Minimizing your losses.

Eugene · Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2012 11:47 pm Post subject: Minimizing your losses.

Recently I was having a conversation with a friend of mine over minimizing your losses, and I was surprised to find it a concept he did not understand. So I got inspired to write this in hopes of hearing other people's opinion and also to make people think about it.

Also warning, I will be using multiple examples from Starcraft, Magic the gathering, World of Warcraft, and Team Fortress Two.
The idea of any Player vs Player game is to be loose and be able to adapt, but it is more important to be able to minamilize your losses as much as you can. I don't mean, win more I mean when you engage in combat be methodical and think about what you and more importantly your opponent is doing.

Let's delve into an example using Magic the Gathering:
My opponent and I both have 7 cards in hand. I play a Blaze for 20 damage to my opponent, which would kill him. He counters the spell by using force of will which forces him to toss another card so that he could play force of will for free. Who won there?
Well my opponent didn't die, but I won that exchange. Think about the card used:

I used one, Blaze
My opponent used two.

Sure he can just draw his next turn and be back up to 6 cards with me, but in that exchange I won due to card advantage.
It is that idea that makes so many of the top players the best in any game they choose to play.

I had another friend get mad at me back in the Burning Crusade expansion to WoW about a 1v1 duel he and I had. I spent 15 minutes minimzing my losses, not taking any risks and slowly draining him of his resources until my win was guaranteed by 100% when I had all of my cooldowns up and he had none.
Now this wasn't pure luck on my part. I set him up to make plays such as putting him in a crowd control and starting to cast a big spell that would deal alot of damage. Naturally he would break the CC with one cooldown and attempt to stun me. I effectively got rid of two of his cooldowns for no cost of my own.

So how does this relate to winning, all I have seen so far is babble about blazes and stupid cooldowns!

This way of thinking isn't about winning completely per say. It is about treating each engagement as a pool of resource, and the one who uses the fewest amount is the winner. In TF2 for example if you nick a medic leaving them at 20 health, you have won the engagement. You won because:
1. You did more damage
2. You have more health
3. The medic is forced to retreat using up time(!) while your time(!) can be used to stay in and deal more damage.
It is this idea of resource management and minimizing your total resource loss that causes so many people to succeed in any sort of competition.

Well I hope some of you learned something and if you have anything to add, please feel free to comment.

Draco · Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2012 1:46 pm Post subject:

And in TF2 it's more about what happens with each class. Each has their own ranking so for example if a Spy were to get killed but he got the Medic then that trade-off is an advantage to the team who lost their Spy. (This using Highlander or 6vs6 format)

2shoes · Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2012 8:17 pm Post subject:

i always look at it like this did i kill one player and or cause a medic to pop uber/kritz early and cause chaos i win if not i fail
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