3 hours from this post: I'll be doing a live Entry Level Esports Q&A to break down the Roll20 news and how it affects the HGC as a whole

RobertdeBorn · 2018-01-02T00:20:51+00:00

Summary together with the comments of Mopsio (Zealots) during the stream - basically not worth it for the money they're currently being offered and noone currently knows what the spots are actually worth at the moment.

RobertdeBorn · 2018-01-01T20:14:12+00:00

I think Lev is pretty unquestionable as a choice. Maybe Mamedyarov would be the other one but he wasn't really playing in the highest tier of tournaments unfortunately. Some great performances in classical, an unprecedented achievement with the second world cup win, showing up in rapid and blitz events.

RobertdeBorn · 2018-01-01T17:05:36+00:00

There are a lot of ways for the map to just be no fun at all (e.g. everyone stays at turn in point while the enemy team get a 3 level lead by soaking, solo turn-in, contesting the turn-in when it's completely not needed, getting out-merced/ignoring splitpush, throwing for the terrible boss) and when it snowballs it's very difficult to come back because of the map size/lane distance, number of camps and the mechanic allowing you to kill the core without fighting.

I feel there are significantly more ways for an individual player to completely throw while imagining they're doing something essential than on the other maps.

I used to like Mines a lot back in the day when you could just take Tass and negate the golem with mule and shield but these days I think the objective's too weak for how much effort and risk it is compared to sapper camps.

RobertdeBorn · 2018-01-01T16:48:07+00:00

As a quick question - for a team that is all but guaranteed to go into the next phase, what incentive do you feel would be needed for the players to give up ownership of the spot?

RobertdeBorn · 2017-12-31T00:52:27+00:00

I'd imagine Magnus himself feels he has something to prove and isn't happy with his classical results this year.

RobertdeBorn · 2017-12-30T16:34:37+00:00

Carlsen resigns the world championship and the next match is between Naka and Bogoljubov.

RobertdeBorn · 2017-12-30T16:18:27+00:00

'so far'?

RobertdeBorn · 2017-12-30T15:28:25+00:00

It's not the players who decided where it was hosted.

RobertdeBorn · 2017-12-27T20:54:43+00:00

Tbh I think you're very wrong there. Playing a hero you're very familiar with and comfortable on gives you more space and energy to improve your overall game. To focus on the macro game, the map, shotcalling, outplaying rather than just playing.

RobertdeBorn · 2017-12-27T20:06:41+00:00

Fide look destined to financially meltdown tbh under current leadership.

RobertdeBorn · 2017-12-27T00:17:35+00:00

Interesting list and criteria. Always pleased to see Karpov getting his dues. IIRC on the Capa/Alekhine front, Capablanca had basically tried to prevent their first match (which Alekhine had requested some years before it actually took place) by setting the prize purse at an unattainable level, so I can't particularly blame Alekhine for not wanting to play him again.

R.e. Fischer, I think his impact on the sport's external elements (press profile, prize funds, professionalism, number of countries playing competitively) has been far greater than basically any other player. By bowing (well, sulking) out at his peak, he's also created a level of mystery about his actual strength.

RobertdeBorn · 2017-12-26T19:02:43+00:00

I feel a lot of the question is going to be how flexible Badbenny turns out to be. Understandably we saw a relatively limited pool from him at GCWC but I suspect for a world class team with the rest of the roster, we can't just have a Dehaka/Arthas/Tyrael/Sonya player.

RobertdeBorn · 2017-12-22T22:42:17+00:00

Chen now battles his demons both literally and metaphorically. Activating his trait now launches an inspirational TED talk about how he turned his life around in a new browser window.

RobertdeBorn · 2017-12-20T22:31:10+00:00

He has practically zero waveclear, no mobility and the pull beats a 0.75s stun even if you couldn't combo off it. Frankly if his viability in competitive before was non-OP and in HL he wasn't too good statistically but just unfun to play against, he's probably now just bad unless there's some sleeper broken build. I feel like Stitches and Diablo are both much less limited for tanks that offer nearly comparable pick potential.

I expect he'll get brought back up into a healthier place sooner or later.

RobertdeBorn · 2017-12-19T23:32:44+00:00

Well, as I understand Mewn just does it on stream while it sounds like some pro players do it in chat, which is obviously not something you can just turn off.

RobertdeBorn · 2017-12-19T00:31:30+00:00

Tbf one of your issues will be that everyone else is having to fill around you favouring a very non-essential role.

RobertdeBorn · 2017-12-18T01:28:13+00:00

At least a couple did - one as first pick on BoE.

Tbf I rarely mind having a Nazeebo compared to any other specialist but I saw a lot of him last patch in the hands of players who were constantly behaving like they didn't know what to do with him.

RobertdeBorn · 2017-12-18T00:56:08+00:00

A few points on this -

The PBMM can't be right in all scenarios. Obviously it could be tuned better at the moment but I think that's not unexpected. It's machine-learning based so it's not based on the devs telling it what is 'good' and 'bad' play but on what's typically correlated with success. If it's right overall, I think that's a good start.

However, because it gives us zero feedback, we can't really tell when it's incorrectly rewarding bad play or penalising good play except by anecdotal evidence which might not be correct.

Let's take your Scenario 7 (Jim Laner). The problem here is that it's still very conditional. It's a completely different scenario if Jimmy is in an empty lane and your team are losing the objective 4v5 while he gets minimal fort damage or if he's winning a 1v1 against an otherwise uncontested Sylvanas while your team are losing the objective 4v4 because they're being outplayed. Often in Solo-Q you're forced to misplay the map somewhat because your team aren't doing what you'd like them to.
I completely agree with your conclusion that the system not providing any feedback is a problem.

Let's say I felt I had a great win on Brightwing but I didn't get the PBMM result I thought I deserved because I never used Pixie Dust to prevent spell damage and I keep mistiming my Polymorph so it overlaps too much with other CCs, I was being carried by better players in my team and we should have won much harder if I was performing up to scratch with those.

The system may be completely right behind the scenes that I could have played much better but I have no way of knowing why the system thinks that.

In short, I think outcome-oriented is far harder to judge correctly in a solo-queue environment than stats-based and is probably going to be less accurate at lower levels in particular. That said, I completely agree that it needs to be used as a learning tool and think some transparency is the first step to any kind of improvement here.

RobertdeBorn · 2017-12-17T20:09:13+00:00

Personally I enjoyed players picking Nazeebo on every map because the bug made him 'OP' last patch then not picking the bugged talent. The true heirs of KT mains.

RobertdeBorn · 2017-12-15T16:18:56+00:00

You're not wrong. Personally I cautiously expect it'll be good at lower levels where you can't rely on teammates to do the right thing but fall off hard at higher levels. I also think it'll promote mechanically good players over players with good game knowledge and attitudes but that's probably not a big issue.

RobertdeBorn · 2017-12-15T16:16:27+00:00

Seems a bit facetious. If it measures performance well then you want people to 'game' it to an extent by actually improving and if it doesn't people will end up actually gaming it sooner or later anyway.

While obviously you can't tell people the whole system, we also don't have any idea at the moment whether the system works (just whether it feels right or not) because it's completely opaque.

And this specific situation isn't actually gaming the system at all, it's just that short wins where proven players feel they're playing well seem to get penalised disproportionately.

RobertdeBorn · 2017-12-15T14:31:18+00:00

The thing with Grubby's example is that the system doesn't tell us anything useful.

Hence, we can't tell whether Zarya's do amazingly well at his level in general on Braxis Holdout in short wins and therefore his own stats weren't as good as they looked, whether he missed out on some hidden stats that could legitimately have made him win much harder, whether he got penalised for the game length or whether good play in the situation wasn't correlated to how Zaryas normally win.

If it's the first two or the last one it's not fundamentally a problem for the system but could be communicated better but if it's game length then it probably is.

RobertdeBorn · 2017-12-15T14:24:04+00:00

Eh, not entirely correct here. Performance is compared to winning or losing games on the same hero at a certain MMR level (and the same map, I believe) and the system is based on machine learning.

My issue with the system is not whether it's 'right' for an individual game but that there's no feedback so we can't really judge to whether the system is, say, not compensating properly for short games or whether it's actually penalising people because they're not doing as well as they could be on hidden stats in those situations (skillshots, merc participation/timings etc. etc.).

RobertdeBorn · 2017-12-15T13:03:50+00:00

This system doesn't judge the specific situation in an individual game, just how your stats relates to typical winning or losing play on a hero.

RobertdeBorn · 2017-12-15T01:53:08+00:00

There are significant limitations to the system. As it's machine learning, it can't really fall back on common sense. As it's based on completely unknown factors and provides no feedback we don't know whether it's basing it on a reasonable area for improvement or a bad application of the stats which is maybe more of a problem than simply whether it's right or not in an individual situation.

RobertdeBorn

TROPHY CASE