I'll start off by saying I'm someone who
NEVER drops solo. The sheer amount of anti-group, anti-competitive ignorance, villainizing and insults spread by solo-only players on this thread frightens me, for I fear for the future of this game. We have so few people who play MW:O who don't suck and I can almost fit the number of comp teams on my hands. From this side of the fence, we see the only solution is to see more players encouraged to embrace organized play. It's actually really fun up here. Whatever enjoyment you guys get from pug vs pug.. I don't get. I only find this game fun when both sides are playing well.
Let's get into some background. I'm personally pretty tired of it because I was hugely into competitive Super Smash Bros when I was younger and we were trolled by the same attitude of punksters saying that we're ruining a game that's meant for parties, doing such un-fun things as disabling items and choosing the less gimicky and neutral stages. It even had its own meta of matchups and some characters being played a lot more than others. These people showed up at tournament events occasionally, having no idea and expecting to have a good time, got
wrecked, and then promptly concluded that we have no lives to have been playing the game so much and gotten this good.
They didn't really sit around to notice the way we were actually interacting with one another. We're not bullies trying to act tough or *********** inside our heads at how much better we are than wimps. We don't get some primitive satisfaction from dominating the defenseless (There are a couple bad eggs I suppose, but a lot of the people I really respected and looked up to in the competitive community were far from that! Nicest guys ever). I don't think it clicks in the casual player's mind that it's
fun to play at your very best and to expect the same in your opponents and to give your best game no matter what. It disappoints us when people don't even try. To put this into MW:O perspective, I consider 'not even trying' the refusal to be part of a team.
Sometimes I'd put money on the line when I'm going up against a regional traveling champ, knowing full well that I was going to lose my money. I played this guy so I could learn from him and get better. And if he 'sandbags' ie doesn't even try because I'm too easy for him, I actually take that as an insult. I want my opponent to drive me into the ground as hard as he possibly can and not hold back for a moment. If I can land an effective hit on a pro, I want to have earned it. I take every loss as an opportunity to learn. I can still almost perfectly replay how some of my games went because I was so amped up and focused in the match. This is a thrill and a joy, and in fighter games especially it's like a new form of interaction, getting inside the heads of people, seeing how they think and watching how play styles interact, how people react to pressure and such.
We always shook hands afterward and said GG, it's just sportsmanlike to do because we all understood that stomps happen not because people enjoy clubbing seals but because we respected our opponent enough to show them everything we're capable of, and they appreciated that back and took their whupping not as an insult but as a reminder that they still have much improvement to go.
I don't feel good clubbing seals. People who are competitive are on a quest for self-improvement and interested in seeing how good they can get. What bothers people like us the most is not losing in itself, but rather not knowing how to improve or not understanding how the loss happened. If it's a loss where the reasons were clear, that's good because we know where we can improve on; we can prevent that from happening the next time or maybe even use that ourselves. People who avoid losses entirely out of trying to protect their egos are not the kind of gamer who stick around in the competitive scene once they've seen what it's like and what it takes to stay in it.
Here's to hoping those shamefully ignorant images aren't actually believed by anyone and that there's more people who can actually understand where we're coming from. There are a lot of different personalities, a lot of different mindsets, and a lot of different forms of enjoyment that players are seeking as they all find themselves pitted against each other in this gamemode. Us competitive players are not evil or cowardly, we just take the game more seriously than you and don't bother dumbing down our own abilities when we could be doing something a better way. Are we going to ruin pugs' experience by being a superior force to their sordidly unorganized mess? Probably. You people who don't even try are wasting our time too. Go back to pug queue please. And I hope the devs find a way to make it harder for all those other units to hide from ours.