MLG Fall Championship Groups

MLG Fall Championship Groups - Page 15

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Talin

Montenegro10532 Posts

November 02 2012 21:04 GMT

#281

On November 02 2012 23:31 Grumbels wrote:
Why isn't Sea attending? I thought TL would want to showcase him.

Don't objectify him. =(

WigglingSquid

5194 Posts

November 02 2012 21:23 GMT

#282

On November 03 2012 04:16 Kilby wrote:

Show nested quote +

On November 03 2012 03:32 WigglingSquid wrote:

On November 03 2012 03:08 Kilby wrote:

On November 02 2012 23:27 Lorch wrote:
Foreigners are just sooo fucking bad at the game at this point. I have a really hard time watching almost every foreigner know, they are just so passive, so slow and you can tell how little most practice.

Here's my 2 cents:

At that level it's not that much about practice though. Of course practice always makes better and it's a known fact that foreigners train less than Koreans but I would just like to point out that at the very highest level, like at the very top of the pyramid, it's not actually practice that makes the difference.

Just look at any other sport. I like to use Usain Bolt as an example here because he is so contemporary and so well known to everyone. At the very top of a certain discipline it is always the combination of sheer natural talent as well as practice that determines who is the absolute best. There are hundreds, even thousands of 100m sprinters out there who train as much or even more than Usain Bolt but because Usain Bolt has huge amounts of natural talent and also practices a lot that puts him way above his competitors. The people who are not so naturally talented but practice insane amounts still cannot even come close to him. And that can be applied to pretty much every competitive sports out there. From chess to ice hockey.

Very poor analogy. Playing Starcraft is a diverse group of fuzzy skills learned through cognitive effort and mistakes can be easily corrected with proper guidance and attention; as such, your proficiency level is very flexible. "Talent", whatever it is, can and will help but it is ridicolous to expect people to be born with a tailored propensity to a particular videogame. Applying it to Starcraft 2 is pure handwavium. It's not talent that makes the difference at the "top level", is having learned the correct set of skills for Starcraft rather than another one at whatever speed and at whatever point in time.
On the other hand, there is hardly any way around the shape of your muscles, which strength must be very carefully built over time and developed without overworking them. I can always learn that the likelihood of timing X is Y, or that my marines tend to die at a certain speed against a set of units, but my quadriceps will only pump so many Newtons before they give up and I am left limping for days to end, not to mention the fact that it won't be possible to grow them past a certain size. There are, of course, many things in SC2 with strong thresholds for humans (micro, probability, calculations etc.), but its overall workings are so fuzzy that it hardly matters.

You pointed out something that I intetionally left out. The 100m sprint is probably at the lowest level when it comes to complexity of skills involved. And that is why I used it as an example. People are always more or less naturally talented in things, no matter their complexity. And if this happens even in such a simple thing as 100m sprint, just imagine how much more those natural skill can affect more demanding, more complex things.

Meh, that seems a non-sequitur to me. I fail to see a reason for which more complex tasks should require more "natural talent".

If you want to look at a situation where "fuzzy" skills are required to win you should look at chess. It is not about the muscles witch which you move the pieces nor how much theory you know. It is about the skill you can show in the actual game and that is something where some people are simply much better than others no matter how much they have practiced. And that is where natural talent comes to play. Look at Kasparov or Carlsen. They are not the best in chess because they have learned the "builds" better than all other pro gamers.

Kasparov started formal chess training at a very early age. There are many players that were or have been more "talented" than him, e.g. being recognized as Chess masters at earlier age but have (so far) failed to replicate his achievements. You can work the problem from any angle and ultimately it should be apparent that the best chess players are invariably people who have been heavily invested in the game from early age, and passionately (if not obsessively) so. Of course, most of these people make more mistakes at one point or another and end up being worse than Kasparov or Carlsen (both of who have been coached by top-ranked chess players, by the way).
What I am saying is that these differences in eventual skill level are not very aptly described by the world "talent", which is usually associated with innate ability. You can use the word "talented" to identify any chess player who appears to be peculiarly good at any given point in time, but really, there are no basis to assume that the difference is due to their natural propensity rather than having learned different things for entirely different reasons through time. (It is likely a combination of both.) Saying that this difference is due to "talent" is just a way to throw a different blob of letters at the fact that they are clearly better but you don't quite know why. For the accuracy of such statement, you could as well say that Kasparov was really quite swashbuckleful at chess, or Apollo guided his hands, or that the Force was stronger with him.

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