Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Dominion General Discussion => Topic started by: Limetime on February 12, 2016, 12:03:06 am
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How do you play well in suboptimal circumstances? If you're salty how do you stay on top of the game instead of resorting to being bad at Dominion? If you have had bad luck in previous games how do you prevent blaming everything on luck and not playing well because of it?
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Sometimes you just have to step away and take a break, that's my best advice.
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Remember that luck is part of the game, try to laugh about it. Don't play out games where you're way behind even if you think you still have a slight chance if it destroys your mood, instead take a deep breath and resign so you don't go on torturing yourself.
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How do you play well in suboptimal circumstances? If you're salty how do you stay on top of the game instead of resorting to being bad at Dominion? If you have had bad luck in previous games how do you prevent blaming everything on luck and not playing well because of it?
For the second question: save your logs, and if you can't beat back the part of your brain that blames it on luck right away, read them a couple days later when you don't care about it as much; it's much easier to be self-critical. (Although of course a lot of the time it is luck.)
You can always post in the "help" forum if you want criticism and feel unable to provide it to yourself. Sometimes, for example, something you think is so obvious that only a total noob opponent could play it wrong either isn't as obvious as you think (e.g. there's an exception to some "rule" you learned like "always buy Goons"), or isn't as important as you think (like yes, it's frustrating to lose to someone who Thrones a Nobles and takes the actions before the cards... but it's more important to ask yourself what your opponent did right to get the TR and Nobles in the same hand in the first place than to criticize the 1% differences in their technique).
(Although there was one fellow a few years back who always posted games where he clearly lost due to luck-- I think what he wanted was validation, not help!)
Remember that luck is part of the game, try to laugh about it. Don't play out games where you're way behind even if you think you still have a slight chance if it destroys your mood, instead take a deep breath and resign so you don't go on torturing yourself.
I only agree halfway with this! I find that when I'm in the "salty" mood (not sure if I'm using the slang right... in my day we said "on tilt"), I tend to resign way too quickly (say when I have a 30% chance of winning but am just too annoyed to play it out). Sometimes you have to force yourself to not resign; your best weapon against your mood is just to reason through things, and even in the 70% chance that you lose you can calm yourself down by knowing you didn't ragequit. I guess what I'm saying is, the first step to not being too salty is to, um dilute yourself with the metaphorical water of reason?
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Also, when you're losing a lot, you might get easily affected by the gambler's fallacy. Don't think that you're going to have better luck in the future just because you have had bad luck now; you're just as likely to get bad RNG again, so you shouldn't take unnecessary risks.