[official thread] https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.ph...ive-gaming

"We recognize that having an active competitive scene is an important part of sustaining a vibrant community for Unreal Tournament. At the same time, the widespread popular success of Unreal Tournament as a game lots of people play is even more important both for UT and for its long term success as a competitive game.

In the near term, aspiring to be a competitive FPS means making sure we have balanced gameplay mechanics that reward a variety of play styles so that success is primarily determined by skill. Further out, we'd love to support UT as an eSport game, and we'll need the community's help in designing and implementing many of the features that implies, like advanced match spectating, live-streaming, matchmaking, ranking, etc.

There are many members of the competitive community that have a deep understanding of game mechanics and balance issues. Your contributions will help make Unreal Tournament’s gameplay deeper and more balanced than any past title, especially at the highest skill levels. As you participate in our design discussions, please remember that what’s most important is that we have a fun and balanced set of mechanics that work well at all skill levels, support competitive play, and reward skill and strategy, not that we re-create some specific mechanic from a past title.

Our goal is to create a game with accessible but deep mechanics that are easy to learn but challenging to fully master. We don’t want to bring Unreal Tournament forward by making it more complex, but we do want to improve the long term reward of the game by providing compelling strategic and tactical decisions at all skill levels. Every tactic should have a counter, every choice should have a consequence.

Our open development model should really help us refine game balance. Having a large audience of players, including a sizeable number of expert players, continuously playtesting the game and providing feedback will have a massive impact on our ability to make sure all elements of the game are well tuned for a wide range of skill levels. "