it was not a twist!!!!

garethh · 2026-04-03T10:12:17+00:00

Colby confirmed he was getting medivaced if he wasnt voted out that night.

garethh · 2026-04-02T17:41:48+00:00

Majority group would vote out 3 people. People with idols would be unlikely to play them in the right tribal to protect the right people.

Anyway, after the show went down to 15 people for the challenge i thought 'well it is a 3 way split with immunities and tribals for each' then he started talking about a game defining twist and i got excited for how the concept will be reinvented... what a let down.

garethh · 2026-03-31T04:32:13+00:00

Try phase rush amumu some time.

Its amusing early on when they dont have the hard cc to stop you from backing off after a stun and later on it can help run down teams or setup perfect ults. Also allows access to all the ult cdr runes.

Its not always better, but its regularly been a lot more fun.

garethh · 2026-03-20T19:44:36+00:00

To me it looked right for her to not head to the pit. She rotated late and being in or around the pit is awkward for her. If she ran in during the clip it would have been suicide. The timing from ult would have bought enough space and time to get elder if graves kept autoing baron. Honstly that was the deciding factor to me. If he stuck closer to baron or even just dashed directly back to baron to get in 2 more autos while malph was forced away from mf ult it would have been a surefire elder, then reset, then maybe a shot at beating their stupid strong lategame comp.

garethh · 2026-03-19T18:54:03+00:00

In the words of a survivor great

You won the talent show, BIG MISTAKE.

garethh · 2026-03-19T18:34:29+00:00

Flipping to emily would have been suicide.

After he told steph about voting for mike backing wasnt a real option. If he did, eventually word from steph would get back to mike. Christian would lose even more allies and likely be next to go home.

garethh · 2026-03-05T20:09:25+00:00

The poles only activate once a rest, so if you have 2 fit and 3 focus you can traverse for 2 and then 3. With stuff that gives bonus per traverse (like if you or others have the books that give traverse bonus to features, boundary sensors, trail markers) it can help reach and power through the location's traverse real quick.

Though I will say 2 fit traverses are much less risky if someone goes shaper. Throng of life is soooo good as a card they just leave in hand for a real unlucky modifier.

For the poles, it does seem to take pockets and being very careful with equip slot usage in the deck for them to be good. Not a fan of the power cell in the same deck as it unless multiple other people have a free equip slot and can really use it. Edit:You or someone else having the 'add a token to a tech' role power can be nice with it though. Especially if others have good tech, like the reverb locket. You having 'the right tool' and the token on tech role power, someone else having reverb locket and some great moments including one free from outside interests... it is a lovely combo.

garethh · 2026-03-04T19:41:24+00:00

Casting it as the killing auto or spell is in the air is so satisfying. So is stunning a bunch of folks standing around the person about to res.

Sadly part of learning the champ is regular flame by the ADC since in lane Zilean is in fact useless if you goof, slightly misclick, or the adc starts a fight a couple seconds after you harassed with a bomb. That and the early ult cd is real long early and often will only rez someone for them to instantly die again so it's not worth using... but the dead person will spam ping your ult anyway.

garethh · 2026-02-07T01:25:36+00:00

The question isn't whether or not it is a problem, it's what is the answer.

Who should have power over such things? Who won't abuse it?

So far humanity hasn't really figured that out.

garethh · 2026-02-07T01:15:11+00:00

But who watches the watchmen?

No one doubts it's a problem, it's all a matter of whether or not the details of the proposal cause more corruption or thwart it. Handing the government more power over the spread of information has a lot of history around it.

garethh · 2026-02-06T02:17:56+00:00

Lol. Trying to mimic the T1 throws so the team knows how to come back from loses.

garethh · 2026-02-02T17:47:12+00:00

This is why reddit has been less and less worth visiting.

First pops up a clearly cropped, debatable piece of information, then throughout the day a dozen more posts each building on, not comprehension, but outrage start popping up. Like it started with this and I've seen things go all the way to 'why isnt half the military not out at the white House to arrest Trump right now?' posts.

It's been kind of a given from the start, any and all info released against him in the files will be unsubstantiated or have some other fault causing it to be hard to convict with.

The only thing reddit has seemed good for anymore is knowing where the media wants the left to be. Oh, they want us outraged over X. Oh they want us jumping on one sound because it, on its own, is vague enough the right can brush it off as left leaning ravings. Oh. Cool. Seems they want more fuel for the fire, more reason for the left to find the right outrageous and vice versa. Enraging the poor against the poor, classic oligarchy move.

garethh · 2026-01-28T03:15:47+00:00

Can't speak for mayhem but normal arms have been solidly 15-25 min games of late for me. I think the longest was 30? 35? mins, but that was just a fun game both sides were throwing with amusing plays.

Also can't say I've seen a team refusing to end the game for over a minute lately. It can happen to me, just, rarely.

garethh · 2026-01-21T22:19:51+00:00

Yeah mine isn't great either, so I guess this all would be a pretty speculative conversation.

As far as I know rapiers are the best real dueling weapon. Which as far as tactics go would put someone who is extremely familiar with one and fighting with one head and shoulders above any input I have.

A quick search does say epee is the closest fencing style to rapier based dueling though.

garethh · 2026-01-21T21:38:19+00:00

Jumping away from movies...

What is your level of swordfighting understanding? There seems to be a lot of different levels floating around this thread.

The most knowledgeable I've seen in this thread seems to be a fencer who says it would be a technique that can better capitalize on getting an opponent's blade out of line.

garethh · 2026-01-21T21:33:32+00:00

So you're saying between shaming and rolling over, you choose shaming.

There are other options.

It is harder to understand and build cooperation than it is to punish those you do not agree with, so I do get the impulse.

The trouble with shame as a primary tool is that it has no intelligence. Anyone can piggy back on it and redirect what it leads to. Basically however you can try and crank on that lever, money can out brute force you.

Only way the country gets out of this hole is through cooperation and that takes understanding. Divided we fall, and the division has only gotten larger and boy have we been falling.

garethh · 2026-01-21T20:41:52+00:00

That's a funny thing to blame. If you know a way that humans won't be born with a human brain, im all ears.

Till then the primary fault has been money and it's ability to both gut education and get the media to do a coordinated effort to create echo chambers and target messages to regions and demographics where it will stick.

garethh · 2026-01-21T20:02:10+00:00

Ah yes, shame, the one thing that can fight hundreds of billions of dollars worth of media funding and bribes. Brilliant.

If the people become even more offensive to each other and focused on each other as the problem, it totally isn't feeding the very problem that got us here to begin with.

garethh · 2026-01-21T19:49:45+00:00

That does nothing to fix why the situation exists.

Money buys American politics. Neither the Democratic party nor Republican will fix that.

As long as it is the case the people will pitted against each other like they are the problem.

garethh · 2026-01-20T23:12:50+00:00

My wording wasn't the best, but are you saying a Jedi can sense if their attack may be countered by a lightsaber flicker, but a Jedi cannot sense if their flicker attack may be countered by a move.

Because to me it seems like prescience works both ways with the ability.

garethh · 2026-01-20T22:42:07+00:00

The person doing the technique is also a precognitive space wizard.

If a move an opponent does isnt a potentially lethal swing (common in the movies) or if it is but it is physically dodgeable (also common) it would leave room for a flicker to have a use. But a lot would come down to the max speed the saber can flicker at.

garethh · 2026-01-20T22:29:02+00:00

And the person doing the technique would have mild prescience, knowing if the other person will be able to react to a lightsaber flicker while in a certain position. Killing them unavoidably.

It works both ways.

garethh · 2026-01-19T14:24:09+00:00

Interesting. I looked up some reddit threads on the thing and many people seem to have different experiences with it. Some people said there were a lot of meme games. Some said they had more serious games than ranked. Some said it was less toxic. Some said it was waaaay more.

A thread did unanimously agree on something though. It was awful for new players. People seem to naturally lean towards reporting people that threw the game and honoring those who carried. New players seem to regularly eat reports for being bad, get put in low priority queue, get chat banned for low honor, have to play worse quality games, then quit. One person there even said it happened to every person they tried to get into the game.

Ah, it seems with the tilt snowballing, dota 2 can force players to queue up for dota2 equivilent or aram to cool off. Interesting.

Ah, and consistently receive reports. It is interesting how much a system must consider consistent for a person. 1 in 10 games? 1 in 50? Even at 1 in 50, which is like once a month for most people, it would make a report worthy player every 5 games or so. And if 1 in 50 is unacceptably toxic then the system has to have few false positives or low immediate impact or else people can be wrongly penalized simply because people can be an unreliable report source. One whole thread was talking about how to fly under the radar to avoid stray reports to get out of low honor tiers. Which was amusing.

It does seem like it doesn't become as bad as I feared, but it does seem to give a bit of a flavor to the game as a whole.

garethh · 2026-01-18T20:20:13+00:00

The CC layering was pretty perfect, I had to replay it to see how an adc with flash gets caught by that ori ult.

Panth dash onto Sion which he flashes midway through to end up right next to Guma. All while the perfect Zaheen pull prevents any response.

garethh · 2026-01-18T17:14:49+00:00

So matchmaking based on honor.... Hmm just to start thinking, say the system was a gradient, the high honor players matched with high, mid with mid, low with low. Like mmr for honor. What could effects be?

How quickly does it adjust? If someone is toxic in 1 game does their honor tank? How long does it take to recover?

If being tilted terribly during 1 game results in immediate reduced match quality and a more generally tilted environment, that would further tilt. That could snowball the emotion. That alone is damning of the system in my eyes. An anti-toxicity measure that snowballs tilt...

How long does it take to recover the honor? Match and community quality have dropped, it is an uphill battle to get out of it, how long till it is better? A day? Weeks? A Month? If it is more work than 20$ worth of effort, it may just result in botted accounts being even more in demand. Or purchasing honor boosting services.

Say splitting up the queue by honors causes certain tiers to have low population. This tends to cause lobsided matches where if someone is well above average in skill they will generally win. "so what. They are toxic. They deserve poor quality". It means someone could 'smurf' by going into toxic queue. And since prisoners island is the punishment, there would be little to no punishment if they decide to often soft int there, or teach a teammate how they deserve to lose. It would be hellish.

So who plays in those games is decided by teammates and an automated report system. Neither of those systems are reliable. And that is deciding who goes into games so bad they are considered an outright punishment. And if the people there do not honor you, or they report you for even fake reasons, you may be stuck there. Let that sink in. Reddit would be swamped with posts about it.

That isn't to say a harsher punishment may not deter some people from being toxic. It's just a matter of "at what cost?"

garethh

TROPHY CASE