DeLux
Player that used to be Lux
- Joined
- Jun 3, 2010
- Messages
- 9,302
Preface:
When you're attempting to improve, many players are often at a loss at what steps to take in moving forward. The goal of this thread is to help players have an objective method in terms of how they determine what steps they ought to take in the name of "getting better".
As a foundation, there are generally two types of plateaus in skill level that I see in a majority of players. These plateaus exist for the most part regardless of skill. The first one is the self imposed plateau, where a player will repeatedly lose in the same method without making any changes nor having the intent to change. This thread is not for the people that are unwilling to change, and I wish them best of luck in their future brackets (because they're going to need it
)
The second plateau is probably the most frustrating place for a player. It's the situation where you're losing, but you can't quite figure out what specifically needs to be changed in order to win. You try new and different options and struggle to get better, but the results are mixed and the losses pile up. If this thread does anything for the betterment of the community, it is my intent that it gives hope to the player that tries and fails, steps up to the challenge and comes up agonizingly short, and when it's all said and done continues trying to reach that elusive victory that shines brightly ahead of the road littered with defeat.
Barring a few exceptions, this plateau should NEVER stop a player from achieving the goal of "getting better". If you are losing and someone is beating you, logically speaking there must be something that you can change in order to increase your chances of winning at any given point during the game. But having made so many adaptations to your play and not been victorious from it, how do can we know that another change will help?
Enter Everett Rogers, author of Diffusion of Innovations. In his work, Rogers cites five primary criteria that are huge determinants on an innovation's viability and affect their ability to spread throughout a field. These criteria are: Relative Advantage, Compatibility, Complexity, Trialability, and Observability (15). In order to illustrate how these concept matter, I'll go ahead and outline specific metagame examples and make commentary on the importance of each specific criterion.
Relative Advantage -
In the context of play, a player can only do so many things at one time. Technically speaking, by doing one option, along with every other definitive feature a move entails like startup, cooldown, spacing, etc. there is also the opportunity cost that occurs because you are not doing something else. To illustrate, let's take the Ice Climbers and an innovation that hasn't diffused successfully in the modern metagame: the tripless chain grab. When an IC main begins doing repeated grabs, he can choose between doing a tripless CG or a non-tripless CG. Every Bthrow performed by Popo when throwing to Nana typically causes a 1.99% chance of tripping, so statistically speaking over the course of six stocks (or what it takes to win a set) an IC main has a higher chance of tripping at least once than he does tripping zero times. The relative advantage of course for the tripless CG can be definitively measured at a theoretical 1.99% decrease in drop rate assuming equal rates of human error.
However, there are other changes worth adopting that might have a more abstract tactical advantages that can be weighed. More guaranteed damage, better positional/zoning gains, additional options for conditioning mixups are all factors to consider in relative advantage. If there is a tactic out there that is missing from your arsenal and you're still losing, relative advantage would dictate you learn everything that's possible and make possible things that were previously thought impossible. Take every advantage you can get to win.
Even more pertinent, it often serves a player well adopt an innovation early in its life cycle on the macro level. The metagame is fairly reactive in terms of how it operates, so a proactive player typically sits one step ahead of the competition. Surprise can often be a strong relative advantage, if only temporary.
Compatibility -
While it's important to play to win, it's often times more important to remember why we play to win. Compatibility calls into question the moral implications that a specific innovation might bring. For example, the easiest thing to pull upon when talking about compatibility in terms of fighting games is character loyalty. In Brawl, there is a clear pecking order as far as characters go and matchups (metaknight). However, some moral codes will have a player make a semi-irrational decision and pick a character that doesn't necessarily maximize their ability to win. So their specific moral code becomes that they want to maximize their ability to win using a specific character. This criteria is a double edged sword. For the most part, compatibility can be a huge road block in terms of increasing chances to win because a moral code adds an additional obstacle one most overcome in the quest for victory. At the same time, from a metagame standpoint, the character loyalists often tend to be the most innovative of players for their specific character, because they realize and accept they are playing from a disadvantage so they find themselves taking whatever they can in order to win (as long as it fits within the code of picking a specific character). In that regard, compatibility is a sort of mixed bag as far as driving innovation. On the macro scale, it helps improve characters that would otherwise never see improvement. But on the micro scale, it might be a deteriment.
That being the case, from a compatibility standpoint, that's up to the player to decide why they want to play. If winning is the ultimate goal, there is a clear and obvious choice in order to maximize chances of victory. However, if winning with a specific limiter is the ultimate goal, then one ought to do everything they can within the limitations.
Complexity -
Players have a finite amount of time in order to prepare, practice, train, etc. If a player assumes time or in game execution are limited resources as far as compatibility goes, then from a complexity standpoint a player would want to pick the options with the highest relative advantage that are feasible to execute in the limited time. In other words, a player ought to be efficient in practice.
An innovation that was released a couple years ago that comes to mind as the poster child of complexity is the King DDD buffered reverse pivot grab infinite on Snake. In this infinite, a player must input 5 inputs in a precise sequence in a 1/6th of a second time frame. The difficulty of this innovation is off the charts in comparison to most other brawl techniques. If we compare this innovation against the backdrop of relative advantage, the option that the infinite would replace would be the standard running CG. Since the infinite's net reward is a stock, a way to remove the complexity to a near inhuman level for a DDD to compensate for the lost infinite reward would be to make the followup to the standard CG as close to stock taking as possible. In that light, the better a DDD's gimping game is at removing stocks, the less efficient it becomes to learn the standing infinite due to complexity. Typically speaking, complexity is a huge reason why players will improve dramatically when they start playing until they hit a plateau later on. Many of the more refined tactics of the game are complex in terms of technical precision or even option/game theory understanding. Assuming time and execution are not a valuable resource, in theory complexity should never be an issue. However, we play in the real world, so time matters. If you want to get better, you'd best be efficient and learn things that have an executable relative advantage towards winning. If execution isn't a threshold worth considering, it's probably time to innovate.
In short: Theoretically possible via game mechanics < Humanly Possible via execution threshold <Efficient Options that give Relative Advantage < Options that translate directly towards winning
Trialability -
There are a few ways trialability matters.
First, when attempting to install a new tactic into your gameplay, you ought to test it before you use it so you understand how it's used. The better your understanding of the option, the better you can truly utilize it to its maximum potential. If the change that you desire is not something that you can test or practice realistically because it is a situation that doesn't occur often, it's probably better to work on something that occurs more frequently or is more testable assuming time is a constraint. If you have all the time in the world, by all means go ahead and knock yourself out and learn everything.
When trying to figure out on what to improve, it is best to stay relevant. For example, if your area is filled with snake mains, it probably best to learn how to juggle snake than it would be to learn how to edge guard against Link in terms of efficiency. If there is an option out there that doesn't affect your ability to win or lose, the option doesn't matter in helping you escape the specific plateau you're in. Typically speaking, this is an intuitive step because a player will typically have the most practice or opportunities available to them to conquer relevant issues.
Some options require such precision that it becomes hard to test if done correctly without the aid of another player. In order to get better, it might be to your advantage to utilize your non-tournament practice time as a trial period to work on tactics that require human involvement. Winning a friendly might give you temporary satisfaction, but the goal of winning in tournament might be worth sacrificing the short term satisfaction as a means of leveraging to gain your long term goal. At the same time, it might be helpful to buy a spare turbo controller for movements, learn to use your feet to make inputs on another controller, toggle CPUs between various modes of Attack/Run/Jump/Walk, go on wifi to test options, or get a frame by frame code.
Observability -
If you're out of ideas on how to improve, go observe another player that's winning and break down what changes you can make in your play in order to emulate their winning. If you're able to observe and understand why you win or lose, cater changes that are specifically relevant to the goal. A good place to start is to typically watch how a player is able to take their opponent's stocks and how they lose their stocks, and work backwards from their for option sequences that setup the kill. Make a note of who the best players are for each character and make a habit of following the metagame as closely as possible for inspiration.
Even on the internal level, one can make specific change to address specific needs. Take video replay of yourself playing and evaluate yourself the same way you'd evaluate another play. Watch both when you win and lose and diligently take what you can from both. Ask other players for critique. Constantly assess and reevaluate your option selection for something that might have a relative advantage.
Even when not playing or practicing, you can mentally take notes on methods that can help you improve from both external or internal source. Keep track of the things you are changing and make an effort constantly change but change only one thing at a time. Focusing on one change at a time will help you work around breaking a habit, as well as have the added bonus of helping isolate a change of results to a specific change as part of the relationship between experimental variables. If you notice a change comes with an unintended side effect (that's negative or positive) keep track of that as well. The more information you observe and understand, the more likely you are to figure out the correct adjustments that bring you closer to victory.
Final Thoughts -
In closing, a good direction towards improving would reconcile all five of the criteria. While there isn't a clear cut path to victory with answers at the ready, improvement and "getting better" is there for someone that wants it badly enough to learn how to get better. It may take a tremendous amount of effort, self evaluation, discipline, and focus, but in my opinion that's what makes the game fun and why anyone, whether they win or lose, should want to play.
Citation:
Rogers, Everett. Diffusion of Innovations, 5th ed. Free Press. 2003
When you're attempting to improve, many players are often at a loss at what steps to take in moving forward. The goal of this thread is to help players have an objective method in terms of how they determine what steps they ought to take in the name of "getting better".
As a foundation, there are generally two types of plateaus in skill level that I see in a majority of players. These plateaus exist for the most part regardless of skill. The first one is the self imposed plateau, where a player will repeatedly lose in the same method without making any changes nor having the intent to change. This thread is not for the people that are unwilling to change, and I wish them best of luck in their future brackets (because they're going to need it
)The second plateau is probably the most frustrating place for a player. It's the situation where you're losing, but you can't quite figure out what specifically needs to be changed in order to win. You try new and different options and struggle to get better, but the results are mixed and the losses pile up. If this thread does anything for the betterment of the community, it is my intent that it gives hope to the player that tries and fails, steps up to the challenge and comes up agonizingly short, and when it's all said and done continues trying to reach that elusive victory that shines brightly ahead of the road littered with defeat.
Barring a few exceptions, this plateau should NEVER stop a player from achieving the goal of "getting better". If you are losing and someone is beating you, logically speaking there must be something that you can change in order to increase your chances of winning at any given point during the game. But having made so many adaptations to your play and not been victorious from it, how do can we know that another change will help?
Enter Everett Rogers, author of Diffusion of Innovations. In his work, Rogers cites five primary criteria that are huge determinants on an innovation's viability and affect their ability to spread throughout a field. These criteria are: Relative Advantage, Compatibility, Complexity, Trialability, and Observability (15). In order to illustrate how these concept matter, I'll go ahead and outline specific metagame examples and make commentary on the importance of each specific criterion.
Relative Advantage -
In the context of play, a player can only do so many things at one time. Technically speaking, by doing one option, along with every other definitive feature a move entails like startup, cooldown, spacing, etc. there is also the opportunity cost that occurs because you are not doing something else. To illustrate, let's take the Ice Climbers and an innovation that hasn't diffused successfully in the modern metagame: the tripless chain grab. When an IC main begins doing repeated grabs, he can choose between doing a tripless CG or a non-tripless CG. Every Bthrow performed by Popo when throwing to Nana typically causes a 1.99% chance of tripping, so statistically speaking over the course of six stocks (or what it takes to win a set) an IC main has a higher chance of tripping at least once than he does tripping zero times. The relative advantage of course for the tripless CG can be definitively measured at a theoretical 1.99% decrease in drop rate assuming equal rates of human error.
However, there are other changes worth adopting that might have a more abstract tactical advantages that can be weighed. More guaranteed damage, better positional/zoning gains, additional options for conditioning mixups are all factors to consider in relative advantage. If there is a tactic out there that is missing from your arsenal and you're still losing, relative advantage would dictate you learn everything that's possible and make possible things that were previously thought impossible. Take every advantage you can get to win.
Even more pertinent, it often serves a player well adopt an innovation early in its life cycle on the macro level. The metagame is fairly reactive in terms of how it operates, so a proactive player typically sits one step ahead of the competition. Surprise can often be a strong relative advantage, if only temporary.
Compatibility -
While it's important to play to win, it's often times more important to remember why we play to win. Compatibility calls into question the moral implications that a specific innovation might bring. For example, the easiest thing to pull upon when talking about compatibility in terms of fighting games is character loyalty. In Brawl, there is a clear pecking order as far as characters go and matchups (metaknight). However, some moral codes will have a player make a semi-irrational decision and pick a character that doesn't necessarily maximize their ability to win. So their specific moral code becomes that they want to maximize their ability to win using a specific character. This criteria is a double edged sword. For the most part, compatibility can be a huge road block in terms of increasing chances to win because a moral code adds an additional obstacle one most overcome in the quest for victory. At the same time, from a metagame standpoint, the character loyalists often tend to be the most innovative of players for their specific character, because they realize and accept they are playing from a disadvantage so they find themselves taking whatever they can in order to win (as long as it fits within the code of picking a specific character). In that regard, compatibility is a sort of mixed bag as far as driving innovation. On the macro scale, it helps improve characters that would otherwise never see improvement. But on the micro scale, it might be a deteriment.
That being the case, from a compatibility standpoint, that's up to the player to decide why they want to play. If winning is the ultimate goal, there is a clear and obvious choice in order to maximize chances of victory. However, if winning with a specific limiter is the ultimate goal, then one ought to do everything they can within the limitations.
Complexity -
Players have a finite amount of time in order to prepare, practice, train, etc. If a player assumes time or in game execution are limited resources as far as compatibility goes, then from a complexity standpoint a player would want to pick the options with the highest relative advantage that are feasible to execute in the limited time. In other words, a player ought to be efficient in practice.
An innovation that was released a couple years ago that comes to mind as the poster child of complexity is the King DDD buffered reverse pivot grab infinite on Snake. In this infinite, a player must input 5 inputs in a precise sequence in a 1/6th of a second time frame. The difficulty of this innovation is off the charts in comparison to most other brawl techniques. If we compare this innovation against the backdrop of relative advantage, the option that the infinite would replace would be the standard running CG. Since the infinite's net reward is a stock, a way to remove the complexity to a near inhuman level for a DDD to compensate for the lost infinite reward would be to make the followup to the standard CG as close to stock taking as possible. In that light, the better a DDD's gimping game is at removing stocks, the less efficient it becomes to learn the standing infinite due to complexity. Typically speaking, complexity is a huge reason why players will improve dramatically when they start playing until they hit a plateau later on. Many of the more refined tactics of the game are complex in terms of technical precision or even option/game theory understanding. Assuming time and execution are not a valuable resource, in theory complexity should never be an issue. However, we play in the real world, so time matters. If you want to get better, you'd best be efficient and learn things that have an executable relative advantage towards winning. If execution isn't a threshold worth considering, it's probably time to innovate.
In short: Theoretically possible via game mechanics < Humanly Possible via execution threshold <Efficient Options that give Relative Advantage < Options that translate directly towards winning
Trialability -
There are a few ways trialability matters.
First, when attempting to install a new tactic into your gameplay, you ought to test it before you use it so you understand how it's used. The better your understanding of the option, the better you can truly utilize it to its maximum potential. If the change that you desire is not something that you can test or practice realistically because it is a situation that doesn't occur often, it's probably better to work on something that occurs more frequently or is more testable assuming time is a constraint. If you have all the time in the world, by all means go ahead and knock yourself out and learn everything.
When trying to figure out on what to improve, it is best to stay relevant. For example, if your area is filled with snake mains, it probably best to learn how to juggle snake than it would be to learn how to edge guard against Link in terms of efficiency. If there is an option out there that doesn't affect your ability to win or lose, the option doesn't matter in helping you escape the specific plateau you're in. Typically speaking, this is an intuitive step because a player will typically have the most practice or opportunities available to them to conquer relevant issues.
Some options require such precision that it becomes hard to test if done correctly without the aid of another player. In order to get better, it might be to your advantage to utilize your non-tournament practice time as a trial period to work on tactics that require human involvement. Winning a friendly might give you temporary satisfaction, but the goal of winning in tournament might be worth sacrificing the short term satisfaction as a means of leveraging to gain your long term goal. At the same time, it might be helpful to buy a spare turbo controller for movements, learn to use your feet to make inputs on another controller, toggle CPUs between various modes of Attack/Run/Jump/Walk, go on wifi to test options, or get a frame by frame code.
Observability -
If you're out of ideas on how to improve, go observe another player that's winning and break down what changes you can make in your play in order to emulate their winning. If you're able to observe and understand why you win or lose, cater changes that are specifically relevant to the goal. A good place to start is to typically watch how a player is able to take their opponent's stocks and how they lose their stocks, and work backwards from their for option sequences that setup the kill. Make a note of who the best players are for each character and make a habit of following the metagame as closely as possible for inspiration.
Even on the internal level, one can make specific change to address specific needs. Take video replay of yourself playing and evaluate yourself the same way you'd evaluate another play. Watch both when you win and lose and diligently take what you can from both. Ask other players for critique. Constantly assess and reevaluate your option selection for something that might have a relative advantage.
Even when not playing or practicing, you can mentally take notes on methods that can help you improve from both external or internal source. Keep track of the things you are changing and make an effort constantly change but change only one thing at a time. Focusing on one change at a time will help you work around breaking a habit, as well as have the added bonus of helping isolate a change of results to a specific change as part of the relationship between experimental variables. If you notice a change comes with an unintended side effect (that's negative or positive) keep track of that as well. The more information you observe and understand, the more likely you are to figure out the correct adjustments that bring you closer to victory.
Final Thoughts -
In closing, a good direction towards improving would reconcile all five of the criteria. While there isn't a clear cut path to victory with answers at the ready, improvement and "getting better" is there for someone that wants it badly enough to learn how to get better. It may take a tremendous amount of effort, self evaluation, discipline, and focus, but in my opinion that's what makes the game fun and why anyone, whether they win or lose, should want to play.
Citation:
Rogers, Everett. Diffusion of Innovations, 5th ed. Free Press. 2003
