Sentinels of the Multiverse

Aidan brought a new game over on the weekend: Sentinels of the Multiverse. It's an interesting card based cooperative game where each player is a super hero blatantly ripped off from comics. Each of the 10 super heroes has their own deck of cards. Each of the 4 super villains has their own deck of cards. And there are 4 location decks with tons of different cards. With so many different combinations between heroes, villain, and location it seems like it should have a fair amount of replayability.

We played three games. The first we only played with 3 people and got destroyed. Then we played the same villain with 5 people and destroyed him right back. We finished off with a 5 player game against a harder boss and barely pulled out a win with Sky dead. Some of the hero decks seems significantly better than others so you can probably tailor the difficulty of a given session with your choice of heroes, villain, and location decks.

Now, I don't really like cooperative games in general. I view them more as puzzles than as games. It can be interesting to figure out how the game works to start, but I don't particularly care to do the same jigsaw puzzle over and over again. Sentinels of the Multiverse seems well designed in that it should take a fair number of plays through to feel like it's solved to the point where I don't want to play anymore, but I don't know how many plays it actually has. I certainly have no intention to buy it myself but could definitely see playing Aidan's copy a few more times at some point.

But if you're someone who likes cooperative games in general this one seems pretty well done. Especially if you like the idea of being a team of super heroes taking out a super villain. I'd recommend checking it out.

League of Legends: Twisted Treeline Revamp

Recently Riot did a complete revamp of the 3 player map in League of Legends. It hadn't been touched since it came in during season 1 with the old mastery trees so it really needed some love. They didn't go light on the changes, either. It's the same map in that it has the same name and is still a 3v3 map but pretty much everything else is changed. The jungle has been completely redone. It's consolidated into a much smaller area and the mobs are significantly easier. The boss jungle mob is much harder than the old one. Some items had been flat out removed (in particular, wards are gone) and a bunch of new items were created just for this map. The layout of the lanes has been changed to make it easier to gank unsuspecting people. (Coupled with no wards and a plausible jungle this actually seems like a relevant change.)

Then there's the biggest change to the map and one that may well be the key to winning on the map... There are 2 altars on the map right in the middle of the jungle but split up a bit so one is closer to each team's base. These altars work a little like towers in World of Warcraft... Someone who doesn't control the altar can stand on it for 10 seconds to take control of it. After taking control the altar locks for 90 seconds and can't be stolen back during that time. After the 90 seconds the other team can go stand on it to take it back. The altars have global vision so you can see whenever anyone is standing on one of them. Then if you control one altar your team gets a +4 gold per kill buff. If you manage to control both altars you get the +4 gold per kill buff plus 10% bonus AD and 10% bonus AP. This will tend to make auto-attackers do 10% more damage and casters do more like 6% more damage. (Spells have a base damage component that won't get modified by the buff.)

The altars open up at the 2 minute mark, which is a little after the creeps will have started to fight in lane. It feels like a jungler has enough time to kill one camp and then go to the altar assuming they're left alone. So in a passive game you'll just pick up your altar with 1 person while they do the same thing and get your 4 gold buff. But what happens if one team just bull rushes the other team's altar and ignores the lanes entirely? Assuming they can win the level 1 team fight what option do they have? You should be able to bully them out of their jungle entirely, jamming their jungler, and claim their altar in like 3 seconds. Then because you're in a pack behind the other team's front line you should be able to run in behind a lane and gank them. I watched a replay and I think you should be able to get the altar and disperse to lanes while missing only half the wave. Setting their jungler back, keeping them from having an altar, and possibly getting a kill from the gank make this seem really good.

Alternatively, you could aggressively push the lanes the second they meet, and then charge the enemy altar. This doesn't screw the enemy jungler, and because you're split up it's easier to react to, but if you have strong pushers at level 1 and can win the level 1 team fight this seems like it could be a real blowout...

So the question is, what sort of champion is good in either setup? Stuns and AE effects seem useful. Kayle, for example, can probably push a lane before the altars open up. I wonder if Annie, who can have both a stun and an AE spell, could work? I've been trying jungle Taric out because of his stun and it seemed to work ok in the random games I've played. Especially against Teemo...

Android: Netrunner

Two weekends ago I picked up a copy of the new Netrunner game. Last week I read the rules, briefly looked through the cards, and built a couple of legal decks. Some people came over for board games on Saturday and I played one game with Sky. I certainly want to play a few more times to draw more conclusions but here's my initial thoughts...

With one minor difference the rules to this game seem identical to the rules for the old Netrunner CCG. I was expecting them to deviate a bit more from the original game but since I liked the old game this is just fine by me.

That one difference is they added character cards for each side. Each character card has one minor ability (doing 1 damage whenever anyone scores points, or getting a minor cost reduction on your first card per turn, that sort of thing) and then some rules regarding deck construction. The cards are split into specific factions based on character with a bunch of generic neutral cards that anyone can use. Then each character can use a few cards from other factions as well. This doesn't really change the way the game is played but does put some real restrictions on deck creation. Restrictions breed creativity, or so I've been told, so this sounds like a pretty good change.

The problem is with the implementation. The corporation in particular has to put a specific number of agendas into their deck. The box contains exactly enough agenda cards for each faction that you barely have enough assuming you use every neutral agenda in the deck. This means you can only build a single deck at a time. And it means you have no choices to make at all when it comes to which agendas you use. Restriction may breed creativity, but this just seems stifling. One of the neutral agendas has a special ability that can only be used if the runner is tagged. This seems decent in a deck focused on tagging and terrible in any other deck. And yet every deck just has to use it.

There also aren't very many other cards to pick from. Some cards have drastically different power levels. Sky kept drawing cards and shaking his head at how useless they were. I was similarly drawing some useless cards but since a lot of Sky's bad cards made me discard cards it didn't really hurt me very much. Maybe there's a focused discard deck in there somewhere that can actually kill the runner? But it felt like there just wasn't enough going on to build a focused enough deck at this point.

Would I buy it again? I actually don't think I would. As a lonely nerd I don't really have much opportunity to play a strictly two player game. And if I did have someone to play with, and we wanted to play Netrunner, I feel like it would be better to play the old game with the old cards where you could actually build a variety of decks. Maybe with an expansion with some more cards it'll get to the point where it does what I want? I donno.

I am happy to see an old CCG coming back though. I would love to see the old Lord of the Rings CCG make a comeback. Sim City, on the other hand, can stay in the vault.

Poker HUDs

Lately I've started reading on the bus to work again and my topic of choice has tended to be random poker books I downloaded a while ago onto my Kobo. One of them had a little Q&A section where one of the questions briefly mentioned something called a poker heads-up-display and asking if they were now mandatory for online poker. I'd never even heard of one (turns out they came into popularity long after my free-rolling days back in University) and figured it was worth checking out. The response to the question was pretty non-committal one way or the other. He said they can help and can be a great thing if used properly.

It turns out the basic idea behind a poker HUD is the HUD interfaces with a poker client to provide extra information on overlays. What kind of information? Well, it can display things like pot odds, or your chance of hitting a flush, or filling your straight. It also reads the log files saved on your computer to display mucked cards after a hand or to show statistics on your opponents from previous hands that session. It also seems there are sites selling databases of such hand histories so you can actually pull up stats for your opponents from every game they've ever played with anyone contributing to such a database. It can also generate personal stats in order to help find leaks in your game and whatnot.

Some of that stuff sounds useful and quite viable to have. Being able to work out your hourly rate just seems sensible. I'd have envisioned using an Excel spreadsheet (Excel being this carpenter's hammer) but I totally can see how a specialized program would be useful. And with so many people playing poker I understand how such a program should exist by now.

Some of that stuff seems questionable. Having the software list the outs you have to a straight feels like it's taking something away from the skill of poker. Maybe I'm just saying this because crunching numbers on the fly is something I'm pretty good at doing. (I find I'm beating people at Pergamon on Yucata because I'm just better than they are at figuring out the right spaces on which to bid.) That said, these are number you can work out on the fly if you wanted to and having them just appear on the client certainly makes playing at multiple tables easier.

Some of it seems over the line. The idea that you can see the mucked cards right after a hand or that you can look up thousands of hands worth of history on a new opponent just feels wrong. Seeing all mucked cards after a hand is a way to help catch cheaters so it makes sense in a way to have it as a general feature for poker clients. Getting a ton of history on an opponent feels like it's removing some of the skill of reading your opponent but I guess a guild of frequent players could share notes on a forum somewhere and this is along the same lines but potentially available to all?

I talked to Andrew a bit about this today and he didn't see a problem with any of it. His theory was that at top levels of play the opponents are going to be shifting their game enough that long-term averages wouldn't mean anything. You'd still have to figure out what your opponent was up to under the assumption he's good enough to be capable of anything. At low levels he thought it might inflate someone's idea of how good they were and cause them to end up playing against top opponents and losing. And if it actually does help a lot then getting used to using it would be a huge detriment in a live game. Having the odds available doesn't actually give anyone an advantage they couldn't have just by practicing anyway.


I donno. It still feels wrong to me on some level but it really seems like they've been declared legal by the poker sites and are here to stay. Has anyone made use of such a thing? Just how useful are they?

World of Warcraft Masks!

Two years ago I posted about a World of Warcraft achievement and went through some new (to me) math to work out some information about how many years it would take for the average person to get it done. It was in the neighbourhood of 5 years of intense play as it initially launched and then 3 years after they added another way to get the items. I was getting close (I think I was at 17 of 20?) and was actually really looking forward to having an active account this October so I could pour in a ton of time trying to finish it off.

That's going to sound a little perverse. I rant about how terrible an achievement is because Blizzard had no idea how to balance the numbers and as a result it was really unlikely to earn... And then I get all excited about a chance to do it. And not because it's skill based and I'd figured out a way to get an edge doing it... No, I just want to pull the lever on that slot machine over and over again in the hopes of hitting the jackpot. I guess something needs to be wrong with people's brains in order for roulette tables to exist and I've got it bad...

At any rate...

Unfortunately it wasn't nearly as exciting as I'd hoped. Blizzard threw in the towel it would seem and decided to make the achievement incredibly trivial. You can buy the masks from a vendor for easily earned tokens. It didn't take very long to get enough of the tokens to buy the last 7 masks I needed. So now I have a real hard achievement, but I got it after it was nerfed into oblivion so it means even less than the nothing most people would think it's worth. Oh well.

League of Legends: Jayce Boot Choice

I played two ranked team games last night as ADC Jayce. One game I tried maxing my attack speed buff first, the other I ignored it completely. It seemed to work out pretty well in both cases. The first time Adam was playing Taric so I figured having a bursty auto-attack buff would be useful during stuns. It was, and I got a bit of an early lead. After I bought an early bloodthirster my W was set up to deal ~250 damage per shot with 3 shots in a second. That's some amount of burst! The other game Adam was playing Soraka so I figured I'd go for a pokey plan and use his infinite mana to poke them a bunch with my Q and E. I died a few times early (I may have wandered into a bush or two filled with enemies) but I did ultimately stop sucking and get back to even.

Both games I bought the attack speed boots and both times I found myself wondering if that was the right idea. Attack speed boots don't help the Q+E poke plan. They don't help the max W plan. Sure, they contribute to random potshots during extended fights but those actually didn't come up all that often I don't think. Late game I could see it helping if I get to stand around and turret for a while but since my team doesn't believe in a 'protect the ADC' plan that doesn't really happen all that often.

Alternatively I could get some sort of defensive boots (this may be a good idea since I like to pop into melee mode and dive onto the enemy ADC) but my real thinking was that some cooldown reduction boots could be very useful. With the Q+E poke plan they seem particularly good since the only reason to put more points into E is to lower the cooldown for more frequent pokes. Cooldown reduction boots do that too! With the W plan it might even be possible that lowering the cooldown of my max W results in more autoattacks per fight than the attack speed boots. I could even go for more movement speed! Jayce is actually pretty slow (310 base speed which puts him ahead of Ashe, Caitlyn, Corki, Tristana, Graves, Draven, Ezreal, Twitch, and Vayne. The same as Sivir, Varus, and Urgot. And slower than no ADCs.) Ok, maybe he actually isn't very slow after all. Most of the junglers and top laners look to be faster than Jayce but I guess no one in the bottom lane is. Miss Fortune with her passive is for sure, but Jayce has a couple run speed boots of his own.

At typical attack speed breakpoints of .8, 1, and 1.2 what is the comparison on my W between attack speed boots and cooldown reduction boots?

With an attack speed of .8 without boots you'd be looking at an attack speed of .965 with boots. Over the course of 6 seconds (the cooldown of hypercharge) you'd be looking at doing 3 attacks for 1.3x damage during the first second and then 4.825 attacks over the remaining 5 seconds. With latency and whatnot I'd suspect there'd actually be a cycle of around 6.5 seconds with 5 normal attacks and 3 super attacks for a total of 8.9 attacks worth of damage per 6.5 seconds or 1.369 attacks per second.

Cooldown reduction boots would instead have a 5.1 second cooldown on W but an attack speed of .8. Over those 5.1 seconds you'd again have 3 attacks for 1.3x damage during the first second and then 3.28 attacks over the remaining 4.1 seconds. Fudging a bit again you probably don't get a fourth attack off at all but may spam the button sooner as a result? You're probably looking at 6.9 attacks worth of damage per 5.5 seconds or 1.255 attacks per second.

With a normal attack speed of 1 instead... You'd have 1.165 with boots. So probably 9.9 attacks worth of damage per 6.5 seconds or 1.523 attacks per second. Cooldown boots would instead have 7.9 attacks per 5.5 seconds or 1.436 attacks per second.

With a normal attack speed of 1.2 you'd have 1.365 with boots. So probably 10.9 attacks worth of damage per 6.7 seconds or 1.627 attacks per second. Cooldown boots would have 8.9 attacks per 5.5 seconds or 1.618 attacks per second.


Ok, attack speed boots are better when turreting a single target though with the amount of rounding I'm doing it's pretty close. And as you get more attack speed from other sources the gap closes. Considering the number of other abilities Jayce has to spam (he has 7 total) I wouldn't be surprised to find his overall damage goes up a fair bit with cooldown reduction boots instead of attack speed boots. Certainly the next time I build a pokey build I'm going to try cooldown boots to see how it works out!

League of Legends: Jayce's Hyper Charge

Over the weekend I picked up one of the newer champions in League of Legends: Jayce. He's pretty widely considered to be the 'overpowered' champion of choice these days and I figured I should play him to figure out how he works. And to kill people with an overpowered champion, you know how it is. I've started out using the build they were using in the season championships a couple weeks ago where you completely ignore two of your skills and only put points into Q and E. It's been working out reasonably well. We have a lot of competition for the top lane in our games and no one wants to play AD carry bottom lane so I've been trying Jayce out down there with success. But I was wondering if maybe I should change my skill order. The skill I've been skipping seems like it might be good for an ADC role. I figured I should take a look to see what exactly it does.

Jayce is interesting in that each of his three main skills are actually two skills in one. His ult swaps between melee mode and archer mode with a different set of skills (on different cooldowns) in each mode. I'm interested in particular with how his W works in archer mode...

Hyper Charge: Jayce gains a burst of energy, increasing his attack speed to the maximum amount for 3 attacks. These attacks do 70/85/100/115/130% of his attack damage. Cooldown 14/12/10/8/6 seconds. 40 mana.

The first thing to point out is the maximum attack speed is 2.5 attacks per second. It turns out it doesn't interact favourably with slows so if you have a debuff on you it may actually be less than 2.5 attacks per second but I'm just going to ignore that for now. I think they recently made a change so attack speed buffs kick in whenever activated to partially reduce the time before your next attack. As such, I'm going to assume it gets used, on average, halfway between the cooldown of the previous attack. So over the course of one second you'll get 3 attacks in with the damage modifier appropriate for the rank of the skill. You're also going to lose that second's worth of auto-attacks, along with half of an attack.

It's also interesting to note that this skill actually increases your AD scaling as you put points into it. Almost every skill in the game gets more base damage when you level it, or lower cooldown, or a longer CC duration. This one scales more with more points...

Regardless of rank, you're looking at gaining 3*X*AD damage while losing .5*AD+AD*APS. At low levels your APS is probably in the .6-.8 range. At higher levels, if you don't stack attack speed items, you're probably more like 1.4. So...

At rank 1 early, you'd gain 3*.7*AD-(.5*AD+.7*AD)=.9*AD.

At rank 1 late, you'd gain 3*.7*AD-(.5*AD+1.4*AD)=.2*AD.

At rank 5 early, you'd gain 3*1.3*AD-(.5*AD+.7*AD)=2.7*AD.

At rank 5 late, you'd gain 3*1.3*AD-(.5*AD+1.4*AD)=2*AD.

Later in the game it seems pretty mediocre to use the ability at all if you haven't ranked it up. But if you max it out first it looks to be a bit of a beating, especially if you're just picking up AD and ignoring attack speed. The attack speed it still good while the ability is on cooldown so it's not bad by any means, but it does decrease the power of hyper charge.

One thing I accidentally stumbled on while testing against bots today is getting 3 very fast attacks out is actually pretty good when you have a black cleaver item. It gives the target a debuff that stacks up to 3 times for an armour shred... If you have other physical attackers on your team that seems like it could be a pretty big deal.

So, is this worth leveling up early? I'll need to look at the gains from the other abilities I guess, but I think next time I ADC him I'm going to try maxing it first and seeing what happens.

CastleCon Recap

So I managed to actually wake up early (with some help from Duncan calling my phone) both Saturday and Sunday and head out to CastleCon. Overall it was a pretty fun time. There wasn't anything terribly exciting about it but sometimes getting 40+ people in a room to play board games for 15 hours is all you need!

I ended up getting 3 new games for my collection that obviously needs more games. I got the Glory To Rome reprint. I got the new Netrunner box. And I picked up a used copy of Circus Maximus from the silent auction. Maybe I'll learn the game and be able to play at WBC next year!

I also actually played a bunch of games, some new to me, some old. I believe I played Dungeon Lords, Castle of Burgundy, Eminent Domain, Ora et Labora, Battlestar Galactica, Stone Age: Style is the Goal, Glory To Rome, Dominion, Milestones, and Trigger. By my count I played games with 15 different people. Saturday was great in that it seemed like I never had to make decisions about what to play. People kept coming up and asking if I wanted to play game X. SURE! Game it up! At parts of Sunday we ended up with a bunch of people milling around who all wanted to play games but with no one who wanted to actually pick a game. I know the solution there is to just pick something, have people sit with me, and let the rest sort it out on their own but that's not really something I'm good at doing. And it makes me uncomfortable. Eventually games got started and it got better though!

Overall, a good time and I'm glad I went. And I'm super psyched to play the new NetRunner at some point!