You Can Catch Up To Better Players
It's just a matter of time
A few weeks back, I wrote about my recent grind to Conqueror III (top 200, roughly) in Age of Empires IV. I spent the following few days basking in the glow of reaching a high rank, doubling down on my builds and playstyle to close in on another hundred or so ELO points. It was a nice feeling! But I knew that to reach my long-term goal of top 50, I needed to break down my play and rebuild it on stronger fundamentals - more civs, more playstyles, more variety. I know from experience that getting too comfortable is a recipe for decline.
My descent down the learning curve was predictable; I was surprised, though, to be a lot more bummed about it than I initially expected. Maybe it’s because I was embarrassed to drop a couple hundred points so soon after writing a long article on hitting top 200; maybe it was just a general frustration with backsliding. It never feels good to think you’ve gotten worse at something, you know? You put in the time, you study the game, you try your best - and in the end, you feel like you’re playing worse, and going nowhere.
It sucks!
But I think what really got to me was the quality of opponents I started facing in high Conqueror. Many of these folks had much deeper experience than myself; it’s not uncommon, nowadays, for me to face players with more ranked 1v1s in this current season than I have total lifetime games. The idea of consistently beating folks with so much more experience felt overwhelming.
Honestly, I thought about giving up. How am I ever going to catch someone who’s put 10x or 20x or 30x more time into the game than I have?
Find Opportunities
I write this article partly out of selfishness, to remind myself that the doubts and insecurities I’m feeling are both normal and surmountable. But I also write it because I think much of what I’m about to say is generally applicable to any type of competitive activity, and maybe that’s useful for others, too. To use one example, I’ve thought about stuff like this while grinding out performance ratings or a promotion at work.
The first thing I try to remember in moments of doubt is that they’re a reminder to seize opportunities to train more effectively - opportunities that most people leave unclaimed. There’s a funny and memorable quote from World War Z, a book about the zombie apocalypse, that encapsulates my thinking:
You've heard the expression "total war"; it's pretty common throughout human history. Every generation or so, some gasbag likes to spout about how his people have declared "total war" against an enemy, meaning that every man, woman and child within his nation was committing every second of their lives to victory. That is bullshit on two basic levels. First of all, no country or group is ever 100 percent committed to war; it's just not physically possible. You can have a high percentage, so many people working so hard for so long, but all of the people, all of the time? What about the malingerers, or the conscientious objectors? What about the sick, the injured, the very old, the very young?
What about when you're sleeping, eating, taking a shower, or taking a dump? Is that a "dump for victory"?
I think the same basic idea is true for any competitive activity: no one is a truly perfect competitor. Everyone leaves something on the table, whether it’s playing a bit mindlessly because they’re tired, or missing important lessons because they’re distracted by Twitch chat, or taking long breaks from the game, or failing to move the needle in some aspect of the meta because they don’t like a particular playstyle, or an endless number of other factors.
No one is a “zombie competitor” - everyone you’re playing against is an imperfect human, just like you.
You can plumb the potential in that differential in quality of practice really far. Every little edge counts for something - playing offline instead of streaming, watching every replay, comparing every confusing loss against pro-level play in the same match-up. Refusing to have an ego about playstyle, refusing to blame balance, always detaching yourself from outcomes and focusing on process. Playing the game “the right way” irrespective of outcome, forcing yourself to play in ways that you hate in order to learn something, always being polite in the face of bad manners to maintain your own sanity and avoid tilt.
I could go on and on. There’s an infinite number of ways to train more efficiently. And if you are consciously trying to claim these opportunities on a proactive basis, and you are finding it impossible to claim them all, then your opponents are probably having just as hard a time doing so, too. In fact, it’s likely that they’re having a harder time, because they’re probably not chasing efficiency as doggedly as you are. And that differential will enable you to catch them.
Experience Has A Half-Life
Related to the notion of training efficiency is the relatively short half-life of experience, particularly in live-service games. Every balance patch or design update or organic meta shift lessens the value of prior experience in the face of the bleeding edge of competition. Your opponent might have thousands more games of practice than you do, but the learnings from that practice won’t apply forever, at least not completely. One game of experience today is worth more than one game of experience in years past.
Even equivalently dated experience - two games from the same day - isn’t created equal. For example, I believe that the most efficient way to improve is to break down each loss with two key questions:
From a high-level strategy standpoint, did I play this game correctly?
What was my earliest significant mistake, and how can I correct it?
If the answer to 1) is no, then I skip 2), because it’s pointless to think about mistakes - the highest leverage thing I can do is play in the more correct way. But if the answer is yes, I start to search around for the biggest issue I can work on, and I think about how I can efficiently address the issue.
It’s very hard to practice this way, consistently - to maximize the value of your experience. It’s challenging to be detached and break down every game from an intellectual point of view. For example, I gave up on my Age of Empires II grinds multiple times because I kept getting exhausted with the process.
Like I said before - we’re all just human.
Everyone has moments where they lose a close game, get tilted, and immediately re-queue instead of evaluating what went wrong. But moments like that are precisely the opportunities to go a different way and make your experience higher leverage than your opponents’. I actually think that most people, most of the time, don’t make a very meaningful attempt to study the game in the ideal way. They play, they lose, they draw an instant emotional conclusion as to what happened (“ah, if I had just defended this one raid properly, I’d be fine”), and they move on. A single quality retrospective on a game is worth, like, ten of these flippant analyses. More, even!
And it’s also worth remembering that the quality of retrospecting on a game hinges on whether it was a quality game in the first place. Many people like to do the same handful of builds over and over, focused mostly on refining their mechanics and execution. That’s fine, but there’s diminishing returns to that approach, because fixing strategic mistakes is higher-leverage than fixing mechanical mistakes (which, in many cases, will fix themselves over time anyway). Multiple games of doing the same thing repeatedly isn’t worth much more than just doing it once or twice.
Add all this up, and the ratio of high quality games you need to play to match the average quality game of experience your opponent has, starts to feel small and tractable. And that’s more motivation to get on with it and grind it out.
Confidence
The third thing I try to remember is that as valuable as it is to strive for perfection in practice, we’re not machines - we all have limits. And what that means is that on a purely material basis, being unnecessarily hard on yourself produces inferior outcomes compared to being realistic and practical.
If you go into a game lacking the confidence to play it in the way that you think is right, then you are probably going to play it in a way that is not right, and you are thus not going to learn very much. And if you are really hard on yourself, then you are going to put yourself in this position more often than is good or healthy for your training regimen.
The classic RTS example of this is when a player loses confidence and all-ins when they should instead retreat and get more ahead. The reason players do this, in my view, is that retreat-and-get-more-ahead is actually harder to execute than all-in’ing; so when players do it, they inevitably throw games they would have otherwise won. It takes real confidence to give up a potentially won game in order to secure a more challenging-to-achieve long-term macro win.
If you lack confidence, though, then you simply won’t do this very often, and you’ll stop improving because you won’t understand how to play a strong late-game.
The solution is not to stiff-upper-lip your way through the ladder, because that’s just not a thing (at least, not in my experience). The right approach, from various tomes of sports psychology like Mind Gym, is to take small actions to boost your confidence and remind yourself that you are a good player capable of executing correctly on good decisions; and that a loss here or there is irrelevant when you are striving for long-term excellence under an umbrella of correct strategic play.
For me, when it comes to RTS, that means occasionally retreating to builds and playstyles that I know well. It can also mean playing on an alternate account (a single lifetime alternate account, in case you’re wondering), or playing some throwaway team games, or even watching a replay of a recent win. Whatever it takes to get my confidence back up so that I’m more likely to make the right decision instead of the easy decision.
It’s not weak or newbie or “soft” to manage your own confidence level; it’s common sense. If you don’t feel like you’re capable of doing something, then you won’t do it. But if you need to do that thing to get better, than you need to find a way to psych yourself up to do it. It’s just that simple!
Final Thoughts
I decided to stick with my grind in part to prove that these ideas actually have merit. It’s easy to say that you should chase unclaim opportunities for efficiency or find ways to boost your own confidence, but it’s harder to actually put that into practice. I want to make sure I’m actually in the trenches of competition when I opine on this stuff.
I think it’s always tough to compete with folks who seem like they are miles and miles ahead of you. The sense that you’ll never catch up can be demoralizing, even paralyzing. I write today’s article in the hopes that it helps someone out there in their own competitive efforts. You’ll get there! It’s just a matter of time.
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.