Pepyri

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Posts posted by Pepyri

  1. Posted

    I really don't think Reddit is a great example. Given their handling of the Fappening, I come to the same conclusion re: Reddit that I do Twitter, namely that it's in their best interest to host the shittiest side of the internet until the exact moment it isn't in their best interest. Harassment and abuse brings traffic from both the perpetrators and the people up in arms about it. If the harassment and abuse get bad enough, the Reddit admins "do something about it" and ban some people or donate to charity. And then once the microscope finds another target, it's all fair game again - sure, they banned the Fappening subreddit but now there's a "Fappening discussion" subreddit that's alive and well.

     

    I honestly think this is a pretty big sidetrack to the fact that it's got a strong community that goes out of its way to support it. I'd also say that if you think the majority, or even a significant amount of Reddit was taking part in The Fappening, or approved/condoned of/it, that you couldn't be less familiar with the overall community. It has its shitty elements for sure, and they're large and loud, but they're primarily the latter, and rarely the former. And you can similarly say the same about any popular service, when you cherry pick like that.

     

    But it still doesn't get to the fact that they are a community that takes part in making sure the business stays afloat and grows. Now to get that to work via an ad-based methodology is definitely difficult, but it's one of those things where execution is everything.

  2. Posted

    The problem is that there's a fundamental conflict between your audience as product and your audience as customers. Ads mean your audience is the product, and advertisers are your customers. With that model, you have an incentive to treat your free users as product, and force them to behave in ways that make them more valuable as a product that you'd never ask a customer to do. Facebook's recent insistence on real names, and Twitter's non-response to attacks by their users are both borne out of this problem.

     

    There have been examples of services that are free for personal use but have a 'business' version that keeps the lights on, where the personal version is to get people invested with the product enough to consider it in business. The two big successes I can think of are Dropbox and Trello; what they have in common is that it's not hard for them to ensure that their paying customers get the lion's share of resources. Either free users are either limited in a way that the service is still useful but can't be too much of a drain on resources (Dropbox) or that it's more useful for business and creative work, which the punters aren't going to do much of (Trello).

     

    I'm not sure you can sustain a social network on the same model because your initial audience is going to be full of punters.

     

    I think this is a really pessimistic view that doesn't acknowledge the last few years. Look at Kickstarter, Twitch.tv personalities, Reddit- places where communities help fund and keep things alive. How? By working together.

     

    Reddit Gold has been a huge success- no, it isn't paying for their staff, but it's cut into costs for the company significantly. Twitch.tv personalities get subscribers in the hundreds, sometimes thousands- each giving $5 a month for nothing more than to encourage that personality to keep going. Kickstarter also works off of this.

     

    It shows that people are more than willing to help you out when you develop a strong community, and a sense of trust between the organization and its fans. In the case of a social network, what if they were up front and honest about the kinds of advertising you could get, and work harder at providing an ad platform that isn't just shoved on people, but in fact is a way for the community to take ownership over the product itself.

     

    I'm not going into a ton of detail because it's a lot of little things- no one singular idea is going to make it work, but I'm fundamentally opposed to the idea that you can't make users feel like they can trust you with their best interests.

  3. Posted

    It's only benefits are aspirational and their funding almost definitely comes with strings attached that will cause them to betray their users.

     

    I have a few followers I wish I could block already!  I can't imagine what it would be like to be harassed/stalked/etc. on there.

     

    Ouch.

     

    I'd love to see a company be more transparent but still have ads. I have some ideas on how you could do that but I also have no interest in starting such a thing, so perhaps I should shut my yap.

  4. Posted

    I was reading that people liked this thing I heard about a few days ago, and now today are apparently hating on it. What happened to trigger the attitude shift in the community?

  5. Posted

    They did damage, less than frags though

     

    Less than frags but still more than enough to be lethal. Aside from my shotgun I could swear they're my #1 tool.

     

    Also, they one-shot any AI, period. Spectre, grunt, anything, arcs just completely screw 'em.

  11. Posted

    ^^^^ The league system will "clamp" you on purpose. It is specifically designed to attempt to keep you in Division 1 rather than moving up to the next league, because once you get promoted leagues you can't drop back down barring inactivity. You basically have to trial by fire and prove your worth to move up from there. I had a lot less frustrating experience with that after I came to terms with it.

     

     

    So effectively, to make people not feel TOO bad, but still a little bad, they ruin their own rating system? Cool!

  12. Posted

    Hitting a long stint of games where I'm either losing, or carrying my team so hard that it makes everyone's head spin. I don't mean carrying like "Oh but I helped others win lanes", I mean literally the entire game is on my back like fucking Atlas.

     

    It's one of those spots too, where I really hate Riot's new system. In Silver 2, a loss is -28, a win is +28. Graduate just to Silver 1, and a win is +2. A loss is -4. Every. Fucking. Time. I can win 12 games in a row in S1- with the largest + being 4. I lose just one, -16.

     

     

    In short: I sometimes really, really hate team games.

  13. Posted

    I'm confused. She hits people with a sword and jumps around and has a shield. She's not doing anything special there, besides killing three people.

     

    Well, except wearing a bunny outfit. "Hey let's design a character that isn't about tits, since we have enough of those... and then release a skin for her that is about tits! PEOPLE BUY THIS SHIT!" Classy.

     

    Tell me what makes that video interesting, because I'm not seeing it.

     

    Well, that's reductionist as hell.

     

    First things first, bunny outfit: The playboy outfit isn't just just about tits. It's classy sexualization, combined with a pun about her Q(being hops).

     

    Now, then, as to what makes her so special:

     

    You've got a character who can scale almost entirely off of a single stat- which oddly, doesn't just make her stronger, but actually ends up restricting her in interesting ways as well.

     

    Second, you've got the fact that her Q is functionally a melee-range skillshot. This lets you use it without having to face your enemy, and in fact, can use it in such a way that you can curve yourself around your enemy while you use it, with smart control. Doing this perfectly can even let you knock the person back with the 3rd Q in whatever direction you like.

     

    Third, you have the way her passive works. And the way the bonus AD on her ultimate works(as well as the bonus range on everything, etc).

     

    But this is all window dressing to what it all means.

     

    No, she doesn't have combos in the same vein as Invoker, but his are less combos in the fighting game sense, and more combos in almost a rhythm game sequence sense.

     

    But the way both all 3 uses of her Q, as well as her E, moves her the small amount- the quick motions, the positioning, the small effects on her enemy. Her shield effectively acting as a block(as it has one of the shortest durations in the game). She plays almost like a fighting game character. Where she doesn't, she still plays unique to any character I've played in any other LoMa.

     

     

    Also, if you don't see what's interesting in that video(in terms of straight-up skill), I'm guessing you just haven't played League? Or Riven? What he pulled off there is impressive to pretty much anybody.

  14. Posted

    I definitely remember having the same sort of ability burnout he did. "Oh look, another free-damage bruiser. This one has *X's* Q, *Y's* W, etc". I mean, there are only so many things you can do that are in the realm of balanced, and some of them do damage while some prevent it so they're going to feel the same. I am long since past that, but I took a break and then came back. Lords do similar things in different ways.

     

    But you can look at Zac and then the to-be-released Aatrox and say "Oh heh two health-based champions with a revive skill passive". Or him and Lissandra "cool two champions released in a row with a free Zhonya's built in".  When you get right down to it, every lord has 4 skillable abilities and a passive and you can get SUPER reductive about how they do what they do. But then on the flip side people freak out about Jayce and Nidalee and Elise because they're all "THEY HAVE 7 SKILLS INSTEAD OF 4 RIOT PLS".

     

    I think over the last year or so they have done a fantastic job with champion DESIGN. It's not all boobs and breastplates, they have been creating some extremely fun and likable and unique characters. I will probably play Vi forever because her attitude and big punchin' fists match her playstyle.

     

    Yeah, their design over the past year, year and a half has gone from "Pretty good, at least matching DotA's quality" to outright "Holy cow everything they release is gold."

     

    Lissandra is a squishy yet short range CC-heavy mage who is forced to all-in with every fight because of her range.

     

    Zac is one of the scariest ganks in the game- a jump with the range to jump the whole river? Nuts. Also, the 'collecting pieces of yourself' mechanic is super fun.

     

    Quinn I've already spoken about, but the idea of a character who is that mobile, that much of an Assassin, yet that wildly difficult to play well, gah.

     

     

    Vi is like you said.

     

    Nami isn't as popular in the west, but in Korea she's nearly as popular as Sona- mostly 'cause she has insane teamfight power that puts most supports to shame, but NA/EU can't stop fapping over early game.

     

    Zed. Elise. Kha'zix & Rengar. Syndra. Diana. Zyra, Jayce, Draven. I mean, what the fuck. Each one of these has awesome design choices behind them that really feel a step away from the standard.  Only after all those do you hit Darius(who is a trainwreck of design). That's just good shit.

     

    Also, once again, Riven is the best thing that's ever happened to LoMas.

  15. Posted

    Yeah, Quinn is going to be a monster and we're going to see her mid a lot.

    For any melee getting sent there, yeah. Except Zed- he'll probably still beat her. But she'll also be strong top- and I think with an aggressive support, she'll be fantastic bottom too. Still will lose against a Caitlyn, but eh, range is range.

  16. Posted

    One thing that should be added, about that League of Legends post that is about 'fun' and game design: They've said frequently, you can break these rules, just that you should know what you're doing when you do. Some of them are more stringent than others, such as the burden of knowledge rule(which ironically, is broken at least lightly, by the champion named after him, Zilean- his bombs mean you really don't want to go near friendlies with them on). But they've willingly broken or twisted their own rules several times- even with their own examples:

     

    Use Pattern Mis-matches Surrounding Gameplay
    I won't go into too much detail on this, but the simple example is giving a melee DPS ability to a ranged DPS character -- the use pattern on that is to force move to melee, then use.

     

    Oh, wait, isn't that the perfect description of Quinn? Huh. (And before someone says 'Yeah but Quinn sucks', just watch the upcoming Summer LCS, I guarantee she'll be featured heavily. She's got spells nearly as powerful as Ezreal's and has Vayne's passive damage output, plus monstrous mobility and an even-better gap creator, now that it's been changed).

     

    I'd also really say that I disagree rather heavily with Brad on League's champion design. I can understand some of the complaints about Champions being samey, such as the "Every melee has a gap closer" one, but haphazard design is almost assuredly one that I could never share.

  18. Posted

    Nick and I wanted to play LOL (as I never have) and then do a cast about it, but honestly, after peeking into these convos... I am afraid.

     

    The biggest thing to take into LoL, is that if you get the feeling there's less depth to something, you're probably not seeing all the pieces. Both games have an incredible amount of depth, and for all the claims that the skill ceiling is lower in LoL, few who start to play it still think so for very long.

    They're two really different experiences, that really just speak to different kinds of people. DotA is a bit slower overall of an experience, but carries a lot more strategy too- the size of the map really contributes to that in some incredible ways. Similarly, LoL seems to lose depth in that you're not punished nearly as hard for screwing up a combo or a spellcast, but it makes up for it where there are things like Skillshots or in the second to second teamfights, where you get punished a lot more for small amounts of CC than you do in DotA(as with DotA, most CCs last quite awhile, whereas most in LoL are pretty dang short).

    They're both spectacular. They both suffer from God Awful communities. And one of them has the best character in any game ever <3.

  19. Posted

    People who prefer League keep saying this.

     

    Do you watch pro Dota?

     

    It's just flat out not true.

     

    Obviously you can find examples of it happening from time to time, but the exact same thing could be said about League.

     

    Also this:

     

     

     

    Can and is easily frequently done in Dota, depending on the hero. Just like in League. The main differene here is there's fewer skillshots in Dota, but there are just as many dodge abilities.

     

    Ever watched a pro Sand King? Storm Spirit? Anyone who konws how to use Blink/Force Staff?

     

    Or, fuck, Puck? PUCK. Puck is easily the most dodge-happy character in either game. It's what DEFINES Puck.

     

    I do actually watch a decent amount of pro DotA. A bit less than I do League, but eh. And the '15 minutes' I said isn't all at once- it's generally divided in spurts around the games. But it's still there, and there's a lot. It's more tolerable when you're really into what's going on, but that doesn't exactly make it forgiveable(or interesting).

     

     

    And as to the dodges: For one, if you don't have as many skillshots, you're not gonna get it as often. Dodges like that Cait dodge are something that happens in nearly every pro game you watch nowadays.

     

     

    However, I'd also say that you don't get dodges like that out of any of the cases you named except Puck and Storm Spirit. Yes, they can dodge abilities, but there's a difference between being able to simply keep moving in the direction you're in, or halfway close to perpendicular, and full 180 dodges. Turn speed matters. The same dodges in DotA would take nearly an extra half second minimum.

  20. Posted

    Here's my view on the LoL v DotA debate, from the distinct PoV of someone who really loves LoL(and thinks DotA is pretty neat):

     

    • Small mechanical differences annoy the hell out of me. In LoL, I feel like if I have two skillshots coming at me, slightly staggered, that I can dodge from one way to another incredibly fast.
    • The abundance of skillshots in general. When you see a skilled Lux, Ezreal, Orianna, etc- or just that single, brilliant Nidalee spear from max range, you can separate the men from the boys. There are even other kinds of 'skillshots' that aren't missile-based, but instead have more to do with positioning- similar to Windrunner, if you will. A good example being Riven- her Q lets her pass through targets while swinging, but you can also hover 'over' a target to hit them with it like a wall. Knowing how to actually curve through and around them so that you're positioned perfectly, or knock them back just slightly the way you want, can make or break the whole thing. Pixels win lanes with her, and many other champions.
    • Different resource systems on champions. Katarina for example, has none whatsoever but her cooldowns, which reset on a kill. Most characters use mana, but some prioritize it more than others- Ryze actually has damage scale off of it, Kassadin needs a huge pool to be able to get his ultimate stacked up enough, etc. With others, it's simply a limit to keep you from spamming spells all day. Even then, there's Energy(small pool that regens quickly), Rage(builds off of auto attacks), and some character-specific ones, such as Rengar's Ferocity or Rumble's Heat meter.
    • Real magic scaling. It's not necessarily better than DotA's, but I prefer it, especially considering 'carrying' as a spellcaster against a traditional Agi Carry can get pretty tough lategame in DotA.

     

    On the other hand, there's a handful of things I really like about DotA:

    • A heavier emphasis on items with active abilities. League has several, and they're all incredibly powerful. But with DotA, there's seriously a ton of the things. I'd kill for a Force Staff in LoL, even if it couldn't jump walls like in DotA.
    • I just like the DotA art style a ton more. God damn, it's a beautiful game.
    • The surrounding infrastructure and client are just better built. That's sorta what happens when you have money even when you're first starting.
    • The innovative ideas that are in the Pennant system, bringing back HLTV(and even supplying an external client!), in-game team skinning, the in-game guide system- it's all pretty damn magical and forward-thinking.

     

    Lastly, some differences that not many bring up, where my preferences shine through:

    • Map size and mobility differences. Mid/lategame, shit takes time in DotA. Just going from fountain to the center of the map takes foreeeeever. In League, it's ~35 seconds. 25 or so if you grab Homeguard boots. Furthermore, champions on the whole are way more mobile in League, in means of being able to hop over walls given proper situations, and in general mobility is just something that seems to be taken much more aggressively in League. Then again, the small size of the map and the high mobility means we'll never see someone like Spirit Breaker, who is just fucking incredible to play to any League player. The idea that he can do that on such a low cooldown is nuts.
    • Skins in League, for me at least, are just flat superior than DotA's option. Yeah, you're not able to earn them ingame, which sucks a bit- but when I wanted to spend money on DotA items, I found that I couldn't even recognize the difference between the default and the new item. Whereas you never have that issue in LoL, and especially on the more expensive skins. Something as simple as iBlitzcrank(~$8.75 USD, maybe less, been awhile since I did conversions) is a massive difference from his normal skin. Same with Redeemed Riven, Fisherman Fizz, Queen Ashe. Then you've got your legendary skins, which are practically a total cosmetic(including audio) change from the default. And that isn't even mentioning the crazy class, like Pulsefire Ezreal, which has multiple in-game tiers to the skin itself.
    • The speed of the games is pretty drastically different. Pro DotA can have some rather... long... pauses. Generally in League, pauses don't last that long- it's pretty rare for pauses in the action to exceed 5 minutes. Your average pro DotA game has at least one 5 minute pause in it, and it's fairly frequent to get more than 15 minutes of downright boring shit going on. However, this also keys into much more going on 'behind the scenes' with DotA- the posturing can make the whole game. And sometimes, that can be pretty interesting.
    • Item variety. In League, you've got a few different build paths for each character, but it's more about deciding between types of all-out damage, or how to itemize against the enemy team. With DotA, there's a lot more variety there. Now granted, most of it is going to be utterly worthless, even if you're playing a Mage support and you're looking purely at items for Mage supports. But then you get weird niche cases like your carry picking up a sheep stick because they can get legit usefulness from it.

     

     

    WOO. THERE. WROTE IT ALL OUT.

     

    The one thing I won't go into: Runes and Masteries. Masteries I'm fine with, no big deal there, and it can create some pretty wild differences that are pretty fun. So can runes. But rune pages being so prohibitively expensive is kinda nuts to me. Hell, I'd even rather they be free- I can't imagine doing that would diminish their income that much, as most of it I know comes from skins.

     

     

    Edit: Oh, and I can't imagine something as fucking nuts-crazy-fast as this(the superfast double hop late in the clip) happening in DotA: 

  23. Posted

    I kinda paid attention to this since before the Kickstarter, but my excitement wasn't turned to fervor until I found out the guy who did the Homeworld Soundtrack was on the team. Then I started frothing at the mouth, and pounding on my desk, wanting it now.

  25. Posted

    Also,

    I really really wanted an option to tell Clem 'I love you' at the end. I had to settle with 'I'll miss you'. Christ Vanaman.

    I also wanted this. I was saying it in my chair, over and over, I wanted her to hear me.

    Jesus Christ, I couldn't stop crying. I'm still crying, and I finished it 20 minutes ago. Clem has to stay safe, she fucking has to.