Absentia wrote:Overwatch - Did all my "placement matches", and I would love to know what the hell criteria they use to decide on your rating because I won more than I lost, got a ton of gold medals, and they gave me 1100 so I'm stuck playing with people so bad it isn't even fun.
Controversially, a lot of the starting rating this season comes from whatever your rating was at the end of the last season. They also tried to spread out the bell curve, so that there are actually bronze and silver players this season. This generally led to better/closer placements, but less of a chance to move up or down based on good placements. I went 6/3/1, and my rating at the end of last season was ~2700, but I went down about 250 points.
Long story short, it has a lot to do with previous seasons. If you didn't rank before, it may be artificially low. Also:
Weekend of December 3rd Overwatch: Lost several matches, but they were all really close so yay? I didn't feel like I or my team was playing badly, but we got unluckily outmatched for about 3 games in a row. Sad!
Batman: A Telltale Series: I'd put this off for a while, but I spent about 3 hours catching up with the last two episodes. I love that this series doesn't tie itself super closely to more popular mythologies (Oswalt Cobblepot and Bruce were childhood friends, Harvey Dent is mayor and is good friends with Bruce, the Joker is barely visible and hasn't met Batman, etc.) so the plot is actually unpredictable. Fun!
Dungeons and Dragons: (not technically a video game, but my whole gaming Saturday) We've passed the one year mark for this campaign, and it's still going strong! Obviously, the players did something totally different than what I had planned for. I adjusted quickly and had them confront an aboleth in the dungeon they went to and it was really smooth and actually fit the narrative. Tremendous!
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"Prepare to be emancipated, from your own inferior genes!" -Abradolf Lincler
Dishonored 2: Halfway through the Royal Conservatory. Bethesda has improved their AI dramatically with this game in general, but I still ran across a moment where I tapped a wall to lure a guard through a blocked door, only for him to run over and hurl a grenade against the door, blowing it and himself to pieces while the other guards failed to show the slightest reaction until I picked up one of his legs.
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"Your mind is software. Program it. Your body is a shell. Change it. Death is a disease. Cure it." - Eclipse Phase
Irishjava wrote:Controversially, a lot of the starting rating this season comes from whatever your rating was at the end of the last season. They also tried to spread out the bell curve, so that there are actually bronze and silver players this season. This generally led to better/closer placements, but less of a chance to move up or down based on good placements. I went 6/3/1, and my rating at the end of last season was ~2700, but I went down about 250 points.
Long story short, it has a lot to do with previous seasons. If you didn't rank before, it may be artificially low.
If they're going to base it on last season's rankings why even bother to have placement matches? For that matter, why even bother to start a new season? They don't start a new baseball season and say "Okay, the Phillies stank last year so they start with 20 losses". Sometimes I think Blizzard goes out of their way to troll their customers (don't even get me started on Hearthstone).
In other news...
95% Cutscenes, 5% Pokemon Battles - Beat the Pokemon League, nabbed Tapu Koko (didn't realize it sucked so bad or I might not have burned as many expensive balls on it). Now I guess I need to get Pokemon Bank to import my Gen 6 crew and get to work on whatever the Battle Tower equivalent is.
Invisible, Inc. - Made it to day 7 in Endless, then got overwhelmed by an army of drones because I never saw an upgraded hacking program in like 15 missions. Might give it one more go at getting the 10-day achievement before I put this one to bed.
Finished Dishonored's main campaign over the last couple of days, and just did the first two missions of The Knife of Dunwall today. Now that I've gotten used to a less-than-ideal controller situation, it's a really great game. I was expecting to be slightly let down - as I was with the Bioshock games, all three of which were fine but which didn't really feel that special in terms of gameplay or setting - but I find both the gameplay and the setting of Dunwall to be really fascinating.
Decided on who I'm shipping pairing up for marriage in Conquest. None of the spreadsheets I've looked at were very helpful to me. I think pairing to avoid inefficiencies in children is better than just for example having someone with killer strength or magic but garbage speed or skill. And I'm not using Kaze in this version because he was weaker than Jakob when I got him, I've got two dread fighters using shuriken, and Niles has locktouch so Kaze is useless to me and I had no use for Midori in Birthright so I don't care if she never exists in my Conquest game.
Attempting to at least finish Chapter 15 today.
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“This is going to become a bad meme,” Todd observed.
Apparently Still a Beta of Pokemon Sun - It turns out that Pokemon Bank hasn't been updated for Sun/Moon yet, and I'm certainly not going breed a new team from scratch when I have so much stuff (and so many max-IV Dittos) already done from last generation, so Battle Tower Tree is on hold. Guess I'll catch a bunch of legendaries and pick up the TMs I missed while I wait for Nintendo to get its shit together. How they were blindsided by the release of their own game, I don't really understand.
Invisible, Inc. - Got to Day 10. There's another achievement for getting to 20, but I'm already at the point where I have nothing else to spend money on and it's getting a bit repetitive, so I think my time with this one is nearing its end. Highly recommended to anyone who likes X-COM, or really any squad-based strategy game at all.
Overwatch - Tired of herding cats while stuck in the toilet tier of Competitive, so for the third season in a row I say "back to Quick Play until Blizzard figures out how to make this fun". It's nice not feeling pressure to play one of my better heroes all the time anyway. For instance, I had a damn good round as Hanzo tonight. The dragon is sated.
FTL: Finished with the Mantis ship class last night. I only had to redo one of the ship achievements which I'd only got on Easy (I also need to complete the unlock quest - there are alternative criteria for unlocking ships and I must have completed that for Mantis - but although that relates to a specific ship it doesn't need to be carried out in that ship, for obvious reasons). The goal was 20 crew kills by sector 6, and I competed it early in sector 5.
I went on to win the run, but the final boss fight warrants a description here.
Spoilered for length
Running the Basilisk (B layout of the Mantis class), I had a two-shot laser, a missile, a bomb, and an ion weapon, but this ship has only three weapon slots so the ion was in cargo. The Basilisk has a four-man teleporter and starts with a boarding and a defense drone, which I kept throughout, and I also had a hull repair drone in cargo. I had a full crew of eight, including four mantis with skills in fighting (three gold, the fourth would reach it in stage 2).
You can't win by crew kill against the flagship, as it's taken over by an AI when all crew are dead. This is undesirable since it then repairs systems (albeit slowly). My usual approach when I have anti-personnel capability is to leave a crew member in one of the isolated weapon pods - laser, for preference - so that the main body can be broken at will and not repaired, destroy the other weapons and all main body systems, and teleport back to finish the crippled hulk off with my weapons.
Emptying the main body is hard due to their upgraded medbay. It can be done a few ways, and I'd planned to get mind control and use that to teleport their crew one by one back to my ship and kill them at leisure. I didn't manage to get it. I thought I had no way to kill the main body crew and would have to finish them with weapons, so I didn't bother to leave anyone alive in the weapon pods. Thus rendered, for stage one, toothless, I set about destroying the ship with weapons.
Growing short on missiles, I decided to swap one of my missile-based weapons for the ion, and picked the bomb as the weaker weapon. I realised my error the very moment I was committed to fighting with this configuration: stage 2 runs a defense drone and my missile was useless. The laser and ion together couldn't touch the enemy through the shields. I teleported into the weapon pods to break them again, not rendering the foe totally harmless due to their offensive drones.
After that, being slowly but surely beaten down by combat and boarding drones in spite of my defenses, and for lack of anything else to do after boarding drones had proved useless, I teleported my four mantis into the ship. They didn't kill anyone but managed to do a little damage in the moments where all enemy crew were in the medbay, so I brought them out, healed, and sent them in again to the drone room, where to my amazement, with all four now gold ability and the aid of a quirk of the game's crew AI, they managed to kill someone. Eventually all enemies were dead. Unfortunately now the AI and auto-repairs took over, but I was still able to disable the ship sufficiently to finish it with weapons, evacuating my boarders before she blew.
I was now on two hull points, but I had about 30 drone parts so I was able to bring the repair drone out of cargo and fully repair before returning to battle stations for stage 3.
I began by wearing down the supershield with laser and ion, two mantis standing by in the teleporter as my first boarding party. Another error of judgement: I put pairs of mantis into the two remaining weapon pods, overlooking the fact that their mind control could hit one of these isolated pods. It did, both times when my teleporter was on cooldown, and I lost two of my fighters, unable to escape their brainwashed comrades. I eventually teleported everyone else into the main body, and had them start to break systems. I put the boarding drone in to help and it hit the missile pod. Lucky for me, since I immediately teleported its surviving occupant back, so my ship wasn't wholly unmanned. Unfortunately, my weapons were dead and a single mantis wasn't able to fix them, and keep the life support going and fires out.
The supershield came back up, and I couldn't bring any of my other crew out. I was on desperately low hull, and thanks to the AI I couldn't keep their systems down permanently so I couldn't afford to wait for my sole remaining crewman to repair weapons, and the weapons to take down the supershield. But also thanks to the AI, the systems kept repairing so that they could be broken again, meaning I was gradually wearing down their hull. It would be touch and go to do it before they destroyed me, and it would also mean the sacrifice of all seven boarders. Their fight was valiant and noble. I finished on three hull points, feeling like the worst captain ever.
Slug class next, much to my disgust. The worst ships in the game, as a result of which I have a lot left to do. It may be some time before my next update.
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A Combustible Lemon wrote:Death is an archaic concept for simpleminded commonfolk, not Victorian scientist whales.
SpaceChem - Got to the boss of the 6th planet, looked at what I was supposed to be assembling, and just noped right on out of there. It was a good run while it lasted.
Pokemon Crack - Upon further reading, it turns out I can use these bottle cap things to give any old Mon max IVs (or at least a non-breedable facsimile)... but I have to get them to level 100 first, which is arguably more of a pain than breeding for IVs. So right now the plan is to see how long it takes to get Incineroar to 100 and decide whether it's worth the trouble to do a whole team like that while I wait on this damn Bank update. I tell ya, I miss the old days when you could just hack IVs with a Gameshark.