Boards›General Discussion

The average skill level

Swiggity Swootie·11/15/2019, 1:56:41 PM·1 votes·1,101 views

Do Y'all think it's increased? I have played since Season 1, I was by no means good, and still am not (peaked Plat 2, sitting gold 1 now). I've taken a few break along the road but always come back.

It seems like I remember early on, around season 1-3. just being able to kite and auto on an ADC made you good. Just having simple mechanics back then were so much different now. I watched a video that BoxBox put out about Riven players, and how he was pretty much the peak of Riven, all of the hidden mechanics he found, now you HAVE to know just to play the champion at a par level. All the other Veterans out there, have you noticed this? I know I am not as good as I used to be, but man I feel like even high Gold the players are much better than I remember. Every season start I would pile through Placing in Silver 1ish and go straight to low/mid Plat, and can't seem to break Gold 1 now at a 51% Winrate.

I know the community is pretty conceited, it's just the nature of the game. But that aside, what do y'all think? Is the average player better?

2 Comments

R0ses R Red11/15/2019, 2:09:51 PM3 votes

Certainly. A point people may forget is that the current Silver would be the past's Bronze and so on. This shows just how much the playerbase has improved BECAUSE no one has ever said "wow, Silver has gotten worse." They only ever say it's improved or that it's pretty much the same. Even if they're saying it's the same, they're admitting it improved because, in actuality, it'd be like saying our bronzes are now as strong as the past's silvers.

Something more objective would be that now players of every division roam when it was an alien concept in even proplay during the past, CS better, don't build AP on every ADC anymore, and so on.

Darkdemon65311/15/2019, 2:46:13 PM1 votes

I used to think so but I'm now I can see it going either way.

I think the reason it seems like the average skill level has improved is we, the people who aren't complete trash, aren't subjected to the part of the playerbase that is. I think we underestimate just how many horrendously bad players there are. People will point to the rank distribution and say that the amount of people in iron is very low, but I think they overestimate the amount of people who play ranked and incorrectly assume that the distribution of skill level in ranked mirrors the distribution of skill level of the playerbase. I have no data so it's just speculation, but I would bet that the average skill of ranked is significantly higher than the average skill of normal games. While there are certainly amazing players who play normals, just the fact that ranked is ranked and normal isn't is going to cause many bad players to simply not do ranked. This is also true with coop vs. AI and normal, but the amount who do coop vs. AI is much smaller.

I would point to WoW and use what happened in WotLK as a good demonstration. Prior to the dungeon finder system, runs generally went well (we'll say just in WotLK for the sake of this discussion). It was pretty rare to have a group fail a dungeon. On the day the dungeon finder came out, runs started failing left and right. Unless you were way overgeared and had no reason to do the dungeon, you simply couldn't complete it if you were a DPS. Tanks and healers could maybe carry their groups, but again, it generally required them to already be at least somewhat geared.

The playerbase didn't suddenly get worse. What happened was the terrible players who weren't joining groups for whatever set of reasons were now joining groups because they were guaranteed to get in with no hassle or effort. There was no matchmaking for dungeons, so there was nothing to stop these terrible players from being put into groups with people from the entire spectrum of skill. And due to the sheer number of them, they overwhelmed the system and even the good players couldn't finish dungeons anymore.