Measuring A Player's Skill?

So bit of discussion took place earlier in another thread

And due to my own pure curiosity and to help curb @TheChef 's hungry curiosity

I figured i would bring the discussion here lol

Here’s a few quotes to get started:

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Here are my initial thoughts - maybe the easiest way to test skill is with a level playing field

I had this idea a while ago to test who can do best with a single 3* hero:

But obviously, it’s very difficult to smooth out the effect of the board, which is why top challenge scores require dozens of runs.

How many runs would be needed to get an satisfactory aggregate?

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I’ll drop in a poll too

What is the biggest contributing skill to success in E&P?

    • playing the board
    • selecting a team
    • long term resource management

0 voters

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It’s very possible I’d opt to answer the question by saying that playing the board is important in an individual raid or titan attack, selecting a team is most important in war, and long term resource management is most important in events (and possibly raid tournaments).

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Interesting topic.:thinking:

Problem is there are far too many variables which need to be controlled to really answer the question fairly. The variables which come to mind immediately are opponent, and characters used (and emblem path).

Jonah has the right idea, I think, in needing to equalise as many factors as possible leaving only the board to be the random element which cannot be controlled.

Picking characters of your own roster is a measure of how well your rolls went. I’m of the mind you adapt your play style in accordance to the characters you have available to you.

But if there were an event where you can pick any character at their highest pre-emblem level (or allow for maximum emblem usage/assignment), then that would be different.

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It’s not very possible, dear Ivy, because I have reduced the entire cornucopia of tactics and strategies for E&P to three mutually exclusive options.

giphy (5)

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@TheDayHasCome

Care to touch on this topic since you unintentionally kicked it off?

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I for one love a good internet poultry measuring contest.

But statements like:

are very interesting to me.

What are the measures? How has he compared the results? Where is the proof?

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I really don’t know and can’t get him, her, “it” to elaborate any further

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I may have to try this now btw lol

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I didn’t mean to vote since i really don’t know lol

Think it’s a combination of the 3 and then some

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My 2 cents.

I used to play Dota 2 before (3000+ hours of my life lol). For those who don’t know, it’s a PC game where all heroes are available to all players from the start, each hero has (usually) 4 skills and the teams of 5 players (one hero each) need to raid and destroy enemy base while protecting theirs.

Balance of heroes in that game is extremely important, each hero has a dominating role but most can be played in “outside the box” style. Skill is extremely important in that game, it’s not a game where if you get to play the right hero it is +50% to winchance. You could be a newbie or you could be the international champion playing for 10,000,000 USD tournament - you were playing the same game and had access to the same things. It was all about how good your team line up was, how well you could play your hero and cooperate with others.

The longer I play E&P (and it’s 1.5 year now) the more I am afraid that majority of good plays or bad plays are caused by luck and not skill. You can have the best team composition and if you can’t charge them or can’t charge them in right order, you will fail even against a significantly weaker team. Especially more recently, where the emblemmed defenses with strong heroes basically force to stack same color against the tank, otherwise when tank fires it is game over (I used to be successful playing 3-1-1 for very long time… now I had to switch to 4-1 or full mono, especially on wars).

Yes, long term resource planning is important. Long term ascension planning is important. Picking a team is important. But when you can do everything right and still lose due to bad luck, it’s not a game where I would say skill matters. Most you can do is play the board right to avoid charging biggest threat, buy yourself some time to see if the luck improves with some lucky combo.

I will not even go over the summoning and the p2w to get the best heroes since the ones available for free are mostly jokes now. Getting the heroes that win you games has nothing to do with skill at all. Skills at earning money perhaps or at being born in wealthy families lol.

IMHO issues with the game are:

  • heroes survivability is too low comparing to the damage they deal. The matches are about who gets to shoot first. If we want skill to matter more than luck, that would need to be redesigned.
  • promoting color stacking over other team composition; again, to much relying on luck in getting the board right.
  • lack of direct player vs player mode; we only ever get to fight AI.
  • some long term goal to pursue, perhaps new game modes… because being limited to picking 5 heroes everywhere makes this game burn out easily in the long run.

I am not saying the skill in moving the right tiles in the right way doesn’t mean anything, but if I were to value the winning conditions in this game, that would be luck > money > skill. That’s not confusing skill with game knowledge, so considering we are talking about playing this game at certain level already, let’s say Diamond arena and 30+ maxed 4&5 star heroes. Obviously for the beginners it is important to get to know what hero roles are, how to compose a team, what are classes, what are hero skills etc but that I don’t consider “skill” in this context.

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Exactly and I’m of the same sentiment

Also doubt there would be any real measure to dwindle it all down to 1 player in all areas since there are so many areas in the game where 1 can succeed at and fail at others or vice versa or be mediocre at all of them(mediocre at all is actually where I’d “rank” myself if i was the judge or whatever lol i really don’t shine in any 1 area but dont completely fail at any of them)

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Brings somethin else up

Think averages and consistency would play a bigger part in measuring “skill” than 1 time happenings or somethin of the sort

I mean if i and 1 other player had the same troops, same heroes, etc

And we tracked our raids for 1k raids

1 had a 85% success rate

The other had a 70% success rate

Are you saying the 150 win difference was all luck?

(Just read the rest of yout post, so i know the answer but not sure how to reword my reply…lol leavin it as is since it just points out the flaw of looking at 1 or 2 losses, and points torward lookin at stats over time)

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Yes, I’d say, with a huge enough sample and basically same conditions two players are in, the result of such excercise could tell you that one player must be doing something better than the other. Maybe they know better synergies, know when it’s worth to take the risk, better compose their teams etc.

It’s a lab thinking though, we do not have access to the same kind of resources, and we rather don’t track how well we (or our defenses) were doing in raids per month. Well, I know some perhaps are, so they’d be the best armed to give you the responses. But… is their new win streak a result of improving their finger plays, or is it a result of throwing 300$ to get Telluria? Hah.

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100% agreed

And i would say it typically boils down to board play and decisions with a few instances of “bad luck” since rarely do i see a video where a match couldn’t have possibly been turned around(especially my own, dissect them pretty hard and facepalm a lot)

Of course without providing data, i can’t say that for certain…

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I think skill level comes down to what you’re able to do with what you have and what you’re given. You’re not always going to win but did you set yourself up to succeed? Don’t have the best heroes? Find your best combinations to give yourself a chance, which for me is mono. Got a crappy board? Find a way to manipulate that sh*t to give yourself a shot. I think I’ve become great at manipulating boards to give my mono teams the best shot to win regardless of the board. I dont always win but I feel I maximize my opportunity to do so. Just because this game involves luck it doesn’t mean you have to completely rely on it to win or lose.

With that being said I dont see how you measure skill or compare between players unless you have an extensive library of recordings you could analyze.

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Numbers are faster, more transparent, and easier to analyze than videos imo

But again would require relative players

Players in the same alliance for instance facing the same challenges

Agree with everything you said though, just for me it would be numbers instead of vids

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As the best player in this game (don’t believe me: search best player in this game and see who pops up) I have to say that rumors of bad boards/RNG screwed me are exaggerated.

I voted for playing the board, only because I think too few people know how to effectively play the board for matches. Do you match every potential diamond/dragon combination or sometimes do you hold off because another match may open up better opportunity to charge 4 ally skills versus the 1 hero charged with the dragon.

That being said team synergy is important as well (especially in wars). If you have a well-balanced team (in terms of skills that work together e.g. Wilbur for defense down, Falcon elemental defense down & Azlar fire damage & burn) an average board can still have you wrecking shop.

All that to be said, sometimes you can tell when a player is less skilled (or had a brain fart) by seeing what moves he makes against a given opponent on the board and in terms of order of firing off special skills.

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I voted “Playing The Board”. And since we’re starting election season here in the US, I though I’d go for the full “informed citizen” route and explain my vote.

I considered right from the start that, for me, resource management is probably the largest factor in determining the options even available for selecting a team, therefore resource management is more important than team selection.

“Playing The Board” and “Resource Management” aren’t really interconnected, so one won’t trump the other in the same way as team choice got kicked. So I considered what happens when both areas go wrong.

Bad resource management will slow and frustrate your game but it is recoverable. With enough time & patience (or money as a surrogate), a player can work themselves out of the rut and regain positive progress.

But bad board play is much less forgiving - in fact bad tileplay is mostly UNforgiving, even with favorable board conditions. There is very little time to recover, if at all. And even the best hero choices, gathered through the wisest resource management, can be squandered when they finally go into action but can’t get charged fast enough to be useful, or get killed because the opponents are charged faster than they could/should be.

And the worst of the worst case scenarios would obviously come with bad tileplay on a crappy board, you might as well just burn your flags and toast marshmallows with them. And we all get crappy boards. They affect players regardless of teams or resources or anything else. If you don’t “git gud” at playing the board you might not have much fun playing this game at all, idk. Of course it’s a skill with range and needs to be developed, but without tileplay strategy wouldn’t we just be playing Candy Crush? :smirk:

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