Hello there gamers. I've just thrown the better part of my week into Salmon Run derusting. I had pretty much silently quit already and so wasn't expecting much, or anything really, out of these sessions, but what do you know, it somehow was genuinely fun for what it was. The temptation to give this game another (slim?) chance, I guess, is there. Let's consider our options.

Table of contents:
~ competition with other games and the concept of growth
~ the Freelance paradox
~ the overfishing paradox
~ birthday challenge(s)
~ closing

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+ Competition with Other Games and the Concept of Growth +
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I need to get this one point out of the way first: There are many awesome games in this world and I absolutely hate to fully dedicate myself to only a single one of them, whether competitively or casually. If anything, I love to do exactly that for a few weeks and then move on to the next thing or something. That works, as it turns out, splendidly for casual gaming, but not so much for more serious gaming. Additionally, I have already put in the hours for Salmon Run a long time ago. What happened: I got results but not THE results. Shifting my full dedication back into it will do absolutely nothing for me. It has to be quality > quantity, or bust. The derust week has been good at reinforcing exactly that idea, for I've pretty much made it back to around 95% of my old power level at the time of writing with more or less minimal effort. Putting in copious hours more alone will not do much to make me better or happier. There are other ways that are more effective.

So, what other games is our good old fish game competing with here, anyway? There will always be random casual/semi-casual games obviously. If someone like Brian is allowed to do it, I am as well. For non-casual gaming I am currently entertaining the idea of getting my feet wet in Hades speedrunning. Right now I'm still enjoying the game casually, which I expect to go for another 2-3 months -- just making my way up the heat scale till all the weapons are maxed out and in-game achievements are met and such, you know. It's too fast to go straight to speedrunning while I can still find other things to do that are equally fun and it would also be my first ever speedgame. Salmon Run overfishing is theoretically equivalent to a speedgame but still not technically a speedgame. Anyway, Hades is pretty much the best game I've played in the last 10+ years, if not even my life, hell knows. All of you should absolutely try it whenever you feel like having a break from Salmon Run. It's available on Switch. That first clear will give you something to chew on just like the first Freelance 999 run (except it's only 1 hours instead of 8), and it also doesn't get old the much faster 50+ clears later. Storytelling is amazing too (the game literally makes your deaths a natural and welcome part of it, how sick is that?), music is amazing etc. Enough gushing. Anyway yeah, I will absolutely try to get a bunch of sub-10 runs in that game (current PB is 15 minutes while not explicitly going fast and not at all being familiar with the finer tech) and then we will see what, if anything, is next.

That being said, let me introduce The Concept of Growth™...except I need a bit of a recap first to better illustrate what it is and why it makes sense. Multiple times in my life I have dedicated my whole gaming time to tryharding the hell out of a single game. First that was competitive Pokémon video gaming for many years, which has led me to some official and inofficial national championship titles, Worlds participations and countless smaller-scale wins, so it was quite all right while it lasted. I ended up leaving mostly because it became too big for me to keep up while at the same time not paying any of the invested money and time back. What they wanted us to do before Covid was essentially to always spend our whole weekends on live tournaments while still having to work on weekdays so we could actually pay the million travels, accomodations, entry fees and shit, all while some venues would make our lives miserable by being too narrow and/or banning our own food and drinks and stuff. That just isn't what I would deem a sustainable way of living, because I'd need to exactly place first out of hundreds that have the same idea to be even on money and then still not really have a life outside of it because, you know, it wasn't just the 3-6 big tournaments per year anymore. It was also the local grind that would mainly eat up your time just for a little safety buffer of ranking points that you kinda need when not placing at every single big event. That was that. Next came...Salmon Run! I don't even know how, it just somehow happened. The objective not being outplaying other (smart) humans anymore was such a welcome change of mood, all while the game still presented immense depth and a small but mostly flourishing community starting from the days I met the true 999 legends. It took me a long time (years, even) to become as good (bad) as I'm now and all of that was really nice. But, with how growth tends to be logarithmic (that is the polar opposite of exponential for the math losers here) in gaming, I have soundly arrived at the point where it's hard as fuck to improve -- just like in Pokémon way before, where it was even easier to get into what we call the "expanded top". And life in the lower regions of that expanded top is just overall the saddest in every game ever. You know you can compete with the very best short-term when things are going well for a minute, but long-term the very best are just so unreachably ahead of you still, and the result is they get all the prizes, records, sponsorships, Exposure™ and everything else while you just sit in the first row of the audience instead of playing there yourself. Now, SR isn't inherently competitive or anything, and neither would be speedrunning, but similar rules still apply -- if you're not winning, you need to find ways to have fun while not winning.

So what is more fun than being stuck at level 99 when 100 visibly exists? That's right, start back at level 1 in a completely new game and do the whole thing of growing till you can't grow all over. Another fitting imagery here would be to say something to effect of "learning is more fun than knowing". While I have absolutely zero scientific sources for this or anything, I also have reason to believe that enforcing growth could be better at keeping your brain moving than just going through the motions forever. (Makes me wonder how titled chess players are handling things, by the way. The mental stamina they need in a game that is difficult as heck but most of the time still just ends in draws is completely off the charts. I only know that in order to even have a chance to make it past 2000 Elo you need to pretty much start (early?) in your childhood and have someone discover your potential so you aren't taught by a sub-1500 all life or something. It's common knowledge that Nepo is also a strong DotA gamer, I guess.) And that's pretty much all I have to say about this. Nothing beats the marvel of discovering new shit and it's up to you whether to force exactly that by switching games or just grinding a single game forever, where this feeling will become rarer and rarer as time passes but you get small but important % of additional skill in return that others would miss out on.

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+ The Freelance Paradox +
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If there is a real return to SR for me at all, it's probably right here, in Freelance gaming. Being able to fire some games whenever and not having to schedule anything with anyone is just obviously great. What's not quite so great is that the number 999 exists and/or how it works. Getting to 999 is long and the first half of it is considerably easier than the second half, and we cannot play the whole run in reverse order. There was a time when it looked like lossless 999 was possible for me to achieve (my PB is the good old dreaded 30 out of 31, as it turns out) but there's a certain catch to it: you need practice at high rank to maximize your chances. I do not have that at all anymore and there's obviously no feasible means to just enter a rank and go from there or whatever. As a result, the lossless run has gone pretty far out of reach again and if I'm not playing for it anymore, I don't know, seems rather pointless. Although, on the other hand, technically getting lossless is just as pointless as failing it -- it's not like something amazing will happen when the 101st person joins the club after there are literally a hundred that have done the same thing faster and sometimes so often that it dwarfs everything else anyway. Practically, what I can do is just play every other rotation till I lose and that will happen sometimes earlier, sometimes later, but always locked out of high-difficulty practice as long as I want to save time. I hate this paradox, I really do. But realistically it's all that's on the table for me here: optimize low difficulty to eventually perform at machine accuracy, completely wing it at high difficulty.

There's one little silver lining in that there are still some new things to try out. I can look into headphone-related technology again and this time actually follow through with it. Another thing is employing some more specific gameplay approaches that often got left behind in the past. When there's nothing to lose, it's the best time to try something new, after all.

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+ The Overfishing Paradox +
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Eh...no. I had some paragraphs written up but decided to delete them because I'm absolutely not looking to start drama with people who might disagree with my perception. Anyway, I'm afraid this ship has just sailed. Let's just say and accept I'm not good enough. It's not only that my results (or lack thereof) speak a clear language, but it's also that I'm actively noticing how I'm making things hard for the teams that I'm playing with. I fuck up lures, I die too much, I have no understanding of weapon roles or positioning in night waves, my mechanical skill is a hot mess, and everything else, really. I guess I'm not being fair to myself here because all of the recent sessions I had were pure rust, so it's acceptable to still try a few more when individual schedules align nicely and see how that goes before coming to a final-final verdict. I'm just not expecting much because my play was also historically not great when not rusty. You'll understand that I'd rather let people play who are just better than that or at least still have real potential to grow. Thanks to the few that invited me in more recent memory, sorry for being just such a boringly replaceable teammate.

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+ Birthday Challenge(s) +
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The most meaningless day in the year, more commonly known as 31 March or my birthday, is just a few weeks away. Last year I used that to host a nice little fish game party with members of the community. Let's do that again, except this time it will be different. I'm not scrambling my contacts to carry this rusty old man to nines but instead offering a challenge for those who feel like they're up to the task. If it's going well, can naturally make that a clean 400-999 run for the history books, but it's also fine to just leave it at the challenge itself and rotate players with it. That being said, the challenge will likely be one of these:

~ no specials
~ no revives
~ 3p69 (Player with a predetermined weapon submerges at start of the wave and then the other 3 have to clear it without that player, no disconnects to retain full HLM quota, which is, yes, 69.)
~ 3v1 (Similar but more spice involved -- 3 players try to win as normal, the 4th sabotages the whole thing in any way they deem most effective. The saboteur could be rotated but I could also imagine inviting a fixed supervillain to make this a real challenge for the team.)
~ princess 999

Any of them pique your interest? DM me! If there are more than 3 that respond, I'm also fine with spreading this project across multiple sessions/rotations so that no one gets left out. Timing will naturally be around late March / early April, EU evenings unless weekend.

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+ Closing +
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Am I back, am I not? I really don't know, man. I will look at things from day to day and probably ultimately stick with whatever is the most fun to me. The tricky part is that both Freelance and mid-level overfishing often live on a scale that starts at "boring" and ends at "frustrating" when you're in that dumb spot where you basically have all the experience in the world and still consistently fail to influence the events in game to your liking. Anyway, see you next job.