Tyris Requiem

It's a question of player skill. For the sake of argument I'll be steering clear of the monk/nomonk teams argument since there is pages of argument on the subject. What I will be examining is why RA is full of bad players, why they never seem to improve and what effects this has on the arena overall.

So... what makes a good player?

General Stuff:

• Good field vision ie NOT staring at the redbars/skillbar.
• Correct use of Weapon sets ie 40/40, 40/20/20 staff, high set, vamp, zealous etc
• Cancel Swapping.
• Having a shieldset and correctly using said shieldset.
• Not dieing out of shieldset.
• Pre kiting melee.
• Positioning intelligently.
• Use of brain in target selection, switching etc.
• Good Knowledge of skills and metagame ie, cast times, cooldowns, costs of the important hexes and prots in particular.
• Correct Timing of key skills such as Bull's Strike and Blinding Flash.

Class Specific:

• Pre Protting spikes effectively.
• Quarterstepping.
• Quarterknocking.
• Being able to reflex 1s and 3/4s casts.

If u read through this list of general skills and have less than half of them you probably fall into mediocre or below. If u are only missing a couple then you fall into good or great or possibly even better.

So what is the point of this?

Well first I will direct you to a nice chart:



The chart is based on my experience in the game of player mentality and attitudes. Most players like to think they are pretty good at the game. They reinforce these ideas with arguments like: "I won 10 consecs so I must be good." or "I soloed that gold cape war so I must be better than cape players." or even "I'm r7 Glad so I must be better than all the low ranks." etc.

This has 2 effects, firstly it works as a demotivator for improvement. Since the players percieved level of competency is high they are not as motivated to find room for improvement or change the way the play, compared to if they percieve themselves as bad. Part of competency is also being competent enough know what needs to improved and below a certain threashold players are quite clueless.

Another aspect is the rank. Some players over emphasise rank, to the point of putting gain in rank above gain in skill. With grind titles such as RA if enough time is spent it is quite possible to obtain a high rank while the overall player skill stays extremely low.

Some players who know about stuff like weapon swaps but have difficulty with it will take the lazy option and claim they can't be bothered or its "too much effort for not enough gain." This further builds the self concept of being better than the player actually is due to the fact they are choosing to ignore ot play down flaws in their play.



This concept can be directly linked to the comfort zones model of learning which clearly shows optimal improvement will take place when players push themselves and try new things. I could continue to quote diagrams and theory to you at this point such as Kolb's learning cycle etc etc but that isn't really the point of this. So moving swiftly onwards...

So what are the effects of so much bad?

And so we come to the topic of syncing... But to understand why people sync we must take a step backward. If you look back to the first diagram you will note that the level of player strength in RA is extemely poor. Strong players become frustrated playing with bad people because it is most fun when playing with like similar skilled people. Also gaining rank is utterly random when just clicking join with all the random bad people is enough to drive many players to hate RA. So to summarise:

• Losing to people who are worse than you is extremely frustrating.
• Rank gains when playing with bad people are slow.
• A match between two strong evenly matched teams is extremely fun.

Syncing is a downward spiral. Since to compete with existing syncs other players are forced to sync resulting in more syncs. More people getting frustrated with syncs will result in more people quitting or joining the syncers. Combined with a shrinking playerbase in an ageing (but still excellent) game. Its easy to see its only a matter of time until RA is headed for destruction.