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Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Playing with people who are better than you is easy. Just accept they're better than you and keep losing.

Decide if you are comfortable with your current skill level or not. If you want to get better, train up. If you are happy with your skill level, then keep losing. That's fine, and I think its healthy to decide to place limits on your skill.

Skill is an infinite treadmill: you can continuously get better at pretty much any subject from now till the end of time. Deciding when to get off the treadmill is just as important as deciding to stay on.

> Games of skill are less appealing if you know a certain person will always win.

I disagree. I will always lose to Magnus Carlsen in Chess. I will always lose to my friends in (insert any FPS game here, I'm bad at all of them). I will always lose to Mew2King in Super Smash Bros: Melee.

My inability to defeat the greatest players of a subject does NOT make the game less appealing. Indeed, I often times seek out the challenge of stronger players, especially when I'm explicitly trying to get better at the game.

Losing constantly by playing vs players who are better than you provides a learning experience. You should find other players you can win against of course: you'll never learn to win if you keep losing. But losing teaches you what bad-habits you've formed from playing vs weaker players.

I think that's the key: losing all the time is unfun. But I can definitely take "losing for a whole week" or "losing for a whole month" in a row, especially if its for training. Finding players of lower skill, equal skill, and higher skill, is important.

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> If you want to get better, train up.

This doesn't mesh with why lots of people play things. It's play. It might just be a nice way to pass the time. I would rather play basketball against someone my level than Steph Curry playing all out. I'm not playing to win or even to get better (getting better is fun, but isn't the point). I just want to have fun.

For many kinds of play, if you have to train for it, you may as well play something else.

I used to play table tennis against my grandfather when I was in my mid teens (he was on the young side). At first, I needed a 15 point head start for it to be close (first to 21). After playing every day for a couple of months we started on equal terms and I only mostly lost.

That was fun! I learned and improved but also every point I won was a victory. Had I played against a professional I'd probably never have won a point, never have got better, and quickly got disheartened. There is just a limit past which the skill gap stops things being fun imo

I use to play during lunch at college, but sometimes there were only asians to play against who hold the bat upside down and hit the ball so fast you could barely see it.

After a while I managed to return the ball back and forth a couple of times, maybe they were going easy on me tho :)

And I don't find some games fun anymore if you or anyone around the table goes in for the kill; simple example that most people will know; monopoly. There are strategies to almost surely win but it makes the game boring and even annoying for everyone involved. So we usually added rules to prevent those strategies. If someone 'is better at that' it means he/she is a boring/non-fun player and no-one will play anymore after 1-2 games. In general; there are a lot of games really not fun at all for people who always want to win no matter what.

I thought the point of Monopoly is to learn that monopolies are not fun, or fair

The point of Monopoly is to make money for the owner of the trademark, and condition people to buy games based on inertia, advertising, and nostalgia rather than complexity, balance, or fun.

Fortunately we have a plethora of much better games now. I think monopoly will be a quirk of history soon. How many boomers have never played monopoly (and hopefully never will) because they have so many other games to play.

I don't understand. Boomers? People born between 1946 and 1964? I think most Boomers in North America and Europe have played Monopoly at least once. "Monopoly has been translated into 47 languages. It's played in 114 countries. It's sold more than 275 million copies. Hasbro prints $30 billion in Monopoly money each year, and well more than $3 trillion has been printed since 1935." -CNN https://www.cnn.com/2015/03/19/living/feat-monopoly-80th-ann...

Boomers? Did you mean millennials?

Was that an autocorrect from "zoomers" to "boomers"?

and interestingly enough, the inventor of the original Monopoly (Elizabeth Magie and "The Landlord's Game") created an alternative rule set called "Prosperity" that was intended to balance out the Matthew effect [1] but this was left out of Monopoly when it was allegedly poached from Magie's game.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

> And I don't find some games fun anymore if you or anyone around the table goes in for the kill; simple example that most people will know; monopoly.

Monopoly is a bad game though. Play Acquire instead.

I am not like some kind of avid Monopoly player; I play a game on a dead rainy sunday afternoon at family gatherings. They won't have Acquire etc. They have scrabble, monopoly and a bunch of other older but very well known games.

I'm curious to learn more about those monopoly strategies and rules against them.

I think there are times for both kind of play. It's annoying when people only play one kind of way. It's like beating you is all that matters to them.

Most people mess up Monopoly in two ways:

* Common house rules prolong the game. Don't use house rules.

* People forget the rule that when someone lands on an unowned property and doesn't buy it, the bank auctions it off.

A game of monopoly should take about an hour. It's almost always those exact house rules that people create that make the game drag.

I have not played it with only adults for a long time, only with (young) children mixed and parents/family; there are a lot of examples to ruin the game (for me and kids and most adults except 'the winners' (woohoo! I beat some kids at a boardgame!)); one of them (one of the most annoying imho) being that if you pick up (at least) 1 of every monopoly and then refuse to trade/sell unless it's for crazy amounts. So no-one can have a monopoly; then it's just a tiresome waiting game, so people (esp kids, but me too as i'm bored already thinking about it) are going to forfeit or will just buy stuff at stupid prices hoping to get lucky (which they won't usually). You don't need to do that and you can just 'sit it out' but it ruins the game element completely. Ofcourse this requires luck with the dice but more often than not, the monopolies are quite evenly distributed in my experience. It depends what you get, but if you have this hand, then you will probably win by tiring everyone else out (especially because really no-one else cares about winning; we were just wanting to have fun).

> It's like beating you is all that matters to them

It does, which is weird considering this is not actually real life or real money; it's (can be anyway) a nice boardgame on a rainy sunday.

We had a house rule where no trading could happen until all the properties were owned by someone. Created a frenzy and lots of excitement waiting for the last one to be rolled on.

I find scrabble that way too. When people start blocking good letters just so that you don't use them, it starts to lose it's appeal.

This also happens with Ticket to Ride. But fortunately, most people I've played with, don't intentionally block routes they don't need at all

> This doesn't mesh with why lots of people play things. It's play. It might just be a nice way to pass the time.

If training isn't fun, then don't train up. Instead, learn to be satisfied with losing.

Which is fine: I'm satisfied when I play a decent game (but lose) against stronger players. I probably was going to lose anyway.

Being satisfied with your skill level, and learning to enjoy a game without necessarily improving at it, is important. For most of us, playing games is just a hobby. Our professions... the skill we ACTUALLY practice to get good at throughout our lives... takes priority over our hobbies.

Part of what makes a hobby a hobby... is the decision to remain weaker than professionals at that skill. I'll never become as good of a Harmonica Player as Magic Dick (who played "Wammer Jammer": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0q2Vy3fx2I). But that's fine, because Magic Dick is a professional Harmonica Player.

I believe you're imagining a scenario where there isn't much of a skill gap, e.g. a match between a newbie and a competent amateur; a competent amateur and a professional; or a professional and a grandmaster. Losing to someone who's still "within your sight" can still be fun, because there's still an element of challenge to the game, and there are still stakes—i.e. you can still control how badly you lose, and therefore there's still something to strive for (to lose by a smaller margin.)

But when your level of skill gap with another player is too large, such that you won't learn anything by playing them and the entire match will be under their control 100% of the time, then there really isn't any point in playing them, and you'd be far better off—both for your enjoyment, and for your growth—to play against a weaker player.

It might be fun to have a sprinting match against your local state champion. It might even be fun to have a sprinting match against Usain Bolt. But there's no point to having a hypothetical sprinting match against The Flash. You wouldn't even leave the starting line before he crosses the finish line. There's no gradation of success available to you. You're simply crushed.

Likewise, there's no point, if you're a five-year-old, to trying to (seriously) arm-wrestle an adult. Your undeveloped strength will be overwhelmed without accomplishing the slightest movement of the opponent's arm, right at the beginning of the match, every time. You won't even get to practice the skill or build the muscles involved in arm-wrestling.

> But when your level of skill gap with another player is too large, such that you won't learn anything by playing them and the entire match will be under their control 100% of the time, then there really isn't any point in playing them, and you'd be far better off—both for your enjoyment, and for your growth—to play against a weaker player.

Unless you're playing in an exceptionally small or dying gaming community, most video games and online board games have good matchmaking services, which provides a quick-and-easy matchup to people of similar skill levels as you.

A lot of the discussions in this thread are about Overwatch (one of the most popular video games right now), or Chess (one of the most popular board games). You should have no issues finding opponents close to your skill in either of these games.

Er, the article is clearly about "participatory games" (either single-player games with leaderboards, or multi-player games intended to be played with friends or family-members rather than strangers) and how they should work vis-a-vis accessibility considerations, like "assist modes." Should a speedrun of a game appear on a leaderboard if you had to play with aim-assist due to Parkinson's? Etc.

If there's an ELO matchmaking system in place, then the whole discussion—"How to play with people who are better than you"—is moot. So, for the purposes of discussion here, you should probably assume that there isn't such a system in place for the game in question. (The people who are bringing up examples from games with ELO presumably haven't read the article.)

Huh, you have a pretty different perception of what makes a thing hobby vs. work. For me, a hobby gives you a permission to get better - because play is an important part of getting better. Whereas at work, you're constrained by the context in which your work is embedded. For instance, when working on a hobby project, I can afford to do each piece of it right, to the best of my abilities - whereas at work, I have to deal with things like team velocity, time to market, list of features driven by sales instead of utility, etc. - all of which preclude doing great work.

At least for me, part of the motivation with playing things is the idea that it is practice, and discipline, and improvement. Part of it is escapism, to be sure, but not all of it.

This is where each of us is unique mix - I couldn't care about improvement in things I do for fun. If it comes naturally, great, if it doesn't, same great. I know many people who aren't like that, especially competitive ones (which I consider a rather big disadvantage in life if one of your goals is to be a happy content person).

The only reasons I do it - to have fun and relax - is already there, it doesn't get better the better I get since there is not top level cap. One example - I do climbing, in & out. If I climb 4c (french grade, which is very beginner level), say after some accident or other longer time off, its the same type of challenge as climbing routes at 5c/6a level after some training period. It really doesn't change anything for me, the challenge, fear of fall/death, pushing through it and sense of accomplishment is the same.

Maybe not the best mental wiring to achieve most in life in measurable aspects like career or net worth, but sure as hell I can be happy with little. It is great. I wish more people were like this.

You can be competitive and still have fun.

In my sport, I train and enjoy competing as hard as I can.

I find the highs I enjoy from winning over a player who is a similar or higher skill level than me outweighs the disappointment of losing to someone I shouldn't. And it seems the better I get, the less often I seem to lose to people that I shouldn't. I enjoy seeing that progress and enjoy competing against better players.

I've lost close matches and still enjoyed every second too.

I'd add to that. I think this doesn't just vary person to person, but also game to game, and even moment to moment. I'd compare it to food, in that it's not one size fits all, even for a given person and a given point in their life. Sometimes you want steak. Sometimes you want ice cream. You ought to eat some veggies. Sometimes you just need a damned cup of coffee.

If you're just playing to pass the time, why does it matter if you lose to Steph Curry or not?

If someone is off the scale better at something, playing becomes tedious and boring. That's not really fun to pass the time (or as a sport; when I go to kickboxing, I don't really expect the guy in our gym who won the EU championships a few times to KO me all day long like if he is competing to an equal). The reverse is true as well; unless teaching, why do they want to play with you. Boring for them too (unless they have gigantic ego's and get kicks of winning from anyone).

Steph Curry probably enjoys just being on a basketball court, even playing against people of much lower skill level. No reason he can't still work on perfecting his jumpshot for himself, even if it's only me guarding him. Lots of people practice shots by themselves.

I'm speculating here, but I think people who don't enjoy it on some level usually don't make it to that highest level in sport. Every top-level sportsman I can think of looks like they enjoy it.

It doesn't matter if you lose - what matters is that you feel like you have some involvement in the game. Good games are like conversations - you can enjoy a conversation with someone who's way more knowledgeable/smarter than you, but not one where you don't get a word in at all

The better player needs to agree to play or converse at a handicap for this to work.

I can have a fun conversation with my two year old, but it's going to be pretty limited in depth.

> but not one where you don't get a word in at all

So no podcasts/radio-or-tv shows then?

Yes, those are a no go if you want to make conversation.

Because there is no excitement or any possibility of winning motivating you to even pretent do put effort in

Winning is not the only motivation though.

If I was playing against Steph Curry, I would try to come up with achievable goals, such as trying to defend well enough to force him to take a jumpshot instead of a layup, trying to make one of my own shots, trying to get him to fall for a pump-fake, trying to get a steal, trying not to fall over, etc.

Winning may not be, but there's always an achievable goal you can strive for.

Doesn't seem like you are playing to pass the time, in that case. Seems like you are playing to win. The difference is in the former case the play is the reward in itself and in the latter case you need to feel victory over someone. Seems crypto-competitive and kind of weird for that reason.

He is playing for enjoyment and recreation. Playing and losing to Steph Curry does not give him that. Playing competitively with his friends does it.

I think you are reading things into 'play' that aren't there. What you seem to suggest is that naming anything 'play' makes it impossible for you to not get enjoyment out of it, since there are no conditions for you to consider it play?

Yea there are people who enjoy the act of training and people who do not. Personally I'm the former but it's easy to understand why people don't want to turn a game into work.

The issue isn't you lose to Magnus Carlsen. The issue is that when you play chess, all you can play against are wanna-be grandmasters who drive the skill floor up to the point where you need to make a heroic effort just to be mediocre.

You have to understand, you are making the hardcore fallacy; you assume everyone will stick to the game no matter what and take whatever abuse or steps they need to git gud. It doesn't work that way; what happens over time is the better people raise the skill floor by driving weaker players out.

And increasingly the skill floor is getting ridiculous. Overwatch University on reddit recommends players post videos of matches for point by point analysis on how to get better, and half the posts are just frustration in dealing with the drudgery of playing so many matches to even climb.

> half the posts are just frustration in dealing with the drudgery of playing so many matches to even climb

This has nothing to do with skill floors or ceilings.

Then play newer or different games. Overwatch has been out for a while by now. Chess has been out for a rather long time by now.

> The issue is that when you play chess, all you can play against are wanna-be grandmasters who drive the skill floor up to the point where you need to make a heroic effort just to be mediocre.

On chess.com you start at 800 ELO, on lichess.org you start at 1500(?) ELO and rapidly decline if you lose many games, until you get around where you should be. You do not need to make "heroic effort" in order to start gaining ELO. You do need to learn basic chess theory like how much the pieces are worth, and some strategy, etc, but it's really not that bad if you genuinely like chess.

> It doesn't work that way; what happens over time is the better people raise the skill floor by driving weaker players out.

Alternatively, people who play push the game forward and make exciting breakthroughs, keeping the game fresh. No one is forcing you to play a game that you don't like. There's no point in shaking our fists at the sky because we didn't start playing a game right when it came out.

Games are fascinating when they -don't- explicitly cater to new players. TF2 is a hard game, yet it's one of my most played games at ~1700 hours. Why? Because I was able to improve and because it has a high skill ceiling (and floor) for certain playstyles.

Pressing Shift to rocket up as Pharah is totally boring compared to learning how to Rocket Jump as the soldier. Learning how to do that took me weeks, yet it's now one of my favorite aspects of TF2. I have hundreds of hours in tf2 just on jump maps- something that wouldn't be possible if TF2 were designed to have as little skill floor as possible (like overwatch).

I would think the ideal to aim for would be an "easy to learn, hard to master" type game. Chess fits this model well, especially with the ELO system matching you with players of similar skill levels so you can improve incrementally. CS:GO, which I used to play, had a similar thing (though it was plagued with other issues).

TF2 doesn't seem to have this option and thus new players don't get much of a chance to learn because they're immediately thrown in with people with 1700 hours of gameplay and don't get a chance to learn the necessary skillset incrementally by climbing a ladder.

Of course. Matchmaking is another issue. Even the new call of duty has had issues with its Super Balanced Matchmaking (SBMM).

However I disagree that people don't get a chance to learn. Unlike chess, tf2 is a team game, so even if the teams aren't super balanced it's still possible to play. Unless one team is absolutely stomping the other, which happens more frequently ever since tf2 made some matchmaking changes in the Meet Your Match update- that's a different can of worms.

> And increasingly the skill floor is getting ridiculous. Overwatch University on reddit recommends players post videos of matches for point by point analysis on how to get better, and half the posts are just frustration in dealing with the drudgery of playing so many matches to even climb.

Is Overwatch truly a game that you fundamentally enjoy, win-or-lose ? Or is Overwatch the kind of game where you can only enjoy it if you win?

If playing more Overwatch is "drudgery" to you, then perhaps you should quit. You should enjoy the games you play. I am serious: there's no real reason to stick to a game if it is making you feel bad. We should play games for enjoyment.

> you assume everyone will stick to the game no matter what and take whatever abuse or steps they need to git gud.

My assumption is that a good game must be enjoyed by the "losers".

Bowling, Golf, and races like 5k, Marathon, and video-game speedrunning, have no "losers". Its just people aiming to improve their own score over and over again. Maybe these games are more suited to your personality.

I have a 14-minute Super Mario World (SNES) speedrun (11-exit). Its not world-class or anything, but I did have to practice and study to get to that point. So its a thing I'm proud of.

------------

But yes, I truly do enjoy competitive games that I've chosen to play. BlazBlue, Super Smash Bros, and Competitive Tetris, and Puyo Puyo... I've played these games a lot because I enjoy them, win or lose.

Frankly, you are NOT going to get good at a competitive game unless you enjoy losing a LOT. The best players in the world are incredibly talented, with insane reaction times. And now that I'm over the age of 30, my reaction time has begun to decline, so I'll never be as fast as I used to be. Chances are, I'll never be a world-class fighting game player, its too late for me. Reaction times peak at around age 24 by the way.

That doesn't change my enjoyment of Blazblue or Super Smash Bros. But its something I've accepted in life. I still have a lot of fun playing the game even if I'm locked-out of being a world class player.

"The hardcore fallacy" is such a useful term I had not heard before. Thank you.

Rats won't play with each other unless the smaller rat wins 30% of the time, even though he will lose every game if the larger rat chooses to do win every game.

A decade ago Call of Duty 4 introduced an under-barrel grenade launcher for the m16 rifle as a way to get easy kills even if you could not aim. The devs called it 'first order optimal strategy' and players called it the noobtube. CoD4 did the right thing, every new player still gets stomped but it ends up being roughly 4-20 instead of 0-24. Game design on this matters.

Honestly, I don't understand the sentiment of "if you're losing, just get better". That's not what games are, socially. You can have contests in high jumping or pi recitation, but no one organizes weekly games of reciting pi. The definition of "game" is an endless debate, but all of the central examples have both winning and replayability. If you can't play two sessions in a row and hope for something novel the second time, it's probably not a game at all. And part of what makes a good game is providing ongoing interest for many players.

I like chess, but I almost never play chess against anyone I know.

It's too skill-based, and (ironically) too interactive. The better player reliably wins, substantial handicaps warp the game, and at least at amateur levels the better player is often completely dominant. Not only is there no hope of winning, there's very little room to make a good play or try an interesting strategy. If two random people who are familiar with chess sit down to a game, it's very unlikely to be an interesting experience.

There are a lot of ways to mitigate this problem. There are "low skill" strategies that prevent blowouts without dominating (e.g. CoD4), rock-paper-scissors strategies (Stratego), graceful handicaps (Go), or satisfying play while losing (Catan). And of course, hidden information and randomness provide novelty in many of the most popular games like Poker.

Chess is not a bad game by any means, but it's not a party game either. "Accept that they're better and keep losing" is good advice if you want to improve at chess, but it does nothing to provide entertainment for mismatched players. There's nothing wrong with wanting a game that's fun, rather than just educational.

A good way in game design is also to introduce randomness. Hearthstone is definitely a skill game but even with massive skill difference the win ration will more likely approach 60-40. It's good for new players to have fun and stick to it.

I stopped playing Starcraft 2 after I realized that there is just no chance of getting anything done unless sinking massive time into it to train.

Randomness is a very popular (and good) answer to skill gaps, but it's also a dangerous knob for game designers to turn.

I quite enjoyed the early days of Hearthstone, including the random factors in who won. But successive releases kept adding more randomness, and specifically uncontrollable randomness, until I quit the game. (It may have improved, and this didn't make it a bad game. It just wasn't for me anymore.)

Most people recognize that War is a bad game, because it's entirely random and has no element of choice. But a game like Mario Party is full of choice, and yet the random payouts are so large that skill is often irrelevant. Even near-perfect play can be dominated by random factors, and those random elements (specifically, bonus stars) aren't numerous enough to average out over the course of a game. That's what broke me on Hearthstone: the feeling that the randomness that was too scarce to average out over one session, too potent to avoid or overcome, and too unconstrained to strategize around.

At the far end of that spectrum, a game like poker consists almost entirely of strategizing around randomness, because the random factors are common enough to view statistically and only indirectly produce winners. And so the better poker player will win pretty consistently, and having fun across skill gaps starts to become difficult again. (Hence the popularity of moderate-randomness card games Euchre for social play.)

Randomness is often a good addition to games, especially in combination with hidden information. Not only does it make play across skill gaps worthwhile, it makes them more replayable. But there's a lot to be said for adding it carefully, in places where players can exert some measure of control.

> A good way in game design is also to introduce randomness.

Randomness management is one of the main transferable skills from one game to another. Most good Poker players tend to be able to easily become good at other games with randomness.

Huh, the under-barrel grenade launcher anecdote would explain why, when playing Alien vs. Predator multiplayer with a bunch of colleagues some 12+ years ago, I was being repeatedly told to never use the pulse grenade launcher under standard marine rifle, because "it ruins the play".

Do you have a source for that claim about rats? Interesting if true.

It was part of Jordan Peterson's spiel, he got it from Jaak Panksepp's book Affective Neuroscience.

The problem that I see is that it is often difficult to learn when you are going against someone who is sufficiently better than you if they play their hardest.

For example, in martial arts an important skill for a beginner is recognizing openings in an opponent's defense. However, an experienced fighter has few openings (so the beginner gets less practice) and can often defend against an attack even if they were open (so its difficult for the beginner to recognize when they successfully identified an opening).

At the early stage it's often a better teaching tool for the experienced fighter to purposely use a strategy that tends to create openings (e.g. by using more aggressive strategies rather than counter attacks), to fight with a handicap, or even to purposely leave themselves open and allow the beginner to score a (non-damaging) hit.

Go uses a very elegant handicap system of spotting stones. The weaker player essentially takes between 1 and 9 scripted moves before the actual game begins.

It's an excellent system for several reasons. Most obviously, it largely preserves the flow of a "normal" game, whereas something like handicapped chess has completely different opening play. But another major benefit is that it remains a good way to practice for equally-skilled play. The skills used to overcome or capitalize on a handicap transfer effectively to playing out a weak or strong position in a neutral match. There are relatively few handicap-specific strategies to play, and "irrational" play is generally less rewarding in handicapped games than simply mismatched ones.

(I doubt this applies in martial arts, but in many games a heavily-outmatched player is actually rewarded for bad play. If their odds of winning on performance are bad enough, they'll succeed more often by making surprising or high-variance moves and hoping for an error. There's an excellent story from DF Wallace about how as a teen he won local tennis tournaments by simply playing safe and waiting for unforced errors, but actually had less upward potential than the people he beat. When unforced errors became scarce, he had no strong play to fall back on.)

Interestingly, the handicap system could be extended beyond nine stones without losing too much elegance, but by tradition it isn't. It's understood that across any greater skill gap, it's essentially impossible to play a real and educational game. The weaker player won't be able to trace why a move is good or causes them to lose, and so handicapped games should be replaced with either direct lessons, or play tailored to education instead of competition. It sounds a lot like the situation in martial arts, and I suspect holds across a great many other games and competitions.

Chess is a particularly poor example for your point because piece odds (the better player starting without a piece... escalating from pawn to queen) is a really good handicap system that not only makes the games more interesting but also gives each player more useful training. The better player how to play when behind and the worse player how to try to win with a material advantage.

And you probably aren’t learning valuable lessons just losing to a much better player over and over again straight up. They won’t be the type of positions you’d get against players of your skill level. A much better player is likely getting decisive advantages out of the opening or early middle game, whereas especially at lower levels the middle game and endgame are much more important.

> My inability to defeat the greatest players of a subject does NOT make the game less appealing

Yes, it does. To them.

Anyone who is driven to get better at a game will be bored with playing with or against clearly worse players very quickly.

It depends on the game. Eg. I'm fairly advanced in Brazilian jiu-jitsu (~10 years of practice, brown belt).

The typical approach that I also follow is that when I want to practice some technique I'm not well familiar with, I try it on white belts first, iron the obvious wrinkles out, and then I keep on going up the skill ladder until I'm able to execute it on my equals.

As I practice it against stronger and stronger opponents, I'm correcting increasingly subtle errors (that they're capable of using against me, while I could get away with them against weaker sparing partners).

It would be more difficult to try new stuff against someone of equal skill straight away, it makes much more sense to work your way up gradually.

It's obviously a physical, but still highly technical sport - and I imagine the same may hold true for many competitive activities.

I feel like BJJ is pretty unique in this regard. It's the only activity I've come across where it's still fun to go 100% against a complete newbie.

Maybe. Another interesting paradox about it, as one of my former instructors once pointed out, that it's actually harder to submit a white belt than to submit a blue belt :)

The former one may be more clueless, but offers 100% ferocious defence without attempting any reasonable attacks of his (or her) own.

You can sort of see how progressing to the next step - from white to blue - is an inevitable setback of sorts.

Funnily enough, this phenomenon vaguely makes me think of the "trough of disillusionment / slope of enlightenment" syndrome (the hype cycle)

As I remember, someone who put together a study of highly mismatched chess games reached a similar conclusion. Strong chess players often play longer games and lose more material when their opponent is thoroughly unskilled players than when they're merely somewhat weaker.

It's possible to beat weaker players more efficiently, but it requires consciously "playing down" to set simple traps and grab materiel quickly. Otherwise, a clueless opponent will disrupt "sophisticated" plays by accepting losing trades and ignoring threats. It lowers their chances of actually winning compared to a better player, but pushes the game towards a drawn out chase.

And yes, I think there's certainly some truth to the hype cycle comparison. They both remind me of the "four stages of competence", where people in the middle two stages of "conscious" execution can be slower and more uncertain than either trained or untrained instinct.

Not necessarily, Day[9] (one of the best US starcraft 1 players) had a great podcast where he explained why playing against worse players can still be massively helpful.

http://www.teamliquid.net/staff/intrigue/Day90006PlayAgainst...

If they are to snooty to play with those with less experience/skill to help them learn the game, and to help the joy of their game spread, then that is their problem. Let them stew in the boredom of only ever playing against the few they consider worthy while the rest of us have a good time!

Has this whole thread forgotten about the concept of moderation?

Most people don't like to play only against much weaker players, nor only against much stronger players.

>I disagree. I will always lose to Magnus Carlsen in Chess. I will always lose to my friends in (insert any FPS game here, I'm bad at all of them). I will always lose to Mew2King in Super Smash Bros: Melee.

That's one data point. But I'm sure valve or blizzard or any company with an online gaming community has stats on retention and knows who people want to play with in aggregate. And generally when you play online you get paired with someone with a similar MMR/ELO.

From this I infer that the statement from the article is generally true.

Yeah, which game of skill is also important. As I commented below, more modular games like squash, where you can get a point here and there, can be played like this. A 600 ELO point difference in chess basically means you will never win, and it becomes futile, and crushing.

I have great fun playing chess with a friend who easily has 600 ELO on me. Before we start each game, we agree it will be one of three types:

1. No holds barred. (I always lose, but nearly won once when they were very distracted.)

2. Like no holds barred, except I can take back my previous move && they sometimes offer “Are you sure that was the best move?” when I’ve done something especially wrong.

3. Them vs. them + me, where I have full access to their skills and knowledge. They suggest moves, and I can ask whether a move is/was a good move, what move they would make, etc. This unsurprisingly results in a 50/50 win rate.

This has been very useful for learning because it balances out the learning with just enough “winning” to keep the game fun.

It's only futile if your main / only goal is to win. I tend to view playing much stronger opponents as an opportunity to learn (especially if they are taking the time to explain things). In that sense, it's a massive "win". Alternatively, you can always redefine a "win", e.g. as getting a draw out of a 400 ELO higher opponent. It's realistic and shows that you are progressing in a positive direction.

If your intention is to improve you are probably better off spectating than playing. Playing against stronger players of any game is an interesting experience but observing stronger players is more educational since you can do so from an emotionally detached position and you don't have to dedicate the majority of your concentration to playing your side of the game.

> but observing stronger players is more educational

I disagree strongly on that. If stronger players are avoiding complicated pins / forks / checkmates, the weaker player will NEVER experience these positions.

It is far, far, far more educational to play against a stronger player and learn the tricks of the trade. Getting pinned by an expert is a lesson. Getting a "Queen Trap" is a lesson. A Fork is a lesson. Etc. etc.

Watching players stronger than you avoid all those positions is completely, and utterly non-helpful. You need to get those mistakes "beaten out of you" so to speak, if you ever wish to get better at Chess.

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Now, observing chess can be helpful with computer-analysis. After downloading the pgn file of a high-level game, play through it yourself vs Stockfish (PC vs SCID is decent freeware to run the Stockfish engine with), and try to discover the traps that the high-level players innately avoided.

Very good points. Personally, I've noticed that I learn best when I use some combination, however.

I'd rationalise it as creating richer neural connections for the topic you're trying to learn. It seems to embed the knowledge out of your "cache" into some deeper level, without which I tend to run out of ability to keep all these things in my head. In terms of practicing whatever you're learning, it's hard to say whether you should play against weaker, equal, or superior opponents; each have various arguments that can be made against them. I'd probably avoid weaker ones, in order to minimise false positive feedback.

I learned chess playing always against a friend that won every single time. I didn't give up. I joined a club and improved. After some months I played again with my friend and I won. That was the last game he played against me. Moral? Not sure. I like to win sometimes, but I don't mind losing most times if that teachs me something.

Playing against someone much better than you sharpens your perception, reactions, everything in a way you can't get any other way. Bring it on!

By the sound of it your intent was to win eventually. You could imagine winning, and with some effort you did win. I think that's subtly different to playing against people who you will never beat regardless of how much effort you put in.

dragontamer's example of Magnus Carlsen is a good one - he was in the top 1000 players in the world when he was 12, and become World Champion at 22. He's intuitively good at chess. The match he played to become World Champion the first time was fascinating because as soon as he could get to the point where the game was outside of what Vishy Anand had experience of he was pretty unstoppable. He's not someone normal players will ever beat. I think most chess players would like to play him because he's famous, but if you met someone unknown with the same level of ability most people just wouldn't play them except to learn. Few people would want to play that sort of person for fun. It just wouldn't be very enjoyable.

By the sound of it your intent was to win eventually.

Eventually we all die. It's fun to play anyway.

In a less philosophical mood: standing against an overwhelming force can be exhilarating. I've felt something like that windsurfing in strong wind conditions.

Down to the specific question, losing always against someone you can't defeat is very good training for winning over others.

I play a fair amount of a regular scale FPS (12v12 max) and it happens fairly regularly that I end up being the last one alive in my team and have to face off multiple opponents.

I don't always succeed but the pure thrill of trying to survive what is usually a virtual death sentence is something really powerful and when successful so exhilarating.

Have you tried BR(battle royale) games? PUBG gets my heart racing too much. I also like that it mixes you in with both pros and amateurs. Not knowing the skill level of the player you are exchanging shots with keeps everyone on their A game.

Yeah I have but this isn't the setting for my play-style which tends to overanalyze. So small scale battle is my jam.

The learning thing is sort of irrelevant since you can install a program on your laptop that is strategically better than 99% of humans and tactically better than 100% (which we now know through experience is enough to beat 100% of humans, even the ones with superior strategic reasoning).

The part where your friend stopped playing you -- that's something that I just don't understand, on a fundamental level.

My brother-in-law talked about chess for years, I finally agreed to play him, and won both games. He's never brought it up again. It makes no sense to me.

Growing up, I was the youngest, so I generally lost at whatever games we played, and it never made me want to stop playing. When my significantly older brother came back home and stayed with us for awhile, we played chess regularly, and I lost a _lot_. But I kept playing, and when I finally got to the point where I won one out of three, it felt really good.

How much fun would I have missed out on if I hadn't kept playing?

This guy is the most stubborn person when learning something that you can find. I lent him a book on flamenco guitar (that I lost hope to recover :) and he actually run through it and learned to play it like a pro. He's short but won a position as firefighter. Now he improved his English, took a sabbatical and is touring south-east Asia with a backpack.

Probably he was just diving in his next obsesion at the time.

> Playing with people who are better than you is easy. Just accept they're better than you and keep losing.

And what motivates the better player to be engaged?

We all know that learning and growth happens right at the edge. When one is stretching and that stretch makes a difference. Too far it is frustrating. No stretch no gain. I'm surprised Go was not mentioned so far since it is customary there to balance the strength of the players by giving a few stones advantage to the weaker balancing the play in a manner that both sides are challenged.

But this is Hacker News. So does this apply to the way we work? How are the challenges we face distributed in the team?

>Decide if you are comfortable with your current skill level or not. If you want to get better, train up. If you are happy with your skill level, then keep losing. That's fine, and I think its healthy to decide to place limits on your skill.

If the difference in skill is too high you won't learn anything from playing with them. What's worse - you might ingrain bad habits that let you occasionally win(that happened to me with one fighting game)

>Skill is an infinite treadmill: you can continuously get better at pretty much any subject from now till the end of time. Deciding when to get off the treadmill is just as important as deciding to stay on.

Agreed, but the speed in which you progress varies case by case basis.

>My inability to defeat the greatest players of a subject does NOT make the game less appealing. Indeed, I often times seek out the challenge of stronger players, especially when I'm explicitly trying to get better at the game.

if opponents are better than you, but not overwhelmingly so ,it is indeed one of better ways to train. It is a matter of mindset - you are playing to deliberately "git gud", but not necessarily win.

>Losing constantly by playing vs players who are better than you provides a learning experience. You should find other players you can win against of course: you'll never learn to win if you keep losing. But losing teaches you what bad-habits you've formed from playing vs weaker players.

This depends on aforementioned difference in skill, too high is prohibitive to learning. The latter part depends on how good game is proving feedback. Some games are great at that(chess, soulsborne), other are horrible(all blizzard games come to mind, DotA, Go). It is very hard to improve in latter group of games without deliberately analysing your past games. For example in Go your mistake might be made really far back into the game, but you are seeing it's effect just now. In chess - it is way simpler to just walk back the history of moves in memory to find the mistake, or at least start spotting the wrong decisions.

>I think that's the key: losing all the time is unfun. But I can definitely take "losing for a whole week" or "losing for a whole month" in a row, especially if its for training. Finding players of lower skill, equal skill, and higher skill, is important.

Agreed, but there is one exception - games with randomness built into them - this includes matchmade team games. With randomness, losing when you are really ahead feels way more punishing, and in team games it is sometimes impossible to carry your team to win - even if you are literally the best player in the match by overwhelming margin.

> if opponents are better than you, but not overwhelmingly so ,it is indeed one of better ways to train. It is a matter of mindset - you are playing to deliberately "git gud", but not necessarily win.

if you train in something, you aren't playing. Training is actually the total opposite of play; you need to do things that are not fun but are beneficial for your goal, and it sucks. You have to do a lot of tedious study and memorization to get better at chess beyond a point, or spend a lot of time in a fighting game's training mode just to be able to consistently do moves and combos on demand.

I think with videogames one of the worries I have is people are now viewing them as work they have to train for; we are creating a professional class of gamers, and whenever we do so eventually players become spectators instead

> ou have to do a lot of tedious study and memorization to get better at chess beyond a point, or spend a lot of time in a fighting game's training mode just to be able to consistently do moves and combos on demand.

Things like that are fun for a subset of people. I played competitive smash bros. melee for years. I always had a separate crt tv in my room ready to go, and I would put on music, or a podcast, etc, and just practice things. It was relaxing after a long day and that practice eventually made me much better in real matches- winning matches is a huge high.

Chess is different but also the same. I'm slowly learning theory, openings, etc, and it's quite fascinating.

> or spend a lot of time in a fighting game's training mode just to be able to consistently do moves and combos on demand.

That's -why- these games are fun to play and spectate. What separates bad from decent from good players is how consistently they can apply technical skill under nerve-wracking situations, such as being 1 game in a set away from getting knocked out of a tournament. Stuff like daigo's parry at EVO 2004 was exhilarating precisely because of the technical skill required, and the fact that he had to practice things like that.

>if you train in something, you aren't playing. Training is actually the total opposite of play; you need to do things that are not fun but are beneficial for your goal, and it sucks. You have to do a lot of tedious study and memorization to get better at chess beyond a point, or spend a lot of time in a fighting game's training mode just to be able to consistently do moves and combos on demand.

I find training to be fun and engaging - i find bettering myself to be fun! There is a difference between going into practice mode and grinding combos, and just dueling someone with intent of 'i'll try to block each low mixup this game', or 'i'll try to pushing each wakeup'.

You are having fun, with a small extra goal added, and you don't mind losing - as long as you don't fail your extra goal.

If I'm playing ball against someone who is way better, it's not about win or lose, I might not even get a shot at the basket. I can lose, but if I don't even get to really play, that's not fun.

Assuming you can keep getting better is a bit of a fallacy too. If that were the case everybody would be challenger!

It's not really a fallacy. However most people think playing == improving. This is not the case.

The best players I know, and the fastest improving players I know, all review their gameplay and take notes on the mistakes they made. They watch other high skill / pro players and take notes on what they do. They practice PERFECTLY, over and over and over (i.e. executing a combo flawlessly 20 times in a row, if you make a mistake, start over. Now do something else for an hour, then flawlessly do the combo 20 times in a row again). They find good players to play with in high stakes situations, such as tournaments or money matches.

Most people don't improve very much because they aren't actively trying to improve. I know many people who are at roughly where they were a year ago, or just marginally higher.

Almost nobody does what you suggest and even doing this does not guarantee you will consistently improve. You don't know what you don't know, and masters are often not vocal about intricacies of their strategy. Many of them are geniuses, particularly in strategy type games, and as such people with much lower G factor probably have a slim chance of ever reaching that level. I know several of them myself. Gave them visual IQ tests like ravens progressive matrices. I know the validity is not very high but of the 6 people diamond 1 or higher in League of Legends I gave the test to, not a single one scored below 135.

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