TSL_inori retires from SC2 and switches to League - Page 23

On November 26 2012 08:40 Kasaraki wrote:
Why does this discussion always arise when LoL is mentioned? :/

On November 26 2012 09:17 blade55555 wrote:


I dunno majority of feelings but I know I would ratehr 1v1 then a team game.

The reason being is I hate having to rely on teamates in competitive games. In 1v1 at least when you lose it's your fault, not your friends, not your teamates, just yours. In games like LoL/Dota/etc I imagine lots of rage comes from players raging at their allies being shit or whatever.

On November 26 2012 08:15 SupLilSon wrote:

I don't think you fully understood what you were responding to. Noobskills was simply saying that because DOTA/LOL are team games, a single player's mechanics are going to have an overall lower direct impact on the games outcome compared to a 1v1 scenario like SC. Teamwork is not a skill, there is no mechanical component to team work that can be quantified.

And while I agree that people throw around the term skill ceiling a bit too casually, it has not always misused in this thread. Yea, the skill ceiling is only theoretical but that does not mean it is not meaningful. There are numerous reasons to hypothesize that LoL's overall skill ceiling is much lower than DOTA... removal of denies, fog spots in LoL vs trees in DOTA, night/day mechanic in DOTA, item and hero differentiation, etc. Sure, it's the internet, people can always say "nuh uh" and deny but if you follow a logical thought process, LoL has a lower skill ceiling than DOTA.

Edit: And the part about Destiny being decent at SC2 and terrible at LoL is contradictory to the rest of your post. You yourself assert that the 2 games require different skill sets... so you can't really correlate Destiny's transition to anything outside of his ability to learn new skills.
European Football is more demanding motor mechanically and motor skill-wise than American Football, I don't think anyone would disagree. Yet it would be silly to think that Messi could join the NFL and have any impact whatsoever... or almost any other Football player for that matter. Why? The majority of their skills have no basis in the much simpler game of American Football... Such is the relationship between DOTA/LoL

On November 26 2012 09:36 The Final Boss wrote:

And the comparison of DotA and LoL is a great example as far as why skill ceilings bare so little meaning. There are more things you have to do in DotA than there are in LoL. However, because there are less things to do in LoL, that means that there is more room to focus on and practice the nuances of League of Legends, which is fine because no matter how good you get at last hitting in League, you will never hit the ceiling, because you can improve upon other things in lane. It makes no sense to talk about skill ceilings in a game like StarCraft 2 or League because they are never going to be reached.

On November 26 2012 09:17 blade55555 wrote:
The reason being is I hate having to rely on teamates in competitive games. In 1v1 at least when you lose it's your fault, not your friends, not your teamates, just yours. In games like LoL/Dota/etc I imagine lots of rage comes from players raging at their allies being shit or whatever.

On November 26 2012 08:40 SupLilSon wrote:
I don't know much about the fighter scene but wasnt SSBM considered much better competitively than SSBB?

On November 26 2012 07:37 The Final Boss wrote:

What I am acting like is a rational human-being trying to reason with an irrational person. People who talk about skill ceilings are so ridiculous, because they are a theoretical thing that there is no real way of measuring, and completely impractical that anyone will ever reach. Look at Brood War, Boxer is a bonjwa, but he never hit the skill ceiling, because after him came Nada, and after Nada along came iloveoov and after oov came sAviOr and after Ma Bonjwa everybody's favorite Flash, and even Flash was never unbeatable, and when you talk about StarCraft 2, I'm not even sure that Mvp is quite at the level of dominance that those players were at, so he hasn't hit the skill ceiling either. And if you knew anything about League of Legends, it's that people are getting better and better, exploring the game in new ways and learning new champions, and they haven't hit the skill ceiling, and no one ever will. Skill ceiling debate is so pointless because it's all theoretical, and it's even more pointless when you are comparing games that are based around different skills.

There is a lot more to teamwork than what you said, and the fact that you have never really played the game should reflect the comments you make about it; don't make generic comments about a game you don't even play. For example, if you knew anything about LoL you would know that the World Champions, Taipei Assassins communicate and act as a unit incredibly well. It's more than just screaming out which champion to target and all focusing that person--Stanley, TPA's top is not the best mechanically, but if you watch him, he knows precisely when to stay in lane and farm/push and when to leave to prep for a team fight. It's a mixture of both game sense and teamwork, and it's a large part in why they beat M5 in the semifinals and went on to win the tournament. It's a bit specific, but if you play top lane like it's an island, and never leave--which is something that even high level LoL pros do--then you will get beat overall by top laners like Stanley.

But what you are saying, about Inori never beating Mvp at his best in a Bo7 is probably true--you provided a situation in which the absolute best player playing his best in a long match. If you provided the same circumstances for League of Legends, then that might be true. Granted, the pro scene is still developing as opposed to StarCraft 2, so there is no defined "Mvp," but part of that is the newly emerging Korean and Chinese scenes, which for a while were secluded from EU and NA. But if you ignore Korea and China, M5 is sort of like the Mvp, and they were for a while. There were teams that could beat them, but if they are playing their absolute best in a tournament Bo5 setting, it is highly unlikely. M5 is actually even more like Mvp because they have that "Game Genie" aspect to them, where they know things and whip out stuff that nobody else has ever even thought about, and while other teams start to use those strategies, they're moving on to the new thing. But right now it's hard to pinpoint a team that is the absolute best just because there is not enough data. As we have more interactions between the Asian and Western scenes we'll have a better idea of who is the "Mvp" of LoL.

And all this is from somebody who has been following e-Sports for a long time, played StarCraft 2 a lot and at a decent level (mid Masters for a while), and is now playing League of Legends trying to get to a higher level. Quit using phrases like "skill ceiling" and stuff that means next to nothing when applied to a real life situation; look at Destiny, he took games and even series off of top level Koreans like Bomber in StarCraft 2 (the far more difficult game, as you say), but he can't even get into Gold League Elo in League of Legends.

On November 26 2012 09:52 zefreak wrote:
Skill ceilings are very real and you guys are performing some mental gymnastics in order to write them off.

It's true that it's unlikely a 'perfect game' will be played in any game of sufficient complexity. However, your argument that because there is less to do it allows you to focus on perfecting the few things you can do, while true, IS a lower skill ceiling. Skills are all about mastering small tasks in such a way that they become second nature, allowing you to focus on the next set of higher order tasks. The more layers of these tasks there are, the more areas you have to differentiate yourself from others. If BW had SC2 macro, the skill ceiling WOULD be lowered. That doesn't mean there wouldn't be things to focus on and perfect. It certainly would take less time to reach the level of perfection that we got towards the end of BW, though.

I'm not saying that LoL has an insufficient skill ceiling to be a competitive game, because I think it does. But the idea of scrapping the whole notion of a skill ceiling when discussing games is wrongheaded.

On November 26 2012 09:36 The Final Boss wrote:

First off your comparison of European and American football is HILARIOUS, you clearly have no idea of how difficult American football is, how trying it is on the human body, and how deep the strategy of the game goes. I'm not going to rip on soccer because it's a sport that I played in high school and enjoy to play and watch, but calling American football a "much simpler game" is an incredibly stupid thing to say. If you're going to post, try not to take uninformed shots at something you have absolutely no idea about, it makes you look retarded.

Secondly, I'm not trying to say that LoL is somehow harder or more difficult to play, I do not believe that. However, it requires different skills and to talk about the "skill ceiling" of it or any other game like StarCraft is ridiculous. As you have said, League requires a different set of skills, because it is not just based around a single person. Your comparison of European and American football is so blatantly retarded that I'm going to leave it behind, and here's a better comparison using sports: it would be like taking a UFC fighter or boxer and expecting them to transition perfectly into American football or rugby. In theory they might have the physical body to do so, but they don't have the correct experience of working in a team setting and the specifics of those sports to transition perfectly. In a complete oversimplification of the sport, two boxers just have to try to knock each other out, going after each others bodies is their victory condition; in football a lineman has to block for the ball carrier. Similarly, in StarCraft I'm just trying to beat my single opponent to death and he's trying to beat me to death; but in League I might be trying to keep an Olaf from getting to my AD Carry, while that Olaf's goal is to murder my ADC. In each, different people have different goals, in StarCraft/boxing you share a similar goal and in League the individual members of each team have different goals.

And the comparison of DotA and LoL is a great example as far as why skill ceilings bare so little meaning. There are more things you have to do in DotA than there are in LoL. However, because there are less things to do in LoL, that means that there is more room to focus on and practice the nuances of League of Legends, which is fine because no matter how good you get at last hitting in League, you will never hit the ceiling, because you can improve upon other things in lane. It makes no sense to talk about skill ceilings in a game like StarCraft 2 or League because they are never going to be reached.

TL;DR don't talk about games--whether it's LoL or football--that you don't know anything about, skill ceilings are borderline meaningless, stop bashing League of Legends as some "no-skill- game," and I'm done posting in this thread, thank you very much and have a nice night.

On November 26 2012 10:17 DonKey_ wrote:

Wrong-headed? What are you talking about? If skill-ceiling for an "e-sports" game will not ever be proved, then there is no reason to be discussing it. What does it bring to the table? The term itself is being used incorrectly in practically 85% of the posts that contain it.

edit: I for damn sure am not arguing that as a concept skill ceiling does not exist. The thing is you have ZERO way to measure it and ZERO way to reach it.

Skill ceiling is being used to somehow justify that someones game is objectively better because maybe just maybe 1000 years down the line when we have scientifically altered ourselves to exceed our current capabilities as humans we will run in to a situation where the game is "figured out".

It's a useless stat not worth talking about that is being used as a scapegoat argument so elitists can say their more complex game is better to play than others.

On November 26 2012 10:23 SupLilSon wrote:

...? You don't have to resort to calling people retarded because you get frustrated...

European Football is more demanding in areas of technical skill and motor skill than American Football, that's a fact, not a question. But I'm not going to get into that because it'd lead down a completely unrelated tangent on neuromuscular physiology and the workings of fine motor skills vs. gross motor skills.

On November 26 2012 10:17 DonKey_ wrote:

Wrong-headed? What are you talking about? If skill-ceiling for an "e-sports" game will not ever be proved, then there is no reason to be discussing it. What does it bring to the table? The term itself is being used incorrectly in practically 85% of the posts that contain it.

edit: I for damn sure am not arguing that as a concept skill ceiling does not exist. The thing is you have ZERO way to measure it and ZERO way to reach it. With regard to all the games classified as "e-sports".

Skill ceiling is being used to somehow justify that someones game is objectively better because maybe just maybe 1000 years down the line when we have scientifically altered ourselves to exceed our current capabilities as humans we will run in to a situation where the game is "figured out".

It's a useless stat not worth talking about that is being used as a scapegoat argument so elitists can say their more complex game is better to play than others. This is really what frustrates me the most.

On November 26 2012 10:29 Whatson wrote:

As somebody who has played both in high school, you couldn't be more wrong. They require different functions and rely on different skill sets, but to say that soccer requires more skill than american football is just wrong.
/tangent.

On November 26 2012 10:31 NoobSkills wrote:


I like this post and it made me remember something. I watched someone play 2 HON characters at one time for a full game using 2 keyboards, but sharing control (he won all 3 games doing this). In SC2 nobody could do shit playing 2 games at one time unless chessing in both games. That is decent evidence that one game does require you to do more with your time than the other and that the skill ceiling is higher. You could argue all you wanted for days that LoL is harder, but I'm pretty sure someone could also play 2 characters on LoL and win at a high raiting. Now, using skill ceiling to put down another game is shitty because there is talent in all games. Even speed runners are doing something better than the rest when they hold world records. There is a difference of level of skill from the bottom to the top which makes all game's professional levels awesome to watch, or else Esports wouldn't be around. But I will get off of this topic for now I guess because I'm and "elitist" who is trying to "justify my game is better."



He is just one of those diehards who wants to defend LoL even when it doesn't need defending. Nobody even said it was a bad game, just that it required less skill to master. I wouldn't pay him too much attention.

On November 26 2012 10:38 zefreak wrote:


It's not something that is supposed to be 'measured'. This doesn't make it useless. You can make comparative, qualitative judgements. This is common in fields like economics where ordinal numbers are often required.

And while a ceiling will never be 'reached' in the sense on playing a perfect game, it still matters. Instead of thinking in terms of a ceiling, think in terms of 'depth'. A simple game will still have room for human error, and so it's 'skill ceiling' will never be absolutely reached. But a more complex game, while also not reaching its skill ceiling, will allow for error and variation among many more domains.

Rock Paper Scissors cannot be perfectly played by humans because we are not equipped to deal with perfectly randomized mixed strategies. This doesn't mean you can say "Rock Paper Scissors can never be perfected so its just as competitive as Chess or Go, the skill ceiling will never be reached either way" Just an extreme example, not actually trying to compare LoL to rock paper scissors.

On November 26 2012 10:48 Whatson wrote:

Except that not every developmentally normal human being can play football at a high level, the same way that a developmentally normal human being cannot play soccer at a high level. I wonder why.
Very well, I see that I cannot possibly hope to change your opinion. Keep on believing that then.
/tangent.

On November 26 2012 10:42 DonKey_ wrote:

Let me get this straight "I watched someone play 2 HON characters at one time for a full game using 2 keyboards, but sharing control (he won all 3 games doing this). In SC2 nobody could do shit playing 2 games at one time unless chessing in both games." you are using this as evidence that there could be a metric for skill ceiling? Aside from the fact that you don't cite this and it is an anecdote, how does that have any relevant information that a metric could exist for skill ceiling.

I did not call you an elitist, unless you are identifying yourself as one who fits that criteria of arguing a more complex game is a better one.

Your entire post is just a series of assumptions without evidence.