Comment by SuboptimalEng | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SuboptimalEng | Hacker News Reader

As far as I know there are three types of player versus player (PVP) games: slow paced strategy games (Pokemon), fast paced strategy (Starcraft, League of Legends), action games (Call of Duty, Halo, Fortnite). For the first type of game, having a tool to teach the best strategies makes sense. For the latter two, not so much.

From personal experience, fast paced strategy and action games just require a ton of practice. I used to read up on the best COD weapons and the best League setup but that never really put me in a place of contention against top players. Regardless of how many videos I watched of the top gamers, I just wasn't good.

Question: I'm wondering what special info your app can provide players that will actually help them get better than just playing the game more. E.g. Knowing a person will "gank" more based on a tag doesn't mean the user will know how to respond to that.

Anywho, good luck on the launch! It's a big feat to even release a product - never made it that far myself haha.

I disagree, at least for fast paced strategy.

For instance in Age of Empires 2, the best way to improve is to look at a replay of your games, and analyse what went wrong. Stuff like "my economy was idle because I was focusing on the fighting" is much more flagrant then, during the game you often think it was just a few seconds, when in reality it could be a whole minute. I could see a lot of value in having an assistant that analyse your game after the fact and give you hints like: you focus too much on fighting, you have too much resource float, you have a big army but it's doing nothing, your army composition was subpar, you should have anticipated the switch to X, ... You could have it run real time as well, but then you get into the "is it cheating?" debate.

Action games are certainly more skill based as you said, and it's harder to give actionable advice.

His point is it doesn't matter much if you hear that advice you still need to spend hundreds of hours improving your mechanics to actually execute that advice.

And my point is that there are many things beginners should and could do that they do not know about. Yes of course, once you have the advice you need to train and not everything is actionable. But for beginners something like a build order is actionable, and if you don't know about them, inventing them by yourself is going to take a while.

Agreed. A product that tells me to build a pylon 10 seconds before I get supply-blocked would be amazing. Or if I have too much money and my production buildings are idle.

I've stood over friends' shoulders and done similar live-coaching. It definitely helps.

> I could see a lot of value in having an assistant that analyse your game after the fact and give you hints like: you focus too much on fighting, you have too much resource float, you have a big army but it's doing nothing, your army composition was subpar, you should have anticipated the switch to X

You're making this sound easy, but in reality it's very complicated.

How to you measure how much someone is fighting? What if they're playing a very aggressive style? What if the opponent is turtling?

What is "too much" resource float? What time period should it be measured over? What if the player correctly prioritized more important tasks over spending resources?

What is a "big army" and what does "doing nothing" mean? What if they're playing a passive style? What if they're actively roaming the map but not fighting?

Etc.

I have tried to create an analysis tool that does similar things for StarCraft 2, and it's extremely difficult because of how variable and contextual everything is.

It's easy for humans to look at these things and interpret the situation. It's way harder to create rules that accurately reflect human interpretation.

I am not saying it is easy, just that it can have value. If anything, the fact it is hard makes it more valuable.

I don't think it's hopeless though, the AI already does something similar. As a very naive implementation, you could for instance run your AI logic on the current state of the game and compare your move to the expected AI move. A bit like with a chess engine.

Completely agree. For the large majority of players, they just need to play more. Having more analysis and statistics is generally not useful until you have the basics down.

Thanks for your feedback. We do not try to minimize the time that you need to practice to play better, in a sense we help you to be more 'aware' of your current skill level (strengths and weaknesses) and what is going on at the game (meta changes etc.) to accelerate the learning curve.

Btw, thanks for your support, we appreciated it!

FPS can have great levels of strategy Quake Arena being a key example.

Map knowledge is a key in shooters along with aim and movement.

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