Why Is The Finals Community Divided
Intro
reach the finals. This is the slogan of the game and references the final round of a tournament. Embark has marketed the game as a virtual game show where contestants compete in tournaments to reach the finals and win the entire tournament. I want us to keep this in mind as we explore the differences between the casual scene and the competitive scene, and I will get back to this point.
I want to point out that at the current moment. I am in the top 50 globally on the leaderboards, and I am a flex pick, meaning I play every roll relatively evenly, so feel free to take that information as you will. The game play that I'm going to be showing is basically just mesh on heavy because I do think that heavy is a pretty interesting topic when it comes to comparing casuals and competitives since season 2 dropped and the rank system became more skill-based.
I have been seeing a bigger and bigger divide between the high ELO side of the community and the casual side. Opinions on various topics drastically differ. The focus on what classes, gadgets, and weapons need to be nerfed or buffed is often on different sides of the spectrum depending on where you're looking.
I thought it would be an interesting topic to explore and potentially point to the different factors as to why this game's community feels so divided, more so than in the average game. Before we get into the topic, I quickly want to address the declining player base. With the increase in cheaters, I am well aware of both of these things.
A lot of content creators are already making Doom posts, and I don't think it's very healthy for the topic. The developers are well aware of this, and it is obviously in their best interest to solve these issues, so I don't want to basically just spend 10 minutes beating a dead horse that's been beaten to death so many times already, so let's move on from that starting point.
Chapter 1 barrier to entry
In the first chapter of this article barrier to entry, let's take a few examples of current games that have ranked and unranked modes.
Within their game that has seen a very good success, valerant Rainbow Six Siege Apex Legends, and let's throw in another game outside of the FPS genre, League of Legends. Now these all show a pretty common trend of having their ranked mode in the go-to casual mode within that game being basically identical in how they play, maybe a few less rounds for casual, or maybe there's no pick or bands, and for some of these games we get like extra casual modes that tend to just serve as like a warm-up, such as death match or PDM, and then some do limited time modes.
One thing we can clearly grasp from this information is that the game is centered around one particular mode, and balancing decisions are focused. By balancing that mode itself, we can also take a look at, say. Call of Duty or games like that where there's tons of different modes, but all those modes play so similarly that the meta is basically the same on all them, so I think that's a little different, and then even when it comes to like ranked, there's multiple modes that are played with in that there's also like a quick play where it just kind of puts you in any mode, so that's a little bit different, which is why I didn't really want to bring that up because I was mainly focusing on games that have a specific ranked mode and then an unranked mode.
The tricky part of adding so many different modes that do not appear in rank Q is balancing. These modes are all very different. For example, in the finals for ranked mes shield, sa2 is extremely dominant, and most ranked grinders would agree that double heavy is very strong, and this loadout is one of the strongest in the game by far where you have the mes shield sa2.
RPG Dome Shield, and usually the C4, but you can also bring a barricade or anti-grab for casual players who enjoy stuff like power shift requests to Nerf the APs, snipers, and a couple other changes that don't really add up to how the game is played in High ELO. Now for the Powers shift, nobody complains about the mesh SA 12, and in high low ranked, nobody's really complaining about APS turrets and snipers, because they're basically non-existent.
When we look at ranked, we have multiple rounds that end in potential enemy team comp vinyl rounds, and if we take casho, which is the closest mode to the rank mode, we end up still missing out on all of these aspects that are extremely important to know when playing rank tactical second place finishings, building a looto that has reserves to cover each map variant in potential enemy team comp vinyl round load out swapping, grieving.
Assisting other teams for your own personal gain by knowing when and why to double up stagger or split cash outs final round spawn manipulation. Now, if you don't understand everything I just mentioned, that is part of the problem with the divide. There's so much nuance to the finals, and it's a pretty complex game, and even Diamond 1es that I played with don't know how much money you get for activating a vault or even for inserting it into a cash out.
Some don't even know how much money you get for a kill. This is because there is so much to know in casual modes, which do a very bad job of onboarding players for rank.
Chapter 2 balancing
Chapter 2: Balancing Now this topic has been beat to death, and I'll always keep taking punches. I'm not going to sit here like most people do and say if you Nerf this thing, the game will be perfect; we all know that's not the case.
I just want to bring attention to the balance differences we see in high ELO and low ELO, along with the changes from casual modes outside of rank in high ELO. The meta is very dominated by two specific loadouts: mesh sa2, like I mentioned before with RPG C4 Dome, and the other loadout being heal beam fcar, defib, zipline, and jump pad.
We usually have the third being a charge and slam heavy or another healer for the third spot, and sometimes we get light with Cloak, which is always nice to see because lights are kind of a rare sight in higher ELO. I always wondered why heavy just isn't seen much in low ELO and in casual games, and I figured it out just by going into casual modes myself as a solo player and seeing how each class felt, so here are my findings.
The light actually feels stronger. Originally, I always assumed light would be harder because of the higher skill. Gap with light needs proper positioning and also very good situational awareness, but it actually becomes very easy to play because light does one thing very well: kill isolated targets.
If you are a light, you have mobility stealth and a stun gun to fully capitalize on it, but in high ELO, this is important to know because, versus a coordinated team, you are very rarely ever going to get a chance to isolate a target. This becomes exaggerated with the strength of the cloak and stun gun.
