Attacking The Leader

Back before WBC this year I spent a week in Pounder's basement and we played quite a few games with Robb who was also living there at the time. One of the games we played was Chicago Express, which is a relatively short economic train game. You start the game off by buying shares in different train companies and then you take actions to sell off more shares or to make the train companies improve themselves. The companies spend the money invested in the shares to get better and as they get better the shares become worth more. After a set number of actions all the companies pay out dividends which provide the players with more money to use buying new shares in the companies. Player money is only ever spent buying shares, is only ever earned through the dividends (there is one way to get a bonus dividend payout for a company when it gets to Chicago), and is the only thing that matters when it comes to winning the game.

In our game through a combination of not knowing the game so well and/or misplaying we let Pounder get into a very good position. He was the sole owner of two different train companies while Robb and I were stuck sharing a company. I think Robb and Pounder were sharing a 4th company and the 5th company had yet to appear on the board. Because the only thing that actually matters in the game is personal money and Pounder was set up to make the most money thanks to owning so many shares he was on the fast track to victory. His only downside was going to be that he had a limited number of actions to spend making companies better so he was going to be stuck earning base value for some of his shares while Robb and I could use our actions making a single company really good. We'd have to split the benefit but if we're able to use twice as many actions on making it better that's reasonable. We'd also be sure to get the 'connect to Chicago' bonus. Pounder was set up to win for sure, but if Robb and I worked together one of us might be able to take him down. Probably me since Robb had that extra share in the 4th company that surely wasn't going to get any better since Pounder had two other solo owned companies to work on, but maybe later turns would see shares sold of other companies that would change that fact.

Instead Robb decided that since I had nothing else to do with my actions I was going to be forced to make our company better and he'd stick the work on making it better solely on my shoulders and went off to make his company with Pounder better. This meant Pounder got the benefit from 1.5 improvement actions to Robb's 1 and my .5. Pounder ultimately won. We got into an argument over if Robb should have been working with me or not. My stance was Pounder was in a good way and would win if he got extra help from either of us in the early game. Economic games are often snowbally so you need to reign in the leader. Maybe not beat him up the whole game, but reign him in a little after he had such a good initial share phase and then reevaluate the board on the next turn and adjust. Both Robb and Pounder disagreed because they hate playing games where frontrunning is punished because it encourages smarmy actions to disguise if you're actually winning or not in order to trick the other players into reigning in someone else.

I can't say I disagree with that stance, because I hate when a game encourages you to sandbag. But I didn't think that argument actually countered my argument either. I think Chicago Express, as an economic game, is designed such that the individual players have to be constantly evaluating who will win if 'standard' actions are taken and then shifting off the standard actions to stop that from happening. You either do that or the first auction phase determines victory! Really I think it means Chicago Express is a game that we shouldn't be playing because we don't like to work in game states that it creates.

A similar situation came up in our one Civ V game which is nearing completion. It was a four player game where I was stuck on my own land mass, Matt was stuck on his own land mass, while Dave and Robb shared a third bigger land mass. Dave was a strong early game civ and was certainly the player between the four of us with the most knowledge of game mechanics at the start of the game. He very quickly eliminated Robb and started snowballing his strong early game position into a really dominating position. He became allies with most of the city states and then declared war on Matt and I which meant Dave had a stranglehold on votes at the council. He made way more science per turn than either of us. He even went so far as to switch which tech he was researching so that he didn't enter the renaissance era (which would give us spies) until he was able to get almost all of those techs one after the other. It was inconceivable that either Matt or I could win a diplomatic victory before him, or a science victory either. A culture victory was theoretically possibly but his large culture gain from getting so many wonders coupled with his declaring war on us (and therefore removing a lot of tourism multipliers) made that practically impossible.

This meant Matt and I were backed into a corner. There was no way either of us could hope to win without Dave losing his capital. Taking Dave out would open up a chance for one of us to win in any of the ways (including militarily) but if Dave didn't die neither of us could win. Even taking his capital alone probably wasn't going to be good enough since he still has a vote lead over Matt, his culture still exists to block my tourism, and his replacement capital could just start working on spaceship parts long before we'd be able to do so ourselves. Taking Dave's capital slows down his path to victory but our own paths probably require him to die completely unless we're going for a military victory. (Once either of us take his capital then anyone losing their capital would have the other one win.)

We both acknowledged this was the case and then set off to work together against Dave. Talking about how to vote at the council, trade routes, trading luxuries, research agreements... We didn't work together optimally (Matt built a constabulatory to slow down my spying on him and I researched the same techs as he did instead of diversifying for optimal spying for example) but we put in a pretty good showing of it. I don't know about Matt but I also made a lot of sacrifices as time was winding down to try to hurt Dave at the expense of my own board position going forward. (I sold all my research labs and public schools so I could afford to rush buy more units and pay upkeep on those I'd built. I also sold all of my subs once Dave was no longer in a position to build boats even though doing so means I've lost control of the sea against Matt in the short term.)

We ended up capturing Dave's capital the exact turn he was about to win the game by building the last space ship part. We knew we had this many turns and saved a bunch of suicidal bombing runs for the end just in case, but we did it. Dave was understandably annoyed at this, since he was the heavy favourite to win the game almost the whole way through but he was barely denied at the end. He asserts that I am going to win the game now (an assertion I agree with, for what it's worth) and that because of that fact Matt shouldn't have worked with me. Matt should have spent the final few turns before Dave was eliminating setting up a sneak attack on my capital so that if I pulled off the miracle on my own to stop Dave then Matt could have taken me out right away and won instead.

It goes back to the age old question of what should 3rd place do? Let 1st place win by standing aside? Work with 2nd place to make sure 1st doesn't win even if it means 2nd wins instead? For me I continue to assert that ganging up on 1st is often the right thing to do, especially early in a game or if the game has variable length. We're going to get at least an extra 6-10 turns out of this Civ game and it could go much longer than that. Matt has the fast track to a diplomatic victory once Dave is eliminated since he was getting 2 extra votes each failed UN meeting. My tourism win is going to come home before that can happen, I think. But it was obvious that neither Matt or I could win until Dave lost his capital and it was really tight on making that happen as it was. I don't think either of us could have afforded to divert much off of what we did or Dave would have won.

My big problem with the argument that Matt shouldn't help me because I'm a 'clear 2nd' is that it encourages me to sandbag my second place position in order to get Matt to help me. If 2nd and 3rd only work together when they each think they're the one in 2nd then you need to hurt yourself (and therefore help 1st) in order to keep up appearances. But I acknowledge that it's the same argument against ganging up on 1st. If Dave had sandbagged his own position then maybe he isn't such a clear 1st place and we don't work to stop him?

It's hard to say what should be done. Maybe we have the same problem with Civ V that we have with Chicago Express. Maybe it's a game that just fundamentally has a kingmaker problem. I strongly feel that if someone has a big lead they need to be held in check by the other people working against them in this sort of game. Otherwise a small early game edge is a guaranteed victory. I don't want to play a game where we concede to the person who builds the great library. On the other hand I also don't want to play a game where building the great library is a bad idea because it just gets you killed.

I do think Civ V has enough catch up mechanics going on that someone can get ahead without it being a guaranteed victory. But really all Matt and I did was making use of those mechanics to keep pace as much as we could with Dave and we're still ending up facing accusations of kingmaking. The winning odds in this game were probably something like 90%-9%-1%, but Matt and I only get our 1% and 9% chances to win if we go all in on working together. I guess the problem is if the winning odds in this game were actually 90%-10%-0% what is Matt supposed to do? If you're certain you can't win then you basically have to choose who does. Some people advocate for standing aside but I will always assert that not taking an action is an action itself. Games can have kingmaking positions in them and you can't just ignore them. Often I'll see people advocating for improving your position, which generally means 3rd beats up on 2nd and you kingmake for 1st instead. Oddly enough in this specific game Matt both improved his position and kingmade for 2nd since I'm pretty sure most people will look at the end state of this game and say Matt came 2nd if I end up winning. Sometimes people want you to improve your own score, which works way better in a Euro board game with victory points to earn than it does in a game like Civ V, but I guess there's a score number in that one and you can certainly work to make it bigger. Like by taking Dave's cities! (Though taking my cities might have been more score efficient since I sure haven't been defending myself at all!)

I donno. I think if you're against kingmaking game states you can work to avoid games that have them, especially games that have them as a core element like Chicago Express. I think Civ V is probably more on the side of having kingmaking game states than it is the side of avoiding them... So maybe it's not actually a game we want to play? I guess we probably need to have a few more games get closer to the end of the game to find out? I do think Civ V can get into game states where ganging up on the leader isn't good enough. I think Dave had guaranteed wins earlier in this game if he plays differently, for example if he built a lot of mid game boats he could have crushed me when I was way behind on tech. But with more experience we probably just become better at recognizing those game states and have to start collaborating earlier and earlier? Time will tell!

Long Live The Queen!

Yesterday I went looking through my list of unplayed Steam games looking for something I could play left handed. Long Live The Queen is a life simulator game and I figured that was going to have no fast clicking required so I gave it a shot. There is certainly nothing real time at all in the game, so it was good on that front. But was it good on the fun to play front?

Short answer: Yes. Very much so. It runs pretty typical for a life simulator; each week you get to make 3 choices and your character evolved based on those choices. Throw in 'random' events to direct what choices you 'should' be making each week and you're set.

The game feels relatively short. There are only around 40 weeks in the game and only 2 of your choices each week actually increase your stats. So you only get 80 chances to level up. Contrast to my first introduction to the genre, Princess Maker 2, where you played 6 years with 3 choices each month so you got 216 chances to level up. PM2 had a fatigue mechanic so you'd have to spend some of those 216 chances on the 'rest' action so it isn't quite that extreme. But it also let you go on a dungeon crawl with some of your actions. PM2 certainly felt longer, but LLtQ still has a lot of substance. It helps that the story of the game is pretty interesting with a lot of medieval style political intrigue going around. There are also a lot of skills...

There are four primary types of skills (social, intellectual, physical, and mystical) with 14 categories of skills within those types. Each category has 3 skills. Each week you get to pick two skills to level up (it can be the same skill twice) and you spend 5 days earning skill points in those categories. Each day you earn a base of 2 points which is then modified by the type and category modifiers listed on the screen at the start of the week. So if I wanted to earn points in ciphering I'd earn a total of 7.1 skill points with my current setup. On the other hand if I wanted to get better at dancing I'd get a whopping 22.9 points. One of those is a much bigger number than the other one!

There are 3 ways to change the rate of skill point acquisition. One is based on your dominant mood which is determined by where you sit on 4 different axises. (Angry/Afraid, Cheerful/Depressed, Willful/Yielding, Pressured/Lonely) Your current mood gives you +1 to 2 or 3 categories of skills and anywhere from -1 to -3 to a larger list of categories. Right now I'm afraid and that makes it easier for me to skill up agility and faith skills and harder to skill up royal demeanor, weapons, intrigue, and military skills.

The second way is by learning skills from that skill category. 1% of the points earned in a given skill get applied as a bonus to future learning in that category. Including prior learning done for the same skill!

The third way is by learning skill from that overall skill type. .1% of the points earned in a type carry over to other skills of the same type. Again, learning a given skill will increase the rate at which you learn the same skill.

After playing the game a few times you start learning when certain events are going to happen and what skills you might need to succeed at the event. (You might get ambushed by bandits at one point, for example. You need a high amount of reflexes+archery skill to dodge an incoming arrow. Otherwise you get shot and need a high amount of battlefield medicine or you'll kill yourself trying to remove the arrow. Even if you pass that skill check you need a high amount of composure or meditation or you alert the bandits that you're still alive and get shot more times. Fail and it's game over; you're dead.) So you know what you need to do, but you want to get the +1 bonus because when you need to get 70 points in something you'd much rather start off earning those points 15 at a time than 5 or 10 at a time. Especially with the bubble forward mechanic since the additional amount earned is a percentage of the initial amount earned! This means you need to manage your mood properly to shift between different moods with different category bonuses. (Which is what your third action each week goes towards... You do something on the weekend to modify your mood.)

One question I've been having is if I'm better off focusing on one category in a week or if I should spread things out. The reason it's a question for me is the bubble forward bonuses only apply to the next week so the second thing you choose this week isn't impacted by the first thing you choose. If you only want to spend 2 weeks on 2 skills in different categories you're certainly better off splitting it up, but is that true when you're working towards a specific goal like getting at least 25 in herbs, 25 in poison, and 60 in battlefield medicine while also picking up conversation skills? If you're putting 8 weeks into conversation and 8 weeks into medicine should you split things up?

If you do 4 weeks of just conversation followed by 4 weeks of just medicine you end up with 141.3 points earned in each category. This gets you 30 in herbs, 33.3 in poison, and 78 in battlefield medicine which meets our criteria. Note that taking out half of the last week only gets us 57.5 points in battlefield medicine which means we haven't hit the 60 we want.

If you split things up and do 8 weeks of a mix then you end up with 145.8 points in each category. This gets you 30.8 points in herbs, 34.3 points in poison, and 80.7 points in battlefield medicine. Note that skipping the last week only gets us 58.9 points in battlefield medicine so we don't get to drop a week.

But what if we learned some intellectual skills in the past? Having as little as a .058 bonus makes it so 7 weeks puts us at 60 points in battlefield medicine. That means having earned 58 points in any other skills, which if you do it when they're worth 15 points per week is only 4 weeks worth of learning. That's easy! But it you have a .132 bonus you get it done in 7 clumped actions, which is only 3.5 weeks of actual time.

From playing it feels like skills only care if they hit a multiple of 10 (you get a little message describing what you've learned at each 10 points) and while it's definitely more efficient to learn 2 skills from different types each week if you can often that extra efficiency won't matter at all. Every now and then it will be critical. Finding two different skills you want to work on that have the big +1 mood bonus can be tricky, so it does feel like it will sometimes be optimal to focus on a single skill and will sometimes be optimal to spread things out. Spreading out should be the default case unless you're in a hurry to get something specific learned on a deadline or if you need to shift moods and will lose your bonus too fast. I like that this is how it shook out.

The game has some checklists with 39 achievements, 11 ways to die, and 24 ending fragments to 'collect'. I like collecting things so this game has some replayability for me for sure. I've already earned my Steam cards but I'll be going back for more... I've even started writing down when events happen and what my stats are for each success/failure so I can try to work out an optimal path... Of course I say that but on my last playthrough (where I took that screenshot) I didn't make it to the end of the game because I'd boxed my skills into a corner and couldn't get through an event without dying. I figured out now what I could have done... I needed to agree to marry some guy early on in the game so that after my fleet lost a battle I could run away to live with him when my castle came under attack (I wasn't strong enough magically to kill the enemy king off in a dual). Live and learn!

Bridge Match 3 - Board 16

Board 16 - Dealer West - EW Vul

Opponents convention card: Bridge World Standard 2001
Opponents playing strength: Advanced

My hand: ♠ Q 9 7 ♥ A 5 ♦ 5 4 2 ♣ Q T 9 6 3

West opens 1 club, partner overcalls 1 spade, and East makes a negative double. I bid 2 spades, West bids 3 hearts, partner passes, and East goes to 4 hearts. I feel like they've got to have overbid here but I don't know if doubling makes sense. Doubling pretty much only serves to break ties when the same result happens at other tables. Costing us points if they make, earning us points if they go down. I don't really see a line to make setting them really likely, so I pass.

Partner leads the T of spades.

	NORTH ♠ T
		EAST ♠ A 3 ♥ 9 8 7 4 ♦ A T 9 7 3 ♣ A 4
	SOUTH ♠ Q 9 7 ♥ A 5 ♦ 5 4 2 ♣ Q T 9 6 3

West	North	East	South
1♣	1♠	Double1	2♠
3♥	Pass	4♥	Pass
Pass	Pass
1Negative

T-3-Q-K. Declarer cashes another spade. 2-4-A-7. Then he draws some trump. 4-5-T-J. Partner shifts to a club. 2-4-Q-K. I sure am glad I didn't double! Declarer draws more trump. 2-K-7-A. Hurray for crashing honours. I throw declarer on board with another club. 3-7-8-A. Declarer draws more trump. 8-6 of clubs-3-6. Ok, so it wasn't that our honours crashed... It's that partner thought it more likely declarer was trying to steal a trick than that I started with Ax of trump. *sigh*

Anyway, declarer has the top 3 diamonds so he's actually up. Making 5.

	NORTH ♠ J T 8 6 4 ♥ K J 6 ♦ J 6 ♣ J 8 2
WEST ♠ K 5 2 ♥ Q T 3 2 ♦ K Q 8 ♣ K 7 5		EAST ♠ A 3 ♥ 9 8 7 4 ♦ A T 9 7 3 ♣ A 4
	SOUTH ♠ Q 9 7 ♥ A 5 ♦ 5 4 2 ♣ Q T 9 6 3

One table played 3NT just in. Three tables made 4 hearts. One table played 3NT up 1. The remaining three played 4 hearts up 1. So we get a whopping 2 MPs. Taking our legitimate 3 heart tricks would have been 9 MPs instead.


Captain Jack agrees with me all the way! I feel like either he shouldn't like my play of low from Ax of hearts or he shouldn't have run out the K on the second round from KJ6. I also think his hand is pretty smelly for an overcall of any kind...

Ranking after board 16/60: 5/16 with 54.91%

Bridge Match 3 - Board 15

Board 15 - Dealer South - NS Vul

Opponents convention card: Bridge World Standard 2001
Opponents playing strength: Advanced

My hand: ♠ 9 8 ♥ Q 3 ♦ K Q J 8 ♣ A Q T 9 2

I open 1 club. It gets passed around to East who makes a reopening double. I bid 2 clubs to eat up some space and it gets passed around to East who bids 2 spades. That also gets passed out.

I lead the queen of diamonds.

WEST ♠ 6 4 ♥ K 9 8 5 4 ♦ 9 4 2 ♣ J 5 4
	SOUTH ♠ 9 8 ♥ Q 3 ♦ K Q J 8 ♣ A Q T 9 2

West	North	East	South
			1♣
Pass	Pass	Double	2♣
Pass	Pass	2♠1	Pass
Pass	Pass
1Strong

Q-2-3-A. Declarer decides to draw trump. K-9-4-5. A-8-6-T. He shifts to a heart. A-3-4-2. Back to trump. 2-T of clubs-4 of diamonds-J. Partner cashes another trump. Q-3-2 of clubs-5 of hearts. Then he fires out a club for me. 8-7-Q-4.

I decide to cash some diamonds. K-9-7-6. J-8 of hearts-5-T. We need one more trick to set them. My A of clubs will be that trick but I don't need to take it now. I can pressure him by making him ruff a diamond first. 8-9 of hearts-6 of hearts-7 of spades.

Now declarer plays a low club. Either he has the K and I can safely play low because he has another club or partner has it and I can play low. So I play low. 3-9-J-7 of hearts. I get just my ace. Down 1.

	NORTH ♠ Q J T 5 ♥ J T 7 6 2 ♦ 7 5 3 ♣ 8
WEST ♠ 6 4 ♥ K 9 8 5 4 ♦ 9 4 2 ♣ J 5 4		EAST ♠ A K 7 3 2 ♥ A ♦ A T 6 ♣ K 7 6 3
	SOUTH ♠ 9 8 ♥ Q 3 ♦ K Q J 8 ♣ A Q T 9 2

Everyone played 2 spades. 2 made, 6 went down 1. So we get 9 MPs.


Captain Jack doesn't like my 2 club bid. He wants me to bid 1 diamond instead. I just wanted to eat up extra bidding space since I thought with my hand that the enemy was going to play a major partscore and I wanted to make it less likely they'd find the right one.

Ranking after board 15/60: 4/16 with 57.62%

One Handed Board Games

I went out today to play board games with the hope that I could do so without using my right hand at all. I had to take a harsh veto stance against games that would require shuffling or drafting but with 14 people that didn't feel like such a big deal sine other people could play Dominion and I could play a different game instead. It ended up working great. Turns out I can play board games with my left hand a lot easier than I can type or use a mouse!

I ended up learning lots of new to me games. Amerigo, Enigma, Navegador, Istanbul, and Infarkt. 4 completely new, one I'd played once before. Navegador was a 5er this time so I didn't get to see about the 3er issue but I did manage to win without buying a single factory so going all colonies can't be too terrible!

League of Legends Worlds Week 2

At 5am tomorrow morning the last two groups at Worlds will get started. Both of these groups include teams from Europe and North America which I suspect means I'll enjoy watching the games more. Not because the games will be higher quality or anything but because I'll recognize the names more often in these games. Both from watching a lot of the regular season games and because of the fantasy LCS game that ran. I'll be cheering for LMQ in no small part because I had XiaoWeiXiao and Vasilli on my team and grew to root for them in the regular season. They're being predicted to come last in their group but maybe the underdog will come home!

I've finished both seasons of Heroes and my wrist still hurts so I'll be happy to have new things to watch. Huzzah!

Bridge Match 3 - Board 14

Board 14 - Dealer East - None Vul

Opponents convention card: Bridge World Standard 2001
Opponents playing strength: Advanced

My hand: ♠ J 8 3 2 ♥ A Q 5 4 ♦ ♣ A Q J 8 4

I open 1 club in second seat. Partner responds 1 heart, Walsh. I only have 14 points but I have a void so I think this is worth an invitational 3 hearts bid. Partner passes it out.

East leads the 5 of spades.

	NORTH ♠ Q T 4 ♥ 9 6 3 2 ♦ A T 9 ♣ 6 5 2
		EAST ♠ 5
	SOUTH ♠ J 8 3 2 ♥ A Q 5 4 ♦ ♣ A Q J 8 4

West	North	East	South
		Pass	1♣
Pass	1♥1	Pass	3♥
Pass	Pass	Pass
1Walsh

I have 2 spade losers, a club loser, and an extra diamond trick that won't help anything. I also have some number of heart losers, probably 2. Something needs to go away, hopefully one of the round kings is onside I guess. Let's see when I get in to play cards... 5-2-K-4. A-Q-6-3. 7-T-9-8. Well, spades split 3-3 so I have an extra useless trick with the 13th spade too. I need to get trump drawn. 2-7-Q-J. The J is a little worrying... What do I do if hearts split 4-1? Lose 2 hearts I guess and there's nothing to do about it. So I might as well find out. A-7 of diamonds-3-8. Well, I have no entry to board to finesse a club or anything unless I want to ruff my high spade. I should either cash the spade and hope he ruffs or just throw him in with a trump.

I don't have any real reason to hold onto my own trump, do I? I guess he can draw all my trump and throw me on board with a diamond. Then if the club finesse loses they can cash a bunch of diamonds. That seems bad. I'm better off hoping my spade gets ruffed I think. It doesn't as East pitches a diamond and West pitches the 9 of clubs. That's a little scary. Pretty sure my club finesse isn't going to win.

Do I want to cash out for down 1? I just need to give up a club right now and then I can win 2 more clubs regardless of their leads back. Or I can assert West is false carding? What are other people likely to be playing? 2 or 3 hearts most likely. Going down at all is bad if a bunch of people stop in 2 hearts. Eh, I want to make so I'm going to pretend. I fire around a heart and West pitches a lower club this time. East draws the rest of the trump and West pitches another low club. East leads a low diamond to West's Q. If I take this I lose 2 more diamonds. I'm pretty sure East had no clubs to start so West is currently sitting on Kx of clubs and 2 diamonds. Yeah, I'm boned. Unless they botch the communication I either cash my A of clubs and give up 3 tricks or I let them take all diamond tricks to end. Boo. I win this and play a club to my A. They're up. Down 3.

	NORTH ♠ Q T 4 ♥ 9 6 3 2 ♦ A T 9 ♣ 6 5 2
WEST ♠ A K 7 ♥ J ♦ K Q 7 2 ♣ K T 9 7 3		EAST ♠ 9 6 5 ♥ K T 8 7 ♦ J 8 6 5 4 3 ♣
	SOUTH ♠ J 8 3 2 ♥ A Q 5 4 ♦ ♣ A Q J 8 4

Lots of different results on this board. 2 hearts made, 3 hearts went down 1, 4 hearts went down 3, and their side went down 2 in 2 clubs and made 5 diamonds. All told we got 5 MPs. If I'd just given up the club I'd have picked up 3 extra MPs. I knew I should have done that...


Captain Jack disagrees with my 3 heart bid because my hand is too strong for an invite. He wants me to splinter with 4 diamonds! He also disagrees with my trump play at the end and wants me to give up a club trick. Good call, Jack.

Ranking after board 14/60: 4/16 with 57.14%

Path of Exile: Tapping Out

The other day while running daily quests in guild I accidentally started one before everyone showed up. I'd meant to click to walk past the quest giver but instead clicked on the quest giver and that started things up. I told them I have a hard time accurately clicking things and Lino mused that accurately clicking things was pretty much the entirety of Path of Exile. While not a perfect assessment of the game it is a pretty good summary and one would wonder why I'd want to play it if I can't click accurately.

I can do things to make it so I do click more accurately. I can grip the mouse tighter and try to make sharper movements. I end up doing the same sort of thing in League of Legends, actually, when I play a champion that requires a lot of precise clicking like Ezreal. Ezreal is probably my favourite champion and certainly the one I'm best at playing, but I can't play him over and over again without my hand starting to hurt from the extra effort I have to put in to controlling the mouse. Which is fine, I guess, since I'll just play someone easier to control to get a break.

In Path of Exile it isn't that simple since it takes many days to level a new character up and pretty much every character needs to click precisely to collect the relevant loot even if they're a summoner and never cast any spells. I leveled someone who uses arc so I didn't need to click on monsters (if you cast arc and there's an enemy anywhere in range it will auto target that enemy) but I still need to click accurately to move around and collect loot. And I'm still holding down right click to cast that arc spell. So my hand is in full on 'be awesome' mode the entire time I'm playing. And if I can only play Ezreal for an hour or two without needing a break what does it say about my plan of playing PoE 10 hours a day for the next two months in order to max my reputation with all 8 masters?

It says the plan is horrendous is what it says. But I didn't want to believe that, so I pushed on regardless. This weekend my body decided to give out. My back, shoulders, neck, and right arm all seized up a fair bit. I could no longer bend my wrist back and it hurt to even press down on a key to type. Path of Exile blew my arm out, and it is not good.

I went out and bought a cold pack, and a wrist support thingy, and some muscle relaxant drugs. I've spent the last couple days not playing PoE, and not playing much at all, and pretty much just being bored. The League of Legends World Championships have been on so I watched those. I watched the WWE PPV. I've watched a bunch of movies. And now I've started rewatching the first season of Heroes. I'm feeling better in that I didn't need to take any drugs today, and I can turn my neck without it hurting, and I don't have a fever anymore. My wrist still hurts a bit, but I can move it around fine and can use the computer in bursts.

So... Probably no long term harm done. But the idea that I could possibly do the challenges in Path of Exile is out the window. Maybe I'll try to play again for shorter periods of time once my wrist really feels all better. Maybe I won't, because I'm pretty sure I have no self control and I will blow myself out again if I give myself the chance to do so. Time will tell, I guess. Time will tell.

Bridge Match 3 - Board 13

Board 13 - Dealer North - All Vul

Opponents convention card: Bridge World Standard 2001
Opponents playing strength: Advanced

My hand: ♠ 4 3 2 ♥ 9 6 ♦ A Q 9 7 3 ♣ 9 8 7

Partner opens a strong 2 clubs and East interferes with a 2 spade bid. I have no idea what my bids mean at this point. I have the points to go places and probably the way to show points is to start with a double so I do that. Partner bids 3 hearts. I bid 4 diamonds. Partner bids 4 hearts. That's not where I want to play but partner is the boss here so I pass.

East leads the 3 of clubs.

	NORTH ♠ K 8 ♥ A K Q 7 5 2 ♦ T 8 ♣ A K 6
		EAST ♣ 3
	SOUTH ♠ 4 3 2 ♥ 9 6 ♦ A Q 9 7 3 ♣ 9 8 7

West	North	East	South
	2♣1	2♠	Double2
Pass	3♥	Pass	4♦3
Pass	4♥	Pass	Pass
Pass
1Strong
2Take out
3Control in diamonds for hearts

I have 2 spade losers, a diamond loser, and an eventual heart club loser. I might have a heart loser too if those split 4-1. I don't really see a way to avoid most of those losers either since I'm pretty sure East has the spade honours and I don't have an entry to my hand to reach the diamonds even if I set them up. I can get rid of a diamond loser if East also has an honour there I guess. I do start by winning the first club trick. 3-7-J-A. I draw trump and they split 3-2 with East pitching a spade on the 3rd round.

I decide to fire out a diamond intending to finesse East for the J. He plays it so there's no need to finesse him for it. This actually sets up a lot of diamond tricks for me I think? At least if West wins this trick, so I better try to let him. T-J-Q-6. Bah. On the plus side now I don't lose a diamond and therefore can make the contract even losing 3 black tricks. I cash the A of diamonds and East drops the K. Turns out he had KJ tight? Sweet, that means I can cash 3 more diamonds and take all 13 tricks.

Turns out my plan of ruffing a diamond back and then hoping East was going to be forced to take the club trick and lead up to my K of spades would have worked too. Hurray?

	NORTH ♠ K 8 ♥ A K Q 7 5 2 ♦ T 8 ♣ A K 6
WEST ♠ T 9 5 ♥ J T 4 ♦ 6 5 4 2 ♣ J 5 4		EAST ♠ A Q J 7 6 ♥ 8 3 ♦ K J ♣ Q T 3 2
	SOUTH ♠ 4 3 2 ♥ 9 6 ♦ A Q 9 7 3 ♣ 9 8 7

2 tables played 3NT and made 7. 3 tables played 4H and made 7. Someone played 3NT making 6, someone played 3NT making 4, and someone played 6NT down 1. This gets us 8MPs.


Captain Jack disagrees with my double over 2 spades because it is supposed to be a typical takeout double and I don't have enough hearts. In fact he wants me to pass. I freely admit to not knowing the right play in this situation but passing when my partner opened 2 clubs and I have an ace seems really suspect. He then disagrees with my 4 diamond bid and has no idea why I made it. I made it because I have a diamond control and a long diamond suit and wanted to offer it as a place to play our slam, Jack. He then disagrees with my diamond play. He wants me to play more rounds of trump first. And then he disagrees with my second diamond play and wants me to play a club instead of just playing the A. I guess a club to the K and then a diamond back lets me finesse East and pick up KJx, but I'd be really worried that West held up from Kxx and I'd be giving away the contract entirely with that line of play.

Ranking after board 13/60: 3/16 with 58.79%

Navegador: 3er Issue?

Earlier this month my sleep schedule synched up properly to let me go play some board games at Sara's. I finally got a chance to learn Navegador which is a game played in an event at WBC. It's a game with the 'rondel' mechanic where the set of actions you can choose from this turn is based on what action you took last turn. The game we played was a 3 player game with 2 people learning but it felt really unbalanced and I've been trying to figure out if the game just doesn't work with 3 people or if we just missed something tactically that could have been done to balance things back out.

The core money making mechanic of the game is the market action which exists in 2 spots on the rondel. When you go to the market you have to choose buy or sell for each of 3 different goods in the game. If you choose to sell a good type then all of your colonies of that type pay out money. If you choose to buy a good type then all of your factories of that type pay out money. The amount of money is based on the position of those goods on the market and goes up and down as different amounts of those goods are sold and bought. Colonies are worth 20-60 for sugar, 30-70 for gold, and 40-80 for spice. Factories are worth 20-60 regardless of type.

It feels like what this means is you don't want both factories and colonies of the same type. You can buy or sell, not both, and even at the lowest value for gold you're getting 30 from a colony. Buy a sugar factory and even if it's also worth the lowest value you're getting 50 from both. 60 from a gold factory is better than 50, but only a little bit, and only in the edge case where gold and sugar are both set to be terrible for you.

It also feels like this means you want to be doing the opposite of the person before you. If they're buying gold and selling sugar then right after they go to the market the values will encourage selling gold and buying sugar. The first person to get a crack at that changed market is the person who plays immediately next.

We played our game based off of those two axioms. Patrick went first and explored gold. I went second and explored sugar. Sara went third and bought some boats. Patrick and I bought colonies of the appropriate types and now Sara had to choose where to go with her double movement action. Moving into sugar colonies immediately after a sugar colony player seems wrong because you'll never get a good sugar sell action and because sugar is worth 10 less across the board. Moving into gold on the other hand boxes me into gold factories (only I want to be the third person to buy gold colonies) and she set herself up to be the person who gets the good gold sell action after my gold buy action. No one varied from there with both Sara and Patrick getting gold colonies and sugar factories while I got sugar colonies and gold factories. (Spice colonies come into the game a lot later than gold and sugar do, so spice factories start off terrible, but Patrick's plan was to get the spice colonies as soon as he could.)

I ended up winning pretty handily because my market actions were always awesome. I consistently got maximum value from my colonies and factories while the other players sometimes got average value and sometimes got minimum value. Sara came second because she got most of the average value actions due to going right after me. Patrick came a distant third.

We tried to figure out some ways to shake things up, but they all seemed bad. Being the first to commit to a type of colony felt like it was going to set the table up to screw you since lefty was going to go the other way and righty was going to copy you. So maybe no one should ever buy a colony? Or push hard for spice?

One thing I've been mulling over is ignoring factories entirely. Could Patrick have gone for both sugar and gold colonies? Or could he have abandoned his gold colony and gone for both sugar and gold factories? I feel like throwing away your 30 bucks per market action from your first gold colony is probably wrong so double factories is bad. And cloning righty is bad. So you have to go for both colony types as the only viable course of action. But is it viable enough? No matter who you marketplace after you're going to get one average sale and one bad sale. You probably need to grab the cheap spice factory too and rake in a third bad sale? Or maybe you actually race for spice and go all three colonies?

In our game we all went a split of colonies and factories but the way scoring happens in the game you're actually encouraged to focus on one or the other. You get to take actions to score 1 point per colony or 1 per factory. Going all in on colonies means your point action is better? And then you can just skip the building action on the rondel (or use it strictly on shipyards or churches) and focus on just getting more and more colonies. Your market action is going to be worse than the other people at the table because you're duplicating parts of both other players and their market actions are going to be better because they each have an exclusive element, but maybe the trade of more efficient point actions for worse market actions is worth it? Certainly the way the game actually played out with giving one player both exclusive market actions was game losing so this can't be worse!

I do want to play this game again to see...

Path of Exile: Atziri

The last Path of Exile expansion added an MMORPG style dungeon with a bunch of trash mobs and 3 scripted boss fights. They gave away some prizes to the first people to clear it out and there are some unique items that can only drop from the end boss of that dungeon. That boss (Atziri) is also on the list of unique bosses to kill for the challenge this time around so going in and killing her is a thing that has to be on my radar. You need to collect up a bunch of items to open a portal to this dungeon and they're worth a fair bit to sell to people (1 exalted for 3 sets of items) but if winning the fight is something I can do then just running it has to be better. (I already bought one of the Atziri drops for an exalted, for example.) I have farmed up 3 sets of the items from corrupted zones I've run across so I'm good to go...

We tried the zone once last week because Lino had a set of items and wanted to see what was going on in the dungeon. So we went in pretty blind with a party consisting of a bunch of underleveled or terrible characters... It didn't end well. We died on the first boss fight, though we did get through a good chunk of it so that's something! I didn't want to throw away an exalted worth of stuff learning the mechanics of the fights going forward though so I decided to look the dungeon up and at least see what was going on...

The first boss is two copies of the Vaal Oversoul boss. He gets 2 new abilities (a wide arc ball lightning spell and an ice damage rain of arrows spell) but is otherwise very similar to the regular boss fight. With his numbers all tuned up, of course! When you kill one of the Vaals the other one gets a big haste buff. This is actually where we died when we tried it the other day... We got the first one down and then the second one obliterated us. So you either need to be able to drastically outsurvive the damage from the second Vaal or you need to kill them both at the same time. The main source of damage from this guy is probably the ball lightnings so lightning resist and topaz flasks are probably the order of the day? He summons adds like normal so you can get your flask charges up. This means maybe you can outheal the damage with healing flasks instead of relying on life leech?

The second boss is a three boss fight. It works like the Iron Council boss fight from Ulduar in World of Warcraft. Killing one of the three bosses heals the other two to full and adds some extra stuff to the fight including making the remaining bosses more powerful. There are massive physical attacks, and massive chaos attacks, and some bleeds. So flasks that remove bleeding are important, and granite flasks are important, and being able to move out of the clouds of damage is important. Figuring out the order you want to kill the enemies is probably a good thing to do. Apparently the tentacle lady gets pretty scary if you let her damage get buffed by killing the other guys? And I think killing her causes adds to spawn which is possibly a good thing since it lets you refill flasks?

The third boss is a three phase fight. The first phase is where you can actually hurt the boss. She casts a wide arc of puncture spears, and she casts flame blasts, and she casts storm calls. Every now and then she also casts a set of three overlapping super flame blasts which seemed to hit for ~8000 damage or so (including the ignite) in the video I watched. She is immune to most effects (stun/shock/freeze/ignite) and reflects curses. The second phase she goes immune to everything and summons a bunch of adds from 4 spots in the room. The adds don't attack and just walk towards her. If they reach her, she heals for a ton. It's basically a damage check... Either you can kill the swarms of adds or you can't win the fight. The third phase gets triggered every time she loses 25% of her health. Atziri disappears and summons in 4 clones which carry around a specific weapon. One has a spear and uses her puncture ability. One has a fireball and uses her flame blast ability. One has a lightning thingy and uses her storm call ability. And the last one has a shield and reflects 100% of incoming damage. This phase ends when you kill off any of the clones. Super high damage builds need to avoid hitting the shield add or they die in one hit! So you need to be able to do tons of AE damage for the add phase, but to burn down a single add in this phase. Ruby flasks are probably important for the main phase since the huge flame blasts look like a big problem. You also need curse removal flasks if you're planning on cursing her.

My current character is running with the vaal pact passive so my life leech is instant. I'm hoping that is good enough to live through most of the dungeon... If I was good I could probably use lightning warp to avoid most of the flameblast damage in the last fight but I probably need to get enough health to live through one. I should be able to leech back to full when I get hit so the ignite isn't a big deal.

So mostly I need to build up the right flasks, level up more so I can get more health nodes from the tree, and probably get some better gear with more health on it too. And then it'll be about trying it out and seeing if I actually do enough damage and have the control to avoid the avoidable damage over and over and over again...

Path of Exile: Actual Masters Numbers

Sceadeau pointed me towards a post on Reddit from someone who wrote down all their rep gain numbers from every master they found in a map. They tested all of the levels of maps and did the runs on multiple characters to see if that changed anything. Turns out no. Reputation can be limited if the quest is too low level for you but a quest doesn't seem to be able to be too high for you. Bringing people into the group doesn't change anything. The amount of reputation earned is strictly determined by the level of the zone where you turn in the quest to the master. (So finding Zana in a 66 map will only get you reputation for a level 66 quest even if she opened a much higher level map.)

There's also a table being populated on a wiki with reputation values by level of quest and level of master. It is unfortunately a very sad table. I was hoping that reputation would ramp up a lot when I got to level 7 with a master and that is sadly not the case. My current pace of reputation gain is what I can expect from the same amount of gameplay and it will take 4-6 months to earn enough reputation at that pace. That won't earn a tshirt at all!

The post on Reddit determined that the best way to gain reputation is to run low level maps without enhancing them at all. Just run them white and clear them as fast as you can. 50% of maps will have a master in them (as opposed to more like 1 in 12 regular zones) and once you find the master you can do the quest and leave. So you should get a master every 1.5 maps and if you can clear a map every 6 minutes or so (discount time spent on the quest) then you probably get 5 quests done per hour. You get 3678 rep from a level 66 quest so it would only be 560 hours to earn enough reputation to max them all (ignoring the issue of finding masters you've already maxed). That's only a couple months of playing 10 hours per day... That's at least viable...

Would you be better off running higher level maps? I actually have some clear speed data from last time around when I timed maps on my summoner to see where I was earning gem experience the fastest. I made a quick edit of that sheet to plug in the rep gain for the level of the map and no real pattern emerged. I suspect the level of the zone doesn't matter as long as you're able to do a good amount of damage. What will actually matter is the mods on the map. Temporal chains is going to slow down your 'find the master' speed, for example. But there is a bump in reputation from each level you go up so as long as you're still able to just run as fast as you can murdering everything it can only be good to go up in map levels.

So I guess the actual question is how much do you care about things other than just master reputation? If you're trying to maintain a high level map pool then you're going to be turning the maps yellow and that'll certainly slow down how fast you can clear them. But if you just blue them (or run them white) then there's no way you'll get enough maps to drop to keep running them. Maybe you could just spend a lot of money buying maps from other people and run them white?

I feel like master reputation is the primary thing that matters so aborting out of maps probably makes sense for me. But it feels so bad to be leaving potential map drops and experience behind. I don't think I can convince myself to do that on higher level maps. But I can probably be convinced that maps in the 66-69 range don't matter all that much so I should just plow through them for master rep.

Civ V: Brutal Trading Bug

I read about a trading bug in Civ V multiplayers games a while ago but didn't give it much thought. It's incredibly abusive if you want to cheat but I figured no one I'm playing with now would be abusing it. And I guess if they were and got caught we'd just stop playing with them. But then earlier today I got hit by a side effect of the bug in a game with Robb. He wasn't trying to be abusive or anything and it only cost me a turn of scouting but it was still annoying and it now makes me think everyone should know about the bug so we don't get hit by any side effects.

The bug is pretty simple. When player A proposes a trade to player B it pops up on B's next turn. B can accept the trade, reject the trade, or modify the trade. The first two work fine but the third one has the bug. You'd think that modifying the trade would be a way to send a counter-proposal to the other player and that's exactly what Robb tried to do in our game. I was trying to bribe him with 15 gold and some horses to get open borders between us so I could go meet a city state behind his borders. He didn't want my horses and wanted more gold instead so he modified the trade to be open borders each way with me throwing in 30 gold. That was fine by me, but when it got to my turn I couldn't accept the trade. You see, the trade was modified by Robb but it was still my trade and that means Robb is the one that needs to accept it.

He doesn't even need me to see the modified trade. He can modify the trade and then accept it.

...

...

He could have, for example, modified the trade so I got nothing and he got my 3 cities and all of my gold.

...

...

Yeah, that's not cool.

Modifying trades is actually a way to speed things up with outside game communication. If Robb had asked me about it in Skype instead of just sending the offer then we could have haggled over the gold amount, he could have modified it, and then accepted it and we'd both be happy.

But outside of that edge case you really shouldn't ever modify a trade. Reject and send a new one of your own if you want. Talk about it on a message thread. But don't modify a trade and expect the other guy to be able to accept it. He can't, because of the bug.

And obviously don't modify a trade and accept it without talking to the other person. There is a log of completed trades so it's pretty easy to check if someone is abusing the bug. Certainly if you steal a city this way we just roll the turn back, kick you out, and move on with our lives.

Path of Exile: Five Link Value

My current character started off as one where I wanted to test out the new arc values. I've always liked that spell and it turns out I really like it now that they scaled up how many times it can chain as it level. I ended up going in a different direction with that character and tried out being really tanky. It's fine, but it doesn't do any damage at all. But I do feel like arc can do damage if I spec properly for it, so I want to start again.

I also noticed while looking up the cost of all the challenge uniques that one of the three really expensive items would be really good for arc. I have enough currency to buy a copy of it, and I'm going to need a copy of it eventually, so it feels like I should buy one and then use it. It's a good theory but having spent the last few days browsing the item listings trying to buy one I've come to realize that there's a really big price difference between versions of the item that rolled well and versions that didn't.

The item in question is pledge of hands and it only really has two things on it that can vary. It can have between 120% to 160% increased spell damage and it can have a varying number of linked sockets. As far as I can tell you're probably going to end up at around 420-460 increased damage with arc so the difference between a top roll pledge and a bottom roll pledge is a ~8% damage boost. That's pretty significant. But how much is it worth? There is a currency item (divine orb) that can be used to reroll all random stats on an item so it's probably worth considering the cost of those when considering how bad a low roll pledge would be. You expect to get a 4% damage boost by using one divine orb, or a 6% boost from two... You can get unlucky here and use a ton of divine orbs and keep getting low results but it's pretty reasonable to assume that if you're willing to use 10 of them that you'll end up with a pretty high roll pledge. (You'd be 94% to hit at least one result in the top quarter of possible results.)

Unfortunately divine orbs are not cheap. They're about half of an exalted orb and if you consider the price range on pledges seems to go from 7-10 exalteds it's actually a pretty big jump to expect to use 10 of the things. On the other hand divine orb is one of the currency items you need to use in the challenge so the plan of buying a min roll pledge on the cheap and throwing a divine orb at it isn't the worst thing I've ever heard. And even with a min roll pledge I'm not losing all that much. I like doing 8% more damage but I don't know that I'm good enough at the game to really notice that loss.

The other factor is the number of links on the item. Adding an extra link to your spell is going to add a lot more than 8% more damage! Lightning penetration, for example, will be anything from a 34% damage boost to a 136% damage boost based on the resistance of the enemy you're fighting. I'd much rather have a min damage roll and an extra link! It's also reasonable to work out the cost of an extra link. Vorici will 6 socket an item for 150 jewelers and 6 link it for 1500 fusers. He'll 5 socket an item for 70 jewelers and 5 link it for 150 fusers. He'll 4 socket an item for 10 jewelers and 4 link it for 5 fusers. When you're talking about prices in terms of exalteds the 4 link is essentially free, the 5 link is worth between 2 and 3 exalteds and the 6 link is more than 20 exalteds.

I don't have 20 extra exalteds to throw at this particular problem and even if I did I wouldn't want to. If I did buy a 1 socket pledge I probably wouldn't even use Vorici. I'd throw a bunch of jewelers and fusers at the problem and be thrilled if I hit a 5 link but reasonably settle for a 4 link. But looking at the prices of all these orbs I suspect I'd probably blindly throw a couple exalted worth of orbs at it without realizing what I was doing. I probably have 3 exalteds worth of jewelers and fusers on me, which is actually a little surprising. I guess picking up all those 6 socket items does pay off!

But what this is telling me is that it's absolutely worth paying an extra exalted if it gets me a 5 linked pledge. Paying extra for a 4 link on the other hand is silly because that's easy to settle on.

Before looking at things I had every intention of paying 6 exalteds for any pledge I could find or 7 on one with a decent spell damage roll. But now I think I should be looking at paying up to 8 on a 5 link with a good roll, or 7 on a 5 link with a bad roll and just toss a divine at it. Is that viable?

The answer, at least for those listed right now, is no. A 5 link is more like 9-12 exalteds. I tried messaging some people who didn't have buyouts listed but none of them were willing to sell a 5 link for 8.

And then as I was looking someone put one up for 6 exalteds. 139% spell damage so right in the middle and not worth throwing a divine on. 4 sockets, 4 links, so no pressing need to throw any money at that issue either. Especially now that I've looked at it and got an idea for how much it costs to throw as many jewelers and fusers at the problem! So I think I'm just happy as is.

Bridge Match 3 - Board 12

Board 12 - Dealer West - NS Vul

Opponents convention card: Jack
Opponents playing strength: Excellent

My hand: ♠ J T 5 3 ♥ K Q 4 ♦ K J ♣ K Q 5 2

Partner opens a weak 1NT in 2nd chair. My balanced 15 count plus his balanced 12-14 sure sounds a lot like 3NT.

East leads the A of diamonds.

	NORTH ♠ A K 8 ♥ J 7 6 5 ♦ Q 9 6 5 ♣ A 8
		EAST ♦ A
	SOUTH ♠ J T 5 3 ♥ K Q 4 ♦ K J ♣ K Q 5 2

West	North	East	South
Pass	1NT1	Pass	3NT
Pass	Pass	Pass
112-14

I have 9 easy tricks once the two red aces are knocked out and they have no way to set up any tricks beyond those 2 aces. I can get an extra trick if hearts split 3-3 or if something wonky happens with the T of diamonds. I can also get an extra spade trick for sure by losing to the Q and can get two if I finesse the Q and the 9 drops on the first 3 tricks. Where I attack first depends on what suit the enemies lead after this first trick, so let's see what happens. A-J-4-5. He plays another diamond. 8-K-2-6.

Is it risky to play on spades first? If I float the J around then I can only lose to East and he has nothing scary to return. A diamond sets up my 9 so he has to play something else and I'll still have both black suits double stopped so I can easily lose a heart afterwards. So I'll do that first. J-7-8-2. Ok, I have 10 tricks now. Time to lose a heart. K-9-5-A. East fires back a diamond so I have 11 tricks.

The game doesn't believe me so I have to play it out for a while. Making 5.

	NORTH ♠ A K 8 ♥ J 7 6 5 ♦ Q 9 6 5 ♣ A 8
WEST ♠ Q 9 7 4 ♥ 9 3 ♦ T 4 3 2 ♣ J 4 3		EAST ♠ 6 2 ♥ A T 8 2 ♦ A 8 7 ♣ T 9 7 6
	SOUTH ♠ J T 5 3 ♥ K Q 4 ♦ K J ♣ K Q 5 2

Everyone bid 3NT. 2 tables made +2, 3 tables made +1, 3 tables were just in. This gives us a shared top board and 13 MPs.


Jack disagrees with my 3NT bid. He wants me to start with Stayman. I guess it's possible we've got the distribution to make a major game better than 3NT but I doubt it. I really think with my flat hand with lots of middling honours that no trump is the place to be.

Ranking after board 12/60: 5/16 with 58.93%

Path of Exile: Challenge Update

Tom mentioned after my initial challenge post that they'd actually changed the rules for how tshirts are given out this time around. I went on a mission today to figure out exactly what changed. It turns out that the number of tshirts they've been giving out has been on quite the decline (61 to 23 to 14) which is why the challenges this time around felt more attainable. Needing to farm 1/8th the currency to buy all the uniques is a pretty big deal!

There is a catch, however. They made it a lot easier to complete all the challenges for sure and they don't want to have to give away thousands of shirts if it turned out the challenges were way too easy. So they put a cap on it. The first 50 people to complete all the challenges will get a tshirt and that is it in terms of shirts. They're also awarding some microtransaction rewards for people who manage to get 5 challenges done and for everyone who gets all 8 done.

If getting a silver or gold halo to wear is something that really interests you then there's that extra little thing thrown in to encourage you to get some challenges done. I don't much care for the halos myself. And while I was feeling like I could probably put in a good try on getting all 8 challenges done I have serious doubts about my ability to be one of the first 50 to get it done. Getting all the masters to max level felt like it was going to be hard but maybe possible depending on how fast the rep gains accelerate as you level them up. But if that's the challenge that takes the longest (and I think it will be) then it's going to come down to who is more heavily involved in getting quests from other people. And that's probably not going to be me. I'm happy to do my own dailies, and I'm happy to do dailies in a group with people I know, and I'll pick up quests as I'm playing. But I don't think I want to be hanging out in a chat channel with random people and trying to worm my way into their quests too.

There doesn't seem to be a leaderboard for challenge completion that I could see but it is an indicator on the normal leveling ladders for the two leagues. I took a look and there are a couple people who already have 6 challenges done. I have one. *sigh* Both of the people with 6 done are missing the challenges for the masters and leveling the classes. So, yeah, leveling the masters is going to be the gatekeeper for sure.

Eh, I'm not giving up yet, but earlier I'd thought it was looking pretty plausible and now... Not so much.

Path of Exile: 'Tanking'

I often find myself grouped with Tom and Sceadeau to do maps when I'm playing Path of Exile. Tom plays a variety of characters that mostly seem to do cast spells at range. Sceadeau plays a crazy flameblast character that needs to stand perfectly still for a short period of time and then everything on the screen dies. My first character this time around was an ice shot crit ranger that worked great alone but was practically worthless in the group. She revolved around getting killing blows to earn frenzy charges and to keep blood rage running and I simply couldn't do that when Tom would kill more than half of the enemies if it was the two of us and Sceadeau would kill everything with any amount of health with the three of us. But the three of us were pretty squishy, especially Sceadeau, so I wanted a new character that could tank for them.

I've done a lot of tanking in my day. Especially in World of Warcraft where I was the primary tank for most raids my entire time playing the game. On a warrior, on a druid, on a death knight... If there was damage to be taken I was there front and center. Tanking as a role made sense in games like that since they have a controllable way to manage who an enemy attacks and the gear is all designed for that role to exist. Tanking in Path of Exile doesn't make much sense at all. There's one ability in the game that can force an enemy to attack you but it's got a short range, a short duration, a long cooldown, and won't stop all the crazy chaining/piercing/area damage that actually gets people killed. It also won't do squat against damage reflection which is the primary way Sceadeau dies.

Basically every character needs to be tough enough to tank. Sceadeau ended up solving the problem by starting a new character using the same spell but using a really good piece of armour and a couple different defensive spells to be tougher on his own. Great for him! But bad for me in terms of having a character that does anything.

I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about how to help tank even with no actual way to be a full on tank. Everyone needs to be tough enough to survive normal situations but are there things that can be done to help out in other situations? The way I see it there are 3 things you can do to 'tank'.

• Bring extra bodies to limit the odds any given attack hits one of your friends.
• Make your friends tougher with auras.
• Make the enemies worse with curses/stuns/freezes.

Having extra bodies like zombies and skeletons around helps mitigate some of the damage from chains and leaping dudes. It won't help against poison on the ground or discharge or things like that. Extra bodies feels like it probably makes the average case easier to deal with but the really crazy stuff like rogue exiles and hard map bosses are going to be hard because they use area abilities and make the minions worthless. Still a useful thing to have around I think, and I am tempted to make a summoner again, but I don't think it'll actually help too much on really scary things.

Auras is interesting because you can give up to 4 to maximum resist of an element by running the right aura. Taking someone from 75 to 79 resist is a pretty big deal (it cuts out 16% of the damage they take) and it's very easy to imagine a 16% damage reduction being the difference between someone living and dying. It's even better if they're running the right elemental defense flask because then you could be taking them from 85 to 89 resist and preventing almost 27% of their incoming damage. If there's a fight with a scary element then running the right aura is a big help. But on the flip side it's such a huge help that it's entirely possible everyone should just be doing that for themselves regardless? There are other auras that can help too, with giving extra armour or evasion or energy shield or life regen. There are so many of them that running them all seems hard, but getting a couple people who run a bunch of them is probably pretty useful. Especially when someone is killing all the enemies in one spell it feels like a thing that can help.

They revamped curses in this expansion such that not just anyone can use a curse at optimal power. Someone who really goes all in on cursing will be a lot better at it than a random Jo. Even with no points into making curses better a high level enfeeble will knock off 28% of the damage done by the enemies in addition to lowering their accuracy and crit chance. If you spec for it you can tack on a temporal chains curse to knock off 28% of their speed (movement, casting, and attacking). Get the right gear and you can throw on a variety of other curses to make the enemies take more damage or give out charges or life leech. People will undoubtedly bicker over the 'right' curses to put up and sometimes enemies can be immune to curses but it's pretty clear to me that if an enemy can be cursed then someone who puts a focus onto cursing will be a big help to the group.

This is probably why my summoner last time around felt so good. Lots of extra bodies and I took every curse node and almost all the aura nodes. I also brought other things as well with all the magic find and the culling strike. Man, that character was good!

My character right now that I play in groups put a bunch of points into shocking so I tend to make relevant enemies take 50% more damage. Note that that's more damage, not increased damage, so it is a straight 1.5x multiplier on damage done. I feel like that's pretty useful. It would probably be better coming from someone who did actual damage too, but it's still something. Sceadeau has me thinking about taking elemental equilibrium so the enemies lose 50% of their fire and cold resist in exchange for getting 50% lightning resist. I'm not sure if that would keep me from shocking or not (shock duration is based on damage done so I can't do no damage and keep it up) but in some cases taking an enemy from 75% fire resist to 25% fire resist is tripling the damage done so it could be a fair trade regardless...

I'm also trying to get a lot of auras up but I'm finding even though I have a lot of nodes I can't run more than 3 auras. A few more levels and I get the last couple aura nodes so maybe that will help. I am running the purity of fire to help mitigate reflected fire damage though and a pretty significant evasion buff.

The reason my character does no damage is I ran all over the tree getting defensive nodes. I'm personally pretty tanky since I can't be crit and my evasion is armour and I have a massive arctic armour self buff. I feel pretty tough in general, and I do feel like the shocking means I'm not dead weight in a group. But my goal was to be a tank and that just didn't happen. Oh well!

League of Legends: Ascension

There was a big patch today (or maybe yesterday) for League of Legends that brought with it an entirely new game mode. It's not clear to me if this is a temporary game mode or if it's here to stay. Ascension is that game mode, and it's a twist on the Dominion map instead of the standard map.

Dominion is a map mode where you're basically playing 'king of the hill' to control 5 towers around the map. Towers spawn minions and earn points and there's a point threshold for winning. Ascension throws that out the window by taking out the towers and the minions. The 5 points are still on the map but they don't really do anything. There's no need to fight over them. They exist solely as ways to enter the fight after you die. Each team has 3 points they can teleport to (using the trinket slot) with the top one being shared between the teams. The game is still played to a certain threshold of points but points are earned in 3 new ways on this map.

You get 1 point for killing an enemy champion.

You get 3 points for channeling on a node for long enough to 'capture' it. Capturing makes it disappear and it comes back in about a minute to get captured again. There are 3 spots where nodes can spawn and they're situated such that each team spawns near one of the nodes and the third is between the two teams.

You get 5 points for killing 'the ascended'. The game starts with a gigantic neutral Xerath in the middle of the map. He's like a Baron except he uses ludicrous versions of Xerath's spells. Whoever gets the killing blow on Xerath scores the 5 points and becomes 'the ascended'. This gives a buff that makes you awesome but halves your healing and reveals you to the enemy team. If they kill you then they score 5 points and Xerath respawns shortly thereafter. As part of the buff you score 2 points if you kill an enemy champion instead of 1 point while you're ascended.

With no minions to 'get in the way' this game is mostly about running around and killing people. Xerath seems to be a trap in that he does a ton of damage and you give up control of the map if you try for him. And he's easy to steal in that no one has smite! But he seems fun so people keep trying them and it keeps being a bad idea. I've played quite a few games and focusing on being at the nodes when they respawn to score up the 3 quick points feels like the key to the game. Having the ability to kite when you're outnumbered seems strong too, because then you can work to deny the opponent points (from killing you) while your teammates hopefully accomplish something somewhere else like capture a node or kill some champions or something.

I've tried a couple times now to have 'Xerath control' by playing one of the champions with a big neutral monsters nuke, like Nunu or Cho'Gath. It didn't really work. In fact, while the abilities work on Xerath (and it's the only way to heal if you're Nunu) it only seemed to knock him to 1, not kill him, so you needed to do more damage right afterwards in order to actually get him. Having that small burst of power (that requires you to be in melee range) didn't seem worth the downside of not getting to use one of your abilities.

There's also a challenge icon available only to people who manage to win a game, while earning the Xerath buff, without the enemy team ever getting the Xerath buff. Seems tricky since so many people are only too happy to coinflip for Xerath. But eventually I'll get it, right? Right!

Path of Exile: Forsaken Masters Reputation

I went looking to see if I could find precise information on reputation gains from the new quest givers in Path of Exile. No such luck. I did find some reasonable conclusions drawn by some guy and I did some testing with Sceadeau and I feel like I have a rough idea of how things work.

To start, you're going to need to earn a total of a little over 10 million reputation to hit max level with all 7 masters. This morning after about a sixth of the available time for the league to end I had a total of 570k reputation. That's 5.5% of the way to completion and there's no way I'll get done at the current pace. But could the pace be accelerating? Doing today's dailies (and a couple of extra quests found in random maps we ran afterwards) got me up to 640k reputation. 19 days got me 570k, 1 day got me 70k. That's definitely an improvement on the past, but even 70 more days at that pace will only get me halfway to the end goal.

Chances are since things have accelerated to this point that they'll keep accelerating from here on out, too. From the testing we did and what I've been reading it feels like each master has a hidden character level based on your reputation level with that character. This hidden level acts as a gate towards how much reputation you earn in a similar manner to the way character level acts as a gate for how much experience you can earn. For example, my Elreon level is currently at 6, and the quests he gives me in my hideout are somewhere around level 54 or so. Elaine's Elreon level is more like 3 and the quests he gives her are more like level 30. So when I tag along on her daily quest the game sees that I 'should' be level 54 and I'm doing a level 30 quest and it drastically reduces the amount of reputation I get from the quest. The same works the other way too, and she's only going to get credit (at best) for doing a level 30 quest when she comes to do my daily instead of the full value of a level 54 quest.

What does that mean? Well, it means people behind the curve want to tag along on as many dailies as possible because even though they're earning less than the other people they're still earning as much as they can be. People way ahead can tag along on low level stuff to help or for fun but the reputation gains are drastically reduced if you're too far ahead. This also means I can't just run through zones on normal mode to spawn as many quest givers as I can because those quests aren't worth anything to me, but if all my quest givers give quests around level 54 then I could actually be running through cruel levels and getting full reputation for doing so.

I don't know the actual factor for penalizing you for being under leveled. It's entirely possible I should still be running through high level zones to find quest givers because they give a little more than the cruel ones? But presumably that's both slower and more dangerous depending on gear levels.

One other thing we found out is you seem to earn a massive bonus for doing your own daily quest. Somewhere between 2 and 3 times as much?

So I do expect that as I level the masters up the rate of reputation gain will also increase. And quite possibly that increase will be very significant. When you're first starting out you're getting 200 reputation from a quest and now I can do quests worth 5k. The jump in experience needed from 6-7 and from 7-8 is around 3.5x as much. If the quests themselves are worth 2.5x as much (so it still takes more time to advance in the later levels but they also get to have huge numbers) then the level 7 quests will be worth 6 times as much as the level 5 quests I'm currently doing. And since I only need to double my current rate to get it done that could be ok.

I don't know that it will be a big boost, but I don't have any real outs if it isn't so I need to just assert it'll be a big boost and move on from there. Assuming it is actually feasible with my current playstyle, what is the optimal way to get all the way to the end as fast as possible?

Well, there's a big boost to reputation gain speed by getting one of the masters all the way to 8. This lets you bring a 4th master into your hideout giving you access to another daily quest. Daily quests are worth double rep for you and you don't need to hunt them down, so that's very good.

There's also a big drain on your reputation gain when you get a master to level 8. When you're at the cap you can't make use of any of those quests that spawn randomly while you're playing the game. You also can't get reputation from your friend's daily quests for that master. And if you get 4 of the 7 up to max level you can no longer make use of the 4 personal daily quests.

This makes me think that ideally you want to get one master to 8 as fast as possible and then you want to spread the rest of them out as much as you can. Since you're never choosing who you encounter randomly the only real way to influence things is by who you have in your hideout and who your friends have in their hideout. So probably the optimal line of play is to have everyone invite the same master as the one you all want to get to 8 first and then spread the rest of them out. Things get complicated a little since one of the masters gives a free high level map each day as her quest but she also requires 74% more reputation to max out as the lowest guys. Everyone wants the map lady, overall reputation efficiency be damned. Sometimes she even gives quests to do someone else's quest in a map so it could be argued that she's the best option anyway.

So really the ideal situation is probably to have everyone invite map lady and one of the two easiest masters as the first two. Then have people invite a mixture of other masters as their third and fourth options to spread things out.

Looking at my reputation levels right now I've earned the most with Zana but my highest level is with Elreon since he's one of the lowest required guys. My third highest reputation gained is with Tora, who happened to randomly be the master I invited as my 3rd quest giver after Zana and Elreon. Tom also started with Zana and Elreon so we've randomly stumbled into what is probably a good plan. His 3rd is Vorici and since he's different than Tora I think that makes me happy.

There's also the slight worry that some of the masters have quests that can be failed. Zana, Vorici, and Vagan have all been failed several times by my groups. I don't think I've seen any of the other four end in failure. So maybe you end up needing to do more of those three just because you don't get the rep every time?

Path of Exile: Challenges!

I went back to playing Path of Exile because some of the changes in the new expansion sounded pretty cool. Having now played for half a month I can safely say I'm once again hooked on the game. The new random quest givers and hideouts are awesome. Carrying forward the lockboxes and corrupted zones from the last expansion adds lots of little bursts of cool stuff without being excessive. There's still a bajillion interesting builds out there to try, and I want to go back to my last build too. So I'm probably going to keep playing the game for a while more... Which brings the question about how viable the challenges are this time around. Could this be the time I get a t-shirt?!?

There are 8 challenges again, same as always, with a similar mix to previous times. A leveling one, a softcore one, a hardcore one, an item collection one, one for using currency... But the devil is in the details...

First up, fully clear all of the zones in the main game. This means killing every single monster on every single level. But you can do it on any difficulty and it doesn't count things like maps and corrupted zones. I actually did this while leveling because I wanted to earn more experience in merciless difficulty. It took a bit of effort so I wouldn't say it was completely trivial but it was definitely easy compared to other challenges.

Then they want you to hit level 65 with each of the 7 classes. This is also easy to do but requires some time. More time than the last one, but there's nothing inherently hard about leveling up to only 65. If you take life nodes as you level you won't get stuck in a death spiral. I have no concerns about getting this done. Especially since I want to play some more builds... I just need to choose different starting classes!

You also need to reach all 13 of the rampage tiers which is the new thing they added for the softcore league. Basically this means you need to kill around 700 monsters without having a window 5 seconds long where you didn't kill anything. Tom already has this one done and I feel like I could get it on my ranger if I ran a level 66 map with pack size and an easy route. Like dunes... I don't have a mobility skill to get over walls but even if I can't do it on my ranger I'm sure I'll be able to on someone else. Maybe I'll have to worry about it as the league winds down if I haven't picked it up by then but for now I feel like I can pick this up.

Once again they want you to use all the currency items. Well, not all of them. I feel like previous challenges included eternal orbs and this time they don't. I expect I'll probably use most of them through regular play and the ones I won't use will only cost about 30 chaos orbs to pick up regardless. I actually have all of them except a divine on me as it is. So no worry here.

The hardcore challenge is to beat up all 13 interdimensional monstrosities. The hardcore mechanic is that when you kill a bunch of enemies in one spot they might open a rift of some kind. Kill more enemies and the rift gets bigger and bigger. Eventually something really tough pops out. I have no idea how easy or hard these things will be. I feel like 'Abaxoth, The End of All That Is' should be a tough dude but I don't know how tough. It is hardcore so trying and failing costs a character... Maybe I should start a hardcore guy up to get an idea of what is going on here. For now I'm going to assume if I just run a solid build (I'm thinking spectral throw) I can probably pull it off but finding out sooner rather than later would be prudent I think.

They want you to level all 7 of the masters up to level 8. I'm pretty sure there are people at level 8 already but they pug the quests with people in a chat channel. I don't care enough to do that and if it turns out that's what you need to do in order to get this done I'll just give up instead. I tried writing down some numbers today to see how much rep I was getting with each quest but it seemed to change based on who started the quest. I'm going to have to do some research on that soon. For now I'm going to assume it'll just happen if I play a lot and tag along on other people's dailies.

You once again need to own a random assortment of the unique items in the game. I went out and priced all the items on poe.xyz.is and they come out to a little under 1000 chaos total for the entire selection. The first time around all the items in the challenge were worth almost 8000 chaos, so the item challenge is significantly easier this time around. 1000 sounds like a big number but we actually had an item drop in a map the other day worth over 700 chaos. I'm pretty confident if we pooled all the items we had on our accounts we'd have more than enough to do the challenge right now. And we're only 1/6th of the way through! The item collectors were really scary in the previous challenges and I thought I'd need to really play the market to get enough money to buy them all. This time around it doesn't feel so bad.

Finally they want you to kill a random selection of the unique monsters in the game. Some of these bosses are in really hard maps which feels like it might be a problem... But it turns out the new quest system can actually send you into lower level versions of some of the maps and I've already killed some of the ones that looked really hard. I only have 7 left to kill. One is the boss of the last expansion, Atziri, and I have the ability to spawn 2 of her zones already once we feel strong enough to give her a try. Five of them are bosses of unique maps. It's interesting to note that one of the quest givers actually opened a portal to a unique map for me earlier, so I may get those without ever seeing the unique maps drop. Regardless, we'll probably have them drop and if not we can buy one of each if we need to. The last is "The First Rhoa" and no one seems to know where it spawns except maybe in a quest from the map quest giver. I feel like all 7 of these are totally doable.

What does this all mean? Well, I need to check out the hardcore mechanic this time around and I need to run some numbers on leveling all the quest givers but beyond that it seems totally feasible this time around. Is it tshirt time? It might be...