Very interesting! Reading this really makes me think about how difficult Starcraft is for all of the exact same reasons. Interestingly, the “you can’t control your teammates” adds a whole different level that I hadn’t really considered explicitly before (synergy vs sum of skill). In a lot of ways, that specific detail is what has always put me off of non-1v1 competitive games.
I can't think of any type of game that's harder than a micro-heavy RTS like StarCraft. The difficulty of playing that game competitively at the highest levels is off the charts. The amount of stuff you have to manage simultaneously is absurd.
That's probably why I liked Total Annihilation more back in the day. It wasn't as micro-heavy, so the gameplay was more about broader strategic and economic concerns, and you'd end up winning by throwing larger hordes of units at your enemy than they could throw back at you.
I don't think that's the case. Or simply from my own perspective. I use to be pretty good at Starcraft2 (like top 0.01 percentile according to ladder, which had me playing vs grandmasters and pros often), but I was never any good at games like Dota2 (game in which I have more than double the hours of SC2).
I think the main difference is that in team games its much harder to figure out what you are doing wrong as you're not the sole contributor to the loss. If you lose in 1v1 in Starcraft, you can watch a replay and pretty easily find out when you lost and why. And with team games like MOBA's you have 10 variables, instead of just 2, so it's always combination of things that went wrong. Another big deal is that you have to master 1 race in RTS and you have a pool of 100 heroes to learn, each with unique mechanics.
I think the hardest thing about Dota is delayed feedback on the decisions you make. And while you wait for the feedback you make dozen different decisions affecting outcome of the first. Not only that your opponents are also making decisions.
But the craziest thing to me is the skill gap between different divisions. Tier 1 teams will massacre tier 2 teams to the point of game being a stomp. In chess you expect top players to win but not completely outrun their opponents.