The 3.15 Lol Patch- On Taric, and Champions we accept to be broken

3.15 Will be a patch that goes down in history as one of the rare moments where Riot noticeably and substantially drops the ball on something. With Riot turning down the pace of new patches and new champions in particular, but releasing a series of limited times and attempting to expand game modes (with the All for One and 1v1, 2v2 and so on types) the expectation for the quality of the patches has risen drastically.

Especially noticeable after the 3.14 Patch, which for a patch that reworked half a dozen champions, more items and introduced several entirely new gameplay mechanics and remade the jungle, was surprisingly well balanced and bug free. Since the PBE in particular, the chances for brokenly powerful combinations (either champions or items) or bugs has fallen sharply.

So the 3.15 Patch is an interesting exception to this trend. with Riot having nearly two months to work out the 3.15 Patch on the PBE, and with the exception of Yasuo, most of the changes being fairly small balance changes, it should have been something that went off without a hitch. Instead, Riot Accidentally deployed another patch that wasn’t even on the PBE yet, including the Skarner rework. How this happened, or the technical complexities involved are beyond the scope of my own limited knowledge, but I think we can all agree that Riot dropped the ball on this one.

This had several knock on effects, including the incredibly unpopular decision to postpone the deployment of 3.15 until the 18th of december in the Oceanic region, until they can deploy it and all the hotfixes at the same time. As someone who had been preparing for Yasuo for three weeks, getting blue balled like that wasn’t exactly fun.

But that aside, let’s move on to the actual content of the patch.

For the most part, the nerfs and buffs are comparatively minor, and or long overdue. Hardly any of them are unique to the preason. The nerf of fiddle’s fear is consistant with the gradual lowering of hard CC numbers across the board, and had been a long time coming. Sivir had been crying out for a nerf since her remake some time back, and all of this predates the 3.14 patch.On the whole everything was comparatively minor, with one notable exception.

Gems hold their edge. Except when they don’t.

Taric.

Now do I think that Taric was overly strong in 3.14? Yes. However, the important facet behind this strength is that it wasn’t in his traditional role. The 3.14 patch hadn’t made Taric a godlike support, it had made him an Overpowered top lane or jungle. A taric with an Iceborn Gauntlet, Spirit Visage and a collection of other tank items could frequently 1v1 any member of their team.

Following a Spirit of the Elder Golem>Ninja tabi>Iceborn Gauntlet>Spirit Visage>Omen>Banshees/Thornmail build, 95% of the champions in the league plain lose. The combination of maximum CDR, 460 armour, shatter armour reduction, damage and rapid heals made him virtually invincible in protracted fights.

Case in Point. 20 Minute Surrender

However, part of his strength was the psychology aspect. 3.14 Taric was a beast that had rarely been seen in recent league times. It was a character that relied on grinding down the opposition through long protracted duels in order to cycle as many Qs as possible. It was a champin that in a game where for the past season assasins have been dominant and champins expend rather than gain relative strength as the fight progresses was fundamentally different in play style and mentality. And a lot of this rested on the fact that ingrained in every league player’s mind was that Taric was a person safe to ignroe in a team fight. Much of taric’s percieved OPness comes from the fact that due to the fact that within a team fight, people instinctively ignore him, which allowed Taric to play to his strengths. If Taric had the same reputation as Jax or Olaf, that wouldn’t be the case. His strength came partially because people didn’t know how he worked or how to deal with him.

It was the potency of Taric top and Jungle, rather than Taric support which forced riot’s hand on this matter. However, in comparison to several extremely minor nerfs to long standing OP champions, the nerfs to Taric were brutal.Unnecessarily so, in my opinion.

Taric

Summary: The armor scaling of Gemcraft has been reduced and Shatter had several changes made to it. Shatter’s aura now increases allied champion armor by the correct amount and the armor damage scaling has been reduced. The shred of Shatter has also had its base value and armor scaling reduced.

“We’re happy with Taric’s kit in the preseason, but his burst damage was just too fabulous, especially when he picks up additional armor items to scale off of. Like other supports, we’ll be keeping an eye on Taric as the preseason progresses.”

Passive – Gemcraft

• Armor scaling reduced to 20% (from 30%)

W – Shatter

• Aura amount bug fixed, will now give correct amount of 12% (from roughly 15%)
• Armor damage scaling reduced to 20% (from 30%)
• Shred base values lowered to 5/10/15/20/25 (from 10/15/20/25/30)
• Shred armor scaling lowered to 5% (from 10%)

The numbers are deceptive. taric’s passive was reduced in effectiveness by a third, and shatter went through four different kinds of pain. Scaling was reduced by a third, shred base values reduced,  aura effectively reduced, and shred armor scaling halved. A champion hasn’t been hit this hard by nerfs in recent memory (well some might argue that the changes to Zed’s ult is of a similar scale, but besides from that).

In effect, the Nerfs take away the one thing that made 3.14 taric so terrifying- his ability to pose a damage threat to carries.

This isn’t exactly a new trend either. taric is one of the most fiddled around champions in the league. This is his third major rework to date, and he’s always had an air of a champion that while listed as “support” always seemed on the edge of becoming something else. Back when Riot last remade Taric when they made his Q CD reduce on every attack way back when, metagolem AS jungle taric briefly became a thing, before Riot did exactly the same thing to that as they did now.

And this all beggars itself to the question. Are there some champs that we just accept are better than others? Not that their unabalcned, but that rather that this champion should always be more effective than this champion, and riot shouldn’t interfer with the status quo as it stands?

It’s true that Taric mechancis aren’t hard to master. With no skillshots of any kind, what seperates a good taric from a bad one is mostly correctly staggering abilities to make the most out of his passive and iceborn, along with correct positioning in fights. Compared to a champion like Lee Sin, or Zed, or Riven, that’s a low mechanical skill cap.

However, this game is getting older, and people are investing the time to reach the skill caps on characters. Lee Sin is currently a strong pick from Bronze to Challanger, and is one of the most popular picks in Silver, precisely because his skill ceiling is so high. Compared to older champions with noticeably less dynamic skill sets, Lee sin is not only stronger, but is designed and stated to be stronger.

And that’s all well and good, up to a point. But if there are 30 odds champions that can only be played in now Low ELO because of Riot intentionally makes them weaker than higher skill cap champions because they are lower skill cap, then we have a problem. Namely that a high skill cap champion, say a riven, vs a low skill cap champion, say Malphite (This is not a lane match up, but rahter a comparison of how much of an impact the two can make on a game) between players of even skill favours the Riven, not because the player is better, but because Riven allows the player to make more plays by virtue of her design. The same can be said of Lee Sin, Zed, and potentially Yasuo.

Mobility creep is one of the greatest threats to the game, but skill cap creep is of equal importance. Hell Yasuo is a champion that has practically no CDs, is an AD caster and has an ult that only works if certain conditions are met Ideally, every champion should be a viable pick at every League and level of the game- that is true balance.

Supports are in my opinion the most maligned group of this phonema. Not the position itself, but the character class. With a few noticeable exceptions (particularly thresh and Zyra) the majority of supports are one trick ponies who exist to perform one particular combo (Sona Ult, Alistair Headbutt-Pulv Combo, Nami ult and Stun, Blitz Pull) and, eh not much else.

Riot might say that it’s attempting to make supports stronger, but there seems to be a tacit acceptance that Supports will never be able to have as much an impact on the game as any other character class. It has gottent ot the point where Supports are being supplanted in their original role by other champions. Fiddles and Annie come to mind immediately, but Lee Sin support has been a thing for a long time now- not because his kit is  complimentary to the position, but because he’s lee sin.

Taric was notable not for the strength of his jungle (it’s slow, but safe, and his ganks are mid range if nothing else) or the power of his late game (Despite being a monster tank with sustained DPS, there are stronger late game champions by miles if very few tankier champions) but because he is listed under support and achieved a status of pre-eminence outside the support role. That hasn’t happened since AP alistair was a thing.

So how is Taric in 3.15? Well, his jungle is still viable, his top is still viable, but it’s no longer has the potential to solo carry. It’s no longer strong. Could a solo top lane taric compete with a reneketon or Riven in lane? Perhaps. Would it be able to beat them soundly, or exploit upon his lead to create openings for his team like Riven or Reneketon can? No. And with his damage effectively slashed in by 25% to a third all things considered, Taric is regulated once again to the stun/heal/aura bot he was pre 3.14. His ability to make plays, or dictate the direction of the game is limited.

The problem with 3.15 Taric is not that its weak. It’s just that there are multiple markedly better picks in every one of his positions. And if there are markedly better picks, then the character won’t be played. This is a champion that created a different play style, one of patience and perseverance rather than the fury of glass cannon fights- And I’m sad to see him go.

Star Citizen is not EVE Online.

The Source of the Trouble- The Bengal Carrier

Star Citizen is not EVE online. And neither should It be.

Star Citizen for those of you who don’t know, is the upcoming space simulator game from Chris Roberts and his new company, Cloud Imperium Games. I say Space Simulator, because that’s what it is. It takes the world of the universe which it creates, and simulates it as closely as possible. Physics, economics, combat, immersion, the works.

So far the came has gained fame for being the most successful crowd funded games of all time, just crossing the 25 million mark today. It’s expanding at an incredibly rapid pace, and already has a large (280,000+), dedicated and extremely enthusiastic community biding their time on the forums for the release of the first major instalment of the alpha, the “dogfighting module” which is meant to arrive sometime in late december.

And it’s revealed something interesting.

While Star Citizen has people from all manner of backgrounds (the game looks to be absolutely fantastic, and my hat off to CIG for making this truly spectacular game) already two distinct groups have emerged. In one corner we have the veterans of the original Wing Commander and Freelancer games, the people who signed on with Star Citizen because they had heard he was back in the business, and were keen on seeing a game like Freelancer and Wing Commander given modern technology.

The Second group are immigrants from the current ruler of the “deep” science fiction MMORPG territory, EVE online. Which in turn is unsurprising. While EVE may only have a few hundred thousand subscribers relatively few given it’s age and influence, many times that number have at one point at least tried EVE online. Needless to say, EVE is somewhat of a niche game. EVE is infamous for it’s appalling beginner retention, ridiculous learning curve, hardcore economics, intricate metagame, massive capital fleet battles, and a collection of player groups which for their ruthlessness, size, cohesion, dedication, organisation, and “pragmatic” (read, employ any means necessary) approach to the game have often been likened to intelligence agencies (google “Goonswarm is literally the CIA”- okay it was a gaffe by american conspiracy theorists, but the phrase gained credence in the community for a reason).

This Group is playing Star Citizen because they are keen on seeing a game, that is like EVE.

But this raises a question? If you’re playing EVE, why would you jump ship to Star Citizen? Although Star Citizen looks fantastic and is exactly the kind of game that would appeal to anyone that is a big fan of science fiction games, the jump equal lies due to well, not exactly flaws within EVE, but more like a Intrinsic part of it’s nature.

To explain it simply, I’ve played EVE with about 10 friends in the past. Nearly all of them have said that if there was a new EVE server, where everyone was starting from square one again, then they’d play for certain. As it is, in EVE at the moment where the game is dominated by players that have been in there for up to 10 years, and possess a wealth of SP, ISK and most importantly experience and standing within the existing nullsec alliances and coalitions.

There’s a perception in EVE, which unfortunately only increases with time, that newer players almost by definition can never catch up with older ones. While not entirely true, it certainly appears to be the driving factor behind the large EVE presence within Star Citizen.

And their influence is already being felt, even at this early stage. The now definitive trailer of the game that showed off the Bengal class Carrier and it’s fighter jets had two different reactions. From the Freelancer crowd, the prospect of living on the Bengal, basing out of it like you might a station was attractive, but they really more interested in flying the small craft (Particularly the Hornet) that featured extensively throughout the trailer.

Badass comes in many sizes.

The EVE players looked at the Bengal and said “I wanna fly that”.  Tellingly, what were originally intended to be comparatively minor features in the finished game (or at least areas for future development), like larger ships, station management, economics, were included in the stretch goals, in fact they make up the majority of the aims.

I’m a EVE player myself, on and off, so I suppose you could peg me to that group, and I can’t deny that the prospect of capital ship warfare is a strong point for me. I can’t see myself fighting battles in the cockpit of a fighter if there’s a Cruiser or Carrier bridge to sit upon.

But, please, please don’t cheapen the experience. What I am saying? At the moment the constellation takes at least three, possibly four people to properly crew (One pilot, Two turret gunners, Attatched snub fighter pilot). And that’s one of the things I like best about the constellation, It’s a ship that requires a team in order to work. Many EVE players are already grumbling about the relative scarcity of Capital ships as they currently are, and the price of what they consider fairly small ships, as Frigate is the smallest combat ship class in EVE, and every self respecting player has flown at least a Battleship, and most veterans have the skills and funds for a carrier.

However, Star Citizen is not EVE. The Scale is fundamentally different, and the game play dynamics are built from a much smaller level.

A Capital Ship is not piloted by a single individual, but by a team.

The Idris Corvette, and the various larger ships planned should capitalise on this facet of the game. In my opinion, a Ship like the Bengal should require at least 30 crew members in order to run effectively, non fighter craft inclusive. We’re talking about a Captain, a Helmsmen, A XO, a Shield operator, a Engine man, Radar and Sensor Officers, Fighter Craft Co-ordinators, a at least a dozen turret gunners, and a ton of marines for boarding/counter boarding actions and battle repair.

I want to be involved in Larger ships, as do many people. I would cringe if these ships were prohibitatively expensive, but also if they were easy to attain. In my mind, the solution isn’t necessarily to increase capital ship proliferation, but rather to increase the manpower required to make those ships functional, making the primary “price” of a bengal not “Do I have X money” but rather “Do I have a crew for it?”. That way the balance of power between capital ships and smaller craft would be preserved, because while a capital ship might be vastly more powerful than one hornet, the number of people required to run it in itself would be the balancing factor.

Basically, if the question comes for a military problem “We can field or Bengal, or we can field it’s crew in Single-seater Craft”, the answer shouldn’t always be the Bengal.

However, this approach does leave RSI with an interesting challenge. What kind of gameplay mechanics could members of the crew of a capital ship do? beside from the Strategic command view of the Command and Control Centres added in the 13 million Stretch goal, the Gunner positions and the helmsman, what else can be done? The 26 million dollar stretch goal gives us some indication-

Enhanced Capital Ship Systems – In addition to the command and control systems we’ve already outlined, we’re going to expand capital ship functions! Lead a damage control team to fight fires and repair key systems during battle, control internal bulkheads to slow boarders and man a number of consoles, like navigation and engineering, that will make commanding a capital ship feel even more immersive.

Suggesting that Capital Ship combat will turn each capitalship into large FPS battle fields in their own right. Which is quite frankly, an excellent thing, given the fact that Capital Ships are big, big beasties with lots of gorgeous spaces inside, and it would really take a long drawn out boarding action to appreciate that properly, now wouldn’t it.

However, the role of the other functions might be interesting as well. Shield operators for example could be responsible for redistributing “shield energy” among the various sections of the ship’s shields, reinforcing sections under heavy fire while stripping away energy from sections that aren’t.

Which, when you think about it would be pretty awesome. This would give formation and flanking real meaning in capital ship combat, as Flanking would force the defending ship to split it’s shield power between two approaches, while through canny formations, a ship’s side and flank could be covered. It would also present a real danger to capital ships from smaller craft that managed to successfully surprise them, for example a stealth ship sticking a pair of torpedoes in it’s engines at minimal shields.

But I digress.

Star Citizen is not EVE, players shouldn’t expect to be able to fly battlecruisers solo, and RSI should be careful not to make it so. Star Citizen and CIG has the beginning of something amazing with the current teamwork based nature of larger ships, and it should be careful not to dilute this nature to appease players with the mind to make turn this new game into a reiteration of a old one.

LOL- Oceania in Season 4.

With the Worlds now well and truly concluded and the end of Season 3 now in sight, (And with tens of thousands of high silver and unranked players beginning their spring for gold,) The question must now be asked.

What will Season 4 hold? How will riot shake up the game this time around? What will those weeks after the Snowdown Showdown have in store for all the summoners across the world. Well, other people are asking those questions, and they’re substantially better informed than I am, So i’m going to ask a question i’m reasonably sure that most other people haven’t yet bothered to ask, or at least haven’t given much thought.

What will Season 4 hold for the competitive scenes in the emerging servers?

Riot’s solution this year was clutch, to say the least. Within weeks of Oceania going live, the opening rounds of the Oceania regional championships began, the birthing pains of the new server. Riot didn’t handle the regionals directly, instead passing the baton to the Australian Cyber League, an organisation that I am proud to say had no idea that it existed before Pax Melbourne back in July. ACL seems to have made the championships open for any team to register and enter, and so a great deal of new, amateur teams filled in the slack.

A few things need to be noted here. First of all these are the teams that emerged from the several rounds of online, sudden death random elimination that ACL ran before the tournament in order to weed the men from the boys. That said because the pro scene before this tournament was virtually non-existant no one knew exactly who the men were. It’s highly possible that several good teams got eliminated just because they had the misfortune to draw Team Immunity or HSD.

In fact, you’ll note that Team Immunity went 8-1 throughout this tournament. They lost their only game in the first round.

The Second thing that needs to be noted here is he sheer size of this bloody tournament. More teams were involved in the regional championship for OCE than any of the major region, including Worlds itself. This is especially poignant because while 6 NA teams were competing for 3 positions to get through to Worlds, 16 teams plus were competing to get a ticket to Turkey where they would have the privilege of attempting to win the International Wild Card tournament.

The acceptable margin of error in this kind of situation is tiny.

Thirdly, is only Five out of the sixteen teams were even Semi-pro, Team Immunity, the two Team Exile5 teams, Eclipse and Lunar, and the two Avant-Garde teams, Fear and Redemption. Two of the semi-finalists, and the eventual runner up, FIGJAM and HSD were both casual amateur teams.

Now this year, Riot was able to chuck all the newer servers into the “International Wildcard Tournament” whose virtues I have covered in previous posts.

And this year, they were perfectly justified in doing so. Both the Oceanic Championship and the International Wild Card tournament demonstrated that the vast majority of teams lacked the co-ordination, teamwork and tight gameplay required to perform on an international level, and that within teams, skill levels could be dramatically different.

Team Immunity and HSD are both prime examples, with HSD’s easy star player being I Will Decimate (His Blue Ezrael Hypercarry is something to watch), and Team Immunity’s Bot lane of Raydere and Rosey (Who won nearly lane in the IWCT, regardless of match up) providing an insight to the problem.

The Team that won the IWCT was the one that showed the best discipline, early game gold leads and co-ordination, qualities that pratically define Korean teams in comparison to NA and European ones. And that was Gaming Gear.

The fact that Gaming Gear got royally stomped in the actual world’s isn’t the point. Putting it into perspective, It would have been remarkable if the brand new Lithuanian team would have been able to beat the veteran teams from NA and EU who have been competing for years together and actually pursue this game as their occupation (many of GG’s members are still in highschool).

And well as for the Korean and Chinese teams… they’re Korean and Chinese. Nuff said.

If GG would have beaten Team Mineski remains a mystery, because for some strange reason they were never matched against each other (that owuld have been an interesting game). All that aside, they still beat TSM. Granted, they were kinda of trolling in terms of positions and picks, but TSM was certainly still trying.

Even with Regi Teemo.

The Crowning moment of funny for the worlds.

Riot won’t be able to simply throw an increasing number of regions, that now equipped with their own servers will show a pro-scene that will steadily mature as it gains a higher profile. Even if Raydere and Rosey are on par with a lot of the bot lane pairs at the highest level, finding a team that matches them and making it work will take time.

If SEA has not one, but two tickets to the Worlds, including one precious Seed position, then it’s hard justifying why Australia, Brazil, South America, Turkey, Russia and Eastern Europe should have one between all of them, especially when SEA failed to secure a single game win between them (Although to be fair, the Gamania Bears went up against SKT in the Finals straight up, and that’s never a pleasant position to be in).

This leaves Riot with two real options. Firstly it can simply increase the number of Worlds Tickets offered to the winners of the IWCT. This solves the problems offered by relatively small servers such as Turkey.

The other would be to give virtually all of these minor regions a single ticket to the worlds, which would probably result in an increase of the number of teams in the worlds by 50%. Now on one hand, this made the Worlds a tad more descriptive, you really would have the best of each region represented.

But then again, you’d have the likes of the Aussie pro scene going up against the best of Korea and China. The IWCT acts as a kind of quality control, and without it  things change. It would create a larger tournament, and one where there would really be two or even three classes of teams competing, but for Riot that tries to keep the Worlds relatively compact and the fans that would be insulted by having to watch more games which are more dramatically one sided.

But even so Riot needs to formalise something and take charge of their own servers rather than delegating it out to the local tournament scene of ACL. Oceania has a Challenger Tier, and I presume the other new regions do as well. If Riot wants that to mean anything, then it needs to make them mean something.

Season 4 looks like it’s going to be an interesting Season for Oceania.

 

 

LOL- True Entertainment.

After watching some very mechanical, extremely tight and co-ordinated Korean play gradually grind their opponents into submission via superior CS and constant pressure in the worlds, I had a desire to observe some more… Eccentric play.

And by Hera’s Golden Girdle did I find it.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, I present to you the unsung heroes of the Worlds, the true source of entertainment for decades to come….

The International Wild Card Tournament.

It came about as I was wondering what had happened to the winners of the Oceania Regionals at Pax back when they launched the Server in June. That had been some entertaining watching, with only a handful of actual “Professional teams”, but with several dozen teams all up. While It had seen some really strong demonstrations of Skill- Hotsoggydecimate, the runners up in particular had stand out performances from Iwilldecimate and Elvte, the teamwork was frequently lacking.

So Team Immunity, took out the Oceania Championship.

And then I briefly wondered where they went. It had put them in the running for the worlds hadn’t it? if so, where were they. And then I found them.

It doesn’t get that much better than this. Brazilians, Turks, Lithuanians and Australians, in a brutal fight to the death to earn that one wildcard slot in the world tournament. All of them are winners of their own local regional tournaments. In a Worlds where play was dominated by extremely tight play, the International Wildcard was a tad more… innovative.

For example, there’s this match between Team Immunity and the eventual winners, Gamer Gear EU in the semi-finals.

Which features… an AD Lulu Mid, and a Tryn top. I am not kidding. Immunity was facing elimination, and this was what they decided to draw out of the bag.

I have to admit this is one of the best matches I’ve seen in a while. Sadly, the might aussie team fell to GG, but from what looked like a complete wipeout at 15 minutes, Immunity fought it out, out farmed but not outplayed to more than 50 minutes. Which seems to Be immunity’s forte.

I’m watching some of the other games now. Do you want to see Tryn, Quinn, and Lissandra played in an International tournament? If so, strap yourself up, the International Wildcard awaits.

BZRK Review

Just for a change of pace, I’ve decided to do a Book review. If you were coming to this blog for the usual dosage of EVE, computer games, or something related to the future of space or technology, then I’m sorry to disappoint you. But here it is.

BZRK:

Pros: As with most Grant Books, the central premise of the book is awesome and engaging, and it gets no small amount of attention in the book. Supporting cast is both engaging and interesting, and the technology is if not entirely sound, respectable.

Cons: The shortness of the novel leads to a pace that is simply too fast for the kind of story Grant is attempting to tell. Characters and plot suffer as a result.

So this is the latest offering from Michael Grant, Author of Gone and Animorphs fame. Did I find his work from Gone Perfect? No, but I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy them either. Grant is one of the modern masters of the Young Adult Genre, and ones that focus on the romance and personal above other considerations (A trend that began with Twilight and has now permeated the genre) and while his offerings in these fields are never weak, Grant works best when world building and working with a large, diverse cast.

This is what made Gone the hit that it was. None of the individual characters in all the books were standouts for me, but the collective whole which they made, and the intensely engaging study of sociology (Lord of the Flies-esque) and cool superpowers in a carefully crafted world is what made the series.

BZRK is not a bad book. But it noticeably fails to utilise Grant’s strengths to a level that would make it a standout.

The central premise of BZRK- a war between two organisations using organic and mechanical nanobots inside peoples heads and all the coolness that entails is certainly the centre piece of the book. And that might just be BZRK’s problem, between the characters, hell even the story, it’s clear that the idea of tiny nanobots duking it out on people’s eyeballs and optic nerves came first.

That’s not a bad thing, but that’s where the story is headed. If you don’t want detailed descriptions of what a Dust mite or a flea looks real close up, this is not the book for you. If you’re looking for a protagonist that has a dark and troubled past, a dead family, and then the reveal at the end that he/she was in fact a deep sleeper agent and another two levels of subversion, then you’re going to dissapointed. If you’re looking for a romance that transcends time and space, then you’re going to be disappointed.

BRZK was a clear step up in pace from the Gone novels, and the combination of limited space, fast pace and a painfully obvious emphasis on the tech left us with a collection of rather undeveloped characters. It’s not that these characters by their natures are impossible to develop, but rather that Grant did not have the time to go into any real detail.

That said, the supporting cast are surprising detailed and engaging. And each of them have their own story to tell, and can do it with minimal effort (or words) on Grant’s part. The problem is that the level of character, personality and the general “feel” we have for someone is about the same for the two Protagonists as for relatively minor characters.

Noticeable exception of course, goes to the resident Big Bad, the Armstrong Twins. At the risk of falling into Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory territory, Grant may have been attempting a double subversion by using a Villain archtype that became cliche back in the 60s. Perhaps more importantly, this extends to the entire opposing side to the Protagonist’s organisation.

Once again, a corporation out to take over the world, driven by a deformed, slightly cracked boss that wants to make a Utopia out of the joint is nothing new, in fact in an age where fiction goes to great lengths to avoid such stereotypes, It was almost welcome.

Provided, of course that you could ignore the fact that the corporation that was aspiring to take over the world and by all accounts has a good chance of doing it is a corporation whose wealth stems from…

Gift Stores.

In airports. The Corporation is named Armstrong Fancy Gifts.

Yes that’s right ladies and gentlemen, you see that gift store in your local airport? the Kind that sells tacky and overpriced crap? It’s evil. Sorry to disappoint you all. This is both rendered hilarious and fantastic is that every character in the book on both sides takes it dead seriously. Including the assassination squads of Land’s End clad hitmen. All this is played entirely straight. Which brings us to my next point of concern.

The Plot is the second major problem of the book. Once again, it’s not that it is structurally unsound or even handled badly, but rather that it is straight and simplistic. I spent most of the second half the novel waiting for the twist, waiting for the moment where what is established goes horribly horribly wrong, or even when an unexpected third force moves onto the field and upsets the natural path of things. When the protagonist’s romance goes through a rough patch. Something.

This never materialised, leaving to a plot that while serviceable, is only that. Serviceable. Doesn’t really add much to the story.

All this struck me as rather strange. BZRK is clearly aimed at an older audience than either Gone or Animorphs, and it is both far Darker and Edgier in themes and harder and faster with both the sex and the violence. Rather than take the opportunity presented by a older, more mature and experienced audience though, BZRK’s own length and extremely high pace betrays it, and makes the story come out as one simpler and shallower than that of either of his previous works.

However, Grant is one of those rare breed of authors whose creations tend to increase in quality rather than decrease with each successive sequel, which should hardly be surprising from one of the authors of Animorphs and to a lesser extent, Gone. Unlike the previous two titles however, BZRK doesn’t quite seem to have the same potential for a long running series.

I don’t know. But by all accounts BZRK Reloaded, the sequel is a much better book.

I don’t know. I’ll have to see.

7/10.

The Real Cost of Space

This is a somewhat lengthy piece. It also tends to ramble. You have been warned. If the lack of pretty pictures disturbs you, can i remind you that this is not a picture book. 

Space, as a general rule has been unpopular in recent years, for a whole variety of reasons. If i had to nail it down to two, it’s that the Space Race is over, and suddenly various countries were no longer prepared to dedicate the quite substantial funds to it, but more importantly there’s been a massive shift from the 70s onward about how we view space, and space exploration in general.

It’s called the Deep Green movement. The rhetoric surrounding environmentalism on earth somehow managed to infect the space debate, and suddenly the entire concept of space travel, and perhaps more importantly, space colonisation got called into doubt.  Suddenly the question became not if we could go to moon, but rather if we should. If we should inflict the curse of humanity on the rest of the solar system. You began to get these weird extrapolations of Environmental rhetoric, like these guys (http://www.space4peace.org/) on a side note, sorry my link function broke again.

The fact that all the quite legitimate concerns which the environmental movement capitalised on in the 70s have little to no grounding beyond a few hundred kilometres up hasn’t stopped them. I won’t even detail the absurdity of attempting to ban nuclear power in an environment where you are slowly being roasted by a colossal nuclear fusion reaction, or the cause to preserve the “environment” of space.

The fact that the moon for example, is just a giant rock devoid of anything even remotely resembling life doesn’t seem to factor.

The entire idea of progress which was the spirit of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century basically got axed in the 70s, and its been in poor health ever since. But the rallying cry of all of space’s multiple and detractors is the expense card. 

So that’s what i’m going to talk about. Really, at the end of the day, how much money does it cost to get into space.

Well first of all we need to define exactly what money is.

Money is two different things, either standalone or a hybrid. It’s either a rarity value- that this is for example gold, and due to their being a limited supply but a rather larger demand. The rarity factor gives something value. Makes it worth money.

The other, and ultimately more important factor is that Money is also a representation of human effort. Why does a laptop cost more than it’s requisite materials? because of the amount of time and effort the people involved in digging up that material, refining it into something useable, shipping it to people that turn those materials into a product, shipping that product to you and then the effort of the guy who sells it.

That is what money is. People often say that time is money, and it literally is. Money means that rather than have to go out there are plant your own wheat crop, harvest it, grind it up into flour and then bake bread to eat, you can just go down to the local bakery and pay for it.

JFK famously said “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard” in his Rice Speech, and in this world, something being hard literally translates as something being expensive. The two ideas are fundamentally the same.

However, there’s this idea that money spent on anything by big governments- especially ones that don’t have an obvious turn around, like a war, like space exploration, are bottomless holes that have no benefit to the nation in question. First of all this is not true. This isn’t true because of the way which modern capitalist-democracies work.

Saying “all that money would be so much better spent getting homeless people off the streets” isn’t quite good enough. Because especially regarding space exploration, all that money goes straight back into the economy. During the sixties, NASA and it’s suppliers literally gave jobs for thousands for domestically developed space craft. That way, you clear up unemployment, and rather than paying people without a return, you pay them to produce.

Democracies need a national project. Something to focus their energies on. Briefly it was space exploration in the late fifties and early 60s. But for the majority of the time, it’s been warfare.

America is the best example. In the 20th century, America’s economic golden ages happened during the two biggest wars in history. Unemployment virtually vanished, the economy boomed. America thrived on the cold war, on the competition and the enormous markets offered by the US Armed Forces. America runs off war- it thrives off it. It’s a pivotal aspect of its economy, and has basically dictated it’s national policy for the past 70 years now.

The Cold war ended 23 years ago now. In those 23 years, America has been at war in major deployments overseas (Iraq (twice), Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, ect) for about 15 of them. And the American economy, for the first part at least loves it. You take millions of youths with relatively poor employment options and put them in uniform, you uphold millions of American households by providing a business for not only the massive defence companies like Northcorp Grumman and so on,  but also for the logistic companies that supply the millions of deployed troops overseas.

From a Corporate perspective, the massive costs of the war don’t make sense. From a military one, the way which America fights a war looks horribly inefficient. Just take a look at the amount of ordnance dropped on Vietnam- 7 million tons. But all this stems down to the fact that the US isn’t obliged to run a war in the most efficient manner, but rather in the way that provides the most amount of money for the national companies involved. Money spent on domestic companies stays in the system. Every bomb dropped is a another bomb that needs to be bought. It’s not exactly morally attractive, but it’s business.

War, like space is a driver of the economy. It is a mammoth task that occupies the time and effort of the nation in order to give the economy something to do. Another interesting example of this phenomena is Prisons in the US, which cost 32 billion dollars per annum or so. And of course, providing for the 2.6 mililion people in prison, by way of food, bedding and so on is a big business.

And of course as conspiracy theorists would say, making sure that there are people to populate those prisons is also part of that business.

America is nearly out of Afghanistan now. After this particularly long war, there might be a greater than normal cooling off period. But within another decade or so, America will find another target to get embroiled with, and the cycle will begin again.

That is, unless of course America decides to  focus it’s national efforts a tad more constructively.

Currently 0.47% of the National budget is spent on NASA, with an annual budget of about 18 billion dollars (standardised to 2007). Compared to what NASA gives to society, and the world as a whole, that’s tiny. Compared to the amount of money which the US spends on Veteran benefits and Prisons, it’s miniscule.

It’s ten percent of how much the US spent (in percentage of the budget) on NASA in the mid 60s. So let’s say you do. What could NASA do with a budget of 180 billion dollars per annum. This is still somewhere between a third and a quarter of the amount of money that goes into the military every year.

It’s hard to tell how much NASA would be able to do, because At no point in NASA (or any other space exploration agency’s) history has even a sixth of that sum of money been granted to a space agency (in real terms). But for comparison, The Mars One project to go to mars is estimated at costing about 6 billion dollars over at 10 year period, with potential cost blow out. At 180 billion dollars, NASA could fund that mission at a mere 1/300th of it’s annual budget. 0.3%.

But what could you. What is every space enthusiast’s wildest dream?

Well you would probably start by Setting up a city on the Moon. We might get hyped about Mars, but the simple fact is that when push comes to shove, the Moon is actually much more appropriate for near future human habitation than Mars. It’s closer, it doesn’t have a annoying gravity well to deal with, solar power is much more powerful due to closer proximity to the sun, infinite sun light (on the souther pole) and a lack of dust storms (like the ones that crippled the Opportunity and spirit rovers for months at a time), and it’s closer to earth.

A moon settlement’s role would be mostly agricultural and recreational. Because, provided that we don’t manage to find a way to recycle our own excrement into new food perfectly, we’re going to need a place where we can grow enough food. Growing crops in zero 0 is a tricky business, and lifestock even more so, but it’s possible on the moon, not easy mind. In order to sustain a population of any size, it would require constructing massive green house structures out of material mined on the moon itself, but with the proper production methods (read 3D printing) and robotics, it wouldn’t actually be the most challenging trick in the bag. Remember robots don’t need to get paid.

More importantly, during and from that point, you could send out dozens of robotic spacecraft to NEAs (Near Earth Asteriods) and knock them into Earth Orbit with a few well placed nukes. What would you do with a dozen or so multi megaton asteriods in orbit?

Well this brings me to a personal favourite of mine. This is actually something you’d probably want to do before rather than after any big trips to Mars and the Moon.

Orbital Elevators.

I’ve explained how they work in previous posts, (along with the applications of 3D printing in space) so you can look there. The point is, once you develop an efficient way to manufacture Nanotubes of sufficient length, fast (which we can’t currently do. They’re working on it) from the actual asteroids themselves, you can begin to role out Orbital elevators, just like the ones you see in Halo.

The upshot of all of this is that the first orbital elevators are estimated to cut the cost of getting into space by a factor of 100. And That’s just when you can only send a cable crawling car carrying a few hundred tons payload up the elevator at a time, whne it’s a four day round trip. Ideally, you would have multiple maglev trains running up each elevator simultaneously.

That itself opens up to the second phase of space exploration. Colonisation.

And since the annual population growth of the world was 78 million in 2011, in order to even make a dent in that number by colonising the solar system, let alone counteract that, we’d need to literally send hundreds of thousands of people up the elevators each day.

Which is difficult. It would require dozens of elevators, massive amounts of energy to power the trains necessitating massive He3 mining on the moon to power Fusion Reactors and expansive orbital solar arrays, huge orbital construction operations to create the stations and habitats in earth orbit to house them, even temporarily, and an even larger construction projects on the moon for more permeant construction. We’d need to break out literally thousands of interplanetary and inter-orbital ships that can bear thousands of ships between the planets, on shipyards in Earth Orbit and on the Moon.

It would require the construction of a huge amount of ancillary infrastructure to support this movement of people, both on the ground and in space. Space-born factories that produce everything from Laptops to personal spacecraft would need to be produced, to cater to the colonist’s wants and needs.

But what i’m describing here is a booming economy. Funny about that isn’t it. The question that we should be asking in this increasingly crowded world isn’t the cost of going to space, but rather the cost of staying on the earth.

It will be hard. As such it will be expensive. But at the end of the day we need to question, what do we really want to put our effort towards. What do we want to strive for? In 50 years time, what contribution to the history of man kind does western society want to leave behind- a collection of futile and pointless wars, or something more? JFK summed it up pretty well, 51 years ago this year.

“Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, “Because it is there.”

Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.

Thank you.” 

–JFK, 12th of September 1962. 

Observations- On AMVs and Christian Rock

I love the internet. If you know where to look you can find combinations, cultural leakage from one niche or cultural type into another that you would never, ever see outside it. In my Observations series i take a look at the ones i find the most interesting.

I have to admit, i’m prone to watching an AMV (Anime Music Video) every so often. Not necessarily because i love the style, although that may be a factor, but rather because of one of the unspoken rules in AMV creation. That is that none of the songs used in an AMV is one that you will probably hear on the radio. You will never hear Lady Gaga or Maroon Five on an AMV, or even ones like Ed Sheeran.

AMVs are one of the more beautiful products of the Internet in their own right. In a way they cross east-west line twice. They mostly cater to the western English (although spanish/Portuguese is becoming more common as anime opens up to south america) speaking Otaku community, but are also created mostly by them. One of the other unspoken rules of AMVs is that their songs are never in Japanese, but rather english. At which point the resultant AMVs are then watched by people in Japan. Cultural interplay

But moving on. Like i was saying, I watch AMVs to discover new and good music. Because if the like an view count is high, you can bet it’s something good. In addition, unlike most music on youtube, because AMVs are never named after the song (in fact sometimes finding the song involves dipping into the comments) you don’t get grouped into a certain style or artist in the recommendations on youtube. You can move from pop to ballads, to rock in the blink of an eye. And since most AMV editors are pretty pragmatic about where they get their music, you can really find anything in there.

This has lead to an interesting phenomena. AMVs starring Christian Rock songs.

Moonflower AMV (Due to various Reasons, Links aren’t working again Have this, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOrh5d309GU)

Featuring Featuring Barlowgirl, Never Alone (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8QubLxJI54)

Who I Really Am AMV(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZepdoH0Hl0) 

Thousand Foot Krutch, Be Somebody(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DprXHr1xAdE)

Both of these feature songs that we identify as Christian rock. Now while there will be exceptions (as there always are) to this rule, the Anime/Otaku internet culture, and fans of Christian Rock are pretty much mutually exclusive groups. AMVs aren’t exactly Gateways into the culture, while a few may focus on Gateway (Pokemon, Dragonball Z) and Primary (Bleach, Naruto, One Piece) Animes, the majority are on Secondary (Fate/Zero, Clannad, Mirai Nikki, Sword Art Online, ect) and Tertiary (Those obscure animes that lie at the end of the Otaku rabbit hole) Animes. 

American Christian Rock on the other hand is insular and mostly limited to the shores of the US, except amongst other christian rock communities around the world. They have their own charts and radio stations, and they don’t appear in mainstream media. They’re also the victim of the casual degradation to lesser or greater extents that comes with the rather unpopular label “Christian”.

If you’re unfamiliar with it and want to get a general picture of the common view, look up “South Park Christian Rock”. That’ll tell you something about the common perception.

Two seemingly mutually exclusive groups. Both are dominated by stereotypes and misinformation, as all insular cultures are. What’s  interesting is that neither have drawn the relationship these AMVs have been each other. In Views per day, Moonflower AMV now runs at about the same Daily views as the Official Barlow Girl music video- 255,000 over about 6 months= 1,416 views per day on average (BestAMVsofalltime does not make stats directly available) as opposed to the current daily view rate of BarlowGirl’s official video, (About 1,500).

Now first of all, Never Alone is a hit, by CR standards at least. According to almighty wikipedia, it was the longest running number 1 on the Christian Hit Radio and Christian Rock charts in 2004. Now while the difference in time (almost a decade now) is important, and it could be said that Christian rock fans might be less avid pliers of youtube than Anime fans, and various secondary videos and lyric videos aside, One third of people who are hearing Never Alone are hearing it through an AMV.

Without the Christian rock label, and the automatic assumption that most people make from every CR band that the song is about God goes out the window. The AMV director actually implies that the lyrics are about the Guardian/Bodyguard relationship between Arturia and Irisviel. Possible references to god are subjective to the listener, rather than explicitly stated.

Of those one third, in the comments section, exactly one has made the connection that the song that they are listening to was originally intended to be of a religious nature in the comment section. Three months ago. I needed to go back a similar amount of time on the official Music video of the song to find a mention of Moonflower AMV.The two videos, despite being of similar popularity, have almost no mention of each other at all.

Which is surprising, when you look at this graph here on the Barlow Girl Official Music Video for Never Alone.

Notice the Spike

Now, the Moonflower AMV was published on January the 22nd 2013. Or right about that spike by almost 400 views, and then a consistent crash beneath 2000 following it. While it would be a bit presumptuous to draw conclusions, the one that i do draw is that the initial spike was AMV regulars looking up the original song. 

I have no adequate response to the crash. I thought it might be people migrating over to moonflower to listen to the same song. Barlow Girl broke up late last year, so it might be that.

Be Somebody and “Who I really Am AMV” don’t have such an obvious link, in fact there is no mention of each other in either video as far as i can discern, even though, like with Barlow Girl, the AMV now accounts for at about a quarter (all things considered) of current views.

Be Somebody Graph (No official video, but this one had by far the highest views at 1.6 mil)

Who I really am AMV graph

Similar to Never Alone and Moonflower, no one even mentioned that the song might be religiously inspired, or even that the band identified itself as Christian Rock. Like with Moonflower, the Director had turned the song into a love son this time focusing on SAO (In the interests of preventing a flame war over THAT anime, i’d like to stress I am neither defending nor attacking the show. Thank you).

The Funny thing is that Christian Rock and Anime/Otaku Culture are just about as far as one can get in the realms of Internet groups. Once more, if you put members of each in the same (in a strictly metaphorical, internet sense), a flame war would probably quickly result as both begin to trumpet their misconceptions of the other.

What do both AMVs and the original vids have in common? They both love the songs. Most of the comments are either discussion on either anime or religion respectively, or if not, the great nature of the music. It’s what i love about the internet. In it we can strip away the labels that society attaches to us, and judge things purely by how good they are. Or in the case, how good they sound.

Next on Observations, Three words.

Clannad and Rap.

First Blood!

So recently i’ve been flying a bunch of Losec roams with my trusty stabber. My expedition to the EVE constellation and surrounds ended predictably, running into a grand total of one person in the entire constellation. Besides from a whole bunch of Cans in the New Eden System from tourists, there was nothing there. It was a bit like finding yourself at an archaelogical dig site.

Also CCP you should feel bad. The art and graphics for the New Eden system is 2003. Like seriously. It’s abysmal. The EVE Gate is a massive yellow star with bands around it. Whoop de do. That’s not up to the standard of 5 years ago, let alone today. Compare it to the modern and beautiful wormholes and its almost painful.

Moving back to highsec from there, i ran into a Prophecy and Exequror pair sitting on a gate who looked like they wanted to biff, but i declined their offer. New Proph is death on beaks to anything smaller than it these days, and i had no intention of fighting off a horde of drones while dealing with a T1 logi reinforced tank in my Stabber, gate guns or no.

Stabber Stabber. Stab stab.

So I did what my Nano-stabber does best- I lit my MWD and gave them a stelar view of my engine flumes. WIth DT fast approaching i decided to make a transit back to Mimmy space the fast way, through Amamake and that fun part of losec. It being very close to down time, no one was around.

So today, when I logged on from Rens, Ky and I decided to go and check out our old stomping grounds (see nooby ratting fields) in Ammatar losec. After fitting up his own Nanostabber, we set out. Not that many people live in that particular part of space, which is what we had counted on as ratters. Hopefully we could catch someone that had also followed our logic.

Like Genesis however, we quickly ran into problems- namely no one was around. We went up through Derelik into the Molden Heath and found… well just about nothing actually. We had a few dockers, a few POSers, but very few poeple in actual space. I had thought that perhaps in the years since we left the 60% upswing in subscriptions would see an increase in the population. This was not the case.

I get a little sad whenever i go through the Molden Heath.Why? I’ll post the Region text here

The common ground of the Heath, away from the bustling crowds of Heimatar and Metropolis, was in the days of the Elders committed as neutral ground between the Matari Tribes, to be claimed by none and developed by all.

Its scarcity of resources, proximity to the untamed reaches of Great Wildlands and the hated space of the turncoat Ammatar have all diminished its value in the eyes of modern Minmatar society. This coupled with barriers imposed by bordering singularities and voids has created a region with an unsettled history and an uncertain future.

Today, as legitimate claimant to the title of “center of the cluster”, and as the site of the Golgothan Fields, the region still evokes great national pride, but despite this remains mostly undeveloped. Indeed, in recent years the outcast Thukker Tribe have been making in-roads, which does little to enhance its already tarnished image.

This must have caught on with the Player community because dispite having the station infrastructure to make it a hub, the Molden Heath is a ghost town. Egbinger has 7 stations, and so does Heild. No one lives here. What was probably originally conceived to be a losec hub by CCP all those years ago lies silent and fallow.

Yes the FW boarder constellations may be held up as successes of Lowsec, and maybe they are. But CCP needs to fix all of losec, not just a few systems that are frequented by a few Pirates corps like the Tuskers.

It was therefore with some regret that we decided to make for home. And then we ran into this guy in a systme by himself. This wasn’t that unusual. We’d already hunted for three guys with no success.

But then we saw very clearly on the D-scan a ship called “Who1eva’s Thrasher.” And then we found rat wrecks in the belt. Game on.

Ky and i split up, aiming to work our way from the bottom and the top in order to find the guy as quickly as possible. Instead, we ended up both warping to the same belt at the bottom.

Which was fine, because that’s where the offending Thrasher was.

I quickly locked and pointed, setting to orbit and got my guns firing away. Or at least I tried to.

“Your Safety settings do not-”

What?

“Your Safety-”

Fuck fuck fuck. It was only then that I realised that the new safety feature, which i had assumed had been developed to prevent highsec carebears from accidentally locking and firing on their mates and getting Concordokened- apparently it worked in losec as well. So after 40 minutes of highly intensive D-scanning, back ground checks, map data analysis, and hours of ship preparation and travel we were very nearly undone by forgetting about what CCP might have changed in the past two years.

Remember Kiddies- When Pirating, Turn the button to Red to avoid lost kills.

Derp.

Fortunately however, the Thrasher appeared to be suffering from a malfunction with his warp drive probably a case of Pilot BSOD, so  I managed to get him pointed in time. After that, the thrasher decided to surrender to the inevitable and not even fire back. Unfortunately however we did not get his Pod.

First Losec roam, and we come back with blood on our knives. Not exactly professional, but its’ the result that matters right. First Blood to the Tax Dodgers, First Blood to the Stabber Roams. May there be many many more to come.

Let’s hope that we remember to turn our safeties off in the future.

LOL- The Most important factor in an ADC and a Tale of two Bot Lanes

This is a LOL post. For those of you interested only in EVE, move to the next one.

Although I was playing EVE first, i’ve played a lot of LOL over the past two years or so, so much that i’m coming up on the 1000 win mark. I was ranked 1450 ELO in S2, and with the release of the Oceanic (read australian) servers i’m just starting ranked in S3 so far it’s going well, 3-0. My name is Forrestal if you want to check any of that. 

I think the bot lane is one of the most consistently misunderstood sections in the game. I’ll cover the problem of the support in the next post, but right now i’m going to talk about what separates good ADC champs from bad ones. It’s not what you expect. First of all let’s define what an ADC’s role is-

An ADC is a platform to inflict as much sustained physical damage as possible, as safely as possible.

Notice that there are two parts of that definition. The First is damage. the second is doing it safely.

Now let’s clear up some misconceptions about damage. Damage is not ability centric on most ADC champs. Some get quite substantial steriods, like Vayne or Sivir, but unlike jungle or top champions (like say, Aatrox) but for the most part an ADC’s power comes directly from the items he or she has.

This is why ADCs get placed in bot lane, with a support. Because more than any other individual on the team, they need as much gold as possible.

But because it is Item rather than ability centric factor, this means that pretty much anyone can build ADC. The other factor- As safely as possible, however IS ability centric- because as an ADC you want to burn as few item slots as possible on staying alive and as many on dishing out damage. You can’t build much in the way of defensive stats. Therefore your entire surviability in team fights, ganks pretyt much every bad situation really is dependant on mobility.

Now here’s the thing about mobility. You can’t buy it- not really. There is no equivilant to the blink Dagger in LOL. you can carry with you in flash. But some champs will have jumps and dashes, and some won’t. And more than anything else, this is what seperates good ADC champs, from bad ones.

So, Let’s just roll off the current favourites in ADCs

• Ezrael
• Graves
• Vayne
• Corki (kinda)
• Caitlyn
• Tristana

Notice something? All these champions have hard disengages- dashes, blinks and jumps that can safely take them out of any hostile situation. the only non-blink champs that see a lot of success these days is Draven and MF, and Draven is getting kinda fixed in the next patch. Let’s take a look at the remaining ADCs, the ones that are NOT played that often.

• Ashe
• Twisted Fate
• Sivir
• Jayce
• Kog’Maw (although once again, it’s very player dependant)
• Quinn
• Varus (see kog)
• Twitch
• Urgot

These are not necessarily bad characters. Jayce top is still very effective. Twisted fate mid is a thing. What’s the seperater? None of these characters have hard disengages. none of them have blinks and jumps that are non target dependant. In short, when shit goes south, there’s no a whole lot they can do.

That’s not that much of a problem in mid lane, which is shorter, or top lane where people build tankier. But in a bot lane gank, you have three people aiming all their CC at you. You need all the disengage you can handle.

There are other factors too. in lane sustain is one, CC is another, and the ability to pull allies’s asses out of the fire is important. This is why the list of viable ADCs is actually a lot longer than Riot thinks it is. Because surprisingly the best characters at filling these roles above are ranged support.

Take for example Sona.

I had a 11-0 around too, but it left match history before this post

Sona Can do anything. Sona ADC isn’t just viable, it’s scarily effective. She matches or exceeds nearly every other champion for AD at equal gold due to Hymn of Valor. Her burst is scary with Her Power Cord Hymn of Valor combo. Her Ult is still as powerful as it ever was. Her support kit is still there and as viable as it ever was. An ADC that can heal- an ADC that can speed buff. And because damage is item centric, then she’s just a good an ADC as anyone. Other supports also make surprisingly viable ADCs. If anyone remembers the season 2 AD soraka, you’ll know what i’m talking about. and in more recent times, ADC thresh.  Riot has balanced this in interesting ways. A lot of the support’s auto attack animations are terrible. I’m looking at you Soraka, but overall, they still remain very viable. It’s only the long term bias against them due to their “support tag”.

One of the rules however of Riot Champion design is that champions intended Supports will never have an inbuilt flash, dash or jump of any kind. This is a problem. This is why support Sonas, sorakas, leonas and tarics get caught out and die in ganks while their ADC jumps or blinks to safety. This can be avoided, and it can be avoided very easily.

So I have two bot lanes- one of them is what i like to call the Jump Lane, the other the Wall Lane.

These lanes probably aren’t viable in ultra-high ELO and pro level play, but that’s not the point. Becausee 99.95% of people who play this game aren’t in that category. At ultra high ELO, there is literally not enough gold to go around to successfully run a fifth character- that is why conventional supports exist. Mistakes are rare, people farm perfectly, and the meta makes sense.

Same cannot be said for everyone else.

The Jump lane is quite simple. You take a conventional ADC- One with a hard disengage, like Ezrael, like Graves, Like Corki, and then because none of your conventional supports have a blink to keep up, you take an unconventional support that has one. Now the Jump lane functions just slightly different from the way we normally think about bot lane. First of all due to the nature of the secondary character actually doing large amounts of damage, kills won’t be solely the domain of the ranged ADC. And due to the supremely dunkly nature of the lane, the focus should be on dunking the opposition as often as possible, as much to deny the enemy CS and xp than anything else. The other important factor is that because he does damage, choosing who to focus becomes harder- ignoring the Lee Sin to kill the graves does not mean you will win the fight. far from it.

Now top of the list are the “tanky DPS” characters that older players will remember as Metagolems.

My personal favourites are

• Jarvan- Jarvan has massive amounts of CC, does large amounts of damage, is very tanky naturally, has a great ult, has a hard disengage and a nice aura from his standard. Combo him with someone like Graves or Ezrael for fun.
• Lee Sin- A well played Lee sin can be played anywhere, and support is no exception. Hard engage and a hard disengage as seperate abilities, ultimate is a nice way to separate the enemy lane, shield for both him and the ADC to avoid damage, an execution, A massive debuff, potent harass, he’s energy based and of course he has large amounts of damage. His kit and Corkis syngerygise very well together.
• Aatrox- Aatrox is on this list for four reasons. First of all, his Q is basically the Alistair Headbutt Pulverise combo all by itself in addition to being a hard disengage or engage. Second of all, his passive makes the Matyr plays that you see from supports a lot a lot less likely to result in death. Thirdly, his W means that he’s virtually impossible to harass out of lane- ever. Fourthly, his damage is insane, even with no items. Massacre+Bloodprice+full passive bar turns him into an ADC. Between that and the actual ADC, things melt. Put him and vayne together for tons of damage.

Aatrox is never harmless. No matter how few items he has.

The most important thing about playing a Jump Lane is the intimidation factor. If the enemy is running Soraka-Draven, then scare them so utterly shitless  that even the mere threat of your Aatrox in the brush is enough to zone them completely out of lane. Reinforce this message with an early kill or two in order to cemment both the psychological, gold and XP advantage over the enemy. If the enemy is farming at parity with you, something as gone wrong. If the enemy feels confident enough to actually Harrass you guys, then something has gone worse. This lane is not so bothered with wards becuase they do not need them so much. Ezrael-Lee sin lane for example just does not care for most junglers, They Arcane Shift-Safeguard out.

And then there’s the Wall Lane.

The Wall lane does not have a hard disengage- instead they have everything else. Because conventional supports do this quite well and conventional ADCs do this terribly on the whole, this lane usually runs with a conventional melee support and an unconventional ranged ADC. The key aspect of a wall lane is that rather than being able to run from a hostile situation, they must have either the CC or durability to walk out of it. Supports have this in spades. The important factor of a Wall lane is that both the ADC and the Support contribute to this durability and CC. So just for ADCs

• Sona
• Karma
• Thresh (although it’s highly dependant on the support. his AA range is a bit too short)
• Janna
• Kayle
• Nidalee

All these champs substantially help the lane survive dunking and ganks, while being able to deal out large amounts of damage. Because damage, as i said before, is primarily itemised.

Damage is just applied gold in this situation. Have more gold, have more damage.

Now for the tanky partner. These should all be close combat tanky people. A wall lane does not work with two ranged squishies without a hard disengage between them.

• Taric (although he got nerfed)
• Leona
• Thresh
• Nunu
• Cho Gath
• Maokai
• Volibear
• Blitzcrank
• Diana (to a certain extent)
• Shen (In fact Shen works in both lane types)

Although this is a wall lane, it is more a wall when taking harass and weathering ganks. A Sona Taric lane for example, simply has too much heals to deal with from a harass point of view. On the offence it is more the bulldozer. CC should be flying everywhere. Imagine a Leona ult into a Thresh hook and box. Unlike with Jump lanes, you can afford to be patient. Some Wall lanes will have a counter jump so hard that many jump lanes will be at serious risk when jumping (For example, Kayle and Cho Gath). Mistakes can be ruthlessly explioted, sometimes jungle ganks can be turned right around into kills if you are winning hard enough.

Jump Lanes and Wall Lanes. Go try them out.

Skill Training Completed- Blog Graphics, and The question of the EVE constellation

So yes, DPR has a new look. Thanks to Gabriel-BS from Deviant art for the really awesome art.

In related news i may be undertaking a little pilgrimage of my own to the EVE gate and the associated systems in that particularly deserted section of Genesis. It’ll be a pvp roam looking to catching unwary ratters inthat otherwise deserted section of losec.

I have to admit, that particular dead end section of losec interests me. Not just from a Fluff and back story perspective, but there’s certainly that. What’s remarkable about the EVE constellation is that it has to be one of the least active regions of K-space in the known EVE universe.

It’s also arguably the most worthless.

Not a single station is to be found anywhere in the EVE constellation. The New Eden system noticeably has no asteroid belts, moons and a single planet. There is some potential here- Gateway has 27 asteroid belts, and Promised land has 81 moons. But overall?

The place blows. Blows hard.

Let’s say that a fairly large highsec corp decided to carve out this section of losec space for itself. Which all things considered probably wouldn’t be very hard, since they’d really be no one to stop them. they’d even have a substantial advantage once established within the constellation, because of no NPC stations to dock at.

The problem? there is literally no reason for them to go there. None at all. It’s more dangerous, less profitable and more isolated than wormholing, and to add insult to injury, you need to pay the glorious Amarrian POS tax. You would make more money in highsec. You would be safer in highsec. You’d make more money in sov nullsec. You’d be safer there. And of course, same goes for Wormholing.

The only potential reason to take the EVE and Monalaz constellations of Genesis and set up your own little fiefdom is the ability to mine and refine losec minerals with NPC station refinery rates. And that’s a terrible way to go about it.

Otherwise- the only thing owning that section of space is the bragging rights owning that section of space imparts. Which in the case of the constellations of EVE  and Monalaz, is infinitesimal.

CCP I know you’re got Something planned for Losec up your sleeve. You must have. We’re been yelling at you about it for years and years now. Regions of losec like the EVE constellation show exactly how out of date the entire thing is.