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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
the only race for which application of effort is moderated by the mechanics of the other races is Terran
so a terran speed boosting medivacs around zerg bases based on the booster cooldown, That's not the zerg's application of effort being moderated by the Terran's mechanics?
Rewrite the article with less assumptions and define your terms. It's difficult to read because it rambles and doesn't use paragraphs. You need data and logic to make an argument.
I'm not going to sit here and try and guess what you're thinking. You have to explicitly show that you're right, like TheDwf's ZParcraft article. The article you wrote is actually terrible. If someone doesn't "get it", it's probably your fault.
[QUOTE]On July 15 2014 23:05 ClueClueClue wrote: [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. [/QUOTE]
I never mentioned any of those examples. I responded to the examples of sleep, eating habits and practice partners. Pls re-read.
Do you know of anyone who plays this well? No? Then arguments that SC2 is easy compared to BW are nonsense.
I think the example with tanks is not valid here. Afaik, there is no way to predict which unit gets focused by a tank. The AI however obviously has info on the system intrinsic focusing information. :D
Do you know of anyone who plays this well? No? Then arguments that SC2 is easy compared to BW are nonsense.
I don't about you (or anyone else) but I would bet all my life savings that a person that can accomplish the above will fare way better than in an environment where you can only control 12 units. And that's just being conservative.
SC2 has more of a skill ceiling than BW, as many risky strats eliminate potential for skill in a game. But, if a perfect AI was against someone, I predict it would win close to 100% of the time, regardless of what build the opponent does, simply because it's micro and knowledge would be so far ahead of any human. So in that regard, it has a very very high skill ceiling, just not a practical one.
Interesting thoughts. I think you may have overstated your case for Terran at the expense of Protoss/Zerg, however.
For example, you relate anecdotal evidence that Terran cannot count on dealing damage with harass as a way that Protoss and Zerg influence Terran's success independently of Terran's skill in a way that the reverse is not true. However, I would disagree with that assumption. While it IS true that Protoss' early game defence is extremely strong, there are multiple examples of Protoss players executing the best possible defence that their build allows and still getting damaged enough by the Terran opponent that they fall behind and lose (it is possibly correct that their build was suboptimal for the scenario, but choosing good builds/responses is a dimension of skill). Similarly, even if the Zerg succeeds in snatching back map control, there is no guarantee that a double drop by the Terran in the correct place timed with a bio-mine move-out will not allow them to regain that map control and begin the oh-so-common parade push.
The root problem, I believe, stems from the word 'skill'. When in comparison between vastly different qualities of player, it is easy to define. Close opponents, particularly across racial lines? Way harder. Let's illustrate:
Query 1 - Is Liquid.TaeJa a more skilled player than Jazzman? (remember, both play Terran)
Response - Objective measures like time spent supply blocked, average spent resources, as well as variable conditions like matchup winrates and average APM, all suggest that Liquid.TaeJa is far superior. If doubt exists (which it should not), a simple best-of-X match should elicit an easy comparison.
Query 2 - Is Liquid.TaeJa a more skilled player than KT.Zest? (Terran vs Protoss)
Response - Uncertain. In order to assess this, we need to know not only their winrates and all the other normal objective measures, but we also require a large sample size of games between the two. Let's assume for the sake of argument that we get a pool of 50 games played between the two, divided into 10 Best-of-5 series, all of which went 3-2. Zest is leading in series 6-4 (30-20) and TaeJa is laggin 4-6 (20-30).
Let us further assume that we know for two of the Best-of-5 series, TaeJa was traveling the day before, and he lost the first one after being up 2-0 (dropping 3 maps), and the second he won by trading games with Zest continuously. Zest has lost the last 2 Best-of-5 series, and has done so after being up 2-1 in each case. TaeJa has a winrate of 65% in games between the two that last less than 12:00, and Zest has a winrate of 70% in games that go longer than 32:00.*
See what I mean? I haven't even begun to discuss what kinds of compositions TaeJa and Zest use, what sort of micro techniques are prevalent, what the stakes were for the games involved, and how their performance against each other differs from their established norms in competition. All of these things help illustrate skill, but drawing the conclusion as to the degree of skill shown is a herculean task.
I'll close with a comparison from a field I'm actually trained in: music. As a professional musician, I can provide you with a good informal assessment of the skill of any musician I know or see perform, but only within the realm of that performance. Without access to the musician's private practice sessions and their sum body of work, I can tell you very little about the objective 'skill' of any one player. And this is a field that I have spent tens of thousands of hours involved in, from performance to history to theory and back again. How much harder is it for me to make an objective assessment of Starcraft skill, an arena that I am nowhere close to my level of proficiency in compared to my music.
*note: I have completely made up all of these stats to illustrate my point.
I don't think this makes sense, especially the triangle comparison. If you keep adding triangles to your triangle, then you don't have a finite surface. The moment you stop adding triangles and therefore get a finite surface, then you will be able to calculate a finite perimeter.
I thought the esportsheaven article was actually a very clear-headed way of approaching the situation, because it simplifies things into their basic components, and you can fiddle with all of them to make them more engaging and challenging to use. In each particular case, whether its blink stalker micro or macroing on a three base economy, each component has its own basic skill ceiling that applies. Of course these ceilings will also be impacted by the attention you have to place on other aspects of the game, and what your opponent is doing (i.e. using fungal growth on your stalkers!), but this merely adds some exceptions and modifications to each skill ceiling. The larger point is that you have a framework for thinking about the complexity of the game, and that's why its useful.
That's why I think your post ironically oversimplifies the concept of skill ceiling, and argues against that oversimplification instead. I think you can safely say that, from the statistics, a skill ceiling for the game as whole hasn't been reached, otherwise luck would play a greater role as you said, and there would be a more even distribution in the winnings.
But with regard to your argument entitled "the island", I think this is exactly why we should add to the concept of skill ceilings, and consider them as more flexible and complex concepts, rather than simply abandoning the concepts entirely. The problem is you have nothing to replace them with except a nebulous concept of skill, and dozens of factors all interacting with each other. So you can't meaningfully discuss how to make improvements in the game.
In the end, you would probably end up doing the exact same thing regardless of whether you used the word "skill ceiling" or not. You would be looking into ways to make "forcefield" a more interesting spell that doesn't completely destroy someone's ability to defend against it. Its just another way for saying, increase the skill ceiling for using forcefield, or for defending against it. I truly feel like all of this is just a fancy way of arguing semantics
Also to parallel universe: I think you really need to consider what is possible to accomplish by a human being. I don't think we would be physically capable of achieving what the computer can do in that video, so its an unfair argument to make.
I don't think this makes sense, especially the triangle comparison. If you keep adding triangles to your triangle, then you don't have a finite surface. The moment you stop adding triangles and therefore get a finite surface, then you will be able to calculate a finite perimeter.
Actually instead of trying to explain it, look up Koch snowflake. The perimeter is infite with a finite surface.
The percieved skill ceiling is all about how you measure. You can go into the smallest detail you can imagine and yet you can always expand from that point.
The skill ceiling applies to the rank of the individual. Once they hit that ceiling they have now advancea to a place where they can play tougher opponents. The skill ceiling will always raise as the player improves. And even at the very tip top highest level of play, there is still room for improvement. So there is no end all be all skill ceiling that one day some mecha-bonjwa (name does not confirm or deny this mythical bonjwa is terran) will reach and forever hold it like the world sitting on Atlas's shoulders.
One thing that confuses me is people talking about the "skill ceiling,” of the game which I can't imagine any pro has ever been close to reaching. What seems more relevant is the "skill floor," ie the level of ability needed to be among the best.
when you look at some of flash's BW games it's hard to say what he could have humanly done better. they are rather impossible to critique because his play was approaching flawless.
It's embarrassing to me to start my post with a bolded attention grabbing title, but luck has become a buzzword in the SC community that doesn't mean anything any more. If it ever did. Since the release of the game scrubs have been raging over their unlucky losses and generally whining about anything and everything. Even debating ad nauseam whether or not the skill ceiling is unattainable or not.
eightym A perfect game is an ideal that progamers strive for. It can never be attained... ...This is why people say starcraft has a high skill ceiling. I even claim it has an impossible skill ceiling.
Pro tip. This guy is right.
The entire concept of luck from a whiners perspective is something that produced an unfavourable result that they don't understand. Instead of taking the time to understand, I mean; that takes time, effort and dedication, they will blame it on some mysterious factor out of their control to explain the happenings around them. This gives them the false sense of security in being right, and having a real object to blame losses for.
Rarely does anyone credit skill any longer to the outcome of a game. Now twitch chats and LR threads are spammed with balance whine and general hate, with no attempt at giving a reasonable discussion. While it might seem odd, I'm going to try to discuss luck in a way that anyone can understand. Only to have one of those "my old bones ache..." moment.
There is no RNG in starcraft. All spells have the same AOE, range, and damage no matter how many times you cast them. Units will always do the same damage. A +1 tank will always one shot a 1-1 zergling, banshees will always take 2 shots to kill a worker, scvs repair at the same rate.
If a player gets blindsided and loses his army in 5 seconds due to a momentary lapse in focus, that wasn't luck. That was not paying attention and missing the one critical moment at which he lost his army. Now, whether or not that is good or enjoyable gameplay is an entirely different discussion, but there was no luck involved.
The only luck comes in with scouting. Hidden cheeses and ninja bases are essentially the only two "lucky" strategies left in HoTS. And most hidden cheeses are obsolete these days.
These strategies rely on not being caught, but even they have circumstances under which skill is involved.
A ninja base is 400 minerals missing from the opponents build order. Diligent scouting against a player who can be expected to play reasonably well will immediately reveal a lower army count, and lower infrastructure. Scans, observers, and overseers can all do this.
Due to the size of maps, there is no unscoutable rush that actually works any longer. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) So, the rest of the cheeses can be predicted by doing things like counting gas, scouting the natural, and counting units. Any later than this early phase of the game and scans, observers, and overlords can spot anything.
Now what? What do I blame my losses on? Why is my favourite player not winning tournaments?
On July 16 2014 01:21 Thaniri wrote: If a player gets blindsided and loses his army in 5 seconds due to a momentary lapse in focus, that wasn't luck. That was not paying attention and missing the one critical moment at which he lost his army.
What about all those other times when you have a momentary lapse in focus for 5 seconds and DON'T lose your army because of it, since the other guy wasn't close to attacking?
You don't lose your army just because you have a lapse in focus. You lose it when you have a lapse in focus at the wrong time. And since the other guy isn't sitting there thinking "Hey, this is the moment where he'll have a lapse in focus, let's attack", then there's an element of bad luck that he attacked at this exact time.
I am sorry but i fail to see how you made a stringent argument here. First you discredit the notion of a skill ceiling, or rather how it is used in most discussion, fair enough ill grant you its misuse but that term has that in common with hundreds of other terms. After that you introduce the comparison to Hearthstone, and draw parallels in terms of how many percent of the players win 50% of the money. I dont see how this would be a meaningful metric for anything. Lets say i made a game for mobile devices, a Tic Tac Toe clone. Its 1 cent. You can become a master at this game in 1 hour, tops, at least 90% of my vast player base can. I make a tournament, winner takes all, 100$ no 100 billion dollar! Doesnt matter really, because i just owned every other esport out there with my <0.01% no luck index.. This is just one factor that plays into your proposed index, that has no correlation to anything skill ceiling related.
After that you proceed to inject your own observations about the metagame into your .. What were you talking about again? The concept of skill ceiling, right? Did you want to clarify that term or did you want to make "argument[s] against the concept of skill ceilings" as you put it in your 2. excursion? You mention luck, which is just the 'other' factor, a complementary term. I guess skill is widely believed to be everything that luck (or call it contingency) is not. That helps little in exploring the concept of skill ceiling really. Why would you then jump into starcraft intricacies when skill ceiling is the term you want to explore, which would have to be applicable (at least) to different games to be meaningful. I agree with you, skill ceiling is, like many mental descriptors (intelligence, emotionality etc.) oversimplifications. Mental processes are usually very complex and demand practical simplifications. I agree with you that skill ceiling is a term that is so broad, its close to meaningless, but how does any of your arguments clarify anything? If you want to talk about racial interactions in sc2 and the power of protoss maybe you should just name your thread appropriately, but i do commend you for cleverly clickbaiting, and admitting it.
On July 16 2014 01:21 Thaniri wrote: If a player gets blindsided and loses his army in 5 seconds due to a momentary lapse in focus, that wasn't luck. That was not paying attention and missing the one critical moment at which he lost his army.
What about all those other times when you have a momentary lapse in focus for 5 seconds and DON'T lose your army because of it, since the other guy wasn't close to attacking?
You don't lose your army just because you have a lapse in focus. You lose it when you have a lapse in focus at the wrong time. And since the other guy isn't sitting there thinking "Hey, this is the moment where he'll have a lapse in focus, let's attack", then there's an element of bad luck that he attacked at this exact time.
So don't lose focus ever. You need to be at 100%, 100% of the time.
Now words like impossible are going to be bandied about, and we will come back to the debate about the infinite skill ceiling.
On July 16 2014 01:21 Thaniri wrote: If a player gets blindsided and loses his army in 5 seconds due to a momentary lapse in focus, that wasn't luck. That was not paying attention and missing the one critical moment at which he lost his army.
What about all those other times when you have a momentary lapse in focus for 5 seconds and DON'T lose your army because of it, since the other guy wasn't close to attacking?
You don't lose your army just because you have a lapse in focus. You lose it when you have a lapse in focus at the wrong time. And since the other guy isn't sitting there thinking "Hey, this is the moment where he'll have a lapse in focus, let's attack", then there's an element of bad luck that he attacked at this exact time.
So don't lose focus ever. You need to be at 100%, 100% of the time.
Now words like impossible are going to be bandied about, and we will come back to the debate about the infinite skill ceiling.
Then view it from the other player's point of view. You're playing 100%, you attack a dude that is distracted. You wreck his army, you win. You attack a dude that isn't distracted, he dodges your attack, the game continues with no change.
After the first result, you just move on to the next game, no more effort. After the second, you have to keep engaging your focus and stamina into the game, which could result in making you more tired for the next.
Those results differ in a significant way. Your skill had no influence on which result happened.
The Hearthstone analogy is irrelevant, almost every major tournament has been an invitational, so of course the same names are going to keep popping up.
Do you know of anyone who plays this well? No? Then arguments that SC2 is easy compared to BW are nonsense.
You need to do some very serious research because the basics of understanding life must not be in you to make this kind of incredibly fallacious argument. Microing units =/= skill ceiling. The fact you think this means you're not qualified to speak intellectually on the subject.
@Thaniri There is luck in the game. There is actually a huge amount of it, and it'd be quite visible if you paired two perfect AI's against each other. I imagine that every single build can be "soft-countered" by another build that is just slightly different. For example... In a ZvZ, one player goes 15 pool, 15 hatch, playing it safe, etc. But, the other player goes 15 hatch, 15 pool, getting a slight lead over his opponent. Assuming the players are both "perfect", then the one with any slight lead at all will almost certainly win, unless another similar situation occurs later in the game. Now, if the pool first player happened to go an all-in build which would guarantee a slight lead over a 15 hatch build, then he will win. This essentially makes builds like rock-paper-scissors. And, given how much of an influence builds have, it makes the game closer to being just R-P-S.
The lack of vision means a lack of a knowledge, and a lack of knowledge means that one cannot be certain they are making the best choice, in any situation. If I see a hatchery before a spawning pool, I am 100% certain that there will not be early lings, because I am given all of the information needed to deduce that, ~100%. Obviously, the same cannot be said for when you don't scout at all. You are just making your best guess, aka uncertainty.
If I lose a game of rock-paper-scissors 4 times, then I lose the Bo7. You can always try and predict what your opponent's build will be (there is some skill to that), but you can never be certain. This eliminates the effectiveness of skill to some degree.
If you compare that to say, Chess, where both players are given all of the information to make the "perfect" choice at all times, then you can clearly see there is no randomness.
Note: human players are far from the micro skill-cap, but even then, it would take an inhuman amount more speed and micro ability to be able to make a huge difference, making it impractical. SC2 has more of a soft skill-cap rather than a hard, definite one, and the fact that build-orders give slight leads subtracts from the effectiveness of skill.
@sCCrooked I would actually argue that the person you quoted is correct. If something can be performed better, requiring more skill, then it has a higher skill-ceiling. I imagine it's physically possible to have consistent 600 effective APM, but it is not exactly practical, making the point less significant.
Chess has plenty random elements, at least if you think of games not as mathematical constructs, but as something played by people. I can't stand analysis of games that doesn't take human psychology into account.
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.
How many years did you take into consideration for each game to create those numbers? If the amount of years is not similar the data is not comparable at all. To get more or less comparable values you need a common variable.
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.
Mmm yes, that's why you can neither identify the argument, nor discuss it. Nor can anybody else. A third of the posts here basically agres, some more, some less disparaging. Anybody can wax lyrical, with an abundance of purple prose, with the pretence of didactic tradition in a pedagogical manner. However, when you can't even define your terms, what is there to discuss? Anybody discussing a fast expand as an opening posted would be righful lambasted for not giving a build order for a fast expand, so what is the difference here? Are you so bamboozled by his lack of adequate paragraphy and his disjointed prose that you filled in the gaps yourself, to simply agree with yourself and your own argument? I hope you don't do this a lot in life, please engage your brain, your brain presumably will gain in value from it. I suppose you are the very target audience he seeks to gain approval from in the end.
am i to understeand that the post means; more consistent winning by a single or few players in tournamentsmeans more skill used by the game, meanwhile variety of different champions per seasons means more luck involved in the game?
i concur with that that.
as for skill ceiling, regardless of how we define the meaning, korean pros do say the game is too easy.
On July 16 2014 02:08 Blargh wrote: @sCCrooked I would actually argue that the person you quoted is correct. If something can be performed better, requiring more skill, then it has a higher skill-ceiling. I imagine it's physically possible to have consistent 600 effective APM, but it is not exactly practical, making the point less significant.
Its not requiring more skill, its not possible to do because of the limitations of the human body. Its simply not possible for the human hand to effectively click 1000 times in a minute much less making those actions an actual perfect micro circle. The concept being discussed is whether or not you can make the baseline skill level necessary for being considered "top level play". Right now, that consists of extremely simple macro cycles and following a build order while scouting. None of those are skill-intensive. Let me give you an example of why every person who opposes my point doesn't understand how strategic games like this work.
Recently there has been some debate over the balance in TvZ. Here's 2 hypothetical changes that could be made. 1 of them is a popular option that a lot of people advocate and make arguments for, however its purely static changes and do not encourage more multi-tasking or a higher level of skill necessary to play without becoming "impossible". The other option may not even affect anyone lower than high masters or GM level, but its the correct way to fix a game because it adds new mechanics that are well within human limitations while requiring a significant amount of skill and added multi-tasking so that its so difficult to master and use well that lower level players simply can't think of doing it without compromising their macro or something more base-line. Proposed change 1: buff widow mines and change medivacs (popular, but overall unintelligent option). Proposed change 2: make it so sieged tanks can be picked up and dropped by medivacs still in siege mode so as not to interrupt their firing cycle too badly. Since Terran compositions have far more other units than tanks unless you're in mech, this change is overall better adding an additional important thing T can do to micro battles well while also adding something so difficult, keeping up with your basic macro while doing that well in more than 2 places could be extremely challenging.
This is the heart of the issue. People who know nothing about how strategic games work or how they should be balanced making articles that are little more than poor opinion column nonesense are constantly trying to claim they have pointed out some big problem or fix that hasn't already been discussed to death. That is the majority of the people I have to correct on here.
On July 16 2014 01:21 Thaniri wrote: The Myth Of Luck In SC:
It's embarrassing to me to start my post with a bolded attention grabbing title, but luck has become a buzzword in the SC community that doesn't mean anything any more. If it ever did. Since the release of the game scrubs have been raging over their unlucky losses and generally whining about anything and everything. Even debating ad nauseam whether or not the skill ceiling is unattainable or not.
eightym A perfect game is an ideal that progamers strive for. It can never be attained... ...This is why people say starcraft has a high skill ceiling. I even claim it has an impossible skill ceiling.
Pro tip. This guy is right.
The entire concept of luck from a whiners perspective is something that produced an unfavourable result that they don't understand. Instead of taking the time to understand, I mean; that takes time, effort and dedication, they will blame it on some mysterious factor out of their control to explain the happenings around them. This gives them the false sense of security in being right, and having a real object to blame losses for.
Rarely does anyone credit skill any longer to the outcome of a game. Now twitch chats and LR threads are spammed with balance whine and general hate, with no attempt at giving a reasonable discussion. While it might seem odd, I'm going to try to discuss luck in a way that anyone can understand. Only to have one of those "my old bones ache..." moment.
There is no RNG in starcraft. All spells have the same AOE, range, and damage no matter how many times you cast them. Units will always do the same damage. A +1 tank will always one shot a 1-1 zergling, banshees will always take 2 shots to kill a worker, scvs repair at the same rate.
If a player gets blindsided and loses his army in 5 seconds due to a momentary lapse in focus, that wasn't luck. That was not paying attention and missing the one critical moment at which he lost his army. Now, whether or not that is good or enjoyable gameplay is an entirely different discussion, but there was no luck involved.
The only luck comes in with scouting. Hidden cheeses and ninja bases are essentially the only two "lucky" strategies left in HoTS. And most hidden cheeses are obsolete these days.
These strategies rely on not being caught, but even they have circumstances under which skill is involved.
A ninja base is 400 minerals missing from the opponents build order. Diligent scouting against a player who can be expected to play reasonably well will immediately reveal a lower army count, and lower infrastructure. Scans, observers, and overseers can all do this.
Due to the size of maps, there is no unscoutable rush that actually works any longer. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) So, the rest of the cheeses can be predicted by doing things like counting gas, scouting the natural, and counting units. Any later than this early phase of the game and scans, observers, and overlords can spot anything.
Now what? What do I blame my losses on? Why is my favourite player not winning tournaments?
Because he didn't play as well as he could have.
can't help but disagree with ur view of luck, and how you say someone didn't play as well as he could have, sometimes you have to take a decision based on the fact that ur opponent is going to do X action a certain % of the time, so you take the best decision according to that, if your decision happens to be wrong (it's not actually wrong you just got unlucky) then you fall behind and against a player of the same level you're going to lose a lot more often than not
so did we lose because we could have played better? probably not
On July 16 2014 01:21 Thaniri wrote: The Myth Of Luck In SC:
It's embarrassing to me to start my post with a bolded attention grabbing title, but luck has become a buzzword in the SC community that doesn't mean anything any more. If it ever did. Since the release of the game scrubs have been raging over their unlucky losses and generally whining about anything and everything. Even debating ad nauseam whether or not the skill ceiling is unattainable or not.
eightym A perfect game is an ideal that progamers strive for. It can never be attained... ...This is why people say starcraft has a high skill ceiling. I even claim it has an impossible skill ceiling.
Pro tip. This guy is right.
The entire concept of luck from a whiners perspective is something that produced an unfavourable result that they don't understand. Instead of taking the time to understand, I mean; that takes time, effort and dedication, they will blame it on some mysterious factor out of their control to explain the happenings around them. This gives them the false sense of security in being right, and having a real object to blame losses for.
Rarely does anyone credit skill any longer to the outcome of a game. Now twitch chats and LR threads are spammed with balance whine and general hate, with no attempt at giving a reasonable discussion. While it might seem odd, I'm going to try to discuss luck in a way that anyone can understand. Only to have one of those "my old bones ache..." moment.
There is no RNG in starcraft. All spells have the same AOE, range, and damage no matter how many times you cast them. Units will always do the same damage. A +1 tank will always one shot a 1-1 zergling, banshees will always take 2 shots to kill a worker, scvs repair at the same rate.
If a player gets blindsided and loses his army in 5 seconds due to a momentary lapse in focus, that wasn't luck. That was not paying attention and missing the one critical moment at which he lost his army. Now, whether or not that is good or enjoyable gameplay is an entirely different discussion, but there was no luck involved.
The only luck comes in with scouting. Hidden cheeses and ninja bases are essentially the only two "lucky" strategies left in HoTS. And most hidden cheeses are obsolete these days.
These strategies rely on not being caught, but even they have circumstances under which skill is involved.
A ninja base is 400 minerals missing from the opponents build order. Diligent scouting against a player who can be expected to play reasonably well will immediately reveal a lower army count, and lower infrastructure. Scans, observers, and overseers can all do this.
Due to the size of maps, there is no unscoutable rush that actually works any longer. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) So, the rest of the cheeses can be predicted by doing things like counting gas, scouting the natural, and counting units. Any later than this early phase of the game and scans, observers, and overlords can spot anything.
Now what? What do I blame my losses on? Why is my favourite player not winning tournaments?
Because he didn't play as well as he could have.
can't help but disagree with ur view of luck, and how you say someone didn't play as well as he could have, sometimes you have to take a decision based on the fact that ur opponent is going to do X action a certain % of the time, so you take the best decision according to that, if your decision happens to be wrong (it's not actually wrong you just got unlucky) then you fall behind and against a player of the same level you're going to lose a lot more often than not
so did we lose because we could have played better? probably not
It's good (or at least fitting, I guess) that you're the one saying it because it's similar to a lot of poker spots, where people are shoving a very large range, but still could happen to be in the top of their range the one time you call them.
Just have to add that Sc2 pro players are sportsmen are they not, in esport.
Since when is a sportsman having good/bad health/sleep/mentality a part of luck?
Luck has no effect on SC2 at the top level, there is one exception, the one thing that is not controlled by the players. That is the spawn locations, unless you are talking about the spawn locations (or maybe having the player booth falling down on your head during the game ) Luck as nothing to do with it.
i think luck has to do with things like scouting and where risks can pay off. 4 player map, zerg 6pool and other player scouts zerg last, send a scout for incoming drop but paths miss by seconds or something, stuff like this. pros do speak of luck, either they're just being humble or its actually there. i think its there.
there are so many super complicated deep strategy games where skill just outshines evrething. Sc2 build orders are to important. Protoss design is to allinish, but what im saying has been said since sc2 beta.
Of course there is a "luck" variable; a probability that your anti-meta build will work on a given map, a probability that a given player is aggressive or plays safely etc etc. Ultimately, people try to develop "skills" so that "luck" is minimised in any given game played, and we think of that as how good we are. But it also possible to play unpredictably , which is where a player increases their "luck" to minimise the influence of the opponents "skill". The fortunate thing in Starcraft, is that there is such an insane amount of "skill" that can be earned, that a player cannot just simply play chaotically and be successful.
On July 16 2014 01:21 Thaniri wrote: If a player gets blindsided and loses his army in 5 seconds due to a momentary lapse in focus, that wasn't luck. That was not paying attention and missing the one critical moment at which he lost his army.
What about all those other times when you have a momentary lapse in focus for 5 seconds and DON'T lose your army because of it, since the other guy wasn't close to attacking?
You don't lose your army just because you have a lapse in focus. You lose it when you have a lapse in focus at the wrong time. And since the other guy isn't sitting there thinking "Hey, this is the moment where he'll have a lapse in focus, let's attack", then there's an element of bad luck that he attacked at this exact time.
So don't lose focus ever. You need to be at 100%, 100% of the time.
Now words like impossible are going to be bandied about, and we will come back to the debate about the infinite skill ceiling.
Then view it from the other player's point of view. You're playing 100%, you attack a dude that is distracted. You wreck his army, you win. You attack a dude that isn't distracted, he dodges your attack, the game continues with no change.
After the first result, you just move on to the next game, no more effort. After the second, you have to keep engaging your focus and stamina into the game, which could result in making you more tired for the next.
Those results differ in a significant way. Your skill had no influence on which result happened.
Thats not luck, that's the opponent being less skilful for a moment.
imo you need to really sit down and define skill ceiling.
You are talking about it as if its a thing. For me its a very wooley idea, more an idea of a force that gets progressivley stronger that effectively increasingly neuters increasing skill.
If you think of that as a simple 2d curve then you still have to answer does that converge to a value or does it increase infinitley. If it increases infinitley you still have to ask how far are people physically able to get up that scale. IE you have an effective ceiling not a theoretical one.
Also with luck you need to be very careful as you are dealing with a game of incomplete information - in starcraft at least.
Sure there are events where you say hes unlucky not to of scouted something etc - eg with scans. But that isn't luck per say its probability within a game of incomplete information.
My point is how do you differentiate luck from the uncertainty that was already there? If you can't then luck is already there in each players graph of probabilities which are then used in their judgements. You only say luck from the perspective of the observer seeing a near miss. Its calculated risk - it isn't blind luck. Personally i think there is a big difference.
Eg in poker people talk about luck - they don't get the game. The game is about probability and variance (and the whole spectra of incredibly fine judgements based on observations) the assumption is that luck cancels out and so is not a factor long term. If poker was a game that depended on luck overall noone would make money - ie luck is short term and a damaging concept when it comes to understanding. Its great for hyped discussion and analysis though.
On July 16 2014 04:25 MrTortoise wrote: Eg in poker people talk about luck - they don't get the game. The game is about probability and variance (and the whole spectra of incredibly fine judgements based on observations) the assumption is that luck cancels out and so is not a factor long term. If poker was a game that depended on luck overall noone would make money - ie luck is short term and a damaging concept when it comes to understanding. Its great for hyped discussion and analysis though.
Luck is part of variance. Just because poker doesn't depend on luck doesn't mean it's not a factor.
On July 16 2014 04:25 MrTortoise wrote: Eg in poker people talk about luck - they don't get the game. The game is about probability and variance (and the whole spectra of incredibly fine judgements based on observations) the assumption is that luck cancels out and so is not a factor long term. If poker was a game that depended on luck overall noone would make money - ie luck is short term and a damaging concept when it comes to understanding. Its great for hyped discussion and analysis though.
Luck is part of variance. Just because poker doesn't depend on luck doesn't mean it's not a factor.
Actually, if it doesn't depend on it, that means it doesn't factor in.
On July 16 2014 04:25 MrTortoise wrote: Eg in poker people talk about luck - they don't get the game. The game is about probability and variance (and the whole spectra of incredibly fine judgements based on observations) the assumption is that luck cancels out and so is not a factor long term. If poker was a game that depended on luck overall noone would make money - ie luck is short term and a damaging concept when it comes to understanding. Its great for hyped discussion and analysis though.
Luck is part of variance. Just because poker doesn't depend on luck doesn't mean it's not a factor.
Actually, if it doesn't depend on it, that means it doesn't factor in.
All right, let me rephrase then, just because the major factor isn't luck doesn't mean it's not a factor.
Is the % of players that won in total > 50% of winnings taken from the same time length? And is it compared to the same size of players, I mean it would be different if you in one game had tournaments starting at round1024 and in the second game in round8, right? Or is it number of players/progamers listed somewhere? That would be strange. I'm just curious.
I thought the skill ceiling for tic-tac-toe was too low for me to play that game, but now I changed my mind and am going pro @ ttt. I'm already destroying people in the competitive Checkers scene left and right.
On July 16 2014 06:01 jinorazi wrote: Isn't probability luck itself? Raffle, lottery, they're probabilities no?
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.
An example in Starcraft 2 terms would be proxying your Twilight Council and Dark Shrine behind the mineral line of the base that is the unoccupied main on Catallena. Let's further say this is PvT. You are making a probabilistic judgement that your opponent will not have the time to investigate the map to an extent that reveals your plan before the structures are complete. In essence, you have made a wager that probability my opponent does not scout this > probability of it getting scouted and easily defended. Now, the tough part is that this wager on probability is not a probability in a vacuum situation. The opponent, if they are very skillful, can minimize the impact of not finding the proxies by making good judgements of the game state and having a build that takes many scenarios into account.
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.
I feel like I should weigh in. Before I was ever a SC2 player, I was a poker player. Not a pro or anything, but profitable. Poker is a game with a lot of "luck" with "luck" being defined as an unpredictable outcome. SC2 has this too. The better player isn't going to win every game and the best player isn't going to win every tournament. In poker, it's easy to see that this "luck" is attributable to the random order of cards in the deck. Of course good players know that any number of skills can be developed to mitigate this "luck" in the long term. What we really mean by "luck" is variance. I'm not going to go any deeper into poker theory because what I really want to talk about is SC2.
When people talk about luck in SC2 they are usually referring to build order losses(or race imbalance, but that's a discussion for another time). Not only does this discredit the skill of scouting and making reads off of limited information (a skill dear to the poker players heart) it also discredits the players skill of reading the metagame and choosing build orders accordingly. Another skill that goes into maximizing the amount of build order wins a player can achieve is by being hard to predict. A player that opens aggressively every game can easily be exploited, for example.
Pigbaby is a great example of a player who used a high level understanding these skills, which most people discredit as "luck", to take down WCS America. He didn't crush Taeja 3-0 because he was better at micro or macro but because he prepared a strategy designed to exploit Taeja's predictable style. That's not luck.
BW was different. Build orders mattered less, because micro/macro skills mattered more. That doesn't mean BW is a game that required more skill or had a higher skill ceiling. It just means BW emphasized different skills.
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
In broodwar players usually said that you only got unlucky because you didnt scout enought.
There is an obvious skill ceeling, but i dont belive it will ever be reached.
Another issue that has been common in both broodwar and sc2 for years is assumptions.
I belive that is also why base trades are so common in sc2, while they were far less common in broodwar. SC2 is "easier" in terms that it is easier to gues how much your opponent has or at least should have based on how the game has been developing, even over long games.
In broodwar, since it was a game that was more mechanicly demanding, it was harder to guess how many "mistakes" your opponent may have made over the course of a game.
Since we all make mistakes in sc2 and broodwar alike, the game where those mistakes are easier to minimalize, will be the easier to predict.
However, not that those problems affect the player and his opponent as well, thus while i belive that broodwar was a harder game to master, both sc2 and broodwar face the same issue in multiplayer: you and your opponent are given the same tools (sort of, since there are 3 races), and small advantyges in sc2 will add up over time, only it might take a bit longer than in broodwar to show the mechanical skill disparity between two players.
Obviously this is just my opinion on the matter, so please do not take this as a fact, but a point of view.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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
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.
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.'
EPT
) Luck as nothing to do with it.
Let's see if I can explain why without sounding like an asshole...
