Earth, although you have to be magnitudes better at using it than basically anything else in Demo's arsenal (and that's just to achieve what the RPG loadout can already handle for much less effort).
If someone jumped into HoE, picked Commando, and proceeded to offperk an RPG and the Spitfires instead of using the assault rifles, I would have many questions, the first being "how soon can I call the kickvote?"
Nobody cares whether you'll win this game or not,
When I start a match, especially in Hell on Earth or CD, the goal sure isn't to see the "Defeat" screen, especially not 45 minutes in. In fact, if the wipe was a direct result of something I caused, I would feel bad about it, as one should if they are the millstone on their team's neck.
KF is one of the only multiplayer games where you don't lose anything for a defeat
Lose time, and depending on the reason for the wipe, patience. Again, there's nothing gratifying about losing 45 minutes in, especially because players just made plain terrible decisions starting from the loadout screen. Sure, there's hard-fought losses that happen despite everyone trying their best, but that's the exception rather than the rule.
and you can always carry regardless of how bad your teammates are,
Sometimes you can. Sometimes you're on a perk that isn't designed for that, and maybe you're not killing multiple angry FPs as a SWAT. Sometimes you're on a map that makes it harder and you lose despite your best efforts. Sometimes you're the first to die because someone set fire to a few large Zeds and they decided that you in particular were at fault rather than the Firebug that caused the issue, in which case you're not carrying anything.
Nothing's a guarantee in this game, even with the scaling that kicks in once people start wiping. I don't get on HoE and CD games expecting to win all the time, nor for others to pick up my slack if I screw up because
I screwed up. But I do get on to accommodate a preexising team in order to minimize the possibilities of something going awry.
so if you like winning, just consider it as an additional challenge.
This is a terrible argument. The challenge in a PvE game should come from the enemies,
not the other players on your team.
That same line was unironically used in the Steam discussion forums when pro-Zerk players were talking about how Firebug and Berserker add a really cool layer of challenge because they screw over precision perks just by existing and doing the things they were designed to do, and it was just as dumb an argument in that context.
We all have different reasons to play, and the last thing I want when I'm playing this game as sharpshooter + M99 is to listen to somebody telling me I should play medic instead, because he somehow doesn't realize my time is more important than his W/L ratio.
(I only wish people actually played Sharp in Hell on Earth instead of Medic, because at least the Sharp is trying. Sharp is the rarest perk in HoE as it is because nobody can play it well enough, and the few who can don't want to deal with chaos teams, which I completely understand.)
The inverse absolutely applies here. Hopes have been dashed because someone insisted on coming in as a second Commando and ruining Zed-Time extensions. Or because someone picks Firebug on a precision team and sets things alight. Or because someone picks Survivalist and dons a terrible loadout, doing very little except making a lot of noise, when all we needed was a Demo to kill HVTs.
And it all adds up to a team wiping. It isn't unreasonable that I get annoyed with someone knowingly not playing with the team because "lol it doesn't matter, don't you know how to have fun?"
THAT is the prime example of how not to be a good teammate.