Greedy Goblin

Monday, December 12, 2016

Git gud lol

Since I'm working on the League of Legends matchmaking rigging (or total incompetence), I have a weird flood of trolls saying "git gud lol", meaning that I shouldn't bother about the games strongly favoring one side from the start, I should just improve my mechanical skills to the point where I can just smash 2 enemies at a time, carrying the game alone.

The problem with the "git gud lol" trolls isn't that they are wrong. 99% of those who climbed out of the bronze-silver-gold cesspool did exactly what they suggested. The problem is that their advice is simple but hard. It's obvious, but very hard to complete. It's like telling every poor people to go to school and then university and become a doctor and then they won't be poor. Factually true, completely useless.

Advices that are actually worth something are pointing out something easy to complete which makes difference. Like my queue dodging suggestion. Pressing Alt-F4 isn't hard. Looking up players on op.gg isn't hard. The results are stellar, my last month history has 58 wins, 34 losses.

However "easy" is not a good measurement. Lot of people suffer from waiting (marshmallow experiment) and find it hard to wait half an hour after queue dodge. The proper quality of a good advice is "yes or no". "Work harder" is not yes or no, there is always someone who works harder. However "quit smoking" is yes or no, you are smoking or you are not. To make difference you must give yes-or-no advices, like the "queue dodge" advice. You are either looking up players or you are not, you are eithe quit champion selection when seeing morons or you are not.

Probably that's why I have bigger audience than the "git gud lol" trolls who offer nothing of value to their readers. And this is why I moderate them out of here. They bring nothing to the discussion.

PS: I don't know how placement works, I was put Silver 3, despite I won 8/10 games (losses because AFK-ers):

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Maybe queue dodging is part of the placement decision?

Anonymous said...

Winning matches isn't the only factor in deciding your league placement. Although Riot has never officially revealed how it works, I'm fairly confident it also measures your own performance to some extent (creeps killed, kda) as well as other factors like your teammates/opponents ranking (could have been easy opponents or your teammates could have carried you).

Anonymous said...

They don't reset you MMR when doing placements. Reddit also claims they bring everyone's MMR a little closer to average. They also compress everyone's divisions so that highest you can get is Plat 1, even if you used to be challenger. So you might drop a whole division in the ladder after placements. For example from your op.gg opponents tended to be Gold to High silver, so without ladder compression you might been placed into low gold, but since the ladder is compressed, you get placed into Silver.

Unknown said...

My favourite useless advice is "eat less calories than you burn". Yeah, sure, if you do it you lose weight, but how do you do it in the first place? It's like answering to question "how much is 555^2? Simple! (500+55)^2

Proper weight loss advice are indeed yes/no propositions. Do eat vegetables. Do not eat sugar. Do not drink soda. Do exercise. Do sleep more.

Anonymous said...

You keep one part of statistics out. How many times you dodge?

maxim said...

What's the point of having high rating by queue dodging?

If it is completely impossible to get any worthwhile rating at all by queue dodging, then what's the point of artificially inflating your rating with it to begin with?

Quick yes/no advice brings quick benefits, but if you are in for the long haul there really is no choice but to git gud.

Gevlon said...

@maxim: the point is to get out of ELO hell, where you waste your time without learning anything. There is no point being in a game where bot lane (yours or enemy) is 2x 0/4/0 by the time you get to lvl 5

Anonymous said...

> ELO hell, where you waste your time without learning anything

You can still learn things (or at least practice things). If you're support then you can get accustomed to ward spots and timings. If you're in lane you can git gud at last-hit and zoning stuff. Someone commented on a previous post, suggesting that you stutter-step while clearing jungle camps instead of standing still and auto-attacking.

Mastering these things won't immediately catapult you into pro status, but you should be doing it anyways if you intend to continue playing the game. What's the point in advancing to a higher tier via clever understanding of the matchmaker ... if your individual skill is still Silver-level and your teammates will whine about your low APM?

Or is your LoL gaming focused *entirely* on analysis of the ranking/matchmaker stuff - and you actually *don't* care about personal performance?

Gevlon said...

Of course I don't care about my personal performance in a twitch game.

maxim said...

@Gevlon
I guess i can see "getting out of ELO hell" as a reason, assuming that ELO hell is actually a thing that objectively exists. That being said, I don't think ELO hell exists outside of the eye of the beholder. Most of the time, my inability to learn from my situation is my own fault, not the fault of any kind of ELO hell.

Well, the true test here is whether you'll be able to get out of ELO hell and will be able to actually learn anything in your games beyond that (getting one-sidedly trounced by players way above your skill level is not a very much of a learning experience, either)

Anonymous said...

"ELO Hell" or "MMR Hell" absolutely exists and it can be very easily proven, because it's simple statistics.

In any large group of players, skill distribution will follow a bell curve. The top of the bell is average ELO/MMR - that's why it's called average to begin with. These are the people who are not skilled enough, or dedicated enough, to go beyond the "Hell". And they are the most numerous(again - because it's a bell curve)

Therefore any player climbing the ELO/MMR ladder will have to go through that hump of averageness. Now the problem with LoL/DOTA2 specifically is that they're team games. There's a reason why no one complained about "MMR Hell" in Starcraft 2 for example. If you can't get out of average MMR in Starcraft 2 it's purely your fault, you're just not good enough.

But if you lose in a MOBA then it can also be your team's fault. You can do everything perfectly and still lose because other players were bad. And since average MMR players are the most numerous, the probability that you'll get them as your teammates is the highest.

Of course, the same applies to the enemy team; but that means that getting through the average MMR is nothing but a grind. You basically have to play enough of games so that the statistical "(4 average players on your team plus the good you) > (5 average players on the enemy team)" finally pushes you over the ELO/MMR hump. And that can quite literally be HUNDREDS of games. Hence the "hell".

maxim said...

@Anon
This is predicated on the notion that there is a way to actually tell that a specific person that hasn't yet passed the "ELO hell" is dedicated and skilled enough to pass it. You are presupposing what passing through the ELO hell is meant to prove.

The way i see it, a game that involves 4 other people aside from you is 5 orders of magnitude harder to learn.

Also, it is entirely possible to write up a matchmaking algorithm that gets you through the ELO hell faster. The question is whether Riot's algorithm is that, but there is no way to actually answer this question without official confirmation (or better insider access to the code).

Anonymous said...

Everybody assumes that he's better than the rest, that he does not belong to the "ELO hell" group. Surprise, surprise, the statistics do not lie - the majority of players do belong there and won't ever improve. For most people, this is hard to grasp and in the end, they try to blame everything but themselves: Getting worse teammates than the other team, rigged matchmaking, overpowered champions, unbalanced game, lags, you name it.