Story time! Shortly after Brawl came out, I got pretty good at it. I could beat all my friends without much effort, so I decided to enter in a local tournament. In my first round I went up against the best player in my state, and I managed to hit him once, lightly, over the course of two games. I later became pretty good friends and practiced with him regularly.
At some point I completely eclipsed my non-competitive friends, to the extent that playing with them felt like a chore. All I had to do was put them in certain situations where I knew how they would react and then punish. It became a simple algorithm. Get behind them in shield, wait for the roll, punish. Put them in the air, jump after them, wait for the airdodge, punish. Throw them off the ledge, wait for the jump, punish. It felt like I was playing a CPU.
Meanwhile, I still couldn’t reliably beat the best player from my state. One day, after he took off a particularly gruesome stock, I paused and, exasperated, asked for advice. We watched a replay and he showed me how I responded to certain situations in the same way every time, leading to a punish. My habits were less obvious than those of my friends, but they were still habits. He said, “you play like a robot, in a bad way.”
So yeah. In that context, I’ve downgraded friends to CPUs because of their predictability, and been downgraded to a CPU by omega, because of my predictability.
To a lesser degree, I feel the same is happening to me in go. I regularly play against GnuGo, and at lower levels (that is, when the CPU has more handicap) I can strongly feel where it’s going, and beat him pretty solidly. At the same time, when confronted without handicap all I can manage is a tie, it feels a lot more unpredictable.
Story time! Shortly after Brawl came out, I got pretty good at it. I could beat all my friends without much effort, so I decided to enter in a local tournament. In my first round I went up against the best player in my state, and I managed to hit him once, lightly, over the course of two games. I later became pretty good friends and practiced with him regularly.
At some point I completely eclipsed my non-competitive friends, to the extent that playing with them felt like a chore. All I had to do was put them in certain situations where I knew how they would react and then punish. It became a simple algorithm. Get behind them in shield, wait for the roll, punish. Put them in the air, jump after them, wait for the airdodge, punish. Throw them off the ledge, wait for the jump, punish. It felt like I was playing a CPU.
Meanwhile, I still couldn’t reliably beat the best player from my state. One day, after he took off a particularly gruesome stock, I paused and, exasperated, asked for advice. We watched a replay and he showed me how I responded to certain situations in the same way every time, leading to a punish. My habits were less obvious than those of my friends, but they were still habits. He said, “you play like a robot, in a bad way.”
So yeah. In that context, I’ve downgraded friends to CPUs because of their predictability, and been downgraded to a CPU by omega, because of my predictability.
To a lesser degree, I feel the same is happening to me in go.
I regularly play against GnuGo, and at lower levels (that is, when the CPU has more handicap) I can strongly feel where it’s going, and beat him pretty solidly. At the same time, when confronted without handicap all I can manage is a tie, it feels a lot more unpredictable.
Did you learn from it? Improved your Brawl-agency?
It might be wishful thinking, but I feel like my smash experience improved my meatspace-agency as well.