On Saterday...

And so it comes to this.

I woke up this morning not in the mood for being alive.

You ever have mornings like that? Where you just wake up and all of 'You' screams in burning agony that reality exists and you're in it? The unfair part is that I don't drink or take drugs of any kind. I just have a genius brain that goes PING occasionally.

Watched some Californication, which I'm really enjoying now it's got to S06 and the crazy nonsense have turned into mad gold. Then crawled to the hypermarket and bought salad and things. Did food shopping for the next week today basically because I ran out of bread and most of my protein type items. Then came home and ate tortillas and chicken, bacon, sweetcorn mayo on seeded bread until I was full.

Wish I had bought more caffeine than a single tin, but low on funds until Monday so. Some coke would've been a good idea though, and I'm in fact sitting here wondering if going for another walk might be a good idea. Probably not though cus the short walk to the hypermarket and back resulted in my lungs trying to evac from my chest.

Fuck I need a doctor to check these things out before I stop breathing. Fortunately I've got an appointment on Wednesday so.

---

Played a couple of League of Legends matches after foods, and that reminded me why I stopped playing that dam shit.

That's why. I've won that game. Won it and should be worshiped as it's presiding god. But see there? Says 'DEFEAT' in big fucking caps at the top of the screen cus my allies are a bunch of mother fucking idiots who don't defend the fucking towers.

---

Hearthstone too, might be single fucking player but fully half of that shit is pure fucking luck, whilst the other half is how much gods dam coin you've spent on buying 'Cards' made of 1's and 0's.

That sort of bullshit annoys the crap out of me. It's one thing to play a physical game and fork over cash for individual bits as each bit needs designing and manufacturing, but art is dirt fucking cheap and digital distribution of software is becoming prevalent over hard copy cus that shit is stupid cheap, so where the fuck you do you get off charging me 1.99 per 6 pack of cards mother fucker?

---

I did just gain closed beta access to Kixeye's new MOBA called 'TOME: Immortal Arena', as I do sometimes because despite appearances I do keep up with new game releases and sign up for beta's like other people scratch.

Haven't played it yet for about three reasons.

The first is my PC is ageing and needs replacing [ah, the wonders of being terminally unemployable] so I'm not sure if it'd even run that well.

The second is that I tried mother fucking Dawngate and found that Waystone are a bunch of idiots who describe their game as a 'Fast Paced MOBA' when their shit is possibly the most convoluted and lacking in focus game I've ever played. And I don't really feel like going through that shit again.

And the third is I should be doing my college work or at least writing games design on Codex Mundus but given my existential crisis [though it was less questioning my value than questioning this universes] I don't feel much like doing anything.

On TOME though, and Dawngate for that matter, these new MOBAs, especially in the case of Dawngate, are pissing me off quite a bit because their developers are effectively ripping off League of Legends, which currently trumps any MOBA out there in terms of gameplay efficiency in the same way World of Warcraft made everyone it's bitch for a good decade.

---

The issue is that their designers have missed a few fundamental points in the design which are essential not only in League of Legends but in MOBA design in general.

They're a bit nebulous, but if I was going to put a name to a few of them I'd say the following:

In character design they've missed one of the key points of fictional mirroring.

Terry Pratchett's Discworld series [where I live half the time in my head] was so successful because he used the narrative design trick of mirroring the real world in fiction. The Last Continent for example was effectively about Australia, but he called it XXXX [a type of beer], and the content of the story was a reflection of what the idea of Australia is in the zeitgeist, the minds of readers.

Riot Games have done the same thing with League of Legends; taking that which exists in the geek and nerd zeitgeist and creating an icon of it to resonate with the gaming playerbase.

These new MOBA's haven't grasped that this concept is the best way to design a 'Legend' character roster.

Riot Game's take meme's and turn them into champions and/or skins, like the Bear Cavalry meme and one of Sejuani's skins.

And then they got vampires, ninjas, pirates, a Lich, a Skaven, an armored bear, a Golem, a Naga, and even a Trent. Those bitches got style mother fucker.

The Dawngate and TOME don't have style. DG has a walking tombstone and an anthropomorphic kitters and TOME have a Satyr, but that's about it.

Even the older MOBA's like HoN and DotA 2 don't usually hit the mark in good champion design, choosing, like the newer ones, to pull something out of their ass and miss the mark entirely.

I'm not saying that originality is a bad thing, but if you want to win this lil game you need to strike a cord, make a 'Legend', populate your roster with both fun to play champions [and they'll always be champions, not shapers or guardians or some stupid shit] but also those which stand out.

Surprisingly, but not surprisingly as it's fucking Blizzard, Heroes of the Storm by Blizzard is getting it right with their roster which made of every icon from their uber long running RPG and RTS franchises Warcraft and Starcraft.

That's how you fucking design a MOBA cast, though I admit they had a distinct advantage given that they're drawing on the popularity of their own IP's. All they had to do was identify the most popular characters and go to town.

---

I hear though that they cocked up the storyline in HotS by explaining how the champions work together and why they're fighting in the game's universe as 'It's all magic, trolololol'.

League of Legends ain't perfect, but at least they gave it the ole college try, and I would've expected more from Blizzard. Other MOBA's either phone in their backstory [give it a half-hearted go or try to make it unique and special and producing something totally ignorable] or do what I heard Blizzard did and simply provide an excuse.

Stories in MOBA's are tricky things. The idea behind the game is to produce a strategic combat simulator. But the origins of the MOBA genera are RTS games [Defense of the Ancients, the original MOBA, being a mod for Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos] which are a blending of topdown combat and a campaign story.

MOBA's need a campaign story which supports both the reasons these champions exist, and why they keep fighting on the same field of battle, and why death doesn't mean the champion is dead.

In League of Legends this is because the champions are avatar's for political powers, and on the fields of justice they're merely copies from the physical template of the individual that are under the command of a Summoner.

Makes sense and there's a certain story there that the player can look into which is never really developed or included in the actual client.

Fine, that's sufficient, but if you go beyond that then you're getting into realms of the RPG and it's not really required for your game. You need some sort of setting, but it only needs to cover the system, not be a standalone component of the design.

---

I said above that The Dawngate was slow, and it is, but it's ethos on 'Breaking the Meta' is also responsible for it's massively snow bally matches and lack of gameplay focus. Plus the clarity of the maps is almost non-existent.

Play a match of DG and, after you've chosen a non-iconic champion, you'll enter into a match whereby there is no flow to the gameplay.

League of Legends [as I said, the thing is epically designed so it is my first port of call for a reference, the only real issue is that Riot Games are mismanaging the fuck out of it] you do your pre-match and then you play a match and review it in post-match. Or you choose a champion you want to play in a given role, you play a match in that role, and you're prep and skill determine the outcome.

This process isn't well defined in DG. When I played it I couldn't find the Summoners Rift process of Blue > Wight > Wolves, Red > Wraiths > Golems. There're just monsters all over the place, a big bad in the center of the map, and then alters to consider, and towers, and everyone moves really slowly and BLAAAH...there's no flow to the gameplay.

Towers, alters AND jungling on one map makes each DG match almost as long as as an LoL match for each component, so like 3 times as long easily, but then they made the towers regenerate, the alters recoverable, and added in twice as many monsters on either side of the map as they're are in all of Summoners Rift, the biggest LoL map.

Someone took a good look at LoL and thought, 'that all works really well, so we'll take some of that shit and add in more of it for even more fun'. That's like saying, hey football is a well loved sport on this planet, so let's take it, add in two more goals on the top and bottom of the pitch, and make it so every player has a ball and there're 2 goalies for each goal...oh, and each match goes on until one side is 50 goals above the other side, so if they're evenly matched the game goes on for days, like a game of fucking Quidditch.

Fucking long dull chaos man...or at least it would be as the matches I played usually ended when one side simply snow balled and walked over the opposition.

That sometimes happens in League of Legends, but at least you can see why cus someone cocked up and fed or allowed the other side to feed. It doesn't happen as a matter of bloody course.

I stopped trying to play Dawngate however after I got sick of the lack of map clarity. League of Legends recently announced a redesign of their premier map for clarity in graphical presentation, and the preview screen shots look all kinds of fucking epic. You need to be able to tell whats what and where you're going and what you're doing. It needs to be quick, it's needs to be snappy, and it needs to be efficient.

Dawngate isn't. DotA 2 isn't. I'm not fucking touching HoN. Haven't played HotS yet, but want to. And I might install TOME but I don't think it's going to run properly for me.

UPDATE: I tried playing TOME: Immortal Arena after I wrote this. Turns out it's a browser title, quite snappy, no BS, closed beta so a couple of bugs. And I prefer stand alone clients rather than a system built on a system on a system, game > java probably > FireFox, but it was playable and I enjoyed it, so GG.

Few flaws in the UI design, no champion grid, odd rune/mastery champion customization system. On the other hand the auto-buy was nice, the lack of last hitting was actually pretty good even if it makes the gameplay too easy [just cus it's typically annoying, doesn't make it bad games design; some things are difficult, annoying AND fun by way of challenging], plus the stand-out-of-combat-for-HP regen made the gameplay much more efficient.

That's the thing with new MOBA's; everyone wants theirs to be quick and dynamic, but if you make it quicker you make it less complicated. League of Legends has this balance between speed and depth which doesn't diminish either. That's my view anyway.

League of Legends is teh shit. It badly needs some customization of champions and maps. And the ranked system needs seriously fucking rebooting for rewarding individual play rather than team effort cus I'm fucking beyond sick of being demoted cus of ELO Hell and all the fucking noobs. And Riot Games can rot in the hell for being more about the money these days than the craft. But it's the best MOBA out there pro tem.

And I think I'm about done here. Tired of writing [see inverted existential crisis]. Going to...in fact the name of my games thesis is current League of Legends Redux cus I never got around to changing it before making these blogs, but anyway, I'm going to base my game thesis MOBA on League of Legends cus it's just that fucking good.

---

Right now I'm gonna watch some more Californication and then do some college work at last. Write more nonsense tomorrow and maybe even do some programming plus college work.

Monday I start the search for new accommodation, moving out a week tomorrow. A week today I have 2 exams on my police course so I really must hit the books soonest. Wednesday I go to the fucking doctor for my throat, and hopefully haven't died of whatever it is by then.

Yup.

On ELO Hell...

Hai. Not a happy temporary resident of a tent at the moment. >:|

Went running last night, did one lap of stage one of my two hour running route, of which contains three stages, and then spent half an hour barely able to breath.

Once I could walk I went to the hypermarket and got some liquid mucus cough meds and drank about half bottle [so against the label but I'm built like a jungle ape and have a slow metabolism so taking more than recommend dose is recommend for me] by sipping every time I needed to cough or couldn't breath normally.

This resulted in it clearly enough for me to do two more laps of the course. Go in, showered, slept, and now my sinuses have thick [sorry] yellow mucus in them, which I'm assuming is the corpse of the growing strep that suddenly found itself bathed in poison last night.

Woke up, decided to give running a miss tonight, and played some Hearthstone to wake up.

---

I just don't understand that game. You build a deck, you find it works, win four or five matches, and then it stops working and you drop to the bottom of the table again. So you try another champion, Druid instead of Rogue, and the same thing happens again.

Mostly I lose because either I have a bad hand [sheer luck factor] or someone pulls out cards which are a] expensive/rare [like the dragon edged boss cards] and b] have this OP ability [the freaking priest champion, in 3 moves in the late game, can make a minion with 15/15 in 3 cards, including summoning the fucking minion, I mean how do you fucking fight that?].

---

I don't know...

You play League of Legends, and you encounter ELO Hell whereby the system puts you with idiot allies who can't possibly fight your opposition. You score 10-15/0-5/whatever assists every match outside ranked, but go into ranked and you lose because of your allies feeding the enemy and dragging you down.

So despite your skill and knowledge of that game, you leave because it's rigged and biased so you lose and can't possibly reach the higher ranked leagues. You could if the game, most sensibly, took YOUR own performance into account when ranking, so regardless of your allies you yourself would still be marked on your own ability, but it doesn't.

I mean, imagine taking an exam where the nearest four people to you in the hall's marks were added to yours and you were given the average of that. You know the material and they don't, so you end up in the 'special' class and can't leave because you're surrounded by idiots. That's how I feel playing League of Legends.

So you go to play Hearthstone on the basis that it's single player so there's only your own ability taken into consideration in ranked. But here you encounter a randomized system with a edge of power-for-pounds, the UK version [the two P's make for eloquent pronunciation] of 'spend cash to be more powerful than other equally or greater skilled enemies'.

Personally I'm of the point of view that both games are rigged, only Hearthstone is a tad more obvious about it's biased game maniacs as if you spend money you can afford more powerful cards.

---

Consider this:

Both LoL and Hearthstone are free-to-play computer games. This means that they don't ask players to spend money to gain access to the gameplay. Instead they give you access to the game's content, for free, but you have the option to pay for customization or unlock devices which expand the content gained by playing the game itself.

In LoL's case customization comes in the form of champion skins so you can make your favorite champions your own. Unlock is then provided in the form of Riot Points which allows access to other champions not on the free roster [the free set consists of two handfuls of weekly rotating champions, and then you can pay either money or RP to unlock new ones quickly or slowly respectively]

And in Hearthstone additional cards can be acquired at a faster rate than what you can gain by playing the game itself and earning gold to buy packs if you spend money. This is indicative of power-for-pounds because those who spend money have a stronger deck than those who don't.

Now, you own the studios behind these games and you want people to pay money for the game and you can achieve this in two ways.

The first and public way is 'Optionally'. This is where you tell people the precise mechanics of the system. Play the game to unlock content. You can unlock content faster and customize your version of the game by spending money. People play the game, become invested, and then spend money of their own free will.

The second and secret way is 'ELO Hell' or 'Rank Bias Failure'. This is where the unranked modes are fare and set up so people of equal skill fight on even footing. However, the ranked modes are designed so that anyone who has not spent money on the game is allied with noobs so despite their own ability, they cannot win matches.

But surely your playerbase would notice this? You'd have a lot of players who play the game for the game for ages and don't care about customization or quick unlocks, or can't afford them, who find that no matter what they score outside of ranked, they can't rank up because their allies all feed 0/10 in minuets and drag them down.

Well this is precisely what Riot Game's have. A large quantity of their playerbase complaining about ELO Hell.

So what do you do about this so the facts of the matter don't make your company seem like a right bunch of assholes?

Well two things:

Firstly, you swear blind, black and blue that ELO Hell is a physiological perception issue, negativity bias, that the players only think it's their allies and is in fact they themselves who are not as good at the game as they believe themselves to be.

And secondly, and concurrently, you play on the fact that this is a partial truth. There are plenty of players who, because of their own personality flaws, will either confirm Riot's statement on the matter [surely it's other people's ineptitude because Riot Game's is the god-king of the universe and other people are garbage] or will play badly and then blame others for their own personal failure [because if there's one thing the average human hates, it's taking responsibility for failure, it's a survival reflex].

Personally, as usual, I discount anything anyone says and just test to see what happens.

I can't be asked right now to go rummaging through my image folders, though I will post this in 'On Games...' at some point, but I've played matches in non-ranked and then played ranked, and found that whilst non-ranked is with fairly good allies, ranked is almost terminally with abject noobs.

Additionally there's this:

On LoLKing they have access to feeds from player accounts which show ranked histories, what champions you were playing, your current rune pages, etc.

And what I noticed there was that when I first started playing the ranked mode of LoL, having a really good go to get to Challenger mode, I discovered that my progression through ranked went diagonally up. OK, I lost a few matches, no one's perfect, but on the whole I was rising steadily. Then my score dropped like a stone as ELO Hell took effect and booted me down two or three divisions.

This happened a couple more times before I gave up.

---

In my own mind I know ELO Hell exists. It might be speculative to suggest that it's tied to how much money you've dropped on the game, but there's a definite biased to ensure that certain highly skilled players are not placed with equally skilled allies and against equally skilled enemies.

Riot Game's denies it, the majority of their playerbase is with them, and no one gives a flying fuck to anything about it. Developers still takes home profits, players still enjoy the game, and who cares if a minority are ignored and treated unfairly. It doesn't concern those who rigged the game in the first place.

---

Hearthstone may have sometime similar in it's design, although it's easier, as I've said, to spot. There's no way you can break out of the lowest ranked division [lv20-21] without dropping some serious cash on higher tier cards. The Dragon/Boss cards are just way too powerful [and can't realistically be earned by playing], and the lower level higher utility cards [which I admit you can gain fairly easily by simply playing and earning gold to pay for packs] in abundance can smash any lower tier deck.

---

In my professional opinion, both games are at least definitely 'Probably' rigged so those who spend money on them are 'Permitted' to rank up.

These games might be free-to-play, but skill is no where near enough to be crowned monarch of the playerbase. As with most things in this world, quality of character isn't enough to jack unless society has decided to give you great riches to go with it.

---

Alright, I've not had breakfast or anything to eat since yesterday afternoon and it's not gone 3pm so shower...Lunner [Lunch/Dinner, lol], and then college work until snooze.

---

Got two and a half days to get through one and half weeks because I need to switch to exam revision on Monday - Thursday for an exam Saturday [got my Day 2 interview on teh Friday at the police recruitment center so].

That's not as impossible as it sounds, doing a weeks worth of work in a day or two.

Each college 'Week' takes place every two weeks in an eight hour session with eight hours of homework, and is easily doable in a day or two.

Although really what my tutor does, because he's a bloody pillock, in 'Class' is simply repeat what the homework states in text. I don't know why I go to them to be honest. Spending eight hours reading and answering online quizzes would be a better use of my time.

When I mentioned this to him he said that 'you wouldn't be able to have the homework set in a proper context'...I have an IQ of a couple of hundred points, more or less, I probably understand and could document this content in greater context than you have you fucking asshat, was my mental reply.

I think the guy has the intellectual capacity of a turnip, and got his rank based on rigid observation of protocol. He sure as hell didn't get there by intellectually adaptive, imaginative and naturally curious like me.

I have this thing with people, like a mental perception memory link where I link people with animals. It's one of the issues, if it is an issue, with being a genius who makes connections between packets of data whether or not they want to.

Sometimes I think of someone and instead of their face I get another image, like you look up someone in a computer database and you get the name and information but you get this picture as their avatar and it's an animal or object instead of them. They are in there, but so is this 'Thing' as well. I mean, I know the thing isn't them, it's just related to them in some way, shape or form.

This one guy from YouTube strikes me as bear like for example. It's like metaphor only it's my perceptions doing it automatically.

And my course tutor for my policing certification course, he's a pig. It's not an insult, it's not a descriptive phrase, it's just my brain looks at him and a couple of neurons are saying 'this chap, in another life, could've been a pig with a curly tail and trotters, and he's the mental image to go with it'.

My personal universe is a very strange place, or would be if I had any other to compare it with, but I hardly think that's bloody normally, anyway...

Can't skip the college class sessions though because otherwise I'd miss the written exams, in themselves a load of fucking nonsense as the 'Exams' consist of a test of half a dozen questions, which you're given access to from Week 1. Essentially all you need do is formulate your answer before hand from your notes, online handouts and text book, memorize it, and then write it down during the one hour 'Exam'.

Dam silly nonsense, the lot of it.

---

Anyway, I's need's food's. :O <---

Bai.