> If that's the new player experience, you done fucked up.

Have you really though?

I'd argue that what made arena shooters great was the steep learning curve and the grind to improve as a player.

The feeling of having practiced duels for months and finally being able to beat players that used to 50-0 you every game was better than any achievement in any modern FPS game I've ever experienced.

Gamers these days just doesn't really care about becoming better themselves. They want the instant gratification and that's why you have FPS games with super low TTK, perks, abilities, heroes etc. All to narrow down the skill gap between actual good players and completely new players.

Maybe it's just me but I find those games boring.

I've given up on PvP. What I never understood was; if I "git gud" then all that really does is shift the "I can't win" problem to someone else. It doesn't resolve it.

Now if you have fun playing the game while losing to others, don't have rewards (whatever they are) based on winning against others, well that's not a problem.

So now I play PvE and it is much more fun in a long term sense. There can still be stats about who the best player is, but everyone gets the rewards and has fun.

That's largely what matchmaking aims to solve, assuming you have enough players you can get a reasonably balanced match to drop people into.

Bots can teach basics, but many of these games rely on abusing game mechanics in ways the developers didn't think of in development so it's impossible to teach. Or things are physically difficult to pull off.

Movement shooters especially have this problem because a core part of the game is abusing the movement system and abilities to out maneuver other players. You can explain the how, but executing it all automatically is a real skill that requires practice. I adore Titanfall 2. I sunk hundreds of hours into it. It's really something else when you get the movement down, it all happens so fast you can't think about it you just have to do it. There's no way to teach that with a tutorial, it's muscle memory and perseverance.

Titanfall 2 has all of these things, campaign, skirmish with bots and PvE, but the skill floor and ceiling is still brutal. Whether it failed or not is a question of how long you expected the game to last, but it still succumbed to the same fate. The more experienced players pulled the ladder up behind them and the matchmaker didn't have enough players to give everyone a fair match.

Splitgate matched new players with bots for the first few hours. It meant I had fun (then eventually I levelled up enough, matched with players, got stomped, and never picked it up again…)