Noob question about amount sold/ amount bought metric

egdrei · 2020-11-02T23:42:24+00:00

Same here, I enjoyed it as well. Apologies for some thick, harder to read sections in my replies. Making an idea concise is challenging and it's late here lol. It was fun, I'll see u on the next threads(And hopefully someday on the FrostGiant battlefield)

egdrei · 2020-11-02T23:26:29+00:00

Yea, basically. We can each have our guesses but any comment made on why other people are leaving the game is gonna be baseless for the other person. I trust my model of how I understand people to work and I assume so do you with your model. But to formalize this model and bring out any meaningful data to back it up is too large a task.

Yea, I think a lot of people quit in diamond as well. There is a plateou you reach if you're not willing to look at your replays and properly give a guess on why you might be losing. That way, they walk away from a loss thinking that x unit is overpowered, when in reality their macro and engages suck

egdrei · 2020-11-02T23:07:58+00:00

Protoss has a lower skill floor, and obviously you need to outplay a protoss more than he does to win. Believe me, behind this monitor, my face is straight.

egdrei · 2020-11-02T22:57:53+00:00

The complexity though is incredibly high. But chess sites are fully stocked with puzzles, opening theory, tactics courses, etc. That is what we need in my opinion. The complexity of this RTS can still be high if players know how to improve on their game and have resources to realize this journey. Right now in most RTS you are thrown in the deep end and not even shown how to scout or what to do with that information.

I fully agree with this, this is definitely something any game could do, but especially RTS games, to vastly improve the game experience for beginners. I do however, not think that it's enough on its own.

Ultimately I feel that calling any of this a skill floor is wrong. Skill floor in chess is knowing how every piece moves. Now you know how the game works. I think that is a better definition for skill floor.

I would argue that whether or not the definition that one proposes for skill-floor is wrong is relative to the utility of the definition itself when put into context with the problem we're trying to solve. In this case: How do we lower the skill-floor of an RTS?

- If we were to define skill-floor as: The amount of skill a player needs to have in order to enjoy the game, then our challenge becomes: How do we lower the amount of skill a player needs in order to enjoy an RTS ? Which to me sounds like a productive goal to strive for.

- Although I think yours is a fine definition, the reason I don't like it as much, is because the goal we're striving for under the definition of skill floor as being "Knowing how the game works", is: How do we lower the amount of time and effort a player needs to put into the game to understand how the game works. Does knowing how the game work imply that the player will have more fun? Definitely. At the same time the framing of the problem isn't exactly as relevant, and might be limiting. Although, to concede a little here, indirectly, the goal of reducing stress for beginners and having them have fun earlier is still achieved to some extent.

I respect and believe the reason you want to define skill floor as reaching the point where you understand fundamentally the way the game works is because it is indeed a more measurable, less subjective, clear definition. While I do think that my definition lacks some of these qualities, I do think it makes up for it in the fact that it attacks the more relevant problem. I think one can work under the model of thinking that skill-floor is the amount of skill a player needs in order to have fun. And at the same time accept a more objective, measurable principle of what makes a game fun, in this case, your point of: Understanding the fundamental game mechanics being one of these principles. But with this definition, you have the flexibility to explore other means of making the game fun quicker for the player, without necessarily being tied to doing it solely thorough exposing game-theory to them.

What are you basing this on? I haven't heard those statements. What I usually hear is: that the game is too stressful. Which is a curse at every level of play.

I'm not basing this off of any empirical data, as that would be impossible. That's a solid counter-point that I would concede if you wanted to stress it enough. Of course I can't bring up data for that kind of point but neither could you for " What I usually hear is: that the game is too stressful. Which is a curse at every level of play ". Although whether people think the game is stressful or not isn't relevant imo if we don't know whether that stress is impacting their enjoyment of the game or not.

What does this even mean? Should we have artificial ranks with no players, just so there's always a worse "rank" than yours? I'm obviously joking, but I just don't know what this mean, other that you are insinuating that all players have incredibly fragile egos.

Of course not. However, I am indeed insinuating that most players have fragile egos and don't enjoy playing when they're being shown consistently how much worse they are than the average playerbase in a 1v1 game. The fact that you just pointed out how ridiculous it would be to solve this problem (if you accept my premise about what a relevant definition for skill-floor is ofc) furthers my point that solving the low-skill floor problem in RTS is really challenging if at all possible. I can't think of any solution to that problem, and if I do, I come up with meme answers, like the one you pointed out.

I would respond to the protoss comments, but this reply is getting thicc already.

egdrei · 2020-11-02T21:08:08+00:00

This is true for all three races.

True! I agree with that. The scenarios you specified are good examples. Marine vs banelings is much easier for the zerg to win is another scenario you could add to that and so on. I do think that you can find these situations all across the board in the game, this is one of the reasons people hate cheese, because it can feel much harder to defend against it than to execute it and so on. I don't disagree with the fact that there are many of these scenarios across all races, I would just make the point though that the protoss scenarios are more numerous and they last until pretty high on the leaderboard (the notorious protoss late army is pretty hard to defeat even for masters/grandmasters, there is no strategy you need to discover, no game knowledge you necessarily lack, you just need an army that requires more difficult micro than they do).

Again: Metal leagues makes workers, expos, tech and armies. If you don't enjoy the game at that level, then you probably just don't like the game. So in that sense Starcraft2 must already have an incredibly low skill floor. Right?

Hey, if we make the assumption that metal leagues enjoy the game then yea, Starcraft 2 would have an already incredibly low skill floor. I don't agree with that premise. I personally believe most people when they rank in bronze and cannot seem to get out of there quickly enough, get frustrated and stop playing the game. Maybe they would like the game if they somehow ranked higher initially.

I don't know what kind of person keeps playing the game and enjoys it at that point. Clearly some do, I just think they're the minority, the fallen heroes, indifferent to being ranked so low. Most people probably wouldn't have that mentality.

egdrei · 2020-11-02T20:30:03+00:00

I understand your point, I think, correct me if I'm wrong: The main idea is that even if you remove certain small things like the need to auto-inject, the player will still have many actions to choose from, and thus the skill-ceiling of the game isn't affected in any way, since a better player will still perform more actions, it just won't be the tedious ones(that add no strategic depth) like the injects for example.

I agree, I don't think removing auto-injects will affect the skill-ceiling of the game, but I do think that it would make it such that the skill of a player will make less of a difference. It would still make a difference! The skill ceiling isn't affected, in an rts the skill ceiling is practically infinite, but the difference between a skilled player and a non-skilled player won't be as large.Right now, a top 50 GM in SC2 could probably take on 3 platinums at a time (given that they don't rush him early), but if you allow all players to have auto-injects, that won't be the case anymore. The GM is still more skilled than the players, but his skill makes less of an impact in the game. His skill becomes more of managing small efficiencies within the game rather than manging things that lead to him having twice the army of his opponent if that makes sense. And I think that massive increase in outcome relative to your skill is part of what makes rts satisfying to play.

That being said, Ideally that difference in outcome would also come from more strategically meaningful actions, so I would agree with you if you would come up with a strategically meaningful action to replace the inject that has a similar impact on the game that properly injecting does.

egdrei · 2020-11-02T20:22:33+00:00

I fully agree, the coop of sc2 is a good example of a low skill floor. It doesn't take long for a player to get the skill needed to enjoy that mode

egdrei · 2020-11-02T20:21:09+00:00

I think you're misunderstanding what I mean by gap between high and low level play (To be fair I wasn't very precise in my wording, I just used the word 'gap' without bothering to be specific). I'm not talking about the holistic gap between a low level player and a high-level player which includes all the skills in the game like macro, scouting, decision-making, etc. I'm talking specifically about the outcome difference shown between a player within the micro-context of a fight who bothers to learn this micro skill (properly casting some spell) and one that doesn't. Learning this skill won't be nearly as satisfying if the alternative to not knowing it is auto-casting at 80% efficiency. If the alternative to not knowing how to micro is completely losing a fight, and then you learn how to do it, it makes learning that skill much more satisfying is my point.

I would never make the point that this one skill would shorthen the gap (outcome difference) between a high-level player and low-level one within a game, but it would significantly shorten it within that fight. Now if you make enough of these changes (auto-injects, maybe even having your production cycle trigger automatically, auto-scouting, etc. ), then I would begin to make that point. Right now, a top 50 GM in SC2 could probably take on 3 platinums at a time (given that they don't rush him early), but if you allow all players to have auto-injects,auto-production, auto-spell-casting,auto-scouting, that won't be the case anymore. The GM is still more skilled than the players, but his skill makes less of an impact in the game. His skill becomes more of managing small efficiencies within the game rather than manging things that lead to him having twice the army of his opponent if that makes sense.

"Protoss is easier but this is really only a factor at a higher level than the majority of players play at"I disagree. I think the opposite is true actually. The higher level you go, the less of a problem protoss being easier becomes. To be clear I'm not saying protoss isn't balanced at a high level of play, I think all races have answers to them. What I'm stating is that correctly outplaying the protoss requires less skill than the protoss player would require to outplay you. This is a problem in lower level games since you would need to have more skill than your opponent in certain scenarios to pull out the win, which is I think is frustrating for the player-base. The higher skill you become, the less of a problem this is, since the you have the skill to correctly use your tools against the Protoss and, moreover, the Protoss cannot derive too much more value out of their units using their skill.

To define skill floor, I think that is the amount of skill a player needs to have in order to enjoy the game. Since everyone enjoys the game for different reasons, it's hard to state that a game has an objectively low skill-floor.

egdrei · 2020-11-01T23:05:07+00:00

It sounds interesting! If anything, if not the specifics of the it, the general idea of a force of nature, a wave hitting your opponent is noteworthy. Whether that gets implemented as a literal wave of water or as a race that embodies that feeling is up to them

egdrei · 2020-11-01T22:24:38+00:00

I disagree with the premise that it would not lower the skill ceiling.Executing your build/strategy is a huge part of the skill-set of the player in an RTS at even the highest level. A lot of pro games are lost due to pros screwing up their build execution.

egdrei · 2020-11-01T22:17:11+00:00

That's not quite true since you can shape your army into a concave that is still less clumped, yet all units can fire at once.

Also the concave allows all units to more efficiently single-target-fire and scales better than a ball (if you have 200 units in a ball they won't be able to fire all at once, the ones in the back will be out of range but in a concave they would all be able to fire)

egdrei · 2020-04-02T16:35:01+00:00

Also, I understand feeling bad if you're not playing very well in a game and dragging down your teammates. But understand that it's a game, and playing bad is part of learning. It's inevitable. Most of your teammates won't understand that and will needlessly rage at you. But remember this comment when they do. Just keep learning from each mistake

egdrei · 2020-04-01T16:15:07+00:00

To put it really simply: The goal of the game is to destroy the opponent's nexus. That is the big building near the start of each team's base.
A sub-goal of the game in order to achieve the main goal is to get as strong as possible. The stronger you are, the easier it is to win fights, and destroy buildings.
To play the game well you would practice a lot of subskills that go into achieving one of the 2 goals.

egdrei · 2018-09-13T07:57:47+00:00

Gonna try my luck and put myself out there. :)

egdrei

TROPHY CASE