Saturday, August 20, 2011

What do you do when you find you are good at a particular skill?

What do you do when you find you are good at a particular skill?

  1. Polish it until it shines and stick it in a trophy cabinet for all the world to see.
  2. Hone it and hunt for greater challenges, then hone it some more.
  3. Sacrifice personnel progress to teach others.
  4. Focus on improving the skill you are weakest at while maintaining you other skills so that things are equal.
  5. Practice it a little to maintain your current skill level.
  6. Say "I'm great at this" and let your skill wane.

Note that your answer will be different depending on what skill you are thinking about. Your answer will also change over time and as you get better/worse at that skill. Eventually you will get to a point where you no longer wish to improve your skills and the extra step takes far too much effort. Also the less you practice a skill the worse you will be at it.

I was thinking about what type of skill to level up in Bastion. I started to reason it out then figgured this can be applied to any skill so I posted it on FB too.

Here is an example of a real world instance.

Skill: Stockwhip
Answer:3
Reason:
Its noisy and tiring, so I don't practice. I know 3 techniques to get it to work and can go left or right. It's a good toy for camping and when I take it somewhere I usually end up showing everybody else how to get it to crack.

And in League of Legends

Skill: Dodge
Answer:1
Reason:
I like dodge, I sacrificed everything else to get more and now I cannot get more dodge. My rune page is full of dodge and I use both Jax and Svir because they have dodge bonuses. In this instance my skill will not wane.

1 comment:

  1. 7. Move on.

    I admit I have the attention span of a gatfly when it comes to sticking with a skill. Once I see that I've extracted all the easy learning parts, and I can see that to get better at the skill is purely mechanical (like practice more), I'll rapidly lose interest.

    Games are little learning packages for me too, so I rarely finish any game as I'm more likely to see better learning gains somewhere else before I finish. Notable exceptions are Portal, and strategy games like Civ that you can't get everything out of in one playthrough.

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