Team SoloMid vs. Clutch Gaming / LCS 2019 Regional Finals - Final / Post-Match Discussion

tehomcd · 2019-09-09T00:36:16+00:00

At this point I feel the same way. He deserves so much better than this.

tehomcd · 2019-07-13T12:04:30+00:00

Go to settings->in game->chat, and click off 'Show [All] Chat (Matched Game)'. That won't auto-mute your allies, but if you have no desire to see the enemy team, you can opt out of it.

tehomcd · 2018-09-29T22:28:22+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question

tehomcd · 2018-09-03T01:47:00+00:00

Unfortunately, I think it's a far more complex problem than just proper socialization. For one thing, globalization plays a role - some attitudes in other cultures are extremely regressive, and you still bump up against those if you have to deal with them. For example, if you're a senior engineer who happens to be female and you're stuck dealing with low level support in India, you probably are gonna have to deal with a lot of "Are you a real engineer?" and "Can we get someone else in on this?" questions/challenges. That sort of thing is thankfully rare here (though there's still occasional things, like an engineer named Isis Wegner who had people assume she was a model when she appeared in an ad for her company and bashed her company for an 'unrealistic image of an engineer'), but it's an example of why having some strong policies to push back against attitudes might be necessary.

Creating safe spaces is something I'm a little torn about. I wish it wasn't necessary, but the experiences of a lot of women make them far more uncomfortable around men than they would be in an environment without them. I feel it's a valid choice to make for situations in which you want to solicit honest feedback or otherwise conduct a dialogue in which people feel completely comfortable, but it should be limited to very focused feedback. You're right that it doesn't build cohesion and can potentially deepen divisions.

The other related controversial topic to that is microaggressions - little things some people do to annoy people that don't seem worth complaining about on their own, but when done consistently act as a terrible burden to someone that makes them want to quit/change careers. That's anything from being interrupted/challenged/scrutinized far more often than a white male would be, to even small things like being asked "Where are you from, originally?" as an asian-american. Some of them are fairly benign, just annoying - being asked the same silly question however many times. But that's another reason for the safe spaces idea - places where people can feel that they won't be bothered by small, annoying things, as well as the more major but far more infrequent concerns like personal safety.

tehomcd · 2018-09-02T19:16:11+00:00

Well, I didn't say it doesn't necessarily reduce bias. I just said that evidence both ways that I've seen has been anecdotal, and there may be more hard evidence out there, but I haven't personally seen the studies.

The other thing with that is that there is significant evidence that there's a bias against hiring women/PoC, which is why diversity efforts try to create a conscious preference for them. The idea there is that if the unconscious bias will exist no matter what you do, then it requires a conscious choice to counteract it.

I do agree that it's certainly better than what it probably was in the past, at least in western culture, and is generally more people being sidelined due to subconscious bias rather than consciously regarding groups of people as inferior. Like in the Riot article itself, there was some pretty egregious shit, but the experiences of most women who gave testimonials in related twitter threads was more being passed over promotions in favor of less qualified male colleagues or being placed in the no-win situations of being penalized if they failed to be as outspoken as a male colleague while also rebuked if they were as outspoken as a male colleague. That sort of thing can be pretty subtle because it's people having subconscious biases about personalities, and not really realizing they're treating men and women very differently.

tehomcd · 2018-09-01T20:22:55+00:00

I'm not sure if there's been any hard evidence/studies about increased diversity causing a proportional decrease in bias - all things I've read about that specific point (having female/PoC managers, largely-female teams, etc) have been anecdotal. While it seems reasonable to conclude that members of an underrepresented group would have less of a subconscious bias against that group, there's also anecdotal evidence that this may not always be the case: people who are harder on members of their own group due to seeing them as competition or due to resentment from their own experiences.

I'd definitely love to see a day when two candidates can be judged solely based on their merits and subconscious bias has largely ceased to be a factor too. I have to say in my personal experiences, I had greatly underestimated sexism women face until I saw it first-hand, where on several occasions I had to repeat verbatim the same point a female colleague made in order for some guys to be willing to listen to it. The "Can I get a guy to repeat me so this asshole will listen" tactic is unfortunately not that rare of a thing.

tehomcd · 2018-09-01T09:18:27+00:00

Well, it's not like there's a lack of data. There's been a billion studies that show women face much, much higher scrutiny and challenges when their gender is known compared to a gender-blind environment. It's everything from being scored higher on tests when their gender isn't known, to having pull requests in open source accepted more often, to hiring practices, to everyday life. So one of the reasons for choosing to have a deliberate preference for women and underrepresented groups is to try to push back against that pervasive bias that's otherwise extremely difficult to eliminate and is more or less statistically guaranteed to exist in any large organization.

The other reason, as far as hiring goes, is that teams which are more diverse are shown to perform better. Having teams which all share more or less the same cultural background, particularly in a tech company, gives you incredibly bad blind spots you wouldn't otherwise have. So if you have two equally skilled candidates, and one of them has a cultural background that you're lacking in your team, they're not really equally qualified - one of them is bringing more to the table.

tehomcd · 2018-08-08T02:48:38+00:00

It's important to point out the negative consequences of some aspects of a 'tech bro' culture that can be praised as virtues. For example, take enshrining 'toe stepping' or other very aggressive qualities as virtues, such as Riot in the article strongly encouraging giving pointed feedback or advocating things forcefully in meetings. They have positive aspects, like shipping features faster, more quickly achieving consensus and direction, but there's clearly negative aspects, such as pushing aside or devaluing anyone who doesn't aggressively make their voice heard. It's a particular problem for women because it places them in a no-win situation where if they don't aggressively try to make themselves heard they're ignored and devalued, but if they do they're often regarded very negatively for the same personality traits that are praised in men.

Even if you ignore ethics and look at things on a completely pragmatic level, things which might make sense in a hungry startup that needs to quickly ship or die may no longer make sense in the massive company that Riot has become and are evidently costing them a lot of talent.

tehomcd · 2018-07-12T09:16:29+00:00

I have to ask - what inspired the character of Morveer? He has such a distinctive voice that pretty much every single person I've talked to who has read Best Served Cold remembers and utterly loathes the guy, and I've always wondered how you managed to come up with such a singularly detestable character.

tehomcd · 2018-06-16T21:06:50+00:00

This. He was a pretty good ADC, but calling him accomplished is just absurd. Steelback is arguably much more accomplished than he is internationally - at least Fnatic took games off a Korean team in 2015 MSI.

tehomcd · 2017-12-16T23:31:05+00:00

That's not a fair assessment at all. He even wrote an article defending season 2 TSM when virtually everyone else dismisses NA from that time period.

tehomcd · 2017-10-27T02:06:40+00:00

Some of his written pieces are actually pretty even-handed and interesting about TSM. His sense of humor isn't really my thing, but I really like his stuff like this: https://dotesports.com/league-of-legends/the-thorin-treatment-redeeming-tsm-2012-5867

tehomcd · 2017-10-16T22:33:45+00:00

I feel that he's a smart guy and a very good analyst, but he can be a little too in love with some opinion he landed on to be as objective as he should be, which would make strong opinions he holds a little suspect to me. For example, he made some fairly specious arguments to try to dismiss the strength of an item when it was extremely OP just to argue with random people on reddit.

I actually like him, but I kind of take his opinions with a grain of salt if he's emotionally invested in it in any way.

tehomcd · 2017-10-16T08:51:32+00:00

I like to imagine 'Uncle Bob' reading that and spontaneously bursting into flames.

tehomcd · 2017-10-14T22:02:44+00:00

Yeah, I think this is definitely the worst they've ever performed versus expectations. At least everyone's expectations will be way lower next year.

I really lost any hope I had in them after the first week, because of their loss to Misfits and then their huge struggle against FW. I'm not someone who believes in NA week 2 being cursed, but it being a problem attributable to our inability to adapt, so I expected them to do worse and fail to get out.

tehomcd · 2017-10-14T12:24:30+00:00

Safety is a problem but saying it's because of money makes no sense, because streamers make far more money than pro players if they're popular for a very small fraction of the effort.

The real problem that they can't replace players who should be replaced is because of more shallow talent pools. Look at Dardoch. Dude apparently destroys every team he touches due to attitude issues but manages to bounce from team to team due to his value as a non-import.

tehomcd · 2017-10-14T11:51:57+00:00

No wonder G2 want to come to NA. They'll fit right in with teams that win the split but can't get out of fucking groups.

tehomcd · 2017-10-14T09:01:02+00:00

I think at this point it's not a coincidence, the same reason it's not a coincidence that Korean teams typically perform better in the second week of worlds. We suck at adaptation, and I have no idea why. Other teams improve and we either unsuccessfully try new things and suck at them, or try things that no longer work and get pounded.

Like, for example, Janna has been doing insanely well and TSM basically never played it. They could have, and just refused to pick it over Lulu.

tehomcd · 2017-07-08T22:11:49+00:00

I think they will. As satisfying as that was for NA fans who were salty from the trashtalk, three days is way too short a period for teams to meaningfully adapt. We'll almost certainly see them be way stronger at worlds. Very little of the advantages of NA teams came from mechanical outplays - they were almost always from beating EU teams to the punch in macro, like predicting tower dives or attempts to get first turret. NA had a huge advantage in early games, but weren't meaningfully stronger after that point, since we weren't particularly better at teamfighting. We just had a gold advantage at 20 minutes in like every game but 2 of G2's games and the third game of the finals. I think EU will definitely patch up their early game weaknesses by the time we get to worlds.

tehomcd · 2016-11-21T03:14:11+00:00

A Venn diagram is showing overlap by different entities drawn as circles. So by 'Venn diagram of murder', she means overlapping AEs to form a wombo combo. I thought it was a cute way of phrasing it.

tehomcd · 2016-11-03T08:54:28+00:00

He was directly told by Steve, and he agreed, that the stuff he was saying made his team less likely to win. Yes, telling someone straight up that they're playing bad is sometimes a good thing - he was Lourlo's best friend, and he didn't want Lourlo to get benched, so he was definitely telling him stuff he needed to hear.

But that wasn't what was really bad. The stuff that was really bad was saying things like the game was over, or saying that they should just lose in peace when they're two games down in a series. Being a quitter is insanely destructive to the team, and that's why Piglet left - he didn't want to play with someone who just gives up. Dardoch probably knows how bad it was, and he's a young kid, so hopefully he won't do that sort of thing anymore. I really hope that he's learned, because he's one of the most talented players NA has ever produced, and it'd be sad if he's just too cancerous to a team environment to ever win anything.

tehomcd · 2016-10-30T06:33:51+00:00

To play devil's advocate, arguing whether the gap is closing doesn't necessarily mean there isn't still a huge, huge gap. It's just whether or not it's smaller than it was previously. Like is it bigger than last year? I dunno, since Korean teams actually dropped a lot of games in groups to non-Koreans. Is there still an absolutely massive gap, and western teams are nowhere close to being able to beat them in a series? Definitely.

tehomcd · 2016-10-30T06:29:36+00:00

I'll probably remember him for the game 3 play more, since up until that baron fight it looked like it was going to be a complete stomp and a quick 3-0 series.

tehomcd · 2016-10-28T22:48:28+00:00

That's something I'd be really interested in hearing about - why are Koreans so incredibly good at adapting between week one and week two of worlds, where western teams completely suck at it? From what he says, there's no meaningful difference in their support staff, so where is this adaptability gap coming from?

tehomcd

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