@jip said in Why does everything suck so much right now?:
Competitive players do not draw in casual players
Sorry but I entirely disagree with this. In pretty much every competitive game or sport that I can think of, people are drawn in by the best of the best.
People get into basketball because they see someone like Steph Curry do some absolute black magic on TV and are just inspired by that and want to do it themselves. You can go to any public court and probably find someone trying to emulate his shooting form jacking up terrible 3 point shots.
People get into chess because they watch Magnus Carlsen play with 10 seconds on the clock drunk and bantering with his friends vs other incredible top chess players who have 5 minutes on the clock and he still wipes the floor with them.
I saw ZLO do absolute wizardry on some Youtube casts; I saw Lu_Xun and csoller put up an incredible fight vs Brainwashed and Brainfart and imagined myself in their shoes; I saw Blackheart and Blodir demolish more average players in a 2v6 and just thought, damn, that was incredible, I want to be able to do that.
This is the sort of stuff that gets people hooked and gets a foot in the door, not stuff like area reclaim. New players do not care about those kinds of features; these kinds of features only affect the experienced players. When I was new, I did not give a shit about ACU snipe mode (in hindsight, objectively broken busted OP feature), I didn't use it because I didn't understand balance. When I was 1200 I genuinely thought Stingers were the best unit in the game because they were the cheapest ACU sniping t2 gunship. Whether that specific feature existed or not would not have mattered to me. I would've played regardless because I just wanted to one day be good enough to 2v6 some scrubs on Dual Gap, you know?
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/08/world/asia/chess-looks-to-young-norwegian.html?_r=0
I think this quote from this article summarizes my view well: "Chess enthusiasts say the game needs another big personality to energize it, and they are pinning their hopes on Mr. Carlsen. “I think that it is fairly clear that chess is not at the height of its popularity,” said David Shenk, the author of a book about the history of chess. “All it takes is one guy to come along and electrify the world.”"