JoINrbs

jorbs · @JoINrbs

23rd Feb 2022 from TwitLonger

I wrote a 6k-word essay on competition in Slay the Spire and people liked it:


The Competitive Duality of Slay the Spire
By jorbs


Friction

There is a fascinating friction at the core of Slay the Spire: it is the best non-competitive deckbuilder ever made, but it is also in many ways the best competitive deckbuilder ever made.

Its non-competitive merits are superlative. Competitive card games of comparable complexity have existed for decades with incredible popularity — Magic: the Gathering, Hearthstone, Poker — and Slay the Spire removes the need for those games to have an opponent for you to play against. The opponent is the Spire. In doing so it circumvents many challenges for competitive card games: fairly pairing opponents, adjudicating fair matches (preventing cheating, outside assistance, etc.), balancing in a way which feels fair to both players of matches, etc. As such, it is my opinion that it is fairly easily the most valuable game in the world for people who are interested in complex card games but disinterested in competition.

At the same time, though, by removing many of the challenges faced by competitive card games, the Spire itself becomes a resonant proving ground for the competitive drive which draws players to games like Magic: the Gathering. You no longer have to deal with opponents insulting you, or timing out. You don’t have to play matchups you don’t like; you can pick whichever character you want. There is no opponent waiting for you to finish your turn, so you can play as quickly or slowly as you like. There are no judges with rulesets you have to abide by; if you’d like friends to help you win that is allowed, if you’d like to reset fights when you make mistakes that is allowed. Because there is no adversarial competition against another human player, there is no harm done in adjusting the way in which you play Slay the Spire to fit your exact competitive desires, and many competitive card gamers have been drawn to the Spire for this appeal as well.

I personally have history with both of these elements. Around twenty years ago, as a teenager, I was building decks for Magic: the Gathering pro tours, and proudly reached #1 in the world in constructed rank and #3 in the world in limited rank on Magic: the Gathering Online. I later dropped out of college to play poker online, and became one of the strongest No Limit Hold ‘Em cash game players on Pokerstars between 2008 and 2011, easily earning enough to pay for travel and living expenses for most of my 20’s.

But, after a decade of competition in these sorts of card games, I found that I was tired of competing. I didn’t like treating my peers as adversaries, and was concerned when I noticed that elements of manipulation and outmaneuvering which I had learned to implement in strategy games were creeping into the ways I resolved conflict outside of them. I stopped competing at card games, and started streaming non-competitive strategy games instead: XCOM, FTL, and so on. For me, the release of Slay the Spire was incredible, a chance to re-engage with my passion for card games in a way which escaped the competitive framework I had lost interest in.


Ascension 0

When I came to Slay the Spire, in early 2018, the only characters were Ironclad and Silent, and there were no Ascension levels. Compared to its current complexity, the game was quite simple, and good players were soon able to win 80% or more of their runs. Differentiating between player winrates among the best players was nonsensical, as many of us were improving rapidly and there was no reasonable way to tell that one player won 93% of the time and another won 94% of the time without spending an extreme period observing their runs, but by the time that period had elapsed they would have both improved even further and the game would have probably received several major balance updates.

There was some interest in winstreaking the game — a competitive metric which carried over easily from other rogue-likes like FTL — but quite soon it was hard to track who had the longest winstreak. I’m pretty sure Celerity’s 50-0 was the world record for a time at least, and genuinely don’t know if he ever ended it. He got bored of playing and went and did other stuff. 50 runs is a lot of runs.

As such, Slay the Spire at ascension 0, all the way up to ascension 15, had few coherent competitive metrics which could be used to compare players based on their actual performance, and instead conversation about the best players attached to other ways in which players proved their worth. A particularly impressive run, a strategy guide for one of the characters, or a new discovery about game mechanics, are a few examples of ways that a player could distinguish themselves as worth paying attention to. I remember being quite a fan of this period of Slay the Spire, as it reminded me of the best parts of being on a Magic: the Gathering team, where different players had different talents and all were worth recognizing and applauding. I myself didn’t like competing at paper Magic events, but had taken great joy from seeing my friends pilot decks I’d worked on into the top 8 of the Pro Tour, and the Slay the Spire community, with constant discussion from many voices, reminded me of that. The subreddit eventually began having daily discussion threads, where everyone was invited to give their thoughts on the card of the day, and these inspired me to start making short videos exploring applications of different concepts to the game. If you’ve ever heard anyone mention “front-loaded damage” or “scaling”, this was the time when the community was largely deciding on those terms and which of them were important. We developed cute peculiarities as a community; “front-loaded damage” is a concept I had applied in the past to XCOM which applied nicely here. “Archetypes” were imported from other games for beginner guides, but conversation shifted away from them as we learned to appreciate the ways that decks could flow from strength to strength over the course of a run.


Balance Patches

The general history of Slay the Spire’s balance in early access is summarized as so: the devs regularly made the game easier, and then every few months they dropped a massive difficulty increase. As they tweaked and buffed cards which were underperforming, while leaving strong cards mostly the same, characters became easier still to win on, but then all of a sudden they released the first ten Ascension levels, and the game suddenly became harder than it had ever been before.

My existing run histories begin on January 30th, 2018, with an Ascension 1 Ironclad loss to Double Orb Walkers. My ascension 0 run histories have unfortunately been lost. It took me 40 runs over the course of four days to reach Ascension 10 on both characters, with my longest run being a grueling 2hr09m22s Ascension 4 Silent victory played at 4:45am. I remember this being the moment that I truly fell in love with the game. A week later Ascension 15 released, and the difficulty ramped up again.

Back then, in February 2018, there still wasn’t much concept of competing at Slay the Spire. The game experienced massive growth, averaging around 10,000 viewers watching on Twitch, compared to the ~1,000 it pulled in in January 2022. Most players were new and just having fun.

For my part, I started to do quite well at the game, and would focus on setting impressive streaks in between doing other fun things. I spent a month or so trying to one-turn-kill every fight as Silent, which was clearly not the right way to play Silent, but also set an early 9-0 alternating world record winstreak at Ascension 15 from March 13th to March 15th, which at the time didn’t require me to spend more than an hour and a half on any of my runs. My success on Ironclad and Silent slowly increased as I became more familiar with the strategies and cards available to them, and I made many videos focused on helping other people play the game at a higher level.


One of the tricky things about competing in a non-competitive game, especially when you are an entertainer, is that you will not sensibly follow an incentive to remain better than other people at the game. If I were playing poker, or Magic: the Gathering, I would have hidden my best strategies, and avoided explaining them to opponents I intended to defeat with them, but in Spire my incentive was completely reversed: my goal was to demonstrate my skill at the game, and the best way to do so was to help others get better at it. If I did, they could see the tangible benefits they were getting out of learning from me, and recommend me to their friends. People started saying I was the best player in the world, and when someone asked who to watch I would often be recommended as an excellent player to learn from. For my own part, I have never claimed to be the best Spire player in the world, and find the idea of pursuing such a title in a game like this to be distasteful. This is the best non-competitive card game in the world, and even among people who have competitive interest in it, we all make up our own rules for what that competition should look like. This is a game where it makes sense to applaud all the cool things different people are doing, not a game where it’s practical or appropriate to try to test that one person is better than others. It is also a game with a fairly low barrier to excellence; there are no mechanical requirements for success, and many players come to the game from other comparable games and quickly find large success by applying lessons which are freely shared by content creators and the community.

When Defect released in May I played through the Ascensions quickly, and then got back to rotating play. Winrates were quite high at this time, and I’m honestly unsure which of my streaks were world records and which weren’t. I won 22 in a row on Silent on a15, which was good enough to be mentioned by people enough for me to find it in google searches still. May 11th I set an early rotating personal best (Ironclad, Silent, Defect) of 4-0, and I extended that to 5-0 a week later. “Competition” at this stage of the game was particularly enjoyable because there were constant balance patches and even entirely new characters, and so there were all sorts of challenges to attempt. By the end of the month I had extended my best rotating winstreak to 9. “Competition” around Slay the Spire continued much in the same vein for the next year or so, with the rotating Ascension 20 world record eventually solidifying as the game’s most prominent achievement, and me setting a 7-0 on Feb 22nd, 2019, which is still unbeaten on patch 1.0 (pre-Watcher and many buffs) and may remain unbeaten for the rest of time, since people have moved onto other patches.

My favorite memory from this time period was a week when I had a different streamer join me on the channel every day, and we played runs together and raised money for charity. I remember that I was fairly close to equalling my 7-0 streak during this week, and I was extremely excited at the idea of sharing it with the contributions of so many other collaborators. Unfortunately we didn’t quite manage to get to 7, but we did raise a ton of money for charity, and played some very goofy runs. Prismatic Shard -> Dead Branch + Corruption happened on Defect on one of the days.


Blur

TheCrimsonBlur is, in my opinion, the most important single figure in organized competitive Slay the Spire’s history. Blur came to Spire from the Smash community, where he played an important role in promoting enjoyable and positive competition. Smash itself has an interesting place among fighting games, as a game which is full of less-serious gameplay modes and known by many primarily as a party game, but which none-the-less has a vibrant competitive scene. Blur saw Spire and wanted to bring that energy to it. He enjoyed watching my channel, and was drawn by the narrative allure of the rotating world record streak. On September 5th, 2019, he tweeted the following:

“I am dedicating my life to beating the A20 winstreak world record in Slay the Spire

All I have left to lose is my sanity

But by god am I going for it.”

My rotating world record streak of 7 had stood for half a year, and Blur was coming for it.


Blur’s quest for the world record streak was aided by the release of patch 2.0, which introduced Watcher to the game and buffed the player character pool in several other ways. In particular it moved several boss relics into other relic pools - Toy Ornithopter, which is now a common relic, used to get dropped by bosses!

On February 4th, 2020, he was the first to win 7 in a row on 2.0, tieing my 1.0 record. I extended that to 9 on March 5th, finally improving on the 7 I had managed over a year prior on 1.0 and “reclaiming sole ownership” of the record.

I put “reclaiming sole ownership” in quotation marks there because that’s how the narrative goes, but it isn’t really how reality works in a game like this. Fans want to say that one player has beaten another, when it’s more accurate to observe that those two players are pushing the limits of the game, and they (and many other players around them) are all contributing to better understanding how to win. In particular, I learned a lot about Defect from how Blur played the character, and while I still consider myself a very strong Defect player, I also feel that I owe a huge amount of that to seeing how Blur approached it. That’s why I personally choose to say that one player “extends'' a winstreak, rather than saying that they “break” it. Nobody is playing winstreaks or achieving massive successes in this game without benefitting from the efforts of players who have come before them, and so I consider my successes to belong to the community around me as well, and feel happy when I see others succeed.

Blur finally fully achieved his goal on March 21st, 2020, by further extending the rotating world record to 10. The community went nuts, with hundreds of upvotes and 135 comments in a thread on the subreddit where the original post was just an announcement from one of his viewers that he’d done it.

This world record, to me, is one of the two most important moments in Slay the Spire’s competitive history. It isn’t just that Blur set out to achieve this goal, and then completed it seven months later, but it’s also the energy that he was able to generate around it.

Unfortunately the thread wasn’t entirely positive; some negative elements of competition crept into it. Lots of psychoanalysis of myself and Blur, and framing of our “rivalry”. Someone posted this copypasta and it got 175 upvotes:

“Hi @TheCrimsonBlur This is jorbs's mom. I noticed you haven't been picking my son in gym class lately. Please know he is going through a rough patch as his father and I are going through a divorce. Please try to recognize him and be more considerate in the future. Thanks, Jorbs's mom”

For me, these sorts of comments were a reminder of how much I disliked competition in strategy games. Objectively, I guess there must be people who enjoy saying and getting excited about stuff like that, but it isn’t my vibe. Reading this thread made me miss the days when the subreddit was full of daily conversations about different cards, and everyone was welcome to share their opinions. Instead of getting excited about beginner guides, which didn’t even try to demonstrate best play but just tried to give new players a way into the game, the community was now getting excited about a rivalry which I was unwillingly being made part of. The game which I had been drawn to exactly because it did not have this in it was no longer that game.

Blur, for his part, handled it impressively. I think his comment on the thread is the most positive approach to competitiveness I’ve ever seen, and I’m just going to quote it in full:

“Hey guys

I gotta admit, some of the comments in this thread make me pretty sad. Want to clear up a few things:

Jorbs is incredible and I don't have a single bad thing to say about him. There is literally no animosity there. The fact that anyone even attempts to play StS at a high level is because of him, and I include myself in those ranks: I learned a ton watching him over the years. He also does charity work for incredible causes, something I admire greatly (and something I should start doing as well with the audience I've been gaining these last couple of months)

I am most known for my time in the competitive Smash community. I don't view competition as antagonistic; in fact I think it's mostly us against the Spire (never forget our common enemy!). Winstreaks are a vehicle for bringing out the highest level of play, and help us explore the depth that this game truly has (it's an insanely good game). A particular goal of mine through this is to show that though variance definitely exists, skill can mitigate an incredible degree of it, to the point that the game becomes consistently beatable, way beyond the 30-40% winrates of yesteryear. I've now won 15 of my last 18 so I think we're getting close to proving that.

Some people like competition, others don't. That's fine. People enjoy games in different ways. For those of us that do, this winstreak stuff has been great. Guys like me, Terrence, jrm1ah, etc have all been getting higher viewership, there has been more eyes and attention on the game, and the community has come closer together. Just last week me and Terrence collabed a few runs so we could learn the game with each other. This is stuff that wasn't happening before. This is stuff that makes the old Smash community leader inside me very happy. It's not just about building winstreaks, it's about building community.

I've averaged it before: a typical run for me is an hour and 40 minutes, including bathroom breaks and eating (both of which I always do during a run bc doing it in between tanks viewership lol). Winstreaks make me play more careful, so I take a tad bit longer. Things like Frozen Eye make me take way longer than average. I'm not that slow :(“

This energy just wasn’t what I wanted, though. I went from being quite active on the subreddit to almost never reading it, and stopped advertising my winstreaks and winrates, even on my own channel, to try to avoid the energy surrounding them. That sort of competitive fandom didn’t work for me or for the community I had built around the game.


Winrates

Competition around winstreaks has now largely dissipated, I imagine due in no small part to my minimization of my own. I am the first person to beat the Heart at Ascension 20 rotating: 7, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, and 16 times in a row, in the world, and my general way of speaking about this fact is to dismiss it and try to redirect attention to how many cool things other people do in Slay the Spire. At some point in 2021 I held the Ironclad, Silent, Defect, and Rotating world record streaks at the same time, and I generally did not advertise or talk about that fact at all and even had “streak” muted in my chat so that I didn’t see people talking about it or asking me questions about it. I am an edge case in terms of being so disinterested in competition while also being so successful at strategy games, and am fortunate that Spire can remain an incredibly rewarding game as I continue to play it without competition in mind.

In late 2020 patch 2.2 was released, and with the newest player buffs myself, Baalor, and Terrence all managed to extend Blur’s 10-0 from 2.0 in the same couple of weeks of January, 2021. This was, in my opinion, the coolest thing that has ever happened in Slay the Spire’s competitive history. The context of prior competition leading to that rotating winstreak, and the confluence of three excellent players all finally extending it after it stood alone for almost a year, brought me a tremendous amount of joy. We got on call together and recorded a podcast-type talk where we went through the runs from our winstreaks and explained key moments, then shared our thoughts on the state of the characters after the 2.2 buffs. Other than that, noise around winstreaks has been minimal for the past two years.

In the competitive void, competition around “winrates” stepped in. This was popularized by Lifecoach, whom I, candidly, don’t have very much to say about. I tried watching some of his runs when he started playing the game and thought he was a solid player, clearly capable of contributing some fresh ideas to Watcher, who was a new character, and 2.2 when it was a new patch, but the way that he spoke extremely dismissively of other players (including myself) who had been achieving success at Slay the Spire for years made it difficult for me to watch him. One night a couple of years ago, while I was chilling out and streaming Minecraft with my community, multiple people came into my channel to tell me he was talking about me on his stream, and when I checked the VOD I found that he’d responded to someone telling him that I’d made a spreadsheet to calculate the value of using Colorless potion on different turns of Act 1 elite fights by spending 15 minutes (mid-run!) saying that I was bad at the game, including remarks like that he guessed he understood that it was okay to be a “for fun” player, but that he thought people should want to watch him instead of me because he made better plays. I gave up on ever watching him and unfollowed his channel. While brainstorming this essay, I decided to check out one of his recent Ironclad runs, and 15 minutes into watching I got up to him and Merl having a conversation about me where Lifecoach claimed my Watcher winrate was 80% (this number is invented) and said I shouldn’t give opinions about how to play the character to him or Merl. He mentioned something about how I didn’t understand the right way to be frontloading Watcher’s damage or something like that and I found it sort of funny because I am the person who introduced the concept of “frontloading” for use in analysis of Slay the Spire, so I guess my ideas about how to analyze Watcher are going to get inserted into his analysis of her whether he likes it or not. I turned off the VOD there.

The concept of winrate-based Spire play is, as I understand it, something like this:
We start with the belief that there are objectively best ways to play each of the Slay the Spire characters.
Players conceptualize the appropriate ways to play those characters.
Players then spend 50 or 100 runs playing the characters in those ways, hoping to prove that these are the best ways to play the characters with their success over that sample of runs.
If a player has a good set of 50 or 100 runs, there is an expectation that that is remembered and used as proof that they have shown an excellent way to play the character.

If I am the extreme example of someone who is successful at card games being drawn to Slay the Spire because it is non-competitive and it lets me play a complex card game without needing to be adversarial, winrate-based play is the extreme example of people who are successful at card games being drawn to Slay the Spire because they are hypercompetitive and it allows them complete control over their competitive arena. Note that the world chess championship, which is perhaps the most prestigious longform strategy gaming event in the world, crowns a champion and awards a 2 million euro prize pool in about a quarter the competitive play time that is expected from people who are trying to prove whether or not Watcher should boss relic swap in this indie card game. During such a chess event, the recency bias of Elo ratings could easily change which chess player was rated highest in the world, even though the change in that player’s overall winrate would be minuscule when computed among the thousands of games they had played in their career.

My goal in the Slay the Spire community has always been to attempt to measure and highlight others at their best. If someone speedruns from Ascension 0 to Ascension 20 faster than anyone else, I try to mention and applaud that. If someone delves deeply into the game's code and discovers quirks in its randomness, I try to remember and credit them when I use those quirks to win a run. The goal of winrate based play is instead to create an exacting and precise competitive environment which players must adhere to, without which their value can be dismissed entirely.

If playing the first 10-0 rotating winstreak in world history is like being the first to climb Mt. Everest, competing for winrate is the dismissal of the idea that Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing did anything important, and a demand that anyone who would like to be considered a competent mountain climber should climb Mt. Everest fifty times and report their times for each repetition. As someone who plays Slay the Spire as part of producing the game’s most-watched entertainment broadcast, I have little interest in playing 50 six-hour-long runs on the same character, and never will, and so competition around winrate tacitly disqualifies any contribution I might be able to make. I am 31W-4L rotating so far this year, which is to my knowledge the best ever rotating performance over 35 runs of a20h, and competition based around winrate would discard this performance because I did not formally announce that I would be playing this set of games ahead of time, and because it is incapable of considering samples of irregular size. The concept of playing rotating characters is largely antithetical to people who are grinding for winrate anyway, since it is harder to achieve high winrates when you are required to split focus between all four characters.

Winrate-based competition is built on claims to be more than it is. I have never claimed to be the best player of any character in the world due to my winstreaks on such characters, or to be the best player overall due to my winstreaks rotating, because I understand both that such performances are insufficient to prove those claims, and also that many players who are excellent at the game have not chosen to attempt to prioritize winstreaks in their own play. At times I have enjoyed pushing the limits of winstreaks, but when attention has settled on my attempts I have never used it to suggest that doing so is the right way to play Slay the Spire.

There are a few massive internal issues with winrate-based play as a competitive metric. The first is that it is, itself, exposed to variance. Binomial variance over a sample of 50 runs is fairly high; if your true winrate is 70% and you play 50 runs there is an 8% chance that your observed winrate will be at or above 80%. This is the problem that we had with winrate as a metric all the way back in pre-ascension days, when it just wasn’t possible to distinguish between players who were close in skill. And keep in mind, again, that there is not much reason for players to not be close in skill in Slay the Spire, since everyone is freely sharing information about strategies with each other. The practical outcome of winrate-based play is that people spend 300 hours flipping coins. When they get lucky over those 300 hours they publicize it heavily and use it as evidence that they are incredibly good, and when they get unlucky they dismiss the results, or start again. In the same way that the longest streaks ever played are largely examples of the luckiest series of runs, and only partially representative of the skill of the player, the highest winrate sets played are, too.

The second is that it largely ignores that time exists. A quality of winstreaks as a competitive metric is that one’s ability to generate winstreaks can be increased by playing runs faster, even though doing so costs winrate. As such the ideal strategy for competing for winstreaks is to play runs at a relatively fast pace until you have accrued a few wins, and only then begin to slow down and play more precisely. Winstreaks reward considerable player flexibility, as someone must be able to perform well at different playing speeds in order to maximize them, and many historical winstreaks have contained the most exciting runs of Slay the Spire ever played, as players at their absolute peak have reason to dedicate their entire mental prowess and mastery of the game to singular runs in ways which would be too extreme to sustain over the course of hundreds of hours of play. In stark contrast, the optimal strategy for maximizing winrate is to calculate as much as possible. Avoidance of this is why every competitive strategy game in the world uses some form of time enforcement for competitive play. The only real reason to play faster, if you are truly trying to maximize your winrate, is that it provides more chances to high roll on variance over a sample of runs; i.e. if you play one hour runs with 65% true winrate you’ll get a set of 50 runs with 80% or higher winrate faster than if you played six hour runs with 70% true winrate. But that’s awkward, because people playing for winrate want to pretend as much as possible that this type of variance doesn’t exist.

As I watch winrate-centered play, I sort of get the sense that the players are disinclined to believe that the ability to accurately calculate in the game is a relevant skill for a player to have. One big thing is that players seem to openly welcome outside assistance from their viewers, but then claim that the result of their run is entirely reflective of their skill at the game. This would be cheating in most competitive environments, and I personally do not allow my viewers to provide outside assistance when I’m attempting to set new world records in the game. But allowing it seems consistent with the idea that the true value being expressed is the player’s idea of the right way to play the character, and that mechanical execution of that idea can be left as an exercise to the reader. Note that, in real life, Slay the Spire is much richer than this; execution of different strategies requires varied mechanical effort and skill, and as such it can actually be right for some players to play a character one way while others play the character differently. Both will ultimately make mistakes, but the best aggro player in the world can be best served taking an aggro deck to a tournament which the best combo player in the world would be best served taking a combo deck to, even though theoretical perfect play would reward one more than another.

This has been particularly frustrating to me with regard to Watcher play in particular, as the character easily rewards focused archetype-based play, and as perhaps the most distinctly non-archetype-focused player in the game’s history, I have spent two years learning, somewhat on my own, how to blend a variety of value cards into my Watcher runs, with increasing success. While I’ve been doing this I’ve been repeatedly asked why I don’t boss swap every run, since many people in the community are under the impression that Lifecoach proved that was the best way to play the character, and then repeatedly asked why I don’t try to go infinite every run, when suddenly Merl’s performance eclipsed Lifecoach’s and people changed their mind on which way to play had been "proven" to be best. It is also frustrating because, rather than beginning with ideas about how characters should be played and then trying immensely hard to execute those ideas, my tendency in learning characters is to use runs as experiments to try out many different micro-strategies, which means my winrate is generally low (what is the point of my winrate being as high as I could possibly make it all the time when I can use runs toward ends other than increasing my winrate, like learning more about a card I don’t take often?) but that my success on characters and ability to develop and refine new ideas on them has historically had a tremendously high ceiling. If I have 90% chance to win a run from the situation I am in, winrate-centered play demands that I regularly choose the path I believe will increase that chance to 91%, and calculate that path heavily, while an actual pursuit of mastery of the game encourages me to regularly choose paths where I now have less chance to win, but more opportunities to learn about the limits of the deck I’m piloting, or even to abandon the run in Act 3 because it feels like a waste of time to complete, which is something I’ve done several times as Watcher.

My personal experience with play speed is that I gain around 10% winrate from going from 1-1.5 hours per run to 1.5-2 hours, and around another 10% winrate from going from 2 hours to 3 hours. I have not generally played runs of over three hours much at all, so it’s hard for me to hypothesize on what would happen if I regularly played six hour runs, but I can safely assume that my winrate would continue to go up, at least in the short term (I think that playing shorter runs is a vehicle for my improvement, so it's very likely that playing long runs all the time would hinder me as a player over longer time periods). I can remember one run I’ve played in my life which I lost while playing at 4+ hour/run pace, and I lost it to a miscalculation in act 2, so it’s likely that it would have been won at 6+ hour/run pace. Given all this, I find it tedious and draining when people request that I prove my winrate to them if I want them to consider me good at the game. The longest run I've played lasted 10 and a half hours, and I was easily able to find new analysis to do which improved my chance to win it for the entirety of those 10 and a half hours, and could have easily continued for weeks.

I do want to say that, despite these issues, I still applaud the players who are grinding out lengthy samples of high-level play on different characters. It’s cool to see the characters played in such calculation-heavy settings (at least when the streamers aren’t casually shitting on me) and they’ve certainly demonstrated some cool and powerful approaches to the game.


Conclusion

This is largely an organization of my thoughts as I sit in the midst of one of my best competitive performances in Slay the Spire ever, and mull over the social dynamics and unspoken rules of the game’s community, the ways they’ve changed over the years, and how they contextualize and value my performance and contribution to the game. I genuinely think an analysis of competition in Slay the Spire could be someone’s Master’s Thesis, it’s just such a unique and bizarre community, blending people focused on very different priorities in ways which are peculiar to our online generation.

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