Henroid

It's always felt to me that the Star Citizen discussions are basically a fascination at what it is and what it's been doing, without commenting on the gameplay at all. I mean, the game is a pretty unique phenomena. I love hearing about it but also know I will never touch that game because of the financial barrier.

I am always terrified of those technically-.jpg files that are somehow gifs.

Just had an hour long match, which I don' experience often. We were certainly losing through the whole thing, but I was doing particularly well as Viper so I managed to have fun. Our best defense that held up was when they had us on our backs with mid and bottom totally destroyed (Ancient exposed); We stopped every push attempt for a damn long time. I came out of the match with a 12-4-13 KDA and 27.7k damage done to heroes, being second best in both categories across all players (the best in both going to Invoker, who swept us). They had a heavily farmed PL and Sniper too. But PL was resentful toward his team because they all spoke Spanish and one of them stole his Eaglehorn in the middle of the match, so he didn't show up often even though he had the ability to wipe us on his own. As for Sniper, he was just bad. Didn't even get Desolator (which would've changed the match entirely; no chance for us to fight back); he went for Helm of the Dominator instead. That was weird. Any time he tried to stand up to me he was a total pushover. It's funny how the brief time you have to build a relationship with your team matters. The PL situation was just hilarious to me. He and I were the only English speakers, on opposite teams.

So about 49k dollars left until the prize pool for the International reaches 10 million dollars. This is bonkers.

Pleased as shit that Danielle is officially a Thumbs host at this point.

I liked the email regarding game complexity vs. simplicity. Chris' summation of making a game about an action vs. making a game about a person good at that action was one of the more concise things I've heard in a while. Like imagine if Max Payne included the mechanics of (forgive me, I forgot the game's title so here goes!) that game where every facet of using a gun was mapped to keybinds that were necessary for play; that would be terrible. Going in a different direction from that - As strange as it is, World of Warcraft of all things has made me aware of peoples' varying perspective on what constitutes complexity in a video game. Making it brief for those who don't know, in the next WoW expansion Blizzard is doing a lot of cutting down on active abilities a player has to be concerned with in order to play (via outright removal, consolidation, or leaving things available only to specific talent specializations). I'm all for this, because every character I played had 30 to 40 buttons available to press and it was ridiculous. There was a ton of redundancy or ho-hum buttons to have involved. While I'm usually critical of Blizzard scrapping entire systems expansion to expansion this is the first time I am on board 100% with what they're doing. Whatever complexities that exist in a class' abilities are still around. They're just expressed / achieved in a new way. Here's the kicker; less buttons to press has resulted in people flipping out about "dumbing the game down", hand-holding, etc. And granted that's the reaction you'd expect from people posting on Blizzard's forum (sorry to bash it), but what I realize is that people forget that video game complexity doesn't just rely on or show itself by player input. The complexities can exist in the systems governing the game, which make the player's input more critical in timing or thought-process / outlook. Also I kinda just object to the notion that more buttons or using every button on a controller speaks to a game's quality or depth. Some people have that viewpoint and I can't relate to it at all.

Still listening in progress but had to point this out: 18:47 - Chris Remo: "Boost."

I hate those matches where the other team won't pick until your entire team picks. It makes me super paranoid about being counter-picked. And that's definitely what just happened. We got our faces stomped in. The only thing that prevented the match from ending fast was the enemy team's hesitation to continue pushes. Edit - Also loved the part where someone on my team yelled at me for "picking Riki against Bounty Hunter," forgetting that I chose Riki long before the enemy team made their picks.

I'm starting to realize how effed Troll Warlord's ult can be. Not for himself. For a Faceless Void that bubbles the team and gets juiced by TW's ult. Holy crap. Also lost a match yesterday where the enemy Warlock used a Refresher Orb and had four fiery golems stomping our asses in on the final push.

It's definitely one of those things going into the bigger equation of people (myself included) getting interested in a Wii U finally. I'm just glad there's finally some worthwhile buzz about it.

Not every character needs a name. And sometimes it enhances the experience of the narrative / character arc. Knights of the Old Republic is a great example of this, especially the second game. "The Exile." The title was more the point of the character than whatever name they were given. 'Course, Bioware decided to throw all that strength out the window when they wrote The Old Republic so whatever.

Anyone remember what episode(s) The Last of Us was discussed?

I didn't notice those icons disappearing. I always put the lord select screen into grid mode, which wouldn't display those icons. I can see them being useful though. So last night for the first time on Spirit Breaker I was able to complete an Agh's to boost his ult. I skipped a couple things in my usual item build order to get it done, but I only did it because we were dominating the match (most of my kills came from the laning phase; I was wrecking things up). The result: Agh's is tragically bad on Spirit Breaker. The AoE is too small, and the mana cost is still super duper high. Plus, making the cooldown 20 seconds isn't that big of a deal because it's not like you're engaging for that long or that frequently.

My problem with people calling for gank help is when they're calling for it at a bad time. I've had gank calls at level two where people were saying to do it by the enemy tower. Which is just a BAD idea. I know it's doable but we are not pros. Just played a match as Riki against a magic-damage heavy team. It was pretty much game over for them when I got Hood of Defiance after my Diffusal Blade.

Her damage spells having a relatively low cooldown but short range and mediocre damage are... lame.

The thing about Headshot is that at low levels that damage adds some noticable oomph. Granted it goes away fast. I can see the case for leveling Shrapnel after one point of Headshot. I always max his attack range first though. It just makes sense to me. Keeps him out of trouble, lets him engage from further away than people tend to remember. You can also shoot across some tree lines out of sight. It's damn crafty.

Oh my god I'm hearing the space ship car-commercial audio right now. That's amazing and terrifying.

Forum avatar strongly approved.

Okay so in case anyone missed the Splatoon reveal: I was confused by it until I saw the time lapse of the arena getting painted over. I immediately caught on to what the objective of the game is and it just looks like fun. And sometimes that's all I need a video game to be! It also has more specific mechanics to it than you'd expect it to have. It was probably my favorite game shown at E3 out of everything. I am too excited for it for my own good.

I'm not sure if Sniper is necessarily bad at tower pushing. If it's just him an the tower and NPCs he can get it done. If he has Desolator it's a done deal. But he's very vulnerable to other heroes, even fully geared. But I guess that's the point of being a glass cannon. Also getting MoM means not having Desolator because UAMs being UAMs.

If you're feeling particularly ballsy you can get Mask of Madness on Sniper, which sorrrta gives you a run-away gimmick.

Wow so apparently the queue times have jumped up substantially with the new language filtering (languages communicated in, not like, cursing, etc). BUT The match I just played was like the most friendly, laid back one ever. Maybe that was just random chance of happening, but when everyone is in on the conversation and only knows enough English to say "you suck" or call you ugly names, it makes for a better playing environment. I'll see how tomorrow goes but DAMN was I pleased with that match. And we were losing too, didn't feel a tinge of anger. Edit - OH, almost forgot. There's a new feature when matches end. A questionaire came up about someone on my team, asking me to rate their friendliness, team-helpingness, and how strongly I feel about playing with them again. If this happens every round from here on out, it would REALLY help to shape the DotA 2 community.

Lots of developers are fine with Lets Plays, some aren't. Some amount of developers are fine with people monetizing Lets Plays, and some aren't. We need to live in a world where the ones who aren't okay with all this (and thus don't give permission) aren't demonized for it.

One of the changes was improvements to the language preference system and how it filters things for your selection(s) so that'll be great to see in action.

Going 19-3-12 as Riki certainly boosts my ego.