Eaglet wrote:
I don't think the numbers in that comparison is that fitting to be honest. To tell you the truth i don't have any experience with modern competitive PC games but i can only imagine that what's required of you as a player to make it to that upper echelon is much more demanding than what it is to get to a "competitive" level at most shmups.
I think the major issue is that a lot of people seem to make stuff like 1CC's out to be a much bigger and harder accomplishment than what they are. Trouserplankisms if you will.
The general sentiment among a lot of casual players seem to be that you have to be a high level autistic without a day job and any other hobbies that plays the same game days on end in order to accomplish anything worth noting.
This is simply not the case. Most mid-level shmups can be 1-ALLed with up to a month of consistent play (a credit a day) if you know how to practice.
As with anything it gets a lot easier the more experience you have.
I did a bit of research into this, and apparently it takes someone with no RTS experience between 1000 and 1500 ladder games to reach Masters League. Averaging 15 mins per game, that's 250 - 375 hours of playing. I'm not sure what the relevant point of comparison would be for "competitive" shmupping, what do you think? Let's take Batrider, a pretty popular game to play for score here on the forums. How many hours does it take a person with zero stg experience to get a Top 3 (or Top X, honestly don't know what the equivalent would be) score on this forum's leaderboard for Batrider, in your opinion?
I'm going to talk a bit more about the "1CCs are easy" sentiment in my reply to Icarus below.
Icarus wrote:
I absolutely agree with this, and have even
said as much on public channels. I never did understand the obsession with building the largest collection of 1CCs going. 1CC'ing a game - a 'scrubby' single loop clear at the least in multi-loop games, if we're making a distinction - isn't remotely difficult at all and only requires a small amount of intelligent, focused practice, and it doesn't really speak to the level of your abilities if you're panic-bomb-spamming and fumbling your way to the end.
The real meat of a game is found in taking its many systems and bending them to your will, and making the game give up all of its points while singing and dancing to your tune. Then and only then can it be considered that you've attained actual mastery of a game.
1CCs are nice things to have, but the journey with a game shouldn't stop there.
I feel a bit silly for having to say this, but this whole argument relies on the player in question having a certain baseline of general shmupping skill. The difficulty of a scrubby 1CC clear is completely relative. This shouldn't even need proof, but I can easily demonstrate it from my own experience - back in January, when I started playing shmups, I estimate that it would've taken me at least 50 hours to clear Futari BL Original - I took over 20 hours for Crimzon Clover's Novice Original, believe it or not. I recently bought the Futari console port, and cleared the game after maybe 6 hours of practice, most of which was spent on Larsa (I then proceeded to try to score, as the clear itself felt like not much of an accomplishment, actually). Point here being, if I need to actually take 50+ hours to get the scrubby clear, then it is, in fact, not at all easy (for me), and this doesn't mean that I'm bad at practicing. General skill developed over multiple games (especially if they're all a similar style of game, like Cave bullet hells) is very much a thing and makes a huge difference in the effective difficulty of any given accomplishment in a game - doesn't have to be a 1cc.
Imagine that you spend many months building up to a 2-ALL of DOJWL, you finally achieve it, and then some Japanese arcade veteran comes along and argues that you need to up your game and that it's really not that big of a deal to clear DOJWL, and why isn't your score better?
On a personal note, as somewhat of a 1cc collector, this whole problem feels very abstract to me, as I'm not especially motivated by being able to showcase my accomplishment on some forum or another. I try to play games that I enjoy and which also present a sufficient challenge that I am forced to improve. That's the primary point, and if I feel like trying to clear a Psikyo game (a style I'm completely unused to) will help me more than spending a hundred hours on Futari Maniac, I will do the former irrespective of how "hardcore" it makes me look in anyone's eyes.