Competitive RTS is… Very Competitive

A few observations

When I lived in Japan, my wife decided to further her language skills and enroll in a Japanese language school. It was a pretty good time - she worked her way up to N1, meaning she can speak quite a bit more than the famichiki I am singularly capable of. Along the way, she became friends with a number of Taiwanese and South Korean students studying alongside her.

My wife and I were several years older than these folks - mostly just out of undergrad - so our apartment became a kind of common gathering place for end of week social activities. My involvement would mostly comprise watching GSL VODs in the background to bridge the Korean <> American cultural gap - I know, my cultural sensitivity astounds - while helping with dishes or cleaning or whatever while everyone practiced Japanese and had fun. Occasionally the kids would want to play board games, and because that somewhat transcends the language barrier (and because they all spoke basic English), I’d join in if they needed an extra player.

Now, it’s my personal belief that it’s somewhat of a faux-pas to care too much about the outcome of board games at a party. You put in enough effort to keep it interesting, of course, but the point is to socialize and have fun over a shared activity, not to win. Most party games have a large luck component anyway, so getting too emotionally invested is just a recipe for becoming tilted. My approach is to kick back and chat about whatever while moving the game along and having fun.

Ah. Not so for my compatriots. Did you know that you can play a version of rock-paper-scissors in a large group? The K-Pop band BTS even has their own official version, because apparently even the rich and famous live in hell on earth. Our friends would use this game to determine who would go first, and it would get fierce. But more incredibly, they would also use it to determine who would go second, third, fourth - all the way down the line. Now remember that this is a social gathering, and we were all seated somewhat randomly around a table. Picking a fixed ordering meant that we had to remember who would go next after each turn, instead of just going around in a circle. Or - in our tiny Japanese apartment - we’d need to spend ages playing this godforsaken rock-paper-scissors variant, and then re-arrange ourselves to accommodate the ordering it produced.

“Why not just pick someone to go first, and then go around clockwise?”, I thought to myself.

Well, that wouldn’t be fair. And winning it all at brownbear’s board game night is, apparently, a key lifetime achievement.

Boston Bound

Look, I get it. It’s more fair to randomize turn ordering in a board game using something like rock-paper-scissors - especially because going first offers a large advantage in many party games.

The observation I want to make is that approaching party games as a competition - and more broadly, placing relative importance on that aspect of a social gathering over other considerations - is a conscious personal choice. For me and my wife, it was a noticeable difference between us and her fellow classmates. They were substantially more competitive, about everything, than we were. For me, for example, I might dial it up to grind out a promotion at work, but I’m not gonna push myself playing Machi Koro. But not everyone thinks that way.

Over the years, I’ve come to better appreciate just how cutthroat the competition in ranked RTS has become. Large numbers of people care a lot about competing, about being the best, about winning. I don’t think this is an especially revolutionary sociological analysis, nor am I trying to make a particular point about it or argue one way or another. Rather I just want to say that, damn, this has become a very competitive environment.

Take play time. When I was younger, and I played competitive Age of Empires like it was my full-time job, that was very unusual, at least in my local, non-Internet context. But I don’t think it’s that unusual nowadays. Pulling up some old StarCraft II data from prior to the COVID spike, the top 10% most active Grandmaster players played at least 6-7 ladder games a day - roughly an hour and a half to two hours a day, every single day! For Master’s players (the top 4% of the player base), it was around half that much. In both cases I’d further add a roughly 50% premium for all the non-ladder stuff that usually accompanies ranked play - build order practice, mechanics practice, studying replays, watching streams, etc.

Taken together, this would imply tens of thousands of players engaging with competitive StarCraft II for at least 10 hours a week at the Master’s level, and substantially more at higher levels - effectively as though it were a part-time job.

That’s… a lot of time! For a lot of people, playing a video game non-professionally.

It amazes me to think about this in the context of other activities. To use a real life example, The Boston Marathon is arguably the most prestigious marathon in the country, and running it is a common bucket list item for distance runners. But you only needed to be among the top 6% of finishers in the most recent NYC marathon to qualify on merit for the fastest age group - a percentile ranking that would put you in Diamond League in StarCraft II.

Tell people you qualified for Boston and they will, to a person, be impressed. (Assuming they know a little about marathon running). Yet how often do you hear “Diamond League” as a compliment - and how often do you hear it as a pejorative?*

Part of the challenge here is that top 6%, when taken at face value, is an impressive achievement. But as feardragon pointed out in this excellent video a few years back, the culture has changed a lot thanks to the increased popularity of professionalized esports. Players tend to compare themselves to professional gamers, not the population as a whole, which tilts them toward being more self-critical than they otherwise would be. And so instead of seeing their Diamond banner as a sign of their hard work paid off, they too often see it merely as a large gap from how good they could be.

Balanced For The Best

I’ve written some version of this article several times over the years, always struggling to piece it into a cohesive narrative. I think what I came to terms with recently is that the underlying facts are basically the point I want to make, in and of themselves. There’s simply a lot of people out there willing to grind out esports, even in relatively niche competitive RTS.

After all - continuing with the running example - Boston’s qualifying times are based on the physical limits of how many people can run a marathon in Boston. If everyone in America suddenly started trying to qualify, the bar would get a lot higher in order to keep the race at a manageable size. And while marathon running has become a lot more popular - three times as many people ran Boston in 2019 than they did in 1999 - the qualifying times are still reasonable enough that a layperson investing several hours a week could qualify after a year or so of training, assuming they maintained a healthy diet.

I find it comparatively mind-boggling how challenging it is to climb the ladder in this day and age. It’s not impossible - but it’s really hard! The sheer number of people willing to put several hours a day into competitive games means that it ends up being a lot harder than a lot of traditionally hard activities.

I think one of the things that’s really interesting to think about is whether and how this impacts design and balance. Competitive RTS developers now need to consider the fact that non-trivial numbers of people will play these games like it’s their full-time job - and for the people for whom that’s actually true, they’ll play them like they have two full-time jobs.

I’ve spoken often, for example, about how Legacy leveraged techniques like asymmetric mechanics - defending something being harder than executing it - multi-pronged attacks, and sudden, game-changing moments to raise StarCraft II’s skill ceiling and push it in a more aggressive and dynamic direction. But I think in some cases this produced a twitchy, unforgiving experience, particularly for players on the middle rungs of the ladder.

The bigger the skill gap between the top of the ladder and the median player, the bigger the distance in actual gameplay. And the nature of balancing around the best means that said median player will have to put up with design and balance changes oriented around a style of play that they are increasingly disconnected from.

I think this is why there’s so much outrage, for example, about things like widow mines and disruptors - balanced at the highest levels, they are nonetheless not that much fun for a lot of median players.

I think we’ll start to see more of this, not less, as time goes on. It’s just really challenging to design skill expression that’s both compelling and relevant across the entire skill range, from top-level players investing 8-10 hours a day to the median player clocking in just a few games a week. And I think one solution we’ll start to see more of is more aggressive player segmentation - pushing less invested competitive players into more casual modes like co-op, while making the competitive experience increasingly ruthless and unforgiving.

It’s crazy how competitive things have gotten. As I return to work after parental leave, I’m just amazed by how much easier that is compared to simply being good at a video game. I feel compelled to point it out, even if I don’t know what conclusion to draw. RTS is hard, man!

Until next time!
brownbear

If you’d like, you can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and check out my YouTube and Twitch channels.

* I think people will reasonably point out here that this is top 6% of the people who actually finished the NYC marathon, which is itself a select group. I think that’s fair enough, although I’d argue finishing a marathon is easier than most people think. Mostly what amazes me is that the training time commitment necessary to qualify for Boston is so much less than what thousands of amateur players put into competitive RTS everyday.