95%-ile isn't that good (2020) • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by sudosysgen » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 5:50 PM UTC

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.

No. Some NA pros have actually said they couldn't do it. There are a lot of cheaters and you get punished for trying to play as a team.

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

#152

Post by Fnoord » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 6:21 PM UTC

nindalf wrote: post #137

Fnoord wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 multi…

It’s easy to measure other peoples effort in video games. Anyone who puts in more effort than me is a try hard/no lifer. Anyone who puts in less effort than me is a casual. Only I put in the exact right amount of effort.

Except that's not what I argue, at all. I have seen people in gaming who put in a lot less effort than I did, yet are far better. I've seen people adapt to new mechanics quickly. That's productive, in a way. I've also seen the opposite of that.

I never said that my own gameplay is the way to go though. Just that I observed people who put in less effort being better, and people put in more effort being worse. Its why I went with a more casual approach, which meant half of what was the standard as structured group play... except for one thing: they added M+ dungeons in that expansion, and that forced players to play more structured group play than raiding.

Also, there's this thing where you give up. There's no shame in such, either. Its just that you decide to not spend time trying. As the saying goes: Quitters never win. Winners never quit. But those who never quit, and never win, are losers.

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

#153

Post by cutenewt » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 6:27 PM UTC

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…

There's a game that I play about an hour a day for the last decade. I wouldn't say I'm very good, but I do understand the game at a competitive level.

I just checked my stats for the game, and apparently I'm in the top 2% of all players.

So yeah, I'd agree with your hypothesis.

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

#154

Post by coatmatter » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 9:26 PM UTC

sheikheddy wrote: post #31

Wow, a lot of these comments seem to misunderstand that this is 95th percentile amongst people who participate, not people who practice actively. The article is mostly correct.

Redefining percentile or who is considered an active participant as the author did is the greater self-serving misunderstanding. Following from my earlier comment here, this weekly graph already shows active players - those who aren't active aren't factored in: https://lichess.org/stat/rating/distribution/blitz

To be active on Lichess requires on to actually be active and have a Rating Deviation below a certain value.

It's all easy to "reaching the top 1% is easy" if you're already at the top. I commented earlier explaining the difference between Overwatch and chess, pointing out how the author's description of what it took to get "good" at Overwatch simply doesn't work for chess. Without trying to slight Overwatch, chess is simply a very very tough game/sport to get very good at.

As Grandmaster Ben Finegold would say, "I'm the best player in this chair!" Yep, so that also makes me in the 100th percentile when in my own chair, just with fancier words.

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

#155

Post by raydev » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 9:38 PM UTC

argc wrote: post #59

ajkjk wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm not convinced anyone can just work at it and get to top 95%, or even top 75%, or even top 50% at any activity. There is a ton of selecting going on that keeps people who do not have some amount of talent from even attempting to get close. I've played a decent amount of first person shooters and RTS games and I am decent but I have friends who play less and are more talented than me. Given similar practice regimen…

> Given similar practice regimens and training/feedback,

But that's the point, I think.

Sure, "natural talent" might lead to a reduction in necessary practice time, but what if you spent 1.5x or 2x or 3x the time, or used a different practice method that was more suited to your needs?

I believe I am one of those people who just needed more time, and I've seen success. It was definitely demotivating watching others improve faster or seemingly not need improvement at all, it just came to them naturally. But I have an obsession, which led to me being very methodical about practice, time, etc. And it worked out.

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

#156

Post by the__alchemist » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 9:49 PM UTC

throwaway6734 wrote: post #126

the__alchemist wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1150 in Aoe2, 1250 in Aoe4.

Oh cool, I'm at similar level in AoE2. I've found that if you consistently make vills & army you can compete pretty easily at this level. For the most part I play random civ, don't use hotkeys, and don't use build orders and it hasn't been too rough. Lately I've been playing more teamgames and spending more time watching streamers play (shout out to survivalist!).

Nice! It really is amazing watching the community over time. Techniques like house walling, archer kiting, scout rushes, hit+run vil attacks with starting scout, boar luring, deer pushing etc went from being rare/high-level play, to something everyone (above 800 ELO at least) does!

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

#157

Post by xigency » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 10:48 PM UTC

temp8964 wrote: post #23

xigency wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leaderboard may be the wrong term. In StarCraft 2 for instance, there are Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Masters, and Grandmasters leagues. Diamond 1 to GM might include around 5% of the ranked players.

Ranked players maybe top 10% of all players? Purely guessing.

In SC2, unranked and ranked players are actually mixed in matchmaking. So if you are playing unranked you still have an MMR, just not one you can see. As an unranked player, you can tell what division you are in based on the portrait frame of your (ranked) opponents.

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

#158

Post by sage76 » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 10:52 PM UTC

jakevoytko wrote: post #105

sage76 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If you don’t have a ton of people flooding into 0MMR

But if you check steamdb, CSGO's playerbase is only increasing.

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

#159

Post by westcort » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 11:05 PM UTC

The biggest takeaway I got from this was that recording yourself doing something, then observing yourself completing it as an outsider can dramatically increase your performance. Relevant content:

After watching a recording of myself writing code, I realized I was spending about a quarter of the total time implementing the feature tracking down which functions the bugs were in! This was completely non-obvious to me and I wouldn’t have found it out without recording myself

Now that I’m aware that I spent so much time isolating which function a bugs are in, I now test each function as I write it to make sure they work

This allows me to write code a lot faster as it dramatically reduces the amount of time it takes to debug my code

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

#160

Post by lostcolony » Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 11:41 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #53

lostcolony wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate to sound trite, but it often is the culture. If people feel siloed it's really easy to fall into not caring very much if you're not intrinsically motivated to succeed. However, on a closely knit team, where you put in the effort to get them included and owning things and be supported by the rest of the team in it, many start performing better (even if that starts by just asking for help earlier) simply because t…

I agree about culture being a big part. Though no clue how you can improve that in your team as a manager? I worked for a company where my team was fine, and individual people from other teams seemed perfectly smart and capable when talking to them, but looking at their team's output, they might as well have been idiots. I image for many of them, if they had worked at a more functional organization like Google, they…

As a manager, the big ones are making sure that everyone understands what is going on, and feels responsible for it. So if you see a silo developing, you intentionally break it, and explain to the team why you're asking someone who knows nothing about a particular domain to own the task (and also call on the silo to make themselves available to help teach the domain and answer questions and such). It means that task will take longer, but the long term health and effectiveness of the team will be increased.

That also includes manager context; ideally, even things that a manager usually does, the team starts stepping up to do. So working with product to define requirements? Manager should include the team with that and look to have them start taking ownership of it over time. Prioritization? Team sport, until it becomes as natural as breathing, and people are better able to prioritize their own time as emergents come in. Etc. This not only helps avoid the -manager- becoming a bottleneck that slows everyone down, but it helps individuals to grow really quickly and feel more empowered.