r/slaythespire

I made this comment elsewhere, but I think it's worthy of broader discussion.

In all the talk around A20/A10 difficulty, there seems to be this unspoken expectation that anyone should be able to win at these levels after some modest effort and subsequently go on winning at a fairly good clip.

I never see this with, for example, Rocket League or Hades or Souls games (thinking of the naked, Level 1 challenge runs), or most any other game with an intense difficulty system. I suppose a distinction is there's nothing really 'athletic' involved in Spire as opposed to RL, but personally don't think that's a major distinction. The intellectual hurdle, for me, is just as great.

No matter how much I dedicate to the effort, I will probably never reach a 50% winrate in Spire A10. It took me over 1000 hours to reach A20 in StS1.

I'm fine with this. It's OK not to be very good at a thing, especially a very difficult thing. This is, I think, a great life lesson. So many posters on this topic seem distraught/annoyed that they're not getting a high win rate.

My two big takeaways here are:

* The best players often underrate how difficult the game is. I see folks very casually mentioning their 50%+ win rates, sometimes annoyed they've not yet hit 60 or 70. Fortunately I don't think I've ever see these folks adopt the 'git gud' smugness you see in many other games, so that's nice.

* Average and below average players like myself sometimes have an expectation that A10 success should be achievable -- and if not, there's something wrong with the game or themselves. For the record, I'm not mentally handicapped. I simply lack whatever set of skills (or the dedication to 'study' the game in all its nuances, e.g., Jorbs' spreadsheets) are needed to get a high win rate. And this is OK.