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Anyone find it difficult to "work hard" for reasons that essentially boil down to disbelief? For example, I play some multiplayer games, mostly RTS and MOBA games. I can see some interesting ways to improve at those games. For the RTS games, some of the ideas I had involved a spreadsheet, of course, and an autohotkey script that would make an additional save game every time I pressed the build worker key so that I could easily compare different decision branches while hill climbing toward an optimal build order. I can see some experiments I could perform in Dota 2, such as running a custom game on 2 computers to explore how I could take advantage of blind spots in enemy vision, or doing some mathematical modeling and running a solo game to figure out the exact patterns of how waves of enemy creeps cascade and yoyo from losing to overwhelming the enemy creeps.
But then I think, hardly anyone even bothers to consistently watch replays. At least, that's my perception. These ideas I'm having, they're weird. I've never heard anyone talk about doing this sort of thing. Would someone really try this hard to win at a video game? Well, eventually, I had the chance to join some high skill discords, and, yes, they made spreadsheets, the were timing things down to the second, they were re-running test ideas dozens of times until perfect, they'd spend hours testing and looking for bugs. Turned out that really was how some people got good. I had the right ideas, but I couldn't believe in them because I couldn't believe others were trying that much because up to that point, I hadn't been trying that much so that must be how others acted too, because otherwise they'd have talked about the extra things they did.
It's all these soft spaces where you can take the time to figure out best ways of getting upvotes on reddit, best ways to get lots of clicks on youtube and it's hard to believe that someone would resort to something like giving their comments an initial boost through alt-accounts so they can ride their initial higher visibility to thousands of upvotes, but that was exactly what incredibly reddit popular and actual scientist Unidan did.
Which all kind of circuitously leads me to the following point here. If it's so easy to have such a bias like "nah, everyone's just playing it straight for the most part" even in the face of seeing that sort of belief overturned multiple times, how much are we discounting the possibility of various conspiracies by a similar kind of bias in favor of ordinariness? If these sorts of weird and trying too hard kinds of tactics are effective at getting you to, say, the top .1% in some endeavor, then even if people willing to bend the rules or go to insane lengths are rare, they could easily make up a substantial proportion of such a small sample of people. For example, could Epstein have actually been running a business model of offering up underage girls to the rich and powerful, surreptitiously recording it, and then blackmailing them? It seems insane, it seems something at least 95% of people wouldn't even dare try, it seems high risk, but if you could pull it off, would you not be a rich man?
I'm surprised that you didn't expect people to watch replays in the most tryhard game in the world. People doing that sort of thing wasn't even an open secret. It was just open.
Well, people talk about it, but like, how often do I see "watching replay" in a friend's status bar or a replay review on someone's stream? It kind of seemed like one of those things everyone said to do, everyone agreed is good, but hardly anyone actually did.
pro players of anything are always actively studying their own games and their opponents. Watching replays is less valuable when you're not a pro playing against random people in matchmaking. Self critique is not as effective if you are below the skill level where there is nobody better than you that can simply point out the mistakes you failed to notice.
Your friend isn't pro enough to benefit as much from watching replays over just playing another game in the same amount of time.
Also, people watch replays played back at a higher speed, or skip to important moments to save time.
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Watching a replay goes very quickly. You're likely interested in specific parts of the game and jump around to those to watch those.
Most of the game time is completely uninteresting because you know exactly what happened and why.
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