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Deep down, a part of me is ashamed of producing a title which can only be described as click-baiting though a more accurate title would simply include the subtitle “In multiplayer games”. Skill ceiling is a term that has the flavour of good marketing. It sounds nice, portrays an argument simply and can be bandied about with impunity, confident that you had delivered a crippling blow to the discussion. To this day people looking to compare Starcraft 2 to Brood War believe they must simply say Starcraft 2 has a lower skill ceiling in order to highlight the truer eSport. So prevalent is its use in the community that it has become almost fundamental in the perception of the games for most community members, with thoughts moving away from arguing the point to how best to increase the skill ceiling of the game.
The entire concept of a skill ceiling is flawed for a game such as Starcraft or Starcraft 2. It is an over simplification for as basic a competition as Bowling let alone of all the abundant mechanisms that are involved in Starcraft, Brood War or otherwise. In all competitions there are two broad categories that will judge performance at any given moment. Skill and Luck. The greater the difference in skill between two competitors, the less of a factor luck will have in the outcome. The closer the competitors in skill, the more luck will play a role.
Rarely observers credit luck to the outcome of a competition. It is however, as important at differentiating competitors as skill. Luck can take many forms, it can vary from the health of the competitors and their previous evenings sleep to their preparation, who they were preparing with and how, and RNG effects in game. While it may seem odd to categorize these factors as luck, these events and their results can have an unpredictable effect on performance and so is difficult to factor for when preparing.
The One Percent:
+ Show Spoiler +To assess just how much an effect luck has in Starcraft, relative to other games, we can look to another game which is noticeably more reliant upon luck. Though Hearthstone is only a new game, it’s free to play model and attractive mechanics resulted in an active competitive scene. Taking the data of the winnings we can see that 11% of players have won about 50% of the prize pool. While this may indicate a skilled game, favouring more talented players, the tournament sample size is relatively small and the proportion may fluctuate.
It, however, pales in comparison to the top heavy nature of Starcraft 2 prize distribution, taking 2010 winnings in order to be more comparable to Hearthstones current stage, 2.3% of the competitive players had won 50% of the prize money. On this data, it should be clear that Starcraft 2 favours skill as a factor for victory significantly more than a game such as Hearthstone. Interestingly, when comparing to Brood War, it took about 4% of Brood War prize winners to accumulate to 50% of all prizes given away.
As such it seems that WoL/HotS (3.13% for 50% prize money as of the writing of this article) and Brood War both seem to favour uniquely skilled participants, and the main arguments of the Skill Ceiling theory are made redundant by fact, highly skilled players have increased probability of earning prize money over the average player base in a similar proportion to their Brood War counter parts.
An Island:
+ Show Spoiler +A further argument against the concept of skill ceilings in a game such as Starcraft, is the concept of no matter the intention of your play, you are not isolated from your opponent. As such while the mechanics of the game may influence your application of skill, the true limit of the application of your skill is the capacities of your opponent. Against a feeble opponent, low level applications are all that is required and any further application is redundant, against more highly skilled opponents there may be no potential limit to how many actions will have a beneficial effect on your position in the game.’
In a model where there are two players competing against and effecting each other skill is not measured as a ceiling but rather as a rectification. To what level is the effort you put in playing, rectified by either the mechanics of yourself or of your opponent’s races. In my opinion, the only race for which application of effort is moderated by the mechanics of the other races is Terran. Between Protoss’ ironclad early game defence and Zerg’s tremendously scalable production, in combination with both races capacity to affect rapid tech switches, much of the damage Terran’s hope to effect with attacks and harass exacts more skill to execute than to defend.
This does not necessarily mean that players of Protoss or Zerg are less skilled relative to their Terran counter parts, it is evident enough in games between Protoss and Zerg that the races eccentricities are more evenly matched against each other creating thrilling and even games often won or lost after losing several bases or engaging in a full base trade. As such it is not necessary to make great changes to Starcraft 2 to create further locations to apply skill, but rather to ensure that the skill applied by members of each race require equivalent skill to counter act or otherwise to inflict damage.
End of Part 1, in the next part I will be more speculative and express more opinion of the current problems with Terran. I have posted it up here.
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On July 15 2014 21:15 Zvonimir wrote:The entire concept of a skill ceiling is flawed for a game such as Starcraft or Starcraft 2. It is an over simplification for as basic a competition as Bowling let alone of all the abundant mechanisms that are involved in Starcraft, Brood War or otherwise. In all competitions there are two broad categories that will judge performance at any given moment. Skill and Luck. The greater the difference in skill between two competitors, the less of a factor luck will have in the outcome. The closer the competitors in skill, the more luck will play a role.
What did you think of that esportsheaven article?
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Grumbels, its a mistake that many people fall into, accepting the idea of skill ceilings without questioning the logic of the statement. I think its poorly thought out, to accepting of paradigms that permeate the community. I really dont like it, it reinforces false ideas within the community and perpetrates thoughts that dont benefit the community or the game itself.
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United Kingdom10443 Posts
Do you think no skill ceiling exists at all.
Or do you just believe that the ceiling is so high for Brood War/Sc2 that it is too high to reach.
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A perfect game is an ideal that progamers strive for. It can never be attained, but it can be approached. This is why people say starcraft has a high skill ceiling. I even claim it has an impossible skill ceiling, because I never seen someone play a perfect game, AI or human. Have you ever seen a replay where a player couldn't have improved? I haven't. That's what is meant.
There's no evidence whatsoever to support the claim that the ratio of players to % tournament wins has any correlation to luck. To assume that without establishing why is disingenuous to the reader. You really think Hearthstone requires less luck than Starcraft? That's silly. It's an interesting idea, but without evidence and logic, nobody's going to buy it.
Being a multiplayer game has no affect on the skill ceiling. Players can scout. Good players know when, why, where, how, and what to scout. It's subtle, but it takes a lot of skill/understanding.
I don't think you're making much sense at all. It's an interesting idea, but I'm pretty sure your arguments are severely flawed. Sorry.
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Could you TL;DR please, I read all the way up to the "An Island" section and is still vague regarding where you're getting at.
There is no (humanly) attainable skill-ceiling in SC2; and the issue luck vs. skill has been discussed to death already.
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Netherlands4511 Posts
i thought this would be about protoss..dissapoint
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On July 15 2014 21:37 eightym wrote:
There's no evidence whatsoever to support the claim that the ratio of players to % tournament wins has any correlation to luck. To assume that without establishing why is disingenuous to the reader. You really think Hearthstone requires less luck than Starcraft? That's silly. It's an interesting idea, but without evidence and logic, nobody's going to buy it.
Of course it has a correlation. The more luck is involved, the less chance you'll have to find players winning everything. Lottery is at one side of the equation, and probably chess is at the other. His argument says Heartstone required more luck than Starcraft, so I'm not sure what you're reading.
I wouldn't have used only early statistics to compare BW and SC2, though, that would be my one complaint with the argumentation. Early after the release of the game, is when the strats are less defined, when even the best players have less of a good idea of what they're doing. That influences the results as well.
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I agree that there are other dimension outside of the game mechanics themselves that impact the outcome of games.
Describing health and who ppl are preparing with however is hardly luck, its professionalism.
Professionalism is an attempt at creating consistency. If you dont have a hotel or food the night of an event and need to sort everything out last minute, surely it can have an impact on your game. But that is not luck, just factors outside of the game itself.
If I understand correctly you describe the effect of these conditions to be luck based, not the conditions themselves. Again I would not agree that the effect of lets say sleep deprivation or foreign foods on players is luck.
With regards to "the island".
Assuming i understood correctly, i very much agree and have been arguing this point for a long time now. Terran units are in now way underpowered or weak. Simply Terran gameplay requires a larger amount of (lets not use the word skill) but mechanics to achieve a similar level of play. Its the glass cannon argument. In theory 10 marines win vs 20 banelings, but who could ever make those splits work...
This is supported by the fact that a few capable players remain competitive whereas mid level Terrans struggle in comparisons to their midlevel counterparts in both P and Z. Not because of imbalance but because T operates at a higher "risk - reward" balance than other races.
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Ok so something that afiak almost never gets mentioned:
Yeah, a game like starcraft has a "skill ceiling" that simply can't be achieved by any human ever.
But that alone isn't really important i feel. What is more important is if you are on the highest lvl right now and get better, how much does this matter in the game?
Simple example: At the beginning of starcraft you are pretty bad, every hour you infest you get better and it matters a lot in the game (for example getting supply blocked <<< not getting supply blocked)
But what happens if you are at the highest lvl of play? Is the gain you get from getting better high enough to be "worth it".
Does it help you enough? I feel this is the important question about "skill ceilings".
Question: Does the game reward you to get better if you are at a certain skill level?
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Skill ceiling is a rather vague concept as to discuss it you first have to admit 1) it does not exist for Starcraft; then you have to add that 2) it concerns the interaction and combination of many different actions and 'skills' that change every game you play, which torpedoes the simple ceiling metaphor; also 3) it does not take into account the psychology of playing vs another human player with individual strengths and weaknesses; and finally 4) it is always explained using idiotic examples like bowling and tic-tac-toe and automaton bot videos.
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On July 15 2014 21:41 Liquid`Ret wrote:
i thought this would be about protoss..dissapoint
Everything is about Protoss if you want it to be enough Ret.
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Well the most dislike is you cant improve your strength if it is already excellent. improve your weakness is the only one way from that pont. I prefer to have some player where you can overcompensate your weakness with your strength, this simply doesnt exist in sc2. All other rts gmes offer this way, even cnc and stronghold.
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I really don't understand why the One Percent portion is basically a comparison of percentages of players winning the prizes. Even worse, the data you used was in 2010! You have to include ALL YEARS the game has been inexistence for you to make some sort of correlation between the two. Even though Hearthstone is fairly new, that doesn't excuse using such flawed logic in your data selection. You need to remember that 2010 wasn't even the current form of Starcraft 2 and that back then a ton of bugs and problems in the units themselves were still being worked out. Huge sweeping changes came almost every month. If you included all tournaments across all years for SC2/HotS, you would not see what you're claiming exists. Its not a very small percentage of players winning money. Nobody can hold on to a crown in this game so there's a considerable luck difference between it and BW.
Secondly in your "Island" part, I'm confused why your opponent's skill has anything to do with a skill ceiling in the game itself. A skill ceiling is created by the difficulty in the mechanics of the game's regular necessary rhythms. If you want to open that old can of worms, there's tons of old BW vs SC2 threads from years gone by (please don't necro them, the discussions were pointless) where this was discussed to death. Needless to say, you're pretty wrong in your assessment mainly because of your misunderstanding of the underlying concepts involved.
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On July 15 2014 21:50 The_Red_Viper wrote:
Ok so something that afiak almost never gets mentioned:
Yeah, a game like starcraft has a "skill ceiling" that simply can't be achieved by any human ever.
But that alone isn't really important i feel. What is more important is if you are on the highest lvl right now and get better, how much does this matter in the game?
Simple example: At the beginning of starcraft you are pretty bad, every hour you infest you get better and it matters a lot in the game (for example getting supply blocked <<< not getting supply blocked)
But what happens if you are at the highest lvl of play? Is the gain you get from getting better high enough to be "worth it".
Does it help you enough? I feel this is the important question about "skill ceilings".
Question: Does the game reward you to get better if you are at a certain skill level?
the efficiency of improvement deteriorates significantly. so yes the game does reward you, but the effects can become insignificant as supposed to strategical improvements.
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On July 15 2014 22:33 Mojito99 wrote:Show nested quote +On July 15 2014 21:50 The_Red_Viper wrote:
Ok so something that afiak almost never gets mentioned:
Yeah, a game like starcraft has a "skill ceiling" that simply can't be achieved by any human ever.
But that alone isn't really important i feel. What is more important is if you are on the highest lvl right now and get better, how much does this matter in the game?
Simple example: At the beginning of starcraft you are pretty bad, every hour you infest you get better and it matters a lot in the game (for example getting supply blocked <<< not getting supply blocked)
But what happens if you are at the highest lvl of play? Is the gain you get from getting better high enough to be "worth it".
Does it help you enough? I feel this is the important question about "skill ceilings".
Question: Does the game reward you to get better if you are at a certain skill level? the efficiency of improvement deteriorates significantly. so yes the game does reward you, but the effects can become insignificant as supposed to strategical improvements.
Well yeah, that is exactly my point though. If the effect of improving becomes insignificant at one point, you basically reached the "skill ceiling". Even if theoretically you always could play "better", it won't help you to be more consistent, etc.
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I don't get the point of the opening post? Seems more suited to a blog post to me.
As far as I can tell, the main thrust of the post is that luck exists.
Nothing seems to connect one senetence to another. It is vague and has far too much colloquial fluff, You talk about an argument you are making, without ever saying what this argument actually is,and how it is connected to your title, or anything else you have written.
Hence why everybody is talking about anything but whatever your opening posts actually discusses, because it doesn't discuss anything.
I think it is most telling that you never even bother to define "skill ceiling".
Quality over sensationalism and faux intellectualism next time please.
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Wait so the 2,3% is just in WoL? I was so happy for that stat 
My take on it, is that in SC2 there's simply a skillceiling that is unreachable.
Mechanic wise is one thing, but as soon as you pit two players up against each other they will continue to outplay each other and improve the highest level.
Question is, if it's a problem that there are styles that you can abuse to make the game more luck dependant, for you to achieve victory vs the always skill aspect.
Surely there is skill, but being a brainy, or tactical gamer, definitely helps.
Edit: Didn't like the Terran whine part btw, if skill ceiling is indeed a myth, then that counts for all races.
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On July 15 2014 22:43 Dangermousecatdog wrote:
I don't get the point of the opening post? Seems more suited to a blog post to me.
As far as I can tell, the main thrust of the post is that luck exists.
Nothing seems to connect one senetence to another. It is vague and has far too much colloquial fluff, You talk about an argument you are making, without ever saying what this argument actually is,and how it is connected to your title, or anything else you have written.
Hence why everybody is talking about anything but whatever your opening posts actually discusses, because it doesn't discuss anything.
I think it is most telling that you never even bother to define "skill ceiling".
Quality over sensationalism and faux intellectualism next time please.
I found it to be an interesting and very intellectual argument. It is also a very strong argument. Take some time to understand it, it says a lot more than luck exists.
However, what you just said is sensationalism. You made points with absolutely zero evidence. Why does it not connect? Every sentence flows from one to the next, and it made perfect sense and connected to me. And you demand he define "skill ceiling", when the definition is as well known in this community as "fast expand." Sorry you don't know the colloquial terms, but that doesn't make his argument any weaker when it is presented in this setting, where the term is commonly used.
I hope you don't do this a lot in life, find something that isn't written the way you'd prefer, and discard it. Because it has a lot of value.
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[QUOTE]On July 15 2014 21:46 Mojito99 wrote:
I agree that there are other dimension outside of the game mechanics themselves that impact the outcome of games.
Describing health and who ppl are preparing with however is hardly luck, its professionalism.
Professionalism is an attempt at creating consistency. If you dont have a hotel or food the night of an event and need to sort everything out last minute, surely it can have an impact on your game. But that is not luck, just factors outside of the game itself.
If I understand correctly you describe the effect of these conditions to be luck based, not the conditions themselves. Again I would not agree that the effect of lets say sleep deprivation or foreign foods on players is luck.
Everything affects your game. You can't avoid interacting with your surroundings by stepping out of reality into the realm of "professionalism". Luck can be getting an, for you, easy bracket. It can be scouting for proxies during the right game, or not doing it when you don't have to. A factor of luck can be that your opponent just happened to recently view an impressive game of yours and is shaken by it. Of course you can always strive to be better in order to make these factors matter less, but they will never disappear, no matter how professional a player is.
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EPT
