Dictionary
Words, grammatical forms and meanings linked to the ontology.
skill floor en · NOUN
Pronunciation
Meanings
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The minimum amount of skill required to be considered competent at some game or activity.
This is to say that I'm not predisposed to sticking to Valorant due to its genre. I'd tried my hand at both Counter-Strike and CS:GO and found that between the aesthetics and a high skill floor, neither of them really got their hooks into me.
2020 October 21, Ricardo Contreras, “'Valorant' Is the Tactical Shooter I Needed to Get Into Tactical Shooters”, in VICE, archived from the original on 07 Dec 2022:Yeah, just you. If we set 3-ball cascade as the skill floor of juggling, 5 ball cascade is not an extremely low level.
2004 February 29, Scott Kurland, “poi/juggling communication invitation”, in rec.juggling (Usenet):Designing a game with a high skill ceiling (where players must invest significant time and effort to achieve maximum skill) often results in a game with a relatively high skill floor as well.
2019 June 13, Game Design Snacks: Easily Digestible Game Design Wisdom, Pittsburgh, P.A.: ETC Press, →ISBN, page 111:There may be no better example of how low the skill floor can go than getting literal toddlers to play Mario Kart and actually exercise a modicum of control over what's happening on screen: Kinect is the only other platform for which I can imagine that happening.
2018 January 9, Dave Thier, “It Turns Out You Can Get A Baby To Play 'Mario Kart 8' On Nintendo Switch”, in Forbes, New York, N.Y.: Forbes Media, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 09 Nov 2020:There's an old game design maxim: good games take minutes to learn but a lifetime to master. Another way to say this is "low skill floor, high skill ceiling."
2009, Steve Swink, Game Feel: A Game Designer's Guide to Virtual Sensation, Boca Raton, F.L.: CRC Press, →ISBN, page 302:I'm always here for lowering the skill floor while preserving a high ceiling. Many developers have tried to make unwelcoming genres like real-time strategy and fighting games friendlier, and I want to see devs continue to try.
2022 June 9, Alice O'Connor, “Former Blizzard folks announce free-to-play RTS Stormgate”, in Rock Paper Shotgun, archived from the original on 14 Aug 2022:Coordinate term: skill ceiling
Enter Gnar, Azir, Kalista and the upcoming Rek'Sai. These are champions with considerably elevated skill floors – they’re simply difficult to play any kind of competently.
2015 December 5, Julian Aidan, “Complex Champions Means Longer Life For League Of Legends”, in Hardcore Gamer, archived from the original on 23 Jan 2022:Hey, I like all the VS, it's just the skill ceiling may not be as high as on some other games. But I feel the difference is far enough from the floor that it provides a decent spread among players in the area. The problem comes in when the skill ceiling is close to or even ON the skill floor.
1999 February 21, Kid Vid, “VS=Good Game”, in alt.games.sf2 (Usenet):[…] we're also working on lowering the skill floor for our game by providing easier ways to take certain actions, such as building our equivalent of a barracks.
2022 June 21, Andy Brown, “Frost Giant Studios CEO Tim Morten on 'Stormgate': "The RTS genre's best days are ahead"”, in NME, archived from the original on 29 Jun 2022:
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