Back when I was obsessively obsessed with CS, that's Counterstrike not Computer Science or Chinese Syphollis, it was nerdcool to obsess over reaction times -- the belief was that if you could improve by even a few milliseconds, it could be gamebreaking in competitive play. Gaming "conditioning" for lack of a better word has never really gotten much traction though -- all top players across most games (of any genre) basically just stick to a "play a lot and you'll improve" mantra. Or dogma?
If you really think competitive gaming is an "eSport", why is there no equivalent of athletic conditioning? You don't "just play" football or basketball, you spend the majority of your time conditioning and working on drills.
What would the gaming equivalent really be? Reaction time and strategy study are probably the most obvious. I'm not sure APM is really a metric as it's sort of a complex measure of speed, but I think similar measures could certainly be predictive in performance.
With regards to reaction time specifically, in many games, this ends up playing out in a binary fashion -- are you fast enough to react to X? If yes with a high probability, then it is strategically sound to plan to react to action X, otherwise, you know you can't reliably counter via reacting. What's interesting to me is that no reflex tests I can find online really test for this, and the way that most nerdgamers approach reflex training is simply trying to get the best possible TOPSCORE. I'd argue that for most purposes, low variance is equally valuable to high speed -- or consider games where you're given a 1/2 second window to react an event, do you really always succeed in countering? Obviously not, you're distracted. It's my belief that top players, the people who look like they have "amazing" reaction times are not really any faster, they just have better anticipation. My ability to counter that 1/2 second move is basically flawless if I know it's coming in the next 2 seconds. (And so would anybody's)
Perhaps this nerdotry will get me back into gaming...
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11 comments:
That's actually a pretty awesome post. I thought about that alot back when I was really into R6: Raven Shield for PC. When one hit basically kills a character, I thought it was all about "reaction time." In some ways it is, but what made me good at that game was the ability to predict where people were going to be and when. Reaction time was just the icing.
Along those lines I quickly realized that people who excelled at run and gun killed far more people than a camper ever could. When I rounded a corner, I KNEW people could be camping in spot X or spot Y even before I turned. If they were there, I shot them before they even could register my appearance.
I also like the comment about variance. It does you no good to be fast and accurate unless you're fast and accurate enough of the time for it to change the way you play.
^^ yessss
More on this later, will try to code up what I feel is a slightly more useful reflex test if I get an hour or two this weekend
I can't get below 200 consistently
Despite the fact that you're horrible at the game you play the most, your thoughts on gaming tactics have always been on point and what would be really cool is for you to copy pasta that conversation you had with aesthyr and them concerning mixups
come back!
dunno shou, i think u r about the only person i know who still plays
also i wrote up a reflex training javascript thingy which i've got a few of the old cs crew testing out if you're interested shou --
hit me up on skype
(or anyone else who thinks they have S class reflexes)
Give me a link and I'll be your guinea pig.
kk
http://shadytm.com/temp6969/ReflexTrain/index.html
ur probably D class bad kryoh
nice difficulty setting names
At least for Mage duels it is almost compeletlys about aniticipation, where very very little coming down to reaction speed, true of pretty much WoW in general tbh
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