Last month, I wrote a post about micro mistakes, and this time I will talk about macro, or macromanagement. In particular, I will talk about 5 macro mistakes and their corresponding real-life examples. Contrary to the last time, when I used Age of Empire to illustrate, I will use Warcraft III in this post.

“Micro” or micromanagement is a crucial concept in Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games where players give detailed orders to each unit. However, in the corporate world, micromanagement is often seen as a negative management style. This post explores why the technique is valued in RTS games but disliked in real life.

Abstract. This post introduces the concept of Nash Equilibrium into Pokémon GO meta-game, with the intention to build a minimalist PvE list. The idea is to build an all-round team for gym battles or for boss raids with few Pokémon. This approach allows the players to concentrate their resources to build a small team of strong Pokémon instead of a large group of mildly strong Pokémon. To demonstrate the usage of the Nash Equilibrium, I use Timeout as the win condition for gym battles and total damage output for boss raids. The resulting minimalist lists are for reference; I provided, at the end of the post, the dataset and the code necessary for the readers to build their own minimalist lists.

Yugioh Duel Links is a digital collectible card game (CCG), which could be played on mobile devices. Like many other CCGs, there is an in-game Ladder system, where players compete with each other to prove themselves as the best duelist in the world. However, many players complain about the mechanism of this Ladder and suggest replacing it with the Elo system. In this post, I can show you, thanks to the cutting-edge research of DeepMind, that the Elo system, or any other systems using averaging, is unavoidably inefficient for Duel Links.

TL;DR: Evolutionary game theory, initially developed for biology, has been successfully applied to other domains such as economics, sociology, and anthropology. This post will use it to explain the various meta of Yugioh Duel Links and predict the nonexistence of the kind of meta which is simultaneously diverse, accessible, and without being Rock–paper–scissors.

Image from Gustavo Santos at DeviantArt

Free-to-play (F2P) and Pay-to-play are two different business models. Pay-to-play requires the players to make a fixed-amount purchase to play the game. Examples include World of Warcraft, Eve Online and so forth. Free-to-play usually adopts a freemium model and does not require any payment in advance to access the game. Instead, players can make in-game micropayments to enhance their gaming experience, which is also the method with which the company makes money. Examples include League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, Clash Royale, Pokémon GO and so forth. F2P has been a great commercial success, and more and more online games follow this model.