More On Ironman

Sky commented on my post from Monday about thinking about doing an Ironman character as well but not wanting to be either a sissy or a big pig. It sounded like his gut feeling was that hunters were going to be the best by far at the challenge and that warriors were going to be terrible. Warriors have had weird rage scaling in the past and I'm not sure where they're at now but I imagine using a white or grey weapon would really cripple a warrior.

There is a webpage with all the stats for people who signed up for the challenge and I like crunching numbers so I figured it could be interesting to take a look at a few metrics to see how classes have actually fared thus far when played by people who are actively participating in the challenge to see who is actually lagging behind the pack. Note that it is possible to delete a dead character and start a new one with the same name so I'd imagine there are some low level characters that died and were subsequently replaced so they don't exist in the data anymore.

Class	Number	% of Total	Best Living	Best Dead	61-70	71-80	81-85	61+ %
Hunter	2856	40%	85	75	39	4	2	1.6%
Warlock	626	9%	65	78	5	1		1.0%
Rogue	321	4%	62	69	3			0.9%
Warrior	425	6%	50	68	2			0.5%
Paladin	969	13%	62	63	3			0.3%
Mage	483	7%	53	64	1			0.2%
Druid	826	11%	56	46				0.0%
Shaman	370	5%	38	43				0.0%
Priest	314	4%	58	47				0.0%

I decided to manually pull out the information above. The total number of each class in the database and the percentage of total. I found the highest level character of each class that are still alive and the highest level that was dead. I counted the number of people in each of the expansion level ranges since those feel like they should be real breakpoints. Finally I worked out how many of each class hit at least level 61 as a percentage of all characters of that class.

Hunters are clearly the best. Someone's actually managed to hit level 85 on an ironman hunter! 40% of all characters loaded into the challenge have been hunters. In terms of sheer number of players that hit at least 61 they have a massive lead but that should be expected when they have 40% of the total. As the last column shows, though, they are busting through that threshold at a better rate than any other class.

Warlock is the only other class to break through the 71 barrier. He made it all the way to 78 before dying which is actually the best of any dead character. Warlocks have the second best success rate as well. They aren't super popular with paladins and druids both clocking in more total characters.

Warrior actually doesn't seem to be doing too poorly. It's had a couple characters break the 61 mark and one even got as high as 68. Looking at the names (Ironpossible and Possibleiron) I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's the same guy who did both characters. I tried to armoury the second one but it's already a level 18 night elf priest.

I worry that the sample size for a lot of these are two small. Is warrior actually ok or is that one guy just godly at playing an undergeared warrior? Since it's just one guy there's also the possibility that he's found a way to skirt the rules without getting caught by the system. I'd like to think not, but the point is with just one guy doing well with warrior we can't have a lot of confidence. Contrast that with hunter which has had 45 characters break the level 61 barrier! We can be a lot more sure that a hunter can handle outlands content.

I feel bad for the shamans. Worst in both best living and best dead character. It's been a while since I've played a shaman and I know they made a lot of totem changes but I would have thought both totems and weapon enchants would be a big help to this sort of challenge.

Priests seem similarly bad and I can't even think of what a priest could have going for it. Without talents I'd think their heals would end up really inefficient and I don't know how they'd even kill anything. Shadow word pain and wand? Are there even white wands? (The answer is yes, as I looked up an armoury profile for a level 64 mage and he has on a ilvl 35 wand. Which does less damage than his staff.)


When I first heard of the challenge I was leaning towards trying it with a hunter. I've always liked hunters, my first character was a hunter, and they seemed like they were probably the best. Having someone actually complete the challenge on a hunter greatly diminishes that desire. I'd rather be the first person to get shaman to level 44 than the second to get hunter to 85! I was thinking that mage could actually be fun. Frost bolt to slow enemies and kite them around while getting mana back. Actually casting polymorph. I think if the challenge was to level up with no gear/talents I'd give that a shot. But doing it without dying? I don't know that I trust myself to play a mage safely enough to do it without dying... Rogue or hunter may actually be my only hope since I may well be too reckless to survive without vanish or feign death.

I donno. I think I am going to give it a spin and I think I'll probably end up starting a shaman since they've done the worst so far. Assuming I can make a character with doctor or dr in the name, anyway!

MITx

Today's post is only tangentially related to gaming but I think it could really interest some people who may be reading. (I found out about this program from an article linked on Facebook by Mike Turian and I wouldn't know him if not for my Planeswalker Points posts a few months ago.) The program is called MITx and the basic idea is that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is planning on putting out free online versions of some of their courses. There will be video clips from lectures, excerpts from text books, and automatically marked assignments and exams. Passing the course won't get you any closer to a degree but can get you a certification stating you took the course and passed.

Personally I miss being in school. I was never really big on actually attending class since I've found I learn best from books and have a real aversion to talking to people so I never really asked questions in classes anyway. I like actually being in a course though. Having someone who knows something plan out what they think is important to learn is useful. Knowing what book to read, and what sections are important, and having a schedule to get it done are all really important.

I've often thought about taking night/weekend classes somewhere and regularly browse the 'continuing education' things that come in the mail from various Toronto based universities but I've never found a course I was actually interested in taking. I hated electives/'bird courses' when I was in school and the continuing education stuff all seems to be even simpler than those or are business courses which don't really appeal to me. It makes me think what sort of course I would want to take... Statistical modeling, quantum physics, psychology, robotics...

It turns out MITx is launching it's pilot class on the 5th of March. They're starting with 6.002X which is one of the starting electrical engineering courses. Maybe not my first choice but certainly something interesting. They make it sound complicated with all kinds of US based prerequisites. Part of me worries that I don't know enough about magnetism to follow along. Part of me worries that I already know everything covered in the course from CS256 and the electronics class I took in high school. But CS256 was one of my favourite classes and I hope if the pilot is a success they'll bring further courses along this chain to the program later. I'm pretty psyched about the class. I've already enrolled and am considering buying the textbook to more easily follow along. And since it's free and there's no penalty for failure I figure it can't hurt to sign up and give it a shot.

Sound interesting? Check out the webpage and enrol before it starts next week!

Ironman!

Recently I've been thinking I should stop 'following' Tobold's blog. I hate it when someone is wrong on the internet and I've found myself getting increasingly frustrated with the assumptions he makes about the way some people play games. I wish I had better things to do with my time than get annoyed on the internet...

And then he comes out with an informative post like this one about playing World of Warcraft in 'Ironman' mode and it makes me happy I'm still reading. I doubt I'd have stumbled across something like this on my own but now that it's been pointed out to me I'm very intrigued.

The basic idea is you start a new character at level 1 and play the game without putting on magical gear, without taking a specialization, without professions, without enchantments or glyphs or potions. You never group, you never do dungeons, you never participate in pvp.  You don't use any of the ways to speed up leveling like recruit a friend or being in a high level guild. And perhaps most importantly you never die.

Now, I love challenges (as evidenced by playing with only one thief in Final Fantasy). For the most part I do them for the fun of doing them. But in this case there's actually a leaderboard and such built for the challenge. They're pulling data out of the armory to check and see if people are 'cheating' or not. It's obviously not perfect (I would imagine you could get buffs, for example, and make sure to toggle them off before you log out and never get caught) but it does a pretty good job. Hearing about this makes me want to take Blizzard up on their 7 days free offer and give it a spin. If I did, what would I want to play? There are a few different metrics to look at, I think, in order to figure out which class would have the best chance of success.

• Scaling - Normally you want skills that scale well with your stats. Here where you're not going to get any stats at all from any source you want skills that just have high base numbers. I don't know how WoW has managed to keep things balanced recently but thinking back to the past things like hunter pets and mage pyroblast/arcane missiles are things that started off huge but didn't scale properly to be good at end game. You're going to want the starting off huge here!
• Emergency Buttons - If you die once you're done so having ways to escape from a deadly situation is really important. You don't want a random elite patrolling on top of you and wiping you out! Hunters seem to be kings here with feign death, disengage, traps, slows, and a pet. Warlocks have a worse pet, healthstone, and some ok crowd control. Rogues get vanish, blind, and sprint. Mages get blink, frost nova, and invis. Druids get a bad sprint? Paladins might have bubble/hearth? Warriors get to die...
• Sustainability - How many fights can you go without having to eat/drink to full? I have a big fear that someone like a mage is going to see this number actually fall below 1. Your mana pool is going to be so small and your spells are going to do so little damage that I really wonder if you'll be able to kill a single monster. On the flip side you have the hunter which doesn't use mana and which has a pet to absorb hits. 
• Gear Availability - You're allowed to wear white and grey items. Is there a good enough distribution of weapons in particular as you level up to stay geared? Rogues for example use energy and have a lot of  great cooldowns but if you can't find a weapon for a large level span you probably have no hope.

The WoWIronman site has stats for what other people have been trying and how successful they've been so far. Hunters are the only class currently alive beyond level 65. Only one non-hunter has made it beyond 70 (a warlock that died at level 78). Almost 10% of all characters that have tried the challenge have been night elf hunters (night elves get a second feign death type ability). Hunters feel like the strictly best option to me since they seem likely to be the best at scaling, emergencies, and sustainability. Assuming they have decent weapons (a quick search shows a gap between level 20 and 60 which might be rough) they should do fine. So if my goal is to have the best chance at making it far then hunter seems obvious. But maybe I'd be happier doing something harder and aiming for the best of that class instead of trying to make it all the way to 85? The highest level dead rogue is only 69, for example.

StarCraft II Winter Arena Conclusion

The final day at the MLG Winter Arena was pretty amazing. They were down to the final six players at the start of the day and there were some pretty fantastic games in the last few matches. The winner's bracket finals came down to Huk against MarineKing so I was pretty happy. Huk had played very well the last two days but seemed to have lost something today as he quickly got steamrollered by MarineKing. This knocked Huk down to the loser's bracket finals where he played against DongRaeGu who the commentators were saying is probably the best player in the world right now. (He made the GSL finals right before flying to New York for this event.) He also quickly steamrollered Huk which set up the final of MKP vs DRG. MarineKing won the first game and was in a good position to win the tournament if he could win either of the next two games. He didn't which meant they'd end up playing a best of 7 with DongRaeGu already up 2-1. MarineKing then pulled off three wins in a row including a great bunker rush in game 5 followed by an incredibly timed late game push in game 6. Definitely a fantastic match and I'm particularly happy about the outcome. Now that I've spoiled the ending for you you should consider watching the VODs when they become available to the public in a week or so.

The MLG guys were saying the Winter Arena was a huge success and they're planning on having two more during the Spring season. On the down side the finals were practically unwatchable at one point. The main stream actually crashed during the third game of the finals so we (Tmiv came over to watch the last couple matches) ended up missing the critical part of the game which was a little annoying. They ended up fixing it such that we were able to watch on 480P most of the time after that and a little bit on 720P but I still wish they could have managed to set it up such that we could have watched on 1080P the whole time. On the plus side they seemed to have fixed their log in issues as I only had to log in once all day and it worked on all the streams. (Well, I had to log in a second time after I refreshed my browser during the crash but that's not too unexpected.)

I actually blew out my download limit with all the streaming of games I've done this month (16G alone between Friday and Saturday) so if I'm going to tune in again in the future I should probably look into getting a better internet setup...

Minor MLG Frustrations

I'm spending the weekend watching the MLG StarCraft II Winter Arena and there have been some pretty spectacular games so far. Base trades, worker all-ins, dark templars, motherships... Huk and MarineKing remain undefeated which is pretty sweet. Idra lost his first two matches and is eliminated. Oh well. I've always hated Zerg anyway!

The games have been great and the commentators have been on the ball (Tumba is really starting to grow on me). I can't complain about any of that at all. I do have some complaints about the technical setup. Some are minor things but others are so frustration to make me think I won't want to buy a pass for the next one if they're not fixed.

• There are 5 streams going at once and they have a neat little webpage set up which lets you switch between streams and lay out any number of them at one time. This lets you figure out which stream has a game going on and swap to it. It's a pretty great concept. I can sit in my chair away from the computer with my wireless mouse and 'channel surf'. Unfortunately they haven't done a good job with authentication. I should have to log in one time and be good to go. Instead I have to log in to each stream individually. And it seems to time out my log in, so I've had to keep logging in over and over again. I probably had to log in 30 times last night. And because I want to watch on my big tv and sit in a non-computer chair I wasn't near my keyboard and had to keep getting up to type in my info. 
• Enter changes between streams even when filling in a log-in form. So I'd be trying to log in and hit enter which works in every log in window ever. Except this one, which switches which stream I'm watching.
• They've done a bad job of normalizing the volume levels of the streams. I need to crank up the volume on the first two streams. But each time I switch streams it resets back to default so I'm constantly having to adjust the volume.
• They offer 1080P resolution but don't seem to have the bandwidth to actually provide it. I get big lag spikes when using it. So I switched to 720P which worked great last night but also is lagging today. So now I'm down to 480P. Which still lets me see what's going on but isn't quite as crisp and awesome. I don't know if it's irrational or not but I feel like if I'm paying I should be able to watch in the higher definitions.

StarCraft II Winter Arena Starting!

I spend a lot of time playing games but today and for the weekend I'm going to spend a lot of time watching games. I bought a pass for the Winter Arena and hooked my computer up to the big screen tv. I find watching to be more exciting when I'm rooting for someone so I need to pick who I want to win. Huk is from Canada and plays my favourite race (Protoss) so he's my first choice for sure. After that I want to cheer for MarineKing because of how awesome he played at a previous MLG event when Reddit flew him in and he put on a show with wacky builds. And then I'm going to cheer for Idra to cover the Zerg option.

Let's rock!

League of Legends: Tryndamere Hatred

There are a couple things which unfortunately seem to be true in general of people who play online games: they hate to lose and they refuse to take personal responsibility for a loss. Illusory superiority strikes again! Most people are going to think they're better than average at the game. They think they should be winning (as an example) 75% of their games but they actually only win 50% since the matchmaking system does a decent job. How do they account for the 25% of games where they feel they 'should' have won but actually lost? They lash out at the other players! Someone else on their team must have played terribly. They're a feeder, or a 'noob', or they picked the wrong champion. They bought the wrong items. They didn't put enough wards down. Eventually if your rating gets low enough you end up in 'Elo Hell' and actually get paired up with teammates who routinely quit the game.

I've taken the brunt of my fair share of these attacks. I have bad games from time to time and can make an easy target for vitriol. Especially when I play Warwick and build the manamune item which no one seems to believe is a reasonable choice. If we lose and I have manamune I'll get yelled at. Interestingly if we win and I have manamune the other team will use it as fodder for their attacks against each other. How could you lose to manamune Warwick?!?

Recently I've started playing the Tryndamere champion. I've been slotted into the solo top role on my fledgling ranked team so I've been trying to diversify my options for solo top heroes. In the IEM event I watched a few weeks ago Tryndamere was sometimes banned and completely dominated one game and I already owned him so why not give him another shot? I read some guides on how to play him, picked one that matched my tendencies (do everything possible to try to secure a kill when you're level 2 and they're level 1 with the goal of snowballing) and have been doing reasonable with it. I win some, I lose some. I kill people a lot. I forget to turn on my ultimate and die. (It prevents him from dying for 5 seconds which could give you enough time to kill them, or run away, or some combination of the two.)

One thing I wasn't prepared for was how much hatred was going to get flung my way. Apparently people have a very low opinion on the skill needed to play Tryndamere perfectly. If I die a couple times early my teammates will inevitably start insulting me. 'How are you dying with Tryndamere?' 'What kind of noob gets 5 deaths on Trynd?' What really surprised me was what would happen when I did well. The other team would start with the insults, as expected... Only they wouldn't be insulting the person I was killing. No, they'd be insulting me! 'Noob has to play Trynd to win.' 'Play a champ that takes skill.' 'Stop being such a tryhard Tryn!'

To be fair, Tryndamere is one of the champions with the best scaling in the game. A fully equipped Tryndamere does a scary amount of damage and can pretty much ignore defensive items what with his ultimate preventing him from dying and all. He can be dealt with by smart opponents (get multiple copies of the exhaust summoner spell, for example) but against your average mediocre team? Pretty much unstoppable late game if he has a lot of items. Getting to that point isn't trivial, but the average player who whines about things isn't going to notice the ways to keep him down early. They're just going to see the end result of a farmed Tyndamere and cry about it.

I've decided I don't actually care about people yelling at me if I'm doing well or poorly. I'm going to keep playing the way I want to play (while sometimes stepping back to see if I could be doing something better) and if people have a problem with it they can rant as much as they want. I was just surprised to get insulted for doing well.

A Few Acres of Snow: Combat

Ok, so now we know how to go around expanding on the board, building more cities, adding cards to our deck, and scoring points. That's all well and good but what if we want to punch the other person in the face? Successfully invading the enemy capital is one of the victory conditions, after all, and doing so completely ignores all those fancy points scored through expanding. How does that work?

Starting a fight is very similar to expanding into an empty space on the board. You need to have a card for an adjacent spot on the board and you need to have a card for the appropriate mode of transportation. Those two cards get discarded as normal. On top of them you need a third card with military strength on it. This card gets set aside into a 'fighting' zone and won't get back into your deck until the fight resolves. Military strength is indicated by a crossed musket icon. (Also, coastal cities can be attacked by ships so either player can play a card with a ship icon as though it were 1 strength.) The siege artillery card on the right here has 3 of them, for example. Once a fight has been started each player can then use an action to add another card with military strength to the fight. The absolute amount of strength added doesn't matter; it's the relative difference between the two which counts. There's a track on the board representing this 'tug of war' strength difference.

A fight ends if when you start your turn the tug of war marker indicates that you've won the fight. If you're the attacker this means you have at least 2 more strength than your opponent. If you're the defender this means you have at least 1 more strength than your opponent. When a fight ends the loser has to destroy a non-location card (if any) from the fight then the rest of the cards played by both sides go to the discard piles. In addition if the attacker won the fight they can immediately settle the location as a free action. If the location has a settler symbol on it then they need to play a settler card to do so. Otherwise they can take it for free.

On top of needing a smaller difference to win a fight the defender has a couple other advantages as well. Every city has 1 military strength by default. Some of the cities have additional strength shown on the board. The two British capitals (Boston and New York) have 1 bonus strength each. The starting French cities Louisbourg and Montreal also have 1 bonus strength each and the French capital (Quebec) has two bonus strength. Furthermore if you plan ahead you can build a fort in a city which blocks all raids and gives an extra 2 military strength to the city. Finally the same fortification card can be used as a military strength but only on defense.

The defender has a couple disadvantages. The first is while the fight is taking place the location card for that city becomes unplayable. Having a dead card in your deck is pretty bad. The second is that you don't get to choose when the fight happens so you need to be constantly prepared to defend yourself lest you get blown up.

Each side has access to one card with 3 strength, a few cards with 2 strength, and some cards with 1 strength. One of those cards, the military leader, doesn't take an action to play. As such the most a player can possibly throw into a fight on a single turn is 6. (Their 3, a 2, and the free 1.) Even if someone happens to draw a hand full of military strength they can only play 2 cards into a fight per turn which tends to give their opponent time to draw more military cards too. So while it is certainly possible for someone to get blitzed out in a single attack it turns out with proper planning (using the reserve to store a couple of military cards should your opponent happen to have a deck with lots of military cards in it) you tend to be able to avoid instantly losing. Most fights seem to go the distance where both players get enough time to eventually put every card they want into the fight. As such fights frequently come down to who has managed to get the most total strength into their deck. Military cards are rather expensive so this tends to be the person with the better money engine but sometimes both players actually get to buy all their military cards. Who wins then?

Well, the French have 1 siege artillery, 4 regular infantry (worth 2 each), 3 militia, a military leader, a coureurs de bois, Montreal, and Quebec. If the fight is at sea (and I can count on one hand the number of fights in 99 games finished that didn't take place at sea) they can also potentially include Port Royal, Halifax, Louisbourg, and their single ships card. On defense they could also have 1 normal fortification and 2 neutral fortification cards.

How about the British? They have 1 siege artillery, 7 regular infantry, 3 militia, a military leader, a rangers, Boston, and New York. At sea they also have New Haven, Norfolk, Port Royal, Halifax, and two ships cards. On defense they have 1 normal fortification and 2 neutral fortification cards.

It should be pretty apparent that the British have a huge advantage here. They have 3 extra regulars and potentially 2 more ships. Note that some of those ships overlap (they can't both own Halifax or Port Royal) but even in a worst case scenario the British have as many ships as the French. They basically can't lose a fight on defense with all their cards and are guaranteed to win on offense unless the French manage to fortify in advance and buy both neutral fortification cards. The British just have inevitability on their side. Their deck costs a lot more (the French pay 21 for their 4 regulars and the British have to pay 49 for their 7) but their money engine is easier to put together so it tends to come out ok for them.

One things to point out is that the British path to Quebec involves conquering spaces with ships on them. This means it's actually easier for the British to win future fights once they start winning fights. Especially since the loser of a fight loses a card on defense! Your deck started with at least 3 more strength than your opponent and they lost a card. You gained a card with a ship on it. And they lose access to the card for the next space you attack. This tends to make for snowballing attacks. It works the other way, too. If the French get started attacking and the British don't properly defend then they'll get snowballed too.

How do you defend? Well, you need to match them military card purchase for military card purchase. Since the attacker only needs 3 more strength in their deck to win every fight it only really takes 2 regular infantry to win the game. If your opponent buys one you might be ok but if they buy a second one and you don't respond you just lose. There is one other way to fight back which is via ambushes which will be covered in the next post.