Well designed competitive scenes are a fickle thing.
You can absolutely keep vertical progression AND support short competitive matches, and you don’t even need to normalize stats to do so. However, there is a fundamental requirement that involves two buzz words you’ll hear sprinkled about these discussions:
Skill-Cap (or ceiling) and Skill-Expression. These two qualities are found in basically any competitive game from Fighting Games to MOBAs, and even some FPS.
Skill-Cap
Skill-cap is largely what my old post is about- A system that rewards any player regardless of gear level based on how well they aim, time their attacks, and position their characters. While we often throw out the term skill, it really boils down to knowledge and the intelligence to apply that knowledge on the fly. A game like this has minimal mechanical requirements; You’re not expected to play Bach’s Fugue in D minor on your keyboard to control your character and make them do things. An example of this would be if we played each other in a fighting game, one that I’ve mastered and you have entry level knowledge of, it wouldn’t matter if I quadrupled your character’s HP and Damage because you ultimately would have little idea what you’re doing and the skill-cap for those games is very high. Now imagine if you’ve got four times the damage and life than me in New World; It would be a slaughter and I doubt I’d come close, even if I played perfectly, because there are very few ways for me to interact with the combat. I might be able to survive a bit with the right weapons and good dodging, but it would still ultimately end the same unless you’re just really REALLY bad. New World has a fairly low skill-cap. There’s almost no counter-play potential and so it ends up being a simple numbers game. Don’t get me wrong, there are some players who will lose no matter how good their gear is, those are outliers, we’re focusing on the people that would fall under a normal distribution, at which point gear and build is going to matter more than player-skill.
Skill-Expression
Skill-Expression, aka the anti-meta- I think is also something that New World needs more of. You can look at most any player, see their weapons, and know what skills they have and what gear they’d be using because there’s pretty clearly defined disparities in power between skills and talents.
Skill-Expression would mean two players picking the same weapons, with wildly different play styles and builds, and being equally successful in their own right. This would require heavy retooling of the weapons and all of the weapon’s abilities so that they’re useful for different reasons as well as the addition of a robust and varied list of perks available for gear to highlight different skills in different ways. I’m happy to provide examples of those as well if you’d like.
If you took the time to read those, thanks! You’d notice I made no mention of equalizing stats or normalizing damage, or any such thing. Vertical progression can absolutely exist in a competitively designed combat system and New World could absolutely support that if they chose too.
Personally, I think the PvP ship for New World has all but sailed with the refusal of Devs to address these fundamental aspects of competitive gameplay. At this point I’d rather just see them focus on delivering a really polished and CHALLENGING PvE experience rather than just more grinds. PvP will never be this game’s selling point without a system that supports competitive play.
