Dosed

Why does it sound like Griffin's got a lisp in the Woodlands podcast?....

Ooooooooooh. I've just downloaded the whole series to my phone! So excited to watch it on the metro. Although I imagine I'll have to contain a lot of my laughter in public which should be interesting. I'll let you know what I think about the series when I finish it all. I feel sorry for ya'll who wanted the TAZ prequel arc to be short. I'm enjoying it, but I do hope it's coming to a close.

Yeah, I get that. I still get overwhelmed even with a few hundred hours under my belt. Have you been tempted back to try it? I found just picking a character and sticking with them helped a lot.

Oh that's a shame. Any ideas what caused the headache? What do you think is putting you off it so much? I'd like to offer some "it gets more [adjective here]" advice but I'm not sure if it'll help coz I pretty much loved it from the outset.

I made it into Masters! Yay! Now for GM. But probably not. Although the other day I got placed against the 137th ranked Tracer and beat them. If I play European morning times I come against people who are a good 500SR higher than me and I manage to hold my own somehow. I've actually made a new account to practice other characters in comp and I'm trying out Ana, Rein and Pharah. Strangely enough Pharah is probably my least favourite of the 3. ANNIVERSARY STUFF TODAY! woot woot.

It's nearly the 1 year anniversary of OW! Are we pumped!? Who's on the hype train for a new hero? Do you think they'll finally drop the Doomfist bomb shell? I wonder what he'll be like? Tank or DPS? Sluggish and a big hitter or a glass cannon? I'd honestly be surprised if they dropped him for the celebration as I think Orisa is still in a terrible place and she came out relatively recently. She seems so out of place to me in the world of OW. Did you guys play much competitive? I'm at 3169 at the moment after a high of 3266 super near the start of the season. I fell down to 2704 which kind of shows how much of a variance there is in terms of team mates/luck/trolls/leaers etc. Surely I can't be varying day to day to the tune of 600+ SR? I'm maining Tracer at the moment and I'm planning on getting her golden guns. She's so much fun. I gave Pharah a go but man is she hard to play. I'm also gonna try Rein out a bit more as I love him so much. It's super hard to practice those characters in QP due to them being so dependent on team comp.

I found a lot of my problems when I was playing at lower levels were due to positioning. As Soldier you ALWAYS want to take the high ground especially at the beginning of maps. Like on KIng's Row when you're defending up on the roof behind the statue is a great place to be. There's plenty of guides online about where to be. I'd also try to be constantly aware of where you are in regards to your team as you don't ever want to overextend or get into a 2v1 or even worse.

What are people thinking about the new style TAZ? It seems like Griffin's definitely gone for a more hands-off approach for the DM'ing. I thinks it's pretty interesting and to be honest I just love listening to the McElroys exist so I'd be happy with a lot of their stuff when they work as a unit. I feel like one day they'll just blow up in the mainstream, but I'm not sure when, how, why, who, what. It seems insane that these guys are so funny and talented and are constricted to a few popular podcasts and youtube serieseseses.

What do you guys think of the new expansion? I got super lucky in my packs and got 4 legendaries (one golden!) and was able to make a few decks which I liked a lot. I haven't had much time to sit down and give it a go as I've been obsessed with Overwatch recently and that's taking up all my time. I can't really imagine how Blizzard will keep going with expanding the game by 500 odd cards a year when the focus seems to be on "new and players returning after a break" especially considering how exepensive the game is. I've heard people claiming upwards of $400 dollars to complete this expansion. That's just this expansion. Not that you'd need to do that, but still even $50 for a 50 pack booster pack with no guarentees of anything seems bananas to me. How is it being back after some time off Roderick?

I really like the PVE stuff and I'm really glad the skins revolved around something Overwatch based and not a seasonal real life thing. I hope they keep doing that. The Blackwatch stuff is so interesting and McCree's and Genji's skins are just fantastic. I'd be really surprised if they ever did a full-blown co-op thing as I would've expected that to ship with the game, and would be pretty difficult to get right after the game has been out for so long. I've started playing a few different characters now instead of just Soldier as I was getting sick of him in ranked games and I could only play a few characters. I decided to give Mei a go... in the week where she was fundamentally broken and had a moment of "hmmm... how come when I play her noone ever gets frozen but enemy Meis freeze me instantly". And it was completely justified. Bad luck I guess. Then I tried Pharah and my God is she difficult to play. She's pretty dependent on the setup of your team and I find it super hard to get direct hits with her. I played a few rounds of Mystery Heroes and got Tracer who I went on a rampage with and that's that. She's gonna be my new main for a while I think. I used to think of her as a character you'd use to just get up in people's business, but after playing her and watching some guides she's way better at just pouncing out of position enemies. Or chasing down low health enemies and cleaning up. What have you guys been playing?

Well I got about 400 pages into The Name of the Wind and yesterday I officially called it a day. It was a very strange experience reading this book as normally I'd give up on something which annoyed me as much as this book, but I felt compelled to read it for some reason. I liked the world building initially and the idea of the magic system, but my god does his perfection get boring as fuck super quickly. I literally rolled my eyes when I don't know why I came into bag on this book so hard. Maybe because I'm a grump bug from working so late recently, or maybe you guys are the only people I (don't really) know who are discussing the book.

In what ways is it worse? I was still considering buying the sequel but if it's crap then I won't bother.

I finished The Fire Dwellers by Margarent Laurence and I would heartily recommend it to anyone. It's very stream of conciousness, which would normally not be my cup of tea, but this time it was really interesting. There's different ways the author indicates what is happening, what the character is thinking, conversations and memories which seem related to whatever is currently happening. It really seemed to capture the sense of having/being a part of a family really well and was just a beautiful book all round. I'm currently reading The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. I like it a lot, but I think I'm a bit tired of the "perfect super hero flawless genius" stuff that seems to be going on. I'm not sure if there's something happens that will change my mind about the protagonist, but so far I'm not that impressed considering how much hype there is surrounding the book.

I've given up on The Tree of Man and The Luminaries recently. I used to have the self imposed rule of finishing everything, but The Luminaries is gigantic and I also don't have enough time in my life to not enjoy something I do for entertainment. The Luminaries seemed really pompous to me and felt like it was trying to be much cleverer than it really was. There was a murder mystery that I didn't give a fuck about right from the outset and that seemed to be the focus from the outset. So I gave up on it.

MAAAANNNN have I just ran into a streak of bad luck in this game. If you're not in Diamond then I'll just tell you now there are hundreds of player who don't deserve to be and quite frankly don't have a basic understanding of the game. I've had games recently go from a comfortable 2-0 lead to a 2-3 loss because Bastion wouldn't change when they've got a Roadhog, Genji and D.VA to counter him. I messaged the Bastion player "pls change" in between rounds and they changed to a second healer which we'd needed for the last round. We got into a 99% overtime battle, thanks to them changing, but ultimately still lost to a sub-par team. It astounds me that people don't know when to change. Or that they need to be told to do it at Diamond levels of play. How do they get this far? What do people think about the Lucio NERF/(???)BUFF(???)? I find it weird them focusing on such a well balanced character when they could focus on Winston, McCree or Sombra.

Anyone on the PS4 european servers?

I never seem to do well in Arena. It's probably due to the fact I barely play it, but I just don't really understand how to get any better because it seems so dependent on your drafting. I'd normally curve out pretty well, get some stuff removed and then just not have enough, or good enough, high drops to play in the later turns. I've also been playing a lot of Wild recently as a Reno mage but it really hasn't gone well. Aggro seems just as crazy as it did in Standard and I can't play Standard due to missing a bunch of essential cards. It seems pretty crazy to me that I've spent hundreds of hours and probably upwards of 80 euros on this game and I still can't play I want to. I'm missing Arya so no Jade for me and I don't have Patches so no Pirate.

I got into Diamond again last night! After a draw (which should've really been a win) and a massacre on Volyskaya Industries I was 5 points from Diamond and I thought it wouldn't happen, but for some reason I was put with a competent team and we rocked it. I finally bought a golden gun with last season's points after much agonizing over what to do. I went with Soldier as he's probably my best DPS character and certainly one of my favourites despite being pretty plain. I'm a bit surprised they didn't release Orisa in the off season or right at the beginning of the season to give players time to adjust. Although, I'm sure competitive would be rammed full of people not having any clue how to play her just like a certain MachineGunBot has been showing up a lot lately. She's also already been "nerfed" a bit on the PTR by having her clip size reduced and something else I can't be bothered to look up.

New expansion! New year! New release schedule! New cards! New key word! New type of card! New new new!

That was fairly amazing. What do people think of the new hero? I think she looks cool! I initially thought it was kind of dull that she has 3 moves which are similar to other characters, but I guess it's a way of making other characters not instapicks like Rein for example. Although I was just learning how to play Rein... Oh well

You're probably right Apple. I was just being a grumpy man because I had lost a bunch so close to being in diamond. I managed to get into Diamond eventually and I had to take a sabatical from Overwatch competitive for a while because I hadn't been so addicted to a game since maybe WoW in my teens. I would dream about it and be bummed out when my SR went down. One thing they do need to sort out is when a team mate leaves. I don't see why I should play 2 rounds of control point and be clearly going to win and then have to suffer a loss when a team mate DCs or just leaves. I think your team shouldn't suffer any loss whatsoever or half the normal amount and the other team should just get a win. I realise friends could exploit this somehow by giving their friends easy outs if things aren't going so well, but there's got to be a better answer than "U LOSE".

I think the cards at the end of the game can be really harmful to the game. For example if a person plays attack Bastion in a diamond level game on Volskya Industries map over a course of 4 rounds they'll probably get gold eliminations. However, as everyone here knows eliminations could count as like a stray bullet hitting someone. So that player thinks they made a meaningful contribution when they could play an actually decent character like Tracer, Reaper, Soldier, Pharah or ANYTHING ELSE APART FROM ATTACK BASTION. Sorry for the caps but that actually happened to me. Along with atack Symettra and Tjobornobnrobnrobn yesterday too. It always happens against teams that should have been a free win too. I think people watch YouTube videos, or it just happens to work one game, they get golden kills and think they made a genuine contribution. You have to be INSANELY good for it to work and these people aren't even above average. I personally think Bastion is shit even on defense. He's so immobile. Once a team makes a push passed his position he's useless for about 5 seconds and you can't afford that. If you focus him in any vague manner he instantly dies. A discord orb + helix rockets = dead Bastion.

You're probably right Patrick. I imagine it's pretty awful. But I do want them to be successful. I can't really imagine what they're gonna do with it either. I don't really know why I'm talking about it coz I can't watch it and I probably will never be able to because I live outside the States and can't subscribe to Seeso. If I could I'd do it just to watch those good good goof boys. I think they said there'd be an episode on YouTube for free so there's that at least...

Is anyone else interested in the MBMBAM TV show? I love the stuff they've done on YouTube (namely Griffin's stuff) and I know it won't be anything like that, but I feel like it could work for them. I know this sounds weird but I really feel like they deserve to be famous. They're so talented, funny and genuine. I've listened to their back catalogue the entire way through maybe 3 times now so I practically feel like I know them. I know this isn't strictly podcasts but it's podcast adjacent.

Yeah, I've seen that a lot even on console when people can't/don't communicate via mics. People will often punch a Sombra or a healer who isn't Ana because they want an Ana. But like you said they have no idea why the triple tank works. I'm pretty happy to give anyone a chance as long as they're not playing attack defensive characters or they pick a 4th DPS when we're already on a stupid 1 healer/3DPS/1 tank composition. I've been pretty surprised by some pretty sick Winstons and Sombras. I just realised I wrote "how's everyone else's experience been this summer?" What the fuck? I'm not Australian... I live in Europe. Why in the world did I write that?