I would prefer not to take on people with history of being gold players because it seems like bad science. However, I don’t have a ton of interest at the moment, so I might consider whether it’s a good idea?
“Picking only smart people is like a school accepting only good students and then miraclously having good grades for their students.”—I don’t think this is true. Yes, if I picked a bunch of smart students and then my students all turned out to be good at mathematics or programming or Greek, it wouldn’t be surprising. However, if I picked people purely on IQ and then it turned out they were all very good marathon runners, it actually would be very surprising! My point is that many people think that esports is a similar domain to marathon running (you primarily need genetics/reflexes and lots of time) whereas I think esports is in a similar domain to mathematics (smart people can become good at it quickly). This is precisely the point I am trying to prove; I am not trying to prove that I am a good coach or measure the impact of coaching or anything along those lines. That would be sort of egotistical.
“Concepts made by 4000 to be consumed by 4000 people might be hard for others to adopt not because of cognitiive domination but it being relevant to that style and culture.”—This is occasionally true, but primarily because of the way other people play in lower SR games. For instance, I might tell a 4400 player to do something which relies on the assumption that they will be backed up and supported by others, whereas in gold your teammates will leave you to die and you cannot demand so many resources. I think if you train an entire team simultaneously, this effect is wholly nullified. 4400 players are just better than gold players, and they play the strategies they play because they win, not because of a stylistic difference.
“There is also a difference of being able to execute”—yes, but this is not relevant for the goal of reaching ~3500. It is not even relevant if your goal was 4200. This is relevant if you wanted to become a 4500+ coach, and basically never relevant as a player.
On learning being less fun—I suspect this is significantly less true for LW-y nerdy types, who will enjoy a game more (not less) if it’s a tricky intellectual strategy game rather than a mindless spray-and-pray aiming adventure (which is the primary way I see the ‘but doing it properly wouldn’t be fun’ thing ever come up).
I can expect that you will have fun without guaranteeing that you will have fun. I think there is a high probability that you will have fun.
I am not planning on bailing out the second I think I am wrong. However, I will cancel the “mandatory activities that all six of you have to do as a team” part if I think the amount of fun/success you will have is not worth the mandatory-attendance-activity-time. In such a scenario I’m still more than happy to do optional one-on-one work if someone just wants to be better at video games for their own sake.
If you can find any high-level coaches of 1v1 games who are interested in running experiments, that’s great. I don’t have the option of just becoming a pro Starcraft coach in order to run a ‘better’ experiment.
I’m also curious why you think this; skills of communication/teamwork are pretty central to what I’m thinking. We already have lots of information about how good smart people are at chess and how smart pro chess players are, too, so it’s just a matter of figuring out where individual games lie on the spectrum from something like chess (very strategic) to something like Smash (very twitchy). We have much less information about FPS, so to me it’s a much more interesting experiment.