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Comment by jules | Hacker News Reader

This I consider a positive. The skill gap between an average player and a good player is vastly higher in RTS than in other genres. A 10th percentile player usually has a basically negligible chance to win against the top player. A 20th percentile player has a negligible chance to win against a 10th percentile player, etc. I personally like the competition. If a game is not stressful that usually is just another way of saying that there is little skill involved. That is fine too, the point is to have fun after all. It's just a personal preference.

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>If a game is not stressful that usually is just another way of saying that there is little skill involved.

For some definitions of "stress" and, most particularly, of "skill".

I take rather great pride in my GMing skills when playing a tabletop RPG game, but if there's any amount of "stress¹" involved in the same sense that there is stress¹ when I play RTS games, then I'm definitely doing something wrong. Of course there's "stress²", but that's the tension and uncertainty in the events of the game I run, or the uncertainty relating to my players and what their reactions are going to be.

So "skill" here can't be used as a scalar measure, and there's definitely no single one measure of "skill" across different game genres. Declaring a linear correlation between "skill" and "stress" seems rather premature and, IMO, detrimental to the discussion.

I agree that there is not a 1-to-1 relationship, but there is undeniably some correlation. If a game is easy then it is not stressful.

I disagree that there can't be a measure of skill across different games. You can just look at the probability of a top X% player winning against a top Y% player. If an average player has a low probability of winning against a top player, then there is a high degree of skill involved. If an average player has a decent probability of winning against a top player, then there is a high degree of luck involved.

> I disagree that there can't be a measure of skill across different games. You can just look at the probability of a top X% player winning against a top Y% player.

Solitaire.

You can't measure my probability of winning against you. This metric sucks.

In a more general way, while in many cases for perhaps a broad range of people stressfulness will correlate, to some nonlinear degree, with the correlation between their choice of action and their odds of achieving a goal (see what I did there, with the second-degree function and everything), the fact that this very (stress-to-skillness) correlation varies in formula from person to person leads me to believe that it's a symptom of a different variable being more meaningful.

What I'm saying isn't that stress doesn't indicate anything, but rather that it's not a very appropriate yardstick to measure things like fun and player engagement when the correlation between stress and skill-dependence varies so much from person to person.

For me, for example, time pressure and assiduousness-related pressures (remembering to always do X when Y or always do Z every time K) will far eclipse any notion of skill-dependency and impact-on-success as far as how stressful I feel is concerned. Give me a game of Chess, and I'll be rather unstressed, despite the high skill-dependency. Put a timer, and my stress level shoots up exponentially, despite skill-dependency remaining more or less unchanged (since the time limit applies to my opponent as well, and doesn't really change the ratio between my choices and my odds of victory).

> Solitaire. You can't measure my probability of winning against you.

This applies to any single player game. The discussion was about FPS and RTS.

The rest you wrote makes sense, I agree.

> This applies to any single player game. The discussion was about FPS and RTS.

Yeah, fair point.

> The rest you wrote makes sense, I agree.

Yay! Same here.

FPS can be really difficult too, but there is always some time between the challenging parts of the game. Just a moment to take a breath, which you don't have in a modern RTS. I think, FPS aren't stressful, but RTS are and FPS are still highly based on skill.

RTS have more factors, making the game more random, because a human can't control all factors well. Therefore, less advanced players have better chances to win once.

The second paragraph is not true at all. It is far more likely to get a lucky kill in a FPS than in a RTS. For example in Forged Alliance if 100 average players play against a top 10 player I'll bite my nose off if even one of them manages to win.

Sorry, i counted in matches instead of turns. Of course, there is always a luck shot. But in a usual match with at least 5 turns, its extremely difficult to win for a less advanced player.

This is the worst type of "gaming" and probably exactly why the RTS genre is dying.

If people within 10% of each other means one gets thrashed then it's simply not fun for one of the players.

The RTSes you're lauding, which I do enjoy, often are little more than thinly disguised rock/paper/scissor with a big dash of "what is over powered today". Until it all gets balanced into a vanilla mush of nothingness. With the added bonus of the occasional unintended broken mechanic, tower rushes, marine rushes, zerg rushes. Anything called "rush" is usually an exploit of poorly thought out mechanic and an all or nothing of wasting 2 peoples time for ten minutes after which one or the other simply quits depending on whether the rush was spotted or not.

Most RTS games also seem to suffer from the same "let's play for 5 minutes of building and capturing exactly the same things every single game before the match actually starts"

I myself do love these games, but I have friends who hate them. It's not the pinnacle of gaming, it's simply one form of it.

> If people within 10% of each other means one gets thrashed then it's simply not fun for one of the players.

You just need to balance games correctly. This is why modern games use Elo or TrueSkill to track each player's performance, just as in chess. Chess too has a huge skill gap: an average player has no chance against a top player, but using Elo even games can be played.

I disagree that RTS is like Rock Paper Scissors. Starcraft maybe, but a well designed modern game no. In Rock Paper Scissors any person can have a roughly 50% win rate against any other person. The fact that an average player cannot win against a good player with any rush strategy indicates that it's not Rock Paper Scissors.

The same goes for the start of a game. A good modern RTS does not require a standard 5 minute opening.

> It's not the pinnacle of gaming

Oh, certainly. RTSes usually do very poorly on some other points (e.g. storytelling), and aren't the best even on points that they score well on (e.g. chess involves far more decision making). Whether you find those important is completely subjective.

> This is the worst type of "gaming" and probably exactly why the RTS genre is dying.

I don't know. I play sc2, and after a few or at most a dozen of matches I just have to quit - too much stress. But I quite like it and I return to it every few days. I don't waste as much time as I would on some no-stress rpgs or europe universalis alikes (waiting for positive reinforcement type of games). These are just different kinds of games. Starcraft fills similar niche like chess - relatively quick competive sport. I don't see people running around bashing chess for the use of clock or the fact that you will lose a lot when you play chess.

> If people within 10% of each other means one gets thrashed then it's simply not fun for one of the players.

Or maybe some players like to get trashed 50% of the time if it's in a honest game? Ladder system is there to match people with similar skill and it mostly works. Inventing chess that are less stressful (let's say you can throw a dice to see if the enemy attack worked) wouldn't make it better game.

I got turned off multiplayer RTS games way back in the C&C: Red Alert days, where every single game was "build a shitload of tanks and rush your opponent". Every time I have dipped my toe back in over the years since I have found basically the same mechanic. Plus, I don't really want to get better at a game where the primary skill is clicking around the map like a manic Jack Russel terrier on speed.

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