People try too hard to remake maps completely, most for recognition. The community cares too much about remakes people make, instead of caring about really good new maps. A mediocre remake should never be given precedence over a great original map. Happens way too much on the subreddit.
Not really. The aim assist is pretty high and the melee system is only beat by Reach in terms of awful.
I'm a pretty big proponent of "a game is only as competitive as its players" and "a skill gap grows as large as a game's players play enough to improve." I mean look at Quake. The little stuff in that game have been being refined by its dedicated players for like decades (lol) which is the only reason it has as large of a skill gap as it does. It would be easy to look at it at face value and say "yeah just another FPS about controlling the map and shooting people." Idk, tl;dr I'd say its all relative.
A game needs to have a skill ceiling high enough to LET players progress that high over time. Doesn't matter how competitive the players are, if the game design isn't good players will hit the ceiling and pretty much every player will be of more or less the same skill. Eg: halo 3, Reach, 4, H2A, probably halo 5 soon. Quake is just a brilliantly designed game.
More or less the same skill is where everyone will stall out at in every game (you literally can only get so good), and then you have the people who have played 86 trillion duels on a single map and have the whole thing so refined that that edge ever closer to the asymptote. Allow me to rephrase my initial saying of "a skill gap grows as large as a game's players play enough to improve"--all games have a 'best you can be' and a 'worst you can be,' and some games may have smaller gaps than others between the best and the worst. In my opinion though, the competitiveness depends on how hard the playerbase squeezes the game in order to get one more drip out of it to expand the existing skill gap just a little more. Even if the difference in skill between the best and worst players is smaller in a game, the]at skill difference relative to the maximum skill gap is the same. This is my reasoning for sticking with "a game is only as competitive as its players." I just think Quake has a natural max skill gap higher than much games, and it has been being squeezed for so long that the gap between the best and the worst is nearing its max. From my perspective, it doesn't inherently make it any more competitive just because the differences in skill are more noticeable. Also mind you I love Quake and watching pro duels are my favorite as far as video games go. Also I think its hilarious that one of the most important things in high level Quake is bunny hopping and stuff to move faster, which was initially a bug. Anywho, I'm bad at articulating things and this is an unpopular opinion thread, so I'm expecting a lot of disagreement. Basically, to sum it up, if this was an equation it would be: competitiveness = (best player's skill - worst player's skill)/(the game's max skill gap) So it's up to the players to get as close to the max as they can to push the competitiveness up as high as it can go. lol