There’s a popular saying that goes, “Practice makes perfect.” In my opinion, that’s the most cliché statement I’ve ever heard. While it is true that practice does make perfect, how you practice is what matters. If you practice something the wrong way, you will start growing the opposite way. If you practice the right way, only then would you see a good difference.
I like playing games as a hobby. In games, there’s this thing called KDA (Kill, death, assist) ratio. To increase your KDA ratio, you need to perform better. This means taking notes and constantly identifying the mistakes you make to be better. Not every gamer really does this seriously or on a regular basis for that matter. Some picks up gaming just for fun, which is fine really, that’s what games are for. It’s something that people can use to relieve some stress, like me.
At one point however, I started getting tired of being matched with teammates who doesn’t know how to position, or just wants to go guns blazing and ends up throwing the game. I was tired of losing.
Enough is Enough
I wanted to get a higher rank to get matched with people who knows what they’re doing and win. (Spoiler alert: the higher rank you get, the saltier the players are.)
For the sake of the story, I will use the game called Overwatch. In Overwatch, playing with your team is how you win. You can’t push by yourself, or you’ll end up dying and feeding ult to your opponents in which they could use to defeat your team. It’s a great example because the game will record every match you play in which you can watch the replay of and roam around the map to analyze what went wrong and what went right while spectating yourself, the opponent, and even in third person.
There are different heroes in the game you can play as and they are separated into three groups: tanks, damage, and support. I like playing support. As a support character, I’m responsible for healing the team. That means, if I die, there’s no sustain and my teammates would also die. To prevent that, positioning is the key. That’s where the replay system comes in.
I became determined to climb out of gold rank and so after every match, if I feel like I did not do good enough, I would rewatch the gameplay and ask myself, am I hiding behind the shield, am I using natural covers, am I doing damage instead of healing? Things like that.
So What?
As I continued to review my gameplays, after a few days of rage inducing games and some bearable teammates, I was actually able to go up a rank. I got what I wanted, so I stopped doing the match reviews afterwards. See, before I did this, I’ve just been doing the same thing over and over. I did not try to think of my next move, I just played the game and watch it unravel.
If you keep doing the same thing over and over, you’re guaranteed to become efficient at it. But efficiency means nothing if it doesn’t solve the problem, that won’t lead to you gaining the right skill. Sometimes taking a breather or stepping back to take a different view or approach is necessary.
