TheLastBaron

Uh there's a chat channel for the guild and you can open up your party and anyone in the guild can just join. Those are the main features.

Well, to the untrained eye Hockey, Basketball, and Soccer are all the same game about getting the thing into the net at the other end of the field and getting points (I'm saying this is a perfect analogy as obviously LoMas are still more similar to each other.) A lot of times casters do break stuff down after a game, they'll talk about what went wrong with particular team fights (which they also do after a team-fight happens), but they don't go to the replay and find it and shwo it at the same time. This is probably largely a budget and manpower thing, and also partly because of time constraints. If the game is part of a series as soon as one game ends everyone prepares for the next one, so the caster might do an overview of what went wrong for one team or what the other team did right, but right after that they have to talk about what to expect from the next match and such. They also have to be in the game lobby for the next match so so there isn't a lot of time do download the replay (which won't be up immediately, especially since there's usually a delay between real time and what spectators see either on streams or DotaTV). Things will and do keep getting better, but for now it's still a work in progress. I'm sure a lot of the things you (and many other people for sure) want have been considered by the people who cast games and are goals they will try and work towards. Also you're right, slow-mo replays going over team-fights would be amazing. When that starts happening I will be so happy.

The production quality has been steadily been getting better, a few big events do have instant replay type stuff going on now, though It think it's only Chinese ones so far. With things like BTS setting up their own studio in LA and the GD Studio getting a lot more heavily involved with people like Bruno and Draskl there now I'd imagine things will keep getting better, and I imagine TI3 coverage will have a lot going on behind the scenes. It's still in progress though, you have to keep in mind that for a while TobiWan was the only person actually doing Dota casting for a living and a person like Purge was just a kid casting from his bedroom in Michigan. Also the way casting works is that the people casting it just join a spectator slot in the game and are just "playing" in the game with the other players and just stream the same way players stream their matchmaking games. This means that for the most part there's just the casters (who many times aren't even in the same room when it's a host and a pro-player co-casting) and not much else going on behind the scenes both in terms of people and equipment. So yeah, for now it's a budget and man-power limitation, but the game is growing a lot (and it is technically still in beta).

The talk about how tons and tons of game devs play Dota makes me really want some sort of Studio Rumble type thing to go down. I would buy a ticket for that so fast.

Fun stuff, nice meeting people! I was the guy with glasses and a brown shirt with a big mastiff face on it.

It's currently 97 degrees here in San Jose so I'm pretty stoked to not be here tomorrow.

Weird, whenever I click it no matter which computer or browser I'm using I just get "Sorry, no new content found."

Here's the post I wrote in notepad yesterday after listening to the cast and seeing there wasn't a thread for the episode here yet. First things, about Treant becoming top pick/ban material, it actually isn't the result of the last patch, which only changed leech seed. It's been happening for a while and finally got picked up in big tournament games. He's been getting played a lot in IXDL for a while now (an inhouse league made by ixmike88 who is the hard support player for Team Liquid where most of the North American pro players play) and it's actually funny to watch another league that has it's own metagame because you see how arbitrary a lot the metagame is. For the longest time the Eastern Dota scene refused to play wisp even after he became super popular with European teams (I think LGD.Brax said it was because they thought it was too unstable of a pick) and now he's a regular pick/ban. About playing a bunch of game and still not having played every hero, I remember back before your hero rankings in your profile weren't relative to the rest of the heroes you play, but compared to the other players in your matchmaking bracket, people would request pro streamers to show their heroes. A lot of the times they would scroll through and at the bottom there would be maybe 10 or so heroes that still had the message saying to play a few more games to determine ranking, meaning that the pro players who had maybe 1500 wins or so still had played less than 3 games or whatever it was with some of the heroes in the entire time Dota 2 had existed. I guess now that I think of it it's not that weird because people coming to Dota 2 who were already pro players already had a team and a role and didn't have a reason to play heroes that they knew they would never be playing in a real game (or they always play in a stack and will trade with other people if they random a hero that isn't their role), but it was still really surprising. I guess there's also also people like ixmike88 who only plays inhouse leagues and hasn't played a single matchmaking game in probably over a year so all his games are considered practice lobbies and don't count stats. In terms of things that are really rewarding (like landing a really good Tide ult), I find that the sound design in the game is one of the things that makes the game feel so good to me. For example, the other day I went into an empty practice lobby, spawned an Antimage on the other team, leveled him to 25 and pushed all my lanes and destroyed every rax in my base. I then proceeded to record ~5 minutes straight of me just destroying creeps with Flak Cannon as Gyro with three Divine Rapiers and have a .wav on my desktop that is the space between waves of creeps cut out so it's just non-stop gold raining down. About a hero that melds with another hero (from the starcraft unit discussion mentioning High Templars), it reminded me of the hero Empath from HoN. Her ult is as follows: "As One: Empath becomes one with an allied hero, buffing the host. Empath may continue to cast spells and use items as normal. Grants a sub-skill, "Faster!" "

Didn't Kim Deal just leave the band?

Is it just me or has the "View New Content" button not been working for a little while? When I click it it just shows that there's nothing new, on both Firefox and Chrome (and on my phone).

The idea that there is a very real possibility that Dragon Crown will be the last Atlus game ever is weird. I don't play a lot of their games but I really like Persona. Funk.

Hey Twig, Fnatic just played a Viper in a game against Alliance and won. They played him mid vs a TA and he did good. I like how now that there's the popups when players buy items when spectating a game you can see just how disciplined pro supports are because you'll always see both teams picking up wards and smokes at the same time, meaning they're buying them every single time the second they come off cool down.

So did people want to meet up on the 29th? 4 works for me and Dear Mom sounds like a good place. I'm open for anything else as well since I'm not doing anything on Saturday.

Do you have to get every card in the set for a badge or just 5? All my badges have 5 slots for cards so I assumed you just needed 5 and there were more than 5 to make it easier for people to trade stuff.

I was scrolling through the list of games that I own with badges/cards and I noticed that Psychonauts and Binding of Isaac both have 5 card drops remaining, meaning I can get the whole badge just from my own drops.

So I guess this is now out of beta and a ton of games now have Trading Cards, also I guess after you get all your drops you can randomly get a booster pack with more cards. "Once you have received all of your card drops, you become eligible for a booster pack containing 3 additional cards. Booster packs are granted randomly to eligible users as more badges are crafted by members of the community. Make sure you log in to Steam each week to maintain eligibility."

Woah, I was scrolling down to post that I'd take Night Sky and was beaten to the punch. If it's not taken I'd be interested in grabbing it. I also have 2 copies of Trine 2 Complete Story if anyone wants.

New Listener album out. I haven't listened to it enough to form an opinion yet, but their last album was ridiculous. Here's a song from the last one and their bandcamp. http://listener.bandcamp.com

I'm down for any meetups that happen, though I'm going to be in Europe for most of August.

From what I've seen there is no flash cart for the 3ds and won't be because there is something that makes the Roms impossible to crack. I haven't really looked since I don't own a 3ds, but that was the situation like a year ago. I had a flash cart for my DS, but I bought games for it. I just hate having to carry around a stack of games in my pocket.

I love how excited Nick always is when he says "And this! ... Is Dota Today"

That doesn't doesn't sound like higher mmr Dota than my games, it's pretty par for the course. I guess this is one of those cases where I have to agree that it probably just isn't the game for you.

I am currently 20 minutes into watching Mystery Men and I don't have any recollection of it ever taking place in a dystopian future or having Tom Waits

seems about right, seeing as the Wii Fit trainer is going to be in the Fight Club of video games.

There's going to be a stream tonight of Shadows over Camelot, I'm pretty stoked.