Week 15 - Conflict

Some factors I didn't consider made this schedule not work quite as well as I'd hoped. Time to make adjustments, and search for alternative ways to fit in Mahjong.

The biggest problem is the animals.

The birds get put to bed at 9. I figured starting the Mahjong block there would be good, so they would be less distracting, but they often make noise for another 5-10 minutes after being covered.

On top of that, for some reason the cat has decided to start meowing at me during that hour as well, asking to go on a walk.

So, what to do about that? Move Mahjong back to 8? The birds get very noisy as it nears their bedtime, so that would just make the latter half annoying instead of the first half.

Maybe I can move it back another half hour, then bring the voice training up to later at night. That gives a longer stretch of no screen time before bed, which would theoretically be good.

I paid attention to what happened today, and forgot about how the cockatiel flies over to land on my monitor repeatedly while out of his cage. And as I'm writing this, it's just about 8, and the parrot is yelling.

From 5 to 7, supper happens at some point, and then from 7 to 9, the birds distract me, and then from 9 to 10, the cat distracts me.

Fitting it in in the morning is hard. The evening is full of constant distractions.

Maybe two consecutive games is asking too much of a weekday. One game at 9:30 after taking the cat for a walk, and then maybe I can fit another game in on the mornings where I work from home. It's really not a lot of games, though.

Maybe I should just drop Mahjong again.

I'd set my goal at Saint, but the more I played and learned, the more I became aware that I'm already capable of it. If I continued on, fully shook off the rust and regained my habits, I'm sure I could reach Saint. That then just turns it into an exercise in putting in the time. The process became less exciting. Not to mention playing on Mahjong Soul felt worse once I realized the weakness of Maka compared to NAGA.

But, let's not be too hasty. Let's think about how we can make it work. Jared Tendler values writing out your thoughts highly.

My time playing RuneScape has shown me I don't enjoy grinds that rely on RNG drops. For example, Fishing Trawler is a simple minigame where you have a 1/12 chance of getting the thing you need, and need four. So, the average person finishes in a bit under 48 runs, with each taking 7 minutes. It took me 77 runs, and was quite painful.

In that situation, I reframed it by doing cooking training during the downtime, and viewed it more as a cooking training activity. The minigame itself and the drops faded away, I stopped even expecting anything to drop, I just banked my cooked fish, pulled out raw fish, got back on the boat and entered a flow like that. Chop tentacle, fix railing, cook fish. There was injustice tilt, but I succeeded in becoming numb to it and focusing on something else.

I wonder if that would happen with Mahjong? Mahjong is a similar thing. A 26% chance, even a 30% chance, you're chasing some number of those first place drops. Maybe I should try just doing like 8 hours of Mahjong one day. Once a month, perhaps.

Another similar activity was the Rogue's Den. In that, you have a 40% chance of getting an item, and need five, with each run taking about 5 focused minutes. There was less downtime than in Fishing Trawler, and you can't take any items inside, so I couldn't train other skills. Getting unlucky was pretty much a pure time waster with no progress attached. The average for getting all five is 13 runs. It took me 33. I was just unhappily going through it while typing in Discord, "3/23. 3/24. 3/25. 3/26." There was no enlightenment in that case.

That's probably similar to my current feelings towards Mahjong. Getting unlucky in a game feels like wasted time.

At the same time, long grinds that don't rely on RNG, I'm fine with. People seem to hate agility training, but I happily went through hours of it. I would click the squares and try to keep my lap times as low as possible. In these cases, the progress is constant, the end goal always known. "300 laps and I'll get what I need." Agility is almost my highest skill (behind only Firemaking, which is high due to me doing a 5 hour Wintertodt solo for fun), despite seemingly being people's most hated.

Speaking of Wintertodt, that revealed another preference. Wintertodt is a boss you fight primarily through Firemaking. You cut logs, fletch them into kindling, then add them to a fire to deal damage, getting points for various actions. The boss regens health, so you can fight it almost indefinitely while solo by keeping it on the brink of death, racking up points until you hit the 6 hour forced logout and have to stop. That's the optimal path for the most rewards, giving about 48 prizes an hour.

Or you can fight it in groups with other players, where you kill it very quickly, which gives more experience but only 35 prizes an hour. For whatever reason, I get bored of this very quickly and can't do it for long, while as mentioned before, I happily soloed it for five hours straight. Perhaps it's due to allowing me to enter a rhythm, or just being more engaging. There's a lot more ways to optimize point income in solos, and you have to balance gaining points with keeping the boss alive. I'm not sure I can apply that in any way to making Mahjong more enjoyable.

Well, let's try that new method. I won't try to get Mahjong in every day, instead, I'll try to get through a big batch of it. Will it be easier to bear if my goal is 20 games in one day?

Another thing I did during the agility training was tracking my luck. There are little things you can pick up that appear semi-randomly. I wonder if that could be fun with Mahjong. Make a spreadsheet where I log "unlucky" and "lucky" things in each round. 7+ orphans, 3 or fewer orphans, first to tenpai, ippatsu / ura, opponent ippatsu / ura, etc. One of the things Jared Tendler suggests for people with injustice tilt is improving their ability to see good variance. Maybe it'd help.

Since the game volume has reduced a lot, I don't really have much to say from week to week. I'll switch to monthly updates. Maybe do a full game review now and then instead of a blog post. Next month, we'll see how this experiment pans out.