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.
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 you have pros.