Dear Developers, Stop Listening to Pros 

The pros are supposed to be good at the game, not change the game so they can be good at it.

Gotta remember that Halo's MP didn't start as this hyper-competitive sweat fest. It started on the couch with split-screen, which is about as casual as you can get. Even down to the screen cheating. Though I never use to do that... Never.

Being a pro doesn’t make you smarter than an actual game developer

It’s important to remember that a good chunk of FPS players don’t ever even touch competitive multiplayer. Many only dabble in it. Very few actually play competitively.

The worst case of this is when a game was not designed to be competitive, then the developers try all the sudden to engineer it to be competitive.

Been playing a lot of Apex in the past 4 or so months and i absolutely despise how Respawn just agrees on whatever stupid idea the 0.1% of players have. I hate what game developers do to competetive or casual games today, creating changes that simply cater to the 'professionals' and completely forgetting/not caring about players that just play the game casually for fun. It's actually ruining certain games and removing the fun and enjoyment.

Griesemer identified them as "optimizers" in his taxonomy of player types, they are perfectly happy to use only one strategy if it's the most optimal. If they're having "too" much fun, something is probably wrong and needs nerfing or buffing.

I started hating pros' opinions with the Zofia incedent in Rainbow Six: Siege. Zofia had an ability to self revive if she was downed but not killed. She was the only operator with this ability, and was the only "healer" on the attacking side for a while. However, there was a pro championship match were the defenders forgot about that ability, and the Zofia got back up and won the tournament. The losing team complained about it so much that Ubisoft removed that ability from her

The reason pro players are better than the developers is because the developers actually have a real job.

Most people don't actually know what they want so listening to the community doesn't works most of the time. Devs should focus on their original vision and only take the community opinion as suggestions.

"You can't force a game to be an eSport."

"Calling yourself a good designer because you're good at games. Is like saying a porn addict is good at sex"

This will probably show my age. But I remember that there was a Half-Life 1 mod called "The Specialist". It's really just another Deathmatch/Team Deathmatch game, but the whole gimmick about it is that the game lets you do action movie-esq stunts, complete with the same 80-90's action movie esthetics in map designs and character models. It was super fun seeing everyone doing dives, somersaults, and the signature Matrix dodges during a match. Every update some new interesting features gets added in. Until one day then the top "Pro" players in the community started whining about how the mod has become "too slow paced" and that the mod is now all about looking cool while shooting, instead of "skill" in shooting. And the developer ended up listening to those guys exclusively for the next overhaul update. They massively sped up the TTK, and sped up the movement speed. To the point that doing any stunt just make you more likely to die with no upsides. The mod turned into a railgun arena, where the most optimal way of play is just circle strafing. Community basically died within months of the overhaul. Even after the developer tried to revert most of the changes in the overhaul, the community population never really recovered. And guess what, the "Pro" players also left soon after they stank up the mod with their inputs. I'm still bitter to this day how a bunch of elitists murdered one of the most unique mod that came out of the Half Life 1 era. That other mod Action Half-Life was nowhere near as polished as The Specialist.

Is no one old enough to remember quake or UT? Created the entire genre that we know it and had(still to this day) some of the most impressive pros in the world. Don't recall any of them changing the game. Instead, they embraced the game and found out how to work around perceived problems.

Anybody else remember that time when halo 3 launched with a bug that caused melele kills to randomly send people flying into orbit? There was a dev post on the forums replying to it that said, if I remember correctly word for word, "This is awsome, we are keeping it in".

The casual scene is much more important than competetive

My best experience for multiplayer games is when I actually just play it with my friends (irl) casually and not strangers who might just talk smack at you for making a mistake by the ones who take it too seriously.

The competitive eater analogy is perfect. A competitive eater might want a chef to make more slimy hot dogs so they can eat them faster when they visit the chef’s restaurant.

Actually with the OG Halo 3, you could change a setting to either, skill based matching, OR quickest server connection. So they let you choose, a fast connecting game, or a closer skill level matched game. So weve kinda gone backwards...

also a lot of the time that pros ask dev's to "make a weapon more balanced" they're essentially asking for it to become boring, unfun, and never used