thoughts on 'getting good'

King of Posters
1

http://insertcredit.com/2012/04/09/playing-to-win-at-life/

i read this pat piece a couple years ago and have been thinking more or less about it recently. I played SC2VN which is a cute little visual novel about making it as a starcraft 2 pro player. this got me into thinking about my own history with competitive games. as someone who grew up playing games for the narrative, just goofing around, shying away from games that were ‘too intense’ for me, my evolution into more of a competitive gamer is very much a new thing. as i kid i would essentially play single player games, appreciating them from a story- and gameplay-based ‘art’ perspective. i never was good at any game really. my intro to competitive gaming came basically with the rise of halo esports after halo 2’s popularity in 04-05 – i wanted to be a 1337 MLG gamer, but my somewhat-tech-fearing parents put the kibosh on that pretty quick by refusing to allow me to get xbox live. so i was in this weird place where i desperately wanted to be good at a game, but i did not have the fundamental tools to do so, and i feel like this left a bit of a gap in my video game life.

i got back into considering playing games in a hardcore way after i watched agdq2013 (thanks geinou) and subsequently got into speedrunning – a hobby that also requires time, practice, dedication to succeed at, and one in which i never really found my passion or got any good at. i wonder nowadays if i can still develop the mental toolset to get good at a game. not just carving out the time – which is a huge part of it – but the ability to analyze my mistakes and adapt, my attitude, being ‘in the moment’

i realized playing CS, and i have been told by gamer buds who are deep into comp gaming, that my main strengths/talents are mechanical – i can e.g. outaim some folks who have much more game experience than me, and i really enjoy grinding out aim maps and flick training, deathmatch with bots, and all the other purely-mechanical ways of getting better. but when it comes to teamplay and ‘seeing the game’ there is some fundamental disadvantage that I’m at, and i have no clue how to fix that, other than active conscious effort when playing. nowadays i’ve got 700-750 hours in CSGO, and i’m legendary eagle, which is kind of good? but really pretty shit?? i don’t think there are figures which describe what percentage of the playerbase this is. i’ve also noticed that as i get better in skill, i start considering my own game to be way more trash, but at the same time analyzing my own game yields greater dividends than it did when i was in the starter ranks, so in certain ways it’s become easier to improve. i had never really thought about how good i wanted to be at the game, but at this point i think it’s realistic to aim for top 5% of the playerbase eventually, and maybe higher. it helps to have folks around me in my gaming circle who have e.g. gotten top 2% in starcraft 2 HotS, and having really in-depth conversations with them about how to improve at games.

my general vibe from sb is that a decent portion of folks dislike ‘taking games too seriously’ in terms of competition (when it comes to the team-based multiplayer anyway, the vibe around fighting games here is obviously very pro-tournaments). i always found that attitude kind of weird, obviously we as a whole take games seriously in terms of their narrative. it’s also been a point raised twice by folks from sb – when i mentioned starcraft – that i’m ‘too old’ to play the game. on a mechanical level i don’t think that’s true, but i’m interested in what that says about our perception of getting good at different competitive games: whether it is genetic talent combined with work, or something you have to do when you’re a kid or you’ll never ‘get it’, or purely physical reaction times/reflex/etc, or what. this has been a topic that has fascinated me since i was a kid in high school band wondering how the best saxophone player in the school got so good, and I guess it never really went away.

so yeah: thoughts appreciated

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Team games come with their own complications, which is probably why there’s an attitude gap here with fighting games.

I feel all of this playing fighting games. I don’t know that I’ve actually gotten much better in absolute terms as a player the last few years, but I have a much better understanding of why I’m not improving, the why of successful techniques and strategies, how the flow in particular games and in the wider genre work. And I’m in my late 20s now – according to “theory,” I’m rapidly coming up on the point where I’ll be washed up and simply can’t compete, except for those 35-year-old dudes who still win big, big money in tournaments. Don’t put too much stock in that crap; it may well matter at the top, top, top levels, but only once you get past all the other factors. It doesn’t matter if your opponent is a young dude with the fastest reaction times if you don’t let him get into a position where that reaction time alone will decide it.

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Maybe someone should create a geriatrics league for 30+ year olds where physical skills are de-emphasised and tactics and experience are highlighted.

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my understanding is that the importance of reaction speed/APM/etc differs depending on the game and your style of play. i know folks with poor APM are at a straight disadvantage in something like starcraft where you have to manage your macro pretty heavily, but at the same time it differs between sc2 and broodwar in that in bw it is physically impossible to do everything you have to do, so APM has greater returns, whereas (according to my starcraft bud who was top 2% of player population) in sc2 you can more or less max out the returns around like 200+ APM – unit pathfinding is better, strategies less complex, etc. it may be a case of transitioning to play less complex styles as you age, or maybe switching to less mechanically demanding games – eg to MOBAs instead of RTS. thinking of a comparison like, a pitcher working on his curveball as his fastball slows

it’s also interesting to me that, when naturally assuming i was aiming to be top 2% like he was, aforementioned bud never raised the issue of being 2 old 2 game – his concerns were all focused around time i could devote to the game. in fact when this guy made his run at being Really Good, he was around 23-24 iirc. i think ‘the average player’ really overstates the drop off

5

interesting topic you bring up here, and I have a tiny bit to share that (i think?) have already shared before, but

SONNICKART2 announcer:i love the sound of my own voice

warning: I’m going to talk about racing game(s) here, so skip if you mind that.

So!
a thing I’ve noticed a few years ago was that I somehow didn’t play a WRC/rallying-game for a long time. I dabbled around a bit in WRC4 on the PS2 (the demo, to be precise) and then got Rally Evolved (iirc the last PS2 Rally-game).
Fast Foward: I wanted to play a “new” rally game, on current gen consoles. When WRC3 came out, it clicked w/ me and I started playing this. Needless to say, being the racing-game nerd that I am, I switched off all the crappy aids like directional arrows, track maps etc., and focused on driving based on the instructions given by your co-driver.
However, i felt like the timing was off in the game - the info came a bit too late to make some corners, and crashing/rolling out of contention can be/is fun, but sometimes gets a bit stupid.

So i used one of the most important settings in any rallying-game, namely that you can choose the timing of the instructions given to you, either you get them very early or very late, i.e. a few hundred yards before a corner or right before you crash into a tree or ditch. Since I’m old™, i decided to go with very early, so that I have time to prepare myself for what’s coming … that instantly improved my driving, until I realized that there’s a price to pay:

You go all “ok, here i have three left”, you turn the wheel/stick and crash into a tree, because you have a three right before that. The price you have to pay is that you have to “cache” a few instructions at a time and pop them from your stack/recall them in the right order.

This was - quite literally - a game changer for me. Instead of relying on reflex movement, I suddenly had time to prepare, but had to cache a number of items like

2 ←, 3 →, crest, 3 →, 3 ←

I really had to train this a for some time until I started to get better at this, and really could “cache” this information. I still have the impression that it helped me a bit to be able to cache information in RL, but might just be wishful thinking, idk…

tl;dr-version: WRC-games are kinda like the Kawashima-type racing games.

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I’m basically the opposite, whereas I have way better understanding of how the game is played than mechanical skills. This has been true even when I was a little kid playing sports.

I’m actually pretty frustrated right now because the rank at which I’m trapped in Heroes of the Storm appears to be such where no one actually knows how to play the game. There are so many games where our team could have won 10 minutes in, but we lose 15 minutes later because no one seems to know when it is safe to dive on the enemy’s core. I’m not good enough to have enough influence over winning or losing, but it’s rather frustrating to basically not be playing the real game.

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Mikado in Tokyo does a “old man” tournament regularly.

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I feel that! it’s the same way i feel about csgo matchmaking, where folks aren’t really using teamplay and it’s basically a team of 5 individuals each trying to do their job without a whole bunch of help from teammates. i was having an extended conversation about this with buds and we basically agreed that while you improve a lot faster playing the ‘real game’, there is still some improvement to be had solo queueing. i agree though it is definitely frustrating to be playing a poor facsimile of the real game – i think best way to get around that is to play with a set group of friends, commit to your specific role within that team framework and vibe, and each improve as you play more together.

the way to approach matchmaking ranking situations imo is, trust that there will be a lot of variability game to game depending on what random teammates you get; but also know that over time the ups and downs will balance out and the impact you yourself are having on the match will be reflected in your rank.

but yeah definitely think the fastest way to improve is to play the ‘real game’, or find ways of getting as close as possible.

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My reaction times are atrocious; I’ve tried to get very good at fighting games anyway, not with remarkable payoff

In team games I’ve given above average time to in the past, I think I’ve always wanted to be a major facilitator than a major pointscorer, but it’s never seemed obvious what that role actually looks like per game

Spent a lot of time in Gears 3 setting up smoke traps on entranceways and hitting the spotter-tag button, being vocal probably past the point of enlightening

‘Getting good’ seems like such a fully occupying timethief it gets easier year on year to just say no to the entire exercise; even easier if you basically have had to have been in specific places on Earth to catch the max benefits of a competitive scene

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It’s odd, I feel that the existence of the internet has basically smashed my desire to “get good” as within seconds I can pull up numerous examples of people leagues better than I could ever be at any given game. As a kid or younger teen I could have the illusion that I was pretty great at a given game.

I remember spending so much time playing Tony Hawk 2 and getting to be what I considered great at the game. I think by the time Tony Hawk 3 came out I was able to more easily see how good others were via online videos and… I wasn’t even close. It was mildly heartbreaking but probably a good thing long-term.

The one opposite example was Ikaruga. For those who picked up the Gamecube version on release you may remember that there was a contest up for the first three or so months where in the challenge mode you would get a password you’d enter on the Atari or Infogrames site that would serve as a nation-wide high score board. There was a decent community around the game at the time and they offered a lot of advice and by the end of the contest period I crawled my way up to the top 50, which I felt was a pretty legitimate accomplishment all things considered.

I used to be an arcade kid back when that was a thing. I was, however, never all that great at fighters so the competitive bug never really hit me there.

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Currently my computer craps out a lot, so we’ve been avoiding ranked and I’ve just been working on the mechanics of things. Next we’re going to work on combos (ranked only lets you queue with two players in hots, relevant information) and see if we can’t use that to swing games in our favor once I can get my computer replaced.

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yeah i think people consistently underrate the effect that getting better at the mechanical aspect of esports can have on your overall play. people seem to either think it’s 100% reaction time/reflexes/etc, or they swing completely the other direction. but just drilling mechanical stuff (grinding flick training or aim maps in cs; map training or refining build orders in sc) gives you the base toolset to be able to execute the cool things that pros come up with, or that you improv on the fly.

i’m weird in that i find a sort of zen in just doing repetitive training like that. that’s probably one of the bigger reasons mechanical ability is my strong suit – i enjoy practicing it more and therefore have way more time sunk into it.

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One of the most important realizations in improving is just knowing that there really are a wide variety of skills applicable to getting better; which ones are actually valued tends to vary from game to game. It’s not just a simple basic set of “execution”, there’s everything from reactions to physical technique to tactical planning to strategic planning to real-time adaptation. You can exercise all of these if you focus on them and don’t fall back on what you’re strong on.

My experience with fighting games is that people with strong mechanical skills excel really well really early, and then they hit a brick wall face-first about a third to halfway up the ladder, and have no idea how to get further. Sometimes they never grow beyond that.

If you really want to get good then the important part is putting all the various disparate skills apart into a toolbox and understanding which situations call for which ones. As I said above, games emphasize different skill sets, so it’s important to know which ones it’s actually asking you to exercise at any given time, and whether or not you feel that’s something you want to be doing or investing time in doing.

Not all situations are best approached with the same tools, even if that’s all you’ve got, basically.

Speaking of which, my reaction times test around 230ms at the fastest. Those are, by most standards, slow, but I’ve still been commended on them by players who haven’t yet figured out the trick yet.

The goal is compressing your thinking down so that your reactions are not “I saw a thing, now I have to decide.” Reactions are a tool you use to do something else, you decide ahead of time what you’re going to do, not afterwards. If you’re fumbling for something after the fact, you’ve already messed up. Kayin’s article on this is a good explanation.

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Getting good is just like any other combined physical/mental skill. If you’ve ever played a sport at a semi competitive level (similar to the IC article above) you’ll find almost the same analogues for digital esports - training fundamentals, drilling strategies, doing mock trials, practices, etc. Also like any other sport, there are people who are just born naturals, but hard work and training will go a long long way.

At the very top levels, things like drugs and natural talent will matter to get that last edge. Even in esports, I wouldn’t be surprised if the pros are all using something to get to the next levels. But, even so there is always room for players who just outwork others - for example, oftentimes the best coaches are the ‘B’ players, because they had to exhaust every possible strategy and technique to get where they are.

As for personal pleasure, there is always something to be said about just working to get good at something. Just like there’s IM sports, pickup games etc, there’s no reason to worry about the pros being so much better than you. There is room for players of all skill in the world.

I’m not sure there is anything else to be said on this topic.

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Every once in a while I want to “get good” at a game. I did it for SF4vanilla and SC2 most recently. I did it for CvS2 way back. I never cared to be amazing, I was just fascinated by their mechanics, and thought it’d be an interesting way to learn them and how they affected player psychology.

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Honestly, if you can’t enjoy losing, you probably aren’t going to enjoy competitive play! I don’t really feel like the most serious/skilled players are the ones obsessed about winning, those tend to be the ones who want people to look up to them more than they actually want to be good, it’s the ones who are craving improvement that end up the best. Have to be at peace with not succeeding to actually succeed, if that makes any sense.

I improved dramatically once I stopped giving so much of a shit about winning, honestly. Salt levels down, experimentation up, and so forth.

Mentality plays a huge part of getting better, but it’s really critical to focus it on what you can do better, moreso than what you did wrong or what was denied to you. It’s a million incremental improvements that get you those critical level ups that make everything make sense, not the massive jumps themselves.

On a side note, I’ve been following MMO forums a bit lately and man, outspoken raiders have some seriously hilarious superiority complexes going on. I don’t think any of them would cut it in a real competitive environment though…

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I subbed to ESEA recently. it’s basically a third-party service that provides its own matchmaking, anti-cheat, and servers to play on. the player population is generally way more skilled and you get more consistent matches with less trolls due to robust blocking options.

I really really suck at the game, i’m beginning to realize

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I hope everyone else is getting the 11 DAYS LATER thing because that is hilarious

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don’t necro-shame me discourse >:[

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