I can remember going out and buying this game at Radio Shack of all places right when it first came out. I don't think I'd even played the original Final Fantasy Tactics at the time, but I had heard myths about how rare and awesome a game it was from Josh. I remember it had a job system with the jobs available based on what race your character was. Job systems are awesome, so this game had to be pretty good... But I don't remember liking it very much. I never beat it, or even came close. I remember being particularly frustrated by the law system where the rules of the game would change each fight, but you'd have to go look them up or get arrested. I like the idea that the rules can change, but I think I would have preferred something where you couldn't do things rather than getting in trouble for doing them? Maybe?
Now, I was thinking I was disappointed with this game the first time around, but I went and took a look at my cartridge today and it turns out I'd played it for around 30 hours last time. 30 hours is actually a pretty long time for a console game let alone for a handheld game, so that's actually a pretty good deal. And I didn't even come close to finishing it!
I was disappointed to find out the 3DS doesn't have a GBA port, so I couldn't actually play this game on my handheld. But then my sister came to the rescue with her original GBA! She was sad that she couldn't find the charger cable for it, but then I flipped it over and pointed out that it actually takes AA batteries. That's how old we're talking here! It also doesn't have a backlit screen, which I remember being a pain back in the day. But I'm sure I can find a place to sit that has a good light behind it... Or at least, I hope I can!
As far as a plan for the game goes, I don't really have one. I'd like to beat the game this time around, which I suspect means I need to keep myself from getting too distracted by side quests. That may well be easier said than done. Time will tell I guess...
I am a little sad with the intro to the game. It starts with a bunch of kids talking about how cool it would be if a video game came to life, and one of the kids says his favourite game is 'Final Fantasy'. And then the main character gets teleported to a world where 'Final Fantasy' came to life. Except it's actually nothing like the original Final Fantasy. It has Bhangas and Moogles and those weren't things in the original game at all. I guess they're just using Final Fantasy as a shorthand for some fantasy RPG game in their universe but that title has real meaning to me and I'm annoyed that they misused it. Bah! Bah I say!
Friday, October 31, 2014
Thursday, October 30, 2014
Banished
At some point in time my brother told me Banished was a good game and I should get it, but I didn't want to pay full price for an unreleased game so I put it on my Steam wishlist. At some point after that it went on sale, I bought it, and promptly forgot about it. Then earlier this week I was over at his place after moving some stuff into storage and he showed me a video of Day[9] playing Banished and again told me I should play it. I didn't really want to go buy a new game, but when I found out I had already bought it in the past I figured I should give it a spin.
The game is a little like a medieval Sim City where you zone areas of the map into housing and food generation and manufacturing huts and the like. The twist is each citizens in your village is an individual actor and follows their own AI patterns based on what job they've been assigned. It feels a bit like how I've always imagined Dwarf Fortress to play, except with actual graphics.
I'm a little disappointed in how little the individual characters seem to matter. Jamie joked that I wanted stats ala Japanese dating simulator, but that's kinda what I want. I want someone who does a lot of farming to be better at farming than someone who brews a lot of ale. But as this game works the jobs are assigned randomly by the game to the individuals. I tell it I want 5 farmers and a brewer and it just picks some people to do those jobs. They're all equivalently good so it doesn't matter who gets picked. But I want it to matter! And I want things to go deep. I want the characters to have stats and get better based on who their parents were since this is a game that goes on for generations. But that isn't to be.
It's still fun even without crazy stats and genetic selection going on. I just want more...
I'm still in my first game, so I guess I learned from watching Day[9] die a couple times. I came close to getting wiped out because I didn't realize you needed to keep building houses or your population would stagnate. I got to the point where I had 37 adults, most of which were about to die of old age, and 1 kid. I figured out what was going on in time to build a bunch of more houses so that after about half my old people died there was room for the few younger people of breeding age to move into a new house and start making babies. My town ended up a little bit inbred as a result...
Mackery and Damaran are brother and sister. Also, Damaran graduated from the school at 17 and was assigned to take over as teacher. Mackery hit 10, went from being a kid to being a student, and moved in with Damaran. His teacher. His sister. And then they went and had a kid of their own. That's... That's not right.
I ended up rebuilding up to about 12 people, and then I built a building that let nomads show up and join my town. They came with 9 people of their own which brought in new breeding stock and made things at least feel like they could be on the level again. And now I'm up over 200 people! With only a few minor starvation issues when I ended up with way too many children and not enough adults to feed them all. Oh well, some of the kids will just go hungry and die and the problem will fix itself!
The game is a little like a medieval Sim City where you zone areas of the map into housing and food generation and manufacturing huts and the like. The twist is each citizens in your village is an individual actor and follows their own AI patterns based on what job they've been assigned. It feels a bit like how I've always imagined Dwarf Fortress to play, except with actual graphics.
I'm a little disappointed in how little the individual characters seem to matter. Jamie joked that I wanted stats ala Japanese dating simulator, but that's kinda what I want. I want someone who does a lot of farming to be better at farming than someone who brews a lot of ale. But as this game works the jobs are assigned randomly by the game to the individuals. I tell it I want 5 farmers and a brewer and it just picks some people to do those jobs. They're all equivalently good so it doesn't matter who gets picked. But I want it to matter! And I want things to go deep. I want the characters to have stats and get better based on who their parents were since this is a game that goes on for generations. But that isn't to be.
It's still fun even without crazy stats and genetic selection going on. I just want more...
I'm still in my first game, so I guess I learned from watching Day[9] die a couple times. I came close to getting wiped out because I didn't realize you needed to keep building houses or your population would stagnate. I got to the point where I had 37 adults, most of which were about to die of old age, and 1 kid. I figured out what was going on in time to build a bunch of more houses so that after about half my old people died there was room for the few younger people of breeding age to move into a new house and start making babies. My town ended up a little bit inbred as a result...
I ended up rebuilding up to about 12 people, and then I built a building that let nomads show up and join my town. They came with 9 people of their own which brought in new breeding stock and made things at least feel like they could be on the level again. And now I'm up over 200 people! With only a few minor starvation issues when I ended up with way too many children and not enough adults to feed them all. Oh well, some of the kids will just go hungry and die and the problem will fix itself!
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
Final Fantasy X-2 Conclusions
A variety of events have conspired to cause my playthrough of Final Fantasy X-2 to come to a bit of a premature conclusion. I no longer have a PS3 (or access to my saved game even if I had one) so my second play capped out at 63% completion. That's not the 100% needed to see the final special cutscene. Which means it's probably time to wrap up that little segment of my marathon and look ahead to the next game, whatever that happens to be...
I was really looking forward to playing FFX-2 when I started this marathon up 3 years ago. (Uh... Jeez, I sure have been taking my time, huh?) But it didn't really pull me in. I think part of it is being jaded with the RTB system. I really liked the updates they did to it the first time I played (I can still remember the first time I used a megaphoenix, had my last character die while the item was in the air, and DIDN'T LOSE because the system let the megaphoenix resolve and bring the character that used it back to life) but I guess they didn't hold up so well. The big thing I think is how terrible anything that isn't an autoattack ended up being because attacking has a higher priority than using an ability or casting a spell. So you could get juggled out of doing your thing by enemies that attacked fast enough. Or if you were the one attacking, you could juggle them out of their things.
Just mashing attack is a thing I used to like doing a lot in RTB games. But somewhere along the way I wanted to do other things. I can remember being similarly jaded with FFIV in this marathon for similar reasons. I think there's a problem when the thing I most want to have happen is to have my characters get berserked so I stop having to input the only relevant command. If all I'm going to do is attack then the game might as well do that for me, right? But then you get into a state like I got into in FFX-2 here where I never actually played the game after I got the catnip. Rikku went first and killed one enemy guaranteed, and by the time someone else got an action and I could input a command she'd kill a second one. So really I could play the game, or I could not play the game, and the same thing would happen. Rikku would kill everything with no input.
The game remains incredibly pretty. I still like the concept of live swapping in what class your characters are on demand in the fights. I like the wide variety of abilities you can access. I really like the costumes and the character combat chat. But going to a RTB system meant most of that stuff was just a terrible waste of time. Sticking with the FFX system or tweaking it a little could have been really, really cool.
I often like minigames and this game is in a very real sense entirely minigames. The actual core plot is nowhere near as detailed or as epic as a normal Final Fantasy game, which I think has to count against it. Minigames are a great diversion from an epic plot, especially when they come with ways to become more powerful. Here it mostly felt like you were doing things just to have something to do. A way to raise that counter up to 100% to get the good ending. Which I didn't get.
I still do want to get that, and it's certainly an idea running around in the back of my mind to just do a run on the PS2 version now that I've looked up what it takes. There's a route to do it in one playthrough. I'm thinking that may be a thing I could do as a start to streaming if the internet here ends up being fast enough.
It feels like I'm pretty down on the game, but I think a bunch of things sort of conspired to make it feel worse than it really is. Taking 3 weeks off to go to WBC this year instead of 1 week put a big gap in my playing that made it hard to get back into things. Then hurting my wrist so I couldn't play at all for a couple weeks (and only sporadically after that) was not the fault of the game. And then needing to return the console/move across the country... None of those things should actually lower my rating here. And while going back to a RTB system makes me sad, it's mostly being compared to other RTB systems, and it wouldn't really be fair to ding this one more than those ones.
The character design is great, but that's leeching from the characters of FFX. Should that count against this one? The one new character (Paine) is actually pretty interesting. The new comedic villain on the other hand is just annoying. I think the real big strike against it has to be the lack of an epic feel. I get that the world is recovering from the actual epic evil from the first game but it does lead to a bit of a let down feeling when it's 'just' a single super weapon that is pretty easily destroyed that's threatening the world this time around.
All told, I think this game fits in around Kingdom Hearts on the rating scale. Awesome graphics and characters, but not really original ones. Fun enough gameplay, but not as good as it probably should have been. And I definitely enjoyed Kingdom Hearts more this time around, so it's going to get the edge here. FFX-2 will get slotted in at slot #9, just ahead of FFIX.
Next up is supposed to be FFXI, but with the World of Warcraft expansion hitting soon there's no way I'm going to be playing a different MMO. Which means I should probably be playing the handheld game Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, which I actually just found in my move. I wonder if I can remember where I packed it...
I was really looking forward to playing FFX-2 when I started this marathon up 3 years ago. (Uh... Jeez, I sure have been taking my time, huh?) But it didn't really pull me in. I think part of it is being jaded with the RTB system. I really liked the updates they did to it the first time I played (I can still remember the first time I used a megaphoenix, had my last character die while the item was in the air, and DIDN'T LOSE because the system let the megaphoenix resolve and bring the character that used it back to life) but I guess they didn't hold up so well. The big thing I think is how terrible anything that isn't an autoattack ended up being because attacking has a higher priority than using an ability or casting a spell. So you could get juggled out of doing your thing by enemies that attacked fast enough. Or if you were the one attacking, you could juggle them out of their things.
Just mashing attack is a thing I used to like doing a lot in RTB games. But somewhere along the way I wanted to do other things. I can remember being similarly jaded with FFIV in this marathon for similar reasons. I think there's a problem when the thing I most want to have happen is to have my characters get berserked so I stop having to input the only relevant command. If all I'm going to do is attack then the game might as well do that for me, right? But then you get into a state like I got into in FFX-2 here where I never actually played the game after I got the catnip. Rikku went first and killed one enemy guaranteed, and by the time someone else got an action and I could input a command she'd kill a second one. So really I could play the game, or I could not play the game, and the same thing would happen. Rikku would kill everything with no input.
The game remains incredibly pretty. I still like the concept of live swapping in what class your characters are on demand in the fights. I like the wide variety of abilities you can access. I really like the costumes and the character combat chat. But going to a RTB system meant most of that stuff was just a terrible waste of time. Sticking with the FFX system or tweaking it a little could have been really, really cool.
I often like minigames and this game is in a very real sense entirely minigames. The actual core plot is nowhere near as detailed or as epic as a normal Final Fantasy game, which I think has to count against it. Minigames are a great diversion from an epic plot, especially when they come with ways to become more powerful. Here it mostly felt like you were doing things just to have something to do. A way to raise that counter up to 100% to get the good ending. Which I didn't get.
I still do want to get that, and it's certainly an idea running around in the back of my mind to just do a run on the PS2 version now that I've looked up what it takes. There's a route to do it in one playthrough. I'm thinking that may be a thing I could do as a start to streaming if the internet here ends up being fast enough.
It feels like I'm pretty down on the game, but I think a bunch of things sort of conspired to make it feel worse than it really is. Taking 3 weeks off to go to WBC this year instead of 1 week put a big gap in my playing that made it hard to get back into things. Then hurting my wrist so I couldn't play at all for a couple weeks (and only sporadically after that) was not the fault of the game. And then needing to return the console/move across the country... None of those things should actually lower my rating here. And while going back to a RTB system makes me sad, it's mostly being compared to other RTB systems, and it wouldn't really be fair to ding this one more than those ones.
The character design is great, but that's leeching from the characters of FFX. Should that count against this one? The one new character (Paine) is actually pretty interesting. The new comedic villain on the other hand is just annoying. I think the real big strike against it has to be the lack of an epic feel. I get that the world is recovering from the actual epic evil from the first game but it does lead to a bit of a let down feeling when it's 'just' a single super weapon that is pretty easily destroyed that's threatening the world this time around.
All told, I think this game fits in around Kingdom Hearts on the rating scale. Awesome graphics and characters, but not really original ones. Fun enough gameplay, but not as good as it probably should have been. And I definitely enjoyed Kingdom Hearts more this time around, so it's going to get the edge here. FFX-2 will get slotted in at slot #9, just ahead of FFIX.
Next up is supposed to be FFXI, but with the World of Warcraft expansion hitting soon there's no way I'm going to be playing a different MMO. Which means I should probably be playing the handheld game Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, which I actually just found in my move. I wonder if I can remember where I packed it...
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
World of Warcraft: Hacking Home Stretch
I got most of my stuff unloaded tonight and found the bag with all my computer wires. I got myself all set up and after taking my Civ V turns I went to check on my World of Warcraft account. I went to log in and got an incorrect password error message. Now I've changed that password probably close to a dozen times in the last little while so I wasn't sure if I even knew what it was supposed to be. So I tried a bunch of passwords for a while and none of them worked. So I went to my backup email account that is now running my WoW account to see if it had any information about what was going on. After trying a few passwords on it I got in and found that on Monday my password had been reset.
*sigh*
I went and poked around on the Blizzard website and it wouldn't let me reset the password without first telling it the SMS phone number associated with the account. So I went and got that from my sister again. Then it made me enter in a code it texted her. Then I got to reset my password and log in. I went and took a look and found a ticket in the system submitted by the hacker around the same time when the password reset request went in. The ticket was ultimately cancelled.
The conclusions I can draw from this is the hacker tried to get a GM to let him back into my account and the GM took a first step towards letting him do so, but only if he had access to both my new email account and to my sister's phone. The hacker obviously has access to neither of those things, so they didn't get in. My password did get reset and it took me a bit to jump through the hoops to enter a new one again, so I'm not thrilled that the GM let him get even that far but at least I didn't lose my stuff again.
And since the hacker tried on Monday, failed, and hasn't tried since? I'm probably free and clear. I still need to figure out the guild leadership issue and then petition a GM for the rest of my money back, but it feels like I should probably get the expansion again after all. Woo!
*sigh*
I went and poked around on the Blizzard website and it wouldn't let me reset the password without first telling it the SMS phone number associated with the account. So I went and got that from my sister again. Then it made me enter in a code it texted her. Then I got to reset my password and log in. I went and took a look and found a ticket in the system submitted by the hacker around the same time when the password reset request went in. The ticket was ultimately cancelled.
The conclusions I can draw from this is the hacker tried to get a GM to let him back into my account and the GM took a first step towards letting him do so, but only if he had access to both my new email account and to my sister's phone. The hacker obviously has access to neither of those things, so they didn't get in. My password did get reset and it took me a bit to jump through the hoops to enter a new one again, so I'm not thrilled that the GM let him get even that far but at least I didn't lose my stuff again.
And since the hacker tried on Monday, failed, and hasn't tried since? I'm probably free and clear. I still need to figure out the guild leadership issue and then petition a GM for the rest of my money back, but it feels like I should probably get the expansion again after all. Woo!
Monday, October 27, 2014
Arrived in NB
Well, I have now arrived in New Brunswick and am a little unpacked. Unfortunately the bag containing all my power cords is currently misplaced so I can't actually set up my own computer or really play games of any kind. But considering how my hands seem to be a lot worse after all the packing and lugging around of heavy stuff... Maybe that's for the best.
Tomorrow night the plan is to finish unpacking the U-Haul (I'm storing a lot of my stuff at my Dad's place) and hopefully find my bag of wires in the process. And then I guess see how much extra damage I inflict on myself lifting heavy boxes up some stairs to see when I can use my hands again without having them go numb.
Tomorrow night the plan is to finish unpacking the U-Haul (I'm storing a lot of my stuff at my Dad's place) and hopefully find my bag of wires in the process. And then I guess see how much extra damage I inflict on myself lifting heavy boxes up some stairs to see when I can use my hands again without having them go numb.
Sunday, October 26, 2014
Bridge Match 3 - Board 23
Board 23 - Dealer South - All Vul
Opponents convention card: Bridge World Standard
Opponents playing strength: Good
My hand: ♠ K 7 5 ♥ 6 5 4 ♦ K 4 2 ♣ J 7 3 2
West opens 1 heart in second seat. East bids 2 hearts. West goes to 4 hearts. Partner and I stay silent throughout.
Partner leads the 9 of clubs.
9-4-J-K. West switches to a spade of all things. A-3-2-5. Then he goes back to clubs. 5-T-Q-2. And another club. 8-3-5 of diamonds-6. Now a diamond. 7-2-Q-6. And another. A-T-8-4. Another diamond gets ruffed. 3-J-2 of hearts-K.
And now he draws trump. 7-4-3-Q. Partner shifts to a spade. 4-Q-K-8 of hearts. Draw more trump. A-K-9-5. T-9 of spades-8 of spades-6. And now declarer is up.
I wish Jack had a claim on offense feature. Making 6.
EW played all the contracts this time. They made 3NT, and 4 hearts 3 times, and 4 hearts up 1 twice, and 4 hearts up 2 twice. I'm not sure how we were supposed to take more than a single trick. Have declarer lead low twice in hearts I guess? Not lead a club to start so I can preserve my 4th round control? I feel like I did nothing wrong and only got 1MP here.
Jack disagrees with my club play on the first trick. And in retrospect, since we're playing Rusinov leads, I guess that makes sense. He should have the T so my covering his 9 with my J is stupid. So we should probably hold them to 5. My bad, Jack!
Ranking after board 23/60: 9/16 with 49.38%
Opponents convention card: Bridge World Standard
Opponents playing strength: Good
My hand: ♠ K 7 5 ♥ 6 5 4 ♦ K 4 2 ♣ J 7 3 2
West opens 1 heart in second seat. East bids 2 hearts. West goes to 4 hearts. Partner and I stay silent throughout.
Partner leads the 9 of clubs.
| NORTH ♣ 9 | ||
| EAST ♠ Q T 8 2 ♥ 9 7 2 ♦ 8 7 ♣ A Q 8 4 | ||
| SOUTH ♠ K 7 5 ♥ 6 5 4 ♦ K 4 2 ♣ J 7 3 2 |
| West | North | East | South |
| Pass | |||
| 1♥ | Pass | 2♥ | Pass |
| 4♥ | Pass | Pass | Pass |
9-4-J-K. West switches to a spade of all things. A-3-2-5. Then he goes back to clubs. 5-T-Q-2. And another club. 8-3-5 of diamonds-6. Now a diamond. 7-2-Q-6. And another. A-T-8-4. Another diamond gets ruffed. 3-J-2 of hearts-K.
And now he draws trump. 7-4-3-Q. Partner shifts to a spade. 4-Q-K-8 of hearts. Draw more trump. A-K-9-5. T-9 of spades-8 of spades-6. And now declarer is up.
I wish Jack had a claim on offense feature. Making 6.
| NORTH ♠ J 9 6 4 3 ♥ K Q ♦ J T 6 ♣ T 9 6 | ||
| WEST ♠ A ♥ A J T 8 3 ♦ A Q 9 5 3 ♣ K 5 | EAST ♠ Q T 8 2 ♥ 9 7 2 ♦ 8 7 ♣ A Q 8 4 | |
| SOUTH ♠ K 7 5 ♥ 6 5 4 ♦ K 4 2 ♣ J 7 3 2 |
Jack disagrees with my club play on the first trick. And in retrospect, since we're playing Rusinov leads, I guess that makes sense. He should have the T so my covering his 9 with my J is stupid. So we should probably hold them to 5. My bad, Jack!
Ranking after board 23/60: 9/16 with 49.38%
Saturday, October 25, 2014
Bridge Match 3 - Board 22
Board 22 - Dealer East - EW Vul
Opponents convention card: Bridge World Standard
Opponents playing strength: Good
My hand: ♠ K 9 8 ♥ 5 ♦ K Q T 8 2 ♣ Q T 9 7
West opens 2 hearts in 3rd seat, which is a preempt. East jumps to 4 hearts which is possibly preemptive. Partner has to have a hand here if East and I couldn't open and West has a preempt. I have support for all the other suits (K98 of spades is a little sketchy, but whatever) and I have pretty much a maximum for a passed hand. So I double, hopefully for takeout. Partner bids 4 spades which gets passed out.
East leads the J of hearts.
J-5-Q-9. West shifts to a club and it's time to think. We have that heart loser, a club loser, and a spade loser for sure. Diamonds are solid. We probably have a second spade loser, though. And the second club might get ruffed. There's not a lot of play to the hand though. Draw trump when I can and hope I can hold the spade losers to as few as possible. The club goes 8-4-A-7. A club back. 6-9-3-J. I fire a low spade around. 4-3-?... Am I supposed to finesse here? If East has specifically JT3 that'll potentially let me make the contract. He also has to have the last club. Going high is right when East has the A of spades. Any A has to be more likely than specifically JT3 with the 3rd club, so I hop. 4-3-K-2.
Ok, that's definitely a start. East has the A of spades now. I need him to have specifically A3 and not have the last club. That doesn't feel very likely. And actually, with the enemies having AJT left between them I have no way to make. I lose 2 spades here for sure. So I just want to try to hold it to down 1. Which is actually guaranteed as long as I draw trump. So I do that. 9-T-Q-A. East draws the last trump out. Hmm. Now I lose an extra heart too. Man, I'm bad. Down 2.
Three tables passed this hand out which seems insane to me. I'd open both the East and West hands! EW made 3 hearts once, went down 1 in 3 hearts once, and went down 1 in 4 hearts once. The other 2 tables went down 2 in 4 spades. Which is worth 3MPs. Holding it to down 1 was possibly, but only worth 1 more MP so not a super big deal.
Jack disagrees with my double. He wonders what I had in mind. I wanted to show a maximum with low numbers of hearts. I think that's a good thing to show on this auction. Jack also disagrees with my throwing away a trick by not ruffing a heart once I won the first spade trick, which is totally fair.
Ranking after board 22/60: 8/16 with 51.3%
Opponents convention card: Bridge World Standard
Opponents playing strength: Good
My hand: ♠ K 9 8 ♥ 5 ♦ K Q T 8 2 ♣ Q T 9 7
West opens 2 hearts in 3rd seat, which is a preempt. East jumps to 4 hearts which is possibly preemptive. Partner has to have a hand here if East and I couldn't open and West has a preempt. I have support for all the other suits (K98 of spades is a little sketchy, but whatever) and I have pretty much a maximum for a passed hand. So I double, hopefully for takeout. Partner bids 4 spades which gets passed out.
East leads the J of hearts.
| NORTH ♠ Q 7 6 5 4 ♥ 9 8 ♦ A 4 ♣ K J 5 4 | ||
| EAST ♥ J | ||
| SOUTH ♠ K 9 8 ♥ 5 ♦ K Q T 8 2 ♣ Q T 9 7 |
| West | North | East | South |
| Pass | Pass | ||
| 2♥1 | Pass | 4♥2 | Double3 |
| Pass | 4♠ | Pass | Pass |
| Pass | |||
| 1Weak two | |||
| 2Possibly preemptive | |||
| 3Competitive | |||
J-5-Q-9. West shifts to a club and it's time to think. We have that heart loser, a club loser, and a spade loser for sure. Diamonds are solid. We probably have a second spade loser, though. And the second club might get ruffed. There's not a lot of play to the hand though. Draw trump when I can and hope I can hold the spade losers to as few as possible. The club goes 8-4-A-7. A club back. 6-9-3-J. I fire a low spade around. 4-3-?... Am I supposed to finesse here? If East has specifically JT3 that'll potentially let me make the contract. He also has to have the last club. Going high is right when East has the A of spades. Any A has to be more likely than specifically JT3 with the 3rd club, so I hop. 4-3-K-2.
Ok, that's definitely a start. East has the A of spades now. I need him to have specifically A3 and not have the last club. That doesn't feel very likely. And actually, with the enemies having AJT left between them I have no way to make. I lose 2 spades here for sure. So I just want to try to hold it to down 1. Which is actually guaranteed as long as I draw trump. So I do that. 9-T-Q-A. East draws the last trump out. Hmm. Now I lose an extra heart too. Man, I'm bad. Down 2.
| NORTH ♠ Q 7 6 5 4 ♥ 9 8 ♦ A 4 ♣ K J 5 4 | ||
| WEST ♠ T 2 ♥ A K Q 7 6 3 ♦ 9 7 3 ♣ 8 3 | EAST ♠ A J 3 ♥ J T 4 2 ♦ J 6 5 ♣ A 6 2 | |
| SOUTH ♠ K 9 8 ♥ 5 ♦ K Q T 8 2 ♣ Q T 9 7 |
Jack disagrees with my double. He wonders what I had in mind. I wanted to show a maximum with low numbers of hearts. I think that's a good thing to show on this auction. Jack also disagrees with my throwing away a trick by not ruffing a heart once I won the first spade trick, which is totally fair.
Ranking after board 22/60: 8/16 with 51.3%
Friday, October 24, 2014
Moving Time
I've been spending this last week packing all of my worldly positions into boxes in order to prep for moving back across the country to New Brunswick. I'll probably get around to posting more about the why at a later date. For now, all that really matters is all my stuff is getting shoved into a minivan tomorrow morning and then its getting driven far, far away.
I'm not quite ready to give up on posting every day, but I don't think the SNES blog is getting updated this week. I figure I'll do up a couple extra bridge hands for the weekend for sure and assert I'll be someplace with internet access for Monday. Maybe I'll do two SNES posts next week to catch back up. The next two games are Super Star Wars and Wing Commander, so that should be good times.
Who knows what's in store for the future... I'm hoping I can find an internet connection with a good enough upload speed to actually try out streaming. That could be fun! I do expect I'll end up just playing a lot of online games like always so probably there won't actually be much changing as far as most people who may be reading this are concerned. I guess we'll see!
I'm not quite ready to give up on posting every day, but I don't think the SNES blog is getting updated this week. I figure I'll do up a couple extra bridge hands for the weekend for sure and assert I'll be someplace with internet access for Monday. Maybe I'll do two SNES posts next week to catch back up. The next two games are Super Star Wars and Wing Commander, so that should be good times.
Who knows what's in store for the future... I'm hoping I can find an internet connection with a good enough upload speed to actually try out streaming. That could be fun! I do expect I'll end up just playing a lot of online games like always so probably there won't actually be much changing as far as most people who may be reading this are concerned. I guess we'll see!
Thursday, October 23, 2014
World of Warcraft: Hack Free!
After my 5th time being hacked earlier this week the GM I talked to reset my secret question and had me change the email address on my account, but he failed to restore my characters properly. The next GM I talked to got confused while trying to restore my characters and decided to permanently ban me instead. But she didn't mark that ticket as resolved, she just locked my account and walked away. So the next day someone else got around to the open ticket, tried to restore my characters, and unlocked my account. 4 nights later and I still have my account. Looks like either the hacker got bored, or the hacker somehow knows they didn't restore all my stuff yet, or the changes the last guy advised actually worked. Certainly without knowing my new email address the hacker can't use the web tools to steal the account. They'd need to go through a GM. The GMs did hand over my account once already so I don't feel super safe, but I do feel reasonably safe.
There's still the issue of my account no being properly restored. They actually restored my gear twice, so I have a second copy of a lot of my stuff. That doesn't actually help much, but it's a thing. I'm still out most of my money. I figure I'm short about 280k still. I also still don't have leadership of the guild. That belongs to an alt of someone we used to play with back in the day. I tried emailing him about it but his old email address doesn't work anymore. If the hacker hadn't deleted him from my Battle.Net friend list I'd try messaging him there. Oh well, not really a big deal I guess. I still have alts that can invite people to the guild, so there's not really a problem. The guild bank is still gone and makes up 174k of the 280k I'm missing. I'm not sure of Amaranthea has it or not. I'm not sure if the GMs would restore it to him or me or what.
I'm also worried that if I bring attention to my account that Blizzard will ban it again despite not being hacked in what feels like a long time.
Eh, I'll figure that stuff out later I guess. Now that I have my gear back I can at least play the game. Unfortunately I'm stuck on a PvP quest in my PvE quest chain... Why in the world would they do that? I'm sure not geared for PvP so being forced to win 2 battlegrounds with me in them is a pretty hard thing to do. *sigh*
But it does seem like I get to play again... So it's prime time for other people to be coming back to play too! At least in 3 weeks when the expansion hits... Think about it...
There's still the issue of my account no being properly restored. They actually restored my gear twice, so I have a second copy of a lot of my stuff. That doesn't actually help much, but it's a thing. I'm still out most of my money. I figure I'm short about 280k still. I also still don't have leadership of the guild. That belongs to an alt of someone we used to play with back in the day. I tried emailing him about it but his old email address doesn't work anymore. If the hacker hadn't deleted him from my Battle.Net friend list I'd try messaging him there. Oh well, not really a big deal I guess. I still have alts that can invite people to the guild, so there's not really a problem. The guild bank is still gone and makes up 174k of the 280k I'm missing. I'm not sure of Amaranthea has it or not. I'm not sure if the GMs would restore it to him or me or what.
I'm also worried that if I bring attention to my account that Blizzard will ban it again despite not being hacked in what feels like a long time.
Eh, I'll figure that stuff out later I guess. Now that I have my gear back I can at least play the game. Unfortunately I'm stuck on a PvP quest in my PvE quest chain... Why in the world would they do that? I'm sure not geared for PvP so being forced to win 2 battlegrounds with me in them is a pretty hard thing to do. *sigh*
But it does seem like I get to play again... So it's prime time for other people to be coming back to play too! At least in 3 weeks when the expansion hits... Think about it...
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Bridge Match 3 - Board 21
Board 21 - Dealer North - NS Vul
Opponents convention card: Bridge World Standard
Opponents playing strength: Good
My hand: ♠ A T 9 4 ♥ 8 5 4 3 ♦ 9 4 2 ♣ 5 4
East opens 1 heart in second chair. My hand sure is bad, so it looks like this is a hand where I sit back and hope they bid too much. They bid all the way to 6 hearts. I sure hope my 4 little hearts complicate things for them!
I decide to go aggro and lead the A of spades. (THE ACE OF SPADES!)
A-2-8-7. East should have all the other aces. Partner played his highest spade, and he sure doesn't have an honour, so it's entirely possible he has a singleton. I know East has at least 2 spades so partner has at most 2 of them. I see no compelling reason to try for anything other than a ruff here, so I'll play a second spade. 4-J-3-5. Oh well.
Declarer draws some trump. T-6-2-3. Q-7 of diamonds-7-4. K-3 of diamonds-A-5. 9-8-3 of clubs-5 of diamonds. Declarer now should have at least 1 club trick, 2 diamonds, 3 spades, and another heart to go with his 5 tricks already taken. That's 12. He has the entries available by playing a diamond to the K, cash the spades, then a club back to cash the diamond ace.
He does exactly that. Making 6.
All of the other tables played 4 hearts. 3 of them made 6, 3 of them made 5, one of them even went down 1. So we get a flat bottom board here. If I lead a club then we set up a second trick when I get in with my spade ace. A diamond cuts communication. So I pretty much let them make with the spade lead. But it only really goes bad when West has 5 solid spades and it was one of the ways to potentially set them if partner had a stiff. So West needed exactly 5 spades since 4 wouldn't be enough tricks and 6 would mean partner could ruff. Oh well.
Captain Jack agrees with me all the way! He also agrees with me that we got unlucky that only our opponent bid slam. Boo!
Ranking after board 21/60: 7/16 with 52.72%
Opponents convention card: Bridge World Standard
Opponents playing strength: Good
My hand: ♠ A T 9 4 ♥ 8 5 4 3 ♦ 9 4 2 ♣ 5 4
East opens 1 heart in second chair. My hand sure is bad, so it looks like this is a hand where I sit back and hope they bid too much. They bid all the way to 6 hearts. I sure hope my 4 little hearts complicate things for them!
I decide to go aggro and lead the A of spades. (THE ACE OF SPADES!)
| WEST ♠ K Q J 6 2 ♥ K Q T ♦ K ♣ J 9 7 3 | ||
| SOUTH ♠ A T 9 4 ♥ 8 5 4 3 ♦ 9 4 2 ♣ 5 4 |
| West | North | East | South |
| Pass | 1♥ | Pass | |
| 2NT1 | Pass | 3NT2 | Pass |
| 4NT3 | Pass | 5♣4 | Pass |
| 6♥ | Pass | Pass | Pass |
| 13+ hearts, game forcing | |||
| 215-17 points, no singleton or void | |||
| 3Ace asking for hearts | |||
| 40 or 3 aces | |||
A-2-8-7. East should have all the other aces. Partner played his highest spade, and he sure doesn't have an honour, so it's entirely possible he has a singleton. I know East has at least 2 spades so partner has at most 2 of them. I see no compelling reason to try for anything other than a ruff here, so I'll play a second spade. 4-J-3-5. Oh well.
Declarer draws some trump. T-6-2-3. Q-7 of diamonds-7-4. K-3 of diamonds-A-5. 9-8-3 of clubs-5 of diamonds. Declarer now should have at least 1 club trick, 2 diamonds, 3 spades, and another heart to go with his 5 tricks already taken. That's 12. He has the entries available by playing a diamond to the K, cash the spades, then a club back to cash the diamond ace.
He does exactly that. Making 6.
| NORTH ♠ 8 3 ♥ 6 ♦ J T 8 7 6 5 3 ♣ K Q 2 | ||
| WEST ♠ K Q J 6 2 ♥ K Q T ♦ K ♣ J 9 7 3 | EAST ♠ 7 5 ♥ A J 9 7 2 ♦ A Q ♣ A T 8 6 | |
| SOUTH ♠ A T 9 4 ♥ 8 5 4 3 ♦ 9 4 2 ♣ 5 4 |
Captain Jack agrees with me all the way! He also agrees with me that we got unlucky that only our opponent bid slam. Boo!
Ranking after board 21/60: 7/16 with 52.72%
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Bridge Match 3 - Board 20
Board 20 - Dealer West - All Vul
Opponents convention card: Dutch Doubleton
Opponents playing strength: Advanced
My hand: ♠ A 9 4 ♥ A 8 6 3 2 ♦ 2 ♣ K 8 3 2
Partner opens a weak 1NT in second seat. My 11 points plus his 12-14 is maybe enough for game, and maybe not. Actually, it's probably not. Unless partner has a good heart suit with a maximum. But we can probably make 3 hearts regardless? And it feels like that bid should be invitational for hearts. Yeah, run it. Partner continues to 4 hearts.
West leads the A of clubs.
Turns out my bid was game forcing, not invitational. But partner has a 14 count with a killer heart suit, so we should be good to go here. We have one diamond loser, one club loser, and one spade loser. With this opening lead we have 9 winners. I can get an extra trick by ruffing a club, or with a dummy reversal by ruffing 2 diamonds in hand. I can also finesse a spade if it comes down to it. Let's see what they take off the top... A-6-T-3. He shifts to a diamond. 4-9-J-2. And back to a club. J-2-9-Q. Well, having the 9 of clubs drop here means my 8 is set up so I get an extra trick that way. Unless hearts split badly I'm up here.
They split 3-1, so I'm up. Draw 2 rounds of trump, ruff a diamond with the A, draw the last trump, ruff a diamond, cash 2 clubs and 2 spades and the rest of my hearts. Making 5.
All eight tables played 4 hearts. 5 of us made up 1, 2 made just in, and 1 went down 1. So we get 10 MPs.
Jack disagrees with my heart bid because my hand isn't good enough to force to game. He wants me to start with Stayman. I'm not sure a 3-5 major split is good for Stayman, but maybe that's because I learned with strong NTs and transfers.
Ranking after board 20/60: 3/16 with 55.36%
Opponents convention card: Dutch Doubleton
Opponents playing strength: Advanced
My hand: ♠ A 9 4 ♥ A 8 6 3 2 ♦ 2 ♣ K 8 3 2
Partner opens a weak 1NT in second seat. My 11 points plus his 12-14 is maybe enough for game, and maybe not. Actually, it's probably not. Unless partner has a good heart suit with a maximum. But we can probably make 3 hearts regardless? And it feels like that bid should be invitational for hearts. Yeah, run it. Partner continues to 4 hearts.
West leads the A of clubs.
| NORTH ♠ K J 6 ♥ K Q J T ♦ Q T 9 3 ♣ Q 6 | ||
| WEST ♣ A | ||
| SOUTH ♠ A 9 4 ♥ A 8 6 3 2 ♦ 2 ♣ K 8 3 2 |
| West | North | East | South |
| Pass | 1NT | Pass | 3♥1 |
| Pass | 4♥ | Pass | Pass |
| Pass | |||
| 15 hearts, game forcing | |||
Turns out my bid was game forcing, not invitational. But partner has a 14 count with a killer heart suit, so we should be good to go here. We have one diamond loser, one club loser, and one spade loser. With this opening lead we have 9 winners. I can get an extra trick by ruffing a club, or with a dummy reversal by ruffing 2 diamonds in hand. I can also finesse a spade if it comes down to it. Let's see what they take off the top... A-6-T-3. He shifts to a diamond. 4-9-J-2. And back to a club. J-2-9-Q. Well, having the 9 of clubs drop here means my 8 is set up so I get an extra trick that way. Unless hearts split badly I'm up here.
They split 3-1, so I'm up. Draw 2 rounds of trump, ruff a diamond with the A, draw the last trump, ruff a diamond, cash 2 clubs and 2 spades and the rest of my hearts. Making 5.
| NORTH ♠ K J 6 ♥ K Q J T ♦ Q T 9 3 ♣ Q 6 | ||
| WEST ♠ 7 5 3 ♥ 7 ♦ A 7 5 4 ♣ A 9 7 5 4 | EAST ♠ Q T 8 2 ♥ 9 5 4 ♦ K J 8 6 ♣ J T | |
| SOUTH ♠ A 9 4 ♥ A 8 6 3 2 ♦ 2 ♣ K 8 3 2 |
Jack disagrees with my heart bid because my hand isn't good enough to force to game. He wants me to start with Stayman. I'm not sure a 3-5 major split is good for Stayman, but maybe that's because I learned with strong NTs and transfers.
Ranking after board 20/60: 3/16 with 55.36%
Monday, October 20, 2014
World of Warcraft: Account Locked
Over the last 4 days my World of Warcraft account got hacked 5 times. I still don't know how it happened in the first place. As far as I can tell there's still nothing wrong with my email account or with my computer, and he only gets to repeat the account hack because Blizzard has done a poor job of securing my account on their end. This is a bit of a serious accusation, but I feel like I can back it up.
Hack #2, the attacker likely got in by using the SMS service he set up on my account during the first hack. Or by using the secret question he set up on my account during the first hack. Neither were removed by Blizzard when they restored my account the first time, even though I explicitly noted the SMS service had been added by the hacker. After this hack I made sure they removed the SMS.
Hack #3, the attacker certainly got in by asking nicely.
Note that before I could get my account back in the first place I had to provide photo ID. This guy did not need to attach ID. Heck, the GM who let him into my account didn't even bother to fill out the madlibs form properly, unless somehow my name is NAMEHERE and my issue was ISSUEHERE. This time the hacker changed my account email address.
Hack #4, the attacker likely got in using the secret question. The GM who helped me out this time couldn't do much, and had to leave my account locked while a restoration team guy worked on the account. He didn't have any new suggestions for securing my account, but what I did on my own was got my sister to let me use her cell phone as the SMS thing. I assumed this would be good enough, but it was not.
Hack #5, the attacker likely got in using the secret question. The GM this time suggested the secret question as a potential vulnerability and had me change it. They also had me change the email address associated with the account. Both of those changes seemed reasonable, and it surprises me in retrospect that none of the other GMs suggested it. Frankly, those seem like much more reasonable things to suggest than getting me to change my email password a second time. (The first time seems quite reasonable.) This GM was helpful in terms of helping secure my account but he failed when it came to restoring my account. He said he'd done it, but my character had no gear and almost all the money was still missing.
So tonight after getting Sceadeau and Elaine to start playing I went and opened another ticket, this time to get my stuff restored. The GM this time around took her sweet time looking into things, which is just fine. An earlier GM had just mailed me 404k to fix the problem and get me out of his hair and I'm more than happy to have someone sit down and restore what I should have. This GM did a restoration, but it was not anywhere near correct. I ended up with 114k total gold when it's obvious that at least 404k was stolen from the guild bank log. I'm pretty sure the total amount is more like 534k. Anyway, I explained a bit of the math behind how I arrived at my number. She went away for a while longer and then came back saying my account had to be locked because of how many times I was hacked.
JUH?
If this was standard policy given how many times I'd been hacked I'd be bitter but could understand it as a stance they'd take. Especially if nothing new had changed. Repeating the same action over and over is just feeding the hacker 534k gold every time and I can see not wanting to do that. So if that's what the guy this morning had said instead of offering 2 new things to try, so be it. But that's not what happened. (Especially if Blizzard can't track down the gold that gets stolen and just makes new gold to give to me, the hacker is making almost $400 each time he hacks me. I can see why he keeps doing it!)
I'm especially pissed because the number of hacks is being used against me when at least one and probably 4 of the 5 hacks can be attributed not to my actions, but to Blizzard's actions. If the first guy had removed the SMS the hacker added and also realized the secret question was added at the same time and had that changed as well we'd probably be free and clear. Certainly the time when a GM let the hacker in has to be on Blizzard! I feel like too many of these GMs have reacted in a way to speed up getting a fix out instead of making sure the fix was the right one and it probably sped up their individual call response times but is jamming the system in general.
This GM said the only way to unlock the account was to have an authenticator mailed to me and used. But she couldn't get them to mail one express before I move, so I'm looking at not being able to play for a couple weeks. And since now is when my friends have started playing that's not really a good option. I also wanted to use this time before the expansion hits to play. Oh, and I'd bought the expansion and the game time last week because I was going to play this month. So I asked for a refund and was denied.
I pressed some more, and eventually she caved. But not to unlock my account. Not to send me an authenticator quickly. Not to run a test to see if changing the secret question and the email address were good enough to secure the account. No. She refunded my expansion purchase. Not my gametime purchase, which I can never use because they locked my account, just the expansion. So they gave me back $50, but not the extra $42 for 3 months of gametime. I'm going to have to yell about that one way or the other too.
I fully intend to open a new ticket tomorrow morning to see if things won't change when I get a different rep. If this experience tells me anything it's that the reps are not consistently trained, so there's a decent chance I get someone else who just lets me in and mails me 404k again. Of course this all depends on not losing my Battle.Net account again overnight. We'll see if the question and email changes are good enough.
But if they aren't, or if Blizzard doesn't let me back in... I'm probably done with WoW. Which sucks, because I was having fun playing and because I'd convinced Sceadeau and Elaine to start playing too.
Hack #2, the attacker likely got in by using the SMS service he set up on my account during the first hack. Or by using the secret question he set up on my account during the first hack. Neither were removed by Blizzard when they restored my account the first time, even though I explicitly noted the SMS service had been added by the hacker. After this hack I made sure they removed the SMS.
Hack #3, the attacker certainly got in by asking nicely.
Note that before I could get my account back in the first place I had to provide photo ID. This guy did not need to attach ID. Heck, the GM who let him into my account didn't even bother to fill out the madlibs form properly, unless somehow my name is NAMEHERE and my issue was ISSUEHERE. This time the hacker changed my account email address.
Hack #4, the attacker likely got in using the secret question. The GM who helped me out this time couldn't do much, and had to leave my account locked while a restoration team guy worked on the account. He didn't have any new suggestions for securing my account, but what I did on my own was got my sister to let me use her cell phone as the SMS thing. I assumed this would be good enough, but it was not.
Hack #5, the attacker likely got in using the secret question. The GM this time suggested the secret question as a potential vulnerability and had me change it. They also had me change the email address associated with the account. Both of those changes seemed reasonable, and it surprises me in retrospect that none of the other GMs suggested it. Frankly, those seem like much more reasonable things to suggest than getting me to change my email password a second time. (The first time seems quite reasonable.) This GM was helpful in terms of helping secure my account but he failed when it came to restoring my account. He said he'd done it, but my character had no gear and almost all the money was still missing.
So tonight after getting Sceadeau and Elaine to start playing I went and opened another ticket, this time to get my stuff restored. The GM this time around took her sweet time looking into things, which is just fine. An earlier GM had just mailed me 404k to fix the problem and get me out of his hair and I'm more than happy to have someone sit down and restore what I should have. This GM did a restoration, but it was not anywhere near correct. I ended up with 114k total gold when it's obvious that at least 404k was stolen from the guild bank log. I'm pretty sure the total amount is more like 534k. Anyway, I explained a bit of the math behind how I arrived at my number. She went away for a while longer and then came back saying my account had to be locked because of how many times I was hacked.
JUH?
If this was standard policy given how many times I'd been hacked I'd be bitter but could understand it as a stance they'd take. Especially if nothing new had changed. Repeating the same action over and over is just feeding the hacker 534k gold every time and I can see not wanting to do that. So if that's what the guy this morning had said instead of offering 2 new things to try, so be it. But that's not what happened. (Especially if Blizzard can't track down the gold that gets stolen and just makes new gold to give to me, the hacker is making almost $400 each time he hacks me. I can see why he keeps doing it!)
I'm especially pissed because the number of hacks is being used against me when at least one and probably 4 of the 5 hacks can be attributed not to my actions, but to Blizzard's actions. If the first guy had removed the SMS the hacker added and also realized the secret question was added at the same time and had that changed as well we'd probably be free and clear. Certainly the time when a GM let the hacker in has to be on Blizzard! I feel like too many of these GMs have reacted in a way to speed up getting a fix out instead of making sure the fix was the right one and it probably sped up their individual call response times but is jamming the system in general.
This GM said the only way to unlock the account was to have an authenticator mailed to me and used. But she couldn't get them to mail one express before I move, so I'm looking at not being able to play for a couple weeks. And since now is when my friends have started playing that's not really a good option. I also wanted to use this time before the expansion hits to play. Oh, and I'd bought the expansion and the game time last week because I was going to play this month. So I asked for a refund and was denied.
I pressed some more, and eventually she caved. But not to unlock my account. Not to send me an authenticator quickly. Not to run a test to see if changing the secret question and the email address were good enough to secure the account. No. She refunded my expansion purchase. Not my gametime purchase, which I can never use because they locked my account, just the expansion. So they gave me back $50, but not the extra $42 for 3 months of gametime. I'm going to have to yell about that one way or the other too.
I fully intend to open a new ticket tomorrow morning to see if things won't change when I get a different rep. If this experience tells me anything it's that the reps are not consistently trained, so there's a decent chance I get someone else who just lets me in and mails me 404k again. Of course this all depends on not losing my Battle.Net account again overnight. We'll see if the question and email changes are good enough.
But if they aren't, or if Blizzard doesn't let me back in... I'm probably done with WoW. Which sucks, because I was having fun playing and because I'd convinced Sceadeau and Elaine to start playing too.
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Bridge Match 3 - Board 19
Board 19 - Dealer South - EW Vul
Opponents convention card: Dutch Doubleton
Opponents playing strength: Advanced
My hand: ♠ 5 3 ♥ Q J T 6 2 ♦ 6 4 2 ♣ A K 2
I'm tempted to open my balanced 10 count but I decided to hold off. Partner ends up opening 1 heart in 3rd chair, which is very interesting. East bids an unusual 2NT showing the minors. I am unsure how to proceed here, but I figure double can't hurt too much. West bids 3 clubs, partner bids 3 hearts, and East passes. If partner has a really good hand could we be missing slam? Probably, but I think that's probably on him in that case. I guess I could bid 4 clubs to show a control in clubs for hearts? Would he interpret it that way? I decide not to risk it and bid the safe 4 hearts which gets passed out.
East leads the T of diamonds.
We have a heart loser and 2 diamond losers. And no way to really deal with any of them. We also have 10 tricks and no real way to lose any of them. Let's see what happens... T-2-Q-A. I draw a round of trump. 3-A-2-8. East cashes a diamond. K-4-9-8. And another. J-6-7 of spades-7. Now he plays a spade. Will West ruff?!?
No. He doesn't ruff. Because he has a spade and because trump split 1-1. Anyway, I claim the rest. Making 4.
Seven tables made 4 hearts. One tables went down 1 in 4 hearts. So we get 8 MPs.
Jack disagrees with my double of 2NT since it is for penalty. He wants me to just bid 4 hearts. I can see the advantage to that since it keeps the opponents from pinpointing a diamond sacrifice.
Ranking after board 19/60: 5/16 with 54.51%
Opponents convention card: Dutch Doubleton
Opponents playing strength: Advanced
My hand: ♠ 5 3 ♥ Q J T 6 2 ♦ 6 4 2 ♣ A K 2
I'm tempted to open my balanced 10 count but I decided to hold off. Partner ends up opening 1 heart in 3rd chair, which is very interesting. East bids an unusual 2NT showing the minors. I am unsure how to proceed here, but I figure double can't hurt too much. West bids 3 clubs, partner bids 3 hearts, and East passes. If partner has a really good hand could we be missing slam? Probably, but I think that's probably on him in that case. I guess I could bid 4 clubs to show a control in clubs for hearts? Would he interpret it that way? I decide not to risk it and bid the safe 4 hearts which gets passed out.
East leads the T of diamonds.
| NORTH ♠ A K ♥ K 9 7 5 4 3 ♦ A 8 7 ♣ 7 5 | ||
| EAST ♦ T | ||
| SOUTH ♠ 5 3 ♥ Q J T 6 2 ♦ 6 4 2 ♣ A K 2 |
| West | North | East | South |
| Pass | |||
| Pass | 1♥ | 2NT1 | Double2 |
| 3♣ | 3♥ | Pass | 4♥ |
| Pass | Pass | Pass | |
| 1Ghestem (minors) | |||
| 2Intending to double at least one of their suits | |||
We have a heart loser and 2 diamond losers. And no way to really deal with any of them. We also have 10 tricks and no real way to lose any of them. Let's see what happens... T-2-Q-A. I draw a round of trump. 3-A-2-8. East cashes a diamond. K-4-9-8. And another. J-6-7 of spades-7. Now he plays a spade. Will West ruff?!?
No. He doesn't ruff. Because he has a spade and because trump split 1-1. Anyway, I claim the rest. Making 4.
| NORTH ♠ A K ♥ K 9 7 5 4 3 ♦ A 8 7 ♣ 7 5 | ||
| WEST ♠ Q T 8 7 6 4 2 ♥ 8 ♦ Q 9 ♣ T 6 3 | EAST ♠ J 9 ♥ A ♦ K J T 5 3 ♣ Q J 9 8 4 | |
| SOUTH ♠ 5 3 ♥ Q J T 6 2 ♦ 6 4 2 ♣ A K 2 |
Jack disagrees with my double of 2NT since it is for penalty. He wants me to just bid 4 hearts. I can see the advantage to that since it keeps the opponents from pinpointing a diamond sacrifice.
Ranking after board 19/60: 5/16 with 54.51%
Friday, October 17, 2014
World of Warcraft: Account Hacked
So I've been playing WoW a fair bit lately, trying out all the raids I missed and digging up some artifacts and leveling my alt to 90. It's been fun. Then I woke up Friday morning to some odd emails. Apparently I'd paid to transfer off 5 of my characters and then Blizzard locked my account down for suspicious behaviour. This had happened about 30 minutes before I woke up. I was able to change my password to something else and log in, discovering that I'd stolen the guild bank and run off with the cash. Just like what happened to Stochastic a year ago.
I went to submit a ticket stating that I'd been hacked. In the process it asked me to enter my SMS phone number, which I couldn't do because I hadn't associated a phone number with my account. (And I actually can't do such a thing because Blizzard detects my phone as being 'prepaid' and therefore won't allow it to be used.) I clicked a link to remove it and it told me it had just pinged my phone and I needed to enter the code it sent to do so. Which meant it actually pinged the hacker's phone and let him know I was trying to do something about what he'd done. So he came back and changed my password on me, kicking me out of my account.
In the meantime I'd changed my email account password to be safe (though if the hacker had access to my email account he should have been deleting the emails letting me know what was up) and ran some malware scans on my computer. Spybot and Malwarebytes both turned up nothing, so I'm not sure how they got my password.
Blizzard is set up such that you can't call support until 10am and can't use the website chat until 9am so I got to sit around bitter for 6 hours until the website opened up. I got in and talked to someone on the website who was pretty nice about the whole thing but ultimately couldn't do much except send me to someone who could do something. Which is fine, I've worked support on a game before and I understand that not everyone can do everything.
A couple hours later I got emails indicating that the character transfers I'd paid for had been reverted, but before they'd give me access to my account again I'd need to send in some ID to prove I am who I am. Fine, I actually have a scanner now thanks to my mother buying me a combo printer thingy so I scanned in my health card and attached it to a new ticket on the website. I ended up having to go to bed before they got back to me about it, though.
I woke up to find they'd unlocked my account (presumably thanks to my health card), reverted the character transfers, and given me back my gold. They did not remove the SMS number the hacker added to my account. So while I slept he took my account back over, bought character transfers for my characters again, and tried to take off with the newly restored cash. *sigh*
It's not clear exactly what happened because the transfers kept getting denied. He ended up buying 16 all told in 3 waves trying to get my characters off of my server. He even had the gall to submit some tickets of his own trying to get access to my account at one point. Of course while my tickets all explained what was going on his only stated:
'My god!!Where are the characters in realm Vek'nilash?I just left out for a little while!'
I'd like to think that wouldn't have worked on them, but in their support website it actually got a response from a person letting them know they'd been helped and that my gold had been restored. Pretty sure this is when he took the account back over via SMS and tried to run off with the gold again.
Anyway, as soon as I got up I sent off a new ticket of my own spelling out that they'd need to remove the SMS from my account and do another restoration. At 9am I again went to the website chat and talked to someone who was able to remove the SMS for me and reset my password. So I got my account back and was able to log in and see what was up. 5 of my characters were flat broke, the other 5 had the maximum amount allowed for a character transfer, and the guild bank was still empty. So I had the website chat person look into that and after showing them the guild bank cash log (by having them log into my character?!?) they just gave me the full amount removed from the guild bank. I suspect this is pretty close to the amount of money I should have since the first time around the hacker deposited ~230k of my own money into the guild bank, presumably because the rest of my wealth was able to be server transfered on 5 characters. So I probably had 130k on those character, 230k added to the guild bank, and 170k from the guild bank itself. I still have the 130k on the 5 characters so giving me 400k should let me get things back to where they should be. I don't actually know how much money I had. 360k sounds like it's probably in the right ballpark? 170k in the guild bank sounds low since it was at 268k when Stochastic got hacked. But maybe he didn't put it all back in? Or maybe repairs are expensive? Or maybe people have been slowly embezzling? Who knows? Who cares? I mostly just want things to be right because I like when things are right. It's not like we actually need the money.
It also turned out the hacker had screwed up all my keybindings. Because he's a jerk. Or probably because he wanted to be able to run using WASD and I've set those to be other things. And Blizzard stores keybindings online now, so him changing them on his end overwrote what I had on my end. Thankfully my sister showed me a trick with Windows Restore and I was able to revert my settings files to what I used in 2013, so that was fixed pretty easily.
He also deleted all my Battle.net friends. Because he's a jerk. Oddly he didn't delete all of them... He left Randy and Jeff. Everyone else was removed. I thought I could use StarCraftII and the Facebook integration to find all my friends again, but I can't. So if you want to be my friend on Battle.Net again, well, send me a friend request (ziggyny at gmail.com)!
I went to submit a ticket stating that I'd been hacked. In the process it asked me to enter my SMS phone number, which I couldn't do because I hadn't associated a phone number with my account. (And I actually can't do such a thing because Blizzard detects my phone as being 'prepaid' and therefore won't allow it to be used.) I clicked a link to remove it and it told me it had just pinged my phone and I needed to enter the code it sent to do so. Which meant it actually pinged the hacker's phone and let him know I was trying to do something about what he'd done. So he came back and changed my password on me, kicking me out of my account.
In the meantime I'd changed my email account password to be safe (though if the hacker had access to my email account he should have been deleting the emails letting me know what was up) and ran some malware scans on my computer. Spybot and Malwarebytes both turned up nothing, so I'm not sure how they got my password.
Blizzard is set up such that you can't call support until 10am and can't use the website chat until 9am so I got to sit around bitter for 6 hours until the website opened up. I got in and talked to someone on the website who was pretty nice about the whole thing but ultimately couldn't do much except send me to someone who could do something. Which is fine, I've worked support on a game before and I understand that not everyone can do everything.
A couple hours later I got emails indicating that the character transfers I'd paid for had been reverted, but before they'd give me access to my account again I'd need to send in some ID to prove I am who I am. Fine, I actually have a scanner now thanks to my mother buying me a combo printer thingy so I scanned in my health card and attached it to a new ticket on the website. I ended up having to go to bed before they got back to me about it, though.
I woke up to find they'd unlocked my account (presumably thanks to my health card), reverted the character transfers, and given me back my gold. They did not remove the SMS number the hacker added to my account. So while I slept he took my account back over, bought character transfers for my characters again, and tried to take off with the newly restored cash. *sigh*
It's not clear exactly what happened because the transfers kept getting denied. He ended up buying 16 all told in 3 waves trying to get my characters off of my server. He even had the gall to submit some tickets of his own trying to get access to my account at one point. Of course while my tickets all explained what was going on his only stated:
'My god!!Where are the characters in realm Vek'nilash?I just left out for a little while!'
I'd like to think that wouldn't have worked on them, but in their support website it actually got a response from a person letting them know they'd been helped and that my gold had been restored. Pretty sure this is when he took the account back over via SMS and tried to run off with the gold again.
Anyway, as soon as I got up I sent off a new ticket of my own spelling out that they'd need to remove the SMS from my account and do another restoration. At 9am I again went to the website chat and talked to someone who was able to remove the SMS for me and reset my password. So I got my account back and was able to log in and see what was up. 5 of my characters were flat broke, the other 5 had the maximum amount allowed for a character transfer, and the guild bank was still empty. So I had the website chat person look into that and after showing them the guild bank cash log (by having them log into my character?!?) they just gave me the full amount removed from the guild bank. I suspect this is pretty close to the amount of money I should have since the first time around the hacker deposited ~230k of my own money into the guild bank, presumably because the rest of my wealth was able to be server transfered on 5 characters. So I probably had 130k on those character, 230k added to the guild bank, and 170k from the guild bank itself. I still have the 130k on the 5 characters so giving me 400k should let me get things back to where they should be. I don't actually know how much money I had. 360k sounds like it's probably in the right ballpark? 170k in the guild bank sounds low since it was at 268k when Stochastic got hacked. But maybe he didn't put it all back in? Or maybe repairs are expensive? Or maybe people have been slowly embezzling? Who knows? Who cares? I mostly just want things to be right because I like when things are right. It's not like we actually need the money.
It also turned out the hacker had screwed up all my keybindings. Because he's a jerk. Or probably because he wanted to be able to run using WASD and I've set those to be other things. And Blizzard stores keybindings online now, so him changing them on his end overwrote what I had on my end. Thankfully my sister showed me a trick with Windows Restore and I was able to revert my settings files to what I used in 2013, so that was fixed pretty easily.
He also deleted all my Battle.net friends. Because he's a jerk. Oddly he didn't delete all of them... He left Randy and Jeff. Everyone else was removed. I thought I could use StarCraftII and the Facebook integration to find all my friends again, but I can't. So if you want to be my friend on Battle.Net again, well, send me a friend request (ziggyny at gmail.com)!
Thursday, October 16, 2014
Streaming Poker
A week or two ago I watched a stream of a guy playing Hanabi with some of the people who watch his stream. Hanabi is a hidden information game so playing it on stream has some potential cheating concerns. They solved the problem by having the people playing the game just stop watching/listening to the stream. In a cooperative game you're playing just for fun with people you have some reason to trust that seems like a fine solution. But it got me thinking about how one would go about streaming something like poker, where if one of the opponents was able to watch your stream they'd have a ludicrous advantage over you. Would you go to a long 'tape delay' where you wouldn't stream a hand until it was over? Find some way to blank out your hand? Both of those options feel like they're going to hurt the quality of your stream. People seem to like watching streams that are exciting or where they can have a reasonable amount of interaction and poker without a hand cam has proven to be pretty unexciting and throwing a long delay on it would remove any pretense of interaction.
So when I saw a stream yesterday with a poker tournament I was intrigued. The streamer went the 'blank your hand' route which made watching what he was doing less interesting for me. But he added in the interaction element by playing against people in the stream. They had $150 in prizes and no entry fee to sign up, so people were just around to hang out, play some free poker, and maybe win a non-insignificant amount of money. It turns out the streamer runs cash tournaments for a game called Puzzle Fighter II with some regularity and I'd actually tuned in to watch one of those many months ago. He generates the money for the prizes in these things from viewer donations. This seems like a really cool idea for how to make use of donations to ramp up viewer interaction.
At any rate, I watched the end of the poker tournament and wasn't terribly impressed by the level of play. People going excessively all in with 4th pair, or a small flush, that sort of thing. After the first tournament ended they ran a second one for fun, but then the streamer decided to throw in an extra $20 to the winner if they got at least 9 people. Then after that one wound down he decided to run it back again.
I wouldn't really say I play poker, but I read a fair bit about it. I've just been finishing reading a pair of books on tournament poker and I decided I'd take a break from playing WoW to give this free poker thing a shot. I ended up winning the 12 person tournament for a cool $20 profit. Woo! Now if that's just a factor of getting lucky or maybe knowing a little bit about what to do I can't really say, but it was fun.
As far as streaming goes I like the idea of running games with your viewers, and I like the idea of giving out prizes without there being an entry fee, and I like the idea of using donations to make that happen. But I don't think I like the idea in general of streaming poker. At least, I don't know that streaming hands with a hand cam turned off is interesting enough? Maybe I'm wrong...
So when I saw a stream yesterday with a poker tournament I was intrigued. The streamer went the 'blank your hand' route which made watching what he was doing less interesting for me. But he added in the interaction element by playing against people in the stream. They had $150 in prizes and no entry fee to sign up, so people were just around to hang out, play some free poker, and maybe win a non-insignificant amount of money. It turns out the streamer runs cash tournaments for a game called Puzzle Fighter II with some regularity and I'd actually tuned in to watch one of those many months ago. He generates the money for the prizes in these things from viewer donations. This seems like a really cool idea for how to make use of donations to ramp up viewer interaction.
At any rate, I watched the end of the poker tournament and wasn't terribly impressed by the level of play. People going excessively all in with 4th pair, or a small flush, that sort of thing. After the first tournament ended they ran a second one for fun, but then the streamer decided to throw in an extra $20 to the winner if they got at least 9 people. Then after that one wound down he decided to run it back again.
I wouldn't really say I play poker, but I read a fair bit about it. I've just been finishing reading a pair of books on tournament poker and I decided I'd take a break from playing WoW to give this free poker thing a shot. I ended up winning the 12 person tournament for a cool $20 profit. Woo! Now if that's just a factor of getting lucky or maybe knowing a little bit about what to do I can't really say, but it was fun.
As far as streaming goes I like the idea of running games with your viewers, and I like the idea of giving out prizes without there being an entry fee, and I like the idea of using donations to make that happen. But I don't think I like the idea in general of streaming poker. At least, I don't know that streaming hands with a hand cam turned off is interesting enough? Maybe I'm wrong...
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Blood Bowl: Scheduling Frustrations
I've been enjoying Blood Bowl less and less in recent weeks. Not so much the games themselves... But what I haven't been liking is sitting around not playing Blood Bowl. Sometimes this is even my fault! Last week I made plans to play a game at 9pm. And then I sat around at my computer playing Heroes Clicker and forgetting to check the FumBBL tab from 8pm until 11pm. I idled my way through a game I wanted to play because it slipped my mind to check on it.
Now, FumBBL has a terrible UI for chatting which didn't help. I get notified through IRC if someone sends me a new private message on the website, and I get notified through IRC if someone mentions my name in an IRC channel. But if someone responds to an existing private message, say one where we planned on playing at 9pm, then I don't get notified. So my opponent showed up a little after 9pm, responded to the private message, and then just sat around for a couple hours waiting for me to reply. (Ok, eventually he gave up and ran some errands... He came back when I clued in that I'd missed the game and we were able to play at 11pm.) I feel bad that I made him sit around. But if he'd used IRC to check on me, or if the website itself was set up to notify me whenever I got any message, things would have been a lot better.
That instance beats some of the other ones I've run into, where my opponents will say they'll show up at 9pm and then never do. It's very frustrating. I'm in one league that purports to play a game every 10 days. I last played a game on August 19th. So pretty much 2 months without getting to play a game with my wrestling themed Orcs.
I'm also running into issues with my sleep schedule. Two of my leagues are set up with almost all NA players so most games take place in the evenings. Which is when I'm asleep right now. That's on me. If I could get my opponent to give me a firm time to show up I'd set an alarm, or I'd stay up one day to push forward... But he won't really communicate. It's all a vague 'let's play during the evenings' and then I suggest the next day and he doesn't get back to me until I've gone to bed and then I don't know if I should wake up or not. I'm betting we don't get this game in, and I'm betting it gets counted as my fault despite my being available for pretty much a 20 hour window every day if I have advance notice. I can't say I blame them if they go that way, since I'm asleep during prime time right now and that's my fault. But it makes me frustrated, and it makes me not really want to keep playing.
Now, FumBBL has a terrible UI for chatting which didn't help. I get notified through IRC if someone sends me a new private message on the website, and I get notified through IRC if someone mentions my name in an IRC channel. But if someone responds to an existing private message, say one where we planned on playing at 9pm, then I don't get notified. So my opponent showed up a little after 9pm, responded to the private message, and then just sat around for a couple hours waiting for me to reply. (Ok, eventually he gave up and ran some errands... He came back when I clued in that I'd missed the game and we were able to play at 11pm.) I feel bad that I made him sit around. But if he'd used IRC to check on me, or if the website itself was set up to notify me whenever I got any message, things would have been a lot better.
That instance beats some of the other ones I've run into, where my opponents will say they'll show up at 9pm and then never do. It's very frustrating. I'm in one league that purports to play a game every 10 days. I last played a game on August 19th. So pretty much 2 months without getting to play a game with my wrestling themed Orcs.
I'm also running into issues with my sleep schedule. Two of my leagues are set up with almost all NA players so most games take place in the evenings. Which is when I'm asleep right now. That's on me. If I could get my opponent to give me a firm time to show up I'd set an alarm, or I'd stay up one day to push forward... But he won't really communicate. It's all a vague 'let's play during the evenings' and then I suggest the next day and he doesn't get back to me until I've gone to bed and then I don't know if I should wake up or not. I'm betting we don't get this game in, and I'm betting it gets counted as my fault despite my being available for pretty much a 20 hour window every day if I have advance notice. I can't say I blame them if they go that way, since I'm asleep during prime time right now and that's my fault. But it makes me frustrated, and it makes me not really want to keep playing.
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
World of Warcraft: Updating Addons
I spent today's patch downtime browsing lists of achievements and getting nostalgic for running around in game doing things so I reactivated my account so I could play a bit after the patch. It turns out that not logging in for over a year meant that I had a bit of an issue with outdated addons. I have no clue what addons I need or want anymore, but I figured just downloading new versions of the ones that were yelling at me was probably a good place to start.
This included my auctioneer replacement, TradeSkillMaster. And then once I had that updated I figured I should put it through the paces again and see if I couldn't make some money off of selling some of the glyphs I have just lying around on my old glyph selling alts. I have no clue what these things are legitimately worth, but what I do know from previous expansions is they're worth more right now than they will be later since there's bound to be a lot of people coming back to the game who also don't know what things are legitimately worth but who will want glyphs to do fun things. So I'm just undercutting whatever's up there now and asserting that they're probably not out to lose money with their prices.
Besides, all these glyphs are already made... So really they're worth nothing to me anymore! Any money I can get for them is good money. Knowing what they're actually worth is more a concern if I want to make more of them to supplement my supply. Which I'll probably want to do soon enough since I like making things... But by then I'll have several days of AH scans and presumably some sale data as well to try to make a more educated guess about things.
I ran my death knight around for a bit and did some stuff on my farm. I found it amusing that the seeds I'd planted in June 2013 had grown into harvestable vegetables and hadn't rotted or anything. I was also surprised to find I'd switched to blacksmithing and engineering at some point. They're removed all profession perks in the next expansion which makes me wonder if I even care what I have anymore. I feel like I almost certainly want mining back because I do enjoy zoning out and mining things and I guess I should probably keep one of blacksmithing or engineering since they both use ore. I'll need to look into it and see if it possibly matters which one I keep. I suspect it doesn't.
At any rate, I have the game to what is likely a playable state. Now I just need to read what all my abilities do and then go out and kill things! After I sleep, anyway.
This included my auctioneer replacement, TradeSkillMaster. And then once I had that updated I figured I should put it through the paces again and see if I couldn't make some money off of selling some of the glyphs I have just lying around on my old glyph selling alts. I have no clue what these things are legitimately worth, but what I do know from previous expansions is they're worth more right now than they will be later since there's bound to be a lot of people coming back to the game who also don't know what things are legitimately worth but who will want glyphs to do fun things. So I'm just undercutting whatever's up there now and asserting that they're probably not out to lose money with their prices.
Besides, all these glyphs are already made... So really they're worth nothing to me anymore! Any money I can get for them is good money. Knowing what they're actually worth is more a concern if I want to make more of them to supplement my supply. Which I'll probably want to do soon enough since I like making things... But by then I'll have several days of AH scans and presumably some sale data as well to try to make a more educated guess about things.
I ran my death knight around for a bit and did some stuff on my farm. I found it amusing that the seeds I'd planted in June 2013 had grown into harvestable vegetables and hadn't rotted or anything. I was also surprised to find I'd switched to blacksmithing and engineering at some point. They're removed all profession perks in the next expansion which makes me wonder if I even care what I have anymore. I feel like I almost certainly want mining back because I do enjoy zoning out and mining things and I guess I should probably keep one of blacksmithing or engineering since they both use ore. I'll need to look into it and see if it possibly matters which one I keep. I suspect it doesn't.
At any rate, I have the game to what is likely a playable state. Now I just need to read what all my abilities do and then go out and kill things! After I sleep, anyway.
Monday, October 13, 2014
World of Warcraft: Patch 6.0.2
Tomorrow is seeing the release of patch 6.0.2 for World of Warcraft and if you're familiar with the way they number their releases you'll know this is a big one. There's a new expansion coming out in a month and this is the patch where they bring in most of the systematic changes in the expansion as a sort of trial run. It's genius, really... Content has been mostly exhausted for a lot of people from the last expansion so there's not a lot of danger to screwing people over if some sort of brutal bug or balance issue exists with their changes. They get a month to fix things before the actual expansion comes out, when tons of people will want to be playing and where systemic issues would be a real problem.
Now, I haven't really played the game since the last expansion came out two years ago. I got a few months of fun out of that expansion and I feel like the same will likely be true for a new expansion too. WoW is just such an incredibly polished game that the idea of getting a ton of new quests and achievements to plow through and new mechanics to fool around with is very appealing. Probably more appealing with enough other people to run challenge modes or raid or something, but still pretty fun mostly alone too I would think.
Anyway, reading the patch notes and the upcoming features in the expansion has me pretty excited. They're making a bunch of changes that feel like they're for the better. Reforging is gone because while it sounded like a good idea it just forced everyone to have someone crunch numbers for them and it always felt like a chore to get an upgrade. Along that same vein they took hit and expertise out of the game completely and are changing the way haste works with dots to remove all those silly breakpoints and caps that you needed to hit if you wanted to be optimal. They're also streamlining gear to get rid of 'holy paladin' loot drops by making all plate have strength and intelligence on them. Sure, only one of those stats will do anything for you, but if every item has both of them it's not like you can find one with a better stat mix for you. It'll feel a little silly for my warrior to be a smart guy but it's a change that just makes sense.
They're finally doing something about the insanity of number inflation that comes from having 5 expansions worth of power jumps. Everything is being rebalanced so there's a smooth line from level 1 to 90 and then it'll start ramping up again. Along with this they're trying, once again, to fix healing by inflating health pools. I don't play a healer but I've heard this song and dance before. Maybe they'll actually make it work this time? The claim is they're going to make health keep scaling over the expansion at the same rate as healing does so you won't get to the point where you can just fill someone up with your cheapest heal.
They're also cleaning up tool bars by removing a bunch of abilities from the game. Including a lot of the instant heals and crowd control abilities in an attempt to reduce clutter and make PvP work better. Feels like it's probably a good thing. There wasn't really a need to have 3 runic power dumps for a death knight... Removing rune strike and just tweaking death coil for tanks seems like a fine idea.
Then there are the stuff that came in this expansion after I quit or that will be coming in with the next expansion. Things like flexible raid sizes so you can bring all 14 people who show up to your raid one day and then just 10 the next day and no one has to be benched. Apparently you can also invite people on your friend list from other realms to join your flex raid. Both of these are things that probably would have kept OGT raiding back in Cataclysm.
The big thing in the expansion is player housing where you get to build up your own garrison with your choice of buildings and followers who will work with you. It sounds like a return to Warcraft roots where you build a little town and then the buildings do things for you. It sounds really cool. You can have something like 25 followers in your town, and they all have internal experience bars, and you can level them all up to 100. So many numbers to make bigger! BIGGER NUMBERS! WOO!
They're adding in a 'toy box' where all the cool junk items you find can get stored to play with on a whim without being forced to fill up your inventory with them. This makes me way happier than it probably should. I used to carry around a bunch of silly little things (mostly from archaeology) to use and not having to waste bag space on them will be awesome. Dancing Dwarves ho! They're also making it so crafting reagents stack to bigger numbers (and they're making it so professions have no stat boosts anymore so you can just do what you want) which will be nice.
One cool thing they're doing is giving everyone a free boost to level 90 with the expansion. This is nice because it'll let people try new classes or reroll to play with friends on another server.
Realm first achievements really do seem to be gone. Unlucky. I'd have wanted to try for the realm first cooking threepeat!
Anyway... The actual expansion is coming out Nov 13th. I feel like I'll be there with bells on...
Now, I haven't really played the game since the last expansion came out two years ago. I got a few months of fun out of that expansion and I feel like the same will likely be true for a new expansion too. WoW is just such an incredibly polished game that the idea of getting a ton of new quests and achievements to plow through and new mechanics to fool around with is very appealing. Probably more appealing with enough other people to run challenge modes or raid or something, but still pretty fun mostly alone too I would think.
Anyway, reading the patch notes and the upcoming features in the expansion has me pretty excited. They're making a bunch of changes that feel like they're for the better. Reforging is gone because while it sounded like a good idea it just forced everyone to have someone crunch numbers for them and it always felt like a chore to get an upgrade. Along that same vein they took hit and expertise out of the game completely and are changing the way haste works with dots to remove all those silly breakpoints and caps that you needed to hit if you wanted to be optimal. They're also streamlining gear to get rid of 'holy paladin' loot drops by making all plate have strength and intelligence on them. Sure, only one of those stats will do anything for you, but if every item has both of them it's not like you can find one with a better stat mix for you. It'll feel a little silly for my warrior to be a smart guy but it's a change that just makes sense.
They're finally doing something about the insanity of number inflation that comes from having 5 expansions worth of power jumps. Everything is being rebalanced so there's a smooth line from level 1 to 90 and then it'll start ramping up again. Along with this they're trying, once again, to fix healing by inflating health pools. I don't play a healer but I've heard this song and dance before. Maybe they'll actually make it work this time? The claim is they're going to make health keep scaling over the expansion at the same rate as healing does so you won't get to the point where you can just fill someone up with your cheapest heal.
They're also cleaning up tool bars by removing a bunch of abilities from the game. Including a lot of the instant heals and crowd control abilities in an attempt to reduce clutter and make PvP work better. Feels like it's probably a good thing. There wasn't really a need to have 3 runic power dumps for a death knight... Removing rune strike and just tweaking death coil for tanks seems like a fine idea.
Then there are the stuff that came in this expansion after I quit or that will be coming in with the next expansion. Things like flexible raid sizes so you can bring all 14 people who show up to your raid one day and then just 10 the next day and no one has to be benched. Apparently you can also invite people on your friend list from other realms to join your flex raid. Both of these are things that probably would have kept OGT raiding back in Cataclysm.
The big thing in the expansion is player housing where you get to build up your own garrison with your choice of buildings and followers who will work with you. It sounds like a return to Warcraft roots where you build a little town and then the buildings do things for you. It sounds really cool. You can have something like 25 followers in your town, and they all have internal experience bars, and you can level them all up to 100. So many numbers to make bigger! BIGGER NUMBERS! WOO!
They're adding in a 'toy box' where all the cool junk items you find can get stored to play with on a whim without being forced to fill up your inventory with them. This makes me way happier than it probably should. I used to carry around a bunch of silly little things (mostly from archaeology) to use and not having to waste bag space on them will be awesome. Dancing Dwarves ho! They're also making it so crafting reagents stack to bigger numbers (and they're making it so professions have no stat boosts anymore so you can just do what you want) which will be nice.
One cool thing they're doing is giving everyone a free boost to level 90 with the expansion. This is nice because it'll let people try new classes or reroll to play with friends on another server.
Realm first achievements really do seem to be gone. Unlucky. I'd have wanted to try for the realm first cooking threepeat!
Anyway... The actual expansion is coming out Nov 13th. I feel like I'll be there with bells on...
Sunday, October 12, 2014
Bridge Match 3 - Board 18
Board 18 - Dealer East - NS Vul
Opponents convention card: Dutch Doubleton
Opponents playing strength: Advanced
My hand: ♠ K Q J 5 4 3 ♥ K ♦ T 8 4 2 ♣ K 5
I'm going to discount my stiff king and say this is a preempt. I open 2 spades in second seat. Partner responds 2 no trump which should be asking me for a feature for 3NT. I guess Kx should count and I definitely have a maximum so I bid 3 clubs. Partner finishes with 4 spades which gets passed out.
West leads the T of spades.
Hmm. It looks like there's not a lot going on here... We're double fit with likely 14 tricks and 1 loser. Though I do have some pretty hefty communication issues if clubs don't split 3-2. Or do I? I can draw 4 rounds of trump and then play 3 rounds of clubs. If they split 4-1 I can ruff a club and then cover my heart K with the A as the entry back. So I guess I only really care if a black suit splits 5-0. But other than ruffing a diamond I'm not sure what I could even do if that happens. So I'm just going to assume it won't and take my initial line.
Spades split 4-1 and clubs split 3-2 so I take 13 tricks. Making 7.
Two tables played 3NT making 7. 5 of us played 4 spades making 7. And one poor sap played 6 spades and went down 1. With clubs splitting 3-2 I don't see how that happened. I also don't know why partner didn't bid slam at my table... What could my club feature be except something that likely gives us 12 tricks in the black suits? And he has the ace of hearts and a diamond stiff! Anyway, this is worth only 6 MPs.
Jack disagrees with my opening bid. He thinks I have too many points and wants me to open 1 spade, not 2 spades. I still think that K of hearts is worthless and the 2 spade bid is way more descriptive of my hand, so we're going to have to disagree here Jack.
Ranking after board 18/60: 5/16 with 54.37%
Opponents convention card: Dutch Doubleton
Opponents playing strength: Advanced
My hand: ♠ K Q J 5 4 3 ♥ K ♦ T 8 4 2 ♣ K 5
I'm going to discount my stiff king and say this is a preempt. I open 2 spades in second seat. Partner responds 2 no trump which should be asking me for a feature for 3NT. I guess Kx should count and I definitely have a maximum so I bid 3 clubs. Partner finishes with 4 spades which gets passed out.
West leads the T of spades.
| NORTH ♠ A 6 ♥ A 9 8 3 ♦ 7 ♣ A Q 8 7 3 2 | ||
| WEST ♠ T | ||
| SOUTH ♠ K Q J 5 4 3 ♥ K ♦ T 8 4 2 ♣ K 5 |
| West | North | East | South |
| Pass | 2♠1 | ||
| Pass | 2NT2 | Pass | 3♣3 |
| Pass | 4♠ | Pass | Pass |
| Pass | |||
| 1Weak | |||
| 2Relay | |||
| 3Feature | |||
Hmm. It looks like there's not a lot going on here... We're double fit with likely 14 tricks and 1 loser. Though I do have some pretty hefty communication issues if clubs don't split 3-2. Or do I? I can draw 4 rounds of trump and then play 3 rounds of clubs. If they split 4-1 I can ruff a club and then cover my heart K with the A as the entry back. So I guess I only really care if a black suit splits 5-0. But other than ruffing a diamond I'm not sure what I could even do if that happens. So I'm just going to assume it won't and take my initial line.
Spades split 4-1 and clubs split 3-2 so I take 13 tricks. Making 7.
| NORTH ♠ A 6 ♥ A 9 8 3 ♦ 7 ♣ A Q 8 7 3 2 | ||
| WEST ♠ T ♥ Q J 4 2 ♦ K J 9 6 3 ♣ 9 6 4 | EAST ♠ 9 8 7 2 ♥ T 7 6 5 ♦ A Q 5 ♣ J T | |
| SOUTH ♠ K Q J 5 4 3 ♥ K ♦ T 8 4 2 ♣ K 5 |
Jack disagrees with my opening bid. He thinks I have too many points and wants me to open 1 spade, not 2 spades. I still think that K of hearts is worthless and the 2 spade bid is way more descriptive of my hand, so we're going to have to disagree here Jack.
Ranking after board 18/60: 5/16 with 54.37%
Friday, October 10, 2014
Clicker Heroes: Atman
One of the ancients in Clicker Heroes is named Atman and he costs a large number of souls to level up. His impact on your game is he makes it more likely to have primal bosses spawn as you're playing. Primal bosses are one of the two ways to earn more souls so he felt like a pretty good guy to have. Spend some souls now, get more souls later! The problem is not spending those souls makes you do more damage, which means you get to kill more things, which might well generate more souls themselves. Almost certainly I shouldn't have bought him when I did, but that ship has sailed. Now I want to at least figure out how many souls I expect to gain from an additional level in this guy so I can decide if I want to sink more souls into him now or not.
Typically on a soul farming run I'll get to level 145 and then reset. This gains me 8 souls from other sources and then some number of souls from primals I find from 105 to 145. My gut feeling is that's been about 4 extra per run. How does that stand up? Well, by default each boss has a 25% chance to spawn as a primal and is worth some number of souls based on the level. In this level range I have 4 shots at 1 soul, 3 at 2 souls, and 2 at 3 souls. Which actually averages out to 4 per run. Anyway, that also means that adding an extra 1% chance of spawning a primal on each level will gain me a whopping .16 souls per run. I can do a run every half hour, so if I were to spend the 23 souls on the next level I'd expect to make them back after 144 runs. So about three days to break even, assuming I didn't lose any time by giving up 10% of my damage, anyway... Which all seems pretty terrible, actually.
But what if I go deeper? My longest run ever killed the boss of 260 who is actually worth 13 souls. The total of all those souls could total 194. Getting an extra 1% of those would get me almost 2 souls per run, but that run took me a day. That's 11 and a half days to break even, which is worse than the fast run case.
I'm all about long term rewards, but a week and a half to break even on the cost even if it didn't drastically reduce my damage is a bit much. Until I really ramp up my ability to farm for souls I don't think I should be sinking any more souls into leveling Atman up any further.
Typically on a soul farming run I'll get to level 145 and then reset. This gains me 8 souls from other sources and then some number of souls from primals I find from 105 to 145. My gut feeling is that's been about 4 extra per run. How does that stand up? Well, by default each boss has a 25% chance to spawn as a primal and is worth some number of souls based on the level. In this level range I have 4 shots at 1 soul, 3 at 2 souls, and 2 at 3 souls. Which actually averages out to 4 per run. Anyway, that also means that adding an extra 1% chance of spawning a primal on each level will gain me a whopping .16 souls per run. I can do a run every half hour, so if I were to spend the 23 souls on the next level I'd expect to make them back after 144 runs. So about three days to break even, assuming I didn't lose any time by giving up 10% of my damage, anyway... Which all seems pretty terrible, actually.
But what if I go deeper? My longest run ever killed the boss of 260 who is actually worth 13 souls. The total of all those souls could total 194. Getting an extra 1% of those would get me almost 2 souls per run, but that run took me a day. That's 11 and a half days to break even, which is worse than the fast run case.
I'm all about long term rewards, but a week and a half to break even on the cost even if it didn't drastically reduce my damage is a bit much. Until I really ramp up my ability to farm for souls I don't think I should be sinking any more souls into leveling Atman up any further.
Thursday, October 09, 2014
Clicker Heroes: Reload
Clicker Heroes has 9 abilities you can learn as the game progresses. Each ability does something and then goes on cooldown for a set length of time before you can use it again. One of those abilities, reload, has an hour long cooldown and reduces the cooldown of your previously used ability by an hour. We were chatting about the game the other day on Skype and were trying to find ways to make good use of this ability.
First of all, 6 of the other abilities all last 30 seconds, have durations ranging from 10 minutes to an hour, and give you a combat relevant buff. It clicks for you, or your clicks are more powerful, or you make more gold when you click... They're all multipliers that stack with each other and the best way to use them is to pop them all for the same 30 second stretch of time. Initially it seemed like the thing to do would be to figure out which ability of those 6 was the best one, reset it, and pop it again in the same window. Unfortunately it turns out that doesn't actually give you a second application of whatever ability you reset. It probably refreshes the duration but it doesn't give you any extra power. And since 2 of these abilities are on an hour long cooldown there's no way to use reload to sync them all up for a different 30 second window.
The next ability is energize which has an hour long cooldown and doubles the power of the next ability you use. It interacts with reload in odd ways. For one, you can never actually reset the cooldown of energize. Reload skips energize and resets the cooldown of the ability used before the energize. Reload can be energized and if you do so it knocks an hour off the cooldown of your previous two abilities used, skipping the energize itself. In an interesting turn of events if reload itself was one of those two abilities it will consume the buff but it won't actually reset the cooldown of reload. This means if we could find two things worth refreshing we could do them both at the same time. I guess you could actually use this to reset the cooldown of both hour long buffs from the previous paragraph to allow you to pop your combo 2 times every hour and a half instead of once an hour. I'm pretty sure just using the energize on the combo itself would be a better thing to do, though.
The last ability is the one that really screams for a reload. Dark ritual has an 8 hour long cooldown and gives you a permanent 5% damage boost. Extra damage is good! If you could target your reload on an ability of your choice things would be easy and you'd just use it on dark ritual. Unfortunately only having it impact your most recently used ability means you need to be careful about your clicking order and it means you can't just spam the reload on dark ritual. If you time things careful you can pull off two reloads per dark ritual, though. Use dark ritual, use reload, and then do nothing else. In an hour come back, use energize, and use reload. This will reload your two most recently used non-energize abilities which happen to be reload and dark ritual. This only works once (try it again and you're reload two reloads) but it does work. Getting to use dark ritual every 6 hours instead of every 8 hours is totally worth it. I don't think there's another relevant use for reload, but this one use is pretty good.
It gets even better once you unlock some ancients! One of the ancients permanently reduces the cooldowns of all your abilities. At max rank (where I have him) he takes a full 75% off of the cooldown for every ability. This means my dark ritual only has a 2 hour cooldown and my reload only has a 15 minute cooldown. I can use an energized dark ritual every 30 minutes! (Energize, dark ritual, reload... energize, reload... Repeat.) I can even use my other abilities as bookends right before the first energize and right after the second reload. It's pretty sweet. I was trying to figure out a way to do better than that, but the problem really is that you need to use the second energize on reload or there's no way to get the dark ritual cooldown under an hour. So you can do one 10% buff each hour while using your full combo 3 times in the hour or you can do two 10% buffs each hour and never do your full combo. If you really need to use your full combo on a boss you could leave dark ritual unused for an extra 15 minutes and do one 10% buff and one full combo every 45 minutes as a compromise between the two. Or you could just not buff one of the dark rituals I guess... Do a 10% and a 5% each hour. That's better than the last option. So, yeah... Always reload the dark ritual, always energize the second reload, and maybe energize the dark ritual or your combo depending on your current boss killing needs.
First of all, 6 of the other abilities all last 30 seconds, have durations ranging from 10 minutes to an hour, and give you a combat relevant buff. It clicks for you, or your clicks are more powerful, or you make more gold when you click... They're all multipliers that stack with each other and the best way to use them is to pop them all for the same 30 second stretch of time. Initially it seemed like the thing to do would be to figure out which ability of those 6 was the best one, reset it, and pop it again in the same window. Unfortunately it turns out that doesn't actually give you a second application of whatever ability you reset. It probably refreshes the duration but it doesn't give you any extra power. And since 2 of these abilities are on an hour long cooldown there's no way to use reload to sync them all up for a different 30 second window.
The next ability is energize which has an hour long cooldown and doubles the power of the next ability you use. It interacts with reload in odd ways. For one, you can never actually reset the cooldown of energize. Reload skips energize and resets the cooldown of the ability used before the energize. Reload can be energized and if you do so it knocks an hour off the cooldown of your previous two abilities used, skipping the energize itself. In an interesting turn of events if reload itself was one of those two abilities it will consume the buff but it won't actually reset the cooldown of reload. This means if we could find two things worth refreshing we could do them both at the same time. I guess you could actually use this to reset the cooldown of both hour long buffs from the previous paragraph to allow you to pop your combo 2 times every hour and a half instead of once an hour. I'm pretty sure just using the energize on the combo itself would be a better thing to do, though.
The last ability is the one that really screams for a reload. Dark ritual has an 8 hour long cooldown and gives you a permanent 5% damage boost. Extra damage is good! If you could target your reload on an ability of your choice things would be easy and you'd just use it on dark ritual. Unfortunately only having it impact your most recently used ability means you need to be careful about your clicking order and it means you can't just spam the reload on dark ritual. If you time things careful you can pull off two reloads per dark ritual, though. Use dark ritual, use reload, and then do nothing else. In an hour come back, use energize, and use reload. This will reload your two most recently used non-energize abilities which happen to be reload and dark ritual. This only works once (try it again and you're reload two reloads) but it does work. Getting to use dark ritual every 6 hours instead of every 8 hours is totally worth it. I don't think there's another relevant use for reload, but this one use is pretty good.
It gets even better once you unlock some ancients! One of the ancients permanently reduces the cooldowns of all your abilities. At max rank (where I have him) he takes a full 75% off of the cooldown for every ability. This means my dark ritual only has a 2 hour cooldown and my reload only has a 15 minute cooldown. I can use an energized dark ritual every 30 minutes! (Energize, dark ritual, reload... energize, reload... Repeat.) I can even use my other abilities as bookends right before the first energize and right after the second reload. It's pretty sweet. I was trying to figure out a way to do better than that, but the problem really is that you need to use the second energize on reload or there's no way to get the dark ritual cooldown under an hour. So you can do one 10% buff each hour while using your full combo 3 times in the hour or you can do two 10% buffs each hour and never do your full combo. If you really need to use your full combo on a boss you could leave dark ritual unused for an extra 15 minutes and do one 10% buff and one full combo every 45 minutes as a compromise between the two. Or you could just not buff one of the dark rituals I guess... Do a 10% and a 5% each hour. That's better than the last option. So, yeah... Always reload the dark ritual, always energize the second reload, and maybe energize the dark ritual or your combo depending on your current boss killing needs.
Wednesday, October 08, 2014
Final Fantasy X-2: Round One Done!
Today I went and took my new catnip item out for a spin on the hard boss in the desert, Angra Mainyu. Rikku wasted some time berserk attacking the arm that was immune to physical damage but when she went after the actual boss she did silly damage to him. Yuna was able to use the dark knight ability darkness to keep the arms mostly dead which cleared the path for Rikku to obliterate the boss. Paine made herself invincible and stood ready to throw a phoenix down at Rikku if she died. I wouldn't say the fight was trivial but it was definitely easy. Catnip may have been nerfed but it's still pretty darn good.
With that boss down I figured it was a fine time to go finish the game. The end boss was actually a joke thanks to the catnip. It's a series of fights that presumably have hard components to them but since Rikku goes first and attacks for 19998 before the enemy can react... Splitting the fight up into lots of small fights where she gets to strike first over and over again bodes very poorly for the enemies.
I got a completion score of 55%, which is far short of 100%. It turns out I did a pretty terrible job of avoiding the plot which is what you need to do to get 100% in one playthrough. You have to do every side quest possible and often doing some of the plot will advance the state of the world such that you miss something. Assuming my wrist holds up I may try to burn through a second playthrough focusing on sidequests and see where that gets me. I'll still have that catnip so actual encounters won't take too long I wouldn't think.
With that boss down I figured it was a fine time to go finish the game. The end boss was actually a joke thanks to the catnip. It's a series of fights that presumably have hard components to them but since Rikku goes first and attacks for 19998 before the enemy can react... Splitting the fight up into lots of small fights where she gets to strike first over and over again bodes very poorly for the enemies.
I got a completion score of 55%, which is far short of 100%. It turns out I did a pretty terrible job of avoiding the plot which is what you need to do to get 100% in one playthrough. You have to do every side quest possible and often doing some of the plot will advance the state of the world such that you miss something. Assuming my wrist holds up I may try to burn through a second playthrough focusing on sidequests and see where that gets me. I'll still have that catnip so actual encounters won't take too long I wouldn't think.
Tuesday, October 07, 2014
Heroes of the Swarm
I loaded up the Battle.Net launcher today to see if there was any news in there about the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion. There was a 5th game listed in the launcher, one that I certainly hadn't purchased: Heroes of the Swarm. It vaguely rang a bell and I figured that if it was a free to play game in a genre I love by Blizzard I owed it to the game to check it out.
My wrist has been feeling a little better and I figured I should give it some work to keep it from losing too much strength. It didn't hurt while playing which was good, but I also took breaks to cool it off. The numbness thing is still around, but whatever.
Anyway, Heroes of the Swarm is still in alpha so it's not a finished product but what they have seems pretty good. It has a good tutorial, mediocre AI bots to play against, and it uses heroes from different Blizzard franchises (Diablo, StarCraft, Warcraft...) so there's all kinds of cool nostalgia moments. Plenty of different map twists too to shake up the basic game.
The basic game is a very, very 'dumbed down' version of a DotA or a League of Legends. It's like Blizzard is trying to make a moba game for the masses who find LoL too complicated. If there's actually a market for such a thing this game could really take off. Here are some of the things they changes to make things simpler...
- You earn experience for killing minions and champions same as always, but your team shares an experience bar. Everyone gains a level at the exact same time. There's no jockeying for who gets to have a solo lane to get extra experience. There's no falling behind and becoming useless compared to your teammates. If one lane does badly and another lane does well then your whole team will remain balanced. On the flip side if one lane does badly and everyone else goes even then your whole team falls behind.
- There is no gold. There are no items to buy. There is no concept of last hitting a minion as a result. There's no yelling at people for buying terrible items. There's no needing to know a huge list of items to have a chance at playing decently.
- You start with (almost) all of your skills at level 1, and you don't get to put more points into them to make them better in your own choice of skill order.
- There is some customization. Every so many levels you earn a talent point which you spend by making a choice from a small list of options. I was playing as Jim Raynor (a ranged assassin) and at level 4 I have to choose between having a longer attack range, or getting life leech on my attacks, or doing extra damage on my attacks, or getting extra cooldown reduction when something I recently attacked dies. So I certainly have a choice to make! I've mostly been going with extra attack range because I like to kite in fights but I could see the argument for other choices. But maybe if you had a team full of people healing you and stunning the enemies you'd just want to take the point that makes you do more damage. If you're just fast pushing a lane then the cooldown reduction for killing minions could be game winning. And extra healing on attacks is always good...
- There are jungle camps to kill, but the reason to kill them is you get to spawn versions of them to attack the enemy base. Running off to summon up some powerful siege monsters felt really good when it worked.
- You get a mount. So basically everyone always has boots of mobility.
Now, I've spent a lot of time playing LoL, and I've gotten pretty good at all the annoying fiddly things. I can last hit to earn more gold than many people earn. I know all the items. I know what order to take the skills. Also LoL is an actual finished game. So for me, LoL really feels like the game to play if I want to be playing a moba game. But if someone was starting fresh? They probably want to play HotS. And that bodes very well for this game in the long run I would think...
My wrist has been feeling a little better and I figured I should give it some work to keep it from losing too much strength. It didn't hurt while playing which was good, but I also took breaks to cool it off. The numbness thing is still around, but whatever.
Anyway, Heroes of the Swarm is still in alpha so it's not a finished product but what they have seems pretty good. It has a good tutorial, mediocre AI bots to play against, and it uses heroes from different Blizzard franchises (Diablo, StarCraft, Warcraft...) so there's all kinds of cool nostalgia moments. Plenty of different map twists too to shake up the basic game.
The basic game is a very, very 'dumbed down' version of a DotA or a League of Legends. It's like Blizzard is trying to make a moba game for the masses who find LoL too complicated. If there's actually a market for such a thing this game could really take off. Here are some of the things they changes to make things simpler...
- You earn experience for killing minions and champions same as always, but your team shares an experience bar. Everyone gains a level at the exact same time. There's no jockeying for who gets to have a solo lane to get extra experience. There's no falling behind and becoming useless compared to your teammates. If one lane does badly and another lane does well then your whole team will remain balanced. On the flip side if one lane does badly and everyone else goes even then your whole team falls behind.
- There is no gold. There are no items to buy. There is no concept of last hitting a minion as a result. There's no yelling at people for buying terrible items. There's no needing to know a huge list of items to have a chance at playing decently.
- You start with (almost) all of your skills at level 1, and you don't get to put more points into them to make them better in your own choice of skill order.
- There is some customization. Every so many levels you earn a talent point which you spend by making a choice from a small list of options. I was playing as Jim Raynor (a ranged assassin) and at level 4 I have to choose between having a longer attack range, or getting life leech on my attacks, or doing extra damage on my attacks, or getting extra cooldown reduction when something I recently attacked dies. So I certainly have a choice to make! I've mostly been going with extra attack range because I like to kite in fights but I could see the argument for other choices. But maybe if you had a team full of people healing you and stunning the enemies you'd just want to take the point that makes you do more damage. If you're just fast pushing a lane then the cooldown reduction for killing minions could be game winning. And extra healing on attacks is always good...
- There are jungle camps to kill, but the reason to kill them is you get to spawn versions of them to attack the enemy base. Running off to summon up some powerful siege monsters felt really good when it worked.
- You get a mount. So basically everyone always has boots of mobility.
Now, I've spent a lot of time playing LoL, and I've gotten pretty good at all the annoying fiddly things. I can last hit to earn more gold than many people earn. I know all the items. I know what order to take the skills. Also LoL is an actual finished game. So for me, LoL really feels like the game to play if I want to be playing a moba game. But if someone was starting fresh? They probably want to play HotS. And that bodes very well for this game in the long run I would think...
Monday, October 06, 2014
Death Roulette
I stumbled across an interesting tool someone wrote to encourage interaction between the people watching a stream and the person streaming a roguelike game. The website is a wrapper around a standard Twitch stream that lets the people watching bet fake currency on where and how the streamer is going to die. (Roguelike games are ALL about dying with permanent death!) When the streamer dies they go to the website and enter in the details of the death and the website pays out to the people who guessed correctly a split of all the currency bet across all options.
I found it very interesting. I didn't know much about the game being played (Crypt of the NecroDancer, a roguelike where you need to enter your commands to the rhythm of the background music) but it was extra fun to watch the stream because I was betting on the outcomes. I got it right once when I bet that he'd die to a red dragon. Woo! (I bet on the red dragon every time... It only came home once, but at least it did come home once.)
I'm constantly amazed at extensions to let viewers participate in a stream. This is no Twitch Plays Pokemon, but it's still pretty cool.
I found it very interesting. I didn't know much about the game being played (Crypt of the NecroDancer, a roguelike where you need to enter your commands to the rhythm of the background music) but it was extra fun to watch the stream because I was betting on the outcomes. I got it right once when I bet that he'd die to a red dragon. Woo! (I bet on the red dragon every time... It only came home once, but at least it did come home once.)
I'm constantly amazed at extensions to let viewers participate in a stream. This is no Twitch Plays Pokemon, but it's still pretty cool.
Sunday, October 05, 2014
Bridge Match 3 - Board 17
Board 17 - Dealer North - None Vul
Opponents convention card: Dutch Doubleton
Opponents playing strength: Advanced
My hand: ♠ J T ♥ A Q J 9 8 ♦ A T 2 ♣ T 7 6
Partner opens a weak NT. I also have a weak NT so we might well have a game here. I'm not playing transfers so I can't transfer to hearts and then invite to game. I could start with stayman I guess? Or maybe I should bid 3 hearts as an invite with hearts? But that's still forcing to at least the 3 level which sucks. My heart suit is really, really good so I may just want to bid 4 hearts. Well, let's start with stayman. I bid 2 clubs. Partner responds 3 spades. I don't know what that means. I assume 5 spades and a maximum. So game should be fine, but I am worried about the minors now. So let's just play 4 hearts. Partner pulls to 4 spades. Ok, you're the boss man partner. Looking at the alerts after the hand my 4 heart bid was interpreted as control in hearts for spades. How in the world is that possible? Stayman doesn't promise both majors! I could easily have 0 spades and 5 hearts! Wow... Partner's lucky I have 2 of them.
East leads the 3 of diamonds.
I have 4 hearts, a club, a diamond, and 3 spades for sure. I have finesses to earn extra tricks in every suit. As far as losers I should lose a trick in each minor for sure and might well lose one in each major along with an extra club loser. So there's a lot of work here. Can I afford to duck the diamond? I'm guaranteed an extra diamond trick if I do, and I have a diamond loser for sure if I hop. Ducking is scary if they play clubs back through my strong holding? But if West has the K of diamonds they get to use it as an entry to his hand later anyway. So I duck. 3-2-K-9. West fires back a diamond. 8-Q-6-T. I now have a diamond set up to pitch a round card, except all my late round cards are high so who cares.
I'm missing 6 spades so I don't know that I can afford to finesse. I may well set up their 9 if I do. I'm also in the wrong hand to finesse and I don't know that I want to play hearts right now. On the down side it's obvious where they can get tricks so if West has the Q of spades I'm letting him in to lead a club. The other option is to let him in with the heart K if he has it which doesn't appeal much either. Playing hearts is bad when there's a 4-1 split and I let them start ruffing. I don't think I really have a good play, so I'm going to hope East has the Q of spades and just play low now. 4-2-J-Q. West fires back trump. 6-5-3-T.
Ok, now I don't have an entry back to hand in order to finesse hearts or draw trump. Unless I ruff my A of diamonds. I'm down if West has the K of hearts so I guess I should just assert he doesn't have it and take my only line to make. I ruff my A of diamonds, draw 2 rounds of trump, lead the T of hearts and cross my fingers. It holds! I play another heart to the Q. It wins too! My A of hearts drops the K and I win all the tricks except the A of clubs at the end. Making 4.
Four tables played 4 spades and made. 3 tables played 4 hearts with 1 going up 1, 1 making, and 1 going down 1. And then one pair went crazy and made it to 6 hearts, down 1. So we get 8 MPs.
Jack disagrees with my 2 club bid. He doesn't think it's good for Stayman and just wants me to start with 3 hearts. I guess that makes sense. I will point out that when I click on my 2 clubs bid one of the potential hands it lists is '11+ points, 5 hearts'... He then disagrees with my 4 heart bid, obviously because I meant it to play and he meant it as a cuebid. I really don't understand how it could be a cuebid. Anyway, he wants me to bid 3NT instead. Finally he doesn't want me to draw trump while playing the hand. He wants me to just bite the bullet and finesse hearts. It does let me finesse spades back when they both work, though since West had Q9xx it wouldn't have saved a trick.
Ranking after board 17/60: 4/16 with 55.04%
Opponents convention card: Dutch Doubleton
Opponents playing strength: Advanced
My hand: ♠ J T ♥ A Q J 9 8 ♦ A T 2 ♣ T 7 6
Partner opens a weak NT. I also have a weak NT so we might well have a game here. I'm not playing transfers so I can't transfer to hearts and then invite to game. I could start with stayman I guess? Or maybe I should bid 3 hearts as an invite with hearts? But that's still forcing to at least the 3 level which sucks. My heart suit is really, really good so I may just want to bid 4 hearts. Well, let's start with stayman. I bid 2 clubs. Partner responds 3 spades. I don't know what that means. I assume 5 spades and a maximum. So game should be fine, but I am worried about the minors now. So let's just play 4 hearts. Partner pulls to 4 spades. Ok, you're the boss man partner. Looking at the alerts after the hand my 4 heart bid was interpreted as control in hearts for spades. How in the world is that possible? Stayman doesn't promise both majors! I could easily have 0 spades and 5 hearts! Wow... Partner's lucky I have 2 of them.
East leads the 3 of diamonds.
| NORTH ♠ A K 8 5 4 ♥ T 4 3 ♦ Q 9 ♣ K J 2 | ||
| EAST ♦ 3 | ||
| SOUTH ♠ J T ♥ A Q J 9 8 ♦ A T 2 ♣ T 7 6 |
| West | North | East | South |
| 1NT | Pass | 2♣1 | |
| Pass | 3♠2 | Pass | 4♥3 |
| Pass | 4♠ | Pass | Pass |
| Pass | |||
| 1Stayman | |||
| 2Five card, maximum | |||
| 3Control in hearts for spades | |||
I have 4 hearts, a club, a diamond, and 3 spades for sure. I have finesses to earn extra tricks in every suit. As far as losers I should lose a trick in each minor for sure and might well lose one in each major along with an extra club loser. So there's a lot of work here. Can I afford to duck the diamond? I'm guaranteed an extra diamond trick if I do, and I have a diamond loser for sure if I hop. Ducking is scary if they play clubs back through my strong holding? But if West has the K of diamonds they get to use it as an entry to his hand later anyway. So I duck. 3-2-K-9. West fires back a diamond. 8-Q-6-T. I now have a diamond set up to pitch a round card, except all my late round cards are high so who cares.
I'm missing 6 spades so I don't know that I can afford to finesse. I may well set up their 9 if I do. I'm also in the wrong hand to finesse and I don't know that I want to play hearts right now. On the down side it's obvious where they can get tricks so if West has the Q of spades I'm letting him in to lead a club. The other option is to let him in with the heart K if he has it which doesn't appeal much either. Playing hearts is bad when there's a 4-1 split and I let them start ruffing. I don't think I really have a good play, so I'm going to hope East has the Q of spades and just play low now. 4-2-J-Q. West fires back trump. 6-5-3-T.
Ok, now I don't have an entry back to hand in order to finesse hearts or draw trump. Unless I ruff my A of diamonds. I'm down if West has the K of hearts so I guess I should just assert he doesn't have it and take my only line to make. I ruff my A of diamonds, draw 2 rounds of trump, lead the T of hearts and cross my fingers. It holds! I play another heart to the Q. It wins too! My A of hearts drops the K and I win all the tricks except the A of clubs at the end. Making 4.
| NORTH ♠ A K 8 5 4 ♥ T 4 3 ♦ Q 9 ♣ K J 2 | ||
| WEST ♠ Q 9 7 6 ♥ 7 2 ♦ K 8 4 ♣ Q 9 8 5 | EAST ♠ 3 2 ♥ K 6 5 ♦ J 7 6 5 3 ♣ A 4 3 | |
| SOUTH ♠ J T ♥ A Q J 9 8 ♦ A T 2 ♣ T 7 6 |
Jack disagrees with my 2 club bid. He doesn't think it's good for Stayman and just wants me to start with 3 hearts. I guess that makes sense. I will point out that when I click on my 2 clubs bid one of the potential hands it lists is '11+ points, 5 hearts'... He then disagrees with my 4 heart bid, obviously because I meant it to play and he meant it as a cuebid. I really don't understand how it could be a cuebid. Anyway, he wants me to bid 3NT instead. Finally he doesn't want me to draw trump while playing the hand. He wants me to just bite the bullet and finesse hearts. It does let me finesse spades back when they both work, though since West had Q9xx it wouldn't have saved a trick.
Ranking after board 17/60: 4/16 with 55.04%
Friday, October 03, 2014
Clicker Heroes
Possibly the worst thing you could do with a hand injured through repetitive strain would be to start playing one of the browser clicker games. Well, I'm pretty stupid, so I started playing Clicker Heroes as soon as Sthenno posted about it. But I'm not playing with my right hand, so it's actually not such a terrible idea as it could be. It's also a game where playing without clicking seems pretty reasonable. My left hand is starting to get pretty good with a mouse, but it's sure not super fast at clicking, so that's a good thing.
Normally these clicker games have you click to earn something (like a cookie) and then you start spending that something on things that make more somethings. Numbers getting bigger, woo! In this game you click not to generate a resource directly but to do damage to a monster. Do enough damage to the monster and it explodes in a shower of gold. You can spend the gold to make your clicking do more damage or to do passive damage over time. Sure, the end result is you're spending gold to earn more gold but adding that extra step in the middle makes things novel and fun.
I really want there to exist a game that combines something like Progress Quest with Cookie Clicker. This isn't quite there since it's missing random (and I mean RANDOM) loot drops but it's a step in the right direction. Maybe it's a step that will convince me to work on one of my own? I doubt it, but it is something to mull over some more.
I'm enjoying this game, anyway. If you like browser clicker games you should check this one out.
Normally these clicker games have you click to earn something (like a cookie) and then you start spending that something on things that make more somethings. Numbers getting bigger, woo! In this game you click not to generate a resource directly but to do damage to a monster. Do enough damage to the monster and it explodes in a shower of gold. You can spend the gold to make your clicking do more damage or to do passive damage over time. Sure, the end result is you're spending gold to earn more gold but adding that extra step in the middle makes things novel and fun.
I really want there to exist a game that combines something like Progress Quest with Cookie Clicker. This isn't quite there since it's missing random (and I mean RANDOM) loot drops but it's a step in the right direction. Maybe it's a step that will convince me to work on one of my own? I doubt it, but it is something to mull over some more.
I'm enjoying this game, anyway. If you like browser clicker games you should check this one out.
Thursday, October 02, 2014
Final Fantasy X-2: Catnip
I'm still not feeling like I can use a mouse in my right hand but I decided to give using a PS3 controller a shot for a while this afternoon. My right hand doesn't make a lot of moves when playing FFX-2... I'm mostly just mashing the attack button. I was able to play for a reasonable amount of time before needing to take a break. I needed that break because both my hands were going numb instead of my right hand being in pain which is a strange turn of events.
Anyway, it's been a while since I'd played FFX-2 because of Path of Exile and then being hurt. When I last played I was diving down into the dungeon under Bevelle. Today I got down to the 40th floor, killed the boss on that floor in two tries, and earned the most broken item in the game: catnip! This is an accessory that gives you the 'SOS: ??????' effect. The SOS part means it only works when you're low on health. What do the question marks mean? Well, any time you would deal damage or heal someone the amount is set to 9999 instead of whatever it would be. Considering Rikku is often attacking for 500 or so, that's quite a significant boost. Consider that you can use attacks that hit more than once... Each hit will then be for 9999! Gunners can attack something like 15 times in an action (the damage is normally drastically reduced and the attack is mostly used for getting a big chain multiplier running) and each of those attacks will be for 9999. It's absurdly powerful and is the way I remember beating all of the hard fights when I played this game back in the day. I hooked Rikku up and switched her to a gunner and went off to murder things...
It turns out that the HD remake has some changes from the original game and one of the things changed was catnip. Similar to how quick attack in FFX was nerfed in the HD remake I guess Square decided things were unbalanced as initially released and fixed things up. Anyway, the change to catnip is that in addition to making all your hits do 9999 you also get slowed and berserked. The berserk part is a real problem because it negates the ability to use any of the abilities that hit a silly number of times. Being slowed sucks too. I had a ribbon on but it didn't prevent them, which made me sad.
I decided I still wanted to use the item if I could and went looking for ways to use it. Rikku had been leveling thief and they attack twice when they auto-attack. Seemed like I should give that a spin. I also got an accessory that granted auto-haste from the same boss fight. Let's try auto-haste with auto-slow and see what happens! Turns out haste wins, which is amazing. It also turns out Rikku had learned the ability to always go first when she's a thief. And because she's berserked I don't have to mash any buttons to input an attack command. So now she goes first and hits for 19998 damage. And then is hasted so she probably gets to attack a second time before I can input commands to Yuna and Paine.
It remains to be seen if the catnip is still viable for boss fights. Permanently losing control of 1/3rd of my party is a real danger. I guess if I ever heal Rikku out of SOS status she loses the berserk and I can probably make use of that. My other two characters get to wear ribbons now, so I do have that advantage in boss fights. And I have 99 phoenix downs, which bring Rikku back to life at low health... She may be able to get in there for 19998 damage before the boss gets a chance to kill her again?
Even if it isn't good for boss fights it's awesome for random encounters. I don't even need to hit buttons anymore. Now, when I'm happy that I get to ignore a major part of the game it does send up some warning flags... But it is what it is. It's not like I get to make meaningful decisions in most random encounters anyway.
I'm not sure if I want to finish off the rest of this dungeon now or if I want to finish the game and then restart with my items and pick up all the stuff I missed on new game+. Hopefully I can spend more time playing without losing feeling in my hands soon!
Anyway, it's been a while since I'd played FFX-2 because of Path of Exile and then being hurt. When I last played I was diving down into the dungeon under Bevelle. Today I got down to the 40th floor, killed the boss on that floor in two tries, and earned the most broken item in the game: catnip! This is an accessory that gives you the 'SOS: ??????' effect. The SOS part means it only works when you're low on health. What do the question marks mean? Well, any time you would deal damage or heal someone the amount is set to 9999 instead of whatever it would be. Considering Rikku is often attacking for 500 or so, that's quite a significant boost. Consider that you can use attacks that hit more than once... Each hit will then be for 9999! Gunners can attack something like 15 times in an action (the damage is normally drastically reduced and the attack is mostly used for getting a big chain multiplier running) and each of those attacks will be for 9999. It's absurdly powerful and is the way I remember beating all of the hard fights when I played this game back in the day. I hooked Rikku up and switched her to a gunner and went off to murder things...
It turns out that the HD remake has some changes from the original game and one of the things changed was catnip. Similar to how quick attack in FFX was nerfed in the HD remake I guess Square decided things were unbalanced as initially released and fixed things up. Anyway, the change to catnip is that in addition to making all your hits do 9999 you also get slowed and berserked. The berserk part is a real problem because it negates the ability to use any of the abilities that hit a silly number of times. Being slowed sucks too. I had a ribbon on but it didn't prevent them, which made me sad.
I decided I still wanted to use the item if I could and went looking for ways to use it. Rikku had been leveling thief and they attack twice when they auto-attack. Seemed like I should give that a spin. I also got an accessory that granted auto-haste from the same boss fight. Let's try auto-haste with auto-slow and see what happens! Turns out haste wins, which is amazing. It also turns out Rikku had learned the ability to always go first when she's a thief. And because she's berserked I don't have to mash any buttons to input an attack command. So now she goes first and hits for 19998 damage. And then is hasted so she probably gets to attack a second time before I can input commands to Yuna and Paine.
It remains to be seen if the catnip is still viable for boss fights. Permanently losing control of 1/3rd of my party is a real danger. I guess if I ever heal Rikku out of SOS status she loses the berserk and I can probably make use of that. My other two characters get to wear ribbons now, so I do have that advantage in boss fights. And I have 99 phoenix downs, which bring Rikku back to life at low health... She may be able to get in there for 19998 damage before the boss gets a chance to kill her again?
Even if it isn't good for boss fights it's awesome for random encounters. I don't even need to hit buttons anymore. Now, when I'm happy that I get to ignore a major part of the game it does send up some warning flags... But it is what it is. It's not like I get to make meaningful decisions in most random encounters anyway.
I'm not sure if I want to finish off the rest of this dungeon now or if I want to finish the game and then restart with my items and pick up all the stuff I missed on new game+. Hopefully I can spend more time playing without losing feeling in my hands soon!