One very common characteristic of "e-sport" games is player being ranked by skill and matchmaking.
When players are constantly pitched in more or less balanced matches, skills tend to improve quickly. The game remains popular to bads and newbies, attracting new players while at the same time encouraging an elitist culture at the top. Bad players have time to learn the game against equally bad players. Against middle-ranked players they would most likely GTX away, but they don't meet the middle skill players all that much. Good players do not lose time and interest crushing noobs but instead keep on receiving opportunities for improvement as they keep on meeting better players.
This is why the level in cRPG is getting stale in my opinion. The playerbase is too small to be split into skill tiers, so the good players have no real reason to improve, and the noobs don't stay.
This is pretty much what I was trying to say. Games that are designed to be competitive from the ground up need to think about how the average and bad players are still going to enjoy the game in a public server. If you look at a game like cRPG you can have 20% of the players on the server getting 80% of the kills. For every person that has more than a 1:1 kD ratio thats potentially another player thats not having fun because he can't kill stuff. The goal of game designers now is for people to roughly get 1:1 KPD, that means everyone is having fun. It sucks because to do that in public FPS games they try to bring the skill ceiling down while bringing the skill floor up. So good players don't really dominate and bad players still have options to do well. You have random deaths with nades flying everywhere, airstrikes, random headshots, rock-paper-scissors, RPG elements, levelling up, thoughtless run&gunning etc.
Games like CS managed to succeed as newbie friendly games and as competitive games because they have a unique design. You have your newbies running & gunning or crouch spraying and getting random headshots which can defeat even the best players depending on random chance, and the best players learn techniques that overcomes the randomness and allow you to force headshots. No matter how good you are you will still die to random sprayed headshots, this allows newbies and average players to still have fun on public servers
Hopefully Donkey crew can do something similar without making the game too frustrating to play. They need to remember to make sure the newbie friendly stuff isn't still used by good players though. Like in cRPG we have xbows. By themselves xbows might be a legitimate way to allow bad players to have some fun, but the way they're implemented means the best players can exploit them by being good in melee and having no downsides in that part of the gameplay. Good players just get a newbie friendly weapon alongside their normal melee capability. Really you should have next to no melee capability if you want to go the newbie friendly route, so that you transition out of that gameplay as you get better
