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 hundreds of hours invested I don’t believe I’ve ever cracked the top 50% in any leaderboard rankings.
Anyone in the top 5% is definitely that good, executing complex strategies with extreme precision.
There are lots of areas in life that are highly competitive — where being the best takes raw talent, a huge time investment, and a bit of luck. I wouldn’t try to diminish that.
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 most competitive games, the bottom 80% is just casuals who play a few times and stop, or people who only play the game while high.
Then the top 5% is when you start understanding the game at a competitive level. The very start.
Then the top 1% is where you can consider yourself good at the game, but, still, there are a ton of fairly bad players that play enough to get here but don't understand what they're doing. It's a combination of grinders and skilled players.
Then the 0.1% is where you have good players. Not pros, but definitely, unarguably, good.
>Then the top 5% is when you start understanding the game at a competitive level. The very start.
On the other hand, your handle is "xbox, no life".
The whole OP premise is:
"Reaching 95%-ile isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do. I think this is one of my most ridiculable ideas. It doesn't help that, when stated nakedly, that sounds elitist. But I think it's just the opposite: most people can become (relatively) good at most things. Note that when I say 95%-ile, I mean 95%-ile among people who participate, not all people (for many activities, just doing it at all makes you 99%-ile or above across all people). I'm also not referring to 95%-ile among people who practice regularly. The "one weird trick" is that, for a lot of activities, being something like 10%-ile among people who practice can make you something like 90%-ile or 99%-ile among people who participate."
It might not be impressive if you have a monomania on the specific subject, but it is very impressive when you also have a life, and this is just one thing you do...
Even more so if you're 95% on more than one things (imaging meeting someone that's 95% programmer, conversationalist, cook, guitar player, marathon runner, business owner, ... He would automatically be hella more impressive than the huge majority of people you meet)...
Congrats on the ad hominem I guess? My name is a joke.
> Even more so if you're 95% on more than one things (imaging meeting someone that's 95% programmer, conversationalist, cook, guitar player, marathon runner, business owner, ... He would automatically be hella more impressive than the huge majority of people you meet)...
Being in the top 5% for more than 1 thing is trivially easy. Top 5% is just 1 in 20 people who have attempted. Most people have tried cooking at least once. Most people have ran at least once in their life (Hell, just completing a marathon would put you in the top 5% of of people who run). The pool of people who have attempted programming by now is pretty massive (and it's a pretty big conversation about how many do not succeed).
Being in the top 5% of just these is really not difficult. It only seems difficult if you only compare people trying to be in the top percentile and not every person who has ever participated.
SC2 is by far the hardest (in terms of time investment & deliberate practice) to achieve. The amount of practice required to not get demolished by 16-19 year olds in a PC cafe in Seoul was ...yikes.
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.
Top 5% rating cutoff for lichess blitz chess is currently 2200. That corresponds to the bottom levels of master/pro players in classic odb chess tournaments. A lot of pros play online, so benchmarking is decently reliable.
"Not that good" is subjective... but to me, this is serious levels of chess play.
But you're looking at "chess players with a lichess rating", not all chess players. Chess in particular has a ton of people who only play very occasionally, can barely remember the rules, and move the pieces semi-randomly rather than develop any sort of tactics or strategy.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Skimmed too fast indeed you missed this: “ …I'm also not referring to 95%-ile among people who practice regularly. …” I think anyone in the leaderboard rankings is consciously learning like you. He means 95th-ile among everyone who plays casually.
I played StarCraft 2 (SC2). I reached Master 3, and my MMR at the time was top 3% globally.
I wouldn't say I was that good. My foundational skills were decent, but not amazing and I did poorly against cheese or in extreme late-game situations. My micro in large scale battles also sucked.
A lot of people in the community would say that Master is where the game starts, and in some ways that's very true.
This:
> Anyone in the top 5% is definitely that good, executing complex strategies with extreme precision
Is more like GM in SC2. In Master players can usually execute 90-95% perfectly if left alone, but that quickly falls apart if you have to multitask. Probably closer to 70-80% at best in real games, if that.
Also, almost everyone is copying strategies not doing anything particularly complicated. It's hard enough to just play the damn game with a simple strategy, no point in making it harder.
I think this is basically true when looking at most skillsets. 95%ile is a grind, but it's mostly one of error reduction and vocabulary building. Most people can build vocabulary just fine given time and attention, but observing and correcting errors is much harder.
When a game is just outright complex like SC2 in its decision making(hundreds of units and structures that could be individually commanded), all the skills needed to reach 95%ile boil down to rote technique: "good builds", "meta strats", etc. This is where most video games sit, since this kind of overt complexity is something you can learn in little nibbles: A is more powerful than B in situation X.
In comparison, games like pinball have relatively little going on in their vocabulary: there are plenty of techniques and rulesets, but much of the good strategy boils down to "hit accurately" and "recover successfully", and those are entirely sources of error, reduced only through many hours of play to find methods of hitting and recovering with good expected value and low risk - sweet spots on a playfield and a deep understanding of the physics to enable combo setups. If you have accuracy, you need only have a small layer of rules and shots knowledge to smoke tournaments. With little to consciously memorize to overcome the skill gap, casual players conclude that pinball is "just random".
1. Overwatch, the competitive ladder, is not a casual game. Everything you mentioned for CS, happens in Overwatch too; it's a esport that had millions invested.
2. The top 5% of CSGO ranked is Legendary Eagle. There is a world of difference between Legendary Eagle and Global Elite (top .75%). And even between those 2 ranks, there are two other ranks. The top 5% isn't that good; and Global Elite itself is still a step below actual pros.
I don't think it's a matter of not being good, just that others are that much better. It might sound similar, but it's not. You're still better than hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of people.
It's like being a tech worker who earns $400k a year and saying "I don't earn that much, there's people who do what I do clearing seven figures a year, and others who were able to retire in their early 30s and don't even have to work anymore because they became so wealthy from work." Sure, it's not a lot of money compared to those people, but it is when compared to the vast majority of wage earners in any region in the world.
Actually, global elite is a few steps below actual pros - above global theres faceit level 10, then open ladders/leagues, then invite only leagues which are at semi-pro level and lastly the pro leagues
EDIT: AFAIK Global Elite starts at about 1600-1700 elo, theres a lot of room above that
Cool. As a Legendary Eagle Master I didn't even know this. I assume that is like the top 2.5% or something? I would agree with the initial statement of the article, though: Watching "real" competitive players just seems like magic and I feel like average at best, albeit apparently (as I just learned) being in the top 5% or better. Same goes for basically anything else I am "good" at, even with work. There's just always so many people being so much better ...
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.
Counter-strike and StarCraft have existed for way longer than Overwatch and it was even truer in 2020. 95-percentile of a playerbase full of casuals is easier than 95-percentile of a playerbase of hardcore fans that have all been doing it for decades.
In fact that may be a lesson to take away. If you want to be 95 percentile easily, pick a new field. Since you don't have catching up to do, 95-perentile effort will get you there quickly.
Top 0.05 is really not good. You're talking diamond league. There's a huge amount of mistakes and errors that a serious observer can spot.
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.
TFA: The "one weird trick" is that, for a lot of activities, being something like 10%-ile among people who practice can make you something like 90%-ile or 99%-ile among people who participate
An important point is that you're now better than 95% of starcraft players if you reach middling competitiveness against those who compete regularly. At 50th pctile in competitions youre absolutely better than the vast majority of starcraft players.
It's not clear what being 99% among people who play very casually actually gives you. In many cases it's not a lot.
Take chess, for example. By practicing regularly on Lichess, you can achieve a skill level that will beat 99% of casual chess players. However, you'll almost never play against this people. You'll play against other folks on Lichess, who all play regularly, and a top 1% of all chess players can easily be in the bottom 50% of the people you'll play on Lichess. It's not clear what you gain from being better than 99% of people who don't play on Lichess with any regularity, and you'll therefore never encounter.
I think the point of the article is more in line of: "If there's something useful you want to be excellent at, rest assured it'll take much less effort than you think".
> Take chess, for example. By practicing regularly on Lichess, you can achieve a skill level that will beat 99% of casual chess players.
> However, you'll almost never play against this people. You'll play against other folks on Lichess, who all play regularly, and a top 1% of all chess players can easily be in the bottom 50% of the people you'll play on Lichess.
Yes, that's in line with TFA and my comment (being middling against top 10% makes you excellent against 90% of people).
> It's not clear what you gain from being better than 99% of people who don't play on Lichess with any regularity, and you'll therefore never encounter.
You gain the ability to say "I'm probably in 95%-le of people who play chess". and "Oh you play chess? We should play!" and you will soundly defeat them. If you don't soundly defeat them, you can rest assured they have studied and practiced and regularly compete, since you do those things. Maybe you can organize chess clubs. Maybe there are in-person tournaments you'd like to compete in. Maybe it'll make you friends or a spouse or open up job opportunities or be a decent interview discussion to show "extra curricular activities". Who knows.
It's not as clear an advantage in every-day situations as, say, practicing a martial art or car maintenance or long-distance running or cooking, where the 10%/95%-ile tradeoff becomes painfully obvious. The problem is that chess isn't very useful. So, being 95%-ile at chess just doesn't get you much.
I bet %95 of the people who do Ski jumping are THAT GOOD because they are already an elite subset of the population. That is probably true for all the professional athletes.
As a result, athletes mostly compete on the higher end where everyone is very good and all the hard work they put in barely moves the needle due to the law of diminishing returns.
My point is, the percentile is likely to be defined around how hard or easy it is to reach the point where putting in effort starts yielding less and less of returns.
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.
> Sometimes with deliberate practice, including reading strategies, playing custom maps to practice certain skills, and watching series aimed at improving level of play.
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.
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.
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.
> Anyone in the top 5% is definitely that good, executing complex strategies with extreme precision.
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).
I’ve made it to the top 5% in a few competitive games, top 1% or 0.1% even. Once you get there, it’s surreal because of how sloppy you know you are: everything you do is still so clumsy and you still have so much uncertainty. It’s just that most other players are even more clumsy and even more confused (often more confident however).
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 hundreds of hours invested I don’t believe I’ve ever cracked the top 50% in any leaderboard rankings.
Anyone in the top 5% is definitely that good, executing complex strategies with extreme precision.
There are lots of areas in life that are highly competitive — where being the best takes raw talent, a huge time investment, and a bit of luck. I wouldn’t try to diminish that.