Yeah, this definitely doesn’t explain my gold players who spend hours every day in Kovaaks.
No, elo is not a flat distribution. Roughly 2-3% of accounts are in Grandmaster (4000+), the next 5% in master (3500-4000), the next ~10% in diamond (3000-3500), the next 30% in platinum (2500-3000), the next 30% in gold (2000-2500)… but this is skewed for a few reasons. Casual players are more likely to stick to Quick Play and not rank in Competitive, and higher-level players are significantly more likely to have multiple accounts, so the percentage of accounts in higher ranks represents a smaller percent of actual players. Sometimes the top 10 accounts in a region (Europe / Americas / Asia) are held by the same 3 people, playing on several accounts each. So 3500+ is much more of an achievement than top 20-25%.
I genuinely think that the limiting factor for lots of people stuck below 3500 is related to conceptual understanding, learning or cognition. They can have fundamental concepts explained to them, but they don’t really understand them, or they understand what you’re telling them about one specific situation but can’t generalise it to future situations. I also see lots of players with issues with tilt, mentality, attitude, multitasking, communication and general ‘thinking speed’. I know a lot of people who will make the right decision on a 30-second delay, by which point it’s a bad decision—that’s not “reflexes”, it’s how well you can offload concepts to sys1 so you see things faster. Keep in mind this is from my perspective as mainly a scrim/tourney coach; I don’t really see individual ladder games, so the play I tend to look at is significantly more strategic and less mechanical. There’s a reason I specified I think they could scrim 3500. I see consistently poor group decision-making from teams below 3500.
Huh, my experience doesn’t support this. I run an organization that has lower-ranked teams as well as higher-ranked teams. Many of my lower-ranked players have been attending scrims and reviews for years (definitely far more work than the equivalent of casting 100 games) and are still below average. I find that a lot of them don’t have good mental tools for integrating information and applying it, or don’t signal to me when they’ve fundamentally misunderstood something, or quickly forget things and reverse improvements, or aren’t good at introspecting about how/why they make mistakes.
I think most-people-don’t-try-very-hard explains why people are bad at many skills, but it struggles to explain why people are bad at video games. Video games are fun, so it’s not difficult to find someone willing to put in 1000 hours. I know lots of people who have put in over 1000 hours and are still bad.