Game has more luck than you'd think

[Surma]

Disclaimer:

Before everyone loses their minds and stops reading further: I am not here to dismiss this game takes no skill. If you think I am just skip the topic entirely, you're already convinced and stopped reading.

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Back to the topic:

Everyone likes to think this game is some kind of god sent game from heavens which has no luck to play on wins and losses and is 100% skill and their individual games outcome is determined by skill only, whoever says anything else has not played long enough or is too low tier to understand.

But lets be real, there is much more to do with luck than you'd think, even compared to other luck based games. IF games would be determined by skill only, the winning team would win 16 to 0 every single game. You take a look of big sports games, even international and you see other team dominating massively, and yet there are some shots that they manage to land on the opposing team and even some cases manage to turn the odds and win. What happens on those games? Aren't those 100% skill games? Well they kinda are but not really.

1. The positioning (large scale)
It's basically just a flip of the coin whether you end up being in the good position and defending and getting first glance of enemy. It's same as being in Football and managing to find a good spot where nobody else thinks you'd have good position to get the ball, and then 2 passes later it's your position that suddenly became a great one, but on other side if your team loses the ball you're basically dead weight for the next 5 seconds when trying to catch the opposing player. There's so many decision on large scale that people just do out of near randomness in order to try "outsmart" the opponent, but when everyone is doing this is there really even skill at all in trying to "outsmart" as long as you're not playing the very same strategy every time.

Teams even construct strategies to try beat enemy strategies and then if the team suddenly switch on mid air and hopes they can get a surprise on enemy, it's a coin-flip to determine if that turned out to actually made a real surprise or the enemy just gets the ball easier now because of changed strategy. You start to advance slowly and sure you'll be able to hold the ball longer but then if you lose then it's just closer to your goal. Similarly in CS (like pretty much every multiplayer shooter) it's basically random chance whether you're going to be there in time to get someone out and even more.

You could say there's some skill in this but it's mostly like playing Rock Paper Scissors. Unless you pick Scissors every single round you're not really that predictable.

2. The positioning (small scale)
Are you turning up the right moment around corner? Does the enemy decide to check left or right first when they come around the corner. How well are you able to be detected by fast mouse movements? Some cases wall and the person are harder to detect than others giving brain little more time to process before detecting an enemy. Of course this skill can be honed but the positioning still effects.

Your team dies defending B and you end up in 2v2 situation on an enemy with both entrances to the area covered, or the areas with most likely entrance. Do you make the wait? Is the bomb going to explode? You wait a little and maybe the enemy starts to cover other areas. You make the bald play and rush at enemy with decoy, them thinking it's a flash? Do you just give up the bomb and wait for enemy to retreat? Maybe 1 retreats a slightly too early and you get a kill and the 2nd player manages to kill the other just in time.

3. What enemy is doing (is he ready)?
Some moments you can just surprise enemy throwing grenade at the second you enter on shooting range. Of course if you never carry grenades you'd be more prepared for enemy.

Even without granades people can focus eyes on the map, losing temporarily ability to detect enemy who could enter in vision range. There are probably at least 5 kills every game caused by lack of focus in middle of the monitor because of the map.

And you can always throw as the person on the back if you're coordinated. Similarly in most sports you can't predict what enemy is trying to do due to obstructed vision or generally not having enough data at your hands, you're ending up with near randomly feeling situations where you just casually walk into some area and get a sweet kill with ease, then other times you run into ambush and get shot. This all can be minimized by just trying to look places that enemy doesn't expect player to be and having good team in general to communicate effectively.

What weapons do you and enemy have? Which position does the game favor opponent and when does it you? If opponent carries a shotgun and you rifle then you're more likely to lose moving than staying still because enemy will most likely meet you near corner. Same on the other way around.

4. The mouse position
What place is your mouse currently? Are you able to easily flick to your right after turning right, how far does your mouse movement extend? Maybe you're a bit wrong so your aim doesn't go exactly right place. People aren't perfect. We can try aim between 2 spots with some gun and try pull a shot between the 2 spots as quickly as you think you can do reliably, and you'd still not be able to make "robin hood" shots on the exact same spot time and time again. This is mostly due to not being in 100% control of even your arms.

You see people throwing darts in competitions and they rarely ever get only the maximum scores time and time again. You'd really have to be a champion level to master hitting tiny tiny areas, and still occasionally they miss. Obviously skill plays large factor in minimizing your personal spray of quickly moving mouse and aiming but even the pros miss 5 pixels to the left or right and they miss shots, while everyone, including the TV host is just telling how awesome that 1v2 was, not actually bothering with the nuance of whether that 1v2 actually was deserved win.

5. Is your brain at the highest focus? Do you have the right swing at the brain waves to set you up? Is the moon and the stars on right position for you to do the perfect plays and not fall into some bad move? What's your decision making? How much is actually behind your thinking right now? Maybe your "right call" is actually the wrong one, maybe on some cases your brain decides to go B instead of A. Maybe you decide to duck instead of move and stand. Nobody knows the exact right thing to do all the time... and even if they did it still comes down to...

People get tired without noticing, or they experience something on some round, they pick some weapon they are unfamiliar or isn't best suited for the defend spot, you end up with worse outcome that if you go with familiar. How much are we really on control what we buy from start? Does it just come from habits? And when you actually do something like 4th round only buy taser and actually manage to pull massive save when you catch 1 guy all alone trying to cover A site. Later in the game you end up being the most wealthy guy who can impact outcome of the teammates performance. Or you can drown the whole team behind with your decision to only go cheap build for the round.

Sometimes you make right choices out of just having idea and sometimes they just don't play for your favor at all. People like to experiment things and with that comes the fact that we're not really trying to min-max all the time. How many people buy on impulse just some junk they thought was pretty clever for that specific day on the shop? We aren't that rational thinkers and this game has it actually worse than lets say Hearthstone where you're given very little options on this category to actually think "wrong" given the amount of play and your card knowledge.

6. RNG in the weapon spray. Does the spray hit in the center when you pull weapon down? Does the first shot get fired on the most lethal areas? On many duels when both guys get to aim the same time one has to get the win right, so in that case it's also due to complete chance and only this can be slightly tweaked on favor by getting a head start.

7. Connection sometimes server interprets some frames differently when your opponent has delay or you have delay. Some of these connections even on top of general connection speed like spikes can severely cause tiny break that gives some frames advantage and couple of pixels for the opponent. Connection in mobile games always ends up being almost removed entirely on competitive games where the game is hosted on the place of the tournament, leaving very little to the connection to effect games. But in just casual brainless ranked playing, you'd be getting benefits from good connection and negative effects of being located in bad areas.

8. Other environmental factors

Does your phone start ringing? Is there loud bang on outside so you leave game to check if all is good? Did someone in tournament intervene by running into the box where players are playing and slam the window? Maybe there was weird smell on house so you suspect a fire. Anything that is outside of your personal control and could disturb your gameplay.

9. Teammates

Every single multiplayer game suffers from this. Randomness in teams is why same teams like Nihilum/Ensidia managed to clear WoW dungeons first time and time again. They just happened to be the best team, the best people with skill, the best people with time to play to continuously push wins. Then couple raids later Paragon takes Lich King and then proceeds to wipe the next 5 raid bosses in row. All because some issues with Ensidia people quitting.

Outcome of the game is almost entirely dominated by whoever you team with. Kungen didn't singlehandedly beat all the raid bosses by being a barass tank. Our biggest strength as specie is to be nice to each other and co-operate. READ ME: CO-O-PE-RA-TE. You build a group and you become unstoppable. A competitive game which requires team play must have organized teams. And even if you personally can accomplish to minimize all the randomness, even if you're playing with 4 professional skill level players, if they all live on a farm with 2000ms connection, they're not going to be making any giant tournament wins anytime soon. It's very vital in life as well to find people who can support you and be inspiration to you, not being addicted to ♥♥♥♥♥♥ friends who you only spend time drinking doing their favors for you. If you have 4 friends who have bad connection and bad computers, don't have time to play, you don't play with them, at all, it's a waste trying to get good and build a team with them. Most important thing in life is who you friend with. That's why people in the "real world" consider gamers as "nerds" in the most negative ways. Because people who tend to game don't have friends and that's kinda true when you look at the majority of people in free to play games. Russians playing loud music and kids making screeching noises. Nobody is going to befriend you, start getting some manners and learn to communicate.

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Sure there is some skill as well like playing noise to your advantage by trying to fool people thinking you shot the guy on the ground and then run up the stairs when you in fact just climbed back down to make a surprise on enemy still aiming the top. And of course being good with grenades. Aiming in the right place knowing full well before enemy arrives. I'm not here to deny that game takes skill. But there is way more luck in the game than people generally seem to give credit.

Like literally you bring the idea of luck into a table and everyone loses their minds. Let me repeat: I'm not here to deny there is skill involved in playing CSGO or any shooter.

But compared to the bigger games with more stuff to pay attention to, this game takes way less skill. You could argue battlefield takes more skill because the field of view you have to defend against. Then again distances are so huge it's easier to detect moving person far earlier than playing sitting on grass. There are games like Quake which aim always shows exact spot where you fire bullets, and thus leave you less with player with worse aim defeating you.

The most luck-less game is actually something like Chess or Go (Chinese board game), where you're only given goal of beating a single opponent and there is a lot of planning required.

But maybe Chess or Go isn't the most "skill" requiring game because it's working almost like mathematics and there is plenty of time to choose where in sports and action video games you're not fast enough if you can't make decisions in split second.

[MailFist]

Yep 100% agree

[ZhiNe]

I agree, there is an increased luck factor that no one really pays attention too. It's not like its huge but it's there.

[Surma]

Originally posted by ✪ZhiNe:

I agree, there is an increased luck factor that no one really pays attention too. It's not like its huge but it's there.

Actually it's pretty huge, especially when you're on same skill level.

If you're with massively different skills, luck plays very small part. You could pick team with bronze against masters and they would only win once in every 10 million games. Basically they would have to play 10 lifetimes every single day to get 1 accidental win against pro team who is really trying their hardest.

Now you play pro vs pro and maybe 3rd spot on tournament has like 30-40% Wingate against best team who ends up winning from let's say 3 out of 10 games.

This means that if luck plays differently in Grand finals there is chance for worse team to win championship, which no way means that you can replace that 3rd best team with bronze people and expect them to accidently win championship.

It's like bowling tournament where pros always land 300+ something scores each round and could easily pick any random scrub and call it skill, because they're talented enough to minimize bad throws. Now some fresh guy comes and tries to play bowling and barely gets 80 points in the end of the round.

But you put pro against pro and you'll see easily other guy losing despite loser having better "skill" of being consistently higher on scoring. Of course you can never have higher than 49% chance to win against highly more trained person.

You take a game like Heroes of the Storm, which tried to eliminate randomness on skills and objectives, only giving tiny random of objective spawns, and you see teams still struggling to get massive win streaks on tournament, which means any game out there relies on some factor on luck, even if luck is eliminated.

[Surma]

Of course the fact you play minimum of 16 rounds it's pretty good on eliminating team with luck winning against team with skill, but as skill gap gets closer luck enters into picture.

[PainKiller]

man, its alot of luck. some times you got trolls in your team. lil kids and quetters,,,
i was mg2... nbow im stuck on nova 3-4 couse of those terms... and some times the other team got a cheater... if u play against a "clan". u can be sure they got atlest 1 cheater.
some time happens to me 4 games in a row with quitter and 2 trolling kids...
so yeahy. its alot of luck.

[_JeLaN1E_]

like

[creeky.wiggly.bones]

TLDR . dont try to ruin the game for everyone.. we all know this game is wonderfull

[Lindo [EN][ES]]

TLDR.
Of course there's a little bit of luck, in every game there are, but this is like 2% of the whole game (about gameplay match moments) so... Yeah, you can die by a buttle that wasn't for you, it's part of any game.

[Ugly shit in this stupid world]

First i didnt read all cause im lazy but... yeah its lucky sometimes im on a aimmap and hit a onetap flick and sometimes i just dont hit him... the same flick way and ingame its pure luck what for teammates you get and how the enemys play sometimes they play like they run just in your crosshair or you look always the right way and you peek perfectly around the corners and some games you just come out and you eat instandly a onedeag cause the enemy is already there or you peek out and a second before the enemy cross the way behind a wall and you didnt saw him it needs just to be a second so the game is lucky sometimes you have good times/ parts or games and sometimes you just suck and you are like ''how im so bad wtf'' (sorry for my english xD)

[bLz']

most is wrong

[Ugly shit in this stupid world]

oh so you always peek out when nobody is looking at you or has the crosshairplacement right on your corner... hmmh than you have wallhacks if you peek every time right

[DirtyCross]

Originally posted by bLaze':

most is wrong

[Surma]

Originally posted by bLaze':

most is wrong

Very insightful, thanks.

I'll just delete my post then... any second now...

Nope, your opinion sucks.

[Whoops...]

you must of never bowled before 300+ score haha nice one

[Whoops...]

also im not disagreeing with you but alot of what you said is things that can be said for anything. if you take some of those points you made and point it to chess which you say is prob the most skill based game and factor in that fly that flew on your face after a giant bomb went off outside your house look like RNGesus wasnt on your side