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Actually, one of the reason that so many sports are random is because they were designed in 1890. :p
If football was a computer game we would call it badly designed. It has outdated arbitration, too many players in the field and it could benefit from some rule changes. In the knock-out phases in the world cup there are so many games that end in 0-0, 1-0, 1-1, which really should be unacceptable because often the skill differences are there. It's too easy to slow down games with defensive play and it makes for so many games that come down to penalty shootouts or to one lucky moment.
In Starcraft 2 we should know better. There are a few factors that come into play I think: 1. If the top players can consistently win it allows us to build up story lines more and get more engaged with the game. See tennis, but also Brood War. 2. If the outcome of matches is predetermined there is no real need to watch early rounds, the games themselves might be boring and frustrating to watch. This is not necessarily a bad thing, in most sports the majority of viewers will turn up for the finals.
I think the solution should be to start out with making the gameplay as interesting as possible, this should be the first priority. I would be bored with a game that's simply about who can macro the biggest army and attack-move to victory, even if it could reward skill almost linearly. I wouldn't be bored with a game where you constantly had to make interesting decisions, and since you couldn't see into the future, sometimes you would end up making the wrong decisions and get a disadvantage, but it wouldn't matter so much because the gameplay itself was interesting. It adds some volatility, but it still allows the better players to win and engage the viewers while they do so, while they constantly explore new situations and try to make the most of it.
(chess is basically an exact match of this description, by the way)
Edit:
To put it another way: is it really a surprise that people complain about volatility when we have had to put up with so many broken match-ups in the last year?
When ZvZ hits that roach-hydra-infestor stage it becomes weird and boring, ZvT with brood lord infestor was a nightmare in the past, same with ZvP (not to mention immortal-sentry). PvP late-game is devoid of interest as well, early game used to be a complete coinflip.
TvT and ZvZ have their share of randomness in the openings, but I honestly think that the community doesn't really mind those, because you still need good micro and decision making for most of the game. I think if there were less complaints about the match-up that mysteriously the complaints about volatility would mostly go away.
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I guess team sports have a "low skill ceiling" too, considering the best people in vegas only predict about 60% of the outcomes correctly
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Bisutopia19049 Posts
The game still hasn't had enough time to stabilize especially with the influx of Kespa players. Expect it to be like this for years to come until after LotV.
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" is the skill ceiling not high enough?" This is exactly what I believe needs to be changed. We need it HIGHER!
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Yes it's way too volatile. Hot streaks frequently turn instantly into major losing streaks without a slow fall. The top players change once a month. It's extremely rare to have someone win 2 tournaments in a row. They almost always have a falling out inbetween or just a permanent fall off. There are so many players who have won 1 premiere event and then never won anything else. There are tons of players who string together a set of wins against top players and then just disappear. No one has maintained a win-rate higher than 60% or so for more than a few months.
Protoss is probably the biggest problem. Zerg and Terran have had some consistency while it seems like the best Protoss changes every month. In 2012 it went from Genius, Squirtle, Seed, Creator, Rain, Parting... MC was probably the best at certain points in there too. Then there is the PvP matchup itself which is just hilariously impossible to predict. There have been so many A>B>C>A scenarios with PvP that happened within the same month or even within the same tournament. It's also worth noting that it is the matchup with the highest foreigner vs korean win-rate.
At least with Terran and Zerg it's been a bit less volatile. The best player has always only been between a couple players. Terran in 2012 was obviously MVP and Taeja. Zerg was Life and DRG. Maybe throw Leenock in there at certain points.
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I completely agree with this. For me it was StarCraft 2 which showed me what a sports should be like: the best players should win consistently. Right now we don't see anything like this. It's nearly impossible to predict the winner of a match.
I am a soccer/football fan but the fact no team ever defended the Champions League title kinda shows that even in football the luck factor is to large. Normally this doesn't apply to individual sports like Darts (16 time world champion there), Tennis (top four of the world also in the top 4 in the australian open). But for Starcraft this doesn't apply and imho this is clearly due to the lack of a greater skill ceiling. The fact how fast the Kespa players catched up shows this clearly. The sad thing is many people don't see this problem obviously. And I don't see how HotS will change anything. Because the new units aren't harder to use then the old ones.
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I don't see the validity of the skill ceiling argument in this instance.
There are way too many factors involved with tourney results in SC2 than to just say that some imaginary skill ceiling alone is responsible for volatility in predicting the winners. I would urge you to consider the history of BW, which was split between individual and team leagues. There were some players who excelled in team league who may not have showed as great results in individual leagues. But when we looked at their overall match histories, we see a large portion of players who are capable of taking games off of the top players favored to win individual leagues.
The same scenario is definitely in play in the WoL scene, maybe even to a larger extent. There's a large pool of really good players. I don't think this implies a hard skill cap so much as a combination of a stagnant meta, player sniping builds, and loads of other factors. It really isn't simple enough to pin down to one conclusion.
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On February 22 2013 15:49 Kennigit wrote:Show nested quote + Is there something inherently wrong with a game where the supposed best players so often lose to players who are widely considered weaker than them? Like, is the skill ceiling not high enough? Is it too luck based? Why don't the best players beat the slightly less good players more often?
This has been suggested by pros, writers, community figures since 2008 when we started playing alpha builds. It has been consistently complained about (especially by idra) for years now.
Starcraft is not tennis. In Starcraft there are three match ups for every player. First of all you would need to measure skill in one match up and compare them at only that match up to determine the likelyness of one player winning. Second thing is we don't just have one map, but a variety of maps. It has less to do with random generation , being coinflippy or flaws of the game. It simply the is complexity of it.
On one field doing the same thing over and over again, you need to be consistent. On the other hand; on multiple fields in multiple match ups against (in addition) opponents that are more or less likely to just be weaker on paper, you sometimes lose and you sometimes win. In my opinion the chance of losing a game in Starcraft is higher, but the aspects I named a reason for it, not bad design even though the skill ceiling could be raised for sure.
Just my take on it
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On February 22 2013 20:55 roym899 wrote: I completely agree with this. For me it was StarCraft 2 which showed me what a sports should be like: the best players should win consistently. Right now we don't see anything like this. It's nearly impossible to predict the winner of a match.
I am a soccer/football fan but the fact no team ever defended the Champions League title kinda shows that even in football the luck factor is to large. Normally this doesn't apply to individual sports like Darts (16 time world champion there), Tennis (top four of the world also in the top 4 in the australian open). But for Starcraft this doesn't apply and imho this is clearly due to the lack of a greater skill ceiling. The fact how fast the Kespa players catched up shows this clearly. The sad thing is many people don't see this problem obviously. And I don't see how HotS will change anything. Because the new units aren't harder to use then the old ones. But what about BW? Excepting the unmentionable one, VERY few players ever exceed 70% win rate in all matchups. Like, almost never! Yet we all know how high the skill ceiling is.
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Looking at TL official article predictions, I was thinking the same thing. If even the best at prediction can't predict it with decent consistency - then the game itself must be pretty inconsistent.
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On February 22 2013 21:16 mordk wrote:Show nested quote +On February 22 2013 20:55 roym899 wrote: I completely agree with this. For me it was StarCraft 2 which showed me what a sports should be like: the best players should win consistently. Right now we don't see anything like this. It's nearly impossible to predict the winner of a match.
I am a soccer/football fan but the fact no team ever defended the Champions League title kinda shows that even in football the luck factor is to large. Normally this doesn't apply to individual sports like Darts (16 time world champion there), Tennis (top four of the world also in the top 4 in the australian open). But for Starcraft this doesn't apply and imho this is clearly due to the lack of a greater skill ceiling. The fact how fast the Kespa players catched up shows this clearly. The sad thing is many people don't see this problem obviously. And I don't see how HotS will change anything. Because the new units aren't harder to use then the old ones. But what about BW? Excepting the unmentionable one, VERY few players ever exceed 70% win rate in all matchups. Like, almost never! Yet we all know how high the skill ceiling is. I wasn't into BW so I can't comment on that. But probably the luck factor was even larger in BW then it is in WoL.
Imho it really splits up into Luck factor and Skill ceiling. When the luck factor is very large it doesn't matter how high the skill ceiling is because after all you will probably still lose to a certain BO. When the Skill ceiling isn't very high it doesn't matter how small the luck factor is because the differences between the top players are too small and thus it's coming down to luck again who wins.
So the luck factor has to be smaller and the skill ceiling has to be higher to make this game a better viewing sport.
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Thanks for the ro8 spoiler asshole
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United States5162 Posts
On February 22 2013 21:20 figq wrote: Looking at TL official article predictions, I was thinking the same thing. If even the best at prediction can't predict it with decent consistency - then the game itself must be pretty inconsistent. Edit: NM, not really a fair question since regular sports have lines and not picking straight up.
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On February 22 2013 15:53 MCXD wrote: But if the same player won every single competition and had a 90% winrate, wouldn't everyone complain about the fact the outcome of every tournament is boring and obvious? I'm pretty sure they would.
Also a lot of other (non e-sports) are incredibly volatile. As much so as SC2, if not much more. I don't know. Having someone extremely solid to cheer for feels good. One of the reasons it sucks to be a Protoss player and fan is because the Protoss players in WoL are all so inconsistent. There is literally no one you can rely on to be consistently top-form. The closest we have/had to someone like this is MC, Parting and Squirtle, but then they all like to follow up their extremely brief periods of dominance with epic fails. As opposed to what Terrans have in The Summer of Taeja and The King of Wings, who can at least be expected to reliably deliver results more than half the time.
I'm not complaining about Protoss being weak, but about how it sucks to not have someone whom we can cheer for everytime without worrying too hard about the possibly that they'd flop and do stupid builds. I for one think it would be sweet to have a Bonjwa-class emerge in Sc2.
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Isn't TL 0/4 in Ro8 predictions this season?
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man, i have serious doubts about the "seventeen over 60% in liquibet" statistic, would like to see how you figure that's accurate. are you only including the (obviously very, very) small minority of people who get to bet on every match? i doubt that includes more than 5%, at most 10%, of the active+semi-active liquibet users. much less out of the 12k users who have bet on something. of whom you could straight up drop the lowest 2/3 of the ladder out of the deal, unless you presume that as the top ladder is voting 60% right, the bottom is managing to get 80%, or 99% wrong. i'm on a huge wrong-wrong-wrong-wrong-wrong streak and have yet to go under 60%, think i was 63% a few weeks ago and can't remember a single point in my liquibetting history (2½ years maybe?) i've had a voting average of less than 57, maybe 56%. and i really don't even watch/follow starcraft that much, rather skimming through recent match statistics to make an assessment of the players' current form. also my point average has always been like 3-7% under my voting average
honestly, you should get better results than 53% correct - which you strangely claimed was top 20% - just by voting on players based on their lifetime win rates in their relevant match ups, which isn't really a very good way to go about things. 53% is likely pretty close to the median voting average, definitely no more than 1,5% better than that.
anyway, any tennis analogies are kind of null and void because tennis is a game of complete information and starcraft is the opposite in that regard. it is not (even theoretically) possible for it to be played perfectly even if you're the best player of the game in the world. neither in terms of micro, macro or strategy. much like poker, the better player will always win in sc2 (let's put in the limitations of a mirror match up right here just to ignore the topic of balance which should be a discussion held separate). sometimes that will not be immediately evident. considering this a flaw in a game, be it poker, starcraft or battleship, is kind of ignoring that it is also one of its defining factors and strengths.
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If predicting was an exact science, sports betting wouldn't exist.
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