The Rocket League Theory of Inequality

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
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Background: What is Rocket League

Rocket League is a video game. It is essentially soccer/football with cars. It is a highly competitive game, with international competitions and prizes into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

As with many games of skill, slight variations in player ability can lead to complete blowouts. The game uses a ranking system to sort players by skill level, so that games remain competitive.

These ranks are reset periodically, and players sort themselves anew. After the reset, the first 10 games, players are unranked, and typically play against other unranked players. After 10 games, they are given a rank based on their performance, and typically play against others within 2 or 3 ranks of their own. From then on, your rank changes as you win or lose games.

In my experience, it’s easier to maintain a higher rank in Rocket League than it is to rise out of the lower ranks. I hypothesize that this is due to the relative value of strategy at different ranks: at higher ranks, strategic planning pays off, because the behavior of other players is more predictable; at lower ranks, other players’ behavior is more random, making winning and losing more random for each player on the team. I also think this principle applies more broadly.

I’ll start by saying that I’m not very good at Rocket League, currently around Gold III in 3 versus 3, but I’ll sometimes fall to low gold and even silver when a season starts. A big part of my problem is that I play on a Nintendo Switch, a handheld with a 6-inch screen, which makes precision much more difficult. That sets a low ceiling on my maneuvering and accuracy, but I’m an adequate defender and good at centering the ball for more accurate players to shoot.

My strength is strategy: I pay attention to coverage, I don’t rush in if I’m the last defender, and hurry back after a drive to cover the net. I’m a good defender and midfielder, and I set up shots much better than I shoot.

But when I’m playing against lower-ranked players, that strength is just not that valuable. You can’t read a play when the players are as likely as not to whiff; you can’t set up a shot if no one else can read a play (or, for that matter, connect with the ball); you can’t rely on your teammates to be in the palces they should be. Without the ability to predict other players, strategy is effectively impossible.

Low-level play is more random than higher-level play, because there are a lot of ways to be bad at a game, and relatively few ways to be good. This isn’t only because there are more individuals at the bottom of the ranking. If ranking up requires both the understanding to decide the correct action (what I’ve called “strategy”) and the skill to execute on that decision, then a highly ranked player will have both, while a low-ranked player could be lack strategy, skill, or both.

The effect is a sort of contagion: an individual attempting to cooperate with lower-ranked teammates will be effectively less skilled than they would be when cooperating with higher-ranked teammates, because whatever their other skills, they are unable to be strategic or rational about their choices.

But this is true in domains other than this video game: there are more ways to fail than to succeed; more ways to be poor than rich; more ways to be dumb than smart. For any competition, the highest-ranked individuals will have a combination of skills, and lower ranked individuals will be lacking in one or more of those skills. The more skills it takes to rank highly, the more ways there are to fail to rank highly.

And in any domain where a group of people are competing against other groups, the unpredictability of an individual’s partners will act as a contagion on that individual, by decreasing the value of skills like strategy, reason, even intelligence more generally.

As a result, if highly-ranked individuals tend to team up with other highly-ranked individuals, and lower-ranked with lower-ranked, then the lower-ranked individuals will have a harder time establishing their correct individual rank, because to the extent strategy is a part of the ranking, it will be hidden by their teammates lack of skill. Over time, that will give the highly-ranked individuals an advantage in maintaining their rank.

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I actually always felt, in ranking up, that I always was at my “true rank”. Any time I got on a win streak and played people a full subrank higher (say, plat1 div2 ranked up to plat2 div2), I would pretty much always feel like WOW, these guys are playing faster and hitting harder than me, and it’s hard to be as consistent as they are. I always ranked back down thinking, yeah, I guess I belong where I am. Until eventually I didn’t.

I’m champ now and that’s the case now as much as ever. I think people do naturally find an equilibrium, and I don’t get the impression in my ranking up journey that that equilibrium is a lot more volatile for lower ranks. Maybe a little more volatile.

There actually are some strategies you can employ at just about any rank (apart from maybe the very top) that will make you better than you probably are already. I’ll give you some recommendations if you like.

With that said, I still think your idea might be generally true. Also, let’s 1v1.

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I have two hypotheses for what’s happening here.

First is that what I’m observing may be a floor effect. Best I can find, Gold III/Plati I is roughly 50th percentile, and the effect I’m observing happens in Silver, which is like 5th to 10th percentile. It seems likely that randomness doesn’t increase linearly, and the bottom 5% of players is way, way more random relative to the average player than the average player is relative to Diamond and Champ (a similar difference in percentile).

Second, the effect is probably more pronounced when there’s a significant mismatch between technical skill (maneuvering, ball handling, accuracy, etc.) and strategy, which I think is the case for me. The small screen and awkwardly shaped controller make precision much harder, and age is affecting my fine motor skills and reaction speed more than my strategic thinking. But reading a play to anticipate where I need to be compensates for a lot of that, it doesn’t take as much precision to break up a play or boot the ball downfield. So to the extent lower ranks reduce the value of strategy, it reduces my effective rank more than someone with greater technical skill.

Ha, you’ll crush me, but I’m game.

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There’s volatility and randomness at that rank definitely, but NOT because strategy doesn’t work, I don’t think. It’s because they don’t understand the right strategies to employ, and how to employ them.

Any strategy that relies on teamwork isn’t even worth bothering with probably until grand champ. Maybe higher. I’ve only really realised that in champ, but it’s true - you have no idea what your teammate is capable of, or your opponent, so offensive passing plays are actually a disadvantage unless you really know how to do it safely.

You should be team oriented on defense, but in a way that expects as little as possible from your teammate. But people in silver don’t know how to do that, and as soon as they do, they don’t stay silver for long.

I’ve been consuming a fair bit of rocket league decision making advice over the last few years. It’s simultaneously subtle and simple. I actually think I could coach just about anybody who’s physically capable up to plat in 1s, diamond in 2s.

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I mean that strategy doesn’t work because of the randomness. Part of that is that some of them don’t understand the right strategies, or even the space of possible strategies, what’s possible or impossible, how play is likely to develop or where the ball will go after a bounce, etc. But they could also have good game sense and low technical skill, or high skill but no understanding of the game.

The paths to low rank are more varied, making other players less predictable and strategy less effective.

Fascinating. Do you use voice chat while you’re playing? I think for real deliberate teamwork you’d need better communication. I only use quick chat, and you can’t be expressive enough to coordinate very well with that.

But without explicit coordination, I find that I have success in basing my play on what I expect my teammates to do. For example, when I push the ball up the side, a teammate is usually following at about a quarter-field behind in case I get stopped, and the other is usually advancing in the center of the field to dunk if I can get it in front of the net. That kind of strategy often works without communication, because players at that level know a bit about how the game is likely to go.

Maybe another interpretation of what I describe in the OP (or another effect entirely) is that cooperation is a force multiplier, but only at higher levels of play. That makes some intutive sense: specialization is only as good as the least skilled specialist, and that matters even more when players are alternating which role they’re playing in each play.

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Very rarely, only when I specifically queue with someone and I haven’t done that in months.

2v2s is, I think, far more predictable than 3s. I think it’s a little easier to reason about strategy and keep track of where people are. 2v2s is the place I feel most comfortable in terms of my playstyle, 3v3s is just too chaotic. I’m also champ in 3s but just barely - I’m high champ1 / low champ2 generally in 2s, and I haven’t been back to diamond in 2s for like a year (I’m hard stuck), but in 3s I can easily fall back into diamond.

My strategy is actually kind of layered - I try to play 2s like it’s 1s, but with a couple adjustments, and I try to play 3s like it’s 2s, but with a couple adjustments. Learning how to play 1s has become such a strength because it allowed me to build that kind of decision making, and I’m playing with people who, I think on average, are more mechanically skilled than me. I mean it’s not unusual for people my rank to flip reset and air dribble. I can’t flip reset except by luck, and I don’t really air dribble often and when I do it sucks.

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This is precisely the point made by Thomas Sowell with regard to inequality of outcomes in terms of career success, wealth, socioeconomic status. The fact that certain groups seem to lag behind others can be, at least in part, attributed to this sort of hurdling model whereby one group tends to, for whatever reason, manifest more of the required behaviors and pre-conditions needed to jump over more hurdles in a row without getting derailed along the way. “Discrimination”, while it does exist, cannot be said to play the only or primary role in explaining persistent differences in outcomes between groups.

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Yeah, and that’s something normie liberals often get wrong.

But it’s also basically the same idea as things like ‘structural racism’: some of the hurdles have to do with who you know, where you live near, how you speak, etc., and those things are shaped in part by past discrimination. Even where current racism is minimized, racism is still playing a role to the extent that society has been structured by the racism of the past, and that structure affects individual outcomes.

I don’t know what Sowell has to say about structural racism specifically, but I should look it up. It seems closer to his ‘constrained vision’, the conservative worldview, at least in its description of the problem (though it’s often used as an argument for ‘unconstrained’ solutions). I believe he saw parts of Marx’s worldview as ‘constrained’, and structural racism shades into Marxism.

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Structural racism doesn’t exist, at least not in American society. Maybe in many African or Muslim societies, you will find actual structural racism. Because in many of those places you still have actual slavery bring practiced.

But here in America, we have equal rights and countless legal protections to the point they even go too far (affirmative action, for example, trying to ‘reverse’ past racism against blacks by being racist instead against whites and asians). Hell we just had a black president not that long ago. Many if not most professional sports players are black and make millions of dollars. Entertainers, musicians, actors, business people, professionals, media personalities, wherever you look you find successful black people.

So no, our society is not “structurally racist”. However, there is certainly a legacy load of something like ‘cultural lag’ for black people considering their ancestors were literal slaves not all that long ago. It certainly takes time to collectively as a group recover from something like that. The culture of black people may lag now in part for that reason but it has also become co-opted by rich (mostly white or jewish) people who program black music and entertainment with harmful influences, pushing black people even further down. Things like BLM, drugs and gangster rap haven’t done the black community much good.

Still, it is up to the black community ITSELF to rise up and improve itself, face its challenges head on. The more it keeps falling into degenerate and poverty-inducing behaviors and thought-patterns, the harder that’s going to be and the longer it’s going to take. That goes for whites too, because whites are also on the cultural decline right now.

I would be all for reparations in some form to black people today, as both a historical apology and attempt at healing but also to try and close some of the cultural lag distance that is still there as a result of past slavery… except that I know 1) most people who get free sums of money just waste it, because they have no financial education and very little self-control and this goes for all racial groups (or at least whites and blacks), and 2) the psychological effect would have an opposite result because the black community for the most part is still in a fairly infantile and irrational state collectively. The average black person would need to operate far more rationally, calmly and thoughtfully for something like reparation payments to have a positive psychological impact rather than just push them even further into an angry victimhood mentality that wants to take rather than work hard and earn and continues to see society at large as some kind of ‘oppressor’ despite that black people today have the same rights and privileges as everyone else, of which there are countless examples in every field and area of life as I’ve already noted.

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I would argue social inequality is largely economic and educational in terms of lack of opportunity. Economic prosperity is the panacea for social inequality concerning the majority of people.

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But do you really think the majority of people, say 95% even, could have consistent long-term economic prosperity? Aren’t you forgetting things like natural division of labor, differences in intellect, conscientiousness, drive for success, or even the Pareto distribution principle which states that 80% of the value is produced by 20% of the workers? That’s just math.

I agree with you that social inequality and lack of opportunity is a cause of so many problems, and this inequality is deliberately cultivated and expanded my modern neoliberal global-capitalism.

What you say about education is key, then. We need to start there. Teach people REAL history. Teach them also real knowledge about finances, how to manage money, how to NOT be poor by wasting their money as brainwashed consoomers to the System. But proper education would also stray into philosophy and economics proper. What is a “job”? It is certainly not a right you earn by merely being born onto this planet. It is something you EARN by virtue of the VALUE you create working in a way that borrows the capital that already exists and is being managed/owned by someone else. You may not agree with ownership in principle, but management cannot be dismissed. All capital, all resources, all materials and productive processes must be managed and taken care of, and this cannot be done by committees of all interested parties alone. There must be KEY INDIVIDUAL MINDS who hold sway, to make critical choices as needed and to take responsibility.

That is why I have never been able to fully embrace communist ideas here in terms of economics. I see that communism here is ignorant of basic facts and realities on the ground economically speaking. That does not mean I exclude or excuse global neoliberal capitalist intrusions into this space. I want to push back against that and create a far more useful, fair and ‘equal’ economic space. But like I was saying to you in the other topic, the more we equalize wages or actual earned income and benefits/wealth the more we undermine natural incentives to actually work harder, produce more, create and establish the underlying EXCESS as such which is the positive economic pressure that keeps everything going in terms of optiminzing supply and demand logistics for example. No centrally planned economic authority or council can substitute for the hand of the free market, and Marx seriously misunderstood the nature of VALUE in economic terms which is easily seen precisely where and why he misunderstands the nature of PROFIT, he thinks profit is mere theft and nothing more. He does not understand the ‘magic’ of mutually beneficial exchanges of values, which increases the amount of value in the world OVERALL and in net merely as a consequence of the exchange of ownership of valued things. Because everyone is different and their needs and desires and interests and drives and motivations are going to be different too.

All that being said, I agree with you that social inequality is a HUGE problem and is causing many of the social and economic and psychological ills we are faced with today. So how to find the middle of the road solution that doesn’t stray into extremes and irrational impracticalities and mere ideology in either direction? I dunno man, you tell me. Because I haven’t found this middle-way just yet.

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I think we’re using “structural racism” differently. I’m not confident that I’m using it correctly and I’ll avoid the term going forward, but to clarify what I meant before:

By ‘structural racism’ I mean a situation where overt, explicit, de jure racism of the past (and I don’t just mean slavery – Ruby Bridges is only 70 years old) leads to a certain arrangement of society, and that arrangement of society has effects similar to the overt/explicit/de jure (“OED”) racism even without those forces still acting directly. So if we have hundreds of years of explicit policies that make black people much poorer (which we did), then social structures that make it harder to escape poverty or decrease social mobility in general will also have the effect of suppressing black people even after the explicitly racist policies are repealed.

And my argument here is that it doesn’t even require policy: there’s a certain kind of cooperative game in which 1) individual ranks are determined in part by the quality of teammates, 2) individual ranks determine in part the quality of future teammates, and 3) the relationship between the individual and their teammates varies by skill level. In particular, in the case of #3, my claim is that both Rocket League and society are cases where lower ranked individuals’ teammates make “rational, calm, and thoughtful” play styles less effective.

So for example, the OED racism of the past enforced segregation in where people live, in where they go to school, in what jobs they get, and how wealthy they are. When you take away those OED racist policies, the next generation of people still grows up around the descendants of people who were subject to those policies. So the previous generation didn’t go to college because of OED racism, and the next generation doesn’t go to college because their parents didn’t go, and none of their peers’ parents went. Peer effects are huge, and they reinforce the generational effects.

I call it “structure” because it has to do with the structure of society: who lives where, who knows who, who is in whose network. OED racist policies can establish a structure that is self-reinforcing across generations. Part of it is “cultural lag”, i.e. it takes time for random movements to un-sort society. But I’m saying it’s more than than that: the movement isn’t random, it’s constrained by the structure established by earlier generations.

This doesn’t only apply to race, it applies to inter-generational mobility more broadly (though in different ways). One of the reasons that the 60s and 70s were what they were is as a result of WWII, Korea, and Vietnam breaking down a lot of social structure by pulling young men out of communities, changing the networks of those left behind, and creating new networks among those who served: introducing them to people they would never have met in situations that create lasting bonds between them, while also giving them the outlook and the tools to consider ending up somewhere different when they returned. That was a sudden, massive rearrangement of social networks, and it had huge effects on wealth mobility and racial equality.

In other words, the pool of people’s teammates changed, and individual rankings changed too.

Most people who get free money inherit it from their parents.

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A huge problem is knowledge mental acumen, prior to the nineteenth century industrial revolution a majority of the population was illiterate where existence in terms of the division of labor was much easier because a majority of society required no formal educational background.

In our current existence a majority of good paying jobs requires a high standard of intellect procurement, in other words, post modern technological society requires everybody to have a very high standard of educational intellect to simply live or exist well in a world where thousands of years of human civilization a majority of the population globally was illiterate. It just isn’t realistic in expecting everyone to have the same kind of mental intellect or educational background, that’s not how human intelligence really works because everyone has different strengths or weaknesses in terms of human intelligence. Yet we condemn people nonetheless for not having the preferred post modern standardization of desired marketable intelligence. We deem such people natural inferiors leading into excesses of their exploitation.

The irony of course with the creation of the technological singularity known as artificial intelligence it has the potential to transform the majority of the human population into obsolete inferiors completely controlled by a tiny percentage of the population that represents the capitalist class.

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Great point about the need for most people to have a high level of education these days, in order for our societies to sustain division of labor, whereas in the past division of labor was much easier to sustain (although, to be fair, life was also a lot more difficult, brutal and short back then for most people). I would also push back a little bit regarding industrialization, because this also created TONS of low to mid-skill jobs all across the economy for people who were at least smart enough to interact with basic machines. Push a button, pull a lever, etc.

What you say really makes sense with the modern technological age and post-modern global capitalism. Everything is becoming high-tech oriented and capital is being sucked up into the black hole of the top 1% of the top 1% of the top 1%. Corporations are consolidating like crazy. Markets and banking are now leveraged and over-financialized to the extreme. The system is very fragile and will probably partly collapse within our lifetimes. What that will look like, who knows. I doubt it will be pretty.

And then you may get something like a return to society closer to historical averages in terms of economic situations. Less affluence, less need for higher education, more brutal down to earth sort of work to survive. A return to farming for a large part of the population, especially if the collapse occurs soon before self-powered AI work-robots become ubiquitous everywhere. Then again, even after the collapse people may be able to reprogram the robots near them to assist with things like farming.

Then again, why won’t we just work on making the education system better. I see nothing wrong with the ideal of having 80%+ of the adult population with a good enough education to get some kind of specialized job. If that means 4-year degree these days, or even more than that. Or just reforming K-12 so that people actually learn important stuff and grow their intelligence during that time. We can use education to push back a bit against the natural limits of intelligence as pertains to the bell curve distribution. Of course you will still get a lot of low-IQ people either way. Maybe genetic engineering can fix that. I am super cautious about genetic engineering but I also realize it is the inevitable future so we should probably start working on it carefully now, so hopefully get it right as soon as possible. Simple things like editing specific genes to reduce harmful gene errors in the populace, prevent genetic diseases and propensities to things like cancer, and to edit certain genes in order to increase the general intelligence of the population. One interesting thing about general intelligence measurements is that they almost perfectly correlates with measurements of task completion based on neural conduction speed. Faster neurons means more intelligence. And there have already been identified clusters of genes that work in concert to contribute to above-average intelligence in very smart people. Of course the dark side of gene editing will probably happen too, which is almost too terrifying to even contemplate. Humanity is definitely not wise and mature enough yet, not old enough yet in our collective conscious history, to be playing around with these kinds of tech. And yet here we are.

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"What if I propose a test to determine humanity? Not some silly IQ test, but one that determines belonging to the species of rational humans? Those who fail — castration. To prevent the breeding of degenerates. Completely fair.

Are you scared now? You’ll cry out about morality, ethics, and virtue. To protect your fear — that you might not be worthy to even be called human?"

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Most technology or organized groups dedicated to science is directly controlled by those who wield capital. In the capitalist mindset of those wielding capital they’re superior to everyone else where everybody who isn’t them are expendable. In the technological post modern era which is one step above the industrial era one has to damn near be a mathematician just to get any semblance of a career with job security in contrast to thousands of years where not only was a majority of the population illiterate but also where advanced mathematicians made up something like less than 5% of the total population historically. We have raised the bar so high in terms of educational intellect that a majority of the population has become deemed disposable while only a small percentage of advanced specialists are deemed acceptable in having any semblance of a comfortable livelihood, even though the most lowly educated modern worker is ten times smarter than his past historical counterparts.

The irony is that capitalists want artificial intelligence and total automation of everything nowadays which will drastically increase the disposability of the majority population to where they control even more of all society for themselves which is why techno transhumanism is in vogue these days within capitalist circles.

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