Elliot shared this YouTube video https://youtu.be/SbF1bRwxIWY
Interestingly enough, a lot of these tips apply 1:1 to learning MOBAs too (Like DotA 2 or League of Legends), and why people don’t improve at them.
- They don’t think about their opponent’s resources, options, and goals. So they make a mistake and their opponent punishes them, but they don’t learn from that and continue to make similar mistakes in the future.
- Playing crazy just to win while playing crazily. This is big in MOBAs where people will play extremely aggressively and try to “style on their opponents” rather than playing patiently and smartly to win or gain incremental advantages safely over time. I interviewed students about this and many openly admitted that they had more fun playing this way and basically prioritized it over learning/improving at the game, although they didn’t explicitly realize that until I asked them about it directly.
- He quoted another chess guy, Lawrence Trent, “When you’re under 2200, don’t you just need to do tactical puzzles until you get to 2200?” Ben Finegold says that’s not right, but there’s a point there. In MOBAs too there are fundamentals that can get you to a pretty high rank just by practicing them e.g. Last Hitting or Laning Skills. But most players avoid drilling those fundamentals instead just spamming lots of games, watching interesting videos on high level strategies and trying to apply them etc. Basically focusing on all the minor stuff first rather than the major stuff, because the major stuff is boring or they think they’ve already understood it, while the minor stuff is exciting because they see pros doing it.
- Making lots of mistakes and not correcting them over time. You only win when other people blunder more than you. You could improve your upper potential of plays, but if you continue to make tons of mistakes while making some better plays over time, the mistakes will overshadow the good plays and still lose you lots of games against players who make less mistakes (even if they also make less good plays as well). Minimizing mistakes is more important than maximizing good plays. Same thing in MOBAs where a lot of winning is about building small advantages and then keeping them, which means not throwing them away by getting overconfident and trying to bite off more than you can chew. Most players make so many fundamental mistakes that they don’t even see that learning new, better plays doesn’t help them improve until they fix those mistakes first. “The only way to stop blundering is to blunder, and then look at it and see why you blundered and what you didn’t understand, and understand it and don’t do it anymore.” So many MOBAs now have fully fledged replay systems where you can watch any game back and even see info you like the opponent’s cooldowns, gold etc. but a minority of players ever take advantage of that feature to identify and learn from their mistakes.
- Excuses and selective memory: Players who get better focus on trial and error, analysis, improvement, and get peer or professional feedback. Players who don’t better blame luck, being tired, forgetting to bring something they needed to bring etc. The selective memory part is focusing on the moments where you got unlucky and using that as an excuse not to analyze the moments where you weren’t unlucky but just made poor decisions. Weak players get fixated on one thing and define their entire experience by that one moment, trashing all the learning potential from every other decision made in that game/tournament.