How do you define player skill?

This is a kind of tangential follow-up post, but it relates to the question in the OP. Basically, I've long had a notion that everything we do in CoH combat has a basic plan. Interfering with that plan, there are random factors in the game, from hit checks to AI choices, that throw varying sized monkey wrenches into the plan. Additionally, there are scripted events that we may be able to predict will happen, but they may happen at hard-to-judge times or places, such as ambushes appearing on your head or an AV firing a HP-threshold nuke sooner than expected because the Broadsword Scrapper landed a critical with Head Splitter.

These "plans" I speak of aren't usually very complicated.For example, "fire all our attacks at the foes until they are dead, then move to the next set of foes," is the kind of plan most of us employ most of the time. A lot of us know the kind of plan the group will employ on seeing the map and the foes, and know how to execute the basic plan without much communication. Most of our power use is just doing what's appropriate to that basic plan - cycling attacks, taunting the boss, keeping long-lasting buffs up, etc. However, we often have other powers that best serve to correct excursions from the plan. We keep them in reserve as "oh crap" type reactions to things gone wrong. These don't have to be "oh crap" powers as we usually define them, such as Unstoppable or Strength of Will. Instead, they can be any power we don't particularly need for the current plan, unless it starts going pear-shaped.

When I see a player regularly breaking out powers specifically to correct for excursions from the basic plan, I start to consider them a good player. I think that behavior shows all sorts of understanding of the game. First of all, it shows they understand the plan and that something is happening that's bad for the plan - they know the AI and critter powers well enough to recognize things they need to react to. It also shows that they understand their powers and how they can be used to correct for the bad thing that's happening. And if they do this sort of thing regularly, it starts to show that they didn't just happen to have that power recharged when they needed it - they're reserving the big guns (so to speak) for situations where they're appropriate, rather than expending them on situations where they are less needed and more an extravagance.

So good players are the ones that smooth out things that go wrong, without needing direction, successfully and regularly.

Well said, UberGuy.

I may be late to the party on this but....

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nalrok_AthZim ...a Mind/Emp solo an entire spawn; ....

Oh come on that's not hard at all! In fact, my Mind/Emp never takes out an entire spawn...the spawn takes itself out!

Mmmm...mass confuse.

Quote:

Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle ... How about when the team rounds a corner and suddenly everyone just stops. It's worse than we expected. Are we all going to die? Nobody knows. After a pregnant pause people begin doing what they do best. Someone hits build up, one of the spawns starts glowing from the impending wormhole, the meleers descend like a thin swarm of thick locusts, the smell of debuffs fills the air and what seems like an hour but was actually thirty seconds later our heroes (or villains) have emerged victorious without a word said between them. Nobody mention that we tried the same thing last mission and had to repair the blaster with duct tape! That's the kind of skill that I like to see, and fortunately the kind that I do see all the time.

Yep...I love being in teams and we're steamrolling through and then something happens; either an extra ambush or we aggro one too many mobs, etc...it seems like we (the team) could face a team wipe but somehow we survive!

Great teammates know when to heal, buff, debuff, etc...sure sometimes it doesn't happen due to lag or whatever but man...living through a "wow, we should have died there!" moment is great

just a thought I had seeing this thread title again:

One of the reasons I play CoH is so I don't need to bother defining 'player skill'.

How do you define player skill?

I don't, I just play the game. Getting into all the crap that people get into in these forums would totally ruin the game for me.

My in game friends just chat and play, no need to bring all that extra drama into it, when we are all just trying to have fun, that's what the forums are for lol.

I find it both amusing and distressing that people seem to convolve the very act of defining skill with possibly being elitist, or stressing one-self (and/or others) out.

I don't like to pug, because I like to move at a pace and efficiency that not everyone else achieves, and I'm happy to go it alone. Finding friends in CoH was something I did after I'd been soloing a long time, and unless we're running TFs or trials (which is, admittedly often), I interact with my friends in global more than on teams.

That doesn't mean I'm a ******* about being into optimization. There's a difference in choosing to play your own way and demanding that others conform to it. I have a very high tolerance for people who don't rock the DPS or XP/hour, as long as they're pleasant to team with. (I generally always try to be pleasant to team with.)

I can sort of see answering the OP's question with "I don't think about it," but it seems like a rather significant derailment - if it's not a topic of importance to you, why feel the need to declare that? Would you post in a thread asking "Fortunata or Night Widow?" and declare "neither, I don't like playing that AT"? But then to go on and assign clearly negative connotations to people who do bother to define player skill (even if just indirectly)? I may well be wrong, but that feels to me like there might be some chips on some shoulders.

As Arcanaville said, there's a difference in this game not demanding that the application of skill being very important in CoH and the skill having no meaning or value. If nothing else, I derive enjoyment from playing with players who exhibit skill, and from (I hope) exhibiting it from time to time myself. Sometimes I care about it more practically because I know the application of skill can lead to more reward / time, and my play time is limited, and I'm very reward oriented. So I have given some thought to the topic. But that doesn't mean I stress about it. Much.

Uber-I guess that post was directed towards me, if so I would like to point to the last line in my post "Don't get me wrong we like everyone to pull their weight, but some people just take playing this game way too seriously IMHO."

To me that does not mean anything other than what it says.I did not assign that title to anyone in particular since it applies to whom it applies too no definition required.

I do find it less than amusing that somehow you got that "I" assigned the title "elitist" to anyone since that was not written by me nor implied. Nobody said you were or that you stress because of the way you choose to play the game.

There was no derailment in "my" post since I was specifically dealing with my perspective on the OP's question and not the additional stuff you added.

If you can seriously say that there are not people that take the game too seriously then we can just agree to disagree right now. Otherwise, I don't see a problem with me mentioning that fact.

Hm, I honestly thought I'd picked up that undertone from at least one other post, but reviewing the thread, I guess not. So while I didn't mean to passively call you out specifically, I managed to anyway.

On the other hand, if I'd thought only one person had gone there about people stressing about performance/skill, I wouldn't have, well, stressed that point. So I'll retract the interpretation of negative overtones - I only got it from your post, and you've clarified it.

And yes, some people take performance way to seriously. While perceptions of performance influence what I play and who I play with, they don't dominate either. There are folks on the forums who I won't name (and who haven't posted here) who I perceive as largely refusing to play anything but the top-performing powersets, playing only the content with the best reward/time (for some chosen reward), and kicking people who don't pass their filters on good powersets, good builds, good play, etc.

I can't tell anyone else how to have fun, but I can't help but think those folks are limiting themselves too much. And to some extent, I think players who do that give communities a bad name if they become too numerous or even just too vocal without dissent.

All that said, I do still find it interesting that several people answered a question about how to define skill with declaration about dislike or disinterest in defining skill. Purely for example, and not to pick on them in any way, Emberly gave a non-answer early in the thread. "If the player isn't actively pissing me off, then the player is good enough for me." That doesn't really define skill at all - it declares a low personal threshold for skill (or lack thereof).

I suppose those can be seen as fair ways to respond to the ending questions in Thirty-Seven's post: "Lastly, is skill important? Necessary? Does it even exist as a factor in this game at all?" Some people just skipped the first part of the OP and answered only these.

I define it as taking appropriate powers for a character and using them appropriately. For example, someone dropping an Earthquake and following up with Stone Cages makes me shake my head. Min/maxing is by no means required in my mind. But someone literally sabotaging their own powers always makes me think they're either a new player or playing an unfamiliar AT/power combo.

I don't by any means demand that others min/max. But I'd prefer they not shoot themselves in the foot. It's painful to watch.