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The classic "oh actually that's a 1 in 20 occurrence rate" issue.
"95 percentile" vs "1 in 20" is a good example of how confusing statistics are. First sounds excellent, second sounds like anyone could (try to) do it.
If you suck at skipping rope (I did) you could probably climb the implicit rank quite easily by practice, till you were up against the sporty girls with aptitude.
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…
But not everyone can reach 0.05, that's where he's mistaken. He thinks that because he is highly intelligent and getting to 0.05 is a breeze for such people. But most people aren't.
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…
The article argues that you need more than "sometimes deliberate practice".
You forgot the most important part which is looking at your own replays, and having someone better than you look at your replays.
Corollary: 95th percentile is only (approximately) 50th percentile of non-crap.
On lichess, the 95th percentile rating of active participants is 2125. I wonder if this author would agree such a rating "isn't that good"? I think it's pretty darn good.
The whole point of the article is that the average active Lichess user would be 95th percentile of people who know how to play chess.
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…
Doing it at a place like Google is a different matter. The job isn't tuning a stack. It's coordinating multiple teams that own different services, and trying to make general-purpose services and frameworks work especially well for a specific case, even in the face of competing demands and standardization forces. It would be 90% political, and the task-specific differentiation required may simply be insurmountable - the extra wrinkles for your use case might cost more in complexity and reliability than it's worth.
In the only 2 competitive games I played enough to talk about this - sc2 and dota2 - the mistakes people make at my level (which at my peak was ~2000 mmr in dota and low plat in starcraft - probably top 60-40% of the active players in both) - were nothing like "not understanding game objectives".
In starcraft it's easy to say what went wrong because there's much less variables. Usually it's going for a wrong build order blindly, not reacting to enemy unit composition in time, or just being too slow mechanically (usually in the economy part of the game, fights you can just attack-move into the enemy army, but you have to build buildings and units FAST or you don't have enough units to fight). I've been watching sc2 games on top level, I've even played vs people in top 90% in 8v8 free for all games, and there's just no way for me to win against them.
I've played one 8v8 game where I was the only one in plat and the rest was in master/grand master. They left me alone for 20 minutes and fought it between themselves. I've build maxed 3/3/3 skytoss fleet with mothership and carriers, full wall of photon cannons and a lot of gates for instant remax. 20 minutes of reasonably fast base-building. After I started to fight I lost in like 5 minutes vs mass marines + medivacs :/ Guy just harassed me to death from 10 different angles while escaping my deathball of carriers. I had 10 times his resources but not the skill to defend from so many points at once. And he wasn't even grand master. Sc2 will show you exactly how much you suck.
In dota there's much more chaos, sometimes it's lost in the picking phase, other times someone just feeds for 10 minutes, sometimes people don't understand who is more late-game and farm for 40 minutes vs later-game carry or constantly fight vs earlier-game lineup instead of farming. Other than these I usually don't know why we lose. It's never "I don't understand the game objective".
I could probably get much higher if I wasn't spamming winter wyvern as pos4/5 every game. But it's the only hero I enjoy, so whatever.
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…
Games like CSGO/OW, where teamwork above speeds viable for human to human communication is required, can often topple "individual rockstars" with superior team coordination (each member of a team reacts to an event within 150-350ms knowing exactly how their teammates will react, and this is executed in tandem). The biggest difference between Top .1% and professionals is very similar to the difference between good and excellent engineers in terms of organizational efficacy: while their individual raw skill levels may be quite similar, the ability to communicate / coordinate makes a world of difference. A well-oiled team, in gaming and in software, will almost always run circles around a disjoined one comprised of people who have an otherwise higher skill level individually.
Source: Been to a few world finals and top 0.01% in CSGO/OW/SC2/SCBW/others.
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…
Novas with ridiculous aim.
Getting to 95th percentile, which is the top 3 ranks, is extremely hard.
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…
Indeed.
> Personally, in every activity I've participated in where it's possible to get a rough percentile ranking, people who are 95%-ile constantly make mistakes that seem like they should be easy to observe and correct. "Real world" activities typically can't be reduced to a percentile rating, but achieving what appears to be a similar level of proficiency seems similarly easy.
Its not that they play flawless. They make mistakes because the skill cap is high that mistakes get you at 95 percentile. Ie. the competition is still (much) worse. Its the same in any competition.
Effort + skill = win.
You might be able to learn skill, by so much (there's some traits you have which are static, e.g. someone with short legs is less likely going to be a good marathon runner or basketball player), but it would require [some] effort. For some, it would cost more effort than others. The outcome (win) does not reflect how much effort you put in. Its a skewed way of displaying your skill.
In WoW, there are people who play the game countless of hours a week. I am talking about 12 hours a week raiding, and then a lot of hours solo and 5-man dungeons (M+). Then they reach a certain M+ rating and a certain amount of mythic raid bosses dead, but such result doesn't mention the amount of hours put into it. For this reason, I joined a 6 hours a week raiding guild (2 days 3 hours) which was considered minimal (most semi hardcore would raid at least 12 hours a week), but Blizzard introduced M+. And no guild would advertise if and how much they played M+, but if you did not you'd get (eventually) removed from the raid team.
> And for games like Overwatch, I don't think improving is a moral imperative; there's nothing wrong with having fun at 50%-ile or 10%-ile or any rank. But in every game I've played with a rating and/or league/tournament system, a lot of people get really upset and unhappy when they lose even when they haven't put much effort into improving. If that's the case, why not put a little bit of effort into improving and spend a little bit less time being upset?
You're missing out, 50% is average. For every person who wins, one must lose, to reach above 50% percentile. Then there's leagues where people of different skill caps get put together. If you ignore effort (money spend on hardware, time spend on playing and improving the game, etc etc), then anything above 50% is objectively better than average.
PS: This article reminds me of Greedy Goblin's rants about M&S (Morons & Slackers).