Month 6 - Abandoning Winning

I'm going to gush about some things I really like for a while, then talk about getting back to the 'Jong, as the kids are calling it these days.

I've managed to work through the OSRS bug. Got that all out of my system. Extremely good game, but it just takes up so much time. MadSeasonShow's playthrough of it is also one of the only YouTube series I still keep up with.

I also think I'll be dropping off of RAID soon. I just finished collecting the fragments for Anaxia, and Guurda. Next CvC with personal rewards I'll redeem those. I also have my three fusion tokens ready to get Eostrid, who I have a 6 star soul for. Those will get me most of the way to Lydia, and then I'll have cleared pretty much everything that's achievable for me. I don't think Faction Wars Hard is doable with only females. I can one key Demon Lord, I can do the top Hydra difficulty, I can clear Grim Forest and Doom Tower every time, I've basically beaten the game.

It was a great two years though, and played almost entirely in isolation. For Uma, my interest was carried by the community, but RAID I stuck with all on its own merits. I haven't even talked to a single other person who plays it, outside of my in-game clan that I joined randomly.

So, I'll have a lot more time now. What will I do with that time?

Recently I've been trying to improve my writing. Reading books, looking for prose I want to emulate, reading books about writing. Will Wight's Cradle series was a great transitional book between translated xianxia and proper Western prose. Exhaustingly fast-paced, though. Brandon Sanderson's prose is very impressive. Stephen King's book 'On Writing' was quite a nice read. The First Law, nice prose, way too dark.

I also fell into a Demonic Mahjong addiction. I added it to my library on the 14th and played 35 hours between then and the 18th. It was a long weekend.

Great game, Demonic Mahjong. I still haven't even tried all the characters, but each one feels very different, and you actually get rewarded for playing around the boss mechanics. So much better than something like Balatro or Slay the Spire for my tastes.

And unlike those games, difficulty unlocks are account-wide instead of character-specific! I hate when roguelikes make you work your way up on every character.

The basic premise is largely Chinese mahjong, 1v1, and you draw 4 (at base) tiles per turn and choose which to add to your hand, swapping freely between the "swap area" and your hand. Then the opponent draws four and does the same, and you can chii/pon their discards. I'll use the Japanese equivalent terms. Score is Fu x Han x Mult. You can tsumo/ron multiple times, and your total score decides whether you win the round.

Just an average Demonic Mahjong hand.

I really like how many things there are to go for, and how each character goes for them differently. Of the ones I won with on the highest difficulty, they went like...

Marionette - Her skill changes the suits of two tiles in your hand semi-randomly, and her passive increases the fu your tiles in hand give when you achieve yaku with mixed suits, like sanshoku. I took advantage of her ability to make the exact same hand each time: Mixed Terminal Chows, 123789m123789s55p. Since they were the exact same tiles down to the suits each time, the fu went crazy.

The hand organization was also crazy.

King Qinguang - Her skill adds a red dragon to your drawn tiles that turn and shuffles more into the deck. Her passive lets you use red dragons as wild cards when calling pon. Two red dragons in your hand, pon anything you want and the reds turn into that tile. Opponent discards a red dragon, pon it with any pair. I did Four Kans + All Honours in various combinations and eked out a win in the mirror.

You can also add to kans infinitely.

Mengpo - Absolutely insane character. She makes bubble tea, which goes into your items slot and has all sorts of effects. Most notably converting tiles into pinzu. She's insane from the very start. Here's a video of early-game Mengpo, where I just force my hand into being a Tenhou + Four Kans. I think her "beat the game on max difficulty with this character" achievement has the highest rate (12.1%), for good reason.

Day Warden - Her active skill adds 3 odd-numbered tiles to your draw area. Her passive increases the fu your odd tiles give each time you go to an event. She's pretty fun. Each hand you look at your starting tiles like, "Is this a suuankou, or is it a matchless?" Trying to balance them is like trying to leave open the path to chiitoi or kokushi in riichi. Also, chinroutou is an odd-tile hand. Who knew.

Not the strangest yaku the game has.

Wither - Also an extremely busted character, but hardly anyone has unlocked her, so she's the least achieved victory (1.5%). Her passive gives her energy when she calls chii, and her active steals mult from the enemy, permanently. With any figurines that let you chii multiple times, you can reduce your opponent's value to near zero and roll over them. Stealing the insanely high mult from difficulty 8 enemies also resulted in my highest scores I've ever had. To unlock her you need to reduce the final boss's value to 0, which requires specific builds, but showed me the strength of poison.

Release the combat turtle!

Black Impermanence - Her passive gives you more figurines, and her active lets you return all your chiis and pons to your hand. The intended path is turning your toitois into suuankous. A rather plain character in comparison to the others. But I combined her with a figurine that applies poison (which reduces mult) to the enemy each time you call. I'd call four times, return the tiles to my hand, call more, and repeat until the opponent couldn't do anything. Doing this can also really break certain figurines that scale off the number of calls you do.

When you chow (chii) 8 times, that's a big number.

Diting - Slightly similar in gameplay to Mengpo if you squint. Her active ability gives you a ready hand (up to 18 fan, which isn't a lot). Her passive gives you 3 food items each round which can manipulate your tiles. Change their suits, values, etc. Every round becomes a puzzle: How can you maximize the number of tenhous you get with the tiles and items you have? Tenhou is 128 han. Then you have to build around all your points being front-loaded. Also, because her ability completely converts your hand, it removes all your debuffed tiles too, so you can take those recklessly.

18 fan doesn't cut it. (Takame daisuurin)

King Taishan - Unlocked by beating her as a final boss with kans, she's basically a victory lap. Her active duplicates a pon/kan you have, adding 3 of the tiles to your draw that turn. You can then call riichi and upgrade your pon/kan three times, getting three rinshan chances. Or use the skill three times and get 9 rinshans. And each kan upgrade you do gives you permanent mult or money. Very easy, very broken. If you get the "Kong Vixen" item which guarantees you a rinshan every time you upgrade a kan, you've basically won already. A Midnight Bloom (Haitei+Rinshan) build with her might be fun.

All of them, obviously. By the way, renkaihou is 88 fan.

All pretty unique. Still like 20 characters to go.

Did it help at all with my actual Mahjong ability? Probably not. Maybe my flush reading. But I had a lot of fun. Looking forward to the big free update this summer that adds more yaku and more characters.

Now, how about real Mahjong?

I've been thinking about the injustice tilt issue a lot. And I think I've been approaching it the wrong way.

I've been trying to think of "how do I convince myself that bad variance is fine" or "how do I stop viewing short-term results." But I think the answer lies more in the direction of, "I should stop trying to win."

EVERYTHING has variance. Pure skill competitions don't exist, where even a slight edge gives you a 100% winrate. Matchmaking itself introduces RNG.

Chess is a game of perfect information, but not a game of perfect knowledge. If you queue into someone with better knowledge of a line, or who plays an opening you haven't studied, you can get put into a bad situation. That's a form of RNG. Fighting games like Street Fighter are the same. Maybe one day the matchmaking is pairing you against higher than average strength players. Maybe the next day it's lower than average. Or you're against characters yours is strong against, or that you've practised against, etc.

I think I need to shift my mindset, have wins be a result of the process, and focus entirely on the process. I have a thing where I prepare a lot, and then games are the test.

Like, if I played Street Fighter, I would probably spend hours and hours in the training room learning my character's combos before ever going online. If I played chess, I would drill openings, making sure I had a response to all the common starts. Only then would I play real games. I got to a 2000 rating in puzzles without playing a real game on Lichess. If I played Counter Strike, I'd make sure I knew the smoke lineups on each map and had good spray control for the main guns before queueing up.

But games should be part of the training.

So how do I make this shift?

Great question.

Let's start with new mantras.

"Winning doesn't mean anything."

"Good players can lose, bad players can win."

"Don't be a winner, be a strong player."

"What would NAGA think of how I'm playing?"

That should do for now. Next, I need to strictly define what winning is. Winning currently has the strict definition of "1st place." But, this is full of variance. It's not something I can fully control. I'll redefine it to something where variance isn't a factor.

To start, let's do calling. I already have a system laid out for what I consider a good call. For the next games I play, winning is exclusively defined by whether all of my calls fit that in South 2 and earlier. I should make no calls that are too early, and I should pass no calls that meet the requirements.

The rest of the game is like doing some Anki flashcards. It's review to keep the rest of the skills sharp. Calling decisions don't happen every turn, and I don't want to be exclusively thinking about whether to call and what at the expense of my other skills. Efficiency, push/pull, late South score manipulation, I still need to try at those, and I'll still review with NAGA, but they won't determine whether the game was a win.

I'll track the games in a spreadsheet and not even note what the placement was. Just how many times I could call, and how many times I called correctly, along with a notes field about any NAGA disagreements for future reference. Times Kagashi wanted to call outside of the system, or didn't want to within it. If I notice some understandable patterns I'll try to adopt them in the future.

Before, I didn't like having to write down a loss in the spreadsheets at all. Some sort of perfectionism, social anxiety, self-esteem issue, who knows. Hopefully this changes playing a game from "I hope it's not a loss this time" to "Let's do my best so I can write down a perfect grade." Improving will directly influence the results. And no messy "this loss was/wasn't my fault."