“Play to Win!”

A proud achievement I’ve tried to get for some time now. Might not be the hardest or rarest for that matter but it shows what the right mindset can do. HoN is a very frustrating game to play when it’s not going as you’ve planed and this often leads the players in the game to act all out towards their teammates and enemies. A short google search provides enough evidence (http://bit.ly/p7uqpv) of how bad the community behind HoN is, and it’s very easy to fall into this trap of being one of these players. The only thing it does is to distract you from the real goal of the game, which is to achieve victory.

They killed us all..

After i achieved this win streak that i longed for so long i felt more lucky then being the one that caused it. However the truth as i see it is that by changing the way i play this game i change the biggest factor for winning rather than losing. Many of the games i played was games i would give up in my mind and concede when the votes came up. But i didn’t and kept a good amount of focus and tried to cheer up my teammates that felt the same way, one of the games the enemy team had a nomad in mid that had around 17-2 at 45 min mark and it felt really lost and impossible to win against this feeded force of “imbaness”. Even the enemy team kept spamming us to concede the match so we all could queue up for a fresh game, somehow me and another guy kept down voting it and kept calm. Renewed the wards, getting steady farm, call ganks, call  misses and trying to convince our teammates to do the same, but it was hard. It almost felt like martial arts, the classic match up of Striker vs Grappler. Emmys as the striker and my team as the grappler. We had some feuds where the other team mostly always went out as winners but went away crippled and it was this that made me feel like we had a chance, even if it was the smallest form of cripple it still was something to hold on to. Obviously did I know it would be strenuous to win and a long way to go.

Cheap mind tricks!

If the other team always is going away crippled from the fights it means they are doing something wrong and we just need to focus on using this advantage for our self. The longer you wait, higher the chance is on making a mistake. It was this that we had to use and wait for. And sure enough the other team was starting to make more and more mistakes which ultimately led them to concede the match without trying to solve their issues and instead started to rage on each other. You can see it so clearly how dangerous a little “harmless” distraction can be to ruin the goal you want.

It wont always be fun to achieve what you want, but it’s the ones that surpasses this that will come out as the winners.

To play with more defensive tactics in mind rather than go out on a barbaric pillage and focus on the more offensive tactics, will feel boring and not what you want. but ask yourself, do I play to win or lose? to have fun or for boredom?

We killed them all!

Think i got a bit off track with this post, but i think it became something even better and it reminds me on a book I’ve been wanting to read for a long time now. It’s named “Play to Win” by a Street Fighter player named David Sirlin which can be found at http://www.sirlin.net/ptw and be read there for free or you can find a link to Amazon their and pay $18usd for a physical copy.