Greedy Goblin

Friday, September 23, 2016

I wish I could /remake M&S

Playing EVE distanced me from the ordinary player. I mean I never actually played with someone in the client. Playing BDO was playing alone. Playing League of Legends in the beginner tier (silver 5, I still struggle clicking the right target in a messy teamfight) forced me to once again get first hand experience with the morons and slackers. While the results may be boring for longtime readers, new ones will probably learn more from these than from philosophy posts.

The LoL devs created the /remake command. It is available if a player is AFK/DC from the start to prevent a 20 mins long hopeless games. Activating it needs 2 out of 4 remaining players pressing yes. No winner reward or loser penalty is applied to the active players, while the AFK-er gets a leaver penalty. It's a no-brainer that you should use the feature.

I got a game where one of the members was AFK from the very start. We got the option to use this feature. I was the only one trying to use it. All 3 other teammates choose to try to win 4v5 in a ranked game. We lost of course.

This has two explanation: the simpler is that they were unaware of this feature and when they saw the popup, they assumed that it's a normal surrender giving a defeat. Slackers typically don't read any materials, not even if they see it popping up on their screen. Maybe I should have typed "Accepting a remake will NOT give you a loss!" before initiating.

The more interesting is if they knew it and didn't care. Why would they pick a very likely defeat? Since I didn't see an "i play 4 fun" in chat like ever, I assumed that ranked LoL players want to win. Maybe I was wrong. After all most useless morons in World of Warcraft battlegrounds were not AFK-ers or obvious bots, but bridge fighters. Fighting on the bridge or another road crossing is a waste of time in battlegrounds, but lot of players do it, because of the instant PvP. Their purpose isn't to win a battle but to defeat another player in PvP. Maybe the morons of LoL don't play to win the battle, but to get good Kill:Death ratio. To "pwn". It's usually invisible, since killing enemy champions have a positive correlation with winning in LoL. However with the case of /remake it was directly opposite. By accepting it, they'd return to the queue and match preparation phase, which is 5-10 minutes waiting. If they play, they can "pwn" in the laning phase, since the missing player wouldn't be around anyway. Only in the later game, where teams are formed will mean a 4v5 fight and obvious loss.

On the one hand, after analyzing killboards of EVE and revealing the true characteristics of whole alliances, fighting simple M&S is a huge setback. On the other hand the reason I started blogging is to show people how they can better their play and their life by handling the M&S around them. So my blog will serve better purpose by posts like this. But I admit, I was annoyed that I had to deal with the lowly crap again.

18 comments:

Anonymous said...

>Why would they pick a very likely defeat? Since I didn't see an "i play 4 fun" in chat like ever, I assumed that ranked LoL players want to win.
I'm sure they do. They just have no idea what they're doing. You're in the Bronze League of LoL. Here's a summary of the conclusion to that lengthy and hilarious treatise:

> >So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.
> >If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose.
> >If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself.
>Bronze players know neither themselves nor their enemies... they just don't know how to play. Now, that sounds really fucking obvious, but it's important to be as broad as possible with regards to the bronze league. It's not specific things that they need to learn. They don't need to learn timings or build orders. They don't need to know how to shift queue commands or how to hotkey armies. They just need to, in the broadest possible of terms, know what to do. They need a goal, a direction, a game plan, some idea, however vague, of where they want the game to progress and what results they want their actions to produce.
>Players can shape the game with the decisions they make, with one stipulation: they need to know why they are making those decisions—they need to know themselves.

You're in for a long and painful grind.

Destabilizator said...

Am I the only one who finds it almost cute, that Gevlon - striking as intelligent and reasonable being - has trouble with clicking/key combos (BDO ;))?

As for LoL - idk if you didn't miss the smartcast and mousecast options of controls? Although I didn't use it back in the LoL days, it might help you a bit.

maxim said...

@Destabilizator
Plenty of people out there who don't have any APM to work with, despite being smart.

@Gevlon
I think you are correct in thinking that the driving force behind not wanting to /remake is to be able to play right away. Also, people do occasionally appreciate an impossible challenge.

Ultimately, you seem to be putting too much emphasis on rank. Rank is certainly a feedback mechanism, but whether the players chooses maximising his personal rank as a goal is up to the player.

I guess you could define players that don't play to maximise rank as "slackers".

Gevlon said...

@Destabilizator: because hand-eye coordination has anything to do with intelligence. See Hawking.

maxim said...

In addition to what the first anon said:
"Knowing yourself" also includes knowing what you play the game for.

Runs With Bear said...

Hey Gevlon,

I second anonymous from above and support your findings: Many a people in Bronze and even up to Silver 4/3 don't have a grasp of how the game is played on a strategic level. They therefore only live and fight for the moment and measure their success on how much they "pwn" the opponent/s (lane/single or the whole team).

Of cause they boast to "know" everything about lane swapping, "all-in-compositions" or poke comps, taking obejctives or when to push and when to stay back, because they watch LCS, LCK or w/e. But they lack the ability to put that knowledge into action.

I have had some success to guide ppl via chat or via pings as often as I got flames. Because of "I want to play the game they way I want".

Cheers and fun in LoL!
Runs With Bear

Destabilizator said...

@Gevlon: I didn't claim it has or hasn't, I just find it interesting. Do tell, when you drive a car, are you in the stand-by mode or do you actively have to think how to shift, etc.?

Anonymous said...

I saw it once, when remake vote was 2/2.

The explanation given to me was "I won 4v5s before". I won't even start on the chances of doing so, or the fact last 4v5 he won was probably years ago, but that is just how morons think - they won it once due to some miracle, they are now entitled to the same miracle, just gotta "try" (aka throw yourself into the enemy hard enough).

Anonymous said...

@Runs With Bear

You are wrong.

First, LCS is watched by less than 3% of players. Even the biggest tournaments are only watched by less than 3% of active players - imagine that for any actual sport, where no less than 50% of active players are spectators to major events. That's why I say that e-sports is a myth.

Second, the ranked mode itself is a niche activity, despite heavy promotion - out of 65 million monthly active players, only 4.8 million are ranked, according to RIOT stats release 2 years ago. That is 7%.

There is unfair matchmaking that keeps every moron above 45% winrate, they can just rely on that to win games for them, thus have no incentive to get better only to get 5% more wins.

There was a good brainhex-based study to show motivations of people who would willingly go against the odds. Turns out it is a hormonal issue, simply going against the odds stimulates synthesis of norepinephrine, which is connected to the feeling of fun for some part of human population. They get a huge dose of it if they win, huge enough to actually get high and addicted, and still get some compensatory dose if they don't. From their perspective, by denying them the chance to go against odds, you deny them their dope of what they consider "fun" (actually just dope ofc). They are simply junkies who naturally think everyone else is the same, and when they find somebody who is more about actually winning (or other objective, like successfully pulling a plan), they are genuinely upset and think they are trolls who came to deny them their dope, and get mad. As long as it lets them stay high, they will never remake or surrender. Polls in 2014 showed about 50% of LoL population to follow that route.

Anonymous said...

If you still looking for a game, then try https://www.etoro.com/
Its not exactly a game and "subscription fee" is high, but its market is close to real life as it can be.

maxim said...

@ latest anon
Firstly, esports are definitely not a myth. 7% doesn't sound like much, but we are still talking hundreds of thousands of people pushing to be the best in their respective games. It will get bigger as time goes by, too.

Secondly, i am not sure why people who just want to experience something new (in the form of, say, trying to win a scenario they haven't won before) are "junkies", while people obsessively-compulsively repeating the cookie cutter sets of actions are not. "Winning" and "pulling a plan" releases its own set of chemicals into the brain, which one can also get addicted to.

Anonymous said...

> Firstly, esports are definitely not a myth. 7% doesn't sound like much, but we are still talking hundreds of thousands of people pushing to be the best in their respective games. It will get bigger as time goes by, too.


Those 7% are "played enough games to get a rank", not "rushing to be the best", most just do it for end-of-season rewards anyway. Overwhelming amount of those utterly suck. The actual competitive scene, as in "participated in tournaments", is below 20000 by my estimation. Amount of people actually qualified to take part in LoL world championship qualification is like what, 1600?
You do realize this is literally below a recognized competitive sport discipline "cricket-spitting"? I'm not kidding. This is where "e-sports" are currently at.

> Secondly, i am not sure why people who just want to experience something new (in the form of, say, trying to win a scenario they haven't won before) are "junkies"

Because they couldn't care less about anything new as long as they can get high enough, and treat every element which reduces their dosage with hostility.

> while people obsessively-compulsively repeating the cookie cutter sets of actions are not.

That is the actual play2win. In a game dominated by picks, cookie cutter sets are inevitable. I consider them better than junkies because they will remake the leaver game, and they will surrender a lost game, while junkies would prefer to stay high in both, wasting time which can be better.

> "Winning" and "pulling a plan" releases its own set of chemicals into the brain, which one can also get addicted to.

Of course. But those have neither the majority, nor degenerate effects of norepinephrine addiction, as stated above with time wasted in a pointless game (they can drug themselves all they want for all I care, as long as they don't go after my time with their dope).

Samus said...

"First, LCS is watched by less than 3% of players. Even the biggest tournaments are only watched by less than 3% of active players - imagine that for any actual sport, where no less than 50% of active players are spectators to major events. That's why I say that e-sports is a myth."

Where are you getting your numbers? The last League of Legends World Championships was watched by more people than the NBA Finals, the NHL Stanley Cup, and the MLB World Series. And you can't think there are nearly as many LoL players as their are of those sports.

I think you have this way backwards. An estimated 450 million people play basketball worldwide, and it was a huge deal that Game 7 of the last NBA Finals topped 30 million viewers. That's roughly 7% of the players (not to mention I'm sure more than a few of those viewers don't actually play). Do you think professional basketball "is a myth?"

Compare that to LoL's 100 million players and 36 million viewers (almost all of which are going to be players). I do not understand why people still dismiss eSports. It has clearly grown rapidly to become a major industry, and it isn't hard to predict that it will eventually "dethrone" sports, if it hasn't already.

Anonymous said...

> Compare that to LoL's 100 million players and 36 million viewers

There were only 14 million watchers, and since this count was reported by the organizing party, this is also likely to be bloated. I won't be surprised if they reported every stream page load as a "watcher".

> The last League of Legends World Championships was watched by more people than the NBA Finals, the NHL Stanley Cup, and the MLB World Series.

No.

> That's roughly 7% of the players

Still more than double of LoL.

> Do you think professional basketball "is a myth?"

Well, it's barely played outside US, and quite a shitty sport in my opinion, so if it declined to be only a bit more than twice of mythic e-sports, that won't surprise me. Also I doubt the game had a free stream, so probably only media-paying customers could see it.

Imagine LoL getting its finals on a paid stream. How many watchers would it have left? The usual 0.8 million of people with more money than common sense?

> I do not understand why people still dismiss eSports.

I won't dismiss it when it surpasses cricket-spitting. So far, it didn't.

Samus said...

"No."

That's a solid argument against something that was widely reported and accepted across all forms of media. You really did some grade A research here and thought this response through.

"That's roughly 7% of the players

Still more than double of LoL."


YOUR NUMBERS WERE 14% FOR LOL. Are you retarded?

"Also I doubt the game had a free stream, so probably only media-paying customers could see it."

The NBA Finals were played on ABC, a free broadcast network. As obviously all major sporting events are, a distinct advantage professional sports still have. Do you live in some kind of cabin in the woods cut off from society?

Damn, Gevlon. Between this thread and the climate change thread, what is it about your blog that attracts complete retards who ignore all logic evidence against their position? "All experts and all forms of media are conspiring for this lie, at no benefit to themselves!" I don't think you would get this kind of nutjob on most blogs.

It has become clear to me that civil discussion with this kind of person is pointless. He cannot be persuaded with reason, his brain is broken. The only thing you can do is meet him with mockery, so that all onlookers can see this is a ludicrous position to hold, worthy only of ridicule. He should not be legitimized by treating his side as something reasonable enough to be weighed equally, because it isn't.

Anonymous said...

> YOUR NUMBERS WERE 14% FOR LOL.

Those are the vendor numbers, can't be trusted for obvious reasons of being not checkable. I just corrected your number, because you took an even more bloated one.

> ABC, a free broadcast network

US only? Nobody cares.

> complete retards who ignore all logic evidence

You.

> It has become clear to me that civil discussion with this kind of person is pointless.

Indeed, it seems your reading comprehension is below discussion level.

Like I said, come back when e-sports can beat cricket-spitting.

Samus said...

"Those are the vendor numbers, can't be trusted for obvious reasons of being not checkable."

Actually, they are the independent numbers produced by the various streaming services used. I have never heard anyone disputing them before you. This was pretty big news, I don't suppose you can provide any sources whatsoever for anything you are saying? I'm sure this is all some big mainstream media conspiracy though. You personal feelings are a more valid source than every media outlet in the world that reported on this.

"US only? Nobody cares."

The US market is by far the biggest sports market...

Okay, your arguments have become more and more ludicrous. You have humiliated yourself enough now, and it is beginning to feel like I am picking on a mentally handicapped child, so I think my work here is more than done. But don't let that stop you, the most convincing arguments showing you are an idiot are coming from you.

Anonymous said...

i had the same. one was afk, and no remake.

reason was, they joined the game as a group. so 2-3 were premades and clicked NO for remake. or didnt even click. they "HOPE" that their teammate rejoins in time.

also in lower elo are many smurfs. which dont give a fuck about the outcome of a game.