I said a couple weeks ago after watching the big speedrunning marathon that I needed to work out how they were streaming from a console to see if that was something I could do at some point. The first page I found (for speed running records) recommended getting a DVD recorder, recording a DVD off of your television screen, and then mailing in the DVD. Or if you had a high speed connection you could get the file off of the DVD and email it or something. I feel like I had actually stumbled across that page a few years ago and being surprised at how terrible an idea it seemed. And now with high speed being even more common it feels really crazy. Mailing DVDs to people feels so quaint. And is clearly not the way they ran their marathon since they were streaming the games live... They weren't sending me DVDs via Canada Post!
I did some more digging in some forums and the answer is actually pretty simple. You need a video capture card of some kind for your computer in order to get the video and sound directly from the console. Oddly enough I can remember doing exactly this over a decade ago. I had a TV tuner card in a computer left behind by a former roommate and I hooked my SNES up to the AV cable connection at one point. I think probably to play FFIV? That computer unfortunately caught fire a long time ago and I didn't salvage any of the bits from it.
Of course it turns out an old TV tuner probably wouldn't have done the job properly anyway. People seem pretty down on AV cable connections because they give terrible video quality relative to the other options. Also people who are playing games with 'frame perfect' button presses don't want to play with the lag coming through a capture card. So the recommended setup seems to involve getting a capture card, a powered splitter, and some extra cables. Then you can connect the console up to the splitter and connect the splitter to your tv and to your capture card. This way you get to play the game on your tv like normal but everything is copied onto your computer as well for recording and streaming.
Getting the picture into your computer is only half the battle because from there you need to pick up the picture and sound and record them. There's a bunch of software to do this and it seems pretty trivial to set up. Open Broadcaster Software is open source and seemed to work just fine for me. I was able to get it set up and was able to stream a League of Legends test game with it picking up the game, the game sound, and my microphone. Sweet!
What wasn't so sweet is my in game ping spiked up from 90ms to ~2000ms. I was still better at last hitting than the bot was even with 2 seconds of lag but it really wasn't very fun and wouldn't have worked for a real game. I checked the archived video afterwards and the quality was terrible. Something like 70 or 80% of the frames were getting dropped and coupled with the fact I was only able to input an action every 2 seconds it really wasn't very interesting. So there was some sort of problem going on...
Dig around a bit and find out that to upload even a decent quality stream requires about 1.5Mbps of upload bandwidth. Rogers account website was down when I went to check what I had but looking at their list of available packages the only one that made sense for what I could have says it has 2Mbps of upload bandwidth. Seems like it should be enough? But then I found a speed tester website which said I was only getting 440kbps. So either my package isn't on their list or I'm really not getting anything close to what they're promising. I went back today and my package just flat out isn't on their list. The worst one they have right now has 80GB of download cap and I somehow only have 60GB. I've often dipped a little over 60GB and they've been happy to charge me overage despite the fact that their worst package right now has a higher cap. Who knows when that changed but it feels like they've been taking advantage of the fact I don't handle confrontation very well and haven't bothered to look things up. Well, if they aren't giving me enough bandwidth to stream I'm going to have to do something about it anyway... Time to figure out what the best thing to do about it is. Probably I need to figure out what I can get from other companies and then put the screws to them. My cable tv has sucked recently too so maybe I can threaten to cancel both and get something out of them. I'll probably still cancel tv regardless but maybe I can let them talk me into keeping my internet for the right deal.
Other than figuring out my internet I'd also need to get a video capture card and a splitter. One that can handle the low resolution signal of a SNES. I did some searching on that too and it sounds like maybe Canada Computers sells these sorts of things. I may go on an adventure this weekend to check out what they have in store and see where things stand from there.
Friday, January 31, 2014
Thursday, January 30, 2014
Insane in the Membrane
Here's something to think about... Come up with some adjectives that describe games you want to play. For me I think that list should include things like interesting, fun, awesome, and challenging. I feel like I should want to have a good time and flex my brain. Games like Alan Wake with an incredible story, or playing Final Fantasy with a single thief and needing to dig into the mechanics to figure out how to do it, or DMC which is just a lot of awesome mindless killing. Path of Exile has so many different crazy and viable builds to try out. Final Fantasy VIII with the fantastic music and plot.
Things that feel like they really shouldn't be on that list are boring, tedious, repetitive, and trivial. Those feel like things that shouldn't be part of games? And yet if I think back to the Insane in the Membrane achievement in World of Warcraft I can't think of ways to describe it other than those. Read a very small strat on how to get each of the reputations which typically involved going to one zone and killing the same monsters over and over again for hours every day for months on end. There was nothing interesting to figure out. Nothing really changed, though I guess there were a bunch of different reputations to get so it changed a little from week to week.
It took me about six months to get, though it wasn't the only thing I was doing in WoW at the time since we were raiding several nights a week as well. It also made me a fortune since one of the reputations required inscription to get the Darkmoon Faire reputation and I parlayed that into a lot of glyph and card related cash.
And I really liked doing it. Being able to just put on some music and zone out doing the same thing over and over again was actually really relaxing and enjoyable. So while I feel like I should want interesting, fun, awesome, and challenging sometimes I just want to be able to go onto auto pilot doing something completely trivial. It helps if there's an achievement for doing so, I guess!
Things that feel like they really shouldn't be on that list are boring, tedious, repetitive, and trivial. Those feel like things that shouldn't be part of games? And yet if I think back to the Insane in the Membrane achievement in World of Warcraft I can't think of ways to describe it other than those. Read a very small strat on how to get each of the reputations which typically involved going to one zone and killing the same monsters over and over again for hours every day for months on end. There was nothing interesting to figure out. Nothing really changed, though I guess there were a bunch of different reputations to get so it changed a little from week to week.
It took me about six months to get, though it wasn't the only thing I was doing in WoW at the time since we were raiding several nights a week as well. It also made me a fortune since one of the reputations required inscription to get the Darkmoon Faire reputation and I parlayed that into a lot of glyph and card related cash.
And I really liked doing it. Being able to just put on some music and zone out doing the same thing over and over again was actually really relaxing and enjoyable. So while I feel like I should want interesting, fun, awesome, and challenging sometimes I just want to be able to go onto auto pilot doing something completely trivial. It helps if there's an achievement for doing so, I guess!
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
Playing For First
I can remember a couple months ago talking with some people on Path of Exile about running their two hour races. In particular I was talking to Snuggles about why he preferred to play a Marauder and why I preferred to play a Duelist. His argument for why Marauder was better is it had more and better defensive options to pick up in the early levels. My argument for why Duelist was better is Marauder has more and better defensive options to pick up in the early levels.
Playing a Marauder is safe because you can get some pretty good defensive points at the start. PoE races are hardcore so if you die you're out. Putting a focus on not dying feels like the right thing to do since if you die you get nothing and if you survive at a reasonable level you get a good number of points. But I found by watching some people and by trying it myself that as I kept dropping defensive points I would be drastically increasing my killing speed and wouldn't be guaranteeing death by doing so. I'd die a good chunk of the time but when I didn't die I'd finish high enough to earn big bonus points. Perhaps most importantly if I played it safe I'd be guaranteed of never winning! Enough people are going to go the risky plan that even if 80% of them died off the other 20% would finish way above the safe play.
I've spent a lot of the last few days playing tower defense games while watching speed running streams on my tv. One thing I kept hearing people say during the AGDQ a few weeks ago was that people were playing 'safe' strategies and were for the most part focusing on being entertaining while still being pretty darn fast. Given that I only saw two games not finish (Fire Emblem and one of the four Super Metroid players) and that I had a great time watching I'd say they pulled that off. Super Metroid was run without trying to be safe and they brought in extra people to comment away from the games to let the players focus on racing. I was surprised that someone died in that race at the time but now I'd more surprised that three people finished!
Most of the people streaming on SRL are trying to beat the world record time in their chosen game. Thousands and thousands of runs have gone into some of these games and people are well aware that if they want to beat the best times they're going to need to throw safety out the window. I've been mostly trying to watch people playing Final Fantasy games and I've only seen one ending credits all week. Unfortunately that was right as I'd started tuning in so I got to catch the end of the final boss fight of a FFVIII run which just happened to break the previous world record. Pretty hot! After that has been a constant stream of people trying really risky things and failing over and over. Often while spending the entire time on stream swearing at the games. Especially poor FFIX which is apparently set up so the random encounter chance resets each time you change screens. It's possible to beat the game only getting a total of 5 random encounters if you get lucky enough! As far as I can tell there's no way to manipulate it to happen other than running to the next screen on the shortest path which makes getting a fast time pretty random. So much so that the timing program they use has a thing to input the number of random encounters you get!
Watching people manipulate random number generators is pretty crazy. I watched one guy playing the start of Lufia II and he must have done the first couple dungeons two dozen times. Apparently the RNG in that game is altered by player input so if you walk on a very precise path you can cause combats to work out in exactly the same way such that you exactly kill all the monsters you need to fight. But the guy is trying to go super fast and input a precise path through two dungeons including solving puzzles... He kept failing and rather than accept a time loss he'd just restart. Over and over and over again.
Then there was the guy playing FFVI who loaded a different saved game before his run. He did this over and over again a precise number of times in order to force the Veldt to spawn the right random encounters when he got there in his real game.
I watched one guy playing Pokemon Heart Gold who would reset his 3DS system clock to a specific time before starting each run. He does this because the game has a night/day feature and he needed it to change between the two at an exact point in his run and he knew how much time was going to pass before he needed it to happen.
There's definitely a time and place for playing it safe, and a time and place for playing for first. It depends on what you're trying to accomplish at any given time. So Marauder could well have been the optimal choice for Snuggles while Duelist could have been the optimal choice for me and we were never going to convince the other one to switch. Which is just fine! I think I liked watching people playing it safe more than going for broke, actually. Though that may just be because AGDQ featured the best players of each game, doing things I hadn't seen before, and with extra people chiming in with commentary.
Playing a Marauder is safe because you can get some pretty good defensive points at the start. PoE races are hardcore so if you die you're out. Putting a focus on not dying feels like the right thing to do since if you die you get nothing and if you survive at a reasonable level you get a good number of points. But I found by watching some people and by trying it myself that as I kept dropping defensive points I would be drastically increasing my killing speed and wouldn't be guaranteeing death by doing so. I'd die a good chunk of the time but when I didn't die I'd finish high enough to earn big bonus points. Perhaps most importantly if I played it safe I'd be guaranteed of never winning! Enough people are going to go the risky plan that even if 80% of them died off the other 20% would finish way above the safe play.
I've spent a lot of the last few days playing tower defense games while watching speed running streams on my tv. One thing I kept hearing people say during the AGDQ a few weeks ago was that people were playing 'safe' strategies and were for the most part focusing on being entertaining while still being pretty darn fast. Given that I only saw two games not finish (Fire Emblem and one of the four Super Metroid players) and that I had a great time watching I'd say they pulled that off. Super Metroid was run without trying to be safe and they brought in extra people to comment away from the games to let the players focus on racing. I was surprised that someone died in that race at the time but now I'd more surprised that three people finished!
Most of the people streaming on SRL are trying to beat the world record time in their chosen game. Thousands and thousands of runs have gone into some of these games and people are well aware that if they want to beat the best times they're going to need to throw safety out the window. I've been mostly trying to watch people playing Final Fantasy games and I've only seen one ending credits all week. Unfortunately that was right as I'd started tuning in so I got to catch the end of the final boss fight of a FFVIII run which just happened to break the previous world record. Pretty hot! After that has been a constant stream of people trying really risky things and failing over and over. Often while spending the entire time on stream swearing at the games. Especially poor FFIX which is apparently set up so the random encounter chance resets each time you change screens. It's possible to beat the game only getting a total of 5 random encounters if you get lucky enough! As far as I can tell there's no way to manipulate it to happen other than running to the next screen on the shortest path which makes getting a fast time pretty random. So much so that the timing program they use has a thing to input the number of random encounters you get!
Watching people manipulate random number generators is pretty crazy. I watched one guy playing the start of Lufia II and he must have done the first couple dungeons two dozen times. Apparently the RNG in that game is altered by player input so if you walk on a very precise path you can cause combats to work out in exactly the same way such that you exactly kill all the monsters you need to fight. But the guy is trying to go super fast and input a precise path through two dungeons including solving puzzles... He kept failing and rather than accept a time loss he'd just restart. Over and over and over again.
Then there was the guy playing FFVI who loaded a different saved game before his run. He did this over and over again a precise number of times in order to force the Veldt to spawn the right random encounters when he got there in his real game.
I watched one guy playing Pokemon Heart Gold who would reset his 3DS system clock to a specific time before starting each run. He does this because the game has a night/day feature and he needed it to change between the two at an exact point in his run and he knew how much time was going to pass before he needed it to happen.
There's definitely a time and place for playing it safe, and a time and place for playing for first. It depends on what you're trying to accomplish at any given time. So Marauder could well have been the optimal choice for Snuggles while Duelist could have been the optimal choice for me and we were never going to convince the other one to switch. Which is just fine! I think I liked watching people playing it safe more than going for broke, actually. Though that may just be because AGDQ featured the best players of each game, doing things I hadn't seen before, and with extra people chiming in with commentary.
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Defender's Quest: Valley of the Forgotten
Last weekend seemed to be the weekend for tower defense games with Steam cards to go on sale. Lino told me about this one and even though it was three times as much as the last one it was still less than a bottle of pop so it had to be worth a try...
Defender's Quest has the twist that you don't have access to a limited number tower types. There are only six types of towers but each type of tower is a class of adventurer. Archer, healer, mage... That sort of thing. Each character has a level, and gear, and a talent tree. You can use two archers if you want, but you need to buy a second one and they will each need their own gear and have their own levels. You can spec them differently, which is interesting. I had one archer who put all her points into having a bigger range so she could attack more enemy paths. My other archer put all her points into doing more burst damage with crits and poison so she was better at actually killing things but got to attack fewer things. I had one mage who focused on freezing enemies and one who focused on doing massive area damage.
The game has a plot that isn't terrible and it has character interaction that I found hilarious. The berserker is awesome! I also like how the main character is female and super powerful. The first tutorial mission made her seem like just another damsel in distress for the berserker to protect but I was glad it didn't pan out that way. The goal of every level is still to keep the enemies from reaching her, but she is in complete control of everything your team does. She's the 'king' of the chess board, if you will. A 'king' with immense power!
I ended up beating the game today with 13 hours played since the weekend. This game was definitely worth picking up. It also has some hard mode achievements that I'd like to try out, so I'm going to keep playing it too. One class of achievement is to beat the game with only one of each character type which will make things a lot harder than my first playthrough where I was able to use 4 archers for damage and had extra healers so I could cover all of my towers. Being restricted to one little area or having to sell and rebuy my healer to move him around will definitely make things more interesting.
Each level has three different difficulties to play it on so there's a bit of replayability there since you can come back and do a level over for more rewards as your towers level up. You can also change how fast you earn experience in wins and in losses if you want to scale up or down how fast you level up. My first play I got to the point where I could do the hardest version of each story level as I reached it but I suspect a lot of that was having 4 archers since my characters were way under the level of the enemies. Or maybe the two levels aren't comparable in that way?
Defender's Quest has the twist that you don't have access to a limited number tower types. There are only six types of towers but each type of tower is a class of adventurer. Archer, healer, mage... That sort of thing. Each character has a level, and gear, and a talent tree. You can use two archers if you want, but you need to buy a second one and they will each need their own gear and have their own levels. You can spec them differently, which is interesting. I had one archer who put all her points into having a bigger range so she could attack more enemy paths. My other archer put all her points into doing more burst damage with crits and poison so she was better at actually killing things but got to attack fewer things. I had one mage who focused on freezing enemies and one who focused on doing massive area damage.
The game has a plot that isn't terrible and it has character interaction that I found hilarious. The berserker is awesome! I also like how the main character is female and super powerful. The first tutorial mission made her seem like just another damsel in distress for the berserker to protect but I was glad it didn't pan out that way. The goal of every level is still to keep the enemies from reaching her, but she is in complete control of everything your team does. She's the 'king' of the chess board, if you will. A 'king' with immense power!
I ended up beating the game today with 13 hours played since the weekend. This game was definitely worth picking up. It also has some hard mode achievements that I'd like to try out, so I'm going to keep playing it too. One class of achievement is to beat the game with only one of each character type which will make things a lot harder than my first playthrough where I was able to use 4 archers for damage and had extra healers so I could cover all of my towers. Being restricted to one little area or having to sell and rebuy my healer to move him around will definitely make things more interesting.
Each level has three different difficulties to play it on so there's a bit of replayability there since you can come back and do a level over for more rewards as your towers level up. You can also change how fast you earn experience in wins and in losses if you want to scale up or down how fast you level up. My first play I got to the point where I could do the hardest version of each story level as I reached it but I suspect a lot of that was having 4 archers since my characters were way under the level of the enemies. Or maybe the two levels aren't comparable in that way?
Monday, January 27, 2014
Super Sanctum TD
My brother linked me to a tower defense game, with Steam cards, on sale for 49 cents. I like tower defense games, and I like Steam cards, and for some reason I prefer spending 49 cents on a game than playing one that's free so I was all in on this bad boy. It looked like the game was on sale so cheap because the company had just come out with a new game in the same universe and was using this as a cheap source of advertising? I'll take it!
The game started off being a pretty interesting looking tower defense game. It is a mazer style game with the twist that you can slightly alter the mazing by building walls in very specific spots. After playing with it a bit though it basically just boiled down to a tax on your starting cash as you built in the required bits to build the maze.
I was having fun with the game, but then it crashed. Ok, one crash is fine. Then it crashed again. Annoying, but both times was in the menu so I just had to restart the game. It then crashed a third time in the middle of a level, costing me some time, and just made me really bitter. A little over an hour had passed, I had my 3 Steam cards, and it had crashed three times. It wasn't that interesting of a tower defense game that I wanted to put up with more crashes so I gave up.
That said... 49 cents for an hour of entertainment, 3 Steam cards, and a chance at a good game? No regrets.
The game started off being a pretty interesting looking tower defense game. It is a mazer style game with the twist that you can slightly alter the mazing by building walls in very specific spots. After playing with it a bit though it basically just boiled down to a tax on your starting cash as you built in the required bits to build the maze.
I was having fun with the game, but then it crashed. Ok, one crash is fine. Then it crashed again. Annoying, but both times was in the menu so I just had to restart the game. It then crashed a third time in the middle of a level, costing me some time, and just made me really bitter. A little over an hour had passed, I had my 3 Steam cards, and it had crashed three times. It wasn't that interesting of a tower defense game that I wanted to put up with more crashes so I gave up.
That said... 49 cents for an hour of entertainment, 3 Steam cards, and a chance at a good game? No regrets.
Sunday, January 26, 2014
Bridge Match 2 - Board 39
Board 39 - Dealer South - All Vul
Opponents convention card: Majeure cinquième
Opponents playing strength: Fair
My hand: ♠ K Q 8 6 ♥ K 6 4 2 ♦ K J 9 ♣ Q T
This seems like a pretty solid weak NT opener. Partner bids 2NT which is an invite to 3. My maximum with decent intermediates is definitely in for 3NT!
West leads the 7 of hearts.
Well, this should be interesting. I have 2 hearts and 2 diamonds off the top. I can set up a spade, and a club. That's only 6 tricks. I can get anywhere from 0-3 more diamond tricks too, but 2 seems most likely. So I probably need a 3rd spade trick. And I need all this to happen before they realize how many clubs they have between them. I could also try to score the T of hearts. West should have 3 cards above the 7 for his lead and the only such cards are QJ98. So inserting the T is reasonably likely to work. On the other hand if I duck and East inserts the Q or J then I can win with the K and then finesse West later. East can actually foil this by playing low from Q5. And he knows it, too, since he can make the same deduction? Except for all he knows his partner has the K, not me, and I could get to score my J if he ducks. I think the key is I want to lead diamonds from board so I want to win this with the T so I'm going to try that. 7-T-Q-K.
I can no longer reasonably lead diamonds from dummy. So I guess I should start from the top in hand and see what happens. K-7-3-4. J-Q-A-2. Oh well. I give up a diamond. 5-3 of spades-9-T. Guess finessing wasn't going to work out well anyway. West shifts to a club. 6-K-A-T. Another club. J-Q-3-7. They have a lot of clubs set up when they get back in. I can cash out for down 2 or I can pound out a spade and hope they can't take 4 club tricks along with that spade. But the only upside is if they can only take 2 clubs with the spade? That requires the suit to be blocked or to have split 7-2 with the A in the other hand. That seems less likely than that they can cash 4 clubs so I just take my tricks and go home. Down 2.
This is a terrible result for our team. We only beat the pair that went down 3 in 3NT. We lost to the 2 pairs that went down 1 in 3NT, and the 2 pairs that managed to make 3NT, and the pair that made 3 diamonds, and the pair that went all the way to 6NT but only went down 1. I guess they cashed their aces and went home? Who knew overbidding could be so lucrative!
Professor Jack doesn't like when I played the 3rd diamond. He wants me to lead a spade instead. It feels like that's leaving 2 tricks on board in the hopes of setting up 2 in hand? But I guess it could set up 3 in hand if East has Axx, which he did, and hops with the A? And if he doesn't hop with the A then I get a spade trick and can then establish the diamonds. Ok, seems better. Clubs actually were close to being blocked, too, and could have easily been misplayed by the opponents. Huh.
Ranking after board 39/60: 2/16 with 55.13%
Opponents convention card: Majeure cinquième
Opponents playing strength: Fair
My hand: ♠ K Q 8 6 ♥ K 6 4 2 ♦ K J 9 ♣ Q T
This seems like a pretty solid weak NT opener. Partner bids 2NT which is an invite to 3. My maximum with decent intermediates is definitely in for 3NT!
West leads the 7 of hearts.
| NORTH ♠ T 5 2 ♥ A T 3 ♦ A 8 6 5 3 ♣ K 7 | ||
| WEST ♥ 7 | ||
| SOUTH ♠ K Q 8 6 ♥ K 6 4 2 ♦ K J 9 ♣ Q T |
| West | North | East | South |
| 1NT | |||
| Pass | 2NT1 | Pass | 3NT |
| Pass | Pass | Pass | |
| 1Invitational | |||
Well, this should be interesting. I have 2 hearts and 2 diamonds off the top. I can set up a spade, and a club. That's only 6 tricks. I can get anywhere from 0-3 more diamond tricks too, but 2 seems most likely. So I probably need a 3rd spade trick. And I need all this to happen before they realize how many clubs they have between them. I could also try to score the T of hearts. West should have 3 cards above the 7 for his lead and the only such cards are QJ98. So inserting the T is reasonably likely to work. On the other hand if I duck and East inserts the Q or J then I can win with the K and then finesse West later. East can actually foil this by playing low from Q5. And he knows it, too, since he can make the same deduction? Except for all he knows his partner has the K, not me, and I could get to score my J if he ducks. I think the key is I want to lead diamonds from board so I want to win this with the T so I'm going to try that. 7-T-Q-K.
I can no longer reasonably lead diamonds from dummy. So I guess I should start from the top in hand and see what happens. K-7-3-4. J-Q-A-2. Oh well. I give up a diamond. 5-3 of spades-9-T. Guess finessing wasn't going to work out well anyway. West shifts to a club. 6-K-A-T. Another club. J-Q-3-7. They have a lot of clubs set up when they get back in. I can cash out for down 2 or I can pound out a spade and hope they can't take 4 club tricks along with that spade. But the only upside is if they can only take 2 clubs with the spade? That requires the suit to be blocked or to have split 7-2 with the A in the other hand. That seems less likely than that they can cash 4 clubs so I just take my tricks and go home. Down 2.
| NORTH ♠ T 5 2 ♥ A T 3 ♦ A 8 6 5 3 ♣ K 7 | ||
| WEST ♠ J 7 4 ♥ J 8 7 ♦ Q T 7 ♣ 8 6 4 3 | EAST ♠ A 9 3 ♥ Q 9 5 ♦ 4 2 ♣ A J 9 5 2 | |
| SOUTH ♠ K Q 8 6 ♥ K 6 4 2 ♦ K J 9 ♣ Q T |
Professor Jack doesn't like when I played the 3rd diamond. He wants me to lead a spade instead. It feels like that's leaving 2 tricks on board in the hopes of setting up 2 in hand? But I guess it could set up 3 in hand if East has Axx, which he did, and hops with the A? And if he doesn't hop with the A then I get a spade trick and can then establish the diamonds. Ok, seems better. Clubs actually were close to being blocked, too, and could have easily been misplayed by the opponents. Huh.
Ranking after board 39/60: 2/16 with 55.13%
Friday, January 24, 2014
NWFL Finals Results
I played the finals of Duncan's FumBBL Blood Bowl league earlier this week. I posted about my different options for how to prepare my team and ended up deciding to cut my dwarf who was missing the next game and to also cut the niggled hobgoblin since I was really worried she was going to just get taken out. I also threw in 150k to get a wizard. I figured my opponent and his likely 220k would be getting a wizard anyway and especially against Khemri adding a wizard on would be a big advantage. He ended up spending his 370k on a wizard and 2 bribes which had the potential to let him foul his way to a man advantage but it didn't end up mattering as he didn't have a single player ejected all game.
My opponent chose to receive the kick and the weather was very sunny. Not that either of our predominantly 2 agility teams were planning on passing the ball but it did mean desperation plays would be a little more desperate. The game started off on a bit of a sour note for my opponent. The opening kick-off roll was a thrown rock which killed his only tomb guardian with block. He did regenerate but it meant he lost a 5 strength dude for the opening drive. He then proceeded to throw some blocks with guys who didn't have block and burned a reroll and then rolled double skulls to end his turn after knocking down one person on each team. I then badly hurt a second tomb guardian on my turn, who didn't regenerate, and moved some guys into position to go steal the ball if he didn't deal with it.
His second turn opened with another reroll burned on a 3 die blitz that came up skull/skull/both down. He did pick up the ball though. I then badly hurt a skeleton who also chose not to regenerate. My opponent only had a 12 man roster so he was guaranteed to be down guys for the rest of the game. His next turn didn't accomplish a whole lot. I KOed a skeleton, made a very risky and probably wrong positional choice, and then got kicked out for fouling. My risky play was sticking 5 of my guys into a little box where they could be hit by a fireball. One of the 5 guys got kicked out so only 4 could get hit. Only problem is those were my 4 best guys. Both bulls, my 3 skill dwarf, and a 2 skill dwarf. It did put my opponent in a really bad position and I was likely going to get a shot at his ball carrier if he didn't use his wizard. As a team with a 2 agility ball carrier I actually want to get the wizard out of the way when I don't have the ball so it might have been the right play? In retrospect I think I probably could have baited out the wizard with a hobgoblin in the box instead of my second bull. He did use the fireball and it knocked over my beatdown bull and seriously hurt my 3 skill dwarf. Fireball does have to roll to hit and roll to break armour so it is only 5% to take each guy out. It is 81% that he doesn't KO or better any of my 4 guys when he takes this action so it is probably pretty good to make him do it? But it does give him an out to get back in the game when I'm already ahead so maybe it wasn't worth the risk? Anyway, I used my apothecary and he came home so Colonel Mustard was back in the game for the next drive.
He ran his ballcarrier down the field and it was looking like he was going to get to score if I didn't use my wizard. I ended up doing 2 go for its to get assists in the right spot so I could blitz off a marking tomb guardian. I had to reroll to make that work. Then my utility bull centaur was able to make a dodge and 3 go for its in order to stand beside the enemy ball carrier. He has stand firm, block, and dodge so it's pretty hard to move him away. My opponent ended up deciding to dodge with his 3 agility blitz-ra to get an assist and the blitz with the ball carrier who has tackle. Skull reroll push meant he was stuck still beside me. He could take the 2 agility dodge and score or he could stand there and hope things got better next turn. He decided to dodge away, rolled a 3, and stunned his guy.
All this play had been taking place on the sidelines so I took the opportunity to ignore the ball and push his tomb guardian and his 3 agility blitz-ra into the crowd. Both got KOed. I also badly hurt another skeleton, but he got better. His turn didn't do much since he only had 4 guys in play and one was stunned. I had 3 turns with the ball deep in my own territory so I started running a dwarf down field as a scoring option, moved a couple guys back to watch the ball, and tried to pick it up with my bull and a reroll. It failed. And the ball bounced to a reasonable spot for my opponent. He didn't have a reroll but he did have a play to roll 5+ 5+ 4+ 2+ 2+ and score, with a reroll on one of the 5+s. He tried, rolled a 2 on the first roll, and kicked the ball out of bounds where the crowd threw it to mid field. I ran my dwarf down field some more just in case and decided to foul his piling on guy while I had the chance. It didn't work, but I didn't get kicked out either. I then failed the pickup through reroll. He did nothing and I again tried the foul on the piling on guy. It again failed, but I still wasn't ejected, so I got to try my desperation play. The pickup and 3 go for its worked, but the hand off didn't, and that was the half.
My plan going in was to try to minimize the impact of regeneration by winning 1-0 so being tied 0-0 at the half after kicking off was just fine by me. He failed all 3 of his KO rolls so it was 7 on 11 for the second half with his 3 agility guy out, all his guard out, and 2 of his 5 strength guys out. I still had my wizard. I didn't see how I could lose. The kickoff table was perfect defense so he got to make my hits a little harder and the kickoff landed exactly in the end zone which was about as good a start as he could have hoped for. But then my bull centaur managed his pickup in the end zone and it was pretty much over from there. He did decide to keep dodging and going for it with his 1 agility tomb guardian to blitz my ball carrier and it kept working but he never got a pow to take my guy down. I stalled until turn 8 while hitting the few remaining guys he had left and scored. He went 1 for 6 on KO rolls for his turn 8 so he was down to just 3 guys and Khemri really can't one turn touchdown with 3 guys. To rub a little salt in the wound the kickoff result was another rock thrown which stunned one of his 3 guys. The dirty player who was undoubtedly going to try to get some revenge. His final action was to roll skull/both down on a tomb guardian block and fall over.
Everything went my way this game. Absolutely everything. I think I played it reasonably well and had a solid plan and I even think baiting out the wizard was probably a good move though I didn't think it through well enough at the time. But I could have played like an idiot and probably would have won the game anyway with the way things went for my opponent.
To make things even sweeter my main bull centaur, Mr Boddy, skilled up and rolled his 3rd set of doubles in 5 skills. I skipped the first one to get block but I actually took stand firm with his 4th skill because I was planning on rolling doubles again with his 5th and wanted to combo it with diving tackle. (I also wanted to be able to play more on the sidelines without getting surfed and the ability to not get pushed off of a marked target was actually pretty key this game.) So now he has block, dodge, break tackle, stand firm, and diving tackle. He's a beast! He should help out against elf teams that can make desperation scoring plays. I had two other people skill up and the whole thing brings my TV up to exactly 1850. As far as I can tell the salary cap for next season is 1750 and I get bonuses of +20 for winning my division, +30 for winning my conference, and +50 for winning the championship. So my cap is actually 1850... Exactly where I landed with no cuts needed! I did cut two guys before the finals, to be fair, but I still like how that worked out. I need to light 440k cash on fire but I'm otherwise good to go for next season. Maybe I'll eventually roll doubles on a dwarf and get claw...
My opponent chose to receive the kick and the weather was very sunny. Not that either of our predominantly 2 agility teams were planning on passing the ball but it did mean desperation plays would be a little more desperate. The game started off on a bit of a sour note for my opponent. The opening kick-off roll was a thrown rock which killed his only tomb guardian with block. He did regenerate but it meant he lost a 5 strength dude for the opening drive. He then proceeded to throw some blocks with guys who didn't have block and burned a reroll and then rolled double skulls to end his turn after knocking down one person on each team. I then badly hurt a second tomb guardian on my turn, who didn't regenerate, and moved some guys into position to go steal the ball if he didn't deal with it.
His second turn opened with another reroll burned on a 3 die blitz that came up skull/skull/both down. He did pick up the ball though. I then badly hurt a skeleton who also chose not to regenerate. My opponent only had a 12 man roster so he was guaranteed to be down guys for the rest of the game. His next turn didn't accomplish a whole lot. I KOed a skeleton, made a very risky and probably wrong positional choice, and then got kicked out for fouling. My risky play was sticking 5 of my guys into a little box where they could be hit by a fireball. One of the 5 guys got kicked out so only 4 could get hit. Only problem is those were my 4 best guys. Both bulls, my 3 skill dwarf, and a 2 skill dwarf. It did put my opponent in a really bad position and I was likely going to get a shot at his ball carrier if he didn't use his wizard. As a team with a 2 agility ball carrier I actually want to get the wizard out of the way when I don't have the ball so it might have been the right play? In retrospect I think I probably could have baited out the wizard with a hobgoblin in the box instead of my second bull. He did use the fireball and it knocked over my beatdown bull and seriously hurt my 3 skill dwarf. Fireball does have to roll to hit and roll to break armour so it is only 5% to take each guy out. It is 81% that he doesn't KO or better any of my 4 guys when he takes this action so it is probably pretty good to make him do it? But it does give him an out to get back in the game when I'm already ahead so maybe it wasn't worth the risk? Anyway, I used my apothecary and he came home so Colonel Mustard was back in the game for the next drive.
He ran his ballcarrier down the field and it was looking like he was going to get to score if I didn't use my wizard. I ended up doing 2 go for its to get assists in the right spot so I could blitz off a marking tomb guardian. I had to reroll to make that work. Then my utility bull centaur was able to make a dodge and 3 go for its in order to stand beside the enemy ball carrier. He has stand firm, block, and dodge so it's pretty hard to move him away. My opponent ended up deciding to dodge with his 3 agility blitz-ra to get an assist and the blitz with the ball carrier who has tackle. Skull reroll push meant he was stuck still beside me. He could take the 2 agility dodge and score or he could stand there and hope things got better next turn. He decided to dodge away, rolled a 3, and stunned his guy.
All this play had been taking place on the sidelines so I took the opportunity to ignore the ball and push his tomb guardian and his 3 agility blitz-ra into the crowd. Both got KOed. I also badly hurt another skeleton, but he got better. His turn didn't do much since he only had 4 guys in play and one was stunned. I had 3 turns with the ball deep in my own territory so I started running a dwarf down field as a scoring option, moved a couple guys back to watch the ball, and tried to pick it up with my bull and a reroll. It failed. And the ball bounced to a reasonable spot for my opponent. He didn't have a reroll but he did have a play to roll 5+ 5+ 4+ 2+ 2+ and score, with a reroll on one of the 5+s. He tried, rolled a 2 on the first roll, and kicked the ball out of bounds where the crowd threw it to mid field. I ran my dwarf down field some more just in case and decided to foul his piling on guy while I had the chance. It didn't work, but I didn't get kicked out either. I then failed the pickup through reroll. He did nothing and I again tried the foul on the piling on guy. It again failed, but I still wasn't ejected, so I got to try my desperation play. The pickup and 3 go for its worked, but the hand off didn't, and that was the half.
My plan going in was to try to minimize the impact of regeneration by winning 1-0 so being tied 0-0 at the half after kicking off was just fine by me. He failed all 3 of his KO rolls so it was 7 on 11 for the second half with his 3 agility guy out, all his guard out, and 2 of his 5 strength guys out. I still had my wizard. I didn't see how I could lose. The kickoff table was perfect defense so he got to make my hits a little harder and the kickoff landed exactly in the end zone which was about as good a start as he could have hoped for. But then my bull centaur managed his pickup in the end zone and it was pretty much over from there. He did decide to keep dodging and going for it with his 1 agility tomb guardian to blitz my ball carrier and it kept working but he never got a pow to take my guy down. I stalled until turn 8 while hitting the few remaining guys he had left and scored. He went 1 for 6 on KO rolls for his turn 8 so he was down to just 3 guys and Khemri really can't one turn touchdown with 3 guys. To rub a little salt in the wound the kickoff result was another rock thrown which stunned one of his 3 guys. The dirty player who was undoubtedly going to try to get some revenge. His final action was to roll skull/both down on a tomb guardian block and fall over.
Everything went my way this game. Absolutely everything. I think I played it reasonably well and had a solid plan and I even think baiting out the wizard was probably a good move though I didn't think it through well enough at the time. But I could have played like an idiot and probably would have won the game anyway with the way things went for my opponent.
To make things even sweeter my main bull centaur, Mr Boddy, skilled up and rolled his 3rd set of doubles in 5 skills. I skipped the first one to get block but I actually took stand firm with his 4th skill because I was planning on rolling doubles again with his 5th and wanted to combo it with diving tackle. (I also wanted to be able to play more on the sidelines without getting surfed and the ability to not get pushed off of a marked target was actually pretty key this game.) So now he has block, dodge, break tackle, stand firm, and diving tackle. He's a beast! He should help out against elf teams that can make desperation scoring plays. I had two other people skill up and the whole thing brings my TV up to exactly 1850. As far as I can tell the salary cap for next season is 1750 and I get bonuses of +20 for winning my division, +30 for winning my conference, and +50 for winning the championship. So my cap is actually 1850... Exactly where I landed with no cuts needed! I did cut two guys before the finals, to be fair, but I still like how that worked out. I need to light 440k cash on fire but I'm otherwise good to go for next season. Maybe I'll eventually roll doubles on a dwarf and get claw...
Thursday, January 23, 2014
More Hearthstone
I skipped out on playing Heartstone a bit last week after noticing that I only got one daily quest, not three, and that I'd therefore not be drafting every day. This week I decided I should probably play it again to give it a fair shake and saw that some quests had built up. So you get one per day and only need to play every three days to clear out the queue? I like that as a feature. It makes you feel less bad about missing a day while still incentivizing you to log in pretty frequently.
I've done a couple drafts since then and managed to even pull off a 9-3 record once which got me what I can only assume is this game's version of a foil along with more than enough gold to draft again and a pack and some crafting reagents. I haven't actually done any crafting but it seems like a way for you to crush a whole ton of cards you don't want into specific cards you do want. I don't know the ratios but it sure sounds better than the whole Zimus problem I had with SolForge.
Robb has been trying to tell me that Hearthstone is a better card game in part because it doesn't have the legendary issue that SolForge has and that the commons compare much better to the legendaries. Having played against a few legendaries today (one guy even had two of them in the same draft) I think that's a bit of hogwash. Ragnaros is way, way better than a common and will win a game on his own if the opponent doesn't have a stupidly good board position or a removal spell that can take out an 8/8. Even if he does Ragnaros will have killed something else too so he'll have been a 2 for 1.
Even ignoring the whole legendary thing (I actually beat the guy with 2 of them because I had a removal for his 8/8 haste and he played his broken 2 drop on turn 12) I just haven't been having much for playing the game. I'm finding it really rather boring, actually. Part of it is the pace of the game I think, which is really slow. It has lots of cutesy animations and stuff that just slow the game down. It reminds me a little of the Cyanide Blood Bowl client... Really cool to start but eventually I just don't want to see pass replays and guys slowly running down the field.
The other part is the game doesn't seem to have many interesting decisions. It works a lot like Magic does except you get a land per turn for free (and don't have to waste draw steps on land) and the attacker chooses blockers, not the defender. So if you have a 3/2 and I have a 2/1 I'm going to attack your 3/2 in order to trade. On the other hand you're going to attack me to do 3 damage if it's your turn rather than trade because I'm probably going to make the trade on my turn anyway and that's 3 free damage. Of course if you're about to play a 6/2 or something then you probably want to make the trade on your turn, and maybe you think my deck has a lot of pump spells or something? It's certainly a decision to be made, but it's one that I think has a blatantly obvious choice an overwhelming amount of the time.
I think it's obvious anyway... I play plenty of matches against people who make what seem to be incorrect decisions. I don't actually know all that much about the cards or the strategy but I keep identifying misplays and then beating those people so I feel like I probably have a decent grasp of things.
Because everyone draws one card per turn, and everyone has a 2 casting cost spell they can play once per turn, it really feels like games devolve into who can make the most efficient trades. If I keep getting 2 for 1s eventually I'll have cards left over and kill you with them. So the trick is staying alive long enough for those extra cards to come home. The majority of my losses seem to come against mage draft decks because they have access to a card that does 4 damage to all of my creatures. I've lost 3 times to decks with 2+ copies of that card in the last couple days. The mage passive spell also feels strong in that it does 1 damage to anything which completely invalidates 1 toughness creatures. You're often stuck drafting them anyway and it just results in the mage getting more card advantage on you.
What it boils down to is I rarely feel like I had any chance in the games I've lost. I'm often winning on my opponent failing to properly trade efficiently. And the games are taking a long time to resolve for what they are.
I still have more than enough gold to draft but I don't know that I'm going to bother. The act of picking cards in the draft is fun but the games to see how the deck works out feel like a chore. I have plenty of games to play that don't feel like a chore, so I think Hearthstone is getting axed.
I've done a couple drafts since then and managed to even pull off a 9-3 record once which got me what I can only assume is this game's version of a foil along with more than enough gold to draft again and a pack and some crafting reagents. I haven't actually done any crafting but it seems like a way for you to crush a whole ton of cards you don't want into specific cards you do want. I don't know the ratios but it sure sounds better than the whole Zimus problem I had with SolForge.
Robb has been trying to tell me that Hearthstone is a better card game in part because it doesn't have the legendary issue that SolForge has and that the commons compare much better to the legendaries. Having played against a few legendaries today (one guy even had two of them in the same draft) I think that's a bit of hogwash. Ragnaros is way, way better than a common and will win a game on his own if the opponent doesn't have a stupidly good board position or a removal spell that can take out an 8/8. Even if he does Ragnaros will have killed something else too so he'll have been a 2 for 1.
Even ignoring the whole legendary thing (I actually beat the guy with 2 of them because I had a removal for his 8/8 haste and he played his broken 2 drop on turn 12) I just haven't been having much for playing the game. I'm finding it really rather boring, actually. Part of it is the pace of the game I think, which is really slow. It has lots of cutesy animations and stuff that just slow the game down. It reminds me a little of the Cyanide Blood Bowl client... Really cool to start but eventually I just don't want to see pass replays and guys slowly running down the field.
The other part is the game doesn't seem to have many interesting decisions. It works a lot like Magic does except you get a land per turn for free (and don't have to waste draw steps on land) and the attacker chooses blockers, not the defender. So if you have a 3/2 and I have a 2/1 I'm going to attack your 3/2 in order to trade. On the other hand you're going to attack me to do 3 damage if it's your turn rather than trade because I'm probably going to make the trade on my turn anyway and that's 3 free damage. Of course if you're about to play a 6/2 or something then you probably want to make the trade on your turn, and maybe you think my deck has a lot of pump spells or something? It's certainly a decision to be made, but it's one that I think has a blatantly obvious choice an overwhelming amount of the time.
I think it's obvious anyway... I play plenty of matches against people who make what seem to be incorrect decisions. I don't actually know all that much about the cards or the strategy but I keep identifying misplays and then beating those people so I feel like I probably have a decent grasp of things.
Because everyone draws one card per turn, and everyone has a 2 casting cost spell they can play once per turn, it really feels like games devolve into who can make the most efficient trades. If I keep getting 2 for 1s eventually I'll have cards left over and kill you with them. So the trick is staying alive long enough for those extra cards to come home. The majority of my losses seem to come against mage draft decks because they have access to a card that does 4 damage to all of my creatures. I've lost 3 times to decks with 2+ copies of that card in the last couple days. The mage passive spell also feels strong in that it does 1 damage to anything which completely invalidates 1 toughness creatures. You're often stuck drafting them anyway and it just results in the mage getting more card advantage on you.
What it boils down to is I rarely feel like I had any chance in the games I've lost. I'm often winning on my opponent failing to properly trade efficiently. And the games are taking a long time to resolve for what they are.
I still have more than enough gold to draft but I don't know that I'm going to bother. The act of picking cards in the draft is fun but the games to see how the deck works out feel like a chore. I have plenty of games to play that don't feel like a chore, so I think Hearthstone is getting axed.
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