Speaking of playing entirely different games, I found I could piss plenty of people off in COD just by using the tactics that worked best at my level of play (which was way below "very good for an amateur;" I was often sipping a beer while I played.) There are a lot of people out there who don't like being reminded that they aren't pros and can be beaten with tactics that don't work against pros. And I don't mean camping or grenade spamming, I mean stuff like using a shotgun on a map with lots of narrow hallways. I take it from the epithets people used to scream at me that pros don't use shotguns as their primary. It was like playing beer league softball and having people scream homophobic things at me about what does and doesn't work in major league baseball.

In TF2 this is where as a pyro I started firing flares at fully cloaked spies (who are inaudible and invisible) and they would burst into flame and become visible, because I’d learned to predict their positions and timings to a degree that exceeded their variability. Something something “know your enemy” applies, even when you have no ‘current’ information at all.

I loved playing TF2 as a pyro. I used a similar technique of running around randomly jetting flames in certain places to find cloaked spies, but also flaming team-mates (as the flames wouldn't hurt them) to reveal spies in disguise.

Gamesense is the word you're looking for.

CSGO is a fantastic example where someone with poor aiming skills but good gamesense (holding angles, using echo-location where you move your view to triangulate opponents based on how the sound moves and what type of footstep sounds are generated, timings, grenade throws, etc) can wreck opponents with poor gamesense and better aiming skills.

I have gotten reported for walling but people just need to realize how much damn noise they make.

A sound card w/ decent surround sound features (Creative <3), noise cancelling headphones, and good map awareness & position play gave me a far higher KDA in CS 1.6 and Source than practicing with the AWP til my eyes and fingertips bled.

The Shift key became infinitely more useful once my ears acclimated to the setup change.

In many ways it's not so different than billiards/snooker/pool. Being a good shot-maker helps but just about all the consistently performing pros focus first and foremost on position-play and thinking several shots ahead.

I find that open back headphones are better for this if you are in a relatively controlled environment without too much background noise. I can hear basically everything on the map with my sennheisers even compared to my friends who have the same closed backs pros use in tournaments (which they only do because they need full noise isolation for the competition).

I mean, to some extent maybe, but CS is still extremely reliant on twitch mechanics and reaction speed. To put it in perspective: I've put 650 hours into Rocket League and have hit the 99th percentile. I put 2000+ hours into League back in the day and hit the 99.9th percentile. I've put 1300 hours into CSGO (and probably hundreds more watching pro matches) and am still at the 50th percentile.

I'd say in most of my games I've got more playtime, trying various strategies, and learning from mistakes, than the other 9 people in the game put together. But at some point it all just comes down to who wins a trade, and I very rarely win them. Game's still fun though, somehow.

> I have gotten reported for walling but people just need to realize how much damn noise they make.

Always amusing when this happens.

I've noticed people who perform best are the ones who pick a strategy and stick with it rather than trying to get the glory.

Another thing is lower level players use nades poorly and are always caught off guard.

Yeh in MOBAs it is totally this. Less reacting in 150ms to a visual queue. More I have been in this situation 100 times and expect character X to do Y right now. That’s why there is a whole psychology around moving in unpredictable manners at a certain level. Similar to the whole master swordsman fearing a novice more than another master.

Same thing with poker. Someone who doesn't understand betting strategy and odds is more dangerous. It takes the game closer to the underlying luck line, because you can't effectively communicate with the other player in the normal ways. And that's a scary proposition, because you're relying on decision making to create an edge... The luck layer is the same for everyone.

It is not the same in poker, because there is a very defined strategy for playing against people who don't understand strategy - and that is to play a tighter range and better hands.

It obviously doesn't eliminate luck; but the person who doesn't understand strategy isn't going to do well either.

I feel like you think you're disagreeing with me, when in fact you are supporting my point. The game goes closer to the luck baseline, and you beat the luck baseline by playing tighter.

Also, that's all well and good for heads up play, but if you're at a full table, playing tighter for one person at the table is just going to see you winning a lot of nothing. (Players paying attention will just skip hands where you bite.)

Come to think of it, it will be closer to the luck baseline, because the distribution of starting cards depends mostly on luck.

What makes you a master is the ability to predict everything before it happens fast and automatically.

A master swordman does not fear novices precisely because they know their movements before they do. They look at (imperceptible for amateurs) body language hints and know exactly what you are going to do before you do it.

In reality there are physics constraints. Before you do a movement, you need to put weight in some part of the body, tense a muscle....e.g it is impossible to jump without a specific movement of going down and preloading.

Not only that , they know exactly what is the best response to it to neutralize whatever comes to them.

It's a take from Mark Twain.

>"But don't you know, there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight? Awkwardness and stupidity can. The best swordsman in the world doesn't need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn't do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn't prepared for him; he does the thing he ought not to do: and often it catches the expert out and ends him on the spot."

I played SSBB (Super Smash Bros. Brawl) competitively. I'd occasionally drop games to the worst players because they would choose one of several of the worst possible options available to them at any given time. I keep expecting them to react the "proper" way and so it would throw off my reads. Thankfully sets are best of 3.

SSBB is a game entirely based on reads due to the characteristic lack of combos and "neutral position" being popular since there aren't many scenarios where you can build momentum in a favored position (unlike the more popular SSBM (Super Smash Bros. Melee) which has combos that allow you to create favored positions to keep momentum.

Similarly, I've observed that opponents who are too bad can really annoy players of both gambling and parlour-style card games. Their ideal opponent plays "correctly", but poorly.

Tangentially related: "How Rangchu Did The Impossible With One of Tekken's Worst Characters" [0]. This guy beat the greatest Tekken players in the world with panda, which had previously been considered one of the weakest characters in the game.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHz2vDQ2m8E&

I’ve always thought that multiplayer games could be improved by essentially giving every player a bot “layer” their actions are relayed through; a bot which perfectly does everything that can be done through rote memorization (pathing, rough aiming based on prediction with incomplete knowledge), leaving the players to compete solely on the things humans are uniquely good at.

(I’m not suggesting aimbots, mind you; the bot layer wouldn’t have more complete information to base its decisions on than the player does.)

I think this is part of why I love games that have a constant stream of user-made levels. Many of my favorite experiences in Halo are when I'm playing a match on a Forge (user-created) level that no one in the match has seen before and I'm trying to adapt to it faster than the enemies. Super Mario Maker (which just had a release on the Switch!) is similarly good since it gives you a constant stream of new levels.

Ugh, I replied to the wrong post here, and I'm past the edit/delete period.

I totally agree. Here's one of my favorite essays on this phenomenon: "On the Marionette Theatre" https://southerncrossreview.org/9/kleist.htm.

That was an excellent read. Thank you for posting it.

I don't want to pretend quake or other games I like don't have that, for example dueling in quake required memorization of maps and such, it's closer to a spectrum (or a linear combination of the skills) but the speedrun type of games, especially skill platformers like Celeste for example really lean heavily on the other aspect of play. Others have pointed out other games like fortnite have this more improvision emphasis which I didn't know because I haven't played it, so may be it isn't as bad as I feel it is as of late, I might just not be playing the right games.

I used to play CS in the dorms, and my roommate had a friend who attended the competing flagship school. Guy was pretty damn good, and playing against him kinda leveled me up. Started learning where people tend to hide, what cover can be shot through, etc. In retrospect I shouldn't really have been surprised that he was cheating.