[programjames]

If you've ever played Risk online, this becomes obvious, very quickly. The worst players to have around are not your enemies, but the stupid ones. They'll randomly block your troops from attacking mutual enemies, accidentally bait you into attacking other players ("attack red together?" . "okay sure!" . hits three of their troops, after you hit thirty), not hold bonuses but not let you hold them either, waste all their troops on a useless endeavour, feeding the game to a third player, and so many more blunders. Sometimes, you really want to work with them, because they've tried to be nice to you, much more so than the rest of the players. Often, they fail miserably and drag you down with them. I'll take a smart enemy any day. Usually smart players don't want to be your enemy, unless you've done something to provoke them (oops... it's more fun). Even then, they'll ally with you in a heartbeat if you can take a mutually beneficial action.

Something sobering to keep in mind is that the vast majority of people have the logical and mathematical capabilities of a good ten-year-old. There are ten-year-old chess grandmasters, USAJMO qualifiers, or to be less extreme, ten-year-olds that have a solid understanding of algebra and an intuition for proofs. Most people do not, and rely on heuristics or intuitions for everything. They do not even realize you can prove something, except with "it feels or seems right". It isn't because they're mentally incapable of learning the skill, it's because they never bothered to, or didn't think it was important.

[anal_reactor]

> Something sobering to keep in mind is that the vast majority of people have the logical and mathematical capabilities of a good ten-year-old.

I had a period of my life where I read a lot of "you're not special" on reddit, but then I finally understood that the ability to think logically on the most basic level already makes me very special. After spending some time with people from lower social classes and genuinely trying to bond with them I became elitist. These people just don't fucking think.

[elzbardico]

The years made me realize that too, but there's also plenty of stupid people in upper-classes. And usually, contrary to the first ones, I can't escape having to deal with those.

[anal_reactor]

That's true.

[SoftTalker]

Does this hold true for most multiplayer online games? I don't play, but my kids could often be heard yelling "why would you do that?!?" when they had a game going.

[ironman1478]

This is really common in fighting games. Many okay players will get beat by really bad players who are really random. Better players in these games play in such a way as to mitigate effects of the randomness of their opponent.

[programjames]

That isn't a fair ranking. Some people are more idealist than you, and a priori want to believe others will play well. If you stick them in a lobby full of smashy noobs, they may not live long enough to update on those beliefs (within the single game). Of course, the same happens in reverse: if you go into a game assuming everyone is a smashy noob, and they're actually good at the game, you're going to end up in the losing position. The rate of mistakes changes the trembling-hand equilibria. The best players will, of course, figure out reputations for the other players as the game progresses, but calling some just 'okay' and others 'better' because they initialize the reputations to different values is not fair.

Think about this: you've probably driven a car to get from Point A to Point B before. If you existed in a society where people were constantly making mistakes, in the sense of crashing their cars several orders of magnitude more often, driving a car to get from Point A to Point B is no longer a good strategy. But it usually is a good, if not the best, move you can make right now, because people aren't making mistakes that frequently.

Here's another example: marriage (long-term relationships). Perhaps not all extra-marital affairs are mistakes, but a significant proportion of them are. If too many people are making these mistakes, leading to messy divorces, it's no longer worth it to even consider dating in the first place.

[ironman1478]

"but calling some just 'okay' and others 'better' because they initialize the reputations to different values is not fair"

Why is it not fair? I was just stating how it goes. It's pretty well documented that the best players have the best defense, unless it's a game like UMVC3. The players at higher ranks tend to be better at playing defense and they just let their opponents kill themselves. They don't get blown up by wake up supers, dps, jump ins, etc. Okay players might be good at doing combos, but their game sense isn't great and they will frequently put themselves in positions to have the tables turned on them. They also don't focus on punishing mistakes and capitalizing on their defense. If you have good game sense, you can actually beat people really well with pretty mediocre execution.

Even if you play multiple matches, these okay players will lose a surprising amount to the players who play randomly and are smashy noobs.

[programjames]

(Note: this is Risk).

I recently played a game with higher-level players. One player was incredibly passive; their bonus would get broken every turn, and rather than doing anything to defend it (and they had enough troops to defend it), they pulled their troops into the middle of the bonus and let everyone else take turns breaking their bonus. This could work fine in a lower-level lobby—eventually the other players might get bored and start hitting each other—but not with better players. Good players realize a couple things about them:

1. They won't retaliate, so I can knock off a few of their troops at no risk to myself.

2. They won't do anything, so any fighting among the rest of the players will effectively be a troop subsidy to them.

Since they're unwilling to help anybody, no one wants to give them free troops, and since they've demonstrated an unwillingness to retaliate, there's really no risk with hitting them over and over. So, naturally, they were the next player to be eliminated.

One thing that's nice about Risk is there's very little to the mechanics. There aren't combos to practice or build orders to memorize, mostly just an understanding of what other people want and how to negotiate. Pretty much everyone rated intermediate and above has the mechanics down: how to move troops around to not block each other, how to choke out other players, what moves are game ending for you or another player, and so on. The thing that sets apart intermediates, experts, masters, and grandmasters is almost entirely their ability to work with other players. However, since many (most?) players are "smashy noobs", lots of people rise up the ranks by just assuming everyone else is a smashy noob, and playing extremely passively to compensate. It works, until they end up in a lobby full of masters.