The Code – Part 4

1. Do whatever it takes to win
2. Be respectul to your opponent
3. Game balance is irrelevant
4. Stats are irrelevant
   So you are playing some games on the ladder and you start looking at your points thinking about how many points you need to get that top rank. You go on a loosing streak and you start to think about how many games you need to win to get those lost points back. You lose a game and you look at the rank of your opponent and realize he was a league below you and you are devastated, or you realize they were a league higher and you feel very confident. Feel familiar?
   The next thing, just as difficult as learning to ignore game balance is learning to ignore stats and metaprogress. I’ve already repeated this before but as the first rule states, the only goal in a game is to win, everything else is insignificant. But the second you leave a game that game is gone, it is played and over. You will never ever play that exact game again. What you have left is a replay though and a learning resource and that is exactly how you should approach a played game, as a resource. You should not even think about your replays as you playing, they are no different than all the replays by other players that you might have. When not in a game, the only goal is to learn and improve.
   Keeping track of wins and losses, and more importantly who you won or lost to is a distraction from your capability to improve. It is completely useless information, even if you lose to a player a league lower than you, that does not really tell you anything, it could have been a smurf, it could have been a player who is in that league due to being bad at the other match-ups and good at the one you played. You actually can’t draw any real conclusions about your own progress from knowing your win rate or who you won against because of how volatile the game is. The only facts that are constant and useful are those in game, the mistakes you made, and the things you could have done better, faster, more precise. Those things are not changed in any way by the skill of the player you played, they do not change in any way if you lost the previous game. Remember the previous game does no longer exist, it is played and over and if you won or lost or how many ladder points you lost or gained does not tell you anything useful in how you should improve for your next games.
   This reasoning extends to you needing to drop games from your mind when you leave them. It is way to common that people go into a game with their head still in the last game, this is why it is important to start thinking about played games as just a resource and not a game anymore. Try making clicking the surrender or leave game button a ritual where you leave the current game behind. If you feel emotional or frustrated at the end of a game, just stay in it until you cool down and then leave the game, the second you hit that leave button the game is gone and you change your mindset from win at all costs to winning and losing does not matter, and then only when you go into a new game do you switch your mindset to winning THAT game no matter what it takes. Swapping between your competition mindset in game and your learning mindset out of games is crucial and they should not cross over each other. Take whatever time you need between games to make sure you complete this transition, before you go into a new game. Make up rituals for yourself if you get really emotional in games, get up and walk for a moment, put your head in the freezer, whatever it takes to drop the competitive mindset and go into learning mode where you can look at your replay as if it wasn’t even you playing.