sclpls

That is some seriously disheartening news.

So the weird thing is this controller is great for turn based strategy games, but a lot of strategy games don't have UI that works when you're using a TV for a display (it'll be too hard to read all the text in the menus). The one exception to this is Endless Legend, which has a big picture mode in the UI tab, so the Steam controller is amazing for that game! I tried playing Surgeon Simulator too and it was hilariously difficult. Played some bot matches in DOTA and CS:GO. DOTA was awful. CS:GO was okay, but I still wouldn't want to give up the precision I get with my mouse. I think I'll be totally fine using this controller for single player shooters though.

w33 has played fantastic this tournament. He's gotten a lot of criticism (not undeseveredly) about having a limited hero pool, but his signature heroes have always been so on point. And game 3 of the grand finals is why I'll always basically be a fan of whatever team Puppey is on. Some teams you can figure out and draft around, but he is always gonna have some ace up his sleeve, in this case the last pick Chen.

Yeah I really like the Cr1t and Fly support duo they work really well together. My prediction is that EG vs CDEC will be fairly close, but I think CDEC have an edge here just because the new EG lineup seems to have less capacity to pull out cheese strats that would threaten CDEC from playing the kind of game they want to play.

Yeah I would have to agree Secret have had an easy time of it this tournament. Despite getting completely shut down by CDEC they were able to make it through their stage by dunking on MVP twice in a row. While MVP looked fine against C9 it seemed like Secret definitely had that team figured out. Monkey Business seem to have about 3 different strats, broadly speaking, with one of them involving the rather easily banned out Tiny + Wisp combo. Watching their game 1 against Secret (which just wrapped up as I'm posting this) their draft looked a little one dimensional compared to Secret's. Hoping they can make the needed adjustments going into game 2 so we can get a better series. EG definitely are looking better and better as the tournament has progressed, which is pretty standard for that team anyway. CDEC should definitely be a good test to see where they are really at.

Yeah I mean fair enough, I wouldn't have even brought it up except that particular game had so many things going for it that made it worth watching.

I believe the last time 3MA did a state of the RTS type episode it was with Soren Johnson right around the time Offworld Trading Company had been announced. It has been awhile, so my memory is a little rusty, but my take away of Soren's broad point was something like this: The classic RTS model that we know from C&C, TA, and SC was the right gameplay model for its time. Rob mentioned that you only needed one disc to play with a couple of your friends, and to top it all off, internet connections were bad, and we didn't have matchmaking back then so we generally weren't aware of how bad we all were at these games. Once that became clearer that model became a lot less appealing to a lot of people. The RTS still has a ton of potential because games in real time offer certain strategic calculations that can't exist in turn based games, and these games are intrinsically a better format for multiplayer games, but designers need to let the old base building model die and invent new designs that successfully exploit the interesting strategic choices that exist in a real time game. I think all of that is basically correct. I've been playing a lot of DOTA for the last year, and I can see how it really satisfies that strategic itch I used to get from playing RTS's, but without all of the annoyances. And that is the thing about trying to play a RTS match competitively, it mostly involves having to do a bunch of annoying things. People complain about how annoying last hitting is in DOTA, but I think it's a stroke of genius. That one mechanic elegantly wraps together your macro and your micro demands that you used to have to separately monitor in the game. There are annoying things you have to do in DOTA to play efficiently. There are these items, a magic potion and a magic wand, and you can use them to regain some fixed amount of HP and mana. But before you use them you want to drop any items that give you bonuses to your strength or intelligence attributes because those stat bonuses affect the size of your HP and mana pool. When your stats change your mana and HP change as a percentage, so it is more efficient to use the potion and wand without the stat boosts so when you pick them back up you have a greater amount of HP and mana thanks to the magical properties of math than you would otherwise. That sort of thing is an annoyance. It's a lot of clicking around to squeeze out a marginal advantage. But its something you only have to do a couple of times a match. In an RTS I feel like a game is typically asking you to do a dozen of those annoying things every minute. That's the reason for the success of RTS campaigns. Most of them weren't that good, but you could get away with not having to do a ton of annoying stuff and still win, and that gives you a taste of what you want out of the genre. So I think a couple of companies tried to release the traditional RTS, and didn't have a ton of success even if a game like Grey Goo was pretty good. I think the genre will be fine, but it won't be because of a revival of the base building genre. It'll be something new, and I think it will need to be free to play just because you want the biggest install base possible.

I wanted to post a link to what I think is justifiably called one of the most exciting DOTA 2 matches of the year. I mentioned it in the other DOTA 2 thread, but it got swamped by Aui and EG shit talk. This match really had everything going for it, and it was for the EU qualifiers finals for the Frankfurt Majors so the teams were competing for a slot for a major tournament, so the stakes were definitely high. Thanks for the links Jolly0451!

I believe you are correct about Team Unknown being the first team to compete in a major tournament via the open qualifiers. Very impressive! If it is the same structure as TI's open qualifier system then they had to win 4 Bo1's in a row followed by 2 Bo3's in order to make it to the main qualifier tournament.

Maybe his answers were a little too insider baseball for people that play DOTA vs people that don't (you play League, right?). Because the way I remember that thread is you were complaining about it, but the DOTA people that were discussing that cast thought he was pretty insightful. Otherwise I don't really know what to tell you. I don't think he is the most articulate guy in the world, but the points he is trying to articulate are really thoughtful and insightful. Anyway, what I really came here to post about is how everyone should watch game 2 of Alliance v NiP in the lower bracket EU finals for the Frankfurt Majors qualifiers. That might be the most exciting game of DOTA I've seen this year.

Oh man, I thought the camera controls for Mario 64 were pretty awful too. I don't think any of that got good until Mario Sunshine.

Seems like a fair assessment. My favorite Aui moment was after EG won some game at TI (forget which, sorry) with Techies, and he was doing a post-game interview with Kaci. His sincerity and enthusiasm for the game really came through there.

I'm with jennegatron on this. There isn't enough evidence one way or the other for either interpretation so I rely on the Occam's Razor rule to reject it. At any rate, I don't think the actual identities is too important to the work.

I lost it at "Crusader Kings: for the underserved nerd"!

Sure, you could make a game... or you could have an opportunity to swim in the money pit by making more hats!!!

I mean, if Brad gets to work on DOTA I gotta imagine that's a win for him.

Yeah the way Vega and Secret picked up Broodmother this tournament was a real innovation in drafting strategies. Back in 6.83 you would sometimes see a Brood pick, but it was almost always a surprise last pick. Teams didn't want to risk picking it earlier in the draft because the assumption was that the enemy team would then respond with a Brood counter like Axe or Bristleback. But now we're in the 6.85 meta, and this tournament we saw Vega and Secret pickup Brood in the first phase of the draft even though that would give the enemy team the opportunity to counter pick. Bristleback and Axe are still fine counters to Broodmother, but the problem is that they aren't strong heroes in the current meta. So the early Brood pick forces the enemy team into having to decide between two horrible choices: either pick a hero to deal with the Brood that weakens the overall synergy of your team, or lose an entire lane and have whatever heroes you assign to that lane be severely under-farmed and under-leveled. Interestingly, Secret gave away the Broodmother in the 2nd game against Vega, and that was the one game they won. They sent Misery to the lane vs Brood and somehow he managed to hold his own in the lane. Meanwhile they had Pieliedie on the Bounty Hunter who even after the nerfs I think is still a really powerful hero because of track. The track was just one more tool they had to easily kill an invisible hero, and it also meant they had an economic advantage after every even or successful engagement against Vega and they were able to take a quick victory that game. Then in the final game Puppey decides to first phase ban the Broodmother instead of the Ember Spirit. Vega picks up the Ember Spirit and 9pasheabashu is devestating on that hero.

The LoL meta is kinda funny to me since it worked about the same as the CDEC strat (only it is the radiant bottom tower that is important to take early, not the mid tower) at TI. It makes sense though because the overall idea in League and DOTA is essentially the same -- you want to control the map and creep equilibrium in your favor, while maximizing gold and XP as efficiently as possible, and you want to do it with picks that won't get punished for it. I think as far as EG goes Andrew and Rob are both sort of right on this count. Andrew is right that it's too small a sample size to really judge the new team. On the other hand, PPD really did stink up the place with that draft he put together in game 2. It's a little difficult to comprehend how someone that is regarded as a master strategist when it comes to drafting put together that lineup. That being said, if I was EG I wouldn't be sweating these results, but I would try and figure out some way to get a lot more games in because clearly this team needs some more time to come together. Andrew's description of Vega reminded me of how subjective some impressions are of teams. I found Vega distinct from the usual CIS style DOTA, and to be quite passive. They seemed to favor heroes like Broodmother, Ember Spirit, Shadow Fiend, and the Tiny + Wisp combo that excel at split pushing, and waiting to fight on their own terms. I think CDEC remained the team that was fun to watch for the raw aggression (but who were once again unable to overcome the cheese factor of heroes like Techies or Brood).

I never got into TD games in general, but Dungeons of the Endless really clicked with me and I think I played about two dozen hours of it. What I like about that design is the push your luck element to the game. I thought the way the dust economy works was a stroke of genius. You light up rooms by using dust to prevent monsters from appearing in a particular area as you proceed to explore a new room, and you get more dust from killing monsters. So the way this works is that as you explore you get stretched thin, thus increasing your risk as you have to continue to move throughout a level with more and more unlit rooms. But the bigger the hoard of monsters gets from all those unlit rooms the more your dust economy grows, thus allowing you to light more rooms. So there is this really nice back and forth in your state of vulnerability/safety. It kind of reminds me of the dynamic of the Super Puzzle Fighter games where it is when you are on the verge of losing a match that you are at your most powerful because if you manage to land the right combo suddenly you have one shotted your opponent. Too many games involve a fairly predictable linear trajectory of power. More games where there is a real swing please.

I appreciate how the game approached its themes in this really open-ended way. I think people are going to get a lot of different interesting ideas about the meaning of the game.

Yeah, not going to lie, I got a real kick out of watching EG get stomped. PPD definitely set them up for failure in the 2nd game with that draft. Sumail Axe hahaha. This has been a fun tournament to watch. People complain about CDEC being a one trick pony, and I guess that's true, but it's a hell of a trick, and makes for really fun DOTA matches. Definitely looking forward to the match vs Secret tomorrow.

I'm a little in awe that Rob has managed to find the time to do another podcast while also somehow covering the world of e-sports. That puts him at like 3.25 a week by my reckoning. Best of luck with the move Danielle. I think New York isn't that cool of a place these days, but at least it is an upgrade from what San Francisco has turned into! I'm looking forward to the new pod!

I think Andrew was selling Aui 2000 short, and the new Team Secret lineup as well. While Aui's Techies was pretty extraordinary to watch, so was his KotL, his Naga, his Skywrath Mage, his Visage, etc. There are some DOTA players that really just know a handful of heroes really well, but Aui strikes me as one of those players that can play nearly any hero really well. It very well might be that EG made the right call kicking him, but if it was I don't think it will have anything to do with the Techies nerf. As for Team Secret, it is admittedly a little early to judge how strong they are as a team. Their new lineup has played a total of 3 matches, all of them in the WCA European qualifiers. They successfully played against Na'Vi, Alliance, and Virtus Pro in best of 3's, losing only a single game to Alliance. Although Na'Vi and Alliance aren't exactly top tier teams these days, they aren't a bunch of scrubs either. Virtus Pro was the team that managed to eliminate Secret in TI, and I would consider them one of the strongest teams in Europe. The Virtus Pro lineup is unchanged from TI so for Secret to convincingly 2-0 them suggests they are just as much a team to be reckoned with as the old Secret. How this new lineup stacks up against EG and China's best remains to be seen, but if I had to guess the likelihood of who wins ESL One I would rate it EG > Secret > CDEC > Virtus Pro.

My friends started using Discord a month ago and never looked back. I think it is way ahead of Skype, Mumble, and Teamspeak.

I wish I was able to enjoy Grey Goo more than I do. Unfortunately I'm pretty awful at the game, and it largely has to do with the fact that I'm unable to train myself to look at the right side of the screen to check for the minimap so I'm running very blind in the game.