Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

95%-ile isn't that good (2020)

danluu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 161 posts

Re: 95%-ile isn't that good (2020)

#101

Post by Fnoord »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #70
xigency wrote: post #17

Admittedly, I only skimmed this. But within the space of video games, I’m not sure Overwatch is a stunning example since it’s generally a casual game. I’ve been playing various iterations of Counter-Strike and StarCraft for decades. Sometimes with deliberate practice, including reading strategies, playing custom maps to practice certain skills, and watching series aimed at improving level of play. And despite the hun…

In every competitive game I've ever played (Overwatch, CSGO, LoL, TFT, Rocket League), the top 5% definitely wasn't "that good". In my mind, the top 20% are people who actually play. If you are stuck anywhere below that, you aren't even trying to improve. If a leaderboard says you haven't even cracked top 50%, then that leaderboard is definitely cutting players that don't play much from the bottom of that list. In mo…

I remember back in the days I had dial-up and installed a Tetrinet server. I could beat anyone, except this one girl who was competitive with me. People came and went. I could slack a bit, get on their level, yet still win. Then I got DSL and my ping improved, making the game easier. OTOH, some people (mostly, good ones) sticked around, and ultimately improved. I had to play better. Until, at some point, we had multiple competitive players. Competition makes people (play) better, its one of the thriving forces behind capitalism (which, arguably, also has its flaws). Did we all play Tetrinet a lot? Oh yes.

My experience with gaming is that at a certain percentile, there's no-lifers, some of whom are pros. I don't want to look up at no-lifers, so I care about the amount of effort put in to reach the goal. Without knowing the amount of effort, I don't care about the result. Its meaningless to me. Whereas in a sports competition with sponsors and everything you can assume they give it their everything (their life's work), we don't know how it is with non-professional gaming. Ergo: meaningless.

Re: 95%-ile isn't that good (2020)

#102

Post by Jensson »

xigoi wrote: post #63
solveit wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Principal Engineers at Google know their stuff, a viral blogpost notwithstanding.

Well, they clearly don't know how to make a web app for accessing cloud storage work decently fast…

What makes you think a Principal engineer is tasked with that? Principal engineers do mostly stuff like create new infrastructure technology like spanner, or machine learning frameworks, or similar stuff. Google doesn't have that many principal engineers, they correspond to director on the manager ladder, but there are way fewer principal engineers than directors as it is much harder to climb the contributor ladder than the manager ladder. Most Google products doesn't have a single principal engineer on the team.

Re: 95%-ile isn't that good (2020)

#103

Post by astura »

ajkjk wrote: post #15
elil17 wrote: post #5

A video game and public speaking seem like really weird/unusual examples. A ton of people play video games, very few people do it professionally. A ton of people give talks, but it’s usually a small part of their jobs. Being even 50%-ile among professionals for either would certainly be extremely impressive. When I think about normal jobs, which are less competitive fields than professional gaming or speaking, being…

95% percentile is _way_ below professional-level. That's kinda the point: it's super attainable for anybody who works at it.

Not just anyone, only those with already existing natural talent.

If something comes very easy to you then you may believe that it's that easy for everyone. It's not. This is the fallacy of the author - he should try to get to 95th percentile doing something brand new that they don't have a natural talent for to understand how very wrong they are.

I found learning to programming extremely easy but my best friend just couldn't grasp it even though she tried much harder than I did and we were in exactly the same class. OTOH she bought a guitar and taught herself to play it without even trying whereas I couldn't play more than a couple notes even with years of music lessons.

Re: 95%-ile isn't that good (2020)

#104

Post by UncleMeat »

Jensson wrote: post #102
xigoi wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they clearly don't know how to make a web app for accessing cloud storage work decently fast…

What makes you think a Principal engineer is tasked with that? Principal engineers do mostly stuff like create new infrastructure technology like spanner, or machine learning frameworks, or similar stuff. Google doesn't have that many principal engineers, they correspond to director on the manager ladder, but there are way fewer principal engineers than directors as it is much harder to climb the contributor ladder t…

Drive almost certainly has an L8 on the team somewhere. It is a big product. And it could be the case that "find a completely new indexing structure that makes drive search and folder navigation 10x faster" is a L8 task. Drive is indeed a lot slower than I'd personally like and a lot of that comes down to the way that indexing works when you cannot group users together, which is at the very core of the product.

Re: 95%-ile isn't that good (2020)

#105

Post by jakevoytko »

sage76 wrote: post #99
xigency wrote: post #17

Admittedly, I only skimmed this. But within the space of video games, I’m not sure Overwatch is a stunning example since it’s generally a casual game. I’ve been playing various iterations of Counter-Strike and StarCraft for decades. Sometimes with deliberate practice, including reading strategies, playing custom maps to practice certain skills, and watching series aimed at improving level of play. And despite the hun…

CSGO is crazy. I have seen silver players doing full executes onto sites. Novas with ridiculous aim. Getting to 95th percentile, which is the top 3 ranks, is extremely hard.

The skill floor of really old games gets skewed dramatically. If you don’t have a ton of people flooding into 0MMR, and people start to filter out of the game, the bare minimum required to make it at the very bottom of the competitive game modes climbs steadily over time.

I left CS:GO as a Master Guardian Elite. I stopped enjoying FPS games. When I reranked a year later, I was low Nova. When I reranked 6 months later, I was high Silver.

Saw something similar in DOTA 2, which I picked up last year. At the lowest MMR, games are filled with people with hundreds or thousands of games.

I’m order to climb off the very bottom of the games, you need to heat people with an intense amount of game knowledge, but below average understanding of winning in the game.

Re: 95%-ile isn't that good (2020)

#106

Post by sage76 »

samb1729 wrote: post #85
rowanG077 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least a few years ago when I was still following the CS:GO scene a lot of pros weren't Global Elite. It takes a different skillset to be able to dominate pubs and to be able to work well in a professional CS team.

A lot of pros aren’t global elite simply because they don’t play matchmaking seriously at all. Absolutely every professional csgo player in a top-20/30/100 team would easily attain that rank if they wanted it.

Not in North America. Some pro admitted that there's way too much cheating for him to get to SMFC or GE.

Re: 95%-ile isn't that good (2020)

#107

Post by rowanG077 »

samb1729 wrote: post #85
rowanG077 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least a few years ago when I was still following the CS:GO scene a lot of pros weren't Global Elite. It takes a different skillset to be able to dominate pubs and to be able to work well in a professional CS team.

A lot of pros aren’t global elite simply because they don’t play matchmaking seriously at all. Absolutely every professional csgo player in a top-20/30/100 team would easily attain that rank if they wanted it.

I mean that's a pretty empty statement then. I might as well say "Anyone can easily attain Global Elite if they wanted it.". Most people aren't taking matchmaking serious at all. It's just a pub game. I don't see a reason to hold pros to a lower standard here.

Re: 95%-ile isn't that good (2020)

#108

Post by the__alchemist »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #70
xigency wrote: post #17

Admittedly, I only skimmed this. But within the space of video games, I’m not sure Overwatch is a stunning example since it’s generally a casual game. I’ve been playing various iterations of Counter-Strike and StarCraft for decades. Sometimes with deliberate practice, including reading strategies, playing custom maps to practice certain skills, and watching series aimed at improving level of play. And despite the hun…

In every competitive game I've ever played (Overwatch, CSGO, LoL, TFT, Rocket League), the top 5% definitely wasn't "that good". In my mind, the top 20% are people who actually play. If you are stuck anywhere below that, you aren't even trying to improve. If a leaderboard says you haven't even cracked top 50%, then that leaderboard is definitely cutting players that don't play much from the bottom of that list. In mo…

Have you played an RTS game? Look at Age of Empires 2 or 4. The ELO system has a nice normal distribution. My brother, myself, and a few friends have been playing for 20 years. I'm top 30%. My brother's top 60%.

Everyone watches streamers, micros, max-performs their civs, uses strong unit comps, does all the economic tricks like luring boars, knows the counters etc.

Starcraft 2 was similar, although ELO was tougher to determine since it was grouped in leagues.

Re: 95%-ile isn't that good (2020)

#109

Post by hi_im_miles »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #70
xigency wrote: post #17

Admittedly, I only skimmed this. But within the space of video games, I’m not sure Overwatch is a stunning example since it’s generally a casual game. I’ve been playing various iterations of Counter-Strike and StarCraft for decades. Sometimes with deliberate practice, including reading strategies, playing custom maps to practice certain skills, and watching series aimed at improving level of play. And despite the hun…

In every competitive game I've ever played (Overwatch, CSGO, LoL, TFT, Rocket League), the top 5% definitely wasn't "that good". In my mind, the top 20% are people who actually play. If you are stuck anywhere below that, you aren't even trying to improve. If a leaderboard says you haven't even cracked top 50%, then that leaderboard is definitely cutting players that don't play much from the bottom of that list. In mo…

This is exactly in line with my experience as well. There is also an idea that all skilled players are grinders, which in my experience is definitely not true; having more games played than a professional usually signals to me that they're addicted to the game but don't care much about actually improving.
Post reply on HN