This isn’t what min-maxing means. It’s a term from originally D&D where you have a set number of points to allocate to your attributes (like strength, dexterity, wisdom etc.)
Wanna be the world’s strongest warrior? Dump your points into strength by having the intelligence score of an illiterate mouth-breather.
It means almost the opposite of “considered resource allocation” or “cost effective investment”. It means artificially inflating to the limit what you perceive to be the most valuable skill possible, at the (very significant) cost of being extremely bad at many other things.
It’s not “let me acquire this item for the least amount of gold possible”, it’s “I could shoot an arrow pretty well and be able to speak english, or i could shoot an arrow REALLY well and mutter unintelligbly”.
John: "The tokenmaxxing/ token-minimizing thing is so silly."
"Do you know where 'maxxing' comes from? It comes from gamer lingo — 'min-maxing.'"
"You shouldn't be tokenmaxxing or token-minning. You should be token min-maxing."
"The idea of min-maxing is, when you're in a video game, you want to get the most resources for the lowest cost. If you're playing League of Legends, you're going to put just the right amount of gold into a particular item. In an RPG, you're going to try to find the optimal build based on your resources."
"Somehow, it feels like tech went through some sort of hallucinatory period where it lost sight of the fact that it should always have been min-maxing. Because that is the goal of business at all times, in all things."
"Like you would never say, 'We're admaxxing this quarter. We're going to buy as many ads as possible. Oh no, it didn't work. We spent way too much on ads, they weren't effective. We need to ad-min — spend as little as possible on marketing.'"
"It's like, no. You always want to be getting the highest return on ad spend."