Solo Queue Autopsy

Analyse one of your own losses. Explain three decisions that materially changed the game, reasoned through the concepts from the first third of the semester.

Due: 29 March 2027 · Weight: 20%

The brief#

Analyse one of your own losses.

Pick a game you lost — recently enough that you remember it in detail, and one where you were not simply outclassed from minute one. Identify three decisions that materially changed the outcome, and explain each one using the vocabulary from Weeks 1–4: what resources or power were at stake, what wave state the decision was made in or created, what the trade actually cost, and — most importantly — what it changed about the decisions available afterward.

A decision here means a choice someone had available, not a mechanical error. “I missed a skillshot” is not a decision. “I chose to all-in on a slow-pushed wave with my flash down” is.

Another player’s mistake may only be discussed in terms of how it changed the decisions available to you. You are not writing about what your jungler should have done differently. You are writing about what their mistake meant for what you could then do.

What you submit#

A written analysis, structured around your three decisions, one per section:

1. The moment — when it happened (an in-game timestamp is enough) and the game state at that point: gold and level, wave state, cooldowns, whatever’s relevant.
2. The decision — what was chosen, and what the alternative was.
3. The conversion (or the failure to convert) — what the decision changed about what either team could do next, using Week 1’s chain, Week 2’s power, Week 3’s wave, or Week 4’s trade as the explanatory tool.

Close with one sentence per decision distinguishing outcome from decision quality: was this a good decision that didn’t pay off, or a bad decision that happened not to matter yet?

What the criteria reward#

Decision identification rewards choosing decisions that actually shaped the game over the three biggest mechanical errors — a clean, well-timed decision that turned out to matter counts; a missed combo does not.

Evidence from game state rewards a specific, checkable moment for each decision over a general impression of “we were losing by then.”

Use of course concepts rewards explanations built from resources, power, the wave, or trading, over generic commentary (“bad decision,” “should have known better”) that doesn’t name what actually changed.

Causal reasoning rewards tracing what a decision changed about the decisions available afterward, not just narrating what happened next.

Outcome vs decision quality rewards telling the two apart. Rank, blame, and hindsight (“obviously that was going to go badly”) earn nothing on their own.