Codicier

One of these things is not like the others... (unless you're Sean) The following selection popped up directly after watching a few games of the rektreational this morning.

What's the reader consensus on the new Dota2 tools, & the effect they might have on the game? I've just finished reading Chris Thursten's write up about the potential it has to change the game & i must admit i am A: interested in the effect this will have on dota2( it's like someone throwing out the rulebook) B:suffering from flashback's to my teenage years where i messed around with the hammer editor just for the hell of it. Think this will fracture the community, or invigorate it? I'm already deeply fascinated with the way you essentially this is the first time since early Victorian times where it feels have multiple populists "codes" grown from one of one (e)sport, this almost feels like a very quite but very important statement of intent from valve, a sort of "the game came from the people, and we're giving it back to them".

I was able to watch the twitch stream VoD's from the UK this morning, & normally they upload the matches to Youtube about a day later so check there this evening perhaps

Sven................. Ok that was kinda brutal, I now fully expect the next Dota Today to just be a full on (& well deserved) gloat

Wikipedia has this much to say on it: Trying to drag this conversation a bit back to fan fiction from the dark dark hole it seems to have climbed into, It's no surprise that in this sort of case copyright holder are rarely exactly happy about any of this. Moore is a interesting character when considering fan fiction in general, since he's always been more than happy to play with other people characters in ways that perhaps were not originally intended with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (& to a lesser extent Watchmen) a prime example . Despite this if you said Fan Fiction I wouldn't necessarily think of Moore or anyone else who has explored characters who's copyright has long faded, even though apart from their professionalism they often meet the supposed categorisation criteria.

Weirdly this comment sold the game to me Reminded me of what i get like when playing KoDP & FTL.

http://www.twitch.tv/rektreational Wednesday, Aug 6 @7pm: Potato Day vs. Five Alive time to watch some real experts!

It's unclear from that article whether what exactly he was caught with but if Canadian law is like the UK. In the UK at least you need to be 16+ to legally have sex but 18+ to legally appear in pornography, whether you are a fictional character or not, so high school girls would definitely come within it. Anyways IRC I think the CBLDF argue there's a difference between Erotica (a story which contains sexual elements) & Pornography, and between young adults (16-18) & underage children(-16). I don't feel they would defend someone who had the latter, but i could be wrong. I'm a huge Alan Moore fan & a few years back the CBLDF were heavily involved in a controversy around him producing a book called "The Lost Girls" with his partner Melinda Gebbie as a 'erotic' take on some classical literature characters (Wendy, Alice, & Dorothy, think of it a big name, high production fanfiction in a way! )But anyway Uk law meant there was a good chance Moore's book could at least in theory be classed as child pornography, which is why it's probably the only longform work of his I haven't read. The Japanese schoolgirl thing is Skeevy as all hell, but also absolutely everywhere if you watch anime or read manga there's a good chance at some point your going to run into a toxic combination of the sexualised portrayal of teenagers, & ubiquitous Fan service. Just off the top of my head Kill La Kill (which was heavily discussed in the anime thread last season) sails pretty close to the line sometimes but did so with a narrative reasoning so i didn't feel too freaked out by it, but on the other hand I remember being legitimately repulsed by a show called High School of the Dead a few years back.

Ok which Runner & Corp do you play? Might help me & others to make recommendations about what style of deck to build in HS. However I feel you need to accept the fact a knowledge of HS Meta Game is present in its player base in a way that no physical card game can match, and that the game's mechanics reward predicting what your opponent plays pretty strongly. You don't have to always play a "optimal" deck, but if you don't at least know what the danger signs are when playing against some of the more ubiquitous decks your going to get your ass handed to you regularly.

I tend to auto mute people in any new multiplayer game i play by default. Playing on PC means keyboard is still pretty efficient way of conveying info when hotkeys, & macros are taken into account. Honestly there are days when just the thought of having to be on the same team as or play against some asshole is enough to put me off playing a game where i can't do it.

I was wondering if you fellow readers had any tip's on lords to learn for the higher slots on the farm priority? Now obviously I know as a beginner I shouldn't be picking hard (or semi) carry lords, but if no one else does are there some options I can look to which are relatively forgiving? The lords I'm focusing on in general currently are Windranger, Sand King, Crystal Maiden, Lich & Puck (who i enjoy hugely but only play v's bots in case i mess up). I'm thinking perhaps Juggernaut & Dragon Knight as relatively fool proof options? ​I tend to enjoy lords with good manoeuvrability so any suggestion's which offer that would be ideal.

100% go arena because you learn a wider variety of mechanics in a more forgiving environment.

oh gawd darn it, the rumours about Studio Ghibli closing seem to have got more & more firm over the last few days. Will wait until we see a formal announcement but I guess unless one of it's current crop of films is a huge international hit that's the end:(

Indeed I'll 2nd Osmosisch's opinion, that was a most excellent potted history/summary, thanks. That point about the art style is interesting too, looking at the screenshot that got posted it's definitely a darker take than either LoL or Dota 2, and it's modelling style feels far closer to their shared wc3 origins (which in fairness might be attributable to it's earlier development). All in all i get a vibe of 'Tradition' & 'seriousness' that certainly does play into some of the thing's that Jutranjo talks about. Dota's starting to seem a lot more friendly in light of some of that stuff...

If truly it is the worst of the worst, the obvious question remains why? what made that community become that way? Taking surrender out of the discussion for the moment. Twig & Jutaranjo, what design/community choices did HoN make which (in you guys personal opinions) led to it's current state.

HoN keeps coming up in this discussion as a game who's way of implementing a GG seems almost universally despised, (& who as Osmosisch say's is renowned for having a particularly toxic community even among LoMa's) but obviously LoL existis and has a surrender option and people don't seem to think it has as much of a problem with concedes as HoN (or as toxic a community). So what is LoL doing that HoN doesn't to stop people GGing as quickly? Is it something mechanical or something about the social engineering surrounding the game? If it's the later how would people feel if valve adopted a approach of rewarding players for keeping fighting & punishing players for showboating. What if for instance Valve offered more battle point's for winning than they do currently just for completing a game, but that the number of points the winner received decayed the longer a match went on? So there would be both a reward for a comeback(admittedly a smaller one), but also a incentive for someone to go for the kill? Or even if they simply offered a GG mode where players had the option of GGing but received battle points at a lower rate than they do currently? give players a choice but give a incentive to people to try & play without GG?

Really enjoyed Pluto even though I totally lack any of Tegan's knowledge of it's Astro Boy influence's, it's definately worth checking out either way. regarding other Naoki UrasawaI works, although it was many years since i read it I remember really liking Monster, although for some reason i've never been keen at all on it's anime adaptation.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was the case, traditionally a sports popularity has often been almost entirely based around how easy it was to participate, and how well it syncs with lifestyle of it's players. In the UK football & rugby (our equivalent of gridiron) both started off being primarily played in the elite educational establishments, what lead to football becoming the national game but rugby remaining a niche sport was not that it was a "superior" game but because it players didn't have to risk what was their important asset in a age of manual labour, their physical health. I'd argue in the 21st century our time is our most precious resource, So i think we shouldn't dismiss the question of if a game values our time out of hand, because it is a incredibly important factor to many people. Dota IS a more interesting game to me than LoL, but i don't think that the elements which make it fascinating would be diluted by giving people the option of a well implemented GG system.

About the Thurston article a intresting piece of context is that he found out about the polygon article at the end of stream which included what seemed like the least fun game of dota I've ever seen, where he really had every reason to want to GG. They got slaughterd, there were several long discons from the opposing team that stretched it out further, & the opposing team were pissing about fountain diving rather than finishing them (& being farmed enough to just shrug off the fountain damage). I still am on the side of surrendering here, although I wonder if allowing a GG only after a certain time would perhaps be a reasonable compromise. Say 30 mins On the other let's just have Rosh drop a Blue Shell and be done with all this

I actually had a really good response building a game night around Risk Legacy with a few of my friends, playing 1 round of it each time plus multiple rounds of smaller games. Not only is it something most people don't feel intimidated by it starts out balanced so the initial games play quicker, newcomers have a advantage, & most importantly it lets people tell a story even if they loose. People would actually text me asking when the next game would be just because this wasn't just a game it was 'their game'.

I'm surprised no mention was really made about Linklater's "Before" series when discussing Boyhood. If for no other reason than it brings into sharp relief that what's remarkable about boyhood as a concept, is not just the synchronisation of actor/character ageing but the combination of the starting age of the actors, and the fact it all takes place within one coherent sequence. With sequels being the mainstay of Holywood we actually see characters/actors growing old on screen quite a lot, we just don't see them growing up. Harry Potter is a intresting one to consider because of how prominent it was in pop culture, but I feel perhaps that franchise's directors were often trying to conceal what Boyhood might be trying to capture. I'm not sure why, but I feel perhaps we saw the actors age more off screen, than we did on screen.

I picked up Volume 1 of Akira today from my main local library's old stock sale for 50p! 50p! Now i know from my time working there the other volumes are kicking around the system somewhere, my main aim over the wkend shall probably trying to find out if I can snatch them too if they have decided to have one of their periodic purges of low issue stuff..

A quick question for Sean & the other Dota lords: Was VG's tactics a case of them falling back on what was familiar to them? or just to something recognised as a generically safe choice? My post final impression was: Which i guess is the former rather than the later, but then again I was reading all these assumptions from the tone commentary & the small sample of games I'd seen them play in rather than any real knowledge of their history & the meta. On a side note: A big part of what i like about dota is how much space i feel there is to grow my understanding as a spectator (almost without a cap) so its actually kinda cool to see esoteric dota talk

Ok that got a genuine laugh from me, you win. Guess we now know how you'd win the duel with Obama. I think the 'Famous' may need replacing with 'Infamous'

I'm talking purely mechanically not psychologically At one point one of the casters of the N00b stream made an analogy which went something like "Dota is like basketball, but where teams starts out 4 foot tall & every time a team scores a point it's players grow a inch"