Reimagining "competitive" Destiny (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Monday, August 12, 2019, 15:42 (1937 days ago) @ Cody Miller
edited by CruelLEGACEY, Monday, August 12, 2019, 15:48

In my mind, a competitive player is focusing on the game at precisely that level: 1 gunfight at a time. This goes beyond Destiny. This is generally how athletes think during a game or a race. 1 possession at a time. 1 point at a time. 1 foot in front of the other. You don’t focus on “the game”. You focus on the hundreds of little moments that all add up to make the game.

I don't think that's true.

(Narrator): It is true

Part of being a competitive player is thinking many steps ahead of your opponent. If you are only reacting to the the thing immediately in front of you, you will lose to someone who is thinking about what is going to happen in the next minute of the game.

This discounts many things such as super management, heavy control, map control, spawn camping, etc, which win games. Listen to someone like True Vanguard talk about how he plays the game. His thoughts are always on many things at once, even just during a gunfight.

Here's a quote from an article called "One Play at a Time : Creating Confident and Coachable Players"

"A basketball game isn't just one game – it is maybe a hundred mini-games. Fifty or so on offense, and another fifty on defense. Within each of those battles might be a dozen different decisions, skills, techniques, strategies, and tactics that a player has to execute; and each and every second is an adjustment so that you are in the right stance and spot to get it done. The weight of thinking every single one of those plays can be a heavy burden on a player. Playing them One Play at a Time is much easier. What do they say? "Inch by inch, life's a cinch. Yard by yard it's really hard". Sports is the same way. Simplify it."

As someone who has played under a bunch of different coaches, and couched a couple teams myself, this is stock-standard athletic psychology. Yes, having mid or long term plans and goals is important, but none of that goes ahead of the moment-to-moment focus on beating the opponent(s) standing right in front of you. One of the reasons why practice is so important is that it drills everything into your muscle memory. Not just "how to hit this shot from this distance"... literally everything about what you can and cannot do, moment to moment. How far to the left does the defender need to be before I can get around him to the right? How close to the net does my teammate need to be and at what speed before I can pass the ball so that it will reach him when he's in position to catch the pass and make a shot? These things aren't planned so much as they are remembered. The entire purpose of practice is to get this stuff out of your mind and into your body, so that it happens reflexively without wasting time thinking about it.

The thing is, our bodies are actually a lot faster than our minds. Thinking too much is a great way to slow yourself down and get beaten. You want to push the act of thinking out of your head so you can divert all your mental energy to attention. You don't want to be thinking about where your opponents are, you want to know where they are. Same with your own teammates. And if you find yourself thinking "hmmm... what's the best way for us to position ourselves so that we can have the advantage here?", then you've screwed up. Because your opponents, if they're good, aren't thinking. They already know where you are, and while you're busy thinking they're busy executing something that they've perfected after hundreds or thousands of repetitions, and while you're using mental energy figuring out what is about to happen, they're laser-focused on every pixel of the screen in front of them, and their reflexes and muscle memory are so fast that while you're caught in your head thinking, they're automatically hitting their headshots and wiping your team out.

If you're opponent isn't good, then maybe you'll be able to out-gun them, but it's not because of all the thinking you just did on the fly.

All that other stuff (controlling heavy, spawn camping) are similarly learned behaviors. I could look back at a recording of a game I've played and say things like "now I'm thinking about controlling the heavy spawn, so I move over here... (etc)", but that's not really what's happening. I already know that it's good to control heavy (from past experience) and I know how to do it (based on past experience) and so I'm remembering how to execute all that based on all the factors that come into play (where did I spawn, where are my teammates, where is the enemy). And those are too many variables to have a perfectly memorized solution to every possible instance, so that's again where the "focus on the moment" mentality is front and center. Because that kind of focus is how you stay ready for anything that might happen.

I’ll average somewhere close to 20-30 kills per game, and 10-15 deaths. And of those 10-15 deaths, roughly half or more are absolutely unavoidable.

And how many of your kills were unavoidable for the enemy?

I literally addressed that in the very next sentence :)

I’ll average somewhere close to 20-30 kills per game, and 10-15 deaths. And of those 10-15 deaths, roughly half or more are absolutely unavoidable. I’m either getting spawn killed by a super, or an enemy is spawning right behind me, or I’ll get the drop on an opponent, hit them with 2 clean headshots, and they’ll turn and fist-of-panic me out of nowhere. And I’ll dish out similarly cheap kills

My complaint has never been that I'm losing games due to super spam and heavy weapons. My complaint is that the integrity of the moment to moment competition is steamrolled by all the supers and crap flying around from both sides. Its frustrating to die to, and its hollow to win from.