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Philadelphia, PA10406 Posts
In BW, players got to prepare for every match, basically. Every starleague, you prepared for your opponents and match-ups. You played at a familiar PC in the same place, very close to where you live.LANs make it much harder for the best players to consistently win. Excess travel, poor tournament conditions, and lack of practice all hamper the best players.
At the same time, I think Sc2 progresses too quickly. In BW, a more technically skilled player could suffer an early deficit, but storm back with better macro. In Sc2, there is no real difference between the macro abilities of MaNa and Rain. In BW, by.Sun would probably be beat MaNa to 150/200 every time. Micro is a more nuanced issue, but I think it's similarly a valid concern.
In Sc2 the reason why the results aren't completely random is that the top tier pros have an understanding of the game that few others have. TaeJa frequently makes all kinds of reads based on very little information. Top players can do that, lesser players can't.
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On December 12 2013 00:40 grs wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2013 00:37 urboss wrote: I believe that this issue is quite important for any sport in general. If the results become random, people just stop caring.
The question is what there can be done about it. I think the first step is making posts on TL. When doing that, it is of importance not to react to any counterarguments and facts disproving the statement. Also it is key I woke real vague statements with out proof like "when results are random people stop caring". Then make more vague statements. The key is to make sure you provide no solid position for people to argue against and prove zero evidence. Then you win every argument.
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On December 12 2013 00:16 grs wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2013 00:10 Kasaraki wrote:On December 11 2013 23:43 opterown wrote: i find the thinly veiled BW elitism in some of these posts rather amusing "Thinly"? "Thinly veiled"; e.g. hardly veiled at all. I meant to say it wasn't veiled at all, but in retrospect that doesn't actually make sense!
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On December 12 2013 00:37 urboss wrote: I believe that this issue is quite important for any sport in general. If the results become random, people just stop caring.
The question is what there can be done about it. I would say its completely opposite. If this same person always win, why would you even watch anymore?
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If we take the last 10 terran premier tournament wins we have : Taeja x 5 Polt x 3 Bomber x 1 MMA x 1
Looks like the same terran are winning.
However if we take the last 10 protoss tournament wins we have : Rain herO Parting sOs Dear x 2 duckdeok StarDust x 2 (with Fragbite Masters) HerO
What does this mean? well for one, it means that 5 terran are always winning while the others don't, and protoss doesn't seem to be able to win on a regular basis (due to the randomness of PvP? :D)
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You probably haven't read the op spoiler so I'll post it here again:
Here are the Ro8 players for the three WCS season finals of 2013:
Season 1 finals: Innovation sOs Soulkey Mvp Roro Alicia ForGG aLive
Season 2 finals: Bomber Jaedong Taeja First Scarlett Rain NaNiwa aLive
Season 3 finals: Dear Soulkey Maru Trap ByuL Oz MC MMA
The only two players that made it twice to the Ro8 are Soulkey and aLive. The rest is a mix of completely random players. I'm gonna be so bold and predict that we are gonna see 6-7 new names in the Ro8 season 1 of 2014.
Can you see my point?
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On December 12 2013 00:54 urboss wrote: You probably haven't read the op spoiler so I'll post it here again:
Here are the Ro8 players for the three WCS season finals of 2013:
Season 1 finals: Innovation sOs Soulkey Mvp Roro Alicia ForGG aLive
Season 2 finals: Bomber Jaedong Taeja First Scarlett Rain NaNiwa aLive
Season 3 finals: Dear Soulkey Maru Trap ByuL Oz MC MMA
The only two players that made it twice to the Ro8 are Soulkey and aLive. The rest is a mix of completely random players. I'm gonna be so bold and predict that we are gonna see 6-7 new names in the Ro8 season 1 of 2014.
Can you see my point?
Please prove the results were random and not based on one player being better than the other. You keep claiming that the results are random, but provide nothing but a list of players that did well, which says nothing.
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United States23455 Posts
On December 12 2013 00:54 urboss wrote:+ Show Spoiler +You probably haven't read the op spoiler so I'll post it here again:
Here are the Ro8 players for the three WCS season finals of 2013:
Season 1 finals: Innovation sOs Soulkey Mvp Roro Alicia ForGG aLive
Season 2 finals: Bomber Jaedong Taeja First Scarlett Rain NaNiwa aLive
Season 3 finals: Dear Soulkey Maru Trap ByuL Oz MC MMA
The only two players that made it twice to the Ro8 are Soulkey and aLive. The rest is a mix of completely random players. I'm gonna be so bold and predict that we are gonna see 6-7 new names in the Ro8 season 1 of 2014.
Can you see my point? Is your point that aLive is really good and doesn't get enough credit? Because I totally feel you on that one.
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No, because you have 3 prelims going into a silly Seasonal Final. You won't see Seasonal Finals next year.
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The vast majority of answers on the first two pages plain explain why the edge (possible % win rates) of the players is relatively small and does not directly explain the "random results".
The "randomness" is mostly because the win rates of top players are a) relatively small (against other top players) b) they differ a lot due to different win rates against different races. a) makes the number of games in a best of ridiculously high to really determinate a "better player" b) introduces bracket luck simply in getting good match ups for you. Of course there are other way smaller factors (win rate deviation on multiple games and maps). The plain math is very simple and just the fact that aligulac has different elo ratings for different match ups makes it waaay better than pure elo. Seriously aligulac is so good in determinating the outcome of a game and it shows you pretty good how random results are. I would guess if you would just mindlessly take +ev bets (within a small threshold) based on aligulac on an online betting site you would make profit.
The first good post that touches more of that is from Fjodorov.
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On December 12 2013 00:54 urboss wrote: You probably haven't read the op spoiler so I'll post it here again:
Here are the Ro8 players for the three WCS season finals of 2013:
Season 1 finals: Innovation sOs Soulkey Mvp Roro Alicia ForGG aLive
Season 2 finals: Bomber Jaedong Taeja First Scarlett Rain NaNiwa aLive
Season 3 finals: Dear Soulkey Maru Trap ByuL Oz MC MMA
The only two players that made it twice to the Ro8 are Soulkey and aLive. The rest is a mix of completely random players. I'm gonna be so bold and predict that we are gonna see 6-7 new names in the Ro8 season 1 of 2014.
Can you see my point?
The season finals are based on 3 groups of winners from 3 different regions. So there is much more variance than there would be if you just ran one tournament. If you put all those players in the same tournament and ran it three times, chances are the lists would be much closer.
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Placing anything less than first in tournaments means you are out of form, a bad player etc. The SC2 community is extremely elitist, and you are only as good as your last tournament win. It doesn't help that in BW that you had players like Flash and Jaedong that were so far ahead of the curve, which you don't have in SC2.
Try and look at results in an unbiased way, and if the 'best player in the world' was eliminated early in a tourney, look at who knocked them out, and don't assume that they are out of touch or the game design is bad. Look at why they won certain tournaments, did they genuinely outplay everyone? Or were they simply ahead of the metagame?
Don't let yourself get swept up in the hype regarding volatility, and don't expect a player to win a tournament just because he won the last one you saw him in.
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I think its mostly Artosis rooting for the players we want to see in the finals, and they are hit by the curse. On a more serious note, I think that having top 8s constantly changing is actually good, its showing that the skill of the players is not an absolute thing, there is no "best SC2 player" that dominates all tournaments and takes a really high share of yearly prize money, we had it in WoL, and I think HotS helped a lot of players advance, I mean, I never heard about Innovation before he destroyed everybody in HotS. So I think its a really positive thing to not have a dominating personality, its healthy for the competition. But still, its mostly Artosis.
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On December 12 2013 01:16 HystericaLaughter wrote: Placing anything less than first in tournaments means you are out of form, a bad player etc. The SC2 community is extremely elitist, and you are only as good as your last tournament win. It doesn't help that in BW that you had players like Flash and Jaedong that were so far ahead of the curve, which you don't have in SC2.
Try and look at results in an unbiased way, and if the 'best player in the world' was eliminated early in a tourney, look at who knocked them out, and don't assume that they are out of touch or the game design is bad. Look at why they won certain tournaments, did they genuinely outplay everyone? Or were they simply ahead of the metagame?
Don't let yourself get swept up in the hype regarding volatility, and don't expect a player to win a tournament just because he won the last one you saw him in.
I already wrote off those two players if you read my earlier post with regards to BW.
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Well we got Aligulac or this kind of tool to estimate the position of the player. This allow you give probabilities on results, as we had this nice thread here for WCS (though I don't think monte carlo was the best way to proceed). It is commonly used in other sports (baseball, soccer...).
A real estimation of the volatility of the game would be based on comparing this prediction to actual results. It is a statistical test as there is obviously a variance, so it is based on many, many, many matches.
It's useless to discuss this volatility before estimating it for real, mathematically.
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On December 12 2013 01:23 TheFlexN wrote: I think its mostly Artosis rooting for the players we want to see in the finals, and they are hit by the curse. On a more serious note, I think that having top 8s constantly changing is actually good, its showing that the skill of the players is not an absolute thing, there is no "best SC2 player" that dominates all tournaments and takes a really high share of yearly prize money, we had it in WoL, and I think HotS helped a lot of players advance, I mean, I never heard about Innovation before he destroyed everybody in HotS. So I think its a really positive thing to not have a dominating personality, its healthy for the competition. But still, its mostly Artosis.
go watch some of the last WOL GSL. Innovation was showing a new level before HOTS.
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Because most top players are around the same level, so most of them can take each other out any given day.
Something that actually means there is a good and healthy competition running. I will never understand this "bonjwa" thing. I hate spanish football because of the same teams winning everything while ravaging the others.
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I agree with Flex, the unpredictability you see is the vicious cycle induced by the Artosis curse:
player enters tournament as favorite => cursed => underdog wins the tournament => enters next tournament as favorite => cursed => etc... There are few players who have proven to be able to resist the Artosis curse, those are known as Bonjwas.
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Yeah, I'm gonna go with that is isn't unpredictable. No foreigner wins, Soulkey, Jaedonng.. etc. And you example of non-favourite players winning is like, wut. All those guys have proven themself to be super good, so are we going to discredit the legitimacy because there are alot of good players? :o
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