EPTBronze Part 2: Hell is Other People - Page 12
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MaFFGeeK
United States47 Posts
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OpticalShot
Canada6330 Posts
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Ninety-Three
United States68 Posts
I really don't understand why some have such trouble learning. I'd hope that even on your own, after many hundred games you'd be able to reflect and come up with even basic improvement. : / | ||
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Azera
3800 Posts
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Cham
797 Posts
On February 22 2012 07:08 Azera wrote: I understand that this is jus satire, but what is wrong with the people who "fear for humanity" when they learn about the Bronzies? I mean, its a fucking game. I'm sure none of them are retarded IRL. I'm sure more often than not a sign of their poor basic problem solving skills can be seen in other things they do as well. | ||
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Lotsa_Spaghetti
Germany50 Posts
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nosliw
United States2716 Posts
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JieXian
Malaysia4677 Posts
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Mythal
Spain108 Posts
"ur not supposed to play this way!" "perhaps that's true" Great blog as always :D | ||
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HyperionDreamer
Canada1528 Posts
Fantastic! | ||
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Sandrosuperstar
Sweden525 Posts
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CreatorGX
United States122 Posts
 Also, if you're going to quote this, please use a spoiler tag to reduce the wall of text.)I have a lot to say, as I absolutely love this series you've written. It has some of my favorite reads in months, and I re-read them when I so desire. Your delving and analysis of the Bronze league is so interesting, for reasons I really don't understand. Perhaps the mindset of the StarCraft-impared is just so radically different than I know that it just reads like the chronicling of how aliens play SC2. It's so wonderfully foreign, so mindless yet so conscious, that your articles are almost fiction. But, what makes me read is the knowledge that, regardless of how much it contrasts how I think in SC2, they are minds of the same species as me. They are HUMAN. They are no smarter and no dumber than I in the real world. They clearly understand the world around me (or at the very least, they understand: The Internet, how to use a computer, how to use a mouse and keyboard, how to set up a SC2 Quick Match enough to "qualify" for bronze, and how to keep their human body alive long enough to do all these things). Sure, you get the occasional game against a bot, or a player who's just down on their luck, or even someone who is using a smurf account to troll around. But ultimately, this league is more unpredictable than Korean Grandmaster because of how their minds work (or don't). This kind of analysis turns this series of articles from a blog about basically trolling the Bronze League, to a series of research pieces of the psychology of lower-level thinking, something I'd read on Ars Technica or something. That is what makes me love it. This does leave all sorts of questions to you, and to us, that I hope you'll look into in future articles. • Why do they think like this? • Does our exposure to pro-gamer play and analysis really change how different we think than this, if not RTS knowledge in general? • What of the Bronze league of StarCraft's motherland? Do bronzies in South Korea act at all like this, or is it another world altogether? • Clearly you can teach some of them, but how do you teach the "Forever Bronze"? • You mentioned Bnet 2.0 as a source of false optimism, if Bnet changed to enforce negativity towards the worst league really get them to want to improve? Or would they want to quit the game altogether and move on to something they're better at? • What else can be done to help, mandatory bot practice if one's MMR is low enough? Ugh, I think that's plenty of questions concerning a league so low. I really look forward to you continuing this series and wish you the best, I'll be promoting these articles as best I can to others. | ||
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Steel_Eagle
United States37 Posts
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Drowsy
United States4876 Posts
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SolidMustard
France1515 Posts
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FookSake
United States11 Posts
On February 21 2012 03:55 ladyumbra wrote: As a bronze player this is both incredibly truthful and more inspiring than insulting. I mostly just find it insulting (OK - entertaining and insulting). I am a low Bronze player. (Whew! It feels so good to get that off my chest.) I'm always a bit bemused by people with experience forgetting what it was like to be inexperienced. Parents forget what it was like to be a teenager and they think their kids are crazy, [poor] teachers do it with their students and think they're stupid. And apparently experienced gamers do it with unskilled gamers and think they're deliberately obtuse. At least human nature is consistent... It couldn't possibly be that hard stuff is hard, especially when you're provided with (at best) no instruction or (at worst) poor instruction. ******************************************************************************************************* I can feel a long-winded post coming on, so I'll just limit myself to 3 points: 1) What a Bronze player knows before playing his first ladder game 2) Who Bronze players are 3) What a Bronze player learns from playing in Bronze 1) What a Bronze player knows before playing his first ladder game They know one thing (at best) - the Campaign. And how do you succeed in campaigns? You turtle, tech up, and make one big push. Let's say they don't take too long finishing the campaign - they have about 12 hours of that play style drilled into their brains, and it was their formative learning experience. Oh wait, they know one more thing - the mechanics of playing Terran (and very fundamental mechanics of playing Protoss). Where does that leave someone (like me) who wants to play Zerg or Protoss? It leaves them with a steep learning curve. Try learning mid- & late-game tech through trial-and-error in a system where the average game lasts 10 minutes (if you're lucky). In short, before they even start their placement matches, Bronze players are programmed to fail. Especially when you consider the shark tank that they're thrown into... 2) Who Bronze players are From what I've seen (which is, granted, only about 50 league games in Bronze), this looks to be the makeup of Bronze league: ---Group A) New/unskilled player wanting to get better (40%): I'd like to think I'm in this group. What these Bronze players have learned (from reading forums & watching Dailies) is that they need to improve their fundamentals. Unfortunately, Battle.net doesn't reward this - this kind of fundamentals training has a long-term payoff, but is very discouraging in the short-term (as it requires a whole lot of losing until they overcome whatever competence plateau they're currently struggling with). ---Group B) New/unskilled player wanting to win/have a good time (40%): This is the group that may or may not have started out in group (a), but has since gone over to the Dark Side. They've learned that Battle.net rewards wins and doesn't especially care how they're gotten, so they resort to gimmicks. They've also learned that most people in Bronze (much of Groups A & C) haven't learned their gimmick & its counter yet. So, like hail balls, people in Group B win & rise to silver, then get smacked back down to bronze by people who have invested in fundamentals. They then gimmick their way to silver, and so on, getting thicker and thicker and heavier and heavier with each cycle (yay for meteorological metaphors!) ---Group C) Casual gamers (15%): God bless them. Nobody gives them enough credit; they're subsidizing our hobby. ---and apparently there's a Group D: Higher-league trolls (5%): unless they're actively coaching, they're not really helping. (No, 'hard knocks' lessons don't really help Bronze-leaguers. More on that later.) These folks might as well be playing Quake with God mode codes on - whatever floats your boat, I guess. 3) What a Bronze player learns from playing in Bronze Why, they learn to play like a Bronze player, of course! When a brand new player is first relegated to Bronze, it's a death sentence for skill growth. When all they see is turtling, 6-pools, banshee rushes, reaper harrass, and mass void rays/stalkers, that becomes all that they know. And Battle.net [temporarily] rewards them for joining the pack. If they wise up and start scouring the internets for advice, it's usually only tangentially helpful. "You can get to platinum by doing nothing other than improving your macro." "All you have to do is improve your late-game." "Yeah, scouting really helps." Advice like this is applicable, but too general to execute on. And advice that is specific is rarely applicable. Build orders help your early game tremendously, but at 5 minutes you're as lost as you were before you mastered the build order committed to a build order. This is why real-time mentoring is so important. Unfortunately, it's also rare. The way people best gain skill in any game (hell, the way we all best learn any life skill) is by playing with & learning from better players. That's why mentor systems are everywhere. But how many Bronze players actually have an IRL/real-time mentor? I sure as hell don't. I have Day[9], a haystack of streams from which to produce a needle that can teach me what I need to learn right now, and my own replays. You know what else I don't have ? Time. I have 2 hours a night (if I'm lucky) to dedicate to my hobbies. (Incidentally, a 14-hour a week hobby is considered a bit excessive by society at large.) That's two hours in which to: - ladder - watch my replays - analyze my replays for the one or two things to work on - watch Day[9] Dailies - watch streams (assuming I've found ones that are useful to a Bronze Zerg player of my skill & knowledge of the metagame... good luck with that one) - watch tournaments (which take place every weekend, apparently) - listen to SotG - research build orders, counters, and mid-/late-game strats (each it's own haystack) - etc. And if I don't do all of that (& immediately program it into muscle memory), then I'm somehow accessory to peoples' loss of faith in humanity? At least it's reciprocated, I guess. ******************************************************************************************************* "But how can you play so much and not learn from your mistakes. These people have played over 100 games - they're not new anymore." *snort* Seriously, try to remember what it's like to be new at something. Step 1 is learning how to learn; even the ability to watch a replay and deduce what your "1 mistake" was is a hard-won skill. That skill alone would take 50 replay-watches to hone, and we haven't even fixed any mistakes yet! "Still, if they've played 100 games, how thick do they have to be to keep falling to the same all-ins over and over?" Let's do some quick math, shall we? 100 games x 50% win rate (if Battle.net is doing its job) = 50 losses -30 games that reach mid- or late-game (when you're lucky enough to be paired with a like-minded Group A-er) = 20 losses in early game (judging from my experience with all-ins & 'cheese') / 9 types early game counters to learn (assuming that, per race, there are only 2 cheeses & 1 common all-in that a Bronze player could reasonably execute. Which, let's be honest, is a laughably low estimate.) = 2.22.. instances of losing to any one strategy I ask you, can you honestly say that you'd be able to scout, recognize, prepare, and effectively execute a counter on something that's only happened to you twice? ******************************************************************************************************* TL;DR - Back the eff off! SC2 is great because it's infinitely challenging, but that means it has a steep learning curve. Why not be a solution instead of contributing to the problem? Skills gaps grow like any other gap (wealth, education, whatever) - when the haves have a choice to share with the have-nots and choose something else instead. | ||
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Deleted User 97295
1137 Posts
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Murlox
France1699 Posts
I mean, to quote the OP on his very first blog, first image "That idea was "fuck this game."" I feel this is spot on on what you've been doing, fucking other people game :-( | ||
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Jayme
United States5866 Posts
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FookSake
United States11 Posts
On March 02 2012 13:14 Jayme wrote: This last page is full of people that missed the point. How you can ever defend losing to a strategy that they've been told how to beat a minute prior and that the execution of defeating said strategy is extraordinarily simple boggles my mind. "The point" n. 15. An objective or purpose to be reached or achieved, or one that is worth reaching or achieving: What is the point of discussing this issue further? 16. The major idea or essential part of a concept or narrative: You have missed the whole point of the novel. --- adj. thesis. For example: I began, then, my quest to better understand the average bronze leaguer. I have been calling them stupid, but that's not entirely accurate. It is wrong, however convenient, to see someone doing something stupid and think they themselves are also stupid. I've done plenty of stupid things; everyone has. You couldn't call everyone stupid, though. Just most people. The fact is, the people in bronze league are only marginally less intelligent than the rest of society. That is where the fascination comes in. That is why I have felt the need to understand why this group of people, who in most respects are completely normal, are so horrible at Starcraft, especially when most of the Starcraft community is concerned with improving itself. They are outliers; they are interesting. ...Sadly, though, most bronze players simply don't want to learn. It seems almost any strategy performed by a capable enough player is able to beat a bronze leaguer. We all knew that, though. The thing is, I would hardly call myself capable. That's where the mindfuck comes in: I'm not good at this game. So to uncover a group of people who appear to be willfully worse than even me is just madness. 17. A significant, outstanding, or effective idea, argument, or suggestion: Your point is well taken. --- adj. sub-thesis. For example: I was tasked again with finding a strategy that bronzies could easily beat and was quick to execute. I couldn't think of anything but worker rushing, but I had already done that to death. Then, my mind wandered back to a forum poster who suggested I worker rush, but at the start of the game calmly explain how to defeat it. It was perfect! It was stupid, it should never work, and I could do it repeatedly to gauge their bronze reactions. And maybe someone would resist the urge to rage at me and actually learn something! What could be better? You're talking about 17 (a 494-word argument within a 5,298-word essay). We're talking about 15 & 16 (the unspoken premises, thesis, & unspoken conclusions of all 5,298 words). | ||
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