Melee is hard but its not the most technically demanding lol

I don't think you can objectively say one game is harder than another, but the reason I think melee is up there with those other games is that it combines all of those elements at the top level. According to this and this, Fox APM at the top level is anywhere from 250-300 APM. According to This, SC:BW APM is generally over 200 at top level, so it would seem that both games are tied in this regard, except for the fact that Melee uses analog input. Take for example shield dropping. Since you say you've been playing Melee for four years, I'd assume that you know what it is and that it is absolutely necessary for some characters' out of shield game. The picture below shows just how precise this input is, and many extremely important options rely on incredibly precice control and movement like this. And you have to do it at 200 APM.

http://www.ssbwiki.com/images/d/dc/Control_stick_angle_overview_%28shield%29.png

This is true, but the difference is where the 1 frame tech is used. For example in Street Fighter, many characters have bread and butter combos that rely on 1 frame links. This sounds insane, until you realise that 1 frame is always the same. There is no situation that a 1 frame link is any harder, or requires faster reaction time. In Melee, however, powershielding is always a reaction to your opponents action. If my opponent shoots his laser slightly later, or slightly closer, or slightly farther away, I have to change my shield timing to reflect that. This is why no top player can powershield 100% of the time.

This may be true, but there is no other game that combines speed on the level of Melee with the incredible decision making trees. Take DI for example. If I'm getting hit, I have a split second to make a decision. If I use combo DI on a kill move, I die. If I use survival DI on a combo tool, my opponent gets another, easier opportunity to hit me again, which can often lead to death.

I'll concede this point to you, although this isn't necessarily a good thing. Giving a player more time to make decisions lowers the skill ceiling. In one match of Melee, you have hundreds of decisions to make, all of which could lead to a death for either party as long as they aren't playing floaties. Melee gives enough decisions to allow the better players to get the upper hand consistently, and delivers them quick enough to ensure that it's impossible to play perfectly.

So that's why I think Melee is one of the hardest esports. Please comment why you disagree with my points instead of -fragging me this time.

that APM is heavily cherrypicked and isn't fair to compare to starcraft whatsoever, melee's average APM is definitely way lower, and even average fox APM in general, if you are gonna use this argument also consider that they don't consider mousestrokes as APM but the do consider analog stick movement as APm which is kinda a joke as I could argue I have off the chart APM when trying to get out of a wobble.

shield dropping is way easier than you are making it sound, it isn't precise at all.

good joke, you are doing while literally sitting in shield, at the most maybe dashing or charging a b special not at 200 APM

Stop making this shit argument please

to clarify for those uninitiated, the hardest Quake game is still Quake World

the "hardest" cs game is 1.3 because the mechanical skill ceiling was slightly higher than later patches

and then brood war obviously for sc

while it might be hard to compare between genres, it's not that difficult to compare within a genre imo

melee is not the hardest esport lol

I'm not arguing that average APM is higher than SC:BW, I'm arguing that at the top level, technical skill is comparable to SC:BW. To quote Prog "most people figured out we put about six or seven inputs per second, which is roughly about the same as professional starcraft."

I'm not incredibly familiar with Starcraft, but selecting a group of units isn't as precise as shield dropping.

That would be kinda a joke if they counted grab mashing as inputs, but since it's impossible to tell how well they're mashing without seeing their controllers, inputs like that aren't counted in these APM totals.

http://www.ssbwiki.com/images/d/dc/Control_stick_angle_overview_%28shield%29.png

I'm not talking about shield dropping, I'm talking about melee's tech in general. Every movement and action in Melee is important and done for a purpose at the highest level, and if you do it wrong, you lose a stock. Also, I'm not only talking about technical skill, my point is Melee combines technical requirements with fast paced decision making against one person.

only if you don't count cpma

I've explained some of Melee's technical depth in other posts above, and I don't really wanna explain that again. Mistakes in Melee are so punishing that in many matchups a grab at 0% means death, barring a mistake.

I don't know enough about SC to be able to comment on the multitasking, but I can say that between movement, punish game, neutral game, learning your opponent's patterns, and adapting to options or playstyles you haven't seen before, Melee has a lot of stuff to deal with. Stage memorization isn't really a thing once the match has started. A bit of the true craziness of Melee can be seen once you think of characters as a tool kit for players to use, not opponents. Sure, characters tend to have different playstyles, but Melee is a game primarily played against the opponent rather than the game. The opponent has options, and your job is to figure out what options they're going to use and/or are using and how to beat them with the tools at your character's disposal. The reason bad characters in Melee are bad is because their toolkits are missing important pieces. Imagine trying to build a house without a hammer.

Sure, top level players have a much more innate understanding of the game than some random, but it doesn't change the fact that your opponent can surprise you. Melee (as with other fighting games) is kind of like rock-paper-scissors. If the best option for my opponent to do is rock, I should obviously pick paper, right? But the problem is that if my opponent knows this, he can pick paper and beat me. Also sometimes paper beats scissors and rock-paper-scissors is much simpler than Melee, but there is no way to always win at Melee, and there's definitely not a way to learn this subconciously.

I couldn't agree with you more, and it's even harder to make a direct comparison between Quake and Melee than it is to make a comparison between Starcraft and Melee. But I'll try.

So let's break this down into categories. I'm gonna list a few aspects of Melee and try to compare them to aspects of Quake. The neutral game in Melee is similar to all of the things you've said combined besides aim and movement. At the base level, both games' neutral game is all about taking the information you have and applying it to what your opponent has been doing or is known to do. I don't think these are really comparable, as they're both kind of like a weird, complex version of rock-paper-scissors, so I'm gonna just call that part a tie. We're going to compare the movement from Quake to the technical demands of Melee. I feel like Melee is much harder than Quake from a purely technical standpoint. (I'm not including aim) Aim in Quake can be compared to the punish game and defense after you get hit combined. I think Quake takes the cake on this one because once the opponent is in an advantageous position in Melee, gameplay is mostly about damage control rather than trying to kill the opponent. Overall I'd say that Melee and Quake are very similar in the rock-paper-scissors department, although in Quake you can compensate for a lacking neutral (prediction and item timings) with a strong punish game. (ridiculous aim) I'd say this makes Melee a bit harder since you have to be extremely proficient in all three facets of the game (neutral, punish, and technical) to be successful. I'm not as knowledgeable in SC and Quake as I am in Melee, however, so please let me know where I'm wrong.

maybe the better term is "more unforgiving" or "higher skill floor" rather than "hardest" for qw

it's kinda sad that since the ql era quake has become almost completely about duel tho, for my money some of the most impressive quake ever is watching a guy like milton utterly shred through TDM

also, even if one were to try to argue that melee were harder than starcraft (which seems wrong to me but I profess some ignorance on the topic) purely from a potential skill ceiling perspective, koreans play sc meaning the game has been taken further, it's that simple

the level of infrastructure bw had in korea was pretty nutty and will prolly never be matched, it was just this perfect cultural moment that could only happen in that mid period of esports from like 2005 to 2010 or so

osu!

XD

Angua on e1m2, dag on dm6, mutilator on dm4, reppie on aero. All wonderful sights in QW that no other quake game can match :(

As a very casual follower of QW, can you explain to me how it ended up with so many one-map specialists? After hearing people like Thooorin and ddk praise Milton as probably the best QW player ever, and lamenting that he reached his peak so relatively late in the game's life cycle, I looked up a forum argument over who was better between him and Dag. It seemed like all the more knowledgeable guys were saying there was no contest, because Dag was only better on his beloved dm6. Why did it turn out that way?

A lot of QW maps are heavily thrown-together, and design tropes are rarely shared between them. Quake 3 has similar variation in map quality but the slight differences in overall game structure ,and the fact that level design was more mature by that point, made gamemodes have ideal map archetypes much like CS. The same thing with different maps having different tropes applies to all games on a superficial level, but the raw lower design quality of QW maps made the tropes much more prone to specialization.

Just IMO.

the map design of qw is so highly specific that it's not uncommon for players to jump divisions in skill because they can "play a map" better than someone and get completely crushed on others - if that doesn't speak to the design quality of qw maps + gameplay then I don't know what does

not denying that a lot of it is a happy accident of playing the same shit for two decades tho - but having 'unique' maps brings out more unique playstyles, even if you have something completely retarded like mh hallway on dm4 there's now a proper way to play around it instead of just mindlessly grabbing items when it's convenient

imo cpma is pretty terrible in comparison if you want to look at skill because at the highest levels it just boils down to sneaking quickswitch rails which is hard but it's still just aiming - the mindgames really pale in comparison which to me is a more interesting form of skill

I sort of agree with you about but I think you're heavily oversimplifying it
on most maps you can do a lot to avoid rails and being able to counter-rail / avoid rails is actually an incredibly important skill that involves a lot of mindgames in itself.

That being said quickswitch rail is pretty bullshit especially on certain maps (aerowalk)
qw is also very punishing, much more so that other afps, which is why map knowledge is incredibly useful

also nothing has any dirt on broodwar, not even sc2 which I still think is way harder than almost everything except melee and there is still a clear difference between them.

IMO it's more like, QW gameplay works better "in a vacuum" and maps need to do fewer specific things. They get away with more variation without making huge violations. Much like TF2 5CP maps have a particular overall structure or else the game plays badly, Q3/CPM are sort of the same, no doubt due to the differences from QW. In QW, individual good maps can be much more different from eachother without becoming gimmicky or unplayable; all the normal elements of the game stay in play one way or another to a stronger degree than they do in Q3/CPM.

This is both a weakness and a strength. You don't get glory running down your spine when you run into a nonconventional map that still works, but you get to take a lot of slack as a map designer and focus more on doing subtle things to make mindgames more interesting, rather than fixing problems that keep the map from hitting the extensive notes that Q3/CPM maps need to hit to be good.

I do also prefer aero in QW to CPM. I guess it's no surprise my favorite CPM map is cpm29/solid. I would say that rail bandages some problems on cpm15/patibuh's lair though.

Just my personal opinion. Comparing different quakes is great talk.