how your sleep impacts CoH performance

Impact of Sleep on COH Player Performance

Summary

Even a single night of 5-6h sleep will have a very noticeable impact on your CoH performance, while several consecutive nights will have an even larger impact, taking several days to recover from

Types of Impacts

In two studies from David Dinges and the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, two major impacts of sleep deprivation were reported:

• Slower reaction time
  
• No reaction at all / miss of small events
  

Some Numbers

I guess both results are of big importance for us COH players. What I found surprising is how large the impact of even short sleep deprivation is. Here is a Chart from the AAA, n=6845. They looked at car crashes.
Comparison group are those, who slept 7h ore more (only in the day before the crash).
Result:

• Those who slept 6-7h had odds 30% higher than the base group,
  
• Those who slept 5-6h had a 90% higher risk
  
• And it gets even worse for those who slept even less...
  

If you dig deeper and look for the reasons, the following table gives a good indication.
For interpretation: the values “overcompensation” and “poor directional control” are imho reasons that result from a short lack of attention.

What you see is, that the reasons shift away from reasons like excessive speed and “in vehicle distraction” or misjudgement to reasons where attention plays a much larger role.
This alone is not surprising, what I found surprising is how big the effect is, even for 5 or 6 h of sleep after a single night.

Fun fact: those with less than 4h of sleep seem to have stopped judging at all :-)

Table: Reason and hours of sleep the night before crash, percentages shown

Why you might simply miss certain events (where did my squad go???)

Interesting for me were the results from the David Dinges tests, Mathew describes in his book. David had test subjects do stupid attention/reaction tests every day. A test like “report where you saw a red dot show up on the screen”. They monitored for reaction and the number of dots spotted.
Result: those who slept less, where of course slower, but they also missed(!) much more dots. They simply did not see them. Uff.


Some more things I took away:

• The tables above are for ONE night of sleep. If you sleep for e.g. 6 hours for 3 nights, things get far worse
  
• Those people with less sleep seriously overstated their ability to still perform (just like “suuuurre, I am not drunk, I can still drive1!”
  
• After a few nights of limited sleep, it takes several (sic) nights to get back to normal
  
• Alcohol, BAC 0.08g/dL is as bad as, gee, I forgot, 4 or 5h of sleep only, something like that
  
  

So,
Sleep well comerades, and do not fail the rodina!




Sources, details, for those who want to look deeper into the numbers…:

• AcuteSleepDeprivationCrashRisk.pdf (aaafoundation.org)
  
• Acute sleep deprivation and culpable motor vehicle crash involvement | SLEEP | Oxford Academic (oup.com)
• 
  
• Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams (English Edition) eBook : Walker, Matthew
  
  

Nice!

I think there is something about grogginess when waking up, too.

I recall, with great fondness, a situation where Herr Sturmpanther and I were to battle the next day. He was up late in the night and I offered some great advice.

In order to beat that morning grogginess, I suggested that he have a few beers throughout the night (to take the edge off as he was nervous before the game) and to practice throughout the night and morning. I think I suggested some coffee, too, but I don't exactly recall.

Fortunately, he took my advice and was able to beat me quite soundly!

Fortunately, he took my advice and was able to beat me quite soundly!

Coffee solved all problems.

Cafeine and cocaine is the way.
J/K.

You also live longer if you sleep more.

Very interesting post (also from a human factors/ergonomics POV)! So the take-home message would be no longer to blame your losses on your opponent outplaying you or (ab)using OP stuff, but on having to play with a serious sleep deprivation handicap.

You also live longer if you sleep more.

I also heard from multiple sources that playing CoH reduces your life expectancy by a fair bit... So cutting down play time in exchange for more sleep should yield double the profit

Nothing a bit of coffee, tons of cocaine and healthy amount of domestic violence to reaffirm your alpha male status can't solve.

Nothing a bit of coffee, tons of cocaine and healthy amount of domestic violence to reaffirm your alpha male status can't solve.

You hit a nice point there, Daddy G, "long sleep" simply does not sound cool/hard/alpha, and I doubt that is going to change anytime soon. (although it might be OP)

Based COH2 player looks out for his fellow players and tells them to get a good night's sleep.

LPT: get dark shades in your room or have something dark to cover your eyes.
Low quality sleep has correlation with lower levels of testosterone and higher levels of cortisol. Some say that if you slept 3-4 hours your reaction is similar to a slightly drunk and 2 hours to severely drunk person, which I actually agree with. Had a minor crash after 3 hours of sleep.