Blog posts

My own meanderings and thoughts, usually based around gaming and suchlike.

I promise a minimum of inane bullcrap!

The necessity of aggression in League of Legends

Posted by Sam Eskenazi on June 30, 2013
Posted in: Blog posts, League of Legends. Tagged: , , . 2 Comments

Watching the CLG v Cloud 9 match last night, a big thing talked about was the significance of Cloud 9’s aggression.

They were pushing turrets incredibly quickly, taking a turret by 3 minutes, 20 seconds. Although losing First Blood, their early aggression earned them a lot of praise. You see, CLG have become somewhat known for their late-game strategy; picking champions that scale well into the late game (like Nasus and Vayne in this game) and just attempting to protect their turrets and farm as hard as possible, so as to win mid-late game fights.

Something interesting happened at a certain point in the game; around 12 minutes or so: Cloud 9’s aggression just… stopped. Two champions (Ryze and Ezreal) had just purchased Tear of the Goddess, an item that increases mana based on spellcasts. This meant that the champions they were opposed against in lane had an incredible damage potential over them. This meant that their incredibly aggression early game gave them a lot of early gold to survive this period of weakness wherein they were forced to play somewhat passively.

This perfectly highlights the importance and significance of early-game pressure. That huge push at the start of the game gave them not just a gold advantage, but a morale superiority; they were ahead, the crowd is cheering for their play-making, and CLG are very aware that they’re behind. Although obviously CLG somewhat pulled it back (not going to spoil the ending) – these guys are pros after all – but the lesson is an incredible one in solo queue.

As my friends say, go HAM (hard as a motherfucker). In solo queue, instead take it as knowing when to apply pressure in your lane and then roam, so as to exert pressure elsewhere. In 5v5s, try to emulate Cloud 9 in their effective pushing and pressure strategy.

Obviously, please don’t try  it when you have terrible early game potential – I have seen many a Nautilus trying to make plays at the enemy’s Inner Turret without having even levelled his Dredge Line… but if you can practise it, do it! The pressure certainly demoralizes your enemies at the very least.

Just something I’m going to endeavour to emulate in future games as well.

Crusader Kings 2: Stupid friends won’t play, learn from their mistake. Please?

Posted by Sam Eskenazi on June 12, 2013
Posted in: Blog posts, Crusader Kings 2. Tagged: , , , , , . 17 Comments

A little while ago I advertised the sale of Crusader Kings 2 at 75% off.

The reason I did that is not just because of my love for the company; don’t get me wrong, I do support Paradox and all their endeavours – I buy pretty much every damn DLC they release because I always know it’s going to be good. I had a more selfish reason to display it though. I want my friend to buy it.

This game is… Good. It is so good. And yet, somehow, it is so damn niche that a lot of people either haven’t heard of it or just simply don’t care! Why?!

Whilst at work the other day – menial phone surveys; hey, a guy’s gotta eat – I was perusing the CK2 forums as I usually do. A member of the cleaning staff put his face next to mine, paused for a moment and then said “Another CK2 fan, eh? Finally!” Thus began a rather long discussion about the game, it’s inherent merits and its general awesomeness. Nice guy. Obviously I was terrified to begin with; I assumed this person was about to the murder me and eat my face. Maybe he still will? Perhaps the game attracts homicidal people? Can’t tell. What I can tell is that the game is so fantastic and yet so damn unknown, that people who do enjoy it are so desperately hoping to lure other people into playing just so they can have someone to damn talk to about it.

I’ve been somewhat successful so far in luring at least one of my friends to the game. I’ve been selling it as a truly glorious medieval dynasty simulator wherein one could accomplish whatever goals you set for yourself in a truly epic history of your own. Instead, I should have just mentioned it has a critically acclaimed and wholesomely accurate ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’  conversion mod. Next time it’s on sale, he’s going to buy it; thank christ, someone to talk to about the damn game…

Of course, he playing Heart of Iron before, so he’s somewhat used to Paradox Interactive games. That’s the main problem however; people who aren’t used to it just have no idea what to expect or how to go about learning it.

I started on the original Crusader Kings, and a little bit of Heart of Iron. It was… so hard. I don’t even remember who I played – what countries, what families… It was all a blur of inheritance laws, rebels, embarking mechanics and other confusions. I don’t know how I eventually got good at it, but I did. So, when CK2 was released, I bought it Day 1 and then of course spend the next few weeks horribly confused all over again.

And I loved it.

And so will you. I’m not paid by Paradox or anything like that (unless you really want me to, PI… Call me) but I simply just want more people to talk to about the game! It’s so moddable, so fun, so re-playable that I always have questions: How can I make it so I can play as the founder of the de Normandie dynasty? Is there events? How do I get an invasion army for free at the beginning of the game so I can go raiding? These are things that I’ve had to deduce on my own (well… with the help of the fantastic modding community that exists on the PI forums hint-hint) but which I would love to discuss with friends. At least my girlfriend is picking it up, and dammit I hope she likes it. We could totally play multiplayer together. That’d be awesome.

I just want other people to buy the damn game so I can play it with them!

Or… Maybe I just want to see them lose everything due to accidentally marrying their heir matrilineally. Yeah… that too.

Addendum: I might actually be doing an AAR (After Action Report, kinda like a Let’s Play with more roleplaying) on the CK forums soon, so stay tuned for that!

Crusader Kings 2 now 75% off at gamersgate. Also, new DLC “The Old Gods” is now available for pre-order!

Posted by Sam Eskenazi on May 24, 2013
Posted in: Blog posts, News. Leave a comment

Any fans of Paradox Interactive must know about Crusader Kings 2.

This game is… Let’s face it, it’s like crack. I go through periods of binging on this game that last a week or two; this typically occurs every few months.

I want to be a stand-up member of society. I want to encourage you all to not buy this game, so that you don’t suddenly discover that massive stretches of time have disappeared. I don’t want you guys to become addicted, I mean it. It’s horrible… The enjoyment, the satsifaction… Oh god, the sense of accomplishment in this game! It ruins you.

I want to be a good man. But I can’t. I’m weak. So, you’re going to go take a look at Gamersgate and you’re going to go any buy Crusader Kings 2 and all the relevent DLC, and then you’re going to thank me. At first.

Then, you’ll curse me. You’ll loathe me. But in the long run, it’ll be worth it, just trust me on that.

The new DLC “The Old Gods is also available for pre-order here. I am so damn excited for it. Might be good to give you guys a list of the Developer Diaries, the episodic teasers by Paradox about the DLC:

Enjoy!

 

My progress so far in the League of Draven

Posted by Sam Eskenazi on March 12, 2013
Posted in: Blog posts, League of Legends. 7 Comments

Been playing games, writing essays and working a whole lot.

League of Legends is bad for me. I play it a lot… I’ve been stuck in Bronze 2 for a while now (the tier system of calculating your rating in comparison to other players) and it got me kinda down how most games someone was essentially either feeding or just truly trolling and trying to intentionally loss the game for the fun of it.

So, my friend made a deal with me; I’d get him a skin for his favourite support champion if he duo’ed with me and got me out of Silver together. He now has said skin.

Oddly enough, my best games are usually when I don’t truly think we’re going to win. Me and my friend usually won two games, then lost one, and repeat. This meant I ever so slowly got to my divisional games – wherein you need to win 3/5 to progress into silver) – although I lost my first divisional matches, my next chance at them proved much better.

In playing the first two, me and my friend actually lost both of them. I assumed I would lose the third, so I simply took a break for a day or two. Then, my girlfriend wanted me to play ranked with her; I was… sceptical at best to play with Bronze V people but it went surprisingly well. I won all three subsequent games, thus putting me in Silver 5! My friends – who decided to spectate my games without me knowing –  told me that they could see how much I wanted to win, and how I was always pushing for the win.

That was nice.

I’m going to keep playing League, as I simply love the damn game. Too much money spent, and far, far too much time but damn I love it.

If there’s one thing to take from this post besides my incessant ramblings about my minor accomplishment in a video game, it’s that the importance of keeping your cool is paramount. Games where I raged, where I yelled or told off my teammates? They were the worst. My friend has been thankfully telling me off whenever I’m clearly getting ragey in chat (going so far as to ban me from chat in certain games) and it has calmed me down somewhat. Hopefully I’ll continue to stop all the BM (Bad Manners) and just enjoy myself in games. After all, it’s meant to be fun, right?

Also working towards something that I’ll be doing soon. Going to take a bunch of work and effort on my part, but hell why not; it’s going to be fun. More info later.

Why Baba Yetu should be humankind’s anthem.

Posted by Sam Eskenazi on January 29, 2013
Posted in: Blog posts. 6 Comments

If you haven’t heard Baba Yetu it means you haven’t played Civilization 4. This means your gaming experience is faulty. You should remedy that. Go to Steam, go buy it, thank me later.

You back? Played it for over 400 hours, lost your family and your job? Good stuff, now you understand, right? Great game, I’m sure you’ll agree. But the song is what’s important here.

The song Baba Yetu, the intro song for Civ 4, is quite simply amazing. As is known, it’s the Lord’s Prayer in Swahili.

It’s a fantastic piece that manages to take the words of a religious anthem, put it into a language that a great number of people speak but most people haven’t heard – outside of the names of the characters in the Lion King – and performed by a choir that manages to make a prayer uplifting.

What’s so incredible about the song isn’t just it’s inherent awesomeness as a musical piece, but it’s message about humanity. It’s religion, joy, and multiculturalism all in one. By having it sung in Swahili, the piece ceases to actually about God or religion or any of that, and instead becomes a kind of anthem about mankind.

This is the song we should be sending out on the Voyager Golden Disc! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record for reference). This is the music that should be representing all of mankind’s achievements and cultural accomplishments in a beautiful 3 minutes and 55 seconds.

Love it or hate it, religion is a part of our history that can’t be avoided; we are all shaped by the religions created by our majestic species – through repression or advancement – and this song brings that historical significance, but at the same time removes the inherent… religiousness of it? I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s like… Listening to all of mankind, in one beautiful chorus, celebrating our achievements and creativity whilst not neglecting the importance that religion played in our development.

So. I propose this: it should be our species’ anthem. When we eventually make alien contact with some form of sentient other many years from now, this should be the song that accompanies the dignitaries we send to them their laser-ray dooms. But seriously, let’s do it! Let’s make it our Earthly Song!

My feelings about Guild Wars 2, and a few MMOs in general.

Posted by Sam Eskenazi on October 19, 2012
Posted in: Blog posts. Leave a comment

MMOs and me have a long and sordid past. I am one of those many thousands who lost an entire summer (or more) to WoW, and I openly claim defeat at the hands of Runescape ruining my SATs in year 9…

I’ve played Runescape, WoW, LotRO, Guild Wars, and even the small yet very interesting Pirates of the Burning Sea. I loved them all, and yet… They never really fulfilled me. There were always problems with them, there were always issues that made it unfun. In WoW, I didn’t like the changes through the expansion (and, truthfully, I didn’t like the amount of time it was stealing from me), in Runescape, it stopped simply being fun and transitioned into a meticulous grind that was mind-numbing. LotRO and PotBS suffered the same fate of being too underpopulated and not having quite enough stuff to do for me, PotBS even more so as it was wholly reliant on have large groups of people clambering for a place in a port battle and participation in the World PvP. Shame really… PotBS had some really novel concepts. Guild Wars suffered simply because of the time I decided to pick it up, and apparently my teenage stupidity. I was unable to get past a certain section, wherein the main force of the human survivors are moving through the northern parts of Kryta; I simply couldn’t do this plot-centric mission about killing a bunch of dwarves. They just murdered me, again and again. Had enough, quit the game for a year, came back with a new character, and there wasn’t anyone to play or group with!

Considering all my past history with MMOs being rather unfulfilling, it’d be understandable that I wouldn’t necessarily wish to pick up a new one.

I was not going to get Guild Wars 2. It was on my radar, I just didn’t pay too much attention to it. However, a friend pestered me, again and again, to get it and play with him. Maybe I was still high on the Steam sales a little bit prior (as said friend encouraged my purchases to match games he was buying)  but I listened to him.

I got two copies, one for me and one for my girlfriend.

I played on release, and it was amazing. Everything was beautiful, it was all confusing and new, and the awesome world boss encounters? Don’t even get me started. I was on Teamspeak with my friend whilst he was showing me the fight and doing it with me, and I was non-stop talking about how amazing  it was, how I’d never experienced anything like it, how I never would experience anything like it.

And yet, here I am playing League of Legends. I’m still level 31 in GW2, and I haven’t been on it in a good few weeks.

I wish I could say why that is… I so much enjoyed the game, and thought it was fascinating. I know my friends will be pushing me to play it again soon at some point, and I did promise another friend that I would play through the original Guild Wars with him once we get the chance. Maybe it was the irritating urge I had to complete every single area I went into? Everyone I knew was doing that, and I desperately wanted the crappy rewards at the end of the map clear, as well as that bright and shiny “100% map completion” tag every time I went there. I guess it got boring? Maybe I have a terrible attention span? Probably that one…

I really want to like GW2. It does a lot of things differently, but at the same time it’s kind of all the same. That fantastic “random” quest system, where you get “heart quests” if you’re near; it’s not really random, is it? It’s the same predetermined questing system that WoW and Runescape and every other MMO has, but instead of asking some dude what’s wrong, you simply automatically know what’s the matter, and start killing things.

The heart giver speech text implies that you spoke to him first about what to do, then you went and did it, even if that’s certainly not the case. It can make some odd conversations, wherein I murder 20 things, go to the dude who needed them murdered, and he’s thanking me and praising me for coming and helping them out of the goodness of my own heart etc. But what if that’s not the case? What if I’m a gorram mass-murderer?! I know that the story for GW2 is that you’re a local hero, but that doesn’t change the fact that I just walked in, murdered everything with a red name and then asked for my letter of thanks and monetary compensation. Maybe the heart givers have some secret communication system, wherein they convey my location at all times? What about the peons? The people who witness it? The little rat-like guys (not kobolds at all…) who live in their great city, who see me killing their grubs. How do they know that the leader suddenly needs this? To them, I’m just some horrible murderer, surely? I’ve just destroyed their entire heard (flock? Murder? What do you call a group of grubs?) of delicious, meaty grubs at the behest of the leader, but the farmers just see someone of a different race killing their food!

Anyway; I want to like the game, I did like the game until it got boring, and I might get back into the game at a later stage.

However, the eternal question remains; I could play GWs… Or I could play Mass Effect 3 and experience a fulfilling story, or even play League of Legends with my friends and have a great time (or a ragey time, it all depends; I’ll make a post about LoL shortly). GW2 needs that special something that makes me want to play it – and not out of a sense of completion-ism either!

Poor GW2… Looks like it’s becoming just like the original GW!