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United States7483 Posts
On September 02 2015 22:08 bo1b wrote:
Are so few people concerned about the diminishing returns associated with ways a player can distinguish themselves every time a change to "lower the skill floor" goes through (theres no such thing btw, this doesn't help a new player beat a good player at all)?
It does lower the skill required to play at a competitive level, but not significantly enough to make a noticeable difference.
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On September 02 2015 23:09 Whitewing wrote:Show nested quote +On September 02 2015 22:08 bo1b wrote:
Are so few people concerned about the diminishing returns associated with ways a player can distinguish themselves every time a change to "lower the skill floor" goes through (theres no such thing btw, this doesn't help a new player beat a good player at all)? It does lower the skill required to play at a competitive level, but not significantly enough to make a noticeable difference.
I don't really think that is the case, as someone pointed in this threads "the game is only as hard as good is your oponent"
There is no such thing as a skill floor, competitive level is just the level the best play and that is defined by the human component.
As an example now being capable of doing "half decent" splits is a requirement to be able to play at competitive level, however in early WoL players didn't poses this skill and wasn't really a necesary skill to have.
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Skill Ceiling => Has nothing to do with how difficult it is to play the game perfectly in a vacuum. It is the difficulty of the game to be among the best in said game. (How much practice before you are considered top tier)
Skill Floor => This is a non-existent term that was developed when people complaining about "low skill ceiling" didn't have an argument why foreigners absolutely suck at SC2 despite how much they practiced. There is already a term for this called Barrier to Entry. SC2 has a very high barrier to entry which goes against what most people who bring up the term "skill floor" want the conclusion to be--so they make up random terms.
SC2 has a high skill ceiling and a high barrier to entry. The reason people don't play it is because its hard to play it casually and its hard to get good at it. What a popular game needs is a low barrier of entry and mid skill ceiling to be popular.
For example: It isn't hard to pass a ball in soccer. It is very hard to be physically fit. So soccer is popular because it has a low skill ceiling (decisions wise as a player) but has a high skill ceiling outside the game (physical fitness). Because of this, people watch the shit out of soccer and say things like "____ should have ____" and they feel smart about it because they know what the player should have done and can blame a non-soccer related limitation (if I wasn't fat/slow/etc...) to excuse why they themselves are not playing the game.
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On September 02 2015 23:09 Whitewing wrote:Show nested quote +On September 02 2015 22:08 bo1b wrote:
Are so few people concerned about the diminishing returns associated with ways a player can distinguish themselves every time a change to "lower the skill floor" goes through (theres no such thing btw, this doesn't help a new player beat a good player at all)? It does lower the skill required to play at a competitive level, but not significantly enough to make a noticeable difference.
I disagree quite strongly with that. Competitive level to me is determined entirely by the skill level of the competition, changing macro mechanics isn't going to noticeably lower the skill floor of competing against a group practising 8+ hours daily in a centralised location.
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On September 03 2015 00:04 Thieving Magpie wrote:
Skill Ceiling => Has nothing to do with how difficult it is to play the game perfectly in a vacuum. It is the difficulty of the game to be among the best in said game. (How much practice before you are considered top tier)
Skill Floor => This is a non-existent term that was developed when people complaining about "low skill ceiling" didn't have an argument why foreigners absolutely suck at SC2 despite how much they practiced. There is already a term for this called Barrier to Entry. SC2 has a very high barrier to entry which goes against what most people who bring up the term "skill floor" want the conclusion to be--so they make up random terms.
SC2 has a high skill ceiling and a high barrier to entry. The reason people don't play it is because its hard to play it casually and its hard to get good at it. What a popular game needs is a low barrier of entry and mid skill ceiling to be popular.
For example: It isn't hard to pass a ball in soccer. It is very hard to be physically fit. So soccer is popular because it has a low skill ceiling (decisions wise as a player) but has a high skill ceiling outside the game (physical fitness). Because of this, people watch the shit out of soccer and say things like "____ should have ____" and they feel smart about it because they know what the player should have done and can blame a non-soccer related limitation (if I wasn't fat/slow/etc...) to excuse why they themselves are not playing the game.
Dota has a significantly higher barrier of entry then sc2. Skill floor wasn't made up after sc2's release. A high level of fitness being required for soccer is absolutely a higher barrier of entry then anything in sc2. Any high paying, physical sport is significantly harder to become competitive in then sc2. This post is worthless.
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On September 03 2015 00:16 bo1b wrote:Show nested quote +On September 03 2015 00:04 Thieving Magpie wrote:
Skill Ceiling => Has nothing to do with how difficult it is to play the game perfectly in a vacuum. It is the difficulty of the game to be among the best in said game. (How much practice before you are considered top tier)
Skill Floor => This is a non-existent term that was developed when people complaining about "low skill ceiling" didn't have an argument why foreigners absolutely suck at SC2 despite how much they practiced. There is already a term for this called Barrier to Entry. SC2 has a very high barrier to entry which goes against what most people who bring up the term "skill floor" want the conclusion to be--so they make up random terms.
SC2 has a high skill ceiling and a high barrier to entry. The reason people don't play it is because its hard to play it casually and its hard to get good at it. What a popular game needs is a low barrier of entry and mid skill ceiling to be popular.
For example: It isn't hard to pass a ball in soccer. It is very hard to be physically fit. So soccer is popular because it has a low skill ceiling (decisions wise as a player) but has a high skill ceiling outside the game (physical fitness). Because of this, people watch the shit out of soccer and say things like "____ should have ____" and they feel smart about it because they know what the player should have done and can blame a non-soccer related limitation (if I wasn't fat/slow/etc...) to excuse why they themselves are not playing the game. Dota has a significantly higher barrier of entry then sc2. Skill floor wasn't made up after sc2's release. A high level of fitness being required for soccer is absolutely a higher barrier of entry then anything in sc2. Any high paying, physical sport is significantly harder to become competitive in then sc2. This post is worthless.
I can go to the store, get a soccer ball, and I already 90% of what's needed to play soccer. I can kick the ball around, read up on plays, and I already know 90% of what I need to know about playing soccer. You don't get payed to play soccer--you get payed to be an athelete. It doesn't matter if you play soccer, or baseball, or football, or basketball--the system is the same. You do all this hard work shit getting your body as perfect as possible, and then you play a game using the body you sculpted. The game itself is not some deep level Kasporov/Bobby Fisher bullshit.
And really? DOTA is your example? I can log in to DOTA, click on the screen a few times, and I already know 75% of the mechanics of DOTA. I walk around the map I already know 80%-90% of what needs to happen. You know what happens if you do that in SC2? Your workers are now exploring the map with no workers in production.
In SC2 you need to know "Build Workers" to make "Buildings" to make "units" to "Do shit with" unlike DOTA where you start with the unit you're using and just clicking with a mouse gets you most of what you can do with said unit.
Don't mistake high end strategy with barrier of entry. Barrier of entry is "how easy can someone learn how to play this game if they just started it from scratch having never played it before" which is something done all the time in board game development. Get 2-5 players in a room with a board game theyve never seen before, and see how quickly it takes for them to get it right.
With FPS, MOBA, and most games its easy since you start with your character and you quickly find out how to move around. With an RTS you have to play the game for 5-15 minutes before you even get characters to play with, and you have to work hard just to keep those characters existing. Most games just respawns you automatically if you die. With SC2 you have to be the respawn mechanic.
Don't be an idiot, you know this, don't let your emotions dictate what you say.
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I think you're reaching pretty hard by saying what you say about dota. Most of the people I played dota with (who hadn't had experience in it or the genre before) had no clue what they were doing, had to have literally everything explained to them, had no clue how items etc worked, had no clue about how last hitting/denying worked. If barrier for entry for dota is surpassed as soon as you select a hero and randomly walk around the map before feeding 20 times then the barrier for entry in sc2 is picking a race then losing 10 minutes later.
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On September 03 2015 00:16 bo1b wrote:Show nested quote +On September 03 2015 00:04 Thieving Magpie wrote:
Skill Ceiling => Has nothing to do with how difficult it is to play the game perfectly in a vacuum. It is the difficulty of the game to be among the best in said game. (How much practice before you are considered top tier)
Skill Floor => This is a non-existent term that was developed when people complaining about "low skill ceiling" didn't have an argument why foreigners absolutely suck at SC2 despite how much they practiced. There is already a term for this called Barrier to Entry. SC2 has a very high barrier to entry which goes against what most people who bring up the term "skill floor" want the conclusion to be--so they make up random terms.
SC2 has a high skill ceiling and a high barrier to entry. The reason people don't play it is because its hard to play it casually and its hard to get good at it. What a popular game needs is a low barrier of entry and mid skill ceiling to be popular.
For example: It isn't hard to pass a ball in soccer. It is very hard to be physically fit. So soccer is popular because it has a low skill ceiling (decisions wise as a player) but has a high skill ceiling outside the game (physical fitness). Because of this, people watch the shit out of soccer and say things like "____ should have ____" and they feel smart about it because they know what the player should have done and can blame a non-soccer related limitation (if I wasn't fat/slow/etc...) to excuse why they themselves are not playing the game. Dota has a significantly higher barrier of entry then sc2. Skill floor wasn't made up after sc2's release. A high level of fitness being required for soccer is absolutely a higher barrier of entry then anything in sc2. Any high paying, physical sport is significantly harder to become competitive in then sc2. This post is worthless.
No you are also just kinda confusing skill floor with skill cap. I known lots of players who aren't in good shape and a bit oveweight who plays soccer casually.
With regards to DOTA, it doens't matter if you don't know a lot about the game. As long as you know the basics like buying items, using hotkeys to cast abilities, then you have "learned" the basics of the game. Everything above that is related to mastering it.
Sc2 is different as the whole macro aspect, unit counters and "decent builds" is something you need to learn and that's a ton more time consuming.
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Skill floor and skill ceiling are illogical concepts to apply to this game. People should be mostly concerned with skill sensitivity (disclaimer: I just made this term up). In measurements sensitivity is defined as the ratio of change in output to the change in the measurable property. An example would be how much the voltage of a thermocouple changes in comparison to the change in temperature.
TSL3 was the first high-profile tournament I watched and I remember people complaining that the difference between players of different skill levels wasn't entirely apparent. Obviously the game was new back then so this was to be expected. That's the only thing I worry about: not that the best can't ever get better but that the difference between the best and mid-tier players will become less apparent.
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Yeah, I'm not going to come down on either side of some of what's being said here, but SC2's barrier to entry is really super high. Heck, the multiplayer has different units, and the units that are the same have different stats and abilities, to the campaign! Winning and losing feel near-random at low levels, especially when viewed through the distorted lens of 'unit counters' helpfully supplied by the game. Just figuring out how to get better at the game is beyond most players - including me; I wouldn't have understood without help from experienced BW players.
This was all true of BW too, of course, but the difference there was, everyone was in the same fun, chaotic boat to begin with. They weren't just dumped in perma-bronze wondering what the hell they were doing.
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On September 03 2015 00:45 bo1b wrote:
I think you're reaching pretty hard by saying what you say about dota. Most of the people I played dota with (who hadn't had experience in it or the genre before) had no clue what they were doing, had to have literally everything explained to them, had no clue how items etc worked, had no clue about how last hitting/denying worked. If barrier for entry for dota is surpassed as soon as you select a hero and randomly walk around the map before feeding 20 times then the barrier for entry in sc2 is picking a race then losing 10 minutes later.
People choosing a bad strategy is not the same as not knowing how the game works.
People don't naturally just make workers. Just like people don't just naturally develop build orders. Those are things that you need to research before hand.
People do click around a screen to see what happens, and in Dota they will immediately see their character moving. They walk around and bump into creep/enemy and see themselves getting attacked/attacking said foes. They now know 90% of the mechanics of the game. They can move around, attack things, run away from things.
Now if they want, they can also learn the strategies of the game. Item choices, last hitting, etc... But those are literally the last 10% of what you do in that game. Most of it is right clicking on the screen.
The same is not true in SC2. If you just right click randomly on the screen in SC2 jack shit will happen. If you click the town hall and then click around--jack shit will happen other than rally which you wouldn't know what that is yet. You need to tell people "This is how workers work, its different from how non-workers work" "This is how buildings work, each building works differently than the other" "buildings makes units" "No, you can't make units from the refinery or engineering bay even though its a building" "I meant that most buildings make units, not all" "There is no way to know which units you should make unless you study the matchup, the metagame, the game state, and scout properly" and so on and so forth. RTS games are very complex for people who have just experienced them for the first time. Not so with MOBAs.
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On September 03 2015 00:52 Umpteen wrote:
Yeah, I'm not going to come down on either side of some of what's being said here, but SC2's barrier to entry is really super high. Heck, the multiplayer has different units, and the units that are the same have different stats and abilities, to the campaign! Winning and losing feel near-random at low levels, especially when viewed through the distorted lens of 'unit counters' helpfully supplied by the game. Just figuring out how to get better at the game is beyond most players - including me; I wouldn't have understood without help from experienced BW players.
This was all true of BW too, of course, but the difference there was, everyone was in the same fun, chaotic boat to begin with. They weren't just dumped in perma-bronze wondering what the hell they were doing.
Well, Bnet 1.0 was a failure. BW ladder was a failure. Literally a country had to make their own server to get people to play BW it was that bad of a game popularity wise. There was only about 10 maps that ever got played. 90% of the player base only played money maps with zero expansion, zero terrain, and was just no action for 30 minutes into deathballs.
If we take BW as an example people just want deathballs and no bases.
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On September 02 2015 18:44 paralleluniverse wrote:
SC2 and HotS, unlike RPS, are non-random games..
Creep spread is randomized as far as I know
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United States7483 Posts
On September 03 2015 00:06 bo1b wrote:Show nested quote +On September 02 2015 23:09 Whitewing wrote:On September 02 2015 22:08 bo1b wrote:
Are so few people concerned about the diminishing returns associated with ways a player can distinguish themselves every time a change to "lower the skill floor" goes through (theres no such thing btw, this doesn't help a new player beat a good player at all)? It does lower the skill required to play at a competitive level, but not significantly enough to make a noticeable difference. I disagree quite strongly with that. Competitive level to me is determined entirely by the skill level of the competition, changing macro mechanics isn't going to noticeably lower the skill floor of competing against a group practising 8+ hours daily in a centralised location.
By competitive, I don't mean professional. When I use the term competitive, I mean both players understand the basic mechanics and are sufficiently skilled for their decisions to be relevant. Low bronze is not competitive, but you don't have to be much better than that to be competitive. I mean that the players are thinking about how to improve and attempting to be competitive, and not just dicking around.
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On September 03 2015 00:56 Thieving Magpie wrote:Show nested quote +On September 03 2015 00:52 Umpteen wrote:
Yeah, I'm not going to come down on either side of some of what's being said here, but SC2's barrier to entry is really super high. Heck, the multiplayer has different units, and the units that are the same have different stats and abilities, to the campaign! Winning and losing feel near-random at low levels, especially when viewed through the distorted lens of 'unit counters' helpfully supplied by the game. Just figuring out how to get better at the game is beyond most players - including me; I wouldn't have understood without help from experienced BW players.
This was all true of BW too, of course, but the difference there was, everyone was in the same fun, chaotic boat to begin with. They weren't just dumped in perma-bronze wondering what the hell they were doing. Well, Bnet 1.0 was a failure. BW ladder was a failure. Literally a country had to make their own server to get people to play BW it was that bad of a game popularity wise. There was only about 10 maps that ever got played. 90% of the player base only played money maps with zero expansion, zero terrain, and was just no action for 30 minutes into deathballs. If we take BW as an example people just want deathballs and no bases.
Yes! That's exactly the point I'm trying to make 
In BW the right way to play the game was nothing like the way people intuitively tried to play it. It took an emerging competitive ecosystem to dig down and expose the underlying principles. But the key word there is emerging. It was of the people. Players felt connected to the burgeoning pro scene.
Exactly the same has happened with LoL. The pro scene emerged from the swell of popular competition. Players can watch high level games and relate to what's going on (I suspect often thinking "That's what would happen if people in my games would just do what I fucking tell them").
But it didn't happen with SC2. The pro scene was designed in from the start, and the thing that separated it from everyday gamers was well known and understood to those who would eventually participate, but not at all intuitive or obvious to the majority of ordinary players.
Imagine for a moment BW in SC2's place. A pro scene of experts right from the start, trying to engage the interest of players working their way through a one-race campaign. Players dutifully heading for 1v1 rather than the more fun, communal, less stressful game modes they played in real-life BW history, and being lectured right from the off that nothing they try matters until they master worker micro and macro. Is that a recipe for grass-roots engagement?
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This is a bit besides the actual discussion I guess, but I thought I would just try to make a graphical point on skill floors, their (not necessary) existance within a mechanic and how I see them.
Behold, insane paint skillZ incoming!
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/OTP0TOK.png)
Why do I call this a good model for a mechanic? Well, it allows you to pick up the game and relatively quickly reach the skill floor. You eventually reach a point at which you can say to yourself: "Yes, I can do this thing." You might not be the best at it and there are people still way better at it, but you are now free to focus on training a different mechanic to the skill floor without feeling bad about not improving in that one aspect. What this especially does is also that it sets a baseline that helps differentiating players.
You may not be much above the skill floor in one mechanic, but you can be a player that is much above the skill floor in a different mechanic and make it "your trademark".
Despite all of that, it allows players to excel at that one thing. Someone may be the best "creep spreader". It doesn't plainly win him/her the game (opposed to something that follows "the blue model below"), but it gives an advantage to that player over a lesser player.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/7dprUkg.png)
The blue model is a bit hard to describe to begin with. A mechanic that gives you more and more returns the better you get at it is a bit of an exotic occurance. Think of it like "If you double your click-speed, you get 4 times as much money." Basically what this does is that it enforces you to exclusively train such a mechanic and not even try to use a different one at all. In SC2 that would be like: "It's better to micro your hellion and never ever do anything else, than to divide your attention".
The green model is a bit easier to understand. It is a bit similar to the blue one in that regard that just training this one mechanic is often better than dividing your attention on various tasks. This is basically what HotS inject is, at least until you are very, very high up the curve. You are bottom of the ladder? Train injects! You are mid ladder because you trained your injects? Well, training them more is still one of the most efficient ways to imrove! You are top of the ladder? Well, you reached a level at which you are finally free to prioritize something different over training injects. Eventually you won't get that much out of it whether you have 90% or 85% inject-efficiancy. But up to those 85% you really should always prioritize inject-training over most other things.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/DvwYFhL.png)
The most typical problem mechanics fall into is the following: They run into a deadend very fast. This is the typical problem most RTS games have when they make "realistically moving" units that then feel very sluggish and have very long animiations. In SC2 a typical case of this would be high damage point units like the hydralisk. You are capped heavily in a combat on your hydralisk micro because the unit just isn't able to do a lot besides sitting and shooting or running and not shooting at all.
In reality the models are ovbiously not as vanilia as painted. I already mentioned injects, which would be a bit like the green "bad" model with a red "good" curve for the last little bit of the curve before the Human Skill Cap. Other mechanics may be pretty hard to learn initially (i.e. start on a blue curve) but eventually transition into a red curve, which basically means they have a realtively high skill floor, but are otherwise well-implemented.
It also isn't that bad if a few mechanics have the "theoretical skill cap under human skill cap" problem in a game with many, many different mechanics. You can just compensate somewhere else and it's not necessary to get all crazy about that one thing that doesn't scale past a certain point. Every game has a lot of those. The important "e-sport" aspect is that it has enough of the scaling ones.
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I was actually about to make a post with graphs almost exactly like the ones Big J uses, because he is really hitting the nail on the head here.
This is exactly why these changes COULD Be a good thing.... because the macro mechanics that Blizzard are trying to move away from are close to those linear relationship reward scenarios, so removing them from the game might actually make the game HARDER because you won't get so much reward out of a brainless mechanic that takes no strategic thinking it is just muscle memory that you practice grinding until you can do it in your sleep. This will FORCE players to put more effort into more exponential type reward mechanics which might actually cause MORE separation between bad, good, and great players.
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Bisutopia19202 Posts
On September 01 2015 16:15 lichter wrote:
The term "skill ceiling" is the most misused term in all of Starcraft. The functional skill ceiling will never be reached. Never. What people are actually arguing about is the competitive skill floor—the amount of skill necessary to play the game competitively. Reducing mechanical requirements does shift the competitive skill floor, but the gap between that floor and the current average skill level of contenders is still significantly large, while the gap between the floor and ceiling still infinite. Reducing an infinite by 10 is still an infinite. I've explained this countless times, and people still like to invoke the term skill ceiling for their flawed arguments. I am this close to making the misuse of the term a bannable offense. :p
(Unfortunately, I can't actually do that. Probably)
ded game is pretty misused too :D
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And another thing that I have seen so many people make frankly just incorrect responses about is the fact that the skill ceiling is not infinite and relevant. If you know anything about Game Theory.... it is obvious that this is a relevant concept to this discussion.
The skill ceiling of any game is the GTO (game theory optimal) solution to that game, where a nash equilibrium is reached between 2 players and because of a certain strategy, nothing that the opponent does matters in any way, because unless he plays in the EXACT same way then he will lose in the long term. It is a strategy that cannot be exploited.
Now lets look at some games and see what this means:
Tic Tac Toe :
The game theory optimal solution is pretty simple and is something that can be replicated easily by a human being. If you don't know it you can read about it and never lose a game of Tic Tac Toe ever. You will win or tie every game.
Checkers:
Checkers was solved relatively recently and in order to play the GTO solution a human would have to learn an completely impossible amount of rules to follow.
Think about the simplicity of the game of checkers vs the game of starcraft and it is easy to see why the skill ceiling of starcraft is so high, and because that is so there is a lot of room for players to be better than other players.
Now looking at the Macro Mechanics, here is the problem with those mechanics.
I am going to use APM as a model to explain this, but keep in mind when I say APM I am talking about useful APM that contribute towards reaching a GTO solution of the game.
A human being is only capable of X APM (whatever that number may be)
Macro mechanics are simple actions that are easy to practice and are actions independent of what your opponent is doing... so you HAVE To do them all the time regardless of your opponents actions in order to compete with him IF he is doing them as well. These mechanics do not require thinking or reaction or strategy you just repeat them over and over like a checklist
Lets say that Macro mechanics require Y APM to complete
So... using some pretty complicated math (lol)
we can see that a human being has X - Y = Z APM to spend on things that are not the core macro mechanics. (because those mechanics currently are the absolute most efficient way to get towards a GTO strategy)
By taking the Y APM out of the equation, we are making it so that this braindead autopilot mechanic that is super easy to practice even by yourself is no longer the single biggest factor in your skill level.
This does not reduce "multitasking" in the game it will just allow players to multitask EVEN better in more exciting ways. (because of X the human APM limit)
I dont understand why this is so complicated for people to grasp
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SC2 macro mechanics are like in a game of chess where somebody has to jump rope constantly or else they lose the game (and call out there moves)... so you are the jump rope chess champion of the world... cool story bro... that doesnt mean you are the best CHESS player in the game
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EPT
