Ask yourself this. When you're playing a game of Yu-Gi-Oh!, are you fully aware of your surroundings and focused on the game at hand, or are you barely even there, just clicking buttons? Personally, I turn my brain off, and I’m in autopilot mode when I play. Now, you might be thinking that I’m crazy, and maybe I am, but hear me out here. For one thing, I use the same Deck I’ve been using for years. I’m very familiar with the strategies and combos in my Deck. I don’t really need to spend time thinking about what the correct next play is. You know? I can just “see” the correct play instantly without even thinking.
This comes with some pros and cons. As you can imagine, I play really fast, considering I don’t need keep figuring out what my next play is. Most Yu-Gi-Oh! players do not play anywhere nearly as fast as I do. And that causes me to become quite impatient. Believe me, you do not want to be in the same room as me when I get irritated by slow players. BOY do I get testy!
Nevertheless, for literal years now, I was never able to understand how the typical Yu-Gi-Oh! player was able to stand playing in the current meta, which regularly involves 20 minute turns, most of which you’re just sitting there waiting for the other player to FINALLY end his turn. I asked the users of DB whether they could relate to me or not. It turned out they were totally not on the same page as me. The users I asked told me they’re in "big think" mode when dueling. It kinda makes sense. You’d want to be making as smart of decisions as possible, but it’s just so not how I play. By the way, I've always wondered something. When it's you're turn, and you say "thinking", what exactly are you thinking about? Like, do you not know how your Deck works, or? If anyone could shed some light on that, I would really appreciate it.
All of this considered, I find myself wondering who’s in the wrong here. Is it me? Could relying on muscle memory and instinct be holding me back from playing my absolute best, or at the very least be causing me to not enjoy dueling as much as the next player? I guess I’m open to that idea. It’s less farfetch'd than the idea that literally every other Yu-Gi-Oh! player is playing this game wrong.
You know what? I’m gonna make an effort to really just be in the moment next time I play. Rather than shutting everything out, I will take everything in. It will be a whole new experience for me! And who knows? Maybe I’ll climb the ranked latter more easily. Not more quickly, but more reliably. Slow and steady wins the race, right?
Today I woke up and attempted to connect to DB like anyone else, and instantly lost connection to my surprise. Whenever the server is having problems, it usually takes awhile, and then you eventually get a “Failed to connect” error. But today it was instant, which meant only one thing. The server application wasn’t running at all. Now why would that be, I asked myself. I didn’t turn it off. I didn’t make any new changes that could potentially cause the application to shut down. So, after a bit of inspection on the server side, I noticed ALL the applications I usually have running were offline, which means the server itself shut down at some point. This is not something that has happened anytime in recent years. A likely cause of this was perhaps a power outage at the server’s location. That, of course, is out of my control.
So, on one hand, I guess I’m relieved to know that whatever happened wasn’t necessarily my fault, but on the other hand, there was nothing I could have done to stop this. It happens. Preferably it wouldn’t happen while I’m asleep, causing users to be shut out of DB for 7+ hours, but it happens.