Efficiency is truly the acme of skill. When you look at someone playing a game at a professional level, you may be amazed at their feats of dexterity at first, but over time, especially if you play the game competitively yourself, their glitches and clutch plays lose their appeal. What continues to amaze even the most avid of players is the efficiency level of a player's strategies and actions. It may be more exciting to see someone jump off of a building, shooting rapidly at an enemy on the ground until he gets his kill, but it isn't as efficient as just looking over, popping off a headshot, and then stepping away. A twelve hit combo knocking your opponent from one end of the stage to the other ending in a spectacular finishing move in a fighter might get cheers from the crowd, but a backthrow followed by a Fox's shine to get a kill at a mere 3% is more efficient if you see that opportunity.

The above was a bit of a ramble, but you get the idea. Efficiency isn't flashy, it is effective. Cold, hard, and effective. The two things that most commonly prevent efficient play are "fun" and "playing safe".

"Fun and playing safe? Those sounds like GOOD things!"

They do sound like good things, but really they aren't. Fun is, well, fun, but it doesn't mean you'll win. I have fun running up and BXRing someone, but doing it all the time never works and is detrimental to the most important aspect of competitive gaming: winning. Playing safe is generally good advice, but it is only good advice if you don't have all of the information you need to win. Why play it safe when you can just walk into a room and blow everyone away? Cowering behind cover when you COULD be walking out into the open and killing your opponents means that your opponents are given an opening they normally would not have received on their own. That is inefficient.

To use Halo 2 as an example, a common stalemate you find is in 4v4 on Lockout. Lockout has 5 primary structures: A sniper tower two floors and a rise that counts as a small "third floor", a two story "lift building" sitting to the sniper tower's left, a two story hallway called the "library" opposite of the lift, a three story "BR tower" sitting across from the sniper tower and the center structure that connects them all is a two story flat square with a rectangular basement connecting the second floor to the lift. The stalemate occurs when one team occupies the sniper tower while the other team occupies the BR tower. Both sides have their advantages, the most prominent being that the sniper rifle spawns at sniper tower (although this is slightly negated by the fact that the BR tower is a better place to snipe from and the sniper rifle won't respawn if the BR tower team has it).

So what do the teams do? Obviously the team with the most points can just sit tight and watch choke points. Playing it safe here is very efficient, as it has the least risk and the highest reward (that is, winning the game). The team with the least points has very little in the way of options. If they have the sniper rifle, the gameplay generally degenerates into their sniper looking around for someone on the other team foolish enough to step into the open, while his teammates pepper the enemy with their BRs. Not efficient, especially since BR ammo doesn't spawn anywhere on Sniper Tower, which means that the rest of his team will run out of ammo! The only way waiting here works is if your opposing team becomes impatient and refuses to camp. That doesn't happen at high level play.

One strategy that is getting more and more popular as of late is to throw grenades at key locations, even though you can't see them. Occasionally you can get a lucky kill this way, and if you are really lucky the player you kill might end up getting a bad spawn, giving you another kill. While this sounds great, seeing as how there is little to no danger to you, it really isn't as successful as you might think. You have no real way of aiming other than hitting generic locations, and if the enemy sees one coming, all they have to do is move. Even if they get hit by one frag grenade, it takes two to take someone out. What makes this even more dangerous is that now you and your teammates don't have any grenades! That's really dangerous, especially if you've been attempting to pepper them with BR ammo from across the map. Who wants to run out of grenades and BR ammo when you are already down in score?

You really only have one option when this stalemate arrives, and that is to advance. But how to advance? It is inevitable that you will get to BR tower if your entire team goes the same direction, but how many will you lose? What will happen if two of your four get to BR tower, and then have to face four members of the opposing team? Is it worth it to cross your fingers and hope for lucky spawns from your teammates? More importantly, what if the opposing team is five or more ahead? Is it worth it?

Obviously the answer is no. You have to approach strategically, and to do that you have to do what takes the least amount of time, the least amount of effort, and presents the least amount of danger. I'm going to skip over the thinking process and just tell you what to do and why. First off, someone from Sniper Tower would need to go to bottom lift and look at an angle so that he can see the Library's window. From here he can make sure that no one is there or, if there is someone there, they cannot shoot at anyone going across the middle platform. Now that library window is gone, you normally have to worry about someone on open ramp, someone on top BR, and one "roamer" that generally covers his teammates (especially covering the entry to bottom glass). A player on open ramp can attack almost any section of the map, and can move with just a few steps to hit anywhere he couldn't see prior. So if someone from Sniper Tower moves onto elbow, which has a clear view of the ramp, he can keep those players busy. Seeing as how your team still has plenty of cover, it is unlikely that the BR team will ever get into a straight up BR battle; there is no reason to do so. If they do, you have a chance to gain on them, with a minimal chance of failure. Now you are set up to advance. The open ramp and library window can no longer hit bottom glass, top BR can't get there without losing his spot, and there is no way the roamer can kill two members of your team. Especially if your bottom lift or elbow players decide that they can advance as well!

So once you get into a stalemate and realize you need to advance, merely cutting off BR tower's main defensive positions and then pushing your entire team through one unguarded choke point is enough to break their defenses. If your two players manage to jump across bottom glass to bottom BR, they can immediately go up the ramp and take second floor BR. Your bottom lift and elbow players are covering open ramp together now, so now there is intense pressure on the BR tower team. You've played efficiently, and have now taken away what could have been a devastating advantage.

That was only one example that was dependent upon a specific strategy, but efficiency goes deeper than that. Your basic playstyle should be as efficient as possible. To quote Gh057ayame of team Carbon, "Don't play to get kills. Play to stay alive. It evens out in the end, trust me". He's completely right too; do it fast, do it smoothly, and put you and your teammates in as little danger as possible. That's efficiency.