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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   1948 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 22, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Video on League of Legends player who obtained rank 1 in two servers simultaneously, as well rank 1 Korea within two weeks. (That’s a top 99.9999th percentile skill in a highly competitive strategy game with millions of players)

Some interesting takeaways:

  • Despite playing the “jungler” role, which is considered cooperative and supportive, the player never listens to his teammate’s ping unless he has independently judged the trade to be beneficial with extreme certainty. The common social expectation of cooperation is ignored, and the player instead focuses on benefits to his character that he can control. Ironically, this produces the most cooperative result, which is winning the game for your team. We see that the social expectation of cooperation is not always the best result for everyone in a group.

  • Wins and losses are totally devalued in importance, and instead the “mundanity of excellence” is pursued. The player cares only about whether he made the statistically correct decision every time a decision arises, not whether it failed once or succeeded another time. This results in a player who is immune to “tilting”, ie bad or flippant moods that arise from loss sprees. Quoting from the eponymous classic study, “excellence is accomplished through the doing of actions, ordinary in themselves, performed consistently and carefully, habitualized, compounded together, added up over time. While these actions are qualitatively different from those of performers at other levels, these differences are neither unmanageable nor, taken one step at a time, terribly difficult […] Every time a decision comes up, the qualitatively correct choice will be made. The action, in itself, is nothing special; the care and consistency with which it is made is.”

  • The math on everything is neurotically and fully understood. Every potential trade is understood in second and tertiary consequences (ganking a lane has risk yada yada, but the secondary effect is loss of jungle farm, and the tertiary effect is that your farm spawns irregularly the next time they pop up). There are only a handful of gank strategies that the player has mastered, but he can execute them with precision.

I've never played LoL or even watched it, but the second and third points were universal attitudes and characteristics shared by nearly all top players in MtG arena. I remember Gevlon Goblin came up with something similar when he blogged about the game, too.

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