Play to Improve, Not to Win
You’ll often hear the advice, “Play to improve, not to win.” What does that mean, exactly?
Essays on self-improvement, software development, and esports.
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You’ll often hear the advice, “Play to improve, not to win.” What does that mean, exactly?
What does Reiterate have in common with top-tier Olympic coaches? It’s all in your head.
League of Legends offers players the ability to forfeit games. After a certain amount of time, any player can start a surrender vote, and if enough players vote Yes then the game ends with a loss. When is it appropriate to surrender a game?
Everyone agrees that autopiloting is a bad habit. Here’s how you can use Reiterate, and specifically its Acknowledgement feature, to eliminate autopilot from your game play.
One piece of advice I’ve seen given frequently is “You should mute all your teammates at the start of every game.” Here’s why I think you should reconsider that.
This article about weightlifting contains useful advice about working out in general, and includes one tip in particular that applies to esports play as well.
One of the most often repeated pieces of advice I see for League of Legends players is: be greedy. Always play for yourself, and assume your teammates are incapable of making the correct plays. I think this is a mistake.
This blog post by Marcus Buffet on Thoughts on Improving on Chess made some interesting points about self-improvement in general and how to properly use self-improvement tools, and I thought there was much there that could also apply to improving at esports. I recommend reading it; it’s not too long. Then you can return here for my thoughts.
In his seminal book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” there’s one particular anecdote that Dale Carnegie uses which I felt was particularly apropos to MOBA gaming behavior.
There are many apps and sites out there that track statistics for you: damage per minute, farm per minute, deaths, kills, etc. Like any other sport, it’s possible to generate all kinds of statistics, and most of it is crap.
Reiterate is a tool to help you improve yourself. It fits into a long and somewhat ignominious category of self-help tools.
In gamer terminology, to “int” means to intentionally feed, that is, to basically give up and allow your opponent to kill you repeatedly. Sometimes the term is used loosely, when a player might exclaim, “I’m totally inting” when he makes a poor play. But originally (and still) it can mean when someone isn’t trying at all, and in fact is helping the opposing team as much as they can. In this post I’d like to discuss that extreme form of inting.
Tap-to-acknowledge is an upcoming feature in the next release of Reiterate
If you want to improve, you have to focus on yourself. That sounds simple, but there’s more to it than you might think.