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A +1. Getting 1 win over loss. Going 1-0, 2-1, 6-5, 11-10... etc.
Ever since I started playing in a competitive ladder system with any video game, my main goal has usually always been to get better. Not to gain rating, not to have a high win-rate as possible, but to simply gain experience in matchups and practicing mechanics. Everything associated with skill comes with getting better.
This is what I always try to tell myself. And it's true! As long as I lose my first game...
In scbw iCCup I always enjoyed playing even if I lost. I remember trying to hit D+ before SC2 came out and got matched up in a PvT against a Korean. I lost the first game terribly but he offered a "re?" and I took it without hesitation. He proceeded to destroy me the next 2 games and even manner CC'ed me. Did I regret those games? Not at all. He had amazing accuracy with his EMPs on my Arbiters and managed to teach me a few things.
In Street Fighter 4, Vanilla to AE v2012, if I ever joined a lobby and got trashed, I would try to rejoin as many times as I could to learn what I was doing wrong and how my opponent was taking advantage of it. I would lose a ridiculous amount of BP to the same players and feel like it was usually worth the experience. I would rejoin until they stopped hosting, kicked me, started trolling, or I felt like I had nothing left to learn (meaning I was losing soley to a gimmick and finally got around it). Anything until it stopped becoming a serious learning experience. When I host, I never kick unless I know the opponent has a laggy connection or doesn't know how to play the game.
I love repeatedly bashing my head against better players. I guess this is why I never really enjoyed the WC3 or SC2 ladders as much. It's much harder to practice a specific facet of a match-up when the opponents are always random.
But back to my previous statement:
As long as I lose my first game...
I have an issue when I play Ranked SF4, SC2, or League of Legends and I win my first game of the day/play session.
I suddenly lose all motivation to keep playing. I got my plus one! Why should I keep going? I have a 100% win rate for the day and I wouldn't want to spoil that! I'm gonna take a break~
+ Show Spoiler +Not to gain rating, not to have a high win-rate as possible, but to simply gain experience in matchups and practicing mechanics. <_<;;
I am a hypocrite. But, only when I win. When I lose my first game, I tend to keep playing through the rest of my allotted time regardless of whether I hit a +1 or not and what my win rate is. When I win, I go find something else to do because the desire to play just... leaves me. Sometimes I can push myself through this, but more often than not I just stop playing.
It's also only the first game of a ranked/ladder session. If I lose the first game, I can go on a 10 game win streak without even thinking about it. It doesn't even happen if I lose the first few games and then get either win or to a +1 position. No, I do not want to lose the first game on purpose to avoid this, especially in League of Legends. Might try it in Street Fighter 4 though.
I always thought that this was a weird issue and I'm having a difficult time trying to figure out what causes it. Who else goes through this and what do you think about it?
 
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I end up doing the same thing, for different reasons.
If I win the first game I often feel satisfied, whereas if I lose, I often feel annoyed at what I did wrong, and decide to do something different - and then I'll keep playing at least until I win another game in the same matchup (which can take some time).
I have no idea why ... just happens that way.
And not every time I play, but often enough that I've noticed the pattern.
Some of my longest gaming sessions have been after losing to a specific, common strategy (say, mech terran in zvt), and then wanting to play until I beat a mech terran in zvt ... which, can take some time 
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Me personally, i play a lot more if i lose so winning streaks are no go for me And if i lose my first game i tend to play a lot more, same like you.
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Last night I played 1 game of starcraft 2 and won, got my +1, played 1 game of ranked LoL and won, got my +1 and then stopped that too.
I used to play sc2 for winning streaks back when I was trying out new strategies / creating build orders for myself, so i'd try each one like 50 times and then watch all the replays and try and come to some conclusions. If I concentrate on developing my skillset / something then I tend to play for longer that if I just want e-adrenaline / the high that you get from hearing the LoL victory music.
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Try deliberately conceding your first game every day. Problem solved 
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You aren't really improving if you stop playing after you win your first game :/ sorry
Any game you won has little room to teach you of your mistakes because the opponent made more.
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I dunno, I'm always more incentivized toward win streaks, so I would never stop after a single win. Especially the way the sc2 matchmaker is set up, which seems to be built for streaks. If you keep winning, your opponents will continue to become harder.
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DoubleRead has a good point: In fact, I make it a point that if I have a few wins in a row, I keep playing until I lose, because I'm obviously playing well and don't want to face a superior opponent as my very first game tomorrow.
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But that's behavior tailored specifically to the SC2 matchmaking system, where as this is a motivational issue that exists across several games.
On April 30 2012 20:15 Salivanth wrote:Try deliberately conceding your first game every day. Problem solved
I've already said I don't want to intentionally lose the first round of the day as leaving a game right as it starts doesn't feel like a real loss (neither does LoL queue dodging) and deliberately losing in Ranked LoL is not a nice thing to do.
On April 30 2012 20:45 Th1rdEye wrote:
You aren't really improving if you stop playing after you win your first game :/ sorry
Any game you won has little room to teach you of your mistakes because the opponent made more.
I think there's plenty you can learn from a winning game but in some games like SC2 you need to look deeper down in detail to spot them, especially with the information spread out over so many different sources (units). Execution always has room for improvement as well.
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It's DoubleREEd. I'm not a bookworm, lol.
I don't know the systems in other games. But streaks are always awesome. If your goal is win streaks rather than win ratio (and win ratio is kind of stupid in general), that would certainly break your pattern.
I've learned to get annoyed at WLWL patterns. That's frustrating for me.
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Eh, it makes sense to me, personally. It's like a REALLY hard single player game (think Contra.) You wanna keep practicing, do better and better, try to overcome it, and then you just flat out win your first try and you're like, "oh," and it was too easy. No challenge, nothing to overcome.
Of course, multiplayer games are different, but it's the same kind of feeling.
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Oh man, so much here that I can Identify with, the onyl reason I'm still palying SC2 after playing over 6,000 games and only getting to mid-high diamond @_@ I just want to GET BETTER. I won't stop until I can't get any better, which hopefully won't ever happen as I feel that there is room for improvement.
The first game thing is totally analagous to my situation and how I feel that I play and react, my training is waaaay to focused on the result of the match and I fail to recognize my mistakes and/or my correct actions, and I know that both need to be noticed and understood but I sometimes just can't bring myself to watch myself lose it just frustrates me and annoys me, so I just hit the button again and I start to put too much emotion into my play which can be a very bad thing when you are as competitive as I am.
All in all great post love the idea behind it and I hope you continue to push forward and get better, I'm pulling for you, we're all in this together!
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Oh man I used to do the same thing all the time. I was like "okay I need to go +3 every day". Of course since it's hard I stopped trying to do that now (because I'd end up at like -5 and have to play waaaay more games than I'd wanted to), but the magic few days where I'd win my first 3 games, I'd end up stop playing.
Then I'd ask myself; why am I playing Starcraft again? When did playing this game become a chore? I stopped going for +3 wins a day or whatever, and went at it with a new mindset -- learn 1 new thing every day. By doing this I stopped caring about the win/loss count, and tried to get something about of every game. If I lost my first game because of a special all in, I would watch the rep and look for the tells of the all in, and then think of a way to defend it. Then I'd go into my next game with a bit more knowledge. Since I didn't go in caring about winning or losing, it no longer became a problem for me to ladder X number of games. What if I go 0-4 over the course of an hour? I hope I learned at least 4 new things. If I go 4-0? Well then I'm just happy that I won some games and keep going. Of course I could watch the reps from those and try to learn something, but it's true: you do learn more from losing than winning.
edit: yay I started my post exactly like the guy above me I'm so original TT
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On May 01 2012 05:59 Cycle wrote:
Of course I could watch the reps from those and try to learn something, but it's true: you do learn more from losing than winning.
I think that belief can lead to disastrous results. Sometimes people slowly shift towards the type of thinking where when you start winning the majority of your games, you feel like you have little left to learn. Losses then start becoming more about "luck or variance" than having made executional mistakes or errors in judgement. Too often people stop getting better once they think they're great and slowly they'll fall behind.
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On May 01 2012 07:41 silencefc wrote:
I think that belief can lead to disastrous results. Sometimes people slowly shift towards the type of thinking where when you start winning the majority of your games, you feel like you have little left to learn. Losses then start becoming more about "luck or variance" than having made executional mistakes or errors in judgement. Too often people stop getting better once they think they're great and slowly they'll fall behind.
Though I know what you're getting at, I don't see how finding something to learn from losses leads to believing the losses are from "luck or variance" -- in face I think it's the opposite.
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On May 01 2012 11:52 Cycle wrote:Show nested quote +On May 01 2012 07:41 silencefc wrote:
I think that belief can lead to disastrous results. Sometimes people slowly shift towards the type of thinking where when you start winning the majority of your games, you feel like you have little left to learn. Losses then start becoming more about "luck or variance" than having made executional mistakes or errors in judgement. Too often people stop getting better once they think they're great and slowly they'll fall behind. Though I know what you're getting at, I don't see how finding something to learn from losses leads to believing the losses are from "luck or variance" -- in face I think it's the opposite.
Ehh, my statement was made more towards the belief that there's a lot less or nothing to learn from winning. If someone doesn't think they learn from winning and they only win then they might start believing that there's nothing left to learn, which is usually false.
I think my +1 problem comes from the fact that in certain games I just simply care about what my rating is, as much as I don't want that to be true.
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You could always go back to Brood War
You seem to be implying that you like it better for most of the post, as a game rather than as a scoreboard. So imo you are answering your own question.
I got my router fixed today. I had about 10 games which had gotten me to D+ over the course of a month already from the horrible process of joining other people's games. Then in a single evening I nearly got to C- before I started feeling the fatigue of multiple games and had to stop since I was starting to play badly. I think the session started 6-0 and ended 7-4. I played because it was fun and a novel distraction that keeps my mind occupied. It would have been nice if I could have jumped 1000 points in a single night, but I don't feel bad and I look forward to the yellow ranks and harder games which will begin requiring me to get better and develop serious strategies. I play random so it's difficult to prepare for 9 possible situations, but now that I get to choose the map and can have a game whenever I want... it's addicting
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I use to worry about how many game I won and lost, and I too would always try and end laddering while I was ahead. After they removed win/loss stats I kept track of them myself on a piece of paper. In the end though, I discovered that this only led me to tilting really hard and focusing on my stats instead of how I played. Eventually I decided to stop keeping track of my wins and losses and just focus on how and not what the results were. This was a great way for me to remove the stress of ladder and the obsession with win/loss.
If winning the first game makes you too complacent, maybe try responding to wins and losses the same way so the results of w/l aren't as distinct in your mind. Respond to your win like you lost: go over the replay and find all the things you did wrong. Treat it as a loss and maybe this well mentally help you get past the complacency of winning first game.
Or, maybe each time you sit down to ladder, try a new build you're not very familiar with. That way you will be more likely to lose, but you can still play hard and learn from your game.
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EPT
