I'm too much of a nub to have played the old LD but I have watched some videos.
Imo, the current generation is better. Mind you: current generation of LD, not current generation of players.
Why? Ld has become much faster in terms of game tempo.
Every striker has a gun now, everyone has trinkets now, everyone has UV's now. It's a higher level overall, and players had to adapt to it.

Feyi

History lesson!

*not everything is accurate as I left for 7 months right after the initial release of LD*

The current generation of Lockdown is actually better than the previous generation. This is just in general, everyone counts. Though, if you gathered the greatest LD players of this generation and put them up against the greatest LD players of the previous generation, the previous generation would absolutely wreck this generation. Why?

This generation has not only complicated the simple loadouts of the past but there are so many play styles that players who use them tend to be unorganized and more prone to make a mistake. You know how everyone has the same old boring loadout now? FF/BTB, GF/DA, Polaris or Valiance. Back then the common loadout consisted of antigua line, DA/GF, leviathan and the flourish line. Not much of a difference but if you look into skill, it's completely different.

Today, players usually follow the combination of swinging your flourish and/or GF and firing a bullet from your valiance to freeze the player > repeat. Back then, the top players used this format. Months of this and people thought to copy the top players back then which quickly spread the use of this play style. When the play style spread, the top players once again changed and sought to counter this play style (brandish). Then once again someone copied and it spread. It's a cycle that still continues today.

Too complicated? No. I remember myself being a levithan charger. I grew a brain and started using a DA/AP combination. There are many players that follow the play styles of all the "great" LD players today. As Misten said, tier 2 right now is filled with a lot of talent and I can't wait to see them in tier 3.

To your finesse question, we would win. Our strategy will probably be better than theres. Individually they are flourish masters but I doubt they could compete with combinations used today. I don't entirely agree that finesse was the greatest either, they split up after their golden age and many of them joined other good guilds at the time (Reign of Chaos, Order of Venus, Knightmare, Apathy, etc.) I guess during their golden age, they were the best so yeah. Again, not all accurate, people told me these stories and I might have butchered it a little bit (probably a lot).

Hope this helped!

Fun facts
- Valiance was never used back then! AP was much more common.
- Brandish was never used but that was pre-patch boosting the brandish's damage.
- I believe there were more vog cubs than skolvers back then, ASI was considered the best.
- Jempire was not the most known guild!

Like, what has changed if we consider the actual game and not the metagame?

Remember that the first generation of lockdown didnt have Heart pendants, the Finesse A team had every single player with heart pendants and UVs, thats why they were invencible.

Id say that the current generation of LD is way stronger in so many levels than the other one, Finesse A Team would get dominated by EoS/Rig/Jemp/Ultra A teams nowdays.

New meta is always stronger than old meta. They took what we had and made it better. Who new brandish would raise the skill ceiling for PvP? None of us thought brandish was any good until players started using them in the way that they are now (very, very precise weapon)

I wish I could re-live the old LD, back when Whitelancer made that 1v1 competition that was never finished, when Chris and Magnus would always go at it, when everyone would die in two hits. And almost no lag

And the best thing is, everything was much more mellow and never any complaints when someone died. (AA, Polaris, Combo spam)

Just talking about it makes me upset on how this game transformed into what it is today.

hi all! just a passing random person to give there opinion on this hypothetical situation that will most likely never happen :3!

so yea firstly i think that this is a pretty hard question to answer as to actually say how someone in the past would do compared to someone who is currently of this generation would have to be measured by there ability to adapt with in a matter of short span of time which would exclude a number of people that learn to specialize at one technique of play or certain style that has been lost due to things like weapon changes and the addition of heart trinkets
plus you'd have to think of what defines who is best in your own mind as one person's opinion of best could differ drastically from another person's reasoning of who is best and if you really wanted to find the statistical "best" you'd pretty much have to strip everyone of there uv's and everyone of there trinkets and have them dual which still has a major flaw of it being a fight of one persons style vs another persons style and how one style could have an advantage over another persons style of play simply because the gear's base stats are higher in one persons way of play vs another persons

but anyways since whats above rarely matters since a very skilled player can probably find a way to beat a not as skilled player who's using a play style with an upper hand to it through holes in their style and other tendencies that leave room for error.

i personally would think that the newer generation would win simply because of the amount of time that was allotted to them to figure out what works best, and also gunners i remember when gunners first started becoming popular it was a huge problem for many people and if you had a good gunner on your team it would just be alot of people charging to their deaths me being one of them haha ^ ^! But i will say that the older generation actually still might win despite their disadvantage my reasoning for this is probably because of carelessness from the newer players because without trinkets some styles that people use in ld now simply fall apart in the face of a good flourisher that can completely shut down peoples movements ah but thats all ill say! :3

ah also i would like to mention that
1) even back when lockdown first started till its update into the new generation there was definitely complaining of course not as much because everyone was new at first and also it was new content that people could do when they where bored or because of the recipes and stuff you could get with krogomo coins so yea there was still complaining lol one of the biggest ones was the flourish because it only took two hits to kill everyone

2) finding best ld players from across any generation is pretty hard i mean there are famous ld players but that doesnt mean they are the best in fact some of the best ld players could be a person that has never played ld or just played ld once got bored and went to do something else or even just don't like having publicity

ok im done...and yea i know my writing skills are completely horrible and if it ticks you off i'm sorry ok T^T and if you plan to waste your time going off topic and belittling it well then good for you! because it probably did absolutely nothing except hurt my feelings...but anyways if you did read through all of this and are still partially sane! then thanks for reading just a simple insignificant persons post!

p.s. definitely not a person anyone of you knows! <.< >.> ah but i am an alt but you know much easier to create an alt and log in on that then through steam! wait is it? hmm oh well! wheeee and sorry for the long post zen-neth tends to get side tracked HERP

@Snarkey Almost no lag!?????!!?? Almost no lag for US players only!

New generation is better.

Finesse members either quit or joined Apathy, they may have gone to sub in for other guilds a couple of times but Apathy was our guild. Although now it seems that EoS has picked up the majority of the few remaining people that still play Lockdown.

@Feller - Finesse died due to being a guild that consisted of around 20 players which after having many of the core players quitting due to school / a dry patch of no content / no guilds willing to play against us (It was the only thing other than FSC that we did), it left a huge gap in our ranks. We didn't disband due to a lack gear advantage.

No question though that new LD guilds would beat the older generations, there is a huge amount of different playstyles now that I doubt they'd be able to keep up with. I'm sure the term "Skolver clone" will eventually be replaced with "Chaos clone" because as Icegill said, playstyles spread and the number of chaos sets is growing.

Dash 'n' bash will be interesting to say the least.

I remember that! I did go back and was delighted to see more play styles... still no use for about half the gear in the game, but it is progress I suppose.

I know what'll make the new kids rage: remove Striker for 3-5 days! That'll get them in a tizzy in no time.

The problem with comparing is not only strategy/loadout/heart pendant/uv changes, but also how mechanics within LD have changed. ie when LD first came out good guardians could be a big problem, and not a speed bump as they are now after getting nerfed again and again.

But in terms of:
weapon strategy- new
skill- old (not counting people like finesse that essentially were p2w)
loadouts- tie (yes, you may argue current combos more effective than older ones, but think back to before you could have vh UV's on everything and they used their set bonuses better than imo the current LD does theirs, and ended up with close to the same stats)

If you speak to the Finesse players themselves, you would know that they are required to not only win the guild matches but to utterly dominate it that accurately reflects the advantages they have. More than anyone else, they are aware of the superiority of their gears over their opponents. To illustrate an example 900 - 150 can be a bad score for them.

Nothing in this thread shows why these old players can be beaten when most of them went over to other competitive games that have a much higher skill ceiling. Games that are played competitively internationally. Most posters are rather naive which is why they will always only be big fish in a small pond, absolutely zero tactical knowledge for both PvP and PvE.

That has already been done if you were there to witness them, Finesse is just so secretive in their recruitment they didn't want people who has potential to leave the guild to join them. Skills and Wealth has no bearing to get you inside that guild, you need to fit their culture which is ridiculously demanding. I don't remember Finesse has send field their A team once. At their peak, they have around 20 plus members and pretty much everyone in that guild play LD. The only catch is the composition of the team they send has to be sufficient to guarantee a win against anyone on that day.

Nobody really likes to play against them because they have a good sense of what is needed to win. It is undeniable arrogance. They have play matches where they went trinketless and all kind of restrictions. Regardless, Finesse is not the be all and end all of Lock Down. They are there because besides of gears, they took a lot of initiatives unseen by the mainstream audience in Lock Down. By now, Jempire should have done the same thing.

Yeah, pretty much, i got promoted to officer and im proud of it. =)
and im seriously annoyed when people say SPAM or maybe AA or whatever so i agree with you little-juances (just sayin)

=) happy spiral knighting everyone

T2 LD is da best!!!!

@Juances: Having fun is okay. Having gun is actually good. But having fun at the expense of both your teammates and opponents who are trying to play the game seriously and have fun in their own way is not okay. Let's take LoL as an example, another objective-based team game many people take "too seriously". You know what happens if your way of having fun in that game is detremental to your team in some way (playing a tank as support, jungler as AD carry, w/e (I have no idea how to play LoL, lol))? You get vote kicked by your teammates. Same thing applies in SK. Just because AA hammer spamming and filling the screen with balls of electric death is your idea of "fun" does not mean it's okay for you to do if the entire other team (and sometimes your team too) is yelling and swearing at you for using a play style that requires minimal skill for a maximum effect. Essentially, you're trolling at that point.