Reign of Gaming

Quote from PotatoSalad 

"Luck is an event which occurs beyond one's control"

If it's theoretically possible for an event to be within your control, then "luck" is not the correct word to be used. Compare the word "luck" to "never." You cannot say something will never happen even if it only has a 0.000...00001% chance of happening. The correct saying would be that it almost never happens. Therefore since there is a 0.000...00001% chance of happening you would have to replace "never" with "almost never" or "rarely."

Similarly with the word luck, which you said includes the definition: "beyond one's control." Let's take your example of the jelly beans in a jar. You look at the jar, take a wild guess and get it right. You may think it's lucky, but the number you chose was not entirely beyond your control. You made an educated guess, and experts (theoretically) can be able to get the exact number every time. Although you may not be able to correctly guess the amount of jelly beans in a jar the second or third time, you obtain a range of how much you are usually off by (example: plus or minus 50 jelly beans) and with enough practice you can lessen that gap.

Surviving a fight with however much hp is skill. You say no human in the world can figure out all the variables on the fly. Most likely, no one in the world can do it now, but it's not impossible. If you can work on your skills to that point, then it's just a matter of skill instead of luck.

All of the examples you gave have things out of your control; namely, your opponent's and teammate's actions. That's a bit nitpicky, though (not luck, but lack of skill by your opponents, but you were lucky that they made a mistake, etc.).

I think the issue is basically one of definitions. If you just limit "lucky" to things out of your control, then a lot of things that most people would consider lucky (rolling a six on a real-life fair die 100 times in a row, guessing the correct amount of grains of rice on a table after a second of viewing) would not be lucky. I think that the common usage is significantly less strict than that.

It's true that a hypothetical perfect player would depend very little on luck. But that perfect player can't possibly exist; they'd either have to have perfect foresight or never, ever take risks. In a real life scenario, players are forced to make educated guesses based on limited knowledge (due to UI restrictions, in-game restrictions like fog-of-war, and the fact that they can't perfectly predict their opponents' and allies' actions); those decisions are basically best-case heuristics at best, which involves some chance of failure. And in that chance of failure is an element of luck.

That's not to say that skill plays no factor in these things, of course. Skill acts as a risk-minimizer by making educated guesses more accurate, meaning that you're less likely to do something that requires more luck.

I would say that all of those scenarios could reasonably be called lucky, with some provisions (2 likely being the exception for a good deal of the playerbase). While the events themselves are deterministic, your understanding of the situation was incomplete, and therefore you had to make some assumptions about the future that were probabilistic in nature. Specifically:

1. No player, except maybe some extremely high level players, has predictions accurate enough to determine a fight to within 1 HP. Therefore, you were making a guess about the outcome of the fight, probably with chances hovering around 50%. Therefore, you were lucky.
2. If you were unaware that your jungler was coming, then you made a prediction based on incomplete knowledge of the system; you were lucky that unknowns worked in your favor. (1 may also apply if you planned on the jungler coming but survived with low health).
3. Basically the same as 2, though most players probably won't be tracking their XP gain as closely as the minimap.
4. You cannot get a guaranteed location for where an enemy champion will be in 10 seconds (or whenever), at best you can make an estimate based on their current location and a prediction of their further actions. This prediction is probabilistic (ie. "he's most likely going to be here"), so you were lucky that you succeeded.

All of the above using a definition of lucky something like "succeeded at something that had a significant probability of failure based on information available at the time". All of the above do have significant elements of skill, don't get me wrong, but they also are based on luck to some degree.

That being said, most of the time people say "lucky" when they mean "I don't think you deserve that kill". And they're just being dicks. :D

In addition to the above, a number of strong bruisers have AS built-in to their kits (Xin and J4 probably being the biggest ones). AS definitely isn't bad on melee champs.

Quote from NinjaCalibur

So yes, a player's MMR raises when they do really well. And they get to end up facing some tougher opponents closer to their MMR. The thing is, why don't they ever get tougher teammates too? Why does it always seem that these players get teammates that just can't compete with the opponents? Is it seriously just that much of a coincidence for it to happen as often as it does? Can you confidently, sincerely say that?

Do you have any actual proof that good players get held down by their teammates? I see the claim a lot in complaints about matchmaking/ELO, but I don't think I've seen anything actually approaching a proof of this claim (usually you get single points of data if anything). It may or may not seem like nitpicking, but really, it's the core issue here, and anecdotal evidence is basically useless; human biases on their own and others' performance are very, very well documented. Burden of proof and such.

I'm sorry but it's just WAY too much of a coincidence for me to believe that after people go on heavy win streaks and then start losing games when they still lack being challenged that it's just purely "by accident" and "random". That it's not intentionally happening. That they are not intentionally being given teammates that aren't as good as the opponents. Every single day I experience this and you can not tell me the experience is otherwise.

This is another well-documented bias; people are really bad at identifying random sets of data. Classic example is that when asked to generate a list of X coin flips, people tend to avoid streaks of longer than three or four or heads/tails, when in reality, much longer streaks are relatively common. I could find and quote numbers, but I'm lazy so here's Google doing it for me.

Nunu just got a jungle-focused buff. Just saying.

Less of a nerf, more of a shifting of priorities, I think. Makes it more of a scouting tool and less of a free ward that's probably best used defending lanes. Probably great for counterjungling.

If anything, I'd say that this is probably a worse measure of your overall skill than anything matchmaking could throw at you. It's the three-point contest to 5v5/3v3's full pick-up-game; entertaining, but limited.

Quote from OuterRaven

People are comparing him to Fiora when he's more of a Xin Zhao/Jax hybrid in that he brings the utility of a bruiser while having the potential damage of a carry. He can perfectly build items like BotRK, Maw of Malmortius and/or Last Whisper and then build tanky and still do a surprisingly high amount of damage.

While I'm commiting the sin of judging without playing him, this seems like it's right. Fiora is the way that she is because she's heavily incentivized to stack AD by her excellent AD ratios (her Q is 1.2 bonusAD, her ult is 1.2 bonusAD per hit, Aatrox's kit has 1.4 bonusAD total assuming one hit of his on-hit) and her excellent steroid (120% AS on a normal ability is crazy).

It seems like he should be well-off on a bruiser build, probably a BotRK + defense (though he probably doesn't want to build health, which is awkward).

On 1, chances are you should've been with your team the first time if they were grouped. ADCs are a strong part of any teamfight, so not being there may well have cost you the fight and possibly the game; minion tower damage is nothing compared to what a five-man push can do. At the very least, tell your team to hold off until you get the wave pushing; if they don't listen, that's their fault, not yours. Otherwise, there's a good chance that the other team was just better than yours, it happens. Any report threats were more than likely empty, assuming you did nothing else.

On 2, you might have had to be a bit more explicit; something like "I can't follow up if you initiate, Pantheon will kill me if I try". If she does it anyway, well, that's not your fault. Especially against a kill lane, staying alive is more important than trying to make plays. If she feeds, then, well, she feeds, there's not much you can do. Just try to be explicit and upfront about what you're going to do.

Not to mention that she's been buffed like three patches in a row now, and they've been fairly major buffs. They probably want to make sure they don't accidentally overbuff her.