I've upvoted your post. Apparently it's a thing for me to upvote posts I disagree with, I'm not sure where this came from but I guess it's a thing I do. Hmm. Anyways, I thought I was upvoting your post because I respected the fact that you wrote it, even though I'm about to try and convince you of all the things you said that I think aren't correct. Hopefully you don't take offense, but even if you do, at least you got an upvote
It happens very rarely that top players play terribly. Usually when one top player plays decidedly worse, it's because they chose a strategy that turned out to be clearly inferior,
I play terribly all of the time, there are very few games I go back an look at where I don't feel I made any mistakes at all. I'm sure other "top players" will say the same thing. And most of the time these misplays are tactical things -- not the kind you're talking about. Little ways I could have played my turn better or ordered my buys to make things move along quicker, or reduce the chance of bad things happening to me. Sometimes I catch these things while I'm playing, but a lot of the time I only see them on the replay or when someone in chat tells me about it. I'm quite sure that if someone looks at their play closely enough, they will find tons of these, everywhere. In most turns of almost every game.
Maybe your definition of "terribly" is something I'm not picking up on, but any misplay (even a small one) is a chance for me to learn from it. Maybe you don't find any benefit in looking at your past games closely, that's OK.
In most of these games luck will still be the deciding factor. I'm not sure how many, but when I say "most" I mean more than 50%.
There's an assumption here that "top players" are playing perfectly or "good enough", as someone has said, to make luck the deciding factor. Pardon me when I say I don't believe you. You can say it's true, but I can say it isn't true (or at least that I don't know that it's true, just to give you the burden of proof
) but both of us are just saying things based on our guts and not on actual knowledge. That number (50%) was effectively pulled out of thin air, I can pull a number out of thin air too and say it's less than 50%.
But the point is not how much is decided by luck. I mean, sure, if what motivates you is being able to win consistently over people who you're much better than, then any high-variance game (like Dominion) is not going to be your favorite thing I guess. Maybe not at the competitive level, at least -- but even then we have a league where we've completed 8 seasons as had only two unique league champions who have never demoted from the top division. In a format like that, where we can smooth out a lot of the variance, you can see skill consistently coming through...
I agree with AdamH that you can always get better. But if in every game you lose, you are convinced it's something you did wrong, you will not improve either, because you will often "learn" the wrong thing. You have to consider the luck factor, which is often significant, as well as what you did and what your opponent did, and navigate between them to try to understand what would have been the best play. That's difficult. Sometimes it's pretty much impossible, because the luck skewed it so much. If you play the same strategy later, with more or less the same cards (and your opponent does too) then you have more to go on and might start to draw some conclusions (if you remember both games that is!).
If you believe this is the case, then I'd say you need to work on getting better at learning. When I start a thread to talk about something and get feedback, my takeaways aren't specific moves I should have done better that game, it's assumptions about the way I play the game that need to change. Do I need to adjust in my mind the power level of a card or a pair of cards? Do I need to put in a mental note to slow down at a certain point in some games? (Never press the "play all treasures" button in a Farmland game. Just don't ever do it before thinking about what you're going to buy.) Or maybe I just need to play a bunch of games with a card or two cards or something to get a feel for something. It will be different for you but if you can't learn from your past games, maybe try learning a different way? I mean, you describe this problem and that just doesn't register with me so maybe it's on your end. I'm sorry but I feel like this isn't really helpful, what I'm saying here.
After a certain point, getting better at Dominion becomes more difficult. Sometimes the things that worked for you before will stop working for you as well and you need to find other things. But just giving up and saying it's luck, I promise that's not one of the things that will help you get better. Maybe it will help prevent you from getting tilted or something, so it certainly has some use.
And there's no doubt in my mind that the best player in the world plays far from perfectly.
We'll never agree on this of course. I really feel like top players generally want to delude themselves into thinking that luck plays a much smaller role than it does.
YMYOSL isn't something you say when you win and you want to rub it in your opponent's face. It's something you say when you lose and your opponent is apologizing because he feels you got unlucky.
It's something you say to the guy who has played ten games of Dominion and just got beat by an engine for the first time (he thought Big Money was unbeatable) and doesn't understand why you won, so he says you got lucky. It means that no matter how good you think you are, you can always find a way to get better if you work hard enough.
I'm not going to tell you that luck doesn't decide a lot of my games, but I just don't feel like my shuffle luck is worth talking about all that much, just that I try to make it the best I can.
PPE: MQ posted something, I'm sure it's along the lines of what I'm saying, since he was saying similar stuff earlier in the thread. Sorry if I'm redundant in some ways.
