After looking at some potential games to try, I didn’t follow up on them and kept playing die in the dungeon. Nothing much happened, until my improvement decellarated. For whatever reason, I chose to look in the comments section of the game for advice. I rapidly found someone claiming they beat the game by removing every dice except 2 attack, 1 defence, 1 heal and one boost die and upgrading them to the max. Supposedly, predictability was the main benifit, as you draw five random die from your deck each turn.[1]
Fighting against my instincts, I followed the advice. And won. Just, completely destroying every boss in my way. Now, maybe this is what the feel of improving in pursuit of the meta looks like. “Search for advice that seems credible but feels counter-intuitive[2], try it and see it makes sense, improve and repeat”?
EDIT: Feeling lacking cause I didn’t try to immediately break this hypothesis. First, isn’t this just “listen to good advice?” If so, I do sometimes feel like I am ignoring advice from credible people. But the mental examples I’m thinking of right now, like beating Angband, don’t have much to do with meta-games. Should I be looking at the pre-requisites for meta-game skills and just aiming for those? But aren’t many of them too hard to try out and make sense of without building up other skills first? In which case, perhaps the core feeling is more like finally understanding inscrutable advice. In which case, I guess I need to look for some game where the advice doesn’t seem effective when I try it out?
Yet again, that isn’t enough. Many skills make you worse when you first try them out, as you need to figure out how to apply them at all. Give a martial artist a sword for the first time and they’ll lose faster. And many people hear advice from experts and think they understand it without really getting it. So advice for people who are just below experts doesn’t have to appear inscrutable, though it may well be inscrutable. Am confused about what to do now.
After thinking about how to learn to notice the feel of improving in pursuit of the meta, I settled on trying to reach the meta-game in a few video games.
After looking at some potential games to try, I didn’t follow up on them and kept playing die in the dungeon. Nothing much happened, until my improvement decellarated. For whatever reason, I chose to look in the comments section of the game for advice. I rapidly found someone claiming they beat the game by removing every dice except 2 attack, 1 defence, 1 heal and one boost die and upgrading them to the max. Supposedly, predictability was the main benifit, as you draw five random die from your deck each turn.[1]
Fighting against my instincts, I followed the advice. And won. Just, completely destroying every boss in my way. Now, maybe this is what the feel of improving in pursuit of the meta looks like. “Search for advice that seems credible but feels counter-intuitive[2], try it and see it makes sense, improve and repeat”?
EDIT: Feeling lacking cause I didn’t try to immediately break this hypothesis. First, isn’t this just “listen to good advice?” If so, I do sometimes feel like I am ignoring advice from credible people. But the mental examples I’m thinking of right now, like beating Angband, don’t have much to do with meta-games. Should I be looking at the pre-requisites for meta-game skills and just aiming for those? But aren’t many of them too hard to try out and make sense of without building up other skills first? In which case, perhaps the core feeling is more like finally understanding inscrutable advice. In which case, I guess I need to look for some game where the advice doesn’t seem effective when I try it out?
Yet again, that isn’t enough. Many skills make you worse when you first try them out, as you need to figure out how to apply them at all. Give a martial artist a sword for the first time and they’ll lose faster. And many people hear advice from experts and think they understand it without really getting it. So advice for people who are just below experts doesn’t have to appear inscrutable, though it may well be inscrutable. Am confused about what to do now.
Yes, I should have tried reducing variance earlier. I am a dum-dum.
Healing/defence die seemed more valuable to me, alongisde a couple of mirror die.