Highest skillcap - Page 12

On May 13 2011 14:52 rickybobby wrote:
the brood war skillcap is basically infinity because 12 years in people with better mechanics and better strategies are still appearing... no other game can say that, especially since the commitment of time and energy from brood war pros is matched by few if any.

On May 13 2011 17:51 Earll wrote:



Although an interesting way to put it, it is still a very flawed way of looking at a games 'skillcap'. The reason why a game like wow you would not win 10-0 in a row, is because of the 'huge' luckfactor in the game (For the sake of this post lets just assume we are talking about some sort of mirror matchup where all other things are the same.) If they removed the luck in wow, then a person who was slightly better, would be able to win close to 10-0 of the time, as he would be able to remove all the straight up unlucky\lucky losses and the better player would come out ahead a lot more of the time. So removing the luck mechanics in wow would increase the layers of dominance. That being said, removing the 'luck factor' in wow, would not at increase the "skill cap". if anything it would make the game a lot 'easier' because one of the 'hard' things in wow is being able to handle the unpredictability that comes from sometimes being crit\sometimes missing etc.

The layers of dominance comes down to how much luck there is in a game to be honest. There is a lot of luck even in a game like BW, when you get into positions where you 'randomly' counter his build because you thought he might be going what he was going, whereas other times you might have been wrong and ended up being countered yourself. Also stuff like 'randomly' scouting a dropship or a proxy or something. Obviously the better you are, the better you are at starsensing out these things, and also the better you are at still winning even when you get 'unlucky'. But there is still a big luck factor in games like BW.

Ignoring the fact that nobody plays at the top of their game all the time, there will be games with absolutely no random factor, where there will be A lot more levels of "dominance" than sc:bw, as a person who is 1% better than you would dominate you (assuming you both played as well as you could) if no luck was involved. As I mentioned before, Poker is a game where there is basically no dominance, The best player in the world can often have a pretty large losing streak against a pretty bad player, yet there is still a tremendous amount of 'skill' in poker and it does not have a 'low skillcap'. And also as mentioned before, the theoretic levels of dominance is also directly related to the amount of people playing and competing in a game, not just the game itself.

On May 12 2011 08:05 Seide wrote:
few things about WoW:
really low skill cap, unitll you get into the top .5-1% of raiding, then it is actually quite higher.

Thought this skillcap is usually a skillcap on how good your teamwork and reaction skills are, not at how good you are at playing your specific character.

Arena was more or less a joke, where playing certain comps and winning is a matter of performing an algorithm based on the comp you are playing.
It was hardly based on skills, as there are comps who can dominate and other comps who simply cannot beat certain other comps if said comp plays correctly. This has also been getting worse and worse the more Blizzard has tried to "balance" things. I think lately they have given up and decided if you have half a brain and play the right comps, you are deserving of a top rating. Honestly the closest WoW has ever been to balance in PvP was when they their original 13 rank system in Vanilla.

For raiding, it is actually extremely hard to find good people to play with for top guilds. Every single person you have that pays attention, keeps a cool head, and is very good at their class and math is a godsend. Often times, if a top dps left your guild, it could leave that spot vacant for months until you could find a comparable person, especially for guilds outside of the top10, but still in the top25.

It's a completely different game when you are in a top guild where you actually have to develop your own strategy to an encounter, not just copy a strategy a top guild did 3 weeks after a world first kill. The only time WoW actually takes skill to play in PvE, is the first month or so of new content, but this only applies to about maybe 300-500 people out of the whole WoW population(and I might be overestimating that as it is only the top10 guilds, and that is 250 main raiders + alternate raiders).

Top level WoW PvE is actually pretty interesting, I find it sad that it gets such a bad rep because only about 1000 people who play the game even can really perform at that level, and even less actually get exposed to what top level WoW is. Its like if a persons only impressions of BW is from watching a D/C level player play.

Its funny, I have played WoW on and off since release with guilds such as Blood Legion and Gentlemen's Club as an average player/officer in those guilds. Quit after we cleared WotLK content. After 4+ years of WoW I cannot really relate to anyone who played that game apart from old guildmembers and people in a similar positions, because it is like we were playing different games. Yet there are people who are even higher up than me, like GMs and world record dps holders, who feel the same way toward me, for the exact same reasons.

The difficulty of the encounters though have been steadily decreasing since Burning Crusade, and as I havent played in some time, I cannot speak for the game in its current state, only from my own personal experiences in Vanilla/BC/WotLK.

In the end it though really did come down to how thick skinned you were to be able to handle constant drama(and holy shit man, some of the drama was unbelievable), and how commited you were to doing the math/grinding neccesary to optimize your character.

Its hard to place WoW, because of the social aspect to it and the fact that in raiding, you aren't really trying to beat anyone as much as you are trying to create a well oiled machine. On one hand its not too hard to play, on the other theres so much shit you have to deal with outside of playing it. Many times in a 25 man raid group, even though those people raided together, many people actually straight up hated other people in the guild. I know I have played for a lot of time with people I hated, but had to so we could get shit done. Having a successful guild was closer to running a HR/Conflict Resolution department of a successful business than playing an actual game.

Apart from BW, I cannot think of many games that have a high individual skill cap. Many get their skillcap from team chemistry.

A Note on the people posting Dwarf Fortress:
There is a difference between a high learning curve and a high skill cap. Dwarf Fortress has a high learning curve, but a not a high skill cap because there are too many random factors for skill to ever account for.

Jeez I ended up writing a lot more than intended, but my fingers just kept flying since it irks me that people who make conclusions about WoW have no idea what goes on at the highest level and seem to judge solely on pvp, which in reality has been a joke in WoW for years. Its like someone judging SC, while only having played Fastest.

TLDR:
WoW PvP: pretty much a joke
WoW PvE: pretty intricate at top level, and it is hard to place it.

On May 13 2011 22:59 Liquid`Drone wrote:


bw does have a lot of luck in it, but that only makes it more amazing that there are so many layers of dominance. as for poker though, skill in poker is not measured in individual hands or even individual tournaments, it's measured in long, long stretches of hands and it's still very possible to come out dominant. the "10-0" as a sort of arbitrary way of distinctioning "dominance" from "non-dominance" is supposed to be strictly applicable to bw - winning 10 hands of poker in a row is impossible unless you are lucky.

you are right about luck being a factor I overlooked when making my initial post, and that lack of luck would greatly increase the frequency of someone being able to win 10-0, thus indicating dominance based on my "brood war dominance determiner". but a 10-0 victory by itself wouldn't necessarily constitute dominance if every win was a really narrow win and there was no luck involved, it'd mean "consistently slightly better" instead. in bw, a 10-0 victory implies dominance precisely because of the inherent luck in the game, as luck being present means you have to win by a lot, if you want to win every time.

On May 14 2011 18:57 ypolt wrote:
Out of all the games I've played, I think I have to say GunZ is the one with the highest achievable "skill cap".
A practice session of GunZ korean style, as it was called, would actually make me sweat and I can't recall any other game that managed to do that.
The key combos you had to pull off was just so unbelievably intense.

I still believe that if some western company would pick this game up and give it some new graphics and better spectating, it could very well become the #1 fps esport title in the world.

On May 14 2011 23:08 Snuggles wrote:


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