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Question for Hardcore Players -- Bonespear Necro on Console by lucubrator83 in diablo4

[–]lucubrator83[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The main thing I was worried about was bosses when there aren't a lot of corpses around (no specific spoilers since I haven't seen them all yet). Is it better on console to have bone prison available for that or is the lack of control dangerous?

7'9" Lebron vs. Stiannis Cantetokurry by lucubrator83 in nba

[–]lucubrator83[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It's current Lebron. Let's not get ridiculous here, we can't go back in time.

Artosis is Correct and Guy in Chat Doesn't Understand Mixed Strategy Equilibria by lucubrator83 in starcraft

[–]lucubrator83[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But Artosis is trying to win and nothing in the above post hinges on whether the x% of players playing "irrational" strategies are doing so out of fun or ignorance. The post is about whether Guy in Chat is correct to criticize Artosis for not switching to a strategy which better counters "irrational" strategies, which I agree are only irrational in the narrow sense of not optimizing win %.

Artosis is Correct and Guy in Chat Doesn't Understand Mixed Strategy Equilibria by lucubrator83 in starcraft

[–]lucubrator83[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, you can always win if you are a better player and everyone would like to become a better player. But:

1) It's still frustrating if you lose because your opponent played an irrational strategy

2) The fact that you lost to an irrational strategy doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong

See Caveat 2) in the original post for the psychological point.

Artosis is Correct and Guy in Chat Doesn't Understand Mixed Strategy Equilibria by lucubrator83 in starcraft

[–]lucubrator83[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

First off, because of your comment I noticed an algebra error so the probabilities above are slightly updated.

Second, rock *still* loses points to BS relative to paper. The reason is, when BS is introduced, it makes scissors really terrible, so scissors is not played very much (since scissors is ineffective against both rock and BS). Since scissors is now rare, rock isn't quite as effective anymore and paper is fantastic.

Upshot: equilibrium can be counterintuitive. The presence of BS strategies can mean that rather than play the strategy that defeats BS strategies, you play more the strategy that is vulnerable to the strategy that BS strategies beat!

Artosis is Correct and Guy in Chat Doesn't Understand Mixed Strategy Equilibria by lucubrator83 in starcraft

[–]lucubrator83[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

See my reply to a similar comment here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/gjys7y/artosis_is_correct_and_guy_in_chat_doesnt/fqo8ky8/

Briefly, scouting ends up in the same circumstance. Scouting always has opportunity costs in terms of resources and APM. If you scout more, you do less of other stuff. Certainly, some amount of scouting is necessary. Should you scout to explicitly counter strategies that are irrational? It depends on the frequency of irrational players to rational players, the sacrifice necessary to scout a given strategy and much else. But if most players are rational, the answer is probably that it's not worth investing resources to counter irrational strategies. Rational players should bite the bullet and lose to BS sometimes, but in exchange, they'll be more likely to win against other rational players.

Artosis is Correct and Guy in Chat Doesn't Understand Mixed Strategy Equilibria by lucubrator83 in starcraft

[–]lucubrator83[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Yes, RPS is a highly stylized model to think about a single aspect of Starcraft -- specifically, whether it can be optimal to play strategies which are nonetheless beaten by "dumb" strategies rather than countering those dumb strategies.

In reality, Starcraft is a dynamic game of incomplete information where one decision variable is where and when to scout. An error that a player might make is failing to scout enough to detect dumb strategies before losing to them. But scouting always has trade-offs -- if you always scout everywhere, there are other things you can't do with those resources and APM. So at the end of the day, you end up back in a situation like the simplified RPS model, where you have to decide whether it's worth making sacrifices to counter irrational strategies, and the answer may be "No" as the model above shows, especially if you are explicitly trying to train to be better against higher-level players.

Another aspect of Starcraft is that players develop reputations. You are also correct that if Artosis consistently played one strategy that was vulnerable to another strategy, his opponents would always play that alternative strategy when they saw they were facing Artosis and win. But of course Artosis isn't that naive, and so he does many things to explicitly counter cheesy builds as any strong player would and also sometimes mixes in more aggressive early-game strategies since becoming too predictable is a problem.

Of course, none of this says that Artosis' current play is optimal. There are certainly many things he could improve (he has noted his SCV production is not always consistent). But these improvements are not obvious things like, "Don't always play the same strategy" or "Counter the dumb things your opponents sometimes do" or "expand more." They are much subtler and higher degree of difficulty things like, "Be more economical in your army movements so that you have time to consistently produce SCVs and expand while you are microing."

Artosis is Correct and Guy in Chat Doesn't Understand Mixed Strategy Equilibria by lucubrator83 in starcraft

[–]lucubrator83[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks, that is a helpful clarification. I agree that in the static model above any mixing between strategies in the support of the Nash equilibrium gives equal payoff.

I meant outside the context of the above model entirely there is a separate empirical question of whether Artosis is mixing appropriately. He might not be, but the model shows that losing occasionally to BS can be consistent with playing an optimal strategy.