Greedy Goblin

Thursday, March 19, 2015

Why top 1% is not good enough?

Blizzard tuned current top difficulty raids pretty high to stop the constant "too easy" whining from those who put in insane effort, I mean 14 hours every day for weeks by their own admission. Well, it works. One by one the topguilds just quit the "race to World First".

Wowprogress has clear data about the progress on current Mythic:
M: Oregorger 1418 (2.65%)
M: Gruul 968 (1.81%)
M: The Blast Furnace 106 (0.20%)
M: Hans'gar and Franzok 1098 (2.05%)
M: Flamebender Ka'graz 938 (1.75%)
M: Kromog 543 (1.02%)
M: Beastlord Darmac 1548 (2.89%)
M: Operator Thogar 421 (0.79%)
M: The Iron Maidens 233 (0.44%)
M: Blackhand 22 (0.04%)

The % values are meant as "% of known raiding guilds". Heroic Kargath Bladefist is something that "everyone" killed, and it got 38399 guilds, 71.80%. If we assume 30 raiders per guild, 100% means 1.6M raiders. WoW has 7 times more players, so if you want to know how much people killed those bosses, just divide every % value by 7.

Anyone who killed anything in current tier Mythic is deep within top 1%. That's the best of the best. And they aren't happy with it. They just can't lay back and say "look, I'm doing pretty well, I'm just going to enjoy it". They keep pushing 14 hours a day, after their real life can't support that and then they quit in anger.

Well, it's a game after all, they can quit and nothing happens. But they approach real life the same way: they must be the best. And they try and try harder until they just grab their chest one day and drop dead or the substances they abuse to take the pressure destroy what made them useful and turn them into what they feared most: a total loser.

Such is the fate of competitive people who just can't make that final jump. Too bad for them. After I got to top 2% in WoW, I was happy. I proved my point (that you can raid well in PuGs) and moved on. Didn't join a topguild to get even higher. What would be the point? What would that change?

People who are already in the top 1% have three choices:
  1. Lay back and enjoy the fruits of what they've earned.
  2. Make the jump and start to change the big picture and not their own position in it.
  3. Try harder until they just burn out or die.
While I don't like #1, it's definitely better than #3. Of course #2 is the best and ironically, it provides what competitive people crave the most: recognition. Not many would know me in EVE if I'd keep ganking miners, becoming the #1 killer of EVE. Neither if I'd hoard trillions of ISK. I became known when I started something that nobody tried before: fighting against a coalition using ISK. It's easy to be the best in that, as no one else was doing it.


PS: he is likely in the bottom 1% in terms of intelligence.
Hey, another pretty battle report.

19 comments:

maxim said...

There is a subset of competitive people that is not so much about recognition, as it is about mastering the system. Those are actually capable of putting in 14 hours a day for months and years on end without burning out all that much.

There are plenty of these in both single-player games and top tier eSports. Not sure how many of these are in WoW, though.

I don't think there are many in WoW, - the system really is not deep enough for this kind of player, - so i do largely agree with your analysis.

Raziel Walker said...

Thor Isu on that 20 billion isk Anshar killmail...
Suggestion: intel mailing list and mail if he logs out in a known system. Won't prevent him from getting kills but will prevent some unneeded losses.

When I read a corp mail saying a known hotdropper had logged out in system I'd use my ishtar instead of carrier for ratting.

Unknown said...

@raziel
You're reading Gevlon's blog filled with PI schemes and trading tips and still rat in anoms?

Talarian said...

It's not much different than Olympic athletes. I had a friend in high school who's mother got Silver in a swimming event, and it apparently crushed her spirit.

2nd place in the world, I'd be pretty pleased with myself, but something about human psychology seems to be hellbent on #1, and if you don't get #1 and you're aiming for it, well, technically you failed, and failure for many folks is difficult, especially if they're not used to failing.

Raziel Walker said...

@Pashko: I burn out on PI real fast, it's just not for me. Sold my carrier two days ago but shooting crosses ranks pretty good on my 'fun' meter.

My most recent income source was selling implants. Still not 'fun' but at a billion isk profit for less as an hour work I'll take that for now.

@Talarian: if your goal is top 3 of the world #2 is success. If you goal is #1 then #2 is a failure.

Jokl said...

For someone who enjoyed trading on the AH in WoW years ago mostly through buying cheap materials and crafting products, or scowering for massively underpriced items and reselling them, would EvE give a similar satisfaction?

Anonymous said...

Not everyone doing mythic is a 14-hour a day raider. I'd imagine that the vast majority of those people are doing 14 hours a week over 3 or 4 nights. They are competing for server firsts or just striving to maximising their progress from a limited play-time.

Samus said...

You forget the mind of the average player. He does Heroic raiding and thinks he's super skilled. Then he sees that "everyone else" also did the same thing, and thinks to himself, "this must be too easy. But I'M different. I'M special. I'M super skilled, so if it was harder, they would all fail and I wouldn't."

Except all 1.6 million of them think that. And when Blizzard does make it harder, 1.5 million of them discover they were wrong, they are not skilled, they are not special.

The "secret sauce" to WoW has always been to make players feel skilled even when they are not. I predict a significant dropoff in subscriptions this quarter or the next (many players will decide to quit, but stick around for a month or two doing fluff like Darkmoon Faire or old content, so the subscription impact is delayed).

Anonymous said...

Bah. Blizzard is too easy on these people.

In addition to the nigh impossible Mythic level, they should have "Nightmare" mode, which is Mythic with all HP's higher based on the setting the raiders choose... 1 to 11.

Then, since impossible isn't hard enough, give out achievements for doing it with less than 20 people... all the way down to 10.

Then stream it on twitch so the rest of us can watch them wipe!

Anonymous said...

the "quit" link doesn't function http://bloodlegion.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=60&t=17602

seems forbidden

Foo said...

@Jokl
Eve markets is far more engaging than the WoW auction house was.

The trick will be finding *your* niche.

Anonymous said...

@maxim

WoW's deep enough on the back end; basically where you write all the dps spreadsheets. Although I'll admit this is only really fun during a new expansions beta phase when you get to figure out the new rotations and what not.

Actual high end raiding works a bit more like performing a symphony. Everyone has to play there own tune, work my CD's move out of fire etc, in relation to the conductor, the boss you're fighting.

The only thing overtly stupid about this sort of game play is that after a certain threshold ping is the only thing keeping you from being in the top 0.001%. What I mean is, during initial content progression your gear is always terrible; you've 10-20% less hp, and dps. You simply don't have the HP to survive more then a tick of anything and you end up only having maybe 0.5 seconds to react to an event. You're in a position where that 200-250ms lag, that was pretty good before, is eating all of your reaction time and prevents you from being competitive.

Anonymous said...

"You're in a position where that 200-250ms lag, that was pretty good before, is eating all of your reaction time and prevents you from being competitive."

Absolutely! This is an inherent factor with on line games, and why some game types like flight sims are catastrophic failures as an online product.

Anonymous said...

So, if I get onto a team for a sport, I should stop trying to improve?

If I get in the top % of results, I should stop trying to get better?

Some people spend a lifetime trying to solve an unsolvable problem.

Some people always want to be doing better than they are, others are happy to just sit where they are and go with the flow.

Different strokes for different folks. We need the highly competitive types, otherwise we would still be sitting round a camp fire, having never explored areas of the world outside of that we were born in, and never having bothered with things like science, maths and technology, after all, what we had before was working perfectly fine, until some obsessed person spent their lifetime trying to make something just a little bit easier or better.
We need the "easily satisfied" people because otherwise we would not have stability.

You can no more change your personality wrt competitiveness than you can your eye colour.

Jokl said...

So are you saying that the eve economy is too complex to have a hand in every market without devoting an unreasonable amount of time.

jokl said...

It's interesting to think that such a mild latency could prevent a WoW raider from being competitive. Is that from your personal experience?

So said...

Alright I followed your final jump link and had to comment on m&s to rational. It is quite a long response.

When plotting a rational course through irrationality you have to start by identifying man and defining your terms. Since man is teleological his course only leads to either his survival or destruction, these are the only possible ultimate ends open to man. Therefore rationality means acting in according with the requirements of existence. Irrationality means acting against the requirements of existence. Rationality has two parts identification and action. Irrationality has misidentification and/or improper action. It is important to note here that rationality is contextual. The context only applies to the available evidence that an individual has, it does not require omniscience. It is thereby possible for a rational man to make an error of knowledge.

Irrationality consists of the active separation of either your consciousness from reality and/or your actions from a proper course given the nature of reality. The fact the man knows the nature of reality does not require a proper action to be taken. Man has free will and thereby knowledge is not a sufficient condition for rationality. He can actively evade that knowledge. However an active approach not to gain knowledge is a sufficient condition for irrationality.

There are two types of irrationality that separate your consciousness from reality. Broadly these two types are called rationalism and materialism (sometimes empiricism). Both declare that mans senses are invalid as knowledge of the world as it actually is. Rationalism declares that man derives his knowledge from deducing from concepts that he holds innately. Whereas materialism holds that concepts do not exist, only brute particular facts as they appear to your type of consciousness.

Psychologically this epistemology leads to two types of mentalities, the concrete bound mentality and the floating mentality. The floating mentality is a person who abstractions are detached from reality. A concrete bound mentality is one who doesn’t abstract or reaches only a certain point and stops. He deals in only in range of the moment particulars. In ethics these doctrines lead to idealism from the rationalism side and determinism on the materialist side. In society these two sides even though they are opposed on the surface come from the same error and need each other to fill the void the other one leaves. The rationalist needs the materialist in order to apply his abstractions and the materialist needs the rationalist to provide him with a long range goal.

There is however a sub category of rationalism that isn’t idealistic called nihilism. It declares that there is nothing that man is certain of save the fact of his uncertainty. That he is hopelessly cut off from reality. Its mentality is the person who actively attacks certainty. It goal is not the building of a floating reality but of an all out attack on reality as such.
The rational man however derives his knowledge from abstracting from the evidence of senses and thereby establish generalizations on which he can act to forward his own survival. Survival in this context is not a mere physical thing in the sense of food, or water but also of the needs of his consciousness; things such as pleasure, and self esteem.

With regard to your four categories the m&s represent the materialists and the socials rationalists. They are the same thing, based on the same error and one is not superior or a transition point to the other. The same coin looked at from each side. Your anti-social category is nonsense. Respect and acceptance is the same thing, positive judgments from others. Even your rational category is entirely other oriented. Trying to manipulate thousands of people with ideas belongs in the idealist category. Rationality means making your life great, flourishing, happy, and successful as your ends. There are only two categories rationality, and irrationality. All the rest is little pieces of each category in the person.

Gevlon said...

@Jokl: EVE market is too big to have a hand in everything even with complete no-life, due to every region has it's own version of the market.

@So: we are mortal. Survival is not an option in the long term.

Foo said...

@Joki : A fully trained single character can have approx 300 orders (think WoW auctions but is split between 'outstanding' buy and sell orders). An account can have 3 pilots.

There are *thousands* of relevant items that are worth trading.

http://null-sec.com/tycoon/

After that, there are 64 markets (or regions) per http://evemaps.dotlan.net/

Some markets are busy, some are idle. Some items are more valuable than others.