descentchampions.org

Getting to Gold tier is more a matter of statistics than anything else. If you keep winning games, no matter how you do it, you'll advance. There is no voting panel anymore that decides "is this guy Gold now or just a really good Silver Vulcan specialist?".
Being well-rounded does still help a lot, though, because it pulls in those pilots you're otherwise still weak against. Vulcan is a really powerful weapon to be good at, but there are still those pilots who are strong against it... and those levels where it's not that huge an advantage... and when that happens you don't want to start scoring like a Silver tier pilot again if you're trying to make Gold.

I think I'm with Jedi on this one. You'll probably want to pay more attention into the strategies your opponent is using... the strategies you're using too. What works, what's getting you killed? Are there patterns in the places you're getting caught? Maybe your opponent sees you in one place, going in a certain direction, and has a Standard Procedure To Kick Your Ass in place for that situation? What happens if you try something different instead - go somewhere else? Even turn the tables on them by coming from another angle while they're watching the old one?
Watching demos, as Djcjr mentioned, is probably a good way to do this. One I know I don't make enough use of myself

But, I also think that as time goes by, you'll get a promotion challenge anyway. You just need to find a way to win it.

I'm a pilot who varies hugely in skill. Sometimes I'm in the zone, sometimes I'm not. Sometimes I'm silver, sometimes I'm not. I can tell you what makes the difference between me being silver and me being bronze. There are three of them:
1) If I don't play more than 2 matches a week, I'm bronze
2) If I always play PPSKI, I'll end up being bronze (long story)
3) Magic.

The magic is a funny quantity. It enables me to dodge MD-1224's spreadfire with alarming sucess, or pocket dodge a smart that's right in front of me. It tells me just before a pilot comes around a corner when I haven't seen him for a minute,and makes me halt just before entering a corridor, and watching a stream of plasma fly past in-front of my face.
The magic has nothing to do with how well I aim, or how good my dodging is. The magic is of the mind. I disengage my brain from my ship, allowing muscle memory to pilot my ship. Then I do a perspective shift. What can the opponent see? What would I do?

In Descent, the mind game isn't just cat and mouse, feints and dodges. It's being able to drive two games at once.

As a kid, I could never play chess against myself. Now I occasionally play Go (a simpler yet vastly more complex game) without any opponent. You know the opponents strategy. He knows yours. The way to win is to not to think further ahead, but to manipulate the opponent. As to how? Well, that's the magic. The feints, the dodges are attempts to manipulate the opponent. The mind game is merely a facet.


People say "watch demos" but what do you watch for? Well, I watch for patterns. I try to predict what people are thinking. I watch myself and try to estimate what I was thinking!

To me, Descent is a game though. If I treated it more seriously I could probably get to top silver, maybe gold. But I enjoy the challenge, I enjoy the fun. I also enjoy being beaten. Don't make it into something it's not. Keep it fun, lighthearted.

I'm interested in mark's advice here. I'm not sure what state secrets he's willing to reveal, but would love to learn about his out of game preparatory measures. (ps i would listen the crap out of a self destruct sequence interview on this topic) How he approaches demo analysis, etc. Entropy as well, if he's here should chime in. He has some great thoughts on keeping pilots from knowing where you are.

I don't do interviews *door slams*... ;P hehehe?

Jkjk! I'd be glad to tell anyone anything they want to know. But, you can ask Drakona on this, I don't promise it will make any sense whatsoever. So. Yeah.

About a quarter of the advice I've gotten from Mark has been life-changingly valuable. The rest I can only assume will be once I understand it.

To Cyrus, I was where you are for most of a year. One of about four frighteningly good pilots at the top of silver, everyone asking why I wasn't gold already. It was months between my first win on Jeds and making gold. I don't know how it will be for you, but for me it was a bit of a wall. I do know that the journey from bronze to gold has never been completed before on this ladder, unless you count folks who only spent days in one or the other. So what you are trying to do is remarkable. But your progress has been historically remarkable so far and I am hoping you succeed.

I can tell you that what I found is, the further you go, the more important both grit and depth become. You cannot get by on strength alone against opponents who seek and exploit weakness as effectively as gold pilots typically do. You may win occasionally on the strength of a point of brilliance in your game, but to win consistently against the best, you cannot have gaps. And you have to be able to hold your own in what is ultimately a contest of will as much as skill, which is the barrier I think most people who don't make it aren't able to overcome. It is certainly what I think holds me back from the next level. Perhaps it will be something else for you, but that is all I know.

The journey to mastery is a personal one and we all take different paths. You'll make your own. Maybe it's perfecting that one skill? I don't think so, and I don't think it has been done that way before, but who knows? You've already taken it farther than *I* thought possible, so who am I to tell you what can't be done? I shall be opposing you with the strategy of depth that I advise, and we'll see what works.

I'm the master student... you're the wrecking ball. Do your thing. I shall be curious to see what that turns out to be.

Good luck.

Having started out silver, nearly dropped into bronze, eventually made gold, dropped back into silver, barely climbed back into gold, and now feeling like I've lost my edge, here's my take on what it takes to be in each group:

High bronze - basically in control of the ship. Able to trichord, dodge missiles, dogfight, lead a target. Likely to have only a few tactics they prefer, and keep going back to them no matter how the game is going.

Silver - may have one or two elite skills (great fusion, great missile placement). Able to recognize when things aren't working and change up, sometimes multiple times per game.

Gold - still maybe only has one or two elite skills (like Jedi's missile-fu, Drakona's lasers, DKH's ninja skills), but could have more. Able to recognize when a fight is not in their favor and change the circumstances, within a fraction of a second. Constantly struggling to tilt engagements in their favor. Can win a game by sheer force of will, even in an arena that favors the opponent. It can be easy to think that you need to emulate the elite skills, but the more important part is the mentality -- recognizing that every point of shields is a struggle, doing everything you can to turn an opponent's 3-second advantage into only a 2-second advantage, getting maximum value out of your weapons and your positioning while simultaneously minimizing the value your opponent gets from theirs.

It's exhausting to play gold-v-gold. It's kind of a cross between competitive sports and taking a grueling test (like the SAT or GRE). If you're not 100% focused, you lose like 20-6. Because every lapse in focus gets you killed, maybe 2 or 3 times. Every gap in your game gets exploited over and over again until you figure out how to adjust. Whatever it is you rely on, opponents will find ways to take away, so you have to go to your second or third or tenth option, and if those aren't strong enough you end up on the wrong end of a lopsided score.

So if you want to make gold, don't focus on your strengths. Focus on your weaknesses, and fix them. Got great vulcan? Try playing a low-or-no-vulcan level. Great at missiles? Try playing a level with only a couple missiles. Prefer dogfighting? Play in FRP or Junebug. Weak at dogfighting? Try killbox. Figure out what your opponent is doing to take off extra shields, and figure out things -- sometimes just little things -- to take that away, little by little. If you find you can't focus well enough or don't have enough willpower to make those changes mid-fight, figure out what's distracting you and deal with it.

Well said, Loth! You nailed my biggest issue in your closing statement. I struggle with outside RL distractions, and I can tell all of you first hand, decision-making suffers greatly from a lack of focus. Auto-pilot can cary most of the time, even if just for short periods, but against the best of the best they will catch you (me) even in that 3 second auto pilot where I am not focused and hose me! Ka-Pow!