TL;DR:
This isn't a real tldr of the 2 videos. But discussion points include the quality game design memes you've heard of before:
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That one fps game with 2 teams, one gun had a better k/d over all players even though the stats were identical. It was cause one sounded cooler and players literally played better cause it sounded cooler
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That time in league of legends where they nerfed a champion and the champ had a winrate drop. But the patch that hit the client didn't actually apply the nerfs in the patch notes, it did literally nothing? Players just sucked shit more cause mad and bad
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That other time in league of legends where they nerfed a champion... it's the same thing as before. "It happens surprisingly frequently with league"
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This bullet point is me shitting on league more, not included in the video. (I play dota2) Did you know that in the recent worlds championship, the devs didn't like all the laneswapping that was occurring? This has lead to the final incentive of all incentives against lane swapping: each player gets a role-specific quest at the pick screen before the pregame, and not being in the requisite lane area griefs yourself against the quest progress. It's WOW well rested buff all over again for the 352nd time.
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a lot of discussion about fighting games because the author was a fighting game developer, and player created tier lists. Did you know that Yoshi jumped many tiers in the smash melee tier lists? This is because someone played yoshi good, and noone knew that yoshi could be played good for over 15 years. No this game doesn't get patched, it's a nintendo game on the funny tiny disk system that's a box you can carry around easily.
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Actually, it can be a good thing to let easy to execute strategies exist, and it's also a good thing to let hard to execute strategies be better than easy to execute stratagies. Risk/reward. Let there be player expression. We're talking about fighting games.
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players are always right that something is wrong, but they are infrequently (never) right about how to fix it. (clap please)
"there is no hard multiplayer games" is more RTS focused. key points:
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Players complain about decreasing the skill cap too much. The skill cap in question: spending time manually queuing workers, placing farms, building pop cap. Key examples are age of empires 2 and starcraft 2.
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The increase of accessablility from starcraft 1 to starcraft 2 increased strategic play, not QWOPing the keyboard and mouse (DAE like having a unit selection cap of 13 lings?)
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identifying 'difficulty' of a game being an amalgamation of multiple measureable tasks, primarily strategy and execution. A general thesis in line with zero-k's "Let players fight players, not the UI"
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Modern RTS QWOPing stems from technical limitations from the time of the origin of the genre, no player campaigns adding new QWOPing, only conserving existing QWOPing and resisting change.
I think the 1 hour video has more to do with hermit balancing, but as it's much more from a fighting game and live service model point of view, I wouldn't say it applies one to one with zero-k. One of the main points is that a balancing team does not exist to create 'perfect balance', but the things in the picture, a fine quote summarizing it is approximately "game tuning is more of an artform than a science" while reiterating all the things you've probably heard before if you watch a lot of GDC game balance/player feedback talks.
