Me while playing League of Legends as my 4 teammates completely rip me to shreds for underperforming: "Yep, they are all on the same page, that's for sure".
Ugh I stopped playing league of legends because it just made me so angry and act so terribly. Screaming at my friends and just constantly feeling angry and frustrated. With the way the ranking system works this is basically guaranteed that you’ll lose half your games unless you’re a literally world class player.
My wife’s ex would piss in bottles while drinking vodka and playing. If I try to play League she’ll throw the breaker because the noises are triggering to her.
Now I play D&D because losing is just as much fun (or more fun!) than losing.
> With the way the ranking system works this is basically guaranteed that you’ll lose half your games unless you’re a literally world class player.
This isn't the real problem. If everyone was on the same page and playing well, and you still lost, would it be nearly as frustrating? (It would be somewhat frustrating, sure, but it would be dialed way back.)
No, the problem with League is that all five players on a team can leave a lost team fight thinking "if they'd played how I wanted, we would have won that one", all five having a different plan in mind... And all five are correct.
The game frustrates people the way it does because they can construct an almost-true narrative where every loss is because of their teammates, while all their teammates are doing the same.
I've never heard that explained so well. Everyone in their own fantasy ego-preserving bubble. I guess the only ways out are carry, be carried, or puncture the bubble and start communicating. Feels like the same thing can apply to life!
This is it, right here. Good games are fun to lose as well. Otherwise it's just a competition where you occasionally beat people and feel amazing about yourself, or lose to people and feel terrible. The variable reward system in ranked LoL messes with our brains, gambling machines and pay-to-win games have exploited this for years.
League, at least for me, didn't seem like a fun game (at least in like 2010 or whatever it was?). Most of the time was hitting hapless minions and waiting for some timer to finish so you could finally fight a human or go jungle/dragon or whatever it was. But that would be over in a few seconds and then back to grinding away at some shitty NPCs. Maybe some people enjoy the actual gameplay enough but 99% of my LoL friends played either for social purposes or were hyper competitive.
I found SC2 way more fun, pretty much every game was fun unless the opponent themselves did something boring like cannon rushing. I would routinely come up with interesting builds/strategies and test them out on people (fun to figure out if it worked or not). Mass marines, weird timing attacks, anti-meta. I didn't see that flexibility in LoL. The mechanics (for me) were far more involved and enjoyable anyway but that's my shitty opinion.
> pretty much every game was fun unless the opponent themselves did something boring like cannon rushing. I would routinely come up with interesting builds/strategies and test them out on people
I've never understood why so many people have this value judgement for long macro oriented games and against short micro oriented games. To me, most macro games look like the same fundamental thing over and over with slight variations, and end on a small mistake that has a drastic effect. On the other hand, I'll never forget the game where Maru got canon rushed and floated his entire base and SCVs through the canons to his third (I think). And won easily.
Coming up with builds is a completely valid thing to enjoy about sc2, but to me what makes the game interesting is the interactions with your opponent. It doesn't get much more interactive than a game with early, non stop aggression.
As ex dota player, the highs you get from those outlier games are incredible.
You overperform, outplay other players. Your team starts to move together and work as one. It feels amazing, you feel like a god for an hour.
But this is one of maybe 100 games, the rest of those games is subconsciously chasing that next amazing game where all stars align you get a good teammates and opponents that are slightly below your skill level. But instead you get toxic team that make you loose hope in humanity.
Its like slots, just each pull lasts 40 minutes :)
Dota is one of most amazing and horrible games ever made. i am glad i am out of it
You are right about sbmm, but it doesn’t make for a good progression system imo. If my hidden elo says I’m diamond or w/e I should cruise through early ranks instead of being matched with other diamond elo players climbing from bronze. It should only feel like a slog/be super competitive when the external rank matches the hidden elo. Not the entire time IMO.
Some games get this right, others (looking at you Apex Legends Arenas Mode) does not and it just winds up being a terrible slog.
> If my hidden elo says I’m diamond or w/e I should cruise through early ranks instead of being matched with other diamond elo players climbing from bronze.
Or maybe you should stop making new accounts and stop smurfing?
I've been a beginner in plenty of games, and it sucks to be matched against someone far above your skill level in most games.
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I get it. A lot of people want to be matched up against weaker players so that they have an easy win. That doesn't make it fair for the losers in this situation. Furthermore, it weakens the community and turns it more toxic. Expert players (or even advanced/intermediate players) shouldn't seek out weak players and stomp them.
50% win ratios, for everyone, should be the default goal. You climb the Elo to keep 50% win/loss, and as you lose, you fall to 50% win/loss as well, or so the ideal is. That way, everyone is on fair grounds.
If you want someone to "feed you wins", maybe play a PvE game like MMOs or something? But a competitive game is zero-sum by default. Half the players lose, and half the players win each game. So community managers need to spread the wins and losses around in a fair way.
> I've been a beginner in plenty of games, and it sucks to be matched against someone far above your skill level in most games.
I used to think this way until I started to understand what it takes to become competitive at high levels. The most efficient way to improve is to play with and against people better than you. If you take your ego out of the equation and pretend everyone is there to teach you, it's hard NOT to learn something.
Tangential to that, a lot of people would be honored to play against a GM in chess. Yet when placed against actual GMs doing some variation of a "3000 elo speed run", they throw a fit. What? Maybe its cultural. For a while in SC2 GSL, there was a side show where a random amateur for the audience got to play against a pro. You could clearly see the reverence most of the amateurs held for their opponent.
> The most efficient way to improve is to play with and against people better than you.
Unless the opponent is purposefully throwing a "teaching game" and/or giving an appropriate handicap of some kind, this is absolutely not the case.
In Chess, games at the 1500 Elo level are won/lost due to a knight fork, a bishop pin, a skewer, and other such traps. GMs literally will give you _zero_ opportunities to find such mistakes from them, because they play nearly perfectly.
Finding such mistakes (in yourself, and your opponent) requires an opponent who makes such mistakes at a roughly the same level as you. GMs who can see maybe 2 or 3 moves ahead of you will prevent such mistakes from even occurring, giving you no chance to learn.
A "show match" vs a stronger player is to be honored, but its not a lesson learned. Its not a teaching game.
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Sure, GMs make mistakes. But the mistakes they make are invisible to 1500 Elo players. There's no hope to ever see it, and no one expecting to learn to play the game studies GM-level chess.
1500 Elo players will improve far faster with skewer puzzles, fork puzzles, outposts, etc. etc.
You learn skewers by practicing them a thousand times. Not by having a GM show you your mistake once over the next hour. Chess, at 1500 Elo, is decided by one mistake like that.
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There's also the chance that the GM performs a checkmate in 7 vs you. This is too far ahead for a 1500 Elo player to see, but something easily within a GM's grasp in the midgame. In this case, you learn nothing (you shouldn't be looking for checkmate in 7 or that depth as a 1500 Elo player)
This is why playing vs Stockfish (superhuman AI) is useless. It doesn't teach you how to think like a human or how to get better at chess as a human... all of Stockfish's moves are so deep that they're AI only.
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Its different if the GM is explicitly performing a "teaching game". (Ex: Hey, you can be pinned with this move, lets go back 2 moves so you can try to avoid it). But if the GM is there to troll you with shitty strategy because they're way stronger than you (ie: most online smurfs who are +200 or so Elo above you), then you learn nothing and simply serve as the opponent's entertainment for the night.
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Same thing with fighting games: go into training mode, and perform your combos another hundred times. You learn nothing from the opponent comboing you though.
Same thing with RTS games: go into training mode, and practice your build orders another hundred times. You learn nothing by the stronger opponent executing their build order perfectly.
Same thing with League of Legends. You learn nothing when the stronger opponent team combos / ganks you out of position. You need to practice your ganks (which are likely a different character, so you'd need a different set of spells used at different timing).
Etc. etc. Training / getting better at a game is very different from actually _playing_ the actual game.
Actually, I think matching you against equal players would be much better in such a situation, but you should gain much more visible elo for wins than you lose for losses (thus going up even with a 50% win rate).
For you to win more than 50% of the time requires that others lose more than 50% of the time. Which sucks.
But what's more important, is that if you apply the same logic to other players from 1 league higher than your real ELO - you should be the one losing over 50% of the time to make them happier :)
The issue is that riot has designed it so the 50% has become the target rather than the metric.
The result is that you'll go on win and loss streaks and if you play long enough it becomes obvious it's being manipulated that way.
Winning 1 or 2 and losing 1 or 2 are just fine.
winning 10-15 followed by losing 10-15 just feels bad and isn't worth it. And if you've played long enough you can start feeling when the tipping point is about to happen. The wins will start getting more and more difficult as more people on your team obviously don't belong in the game. Or vice versa, and you'll start getting people on your teams consistently such that nothing you do matters because you'll just win.
Then you add in a dash of streamers and people doing "bronze to plat" challenges and it's just not fun. Either they're losing on purpose to tank their rank or they're pubstomping people far below their skill level.
The end result is that it all just feels bad and the only people that end up playing a significant number of games are actively addicted to it.
Yeah, I've absolutely noticed those long win/loss streaks and it reduces the value of the game by far. It's like, by the time I get a win, it's such a total stomping, it's not even fun. I slog through like 8 losses in a row, and then suddenly get a totally uneven matchup (in my favor) and the game is like the shortest possible game, because the matchmaking finally tossed me a bone (or whatever). Great, I finally won a game, and it was basically just a free win. I don't find it fun, and the losing team definitely doesn't either. The concept of "winning"/"losing" is diluted or made irrelevant by a crappy underlying system. After this long you'd think there would be a better system devised? I'd rather wait longer than have to get these constant poorly-balanced matchups.
There can still be issues. For example, how does the ELO system view previous wins/losses when calculating ELO gain/loss from future wins?
Anecdote: My friends played the first few ranked seasons on my Xbox Overwatch account, they started at Bronze and eventually got to Silver. I decided to pick it up and play ranked with a different friend, we won 9/10 of the placement matches. I got ranked Silver, he got ranked Platinum. A month later, I make a new Overwatch account on PC and rank Platinum with ease.
In these systems, if you gain a lot of skill in a short amount of time, or have bad luck early on in your ranked career, you can be held back in rank gains to the point that you are essentially stuck in place. Creating a new account generally allows you to advance significantly faster through the ranks.
And I actually only truly grasped this recently(the concept makes sense). My paranoid self always thinks that in a game like League, there are artificial matchmaking things going on to keep you at 50%, apart from a stagnation of skill. In truth, I probably just need to get better(at whatever, doesn't have to be League).
Yeah, if you win 50% of your games it means the matchmaker is working perfectly. People really have a lot of trouble understanding that.
Also, to improve, you probably have to lose a bunch of games while you're unlocking that new knowledge. The toxicity of teammates kind of steers people away from that. Thus people get stuck at where they place and never go up or down significantly.
It's not hard to come up with designs where you effectively cycle types of queues to where the end result is 50/50, but the pathway to get there is psychologically manipulative(win streaks/loss streaks/etc...).
Now, winning a single game of LoL is zero-sum, but you can't say that the ratings themselves are. Without knowing what the actual system is doing, we can't assume that players are losing/winning the same number of ranking points in a game.
Unless of course if a team full of me would have a 70% winrate, and the system is compensating (because hidden ELO) by sticking me with teammates that each have 45% winrates.
It still averages out to 50% winrate. Just because you can force a point of convergence does not mean it is the correct point of convergence.
Yeah, I definitely feel this variance in matchmaking. play games with my friends every Saturday night and 8 hours in after 5 beers, I doubt our MMR is quite as high as it was when we started the session. (The first game probably isn't great either!) But the matchmaker doesn't really know these subtleties, so sometimes the enemies get an easier than expected game. So it goes.
The competitive ladder climbing meta is really about recognizing when you shouldn't be playing and not playing then. Interesting angle to optimize.
Yeah, if I want to climb a ladder I have to play first thing in the morning (with physical exercise as well as warmup games), and make sure I quit at the right time.
I don't think the system should even care for these externalities because they will eventually balance out across a player base and the net effect should be zero(everyone will eventually play against a team with a drunk person on it). But it creates a prolonged cycle and general frustration amongst the player base.
Eventually is the key word. What eventually looks like to the player could be 10 matches, or 1000 matches, depending on how well the ELO system is implemented.
Achieving an equilibrium is step 1. Allowing for upward mobility is step 2. Enabling that upward mobility to occur (correctly) over fewer and fewer games is step 3.
Alternatively, you could also skip step 3, and profit off of smurfing.
Back when I was in game dev, I really wanted to find a way to make them fun even when you lost. I never managed to grok that magic, but I did see it in e.g. Settlers of Catan.
This becomes a different beast when you introduce competitive play. In non-ranked there is this feeling of freedom to try new things, have fun, etc... but in ranked it feels like things are on the line(despite those things being so trivial as a few points up or down).
Settlers is so fun because you really feel like you're on a journey the whole game, and while it is nice to win, you remember the interactions and experiences in the game as the valuable thing(IMO).
I actually did a similar thing using a python script! shuffle(all_combinations[: -10]), and repeat forever. Change the -10 to whatever you want: take everything and you've got your solution, put -35 and you've got random dice again. -10 is a nice middle term, also avoids that at the end of the deck results become too certain.
I've taken to calling that the gambler's fallacy fallacy: the misapprehension that a randomness can only arise in situations where the events are uncorrelated. The randomness in Tetris is another good example: when you think you're due for an I, you actually are.
Tetris actually uses two entirely different algorithms, one classic and one modern. Classic is randint(1,7), modern is shuffling "decks" of the 7 pieces and repeating.
If that’s your experience with league of legends (and don’t get me wrong, i feel you) then don’t even think about even trying OpenArena and similar. The amount of cheaters/aimbotters is astonishing, and the lack of a central authority means everything stays the same or only gets worse.
I had to stop playing because… let’s put it politely and say it was having a very bad influence on me.
I have recently transitioned to Teamfight Tactics and a bit of Fall Guys, and have had much more enjoyment from it. But I have also realized that everything in TFT is RNG based, and is almost equivalent to playing a slot machine where every pull takes 30-40 minutes.
The scary thing with a 5v5 MOBA and a ranking system is that a large part of the game falls outside of your control unless you're that player that can consistently carry. So to that point, you really have to take time to study the game and psychology if you want to climb...but then you get wherever you're going and realize you have almost nothing of value to show for it.
In theory it's a hyper-gravity trainer, spend years competing with people non-stop, then the real world is easy by comparison (or end up twitchy and out of sync, idk).
Inspiration/leadership is another way to carry. Games start blurring together, even just getting people's attention can be enough of an edge to win. I had one game recently where they had the late-game edge. I've lost too many of those standing around with our dicks in our hand + farming, so I started calling targets and forcing early fights, we won pretty handily. I wasn't the best player on the team, and not all the calls worked, but I'm pretty sure it would have been an L otherwise.
> "Screaming at my friends and just constantly feeling angry and frustrated."
A former high school classmate was known to scream at other people during League matches, and I chalked it up to a personality issue and him lacking maturity (aka something highly abnormal).
This might still be true, but it actually sounds like competitive video games and the culture around them might really normalize this behavior as acceptable. It looks like I was too quick to judge him personally, instead of accounting for the context.
Hah just as much fun as winning. Losing at D&D can involve all sorts of weird and creative things happening depending on your Dungeon Master. Often times you might not just die in a conflict.
Recently my character found a cursed necklace that guards against all but the strongest attacks and my bard is very excited and wearing it, feeling invincible. Little does he know, there’s a very powerful evil being who can hear all his thoughts, knows where he is at all times, and can compel him to do his bidding.
I’m pretty excited to see how the story develops, even if it eventually ends in my character’s horrible demise.
D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) is usually fun when something unexpected happens, which is most of the time, win or lose.
Playing LoL (League of Legends) and other MOBAs (Multiple online battle arenas) and winning only results in fun sometimes and almost never results in fun when losing.
I equate League of Legends with drugs or junk food. It's not fun, not rewarding, not creative, not anything. I could play 3 or 4 40m games and at the end have a completely empty feeling. It is, however, extremely addictive.
I'll try hard not to get addicted to something that meaningless ever again. Games like LoL are the soul-sucking rock-bottom of games.
An addiction (to use the same word GP has used) doesn't have to feel fun to keep engaging in it. It just has to feel rewarding, which in its strictest sense it means your brain saying "I shall have more of this".
Fun and addiction are two separate mechanisms mediated by different neurotransmitters.
I have played League for 10 hours straight before and thought "wtf just happened?". Its like time just evaporates and it really does feel like an addiction.
My entire experience with MOBAs is that people will rip you to shreds for not doing or knowing every overly specific thing people didn't know either when they had less experience.
Not really about being anonymous as I've seen the same pattern when playing with people I know in real life, although playing with strangers removes a lot of restraint.
It's more that those games create a scenario where you are going to be frustrated for 20+ minutes because of mistakes of others, and you likely started playing because you're trying to get away from frustration IRL.
Unfortunately I can agree with this completely. I stopped playing Fortnite because of this. Although it can be fun without winning, when they introduced the victory crowns to reward multiple consecutive wins (along with an emote to rub it in everyone's face) it seemed like just enough to cause us all to start getting frustrated and screw up team morale.
Yup. Every time I come back to dota I get (polite) flames for the first 10 games, everyone knows I'm the weak link somehow. Takes a while to be reabsorbed into the hive mind.
I don't even care when people are toxic, they are so easy to bait into raging when they are. I suck at league and say I do though so at least I'm honest.
I usually end every turbo game with "ggwp, have a great evening everyone", and commend all of the other nine players unless someone was being an asshole (regardless of whether we won or lost, or whether that player performed well). I can't remember a time when Dota 2 was ever friendlier than it is now (been playing for over a decade now, since beta)… at least, in Turbo. I'm sure the other "full" modes still have quite a bit of nastiness as the games run longer there than in Turbo.
the whole reason I play the game is what TFA is talking about, syncing up and pulling off cool shit with four other random people against five other random people online. when it works it's incredible.
The problem with ARAM is people play terribly and if you're actually trying to play well, it's pretty frustrating. People mess around and then are like "it's just ARAM bro" when you're like "yo wtf plz actually play properly".
In general, League is a frustrating experience because it's basically inevitable that even when you're playing your absolute best, others on the team aren't. The occasional great experiences where everyone has that synergistic gameplay and excellent coordination/execution makes it all worth it (I guess), but every other match has me wondering "why am I still playing this?" heh
I devote most of my competitive energy to Rocket League for this reason. Games are only 5 minutes long and you can actually solo carry. Also you don't have to re learn the game every 3 months when a balance patch hits.
edit: I know what you mean. A great League game makes it all worth it, but those seem to be maybe 10% of the games and the other 90% you are just trying to be a kindergarten teacher trying to keep everyone from going afk.
We see this behavior in rats[0] and monkeys[1] using various methods of directly linking brains, and have shown that communication spontaneously occurs even without physical presence. Video games are one step of abstraction away from wires and electrodes, but the science is still there.
Yeah I was about to mention this, or really any other highly synchronized activity with a degree of improvisation involved. Very cool feeling doing this kind of thing.
I think the point of studies like this using a video game, though, is that it's a lot more reproducible.
There has been a series of recent in the past few decades on brain synchronization. Unfortunately, it's hard to tell whether it's due to the similarity of the task itself (so two people see and pay attention to the same stimulus as the game naturally progresses) or due to some similar predictions by separate people (so that they are "on the same page" and anticipating each other's actions).
I wish there was some sort of control to disambiguate between synchrony due to sensory processing or due to action prediction. Perhaps different games that emphasize the sensory aspect or the action prediction aspect?
Uri Hassan has done some really thoughtful work exploiting the brain synchrony from sensory processing to understand the processing itself, such as finding when people pay attention (more synchrony) or figuring out which brain regions process meaning rather than sound (synchrony from Russian vs English version of a sentence).
Headline says "online", but the description sounds like they're on the same LAN. This matters because the latency between the systems (LAN latency ~ 1ms, corresponding to frequency of ~1000 Hz) is faster than the phenomena they're measuring (2-45 Hz).
I'd assume the mechanism is that the player has a lot of physicality, so their brain's pretending the on-screen avatar is part of their body. If latency is artificially injected into the display or controls or both, do the brain waves develop a phase offset? Or does latency just cause the game's sense of physicality to break down?
Is interactivity and real-time interaction a necessary component of brain wave synchronization? Or does it show up in non-interactive settings as well? How could this be tested?
I'm thinking what might be going on here is the game forces players' brains' movement processing to physically simulate the same vehicle. The brains aren't syncing with each other, they're syncing with the on-screen object they're controlling -- which is the same for both players, causing their brains to sync -- transitively.
Simply put, if Alice's brain syncs with the vehicle on screen A and Bob's brain syncs with the vehicle on screen B and the two screens are in sync with each other because that's what the game's networking code is designed to do, the EEG ends up measuring Alice's and Bob's brains to be in sync.
I'd be interested in extending the experiment: Instead of giving the two players a real-time multiplayer game, have them play a single-player game one at a time, and see if their brains sync to the gameplay in the same way.
One problem is replicability. To produce the sync phenomenon, you might need a game where the controllable character with good "physicality" -- a tight feedback loop between its movement and inputs, to convince the player's brain to treat their on-screen character as an extension of their body. Give the player a character they can't control, and their brain isn't convinced the character is a part of them, and doesn't sync to it in the same way.
But if you give the player a character they can control, different people playing the game at different times will have different inputs, meaning the phenomenon could be there but you have no way to measure it. That is, Player A's and Player B's brain waves might sync to their individual games, but you can't measure that with similarity analysis anymore, because in Player A's game the vehicle took a different track than in Player B's game.
One way to solve this problem is to give them a character with a physicality they have to consider but can't control. For example, shooting targets from a vehicle -- your brain has to simulate the vehicle's path to aim your shots, but you can't control its movement directly. The players' brains' simulations of the vehicle might end up in sync, leading to their brain waves being in sync.
Another way to solve this problem is to create a game with little margin for departure from the correct path -- think about a Mario Maker speedrun level with a tight timer. Successful runs by different players will have very similar character paths and controller inputs, because significant departure from the optimal path results in failure. See if brain waves of different players may end up in sync as they're executing the same moves with the same timing.
I wonder what it means that the brain wave synchronization decreased over the session. Did some signal cause them to start out synchronized and then they gradually drifted apart spontaneously? Also kind of wonder if this will replicate.
So this caused caused me to associate in interesting manners, one thing lead to another, and suddenly I was reading a really wacky paper, which does have some real science, but where it's hard to tell where science ends and fantasy begins [1]. Anyway one formulation stuck with me and came back after having some nice sleep. How lightning storms can cause the schuman resonance to ring like a bell.
What I realized was that lightning is phenomenon in time-domain. And then I realized that action potentials are also a time-domain phenomenon. And what are brainwaves but the ringing of action potentials (this question is less rhetorical than it first sounds, I don't know, maybe there is actually something more to it)? Lightning storms... action potential storm. Maybe it's simply that the start of the game or something similar, that causes a strong time-domain response, basically a dirac spike, with a little resonant ringing.
I think a muscle tiring out is a halfway decent metaphor for this. It would literally being ion concentrations, neurotransmitter vesicles, etc. that need to “recharge”. I’ve got some undergrad neuroscience research under my belt, but no real qualifications for the statements. Notice the synchronization is stronger for the second game. That would be short term synaptic neuroplasticity (and where the muscle metaphor ends).
I would be more surprised if it occurred without means of communication. Now it is just high level cognitive interaction shows low level correlation, which is not very interesting.
