Blood and Fire Continued

It's easy to get frustrated when you lose GB two nights in a row, especially when you're used to a switch off every day. If you let it, a lowgrade panic can set in. What if they keep winning? What if their buff just goes up and up? In moments like this, the best thing to do is remember you're playing a game.

I like games because its low-stakes challenges. I can solve problems, but if I don't solve them, no one is going to kill me or turn off my electricity. It isn't important, but at the same time, you can still solve the problems. Right now our problem was that Biggest Jerk in the Basket could stand back up after we killed him.

But not always......

I needed to rally people. They were down. I reminded them that any victory had by the Basket would always be pyrrhic. They'd spent so much money on this game that even winning a battle every day still meant they were losing the greater war. Most of us had only invested time. As for the others, they'd invested no more than a night out at Red Lobster. In any battle, we had far less at stake.

With that in mind, we needed to sort out their new advantage. When someone is on a winning streak, it will be announced in the game's Newsfeed. It's also announced when someone ends that streak. In this case, the person who ended it was me. After we all calmed down from the loss, we started talking about why I was able to kill him when no one else could. Trust me, it isn't because I'm the best player in this game. In the rankings, I'm usually sitting at about #10. My guild sits at #1 though, and that is more important.

The thing is, I had a skill activated that no one else did. Most of them HAD the skill, but they didn't have it turned on. The skill causes sustained bleeding after each round up to three rounds. The thing is, it kicks in AFTER the round starts, so even if he stood back up after being killed, the bleed would kill him again and there was nothing he could do about it.

We had a way around him.

When reset kicked in, everyone used their scrolls to boost their Bleed skill. Even one level higher would help us. That night, as we waited for the battle to start, I reminded everyone to activate the skill. It's so silly because yes this is a game, but I couldn't help but smile as I typed.

"Let's make them bleed tonight."

And did this work? Did we win? Of course we did. It helped that their debuff was really high by now, but even with that, our ability to suss out a way around their advantages made all the difference. This city was ours again.