Nox Beta

I'm doing great - Unlocked elite spec on 3 of my chars. Making bank with flax seeds. Getting phat loot from Dragon's Stand and Auric Basin. I'm preparing for the upcoming raid content by gearing up all my chars as best I can with the new minstrel stat combo (support life 5eva). Old guildies have returned in force and are really bringing back the good ol' 'mad rush' feeling with new mmo content. Happy to report that despite going hard out for 2 weeks, HoT still remains fresh and exciting. I feel I've only scratched the surface of the expansion!

MVP.phoenix are truly living up to their wildcard origins. P.S. MVP.kpii aussie hope represent

Hello fellow doto potatoes, I'm doing a PhD about online social well-being and decided Dota 2 would be an interesting space to investigate. Considering we hear all kinds of good, bad and funny social interactions in the game, it's intriguing to know what the players behind the experiences are like. How do players approach the game? How do people view other players? Are players as nice as they think they are? How might MMR and other factors affect this? To begin answering questions like these, I constructed a short 10min survey about player perceptions and Dota gaming habits. The survey will run for 2 weeks - If you would like more information or want to participate, you can head here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/IdleThumbsDota2 The survey might feel a bit long but it's important to have good data to work with (your patience is appreciated!). I will post some preliminary results in this thread shortly after the survey concludes (provided there are enough responses for certain types of analysis). If you have any questions or feedback, you can PM me or simply post in this thread. Any and all responses are greatly appreciated. Thanks for the help, every response counts! P.S. This post has been sanctioned.

Niiiice! I'm super duper envious here haha Was it difficult getting a hold of tickets? I hear they sold out within minutes, which causes me to imagine frantic clicking/refreshing to beat the rush. I planned a trip to the US prior to the announcement of the TI5 schedule. I was stoked to see that the dates coincided/matched up perfectly, but since I didn't get any TI5 tickets, Seattle won't be part of my itinerary URGH, I guess the next best thing is to hit up a cinema viewing or something.

I've always understood playing support to be more about buying items that can help the team (e.g. courier, obs, sents, dust, smoke, force staff, aura items etc.) more so than their innate skill-set. I think it's no coincidence that support is played as position 5, as it adequately allows for the aforementioned itemisation to be achieved at reasonable timings throughout a match (unless if the player is complete rubbish). In saying that, I initially learned how to play Dota 2 as a support so maybe my perception is coloured (it's easily my most successful and knowledgeable role).

It's good that you maintain a positive attitude, that's really the most important thing when all is said and done. As for calling the shots, sometimes it's useful to dissociate experience from the equation if it's unclear who among your team has the most. Regardless of how your calls play out, you can still gain experience by reflecting on them, e.g. Did things go well? if not, why? in what possible ways could it have gone better, if the call was to be adhered to? If you run out of answers, only then is that a time you might reconsider making the call. Sometimes a certain call might not even be the optimal or theoretical best play, but if enough of your team commits, that fact might be negated: For your case, it means that assertiveness, in a context of mutual experience uncertainty, can be valuable in its own unconventional way. P.S. Oh by the way, the first bit of results for the Dota survey I'm running is up! check it out at the Dota Today subforums.

The first portion of results are up! you can find some graphs here: http://imgur.com/a/Hxs5z I circulated the survey on several sites but the overwhelming number of responses (94%) were from the /r/DotA2 subreddit. As such, the results are more reflective of that online community and generalisability to the greater Dota 2 population is limited. It was a little unfortunate that I didn't get as many responses as I had hoped (low upvotes make me a sad panda ) though there were also a non-insignificant amount of responses that fell outside the sampling criteria (and/or were troll responses). In saying that, we can still see some interesting trends that reveal new perspectives, and others that reaffirm established understandings. Firstly, more than 20.49% of participants were over the age of 25. This isn't too surprising if we presume that many Dota 2 players were previously Dota 1 players from Warcraft 3 days. I didn't have any questions asking about Dota 1 so we can only speculate. When it comes to gender distribution, unsurprisingly, most of the participants are male (95.42%) with females accounting for about 3.77%. Almost 50% of participants identify as being hardcore video game players (this is not necessarily specific to Dota 2). What is interesting is that there were almost twice as many participants who identify as hardcore than as casual. I deliberately did not define these two terms because there is no established standard or consensus on its definition as each individual invariably has a personal meaning. The purpose of this question was to determine how participants perceived themselves. There appears to be a significant relationship between weekly play frequency and session duration, but the strength of this relationship is quite weak. In terms of matchmaking rating (MMR), I was quite surprised to see that it was normally distributed. If you look closely, I actually messed up by forgetting to include a '500 to 1000' MMR response range (Thankfully, this small detail won't ruin my thesis). If I had to guess, individuals who belonged in that bracket either reported 'I don't know' or bumped themselves up to '1000 to 1500' . To give a bit more perspective, only 3 people reported being above 6k MMR, and another 3 reported being between 5.5k to 6k. The last few graphs show responses on play-style, lanes and positions from two angles; preferred and actual. In terms of play-style, the discrepancy between supporting was much larger than expected (25.14% preferred vs. 44.63% actual). This suggests that players either forego their play-style preferences a) on their own volition or b ) are forced by their teammates in some capacity. I can't determine which one it is, but I can say that the 19.49% of participants who fill that support void get a commend from me . On the note of supporting, the differences between preferred and actual lanes is also rather telling, perhaps suggesting a tendency for tri-lanes. Interestingly, jungling does not appear to be all that prominent (at the time of surveying, at least). Perhaps this is a reflection of the current meta/patch? I'm interested to know what you guys think, please discuss! P.S. Dota appears to be the 'waifu' game of choice for 78.81% of participants; Sean need not feel bad about his doto ways. P.P.S. The second portion of analyses will take a look at the social side of things and will be more heavy on theory. As such, it will take more time but I hope to have some more results in the next 2 months or so, TI5 viewing notwithstanding.

What potato bracket are u playing in, may I ask? Performing well on your own part is great; have you considered leveraging your understanding of the game to leading and/or coordinating your team more effectively? Although it is not necessarily your responsibility, it is an additional way for you to have an impact on top of what you're already doing as an individual hero. Rise to victory together; don't become a crab in a barrel!

Update: Thanks to everyone who participated! There are currently several hundred responses; a preliminary glance indicates I should have enough data to perform some of the more complex statistical analyses. I intend to post the results in two parts. The first portion will be basic stuff like demographics and distributions, which I'll endeavor to have in roughly a week. The second portion will be more time consuming, which I hope to have ready in the next month or so. Stay tuned!

Who's listened to the new TI5 compendium music pack by Jeremy and Julian Soule? I absolutely love it; it hasn't failed to pump me up for every single match since it was released.

My heart says C9 for EE-sama but my head says Secret because of their recent consecutive LAN wins.

I found it too.

Accidental double post zzz woops.

But young at heart, right?

Response from Anet about the expansion fiasco: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/pre-purchase-community-address/ Firstly, appeasing their longstanding players with a free character slot is something, but is it enough? At the very least, if I decide to get the expansion, it will definitely only be the standard edition. Secondly, Anet's willingness and openness to offer refunds for those whom were genuinely mislead is commendable and noteworthy. I respect and appreciate that (even if it doesn't apply to my situation). For the record, I'm ok with Anet's stance on how they intend to handle future expansions: "In the future, if we release further Guild Wars 2 expansions, we plan to offer all of the prior expansions, the core game, and the latest expansion for one single purchase price."

Yeah, I'm miffed by the price-point as well. The GW2 subreddit is up in arms about it, so I'm hoping maybe something good will come of the outcry. lol who am I kidding.

Woohoo, nice to hear a release date. I've been waiting patiently for this ... not easy when it looks this good and promising. For those who've played the early access, how many hours do you presume the game can offer in a 'normal' playthrough? just curious.

Sure thing, that's absolutely ok. Your post reminds me of when I played Starcraft 2: WoL - I would get a bit of ladder anxiety in mirror match-ups (i.e. PvP - it was 4gate hell back then). It's interesting now because I don't get the same anxiety in ranked Dota 2 matches; if anything, I actually relish the competition. Perhaps it's simply the fact that it's a team game which makes things better, or maybe it's because there's no equivalent feature of mirror match-ups like SC2 (the closest thing might be 1v1 mid?). In any case, that's a story/study for another time

Now, for something a little more eclectic

Yep! Your experiences will still be informative and helpful

It's good that we got to see a bit more NMS gameplay. I don't mean to be a buzzkill but there doesn't look to be enough 'meat' in the gameplay loop in the fact each individual system seems quite barebones, e.g. the gunplay, the ship combat, resource gathering. In saying that, I know it's too early to tell because the game is still in development and I haven't seen everything etc etc. I guess the last thing I want is for NMS to end up a similar way like Spore, where there were a lot of systems in place, but none of them had much depth. To elaborate further, the concept for Spore is rad (just like NMS) but the combination of all the systems (e.g. race creation, evolution, ship creation in Spore) amounted to nothing substantial. That or maybe I'm just overly harsh and pessimistic

I'm interested to see how the devs 'incentivise' and balance combat approaches to be comparable to non-lethal ones (in terms of exp gain, at least). When I played DX:HR, I wanted to go combat each time I found a cool new weapon (rocket launcher, pimped up assault rifle) but I knew sticking to non-lethal (e.g. max hacking and takedowns etc) would ultimately yield more exp. In the end, I don't think it made too much practical difference; if I had to guess, maybe I got like 2 or 2 more praxis points going non-lethal. In saying that, I know I'm not beholden by the game to any one approach and I can always replay the game alternatively, but it would be a nice consideration nonetheless.

It's so darn slick, I could lick it. I was a little anxious the new layout would be unintuitive and confusing but I grasped the UI surprisingly quickly and easily. Some features that really stood out to me include: - Forming parties is much more convenient and functional imho - The 5 axes playstyle breakdown is so darn kool (http://imgur.com/tSsaqHw). However, Reborn still has some issues that need ironing out, e.g. - The 'Heroes' section of your profile is bugged and doesn't actually show your favourite/most successful heroes, nor the correct individual MMR - I have a feeling some of the stats that are shown is not entirely accurate (I swear I've eaten more than 1 cheese before ... lol).

I, too, am excited for a new IP in the ME universe but I am apprehensive about how it'll end up ... I was just too burned by the way the ending was handled. The multiplayer in ME3 was kind of enjoyable, though looking back now, I am unsure how much of my enthusiasm was derived from fanboi hype than any considerable gameplay achievements or merits. In saying that, it did feel awesome being able to play another race. It's a shame there wasn't quite enough map and enemy variety to keep things interesting beyond a dozen or so hours.

Super hyped for Dishonored 2. I do hope they stick to the aesthetic of the first game; the painterly visuals are so wonderfully refreshing. P.S. Emily!!#$%#