This is dating me considerably but I was definitely was soured on the 'casual/hardcore' idea from back in the day where very loud multiplayer playerbases functionally demanded that every game copy Counter-Strike in every way, because the only thing that mattered was competition, and the only thing that could count as 'skill' was if every single game had bunnyhopping and some kind of AWP or shit like that.

I saw plenty of games and mods with interesting ideas basically give them up for the 'hardcore e-sports experience', and 'casual' was a slur for any game that didn't cater to the raging assholes of the multiplayer community who would shit up your servers and bicker endlessly about rules and 'how we do things in CAL'.

I learned to basically hate clans (thankfully they're basically dead now) and competitive players. And I blame them for Natural Selection 2 never getting off the ground, because they functionally built the game exclusively to only appeal to the long-extinct "competitive" playerbase of NS1. Instead of making an interesting game using the ideas they had, the devs were obsessive about trying to make it an e-sport title and they made the game like it was still 2002. Nobody played it, the game balance was trash and wildly swung back and forth because they obsessively tried to balance win/loss ratios without actually understanding the gameplay, and did nothing with the interesting setting, instead choosing to just copy-paste most of NS1 into a new engine and thought it'd work.

In a lot of ways NS2 had the same flaws and died for the same reason Evolve did.

This is dating me considerably but I was definitely was soured on the 'casual/hardcore' idea from back in the day where very loud multiplayer playerbases functionally demanded that every game copy Counter-Strike in every way, because the only thing that mattered was competition, and the only thing that could count as 'skill' was if every single game had bunnyhopping and some kind of AWP or shit like that.

I saw plenty of games and mods with interesting ideas basically give them up for the 'hardcore e-sports experience', and 'casual' was a slur for any game that didn't cater to the raging assholes of the multiplayer community who would shit up your servers and bicker endlessly about rules and 'how we do things in CAL'.

I learned to basically hate clans (thankfully they're basically dead now) and competitive players. And I blame them for Natural Selection 2 never getting off the ground, because they functionally built the game exclusively to only appeal to the long-extinct "competitive" playerbase of NS1. Instead of making an interesting game using the ideas they had, the devs were obsessive about trying to make it an e-sport title and they made the game like it was still 2002. Nobody played it, the game balance was trash and wildly swung back and forth because they obsessively tried to balance win/loss ratios without actually understanding the gameplay, and did nothing with the interesting setting, instead choosing to just copy-paste most of NS1 into a new engine and thought it'd work.