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Yeah playing a support like Dazzle, who is an amazing super powerful hero, is really rough when you are first playing the game because your carries aren't going to be farming efficiently enough for your lower priority farm to pay off (i.e. now everyone is underfarmed). That's why heroes like Lich or Lion are such game winning supports at low levels, they can have high impact regardless of how the rest of your team performs.

One thing I will say about Portal Stories: Mel is that while the voice acting and dialog isn't really up to the high standard of the Portal games, the sound design definitely is. They did a great job using effects like reverb (i.e. you are probably not going to notice it unless you are paying attention to it), and in general it just feels incredibly polished. Very impressive mod effort.

Also in general I feel like people are too precious about spoiler tags, but in this case they are absolutely warranted!

Wow that's a lot of spoiler tags! Jake I'm pretty sure you won't need to get a PS4 to play No Man's Sky because it is supposed to come out on PC at the same time. Or at least I could have sworn I saw information to that effect during E3.

It went okay when it happened to me, but yeah I know what you mean. Trilanes are basically an increased risk for an increased reward. I like when they are run though because I enjoy playing offlane solo heroes. But yeah, it is tough to get enough people together that know what they are doing (I mean, I think I am decent at a lot of things supports do, but even then I'm not sure how good I would be as a support in a trilane).

I only play unranked games so I can't really say what my MMR is. However here are some facts about my games: -I played a game a month ago where a teammate was auto-attacking creeps -Teams having a support is not a guaranteed thing -Trilanes rarely happen -I have never seen the enemy team deward one of my wards, and when I watch replays I have never seen the enemy team use any wards besides maybe initial river wards. Despite all that, it does seem like for the most part people I play with have a general understanding of the game. Barring that player who was auto-attacking creeps I haven't encountered anyone that seemed completely new. People play their heroes more or less correctly, albeit very inefficiently. So if I had to guess it would be in the 2k MMR range. I do communicate with my team generally, although I'm not super assertive, I don't think I have enough experience playing the game to really take that role, though I suppose I have to consider my chances of having the most experience are maybe 1/5. I'd identify the following as my weaknesses: -I'm bad at team fights. When a big fight happens I don't spend enough time trying to anticipate who I should focus on. I also am sometimes bad at managing my abilities and items correctly. -I need to farm more efficiently (don't we all?) -I think my mid-game itemization needs some improvement. I think I generally know what items to build on a hero, but I need to make sure that during a game I am thinking critically about the capacity of my opponents, and what item I need to gain an advantage over them. Like lots of inexperienced players I don't click on enemy heroes enough to learn about what items they have (I am pretty good at doing that in the laning stage since I know I can effectively harass someone that didn't bring enough healing items to lane). On the plus side, I think I generally maintain a positive attitude, and I've never raged at a teammate.

Had a game yesterday where I dominated mid lane as Lina, and kept wrecking fools for the next 30 minutes, and yet I still didn't play well enough to win the game, and it was kinda tough thinking about how I still need to do way better if I'm ever gonna get out of potato bracket.

Yeah the music is quite lovely. Took me awhile to get used to the different respawn music (a.k.a. news at 11) but now that I've adjusted I'm fully on board. I like the quieter moments.

Thanks!

So I'll be in Seattle for the International. Staying at the Westin Seattle. I know it is kind of in a touristy part of the city, so any recommendations for food in the area would be appreciated as I won't have a car.

Philippa Warr of RPS gave a talk about how e-sports are not a meritocracy, and gave a concise rundown of some of the biggest obstacles holding women back from being able to compete at the highest level. My wife has recently gotten into DOTA in a big way which has been a lot of fun, but she is definitely understandably bummed about the rarity of women in the game. So we've been talking about these issues a ton lately. It is a really difficult problem to wrestle with! Here's the talk:

DOTA Run is stupid fun, although I wish it was called Run DOTA Run.

I'm pretty happy that we're in an era where people are making games that act as old PC simulations. I haven't played Her Story yet (definitely looking forward to it though!), but I've been playing a bit of TIS-100 lately, and I am really into the simulation they designed. The game was made by Zachtronics, the developer behind excruciatingly difficult puzzle games Spacechem, and Infinifactory. The conceit is it is the 1970s (I think?) and your uncle from Silicon Valley has died, and his aunt gives you this crazy computer he inherited. When you start the game up it tells you to print out the instruction manual. The pdf file is done up in the super dry technical style of the era. That it looks like some crappy mimeograph copy is a really nice touch. There's some mystery to the game because as you fix various programs in the game you'll come across these comments that your uncle left, but basically the game is just solving these puzzles of getting inputs to do certain things, and transfer to outputs, and your toolkit is a simplified version of assembly language. Don't know how much appeal the game really has because write assembly language to solve puzzles is not much of a hook for a game, but I dig it.

Interesting! Thanks for the correction.

I don't think it is a cynical statement at all. For publicly traded companies they actually have a legal obligation to their shareholders to maximize profits, and anything they do that damages that goal opens them up to lawsuits from shareholders. When large companies make public statements like this you better believe they did studies evaluating how their target demographics would react to these statements.

Touching on the reference to Tale of Tales while discussing the trends of indie development I think it is safe to say that there is a natural rhythm and flow to business environments where sometimes it is advantageous to be a big company, and sometimes it is advantageous to be a small company. When Bioshock Infinite came out it seemed like being small was better. AAA studio headcounts were large, and costs were very high, and as a result games from big developers needed to sell tons of units to be even modestly profitable. In contrast indie development promised quick development time with small teams that could release critically acclaimed games that would sell great on Steam. Of course as soon as that becomes the narrative the market eventually gets saturated with smaller developers, and it becomes harder to stand out in the crowd. Suddenly being a little bigger (or having a deal with one of the big players) seems more advantageous because you have greater means to get attention compared to the million smaller efforts. David Pittman's output here is illustrative I think. He released Eldritch in 2013, and it sold reasonably well and it received quite a bit of press. In 2014 he works on Neon Struct and it was released recently, and I feel like I've seen a lot less written about it comparatively. It does have the disadvantage of being released the same week as the Witcher 3 I think. But still. Eldritch has 14 reviews listed on Metacritic, whereas Neon Struct only has 3. It is harder to get noticed now, even if your game is doing something cool and relatively novel. It is sad to say, but I suspect we'll be hearing a lot of stories similar to Tale of Tales throughout the year.

Some of the more radical changes Paradox makes to their games are kind of troubling for someone like me. My strategy game habits are such that I might put 10 hours into a game in a week, and then not return to it for months at a time. Like, I learned how to play Crusader Kings 2 at one point, but when I played it most recently I basically didn't recognize the game at all, and it was too challenging for me to wrap my head around it. I'm a bit worried that the next time I jump into EU4 it will be a similar experience. This is kind of a worrying trend because for awhile it seemed like Paradox was making huge strides to make their games more approachable without sacrificing any depth.

I like that the alchemists now have a melee attack. I don't think that was the case when I was playing the beta.

semitext is my twitter handle! I can't tell you how pleased I am that this name suggestion was used. The idea was for an EU4 podcast spinoff, I felt it was only appropriate that the Idle Thumbs podcast network have DOTA Today and EU4Ever, but barring that actual podcast this is easily the next best thing!

Ha - the pink room band made me think of early Touch & Go sleaze - like early Butthole Surfers (the strobes probably contributed to that association), and the like. But the Birthday Party is a great point of reference.

I like the 3 vs. 3 vs. 3 mode which I think strikes a nice balance between being kind of tactically/strategically interesting without being super complicated/much of an investment. But yeah, it is true that if you want to knock down towers it isn't going to be the game mode for you.

You should try the Overthrow game mode that's in the new beta client. I think that is going to hit a sweet spot for a lot of people that enjoy all the cool abilities in DOTA, but don't have the interest in committing to potentially long games, or dealing with stuff like getting better at last hitting.

Nice deep dive about how small subtle decisions that don't feel like decisions can spiral out into these bleak social problems. That appears to be an under-appreciated component when people get into discussions about various systemic evils. Simulation type games are wonderful for bringing out these types of insights. I also share Chris' lack of enthusiasm for the sort of generic sci-fi architecture that crops up all the time in games. And while I like the moon, I don't think I share the same enthusiasm for it as Chris and Nick, so the new Anno game hasn't exactly piqued my interest because of the architecture problem. The one exception to this is XCOM 2 where I think Firaxis did a brilliant job of turning generic pristine future cities in video games on its head because this is the architecture of the alien overlords. There's this new building that went up in San Francisco's Mission district that makes me irrationally angry, and I cite it as everything that is wrong with the city right now. To me, this monstrosity looks like an alien ship just landed in the city and is patiently monitoring its human citizens. I feel really uncomfortable any day when I have to pass by it. So I am super excited for the new XCOM game where I will now have an outlet for my frustrations.

Agreed, I don't really have high hopes for this.