Most of these come from MMOs for me interestingly enough:
Diminishing Returns:
“Hmm, this new piece of gear gives +8 strength, which will increase how hard I hit, whereas my current piece of gear adds 2% chance to crit - given my current build/stats, how can I tell which is better?”
This is a situation that every person who’s ever played an RPG has come across. Given the overlap between “gamers” and “autistics”, it was always inevitable that math would be used to meta-game and theory-craft into oblivion. A fundamental key to theory-crafting is the concept of Diminishing Returns - if you’ve ever studied economics you probably know something about Return on Investment or RoI - diminishing returns governs the rate of return on investment. Basically, as your investment in something increases, the rate of return on each “dollar” invested will initially increase until hitting a plateau and then decreasing. If you pump every stat point you have into Strength, but totally neglect Accuracy, Critical Hit Chance, and Stamina, your character will be weaker than one who split their points up between the different stats, and that character will be weaker than a third character who min-maxed their stat allocations with knowledge of the game’s system of diminishing returns.
The law of diminishing returns is an economic principle stating that as investment in a particular area increases, the rate of profit from that investment, after a certain point, can't continue to increase if other variables remain constant.
I learned this in terms of RPG stat mechanics in WoW. The most valuable stats for a class tended to all have “soft caps”, which effectively translate to a point near the “Point of Maximum Yield” on the graph of yield/investment. But really, this applies to…practically everything, atleast everything that can be modeled economically. A political campaign can pump $10M into a single region and get 60% of the votes there, or they could spread $2.5M between four regions and get 51% of a much larger share of voters.
Really a powerful tool that so many have never had to engage with and thus are totally unaware of the concept and how it plays a role in their lives.
Triage
Or: Geek the Mage
This one is simple enough, it’s about prioritizing what’s actually pressing and needing to be addressed immediately (the smaller enemy casting self-destruct, about to wipe your whole group) and what needs to be addressed consistently over the long term (keeping everyone healed, decursed, and buffed, and the reverse for the enemies)
The third lesson I’m not sure of any academic links or terms that could be applied here, perhaps most fitting are the ideas of “high trust societies” in sociology.
What I’ve basically noticed over the years, as “social” game experiences evolved, the value of any given interaction with other players has been reduced to almost nothing - and it seems largely to be because of a “lack of consequence” - nothing in these social games “matters” any more. Three examples I’ll give: party finding in MMOs (the old fashioned way, posting in town/lfg chat and forming a group, or calling from a list of friends) being replaced by “random group finder” matchmaking systems. This is made even worse by the matchmaking systems often drawing from a far wider pool than just “your server” - you will never see these people again, thus nothing you do (socially) in the group can have any consequences, so why bother! This brings me to the third example, private voice chats. Anyone who played through the early days of Xbox live or PC community servers knows how those places turned into ghost towns (50,000 spastics used to live here) with the advent of “party chats”.
Me in TBC as the dedicated mage tank during t4 and t6.
For those OOTL, there were 2 raid bosses in TBC where a mage had to be the one tanking a particular mob as only mages could grab the defensive shield the mob cast on itself with Spellsteal which was needed to survive the spam of nukes said mobs would exclusively cast. In order to do this role properly a mage would have to sacrifice both raw power and general performance to stack Stamina on gear rather than actual combat stats. Most of the time mages would just grab every green/uncommon quality item they could while still maintaining enough Spell Hit for spells to actually work. Me? I knew all the ins and outs of TBC to the point I didn't have greens for my STA stacking gear, I had blues/rares and purples/epics because I had done both the homework of learning about these better versions but also put in a time grinding them because unlike greens which were random drops from every mob in the game, the rares were from rare mobs themselves. The cloth chest came from a rare dragon named Hemathion that needed flying to even get close to. The drops from Yor needed you to be able to summon the mob which was at the very end of a very long rep grind then an even longer quest after littered with RNG if the right mob would spawn from a cage and then drop the right item with the right set of stats.
Some may ask why I bothered min/maxing this much for just the two fights but the reason was by doing so I had a set of gear that gave far better survival than "just greens" and didn't diminish my combat output nearly as much. Greens would be fine for t4 but the t6 fight needed more health so those blues and purples meant a far smoother attempt than more casual raiders would have experienced.
Also of the 3 other mages we had 1 I wouldn't trust to bring back a wet umbrella when it was raining, while the other 2 were frequently busy so couldn't provide regular attendance therefore I was far more at ease just doing the job myself.
Completely unneccesary though. The only thing that matters is that your spell steal hits. After that all damage you take is very predictable (2sec casts). And that's it. Your damage is irrelevant on the fight due to it being a pitiful dps check.
I feel that exactly. Its why I often was the first to line up for the various "in charge of X" mechanics, like Firelands Rag's floor clearing. I had the regular attendance to keep from ever needing someone else to learn and the competence to keep the DPS loss minimum.