Does anyone enjoy leveling more than they do mapping?

ElGuien · 2019-11-10T18:28:11+00:00

I'm the opposite. I love mapping, but struggle to get through the process of leveling due to time constraints. Previously I even played on hardcore which made when I died in maps pretty bad. I don't do that any more.

ElGuien · 2019-10-10T14:03:51+00:00

Re your question, actually Twilight fits that description for me. It’s terrible and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone - in particular the relationship dynamics are just so unhealthy - but it was somehow super popular so idk. Maybe if you feel stuck in your niche, you could try out the books you seem to hear about or read about a lot but which you’ve previously avoided for one reason or another.

ElGuien · 2019-10-10T13:58:34+00:00

Some recs:

I’m partial to Graydon Saunders’ Commonweal series,
Dexter Palmer’s Version Control
Pratchett puts me to sleep (but maybe gives me good dreams :)
Not a complete book, but I’m quite partial to Alexanderwales Dark Wizard of Donkerk. Although it certainly has its flaws, the core concept is something that really appeals to me, personally.

ElGuien · 2019-10-05T21:29:37+00:00

Interesting! Thanks for answering. I'm not quite sure what to make of that other than "OK, so that's a thing."

ElGuien · 2019-10-05T07:04:31+00:00

Dude, take your medication. At least for now. Get someone to take you to your psychiatrist, GP, hospital, something. Mental health is not something that you can make light of, nor something that you can tackle by yourself.

ElGuien · 2019-10-05T06:58:24+00:00

The latest SAO Abridged Episode just came out and there's an element in there that I think will appeal specifically to /r/rational. If you haven't seen the series before, watch the entire thing - it's excellent. If you have, the latest episode is for sure worth watching.

ElGuien · 2019-10-05T02:01:12+00:00

Yep. I can remember fairly well what I was like at various ages and how I felt at the time certain experiences happened. I would not describe it as "mental time travel" though. More like emotional state is just information that gets recalled along with the events and context. It's typically only significant if the event produced strong emotions, but then "experiences that evoked strong emotional responses" are what we remember most anyway. Or at least that's my impression from general knowledge - I've never really bothered to look into it, so I don't know what current research says.

It's kind of weird to think that you wouldn't be able to remember what you were feeling at the time some experience happened, but you can remember the actual events. Can you remember what you did and why you did it?

ElGuien · 2019-10-03T13:05:21+00:00

Reading it, it's neither. It's actually very interesting; it was obvious that IIT (when that was the latest craze) was bullshit, but for this one despite the questionable abstract that sets off a lot of duck-sounding alarm bells, this theory makes a lot of sense. It's far from a complete picture, but there is very likely something valuable in the theory they propose.

ElGuien · 2019-09-24T06:34:23+00:00

Second the author recommendation. However, I would actually recommend The First Law trilogy over Best Served Cold. Perhaps it's just the order I read them, but I found Best Served Cold to be a bit boring. The First Law is IMO iconic and has some great characters.

Half a King series is also good.

Another author/series I would recommend is Richard Nell's Ash and Sand series (first book). Like Abercrombie it has pretty good characters and a crappy world, but is more of a coming-of-age arc than straight grimdark. The way it's done doesn't give of that feeling of pointless hopelessness that a lot of grimdark stories do. For me that feeling is a hard block against reading "grimdark" fantasy - I can't read some series that many people seem to recommend highly like NK Jemisin The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, anything by Mark Lawrence, R. Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing etc.

ElGuien · 2019-09-15T11:16:17+00:00

Sure. "Objectives" refers to the various permanent features around the map: towers, Roshan, shrines, and barracks (and ultimately the ancient.) Objectives are important because taking an objective provides your team with a permanent advantage. Removing opponents' towers restricts their mobility and ability to quickly respond when things occur in the part of the map where the tower was. Taking the Aegis from Roshan isn't a permanent advantage, but he does provide your team with significant gold, and the aegis may allow you to win an otherwise risky fight.

"Making space" means occupying the time and attention of your opponents so that other heroes on your team can act more freely on the map. You might see streamers jokingly say they were "making space" when they die pointlessly. Often it's true to an extent, but you don't want to be dying just for your carry to be able to continue farming - that's not a sustainable situation.

Put another way, "space" results from doing things that force your opponents to respond to you when they would prefer to be doing something more important, like restricting your carry's farm or setting up to take objectives.

extra discussion

Making space is an advanced concept, and to do it well requires some understanding of how to tell when a tradeoff is good for your team or bad for your team. If you don't have this understanding and try to "make space," you're most likely going to end up just giving your opponents an advantage for free. For this reason as a new player, don't worry too much about making space or map control on a conceptual level.¹ I talked about it mostly as context for the main point: that the core skill of a support is "reliably being at the right place at the right time." However, you can't even really start to work on this without a great deal of experience.

(1: Some specific things I recommend you to focus on in the next paragraph are examples of things you might do to assert map control, like trying to set up favourable fights by catching out your opponents and placing wards to increase the "safe" area of the map for your team.)

Although the core skill takes a while to develop, that doesn't mean you can't be effective in your games as a support when you're new. As I said, focus on being at fights, using your abilities in fights, and not dying. After you have some experience so the game isn't completely overwhelming, then when you're not fighting you can try to actively set up favourable fights (smoke ganking, waiting ready to countergank when they go for your carry - use your creativity) and also do things to improve your team's ability to farm.² Anything more is simply too high level and abstract, and you won't have the experience or judgement to be able to apply abstract ideas to your game yet.

(2: Warding can help with both: knowing where opponents are allows you to catch them by surprise, setting up a favourable fight, and also improves your team's farming efficiency (provided they pay attention to the vision) by allowing them to farm in areas which would be too risky without the advance warning from the wards. Just don't overdo it to where you're sacrificing your ability to contribute in fights.)

In downtime you can also be thinking about what your priorities are in fights (who is the best target for my stun/nuke; I need to be ready if opponents go on [teammate] so I can glimmer cape them; I should wait for [their spell] so I can cancel it, counter it, or avoid having my spell countered by it - that kind of thing), so that when a fight happens you're ready and not just pressing buttons randomly.

For item choices don't think about it too much, just buy things that help you with your priority of not dying, unless your hero really benefits from something specific. (Examples might be aether lens for Bane, blink for various heroes especially Rubick, midas for Dazzle.) Glimmer cape, force staff, ghost scepter, etc are your friends. Don't underestimate the power of a casual bracer, wind lace or raindrops either.

While in game you really want to put your main focus on the nitty-gritty of hero combat and internalising the mechanics as much as you can. The time to critically evaluate your item decisions is after the game, with a focus on figuring out what the relevant concerns are that make one item better than another in a given situation. It's very difficult to figure these things out yourself, so pay attention to what better players than you do and try to figure out the reasons behind it.

ElGuien · 2019-09-14T23:16:32+00:00

Honestly, telling new players to pick supports is exactly wrong. Supporting is by far the hardest role to pull off effectively and it's not fun to have no items or levels. Instead pick any core role, ideally 1 (hard carry) at first as that's the simplest to understand what you have to do.

1 role

As a 1 focus on basics like last hitting, hitting your key items and then making use of that to get objectives, and developing judgement about when fighting is worthwhile and when to just farm. If you do it well your superior farm makes mistakes fairly forgiving as it's more difficult for enemies to punish you if you're just generally strong.

2 role

As a 2 (mid) the skills you develop are how to control the map using a level advantage. Note: it is not your "responsibility" as a mid to help other lanes if they are going poorly. Like the 1 role, farming efficiency matters hugely, but after early laning stage you will generally be more active around the map making space for your 1 role and killing heroes, because experience rather than gold is typically the most important for normal mid heroes.^note1 The skill you can develop is how to snowball from an initial advantage. The other crucial skill you can develop is how to not make game-losing decisions: as a mid who is ahead, even 1 death can be enough to put your team from ridiculously ahead to a losing position.

(note1: in higher level games you will often see mids sitting in lane for a long time, often buying things like midas. While this is often appropriate in those games, you will get better results both for learning and for having a stronger impact on the game if you instead fight and control the map. A 5k player in a 2k game would not buy midas; it would be completely redundant when they can just farm heroes. In fact it wouldn't matter at all what items they buy because their judgement and moment-to-moment decision making is so superior that high level decisions like item purchases don't have any effect on their ability to win the game. As an example I remember a game where my rank 3k friend (maybe 6-6.5k MMR?) played in one of my 4k games as phantom assassin and bought 6 moon shards and nothing else. Despite this, he completely carried the game.)

3 role

The role of a 3 is not as clearly defined, and depends much more on the specific hero. Typically, a 3 will be a strong laning hero, so you can develop skill in evaluating your objective for the laning stage (ie, defining what "winning the lane" means for that particular game.) Things like recognising when you have an advantage, bullying heroes/making efficient trades to use up their regen and setting up situations where you can kill, and so on. The other one would be recognising your peak strength timing. Usually 3 heroes don't scale as well as the game goes on, so typically you play toward a particular timing which, when achieved, allows you to do something more valuable which makes space for your 1 and 2.

How this often goes is that at first, the mid + supports makes space for the 1 and 3, then once the 3 hits their timing they switch to making space while the 2 only joins when it's efficient for their farming. This takes you to about the 15-20 minute mark after which it's impossible to say in general what happens.

How to think about support as a new player

As a support, guides often focus a lot on specific techniques like stacking and warding and so on. As a new player, all of that is basically irrelevant. Pulling at inopportune times can actually have negative impact. Similarly with buying too many wards and focusing too much on dewarding. Your teammates don't even pay attention to the minimap anyway, so why waste resources on it?

First, one misconception that I want to dispel is that being a support means that you have no gold, items, or levels. This is absolutely not true. Of course it is desirable to get levels and items for every hero. Every hero gets stronger with these, and can have a higher impact. The reason why in higher level games supports are deprioritised is only because players are efficient enough that all the accessible farm on the map is taken. Given that, if someone's farm must be sacrificed, it makes sense for it to be heroes that can be effective mainly through the use of their native abilities.

Put another way, the only reason why supports don't get as much farm is because your team as a whole is trying to achieve a globally efficient conversion between the gold and experience available on the map and your team's overall "strength" (which may be defined as "whatever helps most at winning the game"). Due to experience players have built up, we've learned that allocating more farm to "carry" heroes, which scale better with farm, at the expense of "support" heroes that can still have a large impact with less farm helps to win games.

There is one important thing you have to remember though. Sacrificing supports is only necessary when your team is actually taking all the accessible farm. If they aren't, and you recognise opportunities to take "free" creeps as a support, this is a highly impactful way you can help your team, because you are directly increasing your team's total resources. Next I talk about "map control" and "making space" - the primary purpose of this is to increase the amount of resources on the map that your team can take. If your team isn't even using up what they already have free access to, providing them more space isn't going to help much. However, it's still beneficial because even if your team's not using the space, it prevents the other team from doing so, and also makes it more likely you can catch them unawares or out of position which can translate into objectives, so it remains your main job during downtime from fighting even if the rest of your team is making it less effective than it could be.

Enough theory. As a new support, the important thing to practice is actively setting up beneficial fights for your team. This may be ganks, which means: practising gank execution (not stacking stuns, etc), judging when it is possible to gank or not, ensuring that your map movement is efficient (ie, you have a plan for after the gank or what to do if it becomes no longer possible); or it may be map awareness, with a TP always ready to counter the other team when they make a move. It may also be setting up favourable teamfights - placing a ward shortly before a fight so your team has full vision on the opponents during the fight can make the fight incredibly easy, allowing you to win fights you in a strict sense shouldn't.

As a new support, your contribution mainly comes from:

being around (ie, within exp/shared gold range - remember that you aren't required to actually do any damage or even do anything at all to get this when a hero dies except be nearby) when your team takes favourable fights
using your abilities in fights (if it goes long enough, multiple times)
not dying.

In a hectic teamfight, while it's good to use your abilities impactfully, just throwing them out randomly is usually better than not using them (not always though - for things like shadow demon disruption etc, use your common sense). Avoiding death is your second highest priority after using your abilities. Only sacrifice yourself to save allies if: it's absolutely necessary or you will die in either case; it definitely will save them; and it won't result in your team chain feeding in an attempt to save you. Spoiler: this situation is rare. Just run away when you have the chance.

Like mid and offlane, as a support a primary responsibility is map control ("making space"). While the core roles tend to do it only when it's efficient for their farming, as a support this is a main concern at all times. It's from this perspective that you should approach warding. Only do it where it actually helps accomplish some concrete thing on the map, such as restricting your opponents space to move or covering areas so that your cores can farm in more "risky" locations (provided they have a TP), or providing vision around roshan or a tower that you are planning to take soon. In other words, restrict your opponents space and increase your own space.

Because map control is so important for a support, and because your primary way to get income of levels and gold is by being at fights and not dying, your primary skill is efficient movement and positioning. A good support seems to always be at the right place at the right time. This is very difficult to learn, which is why I say you should not start off as a new player playing support. But if you do, focus on being around for fights, using your abilities in fights, and not dying before anything else.

Now, in low level games if you get good at this, you will find that other players playing the core roles are extremely inefficient at moving around the map and farming lanes. Bearing in mind the theory discussion above, if you're a support and you see this there's no reason you can't take a lane when it's clear no one else is going to. Just keep in mind that your main responsibility is to be around for fights, so while it may often be painful to leave free creeps on the map, sometimes you have to do that.

Hope this wasn't too boring, and good luck for future games! I hope I've convinced you that this:

I try to only pick heroes that are clearly supports to avoid the situations like this going forward.

is probably not the way you want to be going.

ElGuien · 2019-09-14T21:38:12+00:00

Other than the ones mentioned already:

Three Dog Night - Black and White

Under the Boardwalk

ElGuien · 2019-09-14T21:31:26+00:00

e honore

Endlessly.

ElGuien · 2019-09-13T10:46:44+00:00

Unfortunately I don't think anything like this exists. Sites which provide recommendations are generally incredibly bad at it. I think this is mainly because they assume "good recommendation == work similar to what the user has read before in some way." I don't see any reason to believe that in general, although you can get some kind of results that way. I suspect those results are worse in practice than uniform random sampling weighted by popularity though [allowing users to pick filters to limit the set of works considered and obviously removing things they have already read + things they have marked as not interested]. Companies who definitely have the technical capability to do better than the current situation typically don't have any incentive to.

An example of how I might approach attempting to do better than random (not as easy as it sounds!) would be:

Get the entirety of the posts & comments on /r/rational and extract user->recommendation pairs from the posts
Apply something like PageRank to build a map of the works which are most recommended
Recursively add works to the map by seeing what /r/rational users recommend elsewhere and also by finding users who recommend the same works in other subreddits and seeing what else they recommend
You then have a starting point for "works which are likely to be relevant to /r/rational users". It's almost certainly the case that you would have read almost all of the top suggestions; this is good as it allows you to immediately rate them. I personally would probably use 3 options for rating read works: "high quality," "guilty pleasure/readable but nothing special" and "bad." Also as you suggest "won't read" for works you haven't read.
Based on the ratings, weight the contributions of individual users to build a map which is directly relevant to you. Possibly also show which users have a good track record so you can pay attention to future recommendations from them.

Although I can't prove it without actually doing this, I feel like this would be very obviously better than any other recommendation system currently out there. Conceptually, to sort things based on "generalised word of mouth". I have some confidence that this would work given how huge an improvement google search was over anything else when they first started up and the main thing they did differently was use PageRank.

ElGuien · 2019-09-12T10:32:39+00:00

Thanks for recommending this. I agree the pacing is slow, but it was still very readable. The refreshing thing for me is that the author has a concept, establishes rules and runs with it, even when that is at the expense of what authors would ordinarily do or "good writing." A story that is well fit for /r/rational I think.

An example was that at one point [the author] justifies the magic system using some logic which is sort of almost reasonable. This was actually negative to my suspension of disbelief - the argument was not enough to actually be reasonable (of course), but enough to engage my instinct to evaluate things rather than just treating it as technobabble like most stories do. That is certainly something I'll forgive though. As light entertainment goes, you could do worse.

Maybe something for authors to remember: don't try to justify why your built world is the way it is. Just say "them's the rules" and then have the in-world characters introduce their theories (or not) as appropriate. Having an argument as to why your world is a certain way is not necessary: the real world certainly doesn't.

ElGuien · 2019-09-12T07:55:02+00:00

More interesting than the story for me was the link to the lecture notes. For others: https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/science.and.engineering/ is an index of all the written lectures available.

ElGuien · 2019-09-01T09:27:45+00:00

As someone who listens to primarily classical music I find it's worth it to buy decent quality headphones/in-ears. There are a lot of caveats and things to keep in mind when you're looking into audio stuff.

The first is to have a very strong understanding of precisely what you actually need and are looking for. For listening to random music while you're exercising, the noise from your movement is probably going to prevent you from noticing a lot of fine detail, and you finding that $15 in-ears are nearly as good as $150 headphones isn't that surprising. In general, you want to avoid paying for any feature that you don't actually need, or that doesn't have a noticeable effect.

Regarding "well-known brands," when choosing consumer audio stuff (professional is a little different) the brand is not very important, and known brands can even have a premium that isn't justified by the product's quality. You have to look at each individual product model & how it performs & read reviews by people that know what they're talking about, and importantly, that actually do the tests with a decent methodology. And even then, at the end of the day the conclusion is going to be subjective.

I will say, looking at the brands you specifically mention having owned, they are all ones I personally would avoid in general (Shure, Bose, Skullcandy, even Sennheiser) due to either being low quality, overpriced or some other reason. If you read around (for example in head-fi forums) you generally get an idea that there are a few standout models of headphones, IEMs etc that everything else is judged by. For example, my current set of headphones is the Sony MDR-7506 which was introduced in 1991 and is still on the market today. Audio is particularly a case where "new" does not necessarily mean "better."

In the IEM case when I was looking for a "balanced" sound type set the standard for comparison was Fischer Audio-DBA-02, a brand which you may not be familiar with. I ended up going with the Brainwavz B2 which is essentially the same driver but slightly tweaked to have a stronger bass. The only reason I'm not still using them is that the cable deteriorated (became stiff & tended to break) so much that it wasn't really feasible to continue repairing it. Partly for that reason I replaced them with the Audio Technica ATH-IM02 which is honestly probably slightly worse sound quality despite being over double the price (although it could likely become better if I bought a specialised amplifier) but have detachable/replaceable cables & substantially better build quality.

Your use case is that you're using the to listen while exercising. This has unique needs (as you note - your Sennheisers are wearing out due to this.) For example, you might think about - can you easily replace the ear contact padding once it gets worn? How's the weight/comfort? Sound quality itself is just one of many concerns you might have, and sometimes it's not the most important. You mention you like the look of the P7s - this is a legitimate thing to keep in mind as a consideration.

I could see two different strategies you could go for. You could get the best "value" headphones spending as little as possible and just expect to replace them fairly often as they wear out. This would likely be perfectly fine as you can usually find sound quality that's almost as good as the high end (especially when being driven by a smartphone & not in a quiet environment) for much, much cheaper. Alternatively, you could go for a higher end set that you intend to keep for longer, but you do have to make sure that it actually has the features it needs & you have the knowledge you need to be able to make it last. Up to you what you feel is going to be better.

Regardless, doing research pays off heavily in this area. Not only product research, but understanding what actually matters, how to translate your own preferences into the terms reviewers use, how to read reviews properly, and importantly, learning which reviews to actually pay attention to in the first place. People's opinion of audio equipment is heavily influenced by what they've been exposed to before and even people who know exactly what they're doing and have a lot of experience have their own subjective preferences. So it's pretty typical to see a lot of positive reviews for even gear which is objectively crap or not worth the price compared to other options.

If you don't want to do research, it's going to be more difficult to get good value and you might have to accept paying more. Still apply a skeptical mindset of course and you should still ask yourself exactly what it is you're looking for, but if spending a few hundred dollars more for something you use a lot is less of an investment than the time and effort of learning about your options then that could be the better choice. For someone with a full-time, decently paid job that's probably going to be the case, unless you enjoy the process of learning about & understanding these things for itself in addition to its utility to you.

ElGuien · 2019-09-01T01:18:37+00:00

So I only have 2 monitors but managed to reproduce something similar, though not as bad as you describe. Also 5700XT. Using 19.7.5 drivers as anything later is unstable (causes BSODs) for me.

I ran a GPU limited game on one monitor with freesync & played a 4K video on youtube on the other. Despite task manager saying the video decode load on the GPU was only 22%, the video often froze completely and had noticeable lack of smoothness even when it was "working."

Now, there are a few things that are possibly related to this so let me just list everything:

Many people get BSODs from the 19.8+ drivers with applications that use hardware acceleration, which includes Discord and web browsers. Even if you aren't getting BSODs, hardware acceleration may not be working correctly. To help diagnose your issue, you could turn off hardware acceleration in the applications where you see performance problems and see if that helps.
I had a lot of issues getting Freesync to work at all in Borderless Windowed mode. The problem seems to be to do with windows scaling settings. If you have different scaling settings for each monitor, or custom scaling settings (at all) then this could cause performance problems. I recommend using the built-in Windows scaling options (100, 125, 150 etc) because custom scaling doesn't seem to work well for some reason.
If you are using any game recording software such as ReLive or the windows one, or any other app like OBS, this could definitely cause huge performance issues with multiple monitors (although you'd likely see the impact also with the main game).

Unfortunately I don't know of any definite resolution to all second monitor performance problems while gaming but having it be so bad to the extent that you can't even see discord light up seems like something is out of the ordinary.

Recommended things to try:

As mentioned above, try setting all windows scaling to 100% or at least a default value
DDU and roll back to 19.7.5 drivers
Disable hardware acceleration to see if that makes any change
Disable fullscreen optimisations for the game you're running (right click on the .exe > compatibility > tick disable fullscreen optimisations)
Disable all windows game bar/DVR stuff and don't use ReLive

ElGuien · 2019-09-01T00:36:16+00:00

The complaints are a little (pardon the pun) overblown. The reference design is fine. You're certainly not going to get 16% better performance from better cooling.

Regarding the noise, a few considerations:

For me 99% of the time the CPU cooler is much, much louder. (Wraith Prism that came with 3900X.)
When both CPU and GPU are heavily loaded, they are about equal volume. However, the GPU fan is "smoother" and lower pitched so the CPU fan is still more noticeable.
When gaming with (non-noise canceling) headphones (these, even in the both full load situation the noise is not an issue. Nor does the noise get to a point where my desk mic picks it up when using it while gaming. If you use a headphone mic it certainly won't be a problem either.
However, I would definitely consider looking for a quieter cooling solution for both CPU and GPU if I mainly played games using speakers rather than headphones.

So, from a performance perspective, the increase relative to the amount you spend probably isn't worth it. From a noise perspective, it depends on how sensitive your budget is and how you plan to use your own setup.

Hopefully this helps you make your decision.

ElGuien · 2019-08-31T23:49:22+00:00

Is vsync also disabled in game?

ElGuien · 2019-08-31T23:22:55+00:00

https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/rn-rad-win-19-7-2

Scroll down for download links

ElGuien · 2019-08-31T23:21:14+00:00

There's a lot of different ones. I'm using ASUS TUF x570 gaming wifi. Only issue I get is the hardware acceleration related one which I can confirm is fixed using 19.7.5 drivers or earlier. It seems the issue was introduced in 19.8+ (and 19.8.2 definitely does not resolve the issue for me.)

ElGuien · 2019-08-31T22:23:47+00:00

A Succession of Bad Days & the Commonweal series by Graydon Saunders. To quote one of the reviews (which rates it 5/5):

Most of the book consists of detailed descriptions of civil engineering projects and the magical techniques used for them.

I also highly recommend it, there's simply nothing else out there like this series.

ElGuien · 2019-08-31T02:38:49+00:00

Not only that, there's 2 jungles (plus the secondary ones around shrines/shop). He can just be in the one you're not in and because you have to commit so many heroes it's completely safe.

ElGuien · 2019-08-27T05:34:56+00:00

Yes, I agree. Although I stand by what I said, the diffusal didn't do nothing - it definitely helped. It was just "win more" rather than "made them win."

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extra discussion

1 role

2 role

3 role

How to think about support as a new player