I’ve had multiple people tell me my idea is dumb, but I don’t see the fault in my logic.
So you’re getting stomped in a hopeless match. The enemy team is at least one talent ahead and has control of all the lanes. Your teammate wimps out and says they give up.
What’s going to make me a better, more skilled player? Giving up and sitting in spawn like them, or going out and trying to fight against all odds?
Logically, I think that if we go out against such hopelessness, we can at the least, get better at dodging or landing skill shots. Maybe figure out better positioning. That should be more useful in later matches, where things aren’t so hopeless.
If I give up and sit in spawn, what skill did I build? The skill of giving up. Now I’ll be better at giving up.
I understand the futility of trying to 1V5 the enemy. Sure it would be awesome if I could pull it off, but also the game would be pretty broken at that point. That’s not what I’m trying to ask. All I want to know is: How is giving up a better use of my time?
usually if that happens (which it does fairly often in QM and ARAM) and I’m seriously fighting a 4v5 or worse, I’ll mostly just try to A) delay the game loss as much as possible (usually by playing safe and babysitting the lanes) and B) get as much XP as possible for leveling my own and my teammates heroes. Obviously, if our outnumbered team attempts to make a play I’ll help them but left in a hopeless game you can still at least practice positioning, micro, and get XP for whatever thats’ worth.
To play devil’s advocate, If you can only play for so many hours, having a hopeless match end quicker means you get to spend more time in matches that are hopefully better matched and better for building skills that are revelent for “proper” games.
When losing the game, a fight or an objective I frequently find it most beneficial to just stay away and give your enemy space to make a mistake, and when teams are made of randoms, these become inevitable.
The last thing you want the enemy is to know your position on the map if their team is at a major advantage. If you can’t fight them directly, you can always be doing something useful on the complete opposite end or hide completely to stress them out.
I can’t tell you how many times (a lot) I’ve won a game of chicken where a full team would be walking towards my core with a boss, only to panic recall because I managed to convince some professional actors to show up in their base at the same time.
Ah but how many of those “proper” games are purely in the mind?
I’ve thought about this angle a fair bit. The reality though is that I seem to be given more disadvantaged matches than favorable ones (Even if it’s only in my head). If I’m only going to actually try on a third of the games I play, how much more of a waste of time will this game be to me (And now others because of my lack-luster participation)?
To put a little bit more perspective on my “in my mind/head” statements: I’m coming from the angle of mood congruent memories. Where matching circumstances put you in a mood, and that mood brings back memories of when you were in that mood before.
People that give up quickly have a broken sense of perception and understanding. There’s a common comparison between “time” and “money” but people tend to not think of the actual interactions between the two, and just end up bad at how they utilize both.
[They] think of their actions as “spending their time” rather than investing their time. Regardless of what a person does, the time is “spent”, it does not retain ‘value’ by holding on to it at a different point (ie, money can be accumulated, time no so much) so they think their ‘time’ has a particular “value” and feel at a lose if the don’t ‘get’ [something] from an immediate transaction.
They want “instant gratification”
The ‘real’ value of time is how it is used at a particular moment, not that it has ‘value’ simply because they claim it did.
While some players cannot fathom how they could get a ‘skill’ by apply themselves to observing opportunities, trying something different, and doing more than just giving up, even if they don’t get better at stutter-stepping, or landing a wombo-combo, just riding out the want to “give up” and waiting helps them have “delayed gratification”.
Delaying gratification is practically a super power these days and is a key source of getting “value” from “time”.
If watching replays of gm’s doesn’t count, the only improvements I achieved in HotS were created through trying to make forlorn-hope type attacks against clearly superior enemies
or trying to understand why they made certain macro decisions like pushing at a certain time instead of fighting with their team.
To put it bluntly, high ranked people are just people who win a lot. There is always something you can learn by facing them head-on, even if it means losing by 35 kills to 0.
Worst case scenario, watch the replay afterwards. Look at what the person who killed you 7 times is doing all game. Slowly start emulating those behaviors and strategies.
You probably wont land at Grand Master, but you will definitely get out of Bronze.
As someone who was Bronze for a long time and went to low diamond; Bronzes are always playing the game wrong (in Ranked)
which can be easily exploited and turned into kills, camp thefts and core takedowns if you adapt smarter techniques and ways of playing from non-Bronze players.
tldr; Don’t just sit in spawn or ragequit during those games. They can still give you valuable info even when the game is a 100% loss due to the disparity in team skill levels.
devils advocate here, but if you truly cared about investing all of your time into fruitful activity, why bother playing HotS instead idk, gardening or something more fruitful?
I remember one game where I was Artanis vs Nazeebo and Stukov.
At least five different times, when I used Blade Dash, They—knowing where I would inevitably land—would Zombie Wall/Corpse Spiders and Lurking Arm me to death. My only hope was to land a Phase Prism. I didn’t figure any of that out until after the game was over.
I was trying to keep this aspect of reality hush hush. It can’t be a very popular take around here.
not really devils advocate there, it can just be repeating the gratification issue and ignoring what it takes to ‘invest’ and get a return on said investment.
slippery slope: it’s not about investing “all the time,” the claim is about putting value into what time is utilized. It’s not an all-or-none fix, though that still falls back into the gratification demands. In HotS case though, it’s mostly Sunk-cost Fallacy, or a ‘if life gives you lemons’
motivation and reward aren’t about always “fruit”. (not just quantity vs quality outcomes)
Games, as a hobby or recreation, fall into some 10 categories of motivation and ‘reward’ mechanisms that people get out of it. While I could, and ‘probably’ should, use my time on just about anything else but HotS, if my day-job is already “gardening” or ‘being fruitful’ then a sense of indulgence and waste is more appealing for making recreation something apart from just “job but different”
Even gardeners, or botanists, don’t just mix/max “being fruitful” but have to experiment with different cultivars, and those typically have other costs that come with the wanted outcome. Overproduction of a single staple crop depletes the land of the nutrients to grow that, so it takes a knowledgable rotation to put nutrients back into a sustainable cycle instead of just depleting the resources and selling off the waste.
Adversity builds skill. No one learns much if anything at all if all they do is win and are never put under pressure. To become the best at anything you are going to take loses to get there. You are going to get knocked on your backside. You are going to have matches where you are going to want to bash your monitor with your keyboard not want to look at the game for the rest of the day.
But sooner or later you get back up and going. You, hopefully, learn from the mistakes made, get better, and do better than last time. It does not matter how many times you fall. What matters is how many times you pick yourself back up.
Think of it this way, if you sit in spawn with the rest of the quitters, the loss is now guaranteed. I’ve found that some people, who have said they have given up, will sometimes rejoin a game if you get a kill. The dopamine rush from the enemy killed sound effect, often works wonders.
That said, sometimes it’s just impossible to win with certain players. In a recent ARAM game, I was matched with someone with a tag like “IFyUoSuCkIafk”, they were silenced at account level 7. They picked the worst hero option available to them (Valeera), and instantly started ping spamming the whole team before the game even began. Then they stood just behind our towers so as not to be kicked. Despite our team getting many kills early, they would not join. From the best I could figure, they were a child, or someone who feels they have no control or power IRL, so ruining games is all they have.
Look I’m sorry okay, I only played one Nazeebo game this week, I swear to you on my children’s heads divine inquisitor.
Depends on your team’s mood at the currect time. People who stay back in base and already voiced thier opinions that they dont want to continue the fight are hard to get back on thier feets again. If people says just … it and lets try. What can go wrong ? Then you are more likely to have your team do something. Even better if one of them steps up and leads them.
A leader is nothing without his team. Then it does not matter how good you are yourself if the rest dont follow you.
That is another aspect of this topic. Does it matter what I do when my teammates sit in spawn after giving up?
I’m not one for ranting. I might try to call them wimps—if I can think of a cleaver way to respond to something they said, but usually I won’t say anything.
I like those times when the few that don’t give up make a new game of killing a particular hero. Even if it happens the moment before the core dies, it’s a ‘win’.
Really bad idea, because you can get reported for that. The banning system is hard on things written in the chat but totally okay with people ruining your games on purpose. Be aware of that fact.
Practicing against players better than you is the ONLY way to improve your game. You learn nothing new against player at or worse than you.
Additionally you need to review your games. All of them ideally, but especially the losses, so that you identify where your weak points are. Ideals you would do this with you teammates but since competitive gaming has turned into a solo queue wank fest good luck with that.
Finally, you should find someone with an understanding and experience of playing the game at those higher levels, go through those replays to identify the issues with your game and point them out to you. In sports this guy is called a coach. Coaches are also often there to guide you while you are playing your games as well because nobody is that good that they can play team sports by themselves.
That said, it’s perfectly fine to just jump into games to have some fun. Nobody should think that they need to treat a game like HotS like they are playing in the NFL just to enjoy a little competition. Too many of you all are wasting way too much energy on something that really isn’t that important. Conversely, if you want to be playing at a higher level of play, you shouldn’t be queuing up on the automated ladder, and instead find yourself 4 or more other players to make a team to play in one of the tournament leagues.
