How come you don't play ladder?
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@cheeseberry said in How come you don't play ladder?:
My brain is too smooth to keep the openings and general game plan in my head for the 50 or so maps that are rotated in the 1v1 pool.
Combining that with me valuing mastery over actually winning the game, I dont even wanna play when I know I will already start off suboptimal.
Is this pretty dumb? Yes.
Could this be solved by either just caring less or by going through all the maps in like a weekend? Yes.
Am I gonna do that? Probably not.
This 100% but even spending a weekend on it is prob not enough to not feel like many mistakes are being made.
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i played a lot 1v1 ladder back in time. its the supreme discipline and i loved it. i stopped it someday for a very banal reason. i was getting slower and slower. the age u know. so it wasnt anymore about strategy it starts to get all about execution.
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my 1v1 rating is 1100 and I am 1300 global.
I stopped playing the 1v1 ladder when I realized that people memorize build orders for each map. and the more you play the more maps open up and yet again u find yourself playing against a meta and getting crushed insanely quickly.
It got to a point where the other person would just Ctrl-k when they lose the expansion or the island mex. most of my games felt like the other player has memorized a meta and is playing it and getting the upper hand since minute 4 and toying with me until minute 30 before crushing me.
1v1 ladder is too taxing on your APM and you kinda must memorize meta (I hate doing meta's or microing reclaim).I now play 4v4 which makes the game less taxing in terms of APM and the meta is not so important since games tend to be less predictable
thank you for your efforts in improving FAF!
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I basically played almost no games for a year, forgetting all but the most generic build orders on ladder, and a quarter of the maps in the pool are ones I have never even seen before, not including map gen, yet I'm easily the top active ladder player at the moment. You only need to have a general understanding of what needs to be accomplished and a couple generic build orders to take as a starting point. Where are all the people with perfect BO's and deep understanding of map meta at? It would be great if ladder was actually that active and competitive.
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i think its the most competetive game mode bcs you have to do everything at once and when you are ranked well and you or your opponent can keep up you have to prioritize some areas and make sacrifices in other. although i think casual try hards as me could learn the most from 1v1 ladder its just too stressful. when i come online i want my faf game exerience which i admit is most times to gun com spam my lane in team games. nothing wrong with 1v1 i think, just not the thing im searching for. 10 - 15 mins of adrenaline rush and it shows me too fast the borders of my inferior gameplay. i want to play not to work. ( which is over all my problem with competitive online gaming) meanwhile i think only 1v1 ranks really matters and maybe really high coustom
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@khaldounn please show me those bo beasts. Like every time i play map i do mostly random stuff in terms of bo, every game is a bit different, and i'm like 1800 so clearly bos arent necessary to play at that level. You really dont need to memorise anything, just be good at scaling and know what moves are good in different situations.
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Map pool is of such variable quality. If people could veto maps or the pool was so big as to not repeat the same 3 or 4 broken maps over and over it'd be such a nicer experience.
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I got bored after playing ladder for a while. When I would queue sometimes I would get lucky and instantly find a match, other times I would be there for hours but I honestly never really liked playing lots of 1v1 just because its just me playing solo. There is also the reason that I keep playing the same people that always do similar things so there is never much variety in gameplay .I find it far more interesting to queue with some people I know or host a custom lobby and get to play something semi-unknown.
I am also unsure why there seems to be so many BO warriors all of a sudden. I have never prepped BO's for ladder or practiced ladder maps, especially since I never play 1v1. But except from playing someone on a map like the ditch where having more experience is extremely valuable compared to having little to none, I have 'probably' never seen a replay I lost and though they had a better BO or played so many games on the map that it was unwinnable for me.
I am sure it is much more impactful to have a BO in lower ratings as you can beat someone who is 'playing better' throughout the game. however, anybody who uses it will gain rating and get to the point where they either face other BO beasts or play people who beat them after their BO has done whatever damage it has unless they are intentionally keeping a low rating which is a whole other problem.
Anyway, I might play ladder again if I gain interest in it against since it is really random for me if I want to play or not.
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I think both sides of the bo argument are missing a crucial point for lower level players: Cognitive load.
If you're a 1k ladder player who has played some random map 100 times up vs another ladder player who's also 1k but hasn't played as much ladder and has never played that map before, who do you think is a bit more likely to win that?
The dude who has played it 100 times probably doesn't have a BO, at least not one past the first couple factories, and even if he does it's not going to be that refined (again, 1k rating). But, here is where he has advantages:
- Takes zero thought for him to know where to send acu.
- Knows how powerful air is on the map, if transports make sense, best expansions to go for, etc
- Has a better rough idea of how much power to make and how many factories the mass can support
- Knows what the passable terrain is without looking
- In general doesn't have to spend time looking at the map, reclaim, etc
- And probably a lot of other small things I'm too lazy to come up with now.
All of these things matter far less the higher you go because better players figure that stuff out faster and more accurately.
tl;dr: imo it's not bo, it's general map familiarity. I think experienced players are underestimating how much that matters at lower levels.
Edit: I mean obviously people responding like Thomas and Grimplex don't need BOs for maps, any shit they come up with on the fly is going to be better than what any 1200 is going to come up with after playing a map dozens of times. FAF at the 1800+ level is not the same game as FAF for the rest of people.
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When people talk about bos they probably mean (either directly or through misattribution) that the expansion phase has a disproportionate impact in a 1v1 game, which I tend to agree with.
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@exselsior said in How come you don't play ladder?:
I mean obviously people responding like Thomas and Grimplex don't need BOs for maps, any shit they come up with on the fly is going to be better than what any 1200 is going to come up with after playing a map dozens of times. FAF at the 1800+ level is not the same game as FAF for the rest of people.
Agreed. Like I mentioned in my post, I think at lower ratings it is way more impactful but player should gain rating from such a "large" increase of skill which puts you against people who play on the fly better than you. There are some negative impacts of even having to play against people who have this "greater skill" but this is probably also the reason why higher rated people don't notice many people who win just because they had a better 'bo'. By the time they get high rated they cannot play the rest of the game well enough and end up losing. Lower rated players should also not be plagued by this since the people with BOs are higher rated but I guess there are not enough players queueing to avoid them.
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For me this kind of shows the disconnect between high and low rated players, interesting to say the least. How would one go to address such problem without just saying "git good kid"?
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What basically everyone here misses is that it doesn't even matter if "BO" is a relevant factor in your ladder performance. What's important is that people feel like it matters, so they won't play when they don't want to put that effort in. It doesn't help to explain to people that their perception is wrong. If you want to change this you first need to understand why people think this way, then you can try to change the cause.
I personally think that it stems from people recognizing that they play better on maps that they have already played some times and that they play even better if they looked up a BO from youtube or a replay. Many people want to prepare for PvP to counteract the fear of playing against other people. So they feel pressure to prepare. And they assume that their opponent prepared as well. They then realize that they don't enjoy this preparation too much, so they stop playing altogether because they can't stand feeling like starting from a disadvantage before the game has even begun.
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Maybe a daring comparison since I'm not the best Civ 6 player.. But ig most of the ppl here played it at least once so I'll just do it.
Playing without a specific BuildOrder (speaking of a high ranked one -> Implementing specific reclaim to specific times to get the optimal balance in the first 2-3 minutes) feels like sending the first settler to a suboptimal place where you wanna start your city. Even though in 30 rounds it doesn't matter that your opponent had like 2 food and 1 production more than you simply cuz the decisions overtime have more weight, but it just feels like you're already behind and have to actively close that gap.Back to FAF I personally distinguish between decisions and BOs. E.g. against Harzer on Cobalt I went for engi - lab - scout - engi - lab - scout ; both of my labs got shot down without killing an engineer and in addition to that two of my engis died. From that point it was basically gg. But those are the decisions and not the point I'm trying to make, that's purely "skill issue" and I accept it.
Taking Open Palms for example. I had huge struggles with that map where I didn't look for a specific Buildorder. I went for a basic one and got fucked everytime. iirc I have 7 games played on that and won 0 out of them, only exception being a win against Harzer after he showed me a buildorder (nice coincidence, right?). And that's the main part I'm trying to make but which is just being commented with "skill issue". Not only knowing where to send the engis but also knowing how much mass you need is a critical factor. e.g. if you don't know one engi getting the rocks is enough to support quite a lot of factories, you'll most likely expand with two at the same time bc that's what you usually do to grab mexes for that mass. Since labs are a big thing on Open Palms however you'd need to defend those very early expanding engis with two tanks making it a huge investment. If your opponent knows one engi is enough, he basically saves one tank and gets additional buildpower to get his facs out and also gets things like a bomber way earlier -> It's an advantage on his side.
That's basically the whole point I'm trying to make, not sure if OpenPalms is the best option but since it's a known map I went for that one. If you're like "reee learn how to read maps with reclaim" or "skill issue", then congratz. Thanks for you comment which doesn't change anything. Clown.Also that's where Yps' point had a lot of impact. Simply bc I had the feeling that I'm at least equal then, I ended up playing more aggressively and won after getting killed by some random 1500s in ladder (even though it was a while ago). So yeah, think that has a shit ton of impact.
And if someone comes up with "A BO is not necessary, play that map 10 times and you know how much you can afford with the reclaim", that's literally what a BO means for me. The awareness of what you can afford based on the map / reclaim bc you know "okay I have to send one engi there to not stall, I can keep that one in my base, [...]" is my definition of getting a BO even though it wasn't whored in sandbox. -
As a very new player with fewer than 20 games, my main issues:
- Very few people on when I can play in my TZ during the week
- I queue for 1v1 and 4v4 at the same time and usually the latter is what matches first
- I'm so low level that I am concerned about waiting in queue long enough that I'm going to force a match that ends up being a waste of time for my opponent
- Standard ladder anxiety others have already mentioned
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@blackyps said in How come you don't play ladder?:
What basically everyone here misses is that it doesn't even matter if "BO" is a relevant factor in your ladder performance. What's important is that people feel like it matters, so they won't play when they don't want to put that effort in. It doesn't help to explain to people that their perception is wrong. If you want to change this you first need to understand why people think this way, then you can try to change the cause.
I personally think that it stems from people recognizing that they play better on maps that they have already played some times and that they play even better if they looked up a BO from youtube or a replay. Many people want to prepare for PvP to counteract the fear of playing against other people. So they feel pressure to prepare. And they assume that their opponent prepared as well. They then realize that they don't enjoy this preparation too much, so they stop playing altogether because they can't stand feeling like starting from a disadvantage before the game has even begun.
See, I see BO complaints as protection of ego. It's the same as teamgame "shit team, i won lane, gg." You don't see BO whining in teamgames much because you got the noob team ego protection.
Give it a bit and map gen develops its own ego cope, the problem is fully psychological and people unable to accept someone they view as worse getting a lucky game win or simply being better at them in some matter of the game.
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@blackyps said in How come you don't play ladder?:
it doesn't even matter if "BO" is a relevant factor in your ladder performance. What's important is that people feel like it matters
I disagree
Lots of people think BO doesn't really matter
Then they try out ladder
They have a bad opening, they stall/overflow, they get rekt
remember that everyone overestimates their abilities at RTS until they actually try to play the game
so I don't think people are just imagining that BOs are important. And I don't think it's just perception that's the problem. The problem is the reality that BOs are important
But how can you make BOs less important without neutering the start of the game? If the first 5 minutes of every match don't really matter, that's not fun. You'd have to wait 5 minutes every single match in order for anything interesting to happen.
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You make everyone start with a prebuilt base of a land fac and an air fac.
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The reason I stopped playing ladder was for the simple reason that.
1: I was called a smurf.
2: I have only played one game and won it, thus I have a 100% win ratio.
3: real reason, I don't like competitive stuff, casual is my style. -
@arma473 said in How come you don't play ladder?:
@blackyps said in How come you don't play ladder?:
it doesn't even matter if "BO" is a relevant factor in your ladder performance. What's important is that people feel like it matters
I disagree
Lots of people think BO doesn't really matter
Then they try out ladder
They have a bad opening, they stall/overflow, they get rekt
remember that everyone overestimates their abilities at RTS until they actually try to play the game
so I don't think people are just imagining that BOs are important. And I don't think it's just perception that's the problem. The problem is the reality that BOs are important
But how can you make BOs less important without neutering the start of the game? If the first 5 minutes of every match don't really matter, that's not fun. You'd have to wait 5 minutes every single match in order for anything interesting to happen.
By making it harder to assassinate enemy engis with your 5 unit lead from BO win and shifting power to less impactful things eg. making it easier to kill t1 mex, pgen, mby even hydro. And then as a followup create more interest after the expansion period by buffing aggression in t2/t3 stage.
To some extent the game will always be very volatile in the expansion phase given how mex and natural reclaim work. At the beginning you double, triple, even 10x your economy within a few minutes time. It's not surprising that it creates volatility compared to later stages where you are growing by like 10% every minute.
However the volatility can be somewhat mitigated by balance changes and map pool.
