Understanding the Relationship between BG composition and Skill Level

I saw this heartfelt post today and was compelled to make this response:

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Understanding the relationship between BG composition (inclusion of meta runes) and skill level is important.

This understanding will help players, like MakarovJAC, at lower skill levels understand why they lose and mitigate the frustration that comes from being consistently beat by meta BGs. A lesson that took me years to understand.

The purpose of this thread is to help players understand that meta runes are *A* factor to winning, but that skill level is at LEAST as important as BG composition. If you’re unwilling to use cookie-cutter meta BGs like other chumps out there and care more about fun BGs and experimentation than “always winning”, then this thread is especially for you!

It is a simple principle and I have a chart which tries to illustrate this principle visually:



Each colored line represents a different "skill level" - I used the in-game ranking categories for convenience, but please note that a "Top 25" SKILL player can easily be ranked as Exo or lower by playing non-meta BGs, as I will explain.

Let's look at the first column - we have 5 players of 5 different skill levels all playing the same cookie cutter "Meta" deck. As you see, in this case skill decides the match and the higher skilled player beats the lower skilled player. As we move right through the columns, we see that this principle holds true as the quality of the BG degrades.

This gets interesting when we consider what happens when a "Top 25" Skill player using a Shoebox BG plays a Rare-skill player using a pure Meta BG. Compare the "Win Rating" points I've assigned each combination on the chart: The Top-25/Shoebox BG player has a "win rating" of 6, and the Rare/Meta BG player has a win rating of 7. What does this mean? It means that, despite being a "better" player, the Top-25-skill player is at a disadvantage against a lower-skilled player who is "crutching" on a Meta-BG.

If you consider more scenarios using the values on the chart, you start to recognize that low-skilled players who use Pure Theme or Shoebox/Experimental BGs (i.e. refuse/can't afford to run Meta BGs) are at an extreme disadvantage, both when playing other low-skill players and even more so when matched against high-skill players playing better BGs!

So what is the lesson that lower-skilled players need to learn from this? If you stubbornly refuse to play cookie-cutter Meta decks (like me!), then you have only one option if you don't want to lose the vast majority of your matches: You must improve your skill level.

This has been proven time and time again by top players who have demonstrated with an ALL COMMON/UNCOMMON BG that they can STILL beat most other players, even players running supposedly "OP" Meta BGs. I've witnessed it with my own two eyes and it was actually a "hard truth" for me as a lower-skilled player who used to blame "OP" Meta BGs for my constant losses. In fact, skill-level is just as important - or more important - than BG Composition!

Final Notes: RNG can always upset the formula! This is why us low-skill players playing bad BGs may "sometimes" win...we got lucky ;-) Also, the "win rating" values I assigned are meant to illustrate the principle of disadvantage, which means a "7" does not always beat a "6". This is particularly true for low-skilled players who make chaotic, unpredictable decisions and can routinely "throw" a game where they started with an advantage due to poor play. High-skill players are far more consistent players, so this "chaos" factor is not as important.

 

TL;DR : Obvious things?

 

Unfortunately, for many low-skilled players like myself, it's easier to blame the meta than to face the truth that we need to improve our skill level if we expect to compete with non-meta BGs. It was a hard lesson that took me a while to learn, and I see this frustrated player facing a similar wall.

 

This isn't a problem only in Pox though, it's something that shows itself in any competitive or any game that can prove difficult when faced with choices.
It's the main reason imo that the AC series are so popular, they make you feel like a winner without forcing you to play the game x amount of hours and becoming good in it.
New players in these kind of games will always have this problem, but the problem grows way out of proportions when the game is unbalanced and lack a playerbase, as is the case of Pox.

How can a new or bad player believe the skills vs runes argument when all the old players are saying the game that the game is currently broken beyond belief. Doesn't help that in the history of Pox some of the broken/unbalanced things have been so bad that even a new player can see it with no problems.

 

im glad this is being discussed , this really is the first step to improving..... when you can finally stop blaming the runes ( even if it can be runes fault sometimes ! xD) and see what you can do about it

 

I think to myself everyday about what I could have done to beat the Fist of Bastion with tales of valor on it, it's been 2 weeks and I still have not found a solution

 

I think the lines need to be less straight, I think the dropoff between Theme and Meta+Theme is probably larger, unless it is a theme with a lot of meta runes already. Overall the concept is good.

 

I'm not sure anyone would argue that Fist of bastion/ tales are waaaaay above the power curve for nora cost but every faction has answers to this

 

Noobs copy battlegroups because they cannot make their own.

They do not have the skills to forge a well made deck so they copy one that has already been forged and is successful. I don't know how many times I seen people play a paladin deck. Paladins are decent theme wise and have a powerful core, but so many people think just because they have a deck full of good cards they don't need to play with basic poxnora skills: "champion control, positioning, utility runes, efficient ways to kill champions rather than blow all their spells and be left without a paddle when they really need them"

With that said, I have made a FS bg based solely on what I was playing against. I was enlightened, FS boghoppers really took no skill. It was literally that easy to play boghoppers.

FS takes very little amounts of skill to be "great" with same with FW. Doesn't mean the players in that faction are more noob than in IS or UD or SL, but its just the way the faction plays is much much more simpler. No one is going to pick a faction with blink, while something like drown exist that can just kill the problem with a relic and a spell cast. No one is going to choose to let the duration of Righteous deflection exist when they have a faction that has access to reaper blade and soulreave. Even if its about nora management to a certain extent to show your skills, some battlegroups like SP meta don't care about nora management because its already built into their meta(or faction bonus).

 

I've actually been *****ed out in general chat for playing Mimic, after I lost a game where I used it. It was really unpleasant to be told that I shouldn't use a rune because it's "bad form", but when the people in Limited do, it's playing the meta.

Besides that, I shouldn't have to resign myself to losing games if I don't want to, or can't afford to, play the meta decks. I'm reasonable skilled, and manage to hop between high rare and low exotic using mostly crap decks, and knowing that I played someone with similar skill and lost because of a rune power thing makes me upset. I want to lose because I made mistakes, not because they had a better deck.

Even with a cookie cutter meta deck, I probably wouldn't hit Limited, but I don't want to see meta decks and feel at an immediate disadvantage because I have to get around 2 Angels and a Magnus.

 

this must be true because it has a graph in it.

 

you are losing because you made mistakes. there are, of course, games that are decided on the first turn (although if you heavily outclass your opponent there's still not much excuse for losing to them), but putting draw-wins aside your losses will never include you playing a perfect game. trust me on this. if i were in this graph i'd be the top 25 player that runs "shoebox" or "pure theme" and often beats other top 25 and limited (when i played, again).

how did i win? they're bad. better than the majority of pox players maybe, but not as much as you would think. there's really not a lot of work to be done to catch them. think of pox skill as being exponential (or being graphed as a j-curve, though that's really a dumb term for it, even if it's perfectly descriptive). i'd say most limited players are on or around the big jump up, the higher tier limited players are on the next rung up, and... while i wouldn't say the gods are a whole next step up, they're close.

meanwhile, the majority of pox players are stuck at or next to 0, with a few progressing slowly towards infinity. they'll probably get stuck, for whatever reason, before they take that first big jump.



the other thing to consider, aside from *all* of this, is that in a competitive environment, creating/using a good deck is part of your skillset. if you don't want to be punished for being as strong as you can be in a competitive environment, i honestly can't think of a competitive environment for you. but it's already been said- the way to get by at that point is with your brain. get better. i'd help, if i ever logged in and i was asked.

 

This is why I yearn for limited formats (ie draft) to return to Pox, once the playerbase rises above 25-50 players online at any given moment.

This is also why I loved the player-run shoebox tournaments. Limited formats help to mitigate the importance of Meta BG composition and provides a "more even" playing field, and also gives us some variety, which is dearly needed...

 

insex have not aged well. cyclofesh hasn't aged at all. it's like a vampire that way.

edit- on a related note to that, i had something like a >90% winrate in draft.

you don't get that with just luck. and only a few people could beat me more than once

 

omg you are like exo league right now pls st fu

 

Not sure if this has already been stated, but the argument has hit the forums quite a few times. It's really quite simple and does not require graphs or eyebleeders:

1. You are new.
2. You watch others play but aren't experienced enough to fully grasp the deck, playstyle or setup behind the BG.
3. You copy the BG.
4. You play the BG.
5. You don't take full advantage of the BG.
6. You don't recognize your own mistakes or missed opportunities
7. You cannot define your opponents mistakes and miss opportunities
8. You lose with the same/similar deck.

From here it depends on each persons own disposition but it can go one of two ways:

1. You have an inner locus of control and you realize that you are new, you're missing things and you work to skill up
2. You have an outer locus of control and you blame it on maps, timers, runes, BGs, power, Burn's mom, etc.

If you are a smart person you will skill up pretty fast, the learning curve will pass quickly.
If you are less smart, that process slows down.
If you are maximum smart you can hold everything you need in mind while playing and be successful at top levels.
If you are between minimum smart to less-than-maximum-smart your ability to grow will be capped somewhere along the road.

That's the way the game stands right now. You might think it wrong, weird or perfect, but that's how it is.

Unlike what they teach in school now and demand via the media, not everyone gets the blue ribbon.

 

Not sure if bask still has me on forum ignore , but i disagree to a degree......i think anyone can get to the top levels of the game if they practice enough

 

Baskitkase is a virtual dwarven lord of fury, power, wisdom, and style. I might have a crush on him. Not 100% sure.

Outer locus is real, but inner is the area each person should choose to direct attention and energy. Only u can decide peeps.

+1, would real all of the above posts again. Les saludo.

Edit:

U really need to get out more. Meet people. See the world. Lots of tards running rampant.

 

I never considered my self very smart or anything like that......so i think its fair to say if i can get to upper half of limited, anyone can

 

there is a way to practice yourself up, sure, but consider all of the veterans of the game, the people that have played since the game began or what have you

think of the percentage of all those old players that are actually worth a Bane Shift.


it's a bit bigger than the percentage of the new. just a bit.