singlespace

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Posts posted by singlespace

  1. Posted

    hen do you use Mercy's rez? It feels like such a waste to use it on one person and sometimes even two, but then you just hold it for 5 minutes because the first time someone dies all the deaths become staggered.

    Judge from the rates: if your team is managing to sustain well, you're charging fast, and you don't think they other team has an ult then burn it low. If you're getting a lot of burst damage against your team, people are falling quick, you suspect they have an ult lined up, or you need to make a big push or hold soon, then save it.

  4. Posted

    I know it's crazy, I finished a game last night and one of the cards was for the rocketress which said 32 direct hits with a rocket of 36 fired?! Some of which hit me when she was flying around at max height. Considering the rockets are moving projectiles, this person most have been a maths and probobiliry genius.

    Saying that, there does seems to be a lot of auto aim. And there's a huge amount of customisation with your controls in the settings. I just need some practice, these guys have probably played CoD or destiny every day for the past two years.

    I would guess it's more the old Quake 3 Arena players: Pharah's rocket launcher feels quite similar and some people have logged thousands of hours in that game.

  6. Posted

    I could never really get into TF2, but I love Overwatch. One of the brilliant things about is that there are many classes with a wide variety of play styles including several that don't require great aim or super human reflexes. One of my favourite heroes is the support Mercy where you don't need to aim much at all, but you do need to have a good awareness of what's going on all around you.

     

    Characters range from needing to be pinpoint or have great tracking like with Widowmaker and Genji respectively, to characters that almost don't need to aim, like Winston (who's primary fire arcs in a radius), Reaper (who has a very wide spread), Reinhardt (who's main purpose is to shield while his attacks are all very generous in forward arcs), and the supports like Mercy, Symmetra, and to a lesser extent, Lucio. Maybe a quarter of the cast doesn't require much at all for aim and many are quite forgiving in terms of reflexes. Many of those classes also form the core of your team.

     

    It's really crazy how positive the game feels: even losing several matches in a row doesn't feel bad with how they carefully craft their feedback to the player. Every round ends in a play of the game that replays a nice moment in the game when someone played well, then a screen of several notable achievements by players from both teams are shown in the form of cards. Say if there were some supports and tanks that did a lot for their team, then how much they healed and prevented damage would be highlight under their names. Everyone on both sides votes on who they think contributed the most and you end up with a lot of situations where a player on the loosing team will be the highest voted player, or there will be a single player that most people on both teams will agree did awesome. Better still, the feedback actually has a very concrete benefit, the match making system tries to match you with players you've previously voted for and those who were in matches that you liked. The end result is that the game feels much less adversarial, which is kind of weird for a competitive game.

     

    Even the little details retain the same kind of feel. The kill feed is off by default and many players choose to keep it that way. Kills aren't prominently tracked or displayed, sometimes as a side note you'll see how many last hits you did, but for offense classes assists are the primary stat tracked, not kills. The final seconds of every post match summary is finished off with your own personal stats and achievements for the match such as whether you broke your own personal best or how close you were to breaking one, what your contributions to the game were organized by how your class plays (so supports will track things like how much damage you healed, or how long you kept buffs up, etc).

     

    So if you're on the fence because of worries about slower reflexes and worse aim, or how competitive and hostile FPSes can be, don't worry: Overwatch has your back.

  8. Posted

    The pro-teams have been running it from very early on, so there are people who have logged several hundreds hours if not considerably more already, but it's not really anything to be worried about.

     

    Overwatch is brilliant regardless of your degree of skill as long as you're playing on relatively even teams and so far it seems like match making has been quite good at making sure that happens. The player base in the beta alone was rather massive, so there wasn't really any issue with finding people of similar skill to play with.

  15. Posted

    Delilah didn't answer when Henry tried to ask about Hawks Rest.

    Is there anything special that needs to be to trigger any stories about this cottage?

     

    Delilah tells you the story

    after you report the raccoon attack in the bottom floor of Hawk's Rest when you open the stove. Not sure what the conditions are, but I think it might have to be evening for it to happen.

  18. Posted

     

    But if Brian had hid all the pitons what were they both using when he fell? The reason I mention the crack is because Henry discusses it with Delilah and then uses it.

     

    I thought there were two separate horizontal cracks? One above where Brian fell and another earlier in the cave where Henry descends. To be honest, the entire sequence about what happened didn't really make sense to me and I don't think I have a clear picture of exactly what happened. The general points that Brian did something wrong and fell, that it might be Ned's fault, I get that, but the details I don't know at all.

     

    Henry mentioning something along the lines that someone setup an anchor there with no visible signs of one, the piton attached to a biner and what looks to be a really short length of rope, the lack of a harness or any other gear lying around by Brian, Ned's confession to Henry, all that stuff didn't really give me a clear picture of what happened.

     

    Was Ned there at the time? Was Brian alone? The physical setup isn't what you'd do in reality so you can't rely upon it to tell you the story.

     

    If we imagine that in the Firewatch universe the way Henry anchors his rappels is just how it's done, then maybe Brian improperly sunk a piton that blew out as he was lowering like Henry lowers, but it looks like a vertical drop as opposed to a slope, which is where Henry is always shown lowering. Say that's just how all rappels work, then why was the rope attached to the piton so short? There would be no chance at all of it reaching the bottom. If the rope being short is intentional, as in it snapped or was cut, then why did the piton blow?

     

    I think you can come up with a lot of possible scenarios depending on how you chose to answer the questions, but I don't know if you can come to any conclusion from the evidence available.

     

     

    Cool, there seems like a barrage of interviews right now: GB, Kinda Funny Gamescast, IGN.

  19. Posted

     

    My initial thoughts were maybe he could not get down to where Brian fell, but the carved part in the wall shows someone had rappelled down there before.

     

    Pitons are designed to be driven into existing cracks in rock faces. The thin metal blade is either meant to bend and contort to the curvature of the crack as you drive it into a natural break or wedged away from the direction of load.

     

    Intentionally carving a crack would be laborious and possibly compromise the strength of the rock. When they put in entirely artificial hard points, you drill a hole and put a permanent bolt in that's either glued, as common in the modern era, or compression fitted. More rarely you'll see cement being used from ages ago.

     

    So the crack would just be a crack, not indicating anything really (other than that's probably where Brian fell from).

     

    I think there's a few possible explanations:

    1) He couldn't get down to the body in any fashion because Brian had stolen all of his hardware (e.g. the pitons), so he had no way of setting up an anchor to lower (ignoring that there's a huge ass horn right beside the crack that he could have roped off of).

    2) If Ned still had hardware and he couldn't retrieve the body from where it likely fell, for whatever reason, there's nothing really stopping him from just walking it out as Henry did himself, or moving it to a location where he could rig a system to pull it up. So in that case maybe he just couldn't bring himself to move the body of his dead son.

  20. Posted

    Either the backpack has a tracking device so that Ned can more easily find it afterwards or the alarm system is some sort of a bizarre contraption that inadvertently transmits at the same frequencies as transmitter collars.

     

    Unintentional doesn't make sense to me:

     

    The frequency range of any RF would be directly related to the shape and length of the antenna being used, hence if it wasn't intentional, that means that the circuit would have to have been an unintentional antenna on the board in the appropriate shape and length to transmit in the range of the collar. That seems impossible given the kind of circuit he'd need and how incredibly simple of a design that alarm would have been.

     

    The other bigger problem is that the alarm is rigged to trigger when the backpack is pulled away from the alarm via clothes pins attached to a cord, which means it's probably just closing a circuit to power the alarm. That means that it's not even powered until the backpack is removed, which makes sense because you don't want to be actively burning battery when nothing is happening, hence there can be no EMI at all before the alarm is triggered.

     

    I guess tracking device in the pack unless someone has a better explanation?

  21. Posted

    I'd say that's the conclusion you're intended to make, but given that this is a piece of science equipment calibrated to track the Elk collars, it's a stretch. Possible, sure, but a stretch. Unless the alarm came from science people and had some connection there, but I don't think there's a lot to suggest that.

     

    There could have been a tracker in the backpack I suppose.

  22. Posted

    Have we misunderstood each other?  The elk tracker is on the ground directly beneath the rope.  Ned placed it on the ground under the rope to make sure you would find it, climb the rope and find the bunker.

     

    Ah! Yeah, I didn't get what you were saying. Didn't remember that there was a collar there at all.

  23. Posted

    Actually there is, there's an Elk tracking belt sitting on the ground.  The alarm is, afaik, the only time the tracker finds something that isn't one of the Elk tracking belts.

     

    Edited to add:

     

    The tracker leads you to:

     

    1. The tracker in the tent that gives you more info

    2. A dead elk carcass that is a clue that not all is as it appears (and may lead you to one the easter egg tape, that I missed)

    3. Leads you to the alarm (no tracker)

    4. Leads you to Ned's base, where he placed a tracker on the ground to get your attention.

     

    It leads you specifically to the point where the rope is, not Ned's base, otherwise the sensor responses make no sense (i.e. what it reads as you move around).

  24. Posted

    Basically, what I've read (and am convinced by) is that Ned hid the keys explicitly so they wouldn't be found, which is why the alarm is there. But the alarm is also the thing being picked up by your wave reader, unintentionally leading you directly to that backpack & key.

     

    Problem is that we don't know by what rules the wave reader is operating. It certainly doesn't operate like any hardware in real life, so how does it operate in the fiction?

     

    It's not detecting just any electronics because it flatly ignores things like Henry's radio and ends up leading you to a cassette tape and rope that aren't electronic at all. It's not leading you to just the animal tracking devices because while it's possible that one was placed within the alarm, there's nothing of the sort by the cassette and rope outside leading to Ned's.

     

    Does it operate on authorial intent then? If so, and if there's no other evidence in the narrative world, the only thing you can really do is guess as to what the author wanted it to be.

     

    he whole keys/bag/alarm thing is probably the most inexplicable element to me.  That the bag and alarm had been there as a way to hide them don't fit.  If Ned wanted them hidden there are about 10 million better ways to hide them in that forest, even for someone who isn't totally with it.

     

    It does make more sense that it's been placed there with the intention that it be found.