How to play with people who are better than you

Re:How to play with people who are better than you by dragontamer on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @05:23PM (#21707868)

> 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.

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Re:How to play with people who are better than you by derefr on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @05:33PM (#21707971)

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.)

[ Parent | on HN ]