AWKWARD ZOMBIE

Again, I think skill floor is a bit of a misleading term, as there's no real limit to how bad someone can be at videogames. "Ease of entry" is probably a more accurate description. I think "ease of entry" is always a positive thing in games, "easy to learn, hard to master" should be an ideal games strive to. However the problem comes from things like in your example where the gameplay is negatively influenced to achieve it. Grenade launchers in CoD create an uneven playing field because they almost guarantee two free kills. Because of this it also lowers the skill assymptote, like you said it acts a crutch that dimineshes the diference between a skilled and lesser skilled player.

Arguing semantics will get you nowhere, however more accurate asymptote may be, no-one can spell or pronounce that, skill ceiling is just more convenient to bring up in a conversation and not seem like some vocabulary nerd.

Also, I will bring in my knowledge of skill floor and ceiling as it stands in League of Legends to add to the discussion. There are a wide variety of characters with varied skill floors and ceilings. Take Garen for example. He has, in my opinion, one of the lowest skill floors in the game. Early game there's a lot of people that can beat him, but as the game goes on, he seems to get free stats out of nowhere, and can then mash his buttons and kill you. Anyone can do a passable job on Garen. But he also has a low skill ceiling, which is why he's not seen at competitive play. He just doesn't bring anything to the table other than statistical advantages, there's not really many great plays that can be made with him. So he's basically similar to the rocket launcher in call of duty that has been mentioned.

And then there's someone like Orianna. All of her spells revolve around the movement and usage of a weaponized ball that is part of her character. Everything you do, you have to consider where the ball is, where it will be, you have to plan all of your moves several seconds in advance to make good usage of a ball. She has probably one of the highest skill floors in the game because of this, as it is easy to mismanage your ball and become completely useless in the heat of the moment. But if you manage the ball well, she brings a lot to the table.

I'm not quite sure where i'm going with this. I guess Garen kind of stands as a good champion for new players to play while they get used to the game in general, and then when their knowledge improves, they can work on mastering a champion like Orianna, so it kind of brings in sort of a difficulty curve into the game. Or you can just play whoever's strong at the moment, and wreck face regardless.

What you describe proves that it's possible to have both a low skill floor and high skill ceiling, by having a strategy that works well on low skill levels fall apart on higher levels because it has counters that can be consistently executed. Note that this is not true for the grenade launcher example.

A problem that arises with your example though is the midway-point, where a player learning the more difficult hero will get beaten by worse players playing the easy hero. This can be discouraging and frustrating.


Words are important for proper communication, and if you're not familiar with asymptotes, you probably shouldn't have skipped math in high school. Regardless, my point was more about reaching a better understanding of these common terms rather than actually attempt to change people's vocabulary, which would be quite futile.

True, words are important, but in this case the difference isn't that great.

I do agree with your original point though. Some games function fantastically without a high skill ceiling. Limbo, Portal, Bastion... The common theme is that all of these are single player games. When it comes to multiplayer, and especially competitive multiplayer, high skill ceilings become very important. If the skill ceiling is too low, then environmental variables become incredibly important as high skill players can match each other completely, except for ping/package loss/randomness. This does not leave a very exciting game.

Take chess for an example. Both players have a while to think about their moves and most environmental variables are removed. The skill comes from move prediction and reading your enemies play. The better brain wins. If you had created some artificial skill floor, games would end up like this:



And to be honest, I don't think a skill ceiling/floor really is a thing you can really design for. Yes, you can set out to make certain designs that will inevitably end up leaning to one of the sides, but the general mechanics of the games are more important as to how the skill distribution will be. It's easy to talk about FPS games in general, but then a curveball like Planetside pops in, or ArmA. How do these fit into the arguments and theories we have created earlier? What's a low skill weapon in ArmA for example?

I can't contribute to the discussion, I just wanted to say that video is beautiful.

Yeah. I admit. I made the chess reference just to add that video...

That's the general interesting question to me really, how do mechanics precisely influence and create a game?

I do agree, as I tried to state earlier, that a good skill curve is an organic result of good game design, and not something that should be arbitrarily forced.

So what type of game/mechanic do you want to begin from? As it is now, there are too many unknown factors at play to have a meaningful discussion.

I just write these posts when I have an idea I want to discuss (and can be arsed).

I guess the easiest thing to do would be to pick a game and discuss its mechanics and figure out what changes could have been made to lower/elevate the skill floor/ceiling.