Games I play

Started to play some Heroes of the Storm again since I have an online friend group that plays it too. Also started playing it solo some and it’s pretty fun and feels good to be playing a MOBA where I don’t have to worry about last hits or items (although I instinctively keep pressing Y at the start of the game to open up the shop lol. League of Legends habits as I’m still playing that game too)

Been playing mostly Nazeebo since he gets really strong at level 20 if he has killed enough minions throughout the game (about 175 of them, which is possible to consistently hit as long as you don’t die too much and focus on stacking most of the time). His spider build is quite strong right now whereas in the past his frog build has been the primary one: I definitely prefer the gameplay of the spider build.

I initially thought HotS was dying or dead, but it turns out that may not be the case. Queue times are very short. People wrote some about that in this thread from 6 months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/heroesofthestorm/comments/lnvpt6/how_dead_is_hots/

The eSports scene is apparently seeing a resurgence from the community. It sucks that Blizzard abandoned eSports support for the game but at least they are supporting it with updates (although they seem late on the latest hero release compared to the most recent two releases). Overall I’m not too sad if the eSports scene is not thriving since the game is still fun to play and I’m basically a casual player.

If anyone wants to try playing HotS, let me know and we’ll get some games in! DM me if you want to add me on Battle.net. It’s a very beginner friendly MOBA out there and a great entry into the genre for anyone who’s interested in MOBAs. I also think the fact that it has a lot of early fights and the map objective mechanic makes it good for people to learn how to use their abilities in fights and focus targets while keeping themselves positioned well to survive for a long time. The fact that there are many different maps can make it difficult to new players though and this is one area HotS is more complex/diverse than most other MOBAs.

I don’t like how much of HotS (and many other games, including other mobas and team shooters like overwatch) is trying to coordinate with other players who do the wrong things. Or getting a consistent full team to play, of people you like, who all want to play a similar amount and have compatible schedules, is a huge barrier to entry.

You end up doing a lot of lowest common denominator strategies and having to follow the meta instead of thinking for yourself.

New World open beta is available now until Midnight PST on Sunday - Sign up through their Steam page here: Pre-purchase New World on Steam

I don’t like how much of HotS (and many other games, including other mobas and team shooters like overwatch) is trying to coordinate with other players who do the wrong things. Or getting a consistent full team to play, of people you like, who all want to play a similar amount and have compatible schedules, is a huge barrier to entry.

You end up doing a lot of lowest common denominator strategies and having to follow the meta instead of thinking for yourself.

I mostly agree with this. I’ve been playing HotS quick matches recently with 4 randoms and I’m not taking it too seriously, but there’s still a lot of pressure from people to conform and follow their plan rather than experiment or try to get ahead in alternative ways e.g. split pushing.

With League of Legends I take it more seriously and have been looking for a team to practice with for the last year or so, and have gone through 15+ teams without really finding one that’s serious about regular practice and improvement yet. There it’s not too hard to find people to play with but not a lot of people want to improve if it means doing things like replay analysis or discussing strategy vs. just playing a lot of games.

I’m currently playing tkok (Warcraft 3 map I helped with) and controlling 3 heroes myself. http://tkokrpg.com/ has some info though I’m currently still playing the last version I worked on without reforged.

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Elliot shared this YouTube video https://youtu.be/SbF1bRwxIWY

Interestingly enough, a lot of these tips apply 1:1 to learning MOBAs too (Like DotA 2 or League of Legends), and why people don’t improve at them.

  1. They don’t think about their opponent’s resources, options, and goals. So they make a mistake and their opponent punishes them, but they don’t learn from that and continue to make similar mistakes in the future.
  2. Playing crazy just to win while playing crazily. This is big in MOBAs where people will play extremely aggressively and try to “style on their opponents” rather than playing patiently and smartly to win or gain incremental advantages safely over time. I interviewed students about this and many openly admitted that they had more fun playing this way and basically prioritized it over learning/improving at the game, although they didn’t explicitly realize that until I asked them about it directly.
  3. He quoted another chess guy, Lawrence Trent, “When you’re under 2200, don’t you just need to do tactical puzzles until you get to 2200?” Ben Finegold says that’s not right, but there’s a point there. In MOBAs too there are fundamentals that can get you to a pretty high rank just by practicing them e.g. Last Hitting or Laning Skills. But most players avoid drilling those fundamentals instead just spamming lots of games, watching interesting videos on high level strategies and trying to apply them etc. Basically focusing on all the minor stuff first rather than the major stuff, because the major stuff is boring or they think they’ve already understood it, while the minor stuff is exciting because they see pros doing it.
  4. Making lots of mistakes and not correcting them over time. You only win when other people blunder more than you. You could improve your upper potential of plays, but if you continue to make tons of mistakes while making some better plays over time, the mistakes will overshadow the good plays and still lose you lots of games against players who make less mistakes (even if they also make less good plays as well). Minimizing mistakes is more important than maximizing good plays. Same thing in MOBAs where a lot of winning is about building small advantages and then keeping them, which means not throwing them away by getting overconfident and trying to bite off more than you can chew. Most players make so many fundamental mistakes that they don’t even see that learning new, better plays doesn’t help them improve until they fix those mistakes first. “The only way to stop blundering is to blunder, and then look at it and see why you blundered and what you didn’t understand, and understand it and don’t do it anymore.” So many MOBAs now have fully fledged replay systems where you can watch any game back and even see info you like the opponent’s cooldowns, gold etc. but a minority of players ever take advantage of that feature to identify and learn from their mistakes.
  5. Excuses and selective memory: Players who get better focus on trial and error, analysis, improvement, and get peer or professional feedback. Players who don’t better blame luck, being tired, forgetting to bring something they needed to bring etc. The selective memory part is focusing on the moments where you got unlucky and using that as an excuse not to analyze the moments where you weren’t unlucky but just made poor decisions. Weak players get fixated on one thing and define their entire experience by that one moment, trashing all the learning potential from every other decision made in that game/tournament.

New World Open Beta is pretty fun so far. I’ve pre-ordered the game even though I’m aware there may be some p2w issues. I stopped playing the Open Beta since all progress will be wiped and it does seem grindy even though it’s fun. Will grind when it comes out for real and progress is permanent.

Tried out the Icarus Open Beta too this weekend and it’s pretty fun so far. Interesting take on the survival genre, standard in many ways. I played the alpha a while ago and it was a very different experience, like a looter shooter where you find guns in houses, whereas this time I didn’t even get access to a gun. Wondering if I played a different game’s alpha and confused it with this one…

Only got to play it solo and it seems like it will be much more fun co-op with other people. Also fairly grindy as a game in terms of the skill tree and I couldn’t find online whether progress carries over to the final release. Both New World and Icarus come out around end of September.

Edit: Correction, Icarus comes out November 20, 2021.

Oh, it was Scavengers I played before. Scavengers on Steam

I confused the two because of the similar capsule art on Steam.

A remake is being made of one of my favorite games (for the story/characters - the gameplay is pretty easy)

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Heh Justin, came across this meme on Reddit and thought it relevant:

Wouldn’t have known what KOTOR meant if not for your post here.

i hope they come out with it for other platforms like PC

I finally finished Zelda: BotW (was being kinda completionist for a while but lately I’d been trailing off in amount of playing so I just decided to wrap it up and beat Ganon already even though I hadn’t done all the things yet). Fun game. Found last boss sequence pretty easy though I was pretty geared up. I bought it like a year ago though I didn’t start playing it much for quite a while.

Trying out Amazon’s New World.

I’m on the server Rarohenga (US West) if anyone wants to try it out/join me. Queue times are massive on most worlds right now, so I picked this server because it was low server population and it’s for Spanish and English speaking people, which is maybe why this one had 0 players in queue when I joined.

Due to the large queue load, Amazon announced recently that they will allow people to transfer characters between servers for free in the first two weeks (dunno if this meant one transfer or infinite transfers in two weeks, I’m assuming one transfer)

So I’m levelling up a character here and plan to transfer it to the Heliopolis server on US East to join up with the Upper Echelon guild/company that’s starting up there (more details on that in the UE discord server here: Discord

I found out about that from UE’s youtube text community post stating:

Have you heard of the upcoming “New World MMO”? … Amazons new game?

It comes out the 28th (as many of you reading this probably know) and Upper Echelon is building a company for it.

If you want to join a skilled group and own territory with us… please use the discord link down below to join the server.

There is a complete set of voice and chat rooms for the game, and I will stream it on launch for (maybe) a 12 - 24 hour broadcast.

If you have any interest at all in joining… again… please use the discord link down below and then look for pinned comments in the “New World” channels.

We have a great group already set to go… and would love to welcome anyone else interested on board.

(don’t know how to link to this post specifically but can link to UE’s Youtube community page and it is the most recent post now, but won’t stay that way in e.g. a week or a month)

Queue times are super long to join the server they are on directly, so I will likely transfer my character in or just make a new character on their server to join their company, if queues are significantly lower tonight.

Companies can have a max of 100 players each , and their first company is already almost full, so they will be making overflow companies. They plan to control a central territory in the map called Everfall, but it requires 100k to buy your first territory, so they needed every joining company member to contribute as much of their gold as possible (initially gained from killing and looting mobs or selling resources to NPC shops)

I think they just hit 100k gold an hour or so ago, last time I checked the discord, so it took them about 6 hours from release to get enough gold to buy that territory before some other company bought (idk if they were able to buy it or if they had to settle for buying a less desirable territory)

I think queues for their server are around 3500-4000, as I was 3550 when I joined and then I cancelled queue to make a character on a different server.

It takes about 1 to 1.5 hours to progress your character through the initial tutorial and quest line to join a faction, at which point you can be invited to a company. Their faction line is Marauders so I plan to join the Marauders too, so I can join their company even if I transfer my character, and I think they mentioned green Marauders specifically although idk what that means or how that sub-classification works.

In terms of what New World is, it seems very different from the game I played last year since it was redesigned since then. I think it may still be a heavily PvP oriented territory control type MMO, with some challenging PvE content.

I’m usually more of a PvE player and I like cooperative survival games, and in MMOs I prefer cooperative PvE content and doing stuff like gathering and crafting. PvP is OK, especially if I can get good at it (since e.g. I enjoy MOBAs like League of Legends), but in MMOs it seems harder to have good matchups since I could basically face the best players in the game or really bad ones in the open world. In MOBAs or some structured PvP environments in MMOs, a matchmaking rating reduces that variance, whereas in the open world idk how they’d handle that problem from a design perspective. How well you grind for and craft gear (or what your company makes for you) likely also affects PvP strength a lot more in MMOs than it usually does in MOBAs, so maybe that’s why I tend to prefer PvE in MMOs. If I commit to New World enough and it’s fun, I will likely get into the PvP more over time.

Trying out Diablo 2 as well and it’s interesting just how much the characters from Heroes of the storm show up in the Diablo 2 initial cutscenes, like Tyrael. Edit: Despite not much exposure to Diablo lore directly, Heroes of the Storm gives me an idea of the classes, and what gameplay is like for them, e.g Li-Ming’s arcane spells as one of the paths for sorceresses potentially, or Rehgar being a shapeshifting druid.