The main issue with coaching is the approach of the coach. A pro coach will tell you all the mistakes you are making; strategic changes, pointing out things in the gameplay that are obvious to the coach but maybe seem rather trivial to the student.
Both sides tend to think this is what good coaching looks like. There’s a transactional logic to it: I paid for the hour, so I want as much knowledge as possible out of that hour. More information feels like more value. But feeling like you got value and actually improving are two different things.
The problem here is that the student gets to feel like he is getting a lot of value, but he is not actually improving. In a case-by-case study, I observed a recurring issue where students would buy 3-5 hours of coaching worth hundreds of dollars but never actually achieve an increase in elo. What is the problem?
Daniel Coyle, New York Times bestselling author of The Talent Code, puts it well in an interview with Big Think¹.
Coyle states:
“The fastest learners in the world are probably 12-year-old kids on their skateboards. They learn really fast. Who are the slowest learners in the world? Maybe the same kids in their algebra class. The skateboard is showing them where the mistakes are. They feel that moment and they can correct and adjust. They can make mistakes and fix. In the algebra classroom, they’re sort of sitting passively and knowledge is washing over them.”
His point is that by tweaking the learning environment, you can massively impact the learning velocity.
So if the feeling of failure forces us to correct our ways, then why are coaches just washing their students in knowledge? Why are we not creating environments where those students can really feel their mistakes hindering them from getting somewhere in their games?
Perhaps it is because the coach or the student feel like the coach is not providing as much as they could be doing, but does that even matter if the student improves faster as a result of this?
Most first-time students I work with don’t know what they want to improve. They booked coaching because that’s what you do when you want to get better: someone better watches your games, tells you what you did wrong, and gives you the fix. There’s rarely any emotional reaction to the feedback beyond a bit of embarrassment from the student. Nothing in the process creates urgency, the feeling that a habit, a piece of muscle memory, or a gap in knowledge needs fixing right now.
Why “just play more” doesn’t work
To build actual skill in a video game, it’s easy to say, “Go play a lot of games; with time, you will improve and reach the top.”
Two problems:
First, everyone else is playing a lot too. You’re in a race, and raw hours don’t win it. People before you already have thousands of hours in the game, and even if you start a brand new game on release day, someone with experience from similar games will start at the same moment and pull away from you, because they arrive with a bank of skill you don’t have. The player with better fundamentals starts ahead.
Second, RTS games like Age of Empires are complicated. You can’t expect to play it well without first building the fundamentals it demands.
You can’t play football without building cardio. How will you score if you’re out of breath before the shot? It’s the same in Age of Empires. Before strategy matters, you need to look at a player’s macro, micro, game awareness and positioning. These are the baselines that stop you from losing to simple mistakes, and they free your attention for what actually decides games at a higher level.
Coyle calls this building circuitry. It takes time, and this is where coach and student have to look past the next game and invest in the foundation.
It’s also where the skateboard comes back in. Fundamentals practice is exactly the kind of environment where you feel your mistakes. When you idle your town center in a drill or miss your timing by thirty seconds, you know it right away because you get punished by losing, and you fix it on the next attempt.
Compound growth
If you improve by 1% today, are you a different player tomorrow? Not really. Same skill, same knowledge, same execution.
Now improve by 1% every day for a year. Mathematically, that makes you about 37 times better than day one. The exact number doesn’t matter, and nobody improves at a perfectly steady rate. The point is that small, boring gains stack, and the players who keep stacking them end up somewhere the “ten games a day and hope” players never reach. So often have I seen people with thousands of games be stuck at the same elo with a 50% winrate. It goes to show that playing non-stop does not work.
That means doing the menial work every day: reviewing your own games, studying stronger players, practicing mechanics, practicing macro, and building your knowledge a little at a time.
Let go of the number
If you are hung up on the positive feedback of an elo increase, and that number then going down tomorrow tilts you, you are now overly attached to a specific outcome. You are too focused on getting a number up instead of focusing on the process of learning and getting better naturally.
And I can promise you, as a coach, that focus on the right things, not the bragging rights to your friends or the urge to prove yourself to someone, or maybe yourself, is much more rewarding in the long run.
What coaching should look like instead
If information showers don’t work, what does? This is how I approach it:
- Focused practice: playing against someone better than you who punishes you for making simple mistakes, then reviewing these games and repeating.
- Set clear goals, and review how to get there. No more just wanting to get better.
- Daily practice. Remember the 1% rule? You cannot improve if you are not playing, watching pros play, analysing games, drilling build orders and improving mechanics every single day. These 5 are the most important skills of an aspiring player.
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