EPTAlso, skill ceiling is a metaphor, you're not supposed to take it literally. The fact you shouldn't becomes obvious immediately when you start to use graphs that measure aggregate skill combining all aspects of the game as just one variable.
Near Impossible: Reduce Skill in Competitive Games - Page 2
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Grumbels
Netherlands7032 Posts
Also, skill ceiling is a metaphor, you're not supposed to take it literally. The fact you shouldn't becomes obvious immediately when you start to use graphs that measure aggregate skill combining all aspects of the game as just one variable. | ||
Tephus
Cascadia1754 Posts
I wonder what's next for our hero! | ||
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BeMannerDuPenner
Germany5638 Posts
On August 18 2014 03:46 Tephus wrote: And now, from the guy who brought you 'Riki and Ursa are op' after becoming an expert after 1 month of play, the guy who literally comes from a not-so-parallel universe, comes another awful argument that wont convince anyone! I wonder what's next for our hero! ha didnt notice.makes it even funnier | ||
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Nimix
France1809 Posts
On August 17 2014 14:15 travis wrote: This argument is mostly semantics. However, reducing complexity should bring skill ranges closer together. In brood war the difference between a top 10% player vs a top 9% player vs top 8% vs a top 5% player vs a top 1% player vs a top .01% player were more noticeable than in sc2 for example. In brood war i once played against 4 of my friends at the same time, and they were "good casual players", and I beat them all at the same time. This is just completely impossible in sc2. And it's because no matter how good someone is at starcraft 2, they will never be able to have a big enough gap in skill vs players with even a remote clue to pull off something like that. I agree with your overall idea though. People are not reaching or coming close to skill ceilings in any competitive game. Yeah, the more you remove complexity from a game, the easier it is to focus on what remains, so lesser players will be able to catch up to better players easier. So even if the remaining aspect is complex in itself, it will be easier to master it as you don't have to split your attention/knowledge, it reduces the general practice time necessary to improve at the game as a whole, etc. | ||
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ahswtini
Northern Ireland22213 Posts
On August 18 2014 03:46 Tephus wrote: And now, from the guy who brought you 'Riki and Ursa are op' after becoming an expert after 1 month of play, the guy who literally comes from a not-so-parallel universe, comes another awful argument that wont convince anyone! I wonder what's next for our hero! Dude he's played hundreds of games of Dota | ||
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Krohm
Canada1857 Posts
On August 18 2014 04:10 Nimix wrote: Yeah, the more you remove complexity from a game, the easier it is to focus on what remains, so lesser players will be able to catch up to better players easier. So even if the remaining aspect is complex in itself, it will be easier to master it as you don't have to split your attention/knowledge, it reduces the general practice time necessary to improve at the game as a whole, etc. This is really apparent when I compared SC:BW to SC2. I absolutely destroyed most of my friends at BW. However in SC2 I actually struggled to beat them, and I couldn't beat some of them at all it was a complete reversal of how BW was. Removing and/or streamlining mechanics allows poorer players to compete with better players. I call this the casual curse. | ||
Kipsate
Netherlands45349 Posts
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Velocirapture
United States983 Posts
The BIG thing i will say is that removing mechanics reduces clarity in the quality of a player. If a game requires you to do 200 things then a player who can reasonably manage 150 is clearly better than somebody who can only manage 100 and this is how we experience Broodwar. If there are only 3 things to do then everybody will manage to do all of those things at every level and we are forced to subjectively determine skill qualitatively rather than quantitatively. | ||
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amazingxkcd
GRAND OLD AMERICA16375 Posts
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GrapeApe
1053 Posts
On August 17 2014 14:12 TheYango wrote: In Warcraft 3, it's item drops from creep camps. Dem epic LS drops! Brings back some horrible memories of watching my mineral line get decimated because dude got a LS  | ||
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imre
France9263 Posts
On August 18 2014 03:46 Tephus wrote: And now, from the guy who brought you 'Riki and Ursa are op' after becoming an expert after 1 month of play, the guy who literally comes from a not-so-parallel universe, comes another awful argument that wont convince anyone! I wonder what's next for our hero! thanks i had a good laugh while checking what it was | ||
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Qaatar
1409 Posts
On August 18 2014 08:36 Velocirapture wrote: I actually don't really disagree with the general sentiment of this post. Things like MBS or worker rallying did not lower the skill ceiling of Starcraft because RTS games have a HUGE surplus of actions that nobody does even though they could contribute to winning because there is simply too much to do. The computer controlled "perfect" unit control for splitting marines and zerglings used around 2000 APM on unit control alone and shifting 50 APM away from moving workers to minerals and towards splitting zerglings does not reduce the skill ceiling for a human player. The BIG thing i will say is that removing mechanics reduces clarity in the quality of a player. If a game requires you to do 200 things then a player who can reasonably manage 150 is clearly better than somebody who can only manage 100 and this is how we experience Broodwar. If there are only 3 things to do then everybody will manage to do all of those things at every level and we are forced to subjectively determine skill qualitatively rather than quantitatively. Your second paragraph, I agree with. However, I keep seeing the argument in the first paragraph, and intuitively, I don't feel that it's a good heuristic, because I feel that micro is relatively more difficult to attain mastery past a certain point. This is invariably due to the nature of the mouse vs. the keyboard, as our accuracy with controlling a mouse is tied into micro to a great extent. The essential nature of "micro" means that there are greater difficulties in achieving significant levels of differentiation (there have been studies on the asymptotic nature of skill levels past a certain point in musicians, and it largely falls into this same line of reason). Multitasking, on the other hand, seems to me to have a far higher soft-cap, as keyboard speed, how much information one can hold at once, how fast one processes such information, etc. all come into play more prominently, vs. one's ability to accurately move the mouse down to micrometers. Now, all of this is basically through a priori reasoning and anecdotal experience of what micro and macro are, so I could be totally off. | ||
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Sufficiency
Canada23833 Posts
On August 18 2014 08:52 GrapeApe wrote: Dem epic LS drops! Brings back some horrible memories of watching my mineral line get decimated because dude got a LS Seriously. Who the fuck thought that was a good idea? | ||
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Cheren
United States2911 Posts
Dota's skill ceiling is obviously higher than LoL's, BW's skill ceiling is obviously higher than SC2's, but no one has perfect mechanics and decisions every game in any of those games. edit: The OP seems to be poking at everything from the wrong angles. People play games to have fun. A lot of suggestions in the OP, such as adding auto-aim to CS:GO or taking away multiple building/unit selection in SC2, would make the games less fun for people who play them. People play games to have fun, and then the people who are the best at those games compete in tournaments sometimes. So here's the real "Law of Dumbing Down Games": 1. Sometimes a lower skill ceiling results in more people enjoying your game. (WC3 vs Dota, Dota vs LoL) 2. Sometimes having a higher skill ceiling results in more people enjoying your game. (hypothetical example of adding auto-aim to CS:GO. hypothetical example of workers-only SC2) 3. Making a game that people want to play is more important than worrying about skill ceiling, since as stated before, no one will consistently hit the skill ceiling anyway. edit 2: skill is not "added elsewhere", decision-making and emotional control are just as important in Dota and BW as they are in LoL and SC2. Dota and BW have an additional mechanical layer of complexity, there's no way anyone can argue that. | ||
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porkRaven
United States953 Posts
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ninazerg
United States7291 Posts
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ninazerg
United States7291 Posts
LeBron = 1 You = 1 1/1 = 1 SO U ARE EQUAL!!!!!! HOLY SHIT U CAN TOTALLY KICK HIS ASS BUT WAIT I HAVE THIS GRAFF THAT SHOWS THIS: ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/WCHp1EU.png) | ||
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vasculaR
Malaysia791 Posts
Both are part of becoming a champion. | ||
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Fleetfeet
Canada2836 Posts
I mean, it makes me feel good to think that it does, because I'm one of the best in the world at walking to my kitchen and back... but unfortunately it doesn't actually mean I'm at the same relative skill level as, say, tennis pros. | ||
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paralleluniverse
4065 Posts
On August 18 2014 03:15 Grumbels wrote: One of the things I dislike about this argument is that it takes as a given that the skill ceiling is this one value that you can either reach or not reach. Remove all the difficult mechanics from Starcraft and you will also remove a lot of comeback potential, the ability for good players to showcase near-inhuman feats of skill, the general ability to differentiate yourself from other players. It's foolish to act like all of this is independent of one's concept of skill, and by using the term skill ceiling you neglect a lot of the subtler behavior. Also, skill ceiling is a metaphor, you're not supposed to take it literally. The fact you shouldn't becomes obvious immediately when you start to use graphs that measure aggregate skill combining all aspects of the game as just one variable. On August 18 2014 11:02 Cheren wrote: Skill ceiling is absolutely real, the thing is though that there's no one with the reflexes and decision making to do everything perfectly in a real time game all the time and the emotional maturity to never go on tilt, so even if you see a few perfect games from someone they'll eventually start choking. Dota's skill ceiling is obviously higher than LoL's, BW's skill ceiling is obviously higher than SC2's, but no one has perfect mechanics and decisions every game in any of those games. edit: The OP seems to be poking at everything from the wrong angles. People play games to have fun. A lot of suggestions in the OP, such as adding auto-aim to CS:GO or taking away multiple building/unit selection in SC2, would make the games less fun for people who play them. People play games to have fun, and then the people who are the best at those games compete in tournaments sometimes. So here's the real "Law of Dumbing Down Games": 1. Sometimes a lower skill ceiling results in more people enjoying your game. (WC3 vs Dota, Dota vs LoL) 2. Sometimes having a higher skill ceiling results in more people enjoying your game. (hypothetical example of adding auto-aim to CS:GO. hypothetical example of workers-only SC2) 3. Making a game that people want to play is more important than worrying about skill ceiling, since as stated before, no one will consistently hit the skill ceiling anyway. edit 2: skill is not "added elsewhere", decision-making and emotional control are just as important in Dota and BW as they are in LoL and SC2. Dota and BW have an additional mechanical layer of complexity, there's no way anyone can argue that. On August 18 2014 12:44 ninazerg wrote: Let me propose another model called "Some people are more capable than others". This is the general theory that sometimes, one person has the ability to do something that another person cannot. For example, let's say you played Basketball with LeBron James and it was srs business. In oversimplified math: LeBron = 1 You = 1 1/1 = 1 SO U ARE EQUAL!!!!!! HOLY SHIT U CAN TOTALLY KICK HIS ASS BUT WAIT I HAVE THIS GRAFF THAT SHOWS THIS: You've all missed the point. I never said anything about the actual skill ceiling of the game. I only referred to the maximum achievable skill by humans or "achievable skill ceiling". And in fact, if you would read the OP, the actual skill ceiling is irrelevant to the discussion. The actual skill ceiling does not determine how much skill is required to succeed at the game as long as no one can reach the actual skill ceiling (Law of Dumbing Down Games). | ||
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