Perhaps you and your opponent were simply optimizing for different goals ? For example, it's possible that your goal was "defeat the opponent as quickly as possible", whereas his was "defeat the opponent while looking as good as possible (in order to derive maximum enjoyment from the task)" or "defeat the opponent whose challenge level falls within some optimal range, handicapping self if needed (in order to derive maximum enjoyment from the task)" . Your opponent may or may not have been aware of his true goals at the time.
My point is, it's kind of tricky to declare an action "worse than worthless" without having very detailed information about all of the actors involved.
If I am about to go and fence a bout, the color of the shirt that I wear under my jacket is of no concern to me-- but if I had spent significant time before the bout debating over what shirt to wear instead of training, it would become a damaging detail rather than a meaningless one.
Unfortunately, worrying about whether you should worry is also harmful for the same reasons. Luckily, that question should resolve itself more quickly, so it should be a net benefit.
However, in more difficult cases, worrying about whether your should worry is harder to resol...
Despite being at +13, this post has been somewhat controversial, with a positive vote ratio of only 73%-- I'd be interested in hearing what caused some people to downvote it.
My current feeling is that this comment should have been part of the original post-- I thought it was implicit, but evidently this was not the case. Therefore, I'm especially interested in hearing comments from downvoters who downvoted the post for reasons other than the above.
I've had many just such experiences in various sorts of gaming (World of Warcraft, D&D), attempting to teach less-experienced players how to play effectively. (I can elaborate if anyone wants.) I can attest that there's definitely a common attitude of "well, at most this is doing no good, and it's how I like to play".
In fact, one particular aspect of this is that people seem to place value on personalization — doing things their way. The problem is, if there exists some optimally-effective way of doing things, then most deviations are likely to make performance worse (quite often because, as the OP says, the modified/added action consumes resources or otherwise has an opportunity cost).
Here's an example from World of Warcraft:
In group content in WoW (i.e. teaming up with other players to kill big monsters — the high-end, maximally challenging game content), one of the key roles is the damage-dealer, or "DPS" (damage per second). One of the DPS classes is the hunter, a ranged attacker. The hunter's job is to deal as much damage to the enemies as fast as possible.
Like all DPS classes, hunters have a wide variety of damage-dealing abilities, with names like Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot, Serpent Sting, etc. Traditionally, damage-dealing classes use their abilities in complex, shifting sequences, called a "rotation", to maximize DPS. (The reasons for this are beyond the scope of this discussion.)
At one point, I was playing a hunter in high-end raid encounters, and consistently performing very well (doing significantly more damage than anyone else). I would often group with other hunters, who were not performing nearly as well. I often had conversations that went like this:
Other hunter: Hey, how are you doing that much damage?
Me: Oh, I just use Steady Shot over and over. Nothing else.
OH: Haha (they think I am joking)
Me: No, seriously. Look at the damage ...
I wonder what is the equivalent of the Steady Shot in real life that I keep ignoring...
Perhaps "exercise, go out to meet new people, and keep smiling"?
I don't understand how this can be true. Clearly, you've got to make a choice at some point. You could move that "effectiveness" slider toward combat, or toward non-combat, but you can't have it both ways, given that you have a limited number of points.
Well, one way it can be true is if there isn't just a single slider. There could be multiple sliders. (In D&D, for instance, there's the Skills "slider", and the Feats "slider", and the class "slider", and the spell selection "slider", and a number of others.) Not every slider trades off between combat and something else. Of those that do, not every one of those trades off at the same exchange rate.
For another thing, "non-combat" is not a monolithic thing (I somewhat regret using the term myself). Neither is combat, of course, but it's closer to being monolithic; non-combat is just literally "everything that isn't combat". Social interactions are non-combat. Travel is non-combat. Information-gathering is non-combat. Exploration is non-combat. Trap detection/disabling is non-combat. And so forth.
I would understand if you said something like, "a 10% loss in combat efficiency is acceptable, given a 50% gain in non-combat efficiency"; is that what you're saying ?
I don't think that's exactly what I was saying, but I would assent to a statement like that one (if not necessarily that specific statement).
That depends entirely on how you perceive the tradeoffs. Is a 10% drop in diplomatic efficiency worth a 50% gain in combat efficiency to you ?
Ok, let me try to concretize.
Consider some hypothetical D&D player, call him Bob, who is quite competent at character-building and knows the game system very well. Bob sets out to build a character who is well-nigh godlike in the diplomatic sphere; this character is to be so good at social skills that he could solve the Arab-Israeli conflict forever with naught but smile and a wink.
In pursuit of this goal, Bob pulls out all the stops, making use of every class feature, skill, feat, spell, in short, every last character-building resource he has, to make the character good at Diplomacy and such things. And he succeeds. Unfortunately...
He has nothing left with which to build in any combat effectiveness. Understandable. And any attempt to add combat effectiveness would subtract some diplomatic effectiveness, because every last ounce of character-building stuff has been used up in the social-prowess optimization.
My contention is that in almost all cases, the player who builds the suave diplomat, but turns out to be useless in combat, is not like Bob. He hasn't scoured the game system for every ounce of optimization power. He hasn't used up all available character-building resources in the most efficient possible way. Rather, he's just gone ahead and picked some social-interaction-boosting skills/feats/whatever, not given much consideration to combat ability (or tried, but poorly and incompetently), and called it a day.
Unlike Bob, who would have to sacrifice some power in his character's chosen domain for combat effectiveness, the average "I'm going to play a suave diplomat" player could sacrifice nothing, and be much more effective in combat, by just being better at building characters. He just has to recognize which of the options he's picked are "worse than worthless" — and usually, there are quite a few.
Even in those cases where a tradeoff legitimately needs to be made, it's generally small. It's not as large as 10%; it's often smaller. And the gains are often larger than 50%. If you're making a 5% sacrifice in one domain for a 100% gain in another, calling this a tradeoff may be technically correct (which we all know is the best kind of correct), but it's misleading. If both domains in question are useful, then for the purposes of maximizing your overall effectiveness, such a "trade-off" is a no-brainer.
There are things that are worthless-- that provide no value. There are also things that are worse than worthless-- things that provide negative value. I have found that people sometimes confuse the latter for the former, which can carry potentially dire consequences.
One simple example of this is in fencing. I once fenced with an opponent who put a bit of an unnecessary twirl on his blade when recovering from each parry. After our bout, one of the spectators pointed out that there wasn't any point to the twirls and that my opponent would improve by simply not doing them anymore. My opponent claimed that, even if the twirls were unnecessary, at worst they were merely an aesthetic preference that was useless but not actually harmful.
However, the observer explained that any unnecessary movement is harmful in fencing, because it spends time and energy that could be put to better use-- even if that use is just recovering a split second faster! [1]
During our bout, I indeed scored at least one touch because my opponent's twirling recovery was slower than a less flashy standard movement. That touch could well be the difference between victory and defeat; in a real sword fight, it could be the difference between life and death.
This isn't, of course, to say that everything unnecessary is damaging. There are many things that we can simply be indifferent towards. If I am about to go and fence a bout, the color of the shirt that I wear under my jacket is of no concern to me-- but if I had spent significant time before the bout debating over what shirt to wear instead of training, it would become a damaging detail rather than a meaningless one.
In other words, the real damage is dealt when something is not only unnecessary, but consumes resources that could instead be used for productive tasks. We see this relatively easily when it comes to matters of money, but when it comes to wastes of time and effort, many fail to make the inductive leap.
[1] Miyamoto Musashi agrees: