SLOP8223

The Hand You’re Dealt

Week 1 — Spike

Twenty seconds

You have been given Kog’Maw.

Your team: Kog’Maw, Poppy, Lissandra, Elise, Senna.

Write down your first purchase.

Everyone who wrote something down, what did you assume?

I never told you the enemy team

The question was answerable

…for anyone who noticed it was incomplete.

The champion was never the missing information.

What this mode takes away

  • no-pick — you do not choose your champion
  • no-recall — you cannot retreat and reset
  • one-lane — there is no map to be elsewhere on
  • forced-contact — you cannot decline the fight

These four are the spine of the semester.

“It’s Summoner’s Rift with the interesting parts removed.”

Where the strategy went

On the Rift:

decide what you want → draft a champion that does it

Here:

receive a champion → work out what it can be made to do

The order reverses. Nothing is removed.

Three things that get confused

  1. receiving a strong option — luck
  2. recognising a strong option — knowledge, and lookupable
  3. recognising a normally strong option is wrong here — skill

Only the third survives a bad roll

The strongest objection

Randomness lowers the skill ceiling.

Over one game, the better player wins less reliably here than on the Rift.

This is true.

But it measures the wrong thing

Lower correlation between skill and outcome

≠

lower ceiling on decision quality

The objection assumes decisions are graded by whether they won.

Where the semester goes

The twelve weeks follow the order the game forces:

roll → reroll → augment → build → composition → space → fight → die → adapt → fall behind → question the system

You don’t need better rolls

You need better decisions