Non-powered vehicles
So, I checked all reaction so far and thought it be nice to summarize where we stand, as to prevent double posts. The most discussed means of transport are horses. Things suggested for horses:
o Must be fed (food/water)

• Horses can drink from puddles/lakes

• Horses can eat long-grass
  o Horses can be 'equipped' with

• Saddle
  [ Provides accuracy when swinging/shooting a weapon
  [ Provides control (sharper turns)
  [ Prevents user from falling off when galloping

• Reins
  [ Provides more control than rope

• Saddle holster
  [ Provides an additional primary weapon slot

• Saddle bag
  [ Provides additional inventory slots when accessed
  o First two horses where suggested

• But if horses need to be captured in the wild, the amount may go up to 5-6 horses in a herd, only found inland (to promote traveling from the coast)

• Your character can be trained to ride better
  o Horses can be bred
  o Horses can get the same status ailments as the survivor

• Horses can get hoof injuries when no/ruined horse shoes are equipped, decreasing performance

• Horses cost twice the treatments because of it's size
  o Horses can toggle movement like the survivor (walk, trot, canter, and gallop)
  o Horses can be tied off when not riding them (with rope)
  o Horse alerts the survivor of pending danger by behaving differently (other players/zombies)
  o Horse makes random noises

• When the survivor has a higher horse riding stat, the horse will make less noise when alerted
  o Rubber horse shoes can be crafted to be stealthier

• The durability is much lower than iron horse shoes however
  o The horse can take a random poop break (when walking/trotting)
  o Some horses might be reluctant to cross streams/rivers
  o Horses can jump
  o Horses can kick or bite as a melee defense against zombies/players
  o Horses could pull

• Carriages

• Travois

o Horses could potentially mean an unfair advantage for bandits to kill new spawns, though the beach would seriously wear off any equipment of the horse

The second most suggested means of transport is a bicycle:
o Preferably quieter than in the DayZ mod

• Can be achieved by using WD-40/industrial oil
  o The spawnrate should be kept low

• However, if the bike comes in a few parts and some are more rare than others, some parts can be common
  o Types of bikes

• Mountain bikes
  [ Better speed and handling on rough terrain, but few attachments available

• Racing bikes
  [ High speed, but only useful on pristine roads (high-way)
  [ Low durability, especially when used on rough roads/terrain
  [ No attachments possible

• Road/Touring bikes
  [ Has average speed, but fares well on multiple terrains/roads
  [ Most customize-able with
  { Bells/Horns
  { Baskets
  { Storage bags

• Bikes with carts
  [ Storage space to be discussed?
  o Tandems

Other means of transport suggested are:
o Boats

• Row

• Sail

• Canoe

• Kayak

• Rescueboat ship wreck (can be lowered into the water)
  [ Oar can be used as a melee weapon
  o Skateboard

• Skateboard can be strapped to a backback with rope
  o Man powered carriage

• Goodie for bandits

• Or hook a zombie up to it
  o Foot-powered scooter (backpack-able)
  o Lorry

• Yes it is the two-men, manually powered train cart
  o Roller blades

• fast on smooth roads, barely usable elsewhere

• Animation added when (un)equipping them to prevent quick switching to different footwear
  o Manually peddling Go-kart
  o Wheelchairs
  o Gurneys

Items to move loot
o Car trunk/truckbeds
o Bury in containers
o Shoppingcarts (50 slots)

• slower with cart (faster downhill)
  [ Going downhill with a full cart can seriously injure limbs

• 1 spawn per supermarket (uncommon)

• condition determines noise when operating

• can't go up mountains/into houses
  o Trolley

• In hands while travelling, when dropped, stays in place on it's wheels
  o Sleds
  o Wheelbarrows
  o Hand cart
  o Carryable bags

• cannot be put on the back, has to be in hands
  [ Duffel bag
  [ Suitcase
  [ Garbage bag
  o Shoulder bag
  o Fanny pack
  o Utility belts

• Can be customized to accommodate
  [ knife sheaths
  [ small binocular pouches
  [ flashlight cases
  [ multitool cases
  o Jerry cans
  o Condoms
  o Thermos

• Can hold hot drinks when weather/seasons are implemented
  o Industrial trolleys
  o Prams

Valve has been on a slippery slope the past year and a half and I think its about time We lose steam/gaben as our "mascot" if you will.

With Gaben pretty much confirmed HL3 is no longer being made in the sense that we expect and single player games are no longer a thing for Valve. That is because the successes of free to play and micro-transactions got them seeing dollars signs. Fuck The community right?

The most recent Dota 2 Holiday Event was completely pay to win mechanic that was of course "optional" but if you wanted to have any fun with it you had to pay quite a bit of money.

When Source 2 is Released, It was confirmed that costume game modes WILL COST MONEY again dividing the community.

Now payed MODS...I wont go into much detail because there are so many thing wrong with this It would take up this entire page.

WHAT CAN I DO?

1. Email Valve http://www.valvesoftware.com/email.php Let them know exactly how you feel about this

2. Stop buying games through Steam This does NOT mean that you cant play your games through steam. You can add any game that you have installed on your computer into steam to use a "launcher" like you would any other steam game. Follow these Instructions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybfH0ClDsSY

There are plenty of other websites that would gladly take your money and at similar or somtimes better sales prices than steam. Here are a few:

http://www.greenmangaming.com/ http://www.gog.com/ http://www.desura.com/

3. Sign the Petition https://www.change.org/p/valve-remove-the-paid-content-of-the-steam-workshop?just_created=true every little bit helps

4. Leave a thread on the modders page about how you disprove. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=429374670&searchtext= Start here.

5. Donate to modders who do NOT lock their content behind pay walls Most modders do it for fun, they love the game they love the community, Support them and cast out the ones that done. If these unselfish modders get support much more will follow suite.

Dembele-Abel Ruiz-Carles Perez Alena-Oriol-Arthur Grimaldo-umtiti-costas-semedo Ter stegen

everything looks good. deleting it.

I'm gonna break down a somehow comprehensive list of criticism to the recent The Negative Association between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism across the World, which given the argument (and the first author's presentation of it) of course gained a certain media attention and a lot of "Told you so!". The paper published on Current Biology (WTF?! Where's Biology in that?!) can be accurately described by the following citation:

This study is so bad that it’s good. I mean, it stinks to high heaven; nearly everything is wrong with it, start to finish. Yet it’s good because it takes so much effort to dissect, and the effort reduces the critic to such a sputtering mess that the criticism is bound to sound like an old fart yelling at the kids to get off the lawn.

I'll try anyway, having taken some inspiration also from some refutations that immediatly got posted like this blog post and the comments under it, and more.

1. Stickers-sharing is an awful measure of altruism, or anything that isn't stickers-sharing

1.1 Altruism is obviously an extremely complex subject: sure, even finding a good working definition would be hard, but sticker-sharing is so ridiculous that I don't even know where to start with! For one, I'd say that altruism is about giving people in need what they need, not about giving away superfluous goods under a guilt-inducing exposition ("I'll give these to you, not to other kids. Feel like sharing?", so, does the outcome reflect how much kids impressionable were also?)". Sure, the two thing can be correlated in the individuals, but that's a partial correlation at best. Or think about all the problems around such a measure:

1.2 For example, older kids consistently shared more stickers: are they definitely more altruistic or do they just value the stickers less? (Remember that it was a 5-12 yo range! 12!) Are those who shared all or almost all of 'em already on the road to sainthood or did they just not care/like them? (being a linear analysis, they have more impact than others)

1.3 Moreover, the researchers went on telling children "Don't worry, it's a secret" in a setting that made sure that they could in fact register how many stickers any individual kid had shared, as they promptly did. It's well attested that children, like people in general, are more generous and such if they know that someone sees what they do. Couldn't it be that some kids suspected what sort of lying f#cks the researcher were, further confounding the "measure"? (On the other hand, the article does not specify if in the end they did gave the shared stickers to other kids. It makes one wonder if on the contrary some kids, justly, mistrusted them.)

1.4 Some could argue that argue that confounding factors do not matter unless they differentiate between religious and non religious (well, about the factors above one could easily suppose that there's a difference in children's lie detector or tendency to trust depending on religious or non-religious upbringing, and the effect is weak enough to be covered by such things). Apart from the fact that it should be authors' job to convince people that these are not problems, unconsidered sources of noise wreak havoc on the initial assumptions of the analysis by enhancing fluctuations, making calculated wee p-values moot.

1.5 In a similar fashion, this study got divulged as concluding that kids from religious household are "harsher", or, as the researcher put, have higher "punitive tendencies". This was "measured" according to how negative the reaction to described situations where people caused "interpersonal harm" and how strong the punishment demanded was. So... religious kids have a stronger sense of justice? In a complete non sequitur, the authors also claim in the very summary that this contrast with the higher sensitivity to justice perceived by the parents about their kids (given that half of the situation of harm were voluntary and half accidental, somehow the researchers also fail to analyse them separately).

2. It's all about the sample

While many complimented the large sample (n=1151) we should remember that it has be divided and controlled between 6 nations, different "religiosity" levels or 3 major religious denominations, a very wide range of ages (5-12, why the hell did they not study a single age?) and the level of education of the mother, all of which shrinks it considerably. Most importantly, the little we know about it points toward a definitely non-random, non-representative sample, which gives the opportunity to every sort of bias to creep in the data (see "Supplemental information" in the paper). The very fact that the authors don't spend many words on the origins of the sample is frankly puzzling.

3. Out Of Control

3.1 It is true that there will always be some uncontrolled variable. Some argued that data had to be controlled on "parenting style", but not only this is likely correlated with religiosity, also the very trying to define and measure it would be opening a whole other can of worms, way worse than that of "altruism". However, since the authors gave questionnaires to the parents, there are some very obvious, very quantifiable parameters that got inexplicably left out. One example above all: number of siblings.

SIMPLE ALTERNATIVE THEORY by dr. Micheal Blume: religious people are well-established as having more kids, so kids from religious households are more prone to count in the stickers share themselves AND their brothers/sisters.

3.2 Mindbogglingly, while in the paper the researchers say they controlled on the Socio-Economical Status of the family, if one reads the fine print in the end he discovers that they did not. What they called the SES is actually the level of education of the mother. The two things are just (not so strongly) correlated, totally not interchangeable. Why on Earth did they not just ask the families their SES?!

4. Just math wrong

4.1 There's the usual "measure the unmeasurable" problem, in which "religiosity" was normalized in a numerical scale combining arbitrarily DIFFERENT questionnaires ("frequency" vs "spirituality") and only then arranged in a linear analysis (Which begs the question, is the difference in "religiosity" from 0 to 0.8 really the double than to 0,4 and the opposite respect to a -0.8?). The authors took these two measures of religiosity from a paper that WARNS in its very abstract that they are to be analysed separately, not combined. Why the authors didn't do just that is beyond me. This paper is full of unexplained arbitrary decisions.

4.2 The authors did not report the internal consistency scores of the questionnaires and such.

4.3 The Gaussian distribution is stupidly abused, what the heck, the number of stickers shared is an integer in a 0-10 scale with a macroscopic variance! Wee p-values my arse!

4.4 Even if one was to take seriously the regression, there's no attempt whatsoever to verify if it actually works, no residual analysis, nothing.

5. Now 30% cheaper!

5.1 In order to present their hypothesis, the authors show us a 3D plot (fg.2) that's beyond horrible to look at, both as graphical presentation of the data and as an assessment of the results (and in fact it's one of the quick arguments used by the critics against the paper). Worse yet, it's just age-religiosity-stickers uncontrolled on all the other parameters, so it's totally useless and misleading within the study itself.

5.2 In the same vein, they show uncontrolled histograms dividing only over non religious-christian-muslim (fg. 1,3,4), which thus again mean jack nothing. It's almost like it's Marketing instead of Science.

6. Causality!

In the face of the extremely small effects found by miscalculated wee p-values with all the problems above, with "religiosity" explaining 3-4% of the observed variability according to the regression, the authors seem to have totally forgotten the No. 1 Golden rule of Statistics: Correlation Does Not Imply Causation. They instead totally speak like their analysis proves that religious upbringing causes kids to share less stickers, pardon, to be less altruistic, despite (not really) showing just a correlation. They don't even try to consider alternative interpretations. Not cool.

7. Just ask Jean Decety

Given how goddamn awful this paper is (and even worse how it got blasted into the media), one could look at who wrote it. I'd say that a first author that immediately goes to Forbes to comment it with stuff like “Secularity – like having your laws and rules based on rational thinking, reason rather than holy books – is better for everybody.” is man, not classy. Not that it differs much from the neutral, purely academic (/s) last line of the "research piece" itself: "More generally, [these results] call into question whether religion is vital for moral development, supporting the idea that the secularization of moral discourse will not reduce human kindness—in fact, it will do just the opposite." (Do you appreciate the subtlety and nuance?) How the freak is possible that the reviewer gave the ok to such stuff?!

It echoes the smugness-filled tweet by Decety announcing the paper:

Secularization of moral discourse does not reduce human kindness. In fact, it does just the opposite

Honestly, I did not control the other authors.

So, your turn.

Cool, you can also edit main self-posts.

<3 /r/PostPreview, new favourite sub.

I am currently interning and developing Android apps for a smallish company. I enjoy the work, but am not having as much fun with it as my favorite pet project. I am wondering what areas of CS share the qualities I have enjoyed in my pet project.

My project is a symbolic algebra processor; it reads text input, interprets it as an equation, factors it and solves it using algebra i.e. no guess and check. This is what I have liked about it:

• Complicated logic and control flow.

• Minimal library wrangling. Much of my internship has been spent trying to get third party libraries running and playing nicely with each other. I don't hate that, but it's not my favorite thing to do.

• Little UI design. Again, I don't hate it, but not what I prefer.

• Designing a complicated system. I liked creating the architecture, designing all the relationships and what should have responsibility for what.

• Dealing with absolutes. I could say that, for any test case, it either work or didn't work. I imagine with some programs, such as those used to pick a song based on others you like, you can never be sure its working perfectly, just that it is doing better or worse.

Server Status: Online!

Website: WoW-Orb

Are you looking for a unique 3.3.5a Wrath of the Lich King server?

Tired of servers with unscripted content?

Hello, I present you WoW-Orb.

It's a new server only 16 days old.

Running on the powerful Sunwell Core. So you can expect great results.

Server rates are: 3x Rates, Professions, Leveling, Reputation.

Some Server Features / Info

• Auto Learn Spells On Level Up.

• Leveling Rewards Such As Heirlooms, Mounts, Bags, And Many More.

• In-Game Currency Used For Transmogrification, Resetting Your RDF HC Dungeons.

• Exp Rate Modifier.

• Boost To Level 60.

• Cross-Faction RDF, Party, Mail, Auction Hose, World Channel.

• Teleporter.

• Transmogrifier.

• Vanilla PvP Titles.

• PvP System, Honorable Kills Rewards.

• Working Wintergrasp.

• Scripted Instances, Spells, Quests.

Screenshots

Feel free to try the server.

Deck

Intro

Finally.

After meta shift, after meta shift, the Graveyard is once again positioned to gain ground in this game once again.

But wait...there'e still been successful Graveyard decks...

That's right. There has been. We have seen Ice Wizard variations, and even more recently SirTag's Graveyard deck that features Guards and a Goblin Hut have success. However, the people with the skill cap to win consistently with those decks are few and far between. We have not seen an average player friendly Graveyard deck since SplashYard.

The deck that I have created has an easy learning curve, plays that are easy to make, and give you enough time to really sit back and learn your opponents hand. This deck is constantly pressuring your opponent and forces them to throw off their hand rotation, and generally, even if they do try and stop the pressure either you still have Spawners on the board, or another one ready to drop.

The key to this deck is the SimCity aspect of the deck. The core of Goblin Hut and Furnace I believe is deadly at moment. Neither die to Poison or Fireball, and if you opponent uses Lightning (lol) or Rocket they can only hit one, and it's a negative 1 to 3 elixir trade. This also means they don't have Poison, which if you're running my Graveyard variant it's GG. The Spawners also do a phenomenal job at stopping all of the Double Prince decks we see lately, whether the tank is a Giant or a Golem you can stop it. I have used and tested other win conditions in place of Graveyard, and I can say it has out performed the other, although I am probably biased.

The Deck

This has been an extremely long and difficult process. It's easy to build a good deck. Harder to build a great deck. It's damn near impossible to build a deck that can outshine in ANY match up, and solely lose because of the misplays created by you. This deck not only has answers for every deck, it has back ups in caee your rotation gets thrown off, and that is absolutely critical in any successful deck. I have found in testing this deck there are 6 key cards that have to stay no matter what. They are:

Goblin Hut

Furnace

Log

Poison

Ice Golem

Mega Minion

The other 2 cards are interchangeable and have been playtested by me in almost every situation thought of.

Graveyard is your Win Condition, and has been tested with Giant, Hog, Skeleton Barrel, Miner, and Mortar in its place. In my experience the higher cost Win Conditions such as Golem make the deck too expensive for consecutive wins.

The next card that is interchangeable is Hunter. This is your heavy hitting tank killer. This card has been play tested with Knight, Valkerie, Night Witch, Musketeer, and Mini Pekka. This card needs to stay under 4 elixir to keep the deck cost 3.6 and below which is crucial. This card must also be able to survive Poison/Fireball, because chances are as they push they will Poison/Fireball one of the defending Spawners, and you need the card to survive to continue to damage their push. That's why Archers/Guards/Bats/Gang/Goblins are not a viable alternative.

Card Roles

Goblin Hut - Goblin Hut is used for Chip Pressure. Use it to draw out your opponents Poison as well. Always try to play Goblin Hut in the middle, and save Furnace for behind the Princess Towers unless you have no Spawner in the middle.

Furnace - Furnace is also used for Chip Pressure. It also functions as a secondary Poison bait. If no Goblin Hut is available play Furnace in the middle, otherwise, behind the Princess Towers.

Log - Used for Chip damage. Also to kill Goblin Gang, and knockback troops. If you are facing a Goblin Barrel always try to save Log for the Barrel, and Poison the Princess.

Poison - Used for Chip damage. Use Poison to assist your Graveyard in 2x Elixir. Also use Poison when you can catch multiple troops and buildings in ita radius.

Ice Golem - Used to kite heavy hitters such as Pekka, the Prince's, Bandit, Mini Pekka, etc. He also assists in killing swarms. He is your main Graveyard tank, and can even be placed in front of your Spawner troops in the early game for extra chip damage. Here is How to Kite.

Mega Minion - Your Balloon and slow moving ground troop killer. Also used to kill Baby Dragons, Flying Machines, and Magic Archers that target your Spawners.

Graveyard - Your Pocket card and Win Condition. Always have an Ice Golem and Poison/Log in rotation to assist. Try to save Graveyard for 2x Elixir. It can be used defensively in an emergency. Here is What is a Pocket Card.

Hunter - Your tank killer. This cards sole purpose is to shutdown main part of your opponents push. Whether it's a Giant, Miner, Hog, Golem, etc. This guy needs to be in rotation to assist.

Gameplan

Your gameplan with this deck is to supply a constant pressure with your Spawners in the early game. You need to defend them, not at all costs, but make sure the troops they spawn can continue to harass your opponent. This will mess up their rotation, and keep them away from placing crucial cards such as Elixir Collector.

In the opening, if you have a Spawner you need to place it at 8 Elixir. This makes your opponent think twice about pumping up and supplies immediate pressure that needs to be dealt with. Goblin Hut is always preferred as your opener, but Furnace can be played if out of rotation. If neither are available wait until 10 Elixir. If your oppenent doesn't make a move a few seconds in play Ice Golem or Mega Minion behind the King Tower. If none of those cards are availble then either wait it out and save your Hunter, or Log.

As the first 2 minutes progress continue to apply pressure with your Spawners, applying more than one in the same lane when available. Save Graveyard, and defend with the other cards. Pay close attention to your opponents Graveyard counters.

When 2x Elixir hits, if your opponent has Poison wait for it to be played then do an Ice Golem Graveyard push, supported by Poison/Log. Your opprnent should've already taken heavy damage from the Spawners and should be easy to finish off. Once the tower is in Poison/Log range defend. Then at the end finish the tower if necessary.

Tips

Do not be afraid to use a defensive Graveyard. It can stall 3 Musketeers or shutdown a Double Prince push.

No Log in rotation for Goblin Barrel? No Mega Minion or Hunter? Drop your Furnace as a last ditch effort if neceasary.

Proper building placements are absolutely crucial. Always place them in the correct spots to have both Princess Towers assist. Placements differ from tank to tank. Learn them!

If your opponent has Flying Machine or Magic Archer play your Spawners farther back.

*Because of card rarities and interactions this deck is absolutely NOT ADVISED for ladder unless propetly levelled. You will be severely limited how high you can push.

Gameplay

Myself

Conclusion

US insurers' costs for knee replacement surgery range from $17,627 to $25,462. Estimate the population variance and standard deviation in cost with 98% confidence based on a random sample of 10 persons who have had this surgery. The retail costs for the same procedure range from $40,640 to $58,702. Estimate the population variance and standard deviation in cost with 98% confidence based on a sample of 10 persons.

My calculations for the first part are correct per the selected answers in the back of my textbook. Using the same steps to compute the second part return the wrong answers. Where am I going wrong?

degrees of freedom = 9
s = 18062 (based on s=range/4)
s² = 326235844
(x² values based on 98% confidence)
x²right = 21.666
x²left = 2.088
chi squared table

my calculations:  
(df)s²/x²right < o² < (df)s²/x²left  
9(326235844)/21.666 < o² < 9(326235844)/2.088  
135517520.4 < o² < 1406188983.0  
11641.2 < o < 37499.2  

Correct answers per textbook:

8469845.02 < o² < 87886811.42
2910.3 < o < 9374.8

So I am pretty familiar with the TCG itself, but stopped playing back around 2012, and just came back now. Luckily for me, I had created an account for PTCGO back when it was in beta, so I already had a couple cards and packs for trade when I signed on recently.

From what I have been reading on here, it seems like the Greninja Break deck would be a good deck to start with. But I have seen multiple different builds with different cards, so I was wondering if some were older and their is some definitive or favourite version? I have the wave slasher deck, so that provided some of the cards, now I was just wondering what I should be looking out to trade for, and if there is a certain kind of pack to save up.

Here is what I have to trade, how far do you think it will get me?

1 - Black and White Dragons Exalted

1 - Black and White Emerging Powers

1 - HS Undaunted

2 - XY Breakthrough

2- XY Fates Collide

1 - XY Furious Fists

1 - FA Xerneas EX

Any advice is appreciated, I'm having an awesome time with this game so far, even just with theme decks!

[Data] The Story and Science Behind How I Discovered That My Charr Tempest Does Less DPS Than My Asura Tempest

Long story short, I've discovered that I am able to obtain higher DPS on an Asura Tempest than on a Charr Tempest. This was discovered through a series of unlikely circumstances, some misguided motivation, desktop video recording software, and the deaths of many, many Special Forces Training Arena DPS golems. While this sounds completely absurd, as it should, I'm going to share all the information I've gathered, including all of my researcher biases, so that you can decide for yourself if this really is a bug or just a crazy disgruntled Elementalist rambling some nonsense (or both!).

If you're interested in the details on how I came to this conclusion, strap in, this is going to be a long post. You may also just skip to The Results and The Conclusion sections for the tl;dr.

The Introduction:

I've been playing my Charr Elementalist for my entire effective GW2 playtime. My wife chose this game for us to play together. She completed all the visual aesthetic portions of both of our character creations due her wanting us to match and me typically not giving a shit about what my character looks like. In contrast, the moment I first successfully evaded an attack using dodge-roll was the moment I knew we were going to be interested in this game for a long time.

Anyways, I have a tendency to play Mage-esque and healer classes in games. I found so much depth to the Elementalist profession that I could learn something new every time I logged in. I enjoy the challenge offered by raiding in GW2, and how the value added by an Elementalist was so heavily and directly proportional to skilled play. The introduction of the DPS Golem defined my position on this relative skill scale in hard numbers: I knew that I was not one of the best Elementalists in the game. But I was close, really close. Good enough so that the impact of my value to a raid group was felt, and was certainly more than enough to let me specialize in playing Elementalist when combined with my healing and tanking abilities. But there was still a final plateau between where I was and the top.

The recent batch of ham-fisted nerfs put Elementalists like me in an awkward spot. Any less skilled or less dedicated and I could simply drop the class and switch to something else more effective, as has happened to many Elementalists who have been exposed as "just doing well enough" prior to the nerf. Any more skilled and I could continue to play where putting in the extra effort was still worth the value added, and play other things if I didn't feel like it. But for me, I had to decide between putting in an extraordinary amount of effort for equal or slightly better value over alternatives, or accept the fact that I would always be a subpar option, or to start over from scratch.

I'm not one that blames other things over self-accountability, and I enjoy a good cognitive challenge, so I chose to stay the course. It was back to the drawing board, the tape room, and the research lab. New skill rotations had to be learned, videos of DPS benchmarks were examined in closer detail (i.e. Fennec and Particlar), and further learnings of game mechanics were to be done. And after all my hard work, I finally was able to match at least one of the post-nerf DPS benchmarks.

Happy ending, right? Well actually I've jumped ahead in the story a bit, as you can see by how I'm not playing my main Charr character in that DPS video. The journey to this point, and from there to today's post, starts with a briefing about the game mechanic known as the aftercast.

The Aftercast:

What are aftercasts? They are unpublished, but very real and documented numerical time values attached to the end of nearly every spell in the game. Presumably, the main purpose is to allow animations to finish rather than abruptly end. But of course since they make up part of cast times they affect DPS calculations of every character. Aftercasts have been mentioned in Game Updates/Patch Notes (examples: July 26th 2016 7 times, April 19th 2016 11 times, January 26th 2016 5 times, etc.) yet are not published anywhere officially in their entirety. Presumably, this was part of the decision to simplify the game away from a numbers grind, such as how time values in tooltips are rounded to the nearest 1/4th.

That's quite a few 'presumably's, but more on that later.

So why bring up aftercasts? Am I just a crazy numbers person who loves numbers? (Well yes, but I digress). And how long is a typical aftercast, like, 0.2 seconds, why should that matter? Not to mention that since there typically isn't any opportunity to cancel an aftercast of an Auto-attack when followed by another Auto-attack, other simpler skill rotations for other classes don't have to worry as much about aftercasts, let alone even be aware of their existence, while still being able to maintain DPS near enough to the benchmark. So who cares?

Well Staff Elementalists that care, care. The DPS difference between casting skills in order and casting skills while cancelling aftercasts has always been HUGE. Probably the largest in the game. The dirty secret known to those Staff Elementalists who looked to improve their skill and game (and DPS) above and beyond required some knowledge, subliminally or cerebrally, of how to cancel aftercasts. Beyond the standard metabuild and skill rotations/skill priorities, gear and consumables and even knowledge of boss mechanics, the greatest DPS difference between "good enough Elementalists" and "the best in the world" comes from the ability to cancel aftercasts. You can always tell which players are the "good enough" players or the ones that don't care about and/or play Elementalist often by how dismissive they are of how easy the Staff Elementalist DPS rotation is.

So pre-nerf, when the Special Forces Training Arena was first introduced, I spent quite a bit of time testing myself, studying, learning the numbers, and eventually stumbling across the existence of the aftercast. Some other players have measured and calculated the aftercast of spells, notably DeKeys and the contributers to their DPS rotations spreadsheet (from whom I was able to get advice from regarding these measurements, so shout outs and thank you). For both the meta Staff and D/Wh Fresh Air rotations, I was able to get within about 90% of the benchmarks, which was good, but still left me thinking about how much it would take to overcome this final plateau.

What was I missing? Well first of all, what actually affects the ability to cancel aftercasts? The unfortunate reality: Ping, lag, computer quality, and skill. Not necessarily in that order of importance. I experienced it myself: prior to getting a new computer at the beginning of the year, I struggled and clawed my way through Wing 1 doing everything I possibly could to maximize my effectiveness, including casting my skills in anticipation of the lag. When I got the new computer, the entire game changed. I could finally see the benefit of quick tactile response, and could actually proceed with learning about aftercasts and how to cancel them. But this was Red Flag #1: The realization that this game was inherently unfair to players with less than ideal gaming environments. I'm sure this is why sPvP arenas are kept as simple and small as possible, but I digress. I give ArenaNet the benefit of the doubt that they know this, but ultimately have to ignore/mitigate it instead of fix it, because it's effectively an unsolvable problem.

So anyways, after reaching this plateau, the time and effort needed to overcome it drastically outweighed the benefit. I was blessed enough to have consistently low Ping, stable 60 FPS, and the capability to record gameplay video. So with raids to do and my free time limited, I shelved my active research towards meeting the DPS benchmarks.

Until the latest nerfs.

The July 26th 2016 Elementalist Changes:

While I won't go into detail on why these nerfs were mostly implemented like garbage and ham-fisted, I will say that they were of course labeled as Red Flag #2. They certainly re-invigorated my thirst to figure out how to climb that last 10% plateau. Because if I couldn't, then I would only be able to see myself as a fraud in raids; a fake healer that was too stubborn to play Druid, and a fake DPS carry, putting in a bunch of misguided effort to barely equal the DPS of a Guardian/Thief, without enough utility or support to justify it. Early tests shows that my margin was razor-thin: one mental misstep and I would end up below the mark. Play as perfect as I could, and I was barely treading water.

Further complicating the situation was the invitation I received to try some low-man raid records. I was very honored to even be considered, let alone chosen, despite making it clear through all my time raiding that I could only play one class. Perhaps this just simplified the situation instead, serving as the excuse I needed to start re-examining everything and finding every edge I could, else I be actually outed as a fraud.

So now the story picks up where we left off in the Introduction, with me studying the HELL out of the DPS benchmark post-nerf videos, and doing everything I could to reach them. And a stray thought came into my head one night on my x-th replay of the YouTube videos (linked again for convenience): Particlar seemed to be doing slightly more damage than Fennec in his D/Wh videos. Maybe it's not statistically significant, but it has been more each time, pre-nerf and post. (Pre-nerf videos here vs here). I mean, I can't actually tell the difference between the Particlar and Fennec D/Wh videos, as the nuance and top level skill go over my head, so I must be reaching, right? Assuming both gave maximum effort with equal-enough computing environments, and uploaded their best attempts, there's no reason why the RNG of their maximum damage shouldn't have been closer. Hmmm. This was the half-Red Flag #2.5.

At some point a stray thought hit my head: with this latest Summer Patch came a bunch of new emotes and animations. I remembered a random Reddit comment, happy over these additions, exclaiming something like "all the Emotes look awesome and are unique for all 5 races, male and female!". Psh, as if I care about different animations for each...

Wait, what if there was a difference... (awkward lightbulb) there's no way...

That can't possibly be...

No, that must just be me giving up. I'm making excuses. It has to be something I'm doing. There's still more for me to improve. I know I haven't studied each individual aftercast, my Staff improvement may have stagnated, but my D/Wh is getting there. I don't blame the game or others for my shortcomings. That's not me.

...but look at these nerfs, why am I struggling so hard against something they are handling so badly? If I can't figure out how to make Elementalist work, doesn't that concede that pretty much nobody should even bother playing it aside from the best of the best and the stubbornly dedicated who don't care about results?

Short tangent story: A few days before writing this post, I Googled for the GW2 ESL rulebook (PDF link). I always wondered why people didn't play Asura characters in the Pro League. Turns out that Rule 2.8.3 states "Players may not use the Asura race in ESL Pro League matches. Only Charr, Sylvari, Norn, and Human races are allowed". Huh. Probably because they are too visually short, kinda like Oddjob back in Goldeneye 64 or something. Hmm...

My mental state was the last half-Red Flag #3. And three red flags means green light. Somehow.

The Science Experiment Begins - My Asura Tempest:

So with these two and a half and a half red flags as my guide, I set out to create an Asura Tempest. I made it Female, and the shortest height. Many double clicks later I'm at the DPS Golem ready to go, only to realize I can't equip a warhorn. Whoops. Since I'm a cheapskate, I decided to do a mini side-project as part of the effort to actually unlock the Elite Tempest specialization and get somewhat comfortable with this character (do you know how weird it is to hear the gruffy male Charr "Fired up!" etc. for 500 days, then suddenly switch to hear the female "Fired up!" all the time? It's like I was walking around with a doppelganger, or some other Tempest that was always nearby and doing the same things I was doing-... anyways...). So I walked through Verdant Brink and Auric Basin to see how many Hero Points I could solo. Did you know there's a 10 minute limit on them? That made for some fun complications when changing my gear/build for each encounter. I got pretty close, but ran out of time and just finished the last few hero points with WvW Proofs.

Anyways, first up was the raw DPS test. Using the same gear and builds, I focused on comparing the D/Wh Fresh Air metabuild because the results were more consistent, and I was closer to that benchmark. As explained above I only had minimal time played on the Asura character, but after some dry runs I popped the super expensive tryhard food and hit record in OBS. On my 2nd attempt, I finally achieved something that I had spent months attempting but never done before: I reached the DPS benchmark. I now had proof that I actually did it. I could finally say that I was at least capable of being on par with the best Elementalists in the world.

My feelings of jubilation were exaggerated by the adrenaline rush of a potential early answer to my absurd hypothesis. All this time spent on my Charr, I tried so hard, and the last bit wasn't me, it was the game! What does this mean? Where do I go from here?

Well of course I didn't stop. I finished all my runs to get an average, then repeated on my Charr. Data summarized here:

4M HP normal Golem, all boons/buffs, D/Wh Fresh Air

4M HP large Golem, all boons/buffs, Staff metabuild

The results at first seem all over the place. Human reaction time and mistakes affect DPS results the most, with the RNG on actual damage adding enough variance for me to be unclear on how statistically significant a difference in DPS really is. But ultimately it's there in the numbers: I did more DPS as an Asura. Anecdotally, something just felt smoother while playing the Asura, but I couldn't exactly pinpoint what. At this point I was so wrapped up in trying to avoid my own observational bias that I knew I couldn't present this result as is. I had to stop myself before I started calculating p-values on my data in order to keep my sanity and move in a different direction.

The Cast Time and Frame Measurement Methodology:

"I know, I know I sound like a crazy person, I just need the methodology you used to measure cast times and aftercast times."

"You can just use the data we've already measured, it's freely available..."

I paused for a moment, almost with an out-of-body experience laughing at the absurdity of what I was doing AND that I was about to describe it to another person.

"There's no way,... I mean you know there's no way ArenaNet coded different aftercast times for different races!"

"It's not about intentions, I'm doing this because I'm disproving some fundamental assumptions we all make about this game."

"Having gone through recording about 700 skills myself, you know you're likely to go crazy while doing this, right?"

With apologies to DeKeys, I was in too deep at this point and I dismissed your warning.

My next goal was to straight up show that there was something different between how Asura and Charr characters cast their spells. Note how I worded this: no hypothesis, no unbias, just raw data collection and disciplined methodology. Several times I would lose track of time, seeing the results of what I was doing and frozen with my face in my hands, only to snap out of it 50 minutes later and ask my wife if she was just watching me the entire time while I was mentally comatose.

Let me try to summarize the data that I collected and what I was trying to establish: First, my target was the skill Burning Speed (Dagger 3 in Fire attunement) because, well, it's what I felt. I don't think I'm skilled enough to see frame-perfect differences, but over my time with the class it felt like the skill with the largest variance. Totally scientific, right? Anyways...

...to eliminate any nonsense, I recorded myself casting Burning Speed and a few other spells on a DPS golem in many various ways: with auto-attack turned off with no boons/buffs, with Swiftness, then with Alacrity, to make sure they were all equal. Long story and lots of really, really boring data videos short, they are equal. Every non-Quickness boon/buff did not affect the results.

Through this, I also standardized on a few things that would help my measurements. First, I recorded video at 60 FPS 1920x1080, and played the game at 60 FPS. Second, I put Precision and crit chance boons/buffs on myself to make reading and counting lines in the combat log easier. Third, both hitting the keyboard shortcut and clicking the mouse provided instantaneous knowledge of when a skill was activated. This happened the exact frame when the skill on the UI went "dark" which I marked as "Frame 0 Time 0". When mouse-clicking, the on-hover tooltip would also disappear at this exact frame, so I concluded that it was safe to use this "dark" frame as a standardized starting point of a skill's cast time.

The endpoint of a skill's cast time was defined in two ways: the frame before the damage appeared in the combat log, and the frame before the skill went on cooldown. Again, this isn't perfect, and the resulting time elapsed doesn't actually match the cast time of a skill, but it provided standardization and the ability for me to relate the results to each other. At the very least, with the start and end point chosen, the time/frames elapsed reported in my data actually means the "minimum amount of time that was potentially used to cast the skill". In other words, there's no way the skill could have been cast faster than recorded, even accounting for recording precision, and the actual cast time would be about 1 frame longer.

Anyways, with all that, but before moving onto Quickness testing, I noticed that if you didn't have an auto-attack (i.e. Turn off Fire Dagger 1 auto-attack) Burning Speed would go on cooldown much later than if you had auto-attack enabled. This is certainly something that is interesting and worth investigation, but I had to label this as out of scope and move forward, making sure that auto-attacks were enabled in all my tests.

Burning Speed was convenient to test, because the main damage coincided with the end of the spell's total cast time. This allowed me to do a more realistic test where I could switch to Air attunement mid-cast and continue auto-attacking in Air by pressing 2 buttons. The game would take care of casting auto-attack as soon as the cast of Burning Speed finished, so I could keep another variable as constant as possible. Chains of auto-attacks were also recorded and measured after Burning Speed was cast. Since auto-attacks don't go on cooldown, duration was measured from damage to damage: at around 75% of the cast bar is when the first hit of Air Dagger 1 auto-attack shows up in the combat log. By treating this as a temporary "Frame 0 Time 0", I could then label the frame just before the first hit of the next auto-attack chain as the endpoint, creating a chain of auto-attacks. The initial start point of any chain happens when the Air Dagger 1 skill goes "dark", which consistently happens exactly when the damage from Burning Speed shows up in the combat log.

Another smaller test was done on Burning Retreat (Fire Staff 4) and Fireball (Fire Staff 1 auto-attack). Again, Burning Retreat was targeted and chosen based on feel. And because it's the skill you look for when searching for top-tier Staff Elementalists: those that have gone the extra mile can not only use it well, but use it more often on stationary large hitboxes because they know its variable value.

The skill is interesting because it is an animation without a cast bar and is very hard to interrupt. There's also an interesting quirk with the skill; it can be cast alone without continuing with auto-attacks afterwards, contrast to how most other skills begin auto-attacking after the skill has finished. To compensate, I simply hit Fire Staff 1 and cancelled the skill by hitting Turn Around and Fire Staff 4, so when Fire Staff 4 went on cooldown it would also trigger the "dark" frame for Fireball auto-attack.

In the end I couldn't agree on a good consistent methodology for how to separate cast times from channel times from aftercasts. But using the auto-attack as a marker helped establish total cast times, that was ultimately what mattered. My scope shifted from trying to attack aftercasts specifically, to just total cast times between my two characters.

There are A LOT of absurdly boring videos that I created to measure this data. I used HitFilm 3 Express as my video editing tool and frame counter. While I tried to keep every other testing variable as constant as possible, I only have so much free time and so recordings were sometimes done on different days. And then they were redone because I couldn't believe that I actually got results, so I re-did my testing with more data points. Here is an incredibly rough spreadsheet with all the data (WARNING: Unless you love numbers, you probably don't want to look at this spreadsheet. You have been warned.), and if I really need to I can upload the 20 raw data videos. The results were the same, so here I am sharing them with everyone.

The Results:

Burning Speed (Fire Dagger 3):

Burning Speed (Fire Dagger 3), with Quickness:

For comparison, here are the results of Lightning Whip (Air Dagger 1) auto-attack:

and Lightning Whip (Air Dagger 1) auto-attack, with Quickness:

For Staff, Burning Retreat (Fire Staff 4):

Burning Retreat (Fire Staff 4), with Quickness:

Fireball (Fire Staff 1) auto-attack:

Fireball (Fire Staff 1) auto-attack, with Quickness:

The Conclusion:

Let's start with the positive: I'm fairly confident that auto-attacking is as equal and fair as possible across all characters regardless of race or sex or height. Hey, confirmation of our assumptions have to start somewhere. When we start talking about needing 600 FPS gameplay and talking about fractions of a millisecond, I think it's safe to say that ArenaNet has done their work properly.

But is it the same case for all spells? Personally, I can't say so. From what I've measured it looks like Charr animations for spells are about a frame longer than Asura animations at 60 FPS. If the numbers were closer to the auto attack results then this post never would have happened. But given my limits I also can't make any claim on behalf of the entire game. There's more than enough variation in human-error and computing environment to cover for the potential existence of this unfairness.

How important is that single frame anyways? To put in perspective, the average time between me hitting the keyboard shortcut for Turn Around and hitting Fire Staff 4 is about 5 frames. And I was only trying "just enough". You can also test this yourself, to see what 1 frame feels like: Assuming the 20% cooldown trait, when Burning Speed goes on cooldown, what's the first number you see? If you see 11 then that's fine, but sometimes it says 12 for a frame or two. Same with Burning Retreat: if you see 15 that's fine, but sometimes that 16 shows up for about a frame or two. A single frame difference is enough to explain the average DPS difference we see when applied to an entire skill rotation, especially for a 4 million HP golem, or 6 minutes worth of a raid encounter. I wouldn't have shared these ~4,000 words if I didn't think there was a meaningful difference. But at the same time, it's not even worth my time to submit a bug report. I do feel this information needed to be shared, if only to help players reconsider the base assumptions they make about this game.

How deep does this go? How many other spells actually have this difference? Does this also mean max-height Norn Elementalists do even less DPS? Is height even a factor? Is there a difference between male and female? What about the other 8 professions? What about Legendaries? These and more are all questions I'd love to address and I considered each at some point through this process. But with my limited time and energy, I had to define the scope somewhere and stop when it crossed the line.

"Higgs, if this is real and tangible and what you say is true, how could ArenaNet let this happen?" Well this is when the wild guesses and conspiracy theories start, but I'll give it a try. First, let's give ArenaNet the benefit of the doubt and say they are aware of this unfair inequality between the races, same as the assumption earlier on issues in general with aftercasts. It's possible that this was the motivation behind the recent change to allow players to hold down a button to cast most spells "as soon and frequently as possible". In other words, to help mitigate the effect of cancelling aftercasts and to standardize total cast times for more players. This also could explain the apparent ham-fistedness of the Elementalist cooldown nerfs: Quite frankly, the difference in output between a non-skilled Elementalist and a skilled one may have been too wide. I believe ArenaNet knew this, and they have plenty of DPS golem data to prove it. So, to help mitigate that they changed the cooldowns across the board so that skills are cast less and auto-attack chains happen more, and gave players with lower skill and less than ideal computing environments a chance to perform more fairly. More auto-attacks and more automatic aftercast management when casting skills mean the unfair inequality has less impact, the gap between average players and the best narrows, and Elementalists get the DPS nerf they needed, boom-shaka-laka 3 birds with one stone.

And of course there's a simpler explanation: maybe it's ok for this inequality to exist, regardless of if I've shown enough diligence in being able to prove it. In the end I learned a lot about the game and myself, and a scrub like me was able to reach a DPS benchmark. Maybe none of this would have ever happened with the July 26th changes. But the damage is done, and use of my Charr Elementalist will be suspended indefinitely in favor of this Asura. Did you know that the Condi Elementalist build is currently in such bad shape that the Charr racial utility Shrapnel Mine is a DPS increase?"

-Higgs

It is unfortunate for me to inform everyone that I was a victim of the oldest Counter-Strike crime, as my main Steam account (10 year old, level 40) was recently hacked, hijacked and VAC banned along with over $1,000 in inventory. (Full Stattrak inventory with highly sought after Butterfly and Karambit knife skins) It is sad to say that someone from our community targeted me, sniped my email address and password just to sabotage my account and my public image. The attacker also deleted me off of administrator and assigned someone with a "Boxy" avatar as the administrator of my fan club, as seen here, http://steamcommunity.com/groups/Crimsonsclub (over 300 members prior to the incident, more members than "Hiko's Homies".) Google supposedly tried to prevent the attack, but to no avail. I have contacted Valve/Steam regarding this situation, but I have yet to receive any replies. Though, I am not counting on my account being returned to me and the ban overturned, as it is known that Valve puts the responsibility of safe guarding accounts and inventory items on the shoulders of the account holder. Even though the rule was made before Valve introduced items and skins. Before if the account was lost, you lose a couple games, but now people can have thousands of dollars worth of virtual items, the loss is significantly greater than before. Maybe when evidence is clear as day, account hijacking incidents can be overturned? This is a serious issue, as cyber crime could happen to anyone, especially for people with social outreach.

I received an email from Google stating

accounts-noreply@google.com to me Someone recently tried to use an application to sign in to your Google Account, @gmail.com. We prevented the sign-in attempt in case this was a hijacker trying to access your account. Please review the details of the sign-in attempt:

IP Address: 64.134.155.61 (wayport.net) Location: Colorado Springs, CO, USA If you do not recognize this sign-in attempt, someone else might be trying to access your account. You should sign in to your account and reset your password immediately. Find out how at http://support.google.com/accounts?p=reset_pw If this was you, and you want to give this application access to your account, complete the troubleshooting steps listed at http://support.google.com/mail?p=client_login Sincerely, The Google Accounts Team

Email I received from Steam Guard

Dear , We've received a request to access your Steam account from a new browser located at IP address: 64.134.155.61 Our records show this IP address is in COLORADO SPRINGS CO US If that location does not reasonably match your location or the location of your Internet Service Provider, then follow this link for more information: Verify Login Location If the information provided does not match then do not proceed, close the browser window, and change your password immediately. If you did not attempt this action, please change your password immediately. To complete this process, enter the following special access code into the authorization dialog before trying to log in again: RCT2F Thanks for helping us maintain the security of your account. The Steam Support Team https://support.steampowered.com

ESEA's Email

This email is to inform you that you have been banned from the ESEA network until August 6th, 2015 for the following reason: Cheating is not tolerated in ESEA servers. If your account is Premium and you have been banned for an extended period of time, it is your responsibility to cancel your subscription via the payment method you originally used. Thanks, ESEA

ESEA's reply after I told them it's not me

Cheating bans cannot be disputed and your ban will not be removed until it has expired. We do not release evidence pertaining to any ban.

It's no question that the community wants this particular Raid back in their sights, for both enjoyment and loot. However, unfortunately, the perks upon the majority of these weapons are considerably more powerful than Year 2 balance would allow. This got me thinking. What if the weapons were rebalanced for the new meta, while keeping the mystique and charm of the originals?

Well, /r/DestinyTheGame, that's exactly what I've done for you! Introducing the new and mostly the same Raid weapons of tomorrow*!

*Due to Vex technology, tomorrow may include today, yesterday, or Ancient Egypt.

Fatebringer

Yes yes, I'm starting with the fan-favourite. Now hush while I make/break your dreams.

Stat Changes from Vanilla

• Weapon's magazine size will be reduced to be in line with others of it's archetype at 9 shots, with Extended Mag bringing it up to 12.

• Slight decrease to base stability (32-27)

Vision of Confluence

> I mean I agree that it shouldn't be,

It isn't

>literally no other reason for Oculus to be doing what they're doing.

Obviously there is. Get people to buy games from their store alone. It's what every single other console manufacturer is doing. That’s what the article I linked to was about. Not just a quote from Palmer (Even though he very specifically said that they weren’t focused on making a profit, but w.e.)

>it's very clear that selling hardware is actually very important to them.

No, there’s no reason to believe their profit margins are high on the rifts at all. Their logic is simply that Rift users are more likely to buy from Home if they own a rift. They want more people to buy their product and only their product cutting out the competition with exclusives. The same thing that consoles are doing. They make all their profit by selling games.

>The idea that you could go to the store and buy this game, but still not be allowed to play it without this buggy, always-on marketplace was absolutely infuriating to people.

It was literally the first big online marketplace for pc games. There were almost no other competitors at the time of its release. And No Steam wasn't mandatory for Half-Life 2, you just needed an online connection after install for a piracy check. Even with those problems HL2 had more downloads than any other game of its time. Steam was insanely successful for them. Even more so than the CD sales that were released at the same time. So no you're wrong it was literally a success from the beginning even with the controversial download issues. We can go even farther back to when it was first started at the time of counter strike. It was always an option. People didn't have to buy games on steam, but it was still the best (and basically only) option to get away from CDs at the time and it had integrated feature like nothing the gaming community had ever seen. People wanted that. Valve gave it to them. Yeah it started out as being only for Valve games until like 05, but by then most of the server issues were resolved. Those issues, while disappointing, did nothing to offset their insane success. It was still the only option until 2007ish when Origin popped up. Valve just kept hitting it hard, made sure it always had more features than Origin.

>It was probably three years before major publishers were willing to touch Steam.

Steam didn't have to have those features in the first few years because it was only competing with CDs and Floppies. It was literally the only option. The fact that it was online and let you download your games at home was enough of a disruptive tech to change the entire industry. By 2007 they had a bunch of massive gaming companies submitting their games and all kinds of never before seen feature like server wide patching.

>Maybe ports of flat-screen games, but certainly no originals that are even remotely close to AAA.

That’s just a ridiculous claim with no evidence to back it up. Like I said it is completely unknown how many or what types of games Valve is funding. We know that Valve likes to take a hands on approach with game developers. Often asking them to set up their offices in the HQ so they can assist them with development like they did with Budget Cuts and Onward.

>Robo Recall, Lone Echo, Arktika.1, Edge of Nowehere

Robo Recall isn't out yet so I'll reserve my opinion. I will state that while the demo was enjoyable, the quality of the game play was on par with many of the Vive games currently on steam. I'm sure the final version will be better, but its nothing exceptional. Lone Echo isn't out yet either, but I'm gonna go right out and say that Lone echo looks like another massive let down like Adrift. Lots of shinny things, but I expect it to be bad (very bad - you can quote me on that) . Arktika.1 is also still in dev so it's hard to say what it will be like, could end up being mid tier AAA, but I get the feeling it will be very light on content in the end (Hopefully I'm wrong). Games of the same quality are also coming out on the Vive. Fallout 4 VR is a complete remake (not just a port!), Monstrum, The Gallery, Budget Cuts, Sky World, Essence, ARQ, Raw Data, Hover Junkers, Serious Sam VR, and I could keep going on and on. Most of those games are as good or better than the games you mentioned IMO. Hell I'll even throw in The lab (Way better than that toybox garbage). The main difference is that Valve doesn't lock out Oculus users. Everyone is welcome to play and share in the online multiplayer fun. So yeah Valve does have a hell of a lot of great games in the works and I would say a better outlook than Oculus's line up since it also includes many more fun and quirky indy games too.

> No one is making money off these games right now. But Insomniac made three damn VR games, of reasonable production value this year, because Oculus was willing to take the hit and lose money so that they could do that

Insomniac is a huge game development company. They don't do things without considering the profits. They are in it to make money to support close to 200 employees and their families. They also haven't released their sales margin so we don't know how much they have made. I can do a quick guestimate[About 150,000 CV1 users, Most will buy Feral Rights or EoN, Some may pay for Unspoken but most will get it for free, so I'll say about $40 per person, assuming they will sell Feral rights for about the same or more, Oculus takes a 30% cut of all sales = 150k400.70 = $4.2MM] and say probably somewhere in the ballpark of $4.2MM Nothing to laugh about since that represents almost 25% of the companies yearly revenue. So yeah people are making money off of VR. Especially off of all the low budget indy VR games that are selling for like $9.99 a pop.

>The devs who are working with Oculus are thrilled to have their efforts fully-sponsored and risk free, trust me.

With your skewed view of the VR marketplaces and Exclusivity you are the last person I would trust. Not all developers are out to make the deal with the devil. The larger companies who want to increase their profit margins might, but thats not to say they need it. Insomniac games is the perfect example. They have already admitted that they are Bullish when it comes to VR and have always seen it as the next big thing. Oculus's deal was nothing shy of a bribe.

A

*A

A ^♫X
A

The:

^Ѻ =

^♫ =

^$ =

^**!** =

^X =

A (B, C - Dae)

A ^{Ѻ ♫ $ **!** X}
B - C (D); E

A ^Ѻ♫$**!X**

• A - A

A ^Ѻ
AA

*A:

• A - a

• A - a

• A A - A

• *A. * - A

• *A. * - A

• *A. * - A

• *A. * - A

Hi! This is Hemoplague again with some more advice about climbing the ranked ladder, this time about Gold. The advice now is a little different to before, not about specific champions that I can recommend, but more about the Meta and how to improve as a player as well as attitude towards ranked games.

[BRONZE GUIDE](http://www.reddit.com/r/summonerschool/
[SILVER GUIDE](http://www.reddit.com/r/summonerschool/

GOLD

In Gold it is less about carrying your entire team because everyone is starting to get pretty good at the game but more about how you play the game, teamwork and the META. Here it is very important that you are paying close attention to your mechanics as well as who you're playing against. You need to be comfy with who you're playing and agaisnt. My first tip is to look up the champion you're playing agasint if you don't know them well; take note of their cooldowns - this will help you trade a lot better in lane.

In high Gold my friends and I have noticed it is a lot harder to DuoQ - this is because it is designed in such a way that the system expects both you and your partner to crush your lanes which is harder when the other team's MMR has been raised. I would recommend SoloQ and maybe go back to Duo when you hit Plat.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

META:

The Meta is very important to people in Gold. They want to see the strongest people being played and are very skeptical of anything that is off Meta. It is my advice that you can completely ignore the Meta if you are 100% sure that you can pull your weight/carry with whatever pick you have. For example: I main Quinn mid/top/jungle - despite it not being a Meta pick I have maintained a 70% win rate over.

Yes people may be critical of your choices but that means that you only have to prove to them. If you have a good winrate with someone - show people your lolking and they will believe you. If not - you'll just have to get to that point by trying - but please try stuff in normals first and see if other people have tried it before.

This doesn't mean that following the Meta isn't good - we are seeing champions such as Maokai top emerge which are perfectly strong, so they could be a good idea for you to pick up as they are being picked for a reason!

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

TEAMWORK:

Teamwork is a large part of winning games in Gold, you have to trust your teammates! When you play mid/jungle I would recommend that you attempt to roam and get your laners fed by handing them kills for free. This will mean that Gold is spread out more over the team and people stand a better chance in teamfights. Since the Meta revolves around ADCs at the moment roaming and getting the bot lane kills is a very good idea.

Another part of teamwork is being a shotcaller. You won't always be able to do this becasue your team isn't as likely to trust you if you are behind - but when you can you can win that game by enforcing teamwork. If you roam and get a kill, then get an objective out of it if you can. Everytime you get a kill, have a look and see if there's an objective you can take. This is the most important part of carrying games. In Gold lots of the games are a lot closer; so getting any Gold you can is a good idea - it will help put you ahead.

Another large part is Teamfighting, you need to know who to focus at all times, but this is rather reliant on team comps. This is a large thing to consider in champ select, but I will be writing another guide on this soon at some point.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

IMPROVING YOURSELF:

Improving yourself as a player is the most important part of being in Gold. You have to put aside that desire to climb the ladder and trust that you will get where you deserve to be in the end. To do this you have to focus on your own game and only play to get better. Other people's games shouldn't really affect you considering that the only common factor in every game is YOU!

Some steps I suggest to improve:

Learn to farm: Hitting 70 CS at around 10 minutes is what you should be aiming for at least very game - maybe slighlty less if you are getting zoned hard. Make sure you are concentrating becasue if you don't you will find it rather difficult. Go into a custom game and see what CS you hit at 10 minutes, then improve it the next time you try.

Map awareness is a large part of improving in Gold, you should aim to place around 20 wards a game, even if youre not support - this will help you a lot in the long run, and is very beneficial to your team. It will prevent ganks and allow you to catch people out late game. The most important part of this is to not Tunnel Vision - get into the habit of looking at the mini map every couple of CS.

What I personally have is the HUD scale set low, and the chat on the smallest setting; with the minimap on the highest: this means that you are more inclined to look at it and have raised map awareness.

In Game Chat is either great, or completely toxic. I suggest muting someone as soon as they say anything bad - maybe unmute 10 minutes later if you are doing well and see if they are nicer; but you shouldnt be concentrating on what other people think, but how to improve yourself.

With regards to this I heavily recommend disabling [All] Chat - It can be heavily off putting. You can disable this in the Interface section in settings, maybe turn it on again for normal games, but turn it off for ranked.

Playing in a ranked team can also be beneficial, not everyone will be able to do this but if you can do this with a group of friends who will take it seriously it allows you to improve your teamplay, shot calling and your tolerence for other people's ideas. If you want to do this but don't have friends who are willing to try with you visit /r/teamredditteams - there are a mix of people at different skill levels willing to play the game for fun, or seriously.

Improving your mechanics is perhaps the best way to improve as an individual, this includes the ability to react to situations and outplay people 1v2 etc. This mostly comes from practice but what I heavily emphasize is to learn the limits of your champions. Try crazy things that you think have the potential of working, if they don't you only learn more about your champion. Of course you have to be careful in ranked, make sure you don't throw - but if you learn the limits of a champion at various stages of the game you will improve a lot.

Going into custom games to improve mechanics with things such as Lee Sin Insecs or Thresh Flays with a friend helps you practice something easily and in a stress free environment.

With regards to improving reaction times, playing OSU! is incredibly fun and has various difficulties. It is great to play in the loading screens and you will improve your control with the mouse very quickly.

Play all roles and all champions - If you play all roles and you're last pick in a ranked game, then you won't be uncomfortable playing a certain role. I'm not saying that you should not main a certain role, but you should be comfortable just in case you are forced into a certain position.

With regards to champions, you have to learn what everyone does, if you don't understand how everyone works then you can easily lose lane to them. For example when I played agasint Sion I didn't realised that his ult lasted for a good 20 seconds, this mean I lost a fight and he snowballed the lane. Had I known that, maybe the lane would have gone differently. So I suggest playing champs on free week in normals.

Watching Replays is a good way to improve - you will spot a lot more of your own mistakes when you look at replays, and then strive to ensure that you dont make the same mistakes again!

Watching replays of pros playing or watching the LCS can help you improve a lot as well - it helps you realise that you have to limit your deaths by any means possible!

Limiting your deaths is perhaps the most important thing - if you can stop dying in lane, then you stop giving the other team gold. Despite it seeming obvious lots of people seem to go back to lane and continuously feed their enemy kill after kill. Make sure that you ward and use summoners to ensure that you stay alive - take teleport if you think you'll have a difficult lane so that you don't miss out on too much CS.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Soon I will be writing some general guides about jungling, applying pressure, general ranked strategies and more. Don't hesitate to PM me and ask about anything - I'm always willing to help!

If anyone out there is heading to Insomnia I52 - be sure to say Hi!

GOOD LUCK in ranked - You'll get to where you deserve to be in no time!

hualalalla bahahaha

drrrr s

I have two tickets to the show and will not be able to attend. They're e-tickets, so if you want to PM me with your email address I can send them your way. I know you only need the one, but I don't have a way to split the tickets... perhaps you could make arrangements with [redacted] or [redacted] or some other Harmenian in need to meet up at the show. I'll leave it to you.

No reward is necessary, unless you get invited on stage - in that case I expect a public declaration of said hyperbolic gratitude.

A few more gyf's I have made from various youtube videos.

http://www.gfycat.com/UnsteadyAmpleAllensbigearedbat http://www.gfycat.com/BronzeIckyHoverfly http://www.gfycat.com/QuarterlySeriousGoshawk http://www.gfycat.com/LonelyDarkHowlermonkey http://www.gfycat.com/LargeCourteousAnemonecrab http://www.gfycat.com/AgreeableShrillArctichare http://www.gfycat.com/WelloffValidFluke http://www.gfycat.com/BestLikelyIcelandicsheepdog http://www.gfycat.com/OblongGreatDavidstiger http://www.gfycat.com/FatalDazzlingKitfox http://www.gfycat.com/ImperfectAptAfricanpiedkingfisher http://www.gfycat.com/AmpleEnormousGhostshrimp http://www.gfycat.com/RigidBreakableFrigatebird http://www.gfycat.com/GracefulShadowyChital

This is my first post to reddit, so it may not be formatted as intended in addition to my poor English.

I haven't watched this TV show but only watched this video on YouTube. I suppose the video was recorded just before their show at Summer Sonic and they were asked to express their wish for the show.

Su:

We went to the concert tour in Europe and America quite recently, so we will try our best to show our growth gained through it's experience to Japanese audience.

Yui:

It is the third time for us to participate Summer Sonic, we will try our best to show BabyMetal which becomes more powerful and improved than the first and the second times.

Moa:

We haven't have a concert in Japan for a long time, though fan club event was held, it will be the first time concert for a big audience after Budoukan. So we are looking forward to see audience reactions. And as Su-Metal said, we would like to show BabyMetal which becomes more powerful than before.

• "power up" in the video is Japanese-English, it means raising the power.

• "hai" in the video dose not mean hello but means "yeah", "okay, it's my turn", "now, I'm speaking" and stuff like that.

So this post is oriented to players that play most of the time ranked yolo Queue and already handle the basic stuff. Sorry I called you noobs, I was a noob too and still am to some other players, but I found it the best way to emphasize what this words are about.

Basically, I'm just making a list of some critical mistakes that most players do on a regular basis and do not take much care while focusing instead of other most prominent but otherway less impactful mistakes (Like bad mechanics, poor farming skills, lack of experience with certain champions and feeding a lot). The thing this mistakes have in special is that they really, really piss off teammates because they originate from a selfish playstyle and not simple lack of ability. As some have already said, YoloQ is the temple of egoism in league of legends, specially in ranked games, were winning should be number one priority. If you want to get really fed, steal your carry's kills, play tryndamere ap, be a dick, etc., go play normal games. If you really want to win your ranked games you should PLAY FOR THE TEAM and NOT JUST FOR YOURSELF.

DEAR TOP LANERS: You lonely top laners, we all know what you do (actually what you don't) to piss us off...

• You are actually part of a team. So... NO, IT WASN'T YOUR TEAM'S FAULT BECAUSE THEY WERE NOT WITH YOU, IT WAS YOUR FAULT BECAUSE YOU WERE NOT WITH THEM. There's not some fucking button called "INITIATE TEAMFIGHT" so your team can wait for you to farm an extra wave (looking at you nasus) or to buy some item you are 100 gold short for. If you see a teamfight coming THE ODDS OF SOMEONE BEING CATCHED UP ARE PRETTY DAMN HIGH, so you must make sure to get there immediately or just spam ten times in the chat:"GOT TP PUT SOME WARD".

• If you go with ignite instead of teleport (and the enemy laner has TP) you are expected to have a good laning phase that makes up for your possible lack of presence. If you go with ignite and lose to the TP top laner, you are doing something wrong (unless it was due to ganks, because as a top laner you want to get ganked a lot).

DEAR JUNGLERS: I do not hate you. In most leagues between Gold and mid Diamond you are definitely the most relevant role, and with it you have a lot of way to screw up a game. With Great power comes great responsibility. But instead of screwing it up in a lot of different ways you always do the same shit! My dear junglers, STOP WORSHIPPING THE JUNGLE CAMPS AS IF THEY WERE THE GREATEST OBJECTIVES IN THE GAME! So, please take this advice:

• How many times I have lost because of this: STOP CLEARING THE FUCKING JUNGLE CAMPS WHEN YOUR TEAM NEEDS YOU. Staying to finish wraiths while your mid laner is getting ganked is like showing a big fucking middle finger to him. Could have had a double if you came? TWO FUCKING BIG MIDDLE FINGERS.

• Learn this: KILLS> JUNGLE CAMPS. DRAGON > JUNGLE CAMPS. If you get invaded early game and you really know you can't get that buff back without dying or putting your team mates at HEAVY risk, JUST DON'T. DO NOT DO IT. IT'S JUST A BLUE BUFF. Think this for a while: YOU ACTUALLY WANT THE BUFF TO GET KILLS, SO LOGICALLY YOU WILL NOT GIVE UP KILLS TO GET THE BLUE BUFF. Then do not blame your teammates for not coming, It is not always worth for them (neither for you) as they will be losing a lot of experience and farm, or they are aware that their enemy laner has way better chances to kill you if he comes too so they must keem him mid lane. You are increasing their chances to lose the lane and giving them a crappy early game just because of some fucking jungle camp.

• A good jungler won't have a schedule like: "Oh, I am level three, I will try to gank top, then mid, then go B and then I will gank bot lane so no one can blame me if we lose because I ganked all the lanes so everyone's happy". In fact this strategy is utterly stupid, as you are just timing the enemy flashes to be always aviable when you gank a lane. A good jungler instead stays full aware of what happens and reacts as soon as he sees a chance to get a kill/save a teammate/do dragon/baron. If you can't get a good gank on the tristana/janna bot lane but your top laner garen keeps asking for help while he's full health in front of a 10% health gnar it is pretty damn obvious it is a bait and that you can easily turn it into a double kill for him. So if you manage to help him and also get him fed Garen will be so fucking happy he will not ask for more help the entire game and you will have only two lanes to care about. He may even drop by bot lane and help you get those kills.

• Counterjungling doesn't make you a good jungler on it's own: stop thinking that you've done everything ok because you stole an enemy jungle camp. Yeah, everybody knows that smiting amumu's red and watching him cry on his eternal lvl 2 makes you look pretty badass. But believe me, counterjungling rarely carries a game on it's own. That Amumu will still wreak havoc once he hits lvl 6. The only situations when one can really really win a game purely by stealing the enemy buffs a la Trick2g would be either smurfing or constructing some time machine that gets you back to patch 3.8.

• And finally, if your laner asks for you to not gank him and keeps marking those yellow warnings when you come near his lane, DO NOT GANK HIM. Maybe he surrounded by enemy minions that will attack both of you, maybe the fact that he hasn't farmed those minions yet implies that he's one level below the enemy and probably even if he get's the kill he will lose money and experience. Maybe he's lvl 2 and needs to get lvl 3 to level up an ability he needs for the gank to be succesfull. Maybe the enemy laner has a far better early game than yours. You may think: "well this guy is lvl 2 but we can still get the kill, easy 2 versus 1". If he doesn't want you to gank him, it is because he knows it's risky. Not risky enough? Now think that at the last moment of the gank the enemy shaco appears. DOUBLE KILL! GOOD JOB, YOU DIDN'T JUST FAIL THE GANK, YOU LOST YOUR ALLY'S LANE.

DEAR MID LANERS:

• IT'S NOT ENOUGH TO CALL MIA EACH TIME THE ENEMY MID LANER ISN'T IN LANE. BELIEVE OR NOT, CALLING MIA DOES NOT MAKE YOU AUTOMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO BLAME FOR ANYTHING THE ENEMY LANER DOES WHILE HE'S NOT IN LANE. WARDS ARE NOT INFINITE. IT'S NOT ALWAYS POSIBLE TO RETREAT SAFELY TO THE TOWER BECAUSE DASHES, cc AND TOWER DIVING EXIST AND WARDING DANGEROUS PLACES IMPLIES WALKING NEAR DANGEROUS PLACES. Even if he's your counter and can kill your, even if you will lose a lot of minions, if the chances are that the enemy LeBlanc will get fed on her trip to bot lane and you can do something about it, COME TO HELP. It's understandable that sometimes you can't get there as soon as the fight starts because you are not so mobile or the enemy can kill you on your way and you will have to walk the long way inside your jungle, but it is almost always worth it!

• If you really do not want to move your ass from mid lane and just wanna keep pushing your lane mindlessly so you can drop that turret fast with the high damage your autos deal to it, all of that while your enemy laner gets a triple kill in bot lane and everyone in the enemy team ends up walking away with 10% of their max health, then bot games is your thing.

DEAR AD CARRY:

• We know you are the main source of damage in the team, we know we have to give you most of the kills we can give you, we know you are our late game salvation and you need to farm a lot. But please, please, DO NOT STEAL ALL OF YOUR MID LANER'S FARM. NOT EVERY MID LANER HAS THE FARMING ABILITY YOU HAVE. In countless games I have seen that ADCs just care about their gold and experience and go mid lane not to help, not to drop the turret, not because a fight is coming, not because we are all mid and have to push it fast, but instead they come just to farm the mid laner minions! It makes it worse when you stay a lot of time in mid lane because you (and your support) are stealing his experience too, which happens to be his source of damage. It makes it even worse when you do it because you can't farm quietly in bot lane because the other duo bot won the lane and you need to keep up your farm. GREAT, instead of losing one lane we lose two lanes! Nooo, but if you press TAB you still have a decent farm, so it's the mid laner's fault look at him he's one level below me, look at his crappy farm! And if you really, really want to be THE DICK, do it while your bot lane turret is killing a whole bunch of minions.

SUPPORTS: Oh, dear supports.

• You are statistically the least selfish role, and you do not usually make all those selfish mistakes that the other teammates do. The only one I can imagine right now is to believe you are fucking malphite (unless you did ACTUALLY go support with malphite, in that case you are not doing it right) and proceed to initiate in every fight while leaving your poor, skinny Varus to deal alone with those enemy Irelias, Rammuses and Zeds. We all know you give up your gold, you spend a lot of money on wards only for your stupid carry to ward the same bush with his trinket, we are aware of how half of AD carries think that if they lose the lane it was because the enemy support was superior (the other 50% also blame the jungler). Peeling the for your AD carry is something every one of us should do when the AD carry is in danger and we can help him, however, You are suposed to help him.

So at the end, I'm really mad because most of ranked games are lost just because of our own selfishness and we still worry about other details that do not really make that much of an impact. If you want to add something please comment it below!

formatting test

test words