Highest skillcap - Page 5

On May 12 2011 13:21 dacthehork wrote:CS vids are so boring in comparison.

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 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 12 2011 16:14 DannyJ wrote:
Wow i knew people would bring up the noob fest that is WoW... but i never expected people to also bring up PvE. Really?

Anwho, BW skillcap is ridiculous, which is probably the reason why people good at it get payed an extraordinary amount of money.

On May 12 2011 16:18 Jayme wrote:


Again, most people did WoW PvE on the backs of guides that the cutting edge groups of people MADE for them.

I used to get frustrated at the flagrant disregard people seemed to have for how much work and coordination went into a complex boss fight that NO ONE had done yet. Then I remember that maybe 400-500 people got to experience that in Vanilla out of a couple million and I don't bother anymore.

You would be surprised at how much more difficult it is to dodge the fire when you don't know it's coming...or you don't know what triggers it. Took a ton of work to figure out things then.

I'm not implying that the skill cap was extraordinarily high or anything but it was not piss easy. BW and Wc3 were much higher skill cap wise obviously.

On May 12 2011 07:42 mute20 wrote:
Fighter : Marvel vs capcom 2
Shooter: Quake 1-3
Stratagy: chess/starcraft 1

On May 12 2011 07:44 Eppa! wrote:
Some of the harder games that I know of are: CS 1.6, BW, SSBM, DotA all require huge amount of time to learn the basics of competitive play.

On May 12 2011 14:32 Cofo wrote:
Chess/Go are some of the most strategically deep games out there, but a 3 year old has the skills to move the pieces. You have to be more specific in the definition of skillcap; there are many different manifestations of "skill" across games.