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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2217 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 22, 2023

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Video on League of Legends player who obtained rank 1 in two servers simultaneously, as well rank 1 Korea within two weeks. (That’s a top 99.9999th percentile skill in a highly competitive strategy game with millions of players)

Some interesting takeaways:

  • Despite playing the “jungler” role, which is considered cooperative and supportive, the player never listens to his teammate’s ping unless he has independently judged the trade to be beneficial with extreme certainty. The common social expectation of cooperation is ignored, and the player instead focuses on benefits to his character that he can control. Ironically, this produces the most cooperative result, which is winning the game for your team. We see that the social expectation of cooperation is not always the best result for everyone in a group.

  • Wins and losses are totally devalued in importance, and instead the “mundanity of excellence” is pursued. The player cares only about whether he made the statistically correct decision every time a decision arises, not whether it failed once or succeeded another time. This results in a player who is immune to “tilting”, ie bad or flippant moods that arise from loss sprees. Quoting from the eponymous classic study, “excellence is accomplished through the doing of actions, ordinary in themselves, performed consistently and carefully, habitualized, compounded together, added up over time. While these actions are qualitatively different from those of performers at other levels, these differences are neither unmanageable nor, taken one step at a time, terribly difficult […] Every time a decision comes up, the qualitatively correct choice will be made. The action, in itself, is nothing special; the care and consistency with which it is made is.”

  • The math on everything is neurotically and fully understood. Every potential trade is understood in second and tertiary consequences (ganking a lane has risk yada yada, but the secondary effect is loss of jungle farm, and the tertiary effect is that your farm spawns irregularly the next time they pop up). There are only a handful of gank strategies that the player has mastered, but he can execute them with precision.

Your first takeaway is interesting, because when I used to play over a decade ago, the social aspect was the hardest part of winning. It was crucial to keep your team focused on the game, and not arguing in chat.

There was one strat - split pushing - that went against the expected meta at the time. It was basically an aggressive fork, going too deep, too quickly in order to make the opponent commit to defending one side, and gain momentum on the other. I was really good at it. Experience seemed to confirm it worked. The problem is that (at the time), it was just seen as a "thing you don't do". Doing it (or worse, letting the team know ahead of time I was going to try) would prompt such a raging backlash, it was actually counterproductive. The strat was sound, but tilted teammates typing in allcaps for thirty minutes don't win matches, so I stopped trying.

If this player earned this rank in public games, it makes sense that his strategies are anti-social. There isn't any trust in public games. The best you can do to unite the team is to be the example of good play.

Such players (aka "tryhards") are terrible company during casual play, and sadly there are a lot of people who adopt this behaviour before they're actually good enough to carry their weight independently. A commonly said wisdom is "sticking together with a bad plan is better than going separately with no plan".

We see that the social expectation of cooperation is not always the best result for everyone in a group.

I don't know much about League of Legends, but do solo queue people get pitted against pre-assembled groups of 5? I imagine the group that has experience playing together would be more receptive to cooperative play because they know exactly what those pings mean, whereas in solo queue that ping could mean anything from just providing information "hey enemy is here" to " hey jungler you need to come and gank now". Cooperation means you take the other player's input into account, not to just blindly follow another person's orders.

I've never played LoL or even watched it, but the second and third points were universal attitudes and characteristics shared by nearly all top players in MtG arena. I remember Gevlon Goblin came up with something similar when he blogged about the game, too.

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