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On July 17 2014 01:27 Nebuchad wrote:Show nested quote +On July 17 2014 00:06 Jazzman88 wrote:
Luck is what people call probability when they don't understand probability. Everyone says things like "That one person was lucky to win the lottery", when the reality is the person has absolutely nothing to do with it. Lucky simply is an adjective to describe the recipient of benefits due to the inevitable laws of chance. And that differs from saying that the person is lucky because...? Show nested quote +On July 17 2014 00:06 Jazzman88 wrote:
In this scenario, and indeed, in SC2 as a whole, there is a diminishing returns on probability/luck. The best players do not need to 'get lucky' because their play is good enough that there are a vanishingly tiny amount of scenarios in their play that require anything less than perfect control to be optimized. To be sure, perfect control is practically unattainable, but that doesn't stop them from trying, nor does it mean that one player is lucky because the other's control is less perfect than theirs. That's a snapshot of skill in that moment, not luck that the player was playing badly. You are using a narrow definition of luck because you view it as something negative, as opposed to the positive influence of skill. That's not what the OP intended, and that's not a serious way to look at the idea. The best players do not need to get lucky when playing against inferior players, because skill is more important than luck. The greater the gap in skill, the less luck will play a factor. But now let's take two great players, that we will pretend are of equal skill for the sake of the example. What determines who wins? Each one should win 50% of the time, since their skill evens out. Which one wins the first game? Which one wins the second? At some point, one of them will win two games in a row. Why? And of course you get lucky when the other player messed up. It's an element of the game that allowed you to win easier than you were supposed to, and you had no control over it. If that wasn't luck, a part of skill wouldn't be to force mistakes off of your opponent by stretching his multitasking/attention/whatever
The semantics here are unimportant. In your 50-50 scenario where one player makes a mistake, the player who played better (the one who didn't mess up) won. If both players are equally "skilled" then the determining factor of who wins in the long run is not "luck" but rather consistency.
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On July 17 2014 02:14 sc2isnotdying wrote:Show nested quote +On July 17 2014 01:27 Nebuchad wrote:On July 17 2014 00:06 Jazzman88 wrote:
Luck is what people call probability when they don't understand probability. Everyone says things like "That one person was lucky to win the lottery", when the reality is the person has absolutely nothing to do with it. Lucky simply is an adjective to describe the recipient of benefits due to the inevitable laws of chance. And that differs from saying that the person is lucky because...? On July 17 2014 00:06 Jazzman88 wrote:
In this scenario, and indeed, in SC2 as a whole, there is a diminishing returns on probability/luck. The best players do not need to 'get lucky' because their play is good enough that there are a vanishingly tiny amount of scenarios in their play that require anything less than perfect control to be optimized. To be sure, perfect control is practically unattainable, but that doesn't stop them from trying, nor does it mean that one player is lucky because the other's control is less perfect than theirs. That's a snapshot of skill in that moment, not luck that the player was playing badly. You are using a narrow definition of luck because you view it as something negative, as opposed to the positive influence of skill. That's not what the OP intended, and that's not a serious way to look at the idea. The best players do not need to get lucky when playing against inferior players, because skill is more important than luck. The greater the gap in skill, the less luck will play a factor. But now let's take two great players, that we will pretend are of equal skill for the sake of the example. What determines who wins? Each one should win 50% of the time, since their skill evens out. Which one wins the first game? Which one wins the second? At some point, one of them will win two games in a row. Why? And of course you get lucky when the other player messed up. It's an element of the game that allowed you to win easier than you were supposed to, and you had no control over it. If that wasn't luck, a part of skill wouldn't be to force mistakes off of your opponent by stretching his multitasking/attention/whatever The semantics here are unimportant. In your 50-50 scenario where one player makes a mistake, the player who played better (the one who didn't mess up) won. If both players are equally "skilled" then the determining factor of who wins in the long run is not "luck" but rather consistency.
In my 50-50 scenario, nothing has been said about one player making a mistake. It doesn't change much, since opponent making mistakes would be part of luck, but it's a different point.
Consistency is part of skill, players who don't have the same consistency wouldn't be "of equal skill" in my example. Of course, nobody is ever "of equal skill", there will always be small variations, but I'm simplifying it for the sake of clarity.
And let's not bring long run into SC2. It works for cash game and SNG, it's already a weak concept in MTT, and in SC2 when you rarely play more than Bo5 against people, it's at its weakest.
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On July 17 2014 02:51 Nebuchad wrote:Show nested quote +On July 17 2014 02:14 sc2isnotdying wrote:On July 17 2014 01:27 Nebuchad wrote:On July 17 2014 00:06 Jazzman88 wrote:
Luck is what people call probability when they don't understand probability. Everyone says things like "That one person was lucky to win the lottery", when the reality is the person has absolutely nothing to do with it. Lucky simply is an adjective to describe the recipient of benefits due to the inevitable laws of chance. And that differs from saying that the person is lucky because...? On July 17 2014 00:06 Jazzman88 wrote:
In this scenario, and indeed, in SC2 as a whole, there is a diminishing returns on probability/luck. The best players do not need to 'get lucky' because their play is good enough that there are a vanishingly tiny amount of scenarios in their play that require anything less than perfect control to be optimized. To be sure, perfect control is practically unattainable, but that doesn't stop them from trying, nor does it mean that one player is lucky because the other's control is less perfect than theirs. That's a snapshot of skill in that moment, not luck that the player was playing badly. You are using a narrow definition of luck because you view it as something negative, as opposed to the positive influence of skill. That's not what the OP intended, and that's not a serious way to look at the idea. The best players do not need to get lucky when playing against inferior players, because skill is more important than luck. The greater the gap in skill, the less luck will play a factor. But now let's take two great players, that we will pretend are of equal skill for the sake of the example. What determines who wins? Each one should win 50% of the time, since their skill evens out. Which one wins the first game? Which one wins the second? At some point, one of them will win two games in a row. Why? And of course you get lucky when the other player messed up. It's an element of the game that allowed you to win easier than you were supposed to, and you had no control over it. If that wasn't luck, a part of skill wouldn't be to force mistakes off of your opponent by stretching his multitasking/attention/whatever The semantics here are unimportant. In your 50-50 scenario where one player makes a mistake, the player who played better (the one who didn't mess up) won. If both players are equally "skilled" then the determining factor of who wins in the long run is not "luck" but rather consistency. In my 50-50 scenario, nothing has been said about one player making a mistake. It doesn't change much, since opponent making mistakes would be part of luck, but it's a different point. Consistency is part of skill, players who don't have the same consistency wouldn't be "of equal skill" in my example. Of course, nobody is ever "of equal skill", there will always be small variations, but I'm simplifying it for the sake of clarity. And let's not bring long run into SC2. It works for cash game and SNG, it's already a weak concept in MTT, and in SC2 when you rarely play more than Bo5 against people, it's at its weakest.
A Bo5 and MTT are both "short term". Long term would be a career. The point is that a single game/series/tournament isn't a large enough sample size to observe differences in consistency, but it does in fact matter. In any one specific game(assuming a balanced matchup) the player who played better will win, which is not the same thing as saying the better player won. An inferior player can capitalize on their opponent's mistake. Did they get lucky? Sure, but they still outplayed their opponent.
In a pure 50-50 matchup, in a sample size of one, the winner is still determined by who played better(or was prepared with the better strategy). You wouldn't be able to reliably predict the outcome, but that's a different thing than saying the outcome was determined by luck (in part or in whole). Luck is only a part of SC2 in the sense that you have no control over your opponent. This is true of all games.
SC2 is a game with a fair amount of variance. That's an intentional part of the design and partially responsible for why it's fun to watch and play. If things played out in predictable ways, it would be boring.
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On July 17 2014 02:51 Nebuchad wrote:Show nested quote +On July 17 2014 02:14 sc2isnotdying wrote:On July 17 2014 01:27 Nebuchad wrote:On July 17 2014 00:06 Jazzman88 wrote:
Luck is what people call probability when they don't understand probability. Everyone says things like "That one person was lucky to win the lottery", when the reality is the person has absolutely nothing to do with it. Lucky simply is an adjective to describe the recipient of benefits due to the inevitable laws of chance. And that differs from saying that the person is lucky because...? On July 17 2014 00:06 Jazzman88 wrote:
In this scenario, and indeed, in SC2 as a whole, there is a diminishing returns on probability/luck. The best players do not need to 'get lucky' because their play is good enough that there are a vanishingly tiny amount of scenarios in their play that require anything less than perfect control to be optimized. To be sure, perfect control is practically unattainable, but that doesn't stop them from trying, nor does it mean that one player is lucky because the other's control is less perfect than theirs. That's a snapshot of skill in that moment, not luck that the player was playing badly. You are using a narrow definition of luck because you view it as something negative, as opposed to the positive influence of skill. That's not what the OP intended, and that's not a serious way to look at the idea. The best players do not need to get lucky when playing against inferior players, because skill is more important than luck. The greater the gap in skill, the less luck will play a factor. But now let's take two great players, that we will pretend are of equal skill for the sake of the example. What determines who wins? Each one should win 50% of the time, since their skill evens out. Which one wins the first game? Which one wins the second? At some point, one of them will win two games in a row. Why? And of course you get lucky when the other player messed up. It's an element of the game that allowed you to win easier than you were supposed to, and you had no control over it. If that wasn't luck, a part of skill wouldn't be to force mistakes off of your opponent by stretching his multitasking/attention/whatever The semantics here are unimportant. In your 50-50 scenario where one player makes a mistake, the player who played better (the one who didn't mess up) won. If both players are equally "skilled" then the determining factor of who wins in the long run is not "luck" but rather consistency. In my 50-50 scenario, nothing has been said about one player making a mistake. It doesn't change much, since opponent making mistakes would be part of luck, but it's a different point. Consistency is part of skill, players who don't have the same consistency wouldn't be "of equal skill" in my example. Of course, nobody is ever "of equal skill", there will always be small variations, but I'm simplifying it for the sake of clarity. And let's not bring long run into SC2. It works for cash game and SNG, it's already a weak concept in MTT, and in SC2 when you rarely play more than Bo5 against people, it's at its weakest.
lol if we don't bring long run into SC2 then the luckiest player would be the winner
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I don't mean the outcome is determined by luck. I'm saying skill and luck both play a factor, and that the closer in skill the two players are, the bigger the luck factor becomes. At no point would the luck factor reach 100% (unless you're playing against a clone of yourself I suppose).
The people I'm arguing against, Thaniri and Jazzman, say luck plays no role at all. When you say SC2 has a fair amount of variance, you basically agree with me.
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On July 17 2014 03:23 ROOTFayth wrote:Show nested quote +On July 17 2014 02:51 Nebuchad wrote:On July 17 2014 02:14 sc2isnotdying wrote:On July 17 2014 01:27 Nebuchad wrote:On July 17 2014 00:06 Jazzman88 wrote:
Luck is what people call probability when they don't understand probability. Everyone says things like "That one person was lucky to win the lottery", when the reality is the person has absolutely nothing to do with it. Lucky simply is an adjective to describe the recipient of benefits due to the inevitable laws of chance. And that differs from saying that the person is lucky because...? On July 17 2014 00:06 Jazzman88 wrote:
In this scenario, and indeed, in SC2 as a whole, there is a diminishing returns on probability/luck. The best players do not need to 'get lucky' because their play is good enough that there are a vanishingly tiny amount of scenarios in their play that require anything less than perfect control to be optimized. To be sure, perfect control is practically unattainable, but that doesn't stop them from trying, nor does it mean that one player is lucky because the other's control is less perfect than theirs. That's a snapshot of skill in that moment, not luck that the player was playing badly. You are using a narrow definition of luck because you view it as something negative, as opposed to the positive influence of skill. That's not what the OP intended, and that's not a serious way to look at the idea. The best players do not need to get lucky when playing against inferior players, because skill is more important than luck. The greater the gap in skill, the less luck will play a factor. But now let's take two great players, that we will pretend are of equal skill for the sake of the example. What determines who wins? Each one should win 50% of the time, since their skill evens out. Which one wins the first game? Which one wins the second? At some point, one of them will win two games in a row. Why? And of course you get lucky when the other player messed up. It's an element of the game that allowed you to win easier than you were supposed to, and you had no control over it. If that wasn't luck, a part of skill wouldn't be to force mistakes off of your opponent by stretching his multitasking/attention/whatever The semantics here are unimportant. In your 50-50 scenario where one player makes a mistake, the player who played better (the one who didn't mess up) won. If both players are equally "skilled" then the determining factor of who wins in the long run is not "luck" but rather consistency. In my 50-50 scenario, nothing has been said about one player making a mistake. It doesn't change much, since opponent making mistakes would be part of luck, but it's a different point. Consistency is part of skill, players who don't have the same consistency wouldn't be "of equal skill" in my example. Of course, nobody is ever "of equal skill", there will always be small variations, but I'm simplifying it for the sake of clarity. And let's not bring long run into SC2. It works for cash game and SNG, it's already a weak concept in MTT, and in SC2 when you rarely play more than Bo5 against people, it's at its weakest. lol if we don't bring long run into SC2 then the luckiest player would be the winner
I don't see how that's true, can you expand?
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On July 17 2014 03:30 Nebuchad wrote:Show nested quote +On July 17 2014 03:23 ROOTFayth wrote:On July 17 2014 02:51 Nebuchad wrote:On July 17 2014 02:14 sc2isnotdying wrote:On July 17 2014 01:27 Nebuchad wrote:On July 17 2014 00:06 Jazzman88 wrote:
Luck is what people call probability when they don't understand probability. Everyone says things like "That one person was lucky to win the lottery", when the reality is the person has absolutely nothing to do with it. Lucky simply is an adjective to describe the recipient of benefits due to the inevitable laws of chance. And that differs from saying that the person is lucky because...? On July 17 2014 00:06 Jazzman88 wrote:
In this scenario, and indeed, in SC2 as a whole, there is a diminishing returns on probability/luck. The best players do not need to 'get lucky' because their play is good enough that there are a vanishingly tiny amount of scenarios in their play that require anything less than perfect control to be optimized. To be sure, perfect control is practically unattainable, but that doesn't stop them from trying, nor does it mean that one player is lucky because the other's control is less perfect than theirs. That's a snapshot of skill in that moment, not luck that the player was playing badly. You are using a narrow definition of luck because you view it as something negative, as opposed to the positive influence of skill. That's not what the OP intended, and that's not a serious way to look at the idea. The best players do not need to get lucky when playing against inferior players, because skill is more important than luck. The greater the gap in skill, the less luck will play a factor. But now let's take two great players, that we will pretend are of equal skill for the sake of the example. What determines who wins? Each one should win 50% of the time, since their skill evens out. Which one wins the first game? Which one wins the second? At some point, one of them will win two games in a row. Why? And of course you get lucky when the other player messed up. It's an element of the game that allowed you to win easier than you were supposed to, and you had no control over it. If that wasn't luck, a part of skill wouldn't be to force mistakes off of your opponent by stretching his multitasking/attention/whatever The semantics here are unimportant. In your 50-50 scenario where one player makes a mistake, the player who played better (the one who didn't mess up) won. If both players are equally "skilled" then the determining factor of who wins in the long run is not "luck" but rather consistency. In my 50-50 scenario, nothing has been said about one player making a mistake. It doesn't change much, since opponent making mistakes would be part of luck, but it's a different point. Consistency is part of skill, players who don't have the same consistency wouldn't be "of equal skill" in my example. Of course, nobody is ever "of equal skill", there will always be small variations, but I'm simplifying it for the sake of clarity. And let's not bring long run into SC2. It works for cash game and SNG, it's already a weak concept in MTT, and in SC2 when you rarely play more than Bo5 against people, it's at its weakest. lol if we don't bring long run into SC2 then the luckiest player would be the winner I don't see how that's true, can you expand?
there's too much variance in SC2 to consider short term as an indicator of who is the better player
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On July 17 2014 03:25 Nebuchad wrote:
I don't mean the outcome is determined by luck. I'm saying skill and luck both play a factor, and that the closer in skill the two players are, the bigger the luck factor becomes. At no point would the luck factor reach 100% (unless you're playing against a clone of yourself I suppose).
The people I'm arguing against, Thaniri and Jazzman, say luck plays no role at all. When you say SC2 has a fair amount of variance, you basically agree with me.
I would contend that I'm arguing for the fact that 'luck' in SC2, or at least what I see and hear MOST people refer to as 'luck', is actually your opponent making a mistake. The example that was brought up earlier of 'getting lucky' that your opponent wasn't looking at the army as you attacked is not actually luck, that's a mistake that they couldn't correct in time. I forget who said this earlier, but perfect skill would be 100% focus and 100% reactions at all times. Obviously, that's practically unattainable, but that doesn't mean that luck is the determining factor there, it's a matter of who is playing better in the moment at that particular phase of time.
Your objection makes a great deal of sense, but I think I interpret it differently than you do.  Let's see if I can explain why without sounding like an asshole...
Why does the difference have to be luck between our hypothetical equally skilled set of players? If they are both absolutely equal in terms of macro, micro, decision-making, and all other aspects of the game, one would expect the result to be a draw, or at least very close to one. What prevents this? I contend that it is individual mistakes, not truly 'luck'. I guess it goes back all the way to the Oracle dark days that Terran faced, where proxy Oracle was this massive threat, and it could also be Blink or DTs. The Terran would say in that scenario the Protoss got 'lucky' that the Terran didn't scout the one spot on the map where the proxy building was. In hindsight, however, you can see that the choice to redirect the Reaper to only 1 or 2 spots with no additional information-gathering done was a mistake. Perhaps by making the choice to send an SCV to check some other spots you find it in time. Perhaps you actually got close and missed just a little bit of space where it was. That's also a mistake, just visible mostly in hindsight as opposed to the Innovation style OH GOD I FLEW MEDIVACS INTO MUTAS type of error you KNOW is game-ending right then.
Admittedly, I think we're mostly arguing semantics here. I guess I just prefer to talk in terms that refer back to ways that a player can improve their ability to win games as opposed to chalking things up to laws of probability and variance.
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Canada11316 Posts
I don't really understand this thread.
Does a game like SCBW or SC2 really only boil down to skill and luck, and no other variables? If so, then what is your definition of skill (and luck for that matter)? Does it include both knowledge and execution? Both SC's have imperfect knowledge that requires the players to interpret what the other side is doing and counter accordingly. Interpretation and countering might be counted as a skill, but what about the basic fact that the game does not give you all information, I would not count that as 'luck.'
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EPT
