I don’t think that looking down on players who enjoy fighting games for single player/story/art/etc. content is a smart move for the FGC in general. There are always complaints about how the scene isn’t as strong as it used to be and that it’s deteriorating, and then they turn around and look at the players who aren’t interested in playing the game the same way as they do and mock/insult them rather than try to find a clever way to draw them in further.
I know a good number of people who love skullgirls for its art, character concepts, settings, music, backgrounds, etc. over the gameplay (they actually aren’t interested in the gameplay) and enjoy posting pretty well-done fan-art and whatnot. The last thing I’d want to do is show them that the competitive skullgirls community is an elitist and unapproachable mass of self-righteous neckbeards and completely turn them off of it.
The thing to keep in mind is that there is no way to directly force the number of competitive players to increase. All you can do is make the game as popular and attractive as possible so that it gathers more attention and possibly the eyes of competitive-minded players in one way or another… whether they be established members of the FGC who haven’t considered it before or new untapped talent looking for a fresh and exciting game that appeals to them.
We should definitely be doing everything in our power to attract as many eyes as possible (pro or not), and these statistics give us a clue about how to focus our attempts. I’d love to see a larger presence of skullgirls in general at anime/comic/gaming conventions in particular, since you can appeal to everybody from the cosplay enthusiasts to the talented fan-artists to unfamiliar gamers altogether in one shot. The more they think about it, talk about it and get their own networks of friends into it, the more name recognition skullgirls gets. The more name recognition we get? There’s a higher chance of attracting the serious players that some purists seem to want so much.
You may not have people going around saying that but you will find some people going around and saying various things like ‘Only people that play the game should vote/have weighted votes’ and the like.
USUALLY, when it comes to making changes to a fighting game it is better to listen only to those who have spent some time building an actual understanding of the game.
THIS TIME however, that really isn’t the case, because we are only voting on characters and not the design (by this I mean how they work, not how they look) of the characters themselves. The designs will still be chosen by the creators so there is no need to worry that the winners of the fan polls will hurt the game. Also since everyone who voted paid to be able to do so, you just have to accept the results.
The issue is people are getting super emotional over these polls.
Oh, but there IS a way to get more players to be active competitors: let’s stop being assholes towards the casuals. Stop the misogyny, the racism, the homophobia, the random abuse. Ppl have become WAY too comfy with hurling insults from behind a screen. As far as weighing votes goes, u can’t measure involvement but u can measure $$$ and to say 7.5k is the same as 1$ is bs. My 2 cts.
No, that sentence is bs. You were only required to donate $1 to vote. If you wanted to donate over 7k, you could but they didn’t make you. It was nothing more than a show of your generosity and your love for the game. Then there is also the fact that before voting started, everybody was completely fine with getting the same amount of votes as anybody else who donated less or more money than them. As soon as characters people didn’t like started making it through, THEN people started crying “Oh I donated more money than you so I should be worth more!!”. People saying their votes should be worth more because they donated more money looks to be nothing less than a side effect of being butthurt about their characters.
Though I do think that the minimum required to vote should have been $5 instead of $1. Because you know there are people out there who just wanted to fuck with the votes and donated a single dollar to be able to help out with that. There is always those kinds of people. But in the end we still win as SG players because of it.
To be honest, I’m actually surprised that tournament players make up such a large proportion of the survey vote, 30% is fucking huge. TBH I’m not sure if its even accurate.
You’d better believe if this was SF4 or MK9 the vote would be 90% casuals.
