Before the translation
- This translation is the second half of the first video Dopa uploaded on his channel, not a translation of the second video. If you haven’t read the first part, check it out in the link below.
I noticed that someone else translated the second video that Dopa uploaded on his channel. So I probably won’t be translating that one, but I might translate it anyways if you guys want me to.
Edit: Many of you wanted the link to the translation of the second video, so here it is. The two videos are connected. On stream, Dopa talked for about 3 hours. The first video is the first half of his talk, and the second video is the second half. My first post was a translation of half of his first video, and this post is the other half of the first video. The other translator, who translated the second video, chose to summarize while translating, so the format may be a bit different from mine.
Edit 2: I translated the second video too, and posted it on this subreddit.
The Attention Theory
There’s another theory of mine that I’d like to talk about. It’s related to the theory of ‘concepts’ that I talked about earlier, and is another part of my ‘world view’. So what is the Attention Theory? You’ll probably find this interesting, so just listen to what I say. It’s something that’s always on my mind. It’s the idea that a human has a limited amount of attention that they can actively choose to focus on different aspects of the game. You probably didn’t understand that, so I’ll explain with some examples.
Let’s talk about laning. I personally think that there are 3 rules you have to focus on when you lane.
- You have to last hit the minions.
- You have to harass the enemy to stop them from last hitting.
- You have to avoid being harassed by the enemy when last hitting yourself.
All other plays related to laning, in the end, are ultimately derived from these 3 aspects. Both players know that last hitting is important, so they try to last hit as well as they can. If I try to last hit, the enemy will try to harass me, so they’ll use a certain skill at a certain time. Since I know they’re going to use their skills, I’ll use that chance to trade more effectively. Or say I’m laning against a Xerath. Xerath, knowing those three theories, will obviously want to last hit and harass me at the same time. Since I know that, I’ll stand behind a low health minion to try and bait his Q. When he actually uses his Q, I’ll sidestep it and avoid being harassed. This is actually pretty easy, because the trajectory of his Q is telegraphed. All laning plays are derived from those three basic rules. Your way you play out the game is dependent on how much attention you put on each of those rules.
Let’s assume you have a total of 100 attention that you can use. What happens if you spend all 100 of your attention on those three rules of laning? (Reads chat) Yeah, you just die to ganks. Even if you start off the game spending all 100 of your attention on laning, you have to have to spend some of your attention on other things at the 2 minute mark. Or to be safe, 3 seconds before the 2 minute mark. You have to spend 15 of your attention to look at the position of your jungle and figure out his pathing. It takes about 5 attention to check the time, and you have to spend 10 to predict the pathing of the enemy jungle. That only leaves you with 70 attention to lane with. You have to spend 3 seconds doing that, and then go back to laning with 100 of your attention. Then if a situation arises, you have to revert some of your attention to that.
Attention management
Pings act as a way of stealing away attention. In a mid-jungle 2 vs 2 situation, all 4 players are using all 100 of their attention on the skirmish. If you see 4 caution pings, then you are forced to spend about 10 attention per ping. You divert 40 of your attention to the minimap, and try to find the reason behind the pings. Then you realize that the enemy support is roaming faster than your own support. Then you avoid the skirmish.
This is another example of attention being stolen away. You guys are probably used to this too. Say my bot lane is running it down every 30 seconds. Then I have no choice but to spend a lot of my attention checking on the status of my bot lane. I keep finding myself moving towards bot too, and that eventually leads to higher chances of getting my ult or teleport cancelled. It also opens me up to getting ganked. It’s all because my attention is diverted to bot. That’s why when one lane is blown apart, other lanes have a higher chance of losing. According to my Attention theory, it’s natural. On the other hand, imagine that the enemy bot lane is running it down. Then I know that I’ll win as long as I play well, so I can focus more on the movements of my enemy laner.
Applications
An interesting application of the Attention theory is the Vayne vs Singed matchup, though the matchup itself is a bit outdated. Theoretically, Vayne is hard favored to win against Singed. But the strange thing is that Singed always seems to win the game. Why? It’s because Vayne has to spend so much attention on last hitting and maintaining distance. Vayne has to click every single minion to last hit and clear waves. Singed, however, just has to press Q and fart over the minions. That means that Singed can spend all 100 of his attention on assessing the situation and making decisions. Vayne doesn’t have enough attention left over to spend on decision making, and ends up making mistakes which the Singed player doesn’t.
That’s why I personally think one-tricks or two-tricks have a huge advantage. Oh, and just saying, I consider myself to be a two-trick. They don’t have to spend any of their attention on last hitting and using skills. It’s because they’re so familiar with the champion that no attention is required. I don’t even check to see if I last hit successfully anymore when I play TF. (Chat: Then why do you always miss cannon?) I can then spend all of my attention elsewhere, which enables me to assess situations faster and make correct decisions. It’s like breathing. I can multitask efficiently because of my mastery of the champion. In the same vein, new champions always have low winrates when they are released. People aren’t familiar with the champion, so they are forced to use all 100 of their attention piloting the champion. With practice, you can reduce the amount of attention required to do certain tasks.
Total attention values
So what state am I in right now? I’ve optimized my attention usage so that most tasks require very little attention. But that doesn’t change the fact that I have a lower amount of total attention than I used to. My total attention is getting lower as time passes, so optimizing my attention usage only gets me to where I started. As you age, your total attention slowly decreases. Pro players in their prime have 200 total attention that they can spend compared to my 100. I can still compete with them because I keep reducing the amount of attention required to do things, but my total attention values are getting smaller. It’s inevitable, like how entropy increases. (Chat: Entropy???? Is this a physics stream?)
Pro gamers and champion mastery
People who have understood my ‘Concept’ theory and Attention theory might be able to guess my next topic. I’m going to talk about pro gamers. What are pro gamers? People think that pro gamers are people who can always pick the optimal champion according to the situation. But in reality, they are only people who try to achieve that. Even pro gamers aren’t safe from the curse of mastery. That applies to all pro gamers, even World Champion pro gamers.
You probably have experience asking friends whether they can play a certain champion. How did they answer? People usually say something along the lines of “Well, I’ve played it before, so I guess?” You know how that game ends as well as I do. They have very low mastery of the champion. Let’s say that mastery can be measured on a scale of one to ten. My score of ten is only given to a few selected people. Peak TheShy’s Kalista, 2020 Showmaker’s TF, 2019 Chovy’s Akali. Do you get the idea? Mastery 10 is the highest level that a pro gamer can achieve. It’s at the level where they can first pick the champ regardless of matchup and win.
A mastery difference of 1 lets you get ahead in an even matchup. A mastery difference of 2 lets you go even or even win losing matchups. A difference of 3 or more makes matchups meaningless. Most pro gamers can get to mastery 7 by playing 50~100 games on a certain champion. Getting to mastery 8 is harder, as it requires an innate understanding of the champion. Getting to mastery 9 isn’t achievable just through hard work. Getting to 10 requires blessing from the heavens. Your ideas and views of how to play the game and the Champion design have to synergize perfectly. Most challenger one-tricks’ mastery lie between 8 and 9. That’s why they are so favored.
Pro gamers have to expand their champion pool because against a mastery 8 Yasuo, a mastery 7 Renekton is more efficient than a mastery 9 TF. That’s why pro gamers have to get all meta champions to mastery 7. If you have signature picks with mastery above that, you become a top tier pro. You can only maintain high mastery on a certain number of champions. If you don’t play a certain champion enough, your mastery starts to fall. You can only practice a certain amount of time every day, say 14 hours of practice max, so the number of champions you can maintain high mastery on is limited.
To wrap it up
Mastery is an extension to the Attention theory. (Chat: I don’t understand) See? Doesn’t this all sound like bullshit? This is why I don’t talk about my view of the game often. You guys might be having fun listening to me talk, but there will inevitably be points where you disagree with me. Different people have different understandings, so your views can be radically different from mine. My theories are interesting, but in the end, they’re just my own thoughts.
