95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
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95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
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Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
#2I have played couple of games competitively. I have been somewhere in top ten to top three in the world in some of them (we are talking small communities with large number of accidental players, nothing really to brag about).
My observation is it is critical to somehow get a feeling what it is/means to be good at the game. This means identifying where is the focus of a good player.
Having been playing competitively I have noticed ALMOST ALL of people being intent on playing the game well are completely misplacing there focus, effectively wasting their time on stuff that does not matter.
They are stuck being mediocre to good (but not best) players because they dug themselves in their own holes:
- polishing endlessly skills that give diminishing results but are comfortable to the player but avoiding tackling problems that the player is not comfortable with
- repeating the same routine all the time instead of constantly switching up stuff they are training. If you are training well after some time you have trained a skill enough that you should switch to another that now gives best ROI.
- repeating and acting on falsehoods/myths about the game
- complaining about the unfairness of the game which means they would like to play some different game which is governed by their idealized rules instead of trying to understand the real rules of the real game
- not being ruthlessly critical about their abilities which is necessary step to identifying what to work on to progress,
- not being able to spend a moment to consciously reflect on ones progress to identify why it is they are stuck (instead of blaming everybody)
- being focused on winning instead of getting better. Many players play to get a short term kick out of winning the game instead of playing to get some kind of knowledge/skill that will help them get better. Think Starcraft players who find that they can get consistent wins cannon rushing their enemies but are not willing to fail to try other strategies.
etc.
An example would be rookie players on iRacing (I'm nowhere near the top). iRacing requires you to get minimum amount of games but also, more importantly, minimum safety rating to be able to progress from rookies.
Players who are stuck but would want to leave rookies in iRacing are constantly complaining at other players constantly hitting them, effectively ruining their safety raiting.
While it is true that the state of the game in rookies is such that you get hit frequently, there are people who are quickly sailing through rookies. To do that you just need to notice that the critical skill is not hitting other players and avoid getting hit. Instead of focusing on getting to best place, focus on not hitting anything. Yet, so many people do not understand this and are destined to stay in rookies for a long time.
Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
#3I have played couple of games competitively. I have been somewhere in top ten to top three in the world in some of them (we are talking small communities with large number of accidental players, nothing really to brag about). My observation is it is critical to somehow get a feeling what it is/means to be good at the game. This means identifying where is the focus of a good player. Having been playing competitively I…
This sounds like some great advice for real life...
Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
#4Where did the goal of 95 percentile come from?
Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
#5Aside from all the other things he said, at least for games — 1 out of 20 people get there, and the vast majority of people who play a game play very casually. So if you put a reasonable amount of effort at all into getting good at a game, you’re likely to make the top 5% of players or close to it.
I play hearthstone about, I dunno, an hour a day or so, while I’m on the train. I’ve never made it to the legend rank, but I make it to rank 5 easily most months, which puts me in the top 6%. A lot of months I’ll end up rank 2 or 1, which puts me in the top 3 or even 1%
I don’t think I’m particularly good at the game, I just play good decks and pay attention to the meta game so I know what to expect from the other decks. I don’t tend to plan multiple turns ahead, I don’t try and figure out what’s in my opponents hand, sometimes I’m barely paying attention to the game at all, and sometimes make just obvious mistakes like missing lethal.
But none of that really matters up until you get to rank 2 or 1, where you start playing against people that basically don’t make mistakes.
In fact one of the hardest transitions for me to make in the game was understanding that when my opponent appeared to be doing something stupid in a higher ranked game, they were probably not, and that I need to spend time thinking about what it meant, rather than just assuming they were bad at the game. That doesn’t happen until you’re already in the top 5%, though.
Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
#6This blog is excellent. But there's no RSS feed.
What do other people who rely on feed readers do in these scenarios? Is there a good service (which will not disappear) which will either convert the thing into rss or alert you when there's a new post?
edit: It has an RSS feed, just no link to it in the index.html. https://danluu.com/atom.xml
Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
#7I have played couple of games competitively. I have been somewhere in top ten to top three in the world in some of them (we are talking small communities with large number of accidental players, nothing really to brag about). My observation is it is critical to somehow get a feeling what it is/means to be good at the game. This means identifying where is the focus of a good player. Having been playing competitively I…
> They are stuck being mediocre to good (but not best) players because they dug themselves in their own holes
Also: they fall into a pit where their current behaviour works at the skill level that they are at, but is detrimental when that behaviour is performed at a higher skill level.
Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
#8This has been exactly my experience. When I wrote https://www.jefftk.com/p/record-your-playing few people had heard of my band. We kept recording our playing, listening back to it, and finding places where we didn't sound like we wanted to. Two years after that post we were one of the most booked contra dance bands in the country.
Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
#995th percentile for an SAT score is something like 1450. That's fairly impressive to me. Feels like scoring higher might often have more to do with effort than ability.
Is that excluded from the line of thought in the blog post because it's among "people who regularly practice?"
Or is it that effort vs ability thing? Not impressive because you were born smart?
In a totally "no effort" arena, 95th percentile height for a 19 year old US male is 6 feet, 2 inches. Does that feel unusual/impressive or "not that good?" I imagine it brings plenty of life benefits.
Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
#10I have played couple of games competitively. I have been somewhere in top ten to top three in the world in some of them (we are talking small communities with large number of accidental players, nothing really to brag about). My observation is it is critical to somehow get a feeling what it is/means to be good at the game. This means identifying where is the focus of a good player. Having been playing competitively I…
> They are stuck being mediocre to good (but not best) players because they dug themselves in their own holes Also: they fall into a pit where their current behaviour works at the skill level that they are at, but is detrimental when that behaviour is performed at a higher skill level.
That is true. One way this happens is when somebody tries to progress very quickly, emulating best players, without putting time to understand the basic mechanics of the game.
A good player will be able to adapt their gameplay because they can more or less predict what will happen when they alter the gameplay and/or they can evaluate how their change influenced the result.
A stuck player who skipped basic training may be able to imitate a complicated strategy to some extent but will fail miserably when they change anything and won't be able to evaluate results. They are effectively trained to do one thing from a subset of skills of a pro player and not being able to transition through a valley of failure from their local maximum.